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Oct. 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:11
884 Sunday Call In Show October 14 2007

How to define 'values' - radical empathy - and the 'folly' of resisting cops

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Alright, well, thanks everyone so much for joining us.
Sorry that we're starting a little bit late.
This is October the 14th, 2007.
And, gee, I guess we have a topic, sweetie, don't we?
Why don't you go ahead.
Well, for those who have been following some of the Dfue drama that Christina and I have been going through, more so Christina than myself, Christina has not seen her parents for about three years.
It'll be three years at the end of this month.
We've had relatively little contact with them.
They've sent a couple of letters and they've left some angry voicemails, but for some reason we can't quite figure out because we don't know what's going on.
And this has been the case where, you know, surgeries have occurred and we've hung tough and all this, that, and the other.
But now we are getting the drive-bys, and not just the drive-bys, but the coming up to the porch and aggressively and repeatedly ringing the doorbell.
And so, brave philosophers that we are, we hide upstairs.
Fortunately, we only have one car in the driveway, so it doesn't...
And it was by pure chance.
They came by last weekend, and they...
It was just by pure chance, because we weren't expecting them.
Somebody rang the doorbell, and I thought it was somebody I was working on the fence with, and came down and just happened to see that it was Christina's mom, and she hadn't cupped her hands around the window, so she couldn't see into the house, I guess, at that point.
So, she didn't see me.
So then we hid in the...
And unfortunately, because we have an open concept house, if they were to go around the house during the day, they can see into every room.
So there's no particular place to hide downstairs.
And if they happen to be looking in, when we go upstairs, they can see us go upstairs.
Because, as I said, it's a pretty open concept house.
So yesterday, Christina was driving back from somewhere.
And saw their car and couldn't tell their sort of make and color of car and...
Oh, and they're coming back now.
Are they coming back? I'm pretty sure that's them.
Do they normally drive with their lights on?
The lights are automatic lights.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so we have this parental invasion that's going on at the moment, and they just rang the doorbell as we were getting ready for the show.
Christina came upstairs, and now we're upstairs where we can't be seen.
And so we have a parental eruption on our hands, and...
It's amazing, of course, how this stuff can just start up after a couple of years of not seeing them.
But the DFU process is long and involved and tends to occur in waves, if that makes any sense.
So, from that standpoint, it is a difficult thing.
So, just sort of pointing this out, A, to share, and B, to point out that it is not an easy process.
And we are going to have to send them a...
We could try sending a letter, but they seem to be, if they came by last weekend and they came by twice this weekend, well, sooner or later, they're just going to catch us if they keep coming.
I mean, that's just going to happen, right?
I didn't want it to happen today because...
We've got a show to run. But sooner or later, they're going to catch us, and then the fireworks are really going to fly.
And that's not the end of the world, because the only conversation will be, get off our property, or we'll call the cops.
That's the only conversation.
There's not going to be, because they're going to be, oh, why?
And what did we do?
And how can we make it better?
All this, that and the other, and there is of course no possibility of that conversation going forward in any kind of productive way, so it is going to be a pretty savage and unpleasant scene, which of course you would naturally expect.
When you have defood, because if it wasn't going to be a savage and unpleasant scene, then we wouldn't have defood.
So this is just the inevitability of what occurs in these kinds of situations.
And so I just sort of wanted to share with you what's going on.
And of course, it's during the weekend that I'm sort of working hard to finish off the UPB book.
And it's now on its sixth, and I think final draft.
I'm just going through to make a couple of tweaks, but I'm very pleased with it overall.
Thanks again to a couple of listeners who very kindly donated their time and significant portions of their sanity to help me whip this monster into shape, and it should be out next week.
There's been a slight delay in The God of Atheists.
My editor got sick.
That's his story, and he seems to be sticking to it, and I have no particular reason to disbelieve him.
So there will be a slight delay on that, but don't worry, my friends.
It will still be available for the Christmas season.
So, that's it for our introduction.
If anybody has questions or comments or issues or problems, the show, my friends, is all yours.
Sorry about that. They're talking about a sound.
There's a whooshing sound in the background that they're hearing.
Yeah, well... Yeah, it's not coming from us.
I mean, they can't do much about the whooshing sound.
There's no good technology for recording all these things.
I mean, we either go to telephone quality, which is going to have all its own issues, and also is going to cost people to call in, or we go to, you know, we've tried...
Gizmo, the sound recording quality sucks in Gizmo, and then we have the problem with the whole music.
And we've tried TalkShoe, and we've tried Ventrilo, and we've tried TeamSpeak, and there's just no good solution.
This is the best we have. Unfortunately, what we can't do here in these conference calls, at least that I know of, is to mute people.
So if you are on the call, and you're not talking, if you could mute yourself, that would be great.
Otherwise, we'll just have to have the relaxing sound of Sand and sea and surf and sky in the background of the show.
Is the sound gone?
Oh, yeah, Ventrilo. Unfortunately, we couldn't work with Ventrilo because it records in a proprietary format that is not convertible to MP3 or WAV or anything that's actually useful.
So, can't edit it.
And also, what I do, since I'm recording on two tracks, I can edit out.
I can edit out this WAV sound at the end of it, like the background hissing noise, which I can't do if there's a proprietary piece of software, so that won't help very much.
Alright, so I'm not hearing anybody, but I assume that people can speak, so if you have comments or questions, please feel free to bring them up now.
Was there anything in the window that...
Just a bunch of really surprised and concerned listeners that my parents have been driving by.
Oh, it's horrible. It's absolutely horrible.
And thanks a lot for people's sympathy about this challenge.
It comes in waves, and of course we should consider ourselves lucky that it was a relatively pain-free couple of years that we've had.
And it is absolutely horrible.
It's invasive. It's intrusive.
It's disrespectful to our stated clear and stated wishes.
And of course what is happening is they have anxiety about not seeing Christina for some particular reason or another.
And rather than try and figure out that anxiety themselves, their solution, as it always is in the case with these primitive personalities, their solution is simply to attempt to manage that anxiety by going to see Christina.
And... This is a sad, sad state to be in in your 70s, but this is the choice that people make to be religious, to be cultural bigots.
This is the choice that people make, and this is where it ends up for them.
And there's nothing that can be done other than to hold the fort as best we can and wait for this particular storm to subside.
And it will recur. There will be another set of storms when one of them gets sick and...
It's hard to get out of a cult.
It's hard to get out of a cult.
I still get all these complaints about FDR as a cult, but when people drop out of this conversation, I don't drive over to their house and ring their doorbell 50 times, circle around and park around the corner and wait for them to come out.
The family is the cult.
I mean, we're just trying to solve it from this standpoint.
Steph, would you recommend that somebody who defoos just move to another place far away from foo members?
I mean, that's a tough question.
I don't have a particularly strong answer.
I would say that...
It can be easier, but is it disruptive?
I mean, we've bought a house.
Are we going to sell the house and move?
And where are we going to move to?
Because Christina is bound geographically according to her license, which, along with you wonderful listeners, is my lifeline to food, sustenance, and shelter.
So we don't have that particular option.
We could move to some other house and spend a month or two selling this house.
Go and buy another house, which, I mean, but basically we're talking hundreds of hours of work to avoid a situation.
But no, I mean, it will simply come down to I'm not going to move because there are bad people who are knocking on our door.
But what I will do is, well, and that's why it's so great that I'm working from home, That we will simply tell them to get off our property, and if we have to involve the police and get a restraining order, we'll have to do that.
I mean, it's a shame, but of course this is one of these situations that you would expect them to be invasive and ugly and unpleasant about this, because otherwise we'd still have them in our life, right?
You would expect a cult to come after you.
If it didn't come after you, it probably wasn't a cult to begin with, right?
I mean, if you're a student and you have a choice of where to live, or if you're moving out from your parents' house and you have a choice of where to live, I would certainly choose further than closer.
But I would not like to think that it's a necessary process unless there's any threat or physical harm, which there isn't, of course, in this case.
Then, of course, I would do whatever it took to get it to a safe environment.
But no, I'm not going to move because there's a couple of elderly Greek people on my trail.
Greg asked, what's the right thing to do or what I would recommend doing in this situation?
Well, Steph and I talked about this for quite a while yesterday and over the last week or so because when they drove by last week for the first time, I think they did a drive-by about a year and a half ago.
They just actually drove by, but they didn't ring the bell.
I happened to see them through the window.
But last week was the first time they actually rang the doorbell.
And since then, I've sort of been walking on eggshells, looking out the window.
And, you know, when the doorbell rings and I'm not expecting a client, it's a little freaky.
I honestly think the best way to handle this at this particular point is we could send them a fax and say, you know, please don't drive by.
I think they do know that I work from home, so I don't think that they're going to try and come by during the day when I have clients.
I don't know that they're aware that I also see clients in the evening, so that's a possibility.
They might actually try to come by one evening, but I will have clients there, and I don't think that they have the balls to actually interrupt my work.
I think they just have too much social...
Anxiety about that.
And I don't think that they would do that.
I do think that the best thing for us to do is just to, at this particular point, just ignore them.
I had someone else who was harassing me with phone calls that I had sort of separated from.
A friend, right? A friend, and the phone calls were incessant.
Yeah, a couple a day for a week.
A couple a day, home phone number, to the point where we had to turn the home phone off because it was interrupting my sessions.
And I would have to turn the ringer off on my business phone as well because it was just ringing incessantly.
And so I just said, you know, I mean, the principles of extinction are if you don't respond, the behavior will cease after a period of time.
There might be a little bit of a flurry of activity, but it will eventually just cease.
And that's exactly what happens.
So I'm hoping this will happen with my parents.
I somehow think that they're going to be a bit more persistent than my friend was.
And I think eventually we're going to have to have it out with them, so to speak.
And having it out with them doesn't mean going into the issues.
Having it out with them means saying, you know, I've asked not to see you.
Why are you here? Please leave.
Yeah, please get off our property or we're going to have to call the authorities.
Yeah, and not engaging them, not going into the issues.
They're going to want me to answer all kinds of questions about what's going on, and I'm not going to go into that with them.
Just please leave. I didn't ask you to come.
You weren't invited. Well, we've asked not to talk.
We've asked you actually not to come by and not to interrupt us, and we'd like you to leave now.
And that's, of course, going to infuriate them because they think they've done nothing wrong.
And it doesn't matter how hard I try to explain to them what they have done.
That's the issue here. Nothing I can do, nothing I can say will help them understand what has happened, so there's absolutely no point in going into it with them.
Because they will just turn around and deny every single experience that I've had.
Well, and the way to understand this for those who are contemplating or going through or will go through similar situations is that from their standpoint, they are the parents and Christina is the little love robot that is supposed to provide them what they need, what they want.
She's not supposed to make them anxious.
She's not supposed to make decisions on her own.
So Christina owes them her presence, her contact, her interaction.
In the same way that if I lend you $10,000, you owe me that money back.
Now, of course, if I lent you $10,000 and you kept avoiding my calls and not answering the doorbell, I would get more and more upset and I would eventually turn to the authorities.
Now, of course, here they can't turn to the authorities because there is no contract and there is nothing that is owed, except in their own mind.
So the level of aggression that they're going to feel is similar to how you would feel if you were owed an enormous amount of money and somebody kept unjustly avoiding the just payment of a debt.
And so from their standpoint, they gambled their whole life, right?
On Christina having obligation to them as parents, not as good people, not as people who loved her or listened to her or treated her with respect or anything like that.
They staked their whole, all the decisions that were made, you know, decades ago were all made on the basis that they did not have to respect Christina's individuality in order to get her time, attention, love, resources and so on.
So they made her go to Greek school, they made her go to church, they made her go to Greek dances, they did not listen to her, they bullied her, they never let her express her opinion, and so on.
And all those decisions are decades in the past, and they can't be changed now, and there's no possibility of restitution.
Nobody can go back and give Christina the childhood that she so richly deserves.
And so now, of course, the decisions are so far in the past...
There's no possibility of undoing them, but for them, they are the parents.
Christina is the love robot that is broken and is not providing what she should, and it's incredibly unjust and hurtful and destructive on Christina's part that she's not providing them the love and sanction and reward that they so richly deserve by the very act of giving birth to her and feeding and clothing her.
So, it's very, I mean, it's impossible for them to understand, and of course, deep down, they do understand, but they would put endless amounts of efforts into avoiding that, but this is the price of religiosity, this is the price of conformity, this is the price of social metaphysics, that you are terrified, as they talk about in the book on truth, that you are terrified of self-knowledge and self-awareness on the part of other people, and of justice.
You are terrified of justice.
And so they are, in their own minds, perfectly entitled to Christina's and buy time, attention, love, resources, money, whatever.
And the fact that they're not getting what they want is enraging to them.
It is a just debt that is not being repaid.
And there's no way...
This is why I say all of this is a multi-generational project.
If you treat your parents with justice, then that is going to condition and color how you parent...
Because if you hang out with your parents, regardless of whether they're good people, without a doubt, unconsciously, you will expect the same.
From your children, and then your parenting will suffer accordingly.
Because you will also feel entitled, right?
Like, I mean, if you feel that next week you're going to inherit $10 million, you're not polishing up your resume, right?
If you don't have to earn the values in the future, you don't act to earn them in the present.
So, this kind of situation is ugly, unpleasant, stressful.
But this is how the world changes, not...
Not through Ron Paul, not through articles, not through even posting on the Freedom Aid radio board, though it's good practice, not through listening to podcasts, but making these kinds of decisions in your life.
This is philosophy in action, and it is not pretty, though it is essential.
Did we have anyone else who wanted to?
No, I think...
Alright, well, the show is live and it's being recorded, so I haven't actually heard anyone speak.
I don't even know if we can hear anyone.
I can certainly hear the hiss.
But if somebody could just say hello, then I'll know if the speaking, listening thing in Skype is actually working.
Ah, good. It is.
Alright. So, Greg, you had some...
We'll just give us a second in case anybody had something more immediate, because I know you have some abstract questions, but if you wanted to...
If anybody else wanted to ask a question before you move to Greg's theoretical questions, I would be more than happy to respond to them.
now would be the time to speak up.
All right, Greg, it's all yours.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, so values.
Like I was mentioning on the board yesterday, I've been thinking about what they are and why they are.
And Forgetting about all that other junk about how they're organized and all that.
Just dealing with the question of if they are...
We go on the presumption that we're trying to work toward rational understanding of our values.
I'm sorry to interrupt you just when you're starting, but I'm not sure what you mean when you say values.
Right, and that's exactly what I'm trying to...
That's what I'm trying to define here.
Oh, sorry, you just used the word values, and I wasn't sure if you had assumed the definition or not, but sorry, go ahead.
Right, well, I'm saying...
Let me try and reword it here.
Is the question, what is value?
I mean, is that the question? Is that what you're asking?
What are values? Yeah, basically, yeah.
What would you define them as, for example?
Well, utility in achieving a goal would be sort of my first definition of values, right?
So, a map has value if you want to go somewhere.
If you're never going to move anywhere, it has no value, right?
So, that which aids in the achievement of a goal, the scientific method has value, is a valuable tool for, it's the only useful, it's the only valid tool for determining truth about physical reality, logic for rationality, philosophy for virtue.
It enables you to achieve a goal.
I mean, it's a neutral term in some ways, although it's often applied to the positive, like empathy.
But I would say that a knife has value to a murderer, right?
It helps him achieve the unjust killing of his victim and so on.
But yeah, values, I just say that they are ways of whatever is of use in achieving a particular goal, and the virtue of those values depends upon the virtue of the goal.
Then what does it mean to say living according to your values?
Well, I think it means not living hypocritically, right?
So this is sort of what we talk about in terms of parenting and family as well as other things, right?
So, for instance, I mean, people say honesty is good, right?
And then you're honest with them and they get mad at you.
Well, they say honesty is good, right?
So honesty is the means by which you achieve intimacy in a relationship.
That's their value. The goal is intimacy and the value is honesty.
And... Well, expanding the original sentence, wouldn't the meaning of that original sentence actually mean honesty is the means by which you achieve something that is morally good?
No, I don't think that honesty is, you know, I mean, if I tell you the right way, honesty is certainly a good in and of itself, right?
I mean, if you tell me what's the way downtown and I give you the wrong directions, it's not like I'm evil and you don't get to shoot me.
So, it's not necessarily a totally moral goal, but certainly people would say that relationships should be founded on honesty, right?
I mean, there's no sane human being who would really say, no, good relationships are founded on lies, manipulation, falsehood, and bullying, or whatever, right?
So, when you say living according to your values, if people say, well, intimacy is a value, and honesty is the means, then we should be honest, but then if you're honest, and they attack you, Then, of course, what they should do is they should say, well, then honesty is no longer a value because I'm attacking someone for being honest.
But what happens is they always say, no, honesty is still a value and I get to attack people for being honest.
So it is both a value and a threat at the same time.
And that's what I think it means to not live according to your values.
Because if you attack that which you value, you have to logically stop valuing it, right?
But people want to have their cake and eat it too.
So would you say that there is a distinction to be made between a value and a good?
Can you tell me what you mean by a good?
Because you called honesty good in and of itself, as well as a value, correct?
Sure, but democracy is of great value to politicians or to people who want to get their hand in the public trough, to interest groups and lobbyists and so on.
But obviously democracy is not moral.
So then to say something like living according to your values is really to say something that's essentially morally neutral.
Yes, that's true. Because if my goals are essentially evil goals, then if I'm living according to my values, I'm going to value things like fraud and murder and theft and so on.
Well, I think that's very true, but I would say that there is no way to live with integrity in accordance with values that are false.
I mean, that's one of the arguments in the UPB book, right?
That if you don't have rational values, it's impossible to live with integrity.
So a thief obviously has no capacity to live with integrity because he both violates and affirms property rights simultaneously.
What's a false value?
Sorry, it's impossible to live with integrity with inconsistent values.
So a value could be, for a thief, I want to steal this piece of property, which means that they say property rights are good for me but bad for you.
So that's not living with inconsistency.
Sorry, that's living inconsistently.
Okay, okay, alright.
So... Alright, so it's just a confusion.
Yeah, sorry, that was my injection of a confusing term.
But yeah, I would say that inconsistent values are inevitable when you have an irrational philosophy.
It's impossible to live in accordance with your values if your values are contradictory and your values will be contradictory inevitably.
If it turns out that you don't have a rational philosophy, right?
So this Spaghetti Monster fellow who was on the boards recently, he sent me this, as I mentioned on the board, he sent me this post, which was, you know, all fired and bitchy about not ever using sarcasm.
And then at the end, he was like, well, congratulations on being the first cult leader of the new century, of whatever it was, right?
I mean, just this, you know, incredibly sarcastic.
So this is somebody who's not living according to his values, which of course he can't because he's being emotionally defensive, which means hypocritical, which means socially corrupt.
So it's just impossible, right?
And you see this all the time, right?
Everybody says that democracy is valid because it's voluntary, right?
So I'm getting these interviews from someone, interview questions from someone saying, well, but democracy is voluntary, right?
And it's like, well, what the hell are the guns for then?
Right? If voluntary is the value, then democracy is the evil, right?
But they want to sort of have their cake and eat it too, right?
That the guns are needed for those who don't agree with the fact that it's voluntary, right?
I mean, it's a real kind of squelchy and quicksandy madness, but this is very common.
Yeah. If he expressed a desire for an involuntary social organization, then to call political system X a value would be consistent.
No, it can't be.
Because of UPB, you can't say that only the government can use violence, right?
Violence is either good or bad, right?
You can't just sort of say, well, democracy is good because this little fenced-off area of politicians and cops can use violence but no one else can.
So even then, it's impossible.
And even in the interaction, if he says that violence...
I would like to hear your rational response to the argument that violence is good.
Well, why would you want a rational response if violence is good?
You should want a violent response, right?
So then, in a sense, what you're saying is that consistency is either a good in and of itself or somehow a value in and of itself.
Well, you said living in accordance with your values, right?
So living in accordance with your values is only possible if your values go through UPB, go through some sort of process of being validated according to logic and evidence.
Oh. Okay, so then, right, so, all right, so it's a self-detonating proposition, then, to say, I want to live not in accordance with my own values.
Well, I mean, the logical self-definition, sorry, the logical self-definition of the statement there is my values, right?
There's no such thing as my values.
That you could live in accordance with.
That's just whim-based philosophy.
That's just hedonism, right? My values, to me, then you're just saying it's personal preference.
Everything is personal preference. If you say live in accordance with rational values, live in accordance with consistent values, live in accordance with universal values, but that's the opposite of my values, so to speak.
But if my goal is not to drive anywhere, then a map isn't going to be a value for me, right?
Sure. But a map is a personal preference, right?
But when people say live in accordance with values, what they mean is that it's with reference to some external standard of truth or validation, right?
And that external standard being...
Well, rationality, evidence, whatever, right?
UPB. But if somebody says, I want to live in accordance with my values, and then you say, well, what are values?
And they say, well, it's whatever I want in the moment.
Then it's a tautology, right?
Because what they're saying is, I want to do that which I want to do.
It's like, well, so what? Coke is Coke, right?
So I haven't added anything to the sum total of knowledge or even any total of knowledge to, you know, it's just saying a tree is a tree.
Well, A is A. Aristotle did that 2,500 years ago.
There's no point, right? Or in the case of the murderer, I want to live in accordance with the utility of the knife I'm holding.
Well, sure, but since he is a murderer, that's what he's doing.
He would just be defining the good as that which he is currently doing, which is both to unite the good, which is an objective concept, with his own subjective preference, which is to say subjectivity is exactly the same as objectivity, which is a contradiction.
And in the same way, defining the knife as his value, in other words, defining value as that which permits him to do what he wants.
Do whatever he wants. Right, right.
Which, of course, you have to have a concept of value that transcends the animal kingdom, right?
Because we don't have the social contract with bugs and reptiles.
And so, obviously, a shark does what it wants to do, right?
I mean, you don't reason a shark out of wanting your leg.
I mean, you can try, but unless it's the mechanical shark in Jaws, you're not going to have much luck.
So, of course, saying that whatever is the good is what I currently want to do, well, that also includes, in the social contract of moral virtue, an amoeba absorbing another amoeba, right?
So that really can't work right now.
So there are, in fact, some things that we might want that we shouldn't want.
Well, sure. I mean, for sure.
There are some things that we want, and, of course, There's no possibility, really, of arguing somebody out of an irrational desire.
We all know that from beating our heads against Christianity.
But where the weakness arises is when somebody uses a moral justification for their actions, right?
It's the moral proposition that they put forward to justify their actions that philosophy can swoop in and peck to death.
Right, but isn't what I just stated a moral proposition in and of itself?
What was it that you stated? To say that there are some things that we might or do want that we shouldn't want.
Isn't that a moral statement?
I wouldn't say so, because I don't think that we have any control over our desires.
We have a control over our actions.
But we have no direct control over our desires, right?
I can choose not to eat, but I can't choose to not get hungry.
So not all normative assertions are morality.
Yeah, I would certainly say that if you say that a particular action is universally right or wrong, then this is something that can be evaluated by philosophy.
If someone says, why did I rape that girl?
Just because I felt like it.
Even that is...
So anytime anybody comes up with an explanation of their behavior, then obviously if somebody says, well, in response to the question, why did you rape that girl?
Because I felt like it. It's like, so is it right to do what you feel like?
Yes. Is it right for everyone or just for you?
And at the moment they say it's right as a principle, take what you want, kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, jungle, law of the jungle, or whatever.
Then they, of course, have put up an insurmountable contradiction, which the UPP book goes into in detail, right?
But if they just say everyone should do whatever they want, well, then, of course, then again, there's the same problem, because she's a woman who doesn't want to be raped, otherwise it's not rape.
But if somebody just says, like, just stares at you stupidly, or whatever, or just stares at you and doesn't answer, philosophy can't do anything about that, right?
This is the brick wall of faith, right?
If somebody says, I believe in God just because I believe in God, right?
Which is basically what faith is.
It's a tautology. What is the justification for my belief?
My belief, right?
I mean, you can't penetrate that with any philosophy other than to say that's a tautology and you've proven nothing and you know nothing.
You're just asserting knowledge.
And they're going to say it doesn't matter.
My proof is my proof. I am my own proof.
My belief is my own proof. But the moment they say God exists because X, Y, and Z, then they've opened themselves to an objective analysis.
Okay, the use of the word because requires reasoning, and reasoning is subject to rationality and empiricism.
Yeah, like if somebody says that democracy is valid because the people choose their governments, right?
Then they've put forward a proposition which is moral, which is universal, and therefore is open to analysis.
The analysis being, but there's a gun in the room.
So the blank stare or the faith response would be essentially equivalent to saying, I don't know and I don't care.
I'm just going to act.
Well, it's a shock with language, basically, right?
I mean, the shock just says, I eat because I'm hungry.
Well, he's not even, in a real sense, I mean, he's not even getting to the because.
I eat because I eat.
Right, he's biologically determined to do what he's doing.
Right. I mean, the shark, the equivalent to faith, from a religious standpoint, is the shark saying to you, I eat because I eat.
Right? There's no moral proposition there whatsoever, right?
But, of course, you can always nail the Christian who says, I believe because I believe.
It's like, do you believe because there is a God that exists somewhere out there, or do you believe in a fantasy of a God that is internal to you?
Right, and then he starts getting into rationalization.
Yeah, as soon as he says that there's a god that exists out there, and my belief is empirically derived from that god, or the existence of that god, then bang, they're right back in the arena, and you can take him down, right?
So, then the...
See, what I'm trying to sort out is...
Where a value...
because the word value implies an evaluation, right?
That the beholder assigns a certain importance to an object, right?
The object doesn't have that importance intrinsically.
It's assigned by the beholder.
So if some values are universal, There has to be a way to show how that's true in the absence of looking for it in the molecules, if you know what I mean. Well, sure, but I mean, I don't think you can say that values are universal.
You can say that statements that claim to be universal about values must be universal.
I mean, I think that's the UPB thing, right, which is that Oh, and then by consequence, anything that's valued under that system would be, as a product of that system of thought, assigned the label universal value, but wouldn't actually be a universal value.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like there's no bone in a dog called canine, right?
Canine is a categorization, which is a whole bunch of definitions that I assume are pretty logical and well worked out in the biological arena.
But then if I suddenly say canine includes things with wings that burst into flame and swim underwater, right, then clearly I am no longer conforming to my own definition of canine.
So canine doesn't exist in the real world.
Values don't exist in the real world.
But the moment that you say that this is the definition of canine, then it's subject to rational analysis, right?
Same way if you say this is the definition of the good, it's subject to rational analysis.
But what you can't do is say there's a definition of canine, which is my dog, right?
Because there is no definition of an individual item, right?
It's something that a singular cannot be defined.
Because it is the same thing, right?
You have to look for things that are common in order for there to be conceptual definitions.
So if somebody says this is a category, they can't say it only applies to a particular instance, right?
I can't say canine is my dog today and not tomorrow, right?
Because it's a useless concept.
It's not a concept at all because it doesn't describe commonality.
In the same way, you can't say the good is what I do today, right?
Because the good is a concept that must...
Identify common characteristics across different entities or concepts or other concepts or whatever.
So you can't define what is universal as what is personal because the whole point of universal is it transcends the personal.
Right. It's a classification, not a specification.
Right, right, right. And the moment it has a classification, then it has to describe common aspects of something, some things, right?
And then it's open to rational analysis and empirical observation and all that good stuff.
So the definition of a value, then, in your terms is what exactly again?
Whatever is useful to achieve an end.
Whatever is useful to achieve an end.
So anything that has utility and ends are only those things that individuals can have, correct?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, the scientific method doesn't invent itself or find itself useful.
So, our definitions are very similar, then.
As I was sort of formulating in my head, a value is an assignment of importance according to an individual's purposes or goals.
Yeah, for sure. This is just another way of saying what you said.
Yeah, I mean, it's a compared to what situation, right?
Valuable compared to what?
Well, cutting my toenails is valuable to getting into tight shoes.
Driving to Chicago or whatever, right?
So it's always relative to what?
And there are, of course, ways of measuring particular goals or activities relative to the stated end goal The endgame, and you can assign a hierarchy of values based on that, right?
So, it's important to apply to university to get into university.
It may help to brush your teeth, but it's not essential, right?
So, relative to the goal, right?
So, compared to what? Compared to the goal.
And so, you can get a whole complex hierarchy of values, a whole sort of org chart of values relative to your stated goal, right?
And then you measure those activities relative to the sequence that aids them achieve that.
So then values really are...
If values are something that are relative to an individual...
Well, no.
They're relative to a stated goal, right?
So if I say my stated goal is to say something true about the universe, then I have to use the scientific method, right?
Because your question is, are they objective or subjective, right?
Well, if my goal is subjective, the values have to be subjective.
If my goal is subjective, then the values are subjective.
If my goal is to make an objectively true statement, I have to use objective methodologies.
Like rationality, science, evidence, blah, blah, blah.
If my goal is subjective, then I can if I want, but it's not necessary to use...
Oh, okay.
All right. I understand now.
I understand. We're not actually assigning objective and subjective to the category of value at that point in time.
It's the goal that we assign it.
The category...
Assumes that characteristic by the things that are in it.
So if the things that are in it are the scientific method or logic or empiricism, then the category itself assumes the characteristic of being objective.
So then, in that case, those values would be objective because Those values are objective.
No, I would say that the values are neutral.
They change depending on the goal.
If the goal is to make an objectively true statement, then you need to use objective methodologies.
So the objective methodologies have value, and subjective or merely personally asserted preference does not.
So it's the goal. So you can't say, does East have value relative to West?
Well, it doesn't matter.
It depends where you want to drive. If you want to drive East, then East have value.
If you want to drive West, then it doesn't.
It's the destination that determines how you judge the values.
Right, right, right. But what I'm saying is values as a category Is neither subjective nor objective, then.
The category earns the characteristic by the referent members.
No, by the goal. Right?
Right, so you keep dropping the goal from your definition?
You can't say that values become objective or subjective depending on values, because that's self-referential.
The individual reference are what is objective or subjective based upon my goal.
Yes. Not the category values.
That's correct. But the Okay, so, okay, alright, yeah.
Then we're on the same page.
Right, and again, just to beat the metaphor to death, the value is the equivalent to direction, right?
Direction is a category, and east or west has value depending on your destination.
Go. Got it.
Got it. Okay, um...
That was too easy. Come on, bring up another complication, I dare you.
Come on, do it! Do it!
Do it! Let's just take a pause here, in case anybody else has anything that they want to mention or to talk about.
The show is yours, my brothers and sisters.
Speak up, if you wish.
I think, uh...
We can wait all day.
Don't make me burst into song.
You can type it into the window, too.
Was there anything else that came into the window?
No. We can wait, we can wait.
Well, he's certainly welcome to ask the question because I'm not editing any more of these damn files.
It takes half a day. So if there's a three-minute gap in here, by God, there's just a three-minute gap in here.
So feel free to speak up now.
It is a live show.
You're here for a reason. Not just to get first dibs on the silver-tongued devils of Greg's questions, but to ask questions yourselves.
Go for it, Mr. D. What?
Go ahead, David. Hello.
Hi. Hi, how's it going? I'm good.
How are you? Good, good, good.
I wanted to talk about the police.
The band? And specifically...
I love the band. They've reformed Baby and they're touring again.
I think they might release a new album, but anyway, go on.
Yeah, yeah, they played Don in Fenway Park a couple weeks ago, or months ago now, I guess.
I can't even count the number of times I've seen Sting in concert, but he's pretty damn good.
Okay, so I wanted to talk about the police as in the people wielding the guns.
Yes. More specifically, my reaction to some of the things that the police do.
It's something that I think you and I spoke about briefly over at the University of Florida kid, the guy who got tased asking a question of John Kerry.
And it's something that came up again...
That I was able to process a little more when someone posted, I think it was you who posted the video of the 14, 15 year old kid getting pepper sprayed and hit in the head and had her face slammed off the front of a cop cruiser.
And I really have a tough time understanding my reaction to that.
I was wondering if this is something that might be worth discussing here or might be better suited for a private chat?
Well, I don't believe that we have an unbearably huge queue of people willing to talk, so I'm more than happy to talk about it now, if it's alright with you.
Okay. Yeah, that's fine with me, too.
So... I really feel conflicted, because on the one hand, I really don't think that there should be police.
I'm an anarchist, obviously.
It's hard to listen to your podcast for very long without being an anarchist, because it just makes so much damn sense.
Oh, I thought it was just that people gave up.
Fine! Fine!
Right. Yeah, they're just crying.
That's right. No, but I don't think that they should be police, but when I see these videos of people being, or read these stories of people being abused by the police, and it's something that, especially where it seems like the problem is so easily solvable by the, or preventable by the person being beaten, it's like, why wouldn't you?
Why wouldn't you just... You know, submit to the cop and just let him put the cuffs on and let him get you into the back of the car because there's no way you're getting out of that situation without the cuffs being on.
And whether it happens calmly or whether you have to get all bruised and potentially killed trying to prevent it from happening.
I really get these two conflicting feelings.
It's like, I feel...
I feel anger at the police for doing this, but I also feel, and I'm more prone to act on, the anger I feel towards, I don't want to say, it's actually, it's not anger, it's I feel anxiety, and I want to, most people on the boards react saying, like, the police really shouldn't be doing that, and that's going through my head too, but my reaction is, listen, the girl should shut up and do as she's told.
Right. So, I mean, for you, it's sort of like if you wear a bunch of red clothing and jump up and down in front of a rabid bull, you're going to get gored.
And yeah, getting gored is terrible, but what the hell were you doing?
Right. And I think part of it might be that I've just given up on the police, trying to reform the police.
That it's just...
It's not going to work.
If I was there...
What could I do? That's what I do.
I put myself in a situation where I'm standing there watching, but what do I do?
Do I yell at the police? No, it's not going to do anything.
But if you convince the girl to not resist arrest, then she doesn't get her face cracked open.
Well, I certainly agree with that.
I certainly agree with that.
And I'm guessing that you're not black.
Is that fair to say?
Right, right. So, you know, honky to honky, it is hard for us to understand the relationship, particularly in the U.S., between the black community and the police, because you and I, we get harassed by the IRS on a bad day, right? If something bad happens or whatever, right?
And that's it, and it's polite letters, and we call a lawyer, and this and that, right?
But the prevalence of police abuses in the black community, in the inner cities, particularly in America, this also occurs in the Hispanic community, of course, is something that you and I find very hard to appreciate, I think, and to understand.
There are very few, like in certain neighborhoods, there are very few black families that haven't had a member of their family thrown in jail unjustly.
And by unjustly, I mean because of something like drug laws or something that's just made up nonsense.
So there is a different country that particularly poor blacks live in.
And it's not just poor blacks, I mean it's poor whites too, but just to focus on this particular situation.
And of course the most frustrating aspect is that you would expect the black community to be natural anarchists, right?
Because they do suffer so much more than your average whitey at the hands of the police and at the hands of the state.
But Unfortunately, there is a collectivist culture combined with a very strong religiosity that prevents anarchists from making much inroads into the black community, right?
Because, you know, it shouldn't be hard to turn Jews against Nazis, but unfortunately, in this situation, it is, right?
So, if this girl has been brought up and has seen her older brother dragged off to jail...
Sees no economic job opportunities for herself.
Has grown up probably, again, sort of all odds, in a broken home, in a neighborhood with nothing but broken homes.
Sees no future, right?
Because the discipline that you and I have in life is largely relative to the things that we can achieve.
Right? So this is something I argued about way back in podcasts on Teenage, some of the five-part series on the family.
But there's no goodies that society can hand out to these people.
I mean, they go to shitty schools.
They live in constant terror of violence and rape and impregnation.
AIDS is significant.
The number of drug addicts is high.
And again, this is not black community in general.
I'm just talking about specific geographical areas.
And this also occurs in other communities, but just to focus on this.
So this girl has been terrorized her whole life.
She's been taught to be afraid of the police.
There's this old thing that...
Oh, what's this blobby?
The Supreme Court justice guy, the pubic hair in the can of Coke guy, was talking about.
Where he says, you know, when he was brought up, you're not allowed to look a white woman in the eye.
He's going to be accused of rape, but this and that and the other.
But... Clarence Thomas, yeah.
These black people, you don't ever look a cop in the eye.
If a cop's coming, you cross the street.
That mildly uneasy feeling that you and I get when we're driving down a highway going 115, or I guess in U.S. currency, something lower.
When the cop comes, it's like, ooh, is he going to come out?
We feel like the zebra going past the lions.
Is he hungry?
Is he going to come out?
Well, that occurs a couple of times a day with far worse terror for people in the black community.
So they live in a complete state of nature.
I mean, these welfare gulags are not far off, I would argue, from concentration camps.
You have the unions and the minimum wages that are detonating the capacity for these people to get a leg up through honest labor.
You have these unbelievably terrible schools where they graduate barely able to read and write.
You have a decrease because of government regulation and restrictions on capital investment in sort of heavy equipment areas.
You don't get the same kind of jobs that allow people to climb out of the poorest of the poorest situations.
You have endemic and chronic drug use.
You have the endless temptations of drug dealing and that kind of profitability, where you slip from a cultural terror and rage against police to a literal quasi, you know, you're in the gray market, you're in the black market.
You have a culture, of course, that is the rap culture that largely glorifies this.
You see the rap guys on the videos, the black guys with the big shiny white cars and the sunglasses and the white suits, and you know they're not getting there because they opened up a couple of Starbucks and worked hard.
So there is an incredibly different America for these kinds of people.
And... So that sort of explains why she reacted like that, so terrified of being arrested and so terrified of being hassled by the police for anything.
Well, it's more than hassle.
Is that what you're getting at? Well, it's more than hassle.
The police can plant a drug on you at any time.
The problem with the drug stuff is not just all the stuff that we've talked about, but the fact that there's no actual complainant.
So the police become the complainant.
They can plant drugs on you.
They can control you. So, of course, if there were people, if a third or a quarter of the people on your street had been thrown into concentration camps, you'd be pretty testy and pissed off too, right?
Right. And of course, when the people are in these prisons, you know, they're getting raped, they're getting abused, they're getting staffed, they're getting, you know, locked in solitary, they're going through the most heinous abuses, right?
And people are always like, oh my god, we shouldn't torture the people who are al-Qaeda, and America has just gone through this terrible situation where they allow torture of enemy combatants, and the Geneva Convention is like, fuck that, the prisons.
Yeah. I mean, of course, you and I would look at the judgment of a girl saying, look, just smile, say yes sir, no sir, do what you and I do when we're pulled over.
But their experience of the police is wildly different from our experience of the police.
And so I think if you have some empathy, because what you're doing is you're putting yourself in her situation and saying, well, I would never act like that, why is she being so stupid?
But that, I would not say, it's not true empathy to put yourself in somebody else's position and say, how would I act?
You have to try and put yourself in somebody else's skull and understand how that could be a behavior that would result from, like, how could circumstances have come about that that behavior would seem like a good idea or something?
And again, it doesn't mean that you excuse or forgive that behavior, and I would certainly, Chris Rock has this thing about, you know, How to talk to cops kind of thing.
Don't scream at them.
Don't insult their mothers.
Travel with a white guy is the other thing.
Preppy looking white guy in a suit in the passenger seat.
I would say that the real empathy, where you got to, which was great, is like, if I were in that situation, I'd behave very differently.
But unfortunately, that's not, like, you grew up not living that situation, so putting yourself in that situation now, I think, is only getting halfway to empathy, if that makes sense.
Right. Sorry, that was a long answer.
I'll let you talk now. No, that makes sense as to why I didn't feel empathy for it right there.
But it's the same thing happened when the white Andrew Meyer guy got tased.
And whenever I see these police arresting people or honkies too, I go into this like, why don't you just follow the law?
Why don't you just obey the curfew?
Why don't you just... You know, not cut people in line.
Why don't you just...
Lauren Canario, who recently signed up on the FDR boards, got arrested for not having a license, just refusing to have a license on principle.
And it's like, how can I go and hold a sign for her?
I mean, it's nonsense.
I mean, of course she shouldn't be arrested, and of course Andrew Meyer shouldn't be tased, and of course the girl...
The black girl from the video we were talking about shouldn't get tased, but it's like, I don't feel empathy for any of them.
You don't feel empathy for any of them, okay.
Because it just seems like it's such a...
It seems like it's such a...
A simple thing. It's like, well, yeah, just make a different choice.
I don't think it's because I can't sympathize with the black plight, although, of course, I can't.
I don't as well as the honky getting hassled by the IRS, but it's just...
I think it's broader than that.
I think it's broader than that for me.
Well, let me ask you something, then.
If it became illegal to listen to Free Domain Radio podcasts, would you stop doing that?
I don't know.
What about if it became illegal to read books by anything other than government-approved economists or philosophers or newspapers or whatever?
I don't know.
See, I mean, that's interesting.
I would be tempted to. That's interesting because the interesting thing, right, you'd be tempted to, right, and you would absolutely want to.
Because, of course, you'd recognize that if you gave up on that principle, there'd be no point.
Fighting anything, right?
Then it's just like, well, we're in fascism, we're in a dictatorship, hopefully it won't last more than a couple of hundred years and whatever, right?
I'll get my head down and go join everybody else in the Soviet mine or Gulag or whatever.
But at some point, the values that you have would be violated to the point where you would consider, and I'm sure you would, violate the law.
But that just hasn't happened to you yet.
yet.
The stuff you like isn't illegal.
But the stuff that other people like is illegal.
Like drugs or prostitution or whatever, all the other stuff that gets manufactured to get thrown into.
Getting a job, being paid under the table, going from Mexico to Canada.
It's just that what you and I like hasn't been made illegal yet.
So then we look at these people and say, well, why the hell are you defying the law?
Why don't you just obey it?
Well, that's easy for us to say because what we like isn't illegal.
Mm-hmm.
But if FDR and Murray Rothbard and Ily Rockwell and if all of these places, if it was illegal to go there and you were 99.99999% sure you'd never get caught or, you know, you'd pass around photocopied articles that couldn't be traced through your IP or whatever, right? You would not say, well, that's it.
Well, I've made it illegal so I'm now never going to read anything other than state-approved propaganda again.
Right? Then, the temptation for you to start moving outside the law would be that much greater, and I think that's where you need to get to in terms of really understanding the decision.
I'm not saying it's the right way to fight the law, I don't think it is, but in terms of putting yourself into other people's shoes, this is where to go.
Yeah, that's interesting, because...
I read about stories about people living in Soviet Russia and how they had to pass around copies of these manuscripts, and I can't help but think, you know, yeah, good for them.
And it's terrible when they get caught that they get arrested, but I think you're right.
I think that it's because it's something I could see myself doing, whereas I can't see myself Driving without a license.
What if the draft were passed?
Right. Oh, I'd move to Canada.
Well, see, but this is exactly what we're talking about, right?
See, as soon as it starts to hit home for you, then you're like, fuck the law, I'm out of here, right?
And if they say it's illegal for you to move to Canada, would you say, oh, okay, well, I guess I'll go shoot Iraqis then, right?
No, you'd find some other way to get out.
Right, yeah. And it's different for everyone, right?
But it's hard to judge those people who have a different threshold from you.
We can criticize their, you know, the usefulness of what they're doing, right?
I don't think that getting tasered talking to John Kerry is going to do smack to free the world.
But this is their tolerance threshold.
This is what their values are that are being violated, right?
And yeah, this guy was like he's a notorious, like, looking for attention kind of guy or whatever, right?
But But you have to sort of say, well, what the hell am I going to do?
If you want to understand the black experience, you say, well, what's going to happen if I get drafted?
Getting drafted is less risky than going to prison.
Right, yeah. If you go to prison, you're definitely going to get brutalized.
You're definitely going to get brutalized. You can at least cower down in a firefight, or maybe you'll get a desk job, or maybe you'll just sit around, hurry up and wait, it's the motto of the army.
Whatever, right? I mean, the number of people who actually end up shooting people dead in the army, it's very few.
Whereas everyone gets brutalized in prison, right?
So if you want to understand the black community, imagine that you're going to get drafted to the front lines for 10 years.
Right? Well, what are you going to do?
You're going to be pretty hysterical and tense, right?
And you're going to have a very different relationship to the state than you and I have, right?
So it's just about escalating the stimuli until it matches what is obviously happening for these people.
And that's how I would suggest getting into the skin of what they're doing.
Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And of course, this girl, the girl in the video, the question is also the parenting, right?
I have been meaning, though I don't even know where to start as far as this goes, a couple of months ago, gosh, six or eight months ago, we had a gentleman from Africa on this show who was telling us about this, that, or the other to do with Africa.
And what I didn't get a chance to ask him, which I would love to ask, and if there's anyone who's listening to this who's from Africa or from that kind of culture, tell me what the parenting is like in Africa.
Because when I look at the systems in Africa and how brutal and violent and ridiculous they all are, Of course, I think foreign aid and I think the sale of arms and I think tribalism and so on.
But I got to understand, like, when you have a whole bunch of people willing to commit genocide in Rwanda, how the hell are they raised?
What kind of parenting and punishment were they exposed to where their empathy was crushed to the point where they become pure sociopaths?
And not just a few, but quite a few.
So, I mean, this is the other kind of thing.
It's like, what kind of parenting was this girl exposed to?
Is this cop, the straw that broke the camel's back, was she beaten from day one by a series of drug-addicted boyfriends of her welfare-squatting mother?
To take a ridiculous kind of stereotype, but this could be the case.
It was just one goddamn thing, and she just couldn't take it anymore.
It's hard for us to know.
But I think it's worth examining that, because these people could, I mean, we could really help the black community, right?
Because they freed themselves from slavery, got trapped in welfare and religion, which arguably is a softer and more pervasive kind of, at least a slave openly resents being owned, right?
But this kind of stuff is horrible.
Trapped in bad schools, trapped in welfare ghettos, trapped in In prison, we could really help the black community, but I don't think we're going to get there by saying, well, I, as a middle-class white guy, would not have done the same thing in that situation, so that's not right.
I mean, I understand it, but I'm just saying that to our Ebony brothers and sisters, it might not be the best way to open dialogue.
Okay.
I think that's very helpful.
Okay, good. Well, I'm glad that you submitted to the Endless Gale of Words, and I hope that this helped.
No, thanks for bringing it up.
I know that I got some emails about that, too, that people are like, well, why doesn't she just hamana hamana, right?
And, of course, we have the same thing when we look back at Weimar Germany.
It's like, well, why didn't they just understand that Hitler was a nutjob and not vote for him and so on?
But, you know, human beings are human beings are human beings, right?
And as I sort of argue about in On Truth, the book, there is...
A sensitivity to culture that we need to have and that if we've been born in that situation, we may very well have ended up doing the same thing.
We can't take the gifts that were given to us.
We can't inherit the privilege of being middle class and white and say, well, I'm a reasonable human being because we just weren't subjected to the same forces.
It's like taking an inheritance and saying, I'm a great businessman because look at all the money I have.
Right. All right. Well, thanks so much.
I appreciate that. An excellent, excellent question.
And I will be more than happy to pass along the baton of the microphone to any other runners in the race for truth.
Ooh. Overextended metaphor.
But hey, not the first time and probably not the last.
Brrr, brrr, brrr, brrr, my imitation of crickets.
I can keep going. I do tumbleweeds, but I'm not exactly sure what sound they make.
Bats flying around.
Chew. As they roll across the desert.
Well, we can certainly have an early stop to the show.
If people don't have any other questions or issues or problems, no problem.
We're going to go and dig the parental alligator pit around the house, so we'll need a little bit of time while the light's still good.
Going once. Going twice.
Going three times.
All right. Well, thanks everyone so much for joining us.
I appreciate that. And I will post this.
I think we actually had one that I don't need to edit, which is excellent.
And I will post this later tonight, or first thing tomorrow.
The book on Truth, The Tour, and Evolution available only $11.95 for the PDF download, $14.95 for the fabulously read audiobook, and the new book UPB should be out this week.
And I'm going to release it as audiobook, as PDF, and as physical book.
And I hope that you will buy it.
I strongly urge you to buy it for you and yours.
And thank you so much for joining me on this, I guess, relatively chilly, both climatology-wise and familial-wise, Sunday afternoon.
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