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Sept. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:07
407 Who Is To Blame Part 4: A possible answer...

It's probably not who you think...

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So, this is sort of where I'm at as far as this question goes, and let's hope that we can make some sense of it, because it's really become my white whale.
It's starting to drive me completely mad.
So, this is sort of where I've ended up, and I think it makes some kind of sense, although I still have certain questions that remain unanswered for me.
So, The basic idea that I'm going to work with is a question of professionalism.
But first, let me sort of answer a question that's been floating around in the boards and in my emails, which is like, dude, who cares?
I mean, who cares?
Who is to blame? Why don't we just take all of the intellectual and emotional energy that we're putting into the question of who is to blame and instead start focusing it on creating solutions and reaching out to people and And I fully understand that, and I fully understand the emotional desire that people have to shy away from this question.
I certainly also fully understand that the question might be a complete fool's game, but, but, but, but, I do think that it's an important question for a number of reasons.
First of all, I think that we want to make sure, as a movement, as a philosophical movement, So, the obvious people who keep us down are the police and the military, right? Because without those, we could probably take Trent Lott with one hand tied behind her back.
So, without a doubt, what is apparent to us in terms of the people who keep us down is that it's the soldiers and the military.
We are also aware, I think, that the soldiers and the people who are the soldiers and the people who are the military are not entirely responsible for their own behavior.
And the reason that we can say that, just working empirically, right?
Again, we always want to try and work from the facts forward.
Just working empirically...
We, I think, want to recognize that there are certain times in history when soldiers do, you know, really, really, really bad things.
And there are other times where soldiers and the law enforcement professionals do not do such bad things.
So, you know, of course, comparing us to Soviet Russia or...
Mao's China or Hitler's Germany.
We can see that there's quite a bit of difference between the soldiers that behave, even if it's just sort of lip service, but measurably so.
There's a difference in the behavior of the soldiers and policemen who work in the current arena versus those who have worked at other times in history.
So, without a doubt, they are not the catalyst of their own behavior.
And we can argue, I think, until we're blue in the face, that all we need to do is get them to understand that they are, in fact, the catalysts of their own behavior or the free agents of their own actions.
But I don't think that that's going to work.
I think that you are going to have two major blocks in getting a cop to understand that he's probably enforcing some rather unjust laws.
The first, of course, is that he's then going to have to quit being a cop, and he's invested all of his energy, time, and labor into it.
The second...
Actually, three. Okay, it's three.
The second... Would be that you are asking him to comprehend and go against the grain a vast amount of philosophy that he probably has neither the time nor the inclination nor the ability to process, right? So this is why I don't go and speak at the police associations.
Because I don't really think it's going to do a whole lot of good.
In fact, I think it will do quite the opposite.
So, I don't think that we can go and talk to the cops.
And if we don't want to go and talk to the cops, then it must sort of stand to reason that we don't think that the cops are primarily to blame, that the cops are the effect of something else.
And there's a question of politicians.
Are politicians to blame?
Well, I would say that there are certainly probably more to blame.
They certainly have greater verbal skills and so on.
But they themselves did not invent the system that they profit from, right?
So that's another thing.
You know, in this sort of context, if we look at something like slavery in the South, right?
You have the cops, who would be equivalent to the slave catchers, and the abolitionists did not focus on the slave catchers.
You have the people who buy and sell the slaves, sort of equivalent to the politicians, and you have the slave owners themselves.
And... How is it that you approach getting rid of slavery?
How was it done in the past? Well, they just kept focusing on the ethics of it, of course, as I've said quite a number of times.
So we can't, I think, logically, and certainly there's not empirical evidence to believe that we can blame the cops as primary agents of their own behavior.
And similarly, I'm not entirely sure that we can blame the school teachers because they also did not invent the system and they're pretty well paid for not a huge amount of work and they get their nice and juicy two months off in the summer and professional development days and, you know, all this and that and the other.
So expecting them to walk away from teaching is going to be rather a stretch, right?
I mean... If I end up having a conversation with a teacher, if I get that teacher to admit that there's something immoral about the education, then he or she is very unlikely to quit and to sort of hit the reset button on his or her economic behavior, give up summers off, start all over again, have a huge income hit, lose her pension.
I mean, this is not very likely to occur for a variety of reasons which we've talked about before.
And so I don't think that we can even necessarily blame the teachers.
We also know, of course, that teachers teach, used to teach better, right?
I mean, they taught better before the introduction of the public school system.
And so there's some other factor that's at work, right?
I mean, if people's behavior changes over time in two different circumstances, like a murderer is always a murderer, right?
I mean, a murderer in any sort of time, locale, or whatever, is doing a universally bad thing and subject to sanctions, this, that, and the other.
So a murderer is always a murderer, but a teacher is not always corrupt.
You can legitimately have, in a free society, of course, you can have police functions, you can have a wide variety of other...
You have teachers, of course, right?
So people have said, and I think that's quite right in response to this argument...
They've said, well, look, you're going to have teachers and policemen and jailers and maybe even soldiers in a free society as well.
So, you know, these professions are not evil in and of themselves.
And, of course, they're quite right.
I certainly can't disagree with that.
So, it's not the professions that are evil.
And the people who are within those professions behave differently depending on different cultural circumstances.
As I mentioned before, either totalitarian police versus police.
You know, North American police who are not getting there, but not, you know, ridiculously bad just yet.
Unless, of course, you happen to have a predilection for recreational drugs, in which case they are absolutely stone evil fascists and so on.
But the professions are not evil in and of themselves, and the people who make up those professions change depending on the cultural circumstances, on what's generally accepted within society.
And so, I really...
You can't just sort of blame teachers in and of themselves, right?
Because, you know, without a doubt, if there is a general approach to...
Sorry, if there's a generally, statistically different way that people behave depending on different circumstances, then you can't just say, or at least I don't think you can rationally just say, well, these people are, you know, 150% totally and completely responsible...
For their own behavior, because clearly, empirically, they're not.
There's some other factor at work that turns people into, you know, Gestapo or NKVD or I don't even know what the Chinese version would be, but, you know, this similar sort of thing.
So, given that there is this other factor, then we can't blame people 100% for their actions, because empirically and statistically, it's fairly clear that people are not really in charge of their own behavior, because they generally tend to flow and follow, most people, of course, tend to flow and follow social opinions, social norms, cultural averages, and so on.
So, I don't think that we can rationally blame people.
People for their moral behavior because you can very easily see throughout history that people tend to conform to the normative standards of society and so we really can't rationally, I think, ascribe to them full freedom of will as if they were sort of wildly independent agents.
Now, the reason that I think it's important to get to the first cause is because If you're treating an illness, right, you kind of need to know what the full cause is, right?
So if somebody's sick because of their drinking water, it doesn't do you much good to complain about the air quality, and it also doesn't do you or the patient in particular That much good to treat the symptoms of the problem, right? So, in the question of who is to blame, it's not sort of a pogrom, let's go, lynch people kind of question.
At least I kind of hope it isn't.
I'm a little too old for lynching.
But... It is a question of what is the first cause, or what is the one thing that is primarily responsible.
And I think it's fairly important to work on this, because the freedom movement, a couple of hundred years old at least, a couple of thousand if you think that Socrates had anything to do with it, and even if you just count from Mises' work, then it's coming up close to a hundred.
He was writing in the teens of the last century, so...
Socialism has been disproven as an economically efficient methodology or system since the 1920s, the 19-teens, the 1920s.
So I would say that if philosophers of the freedom movement, libertarian philosophers, whatever you want to call them, anarcho-capitalist philosophers, Lissander Spooner and onwards, If we are doctors, you know, if we're sort of trying to heal society, which I think is a reasonable metaphor, then, you know, we're really bad doctors.
Technically, we're terrible, right?
I mean, we're putting ourselves forward as people who are trying to diagnose and cure a particular social condition called statism.
And we are, you know...
The plague is but increasing, and the health of the society is but decreasing over time.
And I would say that that's probably because we haven't figured out who's responsible, what is the first cause of this kind of plague within society.
So, yeah, I do think it's pretty important that we focus our efforts on the first causes, because life is short, and our intellectual energies are limited, and...
We should try and focus I think our time and energy On the core issue, the first cause.
If somebody's sick because of their water, we kind of want to figure out that it's their water.
And then if we figure out that it's their water, we can say, don't drink that.
Get some tap water and get your pipes checked because you're sick because there's this in your water.
And so far, we've been aiming at trying to diagnose and cure society for a couple of hundred years or a couple of thousand years.
And, eh, pretty bad, right?
I mean, we have a pretty pitiful track record, and, of course, I would count myself.
I'm sort of flinging stones from some cloud realm of perfection, because I, while I've had some success in changing people's minds, and I think some of that success has increased with Free Domain Radio, I would certainly not say that I have identified the first cause of what we're missing in terms of what's causing the world to become progressively less free minute by minute,
hour by hour. So I have not been as effective a physician, so to speak, as I would like to be, and that's why I'm really trying to focus on this first cause, right?
You don't want to... Keep treating the symptoms, and you don't want to have people continue to contribute to the behavior which is causing the illness to spread, right?
It's important to sort of stop what you're doing, I think, and reassess, right?
Maybe I have been watching too much house.
Who knows? But differential diagnosis, people.
That's sort of the approach that I like to take.
Now, the thing I think that is going to be the approach that I take...
This time, I have been really racking my poor, overtired brain at the moment, and what I've realized, of course, is that, and this is a pretty typical thing that you need to do when you're working on a problem, and...
You can't solve it. The thing that you need to do, of course, is to change your premises, right?
So the first thing that I realized is that I'm probably looking in entirely the wrong place for looking at proximate causality to the continuing and increasing lack of freedom in the world.
The continuing error within the realms of philosophy.
I think that...
I was looking entirely the wrong place.
Now, psychologically speaking, there's usually only one main reason that you look in the wrong place, and that's because it will cost you something emotionally to look in the right place.
That's usually fairly much the case.
So, of course, having recognized that this week, I began sort of thinking and talking it over with my wife, this sort of question of, like, where am I not looking?
That I am not able to solve this problem.
And so she wisely and gently led me to the place where I look in the place that is most costly for people to look when assigning blame, and that, of course, is in the mirror.
It's usually a fairly good place to start.
Now, I'm not going to pretend to have even an ounce of self-flagellation within my body, but nonetheless, I thought that that might be a worthwhile place to start.
And so I thought, okay, well, how could it conceivably be the case that I, who have devoted a fair amount of time and energy to the problem of trying to make the world as free as I can sort of affect it, how could I sort of be to blame?
And so we began talking about it, and I began sort of thinking about it more and more.
And this is what I've come up with.
And it really fundamentally has to do with an enforcement of professionalism.
And that's, I guess, an awkward or odd way of saying that what we need to do is to really continually and radically assert both the difficulty, the non-intuitive nature, and the need for professionalism, In terms of philosophy and particularly in the realm of political science and economics and ethical theories, of course, most importantly.
And what does this mean?
Well, if you sort of have a look at the scholastics of the Middle Ages, and, you know, who doesn't?
Who doesn't want to do that?
Then what they did was they basically theorized in a vacuum.
This was the major problem prior to the rediscovery of the Aristotelian texts in the early Middle Ages that the Arabs had kindly kept for us before self-destructing Muhammad.
If you have a look at the scholastics, basically what was occurring was people were asking and answering questions about The physical nature of the universe and other things, of course, but in particular in physics, right?
So people would sort of say, is the earth the center of the universe?
And they'd look up in the Bible and in Genesis it says that the earth is fixed, fixed, I'm sure, and does not move.
And that's, I think, a good answer if you're retarded or paid off, right?
As the sort of scholastics were by the Catholic Church.
So, you just look it up.
You look it up. You consult your prejudices.
You pay. Sorry, you pray.
You ask your priest.
You make it up.
You make it up.
You don't test.
You don't subject your theories to external validation.
You have no requirement to work from first principles.
Basically, there is no such thing as a science...
In the world of physics, there was no such thing in the early Middle Ages.
And what that meant was that any idiot, really, could be a scientist.
Any idiot could just read the Bible, make up physical theories, and people would argue about this, that, or the other.
And they'd have debates about translations of Aramaic or Hebrew and so on.
But basically, there was no rigor or no methodology to the examination of the physical world.
It's sort of like if you go back to even more primitivism, if people live by the sea and there's a tsunami, or if people live by a mountain and there's a sort of volcanic eruption, then they can either sort of move or figure out what happened, develop sort of science and theories and so on, to make themselves safe, or they can just listen to the mad idiot who says, oh, it's because the fire god is angry and we need to sacrifice somebody's firstborn.
And, of course, if they choose the latter, as pretty much all human societies have in the past, then not only do they end up with something that's ridiculous, wrong, brutal, destructive, and evil, but they don't, of course, actually solve the problem at all.
It's sort of fairly significant that sacrificing a firstborn has nothing to do with protecting them from a volcanic eruption, so that's not really a very effective solution.
Now, it is really a pretty basic fact of human cognition that common sense is an idiot's game.
It's completely retarded.
And I mean, again, I sort of mean this with regards to myself as much as anybody else, if not perhaps more.
But common sense is retarded, right?
Common sense is just parroting back the received idiocies of the ages.
So when you don't have a strict methodology in place for examining questions, then any happy mouth-breathing idiot can become a sort of quote scientist and can become a quote expert.
They just make up all the crap that they want and call it knowledge.
And it really does take a pretty concerted effort to...
If you look at the growth and development of a scientific method, it took quite a long time, and of course, sadly, quite a lot of burning of scientists to get this methodology across as sort of an acceptable way to answer questions, right? I mean, Galileo was tortured, and dozens and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of other scientists were tortured, killed, burned at the stake, and so on.
Because there was this war...
Between idiots, frankly, I mean, we'll get to this, and I'm putting myself in this category for taking so long to at least come up with this theory.
True or not, we'll sort of see.
But there's a war between the idiots who want to just go off opinion and the people who are actually interested...
In that little tidbit we call the truth.
There's lots of people who would rather just sit around and theorize about stuff in a vacuum because it's easier.
Actually coming up with the truth is a rather difficult and complicated business.
And so there's lots of people who would just sort of I like to theorize in a vacuum.
You think of Keynes versus Hayek with regards to the causes of the Great Depression, and you can sort of see the difference.
Keynes just sort of made stuff up.
Hayek actually went and did the research and found out that the Fed cut the money supply by a third during the early 1930s, which caused a collapse in prices and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, entirely engineered by the idiocies, corruptions, evils, and degradations of the state.
And so the real question to me then becomes, if there are lots of people in the world who, not just out of sort of malice or evil, but also out of a desire to get paid, right?
I mean, a priest doesn't get paid if he has to prove what he's saying, right?
Then he actually has to sort of become, you know, like a scientist, you know, like a thinker, not somebody who just...
Makes a corrupt living off falsifying reality and selling frightening fairy tales to susceptible children.
He actually has to sort of go out and get a real job, and that's not really what a lot of priests actually want to do.
So, in this sort of conflict between those who think they know, because they just kind of want to, and profit from it, of course, because if you can downgrade the requirements for truth to silly things like faith and belief and trust and deference because if you can downgrade the requirements for truth to silly things like faith and belief and trust and deference to authority and so on, then And sadly, of course, they're not the people who can think very well at all.
So, in this question of professionalizing the pursuit of truth, I wouldn't say that we philosophers have done a very good job of getting people to understand that the truth is a very difficult, very non-intuitive, very challenging very non-intuitive, very challenging and rigorous pursuit.
I I mean, I kind of accept that quantum physics is a pretty difficult, pretty intense, pretty educational dependent, it doesn't mean that you always have to be educated at a university or anything like that,
but I will sort of say that I accept that physics is a rigorous and challenging discipline that Happy idiots can't just wander in and make any kind of meaningful contributions.
So, if you can imagine, recently, a couple of Sundays ago...
Was it last Sunday? Last Sunday.
I had a debate with a teacher of physics.
He runs a department in some place.
And he ventured into...
This is sort of one of the things that helped me to start thinking about this respect for philosophy...
He sort of wandered in to make, and he did admit his lack of knowledge, and kudos to him for that, but he began to come in and to talk about philosophical conclusions.
And I was, you know, I think fairly civil and fairly pleasant and so on, but one of the things that struck me when I began to sort of try and put all of this together was that I sort of tried to imagine how it would have been If I had said to him,
yeah, you know, I've read some nature magazines, I've seen a couple of documentaries, I've read a couple of scientific Americans, and so on, and I would like to come and present a physics paper.
Well, I can't really imagine that he would say, sure, physics is a field that any What a sort of basically educated and somewhat literate layperson can come in and make contributions to.
Physics is a bunch of popular articles and stuff that your dad told you and stuff that you grew up with and maybe some stuff that your grade school teacher told you.
I mean, that's really all that is required.
When it comes to studying physics and making a contribution, right?
The really important thing in physics is, you know, you have a passion for it, that you've read some stuff, and then you can just start, you know, spewing out your opinions as if they're sort of absolute facts.
I've got to tell you, I'm no physicist, but I really do think that he would not take that approach.
I mean, we could ask him, but I really don't think that he would take the approach.
Like recently, I can't remember, I think the American Physics Association or some professional group, there was a controversy because the Dalai Lama was addressing them.
You know, he's a mystic and we're scientists, so why are we having this idiot in robes coming to tell us about X, Y, and Z? But I can imagine, I don't know what the details were, but I can imagine that the only defense that could be made for that is to say, well, the Dalai Lama is not coming to talk to us about physics,
right? The Dalai Lama is coming to talk about how He rejects Western materialism, but would really like his prescription refilled for his glasses, or how skinny legs can look good in a robe, or whatever.
He's going to come and talk about love and peace and so on, and how anti-materialism is best served through flying around the world in first class.
But he's not coming to talk to them about physics.
Anymore than I would be able to go and talk to a group of physicists about physics.
Why? Because I respect physics as a discipline.
Now, why do I respect physics as a discipline?
It's an interesting question, right?
Again, you don't want to take anything for granted in this realm.
Why do I respect physics as a discipline?
Well, kind of more or less, it's because a physicist will look at me with contempt if I make mistakes.
Some basic mistakes in physics.
And he will basically say, look, this is a complicated and difficult field.
I myself have taken ten years of higher education, almost a quarter century if you count my public school days, which we all have, so it sort of nulls out.
But it's taken me ten years of intensive study to come to some truth and knowledge about Mathematics and the physics that are involved and so on.
And even I, who am well studied, am baffled by certain aspects of it.
And I am still leagues away from others in the field and this, that and the other, right?
So, one of the reasons that physics and science as a whole has some respect is because that respect...
I think, is kind of enforced by physicists.
And they don't necessarily do it in a mean way, but it's kind of like you see this on some doctor shows these days, right?
Like, so patients have access to the internet.
And the doctors kind of say, oh yeah, well, sure, you have access to the internet, but that's not quite the same as having studied this thing for 10 years, having been a practicing doctor for 10 years, or whatever, right?
Just because you can look something up on the internet doesn't mean that you're a doctor.
I mean... Maybe it does, given modern education, but let's just say that there's a certain respect that is granted to doctors, right?
I mean, of course it's based on state monopolies and state accreditation and so on, but nonetheless, I don't think that people think that they read a couple of articles on medicine...
And then say, hey, look, I'm a doctor.
I can now go around prescribing to everyone else what they should, you know, eat and drink and what kind of exercise they should go through and so on, right?
So my sort of question is, why are the arts, right, the sort of philosophy and political science, ethical theories, economics, and so on...
Why is it that there's almost no respect for these disciplines whatsoever?
Why is it that every happy grinning idiot thinks that he or she can wander into this field and make significant contributions...
Relative to the field.
And I think that's a pretty central question to sort of ask and answer about what it is that we're doing in this field and why it is that we're failing so badly.
So when I sort of look back on my own education, my sort of history, that I began to read philosophy pretty seriously when I was in my mid-teens.
I'm now... Probably...
I am what? Gosh, I am...
I'm 16 days away from turning 40, right?
So that's 25 years of study fairly continually.
I have...
I mean, this is not to pump myself, right?
I mean, I'm sure there's tons of you out there who have more experience in education than I do, but just sort of to talk about the degree of work that I had to do to get to where I think I can contribute something to the field, right?
So I had to begin sort of reading this stuff up...
In my mid-teens and then I went to university.
I studied English literature and some history and some philosophy and then I did a couple of years at the National Theatre School in Montreal.
I studied playwriting and acting.
And I wrote some historical novels, some historical plays, which required a fair amount of work in terms of research and so on.
And I wrote a historical novel, which I eventually got published.
And then I transferred to McGill University, where I completed my undergraduate in history.
I took some courses on philosophy, intellectual history in particular.
And then I went to do my master's, where I took, obviously, more history, Not too well, but enough to get by.
And I studied some economics.
And during all of this time, I wrote historical novels.
I wrote a manifesto.
I tried to start a political party back when I was young and thought this would be a way to go.
And I engaged in voluminous debates.
I was a professional, semi-professional, semi-professional debater in university.
I was ranked eighth in Canada.
In my first year of doing it.
And so I studied all of that.
And then sort of at an interpersonal level, I've taken personal therapy to get me over some of my irrational sides or some irrational ideas or thoughts that I had, which weren't causing me a whole lot of happiness.
So I I've sort of tried to live happiness as a personal philosophy and freedom as a personal philosophy, which led me to some of the stuff that I've worked on with my wife's help about the family and family structures and how they interfere with freedom in a much more tangible way for many people.
Than politics sort of ever could.
So I've read, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of books on philosophy and economics and science and so on.
More scientific theory, of course.
I certainly have no particular bent towards the sciences.
So I have spent tens of thousands of hours studying and reading and thinking and arguing and debating and writing and so on.
And last but not least...
I've actually worked in the free market as an entrepreneur, so I think that I have a fairly strong understanding of market forces from a very direct, lots of skin in the game kind of way.
I co-founded a company, co-ran it for seven years.
I was a chief technology officer.
They sold that company.
So I've gone through some fairly significant educational processes with regards to free market economics, setting prices, supply and demand, and so on, right?
The value of the ideas within the economy and so on.
I mean, I've sort of been at the forefront of – I say at the forefront, you know, with the full disclosure that it was not a big company, never went larger than about 30 people.
And so it's not like I was giving Bill Gates a run for his money or anything.
But at the forefront, at least, of that sort of industrial cultural revolution and intellectual and economics revolution that went on with the computer industry, I was at least at the forefront in terms of having – you know, starting a company, running it through the boom, selling it.
and so on.
And so I've done a fair amount of sales and marketing and negotiations in the real world for pretty high-priced software packages and so on.
Again, this is sort of not to pump, you know, this is all pretty insignificant experience relative to lots of people in the world, but I think it's fairly safe to say that when I talk about economics with the combination of experience and, you know, 25-odd years of study and having participated directly you know, 25-odd years of study and having participated directly in the realm, in the economics realm as an entrepreneur, I think it's fairly safe to say that I can have some credibility when it comes to talking about economics and,
Can I have a Nobel Prize winning?
Of course not. Am I a professional economist?
Of course not. But That's neither here nor there, of course, because professional economists make up and say the most amazing nonsense in the world and, of course, have a lot to do with why the world is not particularly free.
In fact, have a lot to do with the world going in exactly the opposite direction.
So, from that standpoint, I think that I have a fairly good degree of credibility when it comes to talking about art, you know, as an artist, economics as a...
I'm an entrepreneur and amateur economist and sort of personal relations with the wife who's a therapist, having taken two years of fairly, I guess you could say, intense in terms of three hours a week therapy myself.
So I think that I can talk about these things with some degree of credibility.
And certainly, I would say, just sort of by the by, that there are few people in the general population, right?
The people who aren't really in this field in one way or another.
There are few people in the general population who have devoted as much time as I have, and probably as you have, in the pursuit of these kinds of truths.
And I would say that when it came to looking at other professions, if somebody was a tax lawyer, say, who'd spent, you know, 25 years studying tax law, just because I had seen a couple of newscasts and watched a documentary, or because my family had strong inherited opinions about tax law, I would not say that I would say, hey, you know, let's debate this as equals.
This is really the fundamental thing for me that is occurring within the freedom movement that is barring our progress.
And to me, I'm not saying it closes the book, but it goes a long way for me towards answering the question, who is to blame?
And I think that a strong case could be made that we are to blame.
And the reason that I think we are to blame is because we debate with people as if they are equals.
And I simply mean that in terms of...
It's very hard to learn the truth about the world and about yourself and about society.
It's emotionally difficult in a lot of ways, right?
Because you're kind of setting yourself at odds with just about everything you were taught to believe when you grew up, if you weren't homeschooled by, I don't know, Murray Rothbard.
And so you end up with a real challenging kind of journey, I think you could say, with regards to understanding and understanding Really knowing freedom in a sort of fundamental way.
So from that standpoint, I think the question of who is to blame for the world being in such a mess...
I think that it might be...
I mean, I was going to say me, but I don't want to say me because that sounds grandiose, right?
What do I add up to in the grand scheme of the history of thought?
Well, you know, not much yet.
But I think that a good case could be made for the proposition that when we debate with people who don't know, that they don't know anything, right?
Or, I mean, there's nothing more dangerous than thinking you know something when you don't, right?
I mean, knowledge is good.
Ignorance is second best.
False certainty is by far the worst and most dangerous of mental states to be in, right?
Going the right direction is one thing, is good.
Knowing that you're going the wrong direction is not as good as going the right direction, but at least it's correctable.
You can now turn around.
But thinking that you're going in the right direction when you're actually going in the wrong direction is totally disastrous because it doesn't respond to any outside stimuli and you kind of drive off a cliff, right?
Although, if the people who went the wrong direction philosophically actually did drive off cliffs, the world would probably be a whole lot better off.
So, I think that when we debate with people, I think that generally what I've heard in libertarian debates and so on, and in listening to and communicating with people about how they communicate about freedom, I think that we kind of debate with people as if they know, as if they have any valid opinions whatsoever.
I think that if we were, I'm not saying I'm going to be able to do this, I'm certainly going to give it a shot, and I will certainly report on the progress.
I think if we were able to do it...
To really set the boundaries of knowledge in a very effective way with people who have not studied and who don't know and who've, you know, they may have a PhD in political science, but they still haven't really thought things through if they haven't come to sort of logical and general kind of conclusions, right? It's like the very question of what is right and wrong, right?
Very few people know. It's just a bunch of cultural prejudices.
And so I think that if we're able to begin to approach the problem of people stumbling all over our field and not having a clue what they're talking about and just making up the most absurd and self-contradictory nonsense,
I think that we have to find a way to communicate, and it's a very hard thing to do without appearing to be hostile or aggressive, to To communicate that these people really don't know what they're talking about.
That you can find a way, and I'm sort of thinking back on times when I've wandered into other people's fields with all the bravado of overconfident youth, when I've wandered into other people's fields and started making pronouncements, how it is that I've been corrected that kind of He sort of brought me up short or sort of humbled me or made me at least realize that I was kind of in over my depth.
And I think that the way that I was generally corrected when I would wander into fields that I had no business having opinions about or thinking that I could add something to the debate was, you know, a very stern and confident kind of reproof.
You know, well, you are kind of like, you know, you haven't studied this stuff, so you can't really be expected to know.
And of course, you wouldn't really be wise to think that you do know something about, I don't know, nutrition because you read the backs of cereal boxes or something, right?
So...
I think that we really do need to find ways to get that across to people, to get them to respect that, as I've mentioned before, in this very series, to get people to understand that...
Philosophy and moral theories and economics and also it's very difficult stuff, right?
It's very, very hard stuff to do.
Intellectually, it's very difficult because we've been badly taught for so long, right?
So we were all brought up with the most aberrant nonsense and we had to learn the truth later on, which is always tougher, right?
You have to sort of backtrack quite a bit up a fairly thorny climb, not even count, just intellectually, not even counting the social difficulties of such a situation, but I think that if we can find a way to communicate to people that they don't know what they're talking about,
in the way that a physicist will do when an amateur guy who's read some magazine articles or whatever comes along and says this or that or the other as certain truths about physics, you know, you say, gosh, well, I don't mean to shock you, and I'm sure you're aware of this, but... Unless I completely blew my educational dollars in time, I think that it's more complicated than you're making out.
At least that's certainly my understanding, based on 25 years in the field, that you can't really get a physics degree from reading Scientific American, right?
You can't really get a medical degree by looking something up on the internet or watching House.
You can't get a dentistry degree by flossing.
So I think that we need to find ways of communicating that this is a very difficult field that amateurs should wander into with respect for those who actually have some knowledge within this field.
Of course, this is all very hampered by the fact that there are so many people in economics, political science, and philosophy who speak the most aberrant nonsense and get Nobel Prizes and so on.
But I think that's sort of the fundamental question of who is to blame.
I think that people like to have opinions about ethics, and they like to have opinions about politics, right?
It makes them feel smart, and it makes them feel involved, and of course...
It's considered to be like a civic virtue and so on.
But people don't know what they're talking about.
I mean, this is the great secret of Socrates, which remains unsolved to the present day, that people don't really have a clue what they're talking about when it comes to...
Most people, not everyone.
They don't really have a clue when it comes to talking about ethics and politics and so on.
And I don't really know the degree to which we make that clear to people.
And if we don't make it clear to people that this is a complex field with all of the, you know, I guess you could say kindness and to some degree condescension of a professional physicist listening to some, you know, some weekend astronomer talk about the nature of this,
that or the other, I think that if we don't assert the complex, highly challenging, highly non-intuitive nature of the field that we're in, then I think that, as far as who's to blame for the mess that the world is in, well, I think that it could be us.
Now, I'm obviously just putting this forward as an idea.
I'm not going to say that it's proven by any stretch of the imagination.
But it certainly did help me to look...
In a sort of slightly different place than where I was looking originally.
And so I certainly look forward to your feedback.
Let me know. I have also, for those who are vaguely curious about this as a tangent, those who have been listening to the audiobook of the God of Atheists, I've written, I've sort of gone more than halfway through it by now, up to chapter 45, I think it is.
Certainly, I don't know, a dozen, two dozen hours of, I think, pretty good audiobook reading.
And this sort of goes into some of this stuff in a little bit more detail.
But it's an excellent read, or I guess in this case an excellent listen, and it's available for only $50 donation to Free Domain Radio.
So thank you so much for listening.
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