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March 10, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:52
1007 Friends or Virtue?

Does philosophy require us to be alooone?

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
I wanted to address a question that has been floating around for quite some time in the circles who don't talk about things that I talk about.
And this is from a blog named CherylKline.wordpress.com and she quotes from one of my critiques of taking the political approach to Securing personal and political liberty.
And she quotes from one of my articles, which you can have a look at freedomain.blogspot.com.
And then she says, Part of me agrees with this, with Steph's thesis.
Part of me would absolutely love to cocoon myself with the above-mentioned mythical libertarian pals and drop everyone else.
And yes, part of the reason I don't is quite selfish.
Existing as an anarcho-capitalist is lonely enough.
But to stop interacting with everyone who isn't one...
That would be nothing less than total social suicide.
Also, how would this advance libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism one inch?
My friends already think I'm nuts.
Telling them I'm not going to associate myself with them anymore on the basis of my politics would only lead them to write me off as kooky, if not totally demented.
That's not going to get them to crack Bruce Benson's books anytime soon.
I know that I and others have personally been turned off by unfriendly, super-judgmental libertarians, and I admit that I've fallen prey to this sort of behavior as well.
Consistency and integrity can look an awful lot like running and hiding, or just playing crazy.
Molyneux rightly chides for our hypocritical fantasies of telling people to give up plum state-funded jobs, contracts, and handouts, but isn't he...
Equally supercilious in telling us to drop family and friends for the sake of our ideals.
This is probably in addition to refraining as much as possible from working for the government or the industries it is most heavily plundered.
Also, what kind of swap is give up your extremely lucrative war profiteering for I'll stop talking to the smelly tree hugger who thinks dirt and cellulose are more important than people?
Done and done, by the way.
And, contra Molyneux, education.
It's pretty much all libertarianism has got.
Maybe I'm a special case, but I know I may never have become a libertarian, if not for the books, magazines, websites and blogs devoted to that topic.
What would Molinari or Bastiat, for instance, have said if you told them that education would get liberty nowhere?
I suppose they should have stopped writing and started hiding.
Well, I mean, it's a common critique and a well-written critique and amusing.
So I thought that I would just take a quick spin through my approach to these questions so that hopefully I can point people to this video when they start creating these what I would consider self-serving false dichotomies around
if you are true to your ideals then you have no friends and therefore libertarianism will never advance and I benefited from people who decided to associate with me when I was not a libertarian and therefore if I choose not to associate with anyone who is not a libertarian then libertarianism will never advance and all this sort of stuff and these are all false dichotomies that are erected because people are afraid of social isolation.
And that's fine. I have no problem with that.
I have no problem with the theory that I put forward being completely and totally wrong.
But I will say one thing about this, though, which hopefully will be somewhat illuminating, at least illuminating as far as my perspectives go, if not the truth, let's hope.
I am a monster fanboy of the scientific method.
The scientific method is the sexiest, hottest, most fundamentally stone-cold, fabulous thing that has ever entered the annals of human thought.
It is a just fantastically wonderful, objective, independent, rational, and humble Approach to truth and to reality and to the world.
Prior to the scientific revolution, prior to the scientific method, and even though Aristotle talked about testability being good, the scientific method basically says that evidence trumps reason.
That if you have a scientific theory and the evidence doesn't match your scientific theory, you don't get to make up some new thing that's supposed to, quote, explain away the evidence.
You have to. The mind is subject to error relative to reality, so in any contradiction between our concepts and reality, reality wins and we have to reshape our concepts.
Before we got that, we were just, you know, apes with farm implements.
We just were going nowhere as a species.
We were just, we were closer to animals than we are to the The human beings that we are now.
But with the scientific method, first talked about by the pre-Socratics and more focused on by Aristotle, who never got very far.
There was no capitalism in ancient Greece because there were slaves, you see.
Not much point. But really, with Francis Bacon, 15th, 16th centuries, this is the rise of the scientific revolution, particularly against The hegemony of the Catholic Church and then the Protestant Church, because when you have evidence that trumps concepts, God goes out the window, as we've talked about before.
So, I am just a massive fan of the scientific method.
I think it is just beyond fantastic.
And the logic, which of course is derived from the behavior of matter and energy in the world.
So, I don't think of myself as a libertarian.
I don't think of myself as an anarchist.
I just think of myself as rational, and to whatever degree I can be, empirical and scientific, because there's just no better way.
There's no way to determine truth from falsehood other than reason and evidence.
It's just not possible.
So, when I put forward a theory, people think that I'm sort of sitting here telling them that they have to leave their friends if they're a good libertarian.
Can't see your friends and family unless they're 100% Anakouk.
I mean, there's nothing to do with what I'm saying.
And I'm perfectly happy to be completely wrong because I'm just coming up with theories that I think match the evidence.
If there's other theories that match the evidence better or the evidence I have is incorrect, toss them out.
It's not about me, it's not about my theories, it's about doggedly and with humility and discipline attempting to approach the truth as best you can.
So, as a thinker, as a philosopher, as a moralist, I go with...
The non-aggression principle.
The non-aggression principle, also known as porcupine pacifism, is simply that the initiation of the use of force is immoral.
And I have got a book, Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, freedomainradio.com.
Which you can get for a couple of bucks.
I'll send it to you for free if you can't afford it.
If you don't like it, you never have to pay me.
So you can get the book very easily.
If you buy it and you think it sucks or I don't make a good case, I'll give you a full refund.
So just go buy the book because it's really revolutionary.
And in it, I make the case that I think is a pretty good case.
So far, it's really withstood a lot of scrutiny that the non-aggression principle is, in fact, the only logical moral system.
And So, if that's true, if the initiation of the use of force is a moral evil, then those who advocate or support the initiation of the use of force are not good people.
I mean, if the initiation of the use of force, we'll just say, if violating the NAP is evil, then anybody who does it is not a good person.
It's an evil person. Anybody who praises and supports and enables it is not a good person.
It doesn't mean that they're as evil as the people who do it, right?
Like, I mean, if I load a gun and hand it to a guy and I know he's going to shoot an innocent person, I'm not quite as bad as the guy who shoots the innocent person, but I don't think I'd get any medals for personal heroism either.
So that's just the way that I've worked the theory from first principles, this universally preferable behavior as the definition of ethics and the proof of ethics.
If that is true, and there are very few people in this world who would talk about the initiation of the use of force as being a viable approach to ethics.
So, if it's true, then...
Obviously, the largest single institution or set of institutions in the world that advocate the initiation of the use of force are governments.
Therefore, if governments are the greatest evil in the world, which, since they exist to violate the non-aggression principle and do so in wildly destructive ways, in terms of throwing people in jail, stealing money from them at gunpoint through the violence of taxation, war, and so on, Since governments are the greatest evil in the world, as violators of the non-aggression principle, then those who support governments are not good people.
Now, they may be not good people because they are ignorant of the truth.
I, I think, read The Fountainhead when I was 15 or 16, dipped into capitalism, the unknown ideal, went through the whole Randian thing, and got it fairly quickly.
Now, before that was a...
Evil? No, I was in a state of nature.
I was in a state of empty-headed propaganda.
As I've used this metaphor before, you're not a bad doctor if you don't prescribe antibiotics in the 12th century because you just don't know about them yet.
And you're also not a bad doctor.
The first time you hear antibiotics being developed, you just start prescribing to everyone.
That would make you a bad doctor.
But at some point, when they become well enough established as things that help fight infection, you're not a good doctor if you don't prescribe them.
So, I certainly don't believe, and would find it enormously hypocritical and silly to say that we should never have any contact with people who don't already accept our beliefs.
I mean, that's such a patently irrational thing to say, because nobody has invented this stuff from the ground up.
Aristotle didn't, Socrates didn't, Wittgenstein didn't, Nietzsche didn't, Rand didn't.
None of these people did.
So we're all dependent upon the gifts that are given to us by prior philosophers, which we try to extend as best we can.
And I was not a free market capitalist when I picked up the Fountainhead.
And the amazing thing, too, is that...
So, obviously, I can't conceivably and logically say that we should not have any contact with people who aren't rational in this area, because we all come from a place where we don't know these things, and then we know them.
So, if people think that I have that argument, then they must think that I'm completely retarded, right?
In which case, with what I argue about in terms of abstract ethics, if I'm so ridiculously stupid that I put forward an argument that clearly would have prevented me from ever being able to formulate the argument, right? So, if I say associating with people who support the violation of the non-aggression principle is a bad thing...
Clearly, if that had been followed as a universal rule, nobody would ever have told me about it.
The ideas would never have been generated in the first place.
So, clearly, that's not a respectful way to approach the work that I'm doing.
I mean, I don't ask for everyone to agree with me, but at least give me the basic respect of assuming that I'm not a complete and total moron.
That's all I ask.
I mean... If you're threatened by what it is that I'm saying, the challenge is then, I think, to come up with a better moral system than the one I've put forward, which I would be overjoyed to broadcast and to put my entire intellectual weight behind.
What is sad and...
Ignople, if that makes any sense, is to create a ridiculous strawman argument and then knock that down and think that you've taken me on.
I mean, that's just ridiculous, right?
It's tempting, I know, because it's hard to overthrow moral system reason from first principles, I know.
I just spent months working on it late last year or so, actually in 20 years working on it before that, so it's hard to But it's not very intellectually respectful or respectable to just create a straw man argument, which a four-year-old could think his way out of and say, well, that's what Steph's saying.
See, he's just wrong, right?
So that's sort of the first thing that I would say about that.
So... Of course we should communicate to non-libertarians or people who've just been full of state propaganda.
And of course we could. Education.
The other thing, too, is that if I really and genuinely believed that we should never have any contact with non-libertarians or people who didn't share my beliefs, how would anyone ever know?
Because if you didn't share my beliefs already, you wouldn't have ever heard from me.
Why would I be putting more than a thousand podcasts out on the internet?
And, you know, over 100 articles and four books that I've gotten out over the last year, which I sell or give away to anyone who is interested in learning more about philosophy.
I mean, how would you have ever heard my...
I mean, this is the lack of respect that people who are threatened by ideas give.
And it's not very pretty to see.
I know what's going on.
But it's not pretty to see.
And all I'm saying is raise your game a little bit.
If this is the approach that you're taking, you have to work a little bit harder to overthrow a fairly competent philosopher's ideas than just to inflate them to an argument from absurdity, knock that down, and think that you've done anything other than show your own insecurity.
That's just my approach or my perspective, so hopefully that makes sense.
So let's move on to the argument itself, if you don't mind.
I think that would be interesting.
Because I'm such a mad fanboy of the scientific method, What I do is I say, well, if it is true that the non-aggression principle is the highest moral ideal, if it is true that governments are the most egregious and evil violators of the non-aggression principles,
which they are, and if it is true that the support of government contributes or enables the evils that governments do, Then the people who are knowledgeably pro-government,
who understand the argument and cannot refute the argument that a state, a government, is based upon the initiation of the use of force by a minority against a majority, then the people who knowingly, knowing the moral arguments and who have not refuted the moral arguments, those people who knowingly continue to advocate the initiation of the use of force against you, against me, against everybody else that they know, aren't good people.
They're not good people.
By this definition, this is inescapable, this is not my argument, this is just basic logic.
If NAP is the highest value of morality and contradicting it or contravening it is the opposite or the lowest or anti-value is evil, NAP is good. Violations of NAP are evil.
Advocating violations of NAP knowingly is corrupt or dishonest or wrong.
Then the people who do that are not good people!
You can't escape that logic.
You can argue about NAP and this and that.
That's totally fine. I'm perfectly happy to have that discussion.
But if you are a libertarian, you see, if you are a libertarian, then by definition, property rights, the NAP, that's it.
That's the highest moral ideal.
Those who advocate Violations of NAP against you, violations of property rights against you, through their support of the government, are simply not good people.
I don't make that up.
That's something that you already agree with according to your definition of what is virtue.
So, this is sort of what...
I say to you, if you think that I'm completely wrong, fantastic, you know, instruct me.
I will kneel before your wisdom, without a doubt.
I will learn everything that I can from you if I'm wrong.
I obviously don't want to be wrong.
So, this is my suggestion.
If you say, NAP, non-aggression principle, highest moral ideal, my friends are opposed to the non-aggression principle, My friends support, enable violations of the non-aggression principle, but my friends are good people.
All you have is a contradiction.
It's not the end of the world.
It's not, you know, California doesn't fall into the sea.
You just have a contradiction.
Because you're saying, non-aggression principle is the highest ideal.
Those... Those who oppose the upholding of the NAP, who advocate violations of the NAP, are morally good or good people, people I want to have in my life.
Well, then you have something defined as a good, the non-aggression principle, and you have something defined as a good, which is advocating the opposite of the non-aggression principle.
It's just a contradiction.
And all you have to do is sort it out.
Is sort it out.
That's what we do with contradictions, right?
See, no one who has a shred of intellectual integrity or responsibility would have any respect whatsoever.
For some fundy-ass Christian who says, the world is 6,000 years old, and you say, well, there's carbon dating of dinosaur bones that goes back hundreds of millions of years.
That's been independently verified by 6 million laboratories around the world.
The decay of the carbon atom is a...
It's geometrically sound, mathematically precise, the carbon dating is accurate.
So you say that the world is 6,000 years old.
Here we have fossils that go back at least a couple of hundred million.
So he has a theory.
Theory, world is 6,000 years old.
Evidence! To the opposite.
What does he do? Well, if you're a true head-up-your-ass-fundie, what you're going to do is you're going to say, well...
It's true that the world is 6,000 years old and God put these carbon dating bones deep down there in the ground to test our faith!
And you are revealed as an intellectual asshole and liar and prognosticator and conjurer and having no intellectual integrity of the First Order.
I mean, that's all that happens.
You've got your theory, the evidence contradicts it.
If you continue to just make up bullshit to support your theory, then you're just a liar.
You're just... Taking a fundamentally religious approach to truth, which is to run screaming from the truth and direct a cloud fortress of pure falsehood.
So in the same way, you see, when you are a libertarian and you say the non-aggression principle is the highest value by God, and then you have those who advocate the opposite of the non-aggression principle, You've just got two things which have to be resolved.
If your friends are good people, then goodness can coexist with the initiation or the advocation of the initiation of the use of force.
So then, the initiation of the use of force can't be evil.
If a good person can advocate the initiation of the use of force, then the initiation of the use of force cannot be evil.
And don't get mad at me about that.
Don't get mad. If you say 2 plus 2 is 5, don't get mad at the mathematician who says, sorry, that doesn't work.
4 is just a metaphor for 2 and 2, right?
It's the same thing. So, if you are a libertarian and you say, initiation of the use of force, evil, but those who initiate the use of force are good people that I want in my life, then you either have to give up your friends or you have to give up your theory.
Or you can just lie and bullshit and prevaricate and make up strawman arguments and evade and say, well, I want my friends.
Well, that's fine. Take your friends, but then don't pretend to believe that the NAP is the highest value.
I mean, come on.
Just... Give it up.
If you keep people in your life who advocate the use of violence against you, then clearly you don't believe that the initiation of the use of force or violence itself is bad.
In fact, it's good! Because you find goodness and value in the people who advocate it.
That's fine. Then you keep these friends and stop talking about libertarianism!
Stop talking about nonviolence!
Stop with the intellectual posturing!
That means nothing! That's all I'm saying.
That's all I'm saying.
If you believe that people who advocate violence are good, then stop talking about violence being bad.
Then you have to come up with another moral theory, which is that violence is good, or advocating the use of violence is good.
Or that there's some far higher value that is as yet unknown, called having people to go to movies with, that is the highest moral value.
And that's fine too.
Then you just have to work with that theory.
But you see, if you got this NAP thing cooking away here, initiation of the use of force is really bad, evil, and you got your friends who are really great, who are advocating the opposite, and it doesn't mean anything to you, and there's no contradiction that you feel you need to resolve, you don't have to give up your theory, and you don't have to give up the evidence, and you can just keep this double-think going, That's fine too.
But just be aware that you're doing it.
Or don't! If you don't want to either, that's totally fine.
I'm just saying that this is a contradiction.
This is a contradiction.
Because if you say, this is evil, but my friends who advocate and support the opposite are good or valuable people, then all you're doing is you're saying, my ethics are just a kind of...
Parlor game. They're like intellectual pursuits.
It's a hobby. It doesn't have anything to do with virtue.
It doesn't have anything to do with truth.
It's a kind of Sudoku.
It's like an anarchism crossword.
Now, if I like crosswords and you like Sudoku, of course it would be completely deranged to say, well, you can't be in my life, Steph, because you don't like Sudokus.
Well, that's But I don't think that's because sudokus aren't anything to do with ethics or morals or virtue, honor, dignity, respect.
The people who advocate the use of violence against you clearly do not respect you.
Clearly do not respect you.
That's like saying that a man who rapes a woman does sue because he respects her.
It's nonsense. I mean, you can't look at that and say that with any kind of straight face.
You have to hide from the consequences of that kind of corruption.
So, It just means that you don't really believe in the theory of ethics.
And why? Because there's some higher value to you, and that's fine too.
So this person, I guess Cheryl, it's a woman, she says, existing as an anarcho-capitalist is lonely enough, but to stop interacting with everyone who isn't one, that would be nothing less than total social suicide.
Well, that's fine. Then she's got a hierarchy of values where virtue...
Is way less than having people to hang with.
That's fine. But then there's no point being a libertarian.
There's no point being a moralist.
There's no point being an anarcho-capitalist.
There's no point thinking if you've got some higher value that trumps everything that you think.
It's pointless. It's completely and totally pointless.
Then she's obviously having people around.
The opinion of her friends, well, they'll think I'm crazy or demented.
Well, okay, so then you're saying that the opinions of other people are more important than the truth.
Other people thinking you're crazy is more important than whether you're right or wrong.
And that's fine!
But then stop talking about virtue!
Stop talking about your opposition to the non-aggression principle.
Because it's not your highest value!
So don't say that it's important, especially if it contradicts your highest value.
Especially if it contradicts your highest value, then it's not even on the chart, right?
If I am a surgeon, and I say that my highest value is a Hippocratic Oath, do no harm, help, heal, blah, blah, blah, and then I stab everyone in the neck who's on my operating table and killed them dead, Then clearly, I'm not even remotely interested in helping or healing people.
In fact, I'm probably only using that to get them onto the goddamn table so I can stab them in the neck.
So, if you have a higher value, which is called, I want to have friends around me, and I want to have people to go to the movies with, and I don't want to be thought of as crazy, I don't want to be thought of as weird, that's fine.
Then what you have as your highest value is the good opinion of other people.
The conformity and a fear of ostracism and a fear of the negative opinions of others is your highest value.
And then you just have to organize all your other values to conform with that higher value.
Or you're not a philosopher at all.
You're not a thinker.
You're just a bullshitter, frankly.
You're taking the religious approach to truth and you're bringing it to philosophy and to ethics and to virtue.
You say, well, I'm afraid of other people thinking badly of me.
I'm afraid of being alone.
Well, that's fine.
Then you say, my guiding light is fear of disapproval and solitude.
That's not being a philosopher.
That's just being a cowardly, clingy, codependent bullshitter.
Which is fine. You can do that.
I mean, I'm not going to tell you what to do.
God, listen to me.
But it just means that you don't have a highest value.
That the libertarianism and the anarcho-capitalism and the virtue, the non-aggression principle, the opposition to government, it's all nonsense.
It's a sudoku. It's just nonsense.
If you don't see this basic contradiction between your values and your friends, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Not in any just or rational way.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
You can't say that virtue and the opposition to violence is my highest value, but at the same time, the negative opinions of those who my moral philosophy describes as corrupt and bad is my highest value.
The bad opinion of bad people!
Sorry. You know, that's right.
The bad opinions of bad people are my greatest fear.
The good opinions of bad people are what I really want.
That's what I really want.
That's what I want to pursue. That's what I want to live.
The good opinions of bad people.
That's fine. I don't think it's got anything to do with virtue.
Because the government can't survive without people's belief in it.
It's like the organized church.
I mean, if no one woke up Catholic tomorrow, there'd be no such thing as the Catholic Church.
There'd be a bunch of funny-looking old farts with tea cozies on their heads, sitting on a pile of gold and, you know, slithering after altar boys.
There would be no Catholic Church as we know it, and there's no government if people don't believe in it.
It's a fantasy. It's a myth.
It's a social mythology.
So if you oppose the government, but you support as wonderful and valuable those people who support the government, which is the only thing that gives it life and power, then clearly you just don't believe what you believe.
Clearly! I'm not making this up.
This is just evidence. If you say that, if you're a doctor, if I'm a surgeon, and I say that helping people is all I want to do, and then I just strangle them, What are you going to think about how much I believe in my values?
Obviously my values are meaningless, or rather just used as a lure to get people in so I can strangle them.
And that's all I'm saying.
I mean, that's not me. You can get mad at me if you want.
It's got nothing to do with me. If you say, violence is evil, and you want to keep close and keep friends with the people who advocate violence against you, even after you've explained it to them and instructed them, And they've understood it.
They can't come up with a counter-argument if they just avoid it.
That's fine. Then all that happens is that I'm going to judge you by your actions, not by your words.
And I am going to oppose your use of these precious words, like virtue, like integrity, like honor, like dignity, like honesty, like consistency.
I am simply going to oppose your use of those words.
Because you really have to earn the right to use those words, in my opinion.
You really have to earn the right to call yourself honest, to call yourself a man or a woman of integrity and virtue and consistency.
And if you don't act in that way, if you act in complete opposition to those values, I'm not going to let you have the words.
I'm not going to let you have the words!
Because you've got to earn those.
And these fears of solitude, we all have them.
I mean, I really do understand that.
We really, really have them.
And this is, of course, what prevents us from moving forward.
I guarantee you, though, because I've seen this happen many, many...
In my own life, in my wife's life, I've seen this happen over and over again among many of the thousands of listeners of Free Domain Radio, that if you stop...
Pretending that virtue is important.
If you actually start living, like truth and honor and integrity and virtue are important, you don't end up alone.
That's the beauty of it.
That's the trick of it. You step off the cliff and it turns out you can fly.
A terrifying leap of, quote, faith.
If you start living, like philosophy and virtue really mean something.
Really mean something.
The amazing thing is, yes, you go through a very difficult period where it feels like your life is over, but on the other side of that is real truth and beauty and love and intimacy.
The amazing thing about philosophy and the consistent application of it in your life is that you don't end up alone, but what you do end up, my friends, is realizing That before you really lived with integrity, how alone you really were.
How alone, when you use this as a kind of pompous self-aggrandizing, self-praising set of words, while acting the complete opposite, that you're completely alone as it is.
That's why you fear it so much, because you're already living that solitude.
You're already living that isolation.
So if you just start living like it's really true, You gain amazing companions.
You gain amazing beauty and love in your life.
And you look back and you say, I can't believe it took me that long to practice what I preached.
Thank you so much for listening.
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