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July 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:10
340 How - and why - Some Philosophers Become Popular
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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
How are you doing? It's Steph.
It is time for low rent, low kilohertz, low MP3 quality time within the car.
It always seems that whenever it rains, I have to switch to the Zen Vision M, a fine, fine product, which I'm really enjoying.
But Windows has just decided to stop recording, and so there's not much I'm going to do about that.
I'm not exactly going to try and fiddle with it while on the highway.
And until they come up with the foot computer, it's not going to work out too well that way, and I sure would hate for the trauma of the end of the podcast to be associated with horrible screams and sounds of tearing metal.
So I wanted to chat just a little bit this afternoon.
It's the afternoon of the 18th, I think, of July 2006, and I thought it would be worth having a chat not about Hegel in particular or in detail, But just about a little bit of Hegel, just so that we can get a sense of why thinkers are popular.
I always think this is a very interesting question.
There is a kind of reversal of cause and effect for most people when they think about philosophy, and they have a very tough time judging philosophers on their own merits.
They really do.
They like They know about Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Locke and probably Hobbes and Rousseau and, you know, a couple of others that they know, sort of the big names.
And what they don't understand or know, I think most people, to some degree, maybe you do, is that the reason that these philosophers are popular is not necessarily to do with the quality The logical rigor and the quality of their ideas.
And I find this a very fascinating thing to explore, and I've done some exploration on it.
I'm no expert in this area, but I do think that it's very interesting to sort of try and figure out why certain thinkers become prominent at certain times.
And the discredit that occurs to philosophy as a whole when certain thinkers are venerated.
So, as we've talked about a couple of hundred podcasts ago, there is sort of a divide between the Platonic and the Aristotelian worldview, the Kantian, Randian worldview, you could say, to switch sides.
And when people study philosophy, this is rather confusing, obviously, because you have Aristotle, who specifically rejects the world of the forms of the higher ideals in life, And in the way that I do it, or rather I'm sort of the way that he does it, the concepts are imperfectly derived from instances, and the forms are merely concepts or descriptions of instances and can't contradict any one of those principles that they claim to describe.
And so you have the biggie, Aristotle, throughout the Middle Ages, simply known as the philosopher, not just a philosopher, the philosopher.
And the story of why The mystical Middle Ages found Aristotle to be so interesting.
It's quite fascinating, and it's worth having a look at.
Maybe we'll talk about it one day.
But when you start to study philosophy, and you study Aristotle, and you study Plato, a part of you just goes, huh?
Certainly a part of me just went, huh?
Simply because you have two opposite views, both accepted as the giants of philosophy.
Now, that's not really, to me, a very healthy state for philosophy to be in.
To have, at its core, the sort of two founding giants of these philosophical systems of thought, empiricism versus mysticism, to have them in direct opposition and to both be taught as interesting complementary kinds of thinkers.
And not to overly judge the ethics of the fine Greek gentleman, but it would sort of be like saying, okay, so on the one hand we have Thomas Jefferson as a political theorist and somebody who got a political system up and running, And on the other hand, we have, you know,
Hitler, or Mao, or Stalin, or whoever, who has a different kind of political theory which you've got up and running, and just presenting these two as, you know, eeny, meeny, miny, moe, it's up to you, flip a coin, see which way you want to go.
They're not put forward as, this is fundamentally erroneous, and this is fundamentally not, so much with the erroneousness.
They're just discussed as systems of thought.
And the same thing I find to be true of a wide variety of other thinkers throughout history.
And I just...
I have a general theory, and I'm not going to get into the specifics.
I'd need to have a look at my notes, especially those that I worked on with my masters.
But I have a general theory that what happens is that when an existing system of justification for power begins to erode, then another system...
For the justification of power has to take its place.
And if you are a thinker who is criticizing the old system of power while creating justifications for a new system of power that's pretty much the same, or even worse, then you will be lauded by the Attilus,
as Ayn Rand calls them, the warlords, the mafiosos, the politicians, the heads of state, the whole filthy gang of human parasites That wants to basically coat their axes in sugar so that it doesn't seem so brutal.
So when you have a particular system of justification for power that's on its way out, the elite look desperately for a new system that can justify their power, a new moral or philosophical system that can justify their power, and they find someone.
And now this is not, you know, they don't go through the flip charts of current philosophers and compare them to this sort of goal because it's not just the leaders.
This is sort of my fundamental approach to this sort of power structure and this is what I think the value of adding the family into the mix does for us.
My particular approach to understanding the nature of power is that it's not just the leaders who want justifications for power and the leaders who crush The innocent and lamb-like population in their mailed fist.
It is the sheep flock for justifications to stay as a mindless dumb herd.
And this is a great mystery, which, of course, until, at least for me, it was a great mystery.
Why is it that people are so in love with being dominated?
Why are they just so broken by school and propaganda and so on?
And it just didn't really seem to me to make a whole lot of sense until, with Christina's help, I started really exploring the family side And I began to understand that when your parents beat you down or justify their power with a false argument for morality, then what happens is you end up needing to defend that false argument for morality.
And so when your parents, when the argument that supported your parents' authority begins to wane or to diminish or to lose its emotional strength, in other words, this is usually within a generation or two of a political change based on the murderous consequences of the prior belief system.
So you get a couple hundred years of religious wars that wash back and forth across Europe when the Anabaptists are fighting with the Lutherans, fighting with the Calvinists, fighting with the Catholics, fighting with the who knows who, right?
And you end up with a slaughter of millions across Europe based on these religious wars.
Well, at some point, people sort of go, I just got to tell you, I don't think that this whole combination of church and state is such a good thing.
And so you get a separation of church and state, and what this does is it creates a huge amount of freedom.
Partly what it creates is the Industrial Revolution, of course, and it creates a huge amount of freedom relative to what came before, and a huge amount of, like, less murder.
And so the ethic that supported it begins to take a blow.
And it's only usually a generation after the political change, because you've kind of got to grow up with it, right?
And this generation, the leaders need A new justification for power because a diminishment of power has proven to be very effective in solving the very wrongs that the leaders are supposed to have the power to solve, right?
So if you have 100% power and everything is bad but you claim that you're trying to solve all these problems and then you go to 50% power and the problems get a whole lot better, political power, and then you go to 25% or 10% or 5% and the problems keep getting better and better, then you have a great deal of difficulty justifying Your power!
I mean, it sort of makes sense, right?
When I stop taking this medicine, I suddenly get well.
I mean, it's a little tough to then say that your doctor is an excellent doctor and you should continue to follow his instructions and let him tell you what to do about everything.
So the leaders need a new justification for their power.
And the followers, though, based on the brutalization that they've experienced at the hands of their families, the followers also need A new justification for having power exercised over them, right?
Because if they can penetrate the veil of political illusion about the benevolence of those who are in charge, then they, of course, are going to come very close to facing the same dissolution of an illusion regarding the power and authority of their parents and the morality of their parents, which is enormously painful.
And some people in Freedomain radio board, some very hardy, adventurous, and strong souls, some stalwart souls, We're going down this journey, and it's a fantastic journey.
It's a very difficult journey, but the end result is a liberation that you can scarce conceive of before you go in.
But it's a very painful process, and people don't really want to do it.
And frankly, human longevity, which was around 18 to 22 years for the majority of human history, simply wasn't long enough to make it worthwhile.
It takes a year or two to go through this process.
At least it did for me. Maybe with some guidance other people can do it more quickly, but I was ice-breaking out a little bit alone here.
So... The followers also need to justify power because of their own family histories.
And so, what happens then is you get this combination of a waning of the old idea of justification for power, and you end up with what's called the power vacuum.
Now, a power vacuum generally is believed to mean that The organism of the state has taken a body blow and people are going to rush in and so on.
And I'm sure that's true to some degree.
I haven't really thought about it too much because what I'm much more interested in is the power justification vacuum.
So as the old mental arguments for morality, mental in both senses of the word I guess you could say, when the old arguments for morality begin to diminish in power, when people no longer believe in the old arguments for morality, Then you end up with a power justification vacuum.
And so, in general, you then have a huge need on both the part of the rulers and the ruled to find some new justification for power.
Because power is diminishing and life is improving, and therefore the natural tendency would be to say, well, since political power is by every sane human being recognized as a fairly large power, Overhead in society.
In other words, if we could get by without police and without the law courts and without the government, then we would be saving ourselves a whole lot of shackles because it is simply overhead, right?
I mean, if you don't have to install a security camera in your store, then, by golly, you're probably not going to install said security camera in your store.
I've got to tell you, it's just amazing, by the by, just how, with a small amount of rain...
I don't even know if you can hear this.
It's not like the... The podcast miniseries.
So... So, to continue, this power vacuum that is created by the failure of an existing argument for morality creates a great demand for a philosopher who can come up with new ways to justify existing power.
Now, it is my particular opinion that the philosophers who best serve the needs for a new justification for an existing power structure of some kind, and that doesn't mean exactly the same people in power, but it does mean that power still exists, The need for power is drawn from the people, not from the masters, not from the leaders.
The people create the leaders.
And we'll talk about this another time, but leaders do not create subjugated people.
Subjugated people create leaders.
If you want to understand the basis of political power, then people who are beaten up in their childhoods end up needing to be ruled over, otherwise they really have to emotionally understand how evil their parents were, which is a very difficult thing to do.
And so the need to be ruled over creates a desire For leadership, right?
The leaders are an effect of, as we've talked about, the state is an effect of the childhood.
Leaders are people who are drawn in to the power vacuum that is created by people's need to replace their parents with the state or with the church or the country or whatever it is, right?
Or even the worship of a sports team can happen that way as well.
But fundamentally, leaders are victims of the people's need to be dominated.
I mean, we've talked about this in the podcast on sympathy for the devils, but...
This is sort of my formulation.
I think it's very true.
Because when the people's need for domination diminishes, then leaders' power diminishes thereby.
And then, of course, the leaders will use philosophers and the people will create philosophers and make them popular when they find that they can use those philosophers to create a new reason to be subjugated, right?
Because everybody loves the subjugation relative to figuring out that your parents are corrupt, right?
I mean, so... The leaders and the power structures at the top do not dominate, I mean, certainly throughout most of history, right?
I mean, they could not physically dominate the masses because they didn't have weapons of mass destruction, but they are created, they are in effect of trauma.
They are in effect, the state is in effect of people's need to be ruled over.
So, when we sort of take this very, very broadly, we can see...
That you start with some pretty idealistic philosophers in ancient Greece, and I'm not going to make this any sort of detailed thing.
We have questions you can ask me about things in more detail.
With fairly idealistic philosophers, and then as the state grows, you do find people becoming more dreamy, and then the more dreamy is followed by the rejection of the world, philosophies that occur at the end times with the growth of the state, right?
The world has simply become a living hell, and everybody is swallowed up by the power and control of the state, And nobody can predict their own use of property or their own growth.
You can't have any ambition because you can't get a career except as a sort of pencil pusher or a quill pusher, a tablet pusher in the civil service.
And so you end up with these Kafkaesque kind of philosophies, which is around a pure rejection of the material and a rejection of desire.
And once the government gets so big, then having desires becomes sort of pointless because you can't achieve anything.
The state power is too large and it controls too much.
And so you end up with these philosophies where people say, well, the state is so big that I am simply going to reject, well, they don't say this explicitly, but I'm going to reject all of the material desires that I have.
And that's when a state is sort of on the edge or close to freefall.
We're certainly not there yet, but of course things are going to occur much more rapidly here than they did, say, in the Greek or Roman empires.
And so there's a general broad thing that a society becomes free because of rationalistic philosophers of some kind who champion property rights and limited states and so on.
And so you get a great degree of wealth, and the degree of wealth does draw leaders to it because leaders would rather have 10% of a $100 billion economy than 100% of a $10 billion economy.
So when you get a growth in wealth that arises out of rationalistic philosophies that result in the free market and the denigration of the group relative to the individual, then a country becomes wealthy, which draws leaders to control that wealth and to manipulate that wealth for their own ends.
And then what happens is the power of the state grows, so you get all these philosophers who begin to displace the early empirical philosophers.
As the power of the state grows, the economy begins to decline, and you start to get zero-sum games in terms of economics, which raises...
If I tax you to subsidize my industry, then you don't have money left.
It's not a win-win in the way that the free market is.
And, of course, you start to get the rise of more non-material philosophies, religious philosophies and mystical philosophies, which causes conflicts to rise among people, and this causes parents to act worse towards their children because they don't have a rational methodology for helping them to understand why they should do the right thing.
And as the child abuse gets worse because the philosophies are bad, then people begin to hunger for more and more authority over themselves to justify their parental abuse, and so you start to get calls for a more and more powerful state, or you start to get sympathy for the ideologies that support a powerful state,
of course. And so what happens then is the state really begins to grow, and we're sort of in this phase now in the West where there is a kind of exhaustion, I don't want to go into things today in too much detail.
There is definitely a kind of exhaustion, especially among the young, an exhaustion and a skepticism.
And unfortunately, it's a little bit on the nihilistic side relative to the ideals.
I mean, nobody really believes in the welfare state.
Nobody really believes that the government should get bigger.
Nobody really believes that the government tell the truth.
I mean, the whole idea behind democracy has kind of become a tired, sort of hackneyed bunch of nonsense, right?
So we are sort of paused, quivering with exhaustion and hope, looking for a light on the horizon and hoping that it's a sunrise and not a nuclear bomb, right?
The great song on the final cut, the last album of Pink Floyd, is called Two Suns in the Sunset, which is a good album overall.
It's not quite up to scratch with the wall and with the dark side of the moon.
And even to Amogama, if you're feeling a little freaky, and my favorite, Wish You Were Here.
But a fine song nonetheless.
But people are definitely hungry for a new kind of philosophy, and totalitarianism has not the greatest reputation after the 20th century.
Bye.
And so people are definitely looking for something new.
And so who is going to be the next famous philosopher?
Well, it's going to be somebody who justifies an increase in state power in the West.
I mean... Unless it's us, right?
Which is why I'm certainly putting so much energy into these conversations.
If we can make it this conversation that is the next thing, then we really can take a quantum leap forward as a species and look back upon these as the Dark Ages.
But that remains to be seen.
It's certainly not for effort of will that this may not occur, certainly on my part and certainly not on the part of many people who are giving me the most excellent feedback, positive and negative.
But it's really up to what I would say is the free choice of individuals And what other people might not say is so much with the free choice.
So, when you look at something like, and we'll use very, very broad strokes here, and I apologize if they're too broad.
If you look at something like the Middle Ages, well, the Middle Ages, of course, the more state power exists, the more you need mystical, socialistic, communistic, or collectivistic philosophies.
In order to justify that state power.
So the more you need to worship the abstracts rather than the individuals, whether it's the god or the country or whatever.
Democracy, right, is just another god that people worship.
It's just got a few more heads that don't count, right?
But whatever collective idea you are worshiping, democracy or George Bush or the presidency or America or the Canadian healthcare system, whatever collective nonsense you are worshiping, It's directly proportional to the power of the state,
right? So, as state power grows, people get a little bit uneasy, so you need to find philosophers that are going to make them feel or allow them to drive their uneasiness into a kind of underground, subterranean, true self-buried, alive kind of place.
But if you look at the Middle Ages, of course, you see rampant collective mysticism in general thinking.
A complete abhorrence of empiricism, which is the scholastic approach to both science and alchemy and so on.
And then, of course, when...
And there's lots of things that have gone into this, and I've mentioned this story before.
I was just touching it very briefly.
You get certain technological advancements, like the harness for the horse and crop rotation and so on, in the Quachorros, actually in the 11th and 12th centuries, 12th and 13th centuries.
And then you begin to get the growth of cities.
You get the rediscovery of the concepts of Roman law and Aristotelian metaphysics.
And epistemology, which begins to bring the idea of science and cities and law.
With the excess growth in foodstuffs, you can't have a city unless you have a good agricultural base, because otherwise it's eat what you kill and nobody has any excess to ship to the city.
And so then you start to get some opportunity for those who are in the country stuck in this dull, rural, ignorant life.
To make their way to the city where they can get education, learn to write, and so you just generally get a growth in these sorts of things, which culminates in a sort of sequential series of things that break the back of the mystical hold of Christianity.
I mean, we look at Islam and the Muslim countries and we think, oh my heavens, how terrifying, how horrible, how inhuman, how alien, right?
It's not at all alien. Not at all alien.
All you needed is a time machine to go back, say, 300 years, Maybe 400 at the most, and we were exactly the same, if not worse, in our makeup of social and political organization.
There was very little differentiation between secular and religious in sort of early Middle Ages, in Christendom before the Lutheran break, where Christendom fragmented into a bunch of different faiths, when there was still a monopoly on the Catholic version of the Bible,
And when people sat there hearing stories, never having any access to the original texts, and having their liturgies and masses and communions and all that sung in Latin, which they didn't understand either, well, you had exactly what...
I mean, it was even worse than the Muslim world.
At least the Muslims can read the text, right?
At least they have literacy rights, right?
I mean, the Middle Ages was ridiculous.
Compared to what's going on in the Muslim worlds these days, so it's a little, I don't know, for me at least, it's a little hard to look over there and say, ooh, that's terrible.
That's so foreign, that's so alien.
It's like, that's exactly where we were a couple hundred years ago.
And so what happens, I mean, we'll sort of go over this story briefly.
I know this is a real sprint through the centuries, but what the heck.
You get a break in Christendom with Luther in the 15th century, 16th century's And you get the fragmentation of sort of one Christendom into a bunch of warring sects who all try and gather the guns of the government, or I guess the swords of the government, early muskets, who knows?
You get the weapons of the government to become the one true religious sect.
Before, it was sort of religious versus secular to some degree, in that the aristocracy was nominally subjugated to the divine right of kings, to the priestly class, right, to the pope and so on.
But there was a strong secular element within Western society that was an inheritance from the Roman times and the Greek times, where I can't remember who it was who famously said, the Pope?
How many divisions does he have, right?
In other words, he doesn't have any military, so why should I care?
He's just a storyteller who gets his power through that method, but I prefer something a little bit more direct, like a sword in the guts of the peasant.
So you have this breakdown of Christendom, fragmentation, and then you have everyone trying to grab a hold of the state, To impose their will of religion on everyone else, which results in all these religious wars.
And so, sort of around the 18th century, sometimes called the sad century, because of the amount of starvation and war that it contained, but in the 18th century, you start to see the rise of absolutely skeptical, or at least relatively skeptical philosophers, or some more complete skeptical philosophers, Hume and so on.
And you, sorry, Hume was a little bit later, but You start to see the rise of skeptical philosophers.
And why? Because the leaders, you're starting to see the exhaustion and the running out of the idea of the unity of church and state.
And so you start to see leaders who are very interested in separating the church and the state.
Not religious leaders, but secular leaders.
And they're partly desperate to do this because they're just running out of manpower, right?
I mean, you get the rolling waves of the Black Death from the 14th century onwards, and then you get the destruction of Millions of people through religious warfare and starvation and so on.
So, I mean, the leaders are kind of running out of sheep, I guess you could say, right?
The shepherd says, too many wolves are taking the sheep, and so the shepherd's livelihood is threatened.
And so they're starting to look for a different way of explaining power that is going to keep them in power but not get everyone killed that they're supposed to have power over.
And, of course, in these kinds of deaths...
I mean, this is back when the aristocracy used to fight, right?
Unlike George Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and so on, and even, I guess, Condoleezza Rice.
I mean, this is back when the aristocracy used to put some kids on the battlefield, right?
And so they got a little bit sick of it, too.
So, basically, what's happening is you're starting to get a real desire and a drive for a different methodology for explaining power because people are like, I mean, I don't know...
You know, God, Lutheran, Calvinist, Zwingalian, who knows, right?
But there's something wrong. Something's wrong with the way things are being run here because just about everyone is getting killed or dying or being raped or starving or, you know, illness.
I mean, it's just, this is not working out for sure.
And so when people sort of say, hey, let's go take this hill for the sake of our God...
You know, there's a little bit less of a stampede to the Maypole for that, to sign up for that, right?
So, people start to get a little bit weary and a little bit, like, skeptical about the call to arms, right?
And so they start to look for new ways of doing things.
And that makes Enlightenment philosophy, Renaissance Enlightenment philosophy, starts to become more valuable.
Why? Because people have just suddenly started to figure things out?
No, they just got sick and tired of getting killed.
And sadly, sadly, sadly, so, so, oh, I can't even express how sadly, this is what it takes for human beings to learn at the moment.
Right, it's going to take concentration camps in America to get people to figure out that the growth in state power ain't the best thing in the world.
It's going to take probably some sort of nuclear attack or some sort of WMD attack in the world for people to figure out that governments can't be trusted with WMDs, and it's probably going to take more than one Because, of course, the local governments are going to say, see, there's this rogue government, we've got to have more WMDs and so on.
It's going to take, I mean, how much did it take to discredit communism, right?
About 100, 150 million people murdered, you know, World War, two or three or more generations of Russians and two generations, two and a half, I guess close to three now, generations of Chinese living in absolute wretched, brutalized slavery.
Well, you know, it takes a little while for people to figure these things out, right?
I mean, human beings are not the most proactive learners, and this never made any sense to me until I sort of started working on these family issues and began to deal with people's direct resistance towards freedom and empirical observation and learning through logic.
It just didn't make any sense to me.
Like, how could anyone conceivably be a statist after looking at the 20th century?
Well, it's because of the family, right?
Otherwise, you just have to say that human beings are broken and retarded and propaganda wins, in which case there's no hope, right?
There is hope If we can deal with family issues, or at least there's hope of avoiding people who we can't help because they won't deal with their family issues.
But this kind of situation is what brings philosophers to prominence.
It's what brings philosophers to prominence.
People were tired of starving to death at the end of the 1700s.
18th century, things were getting a little bit better, but there just was no real wealth around.
People were just sick and tired of all of this.
And so it wasn't like Adam Smith was the first guy to say a free market is a good thing.
Property rights are a good thing.
Limited governments are a good thing.
It's just that there was a certain confluence of the people's desire for some kind of freedom based on just an exhausting history of death, want, despair, destruction, murder, slaughter, suicide, rapes, starvation, sickness, plague. I mean, once you have enough of that, you sort of look for alternatives, right?
Just before you beat yourself to death by ramming your head into a brick wall, you'll say, maybe I shouldn't.
This is sort of the history of the species.
It's because of the core rigidity of family structure beliefs or the argument for morality as defended by the addiction to family benevolence, the fantasy of family benevolence.
And so with the rise of, starting with Francis Bacon through to the Enlightenment philosophers, Locke and Hume and Adam Smith and so on, you begin to get a rise of a more private individualistic base, skeptical of abstracts kind of authority.
So you're swinging back to a sort of empirical world that started off with Aristotle, and some philosophers before, but really culminated with Aristotle in the ancient world.
And you're starting to get a resurgence of the simple facts of reality, right?
Which is that individuals rule and exist and concepts have no meaning and don't exist.
And the only meaning that they have is relative to their ability to accurately describe the properties of aggregations of physical entities, right?
Concepts based on the nature and reality of atoms, as we've talked about before.
But what you start to get then, of course, is you start to get a growth in freedom.
A growth in freedom.
And what happens is, and this is particularly instructive, of course, if you look at the history of the French Revolution, which was collectivist in nature and religious in nature fundamentally, or versus the American Revolution, which was individualistic and rational in nature and skeptical of religion, then if you look at these two things side by side, you really do begin to see that more power equals more suffering, right?
This is the great message or the great moral of history, that...
You can go and get post-doctoral, PhD, post-PhD work in history and never hear it.
This is the great thing that everybody wants to hide from themselves, both the rulers and the ruled.
The rulers want to hide from the ruled that more power is more pain, and the ruled want to hide that more power is more pain so they don't have to deal with their childhoods, they don't have to deal with their pains, they don't have to break the conformity with their parents, so they don't have to take that leap off the cliff where you hope to land not on the rocks but in the water, In order to deal with their histories and their past, right?
So, you start to get this great history or message of America, right?
America, everyone's fleeing to America where there's virtually no government relative to everywhere else in the world.
And it's doing just fine, thank you.
Yes, they will talk about gunfights and they will talk about this and that, but what are gunfights?
At least both people have a gun compared to dealing with what was going on, say, in Eastern Europe or other places where people...
China... And so people fled to America by the tens of millions.
And I agree that they didn't all live in peace and harmony, but relative to where they were coming from, things were a whole lot better.
And where there was not peace and harmony, it tended to be with political groups like the Irish, who went for political power rather than economic power.
And so you begin to see this principle begins to become fairly evident across the world that more power...
is more pain and less power is less pain for human beings.
Less death, less destruction, less starvation, less injury, less war, less crime.
Less power is less of all of these things.
Less centralized, coercive, monopolistic state power is less of all of these things.
So the rulers are kind of happy because they've got a very productive population that get to tax more, but this rule that everybody's trying to ignore that more power is more pain, which again brings people right up against the horrors of their own childhoods, You kind of can't live with that, right? So what you need, and you find this in competing countries to America, not so much in America, but in competing countries to America, you begin to see the rise of competing philosophies.
And one of those, of course, believe it or not, we're getting back to the dude himself, is the Hegelian philosophy of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
And you probably have gone over this in some manner or another in your classes today.
And so it's probably worth just mentioning here.
You're probably fairly aware of this kind of stuff.
But Hegel's idea is that there is a thesis and an antithesis.
So you say that this is true, and then you say, well, the opposite is true, and then somewhere in the middle you end up with a comfortable kind of middle ground, and then the whole process starts over again.
So, of course, it has something to do with evolution itself, But most importantly, I guess pre-Darwinian, this would be Lamarckian evolution, but you do need to sort of understand that the way that we get this in the modern world is that no property rights, like communism, I guess the way it would work is capitalism, pure property rights, almost no state, no welfare state, and all that kind of stuff.
That's the thesis. And then communism, no property rights, huge state, And all welfare state, so to speak, that that is the antithesis.
And then the synthesis is liberal democracy.
It's sort of a medium-sized state, some welfare, but some free market, some property rights, and so on.
That there is a thesis, antithesis, and a synthesis.
So a thesis could be that religion should dominate the state.
The state is a tool or an expression of religious will.
The antithesis is to say that religion is completely false and should have absolutely no say in public life.
And then the synthesis is, well, private people are allowed to become religious and vote on their conscience.
So it's always this sort of compromise situation.
And then, of course, that starts over again.
And so this basically idea, this is called the Dialectic of History, and this was old GWF Hegel's, who lived from 1770 to 1831.
And so what Hegel was sort of arguing, it was this dialectic of history, was that the entire course of history is the expression of what Hegel called the absolute, right?
And it's got caps. And you've always got to be careful of philosophers who start using caps.
It's a very, very unpleasant way of arguing to just put things in caps, right?
So the absolute, according to Hegel, unfolds with the dialectic process.
Every state of affairs or a thesis gives rise to its opposite.
And then a synthesis of the two is formed, which then becomes the new thesis, and the process starts all over again, and blah, blah, blah.
Now, Hegel thought the capital absolute revealed itself as an objective spirit in social organizations, right?
So, in particular, like the family, civil society, and the nation-state.
And, of course, for Hegel, the nation-state is the most important of these three, and the culmination of the Historical dialectics.
So, in a nation-state, a person can achieve the highest level of self-realization.
A person is thus most free in a nation-state, in the sense of having the most opportunities for realizing his full potential.
And this you can still see, of course, in the belief that without a state, everything is war, warfare, and so on.
And so you need, in order to have freedom, you have to subjugate yourself, right?
So that the state protects your freedom, And you need to subjugate certain random freedoms, the freedom to kill or whatever, to the state, in order to gain the maximum potential for self-actualization.
And so in Hegel's view, and this is still something that anarchists fight to this day, in Hegel's view there's like a bell curve of human freedom.
And that bell curve of human freedom is pretty much related to the amount of the state, right?
So he would probably say something like, Well, the absolute state is not such a great thing.
And that's not much freedom, right?
To be a slave in somebody's cell is not a great deal of freedom.
And so absolute subjugation to authority is not much freedom.
However, as the state diminishes, then your freedoms increase.
But then, of course, if the state diminishes to nothing, then your freedoms decrease again, right?
This sort of Hobbesian state of nature, and nasty Brutus Short, and all that kind of stuff.
Which is sort of what we face, and this whole dialectic is what gives rise to this idea that fascism and communism are two extremes, and the middle is synthesis, and all this kind of...
This is all a very common thing.
And what it does, of course, is it makes people afraid of extremes.
It makes people afraid of absolute statements, because everything is this swirling dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
So this is something that still has an enormous amount Of effect on how people think and the reasoning that people go through.
So, this is sort of helpful, I think, to understand that Hegel was just this guy who wrote a whole lot of stuff, and a lot of philosophers write a whole lot of stuff, but why did Hegel rise to prominence?
Why did Hobbes rise to prominence?
Was it because they dealt with all possible objections to their philosophy and were the most rigorous and rational And they had the most empirical proof and they had double-blind tests and they put everybody else's thesis to rest or to shame.
Well, no, of course not. None of that had anything to do with the reasons why Hegel and Hobbes and these sorts of people became prominent.
And I would sort of submit that the reason that these people became prominent was because they served the needs of those in power and they served the need to be ruled over That is endemic to those who desire subjugation to power based on family history.
So, as an old system of thinking, which is the unity of Christendom and the need to subjugate yourself to the state as a manifestation of God, right?
I mean, because in Christian politics, or at least in, I guess, post-Augustinian Christian politics, generally the idea Is that you are not subjugating yourself to the king, heavens, no.
You are subjugating yourself to God, who has put the king there to tell you what to do, because that's God's will, right?
It's not me you're obeying, it's God, right?
I try this in meetings, of course, when a programmer doesn't want to do what I want him to do, I say, well, you have to obey me because I'm placed here by the spirit of the company, by the spirit of this organization, this ghost in the hallway, It tells me what to do, and then I'm telling you what to do, but hey, don't shoot the messenger, right?
I'm just, this is what you've got to do, because the ghost of the company, the god of the company tells, has appointed me here, right?
Why else would I have authority over you if the god of the company hadn't put me here?
And so you need to obey, not me, but the god of the company whose mouthpiece I simply am.
And I find that that pretty much ends the meeting.
I'm also going to go into what happens then.
But it certainly helps me not have to go to too many more meetings as well.
And so, why did Hegel rise to prominence?
Is it because of the rigor of his arguments, because the empiricism of his method, because of the ruthless logic of his approach?
No, of course not. It's because he served the needs of people in power, and he served the needs to be ruled over by those who were subjugated and didn't want to know it.
This is the same thing is true of Kant, right?
How do you get a Christian philosophy If you don't have as much religious faith, well, you go to Kant, right?
Who talks about all these collectives as well, right?
How do you subjugate yourself to those in power when you no longer fundamentally believe that you're obeying God through them?
Well, you create this idea of the absolute that manifests itself as countries and the world spirit that moves through countries and that your greatest level of freedom is subjugation to the state.
And, I mean, this is how...
How do you get people to obey you if they don't believe in God?
Well, this is basically what 18th and 19th century philosophy was all about.
How do we get these idiots to believe that they're sheep when they no longer believe in the shepherd?
Or you just make up something else that they have to obey?
Oh, it's not God.
It's the world spirit.
It's the absolute. It's the dialectic.
And So basically the whole history, in my view, of 18th and 19th century philosophy, with the exception of the empiricists who I talked about earlier, is people striving to find a reason to get people to obey their masters without having to work God into the equation.
And then, of course, you get uncomfortable rim shots like Nietzsche who come along and say, well, you are a slave because that's your nature, or you obey the masters because you're a slave.
But who are basically saying, well, it's just a matter of everybody's making up these stories to subjugate other people, but there's absolutely no reason to obey anything outside of yourself.
This is, of course, the reaction to the slave moralities is a kind of imperious hedonism, which you generally associate with later stage empires like the Romans.
But this imperious hedonism, where it's like, I follow my own pleasures and other people be damned, unless they serve my pleasures, in which case I'll force them to whatever, whatever, right?
And so this kind of, I guess it's the penthouse subsidized version of the story of the crazy Roman, I can remember his name now, the crazy Roman emperor guy, who...
Not Nero, but, oh, I can't remember his name, but Penthouse basically funded a film which was about this Roman emperor, and it's this sort of idea that, you know, I just sort of take pleasure for myself, and life is sort of the playboy mansion, and I take pleasure, and other people's standards and values be damned, this is what I'm going to do.
I think we're good to go.
Which both sides of this six sadomasochistic relationship we call society desperately need because they won't own up to the goddamn histories.
So why are philosophers popular?
Because they serve the emotional needs of people.
They give polysyllabic justification to people's innate desire for dominance and subjugation.
And that to me is why these philosophers are so popular.
And this is why, of course, there are so many popular philosophers.
I mean, so many of these philosophers are not saying the same thing.
I mean, there's a couple who say, don't subjugate yourself to anything.
Not many. In fact, I really can't think of too many.
Even Ayn Rand said, subjugate yourself to me.
But there's two differing degrees.
You know, certainly Adam Smith said, subjugate yourself to things a whole lot less than Marx or Hegel did.
But, basically, there's these different continuums of property rights or no property rights.
Big state or little state.
Concepts or instances.
You know, all of these kinds of things, logic or instinct, logic or intuition, logic or faith.
There are all of these ways of thinking, right?
I mean, that everybody and their dog has an opinion, and they're all venerated.
Isn't that rather remarkable when you think about it?
Some people will say, well, I disagree with this about Hegel, but they don't sort of say, well, Hegel was just, you know, it's a sign of the times, right?
Hegel was just somebody who was elevated.
Was he the smartest philosopher?
Was he even a very smart philosopher?
I don't think so. I think that he was obviously good with language, and he was good at presenting a case that people found useful.
People just find these philosophers useful for their own emotional needs, for the leaders to lead and for the followers to follow.
Because the argument for morality is so powerful, people can't just wake up in the morning and say, Yeah, I'm just going to subjugate myself to this other guy because I'm pathetic and weak and don't want to think for myself.
People can't do that.
Constitutionally, human beings are incapable of that level of honesty, which is why the argument for morality is so important.
That's why you have to strip away this stuff and get to the core of the real subjugation because people aren't going to be free until they become uncomfortable with slavery.
And you don't make people uncomfortable with slavery by telling them that it's not slavery.
That's sort of what I'm getting about with the family, right?
I mean, if you don't enjoy your family's company, going over there is an act of pure self-slavery.
And I'm not going to make you or help you become free if I pretend to you that that's not slavery.
That's sort of my basic approach.
And so this desire that people have to justify both being a master and a slave is what propels various philosophers.
And it's not that hard to see the pattern once you get this sort of basic idea.
This isn't my thesis, but I definitely worked on this as an idea during the course of researching my thesis.
But people in general will do an enormous amount to cover up, or to do anything really to cover up their own emotional subjugation, because once they get close to the reality of their emotional subjugation, it leads them away from Hegel and Nietzsche and Kant and these people, back towards their actual histories and families and childhoods, which is...
Precisely why they love all these abstractions, because they get to manipulate this stuff and pretend they're getting somewhere or doing something, when they're just managing their own sad and brutalized histories by pretending that there's some universal virtue or absolute in subjugation or mastery.
And so you at least have to admire Nietzsche's honesty by just saying, yeah, there's slaves and there's masters.
There's nothing moral about it, it's just the way things are.
Now, I don't think that Nietzsche himself didn't exactly deal with his own childhood, so he wasn't able to go any further.
He stayed in the slightly nihilistic, cynical camp, or slightly, somewhat, very nihilistic and cynical camp of social observation, but he could not get through emotionally to the point where he could actually deal with his own history and therefore deal with the facts of the situation as far as slavery and mastery goes.
But I think that's sort of important.
It explains a lot. It explains why certain philosophers I've become prominent at certain times and not others, right?
I mean, it's not like being a model, like a really, really beautiful man or woman where you can just sort of get work as a model.
It's a little bit more subjective than that and a little bit more needs-based than that.
So I think that's a very important thing to understand about the popularity of philosophers.
It also tells you a little bit about something, a little something about where somebody is In terms of their emotional development and their understanding of history, right?
So, somebody who's really attracted to Plato, not the Plato, but Plato, the other malevol substance that has no form, but is obsessed with forms, the people who are very, very much into Plato are in a particular phase in their emotional non-development, which is sort of important to understand, People who are into Aristotle are in sort of another phase, and people who are into St.
Augustine or sort of theologians are in another phase.
And I sort of have a theory, which I haven't gotten around quite yet to proving, which is that these correspond to phases in the mental development of a child.
But I'm not even going to put that forward as anything that I could remotely talk about with any kind of credibility yet, because I'm still mulling that one over in general.
And so I would say that those who are on the platonic side would have experienced significant trauma prior to the development of object constancy or something like that.
But I'm not going to sully my reputation as somebody who speaks nothing but the perfect absolute and well-proven truth every time he opens his mouth by coming up with something like that.
So, you know, when you're batting a thousand, there's really no point swinging wildly.
That's sort of what I'm saying, right?
So I always like to love myself a slow one.
And then still manage to only bunch it as best I can.
So that's sort of my take on these kinds of things.
I think that it's an important thing to sort of think about within your own life, you know, which philosophers are you attracted to and why.
And I think it's worth having a look at what's going on politically in terms of the power structures of society, which end up elevating particular philosophers to moments of prominence, or sometimes longer than moments of prominence, But it is something that is quite valuable to understand, and it helps explain the timing and the selection of philosophers who become famous.
And I think that it also helps understand why there's such a variety of philosophers who are all considered great, who are all in complete opposition to each other, right?
Because they just happen to serve the needs of the time.
And so I would really work on trying to understand that, just so that you can avoid this sort of feeling of like, Oh, well, would I want to say anything against what Hegel says?
It's like, hell yeah! It's not like trying to write a better song than, I don't know, Stairway to Heaven or something like that.
Notes to people under 20.
Check your parents' record collection.
So, I hope that that's helpful.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I appreciate that.
I have set up... Oh, my heavens, I can't believe I didn't mention this to begin with.
I have set up a monthly donation for those of you who would like to not throw me a bunch of shekels all at once, but would like to Chinese water torch in my bank account with drips and drabs of denarii.
I really would appreciate that.
You can go and sign up. I've set the fee at about $17 a month and change, just because that works out to $20 a month Canadian.
For that, of course, you get 40-odd podcasts, you get four call-in shows, you get me cranking out a bunch of articles.
And what I will say, of course, is that if I can start to stabilize some of this income, if I can get, say, 100 or 200 people to sign up for that, then I will be able to do this full-time.
I think that's going to do an enormous amount of benefit for you.
I think you're going to buy an enormous amount of benefit by having me work on this stuff full-time because I'll run out of excuses for getting my facts wrong, which I'm sure will be very pleasurable for you.
But also, for 20 bucks a month, I think you'll be doing quite a bit To help move the cause of freedom forward and so if you can see your way clear to Tootling over to freedomainradio.com and signing up for this 20 bucks a month Canadian 17 bucks and change a month us I would really really appreciate that I think that if you look at it,
it's like 70 cents a day You know less than half a price a cup of coffee that kind of stuff Then I think that's a way that might to make it palatable for you it'll also again as I've mentioned before help me to understand that The degree to which the stuff that I'm doing is important to people.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
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