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July 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

41:08

330 Morality as Dominance Part 1: Examples

An analysis of false morality in 'Crime and Punishment'

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	Good morning, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well. It's Friday.
	It's the 14th of July, and it is 06.
	So, I've got to tell you, I am so angry at Dostoevsky.
	I think I'm going to go over to Russia and stare harshly at his grave.
	I'm reading, or listening, as I mentioned yesterday, to the audiobook of Dostoevsky.
	Crime and Punishment, and it's a wonderful book.
	It's a beautifully written book.
	I wish I could read it in the original.
	I love the Russian writers, as those of you who've read Revolutions might have some idea.
	I love the Russian writers, but I always get the feeling that their metaphors are a lot better than the translators give them credit for.
	And, of course, you don't get the subtleties of the language tics and so on and all of the stuff that, I mean, now is lost because he was writing in the 19th century.
	But in Turgenev, one of the plays that I adapted for stage and directed was Seduction.
	I called it Seduction.
	but it was Stigenev's Fathers and Sons, which is a great book if you get a chance to read it.
	And George F. Walker also adapted it to stage in a play called Nothing Sacred, and it's a really, really wonderful story.
	And I'm actually just going to listen to the audiobook of Smoke, which is one of his other novels, Stigenev's.
	And I've never been a huge fan of Chekhov.
	I just remember seeing The Cherry Orchard and just being completely baffled at the idea that this was a comedy because everybody seems so fundamentally depressed that it's hard to think of anything funny occurring.
	And it really is quite an agonizing play to sit through.
	I was in The Seagull, as I mentioned, and in The Seagull there's a writer who is dominated by a woman And his big metaphor, he's supposed to be this big writer, and his big metaphor is, you know, and I feel like I'm running and running and never catching up like a man after a train.
	And I just remember thinking, a man after a train?
	It can't be like that in the original.
	And the other thing I remember from that is Anand Sekwita from the director, who was talking about how Chekhov was a doctor, Anton Chekhov, not the one from Star Trek, was a doctor, and...
	I just remember him saying that, you know, as a doctor, he would go around through, and he specialized in women's issues, and he would go around the whole neighborhood, and he would see the entirety.
	As a doctor, he would see the whole.
	And, of course, we were all young and foolish enough to giggle at that and make him blush.
	But anyway, so in going through crime and punishment again, I mean, there's things that you can say about it structurally.
	To me, the whole book lives in the exchanges between Raskolnikov and Porphyry, which are just magnificent and psychologically very astute.
	For those of you who haven't read it, there's going to be a couple of spoilers, or try to keep them to a minimum, but it doesn't matter if you know the ending of Crime and Punishment.
	It doesn't matter one whit, because this is the third time I'm going through it, and you are going to have a wild ride.
	Or as Robert Louis Stevenson said about Crime and Punishment, hey, I just finished Crime and Punishment.
	Or, more accurately, Crime and Punishment almost finished me, because it really is a very intense book.
	The first time that I read it, I read it through in two days without sleeping, because I just found it really grabbed me, and it's just a magnificent novel.
	Structurally, it's got some significant problems, but frankly, who cares, right?
	It doesn't really matter.
	So I would like to use that as a jumping-off point.
	I'll talk a little bit about the novel.
	I'd like to talk a little bit about ethics as dominance, right?
	This is not my idea.
	Of course, I'll try and add a few wrinkles to it.
	But this idea that ethics or morality is used by the strong to keep down the weak is something that is very well and alive in the modern world.
	This is something we all feel about morality.
	I don't think it's true about morality as a sort of scientific discipline or science.
	As I sort of say, the argument for morality, universal and reversible in every which way, that if you come up with any kind of moral rule for somebody, then it has to be applicable to yourself, to the policeman, to the soldier, to the government, to the jailer, everyone.
	Otherwise, it's just, you should do this because I think you should.
	And it's usually, do this means you should give me resources or you should submit to my authority.
	And there really is no because in the real world.
	You should submit because I want you to is the only thing.
	But nobody can say that openly because everybody fears the power of morality.
	And so people have to say, you should not submit to me, but to the government or to God or to the good of society or the race or for the nation.
	And something that George Bush was saying the other day, you know, a little while back, it was a great bit on The Daily Show about George Bush and how tough he talked with Saddam Hussein, because Saddam Hussein posed no risk, and then how conciliatory and diplomatic he was with King Jong Il, the guy who runs North Korea into the ground, because the guy has some significant conventional weapons and potentially a nuclear threat.
	So he says early on about Hussein, he says, Well, I have to decide between believing a madman and protecting America.
	I will protect America every time.
	I just think that's funny.
	I mean, if the job were that easy, right?
	If running a country were as easy as saying, well, believing madmen, defending America, huh, tough call.
	I wonder who would go the other way.
	But this is the kind of stuff that you hear, this sort of false morality, right?
	Because then that's a universal principle, like he says every time, right?
	So anybody who could conceivably threaten America, I will invade.
	That's the principle. I mean, that's not really a principle.
	It's at least a statement of action.
	And, of course, what it means is that the principle would be something like a preemptive attack is a valid thing to bring down a potentially dangerous foe.
	Well, of course, 800 military bases across the world.
	Virtually the whole world should be united against...
	Oh, wait. No, that is the case.
	Anyway, we'll come back to that another time.
	Basically, those in power use the argument for morality to get to shut up, obey, hand over your stuff, and sing their praises, right?
	This is how susceptible we are to ethical arguments.
	And we, as I've mentioned before, we sort of freedom fighters to whatever you want to call us, those of us involved in the freedom movement, are...
	I'm irritatingly, as I've mentioned before, somewhat irritatingly fussy about all of the basic, weird, ethical problems that may or may not arise.
	Like, at what stage, when you're going into a coma or falling asleep, are you no longer a moral agent?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is all well and good, and definitely interesting questions to be answered, but maybe we can wait until we've gotten rid of the genocidal state.
	We can sort of deal with those niceties.
	But I think that as physicians we deal with the important aspects of the plague before the minor ailments of peace.
	But in Crime and Punishment, the basic idea is, and this was not an uncommon idea in the 19th century, well, and in centuries before that, but the example of Napoleon was quite instructive in this area, that Napoleon...
	As Raskolnikov puts it in Crime and Punishment, you know, lost a quarter of a million men here, forgot about an entire army in Africa, spent another million lives trying to invade Russia, and, you know, he was just this wild, larger-than-life figure, and was immune to a conscience, and people sang his praises, and he was considered to be a great man, and statues were put up, and that man was a complete slaughterer.
	Or, rather, he was a catalyst for a slaughterfest that was inevitable based on the premises of psychological and philosophical premises of the time.
	It was actually still the case that a friend of mine's mother would use, Old Bones is going to come and get you.
	She would frighten her child that way if he wasn't good, you know, because she was a wonderful woman.
	And Bones was a nickname for Napoleon because he made so many of them.
	He was a mass slaughterer of the First Order.
	And he was really quite the figure, quite an astounding figure, and considered to be very important, not like just every other sociopath with a bunch of medals and a power lust that plagued humanity from the dawn of time, or rather that humanity has let plague them in order to preserve illusions about the family.
	This appearance of Napoleon on the world stage, and other people like him, but Napoleon was a big one, did prompt a lot of people.
	Bismarck was another, of course, but it did prompt a lot of philosophers to say, well...
	The relationship between ethics and achievement is questionable, because what these people did was unquestionably wrong.
	But Napoleon, as you may know from the Napoleonic Code, did create or invent or put through or approve or gather together the people to create a whole set of new laws.
	He got rid of the monarchy, and so yeah, spent the blood of millions, but did achieve some blah blah blah good things, who knows, right?
	So this relationship between ethics and achievement and progress really got screwed up to a lot of philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries, because these sort of men appeared on the world historical stage who seemed to have the power of God behind him, or usually a him, and they just did the most amazing things and moved the race forward, and yes, they spent the blood of millions, but the world was better off, and blah blah blah, all this kind of stuff, right?
	So... Basically, Raskolnikov, who is the impoverished student in crime and punishment, decides to murder a loathsome old, I guess you could say, like a lender.
	Somebody who takes trinkets and charges interest, and if you don't pay her within a month or two, she keeps your watch or your cigarette case or whatever.
	A porn shock, you could say.
	P-A-W-N. I always get that confused because of my accent, just so you know.
	A usurer, right?
	Somebody who lends a high interest on fairly inconsequential goods.
	That she and her sort of half-retarded sister, Lizaveta, he decides to murder the old woman.
	He doesn't want to kill the half-sister.
	In fact, the sister he finds out almost by accident that she's going to be away.
	So he goes and kills Lizaveta.
	This woman. And he kills her because it is a kind of experiment.
	Like he believes that there are two kinds of people in the world.
	There is the ordinary herd who are good for reproducing and supplying taxes.
	I don't think he mentions the latter, but it's sort of implied.
	And then there's the superior sort of man, the extraordinary man, who is not bound...
	By ordinary moral conventions, such as Napoleon and people like that, and they have the right to overcome obstacles.
	The extraordinary person can overcome obstacles and is not bound by the same moral laws.
	He's not compelled to kill, but if he has to kill to achieve his vision for the good of mankind, then he does have to.
	Of course, society has the right to defend against such men, but such men have the right to attack society in its false spots to improve the species and advance the common good, and if death results, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And so he mentions Napoleon, and in a very, very powerful passage, he compares himself to Napoleon because he's supposed to be this guy who has the possibility of advancing himself and so on.
	And after he kills the old woman, he's rooting around under the old woman's bed to try and find her money, and he's in a panic.
	And he says, Napoleon conquered this, and Waterloo conquered that, and invaded Russia, and here I am comparing myself to him while rooting around under an old woman's bed.
	It really is quite a damning and loathsome metaphor for what he's trying to do.
	Now, Dostoevsky was originally a socialist and then made the not too broad a leap to becoming a conservative Christian after he was imprisoned for 11 months in solitude, where the solitude was required to be so extreme that the jailers wore felt shoes, so you couldn't even hear them walking up and down the corridors.
	It was complete darkness and complete silence for 11 months, really quite an astounding moment.
	And then he was dragged out and lined up with a whole bunch of other people to be shot.
	And just before they were going to be shot, it turned out he was just trying to be frightened.
	They were just trying to frighten them. His sentence was commuted to five years in Siberia, which he went and served and wrote a great book about it called Memoirs from the House of the Dead.
	And... Which Solzhenitsyn talks about quite in wonder in terms of the quality of his incarceration relative to the Soviet gulags, but he then returned and became a compulsive gambler and wrote some, dictated, actually dictated, he was quite a smoker, but he dictated a good number of his novels, which is one reason why the monologues are so long.
	of his characters and also one reason why the structure tends to be very weak in his novels.
	But, you know, who cares, frankly?
	I mean, nothing is perfect in this world except for mathematics and the scientific method and the concepts of the free market and logic.
	But in the world, everything is flawed and I certainly know from my own A stab at novel writing that it is a very, very challenging art form and it is never perfect.
	And there's always stuff you want to fix.
	But at some point, like when you're a painter, there's always stuff you want to improve.
	But you have to sort of stop at some point, right?
	You want to end up being completely obsessive about stuff because after a while, what you fix begins to make the rest of it look weird and you just have to stop.
	But Raskolnikov in the novel...
	Is somebody who performs this murder sort of as like an experiment to find out if he is one of these extraordinary men.
	Now, as a conservative Christian, of course, Dostoevsky is somebody who believes in the civil authority.
	So the slightly sadistic but socially and psychologically brilliant Porfiry, the guy who cross-examines him, who suspects him of this murder and who cross-examines him, Is, as I said, slightly sadistic, but a sort of passionate law-abiding citizen who is, you know, trying to uncover murderers and so on.
	And so the civil authority is portrayed with fair benevolence and a necessary power to restrain the evil doers among us.
	And this is why I'm angry at Dostoevsky.
	And the reason that I'm angry at Dostoevsky is he had experienced the civil authority in a way that you and I are never likely to experience them, right?
	Without trial and fake executions and banishment to Siberia.
	I mean, he knew what civil authority was all about.
	There was no real doubt in his mind what was going on.
	And yet, he does not ever talk about unjust authority in his novels.
	The unjust authority in Dostoevsky's novels is always private, right?
	So Svidvr Gailov, who is the nihilist, is accused of murdering his wife and of perhaps driving one of his serfs or servants or slaves, more like, to suicide.
	If not killing him outright, there's a private entity, right?
	Raskolnikov is a private entity who kills two women, and there are other examples of private abuse, right?
	So at one point in the novel, a drunk girl is muttering about how she's been raped in a serial manner by a bunch of men, and she's staggering, so they got her drunk and raped her, so she's staggering along the street, and a wealthy man is following her, hoping to prey upon her drunkenness, and Raskolnikov wants to give her help and calls the policeman who then is very kind and tries to help her.
	And so again, here you have the abuse is private, right?
	The abuse and the harm done to the innocents is always in private hands and those who are in the government are always kindly and helpful and maybe a little bit sadistic in terms of their cross-examination, but it's all for the good of society and they are trying to catch a murderer after all.
	This basic problem that Christians have, which is a worship of secular authority, and I know that there are Christian libertarians and so on, and so I know that there are exceptions.
	I'm just talking in general. The tendency that Christians have to believe that what is, is ordained, right, by God, and so when they oppose the secular authority, it's only because they believe that the secular authority is put there by the devil, fundamentally.
	I get sort of emails of this sort of thing all the time.
	Where they say, oh, 46 presidents and foretold in the Bible and revelations and we'll be free of this godless secular authority.
	And, you know, basically it's often to clear the way for a theocracy, which is what's supposed to be going on.
	So if they hate the current secular authority, it's because it's not religious enough.
	And so it's not like they hate authority, they just hate this authority, right?
	Or they hate authority because they feel that their own views, their own religious views are not subsidized or allowed to be as flourishing as they want to be.
	So they don't hate authority, they just hate this authority.
	And so, in Dostoevsky's vision, corruption is endemic within society, and the secular authorities strive their best to control this kind of corruption.
	Which, of course, has nothing to do with what he experienced.
	So this is why there's such horror in his writing.
	This is why there is such desperation, depression, and almost evil in his writings, because he is angry at the wrong people.
	And this is why there are no solutions in his writing.
	There's just a... Don't get me wrong.
	I mean, the man is a beautiful writer and the gorgeousness of the language and the accuracy of some of the morbid psychology is astounding.
	But you would not go to Dostoevsky for any kind of rigorous understanding of either ethics as a whole or as a universal or secular authority or the state or the church or anything like that.
	But as studies in morbid psychology...
	He had gone through enormous harm.
	His own father was a complete sociopath, and his own father, as I mentioned before, had been murdered by his own slaves, and they did this by forcing him to drink vodka until he died of alcohol poisoning, and you can imagine what a brutal and evil scene that was.
	And so this was his upbringing, and then he's in the prison system and banished to Siberian prison systems with all of these sociopaths.
	And this was, I mean, obviously too much for him.
	And then the morbid psychology was not that he had suffered harm, but rather that he attempted to solve harm by appealing to the power or supporting the power of those who'd caused him harm, right?
	So he mistook everything for private harm, which is inconsequential in society.
	What hurts society is not private individuals who are evil, but public individuals who are evil.
	And those thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of men and women who will do their bidding and kill people.
	So this question of morality...
	It's really quite significant in terms of its capacity for dominance.
	And this is something that the two great nihilists of the 19th century, Dostoevsky, or at least some of his characters, like Svidrigalov and Nietzsche, the two great nihilists of the 19th century, and both of them basically had this argument.
	Now, Nietzsche argued, in a sense, not really for it.
	Nietzsche didn't really argue for or against a lot.
	Except for health and dominance at times in very abstract terms, which could be interpreted by both the Nazis and people going to a gym as productive mantras.
	He simply identified it.
	Nietzsche was not a proposer of solutions, but he was not a healer.
	He was a diagnostician.
	And so he did not propose solutions, but he identified with amazing accuracy some of the things that were going to occur in the 20th century.
	This, in hindsight, wasn't hard to see, but not many people saw it.
	In fact, I can't think of anyone other than Nietzsche.
	He said, you know, God is dead, and now...
	And now men are going to make a god of the collective and the 20th century will be a slaughterhouse because the god of the Christians at least had this fantasy of individual conscience wherein you could go against the collective.
	But once you get rid of Christianity and you get rid of...
	When you get rid of Christianity, you get rid of the concept of free will because of the soul, you get rid of the concept of the individual conscience, and now man are mere atoms in a social body, and their evil will be that much greater thereby, because they won't even have an individual conscience as ways to stand up against authority.
	And so the 20th century is going to be a bloodbath because of this sort of problem.
	Get rid of God, you make the state or the collective of God, and then you have no barrier, no conscience by which you can prevent authority from telling you what to do and killing and murdering by the millions.
	And he was right about all of this, of course.
	Getting rid of God was a grave and horrendous danger for mankind.
	Because there weren't people who could come up with solutions, I think, at that point, and I don't think there have been too many since, who could come up with how you rescue the individual conscience and free will from the absence, or at least the capacity or possibility of free will, from the absence of a deity, right? Isn't then everything mechanistic and inevitable and so on?
	And so this problem of the end of the conscience was something that Dostoevsky was struggling with quite a bit throughout his writings.
	And in particular, of course, in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov tries this experiment of killing these people to get their money to get ahead.
	And this is similar to what Napoleon did at the very beginning of his career.
	He was a fairly insignificant officer, and he acted in a decisive manner to quell the rebellion in Paris, I think it was.
	The people were...
	Lining the streets demanding change because, of course, it was just an ugly, vicious thing to live in France under the monarchy as in A Tale of Two Cities.
	This is quite well depicted by Dickens.
	And what Napoleon did was he said, oh, there's a whole bunch of people who are lining the streets chanting that the monarchy should be gotten rid of.
	I'm going to fire cannons into them and kill as many of them as I can.
	And, of course, this was a very effective method for dispersing the crowd, right?
	People are always hesitant to use this because they feel it's going to make people angrier.
	And it's going to cause a revolution, but that's not the case.
	The revolution never occurs when violence is openly used against the masses because people just scatter.
	This is the Tiananmen Square situation and countless others throughout history that when you fire cannons into the crowd, the crowd disperses.
	That works very effectively because people don't We don't want to get killed, right?
	It doesn't help you be free if you're dead, right?
	So, the revolution only ever occurs when things are getting better and the government ceases to be as oppressive, right?
	This is the lesson that has been learned throughout the world in the 20th century, that the moment you start to let up on things, right, you get perestroika, then you get the rebellion, right?
	Then you get the revolution, so to speak, or you get the end of the ruling order.
	I mean, not the end for the people who are currently the rulers, they get out of the country with all the money in the world, but...
	Their children have to live on inheritance rather than on the blood of the people.
	This particular question of the revolution and what to overturn society, it never occurs when things...
	So Napoleon fired cannons into the crowd, which we sort of went down in history as the whiff of grapeshot, right?
	Because grapeshot was the ball bearings and the nails and all the stuff designed to rent the flesh of the people that was fired into.
	It wasn't just one cannonball. That would almost be more humane.
	It was like basically it would shoot metal into the bodies of the people in the crowd and you only need to get one or two of these in you, of course, and the vast likelihood would be that you would get an infection or you'd get bled by some doctor who thought he was doing you some good.
	And of course, you would end up dying.
	Even just a scratch could kill you before antiseptic, before antibiotics, before all of this kind of stuff.
	And so it was just, you know, a genocidal little moment in human history.
	But it was something that rose Napoleon to prominence and was the launch of his career as a man of destiny, right?
	So here is a man who fires cannons into the innocent bodies of people protesting their own enslavement.
	And he becomes this massive, benevolent world historical figure and so on.
	And so this is the lesson that people took, which is that if you murder the innocent, then you can become a hero.
	And if you kill people, it can be a great advancement to your career, and people won't really have a problem with you, right?
	And this is the theory that Raskolnikov is working on by killing the old woman to get her money.
	Because he wants to do great things.
	He is very intelligent, absolutely.
	And he wants to do great things with his life.
	He wants to benefit society.
	He wants to complete his law degree.
	He wants to get ahead. He can't.
	He's got no money. And so he oversteps obstacles, right?
	He kills this loathsome old woman who's preying on the poor as he sees it, gets her money, and the whole idea is to...
	But, you know, he doesn't...
	For a variety of reasons, it doesn't quite work out the way he wants.
	And, of course, the main reason, just looking at it objectively, is that the man wasn't in the military.
	If he'd been in the military and killed the innocent people in order to serve the rulers, then he would have advanced himself and got medals and so on and would have done very well for himself.
	And that's, I mean, that's no question of that, right?
	The more people you kill in the military, with very, very few exceptions, like maybe half a dozen throughout the entirety of human history.
	But whenever you kill a whole bunch of people in the military, you are rewarded, right?
	I mean, it's a good thing. And if you happen to accidentally kill innocents, then you simply say that they were spies, right?
	If you gun down a bunch of old women, then you simply say, well, they were booby-trapped, and they were advancing at me, and they had bombs around their way, so they had been feeding information to the enemy and wouldn't confess.
	You can just make up anything, right?
	Anything, and you get to kill whoever you want, and that's considered to be a grand thing, right?
	So... And this is, of course, the irony of Crime and Punishment, that Raskolnikov was only considered evil by himself because he was not in the military.
	In other words, people outside of him did not approve of the violence that he was going on, right?
	Because there are military people in Dostoevsky's work who are not evil, right?
	They're a little ruthless and so on, and they're hot-tempered, but they're not evil.
	So, the interesting thing with Raskolnikov looking at it a bit more objectively is that the problem that he has is that he's been infected with a particular kind of morality.
	Which is the Christian morality, which is obey the rulers and protect the innocent, as if those two are ever compatible, right?
	But obey the rulers is a fundamental aspect of Christian philosophy, which is why Nietzsche calls it a slave morality, and we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail when we get around to Nietzsche in a little more detail.
	But... He wants to be this world historical figure.
	He wants to be a grand man of history.
	And he has that kind of ambition.
	And he can't find any good reasons for not doing these murders because he sees that men advance themselves through murder all the time.
	But those are the men who are in the direct employ of the state, right?
	That's the fundamental difference, right?
	So he is still dependent upon other people's approval.
	Now, Napoleon was also dependent upon other people's approval, in that if he'd just got into a bar and shot a bunch of people, then he would have been in jail.
	But because he fired cannons of grapeshot into a bunch of innocent people protesting their own slavery, he became this world historical figure.
	So, Napoleon did not invent the ethics which caused him to flourish, subservience to the state and brutality towards the slaves.
	He did not invent that.
	He simply profited from it.
	So he aligned himself with a sort of master morality or a ruler set of ethics.
	Be brutal to those who would usurp you and reward your friends and punish your enemies and all this sort of political stuff.
	So he aligned himself.
	Napoleon aligned himself with that and profited thereby and became this sort of grand figure and wealth and power and all this kind of stuff and ended up on Elba Island, of course, but still had a pretty fun ride, I guess, relative to his expectations.
	Whereas Raskolnikov did not pursue these kinds of ethics himself.
	So Raskolnikov did not join.
	He didn't understand that the problem was not with his ethics, but with who he associated himself with.
	And by the problem, I mean just in terms of relative to what he wanted to achieve.
	And so Raskolnikov, if he had gone to the military, would have been one of these world's historical figures, but he tried to do it privately.
	He tried to use the ethics of the military or the ethics of the rulers in a private manner, and thus he had no support from those around him.
	So nobody around him believed in his particular kinds of ethics, and his friend Razumihin, which translates to reason, I think, and I'm not sure that he used that rational, but he's definitely supposed to be a better man than Raskolnikov in terms of virtue, but not necessarily intelligence.
	Nobody believes, though, those of his friends around him, Porphyry, nobody believes in his, he can't go and say, well, I did this thing because I wanted to get ahead in life, and this is what happens, this is how you get ahead in life, look at Napoleon.
	it.
	Nobody would believe that because he was in a Christian culture which was subservient to those in authority and therefore only praised murder when it was done by publicly sanctioned officials, you know, the soldiers and the policemen and so on.
	And so the problem is that he decided to take on his own ethic while still being dependent on the approval of those around him.
	And so, of course, this is why he felt so solitary.
	Napoleon did not feel solitary because Napoleon killed a bunch of innocents and was clapped on the back by the king, was paraded through the streets as a hero, all the kind of stuff, right, that you see.
	Same thing from people coming back from Iraq who hang around pro-military people, right?
	They've killed a bunch of innocents and they come back and they're clapped on the back and they get feted.
	There's little processions in their honor.
	Everyone thinks they're great guys even if we disagree with the war.
	We support the troops and all this kind of nonsense.
	And so, the solitariness of trying to create your own ethics is pretty significant, right?
	This is why I certainly appreciate the board and all this kind of stuff.
	The solitariness of trying to apply ethics that are acceptable in one sphere to all spheres is a very difficult and challenging task.
	And can be very alienating from society and from certainly family and friends and so on.
	It's a very lonely and forward-looking, you're like the scout of mankind into the future.
	It's a forward-looking, lonely and challenging task.
	And Nietzsche talks about this quite a bit.
	And I think quite accurately, but with a certain amount of despair that I very rarely feel in this area.
	But you don't want to take the morally sanctioned murders of the military and try and achieve them in private life.
	That's not going to work out for you very well.
	So what Raskolnikov should have done is join the military where his desire to overcome all obstacles and kill people for the sake of his ambition would have been lauded and praised and he would have been given medals for it.
	But of course Dostoevsky doesn't see this, right, at all.
	He doesn't see the murders of the military.
	Dostoevsky was never a military man himself.
	But he has the Christian enslavement to the secular authority and the sort of knee-jerk requirement to praise a secular authority.
	And you could say it was censorship, and of course he was in Tsarist Russia, which was not one millionth as brutal as Soviet Russia, but of course there was still issues of censorship that he had to deal with.
	But he's a smart enough guy to have been able to work this in in some manner.
	And one of the ways he could have worked it in would make Raskolnikov a little older and make him an extra-military man and talk about how he got medals for overcoming obstacles for the sake of others and why is it moral to kill for the sake of others but not for the sake of your own ambitions.
	Just kill for the ambitions of others but not for your own ambitions.
	And he could have made Raskolnikov punished for this blasphemy and so on, but at least it would have been a clue that he understood the relationship between these two brands of ethics.
	So the non-universality of ethics always leads to the exploitation of those with integrity, of those who are gullible, and often with those who are very intelligent.
	And it creates great splits within the personality and the avenues for great evil in society.
	And we'll talk a little bit more this afternoon about this master and slave morality, because I think it's time that we dug into it a little bit more deeply.
	Because what I'm finding in my emails over the last couple of weeks, and in communications that I've been getting in one form or another...
	It's that people are feeling quite prickly about what they consider to be the dominance of my form of ethics or my approach to ethics, the dominance of that within their own life.
	And they're feeling like I'm trying to bully them.
	And the reason for that, of course, is that pretty much all ethics are designed to bully you into submission.
	They're designed to use your desire for virtue to castrate yourself in terms of power and personal self-esteem and authority.
	And so when I say there are these universal ethics, people feel this clammy hand of conformity and bullying and so on close around themselves.
	And this is why people who are raised in crazy ethical environments will often turn to relativism.
	It's the only way that they can squeak out a breath of freedom from this universal fisty grip of ethics.
	And so we need to talk about that, because that's sort of where we are, I think, in the conversation, that people, I think, are finding it less and less able to reject the argument for morality as we've put it forward in these conversations, the sort of universality and reversibility of any kind of ethics.
	They're having a tough time...
	And saying that relativity is the way to go, and you can have all these ethical arguments, but I don't believe in them, that's just another opinion, which is another way that people find to escape the absolutes that they feel are going to enslave them, right?
	Because all the absolutes that they've been taught in the past are around enslaving them.
	Whereas the absolutes that we talk about in this conversation are around freeing people from enslavement and not in a theoretical way but in a very practical way in terms of you don't wait for the new Jerusalem, so to speak, for the state to fall and for everyone to be an atheist and everyone to be rational.
	You don't have to wait for that.
	You can do it in your life with your family and with your friends to demand ethical and moral and respectful and loving behavior from them.
	And if you don't get it, to be completely free to reject those relationships.
	That's freedom, as I've talked about a number of times before.
	So what's happening in our conversation, the reason that I'm dealing with this issue, and we'll deal with it more this afternoon, is because it's now time for people to understand that this is not about dominance.
	Because if you have accepted false arguments for morality which have led to your enslavement, and therefore you have rejected the universality and absolutism of morality, and I don't mean in terms of execution, I just mean in terms of rules, Then you are in a place where you have given up on integrity in order to preserve some sense of freedom.
	And of course those who are in power don't care whatever you do as long as you don't question the base ethical assumptions and come up with an alternative.
	If you question the assumptions, those assumptions will stay because you have to come up with an alternative that's viable.
	Because if somebody's dying of cancer, you might question their treatment, but they're still going to go for it because they don't have a viable alternative, or at least not very likely to.
	Or if they don't, they certainly won't get any better, right?
	So the basic thing that we're talking about here.
	And so if you're in that place in this conversation, then it's time for us to talk about the dominance of ethics and the fact that almost all ethical systems in the history of mankind, and I would put objectivism in this category, Have been used to dominate others and to force submission to a leader's will.
	And I know that that's not so true of objectivism in theory, but it certainly was the case with objectivism in practice.
	And so we do need to find a solution to this problem of ethics, universal ethics as dominance, as the dominance of the leader.
	And this is why, of course, people feel that it's culty, and this is why people push so hard back against the universality of the ethics that we're talking about here, because they feel, or they know, that if they accept these ethics, then they're bound to obey them.
	And what has always been defined for them in the past is that ethics are synonymous with the will of others, and therefore to obey ethics is to be a slave to the will of someone, or some group, or society, or whoever's speaking for society, or the priest, or whoever.
	And that's nonsense.
	I mean, it's not nonsense that they've experienced that, but it's nonsense that it's true.
	Ethics is not enslavement to anybody's will any more than the scientific method makes you a slave of Francis Bacon and his descendants, and any more than pursuing logical mathematical propositions makes you a slave of Euclid and his descendants.
	This is not true at all, and it is something that we need to sort of deal with head-on, and so I'm going to start with this A fictional tale of Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment.
	And we will talk about it in a little bit more detail with some more direct references to Nietzsche this afternoon.
	Thank you so much for listening. As always, it's been two days, shockingly, without donations.
	And again, we're sorry about the board.
	I'll keep working on it. I try not to lose my temper.
	I definitely will have some stern words with GoDaddy.
	I try not to lose my temper with GoDaddy because I make mistakes, right?
	I mean, some people have... I get an email at least once a month saying, you messed up something on your 350-category XML file.
	You made some error in the file number or within the MP3 tags.
	So I make mistakes, and I understand that, and we are...
	Doing something very unusual within GoDaddy, which is we have a very thriving community within a server that is not designed for that.
	And, of course, the people at the front lines aren't responsible for it.
	And the people who are making the largest decisions are making them for the best of GoDaddy, so they're not making a bunch of servers for each.
	They're not putting one server together for each community server, which would make it very expensive to get that add-on.
	So I didn't pay anything additional for community server, and therefore I kind of get the service and quality that I paid for, which is sort of nothing, right?
	So I will try and work it out.
	I'm not too mad at them.
	I mean, they're very reasonably priced, and we are trying to do something very unusual within their strategy.
	And yes, technically they're bound to provide it, but I can understand why we're certainly not the norm.
	And they would not have designed their systems for the kind of activity that we have on the free-domain radio board, so I can sort of understand where they're coming from, and I definitely will push back pretty hard to get this resolved, but I can't sort of say that I'm outraged that it happened because we're getting a lot more value for what it is that I've paid for with our server.
	I will try and quite quickly get the XML files out.
	The Free Domain Radio board is in its own database.
	It's not sort of intermingled with other people, so it should be relatively easy to get the data out.
	So donations are more than welcome.
	I really appreciate those.
	They do help me in terms of enthusiasm and in terms of feedback and in terms of helping me understand how important the conversation is to people.
	So if people just listen but don't donate, then I assume it's just for their entertainment or they like the occasional bad joke.
	And that makes it less motivating for me.
	There's no demand on you, but if you do find the conversations valuable, then I think it would be something of integrity to throw some cash my way.
	And I look forward to talking to you this afternoon and sign up for FeedBurner and fill out the listener surveys on freedomainradio.com.

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