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Sept. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

41:00

419 Reason and Passion Part 1

Rabid convincing

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Time	Text
	Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
	It's Steph. It is 8.05.
	Yes, I have a slightly longer commute than I used to.
	For those who've been following all of the gripping excitement of my career, I am off for my very first day.
	It is the 18th, I think, of September, Monday, 2006.
	And I just had a beautiful and delicious Month off, which was a good time for me to get done the 12 or 15 part series Introduction to Philosophy, which is on YouTube and also on this audio cast.
	And it's bits and pieces, not bits and pieces, up to I think the first couple is on Google Video.
	I haven't got around to uploading all the rest.
	And so that I got done, which is good.
	I got a couple of articles written, which is good.
	And my first collaboration article with a Free Domain Radio listener, the incomparable Wilt, who has got some excellent things to say and some excellent research material to bring to bear on the question of libertarian approaches to immigration.
	And I also got some more Of The God of Atheists read, which I've actually quite enjoyed.
	You can go forever with those kinds of readings, trying to make it just a little bit more realistic, just a little bit more naturalistic.
	I did it only mostly in one or two takes, and so...
	I hope that you're enjoying it.
	Those of you who have a copy and those who don't, just kick me some shackles in a donation and you can get, or if you sign up for the 20 bucks a month, which is Canadian, it's like 17 or 18 bucks a month in the US, monthly donations, automatic, no muss, no fuss, and you get a copy of The God of Atheists in PDF or in audiobook.
	It depends on your preference.
	So, I'd like to talk this morning about...
	And this is a bit of a circle back, but I still think it's important.
	The question of passion in communication.
	The question of emotion in communication.
	Because I've really...
	I had a long conversation with Christina yesterday as we went sort of...
	Not exactly dirt biking, but not exactly concrete biking either.
	I had a long conversation with Christina about...
	This question of why libertarians, and not just libertarians, but I'm just going to focus on libertarians, why libertarians focus so much on logical proof?
	I know that that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say.
	Why do philosophers focus so much on logical proof?
	But I still think it's an important question.
	You know, Spock needed his Kirk as well.
	And I think that there is a certain, and I'm talking about this with regards to myself as much as anyone else, but there's a certain kind of belief that if only, if only, if only we can get a hold of the magical syllogism That proves our premises.
	If only we can get a hold of the magical syllogism that proves our premises.
	And to me, there's a lot mixed up in that kind of...
	Thinking. That I think is quite important to understand.
	And again, mostly speaking for myself, if this means anything to you or hits any emotional triggers within you, so much the better.
	But I'm not going to pretend that I can analyze an entire community.
	But I think that what has gone on for me is sort of important and universal enough that it will be of value to other people.
	Just as what goes on for you, that's deep, is going to be a value to me as well.
	But the question sort of to me is, when you look at the effectiveness of belief, not just the truth value of belief, right?
	People who are philosophers and libertarians, we tend to focus on the truth value of a proposition.
	And that, if you just work empirically, again, as I always try to get out of the syllogisms and back to reality, which is not to say that the two are completely distinct, but we do have to look at, in a sense, the etymology of human belief in order to become effective communicators, in order to be able to not just out-argue people, but actually convince them.
	And to do that, we need to look at what has successfully worked in the past.
	If you just look at belief systems that have been propagated throughout the species in the past, it's not too hard to find the common threads that cause these belief systems to be the most popular.
	Now, It's not logic.
	I mean, let me put that right out there.
	The successful belief systems that have occurred in the past are not exactly logical.
	That, I will say for sure, if you look at tribalism, collectivism, religion, socialism, fascism, communism, racism, all of this kind of stuff, the rationality of these beliefs is virtually non-existent.
	It's virtually non-existent.
	And that doesn't mean that we have to come up with another one that people believe that is not rational.
	It's my perspective that a rational belief, once it sweeps aside, more irrational beliefs and becomes accepted in the heart as well as in the head.
	That will be a pretty powerful thing that will be pretty hard to return from, like to return to a more primitive state of thinking from, just in the same way as we don't really suggest going back to praying to God to answer physics questions or medical questions, which was pretty much de rigueur throughout human history.
	We don't really suggest that, and we don't really suggest a return to slavery, and we don't suggest this, and we don't suggest that.
	And all of that is because we have found such a more powerful and effective way of doing it, namely the scientific method.
	From that standpoint, we can look at these historical beliefs, these prior beliefs, and start to sort of pull apart them, pull them apart, pull apart them for belief we want, to pull them apart and have a look at what works.
	And obviously we can know up front, and I'm not even going to try and argue these because that's really been the substance of most of my podcasts.
	We're not really going to argue that Whether the cult of the virtue or the cult of the state or the race or the class or the family or whatever is valid, because it's not.
	But we can look at why it is that people end up believing all this nonsense, right?
	Because if we can understand that, then we can have some understanding of how beliefs are transferred from one mind to another in a compelling way.
	In a compelling way.
	Now, the first thing which I would suggest is to understand that almost nobody who's past the age of their early to mid-twenties is ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to change his mind or her mind.
	The human mind kind of ceases its physical development at around the age of sort of 23, 24, 25, and so on.
	So, it's not that the brain is fixed after that, but I think it certainly is the case that the personality is fixed after that.
	And the defenses are fixed after that.
	And it doesn't mean that the personality can't change.
	But it does mean, and I can speak from personal experience here, it does mean that if the personality is going to change, that it is only going to change under the duress of the most extreme difficulties.
	So maybe somebody who's overly aggressive is going to change after his third divorce when he's penniless because he got fired for yelling at someone.
	Somebody with a bad temper may change under those circumstances, but they're extraordinarily unlikely to change under any more lesser or less extreme duress.
	And this doesn't mean that you shouldn't debate with people who are older than that, who are in their late 20s and older.
	You certainly can, and enjoy having debates with those, because they help to clarify your ideas, and it may be instructive to other people.
	Of course, I would be quite hypocritical for saying to you, you shouldn't debate people over their mid-twenties when I had this chance with our physics friend over the last couple of weekends, but I certainly wasn't anticipating that there was going to be any kind of revision.
	There's a certain amount of pride also that goes into people's beliefs as they get older.
	A certain amount of, I guess you could say, emotional and time investment, but it's mostly emotional investment.
	If you are a mystic and you've taught your children that God exists, then you're gonna have a tough time reversing yourself because you're gonna lose, as you feel, credibility in the eyes of your children.
	This is, I mean, by the by, this is a fundamental mistake that weak egos always seem to make, which is that they believe that if they reverse positions based on new and better information, that they are somehow That they are going to lose the respect of the people that they are talking to.
	And that, of course, is not true at all.
	That is not the issue at all.
	There's two possibilities that are going to occur if you reverse your position based on new information.
	One is that people are going to respect you for recognizing reality, which I think is quite nice.
	And I think that that's going to happen for a goodly number of people.
	The other thing is that people are going to taunt you and mock you and tease you, and every time you put a statement forward saying, oh, are you as certain of this statement as you were about statement X a few years ago when you had to totally reverse your position?
	Yeah, right. In which case, you tell these people to go take a flying...
	Fudge off a roll and donut.
	Because they're not worth having in your life, right?
	If the moment you act with intellectual integrity and change your mind based on new information or better arguments, that people around you mock you, then get them the hell out of your life.
	Because these people are just claustrophobic and crushing in their contempt and humiliation.
	And I will get to the podcast on humiliation as requested by our good friend Greg yesterday.
	But... Not right now, as you can see.
	So, the reason that it's worth arguing with people who are older than their early to mid-twenties is, yes, it's fun to, you know, match your wits, to test your swordplay, so to speak.
	And also, and perhaps more importantly, you might find somebody who has latent rationality who's just waiting for the outcome.
	Pardon me, can't edit those out anymore because we're on video.
	You know, if you slow that down, I wonder what you'll see coming out.
	Anyway, you may find somebody who's sort of been waiting like a bird in a nest waiting for the mother to come and disgorge a half-chewed worm.
	Oh yeah, that's a tasty breakfast metaphor.
	Somebody who's been waiting with a latent desire or yearning for rationality, they may be 35 or 40.
	They may be uncommitted to any ideology.
	They maybe want to get out of all ideologies and join us.
	In which case, yeah, have a chat with them.
	But I will tell you this, that how the debate is in the first...
	Minute is how the debate will be for the rest of your life.
	I mean, this is an important thing.
	I mean, I've never heard of or seen any exception to this rule.
	I'm not saying it's hard and fast, but I think it is.
	But I'm not going to say that it's obviously empirically proven.
	But the debates that you have with somebody, this is of course particularly true with your family, which is why defooing is a totally viable option if you're not satisfied, because it's so unlikely that anything's going to change.
	But... The debate that you have with someone for the first 30 seconds or the first minute, or their first reaction to when you finish putting a proposition forward, if they're over 25, is pretty much how it's going to be for the rest of your existence with them, which is why it's important not to waste your time, as some people have pointed out to me with my debates with our physics friend.
	But remember, I'm taping these, right?
	So they are very instructive to other people.
	If it were just he and I, I doubt that I would invest that much time and energy into it, and I would start also by asking him about his premises and if I was going to have a more leisurely discussion.
	But what I'm doing while taping and disseminating those discussions is I am showing other people some arguments in action.
	And look, this has always been helpful to me.
	I remember at one point Harry Brown was doing a mock debate on gun control, and I found that enormously helpful.
	It just, it sure helped me avoid having to reinvent the wheel as far as debating libertarianism or freedom goes or philosophy to see somebody else do it.
	You know, however right or wrong, at least it gave me some sort of more quivers for my era, some more bows for my quiver for my era.
	Let me get my medieval metaphor straight.
	So, that's a little bit different.
	But the one thing that you will notice with irrational beliefs, or we can just say other beliefs, is that they fully recognize this fact, that the younger you get them, the closer they stick.
	I mean, if religion could reach into the very womb and massage God into the temples of the baby, then that's what religion would do.
	Religion starts extraordinarily early in its indoctrination of children.
	And that's pretty important to understand.
	The state also starts extraordinarily early in its indoctrination of children, and I don't know if this is common in other countries, but I certainly do remember as a goggle-eyed three or four-year-old staring at the television back then when a 12-inch black and white was like a 42-inch plasma.
	And seeing the friendly state cop representative dropping by to talk about, you know, road safety and to be genial and pleasant and nice and I'm sure get ripped by his companions when he gets back to the office and I'm sure not be too taken seriously by criminals.
	But that aspect of early indoctrination is very, very important.
	Of course, the state has an easier time indoctrinating children than religion.
	Of course, religion, we're in a multicultural society, so to speak, and so you'll get into other people.
	And of course, but the state is universal to the geographical mass.
	Certainly the geographical mass the child is inhabiting for the first six or seven years.
	And so the state has a real monopoly, and the state, of course, gets the kids for six hours a day straight to indoctrinate them about the society And again, I'm not saying this is any nefarious backdoor, backroom plan.
	I'm just saying that it's inevitable that the state is not going to talk about the evils of the state.
	You can expect that the moment that you see a politician running negative attack ads against himself.
	That's not going to happen.
	That's our job. It's our job to criticize the state.
	People get mad at the state propaganda.
	That's their job. They're nasty, corrupt people.
	Who think that they're doing good, right?
	So it's their job to lie to people about the state.
	That's inevitable, right?
	I mean, and they were raised in state schools, and they're well paid for doing so, and they don't, at any level that is conscious, trace the source of their income to a gun against people's heads, right?
	So they don't even remotely think that.
	I mean, there's some kindly old woman Who designs educational plans for children, she doesn't think that she's paid as a result of a stick-up, right?
	That's not really part of her real approach.
	So, they get them young, and they get them through stories.
	They get them through stories.
	It's why I try to use, however unwieldy they come out, I try to use metaphors and little parables and so on.
	I had somebody email me the other day to say that when I was talking and was quite angrily talking about How I felt about people who use the word regrettable to talk about the deaths of foreigners, that I was talking about how if a father is sitting on a lawn and the cops are chasing a criminal and the cop car takes the corner too fast,
	flips out and creams his six-year-old daughter playing on the front lawn and kills her, he's not going to rush up to the officer and say, well, that's regrettable, but have you caught the criminal, right?
	He is going to dissolve into a sheer, bottomless, agonistic well of pain, and he's not going to give a rat's ass about the criminal.
	In fact, he's going to get angry at the criminal and the cops.
	I mean, that's the emotion. And this is exactly the emotional reaction that the slaves in other countries have to the slaves in this country.
	I mean, our masters want us to get really angry at the slaves in other countries.
	Ooh, those Muslims.
	Ooh, those bad people over there.
	Ooh, Al-Qaeda.
	Ooh, they're just so bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
	They're threatening you. It's dangerous.
	Boo! Well, that's all this serious nonsense.
	I mean... At some point, if we're slaves on a plantation over here, and there are slaves on a plantation over there, I think that we should join forces with the slaves in the plantation over there and stick it to the masters.
	Only intellectually, of course.
	But that idea that we should love our masters and be afraid of the slaves on another plantation is really funny.
	I'm sorry. It's just too ridiculous for words.
	Oh, the war on terror.
	Of course, the war on terror is a war on terror.
	All of these things have these Orwellian doublespeak.
	And the terror is of the ruling classes having no enemy through which to frighten the sheep into submission, right?
	I mean, that's the war on terror.
	The terror of the ruling class is that now that we all have a fairly good amount of wealth, and society is pretty stable, and war seems to be a fairly remote possibility for developed nations, you could say, well, gee, maybe we don't need the government as much anymore.
	And they're terrified of that, right?
	So it's the war. The war on terror, for sure, is the war on the leader's terror that they have no enemies, which is why they're enjoying so much making up enemies and frightening us with the boogeymen of other slaves coming to attack us instead of us joining with the other slaves to attack our masters intellectually, of course. That, to me, is just kind of funny, but anyway.
	Because I have a slightly longer commute, we can expect just a few more tangents, or we can say there will be even more tangents than usual.
	So, they get them young, and they get them with stories, and they get them with metaphors, and they get them with parables, and they get them with guilt.
	And I think that guilt is an entirely underutilized weapon in the libertarian arsenal.
	See, guilt is not an unhealthy emotion.
	I mean, there are no unhealthy emotions.
	Emotions turn rancid when they're projected into others and they're manipulated into false self defenses against the real enemies and so on.
	But the emotions at the root are all perfectly and completely and totally healthy.
	And again, you know, you don't want to view your emotions as your enemy any more than you want to view the slaves on another plantation as your enemy.
	We only have one enemy, right?
	It's the rulers. And...
	So, the emotion of guilt is very important.
	It's quite a motivator. And it is an indication of the existence of a conscience, which I wouldn't say is really that bad a thing to have, overall.
	You just want to make sure that the guilt and so on is directed at the proper object.
	This is a rational object.
	This is what philosophy does. Philosophy unravels the abuse that results in twisted emotions because it will ask you about the principles by which you condemn yourself and then say, well, who has done more?
	If you condemn yourself for being If you're angry or short-tempered, then you say, okay, well, then that's universal.
	Everyone must be condemned. Who has been more angry in your life than you?
	And I doubt, in fact, I can guarantee you're never going to say nobody, right?
	Because if your anger is a problem, it's because that anger is scar tissue that forms around abuse and humiliation that has come from, yes, you guessed it, somebody who was enraged in you as a child.
	So, we have parables, we have stories, we have get them while they're young.
	We also have, you'll notice that, with the exception of the Jehovah's Witnesses, there's very few missionaries coming to your neighborhood.
	In fact, I've probably only met the Jehovah's Witnesses about three times in my life as well.
	So, another thing that religious people don't do is they don't waste their time trying to convert people who aren't on the fence any more than cigarette companies target 50-year-old women or men, right?
	I mean, they target the cool, the teens, the young, right?
	They don't waste their time trying to convert people If you're a political candidate and you're a Republican, you're probably not going to go up and knock on the door of somebody who's got 1,500 Democrat posters plastered all over their house, right? So...
	That's another thing that irrational belief propagators do that libertarians don't, which is they don't waste time trying to convert the unconvertible.
	They just keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, right?
	I mean, it's the essence of sales is to know when you're not going to make a sale, because every time you focus on not making a sale, you're not saving your energy, time, and resources to be able to focus on somebody where you can make a sale.
	So, I say that's a pretty important thing to not waste your time as well.
	Libertarians have a tough time peeling back with contempt from those who are persisting with irrationality, right?
	I mean, I think it's important to pull back with contempt.
	And I'm not saying I manage this every time, or even many times, but it's just something that I'm sort of working out as an important approach.
	To simply withdraw with a negative emotional, right?
	Not manipulative, but, you know, I mean...
	Once you put it out as boldly as, hey, when you advocate the welfare state, or you advocate the war in Iraq, or you advocate the state as a whole, even if you're a minarchist, you are suggesting or advocating that I get shot for disagreeing with you.
	I think that is inhumane and brutal and very corrupt and close to evil, if not evil.
	And that's what I mean by provoking guilt in people.
	If you can get them to understand, and you can't do this through logical argument, you can only do it through conviction, which I suspect we are making fairly good progress here, which I suspect we're going to have to get to just a little bit, maybe this afternoon.
	Oh, and for the gentleman who posted on YouTube that he was worried about me fiddling with my webcam while driving, I appreciate that.
	I certainly don't want to cause anxiety to people while I'm podcasting, while I'm driving.
	And so what I have done is I have velcroed the webcam to the dashboard.
	So you'll notice that I'm not reaching out.
	I'm barely glancing at the webcam.
	And so this is exactly the same for me.
	I sort of forget that it's running.
	Not to the point where I'm picking my nose.
	But I do sort of forget that it's running.
	So this is exactly the same as me doing audio podcasts.
	And so I hope that rests you at ease.
	And the reason, of course, that I'm doing the videos, I'm not sure that I'm going to keep them up forever.
	The reason that I'm doing the videos is that I do want people to get a sense of what the podcasts are like, who have so far only looked at the videos.
	We have... We have a lot of...
	I mean, I think it's a lot.
	Given the complexity of the subject matter, we've had a lot of people come and have a look at the videos.
	I mean, it's almost 3,500 people in like two weeks.
	That's two and a half, maybe three weeks.
	That's pretty good, I think.
	So I would just, you know, don't worry about it.
	I'm not going to do anything that's going to endanger me.
	I'm very keen on the heartbeat thing, and so I'm going to...
	I've sort of fixed it up.
	I had some fiddling last night with double-sided tape and Velcro, because, you know, the production quality is all-important here.
	So I am really trying to be careful about...
	This particular thing.
	And you'll know when I'm totally safe, when I do, in fact, when I'm up to my elbow in my nose.
	Then you'll know that I've really forgotten about the webcam completely.
	No, just kidding. So...
	That's another aspect that is important around this question of how are we going to be at least as effective as crazy, stupid, culty beliefs in changing people's minds.
	Just to sort of recognize that the factors that work for irrational beliefs are also going to work for us.
	With the added bonus, of course, that our beliefs are rational.
	So this is an important criteria or consideration.
	If Rationality worked than We wouldn't be in the situation of having to fight all of these omnipresent and almost omniscient, corrupt and irrational beliefs.
	If rationality genuinely works in terms of convincing people, then we wouldn't.
	I mean, the world wouldn't be in the state that it's in.
	Again, you just want to work empirically from these things to get out of the syllogisms and put your feet back in the real world and say, Hey, world, how's it going?
	What's new? How's that whole crazy rationality thing working out for you?
	And of course the answer is that it's working out really badly for everyone, but that doesn't mean that it's drawing to a close.
	So, from that standpoint, it's important to understand that You are not going to be able to change people's minds through rationality alone.
	I think that that will be the case once we've won, and once we've established the value of a rational and scientific philosophy, then we will be able to make that case.
	But we're sort of in the Francis Bacon phase of the scientific method, which is that people think it's evil, right?
	I mean, when Bacon put forward the scientific method, most people thought it was totally evil.
	Because they'd said, well, what, are you going to put empirical reality above the Word of God?
	Right? I mean, he was a jumpy fellow, and for good reason.
	So, I would say that it's important to understand that we are in the very, very, very, very germ-like starting phases of a rational philosophy, and I'm not even for a moment remotely considering that I'm doing something unique in putting this forward.
	I think that the passion aspect is something that's underlooked.
	Overlooked. Underlooked.
	It's under-regarded and possibly overlooked in the libertarian world, this question or issue around how reason and the emotions work together or not.
	And so you find a lot of libertarians and philosophers going off into these dry debates that are frustrating and often irritating and debilitating, not just for the philosophers but for their listeners as well.
	And I'm sort of interested in not doing that.
	And what we need to do is look at beliefs that are successful in the world and try and learn as much as possible from them You know, you study your enemy.
	I mean, this is not an unusual or this is like basic art of war stuff, right?
	Study your enemy, right?
	I mean, if you watch law shows, you'll see them that, you'll see them do the, like, they'll take tapes of the opposing counsel and look for, you know, what he does, trick phrases, words, this, that, and the other, and You'll also see this occurring with...
	If you're in sports, you study all of the moves of your enemy and try and figure out their plays and when they pass and when they hold and, you know, when they fold and all that sort of stuff.
	And so you really do want to study your enemy and figure out what works so that you can understand their tricks and also use the ones that work.
	So... Get them while they're young.
	Lots of stories, lots of metaphors.
	And basically, of course, the argument for morality is what these irrational belief systems use on a continual basis.
	Obviously, with Christianity, if you don't believe in God, if you don't obey your parents, if you don't obey the preachers, then you're bad in some way, right?
	And bad, just sort of by the by, bad has turned from a masculine definition.
	This is really over the last 50 to 75 years, I believe, or maybe 76, really, it's that precise.
	But the concept of bad has really gone from a hyper-masculine to a hyper-feminine kind of definition.
	And this is, for me, this has sort of occurred after the First World War, maybe a little longer than 75 years.
	But, you know, you get 10 million men getting wiped out.
	That's going to do, it's going to strike a certain blow against the definition, masculine definitions within society.
	And then, of course, you get the Second World War wiping out a whole bunch more.
	And then you get, of course, the introduction of voting skewed the political system towards women, which, of course, I mean, I'm not saying it's bad.
	It's bad to be skewed towards men or women.
	And then the rise of the welfare state made men less relevant and less required for the raising of children.
	And so for a wide variety of reasons, the masculine definition of bad, which was crazy hellfire and brimstone stuff in the past, Has been shifted in a pretty subtle but very powerful way towards this feminine concept of bad.
	And the feminine concept of bad tends to revolve around selfish.
	The masculine concept of bad tends to revolve around disobedient and is enforced through anger.
	And the feminine conception of bad generally revolves around being selfish and revolves around guilt.
	I mean, this is just very general.
	I'm not going to say very broad, but a very general kind of definition.
	I think that's useful enough to stand for what it is that we're talking about.
	And so... This argument for morality that you see, I mean, altruism in the sort of guilt-ridden phase is something that is kind of inculcated by women and is really heavily inflicted upon children.
	It's another one of the reasons why men get so angry, is that it's not too good for the male soul, I do believe, to be sunk into this abyss of hyper-feminized guilt.
	I think that causes the male...
	I mean, just look at gangs, right?
	Gangs raised by a tribe of women, young men raised by a tribe of women turn pretty violent and rancid often, and certainly have trouble being masculine in any kind of positive sense, right?
	For them, because they've been raised in a hyper-feminine stew of guilt and obligation and whining and complaining and nagging and all this kind of stuff...
	In a sense, I've never had a clean fight.
	Then they react to that hyper-feminine controlling world by becoming hyper-masculine, which means ridiculous and tribal and aggressive and status-driven and all that kind of nonsense.
	So, sorry, that's a...
	Hey, it's a... You know, as you may have seen from the webcam, see, now you can actually trace this kind of stuff more than just the sound of the speed that I have hit a slight slowdown in traffic.
	And, of course, this is my first time commuting at this hour.
	So this all becomes very exciting for me because this I sort of see spiraling off into the next couple of years and more time on the road.
	But we'll find a route.
	It takes a while, but we will in fact find a route that will work.
	But in the matter of being able to convince people You have to look at what you're working against, which is all of this inculcation of guilt based on the argument for morality.
	Sensitivity, right? Oversensitivity is another way that people generally get raised these days.
	You can't hurt other people.
	You can't offend other people.
	You know, like if you do something your mom doesn't like, then she'll probably say something like, you know, but I'm so upset, right?
	What you did makes me so upset.
	It would be sort of embarrassing for a man to say that, that you should, you know, you should buy my product, otherwise I'm going to cry.
	And I know that's a ridiculous way of putting how women work, but I mean, in some level with mother and a child, it's a little bit too common, I think.
	But women feel that it's a perfectly valid argument in many ways to say, what you're doing is hurting me, therefore you're bad.
	It's patently ridiculous, of course, but it's a pretty common argument that people have when they are trying to deal with controlling others.
	It's a pretty common argument that women have, and of course some men have it and some women don't, but in general it does seem to be the case.
	So, the only way to deal with essentially emotional arguments is with emotion.
	And I'm not talking about anything like yelling back or anything like that.
	But you really do have to fight fire with fire.
	If you are...
	If somebody is yelling at you, being calm and reasonable with them, unless it's a really powerful kind of just staring at them and saying, you know, are you done at the end?
	If somebody is yelling at you, to me it's perfectly acceptable to yell back.
	And if somebody is guilting you, to me, it's perfectly acceptable to get angry.
	And if somebody is manipulating you, to me, it's perfectly acceptable to get angry.
	It doesn't mean that you get abusive.
	It doesn't mean that you call them bad names.
	But get angry.
	It's perfectly healthy. People try to manipulate and control you all the time.
	And if somebody does understand that they're advocating you getting shot by advocating the state, then I do believe that it's perfectly valid to get angry at that person.
	It's perfectly valid to get angry at that person.
	So, I think that working to connect rationality and the passions is very, very, very important.
	It's very, very, very important.
	And we'll sort of talk this afternoon about ways that I've found that are helpful.
	To be able to do that.
	But you do have to be able to connect with your passions if you're going to convince people.
	If you're going to convince people, it is absolutely essential that you end up connecting with your passions.
	Because if you can't connect with your passions, then you simply won't have any luck convincing people in any way, shape, or form.
	Because you're going to end up Merely talking at a different level than they're operating at.
	It was not rational argument that makes somebody a Christian.
	It was not rational argument that makes...
	It is not... And was not rational argument that turned somebody into a Christian or into a statist.
	And we know that because these positions are fundamentally irrational.
	So we know that it cannot be that it was rational argument that made these people into what they are.
	I mean, that's impossible.
	And if it wasn't rational argument that turned these people into who they are, then it was irrational abuse.
	And to me, teaching a child, as I've talked about before, teaching a child false arguments for morality and so on is abusive.
	It's completely abusive. If you're trying to reason someone out of the scar tissue of abuse combined with the guilt of being humiliated and the guilt of having exceeded to irrational demands and the incredible weight of the argument for morality, then what somebody hears, and of course they've been inoculated against rationality, Right?
	So, when, you know, when somebody's religious, what happens is they talk about, they get told about the virtue, when they're children, they get told about the virtue of faith.
	Faith is the good. Faith is the, you know, rationality won't help you.
	Faith is the virtue. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, that, of course, means that when you start arguing with them from a rational standpoint, they have a perfect answer already.
	They're inoculated, right?
	They're well defended against you.
	The beliefs that are inculcated in people are inoculated against their opposites, right?
	I mean, you have as much chance of converting a committed Christian as of dying from smallpox, because the inoculations in both senses are pretty effective.
	But if somebody is bullied into a position, then they're not going to react or respond to rationality in the way that you would hope that they will.
	I mean, it would be nice if they did, but they won't.
	So, what you have to do is you have to fight fire with fire, which means that you have to stop being nervous about becoming passionate in a debate.
	And in my view, you do have to accept that passion is essential in a debate.
	Passion is essential in a debate.
	And you need to connect with your emotions so that you can really effectively communicate with other people.
	Again, it doesn't mean yelling. It doesn't mean being abusive.
	It doesn't mean being cruel.
	It doesn't mean whatever, right?
	But it does mean that you will end up taking your ideas seriously.
	Like, no fooling, for real, this stuff is serious.
	That's what you want to have at your emotional core when you're debating with people.
	To me, that's absolutely essential.
	You cannot convince people in the absence of passion.
	Or if you do, it's going to be a very transitory thing.
	Well, I'm going to, because now you have some decent light, I'm going to stop here while we're at the light so that this dang computer can finish compiling the video.
	Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk more about this this afternoon.

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