June 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:12
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Ha! You didn't think I was actually going to have a 15-minute podcast, did you? | |
| Unthinkable! Alright, it's 8.54. | |
| My conference is at 9, but I'm going to be late because... | |
| There are two exits in Mississauga on the highway here. | |
| One is called Dixon, one is called Dixie. | |
| I'll give you a guess as to which one, relative to the correct one, I exited on. | |
| So, as I went my way back to get to the conference, I would like to talk about an idea that I had, which is a guess, a correction or an update, to an idea that I didn't have yesterday. | |
| So, yesterday I was saying, well, human beings are... | |
| We obey this concept or this idea of preferred behavior, and it seems to be almost involuntary, the degree to which We are bound to accept and to obey preferred behavior. | |
| And I said, I don't really know why. | |
| Now, what I did have this morning was an idea as to why it might be the case that human beings work with or accept preferred behavior, and it seems to be virtually involuntary for us to do so. | |
| That's very important, right? | |
| Because the question is, well, if we had preferred behavior, why is it so automatic that we obey it? | |
| Now, the answer has probably occurred to everyone else, but it's the kind of thing that it took me a day or so to figure out. | |
| But the answer for me is that we are biological organisms. | |
| We have a strong desire to survive. | |
| We'll do whatever it takes. | |
| I was walking the other day in the woods. | |
| I go for a walk where I can at lunch for half an hour because it's so beautiful out. | |
| And I sort of work through lunch in the winter because what am I going to do? | |
| Go outside and get hailed on? | |
| But in the summer, I will always, if I can, take... | |
| A walk out in the woods during the warm weather. | |
| So I was out in the woods yesterday, I think it was, and I heard a rustling in the bushes, and of course it's not anything dangerous, but for some reason I just sort of thought, gee, if that were a tiger... | |
| You know, what would I do? | |
| Would I climb this tree? | |
| Would I jump over that fence? | |
| Oh wait, no, that fence doesn't have any chain links, it's just bars so the tiger would get through, and suddenly my brain is like going a million miles a minute, and I really think I felt my adrenaline start to course a little. | |
| I think that's kind of funny. | |
| It's a rabbit, you know, it's a rabbit, but suddenly I'm in a death-defying struggle with a beast of prey that is wanting nothing more than to pour my intestines out on the grass. | |
| And I think that's kind of funny, but you've probably had the same experience if you're in the woods and you hear a twig snap or something and it's dark. | |
| I mean, I used to work up there all the time where there really were bears, so you'd be cautious, I guess you could say would be a mild way of putting it, and occasionally you'd crap your pants. | |
| So... I think that's kind of funny in terms of how our brains work and how our sort of fight-or-flight mechanism is so easily activated and how we're constantly scanning for danger. | |
| And this is sort of involuntary, right? | |
| It wasn't like I got possessed by the idea of a tiger. | |
| It's just that I was kind of out in the woods and I thought, ah, geez, that would be funny if it was an escaped tiger or something. | |
| And suddenly it's like, okay, well, here's the plan. | |
| And it sort of slides into that in a way that is perfectly natural and perfectly healthy because, you know, the tiger thing was not exactly inconceivable. | |
| In one form or another throughout most of our biological development, so it seems to me a perfectly natural way of approaching the world. | |
| I mean, not every day, right? | |
| What if this man I'm having a meeting with is a lion in disguise? | |
| Well, that's not particularly the case, because usually they're just a statist in disguise, which, you know, you can defend yourself against a lion, but statists, a little more tricky, so... | |
| So this basic idea that we want to survive, that we will naturally and emotionally pursue preferred behaviors, right? | |
| So if you block my nose and my mouth, I'm going to experience some severe discomfort and start to fight like a wildcat. | |
| Because I can't breathe. | |
| If I am very thirsty, I'm going to feel very uncomfortable and be driven to get a drink. | |
| Food, you know, you've got the whole idea, right? | |
| If I don't have a girlfriend for eight minutes when I'm a teenager... | |
| Anyway, we can talk about what young boys do to watermelons another time. | |
| There is this problem, or it's not really a problem, it's sort of an innate drive or an innate fact that human beings, through our autonomous nervous system, are driven to obey universally preferred behavior. | |
| And, of course, we can overcome that, but it's not like we overcome that easily or without enormous amounts of discomfort. | |
| So, the vast majority of our emotional apparatus This is designed to instill in us, in this sort of endless cycle, the value, the real discomfort and pain and agony of not pursuing preferred behavior and the enormous pleasure If you've ever... | |
| I just remember when I was a kid playing soccer. | |
| I was hot and thirsty. | |
| And there was this Coke machine that just... | |
| It would dispense Coke with... | |
| And it would come out like one degree above absolute zero. | |
| It was like one degree Kelvin it would come out. | |
| I mean, your hands would freeze and nearly shatter. | |
| And drinking that was just, oh, bliss, right? | |
| And so... I've been on a business trip, see? | |
| So when you do end up being able to satisfy your natural desire for life-sustaining preferred behavior in a biological sense, there's an enormous amount of pleasure. | |
| And this goes all the way down to bowel movements and peeing, right? | |
| And if you've ever been stuck in traffic and have to pee, you know what a joy it is to finally open the door and have your way with the highway. | |
| You know what a pleasure it is to get to a washroom. | |
| So, I mean, it's nearly orgasmic if it's bad enough, right? | |
| So we are, as human beings, constantly, constantly, constantly being emotionally reinforced in a way that no experimenter could ever, ever provide to us, because it's absolutely constant. | |
| Am I comfortable? I'm too hot. | |
| I need to get some shade. | |
| I'm too cold. I need to get some heat. | |
| I'm hungry. I've got to eat. | |
| I'm sleepy. I've got to nap. | |
| Or whatever, right? | |
| But This issue of preferred behavior and the constant, constant, constant reinforcement that our autonomous nervous system provides us is something that is, I think, absolutely crucial to understand when it comes to understanding why human beings are so susceptible to the argument for morality. | |
| Because the argument for morality says there's this universally preferred human behavior, and there is almost no moralist, I think, except perhaps some theologians, and even then they would talk about happiness, but in the long run, like after death. | |
| But there is no moralist who would not say, pursuing my morality will bring you happiness, Or pursuing this definition or obeying this definition or integrating this definition of morality will bring you happiness. | |
| And not doing so will bring you unhappiness. | |
| I mean, I'm certainly in that category, like I say to people, that if you are rational, you will be happier. | |
| And in the short run, it's going to be painful because you're going to have to review all your relationships and get rid of the irrational, corrupt people that you can't convince that rationality is a good thing and so on. | |
| But in the long run, like after a year or a year and a half, it's going to be great. | |
| I mean, I know that's a long time to ask. | |
| That was just me. You could do it a lot faster. | |
| Of course, I was inventing the wheel a little as I went along, so hopefully you can do it in a slightly more expeditious fashion. | |
| But every moralist is going to say, me ideas equal happiness, me not ideas equal unhappiness. | |
| So it could well be said that we moralists are always, always, always tweaking into or hooking into or, I guess you could say, exploiting if it's a false argument for morality. | |
| We are always tweaking into this basic nervous system feedback of, I will automatically pursue that which is good for me because it will give me pleasure, and I will automatically shun that which is bad for me because it gives me pain. | |
| And given that from, like, day one, babies cry coming out of the womb, right? | |
| It's bright! Why is this man spanking me? | |
| Why am I upside down? | |
| And for me, of course, it was a flash forward for 17 years to look at my hairline, but we'll get into that another time. | |
| But this problem or this issue that human beings have a constantly self-reinforcing mechanism to pursue preferred behavior is something that is very, very, very important. | |
| In my humble opinion. It's something that we absolutely need, we do pursue, we desire. | |
| There's nothing we can do about it. | |
| And so it's something that we are just going to automatically, if somebody can hook into, my philosophy equals pleasure, not my philosophy equals pain, and of course that's the approach that every single moralist will take, | |
| If we do hook into that successfully, which is why propaganda, of course, is so essential and why state schools were so essential to found in the first place, if we can convince the human mind that the pleasure that is taken by the pursuit of this philosophy and the pain that is going to accrue on the non-pursuit of this philosophy, | |
| so the heaven and the hell, right, in the theological sense, If we can convince people that that is the case, then the constant reinforcement of pleasure versus pain that occurs in the human mind is something that we will absolutely accrue to without any particular I guess you could say there's no way to fight it. | |
| And this is why, this is sort of the argument that I make as to what it means to automatically pursue pleasure and automatically shun pain as part of our constantly reinforced nervous system. | |
| And the fact that when you get a successful argument for morality, whether it's true or false, if you can convince people that Their benefit, in terms of pleasure and pain, that you hook into this biological survival mechanism. | |
| And, of course, people always do claim this when they're ethicists, that universal morality is pleasure, and you'll get heaven versus hell and pain and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Well, that's something that human beings will automatically be driven to pursue. | |
| Now, of course, we can... Absolutely end up shunning that, but boy, is it ever a lot of work. | |
| It feels like you're overcoming your desire for food when it comes to reversing the kind of propaganda that we get, right? | |
| So, I mean, just looking to take a sort of brief example. | |
| We'll take another one this afternoon, but a brief example would be this. | |
| So, you know, if you dislike your family... | |
| Then people say, well, you have to reconcile with them. | |
| And why? Because if you don't, you see, if you don't reconcile with your mom or your dad before they die, you will suffer regret for the rest of your natural born existence. | |
| But that's the argument that's made. | |
| And that's, I think, a pretty important argument to understand. | |
| And this, of course, is the case with religion, right? | |
| So there's sort of two aspects of religion that people talk about in terms of pleasure. | |
| The first aspect is people say, well... | |
| If you believe in God, you will be filled with peace, serenity, and joy. | |
| And of course, when people do start believing in God, they may get filled with a short-term love bomb, peace, serenity, and joy, but in the long run, they start to feel uneasy and controlled, and they get sort of stifled, and they start to get tense. | |
| And then, of course, the backup argument for morality exists, an argument from pleasure, right? | |
| And the backup argument for morality is, well, if you... | |
| If you follow religion, then what's going to happen, you see, is that you are going to end up So, happiness after death, right? | |
| That's going to be what occurs for you, is happiness after death. | |
| And so, again, you're sort of hooked into, or you end up being susceptible to, this issue of pursuing pleasure and shunning pain, right? | |
| So, they say, well, if you follow religion, you'll be in perpetual bliss after death, or if you don't follow religion, you'll be in perpetual hell after death, right? | |
| So, they kind of get you both ways. | |
| That's one of the reasons why, of course, religion has remained such a strong force, is it's hooking into this Basic pain and pleasure principle which we are constantly reinforced throughout our life and which we can't do anything to really prevent. | |
| We can oppose it through intellectual advancement, but as those on the board and those who are listening who have tried this with their family, taint exactly the easiest thing in the world! | |
| So, I hope this has been helpful. | |
| I think it's interesting and well worth discussing. | |
| So let me know what you think, and I'll talk to you this afternoon. |
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