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Sept. 23, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:29:24
869 Sunday Call In Show Sep 23 2007

Breaking curfew, freedom without politics, dealing with muslims and surviving professors

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I just posted for the Gold Plus listeners a really fascinating conversation that I had with somebody who was in the Jehovah's Witness Protection Program.
What that means is that he was in the Jehovah's Witness, and then he got out, and his wife is still in.
And we had quite an interesting chat about it.
It's not quite as dramatic as I'm making it out, but you have to grab your drama in philosophy where you can.
So I thought I would mention that.
That's out of the Gold Plus section.
I sent out email invites to those who are in those sections.
The second draft of the book...
Universally preferable behavior.
A Secular Theory of Ethics... Ethics, ethics...
Is almost done.
And Christina has managed to stay awake for...
Well, yeah, 50 pages, but only about a page and a half at a time.
So, actually, this is going to be the kind of book that, if I don't make enough money selling it as a book of philosophy, it's going to be used as an arcoleptic for open-heart surgery.
So, I have great hopes for it in many, many areas.
So, just...
I'm actually very, very pleased with it.
It's more technical than on truth, but you will be getting more words per dollar.
And that really is what I'm aiming for, because at Freedom Aid Radio, as always...
Quality is quantity.
I don't have any particularly huge topics just now, because I've been working on this book, and there's not much point in me talking about the topics in the book, because then your cheapskates won't buy it.
If you wanted to pop forward and pop up with questions, I would be more than happy to receive them.
Over to you, listeners.
Okay. Well, I was out Friday night, and I was supposed to come home.
At 1 o'clock.
And I didn't come home until 3 o'clock.
And apparently my dad came home and I didn't know that he was going to get home so late.
He got home at 3 and saw that I wasn't home and called me.
Anyway, we got into a discussion.
He was saying, you know, you keep saying you're all about ethics and honesty and all this stuff.
But it's all, you know...
But you're not living by what you say, and you're not acting with integrity.
Anyway, it's a long story.
I got into a conversation with him on that, and he went as far as saying, I actually don't care about ethics.
and I said that that's not true I just you know I anyway I felt like I felt like he didn't he didn't really want to know anything about what I felt or believed He just wanted to use the fact that I feel strongly about things against me.
Well, sure, but why were you home so late?
I was talking with a friend of mine that I just met about drugs, actually.
Because I, last Thursday, quit using even legal drugs, and he had the same experience of being into drugs and getting out of them.
The conversation was just getting really, really interesting, so I just kept talking.
I thought they were asleep because they weren't calling.
I thought that if they were awake at 1.30, they'd call, and I was just going to come home, and nothing would become of it.
If that makes any sense.
It doesn't make a huge amount of sense, which doesn't mean that it doesn't.
I don't quite understand the reasoning.
So, was it your voluntary agreement that you were going to be home at 1 o'clock in the morning?
It was my agreement that was voluntary and that I did agree voluntarily, but of course that was, you know...
The fact that I could go over there at all was dependent on my agreeing to come home then.
Right, but what I mean is that it was something that you had agreed to, regardless of the power disparity and the permission and so on.
That was the condition of you going there was to be home at 1 o'clock, right?
Right. I'm not saying that they were wrong about that.
I just... I didn't feel wrong at the time just because I was in that conversation.
I felt like I was having a good conversation with someone I hadn't seen in a while.
I'm not saying that your agreements in this...
I'm not trying to say it's good or bad.
It's just that...
I'm not saying that the way your dad handled it was good, but what I am trying to understand is that You know when you argue with a Christian or something and then they say to you, oh listen, I'm going to listen to logic and reason and evidence and so on.
And you say, okay, I'm going to go into it.
And you spend an hour with them and then they say, oh you know what, I've changed my mind.
I'm just going to believe in stuff because of faith.
That's kind of annoying, right?
Right. And so the reason that that's annoying is because if they'd said to you at the very beginning, I'm not going to listen to any rational arguments, right?
Because a lot of people do this, and I'm not putting you in this category, right?
They'll say, I want reason and evidence to determine what is right.
That's what everybody does when they start debating with you.
Because otherwise there wouldn't be a debate.
Like if I was debating with you and I just said, my opinions will never change and they're not based on reason and evidence, what would your response be?
Well, that's interesting.
There's really no...
We can't go any further with this.
You might as well argue with a bigoted tree stump, which is fairly close to what you'd be doing intellectually, right?
So the reason that that's annoying is because when you enter into an agreement with somebody, they can't reasonably retroactively change the rules later.
So you didn't say to your dad, I'll be home at 1 unless I'm having a good time.
No. Because, of course, the whole point is that you would be home earlier if you weren't having a good time, right?
So from that standpoint, you had an agreement with your dad, which you broke, right?
Right, with my mom. Yeah, I mean, I assume that they're, you know, somewhat on the same planet as far as communication goes.
And, sorry, go ahead.
Oh, I was saying, he was out on a business trip.
He had just come home. So he was the one that kind of caught me, but...
Right, but I mean, we assume that it was sort of with your parental figures and so on.
Now, was it your intention when you made the agreement that you intend to be home by one?
Yes. And did you have in your own mind that you would be home by one unless you were having a good time?
No. So your commitment to yourself was to be home by one, right?
You didn't sort of give yourself any outs, if I understand this rightly.
No. No, I didn't.
Not at the time, no. Right.
And so you unilaterally changed the rules with both yourself and with your mom, right?
Right. And what's your defense for that?
And I'm not attacking you. To me, that's obviously not a very good thing to do.
Not because it's important to obey your parents or anything like that.
It's just that what we do when we do things like that, we set up a premise called agreements can be broken at will.
And that has an effect on us.
That also has an effect on other people.
Sure. You know what?
This guy keeps calling.
I'm going to have to block him. I'm going to have to block him, and even more annoyingly, I'm going to have to start this call again because it stops recording and will not start recording.
Yeah, it will not. Okay, I've just blocked this guy who keeps calling me, so we should be fine after this, but I'm going to have to start the call again.
So sorry. Anyway, so just to the guy who was calling, so if we do this sort of thing where we say, well, I'm going to have a rule or I'm going to set up an arrangement with somebody, but then I'm going to just break it unilaterally, the problem is that we then can't just enforce that rule on other people, right? And it's your self-interest that I'm going to appeal to here, not, you know, naughty, you should obey your father.
Of course, you should be like me, but...
The problem is that what happens is you then cannot, with any kind of real emotional integrity and emphasis, request that other people fulfill their obligations to you, which means that you're going to end up being suspicious and possibly taken advantage of, right?
So to take a sort of silly example, right?
So if you do this kind of stuff where you say, well, I'm going to have these commitments ahead of time, But I'm going to break them whenever I sort of prefer to.
So I'm going to put them forward as sort of absolutes.
Yes, I will be home at one.
Not unless I'm having a good time or whatever.
And you just sort of change them whenever you want to.
Then it seems hard for me to understand how you could justly impose these things on other people.
So if you end up going out with some girl and you say, we're exclusive, right?
We're exclusive. Yes, we're exclusive and so on, right?
And then she comes...
Over one day and says, oh yeah, by the way, I slept with a good two-thirds of the football team last night.
What are you going to say?
You've already said that it's okay to break your commitments unilaterally based on a whim.
How are you going to trust somebody?
If you act this way, how are you going to trust somebody?
It occurs at a really fundamental level.
If you live with integrity yourself, then people will not violate your trust.
If you don't live with integrity yourself, people sense that about you.
They sense it. I don't know how.
It's some weird, subterranean, jungle, unconscious, drum-beating, smoke signals, pigeon thing.
But they get...
That you can't enforce standards on them because you don't live up to them yourself.
So what happens is, good people stay away from you because they consider you to be unreliable.
And this is all exaggerated and so on, but we're just talking about the principles.
And bad people are like, ah, excellent.
Fresh, tasty rabbit meat.
So the reason that you should do that is so that you have the emotional resonance around you to be able to justly Call other people on breaking their commitments to you, if that makes any sense.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it does.
And that's what your dad was totally idiotic, if you don't mind me saying so.
And understandably so, right?
So he's sitting there pounding on you, like trying to hammer you down, right?
To be a better person with more integrity and so on.
Which is understandable if you just don't have a clue about how to communicate to people in terms of But I'm always trying to get people into self-interest.
It's always self-interest that I'm interested in trying to get people to act on.
Because if it's not self-interest, then it's just silly.
Then it's just obedience or something like obedience to a rule or obedience to whatever.
But what you want is you want the right to be able to call people who break their commitments to you.
That is essential in the business world.
It's essential in any relationship that you're in.
And the way that you do that, convincingly, is to keep your commitments to others.
That way you end up with much less complicated and difficult relationships.
Yeah. He brought up stuff in the business world, too.
That makes sense on a...
On a vague level. I was, of course, rationalizing it because I hated the emotional context of the argument.
So I was kind of rationalizing myself away from those type of arguments, I suppose.
But yeah, he mentioned that and building up trust and integrity.
How the hell are you ever going to keep a job if you can't even do things on time, that kind of stuff?
Yeah. If you can't be honest and keep your commitments, the market won't hire you.
The market won't accept that.
So homelessness and humiliation are usually not the best way to motivate people to do the right thing, if that makes sense.
Right. I'll be starving in the gutter, son, and you'll be evil to boot, right?
Nobody wants that, because all that means is that you then end up in this situation where you have to drag around virtue like a freaking anvil, right?
You know, it's like, oh, I've got to be good, I've got to have integrity.
That sucks, right?
You don't want to do it because it's going to make you happier.
Now, then you're stuck in an impossible situation.
Obviously, you don't want to be randomly breaking your commitments, but at the same time, you don't want to be obeying people who are threatening you with guilt and manipulation.
So then you're in this impossible situation.
You can't win either way.
And I sort of want to provide a third way, which is that you do this so that you can boss other people around.
It's beautiful. Wait.
Oh wait, sorry. Did I say that out loud?
Sorry. I'm just reading from chapter 622 of the new book.
But you do that so that...
You're doing three-word chapters this time?
I'm sorry? Are you going to do three-word chapters this time?
It's certainly possible.
It's certainly possible.
And more than 12 words a page.
I think it's going to be kind of cool. It's mostly the PB as a pop-up book.
But it is ethics that poke you in the eye.
That's really what I'm trying to work on.
Hold your head close, read these bad moral statements, then open the book quickly!
Ow, my eye! So anyway, that's what we're sort of working on because I'm tired of this negotiation stuff.
But yeah, that's what you want to do, right?
So you want to have the strength of character that comes from people's commitment so that you can have better people in your life overall.
Yeah. I mean, you don't want to be in business with people who are going to tell you to be on time, otherwise you're just a bad person, right?
So the reason that your dad's argument doesn't have any resonance with you is you don't want to end up being in business with people who use guilt and aggression and manipulation.
So you don't want to be in business with people like your dad, but you want to be in business with people who keep their commitments because they like to, right?
Because it's their own pleasure. Alright.
Well, that makes a ton of sense.
Sorry, metric ton? I just want to check whether I'm in progress.
English engineering. Nice.
That's a compliment. I think it is.
I think it is. That's right.
You're all hot, baby.
Well, yeah, and so anyway, I could keep going.
There's more to what happened, I guess.
It continues, if no one else has anything else to say.
Let's put the call out, shall we?
Anybody, anybody, speak now.
Hi, Steph. Hello.
Is that my conscience? Hi.
No, it's Daniel here. You know what?
My conscience's name is Daniel.
That doesn't help me. Sorry, go on.
I have a question just about one of the podcasts you did recently.
This isn't Born to be Wild, Daniel, is it?
Pardon me? Is this Born to be Wild, Daniel?
Yes, it is. Alright, go on.
I've never seen anyone take down a song as ferociously as Daniel took down Born to be Wild.
There was nobody left standing.
It was like rodeo.
It was fantastic. Oh, is it going to be on the CD, on the FDR barbecue CD? It certainly is, unless you pay me, sorry, slash tell me, otherwise.
No, it's fine.
I have a question on an argument you put on the board, just a brief summary of an argument, which was that engaging in political action makes us less free.
And this is referring to podcast 867, which were you responding to some of, I think it was Limey's...
Comments on the board? Yeah, we're actually referring to him as slimy now, because it turns out that he's a banned user who came back.
But anyway, go on. Okay, now you put in a five-point summary of the argument, which basically is that engaging in political actions imposes positive obligations, and therefore it makes us less free because it imposes these positive obligations.
Now maybe you can help me understand this, but why does it make us less free if engaging in political action is voluntarily entered into?
Well, because people engage in political action because they believe that it is going to make them more free, right?
And so, since it's not going to make them more free, then they're imposing something on themselves, which is a short-term obligation that they would not take on if they understood that it was not going to make them free.
So, if I tell you that doing push-ups is going to improve your memory, and you say, great, I'm going to do all these push-ups, and it won't improve your memory at all, and your only goal is not to develop a chest like Dolly Parton's, but to improve your memory, Right?
Then clearly, what you're doing is worse than a waste of time, right?
Because then now you've got this positive obligation aiming to get you this effect called a better memory, but all you're doing is wasting your time doing push-ups that you don't want to do, right?
People don't just sort of say, my hobby is called engaging in political action.
They say, I engage in political action because I want to achieve X, Y, or Z. And people say, vote for Ron Paul or support Ron Paul and so on because they want to do X, Y, and Z, to get him into office, to spread the word, to achieve freedom, to use politics, to whatever, right? And if that's never going to happen, then all they're doing is they are taking positive obligations upon themselves for the sake of a goal that can't be achieved.
So that is an incursion upon their liberty because they're laboring under illusion.
Like somebody who says, I'm going to go to church to save my soul.
Well, they're only going to church to save their soul.
But, of course, there's no God.
The church is a manipulative lie, and they don't have a soul.
So that's just a net loss to their freedom, because they're pursuing fruitless actions, which are obligations.
Right. Okay, that makes sense.
By the way, listening to Freedom Aid Radio is never an incursion upon your freedom.
Never. Just for those who are frightened by the words 867.
And that's why I argue that if you sort of take the approach that we talk about here and get the bad people out of your life, automatically you're more free.
You don't have to wait for the silver hair at night to come thundering over the horizon and free you.
To get the bad people out of your life, you shake off the positive obligations of politics and family and religion and culture.
And whatever else nonsense you've got going on, and then you automatically, mathematically, I mean I'll stand by this statistically, algorithmically, mathematically, you're going to have more freedom.
That's why I say, like, if you don't want to go and have dinner with your family, then the moment you say, well, if I don't want to, and I've talked about it with them and this and that, then I automatically have more freedom, because I'm not doing something that I don't want to do.
But if you still go and have dinner with your family, and now you have to go campaign and give money to Ron Paul, you're automatically less free, right?
That's just math, right?
Born to be wild.
Hello? Alright.
Sorry, was there anything else that you wanted to ask?
No, that clarifies it.
The only thing that I wanted to try to understand is how is it that an action that's voluntarily engaged could still make us less free, but it makes sense how you're saying because it's a futile action.
It's an action that the goals of which will never be realized.
And yeah, it makes sense to me.
Right. I'm sorry to pound the issue completely into the dirt, but I might as well not change my intellectual habits now.
To finish off the point, people say, well, I get involved with Ron Paul because whatever.
It could be anyone. I get involved with Ron Paul because I want him to become president and so on.
He's going to make things for you. Never going to happen.
And then, oh, they may say, well, I want to get involved with Ron Paul because he's going to spread education and so on.
But he's going to spread education about political solutions because he's a statist.
And he's also going to spread information about religion because he is a Christian.
And he's also going to spread information about patriotism because he's a patriot.
He's also going to spread information about xenophobia because he is frightened of Our friends to the south, well, far south for me, nearer south for some others.
So you can't, you know, as Ayn Rand, I think, quite accurately wrote, any compromise between food and poison, death wins.
So I think it's fairly valid to say that...
Ron Paul is spreading an enormous amount of nonsense as well as some sense, right?
Yeah, hey, get rid of the Fed, get rid of the income tax, I'm down with that.
But you don't get that as a sole package, right?
So people say, well, I'll do it for the education and so on.
But the education for almost everyone involved in the Ron Paul campaign is to spread minarchist ideas, right?
Because Ron Paul is never saying let's get rid of the government as an evil institution.
He says the initiation of the use of force is always wrong and I want to deport 10 million people.
So, what's being spread is just minarchism.
Minarchism is never going to set anyone free.
In fact, if I were a statist, I would invent minarchism if it didn't exist in order to distract all the people who might actually get to a rational philosophy of anarchism.
You couldn't invent anything better that would be something which would allow people to waste their time on stuff which will never achieve anything rather than deal with their own issues and truly become free.
I agree. And sometimes what that means is, I agree, and sometimes what it means is that if I agree now, maybe he'll stop talking.
Sorry, just to put you in the category, say, of somebody I might be married to.
That might be the way it goes.
I'll tell you that this goddamn book on universally preferable behavior is great if you promise to stop writing more chapters that you ask me to review or something like that.
Is there anything else that you wanted to ask or comment about?
No. No, well again, thanks for coming up, and I just wanted to also have a shout-out to the poor guy who tried to take a cab up here, and the cabbie didn't have our address on his rather old map, because our house is only three years old.
Sorry that you couldn't make it.
That sucks. Yeah, we have Graham's book, so if you want to drop by and pick it up, that'd be great, or donate a couple of bucks and I'll go and mail it to you.
Alright, so we can return back to our original caller or if somebody else has a question, comment, issue, problem.
I think Chugar has had a question.
Chewy? It's in the chat.
Oh, it's in the chat.
Am I in the chat? I'm not in the chat.
I'm not in the chat. I have a chat going, I think, here, but I'm not in the chat.
You should be in the chat. I added you.
Did you now? How exciting.
Yeah, but I've got a chat window which says, I am uber confused.
And somebody else says, I don't know, and then they left the chat.
I don't think that's the chat that you're talking about.
Yeah, there's another chat.
Oh, there's another chat. That's great.
Alright. Let me close this chat.
There's one titled FDR Sunday Chat.
I don't know how to find that. Somebody might need to add me again because I hung up and came back.
Alright, well, not this one.
Okay, if somebody could read that question out who's got visibility to the chat, that would certainly be quicker and easier.
And if you could do it in the voice of a gay sconcement, that would be excellent.
Oh, here we go. There's a very long shot inductive reference about Ron Paul spreading ideas.
One! Minarchists are more prone to be accepting of ancapism.
Two! Oh, that's not it.
No. Okay.
I'm really, really, really pleased about the quality and intensity of these shows on Sundays now.
I think that we're really taking massive leaps forward in terms of accuracy.
Alright, he's going to paste something else?
Yes, but whenever Chewy asks a question, it comes out...
Alright, you knew that joke was coming at least once, okay.
Alright, so he says, so my girlfriend has some med school acquaintances with whom she's going out tonight anyway.
They are Muslim and they believe in fiction.
For example, one of them believes that the supreme leader of Iran is a great man.
Um... The stuff that has the question mark at the end is really cool.
If I were to go out with them, should I opt for silence?
Well, that's interesting.
That's interesting. Should we talk about last night and the marriage?
No? Okay, we'll talk about that another time, perhaps.
That is an interesting question.
I would say that...
I would be curious. I mean, if you want to ask them questions, just say, well, what's great about him?
What is the definition of greatness?
What is so great about him?
I mean, there's two things that this guy has said.
I can't even figure out or remember how to pronounce his name, but Iran duty leader guy.
There's two things that he said that were pretty smart that I kind of liked, and obviously he's an intelligent man, if not necessarily virtuous, but he was apparently going to visit the site of 9-11, right?
And That could scarcely be considered wildly controversial, except for the fact that a lot of semi-retarded Americans still believe that Iran or Iraq had something to do with 9-11, right?
Just because there were some hostages some time back, right?
But he went to go visit the site of 9-11, and on 60 Minutes, one of the reporters was harassing him and said, you know, it's highly offensive to Americans that you are going to visit the 9-11 site, right?
And he says, what are you talking about?
The Iranian fellow.
And they say, oh, highly offensive.
Americans are offended.
He's like, but you're a reporter, right?
You don't speak for all Americans.
America is a large and diverse country with many different opinions.
I don't understand how you could claim to speak for all Americans.
The other thing that he said, which was smart, was that, I don't know, apparently the word is that he's a Holocaust denier, and that, of course, does not seem to be particularly reasonable.
But one of the things that he said on an interview that I thought was quite intelligent was, he said, why are the Palestinians groaning under the yoke of the Israelis?
And they say, well, you see, the Holocaust occurred in the Second World War, so the Israelis had to have their own country.
And he says, but who did the Holocaust?
Who committed the Holocaust? And they said, well, the Germans.
And he's like, so basically, what the fuck?
Are the Palestinians paying for what the Germans did?
Which, of course, is a perfectly reasonable question.
Even if we accept the concept of collective guilt, what sense does it make to punish the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, For the Holocaust, right?
And that's a perfectly reasonable question.
And of course the only reason that the Jews wanted to go to Israel, or what was formerly not Israel, is because of the biblical injunction that this is the promised land and that's where they're supposed to end up their days and so on, right?
And the Christians supported them because it helped fulfill Bible prophecy and so on.
Oh, sorry, yeah. Well, what the hell.
It's still interesting stuff, right?
So, yeah, you can ask questions, right?
And so on, right?
So, of course, if I was interviewing this guy and he said, well, Americans have this diverse opinion and how can you claim to speak for all Americans, it's like, well, but you're the leader of Iran, right?
So, obviously, you claim to be able to speak for all Iranians in terms of law and matters.
But, yeah, look, I mean, if you're going to go out with a bunch of religious cultists, right, which is basically any Muslims or any Christians, or if you're going to go out with a bunch of cultists, You're going to have a problem, right?
I mean, there's no nice way around it.
They're going to say a whole bunch of crazy shit that you don't agree with, right?
And it's not pretty.
It's not pleasant, right? There's no magic sauce here that I can come up with that is going to make that a whole lot of fun, right?
So I would say don't do it passively, right?
I would excuse myself.
I would also talk about it with your girlfriend, right?
I mean, that's the most important person to talk about it with, right?
Sit down with your girlfriend and say, you know I'm an atheist, right?
And you know that this stuff is highly offensive to me.
And do you know that these Muslims believe that I should either be enslaved to Islam or put to death?
Or live in some sort of subservient or subjugated state, right?
And if she understands that, then basically what it's equivalent to, and if she doesn't understand that, you can say, well, look at it this way.
If I were a Jew and a whole bunch of people where you worked were Nazis, how do you think I would feel if you said, hey, I want to go out with a whole bunch of Nazis who say that you should be put to death, and I want you to come along?
And nod and smile, right?
And don't be offended, and don't be upset, and so on and so on, right?
Now, they may be perfectly pleasant Nazis, so to speak, right?
Because when people are in the majority in a belief system, they tend to be less radical, right?
I mean, the difference between the crazy guy talking through his beard who lives in a box on the street corner and the Pope is money and credibility, right?
But there's no fundamental difference, right?
It's just that when you reach the majority, you tend to relax and look less radical, right?
So... They may be perfectly, quote, nice Nazis, and they may themselves say, well, I would never want to harm a non-Muslim.
It's like, well then, you're not a Muslim!
Because that's what Islam commands you to do.
And that's what Mohammed, who, by the way, raped a six-year-old, or a nine-year-old, or some damn young girl, Married her.
Oh, married her when she was six, I believe.
Violated her when she was nine.
That's your spiritual leader, right?
It's a child molester, right?
So, a pedophile. So...
Steph, can you hear me?
I sure can. Okay, well, just to clarify, my girlfriend is aware of, obviously, everything, and she obviously objects to their ideological content.
The problem is their acquaintance is on the basis of, I guess, medical school convenience, you know, for studying purposes, and so forth.
So I'm just wondering, I mean, is it right for me to, like, perhaps...
Increase the amount of social ostracism she receives because I'm particularly animated or...
I wouldn't say aggressive, right?
Because that implies that there's violence in what I'm saying.
That I'm particularly aggressive in attacking their beliefs or in addressing their beliefs.
Well, I think that you loaded the question up a little bit there by using the phrase social ostracism, right?
Right. So you said load up on social ostracism and so on.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that?
Well, I'm saying they would treat her in a way that would...
I mean, in med school, it's kind of hard to make it through, you know, just simply because of how the...
The structure of the school is it's a very strenuous time and it's very difficult to have to deal with people not willing to cooperate with you, especially when you have to partner up with them in classes.
So the problem is if it comes off like her boyfriend is somebody who's threatening their beliefs, it could affect her performance in the class.
So I'm thinking maybe the only right course of action for me to do is simply to stay silent while the crazy things are being said.
Well, but the issue is not so much you and your girlfriend's friends or school acquaintances or whatever.
The real issue is you and your girlfriend, right?
Right. What is her perspective of your beliefs?
Oh, well, she's 100% supportive.
And in fact, I feel that we've taught each other a lot.
I mean, I'm more into this stuff, so, you know, she learns a lot from me, but at the same time, her listening and giving feedback helps a lot, too.
So then you shouldn't go, right?
Right. That's what I'm thinking.
But, I mean, even, let's say I were in a situation where I was around them, right?
Sometimes we go to the library to study and, you know...
Probability, chance, you know, we run into each other.
So I just, like, stand with my eyes to the ground and, you know, maybe wear a burka or something.
Well, I mean, what are the odds of them saying death to the infidels when you're around, right?
Not very much, right?
Not very hot. Right.
Well, the thing is, I mean, they're semi-open to criticism because my girlfriend has argued with them before.
It's... It's that, well, first of all, they say these things in front of my girlfriend.
So, like, let's say acting as if, like, my girlfriend were, uh, if my girlfriend were me, right?
Let's say my girlfriend were here, we're the one asking this question, right?
What would her course of action be?
All right, what's the question? Well, the question is, let's say, I mean, they say all types of things, like this one guy is supportive of the temporary marriage clause in the Koran, right?
And, you know, I believe that that's absolute nonsense, right?
So should she just let that pass over in silence, or, you know, should she object?
I mean... Hello?
Sorry, what was the temporary marriage thing?
I don't know that clause. Well, there's pretty much in the Quran, it's like a clause, kind of like a verse that explains that if a man isn't prepared for a permanent marriage, he can say a repeat of verse like three times and have a woman be his temporary wife for like 90 days so they can have sex, right? Because premarital sex is illegal.
Got it, got it. Okay. Well, what is your problem with that statement?
Well, it's just statements like that, statements of the like.
the issue is that they're simply being set in their presence and they contribute to a larger quote consistent picture of the Quran which also includes it's pretty much a prescription of how people ought to act by him saying that he's kind of implying that my girlfriend is a kafir whore because she is not engaged in a temporary marriage like he is well sure I understand that
but I mean why on earth would people's opinions of your girlfriend matter, since they're clearly deranged anyway, right?
Thank you.
Right. So, I mean, what you're implying is that if they just say these things in her presence, she should not go beyond the professional acquaintance of the med school and stay silent.
Well, it depends what kind of relationship that she has, right?
I mean, I don't think we're supposed to be martyrs for truth, right?
I don't think that we're supposed to say everything to everyone, right?
Some guy posted this thing on the board where this idea of radical honesty, right?
You say everything, right?
So if a fat person says, what do you think I should eat?
You say, something that doesn't make you fatter would be a good start, or something like that, right?
The guy who's proposing this has been married five times, as you can imagine, right?
So... So we're not martyrs for truth, right?
The idea of philosophy is not to impose additional unchosen positive obligations called, I must now throw myself on the immolation of Islamic craziness, right?
So I don't think you have to say anything, right?
I mean, it really is to do with the nature of the relationship, right?
You can say, well, I don't agree, right?
That's all you have to say. I don't agree, if you want to.
You don't have to say anything. Because, you know, these people aren't your babysitters.
They're not the teachers of your children, right?
They're just some people that your wife's going to lean on to get through medical school, right?
And so if that's the level of the relationship that you have, then I would say don't engage, right?
I mean, it's not like this is your brother that you desperately want to have a relationship with and need to save from his craziness or anything like that, right?
These are just people who your wife is using at a sort of acquaintanceship slash...
Practical level, right? So if the guy who runs the grocery store that's right next to my house is a Muslim, I'm going to go and buy my groceries, right?
And I'm not going to get into a big argument with him.
He's going to ban me from his store, and then I've got to spend 20 minutes driving every time I need to get groceries, right?
It makes sense. Functional relationships, just work with them at a functional level.
If people say crazy stuff, you can just say, well, that's not my perspective or whatever, right?
Or you can say, well, so you guys believe in this temporary marriage thing and I'd love to live in a house made out of candy like in Hansel and Gretel.
Write about anything, right? You can say anything that you want, but there's no real need to engage because you're never going to interact with these people at any particularly deep level or any permanent level, if that makes sense.
Right. Well, yeah. I mean, what you're saying makes a lot of sense, right?
And that's kind of like what my intuition was.
But I mean, I just felt I was kind of afraid that, you know, if I was put in a situation where I felt uncomfortable because, you know, these people were openly supporting the supreme leader of Iran who openly calls for my annihilation, right?
I was wondering if maybe there was something that would be good for me that would...
That would result from engaging with them.
But yeah, it makes sense, right? You're confirming my hypothesis that functional relationships should stay functional and you don't need to pick up a sword around those types of people.
Right. I mean, you will be fighting fog, right?
And, of course, the truth is going to cost them a lot more than it costs you.
I mean, there's something to be empathetic, I think, about in terms of Muslims, particularly Muslim women, right?
So we, you know, young, waspy guys, for the most part, we can sort of take the leap to freedom, and we leave behind some annoying family, friends, and acquaintances, but...
But we're still in our culture.
It's not necessarily the most immediate modern culture, but we're part of the Greek tradition of philosophy and rationalism and so on.
And even up to the Enlightenment, we're not leaping out of our culture completely.
And, of course, we have grown up in a culture that values, at least on the surface, independent thinking.
There's no value in the Muslim world called think for yourself, but in our culture there is a value called think for yourself.
So we're conforming to that, even though most people say it hypocritically, and when they say think for yourself, they mean agree with me.
But at least it's a value that we can put forward.
But for a Muslim, let's just say for a Muslim woman, right?
If she begins to question the tenets of Islam, it's all up for her.
I mean, where the hell is she going to go?
What's she going to do? I mean, everything, everything is gone.
Everything. And she will be reviled in her community.
And it's not like she's part of the dominant Western culture over here.
So she's going to be some olive-skinned person, so to speak, who's not going to have any particular kind of...
I mean, we know how tough it is for us, right?
But just imagine. I mean, I'm not saying forgive everything, but just to imagine what it's like.
To be in that culture, in that community, and to know that if you put one foot outside of it, you're sentenced to a life of more solitude than I think you and I could ever reasonably grasp.
Right, and in that regard, you do need to empathize, because they're born into that community, and they live in that community, so they have a lot, a whole lot to lose if they ever leave it.
And I guess that would explain why they're so violently averse to anything that challenges their beliefs.
Just to use a minor example, if you and I were living with a bunch of other expatriates in Iran and nobody else in Iran wanted to talk to us because they're all crazy Muslims and we were in a group of 20 people out there, And we knew that if we ever disagreed with anything fundamentally, we would no longer get to talk to those 20 people and sure as hell, the rest of the Iranian population wouldn't want to talk to us either.
That's a pretty high fence to climb, if that makes any sense, to sort of speak out against that kind of community.
Right.
I mean, that was basically the issue at hand, right?
I mean, we could rant about Muslims, but that's all obvious, and that's pretty much given.
I think what he's trying to say is I answered this question about ten minutes ago, but I've been going on for some reason.
Is that fair? You answered it before I left the room, which was about ten minutes ago.
Is that why you left the room, do you think?
Alright, so I would be more than happy if anybody else has any of the comments, questions, or issues, or we can go back to our original gentleman's curfew question or comment.
Well, I had a question.
How far does the conforming, for the sake of convenience, extend?
Like, you said she shouldn't speak out against their beliefs because she would lose all of her study buddies or whatever.
Well, what if you live in a neighborhood where everybody has an American flag on their door and They come to your house and they're like, hey, why don't you have an American flag?
Are you supposed to say, well, I don't believe in the state.
I'm not a statist.
I'm an anarchist.
I don't know. What does living with integrity mean when you're sacrificing speaking on your beliefs for social conveniences?
Well, I mean, that's an excellent question.
Just for the sake of it, I didn't say that she shouldn't speak out against people's beliefs just because she needs study buddies, right?
I mean, that wasn't my particular comment, right?
But that sort of question being there, as I mentioned in the book On Truth, I have a neighbor who's a Christian, right?
And I have never said, obviously, we come back from a bike ride Sunday morning around church time, And they're pretty much aware that we don't go to church, right?
And also, in particular, because of Christina's forked tail, that there are some physical clues as well.
So they know we go, but we don't talk about it, right?
We don't talk about it. So I would not hang a flag on the front of my house, right?
And I frankly don't need my neighbors, right?
I mean, if my neighbors never talk to me again, I really could care less, right?
And I really... You know, when I come home and my neighbors are in the driveway...
I'd rather they weren't there, frankly.
It's not because I dislike them particularly.
It's just I want to go home and talk to my wife.
I don't want to sit there and exchange chit-chat.
We're getting some fences put up next weekend, so that's good.
So if my neighbors came over and said, why aren't you flying an American flag?
You'd be like, well, I... I don't subscribe to this belief in a nation.
I believe more in individuals and so on.
And then if they sort of shunned me, it'd be like, good, right?
I mean, because I don't want to hang out at barbecues with people that I'm going to constantly have to fight my beliefs with.
So where there's some pragmatic use to having some interaction with people at a functional level, then of course if you're at ANCAP, you can't survive without...
If I only dealt with other ANCAPistani people, then I... I wouldn't be able to do anything in life, because they're just too rare.
So I'm fine.
If neighbors want to shun me and they're patriotic robots, then great.
It saves me having to go through even more uncomfortable situations where I have to hide my beliefs.
So I think that's a good idea.
But again, you don't want to be a martyr for truth.
You integrate these beliefs as much as you can, and then whatever you do is the right thing, and you trust your instincts on that.
Okay, because in the past, I've just felt like if I'm not talking about important things with my friends, I'm just kind of lying to myself or letting them get away with whatever they think is right.
Maybe that's just my wanting to manipulate people or something.
Well, see, now we've brought in a different category, which is not study buddy or neighbors, but friends.
So tell me a little more about that and give some specifics if you can.
Well, like my roommate or, you know, old high school friends that I've never really talked about philosophy with.
And I don't know, I just feel like that could never be a productive conversation with them.
But there's other things that you do that you enjoy with them, right?
Yeah. Right.
So, I mean, if you have a group that you go bowling with and you like to bowl, then go bowl.
I mean, we're not doomed to be the flag bearers in the march towards human freedom 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, right?
I think that it's really just around self-trust.
I know that you want to help people in terms of the truth and I know that you would value and welcome a deeper conversation with people.
And so given that you know that and that you're committed to the truth and to living with the honor and integrity of working from first principles and so on, so the great benefit of that is now you can just trust yourself, right?
If you feel like having a conversation with someone, have the conversation with them.
And if you don't feel like having the conversation with them, Then don't.
And trust that you're right.
And trust that there's a good reason.
And then if you feel like going bowling with people and it's not based on fear of what they might say if you don't show up, you know, he's too good for us or whatever, right?
If you genuinely want to go and do that, then go and do that, right?
So every now and then I'll go down to the karaoke bar with a friend of mine and there's a couple other people he knows and they're all lunatics, right?
And I go and have fun because I like to go and sing a song, right?
But I'm not there to convert anybody, right?
And I'm not forced to convert anybody.
I'm not a bad person if I don't convert people.
And I'm not a bad person if I go bowling with a bunch of communists.
Because not going bowling with a bunch of communists isn't going to save the world.
It's just going to put all these rules up that I have to follow.
And the whole point of philosophy is to integrate the rules so that you are the rules.
You don't follow the rules. That's sort of what I was talking about with the gentleman at the beginning.
You trust yourself on your instincts, right?
Okay.
I think he's setting up a bowling league.
Actually, as we're paused.
Was there anything else you wanted to say about that?
No, I mean, that's just something that I've thought about, but...
Yeah, I guess. I mean, I kind of knew what your answer was.
I just didn't really know.
When I think about defooing, I also...
Because in my situation, my parents didn't abuse me or anything.
But like you said, they're kind of boring and I can't really have an open conversation with them without...
My dad or my mom saying, oh, yeah, I have to go to the grocery store, so yeah, we can have this conversation some other time.
My bunions are killing me, son!
Right, right. But that's sort of a different matter, right?
Because in that, the danger is the positive obligations, right?
For a non-pleasurable situation, right?
You mean the positive obligations that come later in life?
Well, there's that. But even just going...
If you want to go to your parents' place and you enjoy being there, it doesn't mean that you have to have philosophical discussions 24-7.
If you enjoy going to your parents' place and you're genuinely happy there, even if you rarely talk about anything of importance, I think that's fine.
It's all about what you want to do.
That's reasonable and rational and you work on that kind of stuff, right?
But if you find, if your emotional experience of your parents is that it's stifling, right?
That's a whole different matter, right?
Like if you sort of, oh, you know, my parents can be boring and this and that from time to time.
Well, Lord knows we all can be, right?
So, I mean, that's like, oh my God, Christina was boring for a moment.
No, that could never happen. But that can happen to anyone, right?
But if you experience...
Your interaction with your parents as stifling.
How do you feel when you're over there?
Do you feel like you're having fun?
Do you feel empowered? Do you feel stronger?
Do you feel richer?
Do you feel deeper? Do you feel more connected, more engaged?
Or not? That's really around trusting your instincts so that we don't have to reason through everything from first principles, but we can trust our emotional instincts in these matters.
Right, right. Well, that's all I had.
Okay. Well, thanks very much.
That's an excellent, excellent question.
Alright, thanks. So, Steph, if a parent talks to their child and the child cringes, I guess that's not really good evidence for why the child should be going home.
Sorry, if the parent does what to the child?
Whenever the parent talks to his child and the child cringes, is that a good reason not to go?
In my case, if the moment that somebody asks for the salt in a loud voice, if you actually pee yourself, that may not be your ideal situation to be in for sure.
But boredom is a very interesting one.
There's an old phrase which says, the boredom is rage spread thin.
And boredom is a very, very dangerous and underrated devil in the world.
It really is around emptying you out.
And boredom is a kind of dominance, right?
It's like you don't have to feed people very good food if you're in a Soviet restaurant and they have to come to where you are, right?
And, of course, this fundamentally is around, as I've talked about before, the family and the free market work on opposite principles.
And they shouldn't. They shouldn't work on opposite principles.
We know that the free market is the best way to get quality is through voluntarism, right?
So, the moment that you feel obligated in a relationship is the moment that that relationship begins to deteriorate.
The moment that you don't expect to require a demand quality and provide it in a relationship, then that is when...
That is when things start to deteriorate.
You know, there's this old joke that women make about their husbands, right?
They say, oh, he was so romantic when we were dating, and he used to bring me flowers, and he used to...
Don't cry.
Oh, hang on, honey. She's crying.
One moment. Think of Raul, honey.
But they say this, right? And they say, oh, and then the moment we got married, all of that stopped, right?
And he was no longer romantic, and he doesn't write.
And that, of course, is because the relationship, from the man's point of view, and I'm sure from the woman's as well, has become somewhat obligatory, right?
It has become... No longer a free market situation, right?
Got the ring on her, she's mine.
So you don't have to woo her anymore.
And that, of course, is not a good idea, right?
Marriage is something that needs to be maintained, right?
And needs to have positive energy pumped into it on a regular basis.
So that's sort of really all I'm trying to do with the family, is to raise the quality of parenting requires that we look upon the family as a voluntary relationship, because The moment it's obligatory, the quality is wretched and the negativity or abuse is going to continue.
Alright, enough from me.
back to you all I hear crickets A breath. Was that a breath?
Speak, my brethren.
Speak. I've got nothing.
I've got nothing. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Chirp, chirp. Chirp, chirp.
Now that's my conscience.
Hey, we got some chicks on the show, finally.
Oh, that was a great joke.
Let's just come in and enjoy that roadkill of a joke.
Should we back over it a few times as well?
Thanks, honey. She's got my back at all times.
Alright, so is there anyone else? We can stop.
Charlie's the website almost done, are we?
Yeah, Charlie, you've got some kudos from the website from Christina.
It's almost done. I've actually asked a friend of mine who's an artist.
Oh, yes! If he'd do some...
Have a look at it from a graphics perspective.
Actually, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who's in the film industry.
I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I thought it was pretty funny.
He's in the film industry, and he sort of goes back and forth between Toronto and Los Angeles.
And... He was talking about this, this director, Mike Figgis, who's quite a big deal in town.
And he was flying, I think he's Scottish.
Figgis, yeah. And he was flying from Scotland to Los Angeles, and he was going to shoot a television pilot, right?
So he's in the airport, and they say, Mr.
Figgis, what are you here for?
And he says, I'm going to shoot a pilot.
How long do you think it was before he saw the light of day?
Yes, in fact, it was quite some time.
It went on and on. Yeah, so quite a...
The thing's not to say at the airport is I'm going to shoot a pilot.
Anyway, so any other questions, issues, problems?
Yeah, I've got one that's not, you know, the typical call and show content.
So... You guys can hear me, right?
You bet. Go for it. Alright, well, I'm taking a class right now of epistemology, and it's kind of a low-level philosophy class, but this issue came up.
Right now, I'm battling skepticism.
Skepticism as, you know, we cannot have definite knowledge about the world, right?
And my main contention to pick with skepticism is that it posits a form of knowledge that's, you know, by definition impossible for humans to attain.
But anyway, one of the contentions that this guy came up with was that, you know, some foundationalists, some people would counter-argue, well, we have certain knowledge of our sensory information, right?
And that's unquestionable.
And this guy countered by saying that it's possible to have false beliefs about our sensory perceptions.
And I'm just thinking, how can we...
It's possible for you to believe, oh, I'm feeling a feeling of heat on my hand, but what you're actually feeling is...
A feeling of coldness.
To me, that doesn't make any sense, but he busts out this diagram and all this circular kind of stuff.
Just what is your view on the metaphysical status or the epistemological status of sensations?
I mean, isn't it by definition true that we feel, we know exactly what we're feeling?
I mean, even if we deceive ourselves to believe that we're feeling heat when we're actually, quote, exposed to something cold, I mean, aren't we still feeling heat?
Well, I think that the way that I would approach that is twofold.
If somebody says to me, I mean, I've mentioned before, right, but it's important to remember, if somebody says to me, you can't trust the evidence of your senses, right, you can just stare at them, right?
And they say, you can't trust the evidence of your senses, right?
You just stare at them, and they're going to get pissed off, right?
And they say, why aren't you answering me?
It's like, I'm not even sure that you spoke.
Because I don't trust the evidence of my senses.
In fact, I don't even know what I'm saying right now.
I don't even know if I, in fact, exist.
I don't know if you're standing in front of me.
I don't know which country I'm in.
I don't know what planet I'm on.
I can't answer any of your questions because I don't know what you're saying and I could be speaking gibberish.
Right? Right.
Well, I mean, okay, then what he would counter with, right?
I'm taking his position. He would say, well, no, no, it's not that we don't have, you know, any knowledge about the world.
We could just have a very similar perception of the world.
And, you know, I'm just saying, like, on a strictly factual basis, I mean, isn't it impossible, absolutely impossible for our senses, for what we feel, what we sense to be false, our beliefs about it to be wrong in any way?
Well, I mean, and anyway, how do you even have foreign beliefs about your senses, right?
You have to apply concepts to what you're sensing.
So that's important. Like, you can't think about the given in terms of concepts.
I mean, at least not in a complete fashion.
So, I mean, I'm just trying to show that skeptic that even with his, you know, ridiculous definition of knowledge that at least something is completely knowable under that definition.
Right. Now, there's a couple of ways to verify and validate the senses.
So, if you imagine that you stick a piece of wood, like a stick, into a clear glass of water, the refraction of light through the surface tension at the top of the water makes the stick look like it's bent, right?
Have you ever seen that phenomenon?
Okay, so what happens is your eyes are correctly processing what they're receiving, right?
Because your eyes process light waves or photons, whatever the hell they do, right?
So your eyes are processing that, and your eyes are not saying that the stick is bent, right?
Right, it's a conceptual process that's making you say that.
It's like the mirages are a product of conceptual problems, not sensory problems.
So the first thing to establish is, with somebody who's a skeptic of the senses, is to say, well...
Is the raw perceptual data accurate or inaccurate, assuming that the organs are not diseased or damaged or something like that?
And if they say no, that there's no accuracy in the organs at all, then you cease debating with that person, because they're insane.
Like, I mean that literally.
They are insane.
If they're using your ears to tell you that your ears don't work, they are insane, and you should stay away from them, because they're a fucking cancer.
I'm dead serious about that.
I'm deadly serious about that.
They are attacking you like a fucking virus.
And they're trying to destroy your capacity to process reality.
They might as well be clubbing you in the head.
So if somebody is so mentally deranged and sick and twisted that they're trying to tell you, using your senses, that your senses don't work, and if you point that out to them and they continue to debate that, they are so incredibly damaged as a human being That you just, like, don't even be in the same room with that person again.
They are poison. I totally believe that.
And that I mean with all seriousness, right?
So somebody's gonna say, well, yes.
I mean, if they're sane, they're gonna say, well, yes.
A functioning organ correctly transmits information from exterior reality, right?
So there's a reason that we have more than one sense, right?
So you can look at that A pencil in a glass of water and you can say, gee, it looks bent, let me check.
And you take your finger and you run it down the pencil, right?
And then you say, your finger touches more, is the most intimate sense, right?
So you run your finger down, you say, oh, it's not bent, right?
So it's an optical illusion and you learn something cool about the world and how light works and refraction and surface tension and so on, right?
So, you just say, okay, well, if the organs work, then the question is, do the organs correlate?
Right? So, and this is the, as you talked about, the mirage thing, right?
So, if you see a mirage, you say, gee, that's a lake.
Well, your eyes don't tell you that it's a lake.
They just tell you what's coming in, in terms of light, right?
You come to the conclusion it's a lake, and then you go forward and...
If you find it's just sand where you thought there was a lake, you know it's a mirage.
But if you're in there splashing and drinking and so on and you drink the water and your thirst is quenched and you pee so you know you actually processed water, at some point you know it's a lake, right?
So that's where people have to sort of get to when it comes to examining the validity of the senses.
Does that sort of help at all?
Right, right. Well, one counterexample that my teacher offered while playing Devil's Advocate, I'm not sure if she was playing it, maybe she believed it, was that she offered a situation where there was an experiment done in which...
A light of a certain spectrum was being, I guess, emitted in a room.
And then people were told beforehand, were given a suggestion that the light was more blue than purple, and that it was more purple than blue.
And then the people walked into the room and it turned out that the suggestion ended up affecting what their response was.
And when they said it was blue, but it was actually more purple than blue in the spectrum, they said it was actually more blue than purple.
Anyway, my response to that, I'm wondering if this was actually correct, was that the conceptual suggestion, just like as in the case of mirages, is what allowed those people to focus more on the blue color spectrum in the light, right?
Which is kind of like the same situation as when you're talking to somebody and you're focusing on them.
Even if your eyes aren't an actual focus on them, your mental focus is on them.
So your perceptual data that's coming around from the stuff behind them, let's say there's a parking garage behind them, you still see the parking garage, but you're not really thinking about it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the conceptual suggestion is what leads us to have the illusion that perhaps our sense data is false.
This is not an attack on the senses.
This is merely an attack upon suggestibility or pointing out suggestibility.
Human beings, we experience truth in a social sense as well as a personal sense and I think that that's entirely valid.
Did you ever see the movie A Beautiful Mind?
Well, in it, Russell Crowe plays a guy who hallucinates, right?
So whenever somebody he comes up to, somebody he doesn't know comes up to him and starts talking to him, he grabs somebody in the hallway, he's a professor, he grabs someone in the hallway and says, do you see that person?
And if they say no, then he knows it's a hallucination, and if they say yes, then he knows that it's not, or they're both hallucinating exactly the same thing, the odds of which are not very high.
So there is a pretty well-known psychological series of experiments, a set of experiments, where the susceptibility of people in a social context is quite high.
So they'll flash some word very briefly, but brief enough to recognize it on a screen.
And they'll have ten people in a room and the word will be fish, right?
And everyone else says, I saw a goat, right?
Because they're not really experiments.
They're not really subjects. They're like other psychology students or whatever.
So everyone says, I saw a goat, even though the word...
And a lot of people over time will say...
Okay, I guess it wasn't fish.
It must have been goat. I mean, I thought I saw fish.
But it would be kind of crazy, assuming that the motives of people are not manipulative, it would be kind of crazy for me to go up against the direct perception of ten other people.
Because they're seeing the same thing.
And if everybody else saw something different than I did, I would absolutely, completely and totally question what I saw.
Because it would be kind of deranged not to.
Because then it would be to say that their eyes aren't functioning, but mine are.
But of course, statistically, if everybody else gets one thing and I get another, it's very likely That I'm incorrect.
So all that Smee says is that it's good not to lie.
The fact that people are susceptible to social cues when it comes to sense interpretation is one of the reasons why.
We know this is true because billions of people believe in a God that doesn't exist because of social susceptibility to cues, to stimuli.
So, that to me is just like, don't lie, right?
Of course people are susceptible to that, and that's why it's so important to tell the truth.
Okay, well then, actually, the reason I actually asked this question, right, is because, you know, you answered it exactly the same way I answered it in class.
I wanted to go on to an even broader question.
My criticism of skepticism in general is that, you know, by creating a definition of knowledge that we can attain, right, there's no...
There's no possible prescription for how...
Like, you know, when somebody comes up with a new rule of logic, like when the person who developed the material implication, the way of converting a conditional to an or a disjunction, right?
That change... That is a prescription for the way we ought to think because every time we see a conditional, we think, hey, it's either not this or...
Or this. In this case, the skepticism, if he can't provide...
If skepticism or any theory can't provide a prescription, a suggestion for how we ought to change our mode of thinking, I mean, is it something valid at all?
Is it something even worth talking about?
The same thing would go for somebody who tries to prove the existence of a deist-style deity.
If it will have no effect ever on how we act, What's the point?
Is it even worth talking about?
Well, I think that's an interesting question.
The Kantian perspective is that we can never know what he called things in themselves.
Because I look at a rock and I can't see the rock from every angle and I can't see the inside of the rock as well as the outside and I don't know when I'm looking at it exactly how much it weighs and what its entire history has been and where it came from and I can't see it in the infrared spectrum and I can't see it in the x-ray spectrum and because I can't encompass within my mind the totality of that rock Then I can't know the rock.
And that, to me, is just ridiculous.
I mean, that's ridiculous. That's like saying that putting blinders on a horse renders all of its senses completely inoperable and destroys its memory, too, right?
So if you put blinders on a horse, all you're doing is you're cutting down its vision.
It doesn't mean that what it sees is invalid.
It just means it sees less than everything, which is fine.
I mean, that's totally valid, right?
So you're right. To set up a standard of knowledge which says unless you can directly with your brain fondle every atom in something, you can't know it, is setting up, and of course Kant was religious, right?
His specific goal was to save religion from rationalism.
He set up a standard of knowledge called God, right?
That God apparently can fondle every atom in the universe and they enjoy it.
And if you set up a standard of knowledge called God, then sure, you're never going to achieve it, right?
I mean, but that's just like, just because we can't see an x-ray but only in the regular spectrum, it doesn't mean that what we see in the regular spectrum is invalid.
It's just not complete.
To me, this is just deranged stuff.
People who are emotionally frightened of certainty.
Once you have certainty, there are particular obligations that accrue to you.
This is just my psychological take on it for what it's worth.
It's important to understand. These are people who were punished as children for making any statements of certainty.
Right? And I mean, my mom was like this, right?
I mean, so I may be more sensitive to this than most, right?
But I would come to certain conclusions about stuff, and my mom would say, well, why did you do this, right?
And I'd say, well, I thought that, and she'd always interrupt me and say, well, don't think, right?
She'd get mad at me, right?
For coming to a conclusion, for using my mind, for, you know, so fortunately, I don't have any reaction formations around that called 850 Podcasts.
But the...
The basic reality is that if you're punished for certainty, then whenever you approach certainty, you're going to feel emotional anxiety.
The same way that if somebody's pushing my face towards a fire, I'm going to feel quite a lot of emotional anxiety.
This is just people who were punished for certainty, and so this hardens into scar tissue called skepticism, because certainty makes them anxious.
The reason that certainty makes them anxious is not just because they were punished for being certain of anything, But also because certainty, once you're certain of something, then you have kind of an obligation, right?
So people want to stay in this realm called skepticism, or I don't know, or uncertainty, or I question the senses, or whatever.
And boy, if you want to see how this is going to show up, when this book on UPB comes out, which I'm still sort of thrashing away on, it's a beast, I'll tell you.
But when this book comes out, there's going to be quite a...
Quite a reaction, right?
Because if I've actually done it, like if I've proven ethics from a secular standpoint, then people got to shut the fuck up about ethics and get living them, right?
They got to stop debating ethics and all these goddamn lifeboat scenarios and what if this and what if that and what if a kid has typhus while he's struck by lightning when there are sharks circling him and he's got flesh-eating disease.
They've got to stop fucking around with all this theoretical stuff and they've got to go out and actually stop being ethical, which is really anxiety-producing.
Right? So you'll see this live and in person and it's going to be volatile, I guarantee it, much more so than on truth.
But they're going to...
So people are going to attack it because it's like, fuck, if this has been proven, I've got to actually go out and get shit done rather than just talk about stuff all the time.
And that produces, you know, when you say to people, hey, it's time for this spinning wheel of your brain to actually hit the road, you've got to get somewhere.
Then you're just not going to...
People are going to find it kind of annoying.
And they're going to want to nitpick.
And they're going to want to attack it.
They're going to want to put it down. And they might have valid points, in which case there'll be a version 2, right?
If I've missed some stuff or some stuff's incomplete, which I'm sure it will be.
But you'll see this.
You know, whenever certainty comes around, a lot of people get really anxious and hypercritical.
Well, what you're talking about in that case is a skepticism, a form of skepticism that actually has, in a sense, a form of prescription, which is don't act as if you're certain about anything, right?
But now let's suppose that this guy was simply saying it, right?
He's like, oh no, I don't disagree with you at all.
all, I'm just saying that this is the nature of knowledge, right?
Then isn't he endorsing a form of knowledge, like as in knowledge for knowledge's sake?
I guess my issue is whenever I hear somebody talk about having knowledge for knowledge's sake, it almost makes no sense, right?
Because what's the point of knowledge?
I mean, besides, I mean, we're motive beings, right?
We act and we utilize knowledge toward our actions, right?
I guess, I mean, with the prevalent attitude of knowledge for knowledge's sake, I just want to know that I have a very good solid grounds for saying, no, knowledge for knowledge's sake is ridiculous.
It makes no sense at all.
Sorry, I'm not sure. Can I interrupt you for just a sec?
I'm not sure what you mean with this example.
Can you give me something more concrete?
Okay. Okay, the skeptic will say, no, no, we can act on the basis of induction and, you know, how we've always been acting, right?
In the reasonable way that you endorse, right?
While still being skeptics, right?
While still agreeing that, you know, there could be these Googles who are sending waves at our brains that are, like, disrupting our thought patterns and, like, maybe...
Causing our view of reality to be slightly off what it actually is.
And there could be people sending waves to those beings that are sending waves at us and so forth.
So the guy doesn't reject the prescriptive form of using reasoning and logic.
He's just stating that we could be wrong.
Sorry to interrupt, but this is the guy who says you can't say there's no God because there could be an alternate universe where God exists.
Right. And then the point is, he can say that all that he wants, but he doesn't tie it to any prescription for how we ought to act.
My contention, right, what I want to say in that situation is, well, why are you wasting my time?
Why are you wasting your time?
And I want to make sure that I can say that with at least a form of authority, right?
Of course you can. Of course you can.
If you say 2 plus 2 is 4, and some guy gets into a long debate with you about how in some alternate universe it might equal 5...
You know, yeah, you can totally legitimately say, what is your major malfunction here?
Like, what are you wasting time with some potential maybe alternate?
Like, we deal with this universe and with things that we can act with and process in this life.
And it's like there are genocides in Rwanda.
There's a war in Iraq.
There is legalized torture in democracies.
Are you really pouring your mental efforts as a philosopher and an ethicist into some alternate dimension?
It's demented.
And you can use this metaphor that I think is quite good.
Ethically, we're kind of in a plague here.
We're in a plague situation.
And you're a doctor, right?
You study philosophy. You're a philosophy teacher.
We're kind of in a plague situation.
And you're babbling on about what might happen in 50 years if someone's 5 pounds overweight in another universe.
You know, if you become a doctor, you should want to heal people and you should start with the most grievous illnesses around you.
I guess that comes down to what I was saying in the thread earlier.
It's about philosophical self-employment, right?
Hey, let's create a problem by misusing language and then in the end I'll have a job.
It's worse than that because the way that you earn your daily bread is by convincing people that their minds are not efficacious, right?
By sowing doubt in the minds of the very people that we most desperately need, which is philosophers.
You are claiming to be somebody who can train doctors, and then you tell them that there's no such thing as illness for years and years, right?
So you're actively cutting off the supply of doctors in a time of plague.
It's not a neutral action in my book.
Right, yeah, of course. There's worse.
I mean, it's philosophical self-employment, but it's like a...
In a way, it's almost like how taxation is redistribution of wealth, right?
You philosophically self-employ yourself, and then you poison young people's impressionable minds with it.
And, you know, by philosophically self-employing yourself, you're actually causing unemployment in other people.
I think that's true. I would go one step further, though, and I would say that...
You are only paid as a philosopher in the modern world if you agree to poison people's minds.
The government is not going to pay you to teach people to think with clarity and certainty.
Clarity and certainty does not serve power structures.
Confusion, doubt, insecurity, worry, an obsession with minutiae and trivia and lifeboat scenarios and attacking the senses and who knows and who can tell and this and that, right?
That totally serves people in power.
Clarity and certainty is the opposite of exploitation.
So you're only going to get paid to poison people's minds.
Sorry, you're only going to get paid by people in power, by the government, if you agree to poison people's minds.
I'll make sure to point that out to all my philosophy professors.
You might want to sort of go back to the thing about the study buddies.
It's just important for you to know, right?
There's nothing wrong with being in the camp of the enemy as long as you remember that they're the enemy.
Right. That's actually a very good metaphor.
You know, you shoot a thousand arrows over the house every now and then you hit a bullseye.
Well, it's not like your metaphors are much better than your jokes.
I choose from that to take that my metaphors are exquisite.
Well, yeah. I mean, that about takes care of it.
Well, thanks. Excellent. Excellent questions.
All right. Last chance, people, to speak now or forever hold your sweaty nutsack.
So, all ready to listen.
Or at least for another week, right?
At least for another week, absolutely.
It will be self-clutching for another week.
Somebody just asked what I said.
Oh, I think you know.
And he's typing with one hand, so I really appreciate that kind of obedience.
So I recently, if you don't mind me just saying, it's sort of not really a question, it's sort of sharing the history, I suppose.
I sent off my brother's website, which I had been hosting on my server.
Oh, I put the files in a CD actually a month ago, and I finally sent it off this last Friday.
And you received it...
I actually noticed that his email wasn't working.
And I guess that was a little passive on my part.
But the note was short and sweet, so I can't host your website or forward your email for you anymore.
And the next day I got an email from his wife that says, please delete my email account.
Thanks for offering it. And then she says, we hope things are going well for you in your new job.
We're not sure what is happening, or maybe has happened, that we are unable to be in contact with you, but we will be here when you do contact us next.
And it was just no, like, question to me or, you know, what's going on.
There was nothing ever like that in any of the, you know, the few, like three or four of the past month, three or four times they tried to say anything to me.
Over the past month, and that's just kind of, for me anyway, sort of the answer that I was sort of...
I guess I was sort of looking for, because I guess I wanted to stave off the so-called confrontation, you know, sending the CD to him and everything else.
When I finally did it, it was kind of like, well, that wasn't so bad.
It's minor, minor stuff, but at the same time, it's...
It's big enough, I suppose.
And how did this email, how did you process it?
How did it make you feel? Well, initially, I kind of looked at it and I was like...
At first...
And when she said, please delete my email account as well...
At first, I was like, well...
Why is she saying that?
And now I realize that even though it only was a day, it had actually gone to their house.
Which, you know, I've had stuff from 20 miles away take over a week to get here.
But when I figured out that, oh, they had received this package with my note, at first it was like, okay, that doesn't make sense.
And then when I understood what was going on, the second part, I would say, kind of like, I don't know what the word is, but kind of like, oh come on already.
If you don't want to know, don't give me this crap.
I mean, they don't want to know, because they haven't asked for any information at all.
I mean, if they're curious, then they're not displaying it.
And I guess it just sort of feels kind of like fog.
But it's sort of fog and just say, you know, brush away.
You know? Right, right, right.
I mean, of course they know, right?
The reason that they're not curious is that they know.
Oh, they know. I know for a fact that they've read my blog.
I don't know how much they've read and I don't know how much they've listened to, but I know that they've read enough.
And, you know, certainly not in the past few months.
This has been like two or three years for me where I've been going on About a lot of stuff.
You know, and only recently have I had somewhere to put it into, like a foundation to put it into.
But still, for this in particular, it was kind of like, received that kind of note, it was like, give me a break.
You know what's going on.
Just this pretense that you don't know what's going on.
There's no other possibility, right?
If they were the kind of people who were curious, it never would have come to this, right?
Oh, for sure. I mean, there's no other possible reaction.
We all hope, I mean, I don't know about you, I still, I mean, we all hope against hope that some better resolution can be achieved, but now we have enough evidence, I think, to be pretty sure that it's not going to be that way, although it's hard not to hope.
I'm only now going to get, my birthday is on Monday, I guess tomorrow, and I'm Yes, happy birthday.
Yeah, yeah, tomorrow is my birthday.
And so it's a new day.
It's been noon month, actually, so we haven't left the house much.
So, well, I haven't.
But my dad left a message on Christina's cell phone, right?
Now, of course, I'm just like, deleted.
I don't even want to hear it. But even until a couple of years ago, I was like...
I'll listen to it just in case space aliens scooped out my dad's brain and replaced it with, I don't know, Richard Dawkins' brain.
Or something. Of course, the odds are higher that that would happen than my father would change.
So it's hard to give up that hope, at least it was for me.
But once you accept the reality of choice and consequence, if you spend 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 years evading reality, it doesn't come a knock-in anymore.
Kind of catches up with you.
You evade reality to the point where you don't really have to evade it anymore.
Oh yeah, like it doesn't even show up on your radar anymore, right?
I mean, if you keep your eyes closed long enough, your optic nose will stop working.
And then if you open them, it doesn't matter.
You still won't be able to see it, right?
Atrophy. It happens with reality.
Yes, for sure. I mean, there wasn't a whole lot there.
That's good. It's always helpful for people to get other people's foo communications so we can all realize that most dysfunctional foos are sort of like menudo, right?
They're sort of like one set of cycling people, but they're all the same, right?
I mean, because defenses are all the same, right?
And The fact that people react to any feelings, the weak people react to any feelings of criticism with attack and passive-aggressive superiority is inevitable, right?
So it does really help for other people to just realize that we all came from the same goddamn messed up family and it's all the same thing over and over again.
What I noticed in particular that was interesting about the exchange between myself and my parents, which really hasn't been happening, my parents, and myself and my brother and his wife, with my parents, it just sort of went into nothing.
If they don't ever call me, that's fine.
And they don't. But with my brother, I sort of got a little bit of the passive-aggressive thing going on, but with his wife, she was really good at it.
She's, like, much better at it than my brother.
Yeah, well, as I talked about in the Subjugation of Women podcast, I mean, it is a sad after-effect of the control that women have experienced throughout history.
But your family will absolutely get in touch with you again, and I say this to everyone.
Your family will absolutely get in touch with you again, but they won't do it until they've got something that will really fuck you up.
Like, until they've really got something that is going to give you some sleepless nights, they won't, right?
And it's going to be somebody's sick, or somebody died, or, you know, until they've got something that's just going to detonate you, they're just not going to do it until they've got that kind of leverage.
Yeah, I'm not looking forward to that.
I've got three grandparents that are alive, and my parents are really young.
So it'll come, I'm sure, but at least for now.
I can actually relax for a little while.
Yes, absolutely. And you'll handle it fine when it happens.
Just stay in the conversation, right?
Because it's really tough when it happens.
And I've put some thought into what's going to happen when my mom dies.
But I still want her to keep living because it makes defooing all the more valuable.
It would have sucked to defoo and then have her die the next day.
Yes. Well, I don't think I... So far, my family seems to be fairly inside of longevity, so I don't think I have to worry about that too much.
All right. Well, thanks. I appreciate you sharing that, and keep us posted on how it goes.
All right. If you'd like to say anything else.
Get something rolling in before the great door of the Sunday show closes with a deafening clang.
Clang! Sorry, sound effects we're still working on.
Anything on the chat window?
Light of my life? No? Okay.
Alright. Okay, well, maybe people misheard and thought that the nutsack thing was with two hands and they can't type.
So... Am I celebrating my birthday?
Yeah, absolutely.
It comes with presents. So I am absolutely celebrating my birthday.
It is a beautiful thing to be alive another year.
Life is an absolutely wonderful and beautiful and treasured gift.
And I am so immeasurably, immeasurably grateful to all of you who have allowed me to do this full-time.
I hope that I am doing you proud.
I hope that I am Doing the right things and if you have suggestions about things that I can do that aren't too gymnastic, do let me know.
So this has been, without a doubt, the best year of my life.
I've got to achieve my dream of doing the best that I can, and it's you guys who have made it all possible, and I just thank you so, so much for that.
However it goes, please diseotap your gymnastics.
Yeah, I don't know that you want that in slow motion.
Middle-aged guys in slow motion, not that great to begin with, but gymnastics in a 2-2, could make some money.
Could make some money. Yeah, I'll pay you not to fill your inbox with this.
Alright, well thank you so much everybody for listening, and I appreciate you dropping by.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week, and I will be back on, I guess, in about 6.99 days.
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