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May 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:35
259 Fighting Philosophy

Just because something is 'better' doesn't mean it's commanded

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Good morning, y'all!
I hope you're doing most excellently.
We are going to talk about ethics this morning for two reasons.
One is that I have noticed over the past couple of days that a few people On the board and in my email are reaching the phase of irritation and a desire to best me.
And I can certainly understand that.
Just so you understand, I've gone through this whole journey myself, so I'm fairly aware of the milestones that occur when you come across a powerful idea or set of ideas that...
If you take them seriously, we'll compel you to do things that are uncomfortable, like examine your relationships with your family and your friends and your spouse and so on.
I sympathize with the phases that people are going through when they're looking at these ideas.
Now, I'm going to sound odd here, and I'm aware of that too, but I still think that it's the case nonetheless, that I've gone through all of these same phases that y'all are going through when I first had these ideas possess me.
I mean, I didn't exactly sit down.
Those who've read The God of Atheists have some idea of the process.
But I didn't exactly sit down and work all these things out and come to a calm conclusion.
These ideas that we're talking about came to me.
Obviously, some of them, a lot of them, have not come to me.
I've simply picked up from other people.
I'm retransmitting. But...
The core of them, the stuff that I'm talking about, the family, the argument for morality, all of the stuff we're talking about with ethics and physics and scientific method and its relationship to morality, all of those kind of came to me in a series of cannon shots to my brain a couple of years ago.
And so I went through exactly the same process that you're going through with me, if you're going through this phase of it.
But I went through it with these ideas themselves, that I resisted them, that I thought they were great, and then they bugged me, and then I ran away, and then I attacked them, and I went through all of the same phases that people are going through, just so you know that I understand, and also so that we can empathize with each other when these ideas present themselves in your life, because I certainly wasn't born with them, and it was enormously costly for me.
When I began to take...
When these ideas hit me, I was quite shocked.
And I have a whole book, which may never ever be published, maybe after I'm dead and gone, but I have a whole book on how these ideas hit me in a series of...
As I say, cannon shots or however you want it, tidal waves.
These ideas sort of overwhelmed me in the same way that they're probably, if you're taking them seriously, kind of overwhelming you too.
So I understand your desire to kick and fight at them, but just be careful with that just for your own self-respect.
Because there's been a number of people who've posted on the boards lately who've taken a rather...
Ooh, how to put it nicely.
Simplistic and condescending tone.
So, I had someone lecture me last night about how to determine truth from falsehood.
And if other people lecture me on similarly obvious things, I've had, you know, someone who, when I did this thing on the banks yesterday and said that in a free market situation or in a minarchist situation...
I said, you know, banks don't like to lend to governments, and I mentioned several times that's when there's private control of currency.
And so, of course, I get a long lecture today on how, are you crazy?
Look at how private institutions love to lend to governments.
I mean, where do you think the government borrows its money from?
And so I'm certainly not asking that anybody think that I'm omniscient.
Good heavens! I'm a million miles away from anything like that.
But what I think is important is to remember that it's curiosity, curiosity, curiosity.
So, for instance, recently somebody sent in an email of a friend of theirs who was criticizing, I guess you could say, my series on toddler, adolescence, and teenagers relative to the family about how early experiences with authority has a lot to do with the growth of somebody's Ethical development and the growth of their relationship to state authority,
and I guess you could say to religious authority, is heavily, heavily, heavily conditioned by the experiences with authority that they have as a child.
Not a radical thesis.
Is it empirically proven? Of course not.
But that's okay.
I mean, there's stuff that I've empirically proven, like my Libertarian Morality, the article that I have on my blog and on Lou Rockwell, Or at least I've taken a good stab at it.
So a lot of that stuff's worked out.
I've tried to work out some stuff here in the car.
So logistically, some of the stuff is more based on my experience.
Because empiricism is a valid way of developing a theory.
You can develop a theory without knowing all of the causes and effects behind it.
So for instance, people in the Middle Ages learned how to...
Do crop rotation so that you could get winter turnip as winter crops and stuff like that.
They didn't know all of the science behind it, but they tried it and it worked, and so they did it.
And so the theory was, if you use crop rotation and plant winter crops, you will get more food and will starve to death less.
Well, they tried it without knowing all of the base science underlying it and the cause and effect at a biological level, but it worked.
And so, therefore...
It was something that was brought to bear, that was perfectly effective and perfectly valuable.
Which was achieved through experience and experimentation, became knowledge.
Now, of course, you want to pursue it further to get to the science behind it, but it's not like human knowledge was zero, and then when we got in the scientific method, became more.
And so, I just sort of want you to understand that, in my own experience, and introspection is a great way.
We're all human beings, right? So, honest and rigorous introspection is a great way Of learning about how the human psyche works.
It is, I mean, you are your own lab from that standpoint.
And then what you do when you work these kinds of things out is you spend, I don't know, a decade or two talking to people, asking them about their history, and trying to figure out what their relationship to authority is as an adult and looking for correlations.
And let's say that your wife is a psychologist and occasionally she might anonymously mention some aspects of her patient's treatment.
And... To me, and then I might be able to glean some more insight out of that.
So there's ways of being able to develop theories on these things without saying, yes, I've empirically proven that this is what happens to these brain cells when somebody goes through this as a child.
Of course not, because that would be unethical, right?
You can't experiment on people's brains.
But it is a perfectly valid approach to work from experience, to work from observation, and to develop theories.
As long as you say that they're conditional and based upon observation and far from absolute, then it's a perfectly valid approach to knowledge.
But anyway, so this email was sent in with this guy criticizing heavily this and saying, well, he hasn't proven it scientifically.
Which I think is great.
I think it's wonderful.
Of course, if I had proven it scientifically, he would just have to take it on faith that I'd said it, but I'm sure that this man takes lots of medicines without looking at all of the data to support that it's safe, right?
So, I mean, there's lots of ways in which that's just a kind of funny response.
And it's a straw man argument, right?
For those who don't know this logical term, a straw man argument is...
To attack a caricature of your opponent's position and feel that you have done something productive, which of course you haven't.
So this gentleman was saying that because I hadn't experimented on people and inflicted corrupt authority on them when they were children, And then tracked all of these people's growth of their political beliefs as they grew up and worked completely from a controlled experiment situation, then my theory was not valid.
Well... He had also said that it would be completely unethical to do that.
So, of course, here you're in a bind, right?
So I claim to be some sort of ethicist, and so this guy is saying that the only way to prove my ethical theory would be to be unethical, at which point, if I did do that, he would then complain that I had achieved the proof of my ethical theory in an unethical manner, which made me dubious as an ethicist.
This is just a trap, right?
Just so you understand these kinds of positions.
It's a trap, which means that you can't win, right?
And wherever you can't win, you're in somebody's defenses, right?
You're in somebody's scar tissue.
Wherever you're in a situation where it's like damned if you do and damned if you don't.
So he says, well, you can't prove this theory because it would be unethical to do so.
And also, I'm not going to believe this theory because it's not proven.
And the theory is ethical, right?
So that's sort of an example.
And look, I mean, it's not that he disagrees with me.
Good Lord, I've had fantastically productive discussions where I've learned an enormous amount from people who disagree with me.
Because disagreeing with me is unimportant, right?
I disagree with me.
We all disagree with each other.
It's the validity of the scientific method for proving truth and falsehood in the realm of philosophy and ethics that we care about, not...
I mean, somebody disagreeing with me is not even the right way of putting it.
And I know I put it that way myself, but that's just an old habit.
We find discrepancies relative to reality or something like that.
So it's not disagreeing with me or anything like that.
But the clincher was this email where this gentleman said, Well, I know that Steph had a bad childhood, and of course he brought out, well, Steph had a bad childhood, and that heavily conditions his approach to authority, right?
So he really disliked his mom, and therefore he wants to get rid of the state.
Which is, again, it's kind of funny, right?
I mean, that's not an argument really, right?
Because, of course, when I say that people's childhood experiences have a strong effect on their political beliefs, and he says, I don't believe that theory, and by the way, Steph disliked his mom, and that's why he wants to get rid of the state.
I mean, that's kind of like a joke, right?
I mean, you can't say that the theory is invalid and then use it to attack the person who came up with the theory.
I mean, that's just kind of funny. But the thing that really got me was that he said that he himself, he said, I have never, even once, experienced any negative infliction of authority or corrupt authority from my teachers, my Sunday school teachers, my parents, my extended family.
Nobody, when I was a child, ever used their authority in a negative way.
And, oh my god, it's like, come on, really?
I mean, do you really expect any sane human being to believe that?
I mean, I think that's just very funny.
So, of course, my theory generally states that if you, I mean, we all experience it because the culture is corrupt.
So this guy, the moment he says Sunday school teachers, you have some sort of idea that he's been exposed to corrupt authority because Sunday school teachers, however good meaning or well meaning their intentions, are going to tell you lies as if they were true for the sake of institutional gain.
And all of your public school teachers, however well-meaning their intentions, are going to hide and obscure the violent nature of state power.
It's inevitable. You can't fight it.
And even if I were a public school teacher, I'd last about three minutes.
The system protects itself, right?
I mean, this is the nature of power.
People have a strong instinctual allegiance to power based on our tribal upbringing and don't rock the boat.
I mean, it's inevitable. And nobody wants to go to work and say, I'm in a situation of corrupt violence and every dollar I'm being paid for has been taken from other people by force.
I mean, I know that some portion of my paycheck is taken from people by force, but I'm aware of that.
I look at that in the face and I've made my peace with it to whatever degree you can within this kind of corrupt situation.
I don't take ownership for the fact that if I want to eat and have a roof over my head, I have to take blood money.
I'm aware of it. I don't hide it, right?
That's the first thing. That's the key thing.
Because people say to me, well, you shouldn't take this money for this, like, that's fine.
But the first step, and maybe I will discover that over time, but the first step is just to be honest and say, yes, of course, some portion of my paycheck is blood money.
Absolutely, no question.
But very few people seem to have the stamina or the staunchness to look at that sort of fact.
So if this guy writes and says he's never experienced any corruption from people in authority, then that's kind of just like a joke.
Also, is it really the case that his parents are perfect moralists and that everybody else just seems to be lost and corrupted and messed up and confused and so on?
But that this guy's parents happened to be a perfect moralist.
Well, of course not. If they were perfect moralists, they wouldn't be sending him to Sunday school.
I mean, that's just so obvious, right?
I mean, you wouldn't be sending him to a cult if you were a good parent.
I mean, I'm sorry, but it's just the case.
So anyway, the funny thing about that is what I said was that my theory says that people who have unacknowledged pain from their past are blind to the corruption of power in the present.
I mean, that's just inevitable. If you pretend to yourself that you had a perfect childhood when your childhood was full of corrupt authority, then you are going to escape the pain in the short term of having to deal with that.
And of course, why wouldn't we all do that?
Because what it does is it makes you blind to corruption as an adult.
And that makes you vulnerable and makes you inevitably going to get enmeshed in difficult and dangerous and destructive relationships.
And it's going to make you miserable.
I mean, good Lord, if repressing pain about the past didn't have any consequences, I wouldn't be doing these podcasts saying, deal with the past.
I'd be like, yes, you can do heroin and get a PhD and never have any negative health consequences and, you know, people will pay you actually to take it and there's no negatives and it's all just one perfect lifelong orgasm.
Well, who would ever put out a podcast saying, I don't know so much about this whole heroin thing?
So I think that it's just important to understand that, yes, you don't have to deal with the pain of your past.
You don't have to look at your family's corruption in the face.
You don't have to look at the people around you and how they lie to you in the face.
Of course not. Good heavens, everything's a choice.
That's freedom. But all choices have consequences.
If you choose not to deal with your past, then you're going to end up like this guy who says that he had a perfect childhood, never had any problems with authority, never had any corruption from those who had power over him, never experienced any emotional compromises or moral compromises from those who had authority over him.
And of course the simple result being that he simply has no capacity to see corrupt and evil power as an adult.
So what I found out later was that this gentleman also had been sent by his parents to military school.
So they sent him into the bosom of the lying culty church and then they sent him into the tender bosom of military school.
And this joker tells me that he's never experienced any corruption from authority whatsoever.
Well, so as I sort of pointed out on a post, this guy couldn't be proving my theory any harder if he tried.
I mean, my theory would perfectly predict that if he denies childhood pain, he'll be blind to corruption as an adult.
And look, that's not my theory.
I mean, there's lots of psychologists who believe this too.
I just adapted it to political science and ethics.
The reason that I'm talking about all of this is that then I got a nice juicy lecture from somebody who said, now Steph, what's important to understand is that, and you know, no disrespect to this person who's posting, I know I've been guilty of lecturing myself and being guilty of somewhat pompously reducing a sophisticated argument to a very simplistic clause and attacking that.
So, you know, with all due affection, I put out this critique of this post.
And not to pick on any individual, because I've had a number of these posts and emails where people are lecturing me about the basics.
So I've got a long post lecturing me about how it's important to distinguish truth from falsehood, and it's important to work with experimental data, and it's important to have proof and logic and all this and that.
And last but not least, that it's important that I not have a theory wherein, if somebody agrees with me, the theory is true, and if somebody disagrees with me, then the theory is true.
So, and of course, Freud was mentioned, because Freud was the master of this, right?
So, if you agree with Freud about, say, the eatable complex, then...
It's true. If you find it offensive and get angry, then it's counter-transference.
If it's not present, then they're repressed.
If the opposite symptoms are present, then it's a reaction formation.
I mean, I'm fully aware of this.
I mean, I just find it amazing that people have found it worthwhile listening to me for a couple of hundred hours about some pretty sophisticated things and then slip into this habit of lecturing me about the basics, like I'm not aware of these things.
And so I mentioned that...
I said something like, listen, like any philosopher, I certainly appreciate being reminded of all of the basics about how to determine truth from falsehood, much like a very experienced doctor likes to be reminded by somebody who's not very experienced that health is actually an important value and that you should try and cure patients and not kill them.
But my issue with the gentleman who sent the reply in to the theory about childhood and adolescence My objection was a stunning lack of curiosity.
As far as pompous lecturing goes, there was quite a grab bag of them over the last week.
The problem that I always have with that is the complete absence of curiosity.
So, if somebody is exposed to a fairly radical set of podcast ideas, like the ones in question, if they don't have any additional questions, but simply say, well, I can come to this conclusion about the podcaster and his whole development, and I never had any of this, and you had any of that, and there's no empirical evidence, but it would be unethical to gain it, and blah, blah, blah, and with no doubt, right, no questions, no doubt, no questions.
Well, it's obviously a defense mechanism.
Wherever there is an absence of curiosity, this is my sort of gem of the day for you.
And it's a tough one. It's a tough one because it's so easy to get offended, right?
Wherever there's a complete absence of curiosity, then there is always, always, always a defense mechanism.
I'm curious about Marxism.
I'm curious about whatever your fascism.
I could come across a fascist on a plane.
I'd be like, well, tell me more.
Because I can always learn.
I can learn what happened to him as a child that turned him into a fascist.
I can learn how his emotional scar tissue has transmogrified into a political theory.
I can learn so much about the world and philosophy and life and ethical development and childhood psychology and all that.
I can learn so much from that person.
So, even from somebody who's really corrupt, I'll learn what story they're telling themselves.
I'll learn how they developed into who they are.
And, of course, I'll irritate them a whole lot more by my curiosity than it would by my outright condemnation, because, of course...
The psychological reasons why people get sort of lectury with me is complicated.
I mean, obviously it has to do with their own fathers or their own authority figures.
And it also has to do with, you know, if you don't mind me saying so, it has to do with a lack of self-respect.
Because we can only have as much respect for other people as we have for ourselves.
And I'll tell you this.
You know, people have made fun of my humility, and I think that's funny, and I certainly enjoy that.
But I have a great capacity for reverence.
I think sometimes too much a capacity for reverence, in that when I come across a great thinker or a great artist or a great musician, I get a little groupie-like.
I mean, I really do put them perhaps a little bit too much up on a pedestal.
And so I have a great capacity for reverence, so I approach people who I respect with a great deal of, you know, if you don't mind and would you, you know, this and that and the other.
So, I'm certainly not saying that anybody has to treat me with reverence whatsoever.
What I'm saying is that if you don't have a lot of respect for your own abilities, fundamentally, or if in your family situation you have experienced a lot of indifference or put-downs for what you treasure the most...
For philosophy, then what's going to happen is that you will have had your philosophical arguments reduced to very simplistic and ridiculous formulas, which then have been criticized and attacked.
And we've all gone through this as libertarians, right?
Oh, you want the port to die in the streets?
Oh, you want civil war?
Oh, you're a dreamer? And all this kind of stuff.
Nobody ever deals with the arguments.
They just create all these scare situations and throw them at us like they're hurling pasta at a wall to see if it's done.
Only it's probably not pasta, but something a little less pleasant.
So we've all gone through this kind of stuff, and we all dislike it.
When somebody takes your arguments and just reduces them to a caricature and then dismisses you based on scare tactics.
Then, you know, we know what that's like and we don't like it.
Now, it's painful, though, to realize how many people are out there trying to undermine the joy and pleasure that we get out of philosophy.
And that's really painful, as I talked about in the metaphor of the Southern Belle.
Then it's sort of a painful situation to be in.
And if you haven't dealt with that pain, primarily from your family, then you're going to be very prone to reproducing this situation with others.
Because whatever we deny in ourselves, we recreate around us.
So if the amount of pompous lecturing that you have received from your family, probably maybe from your teachers or your siblings, but definitely from your family, If you haven't processed how painful and frustrating and demoralizing and sometimes debilitating that can be, and how hostile that is, right?
To take something that someone loves and to continually scorn, attack, and diminish it is a really painful thing to experience if you're on the receiving end.
If you haven't processed that, if you haven't dealt with that, Then you, my friend, are going to be in grave danger of becoming a pompous lecturer, of seeing ideas, reducing them to absurd, simplified caricatures, and then lecturing people who may have a good deal more knowledge than you, or even equivalent in knowledge, or even lesser in knowledge.
There's still no excuse in my mind for the pompous lecturing thing.
You're going to be prone to reproducing that.
And unfortunately, that is going to make it, I mean, every step, every time you do that, it is a very dangerous thing to do.
Because what you're doing is, it's one thing to receive corruption, but it's another thing to inflict it.
And I am not saying that I've never inflicted corruption, and I'm some sort of pure soul.
I know this from bitter personal experience.
That every time you reproduce what hurt you, because you would rather do that than deal with the pain of what you experience, every time you do that, it becomes that much harder to reclaim your true self, right?
Your true self submerges that much further into the bog and the mess and the filth and the corruption of the false self.
You're pushing your true self a little bit more into the swamp, and you're tying a few more rocks to your false self's neck every time you end up reproducing that which hurt you.
And the only way to avoid doing that, the only way to prevent that from incremental, that death of a thousand bites to occur, is to deal with the pain of the past.
And it has nothing to do with agreeing with me or disagreeing with me or anything like that.
What it has to do is your capacity for curiosity.
So if people write to me and say, look, I don't understand this or that or the other.
And, you know, maybe I'll say, you know what, that's totally right.
I'm absolutely correct. If they say, help me understand this or help me understand that, fantastic.
Because, of course, that's what I spent 20 years doing, right?
So I know the value of that.
But if they're curious, then I'm going to learn something.
But if I'm lecture two about an argument that's not even what I'm talking about, then it's obviously an indication of scar tissue, and it doesn't really hurt me because I've processed this sort of stuff and I'm aware of what's going on.
But I'm just telling you it's going to hurt you.
I'm also going to tell you that it's a phase that you're going through or that you're going to go through with any mentor where you're going to get punchy with that mentor.
And I know I'm putting myself out as a mentor and I think that to some people I have been helpful in this way.
But I was mentored, and I mentor.
I mean, I'm just not paying it forward.
I'm just passing it along.
And they say that the best way to deal with pain is to recreate what you didn't have.
And I grew up with nothing but negative instructions.
So as I try and sort of talk to people who are younger and people who are open and curious about ideas that I've received or had or learned that are useful...
In a way that is hopefully, yeah, fairly enjoyable to listen to.
And so I'm just sort of trying to pay it forward that way or to reproduce what I didn't have when I was growing up.
And I found that to be a great thing and an enjoyable thing and an enriching thing.
But there are going to be times when you get really irritated with me.
And I've had a number of people tell me this, again, on the boards and in emails.
I fully understand because I was there too.
Absolutely. I mean, when these ideas were sort of descending upon me, I mean, I was kicking and screaming and pushing back sometimes as hard as I possibly could.
Because it really felt like I was, when I was experiencing these ideas for the first time, and realizing, against my will almost at times, the depth and import of what was going on for me, I felt like I was losing my identity.
I felt like I was being controlled.
I mean, this is the amazing thing, is when you say to people you're being controlled, There are necessary implications to that, right?
So if you say to people, your family is probably corrupt, your friends may be, and you need to sort of get bad people out of your life if you want to live free, then by inviting somebody to live free and live with integrity, it feels like you're being bullied, right?
I mean, that's what I experienced it as.
I felt like I want to be able to make my own choices.
Don't give me all this integrity stuff.
Don't tell me what to do.
I'm going to have a mixture of whatever, integrity, and man's a social being, why do I have to, and nobody else seems to have to, why do I have to live with this integrity, and oh man, I just felt like I was being pushed around and bullied, and oh, it felt like my freedoms were being taken away, right, and my freedoms to have sort of corrupt people in my life or whatever.
I didn't really phase it that way at the time, but...
It really felt like my choices were being taken away, that my free will was being impacted on in a pretty negative way.
And so, of course, like anybody who feels the net of control and command tightening around their neck, well, I kicked and screamed and pushed back and got upset and rejected the ideas and got punchy and then accepted them and tried them out.
I mean, it was a whole ecosystem of processing back and forth for me.
Of accepting this kind of stuff, so I'm fully sympathetic to all of these impulses to kind of kick back at me, but, I mean, there's a number of things that aren't going to help in the long run around that.
Again, much though I respect the kicking and the fighting of the false self, and you want to let that happen, right?
You don't want to sort of overwhelm your false self and then call it your true self, because if you overwhelm your false self, then you are not going to be doing anything other than creating a new false self, right?
I mean, where the false self says, okay, I'll take care of me, but That's not what you want to do, right?
And so you want to make sure that you accept the value that the false self has provided to you in terms of getting you along in life with your integrity of a kind intact, right?
So at least you've retained the capacity for attachment and you've retained the capacity for affection.
Because your false self has allowed you to conform with corrupt people, which has a great deal of value, both in terms of a base survival and in a psychological sense.
So, you know, all hail to the false self.
It's a wonderful mechanism for keeping us going, both physically and psychically, in a corrupt situation.
So you want to respect the false self, because if you fight the false self, all you're doing is creating another false self or...
The false self is splitting, which makes it harder to track, so, I mean, don't do that.
So you want to make sure that you integrate the emotional and psychological energy that the false self has.
You know, you sort of thank it for its service, but the war is over, right?
I mean, that would sort of be self-acceptance, peace of mind is the goal.
Not constant defensiveness and prickliness and so on.
So you say, you know, thanks to the false self.
It's been a ride.
You kept me going. All hail to you.
But the war's over, right?
So you don't need to keep marching around in no man's land and protecting me because...
Well, there's nobody attacking me because I've gotten the corrupt people out of my life.
So we're free, right?
The false self has a true self at the bottom, and the true self runs everything.
And if the false self wants to put down its weapons too, it just needs to be in a situation of safety in order to stop being defensive, right?
To stop protecting you in that way.
That's why you can't get to your true self if you still have corrupt people in your life.
Because every time that those corrupt people push your buttons, your false self is going to be reactivated and more powerful than ever.
And, you know, the tricky juggling act, if you want to know the basic truth of it, is that if you begin to relax your defenses, but you still have corrupt people in your life, even one person, even one person that you see intermittently, If you let down your defenses and that corrupt person then zings you in a negative way or makes it very painful or difficult for you in a way, then you're going to be in a real bind because your false self is going to be reactivated stronger than ever, right?
Because the false self was created when defenses were down because we were defenseless as children.
The false self is created when the true self is attacked when you're helpless.
And so the false self then maintains itself by keeping all of these slings and arrows at bay But there's no vulnerability, right?
That's what the false self, that's what it gives you, right?
There's less vulnerability. But if you go from a situation where you're vulnerable again and then get zinged, then you're recreating what actually brought the false self to bear in the first place, to be in the first place.
So that's a very risky thing.
You want to manage that.
It's like landing a heavy plane with, like, one engine still going.
You want to manage that process.
You get the false people, get the corrupt people out of your life, And then you can begin to let down your defenses, but if you let down your defenses too soon, then this involuntary mechanism of the mind which creates the false self to conform with and defend against corrupt people, that's going to be reactivated in a very strong way, and it's going to be that much harder.
To bring it down again, right?
I mean, if you have had the shields up for 20 years, say, or 30 years, and then the first time you lower them, you get hammered, then the shields are going to go up even tighter, and to bring them down again is going to be that much harder.
So I'm just saying, be careful around that particular situation.
You need to be very smart about how you do that and when you do that.
So I understand all of the risks and the punchiness that's associated with it, but again, to mention sort of once more what I talked about last week, it's no good, it does no good to associate these ideas with me.
I am not trying to dominate you at all.
I'm not trying to tell you what to do.
What I am doing is saying there's a methodology for truth and falsehood, and we're all subject to it.
I'm as much a slave to it as anybody else.
I hold the scientific method in as much reverence as anybody else does.
And if I have come up with certain formulations that are true, then saying that they're my formulations, I mean, I guess, okay, maybe I came up with the ideas, or maybe I'm just retransmitting them from someone else, but they're not my ideas.
Attacking me is not going to do any good at all.
I mean, it really comes down to the theory of relativity is not true because Einstein had a divorce.
I mean, that's what it really comes down to.
Because Einstein didn't get a haircut, his grand unified field theory pursuit was doomed to failure.
So it's really amateur, right?
I mean, and it's not amateur because I think you're amateur.
It's amateur because that's how you were taught to think by all of the amateurs who run society, the corrupt amateurs who run society and who teach children and so on.
So I understand that people are feeling punchy.
There's also a sense that I get, and I'm not going to say I have a lot of proof for this, even though I feel it very strongly.
I'm not going to claim I have a lot of proof for it.
I also get the feeling, and this is quite an interesting feeling, that people think that I'm doing some sort of mad juggle on a high-wire act without a net, and they're waiting, waiting, waiting for me to take a crash.
And again, I'm not going to prove this.
I'll just talk about it like my gut says, right?
Uh-oh.
Now, I think that's very interesting.
Again, not because I'm going to be perfect or omniscient, but when you think about it, over 260-odd podcasts, it's not been too bad.
I've had some corrections for sure.
The free will one, I took a too simplistic approach, and there have been some other minor things.
Well, not that that's a minor thing, but some other things that are minor that I've been corrected on, which has been great.
But it hasn't been too bad as far as that goes.
I mean, of course, if it had been, if I was missing more than I hit when I swung, then you probably wouldn't have made it this far.
But what's amazing to me is that people still feel like I might just turn around and have some completely bizarre and irrational idea that they can't call me on, right?
I mean, let's just say tomorrow I say that, you know, the world is banana-shaped.
Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a whole lot of emails saying that the world is not, in fact, banana-shaped.
And here's the proof. Now, that wouldn't make people feel that I'm crazy unless I said, well, I don't care about that.
Just in this case, the world is banana-shaped.
I'm going to take it on faith. I don't care about the proof.
Well, that would be, obviously, I'm sure kind of disappointing to both of us if that was something that I did.
But... There's no need to feel that I'm on some sort of high-wire act and that every podcast could be a new potential disaster in my thinking.
Not because I'm always going to be perfectly rational, but because if I do make a mistake, you can just correct me.
I mean, that's always been the case because they're not my idea.
It's not my proof. It's not my philosophy.
It's just the truth, right?
I mean, and the truth is not my willpower.
It's not subject to my opinions nor your opinions.
It's just what can be proven and what is logical.
I mean, what is logical?
What is empirical? And empiricism can include one's own personal experience, the experience of everyone you've talked to and so on.
And everyone you've read in literature and every movie you've seen.
I mean, this is all part of our empirical understanding of human behavior.
So that can be a conditional or temporary or not temporary, but conditional proof for something.
But I would say that if...
You feel that I'm doing some sort of high-wire act in every new podcast.
I might completely turn into some lunatic.
Then your level of trust, not in me, but in the methodology of truth, might be something that you want to examine.
And it also might be the case that you might be putting too much stock in what it is that I'm saying.
Because let's say I do say tomorrow that the world is banana-shaped.
Well, the fact that I say that might make you kind of disappointed about my level of integrity, but it shouldn't make you disappointed about the truth or integrity or anything like that as a whole.
Because I don't own any of those things.
I'm just a messenger. So...
I hope this has been helpful.
We actually didn't quite get to the topic that I wanted to do, which is a little bit more of an examination of the ethics.
Where do ethics exist in reality?
Because we've talked about that, but not for a while.
And based on a board discussion that I was perusing last night, I think that I have not made as good a case for at least my position as I could.
So I will give that a shot this afternoon.
Thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate all your donations.
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Board, B-O-A-R-D for the boards, and freemainradio.com.
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