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Nov. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:49
486 The Afterlife...
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Well, it's time for the bad recording.
I am tootling around on my...
on my Rio, and sorry, my Zen Vision M at lunch, and I wanted to get a few ideas down before they escaped me this afternoon through the general sieve of my moment-to-moment brain.
And I had a chat with a long-time listener who is teetering on the edge of catastrophic rationality, is giving up on religion, good for him, I know it's a tough habit to kick.
It's a tough horse to get off.
But, you know, firm ground is always better than colorful clouds.
So, we were talking about the afterlife, and the question sort of came up, and I think it's a very important question, which is, what if I just have an irrational belief of my own?
Am I not allowed to have a belief in the afterlife if it doesn't do any harm to anyone?
Now, this question you'll get quite a bit if you're a philosopher.
And without putting any sort of negative motives in anyone's mind, because I'm not even going to guess at that, but there is kind of like a cheat in this.
And it's sort of an emotional cheat that goes on in this kind of environment or these kinds of questions, which is well worth having a look at and understanding.
And... The kind of cheat is around the question of tolerance.
And when someone says to you, hey, can't I just have some beliefs of my own that don't affect you?
It really comes back to the question of tolerance, which is, what is your perspective, Steph, or philosopher, or whoever, what is your perspective on my personal and private beliefs?
Are you tolerant of people having beliefs that are different from yours, or Does everyone have to think like you?
In other words, are you intolerant and megalomaniacal and judgmental and rigid and, you know, do you want to censor people and so on?
So, there is a question around, is a system of belief, or is belief in general on the planet, in the world, among men in society and women, is belief rigid, a rigid set of controlled And allowed things, perspectives, or is it more of an ecosystem?
So people can believe a whole bunch of different things, and out of that mix comes something more positive.
That's more of the Hegelian synthesis, antithesis, I'm sorry, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis approach.
And I think it's a very interesting question to ask.
And a lot of philosophers, or libertarians, when posed This question, can I believe something that's irrational if it doesn't affect you?
It's something that we have an impulse to back away from.
And I can certainly understand why we would have an impulse to back away from this.
Because we don't want to appear to be invasive.
Even if you have a private belief of your own, it's not allowed.
I'm going to invade your brain like some rational flesh-eating virus and eat up and carve out and...
Scoop out all of the irrationality, and you're not allowed to have any irrationality, and it's a dictatorship of reason, and I mean, I know all of this stuff fairly well, and I've experienced it over the years quite continually, and it is sort of the basic idea, how tolerant are you of my irrationality?
And I sort of have to say that I'm not at all tolerant of anybody's irrationality, which doesn't mean that they have to please me, and it certainly doesn't mean that I have any right or capacity or Ability to use force to change anyone's mind, not that that would ever work.
But no, I'm completely and totally intolerant.
And the reason being, so there is no such thing as a private belief that has any relevance whatsoever.
So let's just say that I believe that sitting on my left shoulder is a tiny purple unicorn named Egbert.
And I never tell anyone this belief.
I go through my whole... Oh damn, I just did.
Okay, let's pretend that I didn't.
I go through my whole... Life, pretending that Egbert...
Believing that Egbert exists, but I never tell anyone.
Well, there's absolutely no...
And it never affects my behavior.
There's no way to trace.
Like, if I keep... I don't tell anyone about Egbert, but I keep turning to the left, having imaginary conversations and whinnying, then there may be some evidence that I have a belief in this little unicorn.
Maybe you wouldn't know it was a unicorn.
You'd think it was a tiny horse. But if the belief had no effect on my behavior...
And I never told anyone about it, then, you know, sort of epistemologically, that's exactly the same as something not occurring, right?
Not existing. It's the equivalent of non-existence.
So if I believe that there's some sort of magical ether in the world, that, you know, a force, let's say, if I'm heavily bearded and slightly childish, that binds the universe together and so on, right?
The force, right? And then somebody, you know, Luke Skyscraper or something, says, well, can I use this force?
No. Well, how do I know this force exists?
Well, it doesn't show off anywhere.
Well, what's the difference between this force existing and non-existing?
There's none. It's faith.
Or something like that.
Then I guess the movie would be a little bit shorter.
But if I have a belief and don't communicate it to anyone and it affects none of my decisions in any way, shape, or form, and there's no evidence that I hold or don't hold this belief...
Then it's not something that anyone needs to worry about, because it's exactly the same as if the belief does not exist.
But when a belief is then put into practice in the world, either through conversation or through action, then it does have an effect on the world.
And, you know, belief is an ecosystem like the body, right?
With the antibodies, you know, sort of immune system.
That you really do want to have sort of a strong immune system.
And it doesn't have to be so strong that it attacks every single thing, right?
But, you know, wherever it can, it's going to eradicate destructive invaders from your body.
And the question sort of then arises...
What effect, what negative effect would somebody's belief in an afterlife, or as he put it, this gentleman put it on the MSN chat, the hope for an afterlife, what effect would this conceivably have on society?
Well, let me sort of explain it to you as I see it.
So, let's say I have kids, and you have kids, and we live next door to each other.
And you tell your kids that...
You think there's an afterlife.
You believe that there's an afterlife.
You hope that there's an afterlife.
Well, first and foremost, everything that you say to your children that is valid in terms of communicating must have some principle behind it.
Like, if you say, I believe in an afterlife, despite the fact that there's no evidence, no proof, no logic behind the position, then you're either saying to children...
One of three things. Either A, that you can just believe in stuff without any proof whatsoever.
And that's a perfectly valid way to approach things.
Right? Which means that for some things there is proof, for some things there is no proof, and you can just believe whatever the heck you want.
Which is completely illogical.
It has to be one or the other. You can't say, I hope that 2 plus 2 is 5, and that's a valid thing to believe in, and 2 plus 2 might equal 5, and also that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
You can't have it both ways.
If 2 plus 2 equals 5, and it's your belief and hope and wish and desire, and therefore it is the case in your philosophy, so to speak, philosophy, then you don't get 2 plus 2 equals 4 as an absolute, because you've just dissolved everything into opinion.
So there's no such thing as absolutes anymore, and you really can't have it both ways, right?
Or, the second thing that you're saying to children is that There's no difference between truth and falsehood, right?
So either there is a difference between truth and falsehood, and you can swing both ways, or there's no difference between truth and falsehood, and 2 plus 2 is 4 is exactly as opinionated as 2 plus 2 is 5, in which case they can't even trust the ears that they're using to listen to your words.
They can't trust anything.
So that obviously, they can't even trust that you're their father, that existence exists.
I mean, if you dissolve everything, that's obviously extremely and horribly abusive towards children.
Let's not worry about that as an opinion or a perspective.
Even Cartesian children or Descartes' children would probably not have gone through that.
They would have had to eat their veggies without wondering whether they existed or not.
And I can't remember the third possibility.
It'll come back to me, I'm sure.
But if you say that the afterlife exists...
Or you hope that it exists, and therefore they have to believe that it exists, or whatever.
Oh, you're also saying that a wish is true.
Wishes are true. Desires are fact.
Which is, of course, a completely messy thing, right?
Because if you're willing to say to children that something without evidence or logic, or with evidence and logic is completely the opposite of your belief, if you're willing to say that that is true, then you're really going to face the challenge Of explaining to children why only that one irrational belief is true,
right? So if I say, I think there's an afterlife because I want there to be an afterlife, I want to live forever and so on, then children kind of get in their gut that there's a principle being put forward here.
Like everything you teach children, everything you teach everyone, it's a principle.
And that's why a violation of a principle like logic and empiricism and science, rationality, evidence, reproducibility and so on, When you break that, you break the whole thing, right?
You have sort of one exception to that in your philosophy, and not just through sort of honest error or whatever, then you break the whole thing, right?
Science doesn't allow science and a bit of prayer, right?
You don't have a nice omelet and a bit of arsenic, right?
You sort of have to have the whole thing be healthy to you or you're going to die, right?
Just as a methodology, nobody has to be perfect in their thinking.
But you're then saying to kids that Whatever you want to believe, you can believe that whim and preference in the absence or the opposition to reason and evidence is perfectly valid.
But then, of course, why is it only the afterlife that follows that principle?
You can't just have whim-based philosophies and then say, well, it's only limited to one thing, because there has to be a reason why it would be limited to that one thing.
Or there's no... Reasoning to anything and then imagination and fantasy is as valid as truth and proof and reason.
But you would then have to say to your kids why hobbits and elves and unicorns and leprechauns and ghosts and so on, why those things wouldn't be true if they found some comfort believing that leprechauns existed.
Or Zeus existed or Hobbits existed or whatever, then you would have to have some way to say that that's not the case.
But of course, because you've already admitted that whim-based truth is perfectly valid, or emotional preference-based truth is perfectly valid, then you can't sort of just suddenly make up an opposite rule all of a sudden and say, well, this one about the afterlife, that's valid.
But this other one isn't valid, right?
There's no principle to appeal to.
Then it just becomes bullying, which is what this kind of stuff in the long run always dissolves into, which is why it's so dangerous, especially around children.
You know, it's like that old question, who made the world?
God made the world. Who made God?
Don't ask, you're evil. The fires of hell await.
Now, what effect does this have on me?
Well, I've got to live in this world.
And, you know, even more importantly, my...
Impressionable children have to live in this world.
So if you say to your kids, the afterlife exists, God exists, leprechauns, hobbits, whatever nonsense you put into whatever slow, irrational, destructive poison you drip into their ear, like Hamlet's uncle into Hamlet's father, my kids are going to run into that.
Kids talk about everything.
Kids talk about everything until they're violently told not to Kids will.
We'll talk about everything.
So, your kids and my kids are going to be playing together, right?
This is absolutely real.
This is how it always plays out.
Your kids and my kids will be playing together.
And let's just say it's God, right?
So, your kids are going to ask my kids, so, where do you go to church?
Do you pray? Have you accepted Jesus?
Whatever. Whatever nonsense you've got in their heads.
And my kids are going to say, no, there's no God.
Come on. Haven't you outgrown that yet?
I mean, you're past the Easter Bunny.
You're past Santa Claus.
So, what's with the whole God thing?
And your kids are going to be kind of horrified.
And they're going to say, there is too a God, and my kids are going to say, really?
Well, prove it. And they're going to say, you can't prove it.
It's in your heart, right? It's like, well, yeah, okay.
Well, it's in my heart that there is no God, so it sucks to be you, right?
So, there's going to be this kind of conflict, right?
And then my kids are going to come back to me, and they're going to say, so-and-so's kids don't believe in God.
Sorry, they do believe in God.
Why do they believe in God?
And I'll say, well, because they've been told to believe in God.
And I'm going to say, well, who told them to believe in God?
I say, well, their father, or their mother, or somebody told them to believe in God.
It's not true, it's just what they've been told, because I have to protect my own kids' mental health, right?
That's sort of the main... The goal of a father is to take care of the kids, right?
And you wouldn't beat them and you wouldn't feed them poison and you don't feed them irrationality or respect for whim-based, bigoted nonsense about reality.
So then, I'm going to have to say to my kids, so-and-so's father, those kids' father told them about God and Jesus and elves and hobbits and whatever bigotry they've got going...
And then my kids are going to say, well, why would he do that?
Because it's not true, right?
And I'd say, no, it's not true. Of course it's not true.
But it's a very common belief, but it's completely false.
Right? So already my kids are like suddenly living in a bit of a frightening world, right?
It's like, your daddy is telling you the truth.
Everybody else's daddies and mommies are telling them lies.
So already they get a sense of how difficult it's going to be to navigate the irrational whitewater canyon Right of the modern world.
I want that for my kids.
I don't want to have to guard them and arm them against the rank irrationality of the tribe.
Why would I want that? Who would?
Who would? So then my kids are going to say, well, is he lying to them?
And I've got to say, well, it's complicated.
It's like, why do I have to tell them all of this?
Why do I have to go through all of this sort of stuff with them?
And they'll say, well, does he know that there is no God?
It's like, well, I don't know.
We sort of have to ask him, but I don't really want to, because that's going to be to mess him up, and he's a neighbor.
We've got to live next to him for, you know, God knows how many years.
So I don't want to get involved in that, right?
Just sort of by the buyers at a meeting yesterday.
I mentioned people found my personal website at work, so I look forward to that feedback.
But... They're going to ask, is he lying?
Does he know the truth? And then they're going to say, well, why does he believe in something that's not true, that's going to prove?
Why does he believe in these things that aren't true?
It's like, well, because he likes to conform.
He doesn't like to think for himself.
He's afraid of what his family might say.
They're going to say, well, isn't that kind of cowardly?
See the difficulty that we're getting into here?
Right? I mean, my kids are going to ask these kinds of questions.
I'm going to teach them about ethics and I'm going to do my best not to pull any punches around what it is that they need to know to get by in this life.
And I don't want to have to have these conversations with them.
I really, really don't, but I don't see sort of any particular way around them in this way.
So what's going to happen next?
Well, what's going to happen next is that I'm going to sort of face this dilemma.
Around with my kids, right?
And the dilemma that I'm going to face is this.
At what point do I tell them about the rank irrationality of the world and how everybody just believes stuff because they're bigoted and frightened and don't want to confront things and that they tell their children things that aren't true just to make the children not question what gives them some momentary sense of comfort and When do I have to fess up about the irrationality of the world?
When do I get that joyful task of talking about the corruption and conformity and cowardice of many, many, many people in the world?
Why do I have to live in a world where that innocence gets smashed that way?
And so, yeah, when people believe things that aren't true, it makes things very, very difficult.
Imagine how well philosophers would do in the game of dating if women were brought up more rationally.
Just imagine how wonderful that would be.
So instead of having to sort of sit down with a woman that you're interested in and listen to her drone on and on about mysticism and psychic phenomenon and her love of Jesus and her respect for Wiccans and her intuition That is psychic.
That you would sit down with a woman and you wouldn't even have to talk about these things.
Because they'd never come up and you'd never really even have to discuss philosophy.
Any more than you have to discuss with a lot of people that the world is around.
It just becomes an accepted thing and you don't have to worry about it.
The whole purpose of philosophy is to stop talking about philosophy.
But that's not possible because people believe all these silly things.
So, it does matter.
It matters enormously what you believe and what you put out there into society and it has a massive effect on me and other people who have to live in this world with all the irrational beliefs that are stuffed into it.
And particularly, of course, what it does as well is that your children will then grow up and I'm not sort of directed at no one in particular, but your children will grow up with these irrational beliefs and With a blindness to the cowardice, hypocrisy, conformity, and fear of mankind.
And, you know, they might become a policeman.
They might become a soldier. They might become a political leader and declare a war that my kids get dragged into.
So, it's enormously important what it is that you put out there in the world.
There is no such thing as private beliefs.
Or if there are, they're completely irrelevant to anything that needs to be talked about.
Like my invisible unicorn, Edgar.
It has no relevance whatsoever.
But the moment that your beliefs change your behavior and you communicate them, then you're peeing in the water.
You're peeing in the swimming pool, so to speak.
And you know, really, that there's no non-peeing side of the swimming pool, right?
It's not that big a pool. So there's no urine-free side when people are peeing into the water.
That's the water my kids have got to live in, and I thank you to keep your uric acid to yourself, and away from your own children, too, if you care about them.
Now, the last thing that I'll talk about with regards to this question of the afterlife is that it really is, of course, a completely contradictory belief, and you can unravel that sort of very quickly.
The first thing, of course, is that either the afterlife is better or it's worse than the current world.
It can't be the same as the current world, because you're sort of short of a body, right?
So... It can't be exactly the same as the current world.
It either has to be a better state or a worse state than the current world.
And, of course, everyone thinks it's a better state than the current world.
Unless you, I guess, believe that you're going to hell, right?
In which case, there's no possibility of saving yourself, and evil tends to mount in that Sicilian Mafia kind of way.
But, most people believe that the afterlife is better than In one way or another than the existing life.
And of course that... The logical result of that would be that you would kill yourself to go and get some of that good slice of infinite cheesecake that's on the eternal dessert tray of the afterlife.
People don't do that. They don't really want to do that so much.
Because they're not sure.
There might be an afterlife.
I really want there to be an afterlife.
But I'm not going to OD on morphine just to go and join...
The bliss in the sky, or wherever you think it's going to be.
So you can't even live with integrity with regards to the afterlife.
Anyway, so if it's a belief that you can never live with integrity with regards to, and there's no proof for it, complete counter proof to it, no alternate realms have ever been discovered, there's no way to measure the energy of the departing soul, there's no reason to believe and we have no evidence that consciousness can exist in the absence of material form, That life can exist without a body, any of that sort of stuff.
So it really is a 2 plus 5.
I really want 2 plus 2 is 5 to be true.
And it is something that you just sort of reach for in moments because it gives you some sort of brief comfort.
But at what cost?
Right? It's the economics or the calculus of philosophy is to uncover the hidden costs of certain beliefs.
Yeah, I get it. If you love someone and they die, believing that you might meet them in the afterlife could give you some comfort and so on.
I understand all of that. But it's a high price to pay.
To give up your integrity and your authority and to teach your children that any random absolute that gives you momentary comfort can be believed in.
Even if it's something like racism.
At least I'm not race X. And that's not what you want to teach your children, of course.
That's not what I want you to teach your children, because I'm not going to be teaching my children that, and I don't want us to end up having to cross the street to avoid each other, because you want to hang on to these silly notions of immediate comfort.
And the other thing that I would say is dangerous about the idea of an afterlife is that it is generally true that the longer the time frame, the greater the procrastination with life.
So one of the things that I asked this gentleman in the post was, well, how does your behavior change because you believe in an afterlife, right?
Now, if he says, well, I changed my behavior with X, Y, or Z, I don't worry so much about the things in this world.
I don't care that much about ambition.
I don't care about this, that, or the other, because I've got an afterlife to look forward to, and this is just this sort of veil of tears that we walk through.
And... People don't say that, though, right?
They have to say...
Because the moment they say, well, I changed my behavior based on the afterlife, then you sort of have to ask, in what way did they change their behavior?
And... They then have to sort of explain it logically.
But so everybody defaults to, well, it doesn't change my behavior.
Right? It's another thing that people say, you know, determinism or regard or whatever they believe in.
Well, how does this belief change your behavior?
If it doesn't change your behavior, what's the point of having it?
Right? And if it does change your behavior, then it really needs to be examined critically because it could be changing your behavior in the wrong way.
Right? So if somebody said, well, I don't get out of bed because I've got an afterlife to look forward to, obviously...
That would sort of be a problematic belief, right?
Especially if there's no afterlife, which there isn't.
And there's nothing to be afraid of, right?
Nothing to be afraid of. We only exist because of death, right?
We only exist through replenished species.
We only exist as the blind photocopies of DNA. So, there's nothing to be afraid of after death, anything more than you look back on your life, quote, life or experience before you were born and say, what a nightmare that was.
It was nothing. What do I care what happened in the 18th century?
I wasn't even around.
And there's no fear or negativity towards that.
I'm not saying I look forward to death or anything, but there's nothing to be afraid of what happens afterwards.
We don't want the experience, the decay, and the ending of life's pleasures, but there's certainly nothing to be afraid of on the other side.
Once you're dead, you're dead, right?
So... Sorry, I'm a bit tautological, but I think you get where I'm coming from.
So, either the belief does have an effect on your behavior, in which case the need to examine it in a critical manner goes...
That becomes very important. Or it has no effect on your behavior, in which case it only has effect on your language, what you tell people, what you say to yourself, what you say to others.
In that case, it's hypocritical, right?
If you have a belief that you only profess but do not live by, then it's just a hypocritical belief.
So I think that's sort of an important thing to understand, that we do live in a collective neural net of beliefs.
And if you're adding irrational beliefs to the mix, you really are harming the progress and the rationality and the survival from superstition that the species needs so desperately, especially with all the military and violent power we have at our command.
So I hope that you'll think twice before taking immediate comforts and not confronting whatever irrational fear your belief in an afterlife is covering, because the whole point is to get rid of illusions so that we can deal with the fear and the anger and the emotional dysfunction that's at the root of our need for those illusions.
Purpose and goal of the psychological aspects of philosophy.
I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so, so much for listening. I hope it wasn't too windy.
I'll give this one a listen before I post it, but I hope it's not been too bad.
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