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July 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:45
343 A Review of Sam Harris's 'The End of Faith' (First Half)

The good, the bad, and the *huh?*

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 8 o'clock in the morning.
I know. It's shockingly, shockingly early.
But I have a mission this morning, in that I'm thinking of taking a job, and I want to test out The commute before I head off to my regular place of soon-to-be, hopefully, unemployment.
The last thing I wanted to do, or want to do, of course, is to take a job and then find out that it's going to take me...
I have a sort of 45-minute threshold for commutes.
This is before I did podcasts, although even I would be, I think, challenged to do two hours of podcasting a day, not to mention the hard drive space that would take up with the original WAV files, but we'll survive that.
But I wanted to give it a shot and just see what it was like to commute to this place, so it's not too, too far from where I work, so we're going to give that a shot and just see how it is.
What it means, of course, is that I have to dip off the private road.
We have a road up here called the 407, which I mentioned before, which is run entirely privately, although, of course, they have to use government, union, labor, and all of that other nonsense to drive the cars up, but it is something that...
It's privately run and it's fantastic.
It's like hyperspace. Very few trucks because they have to pay quite a bit in peak hours.
And so very few trucks and almost no construction during the day.
This is a resource that is fairly costly.
It costs me a couple hundred bucks a month and it's competing against free.
And it's also hobbled with regulations and government labor.
But it just shows you how innovative companies can be even when you have to use government labor to compete against Government subsidized goods, and subsidy is free goods.
It's called communism a subsidy, or a tax.
But I think it's a great road, and I'm just sort of seeing.
I'll have to leave it to get to the government roads, and so we will see if I drive straight into the big wall of jello known as state planning when I leave this road on the way to this job.
So, this morning, I'll just mention it briefly, I continue to be both interested by and baffled by the determinist position, and it seems to me that, and certainly I haven't had a chance to schedule this debate yet, but I certainly will be happy to do so, I would just love for once to debate with determinists and not have them use the language associated with free will.
That, to me, would be fascinating, right?
Because one of the things, and you can hear this in the debate yesterday, I guess once I get around to posting all this stuff, one of the things that you can hear is that they say, well, we should believe in determinism so that we can change the way that we optimize society, so that we don't punish people but we can find them, so that we change our approach, so that it's more humane and more effective.
To me, that's wonderful.
I mean, we have far much more in agreement than we do in terms of disagreement.
I think that if they say that we should evaluate the present and we should evaluate the facts in order to come to better conclusions, then we would come to if we didn't evaluate the facts, and it's preferable that we evaluate the facts, and it's preferable that we go with the science and the indicators of determinism, and that we should do this in order to be able to further optimize and improve things in society and be more just and humane and so on.
Well, I think that's wonderful.
Then I guess I'm a determinist, right?
Because I believe that we should take the facts of reality and we should process them in order to be able to choose better outcomes in the future.
I'm totally down with that.
So I think that I've sort of come to the conclusion that determinists simply have a different thesis around human nature, but they still believe that we should decide on things and choose to improve things and accept the facts to make more accurate choices in the future or come to more accurate conclusions in the future.
So I've got to assume that we're all on the same page.
The only thing I can say is that I just find it confusing.
I just find it confusing. Because people who are stone determinists, which is the determinists who believe that we have the free will of a rock, which is certainly some aspect of determinism, it would seem to me that debating is...
I've never got over this.
We're trying to put new inputs into your head, but there can't be new inputs because everything they do is determined, everything I do is determined, and it's all kind of like a...
It's like pretending to be excited by a sports match when you know that it's fixed.
Maybe you don't know who's going to win, but you sure know it's fixed.
And we all know the IQ of those who follow worldwide wrestling.
Anyway, I've sort of come to the conclusion, I'm happy to debate this further, a little bit more individually, but the determinists and I are in the same...
I mean, we're in the same framework of we should be more rational, we should be more cognizant, aware of, and subjugate ourselves more to the facts of reality, and that if we accept those premises of using the scientific method on everything...
Then we're going to make better decisions, and the reason that we should do that is that we should make better decisions and be more cognizant of reality and get rid of our fantasies and all that kind of stuff.
So we're totally on the same page about that.
They just have a different thesis, which is going to result in some slightly different conclusions.
One of the conclusions I see it logically resulting in is that...
The idea of preference is foolish.
It's like preferring a lion isn't going to eat you when it's hungry and you're tied to a steak in the middle of the Transvaal in Africa.
But that's my perspective.
But they certainly are arguing and debating and saying that we ought to improve things and be more cognizant of reality so we can make better choices.
And, you know, the only thing I can say is that we seem to be copacetic on that score.
We seem to be entirely in accordance with it, and I'm certainly going to follow the science of determinism eagerly, and I'm going to look forward to the day when it can swing to, rather than being descriptive, swing to being predictive of human behavior.
And it's a little different from the way that economics works.
I mean, economics is predictive of human behavior, insofar as all other things being equal, if the price drops significantly, then people will want more of a good that they can't overconsume, right?
I mean, like, Like oxygen.
You can't over-consume oxygen.
You tend to pass out, right?
You're standing there and you breathe like you're just running a marathon, then you're going to pass out.
But goods which can't be over-consumed, which are desired, and where the optimum consumption rate has not been achieved, If the price of those goods drop significantly, people are going to buy more of them.
And even if they can't consume them themselves, if they believe the price dip is only temporarily, they will buy them to resell them later at a higher rate when the price goes back up.
So there are predictors in economics to human beings.
Human beings generally will follow self-interest.
And that self-interest can be defined individually, but it's also defined in a generic sense.
And so, in economics, there is predictions of human behavior.
And of course, in the, I guess, the art slash science of developing a product for consumption by others, there is a lot of predictive behavior that's brought into play or brought into being around, well, we have to sort of study what the client wants.
We have to study what's missing in their arsenal of things that help them do better business, make more money.
We have to do a cost benefit on the cost of developing this thing.
We have to have a test market.
We have to have an advertising budget.
We have to figure out how we're going to pitch this thing.
We have to have a couple of clients so that we know it can be sold before we even think about launching it as a full wide rollout of commercial viability.
So there's lots of things that go into developing a new product.
Which are all designed to reduce the risk.
I mean, theoretically, you could just type a bunch of random code, wait for it to compile, and throw it out as a product and charge a million dollars.
And it's vaguely conceivable that once every 200 universes, you might get the next big thing.
We could say that that's a tad risky, right?
That's like putting up the random word generator and waiting for some great poetry to come out.
It could happen, but it just seems like you'd spend as much time reviewing the poetry to find the good stuff and piecing it together than you would just trying to find someone who had a strong poetic sense or sensibilities and getting them to write it.
So there is some degree of reducing risk, which is to increase the predictability of behavior.
So reducing risk is important, and the way that people reduce risk is they attempt to figure out what people want and then attempt to provide it to them in a way that is sort of cost-effective and so on.
So economics does include the predictions of behavior, but they don't predict the stimuli, they only predict the response.
Right? So, I mean, this is where determinism and economics sort of part ways.
Because economics will say, if the price of a Maserati gets cut in half, all other things being equal, people are going to buy more Maseratis.
What economics doesn't say is next February the price of a Maserati is going to be cut in half.
Or at least if an economist does say that, he's probably going to get sued by Mr.
Maserati or whoever is doing that kind of stuff.
So, that's an important consideration to understand as a significant difference between that, right?
I mean, what determinism is focused on is making psychology a subsection of physics in the same way that if determinism is true, then biology is also a subset of physics in that everything is fixed and preordained.
Not preordained by somebody outside, but just preordained the same way that if you throw a rock off a cliff, it's sort of preordained that it's going to fall down.
Everything then becomes a subset of physics.
And I mean, I fully understand that gives you a kind of tidy and neat conceptual framework with which to view the universe in that you don't have awkward questions around how can consciousness be self-reflecting and self-generating.
And the answer to that is, well, it's not.
It just thinks it is. It's just an illusion.
It's like when your mind produces dreams at night.
It's just an illusion, right?
You're going to do what you're going to do, but then you're going to invent this thing called, it's a choice.
Maybe at some point we could do this in the debate.
I'd be curious to find out why we would develop something like that.
It seems like a lot of overhead within the mind to come up with all these illusions about choice, which a jellyfish doesn't have to bother doing, but it seems to be interesting.
It would be just sort of interesting to figure out why we have this.
I mean, certain biological aspects, you have to sort of figure out why we had it.
Now, it's not that hard to figure out why we have religion, because people profit from religion.
And religion is used to justify the transfer of resources and the control of choices from the lower orders to the upper orders.
So it's an exploitive fantasy.
It's like a Ponzi scheme or it's like selling you a good that is supposed to be a weight loss regimen and then it turns out to be...
Water. Sugar water or something like that.
Or it's like water with NutraSweet in it at 50 bucks a bottle.
It's just a kind of illusion like that.
And they're selling you something that they can't deliver.
They'll deliver you something that's a weird substitute for it.
So for religion, it's a pure transfer of resources.
And of course, there was an enormous amount of ignorance.
And people had a desire for answers before they had a methodology for answers.
And I think that's fairly significant.
People want answers about why...
Is the sky blue?
Where did we come from? They wanted all of these things before we had any kind of methodology for figuring them out, so people just came up with very bizarre answers.
And so, I can sort of understand why we have religion, I can certainly understand why we have a state, it's exploitive, and parenting is bad, and the science of ethics, much like the science of knowledge, was pretty wretched for most of human history, and of course the science of ethics, now I would say, with the exception of some areas of thought, I'd like to put us down for that, but of course that's up to you, The science of ethics is also at a very primitive place within the world.
And that's just something that we're sort of doing our best to try and change.
But I can certainly understand that in the absence of knowledge, in the absence of wisdom, in the absence of methodology, exploitation always grows.
I mean, exploitation and illusion go hand in hand, and they both feed each other, as we've sort of talked about with the reciprocal relationship between the needs of the people for being subjugated and the happy coincidence that subjugators are always delivered seemingly on time and to spec, so to speak. But the need for these kinds of illusions seems to me fairly clear.
The need for the illusion, or the benefit of the illusion of free choice, I don't quite get it myself, but it's certainly something that doesn't prove or disprove, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
But I certainly would be curious to hear what people say about this, the need, why human beings have this belief, universal belief in free will, near universal belief in free will.
And why the mind would produce this illusion of free will when it is in fact an illusion.
To me, it's just an interesting question.
It's just something interesting to figure out.
That having been said, let's turn our topics to other issues, or I guess central issue, which is that I have been plowing my way through a book called The End of Faith by Sam Harris.
And I would say that the first quarter or first third is good reading.
It's good reading. I wouldn't say there was any great shock to me.
There wasn't a huge amount that was eye-opening to me, but he's a good writer.
I mean, and that goes a long way in my book.
I'll even read people with silly ideas who are good writers because style is just delightful, right?
And he's a good writer. He's got a slightly ironic, slightly detached Pomo humor side, which is actually quite enjoyable.
And he is pretty good at discussing the two major outbreaks of religious slaughter, hysteria, or genocide, which is the Spanish Inquisition, which, if you pause on the descriptions of the torturers, is very, very hard stuff to figure out.
Now, I myself have a kind of...
I don't even know how to put it, really.
I have a kind of involuntary empathy.
So when I read descriptions of torture, so for instance, when I read about one of the tortures that went on, sanctioned, of course, completely by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition, one of the tortures was that you would strap, and this was used,
of course, later to good effect, I don't know if George Orwell knew about it, but it's similar to what went on in Room 101, 1984, So they would get this wire cage full of mice and they would strap it to your belly, sort of like a wire bowl inverted with mice in it that would be attached or put against your belly, so the mice would be sort of standing on your belly.
And then what they would do is they would start to put fire onto the top side of the bowl, such that you would end up basically with the mice trying to escape the fire, they would end up having to chew through and burrow through your Belly, right? I mean, this kind of agony can only be scarcely imagined.
And when I read about this kind of stuff, I find it very difficult.
I feel the urge to skim and just go, oh yeah, okay, bad stuff.
Well, that was bad. Let's not, okay, let's keep moving.
But that's not really very...
I guess you could say very just or fair because these people and thousands upon thousands of people did go through this particular problem or horror or evil, I would say, and What I feel is I sort of instantly and almost involuntarily, I would say involuntarily, I really can't control it.
I immediately put myself in the position of somebody who's strapped to a table and who's having this wire mesh.
And no pleading will do any good, right?
I mean, there's lots of stories about how people who pled for survival or mercy in God's name...
We did not have any luck in getting any kind of clemency or mercy from people.
So what occurred was people would just kill them anyway, kind of thing, and that wasn't really something that was reasonable to expect to change.
It sort of went on thousands and thousands of times.
There's no mention anywhere of anyone stopping.
So I put myself in this position, and I feel the little rim or the indentation of the wire cage, and I feel the mice, sort of the pitter-patter of the feet, the mice feet on my belly, the little tickle on my belly hairs, and I see the flame approaching that the mice are terrified of, and I feel all of that stuff, and then of course I feel their urgency, their growing squeaks, all of the stuff that is going on.
That, to me, is just the sheer horror of the situation.
I feel it, like really, really deep down in my gut.
And that is very hard for me to stomach, so to speak.
Some of the other tortures that are mentioned, I won't go into them here, because it's all sort of pure sadistic sadism and evil.
But some of the other torturers that are mentioned, I also physically quail or feel nauseous, feel like I sort of have to stop reading and take it in gasps because they really do sort of feel the horror and the terror of the situation.
And I mentioned one other one, right?
So they've sort of put you in a fire, but what they do is they keep liberally dosing your legs with fat so that you don't burn too quickly.
That's sort of their goal.
To keep you alive as long as possible, to help you.
I mean, the best you can hope for is to be strangled before you were burned.
And I'm sure if you bribe people, you would get that solution.
And when he talks about the Holocaust, he doesn't go, of course, into the tortures as much, because they're fairly well known to anybody who studies this kind of stuff at any level.
But the two chapters are...
And they're tough reading. They're very tough reading.
But they are very instructive in terms of helping to understand what it means to be involved in a theocracy at the back end or at the random end.
And so, this kind of torture, this kind of hell on earth that he associates with religious thinking, and I think rightly so, with untrammeled religious thinking, right?
I mean, religion is calm now because we've calmed it.
It's not calm because it is calm, right?
We've drugged it, so to speak.
It's like a tiger that's been drugged, and we say, oh, good kitty, right?
But as soon as that subphoric wears off, we may not be in such good shape.
So, he's excellent at that kind of stuff, I think.
He's good at figuring out some of the epistemological problems and the metaphysical problems, and of course the problem and ethics that occurs with this kind of stuff.
He's very good at that. And, boy, oh boy, you love that stuff.
Then, where, oh where, oh where does he go?
Well, my friends, he goes into politics, and he goes into ethics.
Now, I'm still planning my way through the ethics stuff, so I'm only going to briefly...
Actually, I won't even touch on that, but what I will do is say that, yes...
He is in fact talking about the ethics of the situation.
And sadly, of course, where he goes with all of this stuff is, you know, what we need, you see, is a world government.
What we need is a world government.
And then he also has some particular approaches to U.S. foreign policy.
Wherein he says, yes, there's lots of bad things that the US government has done in terms of foreign policy, but they're still fundamentally different from the Muslims, from the Muslim governments, because the attempt, the goal or the ideal of the US government is not to kill innocent civilians, whereas the goal of the Muslim terrorists is to kill innocent civilians.
And this is the kind of stuff that you just see asserted without evidence.
And I just, I mean, I find that stuff kind of fascinating.
I'd hear somebody who's like, well, we've got to be rational.
We've got to go with the evidence.
We've got to deal with what is real.
And in ethics, he says, motives count a great deal.
But of course, motives are very difficult to prove, right?
So he's sort of saying that if I, as I mentioned yesterday, if I turn over in my sleep and hit you, it's a lot different from standing up and punching you when I'm awake.
So motives count a great deal in ethics.
And so he says that the motive for the Muslims, or the Muslim hordes, Muslim terrorists, is to wipe out We're all infidels.
There are no innocent people. And I understand that.
I think that's fairly accurate.
But then he just says, well, but George Bush would never, if he had the option for perfect weapons, which, boy, what an oxymoronic phrase that is, right?
If George Bush had the option or had the capacity for perfect weapons, then George Bush would deploy those.
Without a doubt, George Bush would deploy those weapons so that only combatants got killed.
Only combatants got killed.
And he would for sure not aim it at civilians.
That, to me, is quite fascinating.
And this shows something I'll get into a little bit later, but I'll sort of say why this is, I think, problematic.
His analysis of the Muslim world is very good, I think, and I've been meaning to get to Islam for a while.
It just takes a little bit more study than I've had time for, or I've chosen to make time for lately.
But certainly his analysis of Islam is very good, and of course its medieval nature, and its brutality, and its hostility, and its expansionism, and all that.
It's all good stuff, in my opinion.
And so he's very rigorous in terms of analyzing somebody else's religion or somebody else's group.
And I think that's wonderful.
And he has, though, of course, the demographic that he has to appeal to, which is patriotic Americans who have problems with Islam.
And so the way that he treats basically his base is liberals, right?
He's based as liberals in that they know that something is wrong with Islam.
They're skeptical of religion.
They're willing to give up some of the things that he's opposing, like multiculturalism or cultural relativism or whatever.
And that's fine. I mean, that's realistic.
I mean, a lot of people gave up cultural relativism when it turned out that they were actually being attacked.
You know, that's something that helps you understand the courage and integrity of intellectuals, that they're all About cultural relativism until America gets attacked directly, and then they're, well, against it.
Oh, wait, I'm at risk?
Oh, heavens, no, let's not do that then.
If it's not poor GIs from the South who are at risk, then I'm not so much for the cultural relativism, so let's get back to this absolutism thing.
So he's got a base, right?
And I don't know if this is something that he worked out with his publisher or something that's just sort of innate to him, but he'll say sort of openly that George Bush would not, in a million years, it would be unthinkable for George Bush to press a button and target people who were innocent civilians, and the only reason that civilians get whacked is because of the imprecision of the weapons.
The only reason that Iraqis are dead is because of the Because of the imprecision of the weapons.
I mean, it's a rather fantastical statement, really, when you think about it.
And let's just play around with that for a minute or two.
And, you know, I understand where the guy's coming from.
I mean, he's a philosopher.
He's at Harvard. He can't sort of talk about real things all the way through, right?
He's got his constituents, and he's got to try and make sales of his book.
And, you know, there's economic imperatives wherein people are raised by the state, and so they kind of have to...
In order to sell anything to the general population, you have to appeal to their prejudices.
Well, the first thing that strikes me as interesting about that is the unproven nature of the assertion.
I mean, if somebody's going to make a claim about somebody else's moral intentions about murder, the first thing that I would sort of ask for is that...
There's some sort of proof, validation, about this kind of stuff.
Somebody who's making claims about the motivation of somebody who's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
I would sort of say that maybe a little bit of proof might be in order.
Proof is important, especially if you're trying to get rid of religion, right?
If you're trying to get rid of religion, what you want to do is try and prove as much as possible and not take anything on faith except free will.
Just kidding! But you want to really try and be clear about that, for your understanding.
That would be the way that I would approach it.
But of course, he just says this as an assertion.
And that to me is rather remarkable.
The second thing, of course, is that it could well be said that George Bush is not so interested in saving any form of Iraqi lives You know, based on the basic premise or the basic fact that he invaded Iraq and has killed, I don't know, upwards of 140,000 Iraqis.
And I'm using the word he rather loosely here.
He's sitting comfortably in Washington with photo ops and movie stars.
But he did, after all, invade Iraq on false pretenses.
And it's fairly clear to everyone now that they were known to be false up front.
Or they certainly weren't known to be true up front.
An enormous amount of supposition from people like Chalabi and so on.
So what I would say is that I wouldn't really...
Even with the cursory review of the evidence before us that George Bush is all about saving Iraqi lives and would never harm either civilians or non-civilians, would never harm non-combatants.
If he could avoid it, it would seem to me rather specious because the way that I could see that he could potentially, theoretically, have avoided killing Iraqi civilians would be to not invade the goddamn country in the first place.
That's just one logical possibility that might give rise to some skepticism about, say, George Bush's innate pleasure in the idea of saving human life as much as humanly possible.
That's I guess you could say just one possibility.
Just a possibility. Now, the other thing, of course, is that he's very concerned about George Bush's Christian tastes, so to speak.
That he keeps appointing all these Christians to the highest courts in the land, and that he himself is sort of a fundamentalist Christian, and therefore has a sort of stated interest in Israel, that The Christians want to keep Israel alive so that it can be blown away in revelations, all that kind of stuff, right?
So he's got all of this kind of stuff cooking on, George Bush does, and he is invading Muslim countries because God told him to.
But then, of course, Sam Harris says that George Bush could never conceive.
of harming civilians.
I mean, if he had any option whatsoever, then he would never ever harm civilians.
That's a fantastic thing to say.
But, of course, this is part of his need for a solution that involves Authority, right?
People can't conceive of a solution that doesn't involve authority.
I mean, we're very primitive in this way.
We really don't understand solutions.
And of course, it's understandable in the Middle Ages that this is going to be the case, right?
That you're going to have a little difficulty picturing solutions without a central authority in the Middle Ages.
Because it never existed in history, right?
So I can understand that. But oh my heavens, now we have had the example of the free market for 200 years.
I mean, is it really that hard to think of solutions without central authority?
Is it really, really, really just mind-numbingly difficult to imagine this kind of stuff?
And that's sort of the problem that I have, that people just, oh, it's bizarre.
It's like, well, every solution that we have to every kind of problem involves coercive monopolies.
Although I didn't use a coercive monopoly to get into Harvard, although I'm not using a coercive monopoly to print and publish and distribute my goddamn book, although I'm not using a coercive monopoly to get on TV and promote this book, although I'm not using a coercive monopoly to get people to buy my book, still every solution that I'm going to come up with in a theoretical sense is going to involve a coercive monopoly.
I mean, you see just how silly it is.
And I swear, people in the future are going to look back on this stuff and just wonder what the hell happened to human brains during this phase in our history.
Because I can look back at the Middle Ages with a good deal of sympathy and say, well, yeah, I mean, the answers kind of didn't exist.
And so that's kind of a problem.
So I can understand that people didn't really get the whole hang of the free market stuff or of voluntaristic or pacifistic solutions to problems because, well, there was no such thing in the world.
There was no model that people could turn to.
But nowadays, you know, it's like now, I mean, I can understand disbelieving in the ocean if you're born in a desert.
But boy, oh boy, I just can't imagine disbelieving in the ocean when you're drowning in it.
That just seems completely bizarre.
And I guess it's because we have academics that are so isolated from the free market.
I couldn't really tell you.
Maybe it's because they're so subjected to authority in terms of, you know, getting published or maybe their review committees or...
I mean, grad school is not exactly the most entrepreneurial of environments because your only audience are those who have a monopoly of power.
Maybe it's something like that. I'm sort of trying to be as charitable as possible.
But just putting out this idea that the monopolistic central authority of violence is the only solution to the problem of violence.
I mean, this... This is just astounding to me.
It's not astounding in terms of it's kind of inevitable, right?
The moment you see bestseller, you know it's full of nonsense, right?
That it's going to have some facts that are interesting and some arguments that are good, but that the solutions are always nonsensical, right?
Because, as I mentioned yesterday...
However you think it's written, you can have a look at this freedomain.blogspot.com.
If you're trying to come up with any real solutions, then you need to be prepared for some rejection, let's say.
Be prepared for some people not...
Because everyone's got a constituency that they're trying to please.
I sort of try and think that I don't.
I mean, I could, but I don't think that I do.
The constituency that I'm trying to please is the truth, and as I've talked about, my conscience, right?
My sort of conscience which goes haywire.
If I sort of veer from the truth, and of course rational arguments, and so on.
But this guy's got to get the truth out there, or the answer out there, that appeals to socialists, right?
He's basically, this is a kind of warmed up communism, insofar as...
He's anti-religious and wants a world government.
I mean, this is just communism, right?
I mean, this is exactly what Marxist fantasy was, right?
Get rid of religion so that you don't have a competing eschatology or ideology, and then set up a world government because competition is bad, right?
Competition is bad between the state and the church, and competition is bad between governments, so we need a world government, as Sam Harris puts it, so that there's no more chance of war between Pakistan and India than there would be between Texas and Wyoming.
Of course, it's like he'd never heard of the Civil War or the War of Northern Aggression or whatever you want to call it, and he's also never heard of people who've tried to secede, and he also doesn't really understand that America at the moment is in a state of legal civil war, in that everybody's trying and he also doesn't really understand that America at the moment is in a state of legal civil
And so that's really not a viable approach or option, I think, to say that we desire to have a state of peace in the United States, like similar to that which we have in the United States, which is a fantasy that if you have a strong enough central authority, you can eliminate disputes and everyone can live in peace and harmony.
And this is, of course, just somebody that we can certainly understand what his childhood was like Because he thinks that an excess of authority will solve the problems of violence.
The greater the disparity in power, the greater the peace that occurs, which means, of course, that the ultimate peace is a gulag or a concentration camp, where I think there was only one uprising.
I can think of one of the Jewish uprisings in the Polish ghetto, I think it was.
But there really aren't any once you get into the realm of gulags.
I mean, Solzhenitsyn does no mention, at least in the stuff that I've read, no mention of revolutions in that kind of stuff.
So... This is just his fantasy, right?
And this is his fantasy because he's essentially socialistic in nature.
And I'll certainly plow my way through to the end of the book.
This is sort of my premature conclusions, or to some degree premature conclusions.
But that's sort of where I'm coming from.
And I think that it's important to understand that you get this kind of nonsense in all populist works of fiction.
And I always find this kind of frustration, you know?
As I've said before, you're trundling along with a thinker.
And for me, it's like despite myself, despite...
30 years of, I guess 25 years of reading this kind of stuff, you still have some sort of hope.
Some sort of hope that they're not going to go haywire at some point.
That there's going to be some kind of rational follow-through, right?
People set up all of these rational things.
Like they attack the things that they don't like and then defend the things that they do like, but they call it rational, right?
So this guy is all about attacking religion, which he doesn't like.
And then he's all about suggesting that the solution to it is a world government, because he likes government, right?
But he's just arguing emotionally, right?
I mean, I'm fully aware this could be the case with myself and free will, right?
I'm open to admitting, open to admitting it, open to debating it, but still waiting, of course, for evidence.
But that's sort of a pretty important thing to approach, I think, just to understand that most people, when they're arguing, they just have preferences and dislikes and they make up reasons for them.
And sometimes those reasons are very good, right?
This guy's argument against Christianity or religion or, you know, the problems...
He doesn't work so much with metaphysics or epistemology, a little bit, but he's very focused on the argument from a fact, right?
So his... His argument is sort of that, well, if we have this ideology that is based on killing unbelievers or subjugating them, then the moment these guys get a hold of weapons of mass destruction, we're going to have a big problem, you know, more or less, on our hands.
And that seems to me perfectly reasonable.
It seems quite like a realistic proposition.
And so his argument, or potential, possibility, possible future, It's something like this.
So in the future, some Muslim government gets hold of long-range nuclear weapons.
Well, what are we going to do?
We're going to have this kind of fairly large problem in that they've sort of committed to our destruction.
They don't fear death themselves.
In fact, they view the fear of death as something contemptible and weak.
So they don't fear death themselves, and so won't we sort of assume that they're just going to nuke us?
And I don't think that's true, because, of course, the leaders...
Don't fear death is only for the followers, right?
It's not for the leaders, right?
I mean, it's kind of funny, but that's just something to understand.
It's not something that every Muslim believes.
It's just something they teach people who they want to control.
It's an important consideration, let's just say.
So... That's not going to happen.
But he says, of course, that a first strike against a Muslim nation that has suddenly come into possession of long-range nuclear weapons could be a defensible moral thing to do, and of course that's going to provoke even more, and this war clash of civilizations, as it's called, which is kind of funny, right?
Because we associate our civilization with our government, which is a fundamental error, right?
Government is the enemy of Western civilizations.
Western civilization has progressed to the degree that we're willing to get rid of governments, right?
And then saying, well, our government is better because it's Western is ridiculous, right?
It's like saying the cancer is now part of our health because it's gone into remission.
No! No, it's not.
We're not healthy because we have a cancer that is in remission.
We'd rather not have a cancer at all.
This is just a sort of fundamental and obvious mistake that people make in this area, that they do end up with this situation wherein they associate freedom with the government and progress and peace with the government and so on.
It's all complete silliness, all complete lunacy.
And another thing that I find quite fascinating and somewhat inhumane, if not very inhumane, is our dear friend Mr.
Harris's approach to the problem of combatants versus non-combatants.
His sort of basic idea is that George Bush would never, the American government would never injure non-combatants if it could possibly avoid it.
This is like literally one page after.
One page after.
After, he admits to the direct death of half a million Iraqi children because of U.S. sanctions.
He doesn't quibble the number. He doesn't quibble that they're a direct result of U.S. and U.K. sanctions.
But this is his sort of fantasy approach, is that, yes, there's these half a million children who died, but George Bush would never do anything in America, would never do anything to directly cause the injury of non-combatants.
Now, to me, though, it's rather specious, and I would make a pretty strong argument for this, that to divide into combatants and non-combatants is bullshit, frankly.
To me, I don't know, except for a couple like this John Lind fellow.
There's a couple of people who do this, but it's really very few.
Who just go and join because they love the idea.
And of course these people are probably just mentally ill or sociopaths looking for a good place to go kill and get medals.
But there aren't a lot of people who just up one day and say, you know, I would volunteer for that army even if all they gave me was bread and water.
If they didn't pay me, if they didn't train me, if they didn't give me education, if they didn't give me...
Money for a university or college.
If none of that occurred, I would go and fight for this army anyway, because I just love the idea of the army, right?
So, I've talked about this on my blog, in the article called The Soldier's Freedom, but to say that, well, there's no draft that people are there voluntarily, it's kind of specious, because...
Economic opportunities are denied to them because the governments run the economy into the ground, especially in the low-rent manufacturing sector.
They're being heavily bribed with taxpayers' money stolen from other people and handed out to these people, so it's probably one of the few opportunities they feel that they're going to get.
They're lied to about what life is like in the army.
They're lied to about how long they have to serve.
They're lied to about the risks.
They're lied to about everything, and by the time they sign up, of course, it's far too late to do anything about it.
It's important to not sort of think that there's, even in a non-draft army situation like the United States, that it's all voluntary and kumbaya and they just love to fight and that's why they're there.
No, there's a lot of bribery and lying going on.
And if you did that kind of stuff in the free market, right, then...
Like if you try and sort of imagine this, right?
So you hire people promising them a huge salary and you end up paying them a pittance and you hire people with the promise that they won't have to travel and then they end up having to travel 50% of the time and you also release false earnings and false earnings projections and false past earnings in order to get stocks up.
Well, you're going to go to jail, right? Of course, the army can use all of these tactics and more for a far more nefarious end than causing people to lose some money, sort of lose a limb or I lose everything rather than lose an arm.
I can earn back the money.
I can't grow back the arm.
So that to me is fairly significant.
But I would say that you can't sort of look at people in the military as, you know, well, they volunteer, blah, blah, blah, they're heroes because they volunteered.
No. If they volunteer because they're heroes, then of course we would not say that heroes are exclusively made up in the ranks of the lower class, mostly minority, disadvantaged population, who come from very bad educational situations.
I wouldn't say that heroism...
is the result of being born in a trailer park and being educated at some pitiful government school and being fed propaganda your whole life and having no economic opportunities.
We can call these people heroes.
I just call them cornered.
But, of course, if they really were heroes, then we would expect that as one's education went up, one's enlistment to the army would go up because we would assume that virtue has something to do with knowledge.
But, of course, quite the opposite occurs, that those who have more education never go into the army, which, of course, must mean that those with the most education are the most cowardly and corrupt and least heroic.
And George Bush, not badly educated, I guess, so relative to the soldiers he's sending out, he would be far more immoral, blah, blah, blah, right?
So please don't make this mistake.
Now, that's just within a non-draft situation, right?
It's a non-draft situation. Now, let's have a look at it in terms of sky bombing the shit out of the Iraqi army.
They send up their B-52s and unload carpet loads of bombs, truck loads of bombs over these poor bastards huddling in the desert who've been dragged from the farm, who've been handed an ancient, rusty, probably broken Kalashnikov with very little ammo, if any, all of which is perfectly useless against B-52s cruising at 15,000 feet,
and they're just sitting there huddled in their bunkers In the dunes as bombs go up around them and bunker busters throw their friends' limbs in the air and calling these people saying, well, we can kill them because they're combatants versus non-combatants is really funny.
I mean, it's sad and horrifying, but it's got a kind of grim humor to it, right?
It's like calling somebody who is grabbed in a hostage situation, right?
So some bank robber grabs a teller and drags her to his car.
It's like saying, well, we can kill her because she's part of the gang.
She's in the car, so she's part of the gang, so let's just kill them all.
No, we do understand that people who are kidnapped are not necessarily part of the gang.
And given that just about all forms of warfare in the world are kidnap situations or bribery situations with little alternatives for the people as a direct result of prior government actions...
I think it's a little specious to say that there are these people, see, and they are combatants because they're carrying a gun and are willing to shoot us, and there are these other people, see, who are non-combatants because they are women and children and don't have the guns and blah blah blah.
Well, you know, it's a hostage situation.
It's like, it's kill or be kill.
These people who end up in the Iraqi army who were bombed by the B-52s or, you know, there was almost no particular firefighting that went on.
These people are not combatants in any sort of reasonable sense of the word.
They're just poor bastards who are dragged out and given a gun and told that they either fight or, you know, you go fight or we're going to shoot you now.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, they're people we can kill, because boy, are they ever-voluntary combatants who just hate the United States, and I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
Armies are just, they're wars of puppets, I mean, as far as that goes, right?
I mean, people in the army are all just fed propaganda, and bribed, and lied to, and bullied, and have no other opportunities, because the moment people do have other opportunities than the army, they tend to...
Not go into the army, right?
So there are puppets on that side.
And so basically you have, you know, the bribed fighting the coerced.
I mean, that's the great noble differentiation between these two armies.
You have those who are bribed through the use of violence fighting against those who are coerced through the use of violence.
And this is the great noble heroic army battle that we see, right?
It's just a bunch of deranged puppets fighting each other For the whims and profits of the masters, right?
I mean, it's ridiculous to then say, well, I'm going to divide these people into combatants and non-combatants and feel that it's okay to kill the combatants, but we shouldn't kill the non-combatants.
It's like, oh, okay. Well, that seems reasonable.
So the guy who gets killed by Saddam Hussein is a non-combatant, but the guy who's trying to survive by huddling in a bunker as the bombs rain down about him, clutching an old rifle, he's a combatant and we should kill him, right?
I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous.
And so, these kinds of statements are pretty sad.
And this is somebody who's obviously had some training in, obviously, modern political philosophy.
He's obviously had good training in, decent training in logic, I would say.
He still has no idea how to go around building a science of ethics, or at least based on the two chapters I've read on the science of ethics.
That hasn't occurred yet. It may occur as we move forward in the book.
I doubt it, but we'll see.
His basic approach to ethics is, you know, we should do that, which maximizes human pleasure and minimizes human suffering, all the utilitarian nonsense that goes on.
And so he no longer uses, he can't solve the problem that ethics don't exist in nature, and so we can't ever come up with anything other than the pleasure-praying principle, which obviously is relevant to ethics, but is not the deciding factor, because otherwise ethics would be totally fragmented.
Because people's pleasure-pain mechanisms are widely distributed, let's say, across the planet.
And so I would say that it's important to understand his limitations.
It's a good book to read because it's very instructive on a number of levels.
And I would go into it in a little bit more detail.
I think it's worth it because it sort of combines so many errors.
Of socialism that it just is very instructive to see how hard it is for human beings to give up on collective illusions, right?
So, this guy's anti-God, but he's pro-government.
And he's pro-world government, right?
He doesn't even want a bigger government at home.
He wants the ultimate world government, right?
The Zog, or whatever it's called by these paranoid people.
But it's just, it's funny.
And it is the kind of stuff that we're fighting here.
And this, of course, is the kind of thinker who gets...
You know, a post at Harvard, and that's important to understand, but the culture is from that point as well, right?
The moment somebody's popular, you've got to look upon them with suspicion, let's say, because they're appealing to a particular demographic which is not well-informed and which is sort of simply seeking to have its prejudices confirmed.
So we'll talk a little bit more about that later.
Thanks so much for listening.
I appreciate it.
It wasn't too bad a commute. I think I'll be able to take this job if I want it.
About 45 minutes, and I'm about 35 now, so just think.
A little bit more podcasting until I can find some way to do this full-time.
Thanks so much for listening. Sorry that the website is down.
I have a listener who's trying to give me a hand, and unfortunately, he was not able to finish his job last night, but I'm sure we'll get that up and running pretty soon.
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