All Episodes
Previous Next
March 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:06
129 Feminism Part 4: A Way Forward...

OK, OK, enough of the bad news - how do we REALLY start to get it on?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is Thursday, March the 8th, 2006, 8.30 in the morning.
I'm toodling off to work.
And this is going to be a clean-up podcast, which means that I don't have a topic long enough, even for me, who can stretch things out, yay, almost to infinity.
I don't have a topic long enough to take me all the way to work, but I have three little topics which I think are both cleanups of feedback from prior shows... shows?
Rambles!
And also one or two additions to slightly older topics that I think will be of general interest.
So the first thing that I wanted to talk about was just to tidy up or to finish up.
And this is going to be part of a larger podcast series entitled Subjugation.
But one of the things that I wrote about in a novel that I'm trying to get published at the moment called The God of Atheists.
is that one of the things that happened which Nietzsche confidently and accurately predicted in the 19th century that when human beings lost sight of God when they gave up on the idea of God which fundamentally except in America happened in the 19th century throughout Western civilization When people gave up on God, the problem was that formally they had subjugated themselves, their wills, to Christianity, or to religion, I guess you could say.
And in the absence of that, without the growth of the true self, or of authenticity, or of self-direction or of a mature will.
Once you get this sort of cork taken off the champagne of the will, so human beings have a lot of sort of angry, petty, childish willpower because of the way that we're brought up and the way that we're trained.
Human beings, when you get that cork taken off, which is religion, then you get this sort of ugly blood spray of the 20th century, which is the genocidal wars and so on.
And one of the things that I was trying to get at in this novel, which I think is one of the best things I've ever written, is that when people call themselves atheists or agnostics, which is most people in Canada for sure, I know it's not as many in the States, one of the things that happens is that the god of atheists usually is themselves, right?
So you sort of don't have any patience with exterior forms of control over the will, i.e.
religious commandments or whatever.
And you also, because of the fall of socialism, we don't even have the substitute of a state to control our sort of childish, angry wills.
And that's sort of an insult to children in general, but I'm just talking about the way that we're brought up and the way that we're trained.
And so one of the things that we need to do as thinkers, as philosophers, is we need to convince people that they do have to subjugate themselves to something.
That's kind of important.
The God of atheists is not yourself, is not your will, is not just your blind preferences.
That is a very dangerous phenomenon.
So I'm going to talk about that more in another podcast, but that's sort of the idea behind this novel.
But what I'd like to talk about with this, to tie up feminism, is to talk about this in terms of women.
One of the things that I noticed in dating and so on was that I really didn't have much luck until I got to Christina, and I did tot it up with her one day when she was curious, and I think I went out with about 30 women before I went out with Christina.
So we're batting 3% in terms of this particular topic coming up.
That I really didn't have any luck getting these women to alter their behavior to suit what I felt were sort of rational preferences.
And that was pretty important.
And that was, I think, a common enough experience.
And I don't think it was just conditioned by my history.
I mean, obviously, I grew up with a violent mother, so you would have some suspicion about me pronouncing judgment on women I'd gone out with because of the aftereffect of that kind of female violence.
having its influence over the women that I chose to go out with.
And I would agree with you that there may be an influence in that, with the sole and rather significant exception that as soon as I got to Christina, I was like, yay, a man who had been tossed under the waves for decades, suddenly finding sure.
I was a little disoriented, but I didn't exactly want to plunge back into the waters because they were more familiar.
The So, I think a strong case could be made that I was looking for a rational woman, but couldn't find one, and in the moment that I did find one, I never looked back, and never grabbed her as quickly as I could, and we got married, and so on.
So, I don't think it's the case that I just happened to go out with women who were this way.
I think, and of course I could be wrong, I think that women in general in the modern world, in the West, or at least in North America, which is where my dating experience has been, although I didn't just date North American women, that there is a lack of capacity to subjugate themselves in modern women.
And I don't mean to sound inflammatory.
I'm not even going to throw my usual caveats.
Because if you've trusted me enough to come this far, you know that I'm not saying anything negative about women in general.
But everybody needs to subjugate themselves to something.
To me, it's rationality and empiricism, and I would argue that that is by far the best and the only moral thing to subjugate yourself to.
But when it comes to what should you do, what should you say, how should you act, you don't just want to act on mere impulse.
You don't want to just act on the range of the moment, what gives you pleasure in the moment, and so on.
You want to act in a way that is consistent and moral, and the only way to do that is to subjugate yourself to a philosophy or a mental discipline or a methodology of thinking that is over and above just your preferences and your willpower.
In the same way scientists have to subjugate themselves to what passes the test of the scientific method, and doctors have to subjugate themselves to What actually benefits their patients in terms of health.
So philosophers and everybody in general has to subjugate themselves to rationality and empiricism simply because those are the facts of reality that we make mistakes but reality doesn't.
Now that's a pretty abstract way of approaching the topic of women subjugating themselves, but I know that for myself and for the other men that I've talked to, with one or two notable exceptions, we received so much propaganda about how men were just sort of basically mistaken about everything, that when a woman said, do this, do that, We kind of did, right?
And there's a great scene in the movie Fight Club where I think Edward Norton is sitting and chatting about his life, that he said, well, my father just said do this, and he didn't grow up with his father, but he sort of called his father after high school and said, what should I do?
And so on.
And the guy, Brad Pitt, is sitting in a tub, a completely filthy tub, cleaning himself, which is a fairly apt metaphor for the movie as a whole.
And he says, you know, our whole lives we've been ruled by women.
We have female teachers, female principals, women have mothers and all our mothers' friends.
Our whole lives, our aunts, our whole lives we've been ruled by women.
I don't think that the solution to our problem is another woman.
And that's a harsh way of saying something that is sort of true in the modern world with the number of women who are raising sons alone, that we sort of face this problem of the matriarchy, but it's entirely sort of state-generated, I mean, for reasons that I've already talked about.
But I found in my relationships with women that they would say, you need to do this, you need to do it this way, you need to do it that way, you need to...
Relate to me in this way.
You need to talk about your feelings in that way.
You need to clean in this way.
You need to help me around the house in that way.
And, I mean, I didn't exactly have that sort of sloping-shouldered, staring-at-the-sidewalk, muttering-to-himself, broken-down, long-time-married-man look.
But I definitely would say that I did not feel confident until my early thirties.
I did not feel confident.
Actually, no, late twenties.
Confident enough to say to women, I don't agree and here's why and here's how I think we should do it better, and not to just sort of get snowed under in terms of that bias against male emotional intelligence or male relationship intelligence or
Whatever you want to call it, the EQ of the male species had been so dissed overall throughout popular culture that I sort of felt, you know, okay, well, I guess I don't really know much because I'm only a guy, so I'll stick with the things that I can do, like lifting heavy things and maybe thinking a little bit about philosophy, but I can't really do much nothing else, so I guess I'll be just doing what the woman tells me to do, yup!
And I did have that sort of feeling, And I really didn't do well in relationships because of that, right?
Because without the give-and-take of normal negotiations with reference to an external third party of methodologies that can be referred to by both parties independent of each person's judgment, which is sort of like the scientific method or philosophy or, you know, proof in mathematics and so on.
Without that, then it just becomes a war of will.
And basically, it becomes a win-lose, right?
So one person says, you've got to do it this way.
And I tried for the life of me to negotiate this with women as I began to become more aware of the need for this sort of give and take and have more respect for my own emotional intelligence.
I did begin to try and negotiate this stuff with women that I was going out with.
And I found it absolutely impossible.
I found it absolutely impossible.
It was like arguing with a cop when you've been caught red-handed.
It It was really just like... It's inconceivable that you would ask.
It's absolutely inconceivable.
And there was, at first, sort of stunning comprehension that I would actually dare to raise my voice to say that this is how I would prefer things.
And so, you know, one of the things obviously was pretty important to me was no raised voices.
No raised voices.
And so with some of the women who did raise their voice at me when they got upset or when I, quote, spoke back, you know, with alternate viewpoints or other ways of doing things or ways that would be more satisfying to me, there was simply no real way that this could ever be achieved, right?
So if they raised their voice at me, it was because I was being obtuse or provocative or whatever, and I needed to change my behavior so they didn't end up being forced to raise their voice at me, which of course is just completely corrupt and immoral and abusive in its approach to mutual respectful negotiations.
and And so if they raise their voices at me, it was my fault.
And if I raise my voice at them, which I did very, very rarely, very rarely.
I can remember maybe twice.
But if I did that, then it was absolutely my fault and I was being aggressive and abusive and all that kind of stuff.
So I did find it to be sort of a no-win situation, where it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And I sort of thought that this would be something that would change a little bit, just sort of as I talked about yesterday, as I got older, and I sort of had more cards in my hands and women had sort of fewer cards in their hands.
So I went out with a woman who was a little older than me before I got married, actually quite a bit older than me.
Great woman, great sense of humor, very energetic, very funny, very intelligent, but not so much with the negotiating as per usual.
But I knew at this point enough to know that if this wasn't possible, then it wasn't going to work in the long run, and I would rather stay single and die alone than live my whole life subjugating myself to somebody else's irrational whims because they've been told that everything they believe is true and authentic and genuine and female and lovely and wonderful and all that.
So when I would talk about a particular preference with this woman, she was sort of at the tail end of her childbearing years and she talked about wanting to have children quite a bit.
And my only hesitation was that I knew it was going to have to be a pretty sort of sudden death dating and marriage scenario if I wanted to have children with this woman.
So I talked about that a little bit as being something that I was hesitant about because it was going to be so quick and we still had issues to resolve in terms of getting along.
But I sort of thought, I gotta tell you, I sort of thought, you know, like as a highly successful entrepreneur, I was, I think I'm an attractive guy, I think that I'm an engaging partner, I think that I'm affectionate, actually I know that I'm affectionate, and that I express my feelings not always in the way that the women I used to go out with enjoyed, but it was definitely speaking about my feelings.
And I sort of thought, I guess you could say, that this woman, because she wanted kids, and I was kind of her last shot, right?
She wasn't going to sort of find some other guy who was going to be interested in this kind of thing with her within the next year.
But it really wasn't going to happen.
And she'd been single for a couple of years before I went out with her.
And so I kind of thought, okay, well if there's any situation under which this woman is going to have the desire or capacity to listen to things that I prefer, and of course I don't ask for things that I'm not willing to offer.
I don't sort of say, you have to do this gymnastic maneuver and I'm never going to get off the couch.
Whatever I sort of suggest to women as better rules of interaction, You know, the sort of, I feel rather than you are, you know, the refraining from sort of the escalation of absolutes, like you never do this and you always do that and that kind of stuff.
Just sort of irritating and stupid and childish ways to communicate.
And of course, I absolutely, whenever you come up with a rule, if you're any kind of philosopher, you have to subjugate yourself to that rule as well.
And so whatever I would suggest to these women, I would absolutely put myself under the same umbrella.
So it didn't seem to me unfair or exploitive or anything.
But I found that amazingly enough, and this did shock me fundamentally, that this woman wants to have kids, she wants to get married.
I'm kind of her last shot for doing it.
I'm a successful guy.
She only knew me at the height of my success, so everything was pretty validated from that standpoint.
I was willing to take her out and to pay for things for a while because she wanted that.
She said it was romantic, so fine.
And yet, when I would say, I really don't like it when you do this, if we could avoid that, that would make me a lot happier, then I would really... I mean, sort of one of the minor things.
I don't know if guys sort of run into this a bit, but...
I've found that women can be just a tad snappy at times, like if they're stressed, or if other women are coming over and the house isn't perfect, or, you know, and Christina's really not this way at all.
She's to a tiny degree, which we've had some conversations about, and she's fantastic about correcting.
When they're stressed, when they feel overwhelmed, they can get a little snappy.
And so I would generally, I generally prefer that this didn't happen at all, but for sure it shouldn't happen when we're with other people, right?
I certainly don't appreciate being snapped at when we're in the company of other people.
Because, you know, being an honorable man, the last thing I'm going to do is say something cutting back.
So I just think it was sort of a cowardly and unfair way for this woman.
Now, Christine has never done this, but for this woman to correct me in public when she knew I was never going to snap back, I thought was kind of bullying and cowardly.
I didn't put it that way.
I just said, you know, I would really appreciate it if you didn't do this.
I would never do it to you, and I won't.
This doesn't make me feel good, and so on.
No luck whatsoever.
Whatever I asked for in terms of consideration in the relationship, I simply never got.
Whatever I asked for in terms of, this is sort of one of a dozen or two dozen examples, whatever I asked for in terms of consideration in the relationship, I simply never got.
I never got the woman to agree to it as a principle and to, you know, or even if I did occasionally get the woman to agree to it in a principle, that principle would then be thrown aside during an argument, right?
So if I would say, no raised voices, and then the woman would start raising her voice at me, then I would say, hey, we talked about no raised voices, and she said, yes, but you're being very provocative.
And, you know, so it just never, I could never get it as a sort of standard or an absolute.
And I think that's partly because women are so sensitive to this concept of male subjugation or exploitation or bullying or whatever.
So they've got this sort of basic gut level need for a man and need to respect a man and love a man and be loved by a man and partner up in the old good old way that mother nature intended that they have that sort of undertow that is drawing them towards men but at the same time they have all this ideology in their head that is saying that men are exploitive and dangerous and are going to bully them and destroy their whatever, right?
All the stuff that you hear about or see about so continually about men.
And I think that fundamental issue that women won't subjugate themselves to rational rules within a relationship because they mistake those rules, especially if they're coming from a man, as subjugating themselves to the man's will.
In an unhealthy way.
I think it's just very sad for women and very sad for men.
I think it's the cause of a lot of conflict.
So that sort of vanity which says, which women have had inculcated in themselves, to say that all my impulses are great and all the man's impulses are exploitive and dangerous and out to get me and subjugate me and bind me to the heel of the patriarchy and stuff.
That vanity where you feel everything you do is right and everything that your partner does is wrong.
Very destructive to men and women.
Very destructive, of course, to children in the long run.
So that's the last thing I wanted to talk about in terms of feminism.
I'm sure more topics will come up as I get feedback on this.
So the next thing I wanted to talk about was a story that I'd mentioned to a friend of mine at work.
About policing and how non-useful the police were.
And he told me a couple of stories, and the one that I sort of really remembered was... Actually, there's two.
One is that he said a friend of his, who was a cop, was telling him... He was saying, you know, maybe I should put this alarm system in so the cops get notified and blah blah blah.
And he said, well, sure you could.
And this guy had worked 20 years on the beat and was now sort of higher up in the police force.
And this guy said, yeah, you could, but you know, it really doesn't matter.
And so my friend said, well, what do you mean?
Right?
I mean, it seems like a good idea.
And he's like, oh yeah, but I mean, we take our time.
If we get a call about a robbery in progress, the last thing we want to do is run into these guys.
You know, we just assume you have insurance and we're going to show up and we're going to write some stuff down and we can take it back to head office and file it away and never going to look at it again.
But, you know, we'll deliberately take our time.
You know, he said, I can't tell you the number of times when We've been called to sort of a quiet residential cul-de-sac because there's a robbery in progress.
So some man or some woman's up in the bedroom saying, there's someone downstairs stealing my stuff!
And this call goes out from the 911 area and, you know, we take our time.
I mean, we don't want to run into these guys.
They could be armed.
They could be, you know, you're insured.
Why the heck would we want to get shot?
So I can't tell you the number of times we've sort of been driving out to this cul-de-sac, a residential cul-de-sac, so two o'clock in the morning.
And, you know, we're slowing down.
We're taking our time.
We're stopping for coffee.
And even then, if we sort of come up and we see the cars or whoever, the getaway car is still there, we'll sort of stop.
We'll wait till they'll pass us.
And until they're passing us on the way, we're not going to show up.
I mean, why would we?
You're going to get your money back.
And why would we?
You know, these guys could panic.
They could get cornered.
We could get shot.
We could get stabbed.
We could get whatever, right?
I mean, we don't want any of that.
What's the point?
You're gonna get your stuff back anyway, so... Anyway, so I just thought that was an interesting story about how the police view their obligation to protect you from violent crime.
And it's entirely predictable, exactly as I said in my podcast on the police, that they're just not interested in that, and neither would you be, and neither would I be.
I'm not going to get myself shot for a television set.
It's ridiculous.
Especially when the person is just going to call their insurance company and get everything back anyway.
So that was one.
Now the other one I thought was interesting.
And it's a slightly longer story, but I'll try and keep it short.
So let's just say this guy Josh, that this friend of mine at work told me about.
He's actually my boss.
He's a very funny guy.
And he said, so Josh is going to get some passport photos, because he needs to renew his passport.
And he goes to a passport photo store, where they do the passport thing.
And he says to the guy behind the counter, I need passport stuff.
And the guy's like, sure, no problem.
The guy behind has got a turban on.
He's obviously a Muslim.
And so the guy gets his photos and then comes back and the guy says, you need to sign, but you have to sign entirely within the line.
And so he puts a piece of white square paper around where this guy is signing.
So the only thing that he can see is a signature.
So he signs and then he takes his photos, throws them in his envelope and sends them off to the government.
And then he waits and waits and waits and finally he gets everyone else's.
The rest of his family's got their passports renewed.
He hasn't.
So he phones up Citizenship Canada and says, you know, where's my passport?
And they said, oh, we have to reject it.
It's on its way back to you.
We had to reject it.
And he's like, why?
And he said, well, because you didn't sign your photographs.
And so the guy pieced it together pretty quickly that The guy behind the counter had put a square around somebody else right so somebody else's photographs have been signed and so basically his signature and his Identity was now in the hands of some Muslim group and God knows how it was going to be used But it probably wasn't going to be very good So, of course, he phones his local police station, and they say, oh, that's interesting.
I have no idea where to send you to.
So the person who answered the phone goes through the story of this forgery and, you know, this stealing of identity and so on.
So the person at the police station says, oh, that's interesting.
I mean, it sounds bad, but I have no idea where to send you to.
So the guy's like, well, maybe forgeries or something like that?
The guy, oh, yeah, that could be good.
So immediately you've got suspicions that this is not a very efficient process, because you have to tell the person who's answering the phone.
Where to send you, right?
So he finally gets through the guy's voicemail.
Oh, I'm on vacation for two weeks.
I'll give you a call when I get back.
So the guy keeps leaving messages.
The guy doesn't call him back.
Finally, he does call him back and he says, yeah, you know, we kind of do more credit cards and stuff.
This is sort of not out of my league.
Maybe you can call the RCMP.
So, of course, he goes through the same rigmarole for like two months with the RCMP.
He finally gets through to the guy and the guy's like, oh, I'm pretty busy.
I don't know if I'm going to get a chance to look at this.
This sounds pretty complicated.
Plus, a lot of time has elapsed.
Ha, ha, right?
I mean, of course it has because they've been so inefficient.
Maybe you can call the FBI, right?
And so this is starting to get ridiculous, right?
I mean, clearly nobody is interested whatsoever in investigating this rather significant identity theft by a group that is obviously radical and dangerous.
I don't mean Muslims in general, but obviously a Muslim who's stealing passport photos probably doesn't have the best of motives.
And, I mean, the policemen have no interest in dealing with this.
This is going to be a lot of lead work.
They're going to have to go and interview this guy.
They're going to have to start proceedings.
It's going to cheese off the Muslim community.
They're going to get targeted, perhaps, by an extremist group.
And the trail has gone cold, and the guy's just going to say, I have no idea.
There's going to be no proof, and they're not going to be I mean, it would be months of work for the police, and for the sake of what?
For some identity that's never going to be recovered anyway?
But they just have no interest.
And so this is how they're protecting us from terrorism.
I mean, these stories are just kind of funny.
And everyone has these stories.
As soon as you start talking about the inefficiency and ridiculousness of the police, then you for sure are going to hear these kinds of stories from people.
They phone and nothing happens, and so on.
So, you know, feel free to share those on the board.
I think it's kind of funny and I think it's kind of interesting just how these stories are so prevalent as soon as you start to ask people about it.
That the police are just sort of like a gated community of self-interest and they kind of do their own thing and yeah, they'll drop by a domestic dispute if they think it's safe.
Yeah, they'll pick up, you know, if some woman phones and says, you know, my husband kicked in a door, then they'll come and, you know, are there guns in the house, ma'am?
Well, if there aren't, then they'll come and they'll talk this guy out of the house with a megaphone and, you know, that's safe enough, right?
That's not something that they're ever going to get attacked in.
Pray upon drug dealers if those drug dealers can't defend themselves and so on.
But they won't go into any situations which are dangerous.
We know that there's an enormous amount of violent organized crime involved in drugs, drug distribution, growing distribution and sale.
And, of course, cops never get shot by these people, because they just don't get involved.
And when cops do get shot, because some guy that they think is harmless goes postal on them, then they're just completely shocked and appalled, you know?
And, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever!
We never thought that this isn't supposed to happen!
We're supposed to be bullying people who can't fight back!
And so, you know, don't think of it... I mean, people say, well, how would society operate without the protection of the police?
It's like, what do you think is happening right now?
It's just too funny for words.
People just live in this fantasy land of cop shows.
Like, the movie Crash won an Oscar.
And I did see the movie, mostly because the quality of acting I thought was going to be pretty high.
And as an ex-actor myself, I really enjoy watching good acting.
And the acting was very good.
But it was all about racial prejudice and violence and emotional violence and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
And yeah, I'm sure it occurs in isolated pockets.
And I'm getting to racism.
I mean, I've already done it.
But I mean, I just don't really believe in it as a substantive force in society because I've never seen it happen.
I've never really seen it directly happen to anyone.
And yes, there may be racists, but so what?
I mean, it's not really the fundamental driving factor within society.
So I just sort of found the movie kind of silly from that standpoint.
It's like the movies where you have the noble workers and the evil boss.
You know, the sort of evil, mustachioed, twirling, cigar-chomping capitalist boss who's just cold and mean.
Like in Roseanne, right?
They had that boss who was just sort of cold and mean.
In North Country you have these noble beaten up women with their kids who they're trying to do the right thing by and how sad it is that all the men are pigs and sort of all that.
It's like Lord of the Rings.
It's like Narnia.
It's a sort of made-up fantasy world of moral silliness where everybody's categorized according to class or gender or whatever.
It's a made-up world and Crash was sort of the same thing.
And this sort of instance where the cops are sort of nobly trying to protect the citizens, this is another made-up world.
And all these things are derived from art, right?
They're not derived from any sort of rational analysis of the world.
They're derived from people who are very damaged, right?
Borderline personalities who have nothing but conflict in their lives and chalk it up to external factors like race and class and gender and so on, when they're just jerks.
So, this is sort of a made-up world, and the made-up world of, you know, the police are noble, the men in blue, the thin blue line, the cats in blue who just wake up every morning doing nothing but focusing on how best to protect us and save us and help us and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
They get kittens down from trees and bring down shooters single-handedly and, you know, protect the women.
It's all just nonsense, right?
And as I've mentioned before, the free market has helped people in terms of security.
The cops have done nothing.
And this is a fantasy world that's sort of derived from this sort of silliness around cop shows and so on.
It's just a bunch of propaganda.
It has nothing to do with real life and nothing to do with real people, right?
So in these sorts of worlds, you have people who just have no sensible motivations whatsoever, and they're just like sort of sadistic, borderline personality structures.
So, for instance, you have these evil capitalist bosses who just abuse their workers despite the fact that it's been well known and is well shown that, you know, bosses who treat their workers better get richer, right?
You have lower turnover, happier people, more productive.
You can, you know, ask them for more things and they'll be happy to give them to you.
And so bosses who do better are acting in their own self-interest.
Bosses who treat their people better.
And bosses who don't will get fired, usually, unless it's something that is sort of state-run and so on.
So, you know, you just make up these people who are just mean and sadistic despite the fact that it's against their own economic self-interest.
But the fact that they're greedy capitalist bosses indicates that they're greedy for money, but then they treat their workers badly despite the fact that they're just going to get rid of these... it's going to destroy their profit.
I mean, it's just made-up stuff, right?
I mean, you just make up these people with these monodimensional characteristics that have nothing to do with general self-interest.
So even if somebody is greedy, a capitalist boss who's greedy, his greed is going to want to make him treat his workers as best as he can because it's very expensive to get new workers and to train them.
So you just get these made-up situations.
It's the same thing with race as well.
And it's the same thing with this kind of stuff around the cops.
Everybody's got their impression of cops, not from what cops actually do in the real world, but from all these silly cop shows that come up with this kind of stuff.
It's the same thing with doctors as well.
Doctors are noble, heroic guys who just do nothing but sort of spend every waking minute trying to figure out how best to help their patients, and it's nonsense.
Certainly it's not the case up here.
Maybe more the case in the States.
But in socialized medicine, all they're figuring out is how they can get the most money out of the system with the least interaction with patients.
I mean, they're not interested in your long-term health at all.
The only way the doctors make money up here is by cycling through people with minor ailments very quickly and charging for the full amount of time.
So you're directly paid by the state to ignore your patients and to refer any kind of complicated or serious patients and to ignore the elderly and those in the most need.
So of course it's got nothing to do with what doctors actually do in the real world.
That's what people don't ever study.
So the last thing I wanted to talk about this morning was there was a little bit of a debate on the board about strong atheism versus weak atheism.
And I thought it was an interesting topic, simply because it shows just how far and deep-reaching this concept of God really is, and how people just can't think about this concept of a deity in any kind of rational manner.
Because, as you may or may not know, strong atheism is there is no God.
Weak atheism is, well, it doesn't really seem to me that there's a God.
I guess there could be theoretically, but, you know, it's not something I would really subscribe to, and so on and so on.
So that is a very interesting position, and it really doesn't make any sense at all, because you don't ever talk about God.
I mean, there's no point talking about a belief in God any more than there is talking about a belief in pixies.
I mean, you don't sort of focus... there's no sort of strong anti-pixieism and weak anti-pixieism.
Or, you know, strong anti-leprechaunism and weak anti-leprechaunism.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
We're not talking about God here, no matter how large he looms in our mental space in terms of emotional attachment and historical propaganda, no matter how much or how large the idea of God looms in our mental space, God is just another ghost, is just another pixie, is just another leprechaun.
And with the additional characteristics of a highly personalized one, too.
So the real question is not do you believe in gods, but do you believe in this god, right?
This is the only real emotional attachment that we have, for the most of us, to the God that was bullied into us when we were growing up.
So your real question is not, do you believe in leprechauns, but do you believe in this leprechaun, this specific leprechaun, like the one that's on the Lucky Charms cereal box, like that cartoon character who has that voice, and that little jig, and that belt, and that hat, and that red hair, and all that.
Do you believe in that?
Leprechaun, not some abstract deity.
The only reason that God looms large is because the concept was bullied into us when we were kids.
So you're talking about a specific God with specific characteristics.
Not, can mind exist without a body?
That's sort of the real question.
Can life exist without any material form?
Those aren't the questions that people have.
They have, does God exist, does a God, does a God with specific character, all-powerful, all-knowing, wise, judgmental, all, you know, heaven and hell, maybe to some degree as well, but a specific characteristic of a consciousness without matter.
And so it's not even leprechauns in general, which would be consciousness without matter, a life without physical form, or life which cannot die and is not born.
Because those concepts are obviously just silly, right?
When you come up with something that says, life without material form, and life which is neither born nor dies and is eternal, all you're doing is taking organic concepts and negating them, right?
You're not coming up with anything new.
You're saying that there's such a thing as life that doesn't die.
Well, all life dies, and so you're just taking a characteristic of life called Life and death.
Or death.
Birth and death.
And you're simply eliminating it.
Right?
So it's like saying, every building is tall.
Every skyscraper is tall.
But I'm interested in whether a short skyscraper exists.
And of course the whole concept is contradictory.
So you're taking a characteristic of skyscrapers and simply reversing it.
So a characteristic of life is that everybody dies.
And you're simply eliminating that characteristic and saying that you're coming up with something new, which of course is not the case at all.
You're simply reversing a characteristic of life and calling it a new concept, which is completely contradictory to the concept.
So there is no life without death, without birth and death.
And therefore saying, is there life without birth and death is simply a contradiction.
It's like saying, is there such a thing as a short skyscraper, or a tall midget, or a fat thin person, and so on, or a very hairy on top bald man.
I mean, you're just simply taking the concept and deploying its opposite and thinking that you're trying to come up with a criteria for proof, which is just nonsensical.
And so there is no such thing as weak atheism.
I mean, that's just weak thinking, in my humble opinion.
There's no way that an atheist or any rationalist or philosopher can evade the problem of God by saying, well, there's no proof for God, but there's no proof against God.
Because the fact of the matter is, the very concept of God disproves itself.
It is exactly the same as a square circle.
So does a square circle exist?
Well, maybe there's no way of, you know, you can't prove for sure whether it does or doesn't exist.
It seems to me that a square circle doesn't exist.
But, you know, maybe it could... I mean, no, of course not.
You've got a definition that contradicts itself.
It's like a true lie.
It's like something that is up and down at the same time.
It's going up and going down at the same time, from the same vantage point.
You simply have a contradictory concept.
You just completely disprove it.
There is no such thing as life without birth and death.
Birth and death is a fundamental characteristic of life.
There is no such thing as a square circle.
There is no such thing as someone who is both fat and thin simultaneously.
So these things don't exist.
And there's no such thing as consciousness without matter.
There's no such thing as life without material form.
And so this is just a blanket contradiction.
It's a self-contradictory statement.
And therefore it is false.
You know, there's no such thing as a weak or strong position on whether 2 plus 2 equals 5.
2 plus 2 does not equal 5.
2 plus 2 equals 4.
And there's no possibility that 2 plus 2 is going to equal 5.
And so, there's no sort of strong or weak positions on this.
And the only reason that there is such a thing as strong and weak atheism.
It's because people are frightened of just being honest about God and honest about the facts of reality, and just dismissing people who believe in God as people who are, you know, just sort of mentally ill, right?
I mean, they're mentally ill.
They're in a state of nature until they realize the arguments, and if they continue to believe in God after they recognize what a silly and self-contradictory notion the idea of a deity is, then they're sort of voluntarily mentally ill, right?
They're like chain-smoking.
In their brain.
If their brains are analogous to their lungs, they're just chain-smoking and they're going to get sick.
And it's going to be pretty bad.
So I would suggest, and I'll put this on the board, but the idea that there's sort of strong and weak atheism is silly.
There is no such thing as consciousness without matter.
Consciousness is always an effect of matter in every single instance.
And there's no theoretical way even that consciousness could exist without matter.
And you can make up as many alternate dimensions as you want.
You could also make up an alternate dimension where 2 plus 2 equals 5, but that wouldn't really make any sense because you've got the number 2 defined, and therefore when you put two of those together, you have the number 4, which is derived from the number 2 being aggregated with the number 2.
So even in an alternate dimension, you can make up some alternate dimension where up is down, black is white, square circles exist, but that's just a definition of insanity, right?
Yes, in some realm where contradictions exist, then contradictions can be true, but so what?
I mean, that's just, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
Yes, if something existed, then it would exist.
Sure, if consciousness without matter could exist, then consciousness without matter could exist, but the fact is that it can't and doesn't exist.
And there's no theoretical way under which it could.
So making up some alternate realm where anything can be true is not intellectually responsible.
It is not mature.
It is not kind to people who are struggling with these ideas.
It is cruel.
It is like, you know, you go to your lung doctor when you've got lung cancer and he says, no, don't worry, in some alternate universe, smoking is great for you and makes you healthier, so don't worry about it.
Or, you know, when you say, what the hell are you talking about?
I mean, I've got lung cancer.
Give me some chemo, goddammit!
So please stop with this nonsense about strong atheism and weak atheism and just get back into the land of sensibility and screw your moral courage to the sticking place and just recognize that those who advocate religion are terribly traumatized and brutalized emotionally and completely insane intellectually, and they just need to be confronted as such.
Or, you know, get out of the arena and say, I'm too frightened to have opinions about religion, and be honest about it, but don't sort of divide it into this pseudo-intellectual responsibility of strong and weak atheism.
There is simply the truth, and the truth is not strong or weak, it just is.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
▲
Export Selection