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May 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:58
254 The Cult of Freedomain Radio

According to some, the kool-aid is just around the corner...

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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's 8 o'clock on Sunday, the 28th of May, 2006.
I hope you had a great and glorious, I guess it's not the end of the memorial weekend for our good friends in the States, but I hope you had a great weekend if it wasn't, and that you will continue to have a great weekend if you did.
Now, I have been thinking about Free Domain Radio, and I've been thinking about feedback that I've been getting through emails and from the boards lately, and I think it's important that we have a little chat about cult, cultism, cultishness, and so on, because cultism, cultishness, and so on, because I've noticed...
Over the last little while that I have been getting a certain amount of punchy feedback around myself insofar as people have been saying, do you not want people to think for themselves?
And people have also been saying that I have an approach that can be considered problematic by people outside of this conversation.
So people have been trying to invite other people into this conversation.
And other people have been saying, well, it's the tone and so on.
And so, based on a number of emails and threads on the boards, I'm sort of getting the feeling that the question is coming up around the sort of cultish nature of this conversation.
And I think it's well worth having a chat about it, just so at least my position is clear and a way forward, I think, for those of you who are trying to get other people involved in this conversation.
A way forward for you can come about that will get you, I think, in the long run, what it is that you want in terms of involving other people in this discussion, or, if that's impossible, not trying to, because trying to get people to do things that they don't want to do, where they don't see advantage for themselves, is usually not a very productive thing.
So I'd like to talk about it, because I think what's happening is this.
If you've come this far in the podcast series...
Then you've been listening for a couple of months at least, and you've probably been listening fairly intently, and for that I'm very proud and happy, and I think that's wonderful.
But what's been happening over the last little while, I'm guessing, and I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but I think it's true for enough people that it's impacting me.
Not that that should be your concern, but it's just what I sort of noticed, that...
What's happening is people are now going out.
Because of my focus on the family, people are now going out and attempting to get family members into this conversation.
Now, when I talk about this conversation during the course of this podcast, I want to sort of be very clear what it is that I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about me.
I'm not talking about me.
I'm not talking about my ideas or my voice or me trying to tell people what to think or anything like that.
Because maybe I haven't been clear enough about this, but the last thing I want to do is to tell people what to think.
What I would like to do is give people some insights that I've had on how to think, because Lord knows we're not taught that in our current culture and in our current society and in our current schooling.
And certainly not in our current families.
We're not taught the basics of how to think, how to apply the scientific method, logical empiricism, to the questions of moral philosophy, politics, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, family relations, romantic love, you name it.
We're not taught how to apply scientific principles of empirical logical methodologies to To these problems, and so, of course, these problems remain huge, enormous, and ever-growing problems for vast segments of the society, just as, before the rise of the scientific method, mankind's understanding of the physical universe was, let's just say, not exactly matching in a right, logical, consistent, predictable, and scientific direction.
So, the basic idea is that I'm not trying to teach people what to think.
And I think I make that quite clear over and over because what I do talk about is I'm always open to correction.
If somebody can come up with a better way of explaining something, something that's more logical or empiricism, when I have doubts and it's based on my own personal experience, I'm very clear about that, that these are just insights that I'm working with.
So, the last thing that I'd want to do is to be perceived as telling people how to think.
I would also submit to you that if you've come this far in the podcast series, that you certainly, certainly, certainly do not think that I am telling you what to think.
Because there's no way you would have listened to the hundreds and hundreds of hours of these conversations if you felt that I was telling you what to think.
Most of the people who email me, if not, well, actually most of them I think is a fair way of putting it, are intelligent and independent, highly intelligent, highly independent thinkers who would no more relish being told what to do than just about any other human being in the world.
You try telling someone what to do and they will naturally resist you.
But what is happening...
I think, is that people are now taking this conversation to others who are not necessarily along the lines of this conversation that we're talking about, and they're getting a lot of negative feedback, a lot of attacks upon their desire to enjoy these podcasts,
these conversations. So I would suspect that what's happening to you is probably what happened to me If you're trying to bring this conversation to other people, what happened to me when I started to get into philosophy when I was in my teens?
So when I started reading Ayn Rand and Aristotle and all these other, Locke and all these other thinkers, but particularly with Ayn Rand, what happened was people began to suspect that I was getting involved in a kind of cultish, somebody who's on high is handing out all the answers to everyone and And that it was viewed by my family and a good number of my friends back then,
it was viewed as a personal failing, as a weakness of spirit, as a desire to be subjugated, to be swallowed up in the thoughts of someone else, for me to be interested in a rational and empirical approach to determining truth from falsehood.
So I'm guessing that the following is occurring, and this is just my guess.
I don't have any empirical proof, but this is my strong gut sense of what's happening.
I have been focusing, with Christina's help, very much on the family over the past couple dozen podcasts.
And I think what's happening is that it's beginning to have an effect on people and their relationships with their families.
And I'm sure everybody knows that my opinion of the existing family is not always the best, so to speak.
But the proof is in the pudding.
If people had had success in their families, in getting their families interested in this conversation, because this conversation is not about me.
Sorry, just as a minor aside.
It's not about me.
I mean, you don't listen to this because you care about me.
You listen to this because you care about ideas.
I have some ideas. I've worked out some methodologies.
I've spent 20 years thinking and writing, so I think that I have something useful to add to the general conversation around philosophy.
But the conversation is around philosophy.
The conversation is not around me.
You guys aren't out there saying, Gee, I wonder when Steph's birthday is so I can send him a card.
No, of course not. If I get sick, you're not going to bring me chicken soup, and neither should you.
And so the conversation is not about me.
The conversation is about you.
The conversation is about ideas.
The conversation is your relationships, your capacity to think, your capacity for integrity and joy.
the pleasure that you take in exploring ideas.
The conversation is about you.
It's not at all about me.
So I just sort of wanted to point that out.
But I think what's happening is something that is predictable, and I was sort of expecting it to come, but not for another couple of months.
But we've expanded our listenership and got enough people listening to these podcasts that it's happening a little sooner than I thought.
So I think this is the methodology or this is the process that's occurring.
The truth is this, in my view.
This is the methodology for determining the truth, and this is the examples by which I have been able to use that methodology to achieve certain truths.
So one truth that I think is the case is that families, unfortunately, are pretty corrupt.
Not because the nature of family is to be corrupt, no more so than the nature of human beings was to be purely mystical in the Middle Ages.
It's just that a better methodology had not been discussed, discovered, disseminated, believed in, to the point where the scientific method could take root.
And people could begin to work in a less sort of mystical and religious scholastic manner and more in a strict empirical kind of scientific manner.
So it's not that the nature of the family is to be corrupt.
It's just that people are corrupt because we don't have a good methodology for determining truth from falsehood, particularly in the moral sciences.
Now, because people are corrupt and power corrupts in the absence of knowledge, in the absence of knowledge power corrupts, And parents have the most power in society in any way, shape, or form.
And so the absence of knowledge that parents have about ethics is corrupting their relationship with their children.
Because parents have to teach their children how to behave.
Parents have to teach their children how to act, both with relation to themselves and in relation to society.
Parents don't understand about ethics through no fault of their own.
Not everyone is born to be an ethical innovator and a philosopher.
Because parents don't understand about ethics, they have to teach their children nothing but conformity.
Because parents know the power of the argument for morality, and we all desperately want to be good deep down, Then parents present the argument from effect as if it were an argument for morality.
So parents say, you need to obey me, and they can't say, because I want you to conform to society and that with social expectations and to the existing nature of society, and that will make me out as a good, productive parent who's launched their child into the world in a productive manner.
Parents can't do that.
They can't say, obey me because I'm bigger.
They can't say, obey me because I'm frightened of society.
They can't say, obey me because if you conform to society, society will give you lots of goodies.
What they say is that, obey me because I'm morally right.
Obey me because I'm morally good.
But the problem is, and it's not a minor problem, parents are not morally good.
Why?
Because the science of ethics has really fallen into disrepair over the past couple of hundred years. .
After a very brief resurgence in the Enlightenment, rational philosophy around the field of ethics has really crumbled into disrepute.
So we are attempting to run a highly technological, somewhat capitalistic society with the medieval mystical ethics inherited from religion and from collectivism and socialism and communism and so on.
So naturally there's a big mess.
And that's why, for me, families are corrupt.
Because parents are pretending a knowledge that they don't have.
Because the only way that they can get their children...
To obey them is to use the argument for morality, but parents don't know what morality is.
So that's sort of my thesis, and I think that it's certainly borne out by my experience, by Christina's experience, by the patients that she's talked to, by readings that I've done, by people that I've talked to over the past 20 years.
I think there's strong empirical proof for it, and I think there's a strong rational framework for understanding it.
If I'm wrong about this, and I'm perfectly willing to always reopen and re-examine, right?
This is sort of one of the ways in which we know that it's not culty, because there's a methodology for truth that does not rely on the charisma or personality of me or you or anyone in this conversation.
We are all humbled before the scientific methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
So, we know that it's not a cult, right?
And this is a pretty important thing, because I'm not putting myself forward as an expert.
I'm saying that I've got some ideas about how to determine truth from falsehood, I've got some proof for them, and I'm putting it forward as a scientist does.
A scientist doesn't try and bully you into believing that what this scientist says is true.
It's not a cult of personality to be a scientist.
So I'm not putting forward anything here which is related to believe what I believe because I'm just so darn charismatic and all-powerful and all-knowing and so on.
That's got nothing to do with it.
And of course, if that is your opinion, then you might want to listen to some of the earlier podcasts or just sort of sit back and reflect about the nature of a scientific methodology for verification of truth and falsehood.
So, it's not culty from that standpoint, because there's always this methodology by which I'm more than happy to be disproved.
But if I am right about the family, then the following situation will occur.
And I think it is occurring, and I sort of will take this as a conditional verification of the theory, of course, unless you all write back to me and say that it's not the case.
I think what is happening is this.
The ideas that I'm putting out or that we're putting out as part of this conversation are giving you doubts about your relationship with your family.
I mean, that is inevitable.
Now, I am not awakening these doubts.
I am not creating these doubts.
I am not magically gesticulating into the air, creating these doubts like little ghosts and firing them into your heart with my ghostly philosophical bow and arrow.
What's happening is you have these doubts already.
Your true self down there, as we talked about in recent podcasts, is down there desperately reaching out for truth, logic, empiricism, and reality to get free of the fantasy of collectivism and subjectivism and mysticism and the worship of the family and the state and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm out here repeating the same message with minor variants over and over.
And what's happening is the doubts that you already have had, and have had since you can...
before you could even remember about your family, are beginning to be awakened.
So what's happening now is that I'm saying your family is corrupt.
And the best way to find out whether your family is corrupt is to say, there's this guy who has these ideas that the family is corrupt, and I want to talk to you people about them, i.e.
your family, and I think that's a fine thing to do.
No problem with that whatsoever, assuming your family is not violent or emotionally abusive directly and brutal and you're in any kind of danger.
For sure, you know, bring all this stuff up with your family and your friends.
Now, if I'm right about the family, then you are going to hear the following when you begin to bring this conversation into your family.
And we'll include close friends and so on.
We'll just call it the family for now.
What's going to happen is, when you begin to bring up these ideas about familial corruption with your family, if these ideas are false, your family will be curious, your family will chat with you, your family will be very interested, your family will say, well...
I'd really like to know why this is so interesting to you.
I would really like to know what you're getting out of this podcast and the conversation and the board and the phone-in shows and all the stuff that you're getting, which is obviously very interesting and very exciting to you, which you've devoted an enormous amount of time to, an enormous amount of intellectual effort to grasp and to enhance and to ask questions and to make suggestions and to be as generous as everyone has been in participating in this conversation.
Your family is going to be respectful of your beliefs and you're curious about what is getting you so intellectually excited.
If I'm wrong, then bringing this stuff up with your family is not going to cause any schisms.
It's not going to cause any problems.
In which case, there would be no problems or hostility coming towards me as the person who's saying, I think that your family is corrupt, but the best way to test it is to bring up your interest in these ideas with your family.
If your family is very curious and kind and wants to know more and downloads some podcasts or reads some of my articles or reads articles of people who write like me, fantastic!
Then I'm totally wrong.
But then I would not be receiving all of the subtle indications of hostility.
And they're not universal, and I'm not going to sort of point fingers, but some hostility that's coming directly from people who have been voluntarily participating in this conversation.
And now that this conversation is beginning to prove itself...
With their families, the resulting hostility would not be occurring because the families would be curious and want to know and be friendly and be like, wow, that's very interesting.
Tell me more. But unfortunately what is happening is that the theory is being proven true.
Now the theory is being proven true in the following manner.
When you begin to talk about your interest in philosophy, not in my podcast, certainly not in me, like what do you know about me, right?
But when you begin to talk about your interest in philosophy and ethics in a rational, empirical, scientific approach to truth...
If your family is corrupt, they're going to say something like the following.
Oh, it's just a cult.
Oh, this Steph guy is this, that, or the other.
And they're going to start to come up with really amateurish psychological explanations for my motivation and my desire to do what it is that I'm doing.
So, I've heard things like, Steph has mommy issues and he doesn't like women.
Of course, that's one thing. Another thing that I've heard is people reporting to me that It's not so much what I say, it's how I say it, right?
Like, I mean, if I had a deeper voice or a higher voice or something like that, or I, I don't know, spoke in some Urdu clicking language or Esperanto or with a Scottish accent or didn't crack any jokes or spoke in a monotone, who knows, right?
If I had some different tone of approaching it, that the message would be more palatable.
I've also heard one gentleman were saying that he wanted his girlfriend to come on and answer some questions from the board, and the girlfriend said, no, I'm just going to get attacked by all these crazy rational cult people.
So, if you are then bringing this conversation into a wider sphere, then it seems to me quite likely that if this conversation is of value, in other words, if the ideas that we're talking about have some real application...
Then you are going to encounter an enormous amount of hostility from the people around you when you begin talking not about me, But about truth, and about scientific approaches to truth, rationalism, empiricism, when you begin to deflate the crazy concepts that form the foundation of most people's false selves,
which they think are their true souls, and their religion, and their patriotism, and their classism, and their sexism, and whatever it is that they've got, the isms that they've got going on, which they mistake for their true self, or for any kind of real ethics, you're just going to be attacked.
Now, Because most people are passive-aggressive, when you bring up something that you value, you value philosophy, ideas, and conversations about those things, where it's not just a bunch of people windbagging back and forth, but where there's actually a strict methodology for truth and falsehood, because otherwise, really, what's the point?
It's like discussing your favorite colors for your whole life.
It doesn't really get you anywhere.
When people find out that you really value this conversation, and that perhaps it's my own methodology and approaches that has made you even more excited about this kind of philosophy or philosophy as a whole, because people are passive-aggressive, they are not going to attack you directly.
They're not going to attack philosophy directly, because that's going to reveal their hostility towards you.
Right? And then that's going to expose them as people who are out to do you harm and to do you damage and to put you down and to denigrate you.
So if you say, you know, this Steph guy has come up with some pretty cool ideas that have really got me excited intellectually and it's really, you know, making me think about a whole bunch of stuff.
Now if they say...
Well, you're just an idiot, and you don't even have the capacity to think your way out of a paper bag, and two plus two is four would probably be too much of a strain for you.
So you really shouldn't try and pull any of your tiny little mental muscles, and you should just sit back and read the funnies and not worry about thinking about a damn thing.
Well, they're going to come across kind of like jerks, right?
That's going to be a pretty open...
Attack on you, and also not a very credible attack on you, because if you followed the podcast this far, trust me, you have some pretty significant Schwarzenegger-ish mental muscles, and that would just be too obviously a silly attack against you.
Now, they're also not going to attack philosophy.
They're not going to say, well, you know, who cares what's true and false, who cares what's right and wrong, everything's subjective, everything's relativistic, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, your friends may do that.
Your parents certainly won't, because your parents did not raise you that way.
Your parents raised you with absolute moral rules, pretty much which break down to obey me because I'm bigger and I'm scared of the herd.
So your parents aren't going to be able to attack philosophy.
They're not going to be able to attack ethics.
They're not going to be able to attack some predetermined methodology for determining truth from falsehood because they have spent their whole parental lives educating you on how to be good.
And they then can't turn around and say, well, that's all just subjective.
I don't really believe in any of it.
Because that would be pretty hard for a parent to do.
So they're not going to attack philosophy.
They're not going to attack ethics.
They're not going to attack you.
So who's left to attack?
Who's left to attack?
Well, my friends, I put myself forward as a sacrificial lamb for the corrupt relationships that surround you.
Because passive-aggressive people, when they find out that you like these podcasts, are going to attack me, me personally.
Now, why? Because it's a way of deflating your enthusiasm.
It's a way of backing you away from a truth that is threatening to them.
It's a way of making sure that you never question them about what it is that they did or what it is that they do or anything like that.
They are not going to attack you, not going to attack philosophy, not going to attack ethics, not going to attack reality.
They're just going to attack me.
Now, by attacking me, they hope to uncouple you from an interest in ideas, an interest in philosophy, because they can't hope to uncouple you from me.
We have no coupling! I mean, I'm just some guy who talks on your iPod or talks on your CDs.
I mean, we have no relationship.
We email back and forth.
You post on the boards. I think that's great.
But it's not like I'm the closest person in your life.
I think that we have an intimacy that comes from a desire to share ideas, and those are all very deep.
But we don't speak very often, and I speak almost never one-on-one with anybody who is involved in the conversations with these podcasts.
So they're going to attack me.
Now... How are they going to attack me?
And this doesn't bother me that they're attacking me.
I just sort of want you to understand that.
I don't feel upset because people who surround people who listen to these podcasts are attacking me.
Why? Because they don't even know me.
They don't know what makes me tick.
They probably have never even listened to a single podcast.
They have no idea.
They might have listened to half of one or a bit of one, or they might have said that they've listened to one but not really, or they might have skimmed through my blog and then rushed to some conclusions, but they certainly don't know me.
And if they felt that I was wrong, right?
I mean, if they've read my arguments for universal morality or the virtue of capitalism or the value of integrity or justice or honesty or any of the things that we've been talking about for the past couple of months, if they found a flaw in my reasoning, then attacking me would obviously be very silly.
I mean, you don't...
If somebody submits a math paper to you with an error in logic, you don't go and punch them.
I mean, that's not a good way to correct people.
So if somebody has found a flaw in what it is that I'm saying, then, of course, the kind thing to do would be to help me out of my terrible error, because I've always absolutely thrown myself on the mercy of empiricism, logic, the scientific method...
What people would do if they found a flaw in my logic, and this has happened on occasions when people have pointed out something that was incorrect that I've said or whatever, more than happy to correct myself on air.
So if they found a flaw in my reasoning, what they would do is engage in a debate with you.
And they would say, well, Steph said 2 plus 2 is 5, but when you put it to lay it down, draw it through, do some flowcharts, maybe run it through some logic diagrams or just in conversation, they would say, well, here's where I think the flaw is.
And then hopefully they or you would communicate it to me and I would make profuse apologies for leading anybody astray inadvertently and correct myself and thank people and beg forgiveness and that would all be wonderful.
And I would make the step forward that I always love to make about getting rid of error and...
Incorporating more truth into what I believe and what it is that I communicate.
But that would be to engage in the debate with you in a positive and curious and respectful and rational manner, which would mean that my whole theory about the family would be false.
But if my theory about the family is true, then when you bring your love of these ideas, of philosophy, of these conversations, or the other conversations that you're having that are similar to the people in your life, especially your parents, then you're going to get attacked.
And you're going to get attacked by people creating vague ad hominem attacks on me.
in which they take to task my tone, my personality, my psychological problems, my personal weaknesses, my character flaws, corruption in my soul, my ill intent, all was ill-defined, and they're just going to try and create this sort of evil, corrosive, and they're just going to try and create this sort of evil, corrosive, vague fog that discredits me as an individual as if my
So somebody had somebody who said, oh, well, Steph, you see, you've got to understand this about Steph.
Well, he wasn't very popular in high school, and so nobody really listened to him, and he didn't get much attention in grad school, and so he's got a chip on his shoulder, and now he's just set up this world of free domain radio where he...
He gets to be the smart guy, and everyone listens to him, and now it's fulfilling all of his fantasies because he was rejected, and now he's finally got an audience, and he's becoming this pompous, but whatever, right?
I mean, you can, I'm sure, add as many embellishments to that kind of ad hominem attack as you like, and I'm sure you've heard some variation of that.
I am a cult leader. I want to control people's thinking.
I'm just in it for the money.
Now, that's a good one. Someday I'll share with you my donations, and you'll tell me Exactly how much of it that I'm in it for the money.
But people will come up with something to do with nefarious, subjective, and unprovable motives that I might have for putting this stuff out.
Now, I'm, of course, perfectly willing to entertain such ideas or such thoughts.
I think that's wonderful.
If somebody can help me to understand myself better, then that would be wonderful.
I mean, if somebody can sort of help me understand in some sort of objective manner how my personal weaknesses, personal failings, irrationalities, emotional scar tissue, however you want to put it, is corrupting the ideas or negatively influencing the ideas that I'm putting out there,
I think that would be a massive service to me, and of course a massive service to the thousands of listeners we have, who I'm sure are not exactly hanging on my every word, but would find the conversations a lot more fruitful if they weren't corrupted by some hidden, foggy, corrosive, negative, acidic scar tissue that I'm not aware of, but other people can see so clearly, but can never seem to quite get round to helping me to understand.
Well, that would be great.
But the fundamental thing about it, though, is that even if it's true, and I have no problem accepting that it's a possibility, right?
Maybe I'm completely unaware of this, and Christina, as an expert and well-experienced psychologist who's known me now for many years, Has also been unaware of it, and all the smart people in my life who I run these ideas by are also unaware of it, and maybe somebody out there in the ether who's listened to a minute or two of a podcast or skimmed through one or two of my articles has seen something in me that after 20 years of self-examination,
living with a competent therapist, having very intelligent friends who cross-examine me to make sure that my ideas are good before I put them out, board members who question me, people who call in, maybe somebody out there Has managed to see something about me that nobody around me and I myself am not aware of.
Fantastic. Let me know.
Always happy to put myself out there to find out more about myself.
But, even if we say that that's all true, that let's say the theory that I have mommy issues and I don't like women and I want to tell people what to think and I'm culty and I'm arrogant and I'm a know-it-all and I'm a windbag, well the windbag I'll definitely admit to, but Like, I'm all of these things, and that I'm a bully, and I'm vain, or I don't know, whatever, whatever people come out, I want to do all of this sort of nasty stuff.
Even if that's all true, let's just say that I completely accept that for the moment as being true, I'm not sure what relevance that has to the truth or the falsehood of my ideas.
So let's say that I'm a surgeon, and I'm an...
Let's just say, for the sake of the argument, I'm not saying the metaphor holds true in all situations, but I'm an expert surgeon.
You know, blindfolded, one hand tied behind my back in a darkened room, I can whip out somebody's appendix faster than Joey Tribbiani can take off a woman's bra.
Well, that's great, right?
Now, if somebody says, well, you see, but as a surgeon, what he's expressing is sublimated sadism from his childhood.
Well, that may be true.
But I'm not sure what effect that actually has on whether he's a good or a bad surgeon.
Because the good or the bad surgeon has nothing to do with the motivation.
Right? Nothing whatsoever to do with the motivation.
So if the motivation for me in these podcasts is, well, I wasn't listened to much as a child and whatever, right?
So now I want to just be a know-it-all and the center of attention and this and that and the other.
Well, if that's true...
I'm not really sure what effect that has on the truth or the falsehood of what it is that I'm proposing.
I mean, what I'm proposing is fairly rigorous and fairly well thought out and fairly syllogistic, particularly in my articles.
And so I'm just sort of a little bit at a loss as to why that's even important.
First of all, it seems that people who call me arrogant or know-it-all or whatever, it seems to me a little bit arrogant and know-it-all-y to psychologize someone from a distance without entering into any conversation with them.
That seems kind of arrogant to me.
And then not to help them with the knowledge that you have gathered in your near infinite wisdom that you can psychologize me, fairly intelligent and self-knowledgeable person, that to psychologize me from a distance and to sort of sully my reputation with those who enjoy these conversations, that seems to me kind of arrogant and know-it-all.
So that just seems to me a little bit like projection.
Now, the reason that I'm saying all of this is that I think that it's important just from a self-knowledge standpoint, possibly, I mean, I sort of invite you to the possibility of this, that it may be important for you as somebody, as you begin to bring these conversations that we're having, or the conversations around ideas that you may have been having within your own mind or your own journals or other people, this podcast, other podcasts, articles, who knows?
When you start to bring these conversations into your family and your friends and your social circles, that the hostility that these ideas are going to bring about, are going to summon in people, there's a whole lot of projection going on.
So... When you bring these ideas to bear on people, they're going to get attacking me.
They're going to get attacking me as the best way to hurt you.
What do they care about me? Well, they don't.
They don't even know me.
But they know how to get to you.
So they're going to attack me and come up with all these vague psychological theories about my motivations, but not actually talk about my actual ideas.
And then what's going to happen is that they're then going to try and create doubt in you.
Like, oh, wow, maybe Steph is a cult leader.
Maybe he is telling me what to do.
Maybe he is programming me to send him money, in which case I wish I was doing a better job.
But maybe he's doing all of these things and these people are just throwing a bucket of cold water into my mental activity and waking me up and so on.
And then you're going to get angry at me, right?
So what's sort of happening at a very subterranean psychological level is you're bringing ideas of virtue and objective truth and falsehood methodologies to people.
Their own corruption and false self are going to attack, but the false self can never attack the true self, right?
So they can't attack my ideas, right?
The ideas are a product of my true self.
And I know this because I had to battle my false self for quite a long time to get through to this particular area that I'm in right now, or this plateau.
So they can't attack the rational, objective, logical ideas that I'm putting forward.
I mean, they can, right? I mean, I would welcome it if they could, logically.
They can't. It's because the false self can't do that, right?
So the false self is reacting like it's a virus, and it's not going to attack your false self.
It's going to attack your true self by saying it's a cult leader.
He's a cult leader. He's emotionally damaged.
He's, look at his history, his mom, his dad, his crazy guy, and so on.
And so their own guilt and shame about their own moral behavior gets projected onto me, and they then attack me as somebody who's false when they're the ones who are in fact being false.
The effect is that they then rouse the anger of your false self, which then attacks your true self by attacking me.
And so I just sort of, I mean, you can replay that if you want.
I wouldn't necessarily want to try and do that all again.
Off the top of my head.
But there is going to be this complex psychological interaction that is going to occur when you start bringing logical, empirical, objective ideas, particularly around ethics and particularly around the corruption of the family, Into your family.
And I think all it does is help serve the value of the ideas up a little bit higher, right?
It ratchets them up a little bit higher because this is exactly what the theory is going to predict.
You bring these ideas to bear on your family, your family is going to attack me in ad hominem ways or your friends or whatever, and then they're going to try and sever your attachment to some imagined version of me in the hopes that you're going to then discredit these ideas within your own mind, and that's what gets them off the hook.
And so they're also going to get you to defend me, as if I'm even remotely important in the whole equation, right?
The thing that's important here is your integrity.
Not what I'm saying, not what I'm putting out there, but your own integrity.
So they start to get you, right, you know, it's what they say.
If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
So if they can get you to ask the question, is Steph telling me what to think, and is he a cult leader, and is he this, and is he that, and is he...
Maybe really emotionally damaged, and I'm falling under the spell of some crazy damaged guy acting out all of his bad childhood or whatever.
Well, then they're getting you to ask the wrong questions.
Because that's not a relevant question at all.
That would be a relevant question to a cult leader.
But since I'm not a cult leader, or if I am, I'm a really poor one, it's got nothing to do with that.
The real question is, well, if you can tell me what's false about the methodology or the reasoning or the conclusions, the sort of step-by-step logical conclusions, if you can tell me how it's false...
Then I think that would be wonderful.
And I'm sure Steph would be more than happy to hear it, because he doesn't want to put out things out there that are false.
But by getting you to focus on, am I controlling?
Am I manipulative? Am I domineering?
Am I vain? Am I shallow?
Am I damaged? Am I... Am I a bully?
Am I acting out some bizarre psychological...
They're just getting you to ask the wrong questions because it's absolutely irrelevant whether that is true or not.
You're a good singer regardless of the childhood you had.
You're a good or bad singer regardless of how that all happens.
You are a good or bad surgeon regardless of your motives.
So we can talk about motives if you want, and I'm certainly happy to have that discussion, but it has no relevance.
on the truth or falsehood of the ideas.
It would only have relevance if I was some sort of charismatic cult leader claiming that I was true by virtue of being myself rather than what I'm saying is true by virtue of there being an objective methodology.
Now, let me tell you how to bring it up.
Just kidding. See, that's what I don't do, right?
But I would invite you as a possibility, right?
I would say that if you do want to get people involved in philosophy, right?
Not involved in me.
Because, again, I'm not at all.
I'm as important to this as the internet pipeline that you download the podcast in.
It's just a conduit that's, I mean, me, not important in the equation at all.
So if you are bringing your...
Maybe newfound or maybe longfound, but maybe clarified a little bit more love of philosophy to bear on your conversations with people, then one way that you could do it that might be more productive and provoke less animosity towards me, which would be nice for me, you know, just as a whole.
I don't particularly mind it.
My particular issue is concern for you.
Because if they are attacking your love of ideas by attacking me, my concern is not my reputation because I don't have any particular concern about my reputation with either yourself or your family.
My concern is your love of truth that is at risk.
My concern here is you.
Not me. Not me.
I'm fine. I can handle all of this.
My concern is your love of truth.
And my concern is that people attack me through you, that they will undermine your love of truth.
And that would be a real catastrophe.
Them bad-mouthing me is water off a duck's back as far as I'm concerned.
Doesn't matter to me at all.
What does matter is that your love of truth, your love of curiosity, your love of intellectual activity, that is what must be preserved at all costs.
And whoever attacks whatever source of pleasure you get in ideas, me, Aristotle, Locke, your bulletin board, your dreams, your journal, whoever, your writing teacher, Whatever is giving you a love and passion for ideas and the truth, that is what you must guard with all of your emotional and intellectual resources.
So my concern is that by attacking me and by turning you against having hostility towards me, that it's going to undermine your own love of truth, your own love of intellectual pursuit.
And that is a treasure to be guarded and a treasure to be nourished and a treasure to To be protected at all costs and at all times because that is the source of your joy in life.
I would guess one of the primary ones.
And it is also, by the by, the source of human progress and all that kind of good stuff.
So my concern is for your love of the truth, not for my own reputation or for what people say.
It doesn't matter to me what people say about me, what does matter.
Is that your love of the truth is preserved at all costs.
So what I would suggest in order to do that is something like this.
Don't say, well, Steph says this and Steph says that, because that's not empirically important, right?
What I say is not important, right?
The fact that I say anything doesn't mean anything, right?
Two plus two is green.
It's not anymore true because it's run through big chatty foreheads, vague pan-European accent.
It doesn't add any flavor of truth to it at all.
But what you could say, or at least what I would suggest, if you want to bring these ideas up or get people to listen to free domain radio or whatever, is to ask them, well, how do you determine truth from falsehood?
You know, how do you know what's right and what's wrong?
How do you know what's correct and what's incorrect?
Do you think that the senses are valid?
What do you think the relationship is between, you know, reason and truth and so on?
And if they say, oh, I hate talking about that stuff, that's all intellectual masturbation, I could care less, it doesn't matter, I go with what the president tells me, well, then you might actually have your answer there.
Because there is always going to be hostility.
There are entrenched interests.
There are people who feel guilty, particularly people who've raised their children badly.
They feel guilty about it.
They're angry. And they're hoping not to get caught, particularly as parents get older and need your resources.
They'll hope not to get caught. So, I mean, if you're a doctor...
Let's say I'm, you know, this podcast is going on in the Middle Ages and you're a doctor and I'm saying that, you know, bloodletting and leeching is not the best way to treat illnesses and I have some empirical proof and logical analysis of it and whatever.
And you go to a medical convention of the bloodletting, leeches, medieval, sore bones doctors of the world and you begin to bring this sort of stuff up, well, people are going to be a little touchy.
Why? Well, because they claim to be healers, and if it turns out that for a good portion, if not most of their careers, they've actually been killing people rather than healing them because they've been letting blood and sticking leeches on everyone, they're going to be kind of tense about that, and they're going to demand a pretty high burden of proof.
And I think that's great. They should.
I mean, society should have a high burden of proof for reorienting ethics because it's pretty fundamental.
But there's going to be a lot of hostility.
Now, a competent doctor is going to say, great, where's your proof?
And they're going to have a high standard for proof, and I think that's great.
If there wasn't a high standard for proof, I wouldn't have put out 250-odd podcasts.
I mean, there is a high standard for truth, and I have it for myself.
You should have it for yourself, and people who are interested in philosophy and ethics, in particular ethics, should have that high standard of truth.
So if you go and you say, listen, you people of the medieval sawbones, bloodletten, leech society doctor heads...
If there's a better way of doing it, then they should have a high standard of truth and you should have conversations about that.
But if they say, nope, it's just bloodletting and leeches all the way and don't you dare insinuate that I've been anything other than the best conceivable doctor in the known universe now and forevermore, well, that's your answer.
They're not interested in healing people.
They're interested in getting paid for things that they already do.
They're not interested in advancing the science of medicine.
They're interested in being quacks.
So, don't bring it up, my suggestion is, don't bring it up and say, well, Steph says this, and Steph says that, and it's got to be true.
I mean, that's obviously nonsense, and I don't think anyone's doing that.
I'm sort of using an extreme example here.
But that's not going to be what is going to get people interested and motivated in ideas.
The other thing that I would suggest, and it's the last thing that I'll suggest, is that it's very important to work empirically.
Now, empirically, I would guess that you had a similar epiphany to what a large number of people have written to me about, either through listening to my podcast or listening to the conversations or being on the board or listening to all of the other thinkers out there who are working this sort of similar vein.
It's like, yeah!
Well, those are the people you want to talk to, as I've mentioned in a recent podcast.
Those are the people you want to approach.
Because I would very much doubt that you started from a position of extreme hostility to these ideas, and anger and defensiveness and false self-manipulations and passive-aggressive undermining of authorities in any way, shape, or form that you can lay your hands on.
You didn't start that way.
You had a particular conduit.
You had a wormhole, so to speak, between your true self and reality, between your true self and empirical, objective, logical, scientific reality, And that particular wormhole sucked these ideas in, it got in contact with your true self, and now you're attempting to widen that hole and get rid of your false self and get out to the real world.
Well, those are the people that you want to get a hold of, because your life is short.
Life is short. You don't want to waste your time beating your head against the false self, indifference, hostility, passive-aggressive, emotional manipulation of others.
So look for those people who've got the wormhole.
You drop the words into them, and they just fall like a penny all the way down to the water of the true self and go sploosh down a well.
Those are the people you want to spend time with, and the best way to find out those is to find out people who have doubt.
Because having doubt in the modern world is a pretty essential and significant thing, because the modern world doesn't know what the heck it's talking about in terms of philosophy, right?
I mean, if it did, the modern world would be a heck of a lot of a better place.
We wouldn't just be coasting on the rationalism of the past, we'd actually have additional and expanding rationalism within the present.
So, if somebody doesn't have any doubt, right, if they're just, well, what the President says is true, period.
I support the troops.
You know, whatever. I mean, if the President said it, it's good enough for me.
I'm sort of paraphrasing and perhaps exaggerating a little bit, although I'm sure there are people out there like that.
But those are the people that, they don't have any doubt, so you don't have anything to offer them.
Like, if people are certain that what they're doing is exactly the right thing and they have no doubt whatsoever, what value can philosophy have to them?
None. I mean, it's just going to be a frustrating and pointless endeavor, and you are going to be falling into a particularly difficult and dangerous web.
Again, not for me, because what do I care, right, about people's opinions, but other than Christina's and a few close friends, but the danger is that your joy in exploration and intellectual pursuits is going to be damaged and undermined.
So I would suggest that you start off by being curious about what people believe and And if they say something like, you know, I've always wondered that, I've always felt frustrated that I can't figure out in any kind of real way, or I make a decision, then another piece of information comes on, and I change my mind, and I feel like I'm a little bit in a sort of like a leaf in a windstorm, and I can't figure out exactly how to determine truth from falsehood and so on, right?
Then those are the people you want to start talking to because they have doubt, they have curiosity, they have the ego strength to be uncertain because I'm certainly uncertain, if that makes sense, because I have the ego strength and Christina has the ego strength to be uncertain because the true self knows the limitations of knowledge. because I have the ego strength and Christina has the The false self is a know-it-all.
The true self is the self that is strong enough to understand that it knows little relative to the sum total of human knowledge, past, present and future, and therefore certainty is a very dangerous game, right?
The only certainty is in the methodology, not in the conclusions.
There is no position, and that is my position, as somebody quite well pointed out that I said in a previous podcast.
My position is that there is no position, so I'm glad to correct that.
And thank you to the person who pointed it out.
But you want to be curious about people to find out if they themselves have any curiosity.
So if you ask them, and they just slam the door shut and say, sorry, it's in the Bible, and that's all I need to know.
My priest told me, and Reverend Jesse Jackson says this, and Pat Robertson says that, and the President says the other, and so on.
Well, then they can sort of sit in their false self world of absolute and insane certainty, and there's nothing you can offer them.
But if you find somebody out there who's curious, who wants to know, who doesn't have all the answers, like myself, like you perhaps, then that's the person you want to have, you can have an exploration with.
And then you can say, yeah, well, I've got some interesting ideas from this guy.
Forget about him. Let's just talk about the ideas, because he's not important, and he's the first to admit that.
Then you can have some great conversations.
And then what will happen?
Is that your intellectual curiosity will give you the joy of a companion in your exploration of the truth.
And that's really the best part of socializing with people, in my view, other than karaoke.
So that would be my approach to take it.
If you say, well, Steph says this and he's right, then of course people are going to just attack me.
And the casualty there is going to be your own optimism and desire for the truth, not Free Domain Radio or me or anything like that.
So I hope that that's a useful approach.
I just wanted to point this out because I did feel, over the past week or two, quite a lot of hostility and some vaguely ad hominem things.
And people sort of reporting them, I mean, to their credit, right?
People sort of reporting them and not saying, well, I think you're a know-it-all windbag who had a bad childhood and is acting out all his psychological scarring on us.
Poor helpless people for a podcast that you put out for free and ask for donations.
How exploitive of you. That's not what I'm concerned about.
So I would suggest that look for curiosity.
Don't say, well, I said this and, you know, you've got to listen to Free Domain Radio because this guy will explain everything to you.
And of course, that's not the case of what's happening here at all.
But be strict with curiosity.
Be strict with the methodology. And please keep me posted about what happens with your conversations with people.
But be very aware that people are going to take your love of ideas and your love of the truth.
They're going to attack me and hope to detach you from your love of the truth because that threatens them.
It threatens their false self.
And if you can't break through that false self, all you will get out of that interaction is pain.
And doubt. And not the good kind of doubt either, but existential doubt, which is very deleterious and damaging to your self-esteem.
So thank you so much for listening.
I hope that I get some interesting responses on this.
I'm very curious to see how this conversation continues with people.
But if you're having doubts, please express them to me directly, because that's an important thing to work through.
But let's be honest and open with each other about what's happening when you bring philosophy to the people who are in your life.
So thanks so much for listening.
As always, I'd like it if you could donate.
The suggested donation is 50 cents a podcast.
I think that's a pretty reasonable voluntary price.
So please come by freedomainradio.com and donate, and I look forward to seeing you on the boards.
And we will be on next Sunday, 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. You can find information about how to join the conversation through the Internet on the boards, and I will talk to you then.
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