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May 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:47
225 Utilitarianism: The Swiss Army Knife at your Throat (Part 1)

Actually, it's the greatest evil for the fewest number...

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 8.37 on my way to work.
And it is...
Oh lord, I've lost track.
I was doing so well, and now I'm driving, and I don't think I want to check my taskbar.
I do believe it's the 5th of May.
It's Friday, 2006.
And, you know, I actually lost a bunch of the original podcasts last night.
I didn't lose them last night.
I lost them after I had to reinstall Windows.
I have a large drive that I bought today.
To store the podcasts, which of course in WAV format are enormous, and I reinstalled Windows and completely forgot about this limitation that Windows 2000 can't see a drive bigger than 137 megs without a registry patch,
and so when I left it all to defragment and so on, and thus merged a bunch of files together, now of course I have CD backups of it before I bought this drive, so It's not too bad.
Probably about 20 or 30 of the originals I lost.
They merged together with movies and Word documents and so on.
It's all kind of funny.
I'm like, oh, this one's not so bad, and then suddenly it switches into something else completely.
And, of course, I don't really have the time or energy to go through and listen to them all again, just to make sure that they all sound all right.
So, not the end of the world.
We still have them in MP3 format, of course, on the server.
And the original ones are CD quality, and the copies are...
I'm glad, at least, that I spent the time to improve the quality of them recently, but it's a bit of a drag, but this stuff is just so inevitable.
When I was younger, I used to sort of have this belief that life should go well and smoothly, and anything that was not well or smooth was an interruption.
Or a deviance from the incredible wellness and smoothness of life as it was supposed to go.
And now that I'm a little bit older, I have figured out, and it's a It's not that hard a lesson to learn if you just look at the facts that life is in fact a large series of problems that you should learn to enjoy.
I know that sounds kind of funny.
But if you sort of slice and dice life into the stuff which is great that you like and the stuff that is bad that you hate, then your happiness is no longer under your control, but it's largely under the control of the circumstances around you.
And that doesn't mean that I'm never unhappy.
But I like being unhappy.
I like unhappiness.
I don't like feeling alienated and dissociated from myself and so on, and that doesn't happen so much anymore.
But sadness is just a different kind of soup, you know?
It's just a soup with a really unusual flavor, and it's an acquired taste, but...
So something like last night, where I'm just out of checking a few things, realized that an indeterminate number of the original podcast masters have been toasted irretrievably.
I don't think there's any way to retrieve that kind of merged data mess.
There's no sort of original file anywhere.
It's not like a deletion, which you can find in the fat table or whatever.
But... That kind of stuff is inevitable.
There's a Buddhist thing that says everything you have is broken.
And it's just a matter of time, right?
So if you have a glass that you love, it's broken already.
Sometime in your life, 90% chance it's in a move or you drop it or something, it's going to get broken.
And your MP3 player, the headphone jack is going to stop working or give you that weird, annoying mono, or like one earphone, two earphone thing.
Or the hard drive is going to fail.
Like everything that you have is broken.
And the degree to which it's not broken is the degree to which that's good.
Rather than if you take the perspective that everything that you have is...
In perfect condition, and any time that it breaks, it is a negative.
Well, that's not really that rational.
Of course, it fundamentally comes down to the fact that we're all broken, in that after the age of 32 or so, Your cells are all dying, right?
I mean, I'm already dying in that way, sort of medically speaking.
And so death is inevitable, and everything that we get that's not death is a damn good thing.
So that's something that I would also recommend that it's an interesting approach to take.
That everything that you have is not working and is failing.
And the degree to which it doesn't fail, like if your hard drive lasts another year, you should toast your hard drive and be happy about it.
Every day that everything works, you should be happy.
And I've never had...
Again, the last time I had a hard drive failure of this kind was about 10 or 12 years ago when I was installing DOS 6 and ended up with...
This is back in the days of when you needed compression because I had a...
A notebook computer with the princely sum of two gigabytes of storage space.
So I compressed the drive and then something went wrong and I ended up with this big blob of compressed data and no backup.
And I managed to recover that, but that's the last time that I had any reading.
That wasn't really a hard drive issue.
Again, it was sort of a Microsoft issue.
And the only thing that I find annoying is that I installed every single patch after reinstalling Windows, and not one of them addressed the issue of the large hard drive.
I would have been a little bit...
I thought that might have been a useful one to throw in there, you know?
It's fine. There's one hacker in Romania who knows how to control my Outlook Express if I send him an email.
And they'll patch that, but they won't patch the part of the Windows that scrambles your data if it's bigger than 137 gigs.
Anyway, no biggie.
I just thought that was an interesting thing to mention.
It is a drag, don't get me wrong.
It's not like, oh, I am perfectly zen and happy that I had these podcast masters for so long.
But... It's just that this stuff is inevitable, and I simply won't let it rule over.
I can't let it rule over my happiness, right?
That's not having self-ownership then, right?
It's to say, oh, well, the people at Microsoft and the hard drive and the this and the that, and oh, if only I'd remembered this, because maybe I read this somewhere.
Oh, if only I hadn't defragmented that hard drive.
Oh, you know, it's like, well, but those are the decisions that I've made, and I can't go back and fix them.
And berating myself isn't going to do any good.
So I just sort of wanted to throw that out there before we get to philosophy.
Now, of course, I've had some requests.
There's a poll on the website, freedomainradio.com, a good place to sign up for FeedBurner, which I would appreciate, and also to donate, which I would appreciate perhaps even more.
Oh, just before I get on to this next thing, too, can I mention that I have now sent out copies of the God...
The audio book of The God of Atheists to everybody who has donated $100 or more to Freedom A Radio at any time.
And the only way that I may have missed you is if you donated in dribbles and it totaled more than $100 and I didn't figure it out, then just let me know and I will check my records and send you the audio book of The God of Atheists.
If this does tweak your interest, for a mere $100, you can get a copy of a novel, the novel that an independent PhD reviewer called The Great Canadian Novel, which is quite a sobriquet to receive, and he said that it was the best thing that he'd ever read.
I think it's a great book.
I think it's a very unusual book, and I think it's quite a compelling book.
And I think that if you wanted to see the ideas that I have about the family, there's some philosophy in the book, but mostly it's about the family.
And if you wanted to see sort of the growth of moral awakening in children and the effects that it has on them as teenagers, when they begin to judge their parents not through their parents' values, nor through reactionary, anti-parent values, but through...
Rational values and what that does to the family structure, then this is the book for you.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
So that's available to you for a donation of $100 or more, the audiobook version, which I'm not quite finished yet, but I'm working my way through.
For $50 to $100, you get the PDF copy of The God of Atheists.
If you don't mind dropping a few trees to print it out, I think you'll enjoy it too.
And for less than that, you get a copy of my thesis, which you might enjoy.
It's fairly technical, but if you wanted to have a look at a bunch of different philosophers throughout the Western tradition, both rationalists and anti-rationalists, and how that results in their political thinking, that may be of interest to you as well.
So just let me know. So today, based on a poll on the website, people say the philosophy is A number one, mister.
And so we're going to have a chat today about something that is a very common phenomenon that you're going to run into.
It's a little package of lies we like to call utilitarianism.
Now, utilitarianism is...
I'm not going to do it justice, and I apologize for that in advance.
I'm going to use the Spock version.
You know, the great philosopher, Dr.
Spock. Mr. Spock, sorry.
The general popular view of utilitarianism, which has, you know, again, I think Spencer in the 19th century was the philosopher who first Really began to collate and posit this form of ethics, which had been pretty much in vogue and used by politicians of every evil stripe since the dawn of time.
But the idea, basically, is that society should be structured so that it provides the greatest good for the greatest number.
And as Spock puts it in some...
I don't know, I think it was in a movie, I can't remember if it was a TV show or the movie, where he says,"...the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." And, of course, this is really how a lot of people get their philosophy.
I mean, this is something that is so important to understand.
A lot of people will get their philosophy from Star Trek, or their philosophical ideas.
A lot of people will get their view of the CIA from Alias.
Like, they really will. A lot of people will get their idea of healthcare from House.
Like, this is all...
They're all fairy tales, right?
They're all fiction. And people will...
When you're arguing with people, you're actually arguing with scriptwriters who probably never took any course on this in their life and who are just regurgitating what is popular or spirited or controversial or whatever.
And so...
The fascinating thing about arguing with people is you're not arguing with them, which would be a thing that would be possible to resolve because they would actually have thought of the ideas.
You're not even arguing with philosophers who they have imbibed and are regurgitating.
You're arguing with uneducated, know-nothing scriptwriters, which is where they're getting their philosophy from.
And it's all kind of funny, right?
This is the plague of what Ayn Rand calls the second-handers, the people who never say, is this true, but say, what do people think is true?
Who never say, is this right, but is it useful?
Utilitarianism is fundamentally about that.
And utilitarianism is one of the things that drove the Fabian socialists during the progressive era in the early 20th century in the West, and in America in particular, To get government programs up and running, right?
To resurrect these horrible ancient devils of state programs, which if they had done their research, and I doubt that they did, they would have recognized as coming directly in a direct line from ancient Rome, right? From the fall of the Roman Empire.
These state programs were key, of course, in the fall of the Roman Empire.
When someone asked some Roman emperor, and I doubt that he was this intelligent to give this kind of answer, but if someone did ask a Roman emperor, what do the people want?
What keeps them happy? And he said, bread and circuses.
And basically that meant, throw them some welfare and keep them on TV. Throw them some welfare, and in those days it was the shows, right?
The Colosseum shows, the gladiator shows, and so on.
They were mostly free or heavily subsidized, and so to keep the people happy, you give them enough to live on, barely, and you make sure that they have as much free entertainment and innocuous entertainment as possible.
Entertainment that never mentions the evil of their confinement, right?
The bars that are invisible are the ones that really keep us in a cage, right?
Ooh, I'm that close to being a Zen idiot.
Let me steer back away from that pit of fog.
But, um... That is a very important thing to understand.
We're in a Roman system, right?
And also it was the case with the Greeks, but more so with the Romans.
We're in a Roman system.
There's nothing new whatsoever about what we're going on, what is going on in our society.
The bribing of the poor with the arms of the middle class while the rich evade taxes is the oldest configuration of society known to humankind.
We are... In a Stone Age tribal culture, there's no question about it.
So when you're dealing with the progressive, that's why it's so funny, right?
Everything that is talked about is almost always a lie in history and definitely from the government, right?
So the progressive movement was highly regressive.
I mean, the progressive movement, which was supposed to be something new, was in fact reaching back into the most corrupt democracy in human history, And that's not an easy thing to achieve, let me tell you.
The most corrupt democracy in human history, it's reaching back to that and saying that the people need the income of the middle class.
And of course, everybody talks about like only the rich will pay, but of course the rich don't pay.
The rich never pay.
I mean, a few of the rich pay.
Some people will pay if they're stuck in salary and it's deducted at source, but they only do that when they're already rich, right?
So anyway, we're going to talk about that another time.
So the idea that the greatest good for the greatest number should be the ruling principle of society is just so full of errors it's hardly even to know where to begin.
So, the greatest good for the greatest number.
Let's just sort of simmer in that for a little bit, and I'll probably get to part two this afternoon.
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Well, the problem with that that strikes me first and foremost is the problem that anybody who thinks about it for more than two seconds understands.
Thinks, like, understands, which is that, defined by who, right?
I mean, this is the old question, defined by who?
Who gets to define the greatest number?
Sorry, and the greatest good, and also the greatest number.
So, let's say that I can say to you, let's just say you have some respect for my thoughts and some desire to participate in this conversation, that's great.
Now, would you then...
Would you then feel comfortable?
Let's say that you think I'm the most brilliant guy in the world, right?
Let's go out on an incredibly invisible limb, right?
Let's just say that you think I'm the most brilliant guy ever.
Not just now, but ever in history.
I've got the biggest brains, whatever, right?
Absolutely obeying every edict that I ever put forward.
And not just in general.
Not just, like, be honest and, you know, talk to people about ethics and get corrupt people out of your life.
Not that nonsense. I mean, not that it's nonsense, but relative.
That's general, right? I mean, specifically.
I mean, if I said to you, I think it's very important for you to get up tomorrow, get a plane ticket to Australia and go pick grapes in the outback.
Would you be like, dude, I'm on it.
Absolutely. Thanks.
I wasn't sure what I was going to do tomorrow.
Now it's all clear. Oh, yeah.
I doubt very much that you would do that.
At least I'd hope you wouldn't. And so, if I said to you, I don't know, you're a teenager, right?
Yo, Lord, welcome the teenagers.
Thanks for being here.
You are the future. But if you're a teenager and I say, it's very important for you to go and study philosophy at this university, well, would you just say, good!
See, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but now it's perfectly clear to me that I need to go and study philosophy because Big Chatty Forehead is telling me to.
I actually think that's also going to be my new Indian name as well.
But anyway... Of course you wouldn't, right?
I mean, what makes you happy, what's right for you, is very personal.
So, if the principle of utilitarianism was something like that which reduces the greatest evil for the greatest number, that would be something, right?
Because then you're talking about a negative sanction, right?
Don't steal. Don't lie.
Don't cheat. Don't kill.
Don't rape. Then you're talking about a negative sanction, and at least you'd be in the right ballpark.
You'd be swinging and you'd be facing the crowd rather than facing the net, where the worse you connect, hopefully the more it bounces back and knocks you out.
Ooh, I think I took that metaphor just a little bit too far over the line.
But I can't rescue it now.
We must plunge on. Somebody's off the lifeboat.
We keep going. We're sinking.
And, um, so if they said it was the greatest reduction of evil for the greatest number, then that would be something you could work with, and you could sort of slowly swing people towards that, a correct sort of moral answer to that.
But... If you say the greatest good for the greatest number, well, the good ultimately is happiness, right?
The good is ultimately happiness.
Happiness is very personal.
Happiness cannot be guessed at or imposed from someone outside of yourself.
I mean, this is the great fantasy of dependence, right?
Like, if I do X or if I were able to go out with that girl, I'd be so happy.
Or something like that.
Happiness can either be guessed at, provided, supplied, created, or anything by anybody outside of yourself.
Any more than someone can reach into your chest and make your heart beat by squeezing their hand.
I mean, okay, maybe there'll be a short, messy interval of almost got it, but it's not really going to work very well.
So that is something that is just fundamental to understand about ethics and about politics in general.
No other single source of a human being can make you happy.
Now, people can make you unhappy, for sure, by imprisoning you, enslaving you, stealing from you, raping you, killing you.
Well, maybe not unhappy, but just no longer having the capacity for happiness, let's say.
So, there's no doubt whatsoever that nobody can make you happy but yourself.
And Nathaniel Brandon, I think, puts this quite well.
He says, this is the psychologist who worked with Ayn Rand for a while until he banged her and got ejected.
Not from the banging, but from the collective.
I mean, the... The group of objectivists.
And he said that he was talking in group therapy to a group of people, and he said that people make this grave error, like someone's going to come along and save them from their lives, and they don't have to do it themselves.
And he said, you know, I'm telling you, no one is coming to save you.
No one is coming to save you.
And somebody said to him, but you came?
And he said, yes, and I came to tell you that no one is coming.
Which I thought was a clever, paradoxical, but clever response that has some interesting truth in it.
So, the fundamental error of something like utilitarianism is that the greatest good can be defined for another human being, which is happiness, which cannot be defined.
Happiness is an individual pursuit, and there are certain preconditions That are required for happiness, but those preconditions will not guarantee happiness.
All they will guarantee is an absence of pain, to the most part, right?
Like, if you're healthy, you get a cold, but you have a cold for less long and you get fewer colds.
It doesn't mean you never get sick, right?
So if you're a happy person, it doesn't mean you're never unhappy, but when you are unhappy, it's shorter of duration and less intense and so on.
But... Happiness is the fulfillment.
I'm not going to get into defining happiness here, because that's a complicated business.
But happiness is a state of well-being that comes from being virtuous and efficacious.
This is Aristotle's pursuit of excellence is the good life.
I'm not going too far from the old...
I'm a master, but I'm just sort of saying that happiness, yeah, okay, don't kill, don't steal, blah, blah, blah.
But that's the vast majority of people.
I mean, most people you meet don't kill and don't steal.
And yeah, yeah, they might work for the government, but they're not doing it themselves.
So they don't kill and they don't steal and they don't rape.
And maybe they lie a little bit or they lie a lot, but...
They're not happy.
Even though they're not specifically out there violating other people's persons or property, they're still not happy.
Happiness is not just about fulfilling your negative obligations to not inflict harm on others.
Of course, a lot of them are unhappy.
Because they have children and they've corrupted them, but there's not a corresponding increase in happiness that I've noticed among people who don't have children.
So this issue around happiness is complicated.
And happiness means active virtue, right?
So not just refraining from doing bad things, but doing good things.
And I'm going to get, based on a listener's suggestion, I'm going to get to sort of...
The four major virtues that are often misunderstood, things like virtue and honor and integrity and so on.
I'll get to those next week, I think.
Wait, let me check my detailed schedule for the next 900 years.
Yes, it's next week.
Excellent. So...
You need to have active virtue in your life, which means that you've got to reject the bad people, you've got to fight for what is right, you've got to do the right thing in a positive and active sense.
So, if you're a doctor, I know it doesn't sound like utilitarianism, but we need to define good, happiness and goodness.
If you're a doctor and you have the wonderful and amazing ability to heal people, it would be my contention that you will not be happy Unless you're actually in the rough process of applying your skills to heal people.
And it's not a positive obligation.
You don't have to do it, and it's not immoral not to do it.
But if you have the skill and the training and the desire and the capacity to heal people, If you end up not healing people, you're going to be discontented.
You're not maxing out your capacities.
That's the fun part of life.
That's the funsy stuff, which is most of life.
It's like, gee, how far can I go?
I'm frightened of this. What is going to happen if I just do it anyway?
All that kind of stuff. That's the funsy part of life.
That's the growth part of life. That's what makes each new year...
A benefit rather than, you know, once...
What is it they say on the dark side of the moon?
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death, right?
I mean, that's the problem of the years as they pile up if you're not growing, right?
Each new year becomes a negative rather than a benefit, which is why people end up just really depressed and boring in their old age.
Thou shouldst not have been old before thou wert wise, as I think Regan or Goneril says to King Lear in...
Well, I'm sure you can guess the name of the play.
And so, the idea that happiness, which is the fulfillment of individual capacity in the pursuit of virtue, or, you know, I have a more technical definition, but that's roughly it.
That is happiness, and it can't be defined by somebody external to yourself, because it's not even constant for your whole life.
Not even constant.
When I was younger, if you had kept me away from pursuing women, I would have been unhappy, even though, as it turned out in the long run, the pursuit of women was a temporary happiness.
So, I was a hound dog when I was younger, a player.
And so I pursued women, and if you had taken that away from me, I would have been unhappy.
Now, if you made me pursue women, I would be unbelievably miserable.
I mean, it would just be the saddest thing in the world.
When I was younger, if you had kept me from working 70 hours a week to build a company or whatever, I would have been absolutely miserable because that's what I wanted to do, and that was the extension of my capacities.
And now, if you made me work 70 hours a week, I would be unbelievably miserable because I have achieved a certain amount of expertise and can get things done a lot more efficiently.
And also... I've decided to leverage my human capital rather than my just mere intellectual capital in the pursuit of software sales and negotiations rather than cranking out code.
And so I don't actually have to work as hard because I've worked pretty hard to become a human being who can negotiate well and effectively.
And so I can capitalize on that rather than having to spend a huge amount of time and energy learning everything about the new version of Java.
So that's where I've decided.
So if you'd kept me from coding when I was younger and put me in sales, I would have been miserable.
Now, if you said, okay, you've got to learn Java and everything to do with.NET 2.0 and C-Shop and all whatever, and you can't do any negotiations, I would be unhappy because I'd end up having to work 70 hours a week again for a certain period of time.
So, all of this stuff is just so complicated that you just can't figure out because not only is it individual to each person, but it can change literally in the span of a day.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
Let's say that a woman is pregnant and you can say to her, You're her friend, and you say to her, let's go shopping for baby cribs.
Well, that's going to make her happy, and she's going to want to do that.
And you say, let's go shopping for baby cribs.
I will pick you up tomorrow.
And she's like, yay, that's the best thing ever.
Let's go shopping for baby cribs.
And then let's say that overnight she has a miscarriage.
God help her, an awful thing, I'm sure.
And you then come to pick her up the next day, and the previous day was overjoyed to go shopping for baby cribs.
You come to pick her up, and she just bursts into tears and says that if you actually took her to go shopping for baby cribs, she would never forgive you.
Because it's too painful, of course.
Well, that's somewhat important.
In the span of a single day, you can get an utter and complete reversal of what it is that makes a human being happy.
So... The idea that the greatest good, i.e.
happiness, can be defined in the majority by somebody else, let alone that a social structure can be put in place to maximize that, is such a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, or you could say a fundamental misunderstanding of oneself, That it just can't help but strike me as utterly, utterly, utterly malevolent.
Like, for instance, communism is such a fundamental misapprehension of human nature.
And the funny thing is that the people who created communism and so on Did not follow their own edicts.
Of course, there's the whole problem with parenting, right?
So, I mean, Lenin wanted political power and wanted to rule the country, which is not exactly communist.
Communism is about equality, nominally, right?
And that's not what he pursued.
And Marx made a huge amount of money by living off other people and not working and then writes that he who does not toil shall not eat, right?
So it's such a fundamental misapplication of any kind of knowledge about oneself.
I mean, if you want to look at what you consider to be the good, the first place you want to look at is yourself, right?
You don't want to sort of theorize stuff and say, it would be great if we all had wings and could fly.
I mean, the first thing you want to do is look at your...
I mean, if you want to be a moralist or you want to be somebody who convinces other people about ethics...
The first thing you need to do is not read Libertarian Ethics or even listen to this podcast.
What you want to do is look in the mirror.
Look in the freaking mirror. What is it that makes you happy?
And start with that. And once you've got a good understanding of what it is that makes you happy and the social circumstances which allow you to pursue that with the greatest freedom, then you have an understanding of happiness.
Then you can start to look at other people in your life and say, okay, but that's what makes me happy.
What makes them happy? So basically what I'm saying is start scientifically, right?
I mean, just work empirically.
That's all I'm ever talking about.
Everything that I'm ever talking about is just work empirically, what are the facts of reality, and theorize from that.
I mean, that's all I'm asking for people is to get out.
Stop being scholastics and stop being sophists and stop being corrupt and nasty and state-serving intellectual leeches and parasites and degraders and corruptors.
I'm just saying, if you want to study man, study man.
If you want to create all these rules for people about how they should live, then all you need to do is you have the perfect lab to begin with, which is your own soul, and then you can start to think about the souls of those around you.
I mean, that's all we're saying.
That's all we're saying in libertarianism and in sort of scientific ethics and so on.
Just, if you want to say what If it's good for everyone, then at least have some idea of what's good for one person, which would be yourself and then those around you.
But if you come up with stuff like the greatest good for the greatest number, and you have never thought deeply or even shallowly about what it is that makes you happy, and what it is that makes other people happy, then you really should shut up.
Because you're really playing with a very dangerous weapon, which is the argument for morality.
And if you don't have any clue about how complicated something like happiness is, even for an individual, because it changes right over your life...
If I were to have a child when I was 18, I would be unhappy now.
I can't wait. You can't conceivably come up with something that is going to make people happy.
For some people, and I know this from Christina's clinic, for some people, to help them, you must be firm and you must be assertive with them.
And that is something that might help break their habits, right?
So if they're really codependent, then you might sort of want to lean over to them and say, do you have a spine?
Come on! You might want to be firm with them, and not exactly the tough love thing, not that firm, yelling at them, but that is going to snap them out of a certain kind of habit.
If somebody is aggressive, you might find it important to be assertive back.
It also might be, and this is all very complicated, but...
Which is why Christine is so skilled at this.
Or rather, the fact that it is so complicated means that Christine's skill at it is considerable.
There are also times when somebody is much better helped through tenderness and sympathy.
So even helping one individual take one tiny step towards mental health is a very complicated business that requires years of study.
And that's just to have one therapy session with one person.
Nothing as grandiose and lunatic as saying, the greatest good for the greatest number.
I mean, You have to have like a Christ complex or a megalomania that is just astounding if you are going to say something like, I can think of a way or I can design a way or use violence or create a social structure which is going to create the greatest good for the greatest number.
Oh my lord, that is just so vain.
It's just so narcissistic and megalomaniacal.
It's astounding. And it's a pure excuse for political power.
I mean, this is not a moral theory.
This is just what people say so that you'll shut up and pay your taxes, right?
I mean, this is not a moral theory.
But one of the arguments in the novel, in The God of Atheists, which I've mentioned before, is that people who are not religious, but who are still irrational, they still have a religion.
It's just that their religion is now their own prejudices.
And so that's why the god of atheists is themselves, right?
I mean, the god that they worship is their own prejudices and their own desires, which is actually not much of a step forward, and in some ways it could be seen to be a step backwards, because me-ism, like the worship of yourself, is what produced a lot of the moral horrors of the 20th century, plus the technology pillaged from the capitalists through taxes, but...
The god of atheists is often oneself, which is why you get narcissism and you get megalomania, you get nihilism, you get this kind of stuff, and you get absolutely ridiculous blanket theories that say things like the greatest good for the greatest number, which is very, very hard to achieve for oneself.
It is even harder to achieve an understanding of in others, and it's absolutely impossible to create it in others, right?
You can't make somebody else happy anymore than you can breathe for them, right?
I mean, they make me out of breath, but if you breathe double time, it's not like they get better.
So, this idea...
Is completely ridiculous.
It shows a complete absence of knowledge of any kind of human nature.
And yet it's put forward as an absolute, right?
And of course, the reason that it's put forward as an absolute is it gets you to shut up and pay your taxes and submit and bow and scrape and love it, right?
I mean, the state is so evil that it wants you not just to submit, but to love it for submitting, to praise it for submitting.
It wants not just the humiliation of taking your time, money, energy, and life, but it wants you to lick the gun that's in your mouth and kiss it and love it.
And that's what things like, the greatest good for the greatest number.
Oh, okay, so you're stripping away half my life at the point of a gun, but it's moral.
Thank you. Thank you for helping me be moral.
Thank you for helping me be good.
It's sickening!
It really is absolutely sickening what they expect of us, not just to be sheep, but to love them, to lick the knife as it slices our throat.
That is the sickening thing about the state and the savages with advanced degrees who serve its evil and its power.
That is where you get this mealy-mouthed moral filth like the greatest good for the greatest number.
And that someone else defines that for you and for everybody else and enforces their vision at the point of a gun and thinks that that is anything other than rank evil and wants you to worship that gun as it jams into your temple and as people pillage your pockets and your life.
They want you to praise them and thank them.
I mean, this is absolutely the moral equivalent of the rapist who says to the woman, tell me you love it.
I mean, it's exactly the same morally.
And that's why I think that I would not have as much patience as might be useful when talking with someone or to someone who spouts this kind of moral filth without understanding, thus absolutely shoring up the sick and evil villains who steal half my life.
So... You can do what you like with these people, of course, but I have some pretty serious questions for them, and if they end up not having a clue what they're talking about, but continuing to say it, then they are, of course, stone evil of the worst kind, and I would never talk to them again.
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