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Sept. 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:17
411 My Apologies for Lecturing!

Some thoughts I have on the state of our community

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Time Text
I'm a rambling guy today.
I'm cruising around the house doing a couple of things, and I haven't gotten around to buying something which clips on, which I can use to record as I'm rolling about, but I did want to have a chat, and it's going to be a bit of a personal chat, and I apologize, of course, in advance if this doesn't apply to you, but I'm going to put it out there anyway just to see if my instincts are giving me anything correctly.
So, what I've noticed, and I knew that going, there were two things that were going to affect the listenership as a whole that I've been working on recently.
One is going to video, and the other is working things out from first principles.
And so the series that I've done, whether you've seen it or just listened to it, the series that I've done On the building of ethical theories from first principles with reference to neither any kind of authority or any kind of religious principle, it was quite challenging for me, at least it has been over the last 20 years.
And also, without violating the is-ought dichotomy, and also without taking the Randian approach that the highest value is human life, and everything which serves human life is the good, and everything which...
That was never particularly convincing to me, but instead to use the argument for morality, and to talk about how ethical theories are optional, like the scientific method, but if you propose them, they have to be consistent, that kind of stuff.
And I was originally going to continue on to the military and to the family on the videos, and I have found that my motivation has dipped a little, which of course is important.
I certainly believe in willpower, but of course I also believe in listening to instincts.
And so I wanted to take a sort of pause here and talk a little bit about stuff that may be occurring within our community today.
Just to see if it's at all occurring for you or whether I'm just imagining things, which it's always possible, but I'm going to go with my instincts for now and see if they make any sense.
So this is sort of what I think might be happening, and I think it would be valuable to have a chat about it because if it is happening, it's something that I certainly think it would be wise to reflect upon.
And so one of the things that I think could be happening is that now that I have worked out things like first principles, to whatever degree of satisfaction you feel that I have done so, I think that it's pretty good.
I think that it stands up.
And I have yet to be corrected on anything other than mild aesthetics.
I certainly haven't been corrected on anything Fundamental to the propositions, which doesn't mean that they're all correct, of course.
It just means that I can't find the flaw, and so far nobody else has been able to either.
But I think that what this has done for people, I'm guessing, and I'm saying this based on a number of emails and some sort of oblique posts on the board, wherein there seems to be a...
Sort of... I'm going to put this in a nice way.
There seems to be a certain amount of tension, not quite hostility, but there certainly seems to be a kind of tension among people about what it is that I've been doing lately.
And it's kind of subtle and kind of oblique, so I'm going to just sort of talk around it and see if it rings any bells for you.
And... It has to do, I think, that people are feeling a little bit railroaded.
I think that people are feeling that I'm telling them what to do.
I don't have to put it in any more of a subtle manner than that.
I think that people feel that I am telling them what to do.
And I think that people are feeling that Whereas for a lot of the podcasts, I worked out some oblique kinds of reasoning, and not oblique in terms of each individual component, but I hadn't really put them all together in sequence in a way that I think is pretty true.
Well, I think it's more than pretty true, but I'm not going to go out on a limb and say, you know, I've solved the problem of the ages, but...
I do believe that it's put forward in a way that I haven't really put forward before in terms of consistency.
And I think that what's happening based on emails, some posts, and also a staggering lack of donations, they've been pretty consistent for quite some time.
And since I put the videos out, I guess, and since I have completed at least the first round up to Politics Part 3, Of the Introduction to Philosophy series, they have pretty much dried up.
I guess over the last five or six days, I've received one donation of $100, which is quite low, all things considered.
So I'm sort of puzzling that over, and I'm taking a pause from the production of what it is that I'm working on in order to try and sort of figure out this, because I don't want to keep plowing on If I'm getting sort of a sense that there are things going on that sort of need to be addressed,
and again, I apologize for the oblique and obviously quite subjective and potentially completely wrong sense of what it is that I'm talking about, but again, I'm just sort of trying to follow my gut in terms of trying to figure out what's going on.
This is not something that I can derive syllogistically, it's just that I'm certainly aware that there has been Some sort of diminished something has that for a specific and precise philosophical dissection.
There has been a withdrawal of participation from a large number of people.
And I think, this is sort of what I think is occurring, and you can let me know if it seems true or not.
What I think is occurring is that I think people are feeling just a little bit cornered, and I think people are feeling just a little bit bullied.
And I think that people are feeling just a little bit railroaded, as I sort of mentioned before.
And what that can only result from is the feeling that the stuff that I'm talking about is Either authoritarian or top-down hierarchical or some sort of semi-off-putting orders for how to live or something like that.
And the reason that I think that's occurring is because we're so used to absolutes being hierarchical bullying that I think it's very hard for us To accept that absolutes can be very liberating and that absolutes are something that is not something which is designed to,
or absolutes are not statements designed to tell you how to live, but rather to liberate you from how not to live, right?
So it's a very sort of important distinction.
It's the difference between, you know, the thou shalt not and the thou shalt, right?
If I say, don't go to Albuquerque, you can go anywhere, right?
But if I say, go to Boston, you can't do anything else.
I mean, imagining that I have some sort of omniscient power of telling you what to do, which of course I don't.
But I think that it's important to look at the work that we're doing on the board, the work that I'm doing in the podcast and the videos, I sort of understand that although these are statements that I consider to be absolute truth, absolute fact, absolute...
And, you know, there's sort of put a lot of work into coming up with the proofs and coming up with even the evidence, which is in ethics, I think, part six, the introduction to politics as well.
The proofs around sort of the free market and property rights and so on, so that I'm not just talking out of my...
But are in fact trying to get something across that has, you know, I can't sort of say that the scientific method is a really good thing, and then deal completely subjectively with all of my arguments and not bring any proof to bear.
So, I think that both the pretty visceral experience of looking at me argue, I don't know how many people, well I do know, it's just a little under 3,000 people have watched the videos, Oh, sorry. The videos have been watched 3,000 times.
That's not quite the same thing, but there's some sort of perhaps a visceral impact on seeing me talk because that's going to be, to some degree, a priest slash teacher slash parental, right?
I mean, I think, because you don't often get...
Gee, dare I say lectured to?
I guess I dare. You rarely get lectured to when you're not in a subordinate position.
I mean, your doctor is going to tell you to do X, Y, and Z, and your teachers and professors and your parents and your priests and all this kind of stuff.
You don't get lectured to about absolutes without there being some strong hierarchical component to it.
And sadly, you know, as somebody who's trying to lecture, I guess, or trying not to lecture would be the key thing about what it is that I'm doing.
But as somebody who is trying to be an educator...
I inherit all of the emotional baggage that comes from bad educators who we all have experienced almost exclusively.
Almost exclusively have we experienced really bad, hierarchical, bullying, irrational, and often mostly destructive educators within our lives.
And some of the motivation for this, by the way, came about...
It came from having a dream about an educator, which I'll sort of get into here, but this is the syllogistic logic that I'm working from.
I had a dream, see?
And so, given that I am both lecturing from first principles, talking about reasoned absolutes, and also that you may have watched me, and there's a reason I'm not doing this one as a videocast,
There's a reason that you may have watched me working away in my study or maybe even in my car on particular ideas that I think or I feel or I have a gut sense that people are experiencing me as a kind of lecturing hierarchical absolutist authority figure and I'm not saying this is occurring at a conscious level because I don't think that I am.
I mean there's a reason I wear silly hats and that have funny voices is that I'm constantly trying to puncture or undermine the idea that I'm any kind of authority, right?
I mean, that is the last thing in the world that I would consider to be a valuable contribution to anybody's life is for people to look at me as any kind of authority.
I would consider that to be disastrous, which is why I'm constantly trying to undermine any kind of seriousness That I have so that people recognize the sort of basic and essential fact that I am in no way, shape, or form any kind of authority.
That's something that I'm going to talk about a little bit in this podcast.
And I know that this may strike you as a kind of reverse vanity.
You know, like, I am not godlike in my intelligence.
It's going to obviously give people the idea and not Unjustly so that I may think that I am, in fact, some kind of authority and that's why I'm arguing so vociferously against it.
But we have such a difficult time.
We have such a...
I mean, it's almost impossible for us to be, I guess you could say, instructed without there being a win-lose hierarchy.
That's just something that we don't experience in our families.
We don't experience at church.
We don't experience in...
In school, we certainly, I certainly didn't experience it in university, and a lot of us in our debates with friends and so on, we also have the same sort of problem, that it's very, very hard for us to picture any kind of non-hierarchical, non-win-lose kind of interaction.
And of course, it is somewhat natural to associate the person with the ideas, right?
And, of course, I would say that it would be sort of a logical error to associate me with my ideas.
And I know that that seems sort of contradictory.
But, well, I won't get into the whole ideology of how these ideas come about for me or how they rather erupt for me and I try to manage them.
But if you've ever seen someone try to do that mechanical bull ride or seen somebody in a stampede, like the Calgary Stampede, trying to hang on to a horse, that's a fairly good way to appreciate how it is that I experience idea generation.
I hope that I don't get burnt in the geyser-like updraft of hot steam, and that's really all that I can come up with.
In terms of helping people to understand where ideas come from and where novels come from and where for me poetry comes from and so on, that it is not something that I go out and earn.
It is something that I try and manage and tame into some sort of reasonableness and that doesn't have anything to do with whether it's logical or not.
We experience dreams spontaneously and often unbidden and often unwanted As well, but that doesn't mean that dreams are irrational.
It just means that we have to analyze them correctly in order to get to the truth.
And the same thing, I believe, is true of the propositions.
So, 18 months ago, when I first began working out the DRO concept, due to some pretty significant dissatisfaction with what I felt, again, what I sort of felt was an incompleteness in the theories of The free market and of libertarianism or capitalism, specifically objectivism, what I felt were limits and also the emotional dissatisfaction that I had when arguing certain kinds of moral propositions or certain kinds of foundational arguments for morality that I found to be really pretty bad.
And I never felt sort of emotionally satisfied with them.
And again, I know that sounds pretty darn tootin' subjective, but Again, this is just the motive that gets you into working on these kinds of things.
And those of you who've read or, I guess, are now listening to The God of Atheists can also appreciate that inspiration plays a very large part in the formation of ideas.
Not in the validation of ideas, but in the formation ideas.
The guy who came up with the molecular structure for, sorry, the atomic structure, I think it was, for the carbon atom.
He actually dreamt it.
Which, again, doesn't mean that it's logical.
It just means that's where the inspiration comes from.
So to view me as a kind of authority, I think, would be erroneous.
It's sort of fundamentally erroneous.
I obviously do have a rather active unconscious in the creation of ideas, but I do try to work to validate them But to associate the ideas with me, Steph, sort of the conscious individual, is not correct.
So, I mean, even if you sort of think about me talking now while I'm ambling around picking and tidying things up in my house, there's an enormous amount of things that are kind of going on.
I'm walking. I'm holding my Zen Vision M. I am...
I'm formulating new ideas.
I'm trying to follow instincts and I am doing a minor tidy.
All of these sorts of things are going on somewhat automatically for me.
I don't really think about them.
So the part of me that's running my sort of body and brain and the language formation and the communication and so on, it's all, you know, fairly automatic, fairly unthought about, you could say.
And so the me, It's not something that's easy to figure out, right?
The sort of me identity thing, which of course comes back to, God forbid, things like free will and so on.
But I would say that it would be a pretty fair statement, at least from my experience, to say that I am simply the first one to hear these ideas.
They're not mine, right?
I mean, they are mine, but...
They're not mine in the sense that dreams are different from doing your taxes, right?
Dreams are spontaneous and unbidden and discombobulating often and so on.
And they're not the result of conscious intention and you can then choose, I believe, to either analyze your dreams or not analyze your dreams, but either way they're sort of spontaneous creations of consciousness and need to be sort of managed from there.
And On the other hand, doing your taxes, you sit down and sort of plow through them, and I would certainly suggest that inspiration would not be a very valid model for how to work with your taxes.
Pray for a vision on how to complete them anymore.
You could even do that with math.
I guess math occurs that way as well.
But I would say that When I sit down to write a book, I mean, it's a lot of work towards the end, but, well, the last three quarters, but the first quarter of inspiration and typing, I mean, I could five, seven thousand words a day and so on.
There are choices that I make, but the majority of it is simply spontaneous generation.
Yesterday, I sat down to write an article on immigration because I was a tad concerned about libertarian views on immigration.
And, you know, it took me like 45 minutes to come up with what I think is some pretty compelling arguments, and that's just transcription.
I mean, the ideas are sort of coming, and I try and shape them and put them down, but the language it's chosen and so on.
Now, I know that this is going to all start to smack of, you know, so Steph's just this spouting lunatic.
Why on earth would I consider what he says or writes or anything with any kind of validity?
Well, I think that one of the key differences...
Is that I really do try to work towards consistency.
I really do try to work towards having a kind of consistency and logic and this kind of stuff with what it is that I'm working on.
That's quite important for me, as of course it should be quite important for you as well.
And I guess that one of the reasons that I'm able to do it, whereas I guess a lot of thinkers in history, at least from my experience, don't seem to have, It's that I am certainly fortunate in that the ideas that are kicked up by my unconscious tend to be fairly close to rational.
If not rational, most of them tend to be that way sort of upfront.
So when I feel, for instance, that there's a certain amount of emotional discomfort in some of the arguments that I've believed in for many years, arguments about ethics prior to the ones that I've worked out, The emotional discomfort is fairly important, right? If I felt perfectly emotionally comfortable in making those arguments, then I would probably not have pursued other kinds of arguments.
And then when I began working on the DRO model, and I remember it very specifically, arguing with someone And coming up with the idea of how DROs would solve air pollution, with there being a sort of flash of excitement and pleasure, a thrill of pleasure, which of course is not something that I had worked out, right? It's not something I sort of, ah, I have now finally worked out the problem, and I figured out that it's true, and therefore I can now...
Feel pleasure. What happened was the idea sort of occurred to me and I felt simultaneously an enormous degree of pleasure in that idea and that is what then helped me to pursue and codify and write about and work out the idea in more detail.
So the idea sort of appeared to me in the same way that dreams sort of appear to you and it seems unlikely that the idea would have occurred to me if I hadn't spent 20 years working on philosophy and also if I had repressed The emotional state of discontentedness with existing ethical theories.
If I'd have just said, well, I'm sure it's just because I don't understand and I'm sure it makes sense to other people and so on, then I would not have...
I don't think I would have ended up with a situation where I had looked for new answers, right?
If I was perfectly content with old answers, I wasn't about to start looking for new answers or it seems less likely that I would have or would.
And so, you know, an acceptance of my emotions, coupled with an understanding of the discontent, coupled with the joy and the thrill of recognizing a new idea that might have particular value, all of that is just something that I receive, right? Like in the same way that, you know, you eat well and you go to the gym or whatever, you go to exercise, right?
And what you receive at the end of that is good health, right?
So you work on the basics.
And there's lots of people who work on the basics and whatever.
I just happen to have a kind of emotional constitutionality that has made it, I think, easier for me to work on these ideas.
I mean, if every idea that I came up with was six months hard work away from being even remotely rational or consistent, then it would feel like an eternal process of doing my taxes for You know, for almost no return, right? That would probably not be something that would motivate me.
So, the fact that what my unconscious kicks up to me is actually pretty useful and fairly close to a valuable finished product is one of the reasons that I'm sort of able and willing to work on these ideas, right? As you know, I sort of do these podcasts while I'm driving, and if...
The podcasts themselves came out somewhat incoherently.
Well, I shouldn't say they do come out somewhat incoherently.
If they came out far enough away from something useful that I would spend all this time in my car merely doing dry runs for coming up with better stuff in the future, right?
If I sort of sat down to do these podcasts in my car, and what came up was a bunch of stuff that, with enough hammering out over a couple of weeks, could turn into one decent article, then I'm not sure.
I mean, I certainly wouldn't record and broadcast the podcast.
I'd just sort of ramble to myself in a way that I'd pretend to put my cell phone in my ear so that people wouldn't think I was completely deranged.
And I would simply talk to myself without really vocalizing just to sort of work these ideas out.
But I'm not even sure I would do that, right?
Because if all of the stuff that came out for me was too raw, too unhelpful to others, then, you know, the labor ratio to value would be pretty high.
And I remember sort of very clearly, just by the by, I started this reading the articles that were on my blog and Reading a couple of essays and I sort of really honestly remember very clearly the first time that I went sort of quote off book and feeling very sort of thrilled and excited that when I went off book it just began speaking extemporaneously that you know it kind of it kind of worked for me and I guess is working for other people as well.
So If, on the other hand, I had not made any sense when I had gone off book, then I wouldn't be doing it and so on and so on.
So all of this is sort of a lengthy way of saying that I'm not even an authority to myself.
And so I hope that the conversations that we're having do not indicate to you that That you should listen to me, obviously, right?
That I'm any sort of authority, that there's any kind of hierarchy in what it is that I'm talking about, that there's any kind of sense of me telling you what to do, right?
I'm telling you, I'm trying to tell you how I think, trying to describe and to show, right, in this particular instance, this is not only The content but the form, right?
Here it is I'm saying that I'm getting an odd sense from the community, this little community that we have going here, that I'm getting an odd sense from trying to sort of work out what might be going on and what factors might have intervened if I hadn't gotten the odd sense, which I'm not responsible for or conscious of.
I mean, I guess you could say that I'm responsible for it in some way by listening to my feelings and so on.
But when I sit here and I'm trying to sort of work out what's going on, it's like the The last car video or audio where I'm sort of trying to work out why it is that I was feeling sad about leaving a job that was not too positive for me, I'm sort of trying to both demonstrate explicitly and implicitly ways that I think.
Now, if these were just ways that I didn't think were of value to other people, then I would just do this the same way that I did my own personal journals.
Which have never been published, of course, which would just be for my own edification and growth.
But I do believe that there's enough commonality in humanity that what is occurring for me in terms of thought and emotionality and expression and logic, what is occurring for me is not so completely specific to me that It doesn't have any value to other people.
And that's sort of why I started putting out the podcast that the way in which I'm sort of working through issues, ideas, logic, and feelings is, I think, you know, as I've always sort of believed, if you go very deep and very abstract, you connect a great deal with other people.
If you go very deeply into yourself, into your emotionality, and express it honestly, then you connect with other people, and if you go into the greatest abstractions of truth, reality, and virtue, that you also connect enormously with other people, and all the stuff in between is usually just kind of confusing and discombobulating, then I think that we have enough in common, you and I, that what occurs for me, if talked about in an open and honest and rigorous fashion, is of value to you, and I think we can see that.
I sort of want to really try and undermine the idea that I'm any kind of authority and what I'm trying to do is to think and feel and understand out loud.
And to me, rationality is thinking and feeling is intuition and the combination of rationality and intuition which are two sides of the same coin and inform each other, the conscious and the unconscious, that the combination of these two Is that joyful state we call wisdom.
Wisdom to me is the unity of thought and feeling and the cross-pollination and cross-fertilization between thought and feeling.
So sometimes your thoughts will tell your feelings that they're incorrect and sometimes your feelings will tell your thoughts that they're incomplete or are incorrect.
And so the combination of the two to me is wisdom and that's really what my major focus is in what it is that I'm doing is to try and achieve and talk about a kind of wisdom and sometimes that means syllogisms and sometimes that means bursting into tears or laughing or giggling or getting angry.
It's quite a combination, right?
It's like sometimes it feels like it's trying to, you know, getting to the truth is like trying to hurt cats, right?
They sort of keep getting away from you, but that's okay, because you keep coming back and trying to reinforce it.
So, I mean, I'm on a journey, obviously, as much as you are, and my journey is constantly pushing the boundaries of what I'm comfortable with, and so, you know, public tears, and even what it is that I'm doing right now in terms of talking about this topic or following my intuitions about this topic.
It's not the most comfortable thing in the world for me, but I just sort of feel that it's an important thing to do and we'll find out if when you hear this whether it is important to do for you or if it's just for me.
So as far as authority goes, it doesn't feel to me at all like I'm any kind of authority.
My feeling and my thinking and my experience and my communication is I'm sort of trying to talk about how I relate to reality, how I relate to To external reality.
And it is in the external reality that we find things in common.
It is through...
I mean, human beings can only meet in reality.
We can't meet in dreams.
We can't meet in fantasies.
We certainly can't meet in religions or patriotism.
We can only self-array simultaneously and consider it some kind of union.
But human beings fundamentally cannot meet...
Anywhere except in reality.
So what I try to do when talking about this is to assume a couple of things, which, you know, might as well talk about explicitly since we're on this road anyway.
I'm sort of trying to assume a couple of things, and one of the things that I'm trying to assume is that, well, obviously there's some stuff like language is objective and so on, which is all implicit to what I'm doing and which I've talked about in the video cast and the audio cast and the philosophy introduction.
But most fundamentally that we inhabit the same reality, that we have common and similar emotional and biochemical and psychological makeups and experiences, and that the abstractions that come to me that I also try to validate through empirical logic, that those come from reality, and also that my emotional states come from reality, and that sometimes the most important emotional states are the ones that have the least...
Amount of sort of empirical validation to them.
I try sort of always to be quite sensitive to what's going on in the community because I really want to listen to you guys and women as well.
I really, really want to listen to you.
If this is about me talking to you, which of course I have been doing quite a bit of lately in the introduction to philosophy, it's not really a conversation, right?
I don't think that's bad.
But it's not a conversation in the way that a lot of the other podcasts are.
So, for instance, I've been meaning to do some dream analyses for some time.
People have posted some wonderful dreams, haven't got around to it.
Or, you know, fundamentally chosen not to.
I've been doing the videos and I upgraded the website.
And last but not least, I'm spending a couple of hours a day over the last week or so reading The God of Atheists because people requested the end of the audio book.
Certainly more than fair.
So it has been less of a conversation over the last little while.
And my real concern about that is that that is causing people to feel that it's kind of hierarchical and luxury and me talking and, you know, you better listen and you better agree or it's logical and you have no choice.
Whatever it is that's going on emotionally, I want to make sure that I listen to you because, of course, one of the things that I talk about quite a bit is that the problem with families, for instance, I mean, lots of things.
The government, of course, doesn't listen to you.
The teachers, of course, don't listen to you.
Your teachers didn't listen to you.
Your priests certainly didn't listen to you, to your doubts, to your questions, and I would imagine that, if you're anything like me, that you've had You know, especially if you're interested in logic and philosophy and freedom and so on.
Real freedom, not sort of minarchism.
But I would imagine that you've had a whole lot of not being listened to in your life.
And so one of the things that I was kind of concerned about and wanted to address is that I really do want to listen to what you have to say.
The people who post stuff, the people who email me, I hugely appreciate it.
Even the most negative comments are positive for me.
And I really do want to listen to you because I am not an authority.
I am the first to hear the ideas that come to me, which I then communicate, but I am as surprised by them as you are sometimes, and I am as resistant to them as you are sometimes, and I am as skeptical and concerned about them as you are sometimes, as I think I talked about in the one, the 390, 391 on status intellectuals, but...
I just wanted to sort of reiterate that although I've taken on, you know, Joe Shiny lecture head for the last little while, that I really do want this to remain a conversation.
I don't want to be hierarchical.
I don't want to be top-down.
I certainly don't want to be an authority.
And I want it to be a conversation.
And now that I have completed what it is that I felt was important to just be a lecture guy on, which is the Introduction to Philosophy series, and the reason, of course, that I did that Thank you.
because when you assume conclusions, you really only convert people who are already in the camp, so to speak, you're preaching to the choir.
So I wanted to have a series that would lead people into what it is that we're talking about, And also, of course, I wanted to have an answer for those who say, well, that's just your opinion.
So, of course, we have this physicist, Michael, who joins us on Sunday chats, who comes up with silly things like, and not silly because this is his understanding, and this, of course, is all that philosophy has managed to make the case for in society, which is a terrible shame.
He says things like, well, we'll have to agree to disagree about state violence, which of course is nonsensical.
It would be like me being a creationist saying the world was created 6,000 years ago, and he says, no, it was billions of years ago, and I just say, well, you have your opinion, I have mine, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I mean, if I say to my math teacher, 2 plus 2 is 5, we don't just end up agreeing to disagree.
So, I wanted to have an answer as well to those who We're logical, but who didn't understand the value of working from first principles and who I could then point to and say, because of course you don't want to have the same debate over and over again, who I could then point to this series and say, if you work through this and if you find logical errors in what it is that I'm doing, please inform me and I will certainly correct them with thanks.
And if you don't find logical errors in what it is that I'm saying, Then you're bound to accept the conclusions or you have to stop debating because then you're just irrational, right?
I mean, you're just going back to relying on faith.
And the other thing, of course, that I'll bring this up, of course, back on Sunday that was interesting about last Sunday's show was that he said something like, well, Stephen Hawking says that the best physicists of the next century will be mystics.
And having worked out this, a more clear idea of what's Wrong with the world in terms of us not being assertive about the value of philosophy.
You know, the important question there, and this is why I want to sort of get back into the conversations with people, the important question there to ask is, well, should Stephen Hawking take any of my pronouncements about quantum physics seriously, right?
I'm not a trained physicist.
I'm, you know, barely a competent amateur, and then only in the really layman sense, right?
I certainly couldn't do any of the math.
And so, would Stephen Hawking, who's trained for decades in the field, should Stephen Hawking seriously sit down and listen to me about my opinions about quantum physics?
Well, I would suggest that he should not sit down and listen to me, and I would suggest that if I expected him to, that I would be Pretty presumptuous, right?
To say, oh, okay, Mr.
Hawking, you have studied this field for years and worked diligently in it to expand your knowledge and understand fundamentals that I couldn't even imagine.
You need to sit down and listen to me about quantum physics.
But in the same vein, of course, it's rather foolish, and the result is, the fault is not the others but us, in my view, that for people who are physicists to To sit down with us and to expect philosophers to take a physicist's theories or beliefs about philosophy seriously is as foolish and outlandish as me asking a physicist to take my opinions about advanced physics with any kind of seriousness.
In fact, I would say, not to sort of try and trump the physicist, but I would actually say that It's harder to come up with good moral theories than it is to come up with good theories of physics because, well, obviously there's lots of prejudice and there's lots of counter-rational propaganda, right? I mean, as far as morals go, we're barely out of the Middle Ages.
But we can also look at the fact that people do come up with effective theories of physics.
People do not come up, very rarely, come up with Any kind of rational theory of ethics or consistent theory of ethics.
So unless, you know, the only smart people in the world are physicists, it must be that philosophy is harder than physics.
And I would certainly say that without philosophy there would be no physics.
So, I mean, the first thing you had to do was to peel religious sentiments off the realm of metaphysics and epistemology in order to get science.
And that was a philosophical job that was performed by Bacon and Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
So, given that physics is derived from philosophy, it would seem that philosophy would be harder than physics, and also because there's much more progress made in physics than there is in philosophy, then philosophy must be harder than...
So, even though quantum physics is a mind-bogglingly difficult subject, I would certainly...
I certainly believe, and this could just be because it's what I'm doing and other people's work easier, but I think there's some real facts around this too, that philosophy is harder than physics, because A new physics theory rarely requires you to give up your belief in your culture, your society, and quite probably the virtue and value of continually seeing your family or continuing to see your family.
New physics theories rarely require that since sort of the 19th century.
New theories of physics have rarely resulted in being burned at the stake.
Now, of course, new philosophies don't require that either, but they do require that you give up Most of your community and almost all of your friends and your family to have any kind of intellectual integrity.
And that's quite a high price to pay.
So not only is there a lot of propaganda, not only is it very difficult, but the social costs of being a philosopher, because society is pretty corrupt at the moment, are much higher than the social costs of being a physicist.
So I would not say that I would have any respect for what Stephen Hawking, brilliant though he is, would have to say about philosophy, especially moral philosophy, so when he says that the physicists of the future will be mystics, then he's going out of physics and into philosophy, and therefore is incompetent.
And we should not have any particular patience for this, other than for the fact that philosophers have not asserted the rigor of their discipline for many, many years, and Therefore, we can't really expect for people to not walk all over us,
right? It's sort of like, if you're the kid who's scrawny with glasses and a stutter, and it turns out that you're like, I don't know, a black belt in 9th Dan in jiu-jitsu or something, the bullies, if you sort of come across as somebody who's shaky and insecure and physically weak, then bullies will pick on you, and if you then turn around and say, ha, I'm going to take you down now, bubba, then the bullies...
You know, can be forgiven, just at a very practical level, they can be forgiven for riding roughshod all over you without understanding that you were a lot stronger than you looked.
And so when it comes to people wandering in and talking about philosophy, we can forgive them, I think, to some degree because philosophers have not asserted the value and logic and rigor of what it is that they're doing, particularly moral philosophers.
That's the kind of stuff that I wanted to start getting back into now that I've finished the sort of, I don't know, the sort of one-way street lecture series.
I really do want to get back into the conversation and I really do want to respect the contributions and value of the people who are emailing me and writing me.
And so for those of you who felt that there's been quite a bit of authoritativeness and hierarchical lecturing going on, first of all, I hope that you would revise that opinion.
But also, even if that is the case and you still believe that, that I do want to get back to having a more dynamic conversation with you and to remind you that I'm no authority in these matters, that in the authority of truth, you are the actual arbiter.
You are the only one whose opinion matters, and yes, that opinion should be subject to truth and verification, just as mine is, but that's where we meet, not in any kind of authority of mine or anything like that, and I hope that you will forgive me for the one-way conversational streaks of the past couple of weeks, but we will be getting back to something more dynamic soon.
And I will start that a little bit later in the day or tomorrow by going back to the dream analyses that have been quite important for me to get done and of course which people have posted and not heard back from for which I apologize.
But I think it's been worthwhile for me to take the break from the two-way street.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I really appreciate it and I will talk to you soon.
Please come by and give me some donations.
I've thrown out some cash for the upgraded website and so on.
I really would appreciate that. If you've been sitting on the fence doing it, I think that you will feel a lot better for doing it, and I will certainly appreciate it.
It gives me a lot of juice to get a donation, and I will talk to you soon.
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