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July 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:52
333 Morality As Dominance Part 3: Illogic

Logical problems with 'master/slave' moralities

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Well, it's Steph. We're going ludickey this morning.
My notebook battery is inexplicably low, so I can't use Audacity.
But we shall struggle nonetheless.
And after the poor quality, I'm sure, of the call-in show, we are going to follow it with the poor quality, or poorer quality, I shouldn't say, of the fabulous Zen Vision M. And it's a built-in recording system, so I hope you're doing well.
It is July the 17th, 2006, 8.37 in the morning.
Yeah, it's running just a little late.
This morning I had a little trouble getting up, so it's hot.
And even with AC running and a fan, it was a little hot last night, so no problem.
Just a little extra java juice and we're good to go.
I wanted to finish off round three, and I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance last week to...
I shouldn't say that I didn't get a chance...
I'm sorry that I didn't live up to my commitment to get Christina and I to do a podcast on conflict resolution.
It's just that we couldn't agree on the topic.
Oh, oh, can you believe that I stooped that low for the joke?
Well, what am I saying? Of course you believed I stooped that low for the joke.
It would be unthinkable.
Normally, I'm standing up to get any kind of decent joke, so let's just take that.
No, we just, at the end of the day, after...
After she's seen a whole bunch of patients, and especially what with all the extra travel that I have to do for the interview, plus, you know, for the interviews that I'm doing, you've got to hate that kind of vaguely, yeah, I'm leaving at 4.15 because I have to go somewhere and slither out.
At least you don't have to show up in a suit for interviews anymore.
That sucked in a fairly considerable kind of way.
When you'd have to keep your suit in your car and change in some washroom.
That was pretty bad.
But now at least it's not so bad.
You can just show up and have a nice chat with people.
So we shall see where that takes us.
But at the end of all of that, it's not the first thing that we want to do is to do a podcast.
And so we didn't.
But we will. And I'm sorry.
I did say that we would do it.
And it's more me than Christina, who is a little shagged out from the podcasting in the evening, baby.
So, I wanted to finish off this master and slave morality.
At least this time, I do want to get to...
I have to go to the basement and dig up my copies of Nietzsche's books, which are heavily underlined and commented, especially the Antichrist, where I think there's more underlining than non-underlining.
And Nietzsche is a wonderful, wonderful...
Man to read because he's unsentimental, which is great.
He is entirely hypocritical, which is also great because it's very revealing to see a thinker who talks about the will to power and could barely get himself out of bed in the morning, could barely dress himself, and didn't have a job after about the age of 28 or 30 or something like that.
So it's very interesting to see how a displaced...
I mean, I think Nietzsche did have a strong will to power, which he poured entirely into his writing.
But it is, to me, fascinating to see how somebody fights so hard against religious instruction and so hard against his arch-nemesis Socrates, or I shouldn't say arch-nemesis, but somebody who he never was able to resolve an intellectual relationship with, as in Socrates.
To see how hard somebody fights to avoid...
The painfully obvious, which is just to work syllogistically about the things that you want to prove.
And Nietzsche did a great deal of harm to the 20th century, in my humble opinion.
And I think that we would have been a whole lot better off if he hadn't written.
And yet, reading him can be electrifyingly exciting, as long as you recognize that all he's doing is detonating.
I mean, Nietzsche is fundamentally a nihilist or an anthropologist, not a philosopher, as I would understand the term.
But, of course, there's not much point in me talking about Nietzsche.
The most important thing to do is to listen to Nietzsche rather than to me about Nietzsche, because, you know, it's just me, right?
But what we do need to do is get some good quotes, some good aphorisms, some good understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy, or at least his ideas, And see the good and the bad as we sit through the wreckage of a wrecking ball mind who's both the house that he was demolishing and the ball that he was using were both false self stuff, but it's instructive to see this stuff go on.
But the fundamental issue that I have, and I now have finished my brief exegesis on the master and slave morality, but the basic problem that I have with the master-slave morality Welcome to my show!
Because of the brutality of people's upbringing and the fact that they can't really legitimately reach for anything higher other than a twisted goal of power and domination.
They can't reach for anything higher.
We're not taught to aim high.
We're not taught to aim high.
We're taught to aim low, low, low, low, low.
And that's one of the first things that people look for when they meet you.
Are you a cringing, apologetic, pathetic kind of human being who's not going to raise any of their requirements?
I remember watching The Very First Friends a number of years ago.
I watched them very much out of sequence.
I think the show is great, but in The Very First Friends, the very first line is something to do with Monica complaining about all the losers she's dating.
That's the very first thing, and then there's a Strange but funny thing that Chandler says about his mom calling his penis.
But the very first thing that you see is an attractive woman complaining that she's dating all of these losers.
And that's the kind of introduction that you often will get from shows wherein you sort of have a sense of kind of pathetic ease.
It's like, oh, okay, so these people aren't going to raise the bar for me at all.
They're complaining.
They're whiny.
They just don't get things done.
They don't get ahead. They're not going to raise the bar.
This is a comfortable sort of situation wherein they're just sort of clinging to each other in a way that one of the irritating boyfriends It's sort of clinging to each other in a way that is slightly claustrophobic.
Now, it's all very, very well acted and very funnily written, and I've enjoyed the show quite a bit, but this is the kind of thing that people look for.
They look for in someone, and this is why when someone says later on, oh, I didn't realize he wasn't ambitious, or I didn't realize he had a mean streak, or I didn't realize this, or I didn't...
I mean, this is all funny, right?
It's all right there at the beginning.
And there was a woman actually on Dr.
Phil who was saying... I didn't know he was so cheap, and then at one point she let slip, or he was so controlling about money or so cheap, and at one point she let slip that on their first date he refused to pay for her.
And that's, I mean, you could argue whether that's right or wrong, but given the social mores, it would be a clue that he might not be the most generous person.
In terms of money, it's just possible to think.
So these people are just kind of funny, right?
They know exactly what they're getting, and they pursue it.
And then they get it, and then they hate it.
And this is what the false self does to you all the time, right?
And Raskolnikov talks about this in Crime and Punishment, that he was led to, warning spoiler, he was led to pursue this murder because he wanted to be a kind of Napoleon, but he also knew ahead of time that he wasn't.
But he was led in this direction, and with this confidence that he could be, and then after the murder, that confidence evaporated, and he was left with his I'm dating this hot 19 year old or whatever, right? That makes you feel like...
You have some sort of self-worth because it's not in a directive, right?
It's just the value in the eyes of others.
And then when you get that, right?
So you end up getting married or having children, and then the false self will withdraw, right?
The false self has then caught you and doesn't need to woo you anymore, right?
And so then the false self withdraws, and then you are just left with somebody who you don't like very much, and you're shackled to them in terms of marriage and obligation and possibly children.
And all of the status and all of the stuff that you thought was great about them has evaporated and leaves you in this squirming pit of despair and not exactly horror, but certainly depression.
And this is a very common thing.
You generally get this complaint from women that the guy is like, oh, he was so attentive before we got married, and then we got married and he didn't.
He didn't sort of woo me anymore.
Well, that's the complaint that the false self will always leave you with, so it'll always lead you to that sort of place.
Where you feel that you get these things because of the second-hander stuff, right?
You want these things because of the second-hander stuff.
And then you get them, and you don't care about them anymore, but you're stuck with the obligation.
And so the reason that we're talking about this is because this has a good deal to do with the master-slave morality and why I think it's kind of false, right?
And why I think it doesn't work.
It's an attractive thing because, of course, who wants to be in the slave morality?
And people love to see and view the master morality.
But the truth is that it's much more enslaved on both sides.
It's much more claustrophobic.
And the order of magnitude or the order of domination is reversed.
And the actual master and slave is reversed as well.
So I'll sort of tell you what I mean by that, at least my idea about it, and you let me know what you think.
So in the traditional way, right, you have these masters who stride the world like colossi and who are self-directed and powerful and view the world as a group of resources designed to serve their own pleasure in one form or another and are non-sentimental, are of this world, And who are not into abstract philosophy and not into forgiveness or guilt or any of the claustrophobic clammy-ing...
clammy-ing? Clammy-ish?
Those that pertain to being clammy.
And what Nietzsche would call the feminine emotions, who don't seek to control others or dominate others for the sake of a weak ego, but rather just for the sake of pleasure in having power.
And who unabashedly use...
This is sort of a very important thing.
The will to power is to say, look, I'm good looking, I'm smart, I'm ambitious, I'm cunning, so I'm going to use that to get what I want in life.
I'm not going to sort of put out this false modesty and say, well, you know, we're all kind of the same.
No, we're not the same. I'm smarter.
I'm stronger. I'm more mentally agile.
I'm quicker on my feet.
I have more verbal skills.
I'm attractive. I'm going to use all of that to get what I want in life because I'm going to use my skills and attributes to gain the things that I want.
And I'm not going to apologize for having these skills and attributes.
I'm simply going to use them to get what I want.
And if you don't have these skills and attributes, well, that's too bad.
But that doesn't mean that I can't use them.
Just because you're not tall doesn't mean that I can't be a basketball player and unabashedly pursue that based on the skills and attributes and abilities that I have.
Which is, of course, why it's so funny that Nietzsche pursued a girl that never married and had an interesting career as a philologist while very young, I think 26 or so, at a university and then left the job and then basically became a neurasthenic and had health problems and All of these, you know, basically, to some degree wasted his life for the next 20 years and then went mad.
Wrote a couple of touching letters to an old flame, hugged a horse and collapsed into a kind of mental catastrophic situation.
And it could have been due to civilists, and we don't know.
But generally not the life that you would associate with somebody who's triumphing the concept of the will to power.
Although, of course, he did have a fairly large influence on a large number of people, and I guess in that sense, he had an influence, but that's not what he means by the will to power.
The will to power is to satisfy one's own immediate urges, not to have influence on the next generation.
That's not the will to power, as far as Nietzsche talks about it.
But this problem that you have when you talk about the will to power is that there is almost no time...
In human history that I can think of where the leaders have been unforced or have had the option to not mouth the platitudes of the masses.
Right? The argument for morality is so fundamental and so strong, so powerful and so all-pervasive and all-inclusive that even the Roman senators, what you would say is probably one of the most corrupt Democracies in history up to the present time and the present West.
Even they had to talk about their service to the people and their love of the gods.
As one Roman philosopher said, that the concept of God is something to be adhered to in public because of its utility, but something to be scorned in private because of its foolishness.
But in public it is useful.
And it's useful because you can get people to believe that They are obeying God when they're just obeying you, right?
But that division is important, right?
Even the Roman philosophers and the Greek philosophers did recognize that public piety was essential.
And as Sam Harris points out in The End of Faith, an average or mediocre intellect who proclaims a belief in God is very likely or almost certain to become president Versus a rocket scientist who is skeptical about the idea of God, which is certainly not true in the past in America, but it's very true now.
As the power of the state grows, the size of the gods need to grow as well, because otherwise people might have the idea that they're obeying a secular authority.
You don't need a very big god when you have a small government, because there's not much to obey.
But as government gets larger, gods need to become larger, which is why Dictatorships always need the cult of personality, right?
Anyway, we can ensure that's fairly obvious.
I don't need to go into that in too much detail.
But that's why you need more religion around America these days.
It's fairly clear from that standpoint.
So the sort of, quote, masters have always had to obey the ethical imperatives of the slaves.
And yeah, they don't believe them. And yeah, they kind of laugh about it in private.
And they're just... Bring out these shop-worn cliches, these bromides, these standard phrases to appease the vanity and prickliness of the slaves, but fundamentally they always need an argument for morality.
Even the slave owners in the South in the 17th and 18th centuries needed Christian platitudes and we're here for your own good and you all can't.
God has placed us in dominion over you and it's for the betterment of your own societies.
You can't conceivably run yourselves as a group You hapless slaves, so it's for the better, and so on.
So there's always, always, always the argument for morality, which is universal.
There's simply no possibility of hearing somebody justify an action without them using the argument for morality.
Even a criminal will use it.
A thief will say, hey, everybody steals.
Everybody steals.
Women will sell themselves into marriage for money, and men sell themselves every day to go to work, and they sell their time, and basically they're stolen from, because it's all a rip-off.
The government rips off half of everything you own.
Everything is, I'm just more honest about it, right?
A thief will even have the same justifications.
A thief cannot exist, no human being can exist without self-justification.
It's the basic fundamental premise of psychology, that we all have to believe That either we're doing good or that good is a lie and we've seen through it because we're so smart and cunning.
But whatever we do in public, you have to say that, right?
So if you get a thief drunk and you're another thief, he'll give you his theory about how being a thief is more honest and more real than everything else.
But if you are a policeman in court, you're not going to get the same opinion from the thief.
He's going to say, good heavens, no, I didn't steal it.
And that's, I mean, we don't even need to examine that.
That's so common. And you can look at your own life and see the same thing.
And I can look at my own life and see the same thing.
I don't believe in the power of the police, but I don't argue with the police when they pull me over.
I bob my head and pay my money.
Absolutely. I mean, you're a bunch of sociopaths.
It's not something that I'm going to fight by talking at the front lines.
It's something I'm going to fight by talking at the next generation.
By talking to the next generation. Talking with the next generation, let's say.
So this idea that there's this master morality, these masters who believe in this kind of stuff, it's not true at all.
There are people who are ambitious and who hunger for power, but it's always power over others.
It's always power over others.
And Nietzsche's fundamental non-understanding of economics and of the free market, it did not serve him well in this way.
Because what he's talking about is political power over others, which...
Is a completely degrading form of slavery.
A completely degrading form of slavery.
And these guys all look so powerful.
They're up there in the speeches and the big flags behind them and so on.
And they look like they're really confident and powerful people, but they're not.
They're empty shells eaten out by violence and corruption.
Their lives are pure horror, internally.
And you can see this showing up in their relationships.
And you can see this showing up in their histories.
You look into the histories of these people and there are always horrendous crimes in the past.
I mean, you look at the Bushes and the Kennedys and the Nixons.
There are always horrendous crimes in the past.
These people do not search for power because they're healthy, happy people with great relationships who are content.
Their desire for power over others comes from a history and a catalog of crime that is staggering in nature.
And so these masters, these sort of, quote, master morality guys, they're even worse slaves than those that they have power over.
Because the slave morality, like if we just take the master morality and the slave morality as approaches to looking at life, and it's not that it's useless in that standpoint, it's just, it's really incomplete.
Because slave morality is the master morality.
Slave morality is the master morality and has always been throughout history.
Thank you.
What Nietzsche and others call the slave morality is what runs the world.
And yes, those in power will manipulate that slave morality, but that's just hypocritical.
That's just a hypocritical lust for violent domination over other human beings to satisfy a broken and destroyed ego.
This is not masters and slaves.
This is slaves and slaves.
The slaves who crave dominance over slaves are not free.
Those who are outside the master-slave relationship are free.
Not those who lust for power over pathetic and helpless and broken people.
That's something that's important to understand.
The fact that Nietzsche's so-called master morality or master race or master group have to consistently mouth the platitudes of the herd and have to spend their entire lives controlling the herd and lying to the herd and manipulating the herd and mouthing the platitudes of the herd.
These are not masters at all.
It's just a different form of slavery.
In fact, it's a worse form of slavery.
Because at least when you're a slave, there aren't all these other people queuing up to take your place and stabbing your back to bring you down.
And this is the great hell of ambition.
Of any kind of ambition.
Of any kind of ambition.
And I'm not saying that ambition is bad or wrong.
Heck no. Ambition is great.
But it's not the answer to insecurity.
It's not the answer to personal problems.
It's not the answer to a weak ego at all.
Because when you get to the top, especially in a political sense, like in a state sense, but this also happens in corrupt private organizations, when you get to the top, then you're always concerned and afraid and paranoid about other people bringing down or stabbing you in the back or some of your darker behavior coming out to public light or someone finding out something seedy or making up something seedy.
You're crossing the wrong person and they just decide to get you.
Is this a life of terror?
Whereas at least the slave doesn't have all these people, all these Brutuses lying around, lining around to stab him in the back.
And this is sort of the secret behind this famous line, et tu Brute, right?
You too, Brutus, right?
In Shakespeare's play, when Caesar is stabbed, he turns around and says, you too, Brutus.
And most people think that this is He's sad, right?
Like, oh, you were stabbing me as well, my friend?
How could this be? But that's not the case at all.
What he's saying is, you're next, you son of a bitch.
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
You stab me, and all of your compatriots stab me to put me on the throne, to get me off the throne.
You grab the throne, then you're going to be next.
You do it to me, it's going to be done to you.
That's what he's meaning, right?
You don't get to be Caesar Augustus without knowing a thing or two about power.
And you don't be shocked.
You're not shocked because a friend of yours stabbed you in the back, right?
Because you know. I mean, how many people have you stabbed through the back to get up to the top, right?
But these masters, these sort of quote masters, are not free.
Constantly, hypocritically, slavishly mouthing the platitudes and aping the prejudices and the weak-kneed preferences of the majority...
And they're constantly terrified that people are going to stab them in the back.
And they are aping something that they are not, which is some sort of...
They're neither serving the majority, nor are they masters of their own destiny.
That is not the case in either situation.
So in both cases, they are simply living or pretending to exist in a manner that they simply don't exist in.
And that's terribly corrupting to their personal relationships.
I would rather be a slave than a master.
And I know that there's lots of emotional stuff, like the slave is not his weak-kneed and all this and that.
But the slaves run the world.
The slaves rule the world.
This is an important thing to understand.
The slave morality runs the world, so the slave morality is the master morality.
There is no master morality that people will admit to in public.
And so they're not masters even in their dialogue.
And that's something that's very important to understand.
The master morality is a slave to the slave morality.
It doesn't dominate.
It doesn't win. It can't be used except very cynically on occasion in private in the hopes that you're not being taped and that it will end your career.
And people don't even basically talk about this stuff in private.
All they do is discuss those who are close to them by talking about...
I don't know.
I don't know.
Rangy guys with ambition sticking out of their head like a big iron bar.
Which is a really strange metaphor.
Sort of a rusty, ambitious unicorn, I guess you could say.
It's just kind of funny.
It's not ambition.
It's insecurity that is sticking out of their head like a big iron bar.
It's insecurity that is sticking out of their heads.
And so these people are not masters, right?
Napoleon was not a master.
Napoleon didn't get to choose how he spent his day in that sense.
All he did was run around invading countries.
Guy worked 18-hour days to invade countries.
And then ended up as a prisoner on the island.
Elba, I think it was.
So, it's not a man who's free.
Hitler was not a master.
Hitler was a complete slave to this sense of domination.
A complete slave and ended up killing himself after destroying Western Europe.
Decent parts of Africa. These are not people who are masters, right?
Caesar Augustus, complete slave to his job.
Complete slave to ruling others.
Bill Clinton works these 18-hour days.
George Bush, not so much.
Not so much. But still, a slave to everyone who's asking.
You see George Bush at a conference, right?
And all of these people are asking all these questions of him.
And it's sort of important to understand that He's not free to leave.
The people who are asking questions are making him stay.
And his whole life is regulated by his supposed leadership.
His whole life is regulated by his desire to be the master.
So he's got to lie to everyone who's a slave and pretend that he's not interested in power and not interested in dominance and not interested in money and not interested in control.
He has to sort of, as they all do, reluctantly accept the mantle of power for the common good, right?
All of this nonsense, right? And so they say in a great song called The Golden Boy, a well-rehearsed reluctance to be singled out this way.
I thought it was a great way of putting it, right?
Accepting every honor with a masterly display, a well-rehearsed reluctance to be singled out this way.
It's a beautiful way of putting it.
A well-rehearsed reluctance to be singled out this way.
And it's complete nonsense.
These people are more slaves.
I mean, I'm not waiting for people to stab my back and grab political power.
I'm not up for an election every couple of years.
I'm not constantly facing the dangers of backroom intrigue.
I'm not forced to go all over the world for conferences.
And I'm not forced to mouth all these platitudes that are against my deepest convictions.
And I'm not forced to live this two-faced double life.
I mean, what a nightmare that would be.
What a complete hellish nightmare that would be.
And so, the same thing that you see with professors, right?
Professors all think that they're independent because they, and that's why they need tenure, but the fact of the matter is that nobody who is independent gets tenure.
They don't even get hired anymore.
So, professors are just mouthing the, they all like to think that they're independent in their thinking, but it's not the case at all.
You ask professors any fundamental questions, and they won't have a clue about anything, and yet they think, right?
They study Socrates, but if Socrates were to pop up in their classroom, They'd fail him, right?
I mean, this is the funny thing about professors.
I've mentioned this before, but there are no masters.
In the master-slave morality, there are no masters, except for the morality of the slaves.
That is the master. That is what everyone has to bow down to.
So I think that the formulation is weak from that standpoint, because it invents this race of human gods who can rise above the platitudes of the masses, and such group does not exist, right?
Nietzsche's belief that they did exist relative to his own weaknesses is one of the reasons why he didn't achieve anything that gave him satisfaction in life, because he had this fantasy about human strength and human independence from the platitudes of the masses, which, you know, didn't exist, at least in anywhere around him, and it's hard to find where this does exist throughout history.
People are genuinely independent of the platitudes of the masses and the sort of The inner sheepdogs that we all have, or we're all taught to keep ourselves at bay, to keep ourselves from rising or challenging the sort of supposed masters.
And so we end up envying these people who are more slaves than we are, and we end up having these fantasies about these master-slave moralities which don't exist.
There is the slave morality, and the slaves need masters, so they create them, and the masters are more slaves because they have to run around pacifying the sheep all the time, and that's no way to live either in terms of having an independent and happy existence.
I hope this is helpful.
Thank you so much for listening.
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