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July 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:03
338 Productive Debates (Part 2)
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It's time for another round of interviews, of interviews, of interviews.
It's time for another round of interviews until my head explodes!
How's it going, everybody? It's Steph.
It's 20 to 5 on the 17th?
17th of July, 18th of July, 2006.
Well, it's the evening after the morning that we did the podcast with, so that should help you.
Anyway, I'm going to another round.
I have now two jobs, I guess three jobs cooking, three third-round interviews, so we shall see.
At some point, these people better start pushing some paper across a table, or I'm just going to have to stop meeting with them and burrow into my computer and live there full-time.
So, I hope you're doing well.
Let us continue with what I think might be a relatively decent approach to a manifesto for productive debating.
And this is not something that I'm coming up with out of the blue.
It is, of course, what the elves whisper to me as they jostle and fight for my attention.
So that's, well, clearly a lot more objective.
And the way that I would like to sort of approach this is talk about a few of the things that I've sort of found historically.
My debating experience goes back to when I was a teenager, about 20 or so.
When I was a debater for, I guess, about a year and a half, full time in terms of like it was a major thing that I did at school, outside of school and working and so on, and plays.
And I went to Canadian debating finals and I did okay.
And in the sort of time that I had in the debating world and the times that I've studied logic and the countless debates and arguments that I've had with people, the first thing that I would like to...
I'll help you recognize is that there are a couple of situations or a couple of different styles, I guess you could say, of debating that are going to be problematic.
And we're not going to go over the basics.
If you want to look at the basics like the ad hominem or the argument from authority or whatever, you can look up any sort of book on logic.
There's no need for me to go over that stuff with you unless you pay me massively through donations and I will then do...
Well, I'll imitate Yentl, the pretzel Chinese acrobat girl, if you like, if the donation is high enough, and you'll get to see that on webcam.
Thong is a double.
Anyway, no thong is a triple.
So I hope that this will be helpful just in terms of my experience debating and also having had debates revived for me as a sort of daily activity on the boards.
I think it can be useful. So, what I've sort of found, as I mentioned this morning, is that there are certain kinds of things that you need to establish at the beginning of a debate to make sure that you're not going to get drawn into the mind screw, for want of a better phrase.
And the mind screw is basically where somebody comes at you to...
Dislodge all certainty that you have without providing any criteria for proof or disproof or any alternatives, which is basically a kind of virus, right?
It's better to have certainty and be wrong than to have no certainty about anything whatsoever, right?
I mean, it's generally better to be an idiot than a paralytic, I guess you could say, because at least idiots can feed themselves.
So people who attack all certainty that you have Without providing you criteria for proof or disproof and alternative theories are not your friends.
I will definitely put that one forward because of the basic contradiction involved in that kind of stuff, which is I'm going to argue against your positions because I'm going to call them illogical and I am not going to provide any alternatives or reveal to you my criteria for truth or distruth or truth or non-truth.
And that's generally, you're up against a nihilist in that.
And there's not that many on the boards, and maybe they don't even know that they're nihilists, and maybe I'm completely incorrect in labeling them nihilists, in which case they're more than free and welcome to correct me, but I feel that there are a few who are nihilists.
And the problem with the nihilist position is that it is so fundamentally self-contradictory, right?
It is basically the antimatter of logical debating.
It is sort of the cancer of debating, so to speak.
And I don't mean to sort of imply that these people are cancerous, but this very approach where you simply define...
They say that the other person is not correct without providing strong definitions...
You come on strong and you say the other person is not correct.
You refuse to provide definitions that are valuable.
You change your story.
You won't give any epistemological or metaphysical criteria for proof or disproof.
And that's generally not going to be a fun debate for anyone.
And so when you're debating with someone, you really, I think, want to have the idea that you're both passionately and in a friendly manner and a cooperative manner, sort of coopetition, I guess you could say, trying to find the truth to the best of your ability.
And you're not dealing with somebody who's working out psychological issues by screwing up other people's capacity to think or enjoy the process of thinking and so on.
So the sort of semi-bitchy emails that I get...
Which I think I've shared one or two over the last couple of months.
Those would be an example of people who really aren't going to be that much fun to debate with.
And it's not going to be an enlivening and enjoyable and passionate and growth-oriented kind of discussion.
So, the first thing that you need, I think, to understand is what's the point of what it is that we're debating, right?
Like, let's assume that I then accept your position, what is going to be the difference at the end of it?
I think that's a perfectly valid thing to ask.
Because if the person then says, well, as I mentioned this morning, it'll be exactly the same, well then, I would suggest there's, you know, it's not that those debates are unimportant, it's just that relative to, say, the sound of a cricket in Asia, they're unimportant.
Okay, maybe they're as important as that.
But it's just, you know, in the short time that we have on this planet, spending a lot of time and energy pursuing debates that result in no substantive change or measurable change in behavior is not really that useful.
It's basically the idea is that you're studying diets and you're studying nutrition And every diet and every nutritional piece of information that you study all says, well, here's the information, but if you accept all of this, you're not going to change your eating habits at all.
You're just going to know that your eating habits are bad, but you can't change them at all.
Then it'll be like, well, okay, so basically I just get to feel worse at the end of it without changing any of my behavior.
Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
Wisdom is not designed to make you feel hypocritical or incompetent or that you have to dig into the intestinal bowels of a necessary illusion in order to call yourself honest.
And your behavior is going to be hypocritical from now until the day you die.
That's just not what wisdom is all about, or if it is, I don't want any part of it, because it just seems like a big waste of time.
And it's a real sort of kickoff from original sin.
So I think you have absolutely every right to say, okay, so what changes?
Especially when you're dealing with things like free will and no property rights and so on, I think it's perfectly fair to say, what is it that's going to change if I accept your viewpoint?
Now, the second thing, of course, is what is the null hypothesis?
The null hypothesis, as we talked about in the podcast on the burden of proof, is by what criteria is your proposition going to be proven false?
And, of course, if there is no criteria by which the proposition is proven false, then you want to steer clear of that kind of argument as well, because then you're basically arguing with a faith-based life form.
Faith-based life form.
I'm just getting more manly by the day, aren't I? Anyway, so you definitely want to find out what the null hypothesis is with anyone that you're debating with, right?
So if what they're telling you is an axiom in their thinking and is impervious to logic or evidence...
Or if it's in a field where logic or evidence cannot apply yet, right?
So, for instance, if they're arguing that a certain crater exists on the far side of the moon, but nobody has any photos of the far side of the moon, it's not that logic and evidence are impervious to figuring, like, sorry, it's not that logic is opposed to it.
Sure, absolutely it could be the case that a crater, in the way that they describe it, a crater shaped like Marilyn Monroe's bosoms, two craters, I guess that would be, They may exist, it wouldn't be counter to logic, but there's simply no way to prove it yet,
right? So the disproof would then be, oh, well, once we send a spaceship around to have a look at the dark side of the moon and photograph it all, and I know that we have, but let's just pretend we haven't, then we can prove or disprove whether or not these bosom craters exist.
Metaphors are also just getting better and better, as well as I'm not getting any fruitier.
So then you just say, okay, well, if the proof of your proposition or the disproof is if we send the rocket over to the dark side of the moon and we don't see those craters, then I'm not going to argue with you about it.
It's simply we don't have the knowledge yet, so let's not bother, right?
So this is the free will versus determinism debate.
If somebody says, well, everything is causal, that's my axiom, therefore human beings are causal, well, that's fine, right?
They're not going to have much luck explaining how human beings are so radically different from everything else in the universe, but that's fine.
I mean, it could be right. But we're obviously prior to proof of that, right?
If you take it as an axiom that everything is caused and nothing new exists in the world and all that kind of stuff, if basically your axiom is that human beings do not have free will, then arguing free will is sort of pointless because there's no proof.
Other than everything else acts in this way, but that's not proof, right?
Or everything falls down until you see a helium balloon, but it doesn't prove that everything falls down.
And certainly humanity is the helium balloon of the universe in that we do things the complete opposite of everything else, or most other things that exist.
But if somebody's axiom is that everything is causal, then what conceivable disproof could there be?
What disproof could there be to the axiom everything is causal?
Well, no, there's no disproof possible, right?
So there's really no point arguing it.
Now, of course, the criteria of disproof for free will would be figuring out all the variables and being able to predict human behavior with an enormous degree of accuracy and not just like, well, when the price of goods drop, people buy more.
I'm not just talking about the general self-interest of the species.
I'm talking about an individual-specific behavior Even ten seconds out, if you could say with unerring accuracy what somebody was going to do ten seconds out or a year out or whatever, then that would be a fantastic evidence of determinism, right? I mean, it would be wonderful and very exciting and take a huge load off my mind.
Anyway. So there's a criteria of proof or disproof for free will, unless you're dealing with a religious person, in which case free will is based on the soul that is provided by God, which is immaterial and therefore not subject to the causal facts of the matter, of material existence.
And so you're not going to be able to disprove free will from that person because it's based on consciousness as a non-material entity and therefore not subject to material constraints like causality.
And you're not going to have any luck with that either.
It's sort of a basic problem.
Similarly, of course, with God, then you are not going to have any luck with somebody unless they come up with a criteria which allows you to disprove the existence of God, right?
If they say, oh yeah, you can disprove God by X, Y, and Z, and then you do X, Y, and Z, and they say, you know what, I'm just going to go with faith, right?
Then you can mentally strangle them to your heart's content for breaking a contract and thus being suable.
Anyway, so...
You absolutely want to set up the null hypothesis.
And one of the things that occurs in debates around things like property is that people will say, well, property rights don't exist.
They're just a fiction, blah, blah, blah.
Well, just because it doesn't exist in material reality does not mean that it is a fiction, right?
I mean, dreams exist and you are interacting with things that do not exist in material reality except as phantasms in your mind.
And we don't say that dreams don't exist.
The scientific method is valid, even though it does not have independent material existence in the same way that a rock or a tree does, and morality, and so on, preferred behavior of just about any kind.
All of these things have material existence, but we generally don't say...
sorry, don't have material existence, but we don't say that they're not valid and have no bearing on human nature.
Logic, of course, right?
Somebody who's saying, well, my thesis is that that which does not exist in material reality has no validity, then I'm going to argue from here.
Well, of course, arguing and logic do not have existence in material reality.
And so if the person's not just speaking in tongues and saying that their proposition is true because their monkey helmet wears a banana hat, then you might want to withdraw from that proposition, right?
Because if somebody's saying that I don't find things that don't have material existence to be valid, but I'm putting forth logical arguments, then the person hasn't...
Let's just be as nice as possible.
They haven't thought it through as well as they could have, let's just say.
And the fact that they haven't noticed this is probably indication of exposure to nihilism, if not addiction to nihilism in one form or another.
So, that would sort of be another way to approach it.
What's the null hypothesis, and what is the relationship to concepts and abstracts?
Now, of course, we also come to the exciting topic of definitions.
And so...
One of the examples where you want to make sure you don't end up with is the tautology problem, right?
And again, I don't want to go over basic logic here, but this is worth understanding in this context, because it creeps up a lot when you're talking about the government, right?
So you talk about the government, and people say, well, the government is virtuous, right?
And you sort of go down the road, and you find out that they define virtuous as obeying the will of the majority with a monopoly of the use of force, or something like that.
Politicians are virtuous. What is virtue defined as?
Somebody who's voted into office.
Well, it's a politician, so you're saying a politician is a politician.
A politician is virtue, but virtue is defined as a politician, right?
So it's a tautology. You're not adding anything to the mix, and you definitely want to stay out of those kinds of conversations.
And so you get this a lot, of course, when you are debating with people about the state, because they'll say, well, society, like, we need a state to function.
And so functionality is good, and we don't want violence, and we don't want civil war, and those things are all bad, which we can all agree.
And then the only way that that can be conceivably achieved is through the existence of a state.
Well, this is tautological, right?
Because no sane human being is going to say, yes, I want that which promotes universal violence and civil war.
Rather than one state that's in control, I want a bunch of warring states all shooting at each other like the sort of myths of the Old West.
Well, no human being is going to sanely argue for that position, right?
So you also want to watch people who are redefining you into the bad guy corner.
It's another very important thing.
It's similar to tautology, but it's a little bit more subtle.
So you get people...
An obvious example, and you don't get this as much when arguing libertarianism with people as much, but you'll say, I don't want a government, and then basically they define that position as wanting the poor to be trampled by Clydesdales, or something like that.
Some evil thing. Oh, you want the poor to starve, the sick to die, the old to shuffle off into a fiery pit.
And that's how they define your position.
Well, I think it could probably be said, to be fair, that that sort of argument from evil, right?
They're just saying, what you propose is evil, and what I am defending is moral, is good.
Well, I know there's a more technical name for it, which escapes me now, something Latin, but I'm not going to fake it by doing e-pluralist nubbliness or something.
But that position wherein whatever you define is evil and whatever the other person defines is good, well, then you're obviously put in a position where you're advocating evil.
And, I mean, that's not really going to help you very much, right?
That's not going to help you very much at all in terms of having to convince you.
Then you're just like a sort of sick little hand puppet in their theater of cruelty, so to speak, right?
You're not going to have a very productive debate with somebody who considers you the Antichrist in one form or another.
And a lot of debating, especially in the realm of politics and moral philosophy, is wrestling for the high ground.
It's wrestling for the high ground, right?
So what you'll often find, or at least I've found this in a large, large number of times, is when you start to win the upper hand, then people will say, like, you start to win the upper hand and prove that the government is evil and society could conceivably exist in a much more productive and peaceful manner and moral manner without the government, and the person's going to sigh and they're going to say something like, well...
I guess it comes down to this.
I'm just not as naive and idealistic as you are about human nature.
You're going to get something like that.
Well, that's a real...
It's a mind screw, right?
And it's really annoying. Because who is going to say, well, I guess I am naive about human nature.
I guess I am a Pollyanna starry-eyed idiot who thinks that the moment that the state goes away, people are going to be kumbaya-ing themselves into a flower-strewn and hippie-like sunset.
So that's a pretty false argument, right?
And you'll get a lot of this kind of stuff where people just sort of redefine you as an idiot.
Although they may throw a couple of, you know, you are idealistic, right?
Which is a nice way of saying you're an idiot, right?
It's a slightly more genteel way of calling you a stark, raving, nutty fool.
But this is another area in which you really have to watch that you're not being thrown into this pit of evil and having the stones of self-righteousness hurled against your adulterous-to-truth body.
Oh man, that metaphor!
You stretch, you stretch, and suddenly it's like, clang!
Oh, my eye! It's like tightening a guitar chord too high, taking an eyeball.
Anyway, sometimes that happens, and all we can do is stand over the corpse, give it a fond farewell, and keep moving.
Quickly, people, there's nothing to see here.
So this being redefined into the pit of evil is also something that you'll get quite a lot of whenever it comes to...
So you'll get this with taxes, right?
So you say, I think taxes are wrong, and people will say, well, I don't mind paying my taxes because I care about the poor.
Well, that's a funny argument, right?
It's a very funny argument to say that.
Or you say, taxes are bad or our freedom in this country is bad or is diminishing or we need more of it.
And they say, well, look around the rest of the world.
This is the freest country there is.
It's like, yeah, absolutely.
And the slaves in Africa in the 18th century were doing a whole lot worse materially than the slaves who were on the plantations in the South, which means that we should never have tried to get rid of slavery because there were blacks who were worse off than the blacks on the slave plantations in the South.
Yeah, that sounds like good logic to me.
Let's get those people back in shackles.
And so that kind of stuff occurs.
And also the other thing is, you say, well, I don't like government services.
And they say, well, do you drive on roads?
Do you use your water?
Do you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Have you ever used a bus in your life?
Did you go to public school? And of course, what you're then portrayed as, is somebody who's hypocritical.
So now, you may not be a fool, but you're hypocritical.
Or, I'm happy to pay my share of the taxes because I believe in this country.
Then you're portrayed as somebody who's unpatriotic and selfish.
You can't see the common good.
You're blind to the common good.
And so you just want to hang on to your own money because you're mean and selfish and don't want to share.
Whereas this other person is community-based and patriotic and recognizes the value of the common good.
And then, of course...
You, as the libertarian, are the very reason that the government has to use force to collect taxes because there are such mean, selfish people who don't want to invest their labor and energy into the virtue and help the common good and blah, blah, blah.
So all of these kinds of...
There's about a bajillion of these arguments.
And you'll know when this is happening because you'll feel both desperate...
You'll feel desperate initially.
And you'll feel like you want to reassure the other person.
No, no, no. That's not what I mean.
I'm not talking about selfishness, blah, blah, blah.
And... Then, when you get to be a little bit more self-aware and a little bit more aware of these kinds of tricks, then you'll end up just getting angry because it's a real insult.
It's a real insult.
When I'm debating with somebody and they start to call me selfish or naive or starry-eyed or idiotic or anything like that, well, it's a real insult.
It's a real insult because...
Let's say you are interested in debating with someone.
I'll tell you why it's a real insult.
Just sort of picture this, if you don't mind.
So you're interested in debating with a friend of yours and you think he's about to call.
You don't check the call display.
And you're interested in having a very highfalutin debate about the nature of concepts and their relationship to nouns or something like that.
Well, fine. So you pick up the phone, but it turns out that it's your half-cousin's retarded brother who's called the wrong number.
Again. So it comes up with some...
Are you going to continue to have a debate?
Are you going to say, hey, we're just having this great debate, I wanted to get your thoughts?
Well, no, not unless you're sadistic.
Why? Because you really are talking to an idiot.
You're talking to somebody who's mentally subnormal, who's deficient.
So, in this case, you really are talking to an idiot, so you're not going to say, I'm going to start this debate with you, and then when you just keep going, I'm going to call you an idiot.
That would just be cruel. So if you really are debating with an idiot, you don't call them an idiot.
If you really are debating with somebody who's naive, who's genuinely naive.
So an example would be some kid who was raised by wolves in the backlands of Dakota or something like that.
So you're dealing with this situation.
So somebody who absolutely has no knowledge about how society works.
And who is genuinely naive in this context.
So, you know, they walk into stores and just grab things and walk out.
Or they go up to people with shaven-headed tattoos of swastikas on their forehead and say, why do you have funny markings on your face?
They genuinely are naive.
You're not going to put them down for being naive and sort of credible, credulous.
You're going to try and explain to them sort of patiently and kindly because they just have no knowledge.
You're going to try to explain to them patiently and kindly that what they're doing is dangerous and there's no reason that they should have this knowledge.
Because they were raised by wolves and they don't understand how society works.
It's one of these coming to America things.
And so there's no reason that they would have this knowledge, but you're sort of explaining it to them.
In the same way that if somebody genuinely lacks knowledge, you generally don't yell at them.
So if you're with somebody, you go to France, and that person doesn't speak French.
You don't ask them to go and buy a bag of bread from an all-French baker.
I guess you could. Point or something like that.
But you don't try and involve them in conversation with your French friends and then get irritated at them for not making any sense, right?
I mean, that would just be kind of ridiculous, right?
So if you genuinely are naive or genuinely are stupid or genuinely are ignorant, then nobody's ever going to call you that.
They're going to be patient. Nobody's got any kind of brains whatsoever.
Nobody's got any kind of sensitivity whatsoever.
So the only time that people call you these things is if they know that they're not true.
That's why it's false self, as we know, and that's why it makes you angry, because it's a deliberate insult.
It's a deliberate insult designed to make you feel lesser or lower or worse.
They're hoping to hook into your self-doubt.
Oh, maybe I am stupid.
Maybe I am an idiot. Or whatever.
Like I sent an article into Lee Rockwell today, which was a pretty fiery article about the Middle East and collectivism and about how we have to give up these gods of our forefathers called religion, the state, and...
And so on, in order to survive.
And he rejected it completely out of hand, and I sort of understand why.
He's got quite a religious stable of readers, and some of his contributors are also religious, and I'm certainly not.
He's not here to serve my atheist-rationalist agenda, so no problem.
We'll go back to economics and ethics with him.
So you will feel irritation.
Now maybe at some point in my moral or emotional or intellectual development, I will feel sympathy for these people who have no choice but to subtly shift the cauldron of evil, upend the cauldron of black oil evil, boiling oil evil, I'll assemble this bit by bit if you don't mind, over you.
I mean, that's the best that they can do, and they're so threatened by any kind of intellectual rigor that they just have to say, you bad, and run away.
But right now, I just feel really irritated at these people because they are so manipulative and false and so on.
And there's just an enormous amount of disrespect.
And I try not to do this with people that I'm debating with, at least not for the first 60 to 90 nanoseconds, but I will try to assume that people are looking out for the truth and are looking for the best things and so on.
And then if they start to get sort of what I would perceive as weird on me, then I'll ask them for definitions, I'll ask them for the null hypothesis, I will ask them for their criteria for truth or falsehood, because when it comes right down to it, nobody knows.
We're working at it here, and I think we're getting pretty damn close, and I think some things we've already achieved that are relatively new in the history of philosophy, I would dare say that we've achieved some things that are pretty great here.
But most people, they don't have a clue.
They just don't have a clue. It's like the podcast that we had called How Do You Know?
Well, the government is good.
Well, fantastic. Then you must really understand what virtue is.
So then tell me about virtue and everything that you understand about virtue and what it all means and how it's defined and how it's common to everyone.
And everybody knows, fundamentally, this is the true self is down underneath all this bullshit saying, bullshit, bullshit, right?
That kind of stuff. And so everybody knows very, very, almost immediately.
They know that what they're talking about is pure nonsense, and they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Professors are very much the case, but you'll also get this with teachers, although professors are more likely to get those kind of more honest questions.
But nobody has a clue what they're talking about, and so they just want you to stop asking them questions because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
The reason it makes them feel uncomfortable, of course, is because of their families, and we've sort of gone on through this a couple of dozen times already, so I'm not going to retread that, when I could retread other things instead.
But that's another thing that I would definitely try and feel sensitive to.
And trust your own instincts, right?
If you're starting to get irritated with someone, Then get irritated.
I'm not saying flame them. I'm not saying blast them.
But the first thing that I would do is try and confirm the diagnosis, right?
So if you're feeling irritated with someone, as I was with the people who had the free will arguments and then the property arguments and so on, I get irritated, but I'm not going to start blasting with them because, A, that doesn't advance the debate any further.
If I feel like blasting someone...
I will generally just stop the debate.
Life's too short, right?
I can't change anyone's mind by blasting someone any more than you ever have had your mind changed by being blasted.
So I won't do anything like that.
I will ask a couple of qualifying questions to find out if the person who seems to have all the answers does actually, in fact, have all the answers, and if...
If so, why...
They can take over the podcast, because I would sure love to sit back and have someone explain it all to me.
That would be great. So, you ask them the questions.
Like, okay, well, if you really understand that there's no such thing as property rights, and you've pierced this great veil of illusion that everyone else has this belief that there is such a thing, then I would love to hear how you've managed to do this, right?
And so... If they then say, you know, I've got to tell you, I may have overreached a little bit here, and I say this.
I said this on a post today, and somebody accused me of overreaching and was, I think, entirely correct in their assessment, and so I definitely backed down.
It happens to me. You should be honest about things, right?
But if somebody then says, no, basically, I'm not going to back down.
I'm going to stay with my position.
I'm just not going to tell you how I arrived at it.
Well, then you just know it.
You know, it's nonsense. So you want to stay away from that kind of stuff as well.
Because that's somebody who's also appealing to your lack of self-esteem.
It's the appeal to insecurity or the attack on security.
Only a stupid person is the ad hominem.
Only a dumb or naive or violent, prone or idiotic or evil person would hold these beliefs.
You're not an idiotic person, are you?
You don't hold these beliefs. All that kind of stuff.
So these are just sort of the criteria as a whole that I have found to be kind of helpful to use when debating with people, because debating should be a heck of a lot of fun.
It should be really enjoyable.
It should be really rewarding.
It should not be a painful and abusive and confrontational process, because if it gets that way, you're no longer interested in the truth, right?
You're just playing out some crap from your childhood.
So I would recommend definitely withdrawing from those kinds of debates.
Until you can at least approach it with some more rationality.
But when the debates get unpleasant, there's a number of conditions that are in place.
One, of course, one person is putting themselves forward as the all-knowing expert of everything.
And I know that that may sound funny from the guy with 300 million podcasts, but you are going to face that kind of issue where basically somebody is saying, well, it's obvious you just don't get it.
I get it, you just don't get it.
I understand it and it's clear, but you don't understand it and it's not clear.
When it's not clear, right?
So if somebody says 2 plus 2 is 4 and you fight them on that, Then, you know, I think they have a reasonable right to say, well, I can't really explain it to you any more simply than that.
But if somebody says, well, there's no such thing as property rights, but it does maybe apply to the body in terms of self-defense, but only the body, but not the products of the body, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So if you shoot an arrow, well, you don't own the arrow, so you're not responsible for it killing someone.
All these sorts of things. It's not exactly intuitive.
So, property rights, I think, it's a relatively simple thing to discuss with people who sort of recognize that there are property rights, or there's a value to property rights, or can't even conceive of a way that society would be organized without property rights.
And so the question is, how do we define them, and how do we work with them, and so on?
Like, it's easier to work with a physicist who believes that gravity exists, say.
And if a physicist comes along and says gravity doesn't exist, Then it's really worthwhile for that person to understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right?
Which is why I've certainly worked so hard on the whole DRO anarchy model and why my claim that if your family doesn't give you pleasure, you should break with them as you should with everyone else who doesn't give you pleasure.
Except your dentist. That's an extraordinary claim, so I've worked very hard to put forward that in a way that I hope makes some sense to people.
I don't have to agree with it, but at least I've recognized that I'm sort of putting forward a proposition that's freaky to people and not intuitive.
Maybe at a very gut level it's intuitive, like don't do things which hurt you, but there's an enormous amount of propaganda that people have received to the contrary.
So I don't tend to approach people who are like, what?
No government? Are you crazy?
What? Break with my family?
Are you nuts, man? I don't approach people like that.
Well, it's obvious, right?
Because it's not. It certainly wasn't obvious to me.
It took a heck of a lot of intellectual, like 20 years of intellectual sweat.
I don't know, half a dozen books to work all this stuff out.
78 articles on my blog just from the last 18 months or so.
So it's certainly not obvious, right?
So this is another thing you want to watch out for when you're debating with people, and this is how debates turn rancorous.
When people put forward a proposition that is far from obvious, in a way, or with an attitude that it is self-evident.
That's really, really annoying to people.
So somebody who puts forward the proposition that the world is round, it's not really very healthy to say to people, well, it's self-evident, because it's really not.
It's really not self-evident, frankly.
So it took me a little while to get it as a kid.
It's like, it's round, but I'm really tiny.
I'm like, okay, I'll work on it.
I'll go up to the plane when I go to Africa and see if I can see a curve.
I guess it's like the moon and the sun.
Anyway, so it's not obvious, right?
So when you're dealing with non-obvious facts, like, so if you're going to put forward the proposition, there's no such thing as free will, or put forward the proposition, there's no such thing as property, or you don't exist, or nouns don't exist, or language has no meaning, or things that are just a logic that doesn't exist, things that are sort of non-obvious.
Then I would generally say that it would probably be worthwhile having a little patience with those of us who are having trouble with something that's so counter to experience, intuition, logic, and history.
So, that's another way that conversations tend to get kind of unpleasant for people.
Because I get irritated when people tell me things that are completely counterintuitive in a way that is, well, of course it's like this.
Basically, only an idiot would not be able to see this.
When it's completely non-intuitive or counter-experiential or whatever.
I don't think that it's just because I'm an idiot that I can't see this.
I think that there's probably some other reasons in that everything in my experience tells me quite the exact opposite.
And so, you know, it doesn't mean that it's false.
It just means that you kind of need to be patient as we poor dumb mental oxen struggle to catch up to your fiery genius, right?
It's just, you know, when you're explaining things to a three-year-old, you don't yell at them, right?
You don't say, it's self-evident, this quantum physics theorem proof.
Come on! Let's whiteboard it again, junior.
And so that's a way that things get pretty unpleasant.
When there's an implicit premise in a debate that's not understood by both parties, and it's even worse if it's only understood by one party, then when somebody says property rights are not valid, and then they say that things which do not exist cannot be valid and property rights do not exist in reality, then that's how I know that property rights are not valid.
They are a fantasy because they don't exist like a rock or a tree exists.
Well, then you have an implicit premise in there, which is that That which is not sensually evident does not exist and can never be valid.
Well, that would be a kind of useful thing because that would be logic as well.
And that would be, I don't know, like just about every concept known to man, and also language perception, and just about everything you could think of that's not nailed down, so to speak, or nailable down, would be the case, right?
So then you're not talking about property rights, you're talking about the validity of concepts.
Which is a fine topic, but if you think that you're talking about property rights, but you're actually talking about the validity of concepts as a whole, then, you know, it might be worth taking a bit of a breather and going back to the basics, right?
And so that's why, in the debate on property rights, I said, okay, well, what's your criteria for real and non-real?
Because this guy's all about, you know, as I mentioned this morning, what's real and what's not real, and so on.
And so if you can get that nailed down, then you can actually find out what you're really debating about.
And I guarantee you it's almost always the family of origin, plus a couple of influential teachers or profs.
But it is still something that you do have to work at to try and understand so that you can basically avoid.
You want to spend your life not spending time arguing with people who are annoying or irrational, right?
It doesn't mean, like, don't expose...
Oh, that means that you don't want to be exposed to any new ideas.
It's like, yes, that's exactly right.
I don't want to be exposed to a single new idea.
You've caught me. You've got me sorted out.
No, that's not what I'm talking about at all.
I fully understand new ideas, and sometimes ideas which are uncomfortable are very important to get a handle on, to get a hold of.
I'm down with that. I understand that.
I'm good with that. But...
The real issue is that you want to make sure that you're being respected when you're debating with someone.
Because there's no truth that's worth abuse, right?
There's no truth, there's no insight that's worth abuse.
Because whatever insights come from somebody who's abusive...
I think it's relatively clouded by the fact that they are kind of abusive and therefore maybe wanting a little in terms of humanity and compassion.
So that would be another thing that I would steer clear of.
I don't think that the truth value of anybody is particularly relevant if either they're A, abusive, or B, if they're not living their own propositions.
I mean, I just generally don't take pills from people who yell at me and I don't take pills from people who've got the same ailment but who don't take them themselves.
So you don't buy the hair cure.
You don't buy the baldness cure from old Steph, right?
Because obviously I think that baldness...
If I've got a cure and I'm selling it, I think baldness is bad.
And since I'm not so much with the follicles...
I guess I am with the follicles, but not so much with the protein...
Then you just wouldn't want to buy that from me, right?
Because it's like, oh no, it's perfectly safe.
Well, why don't you take it? Oh, I don't mind being bald.
I guess you could say that, right?
But I mean, I'm telling you that being bald is something that needs to be fixed, right?
So that's not really a valid approach to take, in my humble opinion, to deal with that sort of problem where somebody is saying, oh yeah, no, I don't think property rights exist.
And you say, okay, well, you're wearing clothes, you have a job, you have a condo, you have a wallet, and if they're not going to give you their wallet, then obviously they're not living by it, right?
So I just generally just find those kinds of people, like, forget about it.
This is just a nihilistic thing.
All they're interested in doing is undoing other people's certainty because of their own psychological problems and hatreds and histories.
So just steer clear of those people, of course, right?
I mean, that's just sort of natural. And steer clear of anybody who's negative or hostile or abusive, because whatever gold they've got clutched to their gnarly, horny little chest is not worth the grabbing, because, you know, it's sort of a booby trap, so to speak, right?
See how I work chest and booby in there together?
It's just the kind of constant quality that you've come to expect, I think.
Actually, sadly, that is probably the kind of quality you've come to expect from Free Domain Radio.
Anyway, I hope that this has been helpful.
I'm going to toodle on up to my job interview and see if we can't wow and dazzle people with a slightly hoarse podcasting voice.
Hi, it's Steph.
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