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Feb. 21, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:49
651 Doubt

Your most irritating friend...

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Time Text
Good morning everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It is 8 o'clock in the morning on the 21st of February 2007.
Thank you so much for joining me on my morning drive.
I had a toothache about a month ago, or not a toothache, I had jaw pain about a month ago.
And this is a word to the wise, to those who are interested in their teeth and say hanging on to them.
I have been fairly assiduous in my oral hygiene.
I floss, I brush of course, I use my Listerine, and I have had nothing but stellar checkups for 20 years.
But, one of the things that happened, and there's no particularly good explanation that I've heard, is that it's possible for a tooth to crack.
And if a tooth cracks, apparently if it cracks below the gum line, you can't keep the tooth.
They can't do a root canal and keep it, so...
What happened to me was, apparently a tooth of mine cracked at some point, and the crack went below the gum line, which I found out on Monday morning.
When they opened up the tooth to check out the crack, Monday afternoon I had my tooth extracted, which was quite a pleasant experience, let me tell you.
Although it is not a pretty thing, I can certainly tell you that I'm happy to not be living in the Middle Ages.
Because, of course, in the Middle Ages, something like this could just kill you.
The infection could spread to your jaw.
The infraction could get into your bone.
The extraction of the tooth in the absence of antibiotics and, of course, painkillers would be not only physically horrendous, but also it would be...
Something that would lead you prone to infection.
And tooth problems is one of the major causes of death in people, of course, when there's no modern medicine.
And here in Canada, I got to deal with the beautiful and kissable free market because, although heavily regulated and it's a cartel and this and that, the basis of the dental care system here is still pretty much private.
It's inflated in terms of price because it's a set price.
You can have a monopoly in a set price when it comes to being a dentist, just not so much if you're, say, a software company.
But I did get to deal with the beautiful free market, which meant almost no waiting times, which meant a very comfortable, relatively physically comfortable experience.
So now, of course, with the excitement of...
I'm leaving my job to do Free Domain Radio.
I may have to cough up $5,000 for a dental implant, but we shall see.
It's right at the back.
It's so strange. I actually still have all my wisdom teeth, as I've mentioned before.
So it's right at the back on the right-hand side, bottom jaw, just before my last wisdom tooth.
I may not need a tooth back there.
I don't do a whole lot of chewing near my jaw hinge, but we shall see.
So, anyway, I just wanted to mention that's why I was incommunicado for the last two days.
Now, a topic that came up, or has been coming up, I think, a little bit recently.
There's a couple of them, and I'll try and deal with them in the order in which they occurred to me, according to my extensive notes.
But... The one that I'd like to deal with this morning is doubt.
Ah, doubt.
Our beautiful, malevolent, annoying, and essential companion on the road to truth.
Doubt, doubt thy name we worship at, even yea, as we curseth and spitteth at thee for being annoying.
The compare to what that we talked about in Jennyism, part two, is...
Essential and, of course, as I mentioned in that podcast and have mentioned before, and was really the introduction to my master's thesis, the compare to what is essential and not automatic.
It is not an automatic function of consciousness to compare ideas to external reality.
There are a number of After the fact justifications that consciousness seems to invent for itself.
Now, when we say consciousness, what we mean is state-educated consciousness.
There really is no alternative to that at the moment.
Even if you went to private school, it is highly likely that your teachers were educated in public school and certainly went to...
There are no private universities, at least here in Canada, and those in the U.S. are still heavily bound or bonded to the state.
So when we talk about consciousness at the moment, we talk about consciousness that is really badly trained.
We talk about the body as if the human body was defined by an entire population that sat around, ate cookies, chips and chocolate, watched TV, scratched itself and never exercised and seemed to die of a heart attack at 45 and contract diabetes at 30.
Then we'd say, well look, see the human body simply can't handle life and it does very bad things with insulin and cholesterol and doesn't really last much past 30 or 40 years old.
And then taking that as the norm would be a rather bad idea because a body which is being mutilated or treated inordinately badly, corrupted, is a body that is representative of nothing other than what happens when you screw up the body.
It's not representative of the human body in its natural state.
It's representative of the human body In a corrupted state.
It would be like studying sexual relations between eunuchs and harem members.
Eunuchs being guys who've had their wee Willy Wonkers lopped off.
It would be nothing other than to say, well, gee, you know, males don't seem to have any genitalia, just some scar tissue, and they also have very high voices and don't engage in sexual relations of any kind.
Well, all you would be doing, of A eunuch.
You would not be describing a man in his natural state, which is on the couch eating chips, cookies, and chocolate and scratching himself.
So, when we talk about consciousness these days, we're just talking about state-corrupted, bad idea, infiltrated...
Broken, mangled brains.
Of which I do not place myself above that.
I have stitched together as good a raft as I can from the broken bits of my potential mind.
And I think that's at least good enough to set sail from the island of statism.
But I certainly am aware of where I could be relative to where I am.
If I had been trained or raised or allowed to think of my own accord in a commonsensical kind of manner, which none of us, of course, as a family and church and state schools, none of us are allowed to do.
I'm actively punished for thinking and asking questions in a rational manner.
So we do have minds at the moment that are greatly tempted by making up answers after the fact.
So there's an experiment wherein people who were given mild electric shocks in a pseudo-learning experiment, like, so you should learn something and if you get it wrong we're going to give you a mild to not so mild electric shock.
And Those who received little shocks when they were asked why they participated, they said, oh, you know, I was just kind of curious.
It seemed okay. Those who received more or less mild electric shocks ended up saying things like, well, it's essential for the pursuit of science.
So the more pain you suffered, the more you made up reasons as to why you were there.
And this is really, really essential.
It is the Stockholm Syndrome that's at the basis of the family and the state and the church.
The more pain that you inflict upon someone when you're in a position of authority, and particularly size and power, the more pain that you inflict on someone, the more valuable they believe the services that you're providing or their participation in that relationship is.
Patriots swell with patriotic fervor when asked to sacrifice something for the war.
The war is the infliction of pain upon the society, and that raises people's adherence to the relationship.
As long as they don't make the direct causal connection that there's sadism involved, and of course that's the job of the philosopher.
But you can see this very much.
Does the perception of the value of the president rise or lower when the country is at war?
When the president is inflicting mass death on foreigners and domestic citizens overseas, we hope, at least, does the perception of the value of government go up or go down during a war?
Well, in any free market situation where You had a DRO that was supposed to prevent and protect you from such calamities.
A war would be considered an ultimate failure.
To get into a war would be considered an ultimate failure.
To not have seen things coming, to have provoked foreign aggression, to have failed to defend, to have failed to prevent, to have failed to bribe those who may be coming over to do harm, to not do so.
War would be the ultimate confession of failure.
On the part of any free market protection agency.
And it would be that which you would almost immediately, as soon as humanly possible, simply start participating in that.
Or, of course, somebody else would be coming up with a way to solve the problem of the war in ways other than just having bunches of guys standing around shooting at each other, which is a ridiculously bad way to solve conflict.
Just standing around shooting each other.
It's not really what people who are marriage counselors generally will recommend, right?
They won't generally say, hey, you know the way to solve this?
You just don't have enough glocks.
That's the problem, you see.
No, they talk it out, they resolve disorder, and it doesn't mean that the couple stays together, but it means that they at least get to the root of their issues, and if they're going to part, they can do so in a more amicable manner.
But there's no psychologist who, in the realm or in the heat of conflict resolution, says the best thing to do is to send people in and kick in the doors of civilians and torture and kill and rape and do all of the other things.
Horrendous things that war entails.
Blow people up, spill their intestines out all over the floor, run over children on the road, have tanks fall on the legs of...
or tank tracks roll over the legs of servicemen.
This would never be a solution that any sane private agency would ever come up with.
And so in a private agency, war would be that which would cause you to reject your protection agency in the most vehement terms, in the most intransigent terms.
War... Of course, in the realm of the state, raises the popularity of the state.
Raises the popularity of the state.
There is important psychological reasons for that, of course, which is that in a situation of conflict, many people, women and children especially, and old men and very young men, many people need the protection of the elder, of the tribal leader.
And so when there is a state of danger, the value of the tribal leader in a statist situation, and by that I include the ownership of people and property that occurs in a primitive tribe from a central leader and a witch doctor.
So, adherence to the whim of the ruler in a dangerous time is a natural psychological phenomenon.
It's completely wrong, but that's okay.
I mean, we have far more truth than our biology was originally designed to automatically provide us, right?
The earth being round and so on.
So... There is this problem that people will sort of make stuff up after the fact.
And that is not, I would say, inherent in human consciousness.
It's just inherent in the sort of messed up and broken human consciousness that, or the harmed human consciousness that's the result of bad, bad, bad, bad ideas and fear being inflicted upon us when we are children.
Now, once we understand that the ideas within our minds are distinct from the actions of reality, I'm just going to say reality, that's the actions of matter and energy within reality, or the properties of those.
What goes on in our mind is distinct from that which goes on in reality.
Our capacity to think and reason and all of the sensual information is...
or enters into our mind from objective reality but the ideas that we form in our mind about objective reality are based on our interpretation We don't know anything about radiation.
We don't know anything about sound that occurs beyond our hearing until we get an oscilloscope.
We don't know, and enormously, we don't know x-rays, we don't know all of these things.
They are sort of occurring and flying around us, but until we can translate them into something we can see, then we don't really know anything about them.
So we have a very limited perspective as far as that goes.
Richard Dawkins has a great metaphor when he talks about the burqa that Muslim women are forced to wear, which has a little slit, you know, around where the eyes are, that little pillbox.
That's all we can see of the universe.
But of course, the actual information and energy and so on flying around through the universe, we would have to move the pillbox of the burqa like a mile high and a mile deep to get it all in.
So all we can do is keep retranslating all of the energy and matter that we can't see So, our limited perspective, a highly, highly limited perspective on the universe, doesn't mean that what we see is erroneous.
Any more than what the Muslim woman sees through the little slit in the burqa is erroneous.
She just doesn't get to see very much.
But what she does see is valid, is accurate.
So, we derive these principles from the matter that we can see, and then we extrapolate it into the things that we can't see.
No man alive has ever seen a black hole, but we have very detailed knowledge about how they work.
Same thing, I think, with a neutron star.
They're too small to see. We can only get them from the pulses of radiation that occur like clockwork, and I do believe were accidentally interpreted as the Markers of a more intelligent civilization before it was realized that the neutron stars rotate at just an ungodly rate.
So, this process of retranslating that which we cannot see to that which we can see.
There's no science of driving, for instance.
We just drive. There's a craft of driving, maybe.
But we can see what's going on.
In fact, cars are sort of designed not to be invisible so that we can see them.
And so where we can see stuff, it's more like a craft.
Where we can't see stuff, it has to be a science because then we're inferring from what we can see, deriving logical rules from what we can see and applying it to what we can't see or can't experience.
So what occurs within our own mind must be, by its very nature, either true at a perceptual level.
I am driving on a highway.
Or it's true at a conceptual level in that I'm taking the principles that are derived from the actions of matter basically on my senses and my sensual processing and my mental interpretation of that.
I'm taking the principles derived from that which I can see and applying it to that which I cannot see.
And even for the things that I can see, I'm trying to determine regular patterns and regular habits and trying to understand the principles by which matter and energy affects each other.
And not only the perceptual truth of what hits my senses, but also the conceptual truth about why it does what it does and how matter and energy affect each other at the visible and non-visible level.
So what goes on in my mind is derived from Sensual reality, but is extrapolated far beyond the sensual reality.
And it becomes somewhat akin to this.
So, let's say that you read...
You've read, I don't know, a thousand detective novels.
Something kind of formulaic.
A thousand science fiction novels.
A thousand fantasy novels.
Something that's kind of formulaic.
And you read to everything except the last chapter.
And you assume that it's a writer who follows the script.
Well... Can you figure out what's going on in the last chapter?
Well, you should have some pretty good idea.
You may not be able to reduce it word for word, but I've certainly met people like this.
When I go to watch a movie, I enter into a completely beta blocker, flatline kind of brain state.
And I never sort of think, oh, this is a clue for what's coming next.
The moment a character coughs, they're going to die of some horrible disease.
The moment that somebody mentions the word death, somebody's going to...
I don't really pick up on those.
I'm just like, dum-dee-dum, off we go.
Ooh, it's shiny, it's pretty, there are people talking.
But some people really do get movies that way, like they really know what's coming.
And afterwards they can reconstruct the whole movie for me and tell me about everything that happened because they've read some Sid Meier book.
Sid Meier? I can't remember. That's the guy who did Civilization.
Some other guy who writes screenplay books.
And so if you read every chapter but the last chapter in a book, you should have some pretty good idea of what's coming, assuming that the writer is skilled and consistent.
And, of course, those that are the most delightful at times have those sixth sense kind of twists at the end.
But that's sort of what it is with reality, that we get to read a book, but there's a part of the book we can't see.
And the same thing, of course, is true of our own consciousness, although sometimes it feels like we get to read the first few sentences and then have to guess the rest of the book.
But that's only because of the aforementioned broken brains that we all have had inflicted upon us.
So... When it comes to going further than perceptual reality, catching a ball that's thrown at you, but figuring out why the ball flies and the weight of the earth and the ball and the gravity and this and that, then we're going into the realm of the unknown.
And we are trying to figure out what the chapter is of the book that we haven't read.
So we have to, you know, very closely examine the clues, the characterizations, the plot, the theme, and we have to figure out how the book's going to end.
And assuming that the writer's not cheating and just, oh, they woke up and it was all a dream.
And then what happens is we read our sentences out and somebody says, yeah, that's kind of it.
Who has read the book? And somebody says, no, that's not so much it.
You're getting warmer, you're getting colder, right?
That's the whole process of the scientific method and indeed of the philosophy.
That's why it takes so long.
So, the doubt that exists is absolutely essential.
So, religious people have not read the last chapter of the book.
In fact, they've barely read the first chapter of the book, but they just wing it, right?
They just sort of make it up as they go along.
And statists, of course, just receive the propaganda of the state and say, that's how the book ends, and that's how the book begins, and that is the book.
There is no other book. Get back in the book!
But a philosopher is going to say, well, I don't know.
I have doubt. I have doubt about the veracity of the absolutes that I hold within my own mind.
They appear to be true for what it is that I have experienced in my life, but I can't say that it's true for all things at all places.
And stuff which is intuitively true often will turn out to be false.
So, for instance, Galileo's famous experiment dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that he took up a bowling ball and an orange.
And it was intuitive to everyone because one of them is much harder to lift.
And when you drop it on your toe, it hurts a hell of a lot more than the other.
Everybody's sense was that the bowling ball was going to fall a whole lot faster than the orange.
Just seems logical, right?
And of course, when you drop a bowling ball, it appears to move with much greater rapidity because of the impact than the orange.
I mean, just sort of from waist high.
But it turned out to be incorrect.
Of course, it turned out that everything falls at the same rate, the only difference is air resistance.
So, there's sort of an example where everyone thinks they know the end of the book.
How does the plot of the bowling ball of the orange end?
They both fall to the ground at the same rate.
Why even read the rest of the book?
We know what happens. We know what happens.
It's like a badly written soap. It's telegraphed.
Everyone knows what's going on.
There's no doubt. But that's not, of course, how the book does end.
So you don't get to learn. If you think you know how the book ends, then you don't really get to learn.
You don't get to learn much at all.
And you become welded to a defensive position.
You become welded to a defensive position.
So it's my theory that human beings, when raised in a really logical manner, are going to be a whole lot more logical and benevolent and better.
And I think there's some evidence for that, in that you have some ways of explaining why, say, the culture of Canada is quite a bit different than the culture of, say, Syria or Saudi Arabia.
And it has a lot to do with how the people are raised.
We're raised in a lot more rational fashion here in Canada and in the United States than people are raised in the Middle East.
Thank you.
So I think there's some evidence for it.
I think I know the ending of the book, which is that privatizing education and privatizing everything else results in a far, far, far infinitely better world.
And I think there's evidence for that.
And I think there's very strong evidence for that.
And there certainly are logical evidence And that is true, of course, of most people.
So, there's lots of good reasons as to why we think all of this stuff is going to work.
There's stuff which I know is true based on both experience, direct sort of personal experience and logic.
Rejecting irrational authority from my life in terms of family and even friends who had a sort of superior attitude towards the truth they were telling...
Getting rid of all of that irrational authority from my life has only made my life, again, almost infinitely better.
Applying the principle of voluntarism and non-aggression.
Nobody was beating me up, but verbal aggression and undermining was not uncommon.
Applying the non-aggression principle to my life has resulted in a beautiful, beautiful set of circumstances.
A wonderful marriage and...
An exciting career, let's say, and this great conversation.
So applying that to my own life and seeing that being applied in Christina's life and a few other people that we know who've gone through this results in a flowering of the intellect and a flowering of the soul, if I may put it that way.
So there's some direct experiential things.
I'm not going to get into all of the proofs because really that's the podcast series, but we have some pretty good ideas.
Am I 150% certain that a stateless society would be the best?
No, I'm always open to counter-arguments.
I'm always open to counter-arguments.
It is the most true and most consistent and most validated theory about how society should act.
But the problem with me, sort of when I argued in the past, was that I would be a push arguer.
So I would say, this is the truth, and you can see this on the board, and I really wish people wouldn't do it.
Somebody comes along, and they are talking about statism in a positive way, and people jump all over, slam them, jump all over them.
Oh, yeah, right, so you just think that violence should be used as off everything.
And that's jerky, and that's childish.
You want to be a pull debater, not a push debater.
A push debater is somebody who just says, this is the truth, right?
And if you don't get it, you're an idiot.
Or you're corrupt. Which do you want to be, evil or stupid?
It's your choice. Well, that's called being a push debater.
And what it actually does is just push people away.
And that's people who haven't handled and processed their own doubt.
Once you've handled and processed your own doubt, you can invite people in to correct you.
You can invite people in to tell you how it is and then just pepper them with questions in the Socratic method.
Once you've mastered your doubt, you don't need to tell people how it is.
You can invite them in to correct you and then just keep asking them questions.
Oh, but I don't understand if this is the case, how this works with that.
I don't understand if you're against violence, how you think that the public schools are going to be funded.
Like, I'm just not sure about that.
And that's a much more civilized way of leading people towards the truth, right?
The truth that is inflicted on people is not a truth that sticks.
It doesn't stick anywhere. They may agree with you, but they'll just wander off.
And they haven't integrated and they haven't internalized the process.
And so being a push debater is not recognizing...
It's having doubt and not accepting and absorbing that.
And it also is a precarious and willed position.
That's what turns people into aggressive push debaters.
It is a very insecure position.
The process by which you have arrived at your philosophy, I think the philosophy, I hope, but the process by which we've arrived at the conclusions that we have that are always conditional upon new information and changes and so on, better arguments, things we've overlooked, good lord, how many of those could there be?
Quite a few. But the positions that we have arrived at are the result of a methodology and a process, and it's the process, as I've talked about before, that is absolute.
It's the scientific method that's absolute.
It's not scientific conclusions that are absolute.
That becomes dogmatic and religious, in essence.
You must always have your ideas as an effect of the process.
You must always have your ideas as an effect of the process.
And we surf the process, right?
So we're adjusting and it's important to be a skilled surfer so you don't take a spill, but you don't surf in the absence of a wave.
You just look kind of stupid standing there in your living room pretending to surf.
The wave is the process and we are merely the surfers, right?
So what is the goal of the surfer?
Well, to have fun. Obviously, that's why he's there.
And to surf the wave as best he can to improve his skills.
And yeah, he's going to take spills and he's going to end up with his head in the sand and so on.
And that may be the occasional trawl or shock.
But that is sort of the purpose and the goal, is to surf the wave, right?
So our philosophy as the surfer and the process, the methodology of logic and empirical validation, the scientific method, is the wave.
And... Being a push debater is just throwing people at a wave, right?
It's not teaching them principles about how you surf.
And so they may even ride a wave accidentally correctly, but they've learned fundamentally nothing.
So you haven't internalized their own process of understanding how to surf.
You haven't said, oh, you stand like this, you have to do this, you have to, I don't know, I'm not a surfer, but you've got to teach them this kind of stuff, right?
And you're not going to teach them by telling them, just by telling them, here's how it is.
I mean, I know that sounds funny from the guy with 650 podcasts, but I've gone through the doubt thing for 20 years.
And I think I've got a fairly good handle on it.
I'm not always perfect at it, but I've got a fairly good handle on it.
But even I'm not so much of a push debater.
I do try and tell people the principles and not what to do.
The principles, not what to do.
I don't say to people, leave your family, don't leave your family.
That would be a push debater.
I don't say to people, you damn hypocrites, you want to get rid of the state, you can't even take on old mommy.
You cowardly jerks or something like that.
Because also that's, you know, once you've gone through some serious personal work, you realize just how difficult it is and It's a jerky...
Like if a surfer... And I've sort of seen these kinds of people more on the ski slopes, right?
So they've started skiing when they're, you know, three years old and then they look upon people who can't ski as incompetent, right?
Without recognizing that they just learned very early and so on.
So with philosophy and introspection and self-knowledge, once you have really dug in, you realize how difficult it is.
And once you realize how difficult it is, you can have sympathy with the people who are struggling, who are just starting out.
Because it would not be wise to scorn someone for something that is very difficult.
Especially, of course, if you haven't done it, right?
That's not a very good way to do it, I'm telling you.
So the doubt aspect is absolutely essential when it comes to understanding the world, understanding the relationship between the ideas within your mind and the outside world, and recognizing that we want to be the roach motel.
Sweet stuff come in and get stuck.
We don't want to be somebody out there shining a flashlight into people's faces while they're half asleep and saying, you hate the state, right, or are you an idiot?
That's not going to make us look very good, and it's also not a very empathetic and compassionate thing.
This is the temptation. If you feel like calling somebody a jerk, then it's very important to look at your own motivations.
If the person is a jerk, then they're not going to respond to being called a jerk, because they're a jerk, so they're not going to listen to you.
They're just going to call you a jerk back.
It's going to escalate. Nobody's going to get anywhere.
It doesn't achieve anything.
And if they're not a jerk, then calling them a jerk is just abusive.
So that's sort of my invitation, and I've noticed a bit sort of rougher stuff that's going on in the boards.
As people get a little bit cocky with their first flush of integrated knowledge, they're getting a little punchy to the newbies, and don't do that.
Really don't do that.
Don't do that. We must be as gentle with those who are arriving and trying to determine and trying to fight their way out of the fog We must be as gentle.
I mean, again, it's just fluke that we happen to end up in this position where we can talk coherently about the truth.
A lot of fluke, right?
The podcasting, for instance, I didn't invent podcasting.
It just kind of had to exist.
I certainly didn't invent the internet or anything like that.
So even this conversation that we're having is predicated on a large number of mostly accidental factors.
So I would just say that it's important to recognize that doubt is essential.
Doubt is essential. Showing doubt does not eliminate the veracity or the integrity of your position.
It is essential to the integrity of your position.
It is essential to the integrity of your position.
Now, if you're debating with a jerk...
Then, of course, the jerk is going to be an idiot and is going to say, if you say, like if somebody says, well, can you prove that a free market society, a market anarchist society, would be the best of all possible societies?
Can you prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt?
Of course, you've got to say no.
No, there's absolutely no way.
Of course I can't. But that's okay.
You can't prove relativity beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In fact, all scientific theories are conditional.
You can't prove evolution beyond the shadow of a doubt.
I mean, no question of that.
I mean, I'm happy to join those ranks of people whose theories are not proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But a jerk, when you say, no, I can't prove it, a jerk is going to say, oh, so it's all theoretical, so nothing you're saying means anything.
Nothing you're saying means anything.
And then that rage of being humiliated and of being treated in an unjust and irrational manner is going to arise.
And you're going to want to avoid that, but it's important not to try and avoid that, right?
Because what you want to avoid is not the feelings that jerks evoke in you, but you want to avoid the jerks themselves.
And, of course, you don't want to descend to their level.
So if somebody's being a jerk and saying, oh yeah, well, so you have nothing to offer, you're not even certain of your own ideas, if you express doubt, which of course is essential, it's one of the things that we really dislike about religious people, right?
They just don't express any doubt.
They just retreat to this pious bubble world of faith.
But when you express doubt, somebody attacks you for it, or scorns you for it, or mocks you for it, or rolls their eyes...
Or if somebody says, well, what's the point of believing in it?
It's never going to be achieved. It's just a waste of time.
It's just mental masturbation and all that kind of stuff.
Well, that's fine, you know, if somebody doesn't get.
And, of course, the whole point of this is to answer that question, right?
The whole point of this is to answer that question.
Can you build a non-aggression society within your life without getting rid of the state?
That's really what this is all about, right?
I mean, if it was only about getting rid of the state, then yes, it would be nothing more than a hobby and there would be precious little intensity.
It would just be sort of interesting things to talk about, interesting theoreticals.
But because we've tracked this down to the personal and we have said...
That the state is an effect of the family and of the church, and that it is the personal relationships wherein you need to apply your virtue and your desire for freedom and being treated well and rationality.
Well, that has made it sort of come alive, right?
The stateless society is the non-aggression principle society, and that is you and your life and those around you, not the state, not God, or any of those sorts of things.
And that's really been the purpose of this, is to answer that question.
Well, isn't it just theoretical?
Hell no! It's not just theoretical.
It's not just theoretical at all.
And those who are plowing their way through this conversation and plowing their way through what is required if you wish to live with integrity, which is to forget about the state and to focus on your family, they'll recognize that this is probably the least theoretical philosophy that is out there at the moment.
This is not wanking off in cyberspace about alienation and classes and existential angst and what is reality and does life have meaning.
This is saying if you wish to live with integrity in your life, you have relationships in your life that need to be examined from a moral standpoint.
And you need to fix them or flush them.
So this is the least theoretical philosophy that's out there.
This is the most practical philosophy that's out there.
From the greatest abstractions come the greatest details.
And this is the most tractionable, if I can combine traction and actionable, the most tractionable philosophy that we have out there, that there is out there that I've ever heard of.
It's not really part of objectivism.
Objectivism will get you all fired up and ranting about Israel and war and the welfare state and this and that, but...
Objectivism will also get you to come down as a push philosopher, a push debater to those around you and alienate everyone and then you get to retreat into your Galtian superior bubble.
But I think that the need to engage at a direct and ethical level with people in your life is what the purpose of this philosophy is all about.
And yeah, that's something which is going to provoke some doubt in you.
And if people then attack you for that doubt, the doubt which of course brought you to this philosophy...
If you didn't doubt anything, you wouldn't have listened to podcasts.
If you didn't doubt what you had believed before versus what I was talking about here, you wouldn't have gone on to the next podcast.
So doubt brought you to this philosophy, and you can't then come into this philosophy and leave doubt behind.
Doubt is why this philosophy exists.
You can't then manifest a philosophy in the opposition to doubt.
So, and you have to have the strength to be criticized.
You have to have the strength for people to say, it's wrong, and then you ask them.
You say, oh, that's very interesting.
Can you define, first of all, tell me what it is that you mean by true and false, now define your terms, now do this, and then, you know, if you really know for sure, if you're certain that my position is false, then step me through it, because I sure would hate to be wrong about something so essential as virtue and violence and society and so on.
So doubt is essential.
And if you dump doubt and become a push debater and just tell people how it is, then you're absolutely not living a rational philosophy.
If the person that you're talking to is worth talking to, then don't be a push debater.
And if they're not worth talking to, then don't talk to them.
So, hang on to doubt.
Doubt is your best friend.
Doubt is your best friend.
It is not weakness. It is not intellectual weakness to feel doubt.
It is the greatest intellectual strength.
Doubt and curiosity are the greatest intellectual strengths.
That's how we push back the tide, not by just building dams and hoping to keep it at bay.
So, I hope that this helps.
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