All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:40
543 Humility

An essential aspect of wisdom...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It is 7.51 on December the 5th, 2006.
I'm trying to...
I'm going to do a hands-free one this morning, not because I'm in any kind of yelly frame of mind, don't fear for your eardrums, but rather because I want to have my coffee.
I'm tired of using one hand to hold the mic.
I can't find a good way to get the good mic set up.
In a car. Maybe if I get, you know, those piano players that have the mic come down the side, maybe that's some sort of stand, but that starts to seem to me to get a little bit excessive.
Anyway, I wanted to talk this morning about an interesting topic for me, and I hope it will be interesting for you as well.
And it is around the question of humility.
Humility is a very complicated emotion or state of mind to be in.
Because it is, as we know, very often associated with a kind of self-effacement and a kind of deference to authority.
Humility is preached by priests because they wish for you to subjugate yourself to their will.
So humility to the will of God, as expressed by me, is a pretty tasty morsel to get people to swallow if you want to end up hanging off their jugular for the rest of your natural life.
But in the realm of philosophy and science, humility is much more complicated.
So I thought I'd spend just a little bit of time talking about it this morning, at least from my perspective, and then we can chat more about it on the board, or you can send me emails to let me know what you think of these kinds of formulations.
Now, it is to me essential that...
Human beings find a way to subjugate their...
I sort of call it mere will.
You can call it whatever you want, but for purpose of this discussion, let's just refer to it as mere will.
That human beings do have to find a way to subjugate the angry will, or the mere will, or the base preference, or the defenses, or whatever.
To subjugate themselves to a larger principle.
I do believe that that is absolutely essential for many, many, many reasons.
I think that at the realm of sort of basic human civility, subjugating to a higher principle is absolutely essential to maintain politeness and to maintain curiosity and to reduce the amount of Of personal offense and attack and sort of personal criticism and...
I still see some of this stuff on the board.
It's not troll-like, but it's definitely not real pleasant.
I still see some of this stuff on the board where people are sniping at each other and things escalate and so on.
And it's not too complicated to figure out why.
It is because there's not a commonly agreed-upon standard that both people are willing to accept.
There's also not a willingness to take the time to...
Work the argument up from the basics, right?
I mean, the interesting thing is that although, I don't know, quite a few people have seen the Introduction to Philosophy series or listened to it on audio, I haven't had a lot...
I mean, one guy said it was about as interesting as listening to a boring lecture in university, but I haven't really had many people...
And say to me, well, this was totally wrong and that was totally wrong and the other was totally wrong and who do you think you are and who do you think you are coming in and talking about politics like this and all this kind of stuff, which I do get for others.
That's one of the reasons that I did it, was I at least wanted to take people through.
The step-by-step process of how this philosophy is built, or how I think the good philosophy is built, you know, and there's sort of two parts to that whole, there's the content and then there's the methodology, right?
These are the two parts that go into that kind of approach, right?
And the content is, these conclusions are reached, but the methodology is, here's how we reach conclusions.
So that kind of approach, I find, is very helpful.
When you find yourself in a disagreement with somebody else, and you try all the reasonable things around sort of giving them information, giving them arguments, and if it continues to escalate, well, you know you're dealing with a psychological problem.
You can easily choose to, you can ask them if, sorry, at a certain point, the psychological problems that people have with debates, which, you know, are understandable, We've talked about those before.
They will turn rancid, right?
So it certainly has been my experience that if somebody is, it's got nothing to do with disagreeing with me.
I mean, that would be, who would, why would I care about that?
It's more because people are just going, you know, hellbent for leather.
They're on a tirade. And they simply won't listen to reason or evidence or anything.
And then when you put evidence, all they do is poke holes in it.
When you put reason forward, all they do is attack you.
And then if you say, do you have an emotional problem?
With this debate, right?
Because that's what all the evidence points to.
They then say, oh, so you can't dismiss my arguments and now you're going to try and undermine me psychologically.
Not everyone who disagrees with you has psychological problems, blah, blah, blah, right?
Which just confirms the diagnosis, right?
If somebody says to me, do you have psychological problems with this debate because of X, Y, and Z, because you're not listening to facts for the reason, then my first impulse would be to say, gee, I wonder if I do, right?
I mean, I know that I'm tense.
I know that I'm feeling pretty hostile.
And I know that this guy is not calling me names or implying that I'm an evil guy or anything.
So, gee, I must have.
And certainly my reaction is not warranted by the conversation.
Therefore, it must be...
Coming from something else.
But that's what I sort of mean by humility.
The people who just sort of go off on these charges.
And it's a sort of dictatorial impulse, like I'm just going to overbear and bully other people into believing what I say.
Now, this doesn't mean don't get angry.
Of course, I'd be the last one to say that.
But it means, in my view, it sort of means give people every chance to correct themselves and to behave in a sort of more civilized manner.
And then if they don't, you can either withdraw from debate or if you feel that the debate is particularly important, that's an inaction of how I sort of view things, which is that I treat people as well as I can the first one or two or three times that I deal with them and after that treat them the way they treat me.
That seems to me a pretty fair approach, I think.
But these kinds of...
Altercations. And this is not specific to the board.
This doesn't really... I mean, the board is a totally minor example of this.
I mean, the world as a whole is much worse.
But the escalation of tension and violence that occurs in people's minds and in people's conversations occurs because they're not working from first principles and there's no agreed upon There's no agreed-upon definition of who's going to be right.
That's not based on personal snippiness or whatever.
Whatever I am...
I can't remember. It's something to do with glue and whatever sticks on you.
I am a mirror and you are glue.
Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you or something like that.
I mean, to some degree there is that approach to debate.
And it's not everywhere on the board and it's not even in the majority of places on the board.
But certainly there is a challenge that occurs when you have a disagreement with someone on a philosophical matter.
There is a great deal of difficulty.
If you do have a disagreement with someone on a philosophical matter, then the first suggestion, the sort of humility approach is to take the approach, and I don't do all of this perfectly all the time, but this is sort of what I try to do, is sort of take the approach and say, well, perhaps you can tell me more about what it is that you're saying because I don't think that I understand it.
Because if I disagree with something that somebody says, then it could be because I just don't understand what they're saying.
And that certainly was the case in the podcast I did yesterday morning when the utilitarian gentleman figured out that he disproved me by taking two quotes out of context, or disproved an argument that I put forward.
But you can ask, right?
Just ask. And of course, it's not hard to figure out if somebody is a real thinker.
It's not really that hard.
It's not to do with the board.
This is to do with your life as a whole, right?
There's a gentleman posting on the board at the moment who's saying, well, what's going on?
Every time I go out with a girl, I end up with all of this nonsense, and I end up with all of this irrationality, and I end up with all this, that, and the other.
And to which I would simply reply that it's because he still has irrationality within himself.
I mean, if you want to eliminate irrationality from your life, the first place that you look is not to go and find the uber-rational Dagny Taggart kind of girlfriend.
But you work as hard as you can to eliminate irrationality from your own soul, right?
From your own history.
And this guy has fairly recently defued and he's not ready for a relationship.
And that's why he's continually drawn to fill in the hole left by his family with women who are irrational.
I mean, you're just not ready. I mean, how could you be, right?
I mean, it's a 34-year or 34-year or 35-year maybe relationship that this gentleman has had with his family here.
He's recently, like within the last month or two or three, you've broken it off.
And that's not going to go away from your psychology very quickly.
They say, I don't know if it's this extreme, but they say in addiction circles that once you get off a drug or you're no longer an alcoholic or something, that you should...
You should not date for a year.
After a year, you should get a plant.
And if that plant is still alive after another year, then you should get a pet.
And if that pet is still alive after another year, then you can start dating.
That may be a little bit too much, but it would be something that, you know, this gentleman is obviously going out and trying to fill a hole in his life, and that's why he ends up with these irrational women.
Because, of course, if you end up going out with a woman and you find out that she's irrational, you must have been acceptable to her in some manner.
You must have been okay for her, which means that she's able to see a great deal of irrationality within you.
And that would be something that she's able to see that perhaps you're not able to see.
So the thing is that if you keep going into the ring and keep getting beaten up, Then the key thing to do is to not go in the ring for a while, but to train, right?
That would be my...
Don't get frustrated that you keep getting beaten up.
I mean, it's frustrating, don't get me wrong, but don't be bewildered, right?
It's just because you haven't trained enough.
So that would be sort of...
And that's part of the humility thing, right?
If what I'm doing is...
And I'm going through this process at work where I'm working on an absolutely monstrous plan, much larger than I've ever done before, and it's...
It's a little overwhelming to me at times, and it requires a degree of conceptual abstractions, also in something I've never done before, which is a big marketing plan.
So, it's requiring a certain amount of just sitting and staring at the whiteboard and trying to work it out.
And my boss is sort of helping me with this because he's very good at this conceptual stuff.
And it's hard.
It's very hard. But it is around...
I read this great quote in a business book I was reading on the weekend related to this.
It says, If you only have eight hours to cut down a tree, spend six hours sharpening your axe.
I think that's a really great phrase and something really worth pondering on.
And, so, around the realm of humility, I think that you have to both, if you're going to engage with someone in a debate, and you want to do it in a manner that is honorable, or at least that is decent, then...
You have to very quickly, I think, figure out whether or not they are a real thinker, right?
I mean, do they have opinions that they have reasoned through from first principles, or if not, that they are willing to attempt to reason through from first principles?
You know, the basics. What is reality?
What is truth? How do you determine a true proposition from a false proposition?
What criteria will make you change your mind?
All that kind of stuff, right? Because there's a lot of people out of there who like to shoot from the hip.
And look, I mean, I was one of them for quite some time, so I know to some degree whereof I speak.
But this is sort of my feeling around other people as well.
Not everyone, but some people.
That they sort of like to go out there and shoot from the hip and sort of throw out a conclusion.
That is, with the sort of attitude, and this can occur in writing as well as in person, with the attitude that it's obvious.
Everyone knows this.
I mean, this is a basic, sophisticated trick, a way to make a worse argument appear, the better.
And one of the basic tricks in the realm of sophistry, which is, unfortunately, by far the greater skill than rational debating, In the realm of sophistry, one of the tricks is sort of the argument from obviousness, or it's a subset of the argument from authority, or a sibling of the argument from authority.
It's the argument from, duh, you know, it's obvious, everybody knows this kind of stuff, right?
It's the appeal to the crowd. And it can be hard to respond to it.
But it is, again, the guy who's my boss at the moment, he...
He will sort of say, when people come rushing in, I've seen him do this in meetings, when people come rushing in with all these solutions, all these ideas about what to do differently, and he'll sort of sit back and say, I'm sorry, I don't get it.
What problem are we trying to solve here?
And that sort of brings people up.
It's brought me up short, right, at times as well, right?
So that kind of approach is very helpful and very important.
Explain it to me like I'm three years old.
Explain it to me like I just can't get what you're saying.
And that takes a certain amount of ego strength, right?
Because we were all, usually by our teachers and perhaps by others as well, almost all of us have gone through the process of having people say that, you know, if you don't understand me, you're dumb, in one form or another.
And to actually stop and say, I don't know what it is that...
You're trying to tell me.
I can't follow it. Can you explain it to me like I don't know anything?
That can be a helpful way of getting people to sort of pause and think through their own ideas a little bit more as well.
And then you can, I think, quite quickly gauge.
Like if somebody says, why did you say this?
Or I don't understand this.
And then you can give them, you know, I don't know, at least 10 or 12 sequential arguments as to how you came up with that based on these premises and this evidence or whatever.
Then at least you're a thinker, right?
I mean, there's nothing wrong with not showing every reasoning for everything that you do.
That's my job. There's nothing wrong with that.
But if you ask someone and they go off on some tangent or they have a personal attack or, you know, you know exactly what I'm saying, don't play dumb or, you know, anything like that, then you're not dealing with somebody who's ready to debate yet, right?
You're dealing with somebody who's still solidly in the grip of the false self where domination and manipulation is the order of the day.
That is the role of language and interacting and This kind of stuff is exhausting and wearying, right?
Dealing with the false self is like fighting fog, right?
But it's fighting a fog where there's very little oxygen, right?
So it does get very exhausting.
And when you choose not to engage with the false self, you're always met with hostility.
And to react to that hostility is to escalate without...
A purpose, right? The false self likes to create hostility because it's scar tissue based on an overabundance of hostility.
Well, almost any abundance of hostility is an overabundance when you're a child and you're growing up and you're met with hostility, then you have to normalize that hostility, you have to internalize it, and you have to recreate it for others.
For me, it was with irritation, which was mostly internal, but for other people, it's a lot more played out.
And... So the person in the grip of the far south will generally just go around the world being irritating to other people and being condescending and all that in a sort of attempt to recreate the childhood situation of hostility.
That much is pretty much clear.
And if you engage in that hostility, I mean, you actually are sort of doing that person a disservice, right?
Because they're trying to create hostility in the world so that they don't have to lower their defenses, right?
Their defenses have taken on a life of their own.
As I've mentioned before, written in a novel, certain defenses become so powerful that they overwhelm and destroy the personality that they were originally designed to defend, right?
I mean, the military-industrial complex is the same process writ large in the state context.
And so if you fall for this sort of provocation, then you will end up...
What I mean by that is getting angry rather than, there's nothing wrong with getting angry, but getting angry in the absence of facts and argument.
Anger in the presence of facts and argument, the anger is inconsequential.
I know it startles and upsets a lot of people when I get angry, not because they care anything about my anger or that my anger is particularly, you know, whatever, but just because they associate a raised voice with irrational bullying.
And I think that I don't do that.
At least I hope I don't do that. Anyway.
So, you want to find out if their conclusions have been arrived at through a process of thinking, and not just through a process of reading magazine articles or newspaper articles or even philosophy textbooks.
But even if they have, say, if they're a big Aristotelian or Platonist, if they can reproduce the arguments that they believe that Plato has put forward that have caused them to accept Plato's position, Then they're a derivative thinker, but at least they're going through a rational process in figuring out their beliefs, or at least in taking somebody else's beliefs.
Which is nothing wrong with that too.
I take the beliefs of scientists and I actually take the beliefs of the guys who engineered my car and my computer as I drive.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
But a lot of people will pass off as their thoughts the thoughts of others.
And that's why I always try to give as much credit to the people who have enormously influenced me, if not created my capacity to philosophize.
Then it's just important to...
I don't know. To me, be respectful for the people who got you started.
That's a very powerful thing.
Nobody invents this wheel, all alone in sound.
Even Socrates didn't.
So once you find out whether somebody is a thinker or not, if they're not a thinker, then I would just say...
I would not engage, particularly.
If they continue to attack, I might ban or I might sort of attack back in a podcast because I don't like doing it on the board.
It escalates too quickly.
But... If...
If you find out that they're not much of a thinker, then just save your time.
Save your copal tunnel. Don't engage.
I know you want to. Lord knows I want to.
I mean, it's, you know, because I have a history where everyone around me, you know, they sort of knew my mom was nuts, but they didn't so much with my brother.
But everyone around me, like nobody saw the real craziness that I was subjected to.
And even people who sort of were over at my house and so on.
Oh yeah, your mom's odd.
You know, just a little flighty.
He's not a little flighty.
It's like calling a jumbo 747 a little flighty.
But there was a very great blind spot to what I endured in society and among my friends and of course certainly within my family.
And so I have a great desire to show people that people are crazy.
That's a leftover chunk of scar tissue from my history which is something that I'm still working through.
And I would say just try not to fall into that game.
It's sort of what Christina says, don't engage, don't engage, don't engage, right?
Don't engage in defenses.
You want to engage in the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of truth should be a pleasurable thing, right?
The pursuit of truth should be a pleasurable thing.
I think that, I mean, if you listen to Greg and I on the Sunday show, and thanks again to Greg for making that show so much a part of what it is.
I just enormously appreciate it.
But we don't raise voices at each other.
He mildly irritated me once when I was trying to get to a point and he interrupted me by telling me I should really try and get to a point.
But that certainly wasn't really his fault.
But yeah, sort of in the number of conversations that we've had and the exchanges that we've had on the board, they've all been pleasant, they've all been positive, I've learned some stuff, he's learned some stuff.
That's really what it should all be about.
It shouldn't be about snapping and snarling and so on.
And that occurs really because of a lack of humility, I think.
It occurs really from a lack of humility.
And the humility takes a number of different forms.
First and foremost, it's the humility of saying, I don't know whether this person can debate.
Because if you engage with somebody who's defensive or abrasive or whatever, or abusive, heaven forbid, then what happens is...
You are saying, I know that this person can debate, I'm willing to engage with them, they're capable of changing their mind.
I mean, maybe that's what you tell yourself, or whatever, but you don't know that, right?
Or at least, maybe you do, and it's the complete opposite of what you're doing.
But it's the humility to take a break, to count to ten and say, is this part of what I want to do with my life?
Because, you know, every second we spend snapping with somebody in a debate that's not productive is just subtracted from our life, right?
Is this what I want to do with my limited time?
And just making that decision, sort of being humble and saying, well, I can't change this person.
I certainly don't get a gut sense that they're rational and productive.
And so I need to be humble.
And you can ask them if you want.
I mean, we all kind of know this stuff deep down, but you can ask them if you want, can you tell me the reasoning that led you to this conclusion?
If they come back with, you know, I don't have the time for this, here's these 12 websites, go look it up and get back to me when you're ready, or, you know, if you have to ask, I can't explain it to you, or I'm not going to reproduce my entire education, or whatever, right? I mean, if they can't give you a succinct...
Debating point, right? Then that's kind of jerky behavior, right?
Because if somebody comes back and if they put forward a proposition on a board that's not clear, or in a conversation that's not clear, and you say, oh, I don't understand this, can you clarify it for me?
And they say, well, it's impossible because it takes years and years of education, then there's really not much point posting it on a board, especially not on a board devoted to philosophy.
Because if it is the kind of conclusion that takes many, many years of study, Then it's not really a very valid thing to post on a board, right?
I mean, he might as well come in and post this arcane and incomprehensible to most mathematical treatises using all the Greek symbols in the alphabet and this and many other dimensions.
And then when somebody says, I have no idea what this means, can you explain it to me?
It's like, well, no, because you don't have a PhD in math, right?
And then, I guess the reasonable question that would come out of that is, well, why are you posting this on a board that doesn't have anything to do with mathematics, right?
I mean, that really wouldn't make much sense, would it?
So, when somebody pulls the argument from, oh, the knowledge is just too deep, or I can't remember what it's called, but when somebody pulls that, it's just sort of like the argument from authority.
Believe me, because it's just so complicated and you don't understand it, but it's essential that you believe me.
Well, it's actually not, really.
I mean, certainly not in the realm of philosophy.
In the realm of philosophy, you should be able to work from first principles.
And, I mean, if I can pull off a reasonably credible proof of libertarian morality...
In three pages, then, certainly philosophy is not quite that complicated, right?
There are certain things in philosophy where there's grey areas and so on.
But really, we're working in the basics, because the basics have been largely forgotten over the past sort of couple hundred years.
So, you know, we're sort of back to basics.
There's not an enormous amount that requires a PhD in philosophy.
And, of course, Socrates did not have a PhD in philosophy and knew no logic trees or syllogisms or so on, right?
So, don't be cowed by people who say, well, it's just too complicated for your little brain, or you need more education before I will get you to understand this or that or the other.
Now, I've certainly... I mentioned that, I think, in the debate on prostitution.
I certainly did say to somebody that you need more education.
But that's where...
That's where the gentleman I was chatting with was telling me all about psychology, and it was certainly counter to everything that I've ever learned about psychology, and I've learned quite a bit.
And so, for me, it was like, well, can you tell me what training or what books you've read on psychology that you're getting all this stuff from?
And he says, I know nothing about psychology, and then you can reject that as an argument and say you need to learn something about psychology if you're going to put forward theories about psychology You do need to learn something about psychology.
I mean, that would seem to be reasonable.
If you want to put forward theories about physics, you need to learn something about physics first, right?
And really, that's the kind of humility.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't put forward arguments, but I think that it's well worth putting forward arguments that...
I mean, unless you've got a really airtight series of syllogisms and you've gotten other people to understand them and so on, if...
You explore ideas with an objective standard so that it's nobody's personal ego that's at stake in terms of being right or wrong.
I mean, don't get me wrong, we all prefer to be right rather than wrong, but there's no one sort of personal ego that is directly involved in being right or wrong.
But if we put that stuff together and take that approach, that we're humbled before reality and logic, which is the final arbiter of all of our disputes.
And this is all of our, in the wider sense, I mean, long after the board is...
Either flourishing in the 28th century or has gone kaput tomorrow.
This is about the world as a whole, right?
That if you're interested in the pursuit of knowledge, then you need to retain your humility before the sort of twin pillars of logic and reality or sensual reality, evidence.
And you also need to really pick who it is that you're going to debate with.
You need to pick who it is that you're going to debate with.
And if somebody just keeps repeating the same thing in a sort of superior condescending tone or something like that, then...
Don't engage. Don't debate with them.
Certainly if I do that, then don't do that with me either.
I mean, that would sort of be a reasonable thing to approach.
You want to look at your debating relationships similar to how you would look at your dating relationships, with the exception that you can have a polygamous debating relationship without violating the laws of God.
But you want to look at your precious time, your precious intellectual energy, and you also want to look at your optimism, right?
So if you end up fighting with a bunch of immature people in your life and feeling depressed and feeling frustrated and feeling upset and feeling hopeless and so on, that's not good, right?
I mean, the philosophy should lead you towards pleasurable, beneficial, joyful, positive...
Mutual benefit interactions with people, and if it's not doing that, then you need to change who you're philosophizing with, right?
You don't want to get an STD, right?
A syllogistically transmitted disease of hopelessness or despair or depression or frustration or anything like that.
You don't want to get stressed.
I don't know about you, but for me, it's pretty stressful when there's a lot of fussing and fighting going on with people.
It's not pleasant. It's not easy.
It gets me all keyed up.
It interferes with my sleep sometimes.
It's really not very pleasant at all.
Why would I want that?
It's not a pretty fundamental thing.
Why would I want that?
And from that standpoint, that's also part of the humility, right?
Which is to recognize that your resources are not infinite, you can't get happiness out of difficult interactions or out of interacting with difficult people.
And you can do it once in a while, of course, right?
But you, you know, you can, I guess you can also, I don't know, take heroin once in a while, but it's still not a very good thing to do as a general habit.
I mean, maybe it's inevitable once in a while.
I guess, you know, maybe like an aspirin if you're young, if you've got a headache, but don't take it every day.
But it really is just around humility that all resources are finite, including your pleasure in philosophy.
And I really want to protect and help protect people's People's pleasure in philosophy and that really does involve humility, right, and politeness and curiosity and respect where respect is due and a non-interaction where it's not due.
I mean, I would sure love, you know, I think this would be fascinating and this occurred with the very first time we had significant problems on the board.
I would love for this principle to be widely enough approached that when a troll came on board, That nobody interacted with him and he went away of his own accord.
Like I said, I didn't have to intervene, right?
So with the last trial that came on board, I said I would strongly suggest, I posted that I would strongly suggest that people not interact with this gentleman.
And then he got all offended and people, not everyone, but a bunch of people jumped in to interact with him.
And again, it's not that they should listen to me, right?
But if they sort of read back through the post, it wouldn't be that unclear, I think, as to why.
But to me it would be very fascinating if it's nothing to do with a proof or non-proof of anarchistic principles, although it certainly would speak well to the efficiency of mature anarchists, that if trolls came on board, that people just didn't respond to them.
They wouldn't get anywhere, right?
They wouldn't engage anyone. And that has a lot to do with humility and with self-respect, right?
And getting involved in petty wrangles with people who are insulting and so on is not a huge mark of self-respect, right?
Because it's not a good mark of self-respect to say, yeah, I can be treated this way and I can reward that person with my time and energy through continuing to interact with them.
Self-respect has something to do with the standards by which you expect to be treated, and that also has something to do with the standards by which you treat others.
I hope that this is helpful.
I hope that this is useful.
I would just say, really reflecting on humility, your inability to change others, and the need to subjugate reasoning to logic, or your arguments to logic and empiricism, reality, evidence, and so on, and the need for curiosity.
I think it's all very important.
People find it, because we've been subjugated by authority throughout most of our lives, unjust authority, irrational authority, it's hard to think of subjugating ourselves to an external standard without thinking that we're sort of now going to have to hand over 10% of our earnings to Mormons.
That's not what I'm talking about at all.
I'm talking about in the same way that when you're thirsty, you don't try and will a drink into your throat, right?
You get up and get a glass of water.
Is that subjugating yourself to external reality?
Well, I guess it kind of is, but the alternative is pretty unpleasant and difficult.
So, I would say that it's not subjugation in the way that it's traditionally understood.
It is that old idea that nature to be commanded must be Obeyed.
And happiness to be achieved, for confidence to be achieved, we must have humility, right?
For knowledge to be achieved, and for certainty to be achieved, we must have humility.
Confidence requires humility as its icebreaker, as its forefront, as that sort of, what do they call it, the cattle clearer or something?
As the thing that goes in front of the...
The railway engine and clears away the snow and the cattle.
I think it's called cattle clear if I'm wrong.
I think that's right. You need humility in order to achieve confidence.
Humility allows you to conserve your resources.
Humility allows you to respect the difficulty of the task.
Once you respect the difficulty of a task, like philosophy, once you really respect the difficulty of a task, Then you're a long way to having a good deal of self-protection relative to people who are overly cocky and confident and come in sort of swinging their sword wildly and think that they're carving a turkey.
For myself, I mean, I think I'm not a dull fellow and...
It took me 20 years of, oh man, I can't even tell you the amount of writing and papers and essays that I've done and ideas that I've tried to figure out.
I just came across this when I was moving computers recently, you know, an 800-page single-type, all the stuff that I wrote when I was an undergraduate when I was trying to work out various ideas.
And these weren't essays.
They weren't required by anyone. It was an intellectual journal.
And that was 20 years ago, right?
And so the amount of work and labor and all the stuff that I've done for my books, which are pretty philosophical in the nature, my master's thesis, and just all the stuff that I've sort of worked on over the years, it still took me 20 years to come up with anything that I think is fairly original and fairly useful in terms of, like, not just a rehash of what other people have said.
So I know how hard the task is.
And so when people come in with instant and easy answers, this is my humility, knowing that it's a very hard and difficult task to work in the field of philosophy.
I think it's one of the hardest.
The scientific method is generally accepted, but people are still having a great deal of difficulty with standards within the realm of philosophy.
So I think that philosophy, at its state right now, once logic and empiricism is more understood and people accept sort of the basics, then it's going to be easier in the future.
But right now, you know, it's pretty damn hard.
Once you have humility with regards to the magnitude of the task at hand, then you can take people who come in and say, it's just like this, you see.
It's simple. It's like this.
You're all wrong, or you're wrong, or this and that.
People who come in like that, once you do sort of understand that it's an incredibly difficult task...
Then, you know, it's like if you spent 20 years studying to be a surgeon and then, you know, some teenager comes in with a, you know, a butter knife and a prayer book and says, yeah, it's easy, let me do it.
Then it's okay for you to say, I don't think you, I don't think you, A, no, and D, I don't think you quite understand how difficult this task is.
And I know that there's a cockiness that is about youth that is sort of endearing, right?
And there's that old phrase from Mark Twain where he says, like, I left home and I was 16 and I was appalled at how ignorant my dad was and I came back when I was 20 and I was amazed at how much he'd learned in the intervening time.
That certainly is to some degree the story of philosophy as well.
That for a youth, everything is obvious, right?
And that's okay.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's a kind of false confidence that needs to be whittled back, right?
So once you get how difficult a task is, then you no longer are particularly going to be intimidated by people Who come in with, you know, easy toss-off instant answers that they're going to look, you know, a little bit presumptuous, kind of arrogant, and not wise, certainly not wise.
So that's another reason why humility is very important, right?
So you don't get tempted to try and change people's personalities.
You don't get intimidated by people who pretend that this is all so obvious and simple that, you know, a three-year-old could get it because philosophy is the hardest discipline.
I think it's the hardest discipline in the world at the moment.
I mean, just because of the sort of history of the last 100, 150 years and what's happened to respect for empiricism and respect for logical reasoning and so on, evidence, And the god-awful mess that's been made of metaphysics and epistemology and the continuing influence of religion, which is absolutely destructive towards philosophical concepts in any kind of real way.
All of this has made philosophy, and politics, and all this sort of public school education which hasn't taught people how to think their way out of a wet paper bag, all of this has made philosophy just an enormously difficult burden to lift, right?
And everyone thinks they know, and almost nobody does, and you see people who've studied philosophy their whole life, philosophy professors who, you know, kind of fundamentally wrong as a whole, right?
And so it's not...
The differentiating factor is to look at the sum total of philosophical knowledge and I could do podcasts from here to the end of time and still have additional things to uncover and still find out that I was incorrect or had disproportionate emphasis on certain things.
So it just has a lot to do with just recognizing how big the field is, how hard the field is.
And we're all kind of lost in a snowstorm trying to find shelter and We kind of need to be really, I think, kind to each other.
That would sort of be my particular approach.
But, you know, even if we can't be kind, we need to not sort of point off into the blizzard and say, it's right over there.
It's obvious. When, of course, it's not, because it's a very hard thing to get to.
Thank you so much for paying this attention.
I really appreciate it.
I will talk to you soon, and I look forward to your donations.
▲
Export Selection