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April 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:05
186 Metaphors as Philosophy

An examination of what political questions *really* mean

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Good evening brothers and sisters.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is quarter past eight in the evening.
Christina is working on something to do with her clinic.
So I'm going to do an evening podcast.
I didn't actually drive to work today because I had a meeting near my home, so I worked at home in the morning.
And so we did not get our usual chatty drive, which is not too bad, I'm sure.
It must be nicer to hear the slightly better quality sound that I get out of my home office.
So let's have a chat.
It's going to be the last chat for a little while about family issues and about communication.
Because I know that we have drained that particular swamp dry, at least for a little bit.
And so I'd like to talk about a message that was posted on the board that I think is very interesting.
Now, I doubt, highly, highly, highly, highly doubt that I'm going to convince you of my opinion in this matter.
Although I do believe that it is true.
But I also understand this is a really, really, really advanced topic.
And I don't say that with any kind of superiority because it took me heavens-to-betsy decades and decades to figure it out, but this is a pretty advanced topic and you can let me know if you think it's believable or if you think that it's true.
I don't think that I will be able to prove it, but I think that it is compelling nonetheless.
I don't think I'll be able to prove it so logistically because I think it requires a greater knowledge of the brain than we have, but I think it's an interesting enough topic that I'm going to put it out there.
I'm going to ask people what their thoughts and experiences of it are And then you can let me know what you think.
So this is something that was posted on the boards, and I think it's a very interesting problem, but not for the obvious reason.
So I'll read this to you, and you can let me know, and then I'll let you know what I think about it.
The post is this.
The title is called Love It or Leave It, Libertarian Style.
And the poster wrote the following.
So my brother posed this question.
Let's say that you're the only black man in a southern town filled with racists.
Somehow you live there.
Don't ask me how.
I couldn't get a clear answer on this.
But you can't get food at the local shopette because the owners won't let you in.
And you can't get a job because no one will hire you.
And you can't get a loan to start your own business because no one will loan money to you.
And the local fire and protection services won't service you.
Isn't this essentially the same thing as saying, if you don't like it, then you can just move, a la, love it or leave it, which was a podcast in an article that I wrote recently.
Of course, there is the distinction of being actively forced to leave via some sort of democratic vote or dictatorial edict, and being, quote, forced to leave because no one will associate with you.
But his point is that either way, you're forced to leave.
So how are they different in consequence?
If you want to live in Chicago but no one in Chicago will associate with you, then obviously you are forced not to live out there out of pure necessity.
And that's the end of that, and I think this is sort of an interesting question.
I'll sort of give you my response, and then I'll tell you why I think it's interesting.
I mean, I'll give you the response about the surface question, and then we'll talk about the deeper question.
So my response is, I don't see the equation of the two.
The black man is not being serviced by the racist townspeople due to their own individual exercise of private and absolute property rights, i.e., I won't sell you my loaf of bread.
The problem is that by saying love it or leave it, i.e.
in this state manner, those in the government are exercising property rights that they do not in fact possess.
The black man in the racist town can always sell stuff on eBay, or become a stock trader, or grow all his own food, or run porn sites, or whatever.
He doesn't need to interact with anyone in his town in order to survive.
But he owns his house, and no one else does, and no one can kick him out of it.
They can refuse to deal with him, but that does not violate the universality of property rights.
However, in the state example, those in the government claim the right to kick the black man out of his house.
In other words, everything is owned by those in the government who then get to exercise complete control over everyone else's property.
That is not real or logical.
The black man owns his house.
George Bush does not.
It's also a question of incentives.
The less that people want to sell food to the black man, the more he will pay for it, which will cause some people to sell it to him.
Plus, the black man can always move without emigrating, which is very, very difficult in the modern world due to crazed and xenophobic immigration policies.
Just ask your brother what force is used in either situation.
He's using the argument from effect, either way you have to move, rather than any moral or logical argument.
If he's correct, Then every landlord is a fascistic state dictator.
No, not the same at all, I think, but it's an interesting question.
So that was my response, and I think that everyone could sort of figure that one out.
Now the real question to me is, why did this highly, highly, highly intelligent man not see the obvious flaws in his brother's reasoning?
Now, since it's the last in a little bit in the series that talks about how closely the state is co-joined in one's own psychology with the family, I'm going to put forward a little thesis.
And you can believe me, you cannot believe me, but the way to figure out if I'm right or not, and I can't, I wish I could, maybe I can, I can't figure out how to do it now, prove this logistically, but I think that we're in the realm of highly compressed and deep metaphors, so I think that this is a very interesting.
So I think that it's entirely possible to look at this story about the black man filled in the town of racists or in a town full of racists as not a theoretical statement from this gentleman's brother to himself but rather a statement of the family.
A statement of the family.
So why did this person's brother, this gentleman's brother, come up with this argument about the black man in the town full of racists and how that black man is going to have to leave?
I think, personally, that why the story came up and why this gentleman was unable to answer it is that if we look at this black man as this gentleman who is having the question asked of him, the black man is a libertarian and the town filled with racists is the family or the social situation that he's in, the social environment that he's in, the immediate social environment, I mean the country or the town or anything like that, but his family, an extended family.
And I think that What this guy is saying, metaphorically, is, look, you cannot change who you are.
See, he didn't say a gay man.
Every detail in these stories is very important, in my humble opinion.
He didn't say there's a gay man in a town of homophobes, because the gay man can always pretend not to be gay.
He can change who he is.
But in this story, it's a black man And, obviously, a black man can't pretend to not be a black man.
I mean, that would be a makeup job that would be fairly spectacular and hard to keep going in the South because of all the sun and the heat.
And so, in this metaphor, there's a black man who is in a town, and I think it's instructive that this gentleman says, somehow you live there, somehow the black man lives in this racist town, and don't ask me how I couldn't get a clear answer on this.
Well, that's important as well.
Because you've set up this situation that logically wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.
I mean, if you're a black man, how could you have even survived to grow up in this town filled with racists?
I mean, it wouldn't really make any sense.
You would have left or starved to death or whatever long ago.
And at some point, somebody must have sold food to your parents or you when you were a child or, you know, whatever.
I mean, there's not a lot of logic here, but there is a lot of emotional logic.
And so, in this way of looking at things, the southern town is the stand-in for this libertarian's social circle.
His brothers, his parents, his extended family, whatever.
And he is the black man, like the black sheep.
And this person is saying, if you break it down at an emotional level, this person is saying, you can't change, we can't accept you, you are going to have to leave.
And I know that that sounds like a leap, and I know that that sounds like I may be going too far in my analysis, but the one thing that I do have a huge amount of respect for is the storytelling ability of the unconscious.
And I say that not just as a novelist and not just as a thinker, but as a way of understanding things like dreams and how powerful they can be and how much it's worth exploring and examining them.
Political debates From people who have not been very interested or delved deeply into philosophy for many years, political debates are always about the family, always about the immediate social circumstance, not about the state, not about George Bush, not about Washington, not about foreign policy.
It's about the family.
And in order to surmount it being about the family, you have to study it for many years.
In my humble opinion, again, I know that this is not so logistically provable, but I think it's still important to look at it.
And the reason that I say that is that this highly intelligent gentleman was not able to answer this question that is obvious to answer.
And that is important.
And the reason that he was not able to answer it is because he doesn't want to leave his family.
And I think that's something that's very important to understand as well.
It's not just other people who are talking about the family, it's our responses to it as well.
And I think that's something that we need to understand within our own hearts when we're talking about politics.
It's always very, very important to try to realize when we're talking about our own family, or our own history, or our own emotional baggage, and when we're actually talking about the thing itself.
And talking about the thing itself is very hard.
It's a very hard thing to do.
I certainly know that when I talk to people about their families, it's so, so, so important for me to always check that I'm not projecting my own dislike of my family onto them, and also when I talk to people about the government, that I'm not confusing my own parenting with the state, and so on.
It's a constant process of unraveling, and I've mentioned this a couple of times in the podcast.
but I think that it's important for this gentleman to understand that you know his brother asked this question and it is a clear metaphor for his role in the family he's the black sheep he's the black man he's in a southern town filled with racists.
And this is an admission from this gentleman's brother that they are bigoted, that they are in the wrong, but they're not going to change.
And I think this is a very, very clear message.
If you look at it from this standpoint, this is a very clear message.
And if you think about this in your own life, I think you can see this coming up quite a bit, that everyone is telling you all the time exactly what's going on.
We just kind of choose not to listen.
I mean, I mentioned a book, probably, I don't know, 30 or 40 podcasts ago.
So...
When I was going through all these difficulties with my brother when he was leaving the business that we had founded, had been running for five or six years and grown to a good size and a good profitability, when he decided to leave this business and to go into business with this guy who was not an honest guy and not a good guy and who'd sort of done some pretty bad things with our business,
He took me, and he'd never done this before, he took me to a bookstore and he said, you have to read this book.
And my brother's not a big one for doing this, right?
You have to read this book.
And so he took me to the theological section, which of course was rather baffling to me because he certainly knew my beliefs and he was not a religious man, at least wasn't then and probably isn't now anyway.
And he got me this book called The Screwtape Letters by C.S.
Lewis, which is about an elder devil teaching a younger devil how best to tempt a virtuous man with evil, with corruption.
Why did he do that?
So I read the book and I found it interesting, and I've used the metaphors a couple of times.
The question is, why did he do that?
Well, in my particular opinion, he did that for two reasons.
One, to say that he was going to try to tempt me, that he was going to try and instruct me on a darker path, and he was giving me this book as ammunition.
And he did.
And the second is to say that he himself has lost this battle.
And he couldn't say it to me explicitly, so he was going to have me read the book and sort of try and warn me through that particular kind of mechanism.
And that's something that's very, very important to understand.
The true self is always down there.
The true self, the honest self, the self of integrity, the self of purity, the self of honor and dignity.
It's always down there.
It's like the soul in the Christian mythology.
You cannot kill it off.
It's always buried down there under the rubble of accumulated hideousness and moral corruption and evil and whatever it is.
And it still reaches out to try and help other people.
It still reaches out to try and warn other people.
And this stuff is all very obvious once you start to look for these signs about what people are actually telling you.
It's all so so so clear but we just don't want to listen.
We just don't want to listen.
I mean this story about the black man in the town full of racists is a very important story because the brother doesn't say Well, the black man, like the brother who's giving the story to the libertarian, doesn't say, well, the black man should work to convert the racist.
The black man should rise above the situation.
He doesn't give options to the black man about staying in that community and finding some way to work with it in a positive manner.
He also doesn't explain how this black man got there, which is a way of this non-libertarian brother who posed this question of saying, I don't know why you are the way you are, but I can only assume that it's genetic and completely incompatible, because this is a guy who doesn't really understand free will or options, right?
This brother who posed this question.
Because if he did, he would be able to find lots of solutions and also realize the basic illogic of popping a black man into an environment of racism, extreme racism, and not having any history or any causality or anything like that.
So this particular story about suddenly popping into an impossible situation because of your very nature that you can't change, where everyone is going to hate you and you're going to end up having to leave it, is not about the state.
It is about the family.
And that's why this gentleman could not answer that question.
Again, in my humble opinion.
I mean, believe it or not, or believe it or don't, this is sort of my opinion.
I've got lots of examples in my own life where this sort of stuff has come up pretty regularly and pretty consistently.
Now, my brother has always been a moral relativist, and an exceeding moral relativist at that as well, a radical relativist.
Now, why would that be the case?
Is it because he's thought things through?
No, because he was a corrupt and vicious person when he was younger and still has significant traces of those personality traits still within his character.
And so for him, moral relativism is simply a defense mechanism to obscure the moral nature of his own actions to himself.
And then he spins this into all of these other things about the world and society and reality and the state and so on.
But it really comes back to one sort of basic thing, which is that, you know, he feels terribly guilty about what he did as a child, and he can't handle the moral absolutism of that.
Now, the moral absolutism is still part of his nature, but now it's co-joined with the moral relativism.
So he is absolutely relativistic.
He is intolerantly relativistic, because he was never tolerant of my viewpoints around absolute morality, which meant that he really wasn't very relativistic at all.
And so the reason why our interaction never got anywhere as adults was simply because he would project the absolutism in himself, which is innate to every human being.
Every human being is innately absolutist.
I mean, just look at children.
I mean, as I mentioned before, you take the candy from the baby, you'll get a sense of property rights and how important they are to us very innately, very early on.
Moral absolutism is an aid to our nature.
Those people who are relativists, the problem with interacting with them, it gets very soupy and very complicated very quickly and you're no longer talking about any sort of objective facts or logical morality or politics or anything.
Because what happens is they feel intensely terrified and upset and angry and hostile towards and bullied by and dominated by their own sense of absolute morality, which they have consistently violated throughout their life.
Nobody who's a virtuous man becomes a relativist.
That's sort of my particular... I've never seen any examples of that.
So what happens is that their innate sense of moral absolutism, which is as solid as our innate sense of gravity, their innate sense of moral absolutism, they project into you.
And then in order to manage their own feelings, they attempt to undermine your certainty about moral absolutism.
This is why you get into these conversations with people that get very weird, very emotionally charged, very offensive in very deep kind of ways, where you feel like you just can't get any words across that make any sense, where you feel like you just can't communicate in any kind of clear way, and every avenue that you take to try and talk about something where you feel like you just can't communicate in any kind of clear way, and every avenue that you take to try and talk about something gets cut off, or diverted, or framed, or minimized, or diminished,
Well, it's a perfect sign that you're stuck into one of their psychological defenses, and that you are now playing a role, right?
They've projected the part of themselves that they've disowned into you, and then they're attempting to control their own feelings by controlling your behavior, by making you feel futile, because basically, I mean, there's lots of reasons, but basically it's because they need to believe that their kind of corruption is a survival but basically it's because they need to believe that their kind of corruption is a survival mechanism, and that to have integrity and to be morally absolute
So then they project that feeling, their own feelings of absolutism onto you and then thwart you and thwart everything that you think of in order to reinforce that central premise that they have, that to be moral is to be thwarted.
Because that's what they did to themselves.
I mean, I know this is really complicated stuff and it's very tough to talk about.
I've got a webcam, I've got to hook it up and I'll do a video or two on this because it's really helpful to have a couple of chess pieces in it and to have a whiteboard or something like that.
So I hope that you will bear with me as I try and describe some of this stuff.
But it is very important to understand how little we're talking about philosophy and politics when we're talking about people.
Just how little we are talking about.
We're talking about their families.
We're talking about their own lives.
We're talking about their moral choices.
We're not talking about the state.
It's a waste of time to talk about the state if you are not understanding the degree to which you are impacting somebody at a very personal level when you talk about ethics.
And that you're talking about their parents, and their siblings, and their own moral choices, and things that they've done that they're mightily ashamed of.
And that's very, very important.
And they'll tell you that.
They'll tell you that in their objections.
You have to kind of piece it together a little bit.
Take a slightly different angle.
Look at it in a different way.
The same way that you have to with the dream, right?
Like the dream that I had about the tsunami, where the tsunami was not me.
The tsunami was not about me.
It was about my effect on others by talking about the truth and it helped me to become more sensitive about talking about the truth.
You just have to flip it around and look at things a little bit differently and it can be enormously helpful.
It can be enormously helpful because it can help you stop wasting time with people who are running their own psychodramas with you involved and yet they claim to be talking about something like the state or something like philosophy or something about objectivity or logic.
and they're just not and they're just not and the way that you figure that out is through your instincts through your emotions whenever you feel thwarted or you're not energized by a conversation or you feel aggressed against or you feel bullied or you feel dismissed or you feel that there's hostility in the room, or you feel that things are getting too emotionally charged, or you feel that people, it just gets all clogged and messy, then you're absolutely, you've got to stop the conversation.
You've got to stop the conversation, because you have to protect your own sense of efficacy.
You have to protect, like, guard, like gold, like the last scrap of bread in a desert, like a cup of water in a desert, you have to protect, like, You have to guard your own sense of moral efficacy and not expose it to people who are going to diminish it, or break it down, or make you feel thwarted, or make you feel hopeless, or make you doubt.
And I don't mean make you doubt like they've got good reasons and they can step you through them.
I mean make you doubt just by being emotionally weird.
Or hostile, or negative, or dismissive, or whatever.
Or pretend to be bored, or pretend like you're some sort of freak for even thinking about these sorts of things.
You have got to protect your optimism, and you've got to protect... You're like one of those penguins in that documentary.
You've got to sort of shield that egg from the bitter cold of cynicism that's all around you.
You've got to shield that life within you from all the cynicism around you.
And the way that you do that is to avoid getting into conversations with people where you're ostensibly talking about philosophy or psychology or about politics, but you're actually getting swept up in their murky and sick psychodramas about their own histories and their own choices or lack of choices or their own conformities or corruptions or degradations or hostilities or corruptions of others or whatever.
Don't get involved in those conversations.
The moment you feel things are getting murky or confused or complicated or weird, just stop talking.
Don't just say, OK, well, I think that we can talk about this another time and never bring it back up again.
Trust me, they probably won't either.
But this is a very important thing in my humble opinion.
It's an important thing to understand that you really have to protect yourself.
You really have to protect your optimism.
It is a precious and delicate flower.
It is like one of those rare hibiscus that you find in the Amazon.
It's incredibly beautiful and incredibly sensitive to change.
And you have to protect that, because as I wrote in a novel once, the modern world is a harsh wind to the tiny flame of the true self.
And I do believe that that is a fact.
So don't talk about politics and philosophy with people who aren't advanced or mature enough to actually talk about politics and philosophy.
Talk about it with people who share your passion for the truth, your objectivity yourself, and of course if you find yourself getting oddly offended by particular arguments or particular approaches or particular questions, then it's very important that you stop and figure out in your own life what it is that you are being confused by, what it is that you're murking yourself up over, and I can guarantee you it's about your family, it's about your brothers and sisters, and it may be in rare occasions about early schooling and early friends and so on.
But 99.9% of the time it is about your family and it is about your siblings.
So I hope that that's helpful.
I hope that that's a helpful approach.
I hope that the person who posted this will let me know what they think of this theory and I apologize for using them as a guinea pig.
But I really am quite convinced that this person is being marked off as a black sheep who simply cannot change.
He won't be able to change his family.
His family is saying, you're not going to be able to change And given that the racist cannot love, sorry, given that the black man cannot love the racists, this person's brother is also saying to him, you cannot love us and you will have to leave because there's no possibility of coexistence.
And I'm sorry to hear that message.
I hope that I'm wrong.
I don't think that I am.
But I hope that this is helpful for you when you are looking at talking about politics with other people.
Don't talk politics with people who are not Mature and enlightened and understand their own natures and understand their own Motivations because otherwise you will be absolutely undermining your optimism and your joy and your curiosity and your happiness And that's the whole point is to be happy.
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