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April 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:37
208 Moral Reciprocity Part 2: Blindness

Why we are blind to moral reciprocity

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It is 8.41, running a little late, on the 25th of April 2006, and we are going to continue our chat about, not about foreign policy or about reciprocity yesterday, but about the basic idea behind it that makes these absolutely obvious thoughts so It's obscure to the general population.
Noam Chomsky, and I do lean upon Noam Chomsky to some degree, I'm listening to a book of his at the moment called Failed States, which is good.
But I do lean upon Noam Chomsky for foreign policy to some degree.
I do have other sources but I would say that he's the largest and I think that's a reasonable thing to do because he is and has been and has almost gone to jail for and I would say is courageous in his approach to foreign policy and in his approach to ethics.
I think with all due humility that there are things that he doesn't understand Because, for instance, one of the things that he says in failed states is that, isn't it sad that defense spending did not go down After the end of the Cold War.
And he also says, wouldn't it have been better if the money had been spent on education and saving the environment and old age security and welfare and, you know, it's like, oh, no me, no me, no me, no me, no me.
Could it not be at least remotely possible?
Could it not be even theoretically possible that the better thing to do with people's money might be not to take it from them by force in the first place?
You know, he's such a tease.
He's like, yeah, I'm with you, brother.
You go, you grisly old MIT guy.
And then it's like, oh, oh dear.
What a shame.
What a shame.
So close. And yet, not.
And I hope that doesn't happen too often with me, with you.
I know that my own experience has been when I get interested in somebody's thoughts, and I do get very interested.
I remember waiting for Harry Brown's radio show to see when it was posted, and I do get very interested in people's thoughts, and I do, I'd say not so much when I was younger.
When I was younger, I was, I really, I mean, you know, went into Ayn Rand's philosophy very, very deeply, in a way that I don't think I've gone into anybody else's philosophy since, to a much smaller degree with Aristotle, but Aristotle is so voluminous that, and also is not the best writer in the world, because of course he didn't write any of the stuff that we have.
They're all cobbled together from student notes.
But, I really do fall into people's thinking, and I really try that cloak on, and I... I don't...
I mean, I wouldn't say it's culty exactly, but I do think that it's very helpful to go the whole way with a sort of philosophy that is enticing to you.
I think you have to sort of...
My experience has been you sort of pour yourself into it like water into a container.
And then what that does is it breaks the habits of your old personality.
It breaks, you know, all of the habits of your old self, which is good because that keeps the false self at bay.
And then... You find what, as you settle into a new shape, your natural self can come out a lot more and you can see what fits and what doesn't fit.
And I don't mean to say that that's all subjective, but there are some parts of a philosophy that are subjective.
I mean, for sure. I mean, you may not go all the way with me around families and so on.
There's no syllogistic proof about you're going to be miserable if you have bad people in your life.
But we do believe, of course, or at least I believe, that contradictions lead to unhappiness.
And saying that you're for truth and integrity and then allowing bad people to remain in your life will not make you happy, but I don't have any syllogistic proof of that.
Similarly, with Ayn Rand, there are certain aspects of the emotional life as it's portrayed in the characters, and I don't really know what her perspective was personally, but, you know, Howard Rourke and, I guess, Hank Reardon and so on, they're all They all view their pain with a cold eye and very detached and they just try and make it, you know, oh, so I'm in pain.
How fascinating. It's all sort of Vulcan and strange and not very...
It's humanistic, in my view.
Nathaniel Brandon has actually written a good article on this about the dangers of Ayn Rand's portrayal of one's intimacy with oneself, which is not always as much fun as it sounds.
But there are certain aspects to a philosophy that are somewhat optional, I guess you could say.
I mean, there's core premises that, you know, like the scientific methods, it doesn't tell you what you have to study, it tells you how to study it, and that's sort of what I try and enslave myself to.
But I know that when I get interested in a philosopher, I find out quite a lot about that person, and Then I am often disappointed.
Actually, I can say pretty much always.
I was very disappointed with Ayn Rand's personal life.
I was actually broken hearted after I started to read about her personal life, not because she had flaws.
Not because she had flaws.
That much is, oh my heavens, I mean, we all have flaws, so to speak.
I mean, I can't even call them flaws, right?
It's like saying that a pie is broken if it's not perfectly round.
It's like it's a crazy suggestion to have, a crazy ideal to have to begin with.
We don't measure the perfection of a pie by whether it's perfectly round or not.
We measure the perfection of a pie by, mmm, taste it!
And so I don't mind that she had flaws.
What I did mind was that she never admitted to having flaws.
That she said, yes, I live a life just like my characters and I live a life of pure rationality and so on.
And that she was completely blind to her flaws was what troubled me much more than the fact that she had flaws.
Because that... It meant that there was a good deal of grandiosity and self-deception in her personality, which translated to her philosophy, led to the two major flaws I see in Ayn Rand's philosophy.
The minor stuff about her questionable approach to homosexuality and so on, whether a woman could ever be president, that's just opining in my view.
The two major flaws is the way that she approached or portrayed one's relationship to oneself and to one's emotions.
I think it was Asiatic insofar as it's very top-down.
It had a religious streak to it in that feelings were considered to be almost the enemy.
I mean, I know she talks about how valuable they can be and how ignoring them is bad, but the fact is that her characters just always ignored their feelings and were sort of coldly contemptuous of their feelings and They would be a bit of a strain to be around, I think.
I don't think they would be as much fun as I think is worthwhile.
And that turned philosophy into a kind of, almost like a macho game of cold self-regard and perfect icy contempt for everyone not as good as you.
And so I think that's not my particular approach.
And I think that you'd not find a psychologist Who would say that a cold and loathsome regard for one's own emotional problems is the healthy way to live.
And so I think that's sort of one flaw.
And the other flaw is the obvious one, at least for those of us who are an anarcho-capitalist, that she believed that a state was necessary, which was the crack at the core of the whole philosophy.
And it's why, in my view, people say, well, if she had been an anarcho-capitalist, then she would have...
She wouldn't have gotten as far in popular culture.
I absolutely disagree with that.
Completely and totally disagree with that.
If she had been an anarcho-capitalist, then she would have been consistent.
And by her own argument, of any two positions, the most consistent will always win.
And so the fact that she accepted the premises of her enemy, that centralized coercion, was absolutely necessary.
Then she was going to have no real effect.
So anyway, that's a particular approach to Ayn Rand.
And that's after sort of immersing myself very deeply in everything she read and her newsletters and Leonard Picoff's book and so on and really enjoying them.
I mean, the problems that I have with her are completely like sunspots on the face of the sun.
They're minor relative to the sort of radiant...
Thought that she worked with and I mean she of course was about a bazillion times more original than I was and just about anyone who came after her in this vein who read her because she concocted it all out of very little and we have inherited the Ayn Rand and all of the commentators and people that she inspired and so on.
So that's a, I guess, a minor aside.
But I was just sort of saying that I hope that the feeling, the stabs of disappointment that I get sometimes when I'm listening to or reading someone like Noam Chomsky, and then he ends up saying, well, it would be better if they'd used the status funds for some other purpose rather than, you know, then it's like, oh, really?
Do you think that's ever going to happen?
Like, that's such a dream to me That you can have the state be in control of hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions of dollars of credit and all of the violent toys that evil humankind's imagination can invent and that they're going to say, hey, let's spend it all on protecting the environment or on education.
And of course, the other thing that's...
Disappointing about Noam Chomsky, and I had a Jewish friend write to me through the board, through the FreedomAid website, and he was saying that, oh, you're totally wrong.
See, Noam Chomsky's denounced Israel and renounced this and so on, and it's like, yeah, but he's still a collectivist, you know, because he's Jewish, right?
He's still a collectivist because that's how he was raised, and he hasn't gone through the very challenging emotional work of Peeling that collectivism off your own soul.
It feels like you're irradiating yourself or something.
It feels awful to do that.
And it takes a long time, and in my experience, it's quite debilitating.
I mean, there was months when I wasn't much good to anyone when I was working on this stuff.
This is, I guess...
Five years ago or so, and peeling off the last remnants of collectivism and of justifications for the use of violence, oh, unbelievably difficult.
And he hasn't done it. I mean, he hasn't done it.
And so he's still working within the structure of collectivism.
He just says that we should spend the money on this rather than that in the same way that people say, well, Donald Rumsfeld's a bad guy to be in this position.
We should have somebody else.
This fantasy still exists.
So, I hope that it's not too disappointing for me, for you, when you sort of go through my thoughts.
I used to, I became a little wary.
I became a little like, okay, so I'm going with this guy like 90%, and I would start to yearn for the last 10%.
I was like, oh, please, oh, what do I have to do?
Oh, and I'd sort of pick up the next article, the next book, and go, oh, if only, oh, please!
And then... And then it would all come crashing down.
I'd be very sort of disappointed.
And I can sort of understand if there's things that I'm saying that are like way out wacky, irrational, crazy, then I can understand that it's disappointing.
Of course, I really hope that you'll let me know because I don't want to disappoint myself first and foremost, but I also don't want to disappoint others.
Now, the idea about how this reciprocity, this idea of universality, we're just so blind to.
Look, I'm going to touch on religion again here, people.
And I'm going to touch on religion because that's where socialism came from.
So even if you're in one of the European socialist countries, if you don't understand the religious premises behind ethics, which are the foundation of Western views of ethics, then you're not going to be able to fight socialism.
So if you want to imagine that I'm talking about socialism, to me that would be perfectly valid, statism and collectivism of any kind, because it all grows out of the Judeo-Christian side of things.
So I'm sorry that if you don't like the religious stuff, but I'm telling you, it's absolutely of use to you.
You just maybe have to translate it a little bit in your own mind.
Well, the idea...
The only idea that can sustain the idea...
Okay, let me start this again.
I'm using the word idea just a little too much.
The only way that the idea of non-reciprocity can be maintained is if we are good by definition.
And those of you who listened to yesterday's podcast, I guess posted today...
Who were listening to me say that Japan had the right to attack the United States by the Bush Doctrine and Afghanistan and Iraq, and I guess Kosovo as well had the right to attack the United States, and Kosovo had the right to attack the NATO countries because they were openly talking about bombing the heck out of that place.
So, if you say, well, but it's different because Japan, you see, was a dictatorship, and Serbia was Muslim, dictatorish, shippy, kind of, Slobodan Milosevic was an evil guy, and Iraq, well, Saddam Hussein is an evil guy, and so they don't have that right.
Well, that to me is fascinating.
This is the argument you always hear.
And it's an absolutely fascinating argument.
Because what it's saying is that virtue is utterly divorced from actions.
Virtue is utterly divorced from actions.
And by God, people, you just end up at religion for that.
As I've talked about in some series on religion, God is virtuous despite the fact that God kills lots of people, calls for the death of unbelievers, murders children, supports selling your daughters into sexual slavery, supports slavery itself.
It never talks about human rights or property rights or capitalism or any of the things which have actually benefited human beings.
It's against lending for interest, which is...
I mean, I have gone on and on, so I'm not going to go into it, but any of these things which a human being were to do, we would call that being stone evil.
I mean, God, the Christian deity of the Old Testament in particular, I mean, is hundreds of times worse than Hitler, right?
Hitler started a war. Which caused a death of about 40 million people overall.
And God killed the whole planet except for Noah and his wife and kids and some indeterminate number of animals.
So I don't think that if a human being were able to sort of kill the whole world except for a couple of people that we'd say, you know, that person is just infinitely good.
I mean, it's just nothing that...
I mean, you couldn't... I worship this person's virtue.
You couldn't ask for anything better.
But of course, people who know this story, and who know all of the other stories in the Bible where God's wrath smites people and so on, and smites the innocent in particular, they still worship this deity as perfectly good.
In other words, virtue is absolutely divorced.
From what an entity does.
It is virtue. The real faith is believing that God has any kind of morality.
It is not just some cosmic demon in the face of evidence that God himself claims to have transcribed down.
I mean, the Bible is a confession of crime.
It's a confession of genocidal crimes that last for thousands of years.
I mean, if you had a trial, this is in the dude's own words, or the dude's, if you're more of the Wiccan persuasion, It's in the dude's own words.
Yes, I did this. Yes, let me sign this.
I killed all these people.
I caused all these people to become sick.
I flamed this city.
You know, I did all of these things.
I'm commanding people to kill unbelievers.
And it's a confession of crime.
I mean, and it's in God's own hand according to the text.
I mean, this is God's confession.
Maybe he felt better after this.
I don't know. Or maybe some other god put him in jail for breaking free from any kind of moral restraint.
Maybe there was a Nuremberg up there in the sky, and the Christian deity was put on trial, and the first thing they did was say, Okay, well, we have some writings.
Are you the author of these writings?
Yes, I am. Well, in these writings, it would seem to be, Mr.
Yahweh, that you have performed the following actions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, we've got to tell you, it's kind of an open and shut case.
So, I mean, you're away.
You're down. Whatever punishment they come up with, they would absolutely throw the book at him.
I mean, he wrote the book, and the book is all confession, so of course they're going to throw the book at him.
But... This idea that virtue exists completely and absolutely and totally independent of action comes directly from religion.
It comes directly from worshipping a being that is by his own moral standards, as I talked about with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is one among dozens or hundreds, a being that by his own moral standards is completely immoral and evil.
I just thought, you know who the plaintiff would be in that cosmic Nuremberg?
The plaintiff would be Satan.
Satan was rebelling against God, probably because God was, in fact, doing some pretty genocidal things, and then God punished him and so on, and so the suit would actually, wrongful dismissal, right?
The suit would be brought by Satan.
I've got to tell you what a play that would be.
Ha! Ah, dear.
Talk about getting yourself burned at the stake.
Anyway, so this idea that there's no such thing as being able to evaluate virtue through the actions of an entity is exactly why reciprocity is so invisible within our conception of the state.
Well, if you say...
I mean, this stuff is all so obvious, it's almost embarrassing to talk about, but I'm just saying it's not obvious to a lot of people.
Maybe it's obvious to you. But if you're going to say, let's just take the example of Japan.
If you're going to say, okay, so Japan is attacking the United States through Pearl Harbor.
Fine. And the reason that Japan is attacking the United States is that the United States is constantly talking about attacking Japan, and also it's an embargo, and it's starving them out, right?
But Japan does not have the right to attack the United States because the United States is good and Japan is bad.
Well, you'd say, okay, well, why is Japan, why is the Japanese government bad?
Well, the Japanese government is bad because they're a dictatorship.
And how do we know they're a dictatorship?
Well, because they're abusing and harming their own citizens.
So, therefore, the criteria of abusing and harming people...
I mean, do I even need to say it?
Okay, I'll just say it quickly. The criteria is then that abusing...
The people on the island of Japan constitutes an evil action, using force to abuse and harm them.
So, you know, this embargo that the United States was performing is falling under that category.
I mean, of course it is, right?
As I talked about way back in my fourth podcast or fifth podcast...
We say that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy because he's harming the citizens of Iraq.
And so we go in and blow them up by, you know, 100,000, 150,000.
We throw them in jail. We torture them.
There are rape rooms. I mean, we don't even know a tenth of a percent of what's going on in Abu Ghraib, but I bet you it would be unbelievable.
What has gone on? There would be no human degradation and horror that could be conceived of by the Marquis de Sade that would not have occurred in Abu Ghraib and other prisons around Iraq.
So, Saddam Hussein is a bad guy because he is torturing and killing the Iraqi people.
And we are good guys, and we're torturing and killing the Iraqi people.
I mean, it's just, there is no empiricism in morality, right?
There's no sort of, okay, well, I don't know if the Japanese government is good or bad.
I don't know if one of the American, I don't have no idea.
Like, let's start with, I don't know, right?
Rather than all this propaganda and say, ah!
Which way? I don't know.
Explain it to me like I'm three years old, right?
And, oh, the Japanese government is harming their citizens while the American government is harming their citizens while the Japanese government is using force to harm the Japanese.
Well, the Americans are using force to harm the Japanese and they're getting the money to do this and the goods to do this and the services to do this by holding guns to the necks of their own people and...
The Japanese government is threatening the Japanese citizens with murder and they have all these bad laws.
Well, the American government is threatening the Japanese with the firebombing and, you know, Tokyo is a city made of wood, right?
When they firebombed it in 1945, when they had no reason to whatsoever because the Japanese government was scrambling to get communications across around defeat.
I mean, 300,000 people were murdered in one night.
300,000 people were murdered in one night.
And because Japan is not a democracy, you can't blame the citizens for the actions of the government.
This is exactly the same as bombing Auschwitz and saying that, well, we had to bomb Auschwitz because the inmates were bad.
And targeting civilians, the only way it's ever justified is because it's a dictatorship, which means that the citizens have no control whatsoever, and are cowering in unarmed fear, and these are the people you target and firebomb.
I mean, this is just stone evil.
This is just genocidal. I mean, there's absolutely no question of that.
Can you imagine if one night some entity were to firebomb New York and destroy it completely with an atomic bomb and kill like two million people?
How that would remain within the national consciousness?
But we don't see that. We see the dust cloud rising from the Enola Gay, I guess it was.
As it peeled off from Hiroshima, and that's it.
We see a couple of nasty pictures and move on.
But can you imagine how long it would stay in our national consciousness or in America's national consciousness if a couple of million people were nuked in one day and that that was just the beginning and then other cities were flattened?
People remember all of this.
They remember all of this for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
And so that's just a by the by.
It's an important thing to remember.
The people who are in foreign policy rise to the top near the end of their career.
They're in for a couple of years. They want to make the splash on the history books.
And they're gone. And everyone else has to live with it for generations.
But this idea that we are good, independent of our actions, that we are just sort of defined as good, and they are just sort of defined as bad, completely comes from religion.
Completely comes from religion.
And this is why it's so important to talk about religion with people, because even if they're raised communists, they still have religious principles.
Like the state can be good regardless of what it does.
Because the whole justification for the state is that it exists to serve and protect, right?
Which is true, of course, but just not citizens, right?
It exists to serve and protect the rich in itself and defense contractors and all those sorts of people.
The idea that the state is moral, independent of its actions, you don't need foreign policy and the firebombing of Tokyo to make that clear.
You just have to understand that the state exists because it holds guns to people's heads and takes their money, which in any other situation would be called theft and punishable by self-defense, or some sort of DRO court system, or some sort of court system, let's just say.
And so the idea that the government just sort of has virtue independent of its actions is how the government survives.
And I don't really believe that this comes from any other place.
Maybe you have another idea, in which case please let me know.
I don't think that this comes from any other place than religion, where you have a deity that is worshipped, that is believed to be good, completely independent of that deity's actions, and in direct contradiction to that deity's actions.
Now, of course, parents are a big source of this as well, and I'll just touch on this briefly because I've talked about this in a couple of podcasts, but parents also want to be viewed as virtuous Independent of their actions.
Let's say, oh, do as I say, not as I do.
So parents want to be perceived as virtuous by their children so they can use the argument for morality and crush their children's soul because there's no bigger club to use on another human soul than the argument for morality.
And so parents want to be viewed as virtuous and so they really like and promote and relish the idea that virtue exists independent of actions.
You also see this in relationships.
I mean, you see this all the time.
When you talk to people who are in relationships that are pretty obviously troublesome or troubling or problematic or downright abusive, and you say, well, okay, so this guy, I don't know, he yells at you, he's lazy, he snarls at the kids, he kicks the dog, he, I don't know, that's whatever.
From every gamut, right?
But I love him!
But I love him!
And so love, which is the admiration of virtue, I mean, it's the involuntary admiration of virtue, exists completely independently of the person's actions.
But there's this thing called my husband or my wife, and that thing, that entity, exists completely independent of their actions, and I just love that entity.
I mean, I love that person despite everything that they do.
Like, virtue exists independent of actions.
Virtue is something that you choose.
Virtue is something you believe in, regardless of evidence.
Now, of course, belief, regardless of evidence, is also religious in origin.
So it comes back in this sense, right?
Faith as a virtue, belief without evidence as a virtue, is something that you simply can't get without a religious metaphysics and epistemology, for want of a better phrase, as opposed to, you know, adult psychotic fantasy.
But this idea that you just should believe in virtue regardless of actions is entirely based on religion.
Now, one of the things that you see as well in these kinds of abusive relationships, whether they're with the state or with a spouse or with your parents, is the sort of two corollary ideas that come out of religion.
One is the idea of the love test, and this comes out of a number of stories within Christianity that I've talked about before.
It's the Old Testament, so it's a number of different religions.
The love test is, well, if I continue to love this person who is abusing me, then they will change, and my love will overpower them, and I... whatever, right?
And I remember reading one report of a woman who was just savagely beaten by her husband, and she sort of said...
Well, I just sort of figured, I mean, I knew he'd never been loved, and so if I just continue to love him and be good to him despite everything that he did, then I would end up changing him through love, right?
So this is like, abuse has become sort of a love test.
And that's something that also comes directly out of religion.
That God is virtuous, and therefore if you have feelings that God is not virtuous, or if God seems to act in a way that is harmful to you, then it's a test.
It's a test of faith. I mean, so if you love someone and then they beat you up, it's a test of your ability to love them despite that, right?
I mean, this all comes directly from religion.
And so it is very common in societies that as a state begins to act more and more brutally, that people become more and more loyal.
I mean, Bush would never have gotten reelected without 9-11 and particularly without the war.
I mean, this is the point of the war, right?
And so, if he even did get reelected, we don't know, right?
The idea that is very common in societies is that the more abusive a government becomes, the more loyal the citizens become.
This is the idea of the test, the test of virtue.
I believe in my government's virtue, and if my government does bad things, then it is not the government's fault.
It is some other guy within the government.
It's not Bush's fault or whatever.
So the splitting is also very important.
So, for instance, in psychology, if you experience something bad, you go into something called splitting.
And you sort of see this in fairy tales all the time, that the good mother dies and a bad stepmother, evil stepmother comes in.
Well, this is a very common phenomenon, and it speaks about how common female abuse was throughout history, like the abuse of women to children, mothers to children or caregivers to children.
Because in psychology...
If your mother beats you, then the most common defense is this thing called splitting.
So then what you say is there's a good mother and there's a bad mother.
So my good mother loves me.
There's a bad mother that doesn't love me, but she's not my real mother.
And this is sort of how primitive defenses work.
And so I'm going to split this evil person into good and bad.
And so you have to sort of loyalty to the good and you're afraid of the bad, but you don't view that as your real mother.
That's like some demon or some possession or she gets moody or she's, you know, whatever.
But she loves me. She has a bad temper.
So the bad temper you don't like, but the good mother that you love, you whatever.
This is pretty common and I'm sure not that hard to figure out.
And this is, of course, also what happens with God, right?
So God, some evil thing occurs, and we say, well, no, you see, but it's not God, right?
I mean, it's not God at all.
It is one of two other people.
Oh, it's three possibilities.
One, it is God, but it's a test of faith.
The second is that it's not God, it's the devil.
And the third is that it is God, but it's a punishment for evil, right?
And this is the same sort of stuff that you see with the government.
The third is that it's your fault, right?
The third perspective overall is that you're bad, right?
And you see a lot of this too, right?
So you see people say, well, it's the citizens' fault because it's a democracy and they voted these people.
So everybody gets the government they deserve and so on.
And I agree with that at a very abstract level, but I think that asking individual responsibility from people who've spent 14 years being bullied in public schools is...
I mean, I think that would just be sort of cruel.
It would be a cruel thing to do, a cruel perspective to have.
So... That approach, I think, is something that they're all in common, right?
Wherever you have irrational collectives, you have stuff in common.
And I just think that it's important to understand and to recognize the fact that if we have categories of virtue that have nothing to do with actions, they're always traceable back to religion, and they're always traceable back to collectivism, And it's back to this idea of concepts that we talked about about two and a half months ago, that concepts exist independently of instances, that virtue exists independently of actions, and so on.
And what it sets up, of course, is a collective construct that can never be non-virtuous, right?
I mean, isn't that what every political leader wants?
Everything that I do is virtuous.
And it's the same thing that priests want, right?
This is why they get away with such moral horror.
Because people are blind to it because they simply are bullied into believing that everything that a priest does is virtuous.
Everything that a government does is virtuous.
And it's all based on the idea that everything that God does is virtuous.
So I hope that's helpful.
I hope that sort of helps explain at least why I keep talking about this concept of faith.
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