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June 24, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:35:00

807 Sunday Call In Show June 24 2007

Self-esteem, a listener triumph, and Objectivist Ethics

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Time	Text
	Alright, well thank you everyone so much for joining us.
	This is June 24th, 2007 and we are now on the Gizmo channel.
	There's not really any point talking about the phone number because by the time you hear this it will be in the past.
	So this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio and we have a lively group of chillingly bright intellectuals on the phone who are not in any way shape or form mutable.
	So that's going to be a challenge.
	But there's always the unplugging of the computer.
	So we do have a management tactic.
	It's just rather new-key. So thank you so much for joining.
	This is against the pen-molyneux.
	Sorry there hasn't been as many podcasts as I'd liked over the last little while.
	I had some other stuff to work on.
	But I did have a very enlightening and long listen to a whole series of criticisms from a fairly prominent board poster.
	We can call him Bab. And he and I, he spent about two hours dressing me down about various things to do with my behavior on the board and some recent stuff with bannings and so on.
	And I'm just waiting for him to...
	I'm more than happy to post it because I think it was a very good debate.
	And I'm just waiting for him to give it a review before I post it.
	And I think that's going to be quite...
	Quite an interesting listen.
	I've listened to it again since.
	I listened to it yesterday, so I think it was definitely quite interesting, and we came to some very good conclusions, I do think, about better ways to move forward.
	So, that was that.
	I don't have any particular big list of topics.
	I always have stuff that I can talk about.
	But I don't want to take up the valuable members' time.
	If you would like to...
	We'll just have to have a free-for-all.
	It's like a dinner party where we're all blindfolded.
	So if you can just sort of shout out if you want to talk and we'll sort of work it out or figure it out in that way.
	So if you have any topics or questions or comments, issues about anything recent, new, old, or future, then...
	We could type them into the chat window for sure, or we could just...
	you could just speak up.
	Alright, Mr.
	G, you're up. Oh, really, you are.
	Oh, there we go.
	What's up? No, where's your English accent?
	No, I'm actually in Hanover today, so...
	No, but you were in England for a couple of days, right?
	That German!
	You know, if I could hang on to my British accent after having left the country 25 years ago, the least thing that you can do is adopt it after a couple of days in the country.
	I tried.
	I just can't do it.
	So many years in the Midwest, my speech patterns are so flattened out that I couldn't affect any accent if I wanted to.
	Ah, right, right. Well, it's true.
	The Midwest is pretty much like if a computer were to speak English while being simultaneously dosed with morphine, that would be pretty much how it sounds, right?
	Just about, just about.
	Okay, so do you want to tell us anything about your trip, or do you want to go straight into questions, or what's your pleasure?
	Oh, yes, the trip.
	It's just a lot of sightseeing gobbledygook, so...
	I figured we'd probably just go right into questions if...
	All right, go ahead.
	That's all right with you? Be back.
	All right. Now I just have to dig them up here.
	No rush, we're not live.
	Now, sorry, just for those who don't know, who may be listening to this later, by trip, what Greg means is either that he's gone to Europe and has left the what Greg means is either that he's gone to Europe and has left the Midwest, or he's still in the Midwest but is taking an So we're still trying to figure out which one is which, so we're not sure.
	And that's probably one of the reasons.
	When he says sightseeing, he means the amazing contents of his navel.
	So we can talk more about that later.
	It keeps getting bigger.
	So then you just click on OK, and just right-click here, and say Invite to Chat for your main radio.
	Oh, there they are. I found them.
	Ah, good. Excellent.
	Sorry. No, no problem at all.
	I'm OK for filler, as you're all pretty much well aware.
	It's the content sometimes that's a challenge.
	Okay, so something that we were kind of...
	Jake and I were kind of hoping you would take some time to go over.
	There's a lot of...
	There's a lot of psychology and philosophy terms that pop up during conversation on Sundays, and also in a lot of podcasts, too.
	They seem to be not so much conversation terminators, Where everyone in the room kind of just nods their head, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And some of us are going, what did I just miss?
	Well, the short list we came up with, which I'm sure you could probably fill a couple hours with, is the concept of self-esteem,
	the concept of narcissism, And then on the philosophical side, the concept of virtue and the concept of nihilism.
	What are they?
	How do you identify them?
	What distinguishes them from their opposites?
	That sort of thing.
	Ah, okay. Well, why don't I just give the very short definitions, at least the ones that I work with, and then you can tell me that they're perfect and there's nothing else to ask.
	The first one was self-esteem, right?
	Yeah. Well, self-esteem is just the physical health of the soul that results from acting virtuously, right, with integrity.
	And there's sort of two kinds of self-esteem.
	The first is a practical kind of self-esteem, like, I know how to fix my toilet.
	Because I've done it before and, you know, whatever, whatever, right?
	So there's that kind of self-esteem, right?
	So if you're not a brain surgeon, to go and apply for a job as a brain surgeon would not indicate a very high self-esteem in terms of judging your own skills relative to reality.
	And then there's the self-esteem which comes from doing the more difficult things in life that require integrity and knowing that you can trust yourself to do those things and if you don't do those things that you'll be able to recover and turn about and so on.
	So if you're 16 and in your car for the first time having very high self-esteem about your driving would be sort of delusional.
	So there's the self-esteem with relation to reality as a whole and then there's a subset of that which is in relation to Because you could have self-esteem like, I know that I'm a very good thief, like I can bump into someone and take their watch right off, and that would be self-esteem in terms of an accurate representation of your relationship to reality, but that would not be the same as virtue.
	So then self-esteem is just an evaluation, an accurate evaluation, well, an evaluation of your Of your abilities with relation to reality.
	Okay, and the more accurate that estimation is, the greater your self-esteem.
	Yeah. I mean, it's sort of a process, right?
	Because the question of self-esteem is more related compared to what, right?
	And the compared to is with relation to reality, right?
	So it's the decisions that you make and the skills that you acquire.
	And it's a constantly growing process, right?
	So I have greater self-esteem with relation to my abilities in philosophy than I did, say, 20 years ago.
	And I have less great self-esteem with Relative to 20 years ago, I don't know, going clubbing if I were single and picking up some 18-year-old girl in a bar, right?
	That would be higher on my list of things that I could achieve.
	So it's a constant tweaking and a process that goes on where you're comparing what you can do relative to reality, and there's always some uncertainty involved.
	And there's that level, and then there's the level where there's integrity relative to virtue.
	Okay, so...
	What does it say about someone's self-esteem who, say, at 40 goes to a club and tries to pick someone up, an 18-year-old, and actually succeeds?
	That would be inaccurate.
	Right, so they have self-esteem relative to they can judge their ability To do X with relative accuracy, right?
	But that's not the same as being virtuous, right?
	So to me, there's just two kinds of self-esteem.
	And the most important one, the one that really has an effect on your happiness, is the one around virtue and integrity, right?
	The other one is important, you know, and has some relationship to your happiness.
	Like, if you're going to pass yourself off as an electrician, it's good to know something about electricity.
	But... For me, the more important one is the one regarding virtue.
	Well, could you clarify the distinction between the two, then?
	Because I'm not sure I quite get that.
	Well, I mean, you can be good at things, and then you can be good at being good.
	Right? Now, I think, I mean, so, in a sense, the first judgment that you have to make is being good at things, right?
	Because, you know, when you're a kid and you're learning how to tie your shoelaces, you're not necessarily learning the major cardinal virtues and so on, but you have to learn to be good at things.
	That's usually the first step.
	Even if you just think of something like object constancy, you know, the ball rolls under a blanket and you know it still exists, you have to learn to be good at things first.
	And that's how you develop competence Or the feeling of competence with regards to your own ability to interact with reality, if that makes sense.
	Okay. Alright. I mean, that's the first kind, right?
	Right. So then the second kind would be...
	Being able to accurately judge your competence in terms of what you know to be good?
	Yeah, I mean, and they're basically on the same principle, right?
	So in the first one, you basically develop competence with regards to reality by recognizing that reality runs on universal principles, right?
	Gravity and electromagnetism, even if you don't know what those things mean.
	You're able to catch a ball as a baseball player because you know it's not going to sprout wings and fly away.
	If you think it's going to sprout wings and fly away, you don't run to catch the ball, so you don't learn how to do it.
	So we learn how to be competent with regards to reality by recognizing that the reality runs on universal principles.
	And as a subset of that, we become competent with regards to ethics once we understand that ethics runs on a series of universal principles.
	Okay.
	All right, so let me see if I understand this then.
	It's not a self-esteem then.
	It's not necessarily an estimation of your self-worth as much as it's just an estimation of your competencies.
	Either with regard to practical skills or with regard to intellectual skills.
	For sure. Because when you talk about something to do with self-esteem, it can't be a completely internal process.
	Because what you're saying is, I have to value myself and the question is of course relative to what, right?
	Compared to what? How do you compare the value of yourself to and it must be something that's external, right?
	There's no self-esteem which says I had a really good dream last night or a really bad dream last night or you know that that's not an issue of self-esteem because that's a purely internal state.
	So self-esteem is when you compare, right?
	So if you are a priest and you say that the way that I'm going to cure cancer is to pray to God that cancer will be cured Then you are not acting with efficacy with regards to reality.
	If you are a scientist who accepts the scientific method and you work hard, then you may not achieve it, but for sure you're going to be using the right methodology.
	So, if you try to affect the world...
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, I didn't say anything.
	Oh, I mean, if you try to be effective in the world...
	Self-recording conversation.
	If you try to be effective within the world...
	Without recognizing universal principles, you won't succeed.
	I mean, you can succeed in manipulating people like the Pope succeeds in manipulating people, but that's by using non-universal principles, so that's the equivalent of somebody saying, I want to have property and to steal property, so I want to affirm and deny property rights simultaneously, which is not competent in terms of ethics, because it's not subjecting ethics to universal principles in the way that science and math and all those Other good disciplines that work do.
	Because reality runs on universal principles, any human theory that doesn't run on universal principles is going to have trouble, right?
	It's going to run into problems.
	So, to the degree which people confuse subjective impulses or desires for universal principles, they're going to run into problems, right?
	Because then it's just manipulation, and then you have to do that Randian thing where you rely on the...
	The judgment of others, right?
	That's the second-hander stuff that Ayn Rand talks about so passionately.
	So, well, I mean, you're going to run into problems only if you're not the Pope or the President.
	Well, I mean, that comes back to, you know, does the Pope have self-esteem?
	And, I mean, that's...
	That's the problem that ethicists always have, which I talked about recently in Objectivism Part 2.
	That's the problem that ethicists always have.
	They have to say, well, the Pope doesn't really have self-esteem because he's manipulative, but I don't know.
	But I sure know that the theories that the Pope prescribes don't work.
	So ultimately the goal of conforming your thinking to reality, your actions to reality, is not necessarily the achievement of some kind of material success.
	Well no, that's not under your control, right?
	It's virtue for its own sake, is what you're saying, right?
	Right. I mean, we are good not to win the lottery, but to live effectively and to be happy, I mean, and to live with integrity, with consistency.
	So you can't...
	I mean, this is the Randian thing, and I sort of had some second thoughts and think I may have overstretched the case in that podcast a little, just in terms of talking about whether she meant the achievement of integrity or the achievement of external success.
	But, no, I mean...
	You live with integrity, even if that integrity causes you to not be very successful in the Nazi Party or something, right?
	So, what...
	I mean, if you can't...
	I guess that comes down to the case you were making in that podcast as well, which is for people who want to be good, you don't really need an ethical system.
	For people who don't want to be good, no ethical system is going to work for them anyways.
	Right, right, and my solution is not to address either of those situations.
	But, I mean, that gets us into a whole other can of worms, too, which is how do the two live side by side?
	Well, they don't, right?
	They tend to live where the bad people dominate the good people, right?
	Through propaganda and force.
	Sure. Which, I mean, doesn't that kind of...
	Does it kind of imply a bit of a pessimistic view of the world for those of us who are in search of an ethical existence?
	Well, I mean, pessimistic or optimistic, what I would say, I'm not sure, but what I would say is that I certainly believe that the power of the argument for morality explains why evil is so prevalent in the world, right?
	Evil is so prevalent in the world because evil is redefined as the good, and everybody wants to be good.
	So the reason that dictatorships and even our own democracies put so much effort into propaganda, as does the church, as do families, is because propaganda really works.
	And why does propaganda work?
	Because people really want to be good.
	So if you can redefine the good, then you can make good people do bad things.
	You can't make bad people do good things.
	So the fact is that propaganda only works because people really want to be good.
	And so when you redefine the good from the ground up, It's the most powerful way to change the world.
	If people didn't want to be good, you wouldn't need all these justifications.
	You wouldn't need propaganda. Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
	That makes perfect sense.
	So then, I mean, that ties right into the definition of virtue that you work with, which essentially is what is just...
	UBB! UBB! No, UBB! Excuse me.
	Well, maintaining integrity with reality, right?
	Staying honest in your assessment of yourself with relation to reality.
	Right, right. I mean, science is organizing your thoughts about the material world with reference to universal principles and reality.
	And virtue is simply organizing your thoughts about what is good and evil with reference to reality and universal principles.
	So what's an example of virtue?
	What's an example of virtue?
	Yeah. What would be a good example of virtue?
	Or to put it another way, actually, a better way, you mentioned a minute or two ago cardinal virtues.
	Which virtues are in that list for you?
	Well, I mean, the ones we've talked about a couple of months ago with the difference between aesthetics, ethics, and morality, that, you know, the moral stuff, I mean, the fundamental evil is the violation of property and personhood through theft and violence, and to some degree fraud, I mean, to whatever degree people want to get lost in that maze, I don't know, but, I mean, there's the stuff which you can't do and be a good person, right, which is you kill and rape and assault and steal and so on, right, because those are complete violations of any universal norms of human behavior, right?
	So, to me, those are the cardinal virtues, right?
	I mean, they're necessary but not sufficient to being a good human being, which is you absolutely have to not kill, rape, and molest children and all that kind of stuff to be a decent human being.
	But is that a virtue, or is that just a refraining from a vice?
	Well, I mean, if you think about someone who chain smokes, as long as they continue to chain smoke, they're not likely to be very healthy.
	Now, if they stop chain-smoking, they're going to be a hell of a lot healthier than if they kept chain-smoking.
	Does that mean they can run a marathon?
	Well, I don't know. But it's still a better thing to do than to chain-smoke.
	And in the same way, if you refrain from beating people up on a regular basis or you refrain from bullying and terrifying your children, I would say that's a pretty good step towards virtue.
	And I would say that because I know that that's a challenging set of behaviors to change, I would say that it's pretty laudable to do that.
	But isn't... Don't you also have to take into account, you know, there may be some guy who wants to beat the crap out of his kids, but his wife won't let him, right?
	Versus the guy who actually doesn't want to beat his kids at all, and doesn't.
	Well, but then the question is why?
	Why are these two people different?
	And I would submit that they would be different because of how their parents treated them, in most cases.
	Right, but what I'm saying is, doesn't that play a role in defining that virtue?
	I wouldn't call the guy who wants to but never gets the opportunity to beat his kids a virtuous person.
	Who wants to beat his kids but never has the opportunity?
	Oh, I'd say that. And again, parenting is a bit of a different atmosphere because children are so dependent and their minds are so tender and so on.
	But if I walk into my house every day and I absolutely and completely and totally want to beat my children and grit my teeth and refrain from doing so, do you think that I'm going to have a great relationship with my children?
	I mean, if I really want to beat up my wife every day, but I'm like, oh, the cops have installed these cameras.
	I mean, it's just going to come out in some other way, right?
	One of these days, Alice, right?
	Right, right. Or, you know, like if I say to my kids, kids...
	If your mom wasn't home right now, I would beat the living crap out of you, right?
	I mean, that's pretty terrifying to children, right?
	Mom, don't leave, right? I mean, they'd buy the inflatable mom doll, right, hoping to, you know, defraud the dad, but...
	No, I mean, if... Oh, sure.
	Sorry? Sure, but that, I mean, that would be a pretty ugly situation, but...
	The point is that if we define it by action alone, then he would be virtuous.
	Well sure, I would say that anybody who doesn't beat their children is more virtuous than somebody who does.
	Okay, so we're talking differences of degree here then?
	No, no, that's an absolute difference.
	Anybody who doesn't beat their children is more virtuous than anybody who does.
	More virtuous. Yeah, I mean, what I mean is beating your children is bad and not beating your children is good.
	Right? In the same way that chain-smoking is bad for your health and not chain-smoking is better for your health or, you know, it's good for your health relative to chain-smoking.
	Well, wouldn't it be more accurate to say beating your kids is a vice and not beating your kids is a virtue?
	Well, sure, sure.
	I mean, yeah, I mean, that would be fine with me, for sure.
	Oh, jeez. Hello.
	Yeah, I wonder if those beeps are going to...
	All right, did you have any other questions that you wanted to talk about just now?
	Was there anyone else who wanted to jump in?
	Good to have you back, brother. Oh, glad to be back.
	The language barrier makes things a little bit...
	I guess I could say that this is the most I've spoken since I left London.
	Right. I was going to say before, because I know that Tuttle is pretty, like you can't get a word in edgewise, so I thought maybe you would include before you left London, before you got to London, but yeah.
	Very interesting. Yeah, since then it's pretty much all been please and thank you.
	Right, right, right, right.
	So not a lot of English speakers, or just not very good English speakers?
	Not very good English speakers.
	Although Amsterdam... It seems kind of expensive, but go on.
	Amsterdam is better than Germany is, but it was still difficult.
	As far as insensitive, I don't know about that.
	You know, there is the cultural dominance factor there, you know.
	I guess you can't argue.
	Right, right, right.
	Blame them for being, you know, a little resentful of American tourists who aren't fluent in 18 languages.
	Right. Let me try this again, but louder.
	Right. Do you speak U.S.? Right.
	U.S. of A. That's right.
	I'd like a burger.
	Sinner. Dead silence.
	Alright. Okay, so did you have any other questions?
	I don't know if we had... Oh, I got a pile of them.
	Just in case anybody else wanted to ask a question, we can just open it up, and then if nobody does, we can continue.
	One of us in this window is not muted.
	Oh dear, he's got Buddhism.
	Yeah, we do have some Buddhism.
	We do have a bit of an outbreak, don't we?
	...of Buddhism on the board. Quite fascinating.
	Some of them did manage to survive the 808 podcast, but they are hanging on by grim death, one or two of them, so we shall do our best to get them sensible or get them gone.
	I don't know. I mean, this is probably...
	Maybe this is sort of culty-culty on my part, but to me it's just a little bit annoying when someone who's a Buddhist comes to...
	Comes to a philosophy show, or comes to a philosophy board, and then ends up talking all about Buddhism.
	I mean, to me, that's just a little bit rude.
	In the same way that if I went to a Buddhist forum and started talking all about rational philosophy, I guess they can troll.
	They can troll if they want.
	Not troll exactly. I don't mean troll like be bad, but troll like as in put the lion in and see who bites.
	But it's... It's annoying.
	So, anyway, did anybody else have any questions or issues, things they wanted to share?
	I certainly got some news from some people this week that they might want to share with others.
	Or can anyone hear me at all?
	Am I talking to myself? Hello?
	Yeah, yeah, I'm talking about you.
	Yes, you. I'm staring straight at you.
	My pixel friend. How are you doing, Seth?
	I'm good. How are you doing?
	He's in the money.
	I have some massively wonderful news here.
	For those of you following along at home with the saga of the Rodzilla, the letter that I wrote to that former employer who owed me a ton of money, it worked like a charm.
	I wrote a letter, called up a lawyer to see if The tone of the letter was correct and everything like that.
	He said, yeah, it sure is.
	We should do pretty well with it.
	I sent it in and I just a few days ago got a call from the HR woman at the company.
	She was really great. She was actually one of my favorite people at the company.
	She said that she had had a meeting with the new CEO of the company and the company lawyer.
	I guess this new CEO is a reasonably stand-up guy.
	And so I guess on July 3rd they'll be receiving new funding.
	I guess it's the new quarter or something like that.
	And I guess I'm going to be getting a check right off the top of that for all the stuff that they owe me plus 10% per year since.
	Wow! That's nice.
	Yeah, it's really good.
	That's a lot more reasonable than the interest I'm charging people who haven't donated yet.
	So I must say that's quite impressive.
	That is quite impressive.
	It's really great.
	The most amazing thing is that this has been one of the biggest monkeys on my back for years.
	This has been going on since 2003, I think.
	My gosh, it's all starting to fall into place now.
	I've got new businesses started up.
	Nice chunk of seed capital right there, right?
	A little bit of capital is falling into place right at the same time, so it's, wow, it's just amazing.
	Well, that's great. That's great.
	I mean, that's just fantastic.
	And so how are you feeling?
	I mean, you must be over the moon.
	Yeah, I don't know. I think until I get the check in hand, I think I'm just going to try to keep myself a little calmed down about it, but it is really, really, really exciting.
	I mean, I got off the phone with...
	The lady from the company, and I was sitting at work, and I literally had to clap my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.
	It was just such a rush, you know?
	I used to have that at work, too, but for different reasons, but I know what you mean, for sure.
	For sure. I think that's fantastic.
	So what is the schedule now?
	When can we start ordering all of our graphics and design and engineering needs from the great new company?
	You can start anytime you want.
	Let's see. I think actually the web address for just the information that I have is on the profile for this gizmo thing, but so far it's just a really extremely rudimentary web page.
	It's just a placeholder, more or less.
	And would you like to mention it for the nice listeners, 25,000 people who might enjoy your services?
	That's okay. They can go through the...
	The boards. I'll put up a little blurb about it on the boards.
	Right. Right. Okay.
	Excellent. Well, that's fantastic.
	I mean, that is just beyond thrilling.
	And I think that's great.
	And I think, you know, I mean, I think it was worth waiting.
	A, 10% a year is not a bad return on investment.
	Not too bad.
	Oh, we had a request to post it on the chat, your website.
	And also, I mean, if you had...
	I mean, these kinds of things, you never know, right?
	Because it could just be this new guy who's more rational and decent.
	But it could also be that you have been able to...
	I mean, it's amazing how dense human communication is.
	So you have, in the letter that you put together, you probably had a certainty and a directness that got action far more quickly than might have been the case in the past when you were sort of ambivalent about it or scared of it or whatever.
	So, waiting until the right time is usually a really good idea.
	Yeah, actually, when I put the letter together, I showed it to a few people and they're all saying, my gosh, this is really good.
	You know, they said it sounded like a lawyer put it together and stuff like that.
	So it was, yeah, I just said that, pretty much to paraphrase, I said, I'm just reminding you that you still owe me this.
	I'm still expecting it.
	And as you know, the simple interest has been gaining on the principal at a rate of 10% per year.
	And if you pay me the full amount within 15 days of the date of this letter, I'll drop everything.
	I'll inform the Labor Commission that this has been paid and the case is closed.
	And if you don't, then I'll pursue the recovery of my, you know, what's due me by any means possible, including, you know, this, this, and this, and so on.
	It was a very direct and assertive letter that left absolutely no wiggle room.
	That's great. I mean, that's just fantastic.
	All I can say is, go, go, Rodzilla.
	That's just beyond wonderful.
	So what are you planning on doing with the money?
	Well, there has been a large chunk of credit card debt that's been sitting on my credit card since this non-payment thing started.
	There will be that.
	That's all the hookers and blow stuff, right?
	Yeah, there's hookers and blow, especially in California.
	Oh, I don't think they have any there.
	The demand is higher out here.
	Yeah, there is going to be a Solid chunk of donation coming your way because that literally could not have happened, I think, without you and Christina.
	Well, I appreciate that, of course, but remember that your business is the key, right?
	But I appreciate that.
	Whatever you think is fair and right and whatever makes you feel good, I certainly hugely appreciate it, but if you chose to send nothing, you've been very generous already, so whatever you feel is right.
	I've already... I've already kind of capitalized my business by buying just a huge Hoss of a computer and a package of SolidWorks, which is a 3D design package.
	Right, and remember, I think this first came up a couple of months ago, and this is why I was saying as far as donators go, because for us, it's 10% a week, and I think it's been about 12 weeks so far since this first came up.
	Christina, can you help me remember that?
	Oh dear, she's leaving the room.
	In shame.
	So 10% a week.
	Oh, wow.
	You know, do you want to just send it straight up here?
	I'll just sign the back of the check.
	I'll endorse it and send it forward.
	You know, I'd like you to think of this as really just a moral victory.
	Not financial. Not financial in any way, shape, or form.
	Mostly Pyrrhic is the way that it should work.
	Yeah, Christina says congratulations.
	She doesn't have a mic, but yeah, fantastic, fantastic.
	And I mean, this is great because this is foundational too to you moving forward.
	Now that you can do this and you know you can do it, right, then as you deal with potential customers, because people are going to be late paying your bills.
	They're going to give you the runaround.
	This is just natural as far as a startup goes, right?
	I mean, My experience with the startup stuff is, you know, the really reliable people don't do business with you because they already have people they're doing business with, right?
	So you do have to take some more dodgy contracts and knowing that you could be firm in the collection and firm in the whole relationship.
	I mean, it's very hard to be retroactively firm with people, but you can, you know, in the whole relationship up front, you're a stand-up guy, you're strong, you're, you know, you're firm without being stern, you're, you know, fair without being soppy And what happens is then when it comes time to ask for payment, you've got a whole history of how these people perceive you and how they see what you're all about.
	And then it's real easy, right?
	But if you've sort of been like I was earlier in my career in the software world, you know, just sort of head-ducking and, you know, tugging my forelock and clutching my hat in my hands and saying, oh, any work you give me would be wonderful!
	Right? Then there's a whole relationship and perception that's set up then that makes it that much more difficult down the road.
	But, you know, you going in this, you know, 20 feet tall and, you know, 300 pounds of muscle, that's fantastic.
	Yeah, it's really cool.
	Oh, there's another thing that, speaking of reputation or something that, let's see, a little over a week ago, I guess, I had a dinner on Friday night with a guy I used to work with.
	He was my boss's boss at my previous company.
	Before this one, I'm just leaving.
	About a year ago, he and I and another guy were close to going into a three-way partnership of like a consulting firm type thing and for various reasons and my own financial insecurity at the time kind of played into the fact that we just didn't start it up.
	But now that I've launched my own business this time and he's still doing contracting himself and So we discussed the possibility of partnering up on a lot of projects because he has a really solid reputation in the field of medical devices for project management and things like that.
	He was saying that because I told him that it's really great for me to have someone who I respect so much I want to work with you.
	And he said, well, the reason I want to is because you're a very creative engineer and that can be pretty rare sometimes.
	So he said that I'm looking forward to the chance to working with you.
	So it was really kind of a cool thing to see someone or to hear someone who I respect so much mirror that back to me.
	So I must be doing something right, I guess.
	Right, right. Well, you know, and it's funny, this is something that I've sort of noticed that You know, I sort of wish in a way, not to feed vanity, but just sort of genuinely, that I sort of wish in a way that there were more compliments flowing around in the world.
	You know, I think that we, this is just a minor aesthetic thing, it doesn't have to do with ethics, but I think that, you know how nice it is to sort of receive that kind of compliment.
	I think that it would be nice if there was a little bit more of that floating around in the world, and of course it would be nice if more people were competent, but I sometimes think that people do get a little bit...
	Yeah, and the other thing that's cool is that the company that I'm leaving, a few people have asked me for a bunch of my business cards so that they can hand them out,
	and again, that's kind of another thing that's Just really good for the self-esteem is to know that there's going to be people recommending me because what that means is that they're going to be kind of staking their vouching for me.
	And so they're kind of putting their own reputation out there with it.
	So that's another kind of a cool thing.
	Yeah, and just remember, you know, under-promise and over-deliver.
	That's the way to build a long-term business as far as I... I mean, I was working at a startup for eight years and...
	Just under-promise and over-deliver, right?
	Hedge what you think you can give, and then make people...
	People will only remember the difference between what you promised and what you gave them.
	They won't remember what you promised, and so that would be my other suggestion.
	Right. Well, cool.
	That's very good advice.
	Did you have anything else that you wanted to talk about just now, or mostly it was just crowing about your massive legal victory?
	No, I think that's about enough.
	And again, thank you so much for those magic words that you said to me a couple of weeks ago somehow unlocked something really important there.
	Well, it really is. Shazam, the cabra, is definitely an underutilized phrase.
	And so, you know, pay it forward as best you can.
	Congratulations. Fantastic.
	I mean, that's just beyond thrilling.
	Good for you. Alright, did we have anybody else who wanted to come back in before Greg comes back with his laundry list of biblical proportions of questions?
	You can post questions here if you'd prefer a call, that's fine too, whichever one you like.
	Typing is better because then I can interpret it however I want and it's usually harder to correct, but it's up to you.
	I'm going to put the on-hold music on until I get some questions.
	So think of it as punishment.
	No! They say that's right.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	It's either that or me singing, sayeth the wife.
	You know, you got the most compliments of anyone out of that last song that we did together.
	Although nobody made any comments.
	I had a tiny little thing in there that was very subtle.
	Which was when Christina said, don't you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk?
	Right in the background. I'm like, no, not really.
	But it was subtle. All right.
	No, I don't see anything in the chat window yet.
	Just chapter one of a novel, I think.
	It was a dark and stormy text window.
	Suddenly a shot rang out.
	Okay, so nobody else and nobody else?
	Going once, going twice, going thrice.
	Can people hear me or no?
	I can hear you and other people can, for sure.
	Okay. I think there might be a problem with my voice card, but I was on the boards earlier yesterday and we were discussing the is-ought dilemma.
	I'd be happy to debate that point in the meantime, if you want.
	Absolutely, yeah, for sure.
	By what name can I call it thou?
	Franklin is good. Franklin, excellent.
	Okay, go ahead. Well, I mean, I don't know how to frame it, because it was a long time ago I actually listened to your podcast on the Is-Ort Dilemma, so if you wanted to frame things by briefly recounting your view on it...
	Do you think I've listened to it more recently?
	They just passed through me like Chinese food.
	I figured you'd be more familiar with your own views.
	I don't know. Sure, sure. Well, the Azor Dilemma is nothing that I came up with.
	It's all the way back to Hume, and it really was at the end of the religious...
	Religion solves a lot of problems in a very bad way, right?
	So, why should we be good is the fundamental question of ethics, right?
	I mean, there is what is ethics, but what is ethics is...
	It's only after you say, why should we be good?
	If you say, why should we eat well?
	Well, then you can answer that, and then you can say, what should we eat that is good?
	So you have to answer the why should we be good?
	And religion, of course, says that goodness is defined by whatever the priest tells you to do, and that the reason you should do it is because God will light your soul up for eternity in a hellish fire of damnation.
	So that's a bit of a hysterical over-answer, I think, to put it mildly and highly abusive to the psyche and soul.
	But the question of why be good is Hume sort of exploded this early on in the Enlightenment, late Renaissance, early Enlightenment, sort of 18th century.
	He was a rather rotund Scottish philosopher.
	And his argument basically was that there is no such thing as should in the world, right?
	I mean, there's lots of things...
	In the world, there's trees and rocks and so on.
	Do you basically agree with Hume's position, or no?
	Well, sure, yeah. To me, it's indisputable, unless there's something I've missed.
	I think Hume's argument is something of an argument from ignorance.
	He's saying, well, I can't see that the facts of reality imply a moral obligation or a way men have to orient themselves to the world.
	Therefore, they don't.
	And I don't think that reasoning is valid, because we frequently don't see the connection in places, and yet there is one.
	Well, but... Sorry, I think...
	I mean, you could be right, and maybe you've read a lot more Hume than I have, but what I recall from school was that people thought that obligations existed in terms of God's commandments and God's expectations and God's punishments and so on, and so there was an ought...
	A should in the world called God.
	And Hume was saying, if you don't believe in God, and he got into some trouble for these views, right?
	I mean, if you don't believe in God, then there's no such thing as a should.
	Like, in the same way that, for Plato, numbers and the perfect chair, they all exist in this world of forms.
	They exist objectively in some other realm.
	And, of course, the Aristotelian view is, no, they don't.
	They're concepts that exist in our mind.
	Now, my view, of course, is that...
	Ethics are like the scientific method.
	The scientific method does not exist in the real world, right?
	There's no little chest where they have a big bag of the scientific method somewhere, like they'd have a bag of stones or whatever.
	But the scientific method is not subjective, right?
	So that to me is the same sort of thing.
	Ethics, like numbers and like concepts, does not exist in the real world, but can be subject to logical and empirical norms.
	Okay, there's a lot to chew there.
	You're an anti-realist in terms of numbers as well, philosophy of numbers?
	Yeah, the numbers don't exist in the real world, but that doesn't mean that math is arbitrary.
	Well, I think I disagree with that, actually.
	I don't know if it will necessarily prove to be related to our discussion of the Islaught Dilemma, but They do exist as relations between classes of objects and as properties of bodies, right?
	Well, perhaps you can tell me first what you mean by existence.
	Well, I understand that you could have different classes of existence.
	You could say there's such a thing as physical instantiation, but then there's also existence as a property, and I would hold that those are two Fundamentally different kinds of existence.
	I wouldn't say that there's physical instantiation for numbers, but I would say that numbers exist as a way of classifying properties that are inherently similar or relations between classes of entities.
	But they exist in the mind, not in the world, right?
	Like when human beings weren't around, there were still trees and rocks.
	And before human beings were around, there were a hundred trees in a forest.
	But the concept 100 did not exist in reality until human beings came along.
	I don't think the concept existed, but the relations that the concepts referred to existed.
	Well, can you tell me what you mean by relations and whether they exist in reality?
	There was always a potential for this identification or for this concept to emerge.
	Well sure, of course.
	I mean, sorry, when I say three coconuts, if there are in fact three coconuts, I'm accurate, and there are three coconuts, but the number three, or the relationship between them, is the conceptual aggregation in my mind.
	It's not something that exists subjectively in the real world.
	Well, but this conceptual, the ability for this concept to exist, this concept can only exist that there's something in nature, there's some physical property that allows for It's formation, right?
	Well, it's true for numbers, for sure, but that's the ontological proof of God, right?
	Which is to say there's an idea of God, therefore there's a God?
	Which I'm not saying you're making the argument of, but...
	Oh, no, no, no, no, I wouldn't. Well, I would say that it's different with numbers because they're such a relatively primitive concept.
	With God, the reason that argument fails is, I mean, just to reference Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, He has a section in there where he basically looks at the ontological argument and he modifies it and he says, well, the reason that God is different from things like unicorns is that a unicorn is actually made up of parts of more basic concepts, right?
	Right. And God isn't.
	But actually, you can account for the idea of a concept of God by accumulating Descartes actually sort of clarified things in a way that didn't really help his argument very well.
	So I'd say that he actually does have a point if The concept in question is something that's fundamentally unreducible, because you couldn't arrive at something.
	You can kind of mentally put categories together, but those fundamental categories can't exist out of nothing.
	Right, and so I think that you and I are probably on the same page.
	If we were to say, if every single human being left the planet, there would be no such thing as the concept of numbers that would be left behind.
	Yeah, but there would still be a property in nature that would allow for that concept to be developed potentially, and there would be the reference of that concept still.
	Well, and those two words, and I'm sorry, this is just a language thing, I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying.
	For sure, if I put three coconuts on the table, and then every human being leaves the planet, there are still three coconuts on the table.
	I mean, I have no problem with that.
	Object consistency is pretty basic, but...
	But there's nothing in reality that exists independently of the physical entities that would constitute a property other than the observation of it, right?
	So there's no number three floating like a sort of shimmering arc of electricity between these three coconuts, right?
	For sure, there are three coconuts, but they only exist as atoms in space and energy, right?
	It's only matter, and we can, of course, it's like matter with space between it, so we can count three coconuts.
	But the number three leaves the planet with all the human beings, right?
	The properties are the same whether we apply number three.
	If I look at three coconuts and say, that's four coconuts, I haven't changed the nature of the coconuts in any way.
	And if all human beings leave the planet, the nature of the coconuts themselves has not been changed in any way.
	Do we agree on that or is that something that you think is different?
	I mean, I would... I definitely don't agree with the Platonic conception that there is some form of three out there that the coconuts participate in.
	Right. That I would just refute using Occam's razor.
	I'd say, well, you can just say, no, you don't need to evoke another world in order to explain it.
	Therefore, the principle of parsimmy, you know what I'm saying, parsimmy, would allow us to do away with that.
	But there is something in nature that The property refers to, otherwise it wouldn't be a useful thing to ascribe to objects, right?
	Oh, for sure, yeah. For sure.
	I mean, the three coconuts all have similar atoms, they have similar biological structures, they have similar sizes, similar physical properties.
	So for sure, human beings, the concepts that we derive from grouping-like objects are valid, right, to the degree that we correctly identify.
	Like objects, right? So for me, the conceptual derivation that goes on in our minds from observation of things in the real world, it's not subjective, right?
	I can't just look at three coconuts and say, oh look, there's two coconuts and a ballerina, right?
	I mean, it's not just something that you can make up.
	But it also, for me, the concept numbers exist entirely within the human mind.
	That doesn't make it subjective, right?
	The scientific method exists entirely within the human mind, but that doesn't mean that the scientific method is subjective because it's derived from and describes the actions of matter and energy in reality, which is not subjective.
	Well, then, just to clarify things, I think there's a question I'd have to ask, which is, what is it about nature, then, that makes the mind's formulation of that concept exist?
	Because there has to be something...
	atoms? Yeah, atoms.
	I mean, it's all the way back to Democritus, right?
	But the reason that concepts are valid is twofold.
	One, is that atoms have like properties, and two, that universal laws of gravity and thermodynamics and all that exist, right?
	So, the reason that we know that carbon is carbon and gold is gold is because carbon atoms have particular properties which show up Through the evidence of the senses and because gold atoms have particular properties, shiny and whatever kind of stuff that translate through our senses.
	So the reason the concepts are valid is because the laws of the universe are universal and constant and absolute and because atoms have particular properties which we can figure out through the senses.
	But the numbers are used more extensively than that, right?
	They don't just refer to the properties of atoms.
	They refer to the properties of energy, spatial relations.
	So there has to be something more than that going on in order to give a full account of the usefulness of number, right?
	No, sorry, I thought you meant concepts as a whole.
	For sure, yeah, no, numbers are more specific, and of course you have numbers referring to things that don't exist in the real world, negative numbers and bizarre things like that that don't exist in the real world, right?
	So, for sure, they're an extrapolation, but if there was no constancy in matter, obviously we wouldn't exist as a species, but if there was no constancy in matter and no specific properties...
	I think our theory of concepts is sufficiently similar for us to move on.
	If something comes up, we'll just discuss it.
	My problem with the is-ought dichotomy is, first, I think it's an argument from ignorance, as it appears in Hume.
	He says, I don't see the connection, therefore there isn't a connection.
	And I don't think that's valid.
	You need to demonstrate You need to arrive at something more, that there's some sort of logical contradiction involved in assuming there's a connection in order to definitively prove there's no connection.
	And second, I think if you look at the nature of organisms, you can see that there are certain conditions that benefit their survival and their happiness or their well-being, let's say health, and there are certain other conditions that don't.
	And the nature of ought is That if you're a living being, you should, in order to continue to live, act in a certain way that your own nature and natural law creates a moral law for you because you are a living entity.
	That's basically Rand's view of it.
	Given that, then the is-ought dichotomy only Leaves you with a single question, which is, do I want to live or do I not want to live?
	I think it's a safe assumption that most people want to live, since people who die just go ahead and do so and cease to be a problem when it comes to the nature of moral evaluation.
	Right, and I mean, I certainly respect hugely the Randian contribution to ethics.
	I find some problems with it, which doesn't mean anything if it's true or false, it just means I have some problems with it, but...
	The challenge is that the flourishing of the organism occurs at the individual level, right?
	There's no such thing as the good of the species when it comes to genetics, right?
	That's Dawkins' argument, and I think it's a good one, right?
	He says that it's not the human species that flourishes, it's individuals, right?
	Now, for certain individuals, flourishing occurs at the expense of everyone else, right?
	So... There's no such thing as that which is good for the human species as a whole.
	There's that which is good for each individual.
	So if you happen to be a violent sociopath, you will flourish much more by provoking conflict and violence and so on, and you will flourish directly at the expense of those who don't like violence.
	Well, I mean, I'm not sure that...
	I have some problems with Dawkins...
	The way Dawkins just totally rejects, by the way, can you still hear me?
	Yep. Okay.
	The idea of species-based selection, because while I would agree that gene is the primary unit of selection, the radical version of his law would say that there actually is no individual selection, right?
	Because the gene is the primary unit of natural selection, and the body is just sort of this This machine that genes use to propagate itself.
	Right, like I'm just the method by which my little toe makes another little toe, right?
	Exactly. Or even worse, just creates DNA that corresponds to that little toe.
	But we still have and use this idea of health.
	And we still think it's relatively well-defined or at least something you can use as a general rule in practice without much problem, even though Strictly speaking, in terms of natural selection, this idea is not the best way to account for natural selection, right? Well, I agree, but I think that the problem with the Randian approach is that it assumes a species-wide ethics.
	And ecologically, or I guess more biologically, individual flourishing can often occur at the great expense of others, right?
	So this is the Genghis Khan example, where it's like one out of 200 Asians...
	is descended from Genghis Khan, right?
	Because he was a brutal dictator who raped everything in his path, right?
	So as far as the flourishing of his health and so on goes, the transmission of his genes, the success of his life, he did a lot better through brutality than his victims did by not being brutal.
	Yeah, but if you looked at the totality of genes of brutal people versus non-brutal people, there are more genes of non-brutal people, even though Genghis Khan was amazingly The class is less successful even if the individual might be an exception.
	In poker tournaments, the guy who has the chip lead at the end of the first day is always some reckless idiot who just gambles wildly.
	But the person who wins the tournament is normally a guy who played the optimal strategy.
	And the way you account for this is if you look at the reckless people as a class, On average, they didn't do as well as the people who played the correct strategy.
	And it just happened that one of them was very successful because there's a wider variance in it.
	Well, and again, I'm just working empirically here, but if you look around the world, I think it's fairly safe to say that brutal people tend to be in charge of countries around the world.
	And so the survival strategy for the people who are not violent is just, you know, keep your head down, don't ask questions, don't cause any problems, and hope to breed before you get killed, right?
	So as far as success goes, the average Iraqi was far less successful in terms of satisfying his wants than Saddam Hussein was, right?
	So what was good for Saddam Hussein, and obviously he thought it was good because he did it, was to become a brutal dictator and kill lots of people, and that caused him, as an individual, to flourish.
	And that's the problem I have with the Randian approach, that each individual can have that which is good for me, which is very different, From that who he preys upon, right?
	If he becomes a parasitical organism, and human beings can definitely do this, this is the foundation of most societies, right?
	You have a priestly class and a warrior class and an aristocracy that feeds upon the average.
	They do very well out of it, right?
	And they tend to flourish quite nicely.
	And then you can say, well, yes, but they become unhappy and so on, but that's a different argument.
	Well, but I don't...
	I actually think...
	I mean, not to stretch the poker analogy, but I think what it is is that Saddam Hussein was playing a strategy that is objectively inferior, on average, but that has a much wider potential profit margin.
	And even that's possibly wrong, because I would say Bill Gates is a more successful man than Saddam Hussein was.
	Well, yes, but that's only in a free market, right?
	In a free market. If Bill Gates was born in Iraq, he would be killed.
	In the world of the free market, for sure, Saddam Hussein would do less well than Bill Gates.
	But in Iraq, in a dictatorship, in a brutal environment, in an environment of violence, and I would dare say evil, then Saddam Hussein does a whole lot better than Bill Gates.
	So Hitler was an unemployed bum who, because he was able to get his horrible theories more generally accepted, became the ruler of half to half of a dozen countries.
	And so that's the challenge, that when you talk about success within individuals, you have the problem that evil people succeed by preying on good people.
	And like the Queen, right? The Queen of England has a survival strategy that requires virtually no effort on her part relative to others.
	And so she's doing a whole lot better because of that system, although it's enforced through violence.
	Well, but I think that the The premise is the fact that some people do benefit more than they would from that mode of behavior.
	It doesn't follow that that mode of behavior has the highest expected value, so to speak, for men generally, right?
	But there is no such thing as men generally.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's my fundamental issue.
	There is no such thing as men generally.
	To me, that's the flaw with the Randian argument.
	That there's no such thing.
	I mean, there's each individual that's going to try and maximize his resource usage with the minimal amount of effort.
	And I think you and I are on the same page that I believe in universal and absolute ethics, and I'm sure you do as well.
	But I don't think that the proof of them is well for men in general because there's no such thing.
	There's individuals making choices to advance their own interests.
	And some people do far better by using violence than they would through the free market.
	Well, I'm not saying that there's a general commonwealth or a general interest.
	I'm saying that there is a single...
	There is something in nature that allows us to objectively identify men as belonging to the class of human being, right?
	This is not just an arbitrary designation.
	No, I agree with that, but one of the things that we know is that it is a very powerful, potent, and successful survival strategy for certain individuals to use violence to get what they want.
	I don't think it is.
	I think what it is is that It would be like saying, well, there's no reason to not play the lottery, right?
	Because some people do very well with the lottery.
	They hit it big and then they're rich.
	But that's just because they got insanely lucky.
	The lottery is actually an objectively bad investment.
	Well, but governments are not.
	Governments and the military are not.
	Saddam Hussein, like a third of the people or a quarter of the people, I think, in Iraq, works directly for the government through the Ba'ath Party or something else.
	And they did far better by obeying Saddam Hussein than they would have by fighting Saddam Hussein.
	So governments are this massive transfer mechanism from the average to the minority, from the majority to the minority.
	That minority does a lot better under that system than they probably would under the free market.
	I mean, if you go to your post office and you see the average postal worker, and if you think, gee, you know, if that service got privatized, they'd make a lot less money, get a lot less benefits, they'd have to work harder.
	So for them, it would be a net negative, just in terms of resources, to not be in a system which is supported by coercion.
	Well, I know that Rand got this argument a lot, but I think the question is, would you rather be an average guy, average Joe, In a society where people are free to use their minds to the best of their ability to create the products, because anything that has value is in some way the product of someone's mind.
	Would you rather be an average Joe in 20th century United States, or would you rather be the king of some mud village out in the middle of nowhere?
	The things that give our life value and support our continued survival are all products of the mind, and the use of force is contrary to the creation of those products.
	I don't think Saddam Hussein is better off than an average person is in a free society.
	Well, I would agree with you, but the issue is that Saddam Hussein didn't think that.
	Well, yeah, but he was just wrong.
	Well, but you can't use that.
	I mean, that's begging the question, right?
	You're trying to establish that he was wrong, and then you can't say, but he was wrong.
	He was certainly right for himself, right?
	Because he, as a crazy, evil sociopath, did a whole lot better having his 20 palaces to sleep in and, you know, all the gold he could eat and all, right?
	He did a whole lot better in that society than he would have done under a free society, or at least that was his belief, right?
	Yeah, but I think it was a false belief.
	I mean, he... He had to be constantly worried about rebellion.
	His life was constantly under the threat of violence.
	In fact, he did die a violent death.
	He didn't live as long as he otherwise would have.
	He was in prison the last years of his life and executed.
	Right, and this is where the Randian argument has to go, which is to say, and this is back to the Platonic thing, right?
	Not in terms of the forms, but the moral philosopher, when faced with somebody who clearly chooses evil, right?
	Because Saddam Hussein could have left the country at any time and gone into exile anonymously in Brazil, right?
	So he chose to stay as the head of this dictatorship.
	So you can say, well, he was hunted and he was paranoid and he was this and he was that, but he could have left at any time.
	Clearly he preferred to stay in that environment.
	That was his preference. And so then the ethicist has to say, well, secretly he was unhappy.
	But now you're out of the realm of proof, right?
	The proof is that we know that Saddam Hussein believed that he was doing a lot better in his environment by being a brutal dictator.
	And the evidence is, at least according to the objective evidence, is that he did do very well in that environment and certainly a lot better than he would have had somebody else, right?
	Because in that kind of social situation, which I agree was wrong, and you and I agree with that, If Saddam Hussein is like, well, either I take power or someone else is going to take power and they're going to kill me or they're going to threaten me or they're going to rape my wife because that's the cultural ethic.
	So we do have to, I think, just assume that he did what he wanted because he thought it was the best and he didn't find it too unpleasant to be paranoid and to be watched and to feel the danger because he obviously didn't choose to live a different life and he didn't leave despite the billions of dollars he had and go and find some other secret place to live.
	Hmm. I mean, I agree with you that there's absolutely right and wrong, and I agree with you that he was an evil guy.
	I don't think the Randian argument does it.
	I mean, obviously, I have a different argument, right?
	But I think that...
	Sorry, go ahead. I think what it is is that we're looking at the individual Saddam Hussein and seeing his success, and we're not looking at the class of people who chose to live their life according to violence.
	I mean, I think Saddam Hussein is the guy who won the lottery, or, you know, was the guy who was making the bad investments, but just...
	He just got insanely lucky with some D-class bonds, right?
	But everyone else around him too, right?
	His extended family and a quarter of the Iraqi population who worked for him.
	It wasn't just him, it was a whole bunch of people who cashed in on Saddam Hussein, the same way that companies that give money to presidential candidates can cash in as well.
	There's a whole class of people, and this is how society in general is organized.
	That's hegemonic and violent and hierarchical, even here in the West.
	And there's lots of people who do enormously well.
	Look at all the people who are profiting from the war in Iraq.
	They do enormously well because of this kind of violence.
	It's not just one person. Violence as a whole works really well for a very large class of people.
	That's why they do it, and that's why they don't give it up.
	But better than nonviolence works for the class of people who adhere to nonviolence?
	But it doesn't matter because they're making their decisions based on their own self-interest.
	And their own self-interest is to have a system wherein they offload the costs of enforcement to the cops and the military and they get to keep all the profits, right?
	So if you're a bad teacher, you want to be in a government-run school system, because otherwise you won't have a job.
	That's better for you, in terms of other people have to pay the cost of collecting the taxes and enforcing it, and you can just go around being a bad teacher and not get fired.
	So it's better for you as an individual.
	I agree with you that rationalism and pacifism is best, but I don't agree that it's best for everyone, because empirically it's just not so.
	I mean, I do think the issue is that I'm evaluating things on the basis of how would it work generally, and you seem to be evaluating on the basis, well, it works in this particular circumstance.
	But that's how people live.
	That's how people make their decisions.
	Like, the reality is that the world is organized by a brutal cartel of people, and it's a very large cartel of people.
	If you include the public sector, it's usually between 25 and 35 percent of society.
	It's a very large group of people who use the force to get what it is that they want.
	And clearly they think that it's better for them.
	And we can make an argument and say, well, Saddam Hussein, if you step down, then society will be better off in general.
	But that's not how people make their decisions, right?
	They make their decisions based on what is best for me individually.
	And a very large number of people decide that coercion or the fruits thereof are beneficial.
	And that's the way the world works.
	I think it's evil and so do you.
	But I don't think that we can make the case based on the general benefits to mankind because that's not how people make decisions, right?
	And that's...
	I mean, that's clearly not how people make decisions.
	Now, maybe it's how they should make decisions, but that's begging the question.
	So we have to sort of try and establish that that's an inevitable result of the reasoning.
	Well, I mean, but I think that if you live your life knowing that what you do is steal from other people because...
	You know, you and I both agree that's basically what...
	Sorry, my sound card is a little messed up.
	What was I saying? Then, you have to constantly live with the knowledge that A, you're engaging in a behavior that's parasitical and potentially destructive as the very source of the thing that you live off of, right?
	Because there's a chance that people will just stop producing for you.
	And... You also have to carry with yourself the knowledge that you're not actually an efficacious being to survive in this world, that you're just a parasite.
	And I think it's safe to say that it's in the nature of man to be happiest when he has a sense of self-efficacy.
	I don't think Saddam Hussein was a happy man.
	I don't think Hitler was a happy man.
	I don't think Stalin was a happy man.
	Well, and you could be right, and there's lots and lots of ways in which I would agree with you.
	I think that they were absolutely probably quite miserable.
	But they were happier doing what they were doing than anything else they could have been doing, and we know that because that's what they did.
	If you're going to use the argument from unhappiness, if you can't use the argument from how human beings should live as a whole, which I don't think is valid, then you have to use the argument from unhappiness.
	But then you face the problem of saying, well, if evil makes everybody unhappy and human beings prefer happiness to unhappiness, why are so many people evil?
	Well, I think I've gotten this objection before that if there's a moral law kind of written in human nature, why is it that people just don't automatically follow this law?
	Because grasshoppers automatically do what's best for grasshoppers as a general rule, or moths for moths, except when they're flying into the flame or whatever, that this is only really a problem for men.
	I don't think that you can conclude that just because they did what they did that that was what they were happiest doing because they were ignorant of the moral law.
	You don't conclude that a person took the best route from point A to point B because that was the route he took.
	You can still argue that he took a bad route, that he took a route that didn't meet the teleological end he sought or should have sought as efficiently as he could.
	Right, but I think that when you do see the vast majority of people taking a particular route that you don't think is best, I think it's very important to say, well, why are they taking it?
	Moth to the flame, I mean, because there's something in their nature that makes it difficult for them to process the correct mode of behavior that they should be following.
	Well, that's certainly a possibility.
	I don't know that that's been subjected to empirical proof.
	So, for instance, I mean, the way to prove this theory would be a psychological experiment where you would look at people in prison and you would inform them of the moral law and you'd see if you could get them to change and you'd also find out their degree of relative unhappiness and why it is that they did what they did even though it made it unhappy.
	I mean, this is something that would be subject to empirical testing.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess the problem is just Testing it because they're testing theory.
	And one of the reasons it's so difficult to investigate human behavior is that they're moral sanctions, right, on what you can and can't test.
	And the self-reporting too, right?
	Yeah, and self-reporting.
	The Milgram experiment was a fantastic, from a purely scientific perspective, it was a fantastic result, right?
	But the moral The hell those people must have been put through when they learned that about themselves is something incredible.
	Now, the other thing that I would say is that, and to me, we're starting from the same place and we're ending up at the same place.
	It's just some of the steps in the middle that I find problematic.
	The other challenge is that the argument that either there is a general moral law that people should obey or that there's an inbuilt moral nature to human beings that they will become unhappy if they don't obey it This argument has been made for thousands of years, certainly since the pre-Socratic times, and it hasn't done squat to make the world a less bad place.
	In very many ways, the world is worse now than it was because governments have more power, there's weapons of mass destruction, and so on.
	So the other reason that I'm not sure that it's a very good argument is because, looking over history, It doesn't work, right?
	I mean, this argument that evil people are secretly unhappy and they change their ways if they knew what really made them happy and so on, doesn't work, right?
	And the reason that it doesn't work is because there's immediate gains and then there's gains which will accrue to the future and human beings as biological organisms will always tend to gravitate towards immediate gains.
	So I think that just empirically looking at the argument, and Ayn Rand made it very powerfully and very positively, And I don't know that anyone's ever going to make it that well again.
	It still doesn't work, right?
	For me, there's something missing in the argument.
	If a certain cure has been tried for an illness for 2,000 years and that illness keeps getting worse, I think it's time to look for a new cure.
	That's not an argument in a way.
	It's just looking at the empirical history of the argument and seeing how it really doesn't work.
	Well, it seems to me like that argument assumes that there's actually a way to quantify the prevalence of an idea in a society.
	I would argue that, in fact, things have gotten worse precisely because we've moved away from this idea, right?
	I mean, the greatest atrocities we've seen have been in the 20th century, which is the century of phenomenalism, Kant, Hegelianism.
	You know, Marxist communism.
	Sure, sure. Because those beliefs serve people in power, right?
	The same way that religious...
	Subjectivism serves those in power, whether it's religious, post-modernist, Hegelian, right?
	So subjectivism is always going to be the default position of education from those in power, because, right?
	So, and I'm sure you and I would agree with that, that once you become objective, you don't need hegemonic power structures anymore.
	So those beliefs will always come back because they serve the needs of those in power.
	Yeah, but these things that we look at as morally wrong, they have come to exist precisely because people have moved away from the thing I would call the cure, which is understanding of the objective moral law.
	Right, but why have they moved away from it?
	I mean, I have an argument around family history and the argument for morality and so on, but the real question is, why?
	Why do human beings, why is it that the age of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and so on, why is it that there's these tiny little flashes of rationality in human history and then everybody goes stampeding back towards objectivism?
	Well, I mean, the only thing I could say is that it's because practicing moral valuation, proper moral valuation, It's an extremely painful process, right?
	I mean, if you look at all these, if you look at Kant, you look at Hegel, you look at Marx, there's a tendency to kind of want to avoid the pains of reality by submerging yourself in ignorance.
	With Kant, it's the phenomenal noumenal distinction.
	With Hegel, it's the idea that we're just involved in this process that's working itself out.
	The world spirit, yeah. The world spirit, you know.
	And in Marx, it's the idea, well, you know, we don't need to deal with the realities of what our communist society is going to look like because our underlying consciousness is going to change and the economic relations change, and so we can just sort of leave it over there as an undiscovered, you know, promised land that we don't need to think about.
	All these people have shown that what leads them back to the subjectivism is a desire to avoid The painfulness of thought and anticipating future problems.
	I think that that's an excellent analysis.
	I mean there's very little that I would disagree with that and obviously when I say excellent I don't just mean that I agree with it but I think it's a very good analysis.
	But I think then as an ethicist you're going to be faced with the challenge right because you're going to be saying well human beings should be good because it's going to make them happier right so that's part of the argument right that that evil people are unhappy so human beings should be good Because it's going to make them happier and happiness is a motivation.
	The desire to achieve happiness, the desire to avoid pain is a significant motivation for human beings.
	But then you face the problem that evil people or people who are corrupt or people even who are ignorant are going to face great pain when confronting the truth in a philosophical manner.
	So if human beings are motivated by pleasure and pain, which is part of the argument for morality, It's also part of the argument and a significant part of the argument as to why people will not choose to be moral because it's very painful.
	I see what you're getting at.
	It's as if you can't tell a wolf, well, you'd be better off taking up agriculture.
	It's just not in its nature.
	They won't believe you. Saddam Hussein would never believe you that he would be happier if he was a pig farmer or a stockbroker.
	So in a sense, it's almost as if some of these people, and I don't want to sound platonic here, but they're almost too dumb to see that they'd be happier, right?
	Or they've done so much wrong that the pain that they would have to go through would far outweigh any happiness that they might get, right?
	To me, there's a point of no return when it comes to evil, and I think it's mostly around to do with harming children.
	But once you've done so much, if you smoked for 40 years, like two packs a day, and then you quit, you're not going to get better.
	You can't go back to being a non-smoker guy in terms of your health, and it's the same thing with moral corruption.
	Once you've gone so far, then turning back becomes more pain than you could conceivably get back from being a good person, where there's no retribution in particular, right?
	Well, I mean, it's possible then that we have to add the caveat that the moral law requires that a person have a certain amount of intelligence or a certain openness to his intelligence.
	But that's true of any science, right?
	I mean, you can't convince a person of physics or mathematics if they close themselves off to the axioms.
	Well, and you can't convince a priest who makes his money from telling people lies that there's no God.
	I mean, you can, and maybe it'll happen once in a blue moon, but it's so rare that, you know, most atheists don't bother.
	You don't bother going to the Pope and trying to deconvert him from Catholicism or religion, right?
	Because his specific economic interest is in spreading these horrible lies.
	No. So, I know this is argument from effect.
	Oddly enough, it's an argument from effect regarding the argument from morality, but if you don't see the moral laws existing in nature as being absolute, How can you use the argument for morality to convince people?
	Unless you happen to think, well, they do happen to hold the same morality I do.
	Well, that's a long debate, and I don't want to completely eliminate everyone else from it.
	I'll give you my very brief answer.
	No, no, this has been very good.
	I appreciate the rigor.
	My argument is that everybody desperately, completely, and totally wants to be good, wants to be moral.
	And I use some empirical arguments from that.
	Like, if you can convince people that going to pick up a machine gun and get killed in the Somme in 1916...
	is moral, then they will storm the recruiting office to sign up for the draft, right?
	If you can convince people that something is good, then they will do anything to achieve that.
	I think that human beings are completely run by the desire to be moral.
	I think that is inbuilt within us.
	That's why propaganda is so effective and that's why it's used all the time.
	Hitler thought he was being moral and he was able to convince the Germans that he was being moral, which as a result of their own philosophical and psychological history they were right for.
	Patriotism is considered moral, supporting the president going to Iraq.
	Marines are considered moral, and so there are always people who are going to do that.
	The real question is over the definition of the good.
	Whoever controls the definition of the good controls the ethics of society as a whole.
	And so I believe that everybody wants to be good.
	And when you listen to people, they always will justify their own behavior with reference to absolute morality.
	Everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody will do that.
	Even a rapist, a mass murderer will, whatever.
	They will always justify what they were doing.
	according to ethics, right?
	So you need to find the points of agreements that you have in the realm of ethics with people and then use it to widen their definition to the point where they'll give up unhealthy behaviors.
	And if you listen to, I'll send you, just give me a post on the board or send me an email.
	I'll send you to a couple of podcasts where I talk about that.
	But everybody already wants to be ethical.
	They just don't know the definition of it.
	And so you start attacking, so somebody says, well, we should be patriotic.
	But if you can get them to understand that countries don't exist in reality, they're just lines on a map, right?
	They don't really exist in reality, then they'll understand that they're being patriotic towards a fantasy and they won't be able to sustain that.
	So philosophy is just about peeling back all of this nonsense so that people can see the good for what it is.
	Well, so you're saying that the issue is to get people to hold to the correct definition, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I mean, the correct definitions...
	So, if people...
	Like, everybody says don't steal, right?
	Everybody says stealing is wrong or rape is wrong or whatever, right?
	So, if stealing is wrong, if somebody's going to be consistent with that, then they'll very quickly understand that taxation is wrong, right?
	So, you know, this kind of stuff.
	Like, if they say murder is wrong, then you say, well, if somebody puts on a black hat, do they get to kill, right?
	No. Well, what if they put on a green camouflage uniform and call themselves a sergeant, right?
	As soon as people get all the basics, it's just a matter of expanding those definitions consistently, which is the same thing in science, right?
	Everybody knows that rocks fall down.
	It's just about expanding that definition so that you can send a probe to Jupiter, too.
	But if there isn't a moral law, then how is it that there is a correct versus an incorrect definition of morality?
	Well, I mean, that's like saying because the scientific method doesn't exist in reality, how do we know whether anything is true or false, right?
	Or because numbers don't exist in reality, how do we know whether a mathematical theorem is true or false?
	Well, it's logical and consistent and empirically verifiable.
	The same methodology used in all the sciences is used in ethics, right?
	Any ethical proposition, right?
	You don't have to make any, right?
	I mean, but you then can't say there's no such thing as ethics, not that I'm saying you would.
	But you put forward any proposition, you subject it to the same rigor and logic that any other scientific or mathematical proposition would be set to.
	When you say the scientific method doesn't exist in nature, I would say there is something about human nature such that men can only have proper knowledge about certain subjects if they follow X method.
	So that in a sense, the scientific method is present in A law of nature relating to the faculty of man's mind and how it can work.
	What do you mean when you say that the scientific method doesn't exist in nature?
	It's not just a purely arbitrary creation.
	No, no, of course not. But then numbers don't exist in nature, but that doesn't mean that mathematics is arbitrary.
	I mean, concepts are either accurately derived from reality or they're not.
	Concepts are either logical or they're irrational.
	So the concepts which work are those that accurately reflect the nature of reality, which is science, science and so on, and logic.
	So you can't put a mathematical theorem forward which says 2 plus 2 is 5 and 2 plus 2 is 4 at the same time.
	People will just say, I don't care where you go from here, that's wrong.
	And you can't put forward a moral theory which says, Murder is both right and wrong, or theft is both right and wrong simultaneously, right?
	It's one or the other, right? You sort of make up contradictory definitions.
	So if people say, well, theft is wrong, then they have to logically oppose taxation, right?
	Because they can't just make up different rules for different people any more than I can make up different theories of gravity for different rocks.
	So theories have to be universal, consistent, reversible, they have to be logical, they have to be empirically verifiable, ethical theories as well as mathematical theories as well as scientific theories, right?
	It's just expanding the scientific method to include the science of ethics.
	But there has to be something about nature that allows us to have accurately derived concepts, right?
	For sure, and that's atoms and the universality of physical rules, right?
	I mean, that nature doesn't change its rules arbitrarily, and therefore, neither can human beings.
	No, but there is an objective sense in which the idea corresponds to the reality.
	Sure, and the first test of that is, is the concept logical?
	Right? Is it logical? If the concept isn't logical, then there's just no way it can be true in any way, shape, or form, right?
	That's why we know that there's no such thing as a god, right?
	If the concept is innately self-contradictory, we don't have to go hunting all over the universe to find that there's no god, because God is defined as a square circle, and you don't have to go and check every circle to see if it's square.
	You just know that the concept is false, right?
	So if somebody says, theft is both right and wrong simultaneously, then you say, sorry, that's not valid, right?
	Whatever you're going to say about ethics, that for sure is not valid.
	No, no. Well, I agree that one of the tests is that the concept has to be logical.
	It has to be somehow, even if it's through a very indirect chain, relatable to sense perception, But there also has to be something in nature.
	The rules of thought that we find in logic are also rules of nature.
	Sure, I agree. There are these laws, physical laws, and they lead causality to exist in this way.
	And when I say you can't affirm the consequent and arrive that the premise is true, it's because causality doesn't work that way, right?
	Right, right. Sorry, go ahead.
	I guess my question is that it doesn't seem to make sense to me to view concepts as being non-real when they do, in a sense, have to perfectly model something that is real.
	Well, sure, but that's like saying that a mirror is going to perfectly reflect me, but that doesn't mean there's another human being inside the mirror, right?
	I mean, it's not a real human being inside the mirror, it's just a reflection.
	In the same way concepts don't actually have to exist in the real world, They exist in my mind, but they're only valid to the degree that they accurately describe things in reality, the most important thing being the requirement for logical consistency.
	Well, I think maybe where we run across a problem is that the word exist is taken to be sort of a primitive, right?
	It's not a very descriptive term.
	It's used in a lot of different ways.
	I can say the color red exists, but clearly when I say that, I don't...
	I could be referring to the wavelength of the light or the qualia of actually observing red.
	Similarly, I could say the length three meters exists.
	Well, maybe you wouldn't actually be able to say that, but I can speak of existence in different modes, right?
	So maybe we're just...
	I wouldn't say that it physically exists.
	Yeah, I mean, the theory of relativity doesn't exist in the real world in the same way that an atom or a star or gravity does.
	Or in the same way gravity does?
	I mean, yeah, gravity exists as a relationship between two objects that's empirical and measurable and so on, right?
	But the theory of gravity doesn't exist, right?
	Evolution exists as a process.
	The theory of evolution doesn't exist in the real world other than, you know, books and so on, right?
	But it doesn't have an objective existence in the real world.
	But that doesn't mean that the theory...
	Sorry, go ahead. Some people might say, well, gravity is, you know, the shifting of space-time that...
	That relativity refers to.
	So I don't know if you can account for something like...
	Ah, here comes the music.
	Excellent.
	I don't know if this guy's gotten so sick about the bass here.
	He's decided that we're going to...
	I don't know.
	This might be the end of the show, ladies and gentlemen.
	Well, I feel like there's still a lot of issues that we didn't get in touch.
	Well, it's okay. We had a good hour.
	We had a good chat. And I'm glad that we did it this way rather than on the board because that would give us hand-crammed something fierce.
	No, it was. Okay, I can only stand so much more.
	Yeah, that's pretty horrible.
	Good talking to you. Okay, thanks.
	Bye. Okay, yeah, we're going to go out on this music.
	Thank you so much, everybody.
	Appreciate it. And...

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