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Feb. 15, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:07
645 Heroism

Some definitions of the noblest state

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is the 15th of February, 2007, day after Valentine's Day.
I hope that you had a very nice and relaxing evening, whether it was with a loved one, or a loved idea, or a loved book, or, as was so often the case when I was single, self-love.
So I would like to chat this morning, if you would be so very kind as to indulge me, About heroism, which I think is a very interesting concept, a dangerous concept, but one that's, I think, well worth examining.
And there is going to be no doubt whatsoever, I'm sure by now you're aware of this, there's no doubt whatsoever that, as I describe what I define as heroic, that there are going to be certain aspects of what I do that fall into that category.
I mean, obviously that's not coincidental, and neither am I trying to sort of reason after the fact, but I have worked with these definitions for a little while and have tried to structure what it is that I do with what my definition of heroic is.
So, this is not a big pain of self-praise.
I sometimes don't feel very heroic at all, but rather like a fairly frightened mouse.
But this is sort of the aim or the goal that I'm targeting.
So, just so you know, I might as well be up front with that so you don't think that this is all one big elaborate thing to put my picture in the dictionary definition of heroism.
So, actually, that's the dictionary definition of lagaria.
It's different. That's what I'm aiming for.
It's different. So, there is, I think, some definitions of heroism that we can probably all agree on.
The first is that heroism must involve courage of some kind, And that the more difficult or the more rare the courage, the greater the heroism.
So almost all parents have built within them, at a fairly basic level, a desire to protect their children from accidental death.
That doesn't mean they don't beat them or anything, but they have a desire to protect their children from accidental death.
Thus, A woman who lifts a car to free her toddler who's trapped underneath or something like that is acting in a manner that is not necessarily what we would call heroic and brave and so on.
This is just a biological imperative that floods her body with hyperadrenaline and gives her feet strength that will probably give her a soul back for the remainder of her days.
There So there's that kind of reaction, which is obviously not unpraiseworthy, but is not necessarily reasoned and considered moral courage.
Now, above that, there is what I would call a duty-bound form of courage.
And the duty-bound form of courage is a bit tribal, and it's a bit outside-in.
And we can think of firefighters and so on and people who run into burning buildings and people who go up the Twin Towers when the planes have hit and so on.
And that is a duty to a position or a post that seems to have a fairly strong way of compelling people to do things that may not be to their immediate and best personal self-interest.
And I'm not going to say that that's not heroic.
I think that it is, if it's not government-run.
But it is an external and collectivist form of conformity.
And, of course, if you're in the burning building, you'll take whatever heroism you can get and not worry too much about the moral etymology of it.
But nonetheless, I think that conformity to a sense of duty is a double-edged sword, because the people who are willing to run into burning buildings because they have fealty to the realm and to the position and to their comrades are also those who have no problem because the people who are willing to run into burning buildings because they have fealty to the realm and to
So, fealty to position to comrades and to country can produce heroism but can produce genocide.
Can produce military slaughter.
In fact, does. So, I would say that, generally, we would rank as most praiseworthy the heroism that, with the same principles that generated it, cannot be turned to evil.
So... If fealty to companions' position and the realm produces both running into a burning building to save a child and also going to shoot people in Iraq or Nicaragua or Haiti or Angola or, well, on and on.
Then we would say that the impulse is not centered within the person.
It's not irrespective of surrounding.
That which is the most morally pure, or that which is the most morally beneficial, I think, is that which is irrespective of surrounding.
So, if you are obedient to a very good Man or woman, then you can learn something very important about virtue.
That's called coaching, right?
If you are obedient to a very good coach, you become a very good athlete.
So, obedience is necessary but not sufficient, because if you are obedient to a very bad coach, then you will injure yourself and not be an athlete of any kind at all.
So obedience or fealty is one of these things that is not a virtue in and of itself, because it depends on who is giving the orders, and therefore it is a secondary requirement for the pursuit of virtue.
If you obey a good man, you become a good person, and then you don't need to obey the good man anymore.
But obedience alone could easily attach itself, or as easily, and frankly much more often attach itself to a bad man, and then you are not really doing anything beneficial at all.
In fact, you are becoming a corrupt and bad person.
So, loyalty to an individual or to a group or to a position is not a heroic virtue.
It can be if said loyalty is to good people or institutions or whatever.
But... The obedience itself produces far more harm than good in this world.
So I can't say that a firefighter, while his individual actions may be heroic, that the premise or the underlying principle of obedience to the group or to the position of the country is heroic or positive.
Now, the next thing that I would say about heroism is that heroism In the realm of ideas is far more rare than heroism in the realm of the flesh, the body of matter.
And what I mean by that is that whenever a war is called for in one form or another, there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people Who in one circumstance or another are willing to go and face mutilation and possible death and horrendously uncomfortable conditions and so on?
And so physical courage, even in the face of death, does not seem to be as rare as I'd like.
As I think would be beneficial to the race as a whole, to the species as a whole, to the world.
The greatest weapon, in a way, in the First World War was not...
The new tank. It was not mustard gas.
It was not the tin machine gun.
It was not any of that.
The greatest weapon, in a way, in a significant way, in the First World War, was a white feather, which is what the women would hand out to young men of military age who were not in uniform.
And the white feather signified cowardice, and it was men's fear of being labeled as a coward by the women that would propel them into military service and so on.
And there are critiques of the war, like Shaw and Russell and Eugene Debs, the American socialist candidate who actually went to jail for 10 years for opposing Trump.
The war, and of course they were, I'm not so sure about Russell, what his political views were, but certainly Shaw and Debs.
Shaw was a Fabian socialist and Debs was an out-and-out socialist, so they were annoyed at war because, what is it that somebody posted on the quotes section of the Freedom Aid radio board the other day?
If you wish to aggress against your neighbors, you're a Democrat.
If you wish to aggress against foreigners, you are a conservative.
If you wish to aggress against everyone, then you're an egalitarian.
If you wish to aggress against no one, then you are a radical.
An extremist.
So there are millions upon millions of men, 10 million killed in the First World War, many more deployed.
There are millions of men who were willing to risk, in terms of physical courage, the horrors of war throughout the 20th century, tens upon tens of millions of men who were willing to risk the physical dangers of war But very few who were willing to stand up and talk about the outright evils of war.
Now, that to me would indicate that moral courage rather than physical courage is certainly more rare.
And since war...
And the participation in war at whatever level, from taxpayers to having ribbons on your car to going and facing a jihadist bullet.
Since participation of war is fundamentally argued from a moral standpoint, it would seem to me, since prevention is better than cure, and pro-war position is founded on a moral argument, Even if that moral argument is the primacy of self-defense,
then those who can dismantle the moral arguments for war are certainly more beneficial than those who are willing to go and fight.
Prevention is better than cure.
And those who are willing to go and fight and shoot and kill and die and so on, and be wounded and so on, That those people are propelled into war because of a moral argument.
And a person who can undo or attack a moral argument for war It's much more rare than somebody who's willing to pick up a gun and shoot at whoever the leaders point at.
Those people number in the tens of millions.
Those who oppose war philosophically number in the dozens or the low hundreds.
So there's thousands upon thousands of times the numbers of people who are willing to face physical destruction than those who are willing to face moral rejection from the tribe or approbation.
Condemnation. Now, I'll go one step further, if you don't mind, as we climb this heroic mountain together.
The one step further that I will go is this.
Those who oppose not specific violence but general violence are more rare and more beneficial than those who oppose only specific violence.
I'll give you an example.
To the Finland Station, which was a history of the Russian Revolution, Told the story of how Lenin was shipped back to Russia.
Edmund Wilson wrote the book.
The famous guy who was a total socialist who ended up having to flee the United States because he hadn't paid his taxes in 10 years.
Gotta love these intellectuals.
Nobody should have any property.
Everything should belong to the state.
But 15% taxation?
You've got to be kidding. No way.
That's for other people. That's not for me.
That's not for me. Good Lord.
So, Edmund Wilson wrote this story about how the Germans sent Lenin in the First World War because the Germans were dying on the two-front war, as they always do, and also they were dying because the Royal Navy, which was in the supremacy at the time, was strangling any kind of import of food and raw materials and so on.
That's why they broke to the sea in the Second World War so quickly.
Or made a break for the sea. So the blockade and the two-front war was, and of course the entry of America into the First World War spelt certain doom for the Germans, so they knew they needed to end a two-front war, so what they did was they funded and armed and so on and sent Lenin into Russia, and Lenin opposed the war.
So Lenin, I would say, has some minor kudos for opposing specific violence.
But just as the communists dislike religion because it is a competition to the loyalties of the people, communism also dislikes capitalist wars because it is a competition to communist wars.
I am like a mafia guy who is against The legalization of firearms, or who supports arms bans because he is under-armed, right?
And then as soon as the arms bans go into place, he hopes that his opponents will follow the law so that he doesn't have to.
There are those who focus on the rejection of specific violence because they wish to use violence for their own ends.
But the violence is being consumed by this other end.
So Lenin wished to kill all of the kulaks and the Christians and all of the bourgeoisie and all of the other enemies of communism.
And unfortunately the workers, as he called them, the proletariat, were the ones being killed on the Eastern Front from Germany's viewpoint.
And so he wanted to kill other people, and he wanted not to kill, or at least not right away, the people who were currently being killed by the war.
So entirely too much energy was being used, killing the wrong kinds of people.
In the short run, of course, communism turned on the proletariat as much as it turned on everyone else, as the story of Ivan Denisovich shows fairly well.
So Lenin, while opposing specific violence, did so because he wished to point the gun at someone else.
Put down the gun, he says, to the state so that he can pick it up and start waving it around.
So the opposition that people like Eugene Debs and George Bernard Shaw and Lenin had towards the First World War was largely based upon their desire to use the violence of the state for other purposes, which is not, I would say, the most noble of pursuits or callings.
So, as we look up the hierarchy of heroism, I think we can make a couple of distinctions.
I'll just go over them very briefly so that we can sort of continue to plow on.
The first distinction is loyalty to station involved with physical courage.
The second would be loyalty to station which would be involved with some sort of moral courage which is if you are afraid of other professors rejecting you or that it harms your career unless you speak out against the Iraq war because the department head is Noam Chomsky or something like that.
Then it's certainly more rare for that to occur, but it's still not fundamentally very heroic.
It's still sort of cowardly conformist, but at least there's something pointed in the right direction.
At least you're cowardly conformist, but anti-war, which is accidentally the correct position.
And then there is anti-specific violence on principle, but not anti-general violence on principle.
And then I would say that the very highest, in terms of goals...
is to be anti-violence on principle, which means anarcho-capitalism.
So I would say that we are the most heroic in the realm of ideas and in the realm of actual benefits to the human race.
And that's why our life is so hard, and that's why everybody opposes us so much, because they want to live in these little boxes of conformity, which is not the end of the world.
You can live in the little box of conformity.
The problem is that people don't like living in the little box of conformity, so they wish to live in the little box of conformity, but to call themselves heroic.
To call themselves heroic and moral, that is what they need to label themselves to avoid the humiliation of being obedient to bullies.
If they're statists, or if they're religious, or if they're a slave to their family obligations, then they are cowardly and until challenged and rejected, not so.
Sorry, once they're challenged and they reject the position and become hostile, then they become contemptible.
Contemptible. And I don't use that word lightly, but if somebody says, I'm a hero, I'm a hero, I'm a hero, and then you point out rationally and calmly that they are merely conforming and they are doing what they do out of fear, and then they say, that's nonsense, you don't know what you're talking about, I reject your arguments and spit on you, but without any rational reason, then they become contemptible, in my opinion.
It doesn't mean anything, it's just my particular opinion.
So everybody likes to think of themselves as a hero, but pretty much everybody is cowardly and conformist and so on.
And that's why when you bring these things up with people, they get angry at you not because they disagree with you, but because they agree with you deep down.
But they don't want to look at themselves in the mirror and say the hardest thing in the world to say, which is that I have the capacity for corruption.
I have the capacity for evil.
I have the capacity to call rank conformity virtue.
And I'm doing it. And I've done it to my kids.
And I've done it to those around me.
And so on and so on and so on. That's a very hard thing to do.
That is the equivalent of a kind of spiritual death.
Or the death of the false self.
Which feels like, you know, the Titanic is going down.
And maybe you'll float, but not for long.
So I would say the highest pinnacle is to morally oppose violence in general on principle.
I think that's the highest ideal of heroism.
Because it is that which does the most good for society if one other condition is met, which I'll sort of get into that.
And this to me, if you sort of take a medical metaphor...
Bertolt Brecht talks about when he was sent to war, and it turned out he was lying, but it was a good story nonetheless.
He was a playwright who went to East Germany, and he wrote an adapted three-penny opera with Kurt Weill, and wrote a play about Galileo, and so on.
A completely horrendous and morally corrupt human being who supported all of the dictatorial aspects of the East German bloc of the Communist society.
And I believe that the movie, oh gosh, what was it now?
Mephisto, which is a great movie if you get a chance to watch it.
It had a lot to do, I think, with Bertolt Brecht, but it's a very, very good movie if you get a chance to see it.
But Bertolt Brecht was talking about when he was in the war, at least he lied about it, but this was the story.
He said, when I was in the war, they would point at somebody and say, this person needs their leg cut off, and I would just saw the leg off.
And I had almost no medical training other than a first aid kit, but I could at least saw somebody's leg off.
And maybe that saved some lives, and maybe it didn't, but who knows, right?
So in that sense, that's sort of like the physical courage.
And then opposing an illness but not another illness is like, take this pill for your flu, but unfortunately it's going to give you bronchitis.
So you're curing one illness but causing another, which is like the socialists being against the war because they wish to use the violence on disarmed domestic citizenry rather than armed foreign citizenry.
And when you begin to oppose something based on principle and in a universal manner, then it's like you have a pill that cures bronchitis and doesn't cause any other illness, and in fact cures almost all the illnesses, and that of course is a very good thing.
So, heroism then obviously has a lot to do with philosophy and understanding the truth and knowing how to apply principles in a rational and self-tested, right?
Of course, you are not a very heroic person, I think, if you ask everyone else to free themselves from corruption, but you yourself continue to hang with...
I mean, if you say to everyone, oh my god, I can't believe you guys still believe in religion.
I can't believe that you still support the state.
Oh wait, sorry, I gotta go because my hateful mother gets really mad if I don't show up for dinner.
So free yourselves of obligations that are corrupt people, I must go.
So I think personally living your values, you know, taking them for an old test drive before strapping other people into the wheel, behind the wheel, is a good idea.
But I think that there's one other aspect to heroism that I think is important.
And I would say sort of central.
Like, if you've achieved all the other stuff, that's necessary but not sufficient for what I consider to be the true heroism, which I'm certainly not achieving as often as I'd like, but which I work towards.
Now, the true heroism, if you are a doctor and you have a pill that cures the plague that is currently infesting the world, and you take the pill yourself and then you're healthy, well, that's good, right? That doesn't mean that there's one less sick person in the world and so on.
But if you have this pill and you have vats of these pills, silos of these pills, And you go around with your bag of pills to people who are writhing in agony but don't know it.
Maybe the plague is delusion, which we've talked about before.
And you yell at them that they need to take this pill.
It hasn't been tested on anyone.
I've never taken it.
But you need to take it because it'll cure you.
Well, they probably won't want to take it, right?
They'll just look at you as a crazy person.
The most effective doctor is the doctor who...
Who has the medical skill, let's just say, to develop the pill, who takes it himself, finds out that it works, and who then finds a way of making other people want to take the pill.
That's the great challenge.
Coming up with the truth is hard enough, for me at least, and I would say that this is just so rare that it's ridiculous.
Making other people want to live the truth, want to live with integrity, want to go through all the hellishness of confronting family members and leaving situations that are corrupt and all of the stuff that we talk about here.
To drag them away from this altar of praying to the dissolution of the state in some abstract and distant manner, which gets them off the hook from having to actually do something for themselves in their own lives personally.
Getting people to want to do these things.
Now that, to me, is heroic.
And what I mean by that is that if you can not only be heroic with regards to your own life, but I would say the ultimate heroism is when you can inspire other people to heroism.
When heroism, in the realm of abstract, universal, and consistent moral courage, And the willingness to put yourself on the line and to put your relationships to the test for the sake of virtue and truth, to be a philosopher in action in a personal way, that is heroic.
That does the greatest good for the world, although it is not a pretty thing to do at times.
But if you can be a hub or an infector with heroism and to inspire other people to act in a heroic manner themselves, well, I think that is the greatest kind of heroism, and it is extraordinarily rare, in my opinion, or at least in my experience.
A woman joined who's posting i9rand, which is great.
It's always a good conversation to have about the old rand.
But what I would say is that...
I was certainly inspired to a kind of devotional by Ayn Rand, though I did not really make the connection at the personal level, which I would not say is particularly her fault.
She wrote about it in her books, but did not live it in her life, which obviously had an effect on her art.
The choices we make in our personal life have very fundamental effects on how it is that we communicate to other people.
A gentleman posted on the board yesterday that he was having odd feelings of guilt about things that he considers to be not so good in terms of morals, like downloading music and so on.
And my sort of advice was, as it always is, look to the personal.
Another listener was complaining that...
My podcast, Philosophy is Laughter, where I think I spent some time mocking the Free State Project, that he found this made him very angry.
And I said, well, that's likely because you're going to have...
Well, actually, no.
I started by asking you a question, which is usually a good thing to do.
And I said, well, it's possible that it's your personal life that is facing the challenge here and not so much moving to New Hampshire and joining the Free State Project.
It's possible that... The corruption and the moral problems that you're facing are not so much with the federal government, but a little closer to home.
And he wrote back and said, well, yeah, everyone's a socialist, my sister and my mom are Christians, and my dad is, you know, becoming a minarchist to some degree.
So, of course, I wrote back and said, well, the Christians worship a book that says you should be put to death, and the statists in your life are all saying that if you don't obey their particular commandments, i.e.
obey the state, then you should be shot if you resist kidnapping and imprisonment.
So, there's a lot of people around you who either implicitly or explicitly The council that you be put to death.
And that is really the root of government power, is that belief, right?
It's not... Attacking the government is attacking the effect, not the cause.
The cause is people's belief in the government, right?
The government is suspended by fantasy.
Attack the government, and the fantasy, even if you bring it down, the fantasy will simply replace it with another government.
Attack the fantasy, and you actually make some progress.
And the personal fantasies of the people around you, not the abstract fantasies of other people, the voting population as a whole.
You go for the fantasies that support power.
You don't go for power itself.
It's like if you've got somebody who's addicted to really bad relationships, like, I don't know, some woman who keeps dating drunks and bums and drug dealers and so on, and you work very hard to break her up with her latest drug dealer guy, then all that will happen is she'll replace him with someone equally abhorrent or perhaps even worse.
So that's not going to work very well.
Thank you.
So what you need to do is go to the root of her issues, which, you know, are family and self-esteem and all this kind of stuff, right?
So you go for the root. You go for the personal.
You don't go to change the symptoms.
You go to change the cause.
You don't paint over a leper's spots.
You try to go for the cure of the nerve damage that's causing leprosy.
So... This approach that I try to take, which is to make philosophy come to life for people who have probably come into philosophy through politics in a very abstract and state-hating kind of way, which misses the point that the state survives on the fantasies of the faithful, as God survives on the piety of the delusional, and attacking God actually gives God more credence.
Because you're attacking him.
Attacking the state gives the state more credence.
The state is merely the effect of the fantasies of individuals, and you can only affect the fantasies of those individuals around you.
And then people say, well, if you break with people because they believe false things, then...
Do you not lose the capacity to affect the behavior of those around you?
Should we not stick close to those around us even when they attack us because we wish to help them become better people?
And so on and so on and so on.
And I say, no, no, a thousand times no.
And this was a painful and difficult lesson for me to learn.
I'll certainly share it, and I've shared it before, but never any harm going over things this important one more time.
The reason that you detach yourself from people who will not change and will not become decent or moral or good people or who will at least not withdraw their preference that you get shot and killed or will not withdraw their belief in a holy book that commands your death.
The reason that you stop communicating with those people is so that you can start communicating in a powerful and effective manner with other people who can change.
Right? So, if you've got people who are dying of the plague, and they keep biting you and attacking you every time you come near them with a pill, but there are other people who will take the pill, then to me, it's kind of not a good thing to do to keep hanging around the people who don't want the pill, which is interfering with your ability to go and talk to the people who will take the pill.
Every moment that you spend with your family when they will not listen to reason or to virtue is time that you will not be spending with other people who probably will have a much more open mind to these sorts of things, because you You can't change your family.
They're the ones who've harmed you. And they harmed you when you were helpless.
And this cannot be undone.
This cannot be overcome. This can almost never be reversed.
At least I've never really heard of it.
Or rarely. And there's two reasons for that.
One, of course, is that there's simply a time subtraction.
The time that you spend Sunday dinner arguing in a futile manner with your family is time that you're not spending learning about philosophy or arguing with somebody else or just sitting there having a good time, thus making yourself a happier person.
Because when you get the corrupt people out of your life, you're actually taking your beliefs seriously.
That's the worst thing, is to be stuck in the realm of philosophy and to believe in things, but not really.
To praise rationality, freedom, and virtue.
But not really.
In the realm of the state, in the abstract, for the next generation.
But not in terms of the people I actually spend my time and energy with now.
I mean, that's not what philosophy is for.
Philosophy is for the federal government and its eventual downfall.
Philosophy is not for me.
It's for other people. It's for other people in the future to get rid of their belief in the state.
Not for me to get rid of my fantasy that you can be morally productive with corrupt people.
So, the second reason that detachment from corrupt people who will not change, grow, listen, or be rational, or basically kind and empathetic and decent, the second reason is that you cannot achieve the highest level of heroism, in my view, and again, I'm not saying I do it as often as I like either, but this is sort of the ideal for me.
You cannot achieve the highest level of heroism, which is to To inculcate, to summon heroism in others.
You cannot achieve that if you are not living with integrity yourself.
If you have not taken your ideas seriously enough to get corrupt and irrational people out of your life, those who wish your demise or harm, either implicitly or explicitly, if philosophy doesn't mean enough for you to break the bonds of mere biology or to break the bonds of mere history and habit in terms of the people you grew up with, then philosophy doesn't mean very much.
It's just a game. It's a pile of game.
It's like a word game. It's like saying that ethics hangs on whoever wins Boggle or Diplomacy or, I don't know, whoever gets to level 10 in Dungeons& Dragons.
And if philosophy doesn't mean much to you, then you will never be able to change anyone's mind.
Philosophy is torture.
I've talked about this before, but this is false self-philosophy.
Philosophy is punishment and torture, and it comes, of course, out of the religious history.
Philosophy is self-flagellation.
The truth is... It's that which hurts.
It makes you feel futile and impotent, right?
The false self always wishes to make philosophy feel futile and impotent.
And in order to do that, what it tries to do is to get you to argue in a bad way with the wrong people, right?
That's how the false self makes you feel that philosophy is futile.
And also, it makes you wish to hate, tempt you with hatred for your fellow man, right?
So, You argue with your hyper-religious mother about rationality, science, and philosophy, and she keeps sending you devotionals, and she keeps praying for your soul, and she doesn't change a damn thing.
Well, what does that do to your belief in the strength and power and efficacy of philosophy?
Well, if you continue to try and beat your head against that wall, then the wall starts to feel really strong, and freedom starts to look very weak.
And of course, that's the point, right?
Again, this is anthropomorphizing, and I apologize, but for me at least, evil in the world is terrified and fearful of and contemptuous of philosophy.
Well, fundamentally it's terrified of philosophy.
The state and parental evil and teachers, they're all terrified of philosophy.
And they know, in a way that sometimes philosophers don't, that philosophers appear in the world from time to time.
We are the exorcizers of the fantasies of mankind.
And so evil will then attempt to convince a philosopher that philosophy is useless, that it's silly, that it's funny, that it's ridiculous, and it will try to make philosophy seem ridiculous and abstract and like how they portray Socrates in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.
You know, dust in the wind, dude.
As spaced out and abstract and nonsensical, and this is why people love Buddhism and all this kind of nonsense, right?
I strongly desire to get rid of all my strong desires.
Yeah, good luck with that. And so it's made to be abstract, and libertarianism fits into this category perfectly, right?
Because it makes you feel that human freedom depends upon attacking...
The functional basis of the state, which of course makes it all completely useless and nonsensical and so on.
That's why you have so many Christian libertarians and monarchists and so on, right?
These people who just don't understand that philosophy is about the personal.
Philosophy is not about the political.
The political is an effect of the personal.
The state is an effect of the family.
And so, where evil can, where the cultural memes can, they will attack philosophy and make it feel useless and futile and so on.
Now, if you pass that test, and if you end up in sort of still taking philosophy seriously to whatever degree, then what will happen is the devils in the world, so to speak, and I get anthropomorphizing like crazy, but forgive me, the devils in the world will then take another attack, and they will say, okay, I can't make philosophy ridiculous to Bob, so how can I make Bob's philosophy ridiculous to everyone else?
I can't kill off Bob, but how can I quarantine him?
How can I isolate him?
How can I take Bob's ideas and make them appear completely ridiculous to other people?
Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make him very passionate about abstractions that just seem bizarre to other people.
How can I make Bob look ridiculous to other people?
I can't get Bob not interested in philosophy.
I can't make Bob give up on philosophy.
How can I isolate and inoculate Bob's effect on society as a whole?
Well, I will work my hardest to make Bob's pills look really bad and dangerous and foolish and silly and so on.
And that is the trap that most philosophers and too many libertarians fall into.
That they start arguing about some meeting that bankers had, you know, 80 years ago.
And they get really passionate and intense about rent control and other sorts of things.
And God help us with 9-11 and the theories about that.
But they start to get into all of this kind of stuff.
Like one guy, I remember, phoned up Harry Brown and was talking about how, I think, Robert Kennedy was...
Shot in a conspiracy and then there's the JFK thing and all this kind of stuff, right?
And that is part of how philosophers, so to speak, are those interested in ideas.
Fall into the trap, the second trap, that renders philosophy futile, that renders philosophy inert in the modern world, or actually in the world throughout history, that philosophers must then become addicted to abstract things that cannot be proven or disproven, and get involved in minutiae, and get involved in things that don't really make any sense, and start talking about that which people can never achieve, right?
So... If all I ever talked about was we need to replace the state with something else, people would say, well, that's very interesting.
It's a good parlor game. It's got nothing to do with my real life, right?
I mean, that's great. Even if I agreed with you, so what?
But when I talk about, hey, you know, it's about your family.
It's about you. It's about your friends.
It's about your spouse.
It's not about who brought down the Twin Towers, right, as we've talked about before quite a bit.
It's not about any of these things.
Philosophy is not about any of these things.
Those things can be analyzed in philosophy as the effect of personal relationships, but the only thing that philosophy really has any impact on that you can make a change for the better is in your personal relationships.
And if you do clean up your personal relationships, and if you do reject those who wish you death, then you can begin to evoke and inculcate heroism and moral courage in others.
But you can't do it if you don't believe the ideas yourself.
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Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're doing well.
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