April 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:05
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. | |
| It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I just came back with my wife from Punta Cana, a fabulous vacation resort, if you get a chance to go. | |
| Very relaxing, although I do I have certain problems with mariachi bands now, having heard the music solid for about two weeks. | |
| So that's the only thing. | |
| If you don't like the mariachi bands, you might get ye olde facial tick when you go to Punta Cana. | |
| But other than that, it's great. | |
| Lots of beach volleyball, dancing, and all-you-can-eat buffets. | |
| So, I wanted to just mention something. | |
| I had a sort of question that came in through email, and it sort of triggered a train of thought in me that I thought would be interesting to share. | |
| You can sort of let me know what you think. | |
| I was fairly conscious when I started this that this was a very new form of communication, this internet thing, and of course we're all very aware of I think that it's well worth spending just a few minutes talking about, | |
| well... I think it is what I think is important about the internet and how it's really changed the way that we communicate and through doing that has become a very expressive and powerful medium for containing and allowing for the expression of new thoughts and new ideas. | |
| For those who don't know this particular history of mine, I was a writer, thinker, debater, and so on for about 20 years. | |
| I was in academics. | |
| I was a debater. | |
| I worked as a graduate student. | |
| I got my master's degree and thought about doing a PhD, but just got too exhausted fighting the sort of post-modernist, subjectivist, soupy, acidic mental fog of graduate studies, at least up here in Canada, and I would assume in most places in the world. | |
| And one of the things that I found very, very fascinating was about the growth of the internet and the ability for us to have this kind of communication, this kind of direct communication with each other. | |
| And it is a conversation. We receive dozens of emails a day. | |
| There's thousands, tens of thousands of posts on the board. | |
| We had almost a quarter million either video views or podcast downloads for Free Domain Radio last month, so all of that's fairly cool. | |
| And one of the things that I think has really changed in this sort of Gutenberg Bible printing press kind of way, one of these things that has changed enormously With the introduction of the internet, is the ability to speak without the conformist filter of the middleman. | |
| And I'll sort of explain what I mean by that in a minute or two. | |
| When the Bible was first translated into the vernacular by Luther and was printed on this sort of Gutenberg press, it really did represent an enormous change in human thought, human society. | |
| Prior to that, the Bible, and I'm generalizing here, but the Bible was... | |
| Really expressed only through storytelling and the mass was conducted in Latin which of course the average peasant had no clue about any more than we would today. | |
| They had no access to the quote original text and I'm using that term very loosely as you have to when talking about the Bible. | |
| But the placing of the Bible into the hands of any educated laity, any sort of average person who could read, was really a remarkable thing, an incredibly powerful thing, which really broke the back, the stultifying back of the Catholic Church, which had dominated Western society for almost a thousand years, pretty much since the fall of the Roman Empire to the time when the standard of living began to grow back to the Roman Empire days, was about a thousand years, sort of... | |
| 400 AD to 1400 AD. And there was an enormous fragmentation that occurred. | |
| With the printing of the Bible in the vernacular, people finally got their hands on at least some version of the original text. | |
| This caused an enormous splintering within society. | |
| Anabaptists, Zwingalians, Calvinists, Lutherans, the Catholics, and other splits within the Protestant movement. | |
| And this caused an enormous amount of religious warfare. | |
| had consumed for 100 to 200 years, various parts of Europe were consumed in this religious warfare. | |
| And it got, I mean, unbelievably ugly and brutal, the Anabaptists who believed in adult baptism, because they said, what's the point of baptizing a child who doesn't know anything about Jesus or the Holy Ghost or any of these sorts of things? | |
| Not that any adults do either, but this was the reasoning. | |
| They said, what's the point of baptizing a child? | |
| It makes no sense at all. | |
| What we really need to do is to allow somebody as an adult, through the confirmation process, to choose to be baptized as an adult. | |
| And so when the other Catholics would get, sorry, when the other Protestants and some Catholics would get a hold of these Anabaptists, they would murder them by taking them and drowning them in water, saying, here's your adult baptism, MF, and drown them, saying that this was, of course, because they felt that this damned people to hell saying that this was, of course, because they felt that this damned people to hell eternally and that we now, of course, mostly associate with Muslim religions, but... | |
| Which was very much part of the Christian religion up until relatively recently, no more than a couple of hundred years ago. | |
| So, when society fragmented through the propagation of the original text of the Bible, or at least an access to some sort of text of the Bible, because the Bible is such a self-contradictory nonsense document, it caused people to just pick and choose whatever they wanted, and it just fragmented all of society. | |
| And basically what happened was religious groups spent hundreds of years trying to gain control of the power of the state to impose what they considered to be perfect and divine religion on other people. | |
| And then those other people would resist and fight back and there'd be wars. | |
| And this went on for hundreds of years until some bright sparks in the Enlightenment, post-Renaissance and in the Enlightenment, finally said, you know, this whole state church thing doesn't work anymore. | |
| So we need to separate the church and the state because when they're combined and people have the ability to read and reason through, quote, reason through highly contradictory texts where they can cherry pick and choose and create their own denominations, whatever it is that they want to believe, pretty much you can find justification for anything in the whatever it is that they want to believe, pretty much you can find justification for anything in the We can't have the church and the state united because it just turns into a murderous bloody fiesta of death. | |
| As I said in a podcast, about a billion people have been murdered in religious wars throughout human history, so that didn't really work so well. | |
| So, when the middleman, in a sense, was taken out of the equation, when the Bible was translated in the vernacular first by Luther in the 15th century, when the Bible was handed to the average educated laity, which was not a significant portion of the population, but people could read to others, what happened was... | |
| The middleman, which was the priest, who was the interpreter, who was the validator of the Bible, and this really is the key distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is that Protestantism believes that your relationship with God can be direct. | |
| You do not need a priest as an intermediary or intercessory. | |
| And so you can have a direct relationship with God. | |
| You don't need a priest. | |
| Whereas in the Catholic faith, the priest is absolutely required. | |
| He is given a divine mandate by God. | |
| From the Pope all the way down to your parish priest, and he's the only person who can perform the sacraments and so on and get you into heaven. | |
| So it's really a monopoly of divine access. | |
| In the Catholic religion, in the Protestant religion, the priest is like a teacher. | |
| You can learn on your own, but it's easier to learn with a teacher. | |
| Sorry, my video cut out for some reason. | |
| And there's no need for this intermediary priest. | |
| You can learn on your own, have a direct relationship with God, but that relationship with God is going to be better if you have a priest and so on. | |
| When the middleman was taken out and people had direct access to the Bible, then some really quite remarkable and amazing things happened. | |
| Which was that society fragmented because there was no longer a single orthodoxy which dominated and dictated what people believed about highly contradictory and wildly divergent phenomenon such as religious faith. | |
| I would submit that one of the things that the internet is doing is by removing the middleman of the media magnates, the people who control, and I use this term rather loosely, yes they do have monopolistic grants usually on airwaves from the government. | |
| But they are competing for each other, but they're competing to basically repeat propaganda that people are expecting to receive because of their own indoctrination through government-run state schools and so on. | |
| But you and I can have a conversation directly, and of course millions of other people can have a conversation directly, without having to go through any socially approved broadcast medium. | |
| And yeah, okay, that has some dangers, of course. | |
| I mean, you get lots of cooks and crazy people out there. | |
| But what you do get is a great deal of variety in the information that can be presented to you, right, that you can receive. | |
| You can go and pick and choose your information much in the same way that you could pick and choose from the Bible to create your own belief system. | |
| And this caused an enormous amount of fragmentation. | |
| And one of the things that's occurring among the younger crowd in particular, though it does occur among older people as well, Is that without this need for the intermediary, you can actually have a direct conversation through a sort of broadcast medium like this internet, whether you're watching the video or listening to the audio. | |
| You can have that kind of direct communication with someone, and it doesn't have to go through the filter of, do we need commercial advertising to support the production and distribution of this medium? | |
| Because once you get commercial advertisers, you get an extraordinary amount of It's conservatism that is mixed into the message because people are afraid of offending others, people are afraid of getting upset, people are afraid of, especially larger corporations, those who have a lot of money to advertise, they're heavily dependent upon either government subsidies, government protection, tariffs, they have problems with unions if they get to, I guess, right-wing or even left-wing in certain situations. | |
| When you have commercialism mixed into the mix, things get enormously conservative very quickly because capitalists don't want to offend people and people aren't taught to think. | |
| They're just taught to sort of mouth propaganda. | |
| So when they're confronted with things that they're not familiar with, they tend to get kind of hostile and upset. | |
| So there's this kind of play nice, be nice, kindergarten ethics that go on when you get commercialism mixed into a medium. | |
| And so now that we have a way of communicating with each other, which does not involve the mixing in of either a commercial medium or, which is even more of a conservative medium, the government medium, wherein you have public broadcasting and so on, where wherein you have public broadcasting and so on, where it's even more explosive if you end up offending somebody, right? | |
| I mean, if I were to talk about problems with the Muslim community on government tax dollars, Of course, the Muslims would go completely insane, and we're taxpayers, and we're funding this program which is attacking our beliefs, and the Christians would do it as well, and the statists and the people on welfare, all the other people that we talk about here, the academics and so on. | |
| They would feel even more offended because they would feel that their tax dollars were being used to create a message that was in opposition to their most strongly held prejudices, let's say. | |
| We could say values, but let's be honest and call them prejudices. | |
| So whether you have a private commercial structure or a publicly funded structure, there's an enormous amount of conservatism that is blended into the mix. | |
| And the conservatism can occur in a variety of fields. | |
| It's not like there's just one, because, of course, if you look at America, this great cultural divide is sort of the left wing and the right wing, the Democrat and the Republican, the sort of Midwest and the East Coast intellectual establishment, however you want to call it. | |
| You can be Noam Chomsky, say, and write about the problems with imperialistic hegemony that is exacerbated by U.S. foreign policy and all the mess that occurs from that, and then say the solution is expanded social programs at home. | |
| And you have a constituency. | |
| That you can appeal to, that is going to buy your book, is going to listen to you, is going to invite you on the lecture circuit, and so on. | |
| Similarly, on the right-hand side, you can talk about the problems with social programs and so on, and our need for a strong military, and our need for Christian ethics to be at the center of the national discourse, or whatever it is that you're going to talk about. | |
| This goes all the way even over to more, I guess you could say right-wing types, P.G. O'Rourke and so on, but still not, and libertarian types even to some degree like John Stewart. | |
| Who mocks people, then invites them on and gives them big bear hugs. | |
| But it doesn't go all the way over to anarchism. | |
| Anarchism is just something that is completely off the radar as far as an expected or rational discourse. | |
| I mean, when you talk about anarchism, people sort of respond to you as if you were saying, you know, it'd be great to bring back child prostitution and slavery. | |
| Wouldn't that be excellent? I mean, that's considered to be off the map as far as the rational discourse goes. | |
| The amazing thing about the Internet is that by taking out this conservative element, this highly status quo element, and again, that's in vertical strata, It's not like just one message, but it's messaged by a particular group. | |
| What's happened is the discourse has really fragmented, and that's an enormously positive thing. | |
| That is an enormously positive thing. | |
| The fragmentation of discourse by taking out the middleman, of course, had pretty strong effects on two other major institutions, and I would say pretty much the most successful institutions that human beings have ever created. | |
| The removal of the conservative middleman in terms of our understanding of the physical world, the laws and properties of matter and energy, And the substitution of individual judgment according to a rational structure was the foundation, of course, of the rise of the scientific method through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. | |
| It's hard to remember. A little over 200 years ago, doctors thought that the body was just a bag of blood. | |
| It didn't even move around. | |
| They didn't understand that the heart pumped. | |
| They thought that the heart was the center of emotion. | |
| They just didn't have any clue about even the fact that the blood traveled around the body. | |
| So it's hard for us to understand just how far we've come in terms of knowledge of the body. | |
| Relative to just a couple of hundred years ago and all of that became possible because you no longer had a monopoly of truth and interpretation which was propagated by the clergy. | |
| Now you had the removal of this conservative middleman who dictated, as Galileo found his great distress, dictated that the heliocentric model of the universe was false and that the earth was the center of the universe because in the Bible it says the earth is fixed, it does not move and so on. | |
| So when you get rid of this highly conservative middleman, who controls the discourse, the conversation, the communication between individuals, and you substitute a rational structure of individual judgment, which is really this conversation, as far as philosophy goes, as far as understanding goes, As far as our ability to process the facts and nature and properties of reality and society, | |
| mankind and physics and science and psychology and all the things that we talk about at Freedom and Radio, what's happened is we are no longer required to pass muster or to pass through the test of a highly conservative middleman who controls the communication, the discourse. | |
| Now, of course, beforehand it was It's a little bit more delicate, and Noam Chomsky points this out very nicely in a number of his works. | |
| It's a little bit more delicate now. | |
| What happens is the children are taken from the parents for, you know, six, seven, eight hours a day, if you include homework. | |
| And for 14 or so years, they're subjected to just an endless barrage of state propaganda, which is generally highly conformist, highly conservative, and very much value-free, other than the sentimental patriotic values of, you know, rah, rah, our country's great. | |
| And they're not taught how to think. | |
| Children are not taught how to think. | |
| They're just taught democracy is good, America is good, England is good, or sometimes they're taught that multiculturalism is ideal, no one's good, no one's bad, and so on. | |
| And what happens is they no longer have the ability to think outside of that because they're really not taught how to think. | |
| They're just taught to repeat dogma in the way that people in the religious, in the sort of medieval religious world, were also taught to teach dogma and to repeat dogma. | |
| Learning how to think is a very painful process when it's like rehab for the body, right? | |
| If you get your legs mangled in some horrible farming accident, it's always farming accident, right? | |
| Then the rehab is very painful to regain your mobility and when your brain, your ability to think and reason and communicate is crippled through the brain deadening, brain mincing, boredom and repetition and facts, figures and dates that goes on in public schools and this is all the way through universities for the most part. | |
| Learning how to think becomes very painful. | |
| It's a rehabilitation for the mind and it's quite a challenge. | |
| It's wonderful when you do it but getting out of the wheelchair, well there's some pins and needles let's say. | |
| So The other way in which the substitution of individual judgment in a rational framework, substituting that for a previously dominant monopoly of force and conservative opinion also occurred in the realm of economics, | |
| right? From sort of the late 18th century Adam Smith and the American Revolution onwards up until, I guess, the mid-19th century when sort of 1860s when public school came back in and then you had a generation that was primed for all the wars and bloodsheds. | |
| That was primed for all the wars and bloodsheds of the 20th century. | |
| There was a brief period where individual judgment in a rational framework, in other words, the optimization of property in a property rights framework with a very minimal kind of state, also substituted individual judgment in a rational framework for a very conservative and collectivist. | |
| Kind of central authority, which really was the feudal system that operated throughout most of the world, but particularly in Eastern and Western Europe throughout the fall of the Roman Empire and even before the fall of the Roman Empire through to, it started with Magna Carta, but basically began to really erode in the 14th and 15th and 16th centuries with the introduction of better crop and farming methods, better Harnesses for the horses, crop rotation. | |
| You've got winter crops, such as turnips, which could keep your cows alive during the winter, or at least well-fed through the winter. | |
| Production of excess food, which allowed for the creation of cities. | |
| The rediscovery of Roman law, which allowed for a legalistic property rights framework, which you need in cities. | |
| The enclosure movement, which began to aggregate together all of these tiny little strips of farmland that was a sort of legacy of the Middle Ages. | |
| When you have three sons, you just have to survive your land by three, and it became very inefficient to plow and so on. | |
| And this was all enclosed, and farming became much more efficient. | |
| And then this began to allow cities to grow, which gave people places to go when they didn't have any land left. | |
| They would go to the cities, and they would get better jobs in factories, not looking good to us now, but a lot better than the rural industry that was going on beforehand. | |
| So when you allow for the substitution of individual judgment in a rational framework, you allow that to displace a collectivist, highly conservative, ideological middleman who filters and rearranges and refocuses to virtually nothing or to mere repetition of dogma, really essential human communication, You really do get an amazing breakthrough in human communication. | |
| This fragmentation that is going on as people begin to sniff around through the internet to find voices and communications that are new, that are powerful, that are distinguishable from the general repetitive nonsense. | |
| All of that is very, very powerful, I think. | |
| It allows us to break out of Habitual thinking. | |
| It allows us to break out of dogma, to break out of ideology, and to really begin to think for ourselves in a rational framework, and that's really why I try to focus, and we try to focus in this conversation so much, on the power of logical scientific philosophy and psychology, | |
| so that we can break out of our habits, our mental habits, and really begin to stretch our wings and fly in terms of interpreting Reality in an individual rational framework rather than relying on the middlemen who constantly chew up reality, regurgitate this thin oatmeal type gruel which we can barely live on but which causes us no discomfort. | |
| So I just sort of wanted to take a moment to point out... | |
| Just what a revolution, I think, is going on here. | |
| How powerful it is. It really is after the religious conflicts that came out of individual interpretations of the Bible, the scientific revolution, the free market revolution. | |
| I think that this is really the philosophical revolution wherein we don't have to worry about being forced to drink hemlock if we dare to talk about the truth. | |
| That we have a real capacity to have an incredible and direct communication. | |
| Without the middleman who constantly filters and is conservative and won't allow people to say things that might offend and so on. | |
| We really do have an amazing and direct communication here. | |
| I really, really thank you for joining in this conversation and taking advantage of this because it is absolutely unprecedented in human history to have this level of communication direct without the conservative middleman. | |
| And I think this is how we really begin to blow society wide open, to have many more options, many more creative choices. | |
| We're essentially privatizing communication, which has never really occurred before, and I think it's going to be absolutely fantastic. | |
| Thank you so much for joining us. |
Export Selection