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May 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:06
234 Contempt

The final antidote to false morality

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 17 minutes past eight on Friday, the 12th of May 2006.
And we're going to skip over the third category, just talk about which is integrity.
We sort of dealt with that in the last two podcasts, I think, for the most part.
And we're going to talk about contempt, contempt.
Contempt. I think it is a very interesting feeling and I think it is a very helpful feeling to experience as a human being, but particularly as a moralist.
If you're interested in the moral approaches to life and truth, then I think it's absolutely essential that you have the ability to feel contempt.
Contempt is a very, very powerful emotional feeling, and it is one of those feelings, that anger, you're going to feel towards, you know, the old saber-toothed tiger that leaps out from behind a rock.
You're going to feel rage when you're battling it and so on.
But you're not going to feel contempt.
Contempt is quite a different emotion, and it does tie in with the masculinity discussion that is occurring on the board, and so I'll mention it sort of briefly here as a presage to that, which I hope to get to next week.
Now, anger is simply what you feel when your values are overtly threatened in a manner that is fairly obvious.
Anger is what you feel when somebody jumps out from behind a tree and tries to take your wallet or something like that.
Somebody at work criticizes you in a meeting or, you know, whatever it is that you want to say that directly contradicts your interests.
I mean, criticizes you unfairly in a meeting or just in public if they haven't done it in private beforehand, right?
There's obviously somebody who's trying to harm your interests and is not sort of speaking to you brother to brother one-on-one to deal with the issue and then only going further up the chain if that can't be dealt with that way.
So anger is just what you feel when your interests are being overtly violated.
Now, anger is what you feel when somebody is simply grabbing at your possessions or your body or whatever and is not attempting to justify it.
So the guy who sticks a gun in your ribs and says, give me your wallet, he is not somebody who is sitting there saying, I want your wallet for the greater good of mankind, for the greater good of mankind, for noble integrity and service to the nation, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's not saying that at all.
What he's saying is, he's giving you a fair choice relative to these other vile creeps, and he's saying...
Give me your wallet or I'll shoot you.
So he's bargaining with you.
I mean, it's like it's a negative economics, right?
So it's like he's not inflicting a negative in exchange for a positive, right?
So I will refrain from shooting you if you give me your wallet.
Well, that is going to make you angry, but there's not going to be the same level of contempt because contempt is a very separate category and contempt is what we absolutely as a movement need to get in touch with.
We need to get in touch with this.
And I may cuss a little in this, because this is something that gets me quite passionate, and I'm not even going to bother too much with worrying about a few salty words sprinkled into the brew.
Now, where I feel contempt, and I think this is a pretty universal phenomenon, where I feel contempt is when somebody is attempting to screw my interests and telling me that I must submit because of morality.
That is really, I mean, if you want to nail down the most heinous crime that is possible for any human being to commit, It is raping and demanding that it be called lovemaking.
It is stealing and demanding that it be called charity.
It is murdering and demanding that it be called honorable action.
This is very, very fundamental.
This is like the base moral crime that results in the deaths of all of these hundreds of millions of people throughout just the 20th century alone.
The base moral crime Is to demand that the person love being violated.
That they praise the violation.
What Nietzsche called the slave morality.
That you lick the boots that kick you.
That you kiss the gun as it's jammed in your mouth.
This is the base and most heinous moral crime.
This is the moral crime that is worthy of the most bottomless contempt.
So, I'm going to give you some examples.
I'm sure that this is not an unfamiliar area to you, but I'm going to give you some examples of this kind of thing, and we'll sort of take politics, religion, and the family, as usual, the sort of three major structures that keep us down, the state, the church, and the mater and pater, and we will talk about How these arguments show up in these realms.
Now in politics, of course, it's easy.
No single solitary human being can open his mouth or her mouth and demand that people give money to the government without cloaking it in the most saccharine and sickening rhetoric.
It is unbelievable how absolutely common this is.
Once you start to see it, You will be unable to see anything else.
Once you start to see, like for a time, as you process this, once you start to see this false argument for morality, You will be unable to see anything else because it is absolutely the foggy foundation of all of the hellish halls of society.
The American and worldwide gulags, the military, the wars, the rape rooms, the torture chambers, all of them rest on this noble-sounding words of praise, of infinite praise for the morality of what is occurring.
And this, of course, is the job of intellectuals.
And as Ayn Rand, I think, correctly pointed out, intellectuals are the greatest scum on the planet.
This is my absolute base conviction that intellectuals are the greatest scum.
It makes the military look relatively benevolent.
Because the military can't do what they do, the government cannot do what it does, the church cannot do what it does, and by God, the parents cannot do what they do.
Without the intellectuals, and the psychologists, and the philosophers, and the academics, and the psychiatrists, and the pundits, and the whole swarming, fetid, scabrous mass of them.
Squealing around like filthy pigs praising all of the morals that kill people and cause them to live lives of diminished vitality and diminished joy.
And contempt, basically, is reserved for the false argument for morality.
Because the guy sticking a gun in your ribs is doing something relatively benevolent, relative to making you so shattered in your self-respect So debased in your self-esteem that you believe that you must live as a sacrificial lamb to the gross and squalid appetites of other human beings.
That you exist only to serve the corrupt.
Because, I mean, let's face it, people, we don't give our money to the poor.
I mean, this is... You're looking at...
There's a discussion going on on the board at the moment, which is, what is the clincher for the statists?
Right? Well, I'm not sure what the clincher for the statists is, or even if it's possible, but one thing it might be is something like this.
Well, shouldn't we give our money to help the poor?
Absolutely. Absolutely, we should give our money to help the poor.
Absolutely, we should give her money to help the sick, the old, the needy.
That's why we can't or won't or shouldn't or must not give her money to the state.
I mean, when you're talking social programs, you're talking about half the wealth of an entire industrialized nation going to a relatively small handful of politicians and bureaucrats who can do with it what they will.
And of course, if you don't trust The people to be generous with their own money, how on earth are you expecting a few politicians and bureaucrats to be generous with other people's money, to be helpful with other people's money?
It's absurd. So one of the things that we can talk about with the statists is just to keep reminding them, no, no, no, I'm not giving my money to the poor, I'm giving my money to the government.
Now that's a very different proposition.
And of course, you can use whatever it is that they dislike about the government as a wedge, right?
So you're taking some sort of simpering lefty and they're saying, oh, I want to give all the money to the poor.
It's like, well, unfortunately, I have to give my money to the state and the vast majority of it goes to things like murdering all these Iraqis.
So, you know, arresting people for the drug, innocent drug use, getting canned, getting thrown in the can for a bag of vegetables, I mean, it's a lunatic, right?
So, you don't get one without the other.
So, if they're against the one and for the other, just say, well, no, I mean, I'm against the state because if there was some magical way that the state could help the poor and only the state could help the poor, sure, I might agree with you.
But this is never the case.
You give your money to the state and they do with it what they damn well please and almost nothing of it has to do with helping people.
It has to do with bribing them and keeping them down and giving them just enough money to survive without giving them enough money to improve.
And it removes means tests and destroys families and communities and cultures.
I mean, so this is sort of one way that you can point it out.
So the simple phrase is that I'm not giving my money to the poor, I'm giving my money to the bureaucrats.
That might be something that would be a worthwhile approach.
And just to constantly remind people that they're giving their money to the bureaucrats and to the politicians.
They're not giving their money to the poor.
They're not giving their money to the old in terms of Social Security.
They're not doing any of that.
So that's something I think that is well worth discussing as a possible...
It's not the silver bullet, but it's a possible silver bullet for dealing with statists.
So, to return to contempt, contempt is the feeling that is provided by you when somebody is attempting to exploit you based on your virtue.
This is something that is so subtle, and I'm sure I'll try and get to it in one podcast.
It's subtle, and this is certainly not the silver bullet, because this is a fairly advanced topic, of course, but The fascinating thing about the status, right?
I mean, I'm not going to get into all these arguments against welfare programs and so on, which I've done before, but just in terms of contempt, right?
Wherever there's a base contradiction in somebody's ethics, and it serves their self-interest to have you believe those ethics, and they wish to obscure the self-interest at the root of it, Then this to me is an action worthy of contempt.
It's like, take my money, sure, but at least have the respect for me to stick a gun in my ribs.
Don't sort of slither up to me and pour all of this dripping little hamlet type poison into my ears about how virtuous it is for me to live as a slave to others.
So get the frick away from me with that kind of poison because that is absolutely offensive to anybody with any sense of self-esteem.
But the subtlety around this is quite interesting because When people make an argument from morality, they are presupposing that human beings are moral.
This is absolutely essential to understand.
Whenever you hear the common good, the good of the species, the good of the nation, the honor of the military, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Whenever you hear all of this false bullshit floating around, all of these false arguments for morality that paralyze, cripple, and destroy the human race, people are presupposing virtue and the fundamental contempt that I feel for intellectuals It's that they presuppose virtue while calling for violence because of the absence of virtue.
This is sort of the basic contradiction of any false argument for morality.
So to sort of step you through this briefly in the terms of the welfare state, they're saying people should help the poor.
And they're making this as an argument, right?
They're not saying people are evil, therefore they need to be forced to give up their money.
People are basically evil, and therefore they need to be forced to give up their money so that the poor can be helped.
Well, of course, and we've talked about this in four arguments against government way back in November or October of last year, the basic issue with that, of course, is that if all people are evil, then the people taking the money from the evil people are evil themselves, and you're never going to help the poor and blah, blah, blah, right?
So you sort of have to create the situation where the majority of people are evil, but the minority of politicians and bureaucrats are virtuous, and they're able to magically transform themselves out of the common rut of human nature and hand out all of this ill-gotten gains with nothing but perfect virtue and benevolence.
Which, of course, completely destroys the concept of democracy because if you have a majority of evil people, then it doesn't make any sense why they would then vote in good people, right?
I mean, surely evil people do not want to give good people domination over them any more than good people want to give evil people domination over them.
So, this idea that people are evil is generally not proposed by these sort of academics, by these intellectuals.
What is often proposed is that people...
We are virtuous. In general, and of course, by using the argument for morality, you are assuming virtue.
So if I say to you, you have to pay for the welfare state because that helps the poor, well, I'm presupposing an enormous amount there.
I'm presupposing that you want to help the poor.
I'm presupposing that it's good to help the poor and that you believe that it's good to help the poor.
As soon as I use an argument for morality, then I am assuming the existence of ethics in others and benevolence and virtue and a desire to help and blah, blah, blah.
So it's sort of similar to saying to a doctor, I've got this new pill which will cure cancer.
And you're really not expecting the doctor to say, I mean, except in Canada where they make a fortune from cancer, you're not expecting the doctor in a free market situation to say, eh, you know, I think I'm just going to stick with this whole radiation nonsense and just see what happens out of that.
I'm going to half kill them with cocktails and radiation and we'll just call that a cure.
Well, you'd be a little surprised if that were the case, right?
So, if you propose a cure, which is simple, cheap, effective, and will save millions of lives a year, you kind of expect, I think, doctors to go, holy, how can I get me some?
Or at least insurance companies, if not the doctors.
And that's because you're assuming that you're kind of in a situation where doctors want to help their patients.
I mean, you might not get the cancer doctors jumping up and down, but for sure, the insurance companies, well, it's very expensive to treat cancer.
So, that is something that is innately built into the whole argument for morality, that people are on the same page as you, and that they want to help the poor, you're just showing them how.
So, this to me is completely obvious and one of the roots of the basic moral evil of the false argument for morality.
Okay, so I say to you, we need a welfare state in order to help the poor.
Well, I'm assuming you want to help the poor and a good person and all that kind of stuff.
Well, of course, if that is the case, then why can't I just help the poor myself?
If you're assuming that I want to help the poor, that I'm willing to give up my property voluntarily to help the poor, that I want to be charitable and this and that, if you're assuming all these things, I'm not going to shoot the cop who comes to collect my taxes.
Then we don't need a social program.
We don't need the state to do it.
It's only because people want to help the poor that they get suckered into social programs.
In other words, social programs which are forcing people to be virtuous are only justified on the basic position that people are virtuous to begin with and will help the poor voluntarily.
This is the fundamental aspect of the argument for morality that we haven't really talked about yet.
In order to get you to submit to violence, they have to get you to agree that the supposed goals of that violence are moral and that you would do them voluntarily.
This is a basic, enormously complicated, but fundamentally simply complicated in manifestation, simple in application.
It's a fundamental principle.
It's a fundamental contradiction.
And it's so obvious, of course, that intellectuals who spend their time lecturing people about the morality of submitting to violence are entirely worthy of our bottomless, bottomless, bottomless contempt.
Because this is so obvious.
It's so obvious. If I go up to people and I say, we need socialized medicine because nobody should be without money or resources if they need an operation.
And everyone says to me, Are you crazy?
Forget about it. You know, live and let die, that's my motto.
What do I care about others?
I'd like them to die because that's going to lower the price of housing or something, you know.
In fact, I'd be really happy if we could make people more sick and blah, blah, blah, right?
If you come across that kind of nut job, and if everyone you talk to is like this, then you could make some case.
I'm not saying you could make a moral case, but you could make an argument from a fact case to say that, look, absolutely nobody wants to help the poor at all.
And so we'd really better have some sort of coercive way of transferring income because otherwise those who are poor and need help are just not going to get any help at all.
It's not logically moral, but you could make an argument from a fact case from it.
But of course, this is not the case of what happens at all.
What happens with people who are moral or who are talked to about this is that they immediately say, oh yes, well of course, I absolutely agree.
We really want to help the poor little children whose parents are poor and they've got leukemia and they need treatment and so and so and so.
I mean, we absolutely want to help those people.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? I'd love to.
Therefore, I'm not going to oppose this social program.
And of course, this is the case with everyone that you talk to.
Everyone talks about how they want to help the poor, the sick, the old, the indigent, blah, blah, blah.
And so the false argument for morality basically says, you agree with this moral position and you would do it voluntarily.
Therefore, that is a justification for holding a gun to your neck and forcing you to do it.
Or forcing it to occur.
And of course then what is done is that the money is taken from people and flushed down the sewer of political favoritism and bribery and offshore accounts and military contracts and bureaucratic salaries.
Please don't imagine that this is going to help the poor.
You take the number of poor people and you divide it by the Department of Helping Poverty.
I don't know what it is in the States.
It's Health and Welfare Canada up here.
And each poor person gets like 200 grand a year.
Of course, that's not the case, right?
What they end up with is like 10 grand a year.
And so the idea that something is being done to help these poor people is completely ridiculous.
I mean, let's not even talk about that.
And so it's so completely obvious that if you make a passionate argument for morality to justify the use of violence to achieve a moral end, and everybody agrees with your argument for morality, it's so completely self-evident that you then don't need violence that...
I mean, to not see it is a real effort of will to not see something that obvious.
So that to me is a fundamental moral corruption, to use a false argument for morality.
To convince people to allow violence for the service of immorality based on their desire and voluntary attraction to morality, completely fundamentally evil.
This is the base moral corruption and evil of mankind.
And so, of course, if you look at something like the Catholic religion, you see original sin, right?
Original sin, you're born evil, and you're just evil, evil, evil, evil by nature, and we also wanted to mention that you're evil.
And the only way you can be saved is blah, blah, blah, you have all these rituals and so on.
Well, of course, the interesting thing is that if you were evil by nature, if you were truly evil by nature, Then all you would want to do is live as short, nasty, vicious, brutish, self-aggrandizing, self-satisfying a life as possible, and then go and join your good friend Papa Satan.
That would be your goal, right?
If you were born evil, that would be your goal.
I mean, if you're some sort of evil politician, your goal, and this is how they actually act, is lie to the people and steal from their pockets, right?
To have the police hold them down while you rape them and then demand that they call it lovemaking before you leave and make another date.
I mean, that's the life of evil people.
And they don't have any conscience.
They don't sort of look back.
I mean, yes, there are miserable consequences in their personal life, but that doesn't matter because they're corrupt and evil and brutal and so on.
And so, evil people don't want to get into heaven.
Ha! I mean, it's funny.
Evil people don't want to be good.
They're evil. And so if human beings were fundamentally and innately evil, then they would not at all be interested in Jesus Christ, right?
They would not at all be interested in this sort of supposed salvation and the desire to float up to heaven on the wings of an angel and so on.
All they would do would be, you know, burn the church, kill the priests, I don't know, rape the nuns, do whatever it is that evil people do.
Oh, sorry, go into politics.
I think I already mentioned that. Or join the military, which is what the truly evil people do.
And so the idea, this is sort of a false argument for morality, that you're born evil.
This argument would mean nothing to people who were born evil.
It would mean nothing to them.
It would be like, yay, evil!
It's like going to Satanists and calling them Satanists.
They're like, yeah, we're Satanists.
You want to join?
We love it.
We're good.
We're down with the Satan.
Up with the horny one.
So this is completely obvious that if people are truly evil, they're not going to care In fact, they'll revel in it, they'll enjoy it, they'll be happy about it, and so on.
So the idea that we're born evil and that is the sort of place where we start from and then you have to pay the church a whole lot of money to make you good is ridiculous.
Because if you have a desire for goodness and the capacity for goodness, then you're not born evil.
There's another false... I mean, there's millions of them in religion.
I just sort of wanted to pick out one that sort of popped into my mind, right?
Yeah. Well, the other one, if you look at it, is the false arguments for morality that constantly rain down on children.
And I probably won't be able to get to it this morning, because I'm nearly at work.
But the false arguments for morality that rain down, like this acidic, heavy, clubbing rain on children, they're just constant.
And they're all the things, of course, that, if true, if true...
Would never need to be said.
This is what the argument for morality is really all about, the false arguments for morality, that they assume your virtue and then damn you.
I mean, for not having any virtue.
And it's what Ayn Rand talks about.
I don't claim this as massive originality.
Ayn Rand talks about this in Atlas Shrugged, that it's only through people's integrity that they are destroyed.
And this is what is worthy of the most contempt of these kinds of arguments.
So obviously, I mean, to take some simple examples from parenting, and I'll take some pretty coarse examples because the subtle ones might be a good topic for this afternoon.
But if, you know, a mom says to a son, you're selfish.
You're a selfish, selfish child.
Don't be so selfish.
Think of others once in a while, just once in a while, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, of course, there are two falsehoods around that.
The first, of course, is that where did this child learn the selfishness from?
Well, of course, if the child learned the selfishness from the parent, then the parent has absolutely no right to To complain that the child is selfish, right?
If the parent is selfish, and only a selfish parent would use a false argument for morality, if the parent is selfish and cruel and mean and vicious and this and that and the other, then they have absolutely no right to complain about the child having exactly the same characteristics that they've been taught to have, right?
That's like raping a woman and then yelling at her for being a crybaby if she's crying afterwards.
I mean, this is ridiculous. You've inflicted it, and now you can't complain about the effects.
I mean, you can, of course, but it's complete nonsense.
And, of course, if it's not the result of parenting, then it's innate to the child's nature.
Now, of course, if it's innate to the child's nature, it's not susceptible to the argument for morality.
This goes back to what we were talking about in the first one of these yesterday morning with justice.
If somebody has no choice about their behavior, then they can't be criticized from an ethical standpoint at all.
It's impossible, right?
It's like claiming somebody who's schizophrenic is just a liar.
Well, no, they really have problems with their brain.
So, that is something that is a false argument for morality that you hear from parents all the time.
I mean, parents can't even draw a breath without spewing this kind of venomous filth out.
And it's completely ridiculous, right?
And one of the things that you can say back to your parents is, oh, I'm selfish, but you're my parent.
I mean, aren't you sort of responsible?
I mean, assuming the kid isn't 20, right?
I'm selfish. Well, you're the parent, right?
So how did you teach me to be selfish?
And let's work on this together, right?
Let's work on selfishness as a family issue because I'm just a kid, right?
And I'm just sort of doing what is taught me.
I mean, you're the parent. You have responsibility.
That's one way of approaching it.
Of course, the parent is not very likely to say, you know, you're absolutely right.
I'm sorry for calling you selfish.
It must be how I've raised you, and let's figure it out.
Oh, man. It's just the idea that a parent would ever say something like that.
It's just, I mean, I could giggle for a week.
Anyway, so the parent's not going to say that at all.
Now, if you say to the parent that, oh, I'm selfish, but you're the parent, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, I never taught you to be selfish.
It's like, well, where did I learn it from?
I don't know. Well, it must be innate then.
Well, if it's innate in me, then you can't really criticize me for it.
It's just an affliction. It's like, you know, calling someone stupid for being short.
It's just a physical characteristic.
There's nothing you can do about it, so blaming me morally, calling me selfish or whatever, it doesn't make any sense, right?
So, this is typical.
I mean, this is what parents do. They can't even draw a breath without spewing this kind of stuff out, and it's just so they don't even think about it.
It's just natural.
It's just what they use, right?
They claim that their children are bad while having no ownership over their children being bad.
And never claiming that it's innate, right?
So their children are completely free moral agents that have never been affected by parenting whatsoever, right?
But of course, if you're not affected by parenting, if you just became a selfish kid for some reason and it had nothing to do with your parents, then obviously your parents have no influence over you.
I mean, this is something that's also important to understand.
If you're just a selfish kid, like you're just born selfish or you read a book on selfishness and you thought, hey, that's great, I think I'll do that.
And your parents' parenting had no influence over you, so your mom is virtuous and you're selfish and obviously her virtue hasn't rubbed off on you at all, then for her to tell you that you should change based on an argument from ethics is completely contradictory.
Because if she said, you are who you are, completely contrary to my influence...
If you're selfish and I'm perfectly virtuous, then you are who you are, completely independent to or probably contradictory to my influence.
Therefore, me saying that you should not be selfish is missing the point completely.
I mean, it's like me trying to will the orbit of the moon to change.
And then doing it again, and doing it again, and doing it again, and then saying that the moon is selfish for not obeying me.
Well, obviously, if I can't have any effect on the moon, then there's no point in me complaining to the moon.
So if you've become a selfish kid, regardless of the fact that your parents are just these innate virtuous angels, then obviously they have no effect over you, and therefore they have no authority over you, and therefore them telling you to do something would mean nothing.
So, I mean, this is just sort of one example out of about a 10 trillion, bazillion, quintillion examples that you could give in terms of the false arguments for morality that just come spewing out of parents' mouths without thinking.
They don't think about it. They absolutely don't think about it at all.
It would be incomprehensible for them to ask these questions, although they are perfectly obvious.
If I am a parent and I say that you're selfish, I am assuming a large number of things.
I'm assuming that you have some virtue in you and want to not be selfish.
So, of course, a selfish person wouldn't feel that, and so I'm assuming that you're not selfish and calling you selfish.
That's a moral corruption worthy of bottomless contempt.
The second is saying that I have an effect over you from an ethical standpoint.
In other words, I can shape your morals because I'm the parent.
I have authority. I know better.
And you will, to some degree, listen to and do what I say.
Right? So, of course, if you accept that, as a parent, that you have authority over your child, that you've had a strong influence on their moral development, to the point where you're going to call them selfish and expect them to change their behavior, or at least shame them into pretending that they're going to change their behavior.
But if you accept that you have authority over your child's moral development, and they've turned out selfish, then, you know, you would want to look in the mirror, as a parent, a heck of a lot quicker than you would want to look at your child.
So again, this is all just so, it's such errant nonsense.
It's such made-up nonsense.
And it's so corrupt.
It's so ugly and filthily corrupt.
And it is assuming the existence of virtue and then condemning, in the harshest possible terms, the way that people are.
I mean, if people are selfish, right?
I mean, let's just say, well, some statist comes along and says, well, people are selfish.
It's like, well, if people are selfish, they obviously were taught to be selfish when they were growing up, correct?
Yes, correct. Well, who had the children for the 14 years of their fundamental intellectual development?
And who taught them all about ethics and society and all that?
Well, it was the government, right?
So, if people are selfish, then obviously we need to get rid of public schools.
Because public schools are training people to be selfish.
Well, no, you see, people are innately selfish.
Well, okay, then if people are innately selfish, then we can't have social programs because the social programs are going to be corrupted towards people's selfish ends and blah, blah, blah.
There's no way that anyone can ever use a false argument for morality if all you do is feel the contempt for their position.
Now, I'm not saying that you sort of...
I'm not saying anything like that, because you have to be curious, right?
You have to be curious first. But once you point out the contradictions, and they're sitting there staring at those contradictions, then if they end up saying, no, I'm still going to hold my position, then yes, bottomless contempt is the only logical, and it is what you're feeling anyway, right? Our autonomous emotional system is not under our control, and we should never try to control it.
We should simply accept our emotions and learn from them.
But you are going to feel bottomless contempt to somebody who says, I am a brilliant mathematician.
I'm the most amazing mathematician in the world, blah, blah, blah.
And then you sort of say, hey, look at the base of one of your equations.
It says 2 plus 2 is 4.
Now, if they say, oh, my God, I can't believe that I missed that.
That's so obvious. Oh, I must be crazy.
I'm not the greatest mathematician in the world.
I guess I need to learn a few things, and so sorry for wasting your time.
Then it's somebody worthy of respect, in my view.
But if that person says, no, no, it's still correct.
It's still correct. You're just wrong.
2 plus 2 is not 4 anyway.
It can be whatever it wants it to be, but basically it's absolute and perfect and true, this theorem, and you're just full of crap, and I'm not going to listen to you, and you're evil, by the way, too.
Well, this is somebody's just bottomless contempt.
contempt is the only feeling that you would feel for somebody like this who claimed to be a brilliant mathematician and was ignoring at the base of the equation that they were saying that 2 plus 2 is 5.
Although in this case, they're not even using numbers as the answer, as 2 plus 2 is green or a Mobius strip or something.
So I think that's a very important thing to understand.
Contempt is something that the libertarian movement needs a whole lot more of and of course it has a lot to do with getting in touch with masculinity.
Not that masculinity is about contempt but masculinity to some degree is the antidote to passive aggression which is often feminine and the antidote to passive aggression Is logical rigor coupled with contempt?
So we'll talk about that another time.
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