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Sept. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:51
401 Who is to blame? (continued from 391)

Combing over who takes the rap for the hell of the world

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
It is 9.27 on Tuesday, September the 5th, 2006.
We're doing a regular old-fashioned podcast today, and I'm going to chat about a problem I have not solved, and a problem which I'm sure can be solved, So far, I have not had the best luck in the world in solving it, which is a good thing, because it means that I'm chewing some new mental cud, so to speak, and getting a chance to really expand my knowledge and my theories about the way the world works.
And the question for me is the one that I talked about in 391, this question around responsibility.
And it really is quite a challenge for me anyway, and it could be because I have a particular block, but it could also be just that it's a very thorny and difficult question.
The question around responsibility is when you look at the death toll of 260, 270 million people killed by governments last century.
The question then becomes, well, who's responsible?
Who is responsible for this?
And it may be, I mean, there may be five things that jump to your mind, as there were five things that jumped to my mind.
But on closer analysis, it's fairly clear, to me at least, that the things that jump to my mind are not clear solutions to the problem.
So historically I've always felt, well, it comes down to the cops, basically the agents of the state who will take money in order to terrorize the citizens at gunpoint.
And that seems like a fairly good answer to me, but the problem that remains with that theory, which the theory does not solve, just saying it's all the cops' responsibility, or the soldiers, or the gulag prison guards, or those who drag the Jews and the gypsies into the concentration camps...
And point guns at them if they don't go into their cyclone B showers.
The problem with that theory is that if we say it's purely the cop's responsibility, then it doesn't explain why policemen in certain countries and societies are far less prone to violence than policemen in other cultures and societies.
So policemen currently in Saudi Arabia are perfectly keen to cut off the hands of Of thieves and stone, quote, adulterous women to death and so on, whereas the soldiers and policemen within North America and Europe are not content to do those things, things.
And of course, over time, those things may end up as part of our repertoire once more.
But there is a significant difference that's fairly universal between the policemen of the West and the policemen of other sort of free democratic countries and the policemen of other societies.
So if it's entirely 100% the policeman's fault, then the difference between societies in terms of the violence that the police are willing to pursue against innocent civilians is such a, there's such a wide degree of difference between the violence the cops are willing to do in different societies that saying there's such a wide degree of difference between the violence the cops are willing to do in different societies
I mean, if you have two petri dishes with the same bacteria, and one flourishes, you know, 500 fold compared to the other one, then you can't simply say that the only causal factor is the bacteria, because there must be some other consideration that is going on.
So, So it really can't be the corpse alone.
Even if you look within Germany, right?
What were the corpse... What were they willing to do in 1960 versus what were they willing to do in 1940?
You know, there's quite a bit of considerable difference between those two.
So there must be some other factor that is involved.
Now, of course, I began to examine the question of the intellectuals, which is those who create what is generally considered to be the norm, what is defensible within society.
As I have often said, the argument for morality is the most powerful thing in society.
And the intellectuals own the argument for morality.
This is not something that is owned by the cops.
The cops don't write papers on philosophy.
They don't create the normative justifications for moral or immoral actions within their own society.
So it really would be unfair to say to the average cop who has not even completed university that...
This cop is then responsible for what is considered normatively or unbalanced moral or immoral within a society.
The soldiers do not invent the moral justifications for soldiering.
You could say that they profit from it in terms of resources and respect, but they do not themselves.
The average grunt soldier in Iraq is, you know, grade 12 education if he's lucky or she's lucky.
And these are not people who create these kinds of justifications.
If you look at Abu Ghraib, then you can see that the normative justifications for the torture and the abuse came from the top levels of government, and that I doubt that Lindy England or these other people are now at home locking people in their basements and that I doubt that Lindy England or these other people are now at home locking people in their basements and
So it doesn't seem very likely to me that somebody like Lindy England or the people who were the grunts at the war front in Iraq are the ones creating the circumstances that make themselves possible.
The respect for the soldiers, the respect for foreign policy, the respect for the leadership, and so on.
So then, it seems that you want to look at not the individual soldiers or the individual policemen who are pointing the guns at the innocent civilians, but instead you want to look at the intellectuals.
Now, as I've talked about in previous podcasts, looking at the intellectuals makes me somewhat nervous, and I'm not sure if that's because I shrink back from the conclusions of the possibility of applying principles of physical self-defense to intellectuals, but certainly and I'm not sure if that's because I shrink back from the conclusions of but certainly it seems possible to be the case that the intellectuals are responsible for creating the climate of what is normal and approved of within society,
and if what is normal and approved of within society is what we currently have, where thugs are praised for and if what is normal and approved of within society is what we currently have, where thugs are praised for taking money from the state to go and kill people, then the root cause of the violence of the 270 The soldiers who pull the trigger are a symptom of the minds that produce the ideas.
Now, if that possibility is true, Then it would be sort of analogous to the following situation.
Let's suppose that you are a black man tied to a tree.
Let's just say your hands are free, and there is a bunch of KKK nutjobs milling around, and they've sort of captured you, and they're trying to figure out what to do with you, and then The sort of grand wizard or whoever the leader of these bedsheet nightmares are jumps up on a tree stump and begins haranguing about how the black men rape the women and undermine the ethics of the children and they have to be put in their place and it's our Christian duty to X,
Y, and Z, and so on. And the crowd begins to get more surly as this man whips himself into a frenzy.
And... You have, let's just say you see a gun lying on the ground, and you know that it only has one bullet in it, and you want to obviously not get lynched, but this guy's whipping you, or you want to get killed, right? This guy who's on the tree stump is whipping these, you know, not-too-bright people into a kind of frenzy of hatred, with the power of his eloquence and the force of his language and his personality, and...
Let's just say you managed to sort of get yourself free, but you knew that if you ran off, everybody was going to charge after you into the woods and you were probably going to get caught.
And then, because you had tried to escape, that you were going to get killed.
Now, if you sort of have this one bullet and you want to get away and you're in a legitimate situation of self-defense, which I think we could all agree on here...
Who are you going to fire the bullet at?
And I posed this question on the board and got a variety of responses.
The response that I would put forward as the most legitimate moral action would be I, you know, sort of I would personally take an aim at the person on the tree stump who was whipping the crowd into a frenzy.
Because the eloquence and the rhetoric that is floating around is defining the moral reality and the next course of action for the crowd.
this is a crowd that simply cannot think for itself and i'll get to that in a few minutes but i would actually not necessarily kill the orator but i'd certainly want to stop the oration from occurring because the oration was the thing that was whipping the crowd into the frenzy of hatred that was going to result in me getting hanged or torn apart or you know hacked up or gunned down or something
and i would simply know that if the cause of the lynch fever that is gripping the crowd is the orator if i shoot a crowd member with the hopes of driving other people back just sort of one of the people milling around then the orator is going to seize upon that and use that as fuel to whip the crowd into a murderous frenzy towards me so if the orator is talking about how evil the blacks are and so on
and everybody's like well yeah but you know i got some some of my best slaves are black and if you then shot one of the people then he would say ah you see how violent they are and he would use the shooting if i shot one of the crowd members he would use that as an excuse to whip the So that really wouldn't work.
Now, of course, some people say I turned the gun on myself, but I wouldn't necessarily do that.
I would shoot the orator if I wished to save myself or have the best chance of saving myself.
And I would do it sooner rather than later.
Because you want to make sure that you shoot the orator before the mass, the crowd hysteria takes on a momentum of its own and the orator is no longer necessary.
So from that standpoint, I would say that if I wanted to give myself the best chance of getting away, then I would aim a bullet at the orator.
Now the question is, do you wound or do you shoot to kill?
Personally, I think that wounding would be pretty dangerous.
Let's just say you shot to wound this fellow and you just sort of dinged him.
Then he would rise up, blood streaming from his arm or something, and shriek out with all of the additional vengeance of physical pain.
The power of his oratory would only increase, and the drama of his visage and the force of his personality would Would only increase.
So I'm not sure that I would go just for a mere wounding, that I might in fact take aim at the orator who was whipping the crowd into a frenzy to get me killed.
I would take aim at the orator rather than somebody in the crowd.
And if I could run away without shooting a bullet, then I would also be in grave danger.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why the bullet becomes relevant.
Because if I tried to run away, the orator would see me and whip the crowd into the frenzy and say, he's getting away.
I would actually be in more danger.
But if I shot the orator, the crowd would then rush around and look at the orator and try and save him and try and help him.
It would be much more likely that I would be able to slip away unnoticed.
Now, of course, there's lots of problems with this whole scenario, and I'm perfectly aware of them, of course, that if you shoot the orator, the crowd is going to view that as an act of violence and howl upon you and so on.
But I think that there are certain situations under which this could be the most credible course of action.
Certainly shooting a crowd member is not.
Slipping away with the orator still going is going to create a problem because your trying to escape is going to be communicated by the orator as further evidence of your guilt and evil, and the crowd will be upon you.
I would say that the best chance that you have is to shoot the orator, and in the resulting confusion and moral dismay, to...
To sort of get away.
Because in the absence of the orator, it would seem to me the average person's going to want to sort of go back to his wife and his families, back to tilling his fields or whatever.
But with the orator around, the chance for them getting whipped into a genocidal frenzy becomes that much higher.
That the catalyst is the orator.
The catalyst for violence is the orator, not the gun, not the soldier, not the The bureaucrats and not the police, that the motives of these sorts of people are a mere effect of the orator's power and eloquence.
And we know that there is an enormous amount of power in eloquence if we look at somebody like Hitler or some of the other great orators, both evil and not so evil within history, that there is a great deal of power in this kind of oratory.
And the reason that I think that is the case, and the case that I would sort of make for it, is something like this.
In my experience and in my belief, philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, is by far the hardest, hardest, hardest, hardest field of human knowledge.
To rise above prejudice, to continue to be rational, to Receive the social ostracism that comes from thinking for yourself and questioning social mores in this indoctrinated age of state education.
These are all very, very difficult things.
There are obviously tasks that are incredibly demanding from an intellectual standpoint, advanced mathematics and physics and so on, but there are very few people who get socially ostracized and hated for a discovery in mathematics or a discovery in physics or,
I guess, biology to some degree, Darwin in the 19th century, but there are very few people who face immediate hostility and hatred for rationalizing or advancing The science of physics or mathematics or even these days biology or geology and so on, although these are all very intellectually demanding pursuits.
But philosophy, and in particular in the realm of moral philosophy, although of course the question of the existence of God raises a few hackles itself, but the question around examining questions from a logical standpoint around Moral philosophy, political philosophy, sociology, social philosophies, the philosophies of human interaction and so on, philosophies of the free market versus coercion and so on.
All of these disciplines or all of these sub-disciplines of philosophy create enormous amounts of social hostility, friction, ostracism, problems, friendships get broken, families get torn asunder, marriages get split in two.
When you begin to take a philosophical approach, a rational, scientific approach to questions of ethics, and you also have your own indoctrination, or at least I certainly have had my own, and continue to have, my own indoctrination and habitual conditioned thought to overcome,
because I had been sort of slammed between the two irrational poles and of religious instruction and state conformity when I was a child, so there's still things that I have to work on to overcome.
And the social rewards for conforming to the ethical theories currently in vogue within your society is enormous.
You simply get, as an intellectual and particularly as a communicator, you get extraordinarily well paid by the state and other institutions and religious institutions as well by passionately advocating the status quo In the field or in the realm of ethics and morality.
So there are both enormous negative consequences, extraordinary personal introspective requirements, and the capacity to resist the temptation of selling out to lend your talents to support the status quo is And this is all combined with the extraordinary conceptual difficulty of working out ethics from a rational or empirical standpoint.
So if you put all of this sort of together in one big bag, you end up with a very challenging, let's say, and I would say the most challenging area of human thought, the most difficult to come to an objective conclusion to, the most difficult to communicate in a way that is neither hostile nor fearful,
the most challenging to handle in terms of The volatility of the feedback that comes along, there are enormous challenges, and I would say that this is, in both its complexity and its social cost, and the temptation of social rewards for championing the status quo, the field of moral philosophy is the most difficult field in human thought.
So, what does that mean?
Well, if it is the most difficult field in human thought, then The average person has no chance whatsoever to think for himself in this area.
I mean, I know that that sounds a little bit like, yes, a guy who's four feet tall could conceivably play in the NBA, you just never see it, right?
So, it is possible, I guess, in some sort of mad, I guess, idiot-simile kind of way, that a person with an IQ of 100 could trip over or spontaneously generate the theory of relativity or some A new moral theory that is valid, but you don't really see it happening.
So I think, to all intents and purposes, we could say that it is impossible.
And if the average person is never going to have any luck thinking for himself in the moral sphere, then he has no choice whatsoever but to rely on the opinions of experts.
So, for instance, it is impossible to do surgery on yourself when you have the requirement for general anesthetic, right?
Because you're knocked out, and so somebody else is going to have to do the surgery for you.
So, given that it is impossible to do surgery upon yourself, and even if you take out general anesthetic, let's say brain surgery or back surgery, which you can't reach, Even if you could withstand pain, it is impossible to do surgery on yourself.
Therefore, when you need surgery, you have no choice but to rely upon an expert.
No matter how much you study, you're never going to be able to do surgery on yourself.
And in the same way, I would say that for the average person, So, for the average person, the chances of them being able to think for themselves in terms of moral philosophy is virtually so small as to be non-existent.
So, given that it is impossible for the average person to think for himself or herself in terms of moral philosophy, then it seems inevitable that they will have to rely upon experts.
And just as we do not expect the average person to be able, or any person, to be able to perform back surgery on himself, we cannot conceivably hold it, the average person, as responsible for what they believe to be moral and what they believe to be immoral, with some caveats, which we'll get to later.
But in terms of the received wisdom of ethical goods and evils, they must, must, must rely on the experts.
Now, one of the other reasons that we know that moral philosophy is the most challenging of human thought endeavors is that despite over 2,000 years, 2,500 plus years of ethical theories, there is nothing that is considered consistent or constant or universal throughout the world as far as ethical theories go.
So even if we accept that it is the most difficult of human endeavors and it requires a great deal of intelligence and integrity to work through ethical theories, then the average person is also going to survey the field, the average sort of layperson is going to survey the field of ethical theories and see that in practice there are enormous inconsistencies around the world, right?
So there's dictatorships, there's democracies, The democracies that we have right now are vastly different from the democracies that were put in place during the 18th century.
We had originally the separation of church and state, and now we have the growing unity of church and state, at least particularly in America.
We have ethical theories around the virtue of selfishness.
We have ethical theories around the virtues of self-sacrifice.
We have utilitarianism.
We have pragmatism.
We have objectivism. We have To whatever small degree, things like free domain radio, we have enormous and hugely varying ethical theories that also change day to day, right?
So something can be illegal one day, which we presume to be has something to do with ethics, and then becomes legal the next day or vice versa.
And there's no particular transition that's understood.
There's John Rawls' theory of justice.
There is existential theories of subjective morality.
There are, I mean, you could go on and on, but there are enormous and wildly conflicting systems of ethical thought after 2,500 years of pretty much the most intelligent people in the species working very hard to try and define years of pretty much the most intelligent people in the species working There is still no consensus.
In fact, there's barely a consensus about reality in philosophy, let alone any kind of consensus in the realm of ethics.
Now, you can point to other fields and see that there are problems with consensus there as well.
Of course, you could look in economics and you can see the tension between the free market, the state, and central planning and say, well, there's no consensus there either.
But certainly after the stagflation of the 70s and into the 80s and the Nobel Prizes that were awarded to the free market economists, there are some movements towards a return to classical economics.
So there's some consensus, at least there.
And there are some consensus on the basics within economics.
The basic reason for being for economics is that human desires are limitless, but all resources are finite.
That you have a demanded supply curve, that Say's law is considered to be pretty valid by just about all economists, that the idea that the overprinting of money produces inflation is fairly well understood.
There's a lot of consensus, and of course there are very few economists these days who are pure socialists or Marxists, so...
Within the realm of economics, there's some consensus, at least.
But, of course, economics is tied to government policy, and economists are pretty universally bought off by the state.
So there's not a lot of consensus there.
If you look in the realm of theology, you see a similar lack of consensus around what is virtue, what is spiritual, what is God, what God's nature is, what man's relationship is to God, and what is permitted and what is denied,
and so on. And so, if you compare this to something like the scientific method, then you can see that in the social sciences, particularly, I would say, in the realm of moral philosophy, that there's no consensus that comes anywhere close to the kind of consensus that is accepted,
not just in the scientific community, but in the community of informed and intelligent laypeople who That there's no consistency in moral philosophy relative to something like the validity of the scientific method.
There's no scientist around who says we should not use the scientific method.
We should instead consult the Dalai Lama or something like that.
And so, from that standpoint, it is embarrassing.
And if we understand that the most intelligent people in society for 2,500 years...
Have not been able to come up with anything even remotely considered a consensus in the realm of metaphysics or epistemology, let alone things like ethical theories or political theories.
To me, expecting the average layperson...
To have any kind of consistent approach to ethical theories is completely ridiculous.
It's completely ridiculous.
It is exactly like asking somebody from the Middle Ages to program a computer, right?
I mean, they won't even know what a computer is.
And so asking for human beings to act with integrity in the realm of ethics when ethics remains such a scattered and contradictory field after millions of person-hours from the most intelligent people in history Over 2,500 years, that that has not produced anything even remotely, like a consensus, is...
I mean, if the intellectual simply can't be consistent in any way, shape, or form, not even just between themselves, but even within their own systems, right?
I mean, just to take as a silly example, I mean, Marx, of course, believes that there's no such thing as private property, that property is theft, yet manages to accumulate a vast amount of property...
I mean, that's kind of funny,
right? That there's no consistency that you can find within a moral philosopher's own life, let alone between moral philosophers and so on.
So, if we understand that moral philosophy is the most difficult aspect of human thought, and that 2,500 years have produced zero consistency, not only between ethical theories, but even within ethical theories themselves, obviously there's no consistency in modern political thought, This is true even of objectivism and most forms of minarchist libertarianism.
There's no consistency in philosophical thought or ethical thought in the realm of politics because, of course, everyone who believes in the state is required or valid must also believe that what is allowed to the people who wear the hat of the state is directly opposite to what is allowed to the people who do not wear the hat of the state.
So even within those who are anti-state, or at least anti-large state, there's no consistency within those ethical theories either.
So if the most intelligent people for 2,500 years have been unable to solve the problem in any consistent manner, either between the theories or within the theories themselves, asking the average cop to figure out moral philosophy is really quite ludicrous.
It's completely ridiculous.
And so to me, assigning moral responsibility to a cop When the philosophers themselves can't figure out ethics in any consistent way, it's completely ridiculous and something that creates a fair amount of hostility from the average person, and I include myself in this, of course, as somebody who's put forward that the cops are to blame and is now reconsidering the position.
It creates a lot of hostility towards the Those who are manifestations of ethical theories, those who are taught what is good and what is evil by their teachers who receive it from whoever who receives it from whoever who reads it in some book by usually a long-dead philosopher.
So I think that it's fair to say that the philosophers are more responsible than the cops.
Now, of course, then the question becomes if the most intelligent people throughout the history of the world Have been unable to solve the problem of ethics in any consistent or logical fashion, anything that even remotely approaches the rigor of the scientific method or anything like that, then can the philosophers be held responsible either?
And, of course, it's hard to say that they are as well, because they have been obviously unable to solve the problem.
Now, the question is, have they been unable to solve the problem Because they have been unwilling to confront emotional biases or historical biases or even familial biases or biases that come from their social circle.
In other words, if Immanuel Kant decided to be purely rational and to apply the categorical imperative to all aspects of philosophy, then he would have ended up As a sort of market anarchist and a rational, objective moralist in the style, I think, that we're trying to put forward here.
Well, did he not do that because he was corrupt and bought out by the state and wanted to be popular and wanted to save the existence of gods and devils and so on?
In other words, did he have the emotional capacity to do it, but decided not to?
Well, of course, there's no real way to tell.
You can't psychologize.
People who were long dead accepted the most cursory sort of forms.
And so the only thing that we can do is really look at the philosophers that are around today and sort of see what realities they are putting forward.
And you can look at people like Sam Harris, who I've talked about in a previous podcast, who talks about a world government as a solution to The problem of religious violence.
And we could certainly say that Sam Harris probably does not run his own life as sort of a form of mini-state and uses guns to get his ideas across, but instead actually writes books and tries to argue with people.
Now, why is it that somebody like Sam Harris or John Rawls or these sorts of modern philosophers are completely unable to promote the kind of ethics that they live their own lives by?
It's hard to say. It's hard to say.
I think that If you do try and work empirically from what works within your own life as far as ethics go, then it's really not that hard to come up with a non-aggression principle, especially for people who are in university or philosophers or academics or thinkers of every kind because we thinkers use rational argument, we use evidence and so on.
So it's really not that we don't use violence to get our ideas across.
So it's really to me kind of hard to understand Why it's so hard for people to simply work out from what works within their own lives to ethical theories in the abstract.
Yes, I use property.
Yes, I exchange for mutual benefit with others.
Yes, I do not use violence.
Yes, I, you know, all these kinds of things.
And then say, well, that's how I live, and maybe ethics has something to do with how I live.
But people of course can't very easily work with that because of the social cost, right?
The moment you start to work ethics out from actually how you live...
Then there's pretty significant effects on your social circles, let me tell you that.
And if you haven't experienced that, it's because you haven't communicated with energy and consistency the non-aggression principle.
Trust me, it will be very exciting for your family and friendship and professional circles if you bring this to bear on questions that people have.
So I can generally only say that the central problem around ethics is one of fundamental hypocrisy, that people do not use violence in their daily lives, but advocate it as a useful or an essential tool for solving social conflicts, though they would never consider deploying it themselves.
It's the exact equivalent of a man who is tendered towards his wife, advocating the rape of women to keep them down in the social sphere.
People who do not use violence within their own life, advocating the existence of governments and soldiers and police forces in the social sphere as a methodology of solving problems.
Now then the question becomes, of course, I'm not saying I'm going to solve it all, this is just sort of the balance of what it is that I'm thinking about.
The question then becomes, well, why the hell don't people see this very clearly?
Why don't people see this very clearly?
And where I'm sort of settling in on, and I have to do some research to come up with some better empirical supports for this particular approach, But I'll just sort of leave you with this thought about the ways in which I'm approaching this question of who's responsible, is that, to me, the fundamental problem that occurs with people who are unable to see the violence of authority occurs within childhood, the fundamental problem that occurs with people who are unable to
I mean, something that is this deeply rooted and this widespread must occur In a common set of early experiences, or it's genetic, which I don't believe, of course, because then I would have to define myself as a non-human being, which I think would be, let's just say, a tad premature.
Perhaps E.T., my daddy, will beam down and tell me about everything that happened before I was born, but I'm not holding my breath for that particular circumstance to occur.
So it must be some sort of common early childhood experience or continual childhood experience that produces this blindness, this inconsistency between Virtue and values and actual life decisions.
Why virtue and values are considered to be so completely divorced in the abstract state or religious sphere from how one actually lives one's life.
This dichotomy, this split, this completely non-empirical way of working must come from some early childhood experiences.
And so, for instance, when religious fundamentalism was the core value within society...
Throughout the Dark Ages, the later Roman Empire of the Dark Ages and the early to middle Middle Ages, then we could say that people had these beliefs as a whole because they were heavily frightened and beaten and brutalized as children for the sake of these beliefs, and therefore they grew up with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome attachment to the beliefs that caused them great harm as children.
So I think that would be a fairly reasonable approach to take.
And it wasn't that human beings were innately non-scientific or anti-free market, as I talked about on Sunday.
What actually occurred was that people were just beaten, bruised, and terrified into believing particular things.
And anytime they tried to think for themselves, they'd get beaten again.
It's a fairly clear way and a fairly effective way to prevent people or have people shy away from any kind of independent or individual thought.
And so it must be early childhood experiences that occur, and the only thing that I can think of that would be common enough to everyone to produce this dichotomy or this split between what one lives and what one believes or posits as an ideal It must be because the parents are exercising brute power over the children, but the children are taught that the parents are virtuous.
That is the only conceivable explanation that I can come up with.
Of course, it doesn't mean that it's the correct one.
It's just all that I can come up with, right?
That's just sort of my stab at it after about two weeks of...
Fairly heavy grinding about it.
That our parents inflict upon us social conformities.
They inflict upon us anti-true self, subjective, irrational thinking, which is not the end of the world.
What is the end of the world is that we are taught that they are virtuous, and parents teach us that We should believe X, Y, and Z not because they're frightened if we don't, not because they get angry if we don't, not because they're offended if we don't, but because it is true and virtuous and noble and true and valuable and good and heroic and courageous and all the things in the world that you could imagine that you could throw at as far as positive moral epithets to particular beliefs.
So, you know, for instance, if you grow up and you don't necessarily believe in God to begin with, but then your parents teach you all about God and And they tell you that God is love, and they tell you that you should believe in God because God exists, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, this comes back to the question of full disclosure, which I'm still going to keep working on, but the question is, for the child, why am I being taught that this is true?
Well, parents don't say, well, I'm teaching you that this is true because this is what I was taught, and because I've got no proof that God exists, it's just that I get very nervous and scared when I think about God not existing, or whatever, and this is true for Things like democracy, or, you know, if you're a Republican or a Democrat, your parents are Republicans or Democrats as you begin to get into the political realm, and so on.
But basically, parents teach children all these morals that they have absolutely no belief in, no way of proving, because, of course, if even the major philosophers can't come up with consistent theories of ethics, then the average parent has zero hope whatsoever.
But the parent doesn't say to the child, all of this is simply what I was taught.
It's got value in terms of social conformity, but I can't claim that it's true and I can't prove it.
And so parents don't have full disclosure with their children when they're teaching their children social rules, for understandable reasons.
If you teach your children that you should not steal just because it's frowned upon and disapproved of and you want to conform to people, you're going to have a fairly tough time fighting their natural conformity to their peer pressure group within the teenage years.
You're just not going to come across as much of a hero to your children if you're just teaching them to blend into the wallpaper because it's socially convenient.
That's going to be very tough to come across with as parents.
So parents need to teach or feel the need to teach their children as if what they're teaching their children is true and proven and virtuous when it's simply what they've been taught and what's been handed down and what they're expected their children to conform to for a variety of reasons.
And so as children go through that process there is a complete split a complete dichotomy that grows within them in that the values that they receive are considered to be true but have no proof And the fundamental problem, as I mentioned, is not that they have no proof, but that their parents are teaching them as if they're true, which means that the parents are kind of lying and bullying and overstepping their bounds as far as what they're teaching and why they're teaching it occurs.
So, I mean, I've talked about this sort of parental stuff a lot, but I think that this has a lot to do with why people grew up with this complete dichotomy between how they live and what they preach.
How they live and what they preach.
And there's so many examples of this throughout history that we could spend a thousand podcasts on it and still not be done.
But fundamentally, this dichotomy between how people live, which is in a non-violent state, and what they preach, which is violence in one form or another, through statism or through warmongering or through certain kinds of religious beliefs, That they themselves live peacefully, but they advocate violence.
It must be because they really feel no emotional or tangible connection between life and virtue, between experience and ideal.
And that must be something that's taught to them as children.
And so this is one of the reasons why I'm going to work on this question of full disclosure for a variety of professions, the most important one, of course, being the parental one.
And so in the question of who's responsible, then I think obviously the philosophers are responsible for not coming up with a system, a clear system of ethics, or for saying that there's no such thing as ethics, right?
It's sort of one of the two should occur.
And yet those philosophers themselves were raised by parents who created within them this dichotomy, this complete lack of connection between how you live and what you preach.
And so it's hard to expect that the average philosopher, even however intelligent he or she may be, is going to be able to overcome all the emotional barriers that come up when you begin to consider that your parents may have just lied to you for the sake of their own convenience.
They did not tell you the truth about virtue and ethics.
And they told you that everything was good when all they were really communicating was everything that made them comfortable and everything that was expected within society.
And they told you to think for yourself...
But taught you everything about how to conform to society without telling you that that's what they were doing.
So I think, I'm starting to sort of think, and I'm going to do some more research to try and work this idea out further, I'm starting to sort of think that the people who may be the most responsible are those who teach parents how to parent.
I think that those are the philosophers or the intellectuals who perhaps do the greatest damage to the world.
Because parents don't invent parenting.
They don't sort of work it all out themselves on a big chart.
They work sort of instinctually based upon the social norms for parenting.
And that, I think, is where the intellectuals do the greatest damage.
If it's true that corruption within thinking as an adult comes from contradictory rules and ideals communicated to children, then those who teach people how to parent are the most responsible for the corruption in the world and the violence that ensues that then those who teach people how to parent are the most responsible for the corruption in the world And so I'm going to have a bit of research or do a bit of research towards parenting theories.
Of course, the most fundamental parenting handbook throughout the history of the West has been the Christian Bible.
and of course this is the same for the Quran as well.
So I'm going to have a look into those texts, and I know something about what they speak about in terms of child raising, i.e.
spare the rod, spoil the child.
This idea that children are fundamentally evil because they haven't conformed to things which aren't true yet, i.e.
religion. But I think that the people who write about how parents should parent are the most responsible for the problems within the world because it all starts at home.
It all starts with the family and simply plays out from there.
And war and corruption and violence and the state and the brutalities of religion and the brutalities of prisons are all an effect of what we are taught as children.
And so I would say that That those intellectuals who teach parents how to teach children or teach parents what to teach children are the most responsible.
And we will have a chat about this some more when I have gotten around doing some research on this topic.
As it stands so far, I hope this has been helpful.
I hope that my continuing hacking away at this problem is of use to you.
And I hugely appreciate you continuing to pay attention to these podcasts.
I look forward to donations.
And they've been a little skimpy throughout August, and I would put that down to summer and travel and so on.
So if you have not donated in August but have listened, I think that it would be good for you.
I think they would be acting with integrity to throw some dollars my way.
50 cents a podcast is the recommended.
And thank you so much for listening.
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