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Oct. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:35
896 Weight and Philosophy
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Sorry about the big bar of illustrious light coming off my forehead, but it's that time of day in the study, and I have to get the podcast done right now, because my wife's seeing some patients this afternoon, so just in case it turns into one of my FDR shriek fests, I thought I've tried to block the light out with a blanket, but unfortunately it's an archway in the room, so I don't have any curtains on it, or blinds.
So... This is going to be a delicate podcast or videocast.
It's a challenging topic, so I will try to do it justice.
Full disclosure, I have to watch my weight.
I am 41 years old.
I have, not too bad, but a little bit of chunk here, a little bit of chunk here.
That's all right. That's middle age.
What can you do? But...
I was sent to a video recently by somebody at the Freedom Aid Radio Board, and this was a philosopher, we'll call him Bob, he's, I believe, an anarcho-capitalist, certainly radical libertarian, minarchist slash anarcho-capitalist philosopher.
And he was giving a speech, and I've heard this guy before, but I've never seen him before, and he kind of went up To the podium.
And he was a big fellow.
I mean, certainly north of 300 pounds.
Big. And when I looked at his presentation, I found it hard to get past this question or this issue of weight.
And so I wanted to talk about it a little bit here.
Because what I did was I posted something on the board and I said...
It seems to me that a philosopher should at least be able to manage his own appetite, which some people took exception to, and I can understand that.
I mean, it's up to me to make a case as to why I think that should be so.
So I will attempt to do that here.
I mean, I exercise quite a bit, and I love to eat.
In fact, I exercise so that I can eat.
And, of course, as you get older, you just have to give up stuff.
Switch to skim milk, and I don't eat cookies anymore, and I don't eat chips, and I don't...
I mean, very rarely. I have some chocolate once in a while.
Halloween, for instance.
When I go out as the aforementioned Mars landing, you see?
Play that back in slow-mo, you'll see what I mean.
But I have to watch my way, just like I think everybody does, because we have this natural desire as living organisms, as human beings, to eat more than we should.
And that, of course, is because in history, or throughout history, there's been this problem.
Which is that we want more food than we can comfortably digest because we never know where our next meal is coming, and so when we have the chance to gorge, we do.
I mean, we're sort of programmed to do that, and we're naturally drawn to sugars and fats, of course, because they were...
Essential but hard to come by things in our in our natural environment, right?
So we would endure the bee stings to get the honey because we need the sugar and we need the fat and we need that because you know food intake was Uncertain particularly in the hunter-gatherer society a little bit less so in the agricultural society But of course that was also partly due to whether or not the crops failed or what the weather was like So we are naturally drawn To eat more than we should.
I mean, that's just something you have to manage as a human being, and it's not the biggest price in the world for the joys of being a rational organism, but it is something that we need to be aware of as human beings and so on.
So our natural desire...
Is to eat more than we should and to gravitate towards foods that taste good.
I mean, no matter what your love of vegetables, cheesecake will never be displaced by cauliflower on the dessert tray.
It's just never going to happen. It just doesn't taste as good.
So that's natural, and that's part of what we have to overcome in order to maintain our health, given that we're in a situation where the availability of bad food is so prevalent.
And I only say bad because of its prevalence.
It wasn't bad in the past.
It's so prevalent that we simply are in danger of becoming or staying unhealthy, of diabetes, of heart problems, and so on, joint problems, if we gain too much weight.
It is also not easy, if we assume, this Bob was a tall fellow, so he's Maybe 100 to 120 pounds overweight.
That's not an easy weight to gain.
I mean, that's not easy to gain.
You have to eat considerable, considerable, considerable amounts of excess food in order to gain and maintain that extra weight.
So this is not somebody who's 10 pounds overweight or 20 pounds overweight.
This is like my wife weighs 110 pounds.
It's like me carrying my wife on my back.
I'm 215 pounds, just in case anybody's curious.
And most of it's forehead.
So when we look at...
When I made this comment, I mean, it's perfectly reasonable to say, well, isn't this just a catty comment to make and so on?
But let me sort of explain to you why I made that comment, and hopefully it will make some sense.
And hopefully it will also give you some...
Power or strength in your own conversations with people about philosophy to be able to convince them more strongly about the truth of what it is that we talk about here.
I mean the whole point of this conversation is to spread it as quickly and as rapidly and effectively and with as great integrity as possible.
So it is my particular goal to try and give you as many tools if you love philosophy to be able to convince as many people of the values of rationality and so on.
So To move beyond the obvious is really the goal of rational thought.
To move beyond the obvious, and in many ways to reject the obvious.
And I've used these examples before, and I'm sorry, but I mean, they just work, so I'm going to do it again.
That the world looks flat, but it's not.
It's round. The sun and the moon look the same size, but they're not, right?
It's just the relative distances that make them appear that way.
It feels like the earth is still and the stars are rotating around us, but that's not the case, right?
So in the realm of physics, we're perfectly comfortable with the understanding that the purpose, really, of physics is to move beyond what is obvious.
And I talk about this in my recent book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
Plug. Go buy it.
Really, seriously. It's risk-free.
And so we're aware that the point of science is to move beyond what is obvious.
The point of nutrition, of course, is to move beyond what is merely pleasurable, or rather to say that we must balance the short-term pleasure of eating a whole cheesecake, say, with the long-term pleasure of maintaining a healthy weight.
So, The purpose of conceptual thought is to surmount immediate perceptual or sensual evidence and go towards more universal truth.
So really, it is about a rejection of the obvious in favor of the true.
Take a moment and pause and process that, but I'm sure you get it very quickly.
it's a very smart crowd who manages to thrash their way through these videos and i hugely appreciate it of course as i do massively appreciate people's kind donations which allow me to do this rather than fall asleep in meetings as a software executive so when we are a moral philosopher in particular not a philosopher of science not a philosopher of metaphysics
but when we are a moral philosopher which anybody who dips into the realm of politics in particular ethics human motivations interaction society we are all moral philosophers The degree to which you do that puts you into the ranks of that as well.
So a moral philosopher...
Particularly somebody who's interested in economics, and this is an Austrian, a guy who's spoken at Austrian conferences, Austrian economics conferences, this Bob fellow.
So if you are a philosopher, a moral philosopher, a philosopher interested in economics, then basically what you're doing is you're saying, well, it's easy.
I mean, economics is fundamentally a science of totaling up the hidden costs rather than the obvious benefits, right?
In economics, if you give a subsidy to the steel industry, it's very clear that the steel industry benefits from that and the workers are happy and so on.
What the science of economics is required for is to say, yes, well, there are immediate positive gains to giving a subsidy to the steel workers or the steel industry or steel companies.
But there are the hidden costs of this as well.
And if we don't ever think about the hidden costs, we're not an economist, right?
So, in this sort of famous parable of the broken windows, someone goes and breaks a window and people say, well, this is good for the economy because now a new window has to be built by the glacier who gets more money and that's positive and so on.
But, of course, what is always missed is all the stuff that was not produced because of the resources diverted to the glacier, all the stuff that was not bought because of the money spent at the glacier, and so on.
So, it's really, both in philosophy and in economics, it's about looking for The hidden costs, right?
So when we're younger, at least this certainly was the case for me, the benefits of conformity are very clear.
You get along with people, you're accepted, you don't cause problems, you don't have fights, you just, you know, the best way to get along is to go along and you win friends and you influence people by being...
But a philosopher will tell you that while there are short-term immediate pleasurable gains to be had in avoiding the anxiety of individuation, of individuality, of thinking for yourself, there are significant short-term anxieties that are created by opposing the errors of the status quo.
Similarly, there are long-term costs to conformity, right?
A sense of emptiness, depression, existential angst, a feeling of a loss of meaning, and problems in relationships, because if you conform, then you kind of don't exist as an individual, and so you can't relate to anyone because you're too busy obeying the conceptual and erroneous mythologies of whatever social group you're choosing to mold yourself to.
So... Really, when we look at the sciences and we look at philosophy, it is about rejecting immediate short-term obvious positive gain for the sake of longer-term beneficial gain.
So if we look at something like nutrition, nutrition is the science of saying, well, yeah, it tastes good, but that doesn't mean it's good for you, right?
There's good reasons as to why it tastes good and is bad for you in excess.
Because it never was an exodus in the past, but we had to have it.
So we developed taste buds to seek out, you know, these sugars and fats that we talk about.
So if everything that tasted good was good for you, there'd be no such thing or no need for the science of nutrition.
If everything that we observed was scientifically true, there'd be no need for anybody to develop the heliocentric theory of the universe, of the solar system, sorry, to develop theories of gravity, to develop theories of the rotundity of celestial objects like the one we stand on.
And so if everything was obvious, we wouldn't need philosophy.
If ethics was conformity plus, you know, avoid anxiety plus do whatever immediately feels like is going to be the best thing, we'd never need a science of philosophy.
We'd never need that at all.
Kids don't need nutritionists to tell them that candy is good.
Kids need nutritionists to tell them that too much candy is bad and you've got to eat your veggies, with the exception of Brussels sprouts, which are basically...
Satan's sweaty nutsack, nutritionally speaking and aesthetically speaking.
So, a philosopher, particularly one who's interested in economics, and especially one who focuses on ethics, must or is fundamentally saying to people, you need to not pursue what is in your immediate short-term interest.
Avoidance of anxiety, a feeling of acceptance, getting along with people by going along with people, whatever it is that makes you feel better or helps you avoid anxiety in the short run, you need to sometimes reject that and pursue what is beneficial for you in the long run.
And that really, of course, is the principle behind philosophy and economics and nutrition and all these other things.
Avoid the obvious. Don't fall into the obvious into conformity for the sake of avoiding anxiety because there are long-term consequences that are negative.
So if that's true, like if we accept that that is true, then when somebody comes up to a podium and is 100, 120, 130 pounds overweight, then What they're really saying is,
I do not reject short-term immediate benefits for the sake of longer-term advantages.
But this is what the bulk, the weight, the fat, this is what it communicates, even if it's at an unconscious level, this is what it communicates to everybody else.
Right? It communicates, I use food to manage my anxiety.
I do not push away the short-term immediate anxiety reduction of eating food or the emotional benefits of eating food or the taste and pleasure benefits of eating food.
I do not push those aside for the sake of the long-term goal of health and vitality.
So, if...
If you, as a philosopher, don't, you know, kind of do what philosophy dictates, which is to eschew, to push away, to reject short-term gains which are destructive for the sake of longer-term gains which are healthy and productive,
if you don't do that on your plate, if you don't do that in your mouth, if you don't do that with your cutlery, if you don't do that three, four, five times a day, Can you really convincingly say to other people, you should give up your short-term gains for the sake of longer-term gains?
You should reject what is obvious and pleasurable and that which reduces anxiety for the sake of that which is true and beneficial in the long run.
I don't think that you can do that in a valid and logical way.
And let me go a little bit further.
You know, I've had debates with people about tattoos and earrings on guys and stuff like that, eye rings and so on.
And I really, really dislike these things.
I think that they're distracting fundamentally, and of course I think that they come out of abusive histories, and when you get out of your abusive histories, so often people will re-inflict abuse upon themselves in the form of this kind of pain and problems, but we can talk about that another time.
But... Actually, on the Free Domain Radio BBQ CD set, which is 17 hours of audio from the Free Domain Radio BBQ, where we had an uproariously great time, there is a long conversation with somebody about that.
So if you have any questions or concerns about that, it's a couple of bucks to order the CD or you can even download it.
So when somebody presents themselves, I think it's important if you really want to communicate your ideas to an audience, it's important to get out of the way and let the ideas come through.
These conversations are not about me.
I want you to think about me as little as possible, and I want you to focus on the ideas that are coming into your mind, to evaluate them, to test them, and so on.
Let me just check my screensaver here.
So, if you are really committed to...
Communicating ideas in a positive and productive way to people that are essential, particularly moral ideas or ideas about mental health and so on, you need to get out of the way of yourself, right?
So if I had a big swastika on my forehead, then it would be very hard to concentrate on what it is that I was saying.
If I had a carp draped over the top of my head, it would be very hard to concentrate on what it is that I'm saying.
And if I were putting myself forward as a nutritional expert and I came in and the webcam could barely encompass my girth and I said, I am a nutritional expert and you need to listen to me in order to lose weight, then it would be very hard to take me seriously.
Right? If I said, losing weight is really valuable, it is the greatest value, I know exactly how to do it, and I was seriously overweight, I was the before and the after picture that never came, then you would have a very hard time taking me seriously, because either I knew what to do but didn't do it, in which case I can't claim that it's the most valuable thing to do, or I was doing what I said, in which case it didn't actually cause me to lose weight.
Either way, you're not going to take me as an example of, or you're not going to follow my advice, because clearly it hasn't worked for me.
And so in the same way, If you say to people as a philosopher, as an economist, as a moralist, you need to reject the obvious, you need to reject that which causes you anxiety in the short run or problems in the short run in order to focus on the truth in the long run, and yet you don't do that in your own diet, it's hard to be taken seriously. When you come in and you're that big, that's kind of an important piece of information that you're presenting to the world.
It's the old thing, like I sometimes sort of get this phrase in my mind, it's an old thing for me, where I say, I can't hear you over what you're doing.
I can't hear you over what you're doing.
So if I put myself forward as a relationship expert and I've had three divorces and I'm currently going through my fourth...
It's a little hard, I think, for you to take my relationship advice seriously.
Either I'm following it, in which case it will result in disaster, or I'm not following it, in which case I don't really believe it and I want you to be my guinea pig and I'm just up here talking for the sake of talking and blah blah blah.
So, if you are a philosophy professor and you come up to the podium and you start to speak about the joys and the virtues of deferring gratification and doing the right thing and acting rationally for the sake of long-term benefit and truth and value and so on, and you're 300-320 pounds, the students will not be able to hear you over what you've done, over what you're doing.
80 to 90% of communication is non-verbal.
Non-verbal.
And whenever you put yourself forward with an unusual personal appearance that you have some control over, I don't know, shorter or whatever, then if you put yourself forward in an unusual personal appearance, particularly one that directly contradicts the message that you're trying to get across, particularly one that contradicts the message that you're trying to get across, Well, you're not doing philosophy any favors.
You're not doing virtue any favors.
You're not doing clarity. You're not doing rationality.
You're not doing ethics any favors.
You are, in fact, causing people to short-circuit a little.
An Austrian economist comes up and says that it's important to understand and to act on the long-term hidden costs of what you're doing rather than the short-term benefits, and I'm going to have three more cheeseburgers It doesn't connect.
It doesn't work. It doesn't convince.
At a very fundamental level, it does not convince.
And you can have a career doing this.
You can have a job. You can write books.
You can tour. You can speak.
You can do whatever. But it will not convince anybody outside a particular circle.
Anybody outside a particular circle.
Certainty. I mean, certainty is what is required.
I'm going to get into all of this in another podcast, but I'll just touch on it here.
Certainty is what is required when we want to convince other people.
We have to be certain. If we're not certain, then we're just using them as a, you know, please do this and tell me if it works, right?
I mean, certainty comes from living your ideal.
Certainty does not come from thoughts.
Certainty does not come from books.
Certainty does not come...
From reasoning through things.
Certainty does not come from eloquence.
Certainty does not come from any of these things whatsoever.
Certainty only comes from living your values.
Rational certainty. You get priests and rhetoricians and what Socrates called the sophists who can make the worst argument appear.
But I'm talking about rational certainty.
Really the strength of character that can really help people change.
When you're not asking them to be your guinea pig.
When you've lived the values that you claim are valuable to other people or are true.
If you have values and you believe that they're true, you should damn well live by them.
I don't mean perfectly. I have pecan pie once a month maybe.
Perfectly. But enough to be sure that they work.
So I don't tell anybody to do anything that I haven't done.
I don't tell people that they should get corrupt people out of their lives if they can't Have honest and beneficial relationships with them.
I also say that it's impossible to have honest and beneficial relationships with corrupt or destructive people.
I don't tell people to do that and then go for lunch with my crazy mother.
I got her out of my life eight years ago.
My brother, my father, a number of friends.
It's you and me, brother. But I don't tell people that this approach, what I call the real-time relationship approach, is very beneficial to your romantic and personal relationships.
And then have a bad marriage myself.
I have an ecstatically joyful marriage with a woman that I absolutely adore head to toe.
So I've...
And all of the things that I talk about as being beneficial in relationships are things that I have done in my life.
All the things that I talk about.
About committing yourself to virtue, committing yourself to rationality, approaching things with mad enthusiasm, and living your values in order to be able to convince other people Of the value of that.
This guy posted on the board last night about he was going to buy, I don't know, was it a...
100 copies or 50 copies or something of some book, Bastiat's The Laws, and he was going to sort of, you know, hand them out and so on.
I mean, I certainly appreciate the thought and the idea behind it, but it's not going to work.
I mean, it's not going to work.
I'm telling you. I've been doing this for over 20 years.
It's not going to work. The only thing that's going to work is for you to be as happy and joyful and positive and productive a human being that people, like, beg you for your secret, right?
That's the only way That I can't convince you of the rationality of my arguments if I'm not a happy person.
If I'm not a joyful, passionate, and committed human being myself, not if I hand you or show you, you know, Atlas Shrugged or Economics in One Lesson or On Liberty or whatever it is, or Rothbard's book, if I show you all of that stuff, so what? You can go read that stuff yourself, and then we can all live in this little place called conceptual freedom, which doesn't add up to a damn thing in the real world, or I can actually live my values in a personal sense.
In a personal sense!
And then I get the certainty of just knowing that they work.
The theories are rationally validated, and that's in the universally preferable behavior book.
And they're lived, and because they're rationally validated, and they're lived, and they work, and they do produce happiness, and I know that from my own experience, then I can be absolutely certain in putting them forward for you.
Right? If the doctor who has cancer says he has a drug that cures cancer, but he doesn't take it himself, why should you take it?
Why? If you don't live your values consistently and have the resulting joy and certainty that comes from knowing that they work in the real world, why should anybody listen to you?
Why should anybody listen to Bastiat?
Or Smith? Or any of these people?
Ricardo? But it's your life that you have to use to convince people.
And they will never be able to hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
Over what you're doing. What you're doing.
I gave up a damn lucrative career to talk to you.
Because I care about your soul and your happiness and your virtue.
And I know how to get you there.
I know how to get you there.
I've gotten there. This is the most important thing that I can be doing.
And how do you know that I believe that?
Because I'm doing it. Because I'm doing it.
And so if you believe that morality is about the non-obvious, is about not using external things to manage your anxiety, there is no external solution to the problem of insecurity or anxiety.
It is always an internal state that must be wrestled with.
If you say as a philosopher, if you say as somebody who's interested in freedom or truth or laissez-faire capitalism or anarcho-capitalism or whatever political solutions you believe in, If that is your approach and you say to people, well, the truth is not obvious.
The truth causes anxiety and we should accept it and embrace it anyway.
We should reject the easy solutions of conformity or joining a camp or merging into some group, whether it's Democratic or Republican or Libertarian or whatever.
We should reject Those easy solutions in the same way that we should reject the easy solution in the realm of biology which says, oh, God made everything.
Or in the realm of physics, oh, God made everything.
That's an easy bullshit answer.
And it's also not true, of course.
And we should do the same thing in our own lives.
If we have this thing which says we should reject immediate gratification for the sake of the truth, for the sake of long-term value, Then, if we're really, really overweight, we are contradicting ourselves just by showing up.
And people will never be able to hear what we're saying over what we're doing, over what we've done, over how we present ourselves, over how we appear.
Appearance is not shallow.
I don't mean looks or hair or anything like that.
Appearance is not shallow. Appearance communicates an enormous amount.
Eye contact communicates an enormous amount.
A firm handshake communicates.
And you can use and manipulate these things, but you can feel that too.
You can get that too. But if you really care about freedom and about getting people to freedom, getting people to happiness, if you really care about that, then you start with your own garden, right?
As Voltaire says in Candide, tend your own garden.
If you want to convince people of the virtue and the joy of philosophy, be virtuous and joyful.
And don't lecture. Like I say this with 900 podcasts, but...
I waited until I had my shit together before going out and saying, here's how you should gather your shit together, so to speak.
So I hope that that makes some sense, right?
That I think it's very valid to say that a philosopher should be able to control his own appetite, his own immediate short-term anxiety coping mechanisms like binge-overeating, which is what is required to gain that much weight.
I think it's a perfectly valid thing to say that a philosopher should be able to control his own appetites because philosophy is about Managing your appetites, our appetites for conformity in a corrupt society, which is where we live.
In a virtuous society, we have nearly as much to manage.
But it is about not taking the path of least resistance, not using other people to manage our anxiety, whether it's through conformity or subjugation or domination or merging or what is called...
Fusion in psychological terms, right?
It's about not using other people to manage our anxiety, but focusing on the truth and pushing through the anxiety to get to the virtue and the truth and the joy and the happiness that's on the other side.
And when I see somebody who's vastly overweight, I simply know that they're not doing that.
And so if they're not doing that in as personal and as intimate and as easily controllable a place as their eating habits How can they possibly tell society as a whole, well you need to give up the state?
Because people feel great anxiety about giving up the state.
Giving up the state is radical.
It blows people's minds. It's mad.
It's like the medieval people thinking about giving up the role of God in the universe.
Nothing makes any sense. It seems empty.
It seems weird. It seems violent.
It seems crazy. So when we say to people, give up the state, or give up your corrupt relationships, get out of your bad relationships, or maybe even if you can't be honest with, in a productive way, your family, give up your family, when we say to people, give up things that are bad for you,
that are wrong for you, that are immoral, that are destructive, the state, the church, the cult of the family, and we can't give up the second piece of cheesecake ourselves, how can we rationally, conceivably Say to people, you need to give up everything that you're familiar with despite the immense anxiety that it causes, but I'm not going to give up my second piece of cheesecake because that will make me feel anxious.
We can't.
We can't ask other people to give up things which legitimately frighten them a thousand times more than giving up a second piece of cheesecake would frighten us.
Then you're asking people to do something that you won't even do a tenth of one percent of.
You're saying to people, you need to climb this mountain.
I'm not going to take two steps up on the staircase.
But you need to climb that mountain.
People will just laugh at you.
You want to climb this mountain?
You get to the top.
You sell me on the view.
Then I'll climb the mountain.
But if you say to people, you climb that mountain.
I'm not getting off this couch.
It just won't work. And people know that deep down.
You know that. I know that.
We know that deep down. It's kind of charades, right?
Anyway, so I hope that this is helpful.
I hope that this gives you a path by which you can help to move forward to change the world.
And don't use other people. Don't use me.
Don't use it. Use your own life.
Use your own virtue. Use your own joy.
Keep working on your own happiness, your own joy, your own rationality.
And be happy. Have a great life.
Have great relationships. Have a satisfying and rich existence.
That's what will sell people, not your mastery of objectivist epistemology or the Rothbardian theory of the gold standard.
That's not going to sell people on anything other than on the fact that you prefer abstractions in your mind to actions in your life.
Which is always the opposite of convincing.
Thank you so, so, so much for dropping by and having a listen and a watch.
I hope that this has been helpful.
I look forward to your donations.
Please, please, please drop by thefreedomainradio.com and pick up your risk-free books.
I can't urge you strongly enough to grab a hold of these and to implement that which is contained therein.
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