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Dec. 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:34
554 Argumentation Ethics

Lessons from a listener

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Good day, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's the 14th of December, 2006.
Time for our low-quality recording here.
I'm sorry, but I lost my recording from this morning, so I'm going to go for a short walk at lunch today, and we're going to get the topic sorted out relatively quickly, so I hope that's all right with you.
Sorry about the low-quality. So I had an email exchange with a gentleman, and it's funny because I was just talking about this condescending stuff.
Yesterday morning, but I thought I would start to outline an idea that I think is quite important when it comes to debating with people.
So let's start right away with somebody who wrote about my Gun in the Room article, so that the government is forced, and he said, interesting piece on the Gun in the Room, he wrote, I announced the concept.
On someone else, and he asked me how you would apply this in the year 1776 when taxes were imposed to fund the Thirteen Colonies Revolutionary War against England.
I'm sure no further explanation is needed.
And I said, well, look where it got us, and the Iraqis.
And he said, I suspect that the flippant response that we would have been better off not going to war against the King of England won't win over very many people here in the United States.
Perhaps you should give yourself a day or two before you formulate a thoughtful answer to this.
And then I said, okay, that's really my opinion.
It's not flippant at all, although I certainly understand why he saw it that way.
Here are some other ideas. Do you think that the slaves who would have been freed under British rule were happy about the success of the US Revolution?
What about the 600,000 souls who were killed in the Civil War?
Were they happy about independence?
And now when US taxation and national indebtedness is staggeringly high and ever increasing, do people think that fighting against a few percentage points of UK taxation was a war that ended in victory for the American people?
I said, I am an anarchist, which may not be evident from my article.
For me, replacing one master with another is not freedom.
Waging war against a foreign government and then creating your own government is an exercise in futility.
Human beings would be far better off without governments of any kind.
Now that would be a revolution worth pursuing, I said.
And he said, Hello, Stephen.
Knowing that you are right is not sufficient to convince others.
I believe the purpose of an argument is to convince another, though not always the person you're arguing with.
That your position is thoughtful, to convince another that your position is thoughtful and has merit.
The most persuasive arguments tend to be those that systematically take the person from where he is to where you want him to be.
And if you can make him think that it was his idea all along to come to your conclusion, so much the better.
This email does not require an immediate response.
Take a little more time to think this one through.
And so I wrote back to him.
And this stuff makes me angry.
I gotta be frank.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank with you.
Can I be frank with you? Hey, you can be anyone you want with me.
But this stuff makes me angry.
It really, really does. There is such a depth of hypocrisy and condescension and so on in this kind of stuff.
So I'm gonna spend a few minutes just sort of talking about it and then you can let me know if it makes any sense.
And of course, what do you care about my wrangling with this guy?
Well, you don't care about it at all, and I wouldn't imagine that you did.
But what I would say is that this is going to be something that's going to come up quite a bit.
The condescension that happens for people in the realm of philosophy, especially when you're coming up with unusual ideas, is really quite staggering, and it's a little bit stomach-turning to sort of get a hold of it.
So, let's talk a little bit about this, and we'll see if it can make some sense.
Now, why does this guy make me angry?
Does this guy make me angry?
Does it sound like this guy, this guy, it does make me angry?
It's falling? Why does this guy make me angry?
Is it because he suggests that I shouldn't be flippant?
Well, no, I mean, I... I understand that he could perfectly perceive that my first response was flippant.
I think that there's a lot in the first response, You know, look where it got us, right?
I mean, this fighting against the sort of, quote, imperialism of the UK, with a couple of percentage points on T of taxes, and now taxes are running 30, 40, 50 percent.
And if you include indebtedness, it's much higher.
That's where things have ended up in this sort of American revolution.
So, was it a successor revolution?
No. Did it create an imperial power that's, you know, weighs its bases in dozens and dozens of countries?
700 military bases overseas?
Sure. I mean, you have to look at the form, not just the content of a certain kind of revolutionary or intellectual movement.
Did the United States win the war against tyranny in 1776?
No, of course not.
The taxes that were imposed shortly after the Declaration of Independence were higher than the British taxes.
But, oh, it's domestic, so that's different, right?
As if it matters. I think that there's still a fair amount of content, and of course, you know, now that we've killed hundreds of thousands, now that the American government has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, which is just the latest wave in murders of Iraqis, if you count half a million killed during the sanctions, it's quite a lot of damage that's been done.
So... I don't think that it's particularly reasonable, or I don't think it's a particularly unreasonable answer to say.
Well, look where the American Revolution got sort of the world as a whole, I guess you could say.
But America in particular, it certainly didn't win, right?
And I've done a detailed article examining the points that Jefferson had, or the complaints that Jefferson had, about the then King of England, George, And comparing those to the actions of the US government in the present.
So I do have some idea what I'm talking about, which this guy would have seen if he'd done any sort of research on.
If he'd clicked on two links to get to my...
You know, if he'd gone to the archives and had a look at my general philosophy, then he would realize that while my email to him was short, it's not particularly flippant.
So, but no, let's just say that it was flippant and so on, right?
The reason that this kind of conversation makes me angry and...
Gets my blood boiling is simply this.
This guy is saying that the purpose of an argument, or the value of an argument, is judged by the way that you, step by step, lead the person to a conclusion, and perhaps you manipulate him into thinking that it was his idea all along.
But the value of an argument is the gentle nature of your persuasion and the step-by-step leading someone to your position, right?
In other words, you have to be sensitive to your listener, you have to present information in a way that works for him, and that the measure of your success as a communicator or a debater is not particularly the content, but the degree to which you can convince others.
I'm sure that he would say, as would any sophist to that, If you can convince someone of a true argument, so much the better.
But he says that sensitivity, delicacy, you know, suggestibility, manipulation, and so on, that the way in which you communicate a position to another human being should be pleasant enough and good enough, and you should be judged by the subtle effect that you have on shifting that other person's position.
Right? So, that's an interesting argument.
I certainly would be interested in exploring that more at some point.
Of course, screaming the truth when you have a duck on your head and you're standing naked in Times Square, even if your truth is that the government is bad, is not really a very effective way, of course, of getting information across.
So, I certainly understand that there are some aesthetics to arguments, and no problem with those.
But here's what makes me so angry.
This guy, the first thing that he does is he completely, totally, and utterly violates his own premise.
He completely, and this is why I say there's condescension and hypocrisy, and to me it's vile.
To me it's vile. It is condescending and hypocritical, because he's saying that you should sensitively lead your listener to the correct conclusion, and basically he's just calling me thoughtless and ineffective.
Now, how is that, applying his own principles to arguments?
This is the stuff that just makes my blood boil.
How is it? And this is something that's so important to understand, and there's an entire branch of philosophy that Herman Hoppe has We've worked on quite a bit called Argumentation Ethics, but it really is also centrally based on the principle or the premise that if...
I mean, boiled down, it's practice what you preach, right?
If somebody does not practice their own beliefs, then you don't actually have to spend a huge amount of time going into their logical errors, right?
Because their actions contradict their content, right?
So, if I scream at you that human beings should never scream at each other, I don't have to be taken very seriously as an ethicist, right?
It's the old thing that we all know from bad parenting, that parents will hit their children, and then will say to their children, don't hit.
And children are very sensitive to this kind of hypocrisy, and at a very minor level, a colleague was telling me about how his kids, you know, he says to his kids, don't throw, his kids are very young, don't throw, and then he throws something into the garbage, like a piece of paper, and they're like, hey, you said don't throw, right?
Or another colleague of mine was saying that, he said, you know, your kid comes up to you when they get into their early teens and they say, Dad, do you ever lie?
And he says, no, I never lie.
And he said, well, you know, a couple of weeks ago you said you were going to take me to this fair or this show or whatever, and you didn't.
So is that not the same as not lying and blah, blah, blah, right?
They're examining the ethics of their parents, of course, as I dramatize in The God of Atheists, available for donations of $50, $100, we'll get you the audio and the PDF. But there is a kind of rank hypocrisy that occurs within people's argumentation ethics.
Now, of course, the people who argue that the government should solve problems are basically saying that problems should be solved using violence.
That, of course, arguing that problems should be solved using violence is a direct contradiction, right?
It's a direct and implicit contradiction in the position.
It's something we should all be, I think, very aware of.
And it's perfectly valid to point this out.
Somebody says, I think the government should solve problems.
It's like, well, so you're saying that violence should be used to solve social problems, but you're trying to debate this with me.
So clearly, you're contradicting yourself, right?
You're saying... That violence should be used to solve problems, but reason should be used to solve problems, right?
Well, it's one or the other, and the two are antithetical.
If you force someone, you're not reasoning with them.
And if you're reasoning with someone, you're not forcing them.
So, this is just, you know, if somebody who advocates a state solution to a problem is saying violence solves problems, but they're not applying their own...
Methodology to debating about whether or not violence should be used to solve problems, right?
If they took a gun to your head and said, agree with me that violence solves problems or I'll shoot you, Then you could at least respect their consistency, if not necessarily their evil, bitter, and corrupt souls.
You could at least, at least, you could to some degree respect their consistency.
Holy crap, it's windy!
Let me back out of this. This is probably going to sound much like I'm sort of podcasting from the heart of the sun, so let me just back away from that.
There are certain spots in and around the office that are like tornado alleys, so...
When I come across one of those, even though I've wrapped this in a headband, in the fine, high-tech approach of free domain radio.
So, that's what I find so vile, right?
This is why this pomposity and this kind of condescension is just so hideous, and it's just so...
it's so patently obvious, right?
So I wrote this guy back, and I said, well...
I said, geez, you really are as condescending as I feared.
You know, if you had spent one minute to go to my website...
You would have seen that, you know, 135,000 podcast downloads, a bunch of video views, a couple of thousand visitors a month to my blog, articles on Lou Rockwell.
I mean, nobody's saying that I'm Ted Turner here, but it's not bad for a philosophy communicator.
And 365 members on the board, and so on.
And this morning I saw there were like 40 guests browsing around.
No one's saying that I'm cornering the market in terms of the media, but...
For a free podcast about philosophy, it seems pretty good.
So if this guy had gone to my website, then he would have seen that there's at least some validation that could be considered reasonable as to the fact that I have some idea about how to communicate things to people in a way that is positive for them, right?
And certainly... Given the, ahem, shall we say, unusual approach that I take here to philosophy, or I could say unusual in that it's consistent and logical, or at least that's what we strive for, given this unusual approach, the fact that it's successful despite being unusual, Is, I think, testament to the receptivity of people to ideas that are presented in a positive, encouraging, and occasionally funny, and sometimes on purpose kind of way.
So, he would then have, if he had investigated, because he's saying, well, you need to be sensitive to the concerns of the US listeners, and not just suggest that the revolution was a complete failure, because we're sensitive to that kind of stuff, and you need to approach us step by step, and be delicate, and this and that, right?
So, he's saying, here, I'm trying to educate you about your listeners.
So that you can be a more effective communicator and take your potential listeners' viewpoints into account.
That seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do, I say, I say.
But I'm a potential listener for his argument, right?
I mean, this is something you really...
it's worth keeping an eye on in your conversations with people.
It's really, really worth keeping an eye on in your conversations with people.
Look at the form.
If they criticize you for the form of your responses, and you'll notice, of course, that he has not addressed any of the content.
He's basically offended at the tone.
I've put forward Iraq, slavery, the Civil War, national debt, high taxation, and compared that to the British taxation that was supposedly being fought against, precisely for this very reason, to point out that There was simply a transfer of power.
There was no opposition in principle with the government to taxes.
Look at the Whiskey Rebellion.
There was no disagreement in principle to taxation between the American and the British governments.
It's just that they, you know, they transferred ownership of the livestock to...
To domestic farmers rather than foreign farmers, but the livestock principle remained untouched.
So I put forward a number of arguments as to why, and he didn't respond to any of them, right?
But he simply got offended because he felt that I was riding roughshod over the delicate sensibilities of my American listeners, which, of course, given the number of American listeners that I have, seems rather odd, but nonetheless, this is what he says.
So, the question is really, Does he believe in what he is saying?
This is a very central question when you're debating with someone.
This is how you avoid wasting time with fools.
This is how you avoid wasting time with fools.
And this is where, in terms of anger, and there's some questions on the board about the appropriateness and so on, the real question is, does the person actually believe what they're saying?
Does this person that I'm debating with really believe?
And what he or she is saying.
Because if they don't, then it's just, I mean, you're basically just jerking off into a cup together and throwing it out, to use a crude metaphor, but it's a complete waste of time.
I mean, if the other person doesn't really believe in their position, then they're just jerking you around, right?
They're just messing with your head, they're just being difficult, they're just being annoying, they're just being contrarian, and it's not a real debate.
So, the first thing that can occur when you feel that you've been provoked in a debate is to kind of look at the other person, and you can take a break from the debate if you need, and so on, but look at the other person and say, okay, well, does this fine gentleman or fine lady actually believe in what he or she is saying?
Right? Now, the best way to find out if somebody believes in what he's saying is...
To reverse the principle, right?
To reverse the principle or to, basically, this again is the power of the argument for morality, to look at it in a universal context.
So if this guy is saying, you're a bad communicator, even if you tell the truth, you're not sensitive to your listeners and you're not gentle in taking them step by step to your position.
That's his position, right?
That I'm a bad communicator.
Now, If his criteria for being a good communicator, and this is, again, just an argument for morality, I don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but this can be very useful when you're having debates with someone.
If your participant, I don't really like to say opponent, because a really good debate is two people in search of the truth, but if the person who's participating in your debate is actually...
If they are advocating a certain thing, then they, of course, should be applying it themselves.
I mean, there's no point advocating something if you don't believe in it yourself.
That's one of the fundamental definitions of hypocrisy, of course, right?
So the best way to find out is to say, well, are you living by the credo with which you say that I should follow, right?
So if being sensitive to your listeners and taking them step by step through a process is important, then Clearly, the person who's advocating that should also be doing that, right?
I shouldn't even notice until the end where this guy's trying to lead me.
But instead, you know, Huffley calling me brusque, and then, and then, oh heavens, oh, you've just got to love it, right?
And then heavens using this incredibly passive-aggressive tool or approach of saying, don't be so hasty.
Now, you take just a little bit of time and you think about your response before you send it back.
I mean, that's very insulting, obviously.
That's how you would speak to a very small child who is unprepared for some dangerous task.
So, that condescension, I don't think that he would argue that the best way to get people to swing around to your way of thinking...
Is to insult their both intellectual capacities and emotional maturity, which is kind of what that content does.
And again, I'm not asking you to care about what he said to me, but this is the kind of stuff that you will face, without a doubt, in your career or hobby as a philosopher.
So, I don't think that he would say, what I found problematic with your proposal, Mr.
Molyneux, was that you didn't insult your listeners enough, you didn't condescend to them enough, And you didn't sort of hand out assignments like, think about it for a day or two and then get back to me.
As if you were sort of the old lord of maturity, intelligence and wisdom.
He didn't say that. He said, you should be more sensitive to your listeners.
Was he sensitive to me in his response?
Well, of course not. So clearly he doesn't believe his own garbage.
Clearly he doesn't believe his own nonsense.
And that's it.
That's all I need. That's all I need.
Again, we're always trying to find ways to be efficient in our debates and to...
To refrain from or to cease continuing with debates where the person is just a manipulative fool, right?
Who's just offended by what you're saying, has no intellectual capacity, ability, or willingness to respond to your arguments, but instead will attack the form of your argument, right?
And try to be condescending and try to be superior and try to pretend that they're just all that without actually addressing any content of your argument, which is, of course, what this guy did.
So, this is somebody that you have no point debating with.
There's no point debating with.
This is a patriot. Who believes USA is good and that the revolution was wonderful despite the fact that it wasn't so wonderful for the slaves and other segments of society?
That having been said, of course, there is no question that the Constitution of the United States in its original form and its original practice was superior to almost all other prior forms of government and that if the inevitability of government growth was not so Inevitable?
Let me try that one again.
If the growth of government was not so inevitable, then it would have been a fine document and nobody would have gone to the wall and done 550 podcasts because of a 2% tax on stamps.
But given what's going on with the growth of government and the inevitability of that growth, we have to go to the barricades again.
And this has not been a particularly long experiment, right?
It was... You know, two generations after the war that, sorry, after the war of independence, that the war of northern aggression, the war between the states, the civil war, whatever you want to call it, occurred, and then you had the public schools taking over the minds of the children,
then you had the progressive movement, you had the imposition of the income tax, you had the creation of the Fed, you had the creation of vast amounts of price controls in World War I, and then you had the With the Fed, of course, you had the wild inflation of the 20s, followed by the depression of late 1929 until pretty much 1945.
And then you had the incredible growth of power in the New Deal programs, and then you had the incredible growth of power in the war programs, and then you had...
Anyway, we can sort of go on and on, but you've got all of the LBJ programs, and then The founding of the EPA and so on, OSHA, all this kind of crap, right?
So it's been a pretty steady, and of course the entire military-industrial complex.
So, you know, like 180 years after the foundation of the Republic, you've got permanent standing armies, massive and expanding government bureaucracies.
The children have now been...
For a hundred years, the wards of the state.
Certainly not, of course, what the Founding Fathers intended, though, of course.
What they were focused on was achieving political power for themselves rather than, you know, creating an enduring and perpetuating legacy of freedom.
But... So, you know, you can certainly make an argument that the American Revolution was a waste of time and, you know, a massive amount of death and murder of, you know, not a huge amount of, you know, what happened was, you know, you end up with the American Revolution and you end up with America dropping bombs and nuclear weapons on Japan,
right? And so... It's sort of hard to say that, boy, did we ever strike a blow against tyranny by getting rid of the British government and substituting the American government as the new rulers of the sheeple, so to speak.
But I only say sheeple because I'm using the livestock metaphor.
So, you know, there's an argument to be made, but this guy who's an irrational and very manipulative patriot doesn't like this suggestion, right?
Because for him, USA is good, and he probably has some negative feeling about where USA is at the moment, and wants to get it back to its roots, right?
He wants to fight the cancer back to just when it was starting out, and I'm...
I'm fairly sure he'd be comfortable with letting it grow again, given, of course, that there's far more revenue now around than there was back then.
The government, even if we beat it back to constitutional and war of independence days, would, within a generation, and probably less, would be right back to where it is now.
So, I mean, it certainly wouldn't take as long again, because there was just much less capital and much less ability to transfer that capital around.
Back then, but now, deductions at source, wireless transfers, the internet, the amount of capital that's available.
I swear to God, we've got that thing back to, you know, 2% or 1% of its current size within a generation, and probably less.
It'd be right back to where it was, and that's not something that I can get behind.
That's not something that I want to spend my life pursuing, is beat back the power of the state for a decade or two.
That's... It's not enough to get me motivated, let's say.
I mean, what gets me motivated is a sea change, a radical paradigm shift, a huge change.
Not, let's make the slave owners less powerful.
Let's not have slave owners.
So, I mean, looking at the form of somebody's argument, I think, is quite important.
Right? So, As I wrote back to this guy and said, well, why should I take you seriously?
You're not applying your own principles when it comes to debating with me, so obviously you don't believe in them.
Right now, I don't know, he emailed me something back, I haven't read it yet, but it's just going to be another load of nonsense, and what it's going to be is, now he's, of course, this is perfectly inevitable, he's going to be saying that I'm wrong because I'm clearly angry, right?
That he's trying to help me, that all this passive-aggressive nonsense, right, manipulation, there still won't be any real address of anything to do with an argument.
That I've put forward, but now it's going to be an email about how clearly he's touched a nerve because I seem rather aggressive.
You know, maybe I need to look inward and figure out what's going on with me and blah blah blah.
All this sort of passive, aggressive, manipulative bullshit that people just seem addicted to putting forward because of this...
I don't know.
I mean, the psychology is something we don't have to get into right now, but...
This is something that's very important to bring to bear on arguments that you're having with people, right?
Somebody says, I think that the government should solve problems.
I say, great, okay, so violence should be used to solve problems.
But why are you debating that with me?
Right, because with you and I, like, the way you're actually living is that debate and rationality and appeal to evidence and so on should be used to solve problems.
But then you're saying, no, violence should be used to solve problems.
And they're kind of antithetical, so which one is it?
Is it violence or is it non-violence?
That should be used to solve problems.
Or is there, you know, some wild difference in terms of problems that violence is, the initiation of the use of force is good for one but not good for another, how to differentiate these things and so on, right?
And this can go into a very subtle manner, right?
Into this kind of debate where a guy says it's very important to be respectful of your listener and to make sure that you take them step by step.
And then basically calling me an idiot and being contemptuous and condescending, which is not applying his own principles, right?
This is just how you know that somebody is, like, nowhere near the planet of mature and intellectually engaged debating.
Because, you know, it's the whole thing.
It's like, if you haven't thought through the basics, and if you don't apply your own principles, then you're clearly not ready to debate, right?
I mean, debating in ethics is like the Olympics.
I don't wake up tomorrow and say, you know, I... I can sink some baskets when I throw paper into the garbage, so maybe what I should do is join the NBA. No, it takes years and years of practice, right? And people sort of wander into the realm of debating and, you know, with their own emotional baggage and nonsense and history and prejudices and bigotries and irrationalities and so on.
And, you know, they just start swinging around and...
Just look kind of ridiculous.
So really, really have a, I would say, it's a useful idea to pay some very close attention to what goes on in the form of the person that you're debating with.
If they won't deal with your content but instead attack you on form, then unless their attack on your form is that you're not attacking enough but they're attacking back, you can dismiss them and just not bother dealing with them again.
I hope this has been helpful.
It certainly is a very important aspect to study, right?
This argumentation ethics. What are the premises implicit in arguing?
Well, that rationality is better than force, that words are better than guns, and, like, infinitely superior, right?
Because that's how people are actually living.
So it's just asking them, which is quite a lot for a lot of people, of course, but it's just asking them to be consistent with what it is they're putting forward as an argument.
Thank you! So much for listening.
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