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Nov. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:31
485 Gods and Politicians - A response to user posts

One is the shark, the other the blood, the result a feeding frenzy on your freedoms!

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Good afternoon, brothers and sisters.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's just before five on Halloween.
So, I hope that you're having a great and sugary kind of day.
And I want to join a topic that we have not joined in some time.
And this is coming off a fabulously exciting and well-traveled post on the boards, which I am toying with the idea of getting into in more detail live.
What I would like to talk about is this question that arises when people talk about religion and other people Talk about, it's just the state, right?
And so they say, well, George Bush invades Iraq because he believes in the Christian God.
He prayed to that God, and that God said, yes, go and explode a large number of fellow creatures who worship a different God because you worship me, and I prefer that, and so on.
Well, what is often replied to, or what often comes back as a response, is the statement that it's just the state, but it's called God.
So if you say, well, George Bush invaded...
Iraq, because God told him to, or at least that was a cover story in Justification, then people say, well, sure, but you don't want to blame the effect.
You want to blame the cause.
And the cause is not his belief in God.
The cause is his statist policies and the money that's to be made from the war and the general desire of people to go and blow up foreigners and all this kind of stuff, right?
So, This is a very interesting question, and I think we should sort of chew it around for a little while and see what comes out.
Because if everything is reduced to the state, right, I mean, if all power structures are simply to do with the state, then it is, of course, rather hard to imagine why religion is so prominent and why, as the power of religion grows, the power of the state tends to increase, right?
So if People say, and it's a reasonable argument, and certainly there's lots of ways that you could approach it that would be supportive, none of which I'm going to take.
No, I'll try and do the contrary position as well.
But... Sorry, just doing my merge.
Safely, safely. But I would like to sort of take this sort of head on and say the ways in which I think that religious belief corrupt the political and moral sense of mankind so that at least you can understand if you're of that other position or if you run up against someone who is of that other position.
So at least you can understand some of the reasoning behind why I think that you can't get rid of the state without getting rid of religion.
And if you get rid of religion, it actually makes the state in some ways, as we saw with the communist experiment, more powerful.
But truly, I'm just backtracking in my head here, and I'm going to try and sort of do an honest detour here, because I'm talking about how when the power of religion grows, the power of the state grows, and then I talk about that when you get rid of religion, the power of the state grows even greater in terms of communism.
Well, there are some examples about that, so I'm not going to even pretend to try and unravel that one just now.
Let me put it on the back burner and see what hairballs of wisdom my unconscious cuffs up as we continue.
This is why I had to take the webcam off, of course, because it's scary enough for people that I'm driving and doing a podcast, but when they see that I'm driving, doing a podcast, and performing a fair amount of self-cleaning by licking my hair, then they will really, I think, get alarmed. And that's not what we want, is for people to feel stressed while watching me do the podcast, but simply to enjoy the lilting tones of random reason.
These are the ways in which I think that the religious ethic And when I say the religious ethic, I really do include communism, and communism believes in classes which are irrational categories of collectivism, just as religion is an irrational category of collectivism, right?
So the rich and the poor are considered to have diametrically opposing virtues and values and goals and so on, and that the rich are only rich because they've exploited the poor, and the poor are only poor because they're kept down, and this, that, and the other.
So that is sort of this irrational collectivism that socialism and Marxism posit is as irrational a set of collective ethics as different religions are.
So to me, Marxism is just another form of religion.
But the central reason I think that religion is so useful to the state is that obviously religion If it's in a social context, I don't talk about me-ism, this sort of vague belief that there's a higher power that never really has any demands on you, but provides all the comfort that you can imagine.
That's a sort of lazy, narcissistic kind of religion.
I'm talking about the public, organized Christianity kind of sphere, right?
The one which involves the transfer of wealth, not this sort of lazy, there's a vague force out there that is going to make everything all right at some point and in some manner.
But I'm talking about the kind of religion wherein God intervenes in the world.
I'm not talking about deism, right?
The idea that God kind of wound up creation and then went to return some beer bottles and never came back.
But this idea that there is an intervening or interventionist God.
And me-ism could definitely fall into that category, but we do have to believe, if we believe in God, that God intervenes, as I've talked about before.
You simply can't have...
Belief in a deity if that deity never intervenes.
Because if that deity never intervened in any way, shape, or form, then you would have no evidence of that being existed and you simply would be worshipping your own imagination.
So it's like falling in love with a woman who was never born, right?
That would be mentally pretty unhealthy, right?
So falling in love with a woman who's born and died is, you know, you fall in love with her, she dies, and you continue to love her in many ways.
But her memory, that's one thing.
Even though she's no longer physically present, she was at some point and has left, you know, photos and so on.
But if you fall in love with a woman who was never born, that obviously is someone who has left no impression in the world, can't possibly have done so.
And, therefore, is probably not the healthiest non-person to get uninvolved with or something.
So, if a deity doesn't intervene in any way, shape, or form, then clearly there's no such thing as praying to a god, right?
I mean, that's like praying to a lamppost.
No possibility of response because God doesn't intervene.
You would have no idea what God wanted or who God was or whether there were any commandments or whether there was any requirement for worship or for the transfer of funds or for the murder of other non-religious people or other religious people.
You'd have simply no clue about any of this stuff.
So from that standpoint, you have to believe that God intervenes in human affairs.
Now, of course, God intervening in human affairs brings all these other moral issues up, which I've talked about before, which we won't get into now.
But you really do have to believe that God intervenes in human affairs if you are going to be religious at all.
As I said, if God doesn't intervene, you have no idea whether or what or, you know, there's no relationship, there's nothing to do, there's no one to supplicate, there's no one to pray to, there's no one to give money to, there's no such thing as the priesthood, there's no such thing as holy books, there's no intervention whatsoever.
So God must intervene in human affairs and must guide human affairs in some manner.
He must intervene and so on.
And... So, of course, if—and sorry, just to be a little bit more, I'm getting all these sort of tickles in the back of my brain about making sure that I'm clear here, so sorry, but I sort of wanted to add something else.
There's a distinction, of course, between intervening in the past and intervening in the present, right?
So you could say God went on this whole intervening binge when he dictated the Old and New Testaments to the rather hallucinogenic, addled monks who wrote it all down, seemingly in backhand, underwater, while falling through the air and high on something or other.
And so God definitely intervened in the past, right?
The Age of Miracles was in the past and God intervened and bushes burst into flames and lepers were healed and the man was born a virgin and all this sort of stuff.
And so God intervened in the past, which gave us all these instructions, and then he decided not to intervene in the present, right?
So it just means that God is not intervening right now, but God must still intervene in terms of answering prayers, right?
So even if God doesn't intervene in a direct, you know, stop the planes from hitting the trade towers kind of sense, the big, huge, ghostly hand, which I thought would be pretty cool, Even if God doesn't intervene in a physically detectable energy mass kind of way, even if God no longer is able or willing to heal lepers and destroy cities and cause floods and so on, Then God must intervene in the modern world to provide guidance to human beings.
So human beings must pray to a deity who then responds with guidance, sort of scrolling texts like you see on screensavers about what the heck to do in order to be a good person, be a good Christian, be a good Muslim, and so on. So, even if God is not intervening in a direct kind of, you know, burst up the flames, turn loaves into fishes, walk on water, that kind of stuff, stuff that would be empirically measurable, and I think, again, pretty cool, right?
Christ is only the middle point of a long line of superheroes, right?
I mean, I think that would be a pretty cool comma script.
But... Super Christ.
But he definitely intervenes now.
Even if it's not in a physical sense, he intervenes in a way of answering prayers.
If God no longer answered prayers, if everyone got, you know, the answering machine is now off.
Don't leave a message after the beep.
I'm out to dropping off the beer bottles.
I got lost. I'm never coming back.
So no prayers will be answered anymore.
Like if every religious person suddenly got that God was no longer intervening in the world, Then that would be quite a different situation.
So we have an interventionist God in our hands, in our hearts and in our minds, a tweak in our souls, telling us what to do and so on, in subtle, non-empirical, always, non-measurable kinds of ways.
And so given that that's the case, we have a relationship then between secular authority...
In a religious society, we're talking about in a religious society, we have a relationship between secular authority and God.
There has to be. This is purely logical.
If God intervenes, if God answers prayers, if God intervenes in human affairs, then God must allow or encourage or answer prayers telling you who to vote for, for secular authority.
So the sword of the state must be dunked in the holy water of religion.
It simply must be the case.
Because if God intervenes in human affairs, then people must pray before they go to the ballots, and people must believe in the leader, and the leader prays, and the leader gets guidance, and people pray, and so on.
Therefore, whatever course the world is on, there must be some virtue in it.
There must be some virtue in it.
And wherever there isn't virtue, of course, it's because people don't pray and are godless, and so on.
But as religion grows within a society, the course that that society is on must perforce logically.
Almost irreducibly, must be becoming more virtuous.
As people become more Christian and more prayer and so on, then society must be becoming more virtuous, particularly in terms of its secular leaders.
Because God intervenes, right?
So, God intervenes.
God guides the world and people towards the best thing.
Therefore, the secular power that is in charge of people must have to some degree the sanctity of God.
Now, I'm not talking anything as primitive And obvious as the divine right of kings, which really was how it was portrayed in the past, which was that a king or a queen, whoever was the secular ruler, was a direct representative of God on earth in the same way that the Pope is considered to be.
So... I'm not talking about that sort of aristocratic stuff, but I'm talking about the constant need or belief in the virtue of the state.
And I know that there are libertarian Christians and this and that.
I'm just talking in general.
Because, of course, libertarian Christians simply take different sections of the Bible, but I'm talking in general.
Now, if you have any doubt about this, right, about people's allegiance to the intervention of God in the state, then you simply have to ask yourself, why is it that every single political leader, especially in America...
Well, let's just talk about the American political leaders, but it's true also of...
Of Canada, and I would imagine most of the rest of the world as well, that imagine a political leader describing himself or herself as an out-and-out atheist.
That would be someone who would have a great deal of difficulty, and let's just talk about the States, a great deal of difficulty motivating people, and people would have a great deal of difficulty believing that that person was moral if they weren't receiving instructions from God.
This is a very, very important thing to understand.
Morality in the Christian context, in the religious context as a whole, is receiving knowledge from God.
You pray what to do.
You go and ask God.
Not the obvious ones, I don't kill or whatever, although of course it's okay if you hide it with an army.
But in general, morality is information that is given to you about what to do from God.
There's no other definition for morality in the religious context.
Obedience to God's will is something that is the foundation, of course, of religious ethics.
And since, of course, there's no way that God exists in any way, shape, or form, then what it really means is whim-based ethics, as you can certainly see.
Whim-based absolutism is the most dangerous combination of subjectivity and absolutism.
That's... That's communism, fascism, and increasingly, of course, democracy, and certainly it is religious societies as well.
You have subjectivity combined with absolutism.
And so...
It's very important to understand that for a Christian, God intervenes to make you good.
You ask God what to do, God tells you what to do, and you go and do it.
And that's what morality is.
It's simply getting the divine facts from on high and following it through, like you're supposed to be one of those ghost-driven playing pianos that ran off the sheets of music with punched-hole paper.
Well, you're supposed to be the piano, and God's supposed to punch the holes.
You run it through, and that's what you do.
That's how it works.
So, if that is morality...
Right? Then, if you say, I don't listen to a fictitious being called God in terms of determining what is right or wrong, I think for myself, I reason it out from first principles, I have a logical morality, and not only do I have a logical morality, but you all are just insane, whim-based people who just, you're talking to yourselves and you think you're talking to God, which means that you're praying to the part of you that thinks it is God, right?
Because people get answers.
I mentioned this before. People get answers when they pray.
Which means that they are receiving answers from themselves, right?
That's the part of them that thinks it's God.
That's not very healthy, to say the least.
So, if somebody campaigned for office saying all of that, well, it would be almost impossible for Christians to believe that this person was moral, right?
Because they would not be receiving...
They would not be acting in the only possible way to act in a moral manner, which would be to receive impulses or to receive...
Suggested actions from a god.
So leaders have to pretend piety, right?
I mean, we think of this in terms of George Bush and so on, but it's equally true of all of the other politicians.
I mean, Bill Clinton went to church and so on, and there was lots of kneeling around Bill Clinton, but I think that was something...
The presidential knee pads was entirely different, but this issue of...
Leaders needing to profess piety, or at the very least, needing to at least not say anything.
But a leader who wishes to gain power in a political context simply has to say that he is religious.
And he may not be fundamentalist.
I think certainly that George Bush is more fundamentalist than Bill Clinton, but it's just a difference of craziness in my book.
So this is very important in terms of how people perceive political power.
So if a person at the top of the heap in the political sense is going to be praying to a god to get answers, Then people must believe that God is really going to answer their prayers.
Because they have so much power.
And also, that that person is in power because God answered prayers of those who were voting for, who were saying, who should I vote for?
Oh God, oh God.
Bush or Kerry or whatever, Clinton or Bush.
Who should I vote for?
And the answer always comes up that whoever gets into power, by golly, really is the person that you should have voted for.
So there. And...
That is something that is hard for people who aren't religious to really understand, that people who are religious view the secular power as kind of put there by God and as part of His divine will.
I certainly can't think of a time in history...
I'm just sort of casting my mind back.
I can't think of a time in history when a Christian...
Multitude overthrew a ruler because he was not put there by God.
I can't really think of an example of that.
That's kind of important.
So Christians will obey somebody who's placed there because they believe he's placed there by God.
But of course the fluidity and endless self-referential self-justification of religious belief will sort of say the following, that if you have a ruler who professes to be Christian who gets in, then it's because God answered everyone's prayers and put that person in power.
Right? So everyone said, who should I pray for?
And it's like, pray for Bush, Bush, Bush.
And... So then, lo and behold, Bush gets in and so on and so on and so on.
So you have to then obey Bush because he is God's representative because everyone prayed for...
Now, if you get some non-Christian in there, if you get someone in there who's not Christian, well, clearly God must have influenced the Christians and must have allowed this person to get into power.
And therefore, this person must be in power as a punishment to Christians, to the world, right?
It's because we were bad that this person is now in power, and we must then submit to God's punishment, right?
This is why secular rulers just love religion so much.
I mean, they might as well just hump the Pope when he comes by, because...
If they act in a moral manner and treat their people, I don't know, well according to Christian ethics, I mean moral in the Christian sense, then obviously he is a just and wise ruler sent by God to rule over us and we should be happy and submit to him as the ruler chosen by God.
On the other hand, if...
If this ruler is a bad ruler and is mean and so on, is not Christian, and closes churches, then obviously he's still put there by God, but he's put there by God as a punishment, and you have to submit to the punishment that God has meted out against you, just as you have to submit to the Hail Marys the priest tells you to, or whatever, submit to the Ten Commandments.
So it really is the sort of religious faith and the belief in an interventionist God that influences human behavior must result that whenever there's a secular authority, that authority is placed there by God's will.
If you have a great Christian ruler, obviously God has put him there.
And if you have a bad Christian ruler or a non-Christian ruler, then obviously he's put there as a test.
And this is, of course, exactly as, you know, this is all the way back to Lutheranism and Catholicism and so on, this very basic idea that you simply must obey the secular ruler as he is placed there by God.
So the power of the state is really directly supported by many, many different beliefs in religion.
Now, there's sort of two other major areas that I'd like to talk about.
I think I can do them a little more briefly, but the first major area to talk about is this idea that there is a godlike intelligence or that a human leader has access to a godlike intelligence.
That that is something that is enormously dangerous, right?
What Hayek called the fatal conceit of government planners, which is that we can, through our willpower, spreadsheets, calculations, and chicken entrails, we can reproduce all of the complicated and near-infinite decision-making capacities, and through our price fixing, we can allocate the near-amazingly infinite, complex ticker tape of information that comes through the free market's pricing mechanism in terms of the allocation of goods.
We can reproduce all of that As central planners.
We can tell you how to live and what to do and how to allocate resources better than you can yourselves.
That's sort of the fatal conceit, as it's called, of central planners.
And so there has to be some way that people are elevated, people in power are elevated to this incredible...
Where they can wage war and conduct foreign policy and invade countries and they can run massive economies and they can make incredible decisions about health care and charity and old age pensions and schooling and all of these sorts of things.
And there must be some paradigm that allows that to occur, that allows somebody to legitimately sort of look you in the eye and say, I'm better at running your life than you are.
I'm better at making decisions for you than you are.
I mean, you'd have to have pretty low self-esteem, and this is, of course, one of the reasons why low self-esteem is so inculcated in state institutions like the bureaucracy and, of course, before that, the school system, and, of course, particularly in churches.
It takes a pretty savagely low self-esteem, bordering on self-loathing, for You to look someone in the eyes and say, you make the decisions for my life.
You should tell me what to do.
You should take my money and spend it because I'm half retarded when it comes to managing my own affairs and I'm basically a bad, selfish, nasty person and you know how to dispense of my life and I don't.
That kind of slavery requires extraordinarily, catastrophically, horribly low levels.
Of self-esteem. Nobody with any shred of self-respect would look at the state and say, order me around, you suit-wearing, shiny-haired, mad, vain, glorious bigots with the guns.
Order me around. That's a form of masochism that requires crushingly low self-esteem, which of course is why children are broken, so that they can be exploited forever as adults and lick the boots of the people who kick them.
Now, what is it that elevates these leaders to this godlike ability of being able to better tell what everyone should do than the people themselves?
And not just for me.
Let's say that somebody knew me very well and they say, Steph, I've seen you try to run your own life.
You didn't do such a good job.
So I'm going to take over your money and your time.
And I know that you want to do this free domain radio thing full time.
The donations aren't happening in the way you want.
So I'm going to just take half of your money and I'm going to give some of it to charity because you're a selfish son of a bitch.
And I'm going to plan for you to save.
I'm going to pay off the house so that you can do this full time.
Somebody who even knew what my goals were in a very deep way That these people, somebody who knew me very well, would be able to tell me what to do and I would submit to it, right?
That would be pretty low self-esteem, assuming that person is not my wife.
But when you're a leader, you're doing this for, what, 300 million people?
If you're the Chinese leader, for a billion people?
You don't even know them, right?
I mean, what savage abstraction is it that causes people to imagine that there's somebody up there who knows exactly how to dispose of half of their life and most of their childhood far better than they ever would themselves?
And, of course, the answer is collectivism.
I mean, that's no big shock. I'm sure we're all aware of that.
But... This belief that there is this person of God-like intelligence who can dispose of your life far better than you can yourself, and your neighbors, and your neighbors' neighbors, and your neighbors' kids, and your community, and your town, your city, your state, your municipality, your province, your country, or whatever.
Of course, the UN, we don't even have to get into it.
But how is it that people imagine that somebody out there, just in a vague sense, That somebody out there just dwarfs their intelligence to such a degree that they're able to psychically know what they want, the people who are giving up the power, and execute on it for them.
Well, of course, in the communist sense, it's the concept of false consciousness, right?
That everything is run according to class logic and class warfare and that anybody who thinks otherwise has got a case of false consciousness and doesn't know what they're talking about and so on.
In the religious context, of course, the paradigm is the priest, right?
So the priest can tell you what to do because the priest has direct access to God.
And so, you can't disagree with the priest, because the priest simply is...
God talks to the priest directly, and any time that God talks to the priest, then the priest is always right relative to you.
So this, again, very important thing to understand.
Something breaks people's self-esteem to the point where they believe genuinely and honestly and with fervor and pretend joy that there are people out there who know far better how to live their own lives than they do themselves.
And that lowers the cost of ownership.
The total cost of ownership for a population is intensely lowered if people believe there's some Hyper-intelligent, massive consciousness that dwarfs their own, that knows better what they want than they do themselves, and thus they're willingly going to submit to the predations of those in power, because those in power know so much better how they should be happy than they do themselves, the individuals being ruled.
And God is essential for this.
Religion is essential for this.
Religion creates an intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself.
Religion creates an imaginary intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself.
And that's something that's very important to understand.
This creation of an omniscient consciousness is absolutely essential for the maintenance of power.
And it needs to be fundamentally a moral consciousness that is created, an infinitely moral consciousness that is created, that knows you so much better than you know yourself.
And in the Marxist paradigm, it's the state that knows the allocation of resources, and it's the moral people who run the state in the platonic, dictatorial, philosopher-king sense who know because everybody who runs their own concerns is just programmed by capitalism and is selfish and won't contribute to the common good and so on.
But there are people with guns who know so much better than you do yourself how to run your life and so on.
And you simply can't get that.
If you just look at people, like if you just look at people, and if you just sort of look around, you know, the people you knew growing up and so on, who is it that you would voluntarily hand over the reins of your life to?
Like if nobody was forcing you to, I mentioned this sort of once before, would you sort of have a George Bush hotline?
Where, you know, you'd phone up if there was no government, right?
George Bush would be this guy who's so smart.
He knows how to run everybody's life.
He'd have like a phone bank or a hotline or, I don't know, maybe like a dial-in recorded voice message or something saying, you know, this is what I want you to do today.
But this is what you should do today.
I, George Bush, am so wise that I think you should give half your money to the Defense Department, and here's the rate of savings that you should have for your retirement, and here's the drugs that you can buy, and here's the drugs you can't buy, here's the medications that are available to you, here's the price you're going to pay for gas,
here's this. If George Bush was that wise, of course, and did have that much incredible insight into how everyone should live, So much better than they did themselves, then people would voluntarily flock to the leaders as they were just so wise and so great and so powerful and so all-knowing that, sure, who wouldn't? We all defer to experts in one way or another.
So as far as how my life should be lived, I would simply defer to somebody else who'd say, Steph, stop rambling in the car, go and be a politician.
Oh, okay, well, I don't really want to, but obviously you're so much smarter than I am that I'll just do what you say.
So, if you just sort of look around you, there aren't people in the world that you're going to want to voluntarily give up your power to.
And of course, you really can't, right?
I mean, you can't fundamentally accept at a point of a gun, and it's sort of not moral in its nature.
But since there's nobody in the world that you know, I bet, who you just say, oh, you tell me what to do.
I mean, there are people who might give you some influence on your ideas and so on, but I bet you there's nobody out there who just, you know, you sort of stand up in the morning and you say, I don't know which foot to put in front of the other.
I don't know whether to brush my teeth or, you know, stick a pill container up my nose.
What should I do? And there's nobody who, I bet, in a free society, there's nobody that you are going to be very keen on sort of giving half your paycheck to and just saying, you just go spend this because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
I'm just going to randomly buy stuff and burn it.
I'm going to just give my money to criminals, and I have no idea what to do with my money to make it turn into a moral instrument, so y'all just go ahead and spend my money for me.
You don't have to account for anything.
You don't have to give me any receipts.
You don't have to prove that you're doing any good.
Just take this damn money.
Do with it what you will, because I just want some left over, maybe like a quarter or a third or whatever, 40%.
Something left over just so I can eat, but I don't have a clue what the hell I'm doing with my money.
You all just take it and do what you want with it.
I bet you there's nobody in your life.
That you would do that too, right?
And so this, of course, is what happens with the state.
It's all too subtle a metaphor for words.
And so there has to be some intervening idea that says there's somebody out there who's so smart that they can see the whole picture and they can tell everyone what to do and it's better than people deciding for themselves what to do with their time and lives and money and energies and so on.
So the first thing that you have to create is the idea of an omniscient consciousness.
Because if people don't believe in it...
I mean, forget about the state for a moment.
Let's just talk about God, right? You have to come up and get people to believe in the idea of omniscient consciousness.
Now, if that omniscient consciousness existed but was not interventionary, did not answer anyone's prayers, did not tell anyone what to do, did not influence who gets into power and so on...
And I know that sounds silly, but this is really how it works.
If this consciousness existed but we had no access to it whatsoever, then everybody was going to be an even playing field when it came to doing the good or bad things or making decisions for themselves.
And nobody would have any real conceptual right in any sort of sensible way to tell you what to do.
I mean, they could force you to do stuff, but it wouldn't be ever considered to be moral to...
Submit, right? It's not considered moral generally to submit to a rapist.
It may be practical, but you're in a state sort of beyond morality at that point.
But nobody says it's actively moral.
Go find yourself a rapist, submit to him, and that's the best thing you can do.
But instead, we have this situation where this divine, omniscient, perfect consciousness exists, to whom, like if this being did exist that knew everything about everyone and everything about how everyone should act and behave, If this consciousness did, if it does exist, then you would definitely want to submit yourself to God, right?
Because God would know the future. God would know the minds of everyone else.
And you'd sort of say, well, how much should I price the chewing gum that I'm making as a manufacturer?
You would pray because God would know everything about your competitors' prices and so on.
And so if this omniscient consciousness existed, you absolutely would want to submit yourself to this omniscient consciousness.
And, of course, the first thing you'd do is you'd sort of sit down and experiment with it and say, well, okay, I'm going to pray and see how much my chewing gum I should charge for it, and then if it turned out to be true, then I would say, wow, this omniscient consciousness is really cool.
It's like having the personal Warren Buffett of investing, and so I'm going to now keep asking questions and so on.
But then, of course, you'd realize pretty quickly that it was all random, that it was nonsense, that it's like psychic phenomenon.
You get it right sometimes, or like those prescient dreams, you get them right sometimes, but most times.
It's just random noise. It's just coincidence.
And so you go, okay, well, there's no omniscient consciousness.
Nobody fundamentally knows more than I do, like in a very fundamental...
And certainly about my own life, right?
Certainly about how I should spend my money, how I should spend my time and energies.
Nobody knows more than I do about that stuff, right?
And it's hard enough sometimes to figure out what you yourself want directly.
Figuring out what other people want is...
It's a ridiculous proposition, right?
And of course, if somebody did say, I know you better than you know yourself, and you did sort of feel like submitting to them for whatever reason, that would still be testable, right?
So they'd say, you know, if you give me half your money and don't demand any receipts and let me go spend it however I see fit, you're going to be a whole lot better off.
Even if you felt like doing that for whatever deranged reason...
You then say, oh, okay, so basically you're throwing people in jail, running up huge debts, which I'm going to have to pay.
You've got my credit card, you're on a spree, and you keep hiring all these hit men to go and make my life more dangerous, and you're miseducating and destroying the brains of the young, and you've got these rape rooms and prisons and millions of people.
Okay, well, let me take this credit card back.
I'm not paying these bills anymore, because clearly when you said to me that when you spent my money I would be better off, you were just lying.
In a very evil kind of way.
So all of that would be testable.
But even though all of this is so patently ridiculous when we look at individuals that we wouldn't surrender half our income to people and so on, let them spend it for us as they saw fit, but somehow we have some intervening concept that lets us say, well, it's okay if it's the state or George Bush or the church or whatever through the tithe.
And the fundamental thing that is required is this belief that there's a consciousness that's omniscient.
And when people sort of believe that there's a consciousness that's omniscient, then it's easier for them to believe that someone or something knows them better than they do themselves and is perfectly fit, more fit than they are themselves, to make decisions about their lives and resources and energies and so on.
And that is a really, really bad idea, obviously.
Pretty fundamentally bad.
And... This occurs in the Hegelian world spirit that transubstantiated through Marx into this eternal conflict of class and so on.
Once you get rid of your false consciousness, you see the truth.
There are moral people who know so much better than you do how to allocate your property and how to allocate your time in life.
This sort of slavery, you simply have to believe in this omniscient consciousness.
If you take away... The idea of a vastly superior form of consciousness than your brain and other people's brain, especially with regards to yourself.
You are as close to omniscience as anything is ever going to get with regards to yourself.
Yes, you can fool yourself, and yes, you can be mistaken about yourself, but you are omniscient relative to anybody else with regards to your own thoughts, feelings, desires, wishes, resource allocations, preferences, and so on.
Nobody else, I mean, could even remotely come close.
And so this sort of fundamental omniscience has to be destroyed in you, right?
So you have to sort of think, well, I'm evil, I'm a sinner, I'm greedy, I want to keep my property, and in the communist sense, I'm possessed of false consciousness, I'm not close to God, other people are close to God, everyone says they're talking to God, but I'm sure as hell not, which is what everyone, of course, thinks and feels.
But you fundamentally have to doubt your own thinking, doubt your own experience, doubt your own capacity for reason and to choose the right things for yourself at the same time as you have to imagine that there's somebody else who can do it for you.
And in the absence of a god, in the absence of a deity, it's absolutely impossible to imagine how this could be the case.
It's absolutely impossible to imagine either A, how people could end up being so brutally crushed that they doubt themselves, right?
And in the absence of God, I'm sort of including communism in this sort of deification.
It's irrational collective abstracts.
But you have to sort of cease to exist.
You have to be as nothing compared to the group, right?
I mean, that's pretty fundamental.
And in communism, it's the class and so on.
It's the society. And this is true for all forms of collectivism.
So you have to sort of see, so you have nothing.
Everything you think is wrong.
Everything you want is wrong.
Everything you prefer is bad.
And simultaneously, there's some perfect moral being out there, perfect moral consciousness, that knows everything so much better than you could ever know yourself about what it is that you want and need and feel and prefer and should do.
Really, that is, of course, the basis of obedience to violent authority.
Not to go into your doctor and take pills, but the sense of obedience to violent authority is that I'm bad, and there's this perfect, wonderful, absolutely flawless omniscience out there that is really good and knows everything that should ever be done by me and everybody else and so on.
You take that all away.
You get rid of the idea of God.
I mean, in a very fundamental sense.
You get rid of the idea of God and irrational collectivism and society and all that nonsense that goes along with it.
But God is the keystone.
The idea of God is the keystone.
If there was no such thing as God, and we're all stuck with this residual idea, which the state exploits.
If there was no such thing as God, then the idea that other people knew better than you did how to live your life would be simply ridiculous, because all you'd do is ask them.
So I'd just phone up, I don't know, Stephen Harper is the PM of Canada, and I'd say, Stevie, Stevie boy, Stevie baby, what is it that I really want in life?
And he'd be like, who are you?
And I'd be like, no, don't worry about who I am.
It's my name, and you already know.
So you know exactly what I want out of 60 or 70% of my time and life and money and energy and so on.
What is it that I want that's going to make me happy?
Right? And he'd say, I don't know, like help your fellow man and stuff.
And it's like, well, sure, I understand that.
But I mean, A, that's not what you're doing.
You're sort of forcing me to do stuff.
And B, how do you know I wouldn't do that if I had the money and so on and so on and so on.
Of course, look at all these podcasts.
I don't think I'm interested in helping my fellow man.
This is largely a charity.
And he, of course, wouldn't have any answers to those kinds of things.
So then I'd say, you know, I have to take my credit card back, giving you 70% of my income and life and time.
He's obviously pure nonsense.
So it would be verifiable, right?
But people really do have to believe that their own consciousness is just dwarfed somehow relative to everybody else's consciousness.
That's absolutely essential.
Because if you can't get people to believe that, then leaders just look like vain, arrogant, shitty assholes.
Do what I tell you to because I know you so much better than you know yourself.
It's like, really? What number am I thinking of right now?
I mean, it would really be that simple.
But people really do have to believe in this abstract, omniscient, perfect consciousness.
And of course, this occurs with parents as well.
Everyone thinks that their parents are telling them what to do because the parents are wise and all this stuff.
And of course, it's nonsense, right? Parents don't have a clue what to be good.
They're just sort of teaching you out of their own fears and conformities and so on.
So, that aspect of things is very, very important to understand.
You can't have the state without God, without this idea that somewhere out there is this perfect consciousness that knows everything, more than you will ever know about yourself, infinitely more.
You get rid of the keystone of God, which is why I spend time on God in these podcasts.
You get rid of the keystone of God, and it's going to be really, really hard to I would say impossible.
It would be really, really hard to get people to believe in these irrational collective absolutes.
And once you get rid of that, then you're a whole lot closer, of course, to the idea or the goal that you can get rid of the state or that people will simply stop believing in this kind of stuff.
Of course, people do have to believe that Bush is being told stuff by God that isn't being told to them.
Because, of course, this is a fundamental paradox.
This is why it's so useful to have this idea in the hands of the state or in the hands of statists.
See, if Bush knows that it's the right thing to do to go and invade Iraq because God told him to, Then Bush should never need to raise taxes or print money to go to war, right?
Because if it's the right thing to do to go to war in Iraq, and Bush is told that because God knows it's the right thing to do, even though it seems pretty evil to every sane and moral human being, then Bush goes and talks to God, and God says, go invade Iraq.
Well, obviously, then everybody else should get the same message from God.
Everybody else should get the same message from God.
But just like the priesthood, there has to be this belief that somehow God and Bush have a more special relationship than you and God do, or God and I do.
Bush has to have kind of like the inside phone, the red ghost phone to God.
Bush has to have the inside scoop on what God wants, and God must be talking to Bush, but not other people.
Because if God told everyone that it was the right thing to do to go and invade Iraq, then everybody would volunteer, they'd pay, they'd do whatever they needed to do to make that happen.
But, of course, what happens is God just becomes this big excuse for people to not stand up for their own ethics, right?
It's like, oh, well, God told him, and I don't know, I didn't talk to God, but maybe it's because I'm a sinner, you know, and God talks to Bush because Bush is so much more important than I am, and so Bush gets more of a direct connection with God, and, you know, maybe it's true, maybe it's not true, but I sure as heck didn't get to go invade Iraq, but maybe God's more busy talking to Bush, and maybe I am a bad person, so God doesn't talk to me as much, and I guess I better go back to church.
There's a huge amount of muttering dissolution of the self that goes on when people even have the vestiges of God in the form of the public good and all that kind of stuff.
When people have the vestiges of a consciousness that is greater than an immortal, limited human consciousness.
There's something very important.
I know, and I'm fully aware.
I'm sort of getting over this thing slowly.
A bit of a personal example here, and only because traffic's a little slow.
I decided to take the public roads today.
Madness. Madness, I tell you.
But I left work a little bit early, and I was just kind of curious whether I could get home at any reasonable time using the public roads.
A very bad idea.
But here's the sort of personal example that I'm sort of getting used to in my life, right?
So, I mean, there's so much stuff that I don't know.
When it's sitting down at business meetings and people are talking about, you know, the best way to get investment and they're going over all these P&L statements and so on.
I mean, they might as well be Charlie Brown's teacher up there.
And so I'm sitting there going, oh man, there's all this stuff that I don't know about business.
I don't know how to read a balance sheet in any great level of detail and so on.
But, of course...
They don't know how to design software, these people that I'm talking to.
And I sort of sit there and start getting into really technical debates with the chief technical officer about software design.
Well, they all, you know, we turn into Charlie Brown's teacher and so on, and they just don't want to know.
And that's one of the things that you get the hang of as you get older, that there's tons of shit you don't know.
But that's the result of having spent time studying stuff that you do know now, right?
So every choice you make is an infinity of choices not made, right?
Every path you take is an infinity, a near infinity of paths rejected.
And so one of the things that you sort of get to understand as you get older is that, yeah, there's tons of people out there who know more than you do, but that's just because they just spent time studying that stuff.
Right? So, there's people out there who are better physicists than I am, infinitely.
And that's because they spent their time studying physics.
And I spent my time studying philosophy and women.
And so, yeah, they know more about this, I know more about that.
You get that there's kind of like a balance in things, right?
And there's nobody who knows everything, because even the smartest people in the world, they've just spent their time learning a bunch of stuff, but they haven't learned a whole bunch of other stuff, right?
Somebody who's excellent at Spanish has spent time learning that, and they're not going to be as good at philosophy because they didn't spend time, Learning philosophy and so on, right?
Look at the personal life of Einstein, you realize that, yeah, he might have been smart, but he sure as hell wasn't wise.
So once you get that human knowledge, while it sort of spikes in particular individuals, always comes at a deficiency of other kinds of knowledge, right?
So every spike, every peak is a valley in some other area.
And this is always the case when you see people start to speak outside their own fields, that it's all kind of vaguely embarrassing and silly, right?
And it's just sort of, I don't know, like...
Cher talking about Middle East policy, it's like, okay, but the singing and the acting, that's fine.
You go do that stuff.
Go enjoy your will and grace moments, but not so much with the philosophy.
You stick off the philosophy, and I won't jump out of a battleship wearing a thong singing a song, right?
How's that for her? I think that's really a win-win in so many ways, don't you think?
So, once you get the hang of that, there's nobody out there who knows more than you do.
There's nobody out there who knows more than you do.
I mean, this just in general.
I mean, yeah, yeah, I know there's specific talents and this and that.
I understand all of that.
And there's some stuff that, you know, I can't play basketball at the NBA and so on.
But... There's nobody out there who knows more than you do because everything that they've studied that you haven't studied is just a choice they've made not to study the stuff that you've studied, right?
So everybody's kind of looking over and saying, ooh, that guy's really smart.
He knows a lot. But that's only the degree to which you obscure your own knowledge and recognize that everything that that person studied.
And yeah, there's people who pick stuff up quicker and so on.
But overall, fundamentally, you know, in a very general sense, nobody knows more than you do, right?
It's like in economics. All choices are equal.
If you choose not to work, you're relaxed, but then you get a stress of not working and so on.
If you want a house in a great neighborhood, then it's going to cost you more, but you get a great neighborhood.
But if you get a house in a worse neighborhood, it costs you less, but you get a worse...
All choices are equal.
And the same thing to do with human life.
All knowledge is equal. There's tons of people out there who know way more than I do.
I've got a kind listener who helped me set up a community server.
Why? So I don't have to sit there farting around with XML for two days and pulling my last remaining armpit hair out.
So, once you get that everybody has the same level of knowledge, then you just sort of understand that.
Just to take a familiar example, Einstein, obviously the man knew a hell of a lot about physics, but because he was so good at physics, that's all he spent his time learning.
Right? So he was a socialist and so on, because he's an idiot around that stuff.
Right? In the same way that I spent all my time studying, you know, philosophy, psychology, economics, and art, which means that, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, and I don't know smack about physics, right?
But at least I have the humility and the wisdom to know that I don't know smack about physics, and so I only talk about it in peripheral ways, so I sort of recognize the value of learning.
So once you get that everybody knows the same amount of shit, then this idea that there's some whiz-bang consciousness out there that just beats yours hands down, even with regards to stuff in general.
Freddie Mercury, great singer, wrote great songs, knew smack about philosophy, economics, and why would he?
He spent all his time writing songs.
Right? So, that's something that's important to understand as well, right?
So, Alan Greenspan, good economist when he was younger, right?
Corrupt son of a bitch when he got older because he spent all his time playing politics rather than being a good human being.
So, yeah, he learned more about running the Fed than you and I will hopefully ever know, but that has nothing to do with anything.
Because all the time he spent learning to do that, he didn't spend...
Anyway, you get the idea. So once you get that nobody knows more than you, and this is just in general, obviously nobody knows more than you about how your life should be run, how you should live, but nobody knows more than you about anything in general.
I know that this is a leap for a lot of people, and we all want to sit there and think, ooh, I have a relatively small intellect, and all these people out there who know so much more, and they're so much smarter than me, but that's all nonsense.
That's all nonsense.
You know as much as I do, because all the shit that I spent time studying and learning and thinking about and writing and so on, you spent time learning about other stuff, right?
Even if it was like, I don't know, what wine goes with a nice halibut.
I mean, I don't know anything about that.
I know nothing about wine.
So it's all equal.
Everything that you accumulate is equivalent to whatever...
And you can say, oh, there's different values and so on, but I don't know that that's always particularly true.
So... That's just something important to understand.
There is no magical consciousness out there that is so much superior to yours, right?
You are perfectly smart.
You're as smart as I am.
You're as smart as everybody else is.
You just spend time learning stuff, and if you compare your valleys against other people's peaks, then sure, you're going to feel like a do-do-yo-do-bo-bo.
And we don't want to feel that, right?
We want to feel like golden gods, as I sort of talked about before.
And you don't sort of do that.
If you compare your sort of mountains of knowledge against other people's valleys, then you're going to get sort of vain and you're going to feel like you're superior and so on.
But it's all just, you know, it's same shit, different pile, frankly.
It's just a difference in topography.
It's not a difference in elevation in a very, very fundamental way.
And so I would sort of say that once you get rid of the idea of God, you get rid of the idea of people being smarter than you in a sort of really fundamental kind of way.
And you can always find something that you're better at than everybody else, right?
I mean, certainly any other particular individual, right?
You pick anybody in your life.
There's stuff that you're way better at than they are.
And they never will get good at.
And, you know, so it's all sort of equal.
Everything that we learn.
I mean, we can't be alive without learning.
Even if all you've learned is, I don't know, how to recite every episode of Happy Days, well, that's something you know that I don't.
And... So once you get rid of this idea of God, then you get rid of this idea that there's some higher standard of knowledge or wisdom or virtue than fallible, limited humanity, where every choice is a rejection.
And there's almost infinitely more rejections than there are positive choices.
Everything you choose, you reject everything else.
So, like, I'm doing a podcast right now.
It's running up for an hour. I hope that this is important and enjoyable for you.
It certainly is for me. And I was sort of mulling, oh, do I want to do a podcast, or do I want to listen to my history of philosophy, by the way?
Will Durant. Will Durant, fantastic writer.
But... So I chose to do a podcast, right?
So you're going to say, ooh, Steph did this podcast, and maybe there's something of value in it that's good, but I have that much less knowledge about the history of philosophy now, right?
If I listened to that, I'd have another hour of knowledge about that, and so I'd be smarter there, but not have this podcast, not have realized this stuff and communicated it and so on, right?
So like all the time that I spent doing my podcasts and all the time that I spent compiling them and uploading them and all that kind of crap in the videos...
That's all stuff that I could have been reading books.
Maybe not in the car. I could have been listening to books.
I could have been doing other stuff.
So that's what I say.
You're totally as smart as I am.
We just have different topographies.
Yeah, there's IQ, and I got all of that, and there's difference.
But even among IQ, people are drawn by a particular talent.
I'm Horowitz, the fabulous piano player.
Then I'm going to spend all my time playing piano, and that's going to be that much less that I learn about anything else.
All you do is get a deeper trench with talent, right?
Because people are drawn to and paid for and so much more successful with that, that all you get is a deeper trench.
It's not like you get more topography.
Anyway, I think you sort of get the idea.
And the last thing I'll sort of mention, I know this has been a long one and I appreciate you hanging in there, but the last thing of course is that this idea of God is that perfect power and perfect virtue can go hand in hand.
And I'm not going to repeat the whole run through of it because I'm sure you get the general idea.
But power corrupts, right?
And we all know that, right?
But we sort of don't think about it particularly because still within the sort of base reptilian program propagandized religious minds that are the base of the brain stuff that is hammered into us, Basically, what happens is that we have this vague idea that perfect power can be co-joined with perfect virtue.
Infinite power and infinite virtue, infinite power and perfect morality can be co-joined, and therefore we don't get that the power to kill hundreds of thousands of people with the signing of a pen or the issuing of an order would corrupt any human being.
There's no one who could be sane in positions of power.
It's absolutely impossible.
But we still believe that somehow up there, there's perfect power with infinite virtue, and that that is the way that life should run, and that's possible, and because it's possible, then that consciousness could be advising humanity, and so on, all this kind of nonsense.
Anyway, I hope that this has been helpful.
This is sort of one of some of the reasons why I think it's so, so, so important.
to get this sort of idea of God out of your brain because it is a desperately dangerous notion that is just the keystone of just about all of the major institutional hegemonic corruption and violence in the world and you pull that nonsense out then people actually gonna start judging on rational standards and therefore they will be far far less likely to end up deferring to other people in power thank you so much for listening I look forward to your donations I will be resurrecting the survey Soon.
I sort of let it go by the wayside when I redesign the site, so please drop by and have a listen to that.
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