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Oct. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:45
448 Empiricism and Nonsense Part 1: Church

A brief history of belief and disbelief

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's 8.47 on October the 4th?
5th? Thursday, for sure.
And I hope that you're doing well.
I wanted to chat this morning.
I'm going to take a short break from yelling at people and cursing like a deranged sailor.
As I mentioned on the board, I apologize for the profanity in the last couple of podcasts.
It is language that would make an old sailor's ears bleed.
So I hope that it was okay with you and that you survived my salty tongue.
But I just don't think that I can credibly do a cop or a soldier with a slightly British accent and erudite well-chosen words.
So, I'd like to talk this morning, take a break from that stuff, and I would like to talk about this question, which I think is important to ask whenever you come across somebody and...
You hear them say something.
You hear them assert a truth.
You know, there's a pretty fundamental question that I think is well worth asking them in this area.
And the question is simply this.
Is this something you were told, or is this something that you have established for yourself through empirical observation?
Is this something you were taught, or is this something that you have directly experienced or have empirically built up from evidence over time?
And that's a very, very important question.
And it's a continuum, of course.
I mean, except for the fact that I believe that I'm driving and that gravity exists and so on.
I have no problem with all of that stuff.
And I would say that I fairly much believe in the theory of relativity.
Although, of course, I can't prove it myself.
I don't have the mathematical ability.
Or let's just say training.
And there are other things which you can kind of reason from first principles.
So, of course... I can certainly say with some degree of credibility that the government is forced because I am fairly aware and have read about it and have seen it, of course.
I'm fairly aware of what happens when I don't pay my taxes or if I don't pay my taxes.
The consequences of that, let's say, have been made relatively clear to me.
So, There are certain things that you can just sort of understand based on your own direct experience and things, in that instance, threats which have been made to you.
And there are other things that you simply have been taught as true.
To take an example, and maybe a little slanted, but to take an example, you could say something like, well...
It is something that I have directly experienced.
The threat of the state, right?
The threat of the state of being arrested and so on.
I actually have, believe it or not.
Nothing too shocking.
When I was 17, I bought some beer and I also got some beer for someone else.
And that, of course, is supplying liquor to a minor.
And so I was arrested and I had my day in court.
And so on. So yeah, I do sort of understand the whole deal with the state and So that's something that I have sort of a direct experience of.
So when I say the state is coercion, I sort of, you know, I'm not sort of just, it's not something I was just taught.
Now, I was taught that the state is virtuous, right?
I was taught that the state is all about protecting me and caring for me like some infinite bureaucratic mom.
The state is all about caring and virtue and dedication and nobility and so on.
Similarly, I do understand that soldiers kill people, right?
That much I can sort of get a handle on.
So, that much we've got no particular issues with.
Soldiers do, in fact, shoot people, and we're all fairly comfortable with that basic idea.
However, the virtue of soldiers is not something that I myself have directly experienced.
In fact, having worked with a number of people who were sort of ex-military, I can tell you that I've experienced, you know, directly and empirically quite the opposite, that these people are not virtuous, that they are not mentally healthy.
And the idea that they represent some shining paragon of virtue is something that, you know, I mean, cops and firemen and soldiers and so on They're not even held to ordinary moral standards in the way that you would hold an accountant.
Nobody thinks that an accountant or a bricklayer is some sort of hero for doing what he's doing, that the bricklayer just wakes up with visions of how wonderful he's going to make everyone's house from here to eternity.
That's not really how How we perceive bricklayers.
We say, well, they get up and they want to eat.
They like having bricks around them as well as laying them, so they go to work and they get a paycheck and they do the bricklaying.
But... When it comes to soldiers, right?
And cops and so on.
Even bureaucrats are not held to an enormously high standard when it comes to their moral natures, right?
I mean, we don't think...
There are tireless civil servants working, enslaving day and night to make the world a better place for whoever, whoever.
That much... We all have, as a little bit of a metaphor, we don't really believe it as much anymore.
It's sort of fairly important.
We don't really believe that whole thing nearly as much anymore about the tireless civil servants who slave night and day to make our lives better and so on.
But we surely do believe that with people like soldiers and cops and firemen and so on.
And school teachers, right?
And school teachers. And this is sort of why I picked on these people to begin with, right?
This is sort of why I picked on this category.
And politicians, right? There used to be this idea that politicians...
And we used to have this around priests as well.
We used to have this idea that politicians and priests were, you know, wise and kindly and concerned with the future of society and about building bridges to the 29th century and stuff like that.
And fortunately, we don't believe that as much anymore.
I mean, we're going through, I mean, just sort of from a big picture standpoint, we're going through a disillusionment with the state that is pretty much the same thing that occurred.
When Western society went through a disillusionment with religion as a whole, with the exception to some degree of America, but certainly Europe, went through a disillusionment with religion in the 19th century.
This is sort of a fundamental thing to understand about where we are as a society.
In the 19th century, there was an enormous disillusionment with religion.
And the enormous disillusionment in the West, in Western Europe for the most part, with religion came about pretty simply.
For, you know, 1,500, 1,800 to almost 2,000 years, and if you count the Old Testament, 5,000 years, religion had been claiming to be a huge benefit to mankind, right?
I mean, so... Religion says, we are the way, we are the truth.
This is how the world will improve.
This is what is.
This is how things get better.
We are the way that human beings should think and should move forward.
We are virtue. We are all that is good and noble and true, and so on, and so on, and so on.
And people got a little sick of that, of course, after the fragmentation of Christendom, after Luther in the 16th century.
After the fragmentation of Christendom from a sort of monotheistic Catholic religion into all of the crazed sects, not that Catholicism was not and is not a crazed sect, but after it broke into the Calvinists,
the Spingalians, the Lutherans, all of these Quakers, after all of these sects fragmented, and because of the unity of church and state, there was Hundreds, hundreds, about 100, 150, almost 200 years in some places of religious wars that went on, which were just savage in ways that we can barely imagine in the modern world.
I mean, I know we have pretty brutal wars, and we have wars that kill a whole lot more people, only because the technology is better, and frankly, there's a whole lot more people to kill.
But the kinds of The living hell that religious warfare turned the planet into is just savage.
It's just absolutely savage.
And the torture, the maiming, the disemboweling, the...
Oh, man, you don't even want to know.
People would beg for death. They would beg to confess to anything and beg for death, even though they knew they were going to hell because they just couldn't stand living a split second longer.
So, this kind of problem that occurred in Western Europe was one of the reasons, of course, why the separation of church and state became sort of a necessity, right?
So, in order to...
Because so many people were dying, right?
And as I've mentioned before, there's a traveler who went through Europe in the 17th century...
Sorry, who went through Germany in the 17th and 18th century...
18th century. 17th, so sorry.
And he said... That he had almost never passed a tree by anywhere that didn't have at least one person hanging from it, right?
Because somebody was offended by his or her religious sensibilities.
This was equal opportunity genocide from a religious standpoint.
What happened was people began to realize that with the unity of church and state, this kind of genocide was just going to continue and human life was going to remain fundamentally unbearable from here until the end of time.
And so they began to look at working to separate church and state and What they had to do was they had to give up, of course, to separate church and state, you have to give up a belief in the general veracity of the Bible,
right? I mean, you have to give up literal interpretation of the Bible, which clearly says that secular rulers are put there by God, and none shall tear them asunder, and any offense against them is an offense against God, and any rebellion against them is a rebellion against God, and all of the...
Parasitical evils that intellectuals generally fill people's minds with in order to draw crumbs of gold from the pillaging of the rulers on the general population.
The idea that the Bible was just another story began to sort of percolate around sort of during the late Renaissance and particularly in the Enlightenment.
That, yeah, there may be a God, but let's not get so invested, so heavily invested in these kinds of fairy tales.
Let's just say that God is...
A, you know, a spiritual, personal, it's a personal thing.
It's a personal thing, right?
So, in order to put God down as a personal thing, you have to do an enormous amount of injustice to the, you know, fundamentalist Bible is always true perspective.
But, of course, they were willing to do that because they were kind of sick of getting tortured and killed.
And of course it wasn't just the wars, it was all of the associated horrors that go along with wars, like starvation and all this kind of stuff, right?
So there was an enormous number of problems that were occurring in this realm, and so what had to happen was they began to sort of separate church and state, which meant repudiating the universal validity of the Bible, and so on.
I mean, it's because fundamentally the priests and organized religion as a whole had proven itself so fundamentally unable, To rule people's lives that people began to sort of question the universal validity of organized religion, right? So you got the rise of deism and certain forms of atheism and radical skepticism and in the 19th century, of course, nihilism.
But what happened first was that people just said, okay, let's do the separation of church and state, and from there we'll sort of hope that things at least return to where they were in the early Middle Ages, like in the Quattrocento or the Dark Ages or whatever.
Let's at least hope that we can return to that, you know, where we only had the Black Death to worry about, not so much human beings or torture and so on.
Now, what happened then was, after the separation of church and state, and there was a lot more that we won't need to get into here that was involved in the rise of capitalism, but after the separation of church and state, society completely and totally flourished.
It's a very, very important thing to understand, and we haven't really lived through this, we're kind of living through the reverse with the state, but it's very hard for us to really understand what this means.
So if you have a group which claims the absolute perfect moral right to order everyone around, like organized religion, and they say, well, we have to have the power of the state otherwise, because you're evil, and all the bad things in the world, they come from you, from you sinners, we are morally better, you are evil sinners, and we need to order you around because we're good and you're evil.
Well, when the power of that group is then curtailed and curtailed in a way that was unprecedented in human history and curtailed in a way that we almost can't comprehend.
I mean, the next curtailment of corrupt power that will be comparable to the separation of church and state will be the elimination of the state.
There's really nothing else that could be as great a shift in hierarchical, hegemonic, organized power.
You know, you could talk about the family and so on, but that's a little bit more personal.
So, if this group says we're perfectly moral, you're perfectly evil, and you must submit yourselves to us so that you can be better off, When this group, their power is largely taken away from them.
And yes, of course, there was still organized religion, but it had almost no power relative to what it had during the unity of church and state.
I'm also aware there's lots of gray areas here.
There wasn't a perfect separation of church and state, in God we trust, endowed by our creator, blah, blah, blah.
But still, it's a...
To me, it's like you get rid of the state, yes, you'll still have condo boards and stuff like that and DROs, but the fundamental power of religion to command the troops of the secular rulers to enforce religious edicts was largely taken away.
And what happened then was not what The priests and the popes and so on had predicted, which was, I mean, you know, how could it get any worse, right?
Making it worse?
How could it be worse?
But you certainly couldn't get worse than the religious wars of the 16th, 17th, early 18th century.
You just couldn't get any worse than that.
There's no possible planet that could be worse to inhabit than that planet.
So, in a sense, you know, society kind of has to change when it has nothing to lose, right?
That's sort of something too important to understand.
We can maybe talk about that another time.
That's well known in addiction treatment circles that people really only change when they have nothing left.
To lose, that's when they, you know, when you're in your face down in a gutter in Vegas with three cents in your pocket and you've just impregnated four strippers and you have herpes or syphilis or something, you know, that's when maybe you'll say, okay, maybe I should cut back on the drinking and you'll go and seek help.
Very few people will do it before that kind of extremity and I put myself in that category as I talked about on Sunday.
Not a drinker, but susceptible or addicted to propaganda regarding family.
But what happened then was that these people who said, if you take away our power, the world will become a living hell and you will all be damned to hell in the afterlife forever.
What happened was when the power of this group was curtailed of organized religion, Then society flourished.
Society flourished.
I mean, it's hard to even communicate how jaw-droppingly, shockingly astounding this was.
But it's kind of like if you're a cancer patient and people keep telling your doctor and all the doctors in the world keep telling you that if you stop doing chemotherapy, you're going to die.
And if you end up stopping doing chemotherapy against all historical precedent, against every single judgment of every doctor in the universe, and every expert and everyone, you stop doing chemotherapy and not only do you find that you don't die, but you don't even have cancer.
That it was the chemotherapy was the only thing making you sick.
And that you are healthy and vital and recovered to a kind of health once you start with chemotherapy that you didn't even have before you were diagnosed with this supposed cancer.
I mean, how would you feel about your doctors who are prescribing you all of this sick stuff for their own profit that just makes you ill, and when you decide not to do it, you become incredibly healthy?
I mean, wouldn't you just be absolutely shocked and appalled beyond words?
Well, this really was the state, the situation, I didn't use the state, this really was the situation In 19th century, 18th and 19th century Western civilization, with the, to some degree, exception of America.
And that is just something...
I could sort of spend a whole podcast on it, but I won't because I'm sure you get the idea.
That's something that's just fundamentally impossible to understand for people now.
What a shock that was.
But that's exactly where we are beginning to be.
The beginning of that process...
Actually, you know what?
I think we're more than at the beginning of that process.
We're further along.
And what has occurred for us is that we actually are beginning to look at the state.
And I don't just mean libertarians.
I really don't just mean libertarians.
We are beginning to look at the state In the same way that people were beginning to look at religion in the 17th,
18th and particularly 19th century, we are beginning to have enormous doubts about the moral falsehoods that are being offered to us by the state.
We are beginning the process Of starting, just starting, to work empirically rather than just listen to propaganda.
I mean, the idea that everyone's lying to us is obviously a pretty unnerving idea to most people and I can understand that.
Lying is a difficult word to use in the realm of propaganda because it's propaganda, right?
And it's universal and so on, right?
I mean, was everybody lying when they said that the world is flat in the 14th century?
No. Even though some people knew differently, it was just such a generally accepted wisdom that a kid who's raised in a cult or a kid who's raised in Stalinist Russia Are they lying when they say, is the Stalin kid lying when he says, yes, communism is good?
Well, it's tough to say, right?
It was raised in pure propaganda, so it's complicated.
But I think, I mean, I've sort of found in general that in the conversations that I have with people outside of my car, that we are beginning to doubt the state in the way that we began to doubt religion, In the 18th, 19th century, particularly in the 19th century, things went kind of haywire, as Nietzsche sort of talked about, the God is dead stuff.
Things got a little crazy there for a while, and what happened was, because the family is such a brutal superstructure, for the most part, for children, what happened in general was that When religion was taken away, there was a power vacuum in people's minds.
External, secular, hierarchical, religious, whatever hegemonic structure exists, exists largely to justify and normalize the initial brutality of the family, of your parents.
Because your parents are brutal, you then need an external, hegemonic, hierarchical authority to justify your parents and avoid the pain of having to deal with parental abuse when you're an adult.
You go and search for this kind of structure to sort of plug yourself into so that you don't have to avoid the pain of the diminishment that occurred to you at the hands of your parents' bullying, right?
The sort of a fundamental fact about power, that it doesn't just arise out of nowhere.
It arises, power in a political or even a religious sense, arises because people are abused as children in one form or another.
And I've gone into this before, so don't misunderstand me when I talk about abuse.
I don't just mean sort of beatings and And, you know, sexual abuse and all that kind of stuff.
I'm talking about a lot more pervasive and subtle kind of stuff that occurs as well around...
Well, you can go and listen to the previous podcast.
There's no point in me going into all of this again.
But what happened was, and Nietzsche kind of got this, as you would imagine, he was the son of a Lutheran minister, so as I believe so was Marx, right?
So these people knew something about power, right?
I mean, having been raised in this kind of environment, they were fairly down with the whole abuse of power thing.
And Nietzsche quite correctly predicted, of course, that when God is dead, and God has died largely because we are flourishing as a society in the absence of centrally coercive and organized religion, When God is dead, human beings don't immediately evolve.
Family structures don't immediately evolve.
And when religion gets to such a bad situation, when you look around in the 17th century and say, okay, universal murder, genocide, torture, starvation, this is where the kings and the priests have led us to.
After telling us they were essential and that they would make everything better, this is sort of where they've led us to.
So let's limit the power of the state and let's separate the church and the state, and then society flourishes as a whole.
When that occurs, it's not like the family structures change, right?
So everyone's always sort of like, why is it then when human beings get rid of one form of power, they always invent another form of power, and that's because of the problem of parenting, the problem of not having rational parents.
So you...
In the 19th century, they got rid of the, sort of fundamentally and psychologically, they got rid of the idea of religion as a positive force.
In talking in general, in the intellectual circles, not the sort of common man.
And the reason that they originally got rid of Like, you originally will stop drinking because you're face down in the gutter.
You've lost your wife, your house, your kids, impregnated the strippers, and you have no money.
Right, so at that point you say, oh my god, I don't know what I've got to do, but holy crap have I ever got to stop drinking.
So that's sort of your feeling, and that's sort of what happened with religion in Europe after the religious wars.
And then what happens is you kind of quit, right?
You quit drinking, and your life gets immeasurably better.
And then you really do have an appreciation.
Originally, you want to keep drinking, you just can't take it anymore.
Physically, you just can't take it anymore.
And so you want to quit...
Sorry, you want to keep drinking, but physically you just can't take it anymore.
And that was really the first stage of the end of religion as a sort of believable paradigm within the Western mind.
You know, the virtue of religion, the virtue of priests, and so on.
And what happened then was society got like immeasurably better.
And what that meant was that people really got what horrible falsehoods and predations and corruption and evil had been played upon mankind by the priests and by the kings and the queens and the priestesses, if you go back to ancient Rome, ancient Athens.
But This is a pretty important thing to get, right?
There's sort of two stages of ending an addiction.
The first is, oh God, I just can't take it anymore.
And the second is, holy crap, is my life ever so, so, I mean, infinitely better?
Before I was going down, now I'm going up, up, up.
So, you know, I thought alcohol was my friend, and it's still your friend when you quit out of desperation, but it's just a friend you can't take anymore.
And afterwards, you realize what an impossible and brutal enemy alcohol was in your life.
And that's sort of what happened with the...
In the 19th century, they kind of got the second round of breaking free from an illusion and an addiction.
Now, they didn't get to the point that they began to really look at the family structure and the family histories, right?
I mean, it's kind of an obvious thing once you see it, but it seems to be very tough for people to see.
So, once you get that every human being's first experience with authority is with the family, with the parents, and that the family or the parents...
have greater authority over children than any other agency except perhaps for a torturer or a prison guard will ever have over a human being further along in life.
So the fact that everything starts with the family is something that people don't like So what happened was because the family structures, and particularly in the 19th century, compared to today, of course, right?
I mean, the poisonous pedagogy, as Alice Miller calls it, or the violence and control and dismissal of children was pretty significant.
So, in the 19th century, you got rid of even the illusion that religion had ever been virtuous, right?
It's like, oh, we can't take it right now.
We've just got to do this out of desperation.
And then when you begin to flourish, you go, oh, my God, right?
You might say, I've got to stop chemotherapy because I just can't take it anymore.
And then the moment you stop chemotherapy, you start to feel a whole lot better and your doctor says, no, no, no, no, no, that's just a false effect.
But then you sort of say, you know what, I'm going to roll the dice.
I'm just not going to go back to chemotherapy.
You get healthier and healthier very, very quickly and then you end up enormously healthy and vibrant and powerful and all that kind of stuff.
Well, you know, you're going to stop out of desperation because you just can't take it anymore, but then you're going to begin the process of really understanding what evil had been wrought upon you by this sort of...
I'm not saying chemotherapy is false, but if it were, right, by this false virtue of chemotherapy.
And it's not even... Chemotherapy is not even close to what we're talking about because we're talking about a virtue here, not just a procedure to keep you alive.
But... So what happens then in the 19th century is people really begin to believe or begin to understand the evil that had been wrought on them by the priests and by the kings.
And what happens emotionally and psychologically is that people then begin to get closer to the idea that authority is invalid.
That hierarchical authority is invalid.
And what that does is it begins to bubble up an enormous amount of childhood pain which they experienced due to what was happening with their parents.
And people don't want to face that pain.
Fundamentally, they don't want to face that pain.
They want to continue to believe in the innate virtue of family.
And again, I'm not trying to say that family can't be virtuous.
I'm just saying that family, as a concept, has no such thing as virtue.
Anything more than a crowd has a bowel movement.
Or a crowd has virtue or vice.
I mean, people can have virtue and vice.
Categories cannot, right?
A white guy can be good or bad, but whites as a whole can't be good or bad because it's just a concept which we've talked about in the History of Philosophy or the Introduction to Philosophy series.
So family has no moral content and...
So it's important to understand that people are told their whole lives that the family is all about them and the family is good when the family is not good because we are still in our infancy as a species with regards to ethics.
So there's really no possibility for families to be moral because moral is something that we're just kind of vaguely beginning to get the hang of absent of central sort of authority as regards to morality, but working empirically and logically.
The science of morality He's barely out of the womb.
And so, when we look at the flourishing that occurs when we get rid of religion, we begin to go, oh my god, maybe authority is bad, right?
Because that would be the general principle by which you would understand that process, right?
Maybe authority is bad because when we got rid of religion, everything got better.
And that's a little unsettling for people, right?
Maybe authority is bad. This doesn't mean that children shouldn't have any discipline.
I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about maybe authority is not virtuous, right?
Because when we got rid of the church and we got rid of the kings, things got immeasurably better.
But people have a great deal of emotional problems with the idea that authority is evil.
It's a principle, right?
Because that really goes back to their family, themselves, their own situation.
It's much more personal, right?
When you get the principle that authority is evil, and by that I mean coerced compulsive authority, Non-reciprocal authority, and particularly, sort of most fundamentally, authority which uses the argument for morality in a false and hypocritical manner.
That is, the central corruption of authority.
Even if your parents didn't beat you, if they told you stuff was wrong, that they themselves did or supported, if violence is wrong, but you should obey the state.
Whatever it is that you're taught, that sort of false and hypocritical argument for morality, that's the sort of fundamental corruption that goes on in the realm of family.
So, in the 19th century, they kind of ditched religion and they then were left with this uncertain or unsettling question, which is, authority is bad.
Now, when you start to work with the principle that authority is bad, Then it's really dizzying.
It's really a frightening, terrifying thing, emotionally.
Because then it's like, well, all authority is bad, right?
All authority is bad.
That's really unsettling for people, and rightly so, and understandably so.
And what happens then is that people panic.
And they need a new authority.
They say, rather than face their own histories, rather than face their own childhoods, they say, okay, well, it's not that authority was bad, but another authority is good, right?
This is to rescue the parents, right?
It's to rescue the virtue of the family.
Some authority must be good.
Because if all authority is bad, then my parents were bad and lied to me.
And my social circle is bad, my friends are bad, and of course, since these things generally get discussed in a public sense by people who are older, then the question is, am I bad?
Because these people have had kids by this point, so they've enacted out their own hypocrisies and falsehoods on their own children.
And so then it becomes a very hard thing.
For people to be able to look in the mirror and say, yeah, authority is bad, and I can get angry at other things, but first and foremost, I need to deal with my own history of corrupting authority with regards to my wife, or with regards to my children, or with regards to my husband.
It could be either way.
But this is a very hard thing for people to accept and to go with.
Very, very difficult emotionally.
Very hard. So they say, okay, well, some authority is good, but that authority was bad.
Now, of course, if some authority is good, then they're going to have to reproduce their family structures once more in society as a whole to justify both their parents and themselves in terms of their own exercise of authority.
Right? So, there was an example of John Lennon, right, whose father was this brutal merchant seaman who left when he was five years old.
His mother handed him over to his aunt and stuff like that, and he became a communist, of course.
He won't deal with his own history.
He himself became, I think he had his wife, Cynthia, at least once.
So, he himself became abusive and became a communist, right?
And this is entirely predictable, right?
As I'm going through this sort of stuff here.
You can get rid of one authority structure, but you will forever be regenerating new ones unless you deal with your own family history, right?
This is why authority is so hard to get rid of.
So, in the 19th century, they got rid of religion, and they created a huge power vacuum in the minds of men and women.
And so, of course, they go to the state.
Because the state has been rendered less evil due to its diminishment of power, religion has been revealed as cancer on the soul of man, and so then they go, wow, okay, so authority is still good because of our own family histories and our own behavior as parents.
Authority must still be good, but boy, that authority was really bad.
That religious authority was really bad.
And so then you have to pick another Another collective, another concept that is going to be dominant in your life, in your mind.
You simply can't accept that authority is bad.
And so you ditch the church and you raise the state in its place, right?
I mean, this is the whole history of the 19th and 20th century.
Now, there are some people who combine the state with other things, like the totalitarian state plus the idea of class then becomes communism.
The state plus nationalism becomes fascism.
The state plus race becomes Nazism.
So there's always some other thing.
There was some argument for morality around the state.
But something has to take the place of unjust power if power is still viewed as just in some way.
And so what I'm sort of talking about is that we are sort of now beginning to have a look at the injustice of the state in a sort of clear way.
People are sort of seeing, as somebody said at work the other day, which was quite surprising, privatize the state, right?
It's a very interesting phrase.
And I was sort of talking a little bit about my ideas, but not very much.
This was sort of his contribution, which I thought was very cool and very smart.
So nobody really believes in the virtue of state anymore except those who claim to based on the fact that they're paid by the state, like public school teachers and professors and so on.
And so we're kind of in that situation where people are beginning to work, like the empirical evidence is piling up to the degree that people are just getting uneasy and going like, holy, you know, I don't know what's going to fix it, right?
Now, they can't really go back, I mean, in the States they are to some degree, but most people can't really go back to religion.
That's already been discredited, and there's a certain amount of embarrassment about the idea that we should believe in religion, certainly in Europe, Western Europe, that's very much the case.
So, you know, where are we going to go?
Well, it's sort of my particular belief that one of the reasons I talk so much about the family is that when we begin to disbelieve in the last blood-soaked and corruption-laced fantasy of the virtue of power, when we begin to finally look at that stuff more clearly...
Then we actually have the opportunity to switch the lights on in the whole house.
Because we keep switching one light on and the power then slips to another room and then we go to that room and then it slips to another room and then it goes back to the first room.
So we keep trying to nail this jello of understanding power to the wall, so to speak, in our minds.
And what is, I think, a valid way to understand it now is that we're actually getting to the point where...
We can see power directly for what it is, and in a sense, it has no place to go.
Like, if we displace power, if we begin to suspect power from, that the power of the state is bad, Then there's no particular place for power to go, and that's so we can finally look at the real source, which is the source of corruption in society, which is the family.
Anyway, I hope this has been helpful.
I will try and finish off the idea of empiricism versus inherited ideas a little bit later.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I can't see, there it is.
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