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Oct. 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:32
480 Proving Alienation - Evidence for Hostility to Truth

Is FDR478 vanity, or truth?

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Good afternoon, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. Sunday, the 28th of October, I think it may well be.
It is 12.30, actually 1.30, but we will pretend that a biological clock is unimportant, so we're not going with the time flip that occurs to stay us on track with the sun.
But what we are doing is I'm going to have a little chat about something that has come back from podcast 479, which I believe is quite important and quite relevant to what's going on.
And by the way, hopefully we should get some increased audio quality here because I've given up on the fabulous webcam idea.
So now we're just going with the audio, which I think It should be, I think, better for everyone, including those who don't want to watch the jerky descending light video of me doing podcasts in the early evening of the Canadian winter or so.
So I did a podcast on greatness, sort of our greatness as philosophers, our greatness.
And this is not, again, I was going to do a couple of caveats.
I know I hate the caveats when I listen back to them, but indulge me.
This is not anything to do with megalomania.
It's not anything to do with we are superior, infinitely better than other human beings or anything like that.
It's simply a simple recognition of a skill and ability and a talent that is innate or learned or however provoked, who knows, in us.
And I think that we kind of need to just get a handle on this because otherwise life doesn't really make that much sense, right?
I mean, why would everybody claim to love virtue as everybody does and then hate to discuss virtue?
And why is it that we are constantly rejected and so on?
So I wanted to Put out a couple of criteria that can help avoid the problem of the self-referential system, which is obviously a very, very dangerous thing to have, right?
So, for instance, the self-referential system is where you simply, there's no criteria for disproof.
So that's, of course, we've talked about this briefly before, that in the realm of certain kinds of analyses, if a trait is present, then it's proven, and if it's absent, then it's a repression, and if the opposite is present, then it's a reaction formation, and so on.
You don't want to end up in one of those situations.
Because part of what I did in the podcast 479 was I defined greatness and tried to put forward a theory as to why...
Ideas, which are obviously the most important thing in the world, and people would say that being good is very important, ethics is very important, and integrity.
All of these things are all viewed as very important, and yet nobody wants to discuss them, right?
Sort of an important... I mean, I overused the word important here.
But it's a challenging concept to work with as to why this is the case.
So I sort of put forward a theory, and I certainly did not expect this to be otherwise, but immediately I got sort of reactions back saying, That this is a really dangerous kind of self-referential megalomania, right?
So it's like, I'm a great philosopher, right?
Say I or something akin to that.
I'm a great philosopher, and conveniently, my theory allows me to define a great philosopher as somebody who is not considered to be a great philosopher.
I don't have a three-hour worldwide radio show.
I'm not ranked among the great thinkers or anything like that.
Isn't it just a little bit convenient and self-referential to say, I'm a great philosopher and I've defined a great philosopher as somebody who's rejected by the mainstream because that not only allows me to retain my tag of great philosopher but deals with the answer or the potential objection.
If I'm so great, why am I podcasting from my car and not from the top of Radio City Music Hall or something like that?
I want to make sure that we have some criteria by which we can define greatness that isn't just self-referential and faces the great danger Of megalomania, which is the claim, or vanity, which is the claim that I am great and I know that I'm great because nobody thinks I'm great,
right? I mean, that's a really dangerous situation to get into and one that we really should avoid at all costs and is a perfectly valid criticism to bring to bear against what it is that I was talking about in podcast 479.
So, I'd sort of like to take the following approach.
It's a double-pronged approach, and I'm just on my way to go and do a little shopping, so this is going to be a pretty short podcast.
I'll do part one on the way and part two on the way back about how it is that we can judge greatness.
Of course, there has to be some definition of greatness.
Greatness really is all around accuracy.
Fundamentally, sort of accuracy is other theories or ideas that you put forward accurate.
They don't have to be consistent because If you believe in forms, certain of Plato's dictums are consistent.
And they don't have to be logical, because logic, if the premises are faulty, doesn't lead you anywhere but down the garden path and off a cliff.
And so we need to sort of say that they're accurate.
And of course, accurate is the question in relation to what.
And as those who've seen the Introduction to Philosophy podcast, we know that the answer we work with here is accurate in relation to reality.
In relation to reality.
So... So the way that you would determine greatness in the realm of philosophy would be in terms of premises that are accurately founded with relation to reality and logic that flows with the premises and consistency among wide varieties.
Philosophy is the all science, right?
And so it would have to be consistency along a wide variety of It's a cohesive whole and also that the philosophy has both explanatory and predictive power.
Those things are sort of very important when it comes to looking at a system of thought.
Does it have both explanatory and predictive power?
Does it explain things in the past as well as predict things in the future?
Well, we're not going to go on a big sort of overview of what that means with relation to the stuff we talk about here at Free Domain Radio, but I think, because we've already talked about it once or twice before, I think it's fairly safe to say, though, that we do have a pretty good predictive map of what's going to happen in the future, and, of course, you know, the fact that What, $800 million went missing in Iraq, can't be found, and lots of payoffs, and these people have left Iraq.
The people who stole all this money from the defense procurements have left Iraq and now are just bribing everyone, and there's no law, and there's nobody sending them back to Iraq, and so on, right?
All of this stuff and the failure of the government policies in all areas, all perfectly predicted by anarchic ANCAP, or at least libertarian theories.
So, we do have a pretty good predictive and explanatory power.
The processes of the past, as we've talked about a number of times here, the history of man falls well within these ranges and these categories, and we can be content with that, I think.
So, we do have that sort of under our belt, and greatness in the realm of philosophy is accuracy in the relation to reality, and requires both explanatory and predictive power.
So, fundamentally, we are comparing our thoughts To reality.
And since reality is logical and consistent and so on, our thoughts then therefore have to be sort of, you know, logical and consistent and so on.
So that's sort of an important way, I would say, to look at this kind of issue.
And say that we don't define greatness in terms of general social acceptance, right?
So the first person to come up with the theory or to prove the idea that the world was round was everyone in the world except for that one guy who disagreed with him.
There's a story of some physicist who's out with his girlfriend one night who's just figured out why the stars burn.
And he looks up at the stars and she says, they're beautiful.
And he says, yes, and right now I'm the only person on the planet who knows why they burn and why they're beautiful.
And so when you come up with a new theory, you're always in a minority of one compared to the historical existing prejudices of everybody else on the planet.
So in terms of social acceptance, the degree of social acceptance of an idea is inversely proportional to its originality.
Now, originality doesn't equal accuracy, of course, but nonetheless, that's, I think, an important thing to understand and to recognize that We are not going to get social acceptance if the idea is truly original.
Then there's going to be no possibility of any kind of acceptance that is going on in the world.
And in fact, especially in the realm of ethics, as I talked about in 479, there's going to be almost no possibility that anyone's going to not be totally hostile about it.
Philosophy, and particularly ethics, they're all sciences.
Philosophy in terms of logic and ethics in terms of emotion.
So if you are truly original in the realm of ethics, which these days means accurate with respect to reality, then it's absolutely predictive that you are going to end up with this problem that no one's going to agree with you, and because ethics challenges the emotional life and nature of mankind, then you are absolutely going to run into the problem that people are not only going to disagree with you, but are going to disagree with you in an emotionally aggressive way.
I think that's not just self-referential megalomania, at least I don't think it is, let me know if I'm wrong, but the fact that you compare your thoughts with reality, with logic, with history, with predictive abilities, that's how you compare the scientific method.
Einstein didn't say with the theory of relativity, and I'm sorry to be overusing this, but I don't have time to look up more metaphors.
Einstein didn't say, well, the theory of relativity seems good the first time he wrote it down, but nobody else believes this, so it can't really be right, and so on.
So we compare our ideas with logic and reality, and empiricism in history, and to some degree, given the variability involved, I think?
The greatness is not in relation to general social acceptance, which, if the theory is original and rational, and particularly if it is both those things and touches on the realm of ethics, is going to raise a kind of indifference and hostility in the world.
That would be, I think, something to understand.
And so there is no reason to believe that prominence would be the result of any kind of valid approach to originality in philosophy or particularly in ethics.
Alrighty, so let's move on with the second sort of way in which you can approach this proposition that I put forward in 479 just to maybe, maybe see if we can avoid this trap of self-referential megalomania and see if we haven't come up with a viable proposition.
Well, the next thing that you could do to approach this question would be to look at the standards that are currently out there as far as philosophical truth and prominence goes, right?
So, for instance, if I said that I was a great physicist and there were, in fact, great physicists out there who was prominent, but I said that the reason that I was not prominent It was because people just didn't like great physicists for whatever reason.
If I had a thesis that said people didn't like great physicists, and yet there were great physicists out there who were prominent, then my thesis would take a little bit of a blow.
So I think that would be one approach.
Now, to take that sort of approach, then what we would do is if I say that Really good, competent philosophers are not prominent because people dislike the truth because they've been so corrupted by family, state, and church so that they've ended up disliking the truth.
Then one way of testing that thesis would be to look at the integrity and rationality and humanity and depth and soulfulness and compassion and so on of Public intellectuals, sort of prominent and public intellectuals, and see whether or not their prominence was due to their integrity, clarity, rationality, originality, courage, and so on.
And if it was the case that they were prominent and really, really, really rational and good and logical and courageous and so on, then my thesis that The greater the virtue, the greater the rejection would obviously take a blow because I would say I'm not prominent or we're not prominent and successful in these fields because people dislike the truth.
But if people who were prominent were speaking the truth, then that theory, of course, would take a blow.
Now, you could pick up any sort of number.
These are just sort of two that have popped into my mind from the last week.
And one is a bit unfair because she's a politician.
But nonetheless, certainly a public advocate of ideas, right?
I mean, let's not fool ourselves that any politician who doesn't claim to also be a philosopher is not a very good politician, right?
Because politicians obviously...
We claim to know what is true and false and right and wrong for the majority which would require, as Socrates pointed out in his trial, it would require an extraordinarily deep and powerful knowledge As to what was good and evil and right and wrong, both for an individual and particularly for a collective and disparate group like society, all politicians make the claim to be great, deep, powerful thinkers and philosophers, right?
That's their basic false argument for morality, is that everything they do is for the common good, and so they must know the individual good, the common good.
They must be incredibly wise.
So I'm going to include Nancy Pawlowski here.
And also we'll throw in Michael Ignatieff, who was a public intellectual who was at the, as a professorship at the Kennedy School for Government and was this sort of prominent public intellectual with countless articles and books, and he invited to speak and all these sorts of things.
So Nancy Pulaski, you don't know much about her, saw her on 60 Minutes the other day, and it was kind of funny, right?
Because Diane Sawyer, I think it was, was interviewing her and said, Nancy, you can be pretty harsh about George Bush.
You say that he's incompetent.
You say that the Republican Party is equivalent to a criminal gang and this and that and the other, right?
Like, what's going on? And Nancy Pelosi says, well, you know, George Bush understands what I'm doing.
I have to do my thing.
He has to do his thing.
It's just politics.
It's just, you know, and so basically she was saying, I mean, to paraphrase her, I think accurately, She was saying, look, this is just a kind of theater.
I mean, I have to say these things so that I can raise the $100 million that I've raised for my husband's friends.
And also she was...
We'll get to that in a sec. So she's saying, well, it's kind of a theater.
I mean, you don't take it seriously. This is just kind of like a game.
Right? So then... Then Diane Sawyer says, so it's not personal, right?
Which would be the next logical thing.
It's just a kind of theater, right?
It's like trash talking before a basketball game or whatever.
It's just not personal. It's for the fans, right?
It's like the way that boxers talk up how they're going to grind each other into pulp and they hate him.
It's just theater, right? It's nothing real.
And then she says, no, I mean those things.
But you have to be thick-skinned in politics, right?
I mean, he is incompetent, right?
So right here you have a complete turnaround, right?
There's no integrity behind those statements whatsoever.
And you could sort of spend quite a long time.
Of course, no, Diane Sawyer doesn't, right?
She goes on to talk about how she's had five kids and is a proud grandmother and goes on to the usual political fluff.
But it was a very revealing moment for Nancy Pulaski to say, no, it's just politics.
Like, I'm not mean.
It's just politics. So basically it's bullshit.
No, no, I mean it.
It's just saying whatever she can to get on to the next question.
This is a public intellectual who's going to be potentially the next Speaker of the House and all this and all that.
So there's an example of what goes on in the public realm, somebody who's publicly putting out ideas about ethics and so on.
And also she's asked by Diane Sawyer, I think it is, she's asked, no, Leslie Stahl, I'm sorry, Leslie Stahl, she's asked, well, you know, we assume that you underestimate the jihadist threat against America, blah, blah, blah.
Now, she's been in 14 years of defense briefings and intelligence briefings and so on, and it's like, I do totally understand the jihadist threat against America.
This is the standard thing where you have to talk tough in order to get the votes of certain constituents.
It's got nothing to do with reality.
That's a knee-jerk reaction.
Don't you want to defend America?
Well, of course I do. Let's go kill everyone.
And, you know, she doesn't say the intelligent thing, which she's perfectly aware of, which is, you know, well, why do the jihadists want to kill us all of a sudden when for the first hundred and...
70 years of our history as a country, they didn't want to kill us, even though we were supposedly more free, and they were certainly more radical, certainly more extremist, because it's not like Islam is becoming worse than it was in the past.
She's perfectly well-educated, perfectly aware of all of this sort of stuff, but doesn't say it, because she can't say it, because then she won't get elected, blah, blah, blah.
So this is just sort of an example of where public intellectuals are, and this is where I think it's legitimate and reasonable for us to compare ourselves to these people and say, well, if we're not prominent and they are prominent, and if we're not rejected for being more honest and truthful and logical and courageous and so on, if we're not rejected for that, then the people who are prominent should display those characteristics as well.
And, of course, they don't, right?
Another example, and just touch on this, sort of Michael Ignatieff, who is the son of a Canadian diplomat who has spent a good deal of time in the United States and has written a bunch of books, and he's written very positively and glowingly and almost fetishistically about the virtues of the invasion of Iraq and the genocidal activities against the Iraqis.
And now he's up here running for...
Leadership of the Liberal Party, because I guess he wants to get into politics and this and that.
And it's a great, you know, in the States where he was, it was a great benefit for him to be for the Iraqi war.
And now, in his role in Canadian politics, it's a great liability to be for the war in Iraq, right?
So how is he getting around this?
Is he saying, well, I was mistaken to be for the war in Iraq, and here's why, and here's how, and I retract my former statements?
No. Because then he'll be accused of flip-flopping, so he's got to just eject some squid-like, evil, viscous fog and ink to obscure his prior position.
Because now, not only is in Canadian politics and we rejected the war, but...
He also has the problem that the war is so obviously a disaster that his former advocacy of it would be called into question.
So I don't know if people sit up nights coming up with an answer to this stuff, and I don't know whether it just comes easily to them.
I imagine that they're so corrupt it just comes easily to them.
But his answer is to say, well, I was right in being for the war in Iraq.
I just didn't count on how incompetent the Americans were going to be.
That's a perfect answer.
I mean, what can you say, right?
You were wrong for, well, I'm not omniscient, I don't know, blah, blah, blah, how the Americans are going to prosecute it, so it's not my fault and this and that.
So, and he also, I don't know the details, it's just someone mentioned it at lunch the other day at work.
You know, he says to the Israeli, to the Jewish group, that he's, you know, very pro-Israel and, you know, against the Palestinians.
And then he says to a Palestinian group that he's very pro-Palestinian and against the Israeli occupation.
He's just saying to people what they want to hear in order to get power.
Obviously a man with, like, zero integrity.
One of these, you know, revolting intellectual jellyfishes who just squirm into whatever shape.
They have to achieve in order to gain momentary access to power.
It's really stomach-turning.
This is a kind of political pedophilia that is absolutely disgusting and hideous, right?
And you could sort of go through the roster of just about any public intellectual that you could imagine, and you would come up with pretty much the same evaluation of them.
So, since there are no public intellectuals that are consistently Pro-rationality, pro-liberty, even in terms of limited, limited, limited state.
And you could say, well, what about Ron Paul?
Yeah, absolutely.
The guy is a libertarian in many ways.
He's joined the Republican Party.
Definitely he's out there saying that Republican is good, and he's certainly not getting rid of his career in politics in order to out the actual corruptions and evils of the government.
I really don't know enough about it, but certainly you could say that there's one.
Absolutely. And if you are willing to tow the party line to a large degree and to take that approach, then you can get out there.
I don't see him quoted in a whole lot of mainstream media.
You do see him quoted in the libertarian media, but that is one example, and that could be debatable, and I don't really know enough about the gentleman and his voting history, but yes, you could say that there is one possibility.
Out of thousands and thousands of the world, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals the world over, there are none who have any real prominent access to the media who talk about these kinds of liberty things.
Another possible exception would be John Stossel, and that's certainly true that he has a libertarian bent, but certainly he's not a philosopher in the sense that he's building his He's using very much the argument from a fact.
At least that's what I've read in the one or two books of his that I've read.
So he's not a philosopher, but again, I don't want to sort of be twisting the facts to suit the theory.
So even if we sort of say that, you know, John Stossel and Ron Paul and so on, that all of these people are out there and they're libertarians and they're talking and that's great.
Then you still then have two or three or ten out of hundreds of thousands of professors and public intellectuals and so on who are all Pro-state or pro-church or pro-collective fantasy in some manner.
And so you would certainly say that there seems to be a bit of a trend against prominence for intellectuals who have integrity and who are willing, as intellectuals should be willing, to question all of the basic assumptions of their society and to revisit all of the essential questions and to decalcify The filters of public opinion to revisit issues in a fresh way in the Socratic method.
What are we doing? Why are we doing here?
Let's reopen all things. Let's not fall into habit.
And so on. So in that sense, if I have a theory that real philosophers, those who really care about ideas and who are open to questioning basic assumptions, that we are hated and reviled, I'm not even going to get into the third argument, which would take a little bit more time.
About the degree to which philosophers have been attacked, assaulted, murdered, killed, imprisoned, and so on, beaten up, threatened throughout history, all the way from Socrates to Aristotle to Kant to any number of examples of how people have been threatened by the state of the church in terms of philosophy.
Even if you take all of that stuff out of the way, Then just look at this issue of who's currently out there and what are they currently saying?
And, of course, if people were out there and very successful who were really sort of speaking the truth, then the thesis that people who really speak the truth are hated because of existing corruption and people's desire to hide their own ignorance, then that theory, of course, would take a significant blow.
But I think that if you sort of take these two approaches, and if you want, you can look into the historical approach as well and see the examples of how this has occurred empirically throughout history.
But even if you just sort of take the approach that I'm talking about here to compare the ideas that we're talking about here with reference to the ideas that are actually in reality, sorry, not the ideas, to take our ideas and compare them with what actually happens in reality, I think that would be a very useful thing to do.
But the second aspect is to compare the conversation that we're having and the level of insight and originality and rationality that we're bringing to bear on these topics and compare that to The public intellectuals who are currently out there filling up the mind of the public.
And I would include the politicians here as well, since they claim...
And people believe them, right?
And people don't vote for people they think are evil.
So they claim to be ethicists and philosophers of the first order.
And if you include public intellectuals, public writers, artists who talk about these kinds of things, pundits like Michael Moore and so on, and the politicians and the professors and the teachers, and all of the intellectual class...
That you can find, you know, sort of count on the fingers of one hand or almost one hook, the numbers of people who are actually prominent, who have some ability to talk from first principles, and I would say that there actually are none, and not even sort of Ron Paul and these people, at least not from what I've heard, have the ability to reason ethics from first principles and to prove morality without reference to religion and so on.
And so really there are none, and so there must be some reason for that.
All I'm trying to do is explain in some manner that I think is rational and takes into account the facts and the evidence both of the world as it is and each of our own personal histories, which we've talked about quite a bit.
I'm just trying to explain a fact of reality, and I know that it's uncomfortable to think that you may be great and be hated for being great, but it's certainly possible, right?
Certainly within the realm of possibility, there's ample evidence in many ways to prove that, and that doesn't mean that it's correct, since, of course, it is still a theory, but the way to test this theory, of course, is simply to go out, as I've suggested a number of times, Thank you.
you will undergo a pretty strong and deep and rapid experience of being reviled and rejected and never talked to again.
So, again, you don't sort of need to argue with me You can just go out and try it in your own life and see if it's the case.
I absolutely guarantee you that the theory will be proven, and so we will have one more step closer to this idea of developing assertiveness for philosophy and for philosophers, and I think that would be a great thing to regain respect for the discipline of philosophy and take it away from the idiots who are currently using it these days to destroy virtue rather than to enhance it.
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