All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:06
468 Seeing Through Darkness
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
It is, in fact, the 19th.
Let's not panic about the dates.
It is 5 o'clock.
Heading home to my baby.
And I hope you had a great week.
I had a lot of fun. I'm just finishing up a whole series of white papers for work, which will be gripping and staggeringly enlightening about profit optimization within a manufacturing environment.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. I'm going to touch my own nipple, too.
So, I hope that you're doing well.
I wanted to chat this afternoon about a topic that Christina and I, for a variety of reasons, have been talking about this week, which is why I just can't shut up.
No. Well, yes, but also, why, oh why, is it so hard for women to, and it's true for men too, right?
I'm just talking about it in the context of Christina, for this question of the dark side, the dark side, right?
The dark side is a very, very important aspect of psychology.
It's called in Jungian terms, it's called the shadow.
And I guess in Freudian terms, it would be called the id, although the Jungian shadow is a bit more technical in that it is the rejected or despised aspects of the personality versus the Jungian id, which contains a great deal of psychic energy as well as what are negative things.
And it's a little bit related to what I was talking about this morning.
In terms of what is it that...
How is it that you know whether it is...
Reboot.
Sometimes the language center just runs on Linux.
You know what I'm saying? Oh, here come the Linux flame mails.
Anyway, how is it that you know that you're immoral?
What empirical evidence would you have and so on?
Logical and all the other virtues that you have described to yourself as I did and do ascribe to myself.
How is it that you know these things are true?
The one thing that I think is the case, and this was provoked a little bit by Nate's comment on the boards about women, that he finds it frustrating to talk philosophy with women.
And it's a very interesting question, and I had a chat with Christina after last weekend's comment where...
There was a question about something to do with men and women, and I was saying that women are a little bit more conflict-avoidant than men, which is not to say that men successfully resolve conflicts, but women are a little bit more conflict-avoidant, in my experience, than men.
And philosophy, of course, is very fundamental to conflict-solving, but the one thing that philosophy will absolutely detonate within you, if you pursue it, is rank sentimentality.
Sentimentality is a false argument for morality, basically, and it is the opposite of the kind of empirical morality that we were talking about this morning.
Sentimentality is how you want things to be, and it is the basic principle of rather than becoming a good person to manipulate other people into thinking that you're a good person.
That's sort of the base essence.
In many ways, really, of sentimentality.
Rather than trying to become a good person, you will manipulate other people into believing that you are a good person.
This is the most common response to discomfort, right?
This is the most common response to personal discomfort, is to manipulate others, right?
I mean, this is the root of politics, the roots of crime, which is a superset of politics, certainly is the root of the military.
That if you feel a deficiency, that you are going to brutalize and manipulate other people into filling up that hole in you or providing you with the resources to alleviate the pain of a deficiency.
So if you look at something like the welfare state, you either get a job or you can manipulate and bully other people into giving you money, which is sort of the essence of politics and particularly of mob democracy.
And this also occurs in the realm of romance as well.
And if you want to be loved, then what most people will do is they will work on personal grooming.
This is the depth of our society at the moment.
So when most people want to have somebody be attracted to them or to attract someone...
You know, they go get their hair done.
They go and, you know, lipstick and so on and, you know, get sexy clothes.
Maybe they go to the gym or something.
I'll lose this weight and I'll be more attractive and so on.
And this is really, obviously, physical attractiveness is a form of manipulation, which is not to say there's anything wrong or bad about it.
But to be handsome or to be pretty, to be attractive in the sort of standardized sense, and to focus on that, right, as a primary methodology for drawing value and providing value to others to draw them towards you, it's fundamentally manipulative because it's kind of shallow.
And you're kind of tweaking off of the...
You're kind of tweaking off of hormonal and built-in biological base attractors that are just sort of innate, right?
So, you know, when you're hungry, you want something to eat.
There's nothing moral about it.
And when you are...
If you're feeling sexy, then you want to find somebody to make love to, or at, or however you want to put it.
And, of course, you're going to have particularly built-in and somewhat socio-conditioned, but mostly built-in biological receptors and preferences about what it is that you find attractive.
Young lady versus old hag, say.
Unless you're that wattle guy from Ally McBeal.
This is sort of emotional.
It's sort of a biological manipulation, right?
This question of sexual attractiveness.
And of course, it is the great danger of women, I think, more so than men, simply because of the tide of desire.
But it is the great temptation of women to sort of make a throne out of their vaginas, to really mix my metaphors in a possibly visually unpleasant way.
But, you know, the fact that men want to have sex with women doesn't make women good.
It doesn't make women moral. It doesn't make women, you know, in the same way that, you know, traditionally speaking, in a very sort of traditional way, the fact that women want men with money, or at least men with resources so that they can have resources to help them take care of their children in a base biological way, the fact that women want men with money It does not make men with money good people.
It doesn't make them moral. It doesn't make them happy.
It does any of those kinds of things.
Nature is a blind photocopier.
Whatever it takes to get the photocopy machine to work, nature will do.
But that's not quite the same as having philosophical or moral value.
So there is a sort of great challenge about how is it that you provide value to others?
How is it that you draw them to you?
How is it that you get them to want to invest resources in you?
And, you know, I think for a lot of good people, and not that there are a lot of good people, but for a lot of good people, you want to provide a value in the sort of capitalist sense, right?
So exchange of value for value and so on.
And it's a win-win and it's a positive-positive.
But a lot of other people don't.
They want to manipulate other people into giving them values.
And this is a lot to do with family, right?
So if you don't really feel like seeing your mom, then she's going to make you feel guilty, as I sort of talked about negative economics, right?
That she's going to make you feel guilty and then withdraw her evocation of guilt from you.
That's going to be your payment for going to see her.
Not that she provides you a positive value, but rather that she at least will withdraw a negative emotional value to do with why it is that you're seeing her.
You don't go see her. She makes you feel guilty.
You go see her. You feel better. That's the value she gives you, which is like, I'll stop standing on your toe if you'll go and dance with me.
It's not that you're attractive.
It's just that my toe hurts.
And... So I sort of wanted to talk a little bit about the dark side, right?
Because this is the great temptation for everyone.
It certainly was for myself and is for myself at times.
It's a great temptation to manipulate others into thinking that you have value rather than to actually have value and sort of let the chips fall where they may.
It's very hard, as it is within our own personalities, to give up the idea that controlling things is good.
I mean, control is the great sort of temptation of the false self, which is why age wipes it off the map for a lot of people.
You can't control aging and so on.
This idea that we can control and manipulate things in order to gain value is the great temptation of, you know, we are essentially social animals, of course, so there are, as I think Hayek or Rothbard pointed out, sort of three strategies for gaining resources in the world.
The first is to produce them, right?
So if you're If you're hungry, you can go and get yourself an apple from someone's unowned property or something.
Go and get an apple, or in the long run, you can become a farmer and grow food and so on.
That's one way to get resources.
The second way to get resources is to steal them, either using overt or explicit or implicit force.
So you go stab a guy and take his bread, or you say you're going to stab him if he doesn't give you the bread, and that is how you get that resource.
And the third one is to sort of manipulate and so on, right?
So there's no particular violence involved.
There is only the sort of emotional manipulation and bullying.
It usually comes from a situation of implicit violence, which is the relationship between parent and child.
From the child's part, it's an implicitly violent relationship because the child has no capacity for independent action and is completely dependent and at the mercy of the parent.
So there are sort of these three options, and we all have the capacity To pursue these options.
These are all perfectly viable biological strategies.
In fact, theft in a lot of ways is a far more viable biological strategy, which is why theft tends to be the norm for human relations.
I would say now, if you count the national debts of most countries, there's more theft than voluntary interactions, even in the sort of, quote, capitalist Western countries.
But theft is the norm because theft is sort of highly profitable.
And theft is highly profitable because of the existence of the state, right?
Theft is a lot less profitable when there's no state, which is why the idea that less state leads to more violence is really quite laughable.
But theft is very common, and from a biological standpoint, from an amoral, blind photocopier, get your genes to the next generation kind of standpoint, it's perfectly viable.
Theft and rape are perfectly viable biological strategies, and I think have been quite common throughout history.
Look at the mulattoes in the South and look at the sort of half-Caucasian, half-Oriental babies in Vietnam, just to take two sort of minor examples, not to pick on the Americans because it's common all the world over.
But sort of theft and rape and so on.
Now, theft and rape are how sort of people who are corrupt, this is how they get a hold of resources when they're in the...
When they have superiority, when they have physical strength and superiority.
Theft and rape is how people gain access to resources.
When they're not in a strong position, then they generally work on manipulation.
It's a very important thing to understand.
It doesn't mean everyone's evil or anything.
It's just we have to look at how human beings are involved and how is it that they get a hold of resources.
Now, of course, the major problem is that when there's sort of theft, rape, and manipulation going on, there's almost no incentive to produce anything, which is why these societies always end up generally starving, although the good men invite the pillagers, the rapists, the thieves, and so on by allowing the existence of a government, organized plunder, disorganized crime, as they say in Yes Minister, politicians, the government is disorganized crime.
But the great challenge is to recognize, I think, one of the great challenges in morality, in personal morality, is to sort of recognize that we all have the capacity for this kind of manipulation, for this kind of plunder.
And that's something that is part of the shadow, part of the things about ourselves that we do not like, but which are absolutely essential.
I think it's very important for people to have access to their full personality.
And that means not just having access to the parts about yourself that you like and approve of, but also having access to the parts of yourself that are sort of, quote, darker and so on, and meaner and petty and manipulative and cruel and hypocritical and so on.
These are all aspects of ourselves that we have.
The great temptation is to just, A, pretend they don't exist, and B, if they manifest themselves, blame the other person, and C, if you can't blame the other person, then submit to criticism of those traits with, you know, barely suppressed rage and indignation, and then immediately make up stories about how you were forced to do it and it's not part of you and, you know, this kind of stuff.
So this is a pretty inevitable reaction.
It's a very false self-reaction, but it's pretty inevitable to any sort of intimation or confrontation with one's own dark side, with the weaker side, with the more petty, manipulative, and cold.
And cruel side, which is just about, you know, maximize resources, maximize resources, maximize resources.
That sort of cold, calculating, merely biological, although enormously powerful, but merely biological kind of approach or kind of situation.
And it's certainly my strong feeling, and it's certainly not just my strong feeling, that it's very important to accept our capacity, our base biological calculating capacity,
to do some pretty great harm, even those of us who to do some pretty great harm, even those of us who strive for morality and so on, and maybe even especially those of us who strive for morality, that it's very important that we get a handle on the fact that we really do have a capacity to cause some pretty significant harm in the And if we deny the capacity that we have to create harm in this world, then we end up with much less of a robust personality.
*shriek* Pardon me. We end up with a personality that's fundamentally weakened.
It's fundamentally quite weak.
The sort of base biological calculation aspect of our personality, the manipulative cold side, is very important to have because, of course, there's lots of people around us who have it.
And if we disown it within ourselves completely, then we have no sort of capacity to understand and to deal with those kinds of people.
If you get rid of your dark side, you actually become rather helpless towards evil.
There's a theory, and I have some mixed feelings about Churchill, but Churchill's own ambition was extraordinary, and his own capacity for violence was not inconsiderable in that he was in the Boer War and shot innocent men because his government told him to and then had this daring escape and ran for office and so on,
trekked across the Transvaal. And so the fact that he was a violent man who had killed other men for the sake of his uniform, and that he had overweening ambition, all of this, I think, should combine to help us to understand why Churchill was able to see the evil of Hitler when very few other people were able to.
You know, evil grows through the idea that we can't be evil, right?
I mean, this is the fundamental, this is how evil spreads, right?
This is the channel, right?
This is the transmission mechanism of evil, is our belief that we can't be evil, or that we're not evil, or that we have no capacity for evil.
That's how evil really spreads, right?
And in order for evil people to be able to exploit good people, then good people have to believe that they're just automatically good and have no capacity for evil.
And the mechanism by which that works is sort of interesting.
Now, it is really impossible to be good if you have no capacity for evil.
If you have no capacity to do harm, to destroy, to undermine, to manipulate, to be a cutthroat human being in one form or another, if you have no capacity for this, it's really impossible to be good.
A goodness must be a virtue that arises from choice and dedication to virtue.
And it's not something that is just a state of nature.
It's not virtuous to have two arms.
Because that's just what human beings do in general.
They come out stamped from the mold having two arms.
So it's not a virtue. It's just, you know, look down, two arms, that's who I am.
It's not virtuous to be intelligent.
It's not virtuous to have talent.
These are all inborn things.
Now, if virtue is an inborn thing, if you're just virtuous and just a good person because you have no capacity to be evil, then it's not a virtue.
It's just like a talent. It's like being able to sing or being able to do somersaults or something.
It's got no moral content whatsoever.
So you're not actually a good person if you don't have the capacity to do evil, if it's not a choice.
It's then like calling yourself a good businessman because you've inherited a huge amount of money, right?
I mean, it's just an inheritance. It's part of your nature.
So, in a world where an individual...
When an individual...
I'm just talking about myself. If I have no capacity to do evil, then I have no capacity to be good.
There's no choice then. It's like...
It's like saying, I'm a pacifist because I've spent my whole life in a straitjacket.
It's like, well, no, you're not a pacifist then because you're in a straitjacket, right?
I mean, everyone who's in a straitjacket could call themselves a pacifist or a whole bunch of other things, lazy because they don't get around much.
So the terms that have moral content must arise out of a situation of choice.
They cannot arise out of a situation where it's simply an inevitability to act the way that you act.
So that has to be a choice. Now, if we deny our own capacity to do evil, to be brutal, to be vicious, to be cold, whatever it is, whatever negative epithets that you want, if you say, well, I just don't do those things, I'm not capable of those things, then you get a kind of false superiority.
You claim a kind of ethics that don't exist, right?
So basically you claim a moral value called I am good, which can't conceivably exist because you can't be any other way.
It's not virtuous to be tall.
It's just how you grew, right?
And it's not like you made a choice to be tall and someone else made a choice not to be tall and so on.
So, in a world of assumed virtue, there is in fact no virtue.
Now, of course, if there's no good, there really can't be any evil.
And this is why when people believe that they are good and have no capacity for evil, evil becomes invisible to them because virtue is also invisible to them.
What you have instead is vanity.
Vanity and virtue are quite the opposites.
Virtue, in my experience, and I think there's good logical arguments to be made for it, arises from a sort of humility.
To realize that your ego is just a small part of your whole personality that there are.
Lots of impulses that are beyond your control.
That aging is beyond your control.
That your family of origin is beyond your control.
That many of your physical attributes are beyond your control.
That sickness and health are to some degree beyond your control.
And there's a certain amount of humility, I think, that's very important.
And also, humility in the understanding that we have the capacity to do great evil.
All of us have the capacity to do great evil.
I mean, this sort of Nazi conformity that occurred in the camps and in the concentration camps and so on.
This doesn't arise out of nowhere.
This is common to all human beings.
I mean, if I had been born in communist Russia, I certainly would have been a rather different human being and would have held enormously different beliefs.
That seems to me very likely.
And so, given that we're all slaves of circumstance and that we're all slaves of biology and that we're all slaves of our histories and we're all slaves of our physical capacities and so on, all of these sorts of things, I think, are quite true.
It doesn't mean that we have no free will and we have no, at least...
For me, and we have no capacity for virtue, it just means that there's a certain amount of humility that we need to accept.
And that means stop trying to control everything about your own personality, which tends to...
It's like paving over a rainforest.
You've controlled it, but it's kind of dead, right?
So, if we believe that we don't have the capacity for evil, then virtue is not a choice that we're making.
Virtue doesn't exist, and therefore evil doesn't exist.
Which means that we really can't see evil.
We can't really sort of see or comprehend it.
Because we view ourselves and our own capacities for ethical action in a very shallow kind of way, I'm just nice.
I'm a nice person.
I'm a good person. I take care of people.
We all get this sort of stuff from our...
Our mothers and maybe our fathers and so on.
A lot of sentimentality, right?
Now, the fact of the matter, though, is that we all do have the capacity to do great evil.
And you only need to put people in positions of unmonitored power for usually a couple of hours to a couple of days to see them begin to degenerate and slide into evildoing, right?
And it's the famous Milgram's experiment where he divided two groups of college students into sort of pseudo-guards and pseudo-prisoners and then ended up having to stop the experiment within a day or two because brutal beatings began to ensue.
These are all sort of nice, normal, middle-class kids without any...
Without any moral compass whatsoever, sort of conformity, right?
And then you grant human beings power, and they will inevitably begin to abuse that power because they switch to their base biological calculator and says, now that I have power, I must get as much power as possible because other people will come and take it from me, and I'm now in a state of nature, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the base biological calculator kicks in, which causes great brutality and cruelty towards others, and you are then in a situation of amorality and then very quickly into a situation of evil.
This will always occur with a power disparity within any kind of society.
I think it's possible that it won't occur with parenting if parents are very sort of strict and understand their own with themselves and understand their own capacity to abuse the inevitable power that nature grants them over their children.
But for sure, with a state, it's completely and totally inevitable.
And I believe also with the church and its relationship to children, it's completely and totally inevitable.
So... If we forget that we can be evil and we can do evil, then we end up in a very, very compromised and vulnerable position.
We no longer are as alert to and aware of the inevitable predations that those in power will To perform or engage with on those who they have power over.
We forget about the corruption of power when we forget about our own capacity for evil.
If I were given lordship of the world tomorrow, even though I try and really focus on ethics and so on, I'm quite sure that it would not take me more than a couple of weeks to begin making morally compromised decisions if I couldn't sort of not be that guy.
So, this capacity that we all have, based on particular circumstances, to become evil and to do horrible things, the fact that we don't remember or recognize our capacity for this, and that it's common to all of us, and that there really seemed to be almost no exceptions to this rule.
I mean, you think of people like Thomas More and so on from a man for all seasons fame, but he was doing it because he believed in God and defying the power of the king and so on.
So it really wasn't sort of a personal virtue.
It was just a different kind of craziness that opposed the craziness of aristocracy.
And there is Socrates, but Socrates himself in Plato's observations was a slave to the laws of Athens and believed that the laws of Athens had the right to put him to death because they had validated the marriage of his parents.
He was really crazy in his own way.
Whether that's Plato or Socrates, it doesn't really matter.
But... This fact that we all have the capacity to do great evil and to be very cruel, and that we're just working empirically, just working throughout history.
When society turns bad, everyone pretty much gets on the bandwagon and turns bad right with it.
We can see that sort of looking around now.
You get to people who are pro-war because they want to go kill people and they're evil and corrupt.
And then there are people who are anti-war because they'd rather that the soldiers be used to extract and transfer property from people within the country because they're socialists or lefties, liberals as they're called.
And those people are equally corrupt.
So when the power grows, the corruption always grows with it.
It's inevitable. It's a law of nature.
It's almost as certain as gravity.
And you and I have exactly the same capacity as well.
We have exactly the same capacity to do evil should society become openly corrupt, evil, and destructive.
And if we forget that we have this capacity, then we are extraordinarily vulnerable to evil.
So America, to pick on America, simply because it's what we hear the most about up here in Canada, and Canada is too boring a country for most people to know anything about it, so I don't mean picking on our American friends, but...
In America, people with all seriousness can talk about America, the free country.
They can genuinely and absolutely, with conviction and passion in their voice, talk about how we need to make torture legal to preserve America's freedoms.
They absolutely and totally believe, as an axiom, in the virtue of their country, in the virtue of their society.
In other words, They don't believe that it's possible for Americans to do evil, that Americans are some sort of extraordinary, interstellar, extraterrestrial race that don't share the same gene pool with, say, the people who are terrorists, as I quote as insurgents and so on.
The people who Americans openly say, well, those people are evil, those Muslims.
That somehow Americans are a different species and don't share those genes, right?
So in that sense, it renders you extraordinarily blind to a great evil.
It lets you sort of be distracted by stupid, unimportant evils and forget about and sort of miss the great evil.
And so when you believe axiomatically in your own virtue, whether that's personal or your country, you end up with a wide variety of extraordinarily problematic Perspectives that lend you to be extraordinarily vulnerable to evil growing within your own society, right? So when you are an American and you sort of look at 9-11 and you look at the coal incident and you look at, you know, whatever, whatever, you say, boy, those Muslims are evil.
Right? So they're opposite.
They're bad, I'm good, they're bad, and I'm good.
And the question also then becomes, well, why?
First of all, what's the evidence?
You sort of go, well, they kill people.
It's like, well, your government kills people.
They're religious fundamentalists.
Well, George Bush invaded Iraq because God told him to, according to his take on the tale.
So, you know, you'd have to really dig hard to find principles that separate the country.
Well, we have separation of church and state.
Well, you know, kind of less and less all the time.
Well, we have economic freedom.
Well, that's certainly true, that there's much more economic freedom in the U.S. than there is in the Muslim countries.
But you'd have to, of course, ask yourself, which direction is the U.S. Economic Freedom Index going?
And it ain't skyward towards minarchism, let alone anarcho-capitalism.
So... You would not be able to say then that, I mean, America is certainly more than half corrupt in that sense, because, I mean, more than half the dollars, I think, now are spent by the government or something, or in debt through by the government.
So there would be that aspect, and it's obviously going in the wrong direction, so you certainly, it wouldn't be, we're good, you're bad.
It's like, we're bad, you're worse, right?
It's not really quite as compelling a patriotic statement.
And so the evidence is certainly not pointing towards, you know, okay, there's 9-11.
Yep, okay, you know, 3,000 Americans got killed.
That's really bad. Half a million Iraqi children got killed by American and British and coalition action.
And now hundreds of thousands of Iraqis seem to be killed and hundreds more thousands have fled their homes.
And, you know, this is so...
It's kind of... It becomes a little bit of a tit-for-tat stuff, as you can sort of see between the Jews and the Muslims.
It becomes sort of a tit-for-tat stuff where, you know, frankly from the outside, from the rationalist atheist perspective, you know, you're all saying each other are muddy, but you're all neck deep in mud, right?
So it looks kind of silly from the outside.
But once you get past the question of what's the evidence that we're good and they're bad, right?
Then you have to, once you get past the aesthetics, then you actually have to get to the cause, right?
Okay, well, Americans are good and the Muslims are bad, right?
So, okay. Well, why?
Why would an American raised as a Muslim be bad, right?
I mean, is it interchangeable?
Is it reversible? These are all sort of basic questions that you really do have to ask yourself to be a morally responsible and wise human being, which of course Almost nobody asks because they're very uncomfortable questions, right?
So if you go to some super patriot who says, you know, America number one, Muslims are bad, right?
The question would be, well, okay, my friend, who do you think you would be if you grew up as a Muslim in a Muslim household, right?
Would you be a Muslim?
Would you be the kind of people that you're currently despising?
And, of course, he might say, I'm just glad to be an American, right?
It's like, I'm sure you are glad to be an American.
The question still stands, though, if you weren't born an American, would you be virtuous, right?
Now, you know, if he was really vain and crazy and would probably never answer this, then he'd say, no, I'd be a perfectly virtuous American even if I was born, you know, Farouk Bulsara in Syria.
Right, which is to say that he is genetically different, right?
Because if he's not genetically different, and of course then you just sort of take him to a lab and irradiate him with something to wipe his stupidity off the place of the earth, but you sort of compare the DNA and say, well, you know, you're pretty much the same as some guy in Syria, so it's not genetic, so what is it?
Do you have this magical ability to just see to the truth no matter what your social circumstances, no matter what you're taught, no matter what your culture, what your environment, right?
If so, then why are you so blind to U.S. corruption and so on, right?
So if this gentleman takes a minor step towards wisdom and says, well, I guess then that the reason that I'm virtuous and that America is great, or the reason that I'm a virtuous American is because I just happen to be born in America.
And if I were born a Muslim, then I would be an evil Muslim.
So there's nothing in my nature that makes me innately good.
It's not genetic that I am innately virtuous.
It's circumstantial. It's circumstantial that I get to call myself virtuous.
I just happen to be taught some more virtuous principles as I was growing up.
I happen to live in a slightly freer country and I happen to have swallowed a whole bunch of propaganda about the virtue of my culture and country.
But it's not fundamentally the case that I am genetically more virtuous than other people.
It's just that I happen to be born here.
And if I was born over there, then I'd be cursing Americans as a Muslim.
And if I were born in America, then I'm cursing Muslims as an American.
So that's something sort of fundamental to understand.
That's what I mean about humility.
We're lucky a lot of times.
A lot of ethics is just luck.
It's blind freaking luck.
But once you get that humility that you're not perfectly responsible for your own moral character and moral nature, good heavens, culture and imprinting and family and all this has an enormous impact and all that kind of stuff, right?
So once you get the kind of humility that's associated with that, then you naturally and inevitably lead to the next conclusion.
And the next conclusion is, okay.
So if I'm genetically the same as a Muslim, then...
I would be as a Muslim is if I were born in Iraq or Iran or Syria or wherever, Saudi Arabia.
In which case, logically, I have the same capacity for evil actions as those I despise.
I have the same capacity for evil actions as those I despise.
I am not a morally impervious knight in shining armor that no dragon can slay.
I am a vulnerable, succumb to temptation, want to get along with people, full of anger and bitterness, capable of cruelty and murder and all these sorts of things.
I am that person just like they are.
Now what that does is does some quite remarkable things.
First of all, it helps you get to the question of circumstances.
Which is what makes you stop thinking about ethics as far as a we-them and starts you to understand sociology and politics and family a little more.
Because if you say, okay, well, so I would be as evil as the people I hate and call evil now if I happen to be born over there.
Well, what's the difference? Well, the difference is the society.
The difference is the general cultural beliefs.
The difference is the education.
The difference is, fundamentally, in its most fundamental way, the familial slash political system.
And so once you get that the reason that Muslims hate Americans is because they're raised that way, then you get that you need to change their environment rather than just hate them.
I mean, if you have a sunflower and you try to get it to grow in a cave, you can either keep getting mad at the sunflower and call it lazy and stupid and a good-for-nothing seed, or you can say, huh, maybe I'll try planting it outside where there's sun.
Sun, flower, maybe, maybe, anyway.
So, once you get that, that it is the environment that is producing people, right?
The environment produces the people.
And I know the people produce the environment and so on, but empirically we're just looking at why people are so different in different cultures.
And it's because, you know, for the vast majority of people, the culture produces the people.
With some, you know, minor exceptions, blah, blah, blah, right?
Like species reproduce but there are mutations doesn't destroy biology.
The principle that the culture produces the people and the fact that there are people like us who are not products of our culture or in reaction to our culture or whatever doesn't destroy the principle because these principles are biological in nature and therefore don't need the same absolutism as physics and so on.
So don't get all knotted up about that.
Don't get your pants in a twist about that, my friends.
And so it allows you When you recognize that you have the same capacity for evil as those you hate, you are just goddamn lucky not to be born in their circumstances.
You have the same capacity for evil as the people you hate.
You are just goddamn lucky not to be born into their circumstances.
Then you begin to have a very strong understanding of what evil really is.
Evil, fundamentally, is the institutionalization of violence, whether at a familial, political, or religious level.
It's the institutionalization of violence that produces corruption in people.
Society is a huge machine that pushes out people in the same mold.
Fundamentally, people don't think for themselves.
There's no need for them to do that any more than I need to be good at every single profession in order to call myself a competent human being.
We can specialize.
We can have philosophers and people who fix cars.
The people who fix cars don't have to be philosophers, and I'm more than happy with that as long as nobody ever asks me to fix my car.
So the division of labor is perfectly fine, and the vast majority of people can't think for themselves any more than you and I could perform brain surgery on a rodent.
And there's no... I mean, we can hate them for that if we want, but that's sort of silly, right?
Because, I mean, that's just a special skill, specialized skill and talent.
But once you get that society basically just photocopies a human soul over and over and over again, then you get that, and it starts with the family and continues with the public education in the state.
The family and the state are not that separate in this paradigm because the state takes over the education of the children for 14 years when they're young and impressionable.
So the family and the state are co-joined as is religion, right?
All those who influence the minds of children are sort of what you could put under the heading of family, right?
So, once you get that, people just kind of come out like machinery out of a central familial, political, cultural environment.
Then you get that hating people for being who they are rather than wanting to fundamentally change the environment that produces them...
Again, I'm just working empirically.
I'm not trying to be radical here.
You just look around the world.
People who come from the same culture tend to be the same kinds of people.
It's not that complicated to look around and see this, and it takes a fair amount of hyper-intellectual education to miss this.
Men are different from women, and Italians are different from...
People from Korea.
There are cultural stereotypes that have some value.
And so once you get that it's the culture and the society and the ideas as a whole that justify the power structures which produce the people, then getting angry at the people who hate you because you think that they're just hateful, evil people is like getting angry at the knife, not the guy who stabs you.
Oh, it's that damn knife that stabs me.
The knife is evil. Let's put the knife on trial and let's electrocute the knife for being a bad, evil knife.
No, it's the person. The culture is the person.
The individual that you hate in this sort of metaphor is just a knife.
They're just a product of the culture.
So, once you get the humility that you could do as much evil as those you despise, if the circumstances and environments had been different, or even if you don't like that, if just your particular latent talents and abilities and preferences had been different, right?
My brother and I came from the same family.
One of us became rational, the other one became sort of the opposite of that.
It obviously has something to do with the fact that I like rationality more than he does, right?
Is that something that is innate?
Yeah, it kind of feels that way.
So, what you want to do, of course, this is why freedom and a stateless society is so important.
What you want to do is to make sure that societies exist that don't program people to be like horrible, thuggy kind of murderers, right?
That's a pretty good approach to having a society that's better.
Because if you imagine that people are going to just wake up and start being philosophical and that you can put them in public school but they won't end up worshipping the state in one form or another, either in a sort of external militaristic or domestic welfare sense, If you think that that's the case, then you really don't understand how human beings work, which is that they photocopy off their culture.
But that's what they do. Human beings are just cultural photocopies, undifferentiated cultural photocopies, for the most part, and in general, right?
So if you don't get that, then you're going to end up not getting how important it is to get rid of the state, right?
Because the state destroys people's individuality.
I'm not saying that they're all going to turn into philosophers in the absence of a state, but at least they're not going to be caricatures and stereotypes and empty people who think that everyone else is evil and that they're perfectly good and don't have any humility when it comes to their own good fortune and simply end up saying that I have no capacity for evil, but I'm still good, and this person has no capacity for good, but is still evil, right?
I mean, it's all this sort of illogical nonsense.
So getting in touch with your own capacity for corruption is a very, very important thing when it comes to understanding other people, other cultures, and why things like a stateless society is so absolutely important.
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll talk a little bit more about projection either on the weekend or on Monday.
Tonight, I think we'll be recording version 2 or series 2 on Ask a Therapist.
▲
Export Selection