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Nov. 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:44
490 Murderous Railroaders
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All right. All right, you asked for it, my friends.
There's nothing I can do.
Somebody has very kindly compared my singing voice favorably to Bob Dylan.
Now, it's not that I don't appreciate the taller than Mickey Rooney contest, but I'm afraid in comparing my voice to Bob Dylan's you've left me absolutely no choice.
And mothers and fathers throughout the land.
And don't decide what you don't understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
If your time to you is worth saving, then you'd better start singing all your friends like a stone, cause the times they are changing.
And I could go on and on if you want to commend me to someone else, Celine Dion.
Feel free. There's more where that came from.
So I hope you're doing well. I had an interesting...
I'm leaving work a little bit late this evening.
And I wanted to just have a little chat.
The debate rages between Thorfinn and the rest of the Freedom Aid Radio crew.
And what an exciting debate it is.
It's now fragmented into, dare I say it, nearly a quasi-religious holy war.
So... When we can't convince religious or semi-religious or quasi-religious or religious sympathizers' minds, then what we attempt to do is recreate religious wars through the very ferocity of our incomprehension.
I just thought I wanted to touch on two points here about...
The sort of questions that have come up.
The one, of course, is that...
And you hear this old chestnut quite a bit.
And I don't know why it sort of still sticks around half a millennia after the introduction of the scientific method, or nearly.
But it's still something worth chatting about.
Because it's a misnomer.
It's a misnomer and it's something that...
Happens quite a bit. You know what I don't think I even could have done, Bob Dylan, if I didn't have a call?
But the reason that it's a misnomer...
Oh, sorry. Before I get into why he's wrong, let me tell you what he thinks.
So the question... I didn't read this in detail, for which I apologize, but I was busy today, shockingly.
And what has...
What he's put forward is the idea that scientific knowledge supersedes itself, that scientists come out with statements of certainty which they are then forced to revise.
And certainly, with the exception of the scientific method, it is a brash and brave person who states an absolute in science.
They always do seem to get overturned, and I'm sure that at some point the constant speed of light, the 186k miles per second, will be overturned, or there'll be cracks in it, or maybe it'll be something other than tachyons that can go faster than light, or who knows what.
But scientists are constantly having to revise their certainties based on new information, new approaches, new perspectives, and so on.
And so this, of course, is considered to make science the equivalent of religion.
And that is an old chestnut that just, there's so much that's cyclical in philosophy.
And I sort of want to caution as well.
There's some minor magna-like eruptions of temper.
It's not a minor flares, minor social flares.
In the general rageaholics paradise that is Free Domain Radio, there are some minor flares.
Of temper. And I just sort of caution you, sort of in general, not because, you know, bad or anything, but just for your own sort of peace of mind.
Patience is always very, very important.
I mean, Lord knows it took me 20 years to be able to think my way out of a paper bag, so for me to expect somebody to nail a tricky or challenging DRO-related or anarchy-related question on their sort of first post-go-round, I think is sort of ambitious and is holding a far higher standard For others than I ever have held for myself.
I certainly didn't get mad and run a cheese grater over my forehead when I realized the truth about the Iraq war and about war in general and the state in particular.
I was able to sort of, you know, be at peace with myself from my ignorance, because the only thing that's important is not the achievement of knowledge, but the pursuit of knowledge, right?
Because we're never going to achieve perfect knowledge anyway.
So it's the pursuit of knowledge that makes for virtue, just as it's the pursuit of virtue that makes for love.
So, I would say that when somebody comes along, and techie people are a little bit known for this, you know, with the contempt for noobs, I would just say that maybe, just maybe, it might be worth your while.
If you don't feel like responding to a newbie's question, then don't respond, right?
But don't respond with, oh, come on, how can you have any trust in the government?
I mean, please, people. I mean, if we hadn't been exposed to the great thoughts of those who came before us, what would we be doing?
We'd be sort of metaphorically pecking at the same statist food pellet system that everybody else pecks at.
So I'd just sort of say maybe be a little bit nicer to the newbies and recognize that when you are in possession of certain kinds of knowledge, It's certainly not universal.
And you want your knowledge to be a source of pleasure for you, not a source of constant irritation that other people might not share the same knowledge at the same rate and so on.
And remember, you know, you may be, I don't know, maybe you're like 30 years old and you've been studying this stuff for years.
And then some lost little status lamb comes wandering in who is, I don't know, 15 years old.
And Lord knows I was fairly brain dead at 15.
And the kids who are coming along now are a hell of a lot smarter than I was.
But he's 15 years old.
It's like you're a calculus professor and you're getting mad at a 15-year-old for not knowing advanced calculus.
Have some empathy.
Have some patience. Be kind.
Be nice. Be welcoming.
Be inviting. Be virtuous.
This is virtue. This is what we're talking about.
It's virtue. Virtue is to act in accordance with reality and with the basic reality that knowledge is widely disparate among human beings based on age, exposure, history, accident, birth, country, culture, language.
As many variations of knowledge as there are human beings on the planet, and I just think that if you have a situation wherein you roll your eyes and pretend a certain kind of superiority when some newbie comes along and asks a basic question, yeah, well, it's basic to you, but it's the Olympics to them, as it was for us when we were going through that phase.
You know, be virtuous.
Be virtuous. Don't be short-tempered.
And don't be sarcastic.
And, I mean, you can do all of those things, of course, right?
If you do too much of it, though, I'll certainly get you off the boards.
But that's only come to that once, I think, so far.
But, you know, just be nice.
Be nice. And if you can't be nice, don't type.
Because as somebody pointed out on the boards who's new, who's come in, who felt that somebody was a little short with him, is this movement so big that we could afford to scorn newcomers for not knowing everything perfectly as we ourselves know almost nothing perfectly?
Well, I don't think so.
So that's just sort of my advice out there.
Just be nice.
Treat other people as you'd like to be treated.
I mean, when you were sort of getting into a field, It's, you know, and there's lots of people around who know a lot more than you do.
Think how wonderful it is and what a wonderful gesture it is to reach out a helping hand to somebody who's looking for a hand up rather than, you know, as P.G. O'Rourke says about French waiters, you know, that they treat you as if they're peeing on you from a great height, right?
Don't be one of the tall peers, I guess is what I'm saying.
So... The question around the relationship between the scientific method and religion is one of complete, absolute, utter and total polar opposites.
There is, and the entirety of the difference is based on methodology, right?
Not on the content of the thought, but on the methodology of the thought.
The difference between philosophy and opinion is not, well, when you have philosophy, you have beliefs.
And when you have opinions, you have beliefs.
And when you have faith, you have beliefs.
And when you're paranoid, you have beliefs.
I mean, of course, that's all just nonsense.
That's just saying there's stuff in people's heads, which means nothing.
It's the methodology.
The methodology is everything.
As we know very much when we look at something like wealth.
If we look at somebody who has provided goods in a free market or as free a market as he can get his hands on, if we look at somebody who's become wealthy by putting their...
Sorry, I'm just rebooting.
Let's try Linux this time, shall we?
Ah, we found the driver.
Let's go.
When we look at somebody who has gained wealth through free participation in a voluntary market, who's provided value to others, whatever that is, online porn, gambling, CDs, who knows, right?
When somebody's provided value to other people and they have gained rich thereby, we look upon that as fairly virtuous money, right?
It may not be perfectly virtuous, but, you know, it's pretty honest money.
It's honest money. But if somebody has exactly the same amount of money, but they've got it through extortion, bribery, or Congress, then we don't look upon that as honest money.
The money in the bank accounts is the same amount, but it's the methodology that determines the virtue.
It's the methodology that determines the reproducibility and accuracy of what's going on.
And the methodologies between religion and science are polar opposites.
So the fact that both groups of people in the religious and scientific camps both believe things with certainty that turn out to be false or both change their minds about formally perceived absolute truths which turn out to be more subjective or less true or whatever, right? Like the Catholic Church 400 years after they tortured Galileo says, maybe we shouldn't have done that.
Maybe if we'd been a younger man it would have been okay, but it really wasn't the right thing to do because I guess it did move after all.
The earth, that is. But still it moves, he said.
I don't know if that's apocryphal or true.
Anyway, so it's the methodology that is the separation between the two.
When people believe something in a religious context, they just believe it because they want to.
That's all that manages to get done.
They believe it because they want to believe it.
They believe it because they're told to believe it.
They believe it because they're bullied into believing it.
They don't believe it because there's any evidence or proof for it.
Excuse me. Well, I'm back.
Sorry about the flex of lung coating the microphone here, but we'll survive.
Perhaps Dylan plus the coal wasn't the right idea.
But it's the methodology which is wherein we know the difference between Science and religion.
So, just as it's how we know whether somebody has earned their money honestly, whether it's sort of been granted to them voluntarily by a free exchange of values, or whether somebody's used force or fraud to get a hold of their money.
Another way of looking at this question would be to, again, ask that sort of basic query that we've talked about a couple of hundred podcasts back.
Is there a difference between lovemaking and rape?
That's sort of one of the other questions that you could ask in order to determine the ethics of a particular methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
If you put your penis inside a woman, or I guess inside a man if you're in prison, If you put your penis inside a woman and saw it back and forth and shave off a few ejaculates, then that could either be rape or it could be lovemaking.
And really, the difference is rather extreme.
And the difference is one of voluntarism.
If it's voluntary, it's lovemaking, even if the woman regrets it later.
And if it's not voluntary, then it's rape.
And sure, there are some gray areas right in the middle where it's, oh, you got me drunk and I just said no, but then I said yes and all that kind of stuff.
But we're just talking about the fairly clear-cut ones, right?
Now, I know I'm not equating all religion to rape and so on or anything like that.
I'm just talking about the importance in the methodology, right?
The importance in the intent and the process is really the major difference.
The content of people's minds is not that important, right?
If somebody says E equals MC squared because God told me to, then they're not a scientist, right?
And if somebody says, I believe in Jesus because there's extensive archaeological evidence for his existence, then he's not religious.
He's certainly not religious for long if he starts looking it up.
So it doesn't matter what the content of somebody's beliefs are.
It matters the process by which they validate or reject those beliefs.
Or I guess by which they validate their beliefs with the result that they accept or reject certain propositions.
It doesn't matter what you believe, if you believe it because you're told to, or if you believe in evolution just because people told you to, then you're not scientific.
That's religious, fundamentally.
And if you believe in God because you, sort of like in the Augustinian approach, you believe that there's logical reasons to believe in God, the first course, and this and that and the other, then you're not religious.
And again, if you're honest, not for long.
So I would say that if you focus really on the methodology of science versus religion, of philosophy versus faith, then you really do get a sense that it doesn't matter what people believe.
So the fact that certain scientists believed stuff and thought it was true and then it turned out to be false, Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics to whatever the hell is going to replace Einsteinian physics, that there's a constant state of growth and flux doesn't matter.
It's like saying that gravity varies with the height of a mountain.
I mean the principle, not the actual measured stuff.
Well, gravity doesn't vary by the height of a mountain.
The principles of gravity do not vary by the height of a mountain.
The measurable gravity might vary, and the height of the mountain is largely determined by gravity, but gravity as a principle doesn't alter.
Based on the height of a mountain or the steps in geology.
And similarly, although the contents in people's minds will change what they conceive to be true, the scientific method, which is the gravity of the situation, ba dum bum, the scientific method does not change.
Reason, evidence, empiricism, rationality, syllogisms, whatever you want to call it, the scientific method, as practiced in the physical sciences, the softer sciences, wherever it can be, in philosophy, first and foremost, since it was philosophy, of course, that gave rise to the scientific method, the scientific method itself does not change.
Which is why you'll get a whole bunch of scientists at a conference arguing about whose theory is true.
And that's perfectly valid within the scientific paradigm.
But you don't get a whole bunch of scientists saying, we should replace the scientific method of empirical observation, reproducibility, logic, and so on.
And consistency with prior verified knowledge, or at least a better way of explaining it if it turns out to be inconsistent, you don't see scientists saying we should replace the entire Baconian-Aristotelian superstructure of truth verification with tea leaves and reading chicken entrails.
Not a whole lot of debate about that, right?
And if you don't believe me, no problem.
Then go and submit to a scientific paper The proposition that scientific method should be abandoned in favor of astrology and psychic phenomenon as broadcast by the movements of carp or koi in a pond.
And to see, you know, if they say, well, that's very interesting.
You know, we hadn't really thought of that.
That's a very novel and fascinating approach.
We'd love to have you come and speak at our next conference because what would you be saying?
But you wouldn't be saying anything.
You'd be saying, I think that we should replace a fact with madcap, rank, whim-based opinion.
And that's never going to fly with scientists, because then they're not scientists, then they're priests, right?
So, it's important, I think, to understand that it's the methodology that separates science from religion.
Not... Whether beliefs are overturned or proven wrong.
So, hopefully we can put that one aside, at least for the next couple of podcasts, and Talk about something else.
Now, the other thing that's come up is this question still remains.
And by the way, thank you so much to the fine gentleman who transcribed some chunks of my podcast and posted them.
I haven't actually read any decent transcripts of my podcast before.
Greg posted one a while back, but that was a snippet about the invisible apple.
But it really was quite fascinating to read the transcription of the podcast.
I'm terrified, of course, that it's going to become really transcribed.
All of them have become searchable, and then you'll realize what a logical thread I'm hanging by continually.
But so far, the goal of keeping myself unverifiable by sticking with only sound waves has...
That's why I tested out the speech recognition, which had me worried for a bit, but I think I'm okay, pretty much perpetually.
The only thing that the speech recognition actually picks up on is Dylan songs.
Except for this little bit, we'll be fine.
But there's still some confusion about...
What the perspective of atheists who are, I guess, morally honest and have some sort of philosophical integrity, the approach that we have, forget the we, I'll just talk about the I, that I have towards Christianity or other religious people who subscribe to holy books that say I should be killed.
Now, this guy is saying, well, okay, religious people killed each other in the past, but you don't hold them to blame for that now.
It's like, no, of course not. Just because Nazis killed people in the past doesn't mean that everybody who's part of a Nazi club or a Nazi gang can, you know, Jews can't go around shooting some punk kid in downtown Manhattan for sporting a Mohawk and having a swastika as an earring.
Because he didn't. Other people in the past, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, we're all fine with that. I don't know if this is considered to be some big challenging moral thing, but when he says, well, you wouldn't want to blame people for the sins of their fathers, it's like, yeah, of course we would.
Yeah, we're absolutely into generational guilt.
That's how we differentiate ourselves from those who believe in original sin.
And so I'll just sort of try and lay it out, and I'm obviously not going to put the nail in the coffin any more likely than I did with the free will versus determinism debate, but that's okay.
We've got more nails. We can be patient.
But let me sort of take a slightly different angle at it, because if something's true, I believe you can take it from just about any angle, and just as if something's false, you can grant all of the premises and syllogisms prior to the last one are still going to fall.
But as far as our perspective goes, you can just like, let's start with something sort of easy, right?
So you know two people, right?
One of them is in a model railroading club, and he likes to get together with a little engineer's cap on and watch the choo-choo trains and make them go around the 12-gauge or 12-inch track or whatever it is.
And... There's a little rule book which says you have to replace the trains that you break and you have to bring donuts every third Tuesday or whatever.
A couple of innocuous things.
Membership dues are five bucks a month or whatever.
And that's sort of one person.
It's obviously not morally that important.
I guess they should pay their five bucks a month or whatever.
But there's no real moral sort of flavor around all this kind of stuff.
Now, there's another group.
Who belongs to another club, and that other club has in its handbook that you have to go and kill people.
And that's the only difference.
I don't care even if that's the only difference.
Two model railroading clubs, right?
One is pay your dues and bring donuts.
The other is pay your dues, bring donuts, and kill people who run on a different gauge modeling scenario.
Zed gauge. I think it was the smallest one when I was into this as a teenager.
Now, if there's no moral difference whatsoever for you between somebody Who belongs to a club that has nothing to do with any instructions to kill people, and somebody else who belongs to a club which has explicit instructions from the highest moral entity in the universe to go and kill people.
If you feel that there's no difference between these two people morally, then I think that's sort of wrong.
Because there is a difference, logically.
That's like saying there's no difference between two and three.
There is a difference, right? We've added the instruction to kill people, so there is a difference.
Obviously, the instruction to go and kill people who are not aggressing against you and done no harm is immoral, right?
So there is a minus one morality point in whatever kind of situation you want to set up, right?
Belong to a club that doesn't tell you to kill people and belong to a club that does tell you to kill people.
There's minus one morality point on the person who is in the club that tells you to kill people and so on, right?
So really that's, you know, even if it's only one morality point out of a million, there's still a slight difference, right?
Just as the room gets slightly smaller when you slap another lick of paint on the walls.
And even if that's the only degree that you're willing to grant, that somebody who belongs to a club that says rape, murder, genocide, pedophilia, and so on is really great, you have to do it.
And I haven't said that anyone's done anything.
I haven't said that anyone's done anything yet.
That's an important thing to understand. I'm not talking about anything to do with actions.
We're simply talking about the clubs that people belong to.
And if it's not minus one mini, tidy, nanosecond, micromillimeter morality point to belong to a genocidal club, then that's just logically incorrect, right?
Because there is a difference, and the difference is conceded to be immoral that the instruction to kill people is a less good thing than no instruction to kill people, right?
So, from that standpoint, I'm sure we all agree that that's fairly tidy and cozy.
Now, if you do disagree with that, and let's just say that there's no minus one micro morality point for belonging to the genocidal murderers club, then even if you do say that there's no negativity involved in that, that's fine too.
As I said, any proposition that's false anywhere along it, you can take anything and it'll still be false at the end.
So let's say that those two situations are perfectly equal morally.
Belonging to the genocidal railroad club and the non-genocidal railroad club is morally exactly the same.
Then surely belonging to a club that says genocide club people are bad is also completely morally neutral.
Because if it's morally identical to belong to a club that says go kill people, And also, it's identical to belonging to a club that says, don't go and kill people, then the fact that atheists are part of a club that says, it's wrong to belong to a club that says, go kill people, you can't judge the atheists negatively for that.
Because the moment that you say, I'm going to apply moral criteria to this club, of atheists and say that they're bad and wrong and should change their minds for talking about Christians, then you've said that the morality of a club can be opposed.
That you can call a club immoral.
Right? Now the moment that you say that you can call a club immoral, then logically you can't then say that belonging to a club That advocates murder and belonging to a club that does not advocate murder is morally equal.
And the moment that those two things are not morally equal, and we're going to only assume that you can, you're not going to be so morally insane to say that it's more moral to belong to a club that advocates genocide.
So the moment that you criticize a group called atheists morally and logically, then you're saying that we should be able to judge according to objective moral standards.
It have to be objective. Otherwise, why would we listen to this guy?
Objective moral standards can be applied against clubs and that there is a difference in moral standing between different clubs.
Everything isn't totally neutral and completely neutral and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So given that that's the case, you then have to reorient your laser-like attack upon the atheists and focus on the Christians.
Because if atheists are minus one morality point for being upset that Christians believe in a book that tells them to kill us, then obviously the people that you should be most upset about morally are not the people who are offended by people wanting to kill them, or people who are believing in a book that wants them dead, but rather the people who actually believe in the book that wants people dead.
So there's simply no way out of this particular issue.
The moment you start saying this group is morally wrong or logically bad or whatever, which is what this guy's been doing to us, then the only way he'd be able to defend it is to say, well, yes, there's minus one point for Christians by being part of a group that says that people should be killed, But there's minus five million points for atheists for being offended by this, right?
So, I'll get to the Christians later.
After I've dealt with the real evil, which is people who are upset that there are books out there that want them dead, right?
So, I'll get to the Nazis later.
I'll get to the Nazis later.
But right now, I'm really mad and going to attack the Jews who have a problem with the philosophy of Nazism, right?
I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
It's not something that anyone should ever really particularly expect us to take seriously as an opinion, right?
I mean, if he's so all-fired thrilled and fired up about moral distinctions between groups, and after surveying and evaluating...
All of the moral distinctions that are out there among all the various groups in the world, right?
From cannibals to pedophile rings to the man-boy love association to the pedophilic priests to the Muslim terrorists to the foreign policy terrorists to the state.
I mean, you could go on and on, right?
After surveying...
After surveying all of the groups around the whole planet and all of the nefarious evil that groups get up to, he's decided to focus his logical and moral outrage and his integrity upon a group of anarcho-capitalist pacifists who are discussing how they can get rid of violence and war by getting rid of the state.
Right after surveying everyone, this is who he's venting his moral spleen upon.
Because in the hierarchy of where he should be dealing with moral problems within the world, a tucked away little corner of anarcho-capitalists is where he really has to bring his big heavy guns in because there's just no other group in the world.
That he could be more productively confronting.
And it really is quite remarkable how brave and strong people can get when they're confronting philosophers and pacifists, right?
I mean, it really is just wonderful to see the full flower of human courage in full form when people say, gee, now all of these groups, all these groups doing evil in the world, I'm going to go and attack the philosophers.
And why? Well, because he knows we're not going to attack him back, right?
I mean, that's... That's pretty funny.
Anyway, I just sort of wanted to point that out.
That's sort of a funny thing to think on, right?
Whenever people attack your beliefs, they could be doing anything else with their time.
Look at the opportunity costs of all of the groups that they're not attacking and undermining and getting mad at, right?
And so he chooses, since he is determined that certain groups are good and certain groups are bad, that the group that he wishes to attack is not those advocating genocide, But those who wish that they wouldn't advocate genocide because he's really got his moral priorities in order.
Thank you so much for my donations today.
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