1055 In Praise of Personal Attacks...
Are personal attacks ever warranted, just or fair? Well... ;)
May 5, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:59
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I hope that you're doing very well. | |
| Please drop by freedomainradio.com to pick up your free copy of my book, Everyday Anarchy, available in PDF. You can read it online, and it's also low and high quality. | |
| Audiobooks, strongly recommended. | |
| Open source, it is the Linux of Anarchy, and you can send it out to whoever you want. | |
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| Whatever it is that works for you to get the word out there, I'd really strongly appreciate it. | |
| I also look forward to your donations since I am now foregoing book revenue. | |
| We've had over a thousand copies of the book downloaded in the last 20 hours or so. | |
| So, if you could see a way clear to throwing me a few denarii, that would be fantastic. | |
| Or just read the book and pay whatever you think it's worth. | |
| I would hugely appreciate that. | |
| So, enough of that. | |
| Let us continue with this conversation with a little ditty I call in praise of personal attacks. | |
| And let me sort of put a framework around what it is that I'm talking about first, which is that whenever you bring up somebody's personal life in a philosophical discussion, there is this response that you get, which is, oh, that's an ad hominem attack, and therefore it's not valid. | |
| And logically, the basis of an ad hominem attack is its ad hominem is against the man, right? | |
| So it's like saying, well, Hitler says 2 plus 2 is 4, but Hitler's an evil guy, so therefore 2 plus 2 is not 4. | |
| Clearly that is not a logical statement, but here I'm going to attempt to rescue the ad hominem or against the person attacks so that we can perhaps become a little bit more efficient when it comes to reviewing people's moral, logical, and philosophical propositions, economics, politics, whatever. | |
| So, for instance, if you develop a kind of cancer, let's start with a nice metaphor, shall we? | |
| If you develop a kind of cancer and you go to an oncologist, and the oncologist says, well, you need really aggressive radiation treatment, And it's going to make you sick, it's going to make your hair fall out, all of these kinds of things. | |
| And then you find out, after the visit, when he says go mull it over, that your oncologist last year had exactly the same cancer that you have had, or that you currently have, and specifically rejected and avoided and never took the same treatment that he's prescribing to you, this aggressive chemotherapy or radiation treatment. | |
| That, to me, would be a pretty significant piece of information to digest. | |
| And if you were to go back to your oncologist and say, well, you're not taking this prescription that you're giving to me, though we have the exact same ailment. | |
| Agreed? He says, yes, we do have the exact same ailment. | |
| Well, why is it that you didn't take this aggressive and dangerous and destructive treatment course that you're suggesting to me? | |
| And he says, well, it doesn't matter what I do at all. | |
| It doesn't matter what I do. | |
| You can't judge the efficacy of the treatment based on whether or not I submitted myself to it. | |
| I think we can all appreciate and understand That that would not be a particularly satisfying answer. | |
| We damn well would want to know why he was prescribing to us a medicine that he would not take himself. | |
| So I think in that instance we can understand that. | |
| And I talk about this in my book. | |
| Did I mention that? Everyday Anarchy. | |
| Free. Freedomainradio.com. | |
| That if you're walking down the street and some unshaven, crazy-eyed homeless guy comes up and offers his services to you as a financial advisor... | |
| Rejecting all forms of ad hominem attacks or criticisms, you could say, would be that you would evaluate that person's financial advice with exactly the same value that you would value Warren Buffett's advice. | |
| Not Warren's, not Jimmy, right? | |
| Wasting away in RRSPville. | |
| Anyway, the Buffett, who's good at investing, That you would take the homeless guy and say, well, I'm not going to hold it against you, homeless guy, that you're homeless, but I'm going to judge your financial advice as completely the same as Warren Buffett's or whatever. | |
| If you were looking at a diet book that somebody was putting forward that said, anyone can lose weight and it's totally easy, and he himself for, say, 400 pounds... | |
| You would think, well, either this person is not taking his own advice, in which case his claim that it's easy is falsified by that very action or non-action of following his own diet, or he has followed his own diet and he is hugely and immensely obese and therefore his diet doesn't work. | |
| So there's ways in which looking at the presentation that a person brings to the picture can help you evaluate In a rational probability kind of way, their own claims, right? | |
| So the homeless guy, you know, maybe there's a one in a billion chance that he's a complete financial genius and you should follow every piece of advice that he's saying. | |
| But given that the odds are so small, we would generally say that we would not pursue this claim. | |
| We would not pursue this claim. | |
| If somebody writes a book saying that good grammar and spelling are a mark of intellectual correctness and respect for your readers and it's a virtue and it's good and we should do it, and his own book is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, then We would say that there's something quite wrong with that formulation. | |
| If he says that it is really, really good to have, you know, correct spelling and grammar, but his own book is not proofread at all, then clearly we would have some questions or we would say that there's something wrong with that. | |
| And, you know, the way that we would approach that is we would say, well, either this person who's written the spelling and grammar book Does notice that there are spelling and grammatical errors, and does not notice that that's in complete contradiction to what he says is of value, which is, you know, he's obviously contradicting himself up front, so why would we continue, right? | |
| I mean, if the first page of a 200-page mathematical proposition says that 2 plus 2 equals 5, why would we keep going? | |
| Maybe every other piece of reasoning is correct, and if we just adjust this and spend a month trying to figure it out, maybe it all works out beautifully. | |
| But we can say that if the mathematician doesn't notice that 2 plus 2 is 5, and he's published this for, you know, after peer review and so on, and he's saying that mathematical accuracy is the sine qua non of intellectual achievement, then we would say that he either doesn't notice that 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 5, in which case he's insane, or he does notice it and doesn't care, in which case he doesn't really care about accuracy, all his claims to the contrary, notwithstanding. | |
| So we can absolutely judge The validity of a person's thinking processes, their capacity to process things logically. | |
| If the homeless guy doesn't notice that the fact that he's homeless is going to make your receptivity to his economics theories or theories of investment that much less credible, then he doesn't really understand how he has very little social intelligence, right? | |
| If you're hiring someone for a sales position and they show up half-shaven and with a big old marinara stain on their tie, then yes, they may be the most brilliant salesperson in the world, but the odds of that become significantly diminished by the fact that they're not even aware that you're supposed to show up shaven and without a big S. Marinara stain on your tie. | |
| So there's just these principles of efficiency, which we all go through. | |
| It's all a perfectly rational, perfectly sensible way of looking at things in the world. | |
| We do this all the time. | |
| If you saw an ad for an acne cream which had a model who had five big old honking, nipple-sized pimples on her face... | |
| You would probably say, well, I wonder why they would do that, advertise an anti-pimple cream with somebody with pimples. | |
| Now, if you read the fine print and say, well, she had 10 big old pimples before she started taking this treatment, it would still be sort of confusing for you. | |
| If I was on the front page or on the page of an ad advertising how to grow a good mohawk or how to use styling gel or cream and not just in your nose hairs or your ear hairs, then you would be kind of confused about all of that, right? So... This way of approaching people's arguments and comparing them to the actual choices they're making in their lives is really, really important and very helpful. | |
| I have a podcast somewhere out there on Marx, and some of it is around a criticism of his economic theories, but if Marx says that it's evil to exploit your workers and he himself impregnated his own maid and then basically tossed her out like garbage for her to fend for herself, | |
| And then complains in the Communist Manifesto about bourgeois capitalists doing exactly that to their workers, then clearly we can understand that Marx is not a thinker that any sane human being would take particularly seriously. | |
| Because if he defines something as evil and then does it himself, and he is putting himself forward as an ethicist or a moralist, which is fundamentally what he was doing, If he says exploiting the workers is evil, and I have just banged and abandoned my own maid, who is big with my furry and aggressive child, then clearly he doesn't believe his own ethics, right? | |
| Like the guy who says it's totally easy to lose weight and my diet will do it for your lickety-split, and he's still 400 pounds, and he just doesn't believe his own ethics. | |
| His own statements. | |
| It just doesn't believe them at all. | |
| And that's important to understand. | |
| If somebody puts forward a series of propositions and then acts in a contrary manner, that is relevant to what it is that they're doing. | |
| Because they clearly don't believe what they're saying. | |
| And if they don't believe what they're saying... | |
| I mean, if you don't even believe what you're saying, why on earth should I spend days or weeks or months investigating your thoughts? | |
| Right up front, you're telling me I don't believe what I'm putting forward. | |
| And either you notice... | |
| That you don't believe that, but you ignore it, in which case you're being totally manipulative and gross, or you don't even notice that you're contradicting your own statements through your actions, in which case you're just kind of mental, and why would anybody bother wasting time with that? | |
| So I think that it is relevant to look at a person's personal behavior, and it is relevant to bring that personal behavior up if it is directly related to the propositions that they're putting forward. | |
| So, I mean, as I've mentioned before, there have been a couple or a number of attacks that have floated around on me, which says, well, you know, Steph's all about the free market and this and that, but Steph relies on his wife's income to pursue free domain radio. | |
| It's not true, but even if we accept that it is true, it is in no way a violation of voluntary association for me to take my wife's income to fund my philosophy show. | |
| In fact, that would be because she values what it is that I'm doing, or even if I'm bullying her emotionally or whatever, and that was the result, it's still not a violation of the non-aggression principle, it is not a violation of UPB, it is not a violation of any of these sorts of things for me to take money from my wife to pursue philosophy. | |
| It's not that every attack on a human being is valid, but where the person's actions directly contradict their behavior, as we talk about in everyday anarchy, we have thousands of economists or tens of thousands of professional economists the world over, | |
| Who talk about the evils of subsidy and protectionism and the need for free trade who themselves work in highly subsidized and protected fields like academia, the IMF, the World Bank, various governmental agencies and NGOs and to do with aid and all these other sorts of things around the world. | |
| So, I mean, then they're basically saying that protectionism is bad except for us. | |
| That's what everybody says about protectionism, so they would need to resolve that own contradiction. | |
| They can't then say protectionism is universally bad, but we're going to hide behind protectionism and flee the free market. | |
| I mean, just these things are important and relevant, and it is not an attack upon the person to say that what you are proposing is completely at variance with how you are acting. | |
| And either you notice that or you don't. | |
| If you notice it and don't care, then you obviously have no interest in logical consistency, so I'm not going to bother pursuing I just wanted to put out this little blurb just in praise of the ad hominem because I think that it is relevant. | |
| It's not relevant that... | |
| I'm not wrong because I'm bald. | |
| I'm not right because I'm bald. | |
| But if I talk about things in a philosophical and moral standpoint and do not... | |
| And nobody has to be perfect, right? | |
| I mean, nobody has to be perfect at all. | |
| But if I am fundamentally at variance with the morals that I'm putting forward and reject and refuse to accept any of that fact, then for sure you should throw me out like a week-old cat litter and go find somebody more consistent. | |
| I just wanted to point that out. | |
| The embrace of the personal attacks, I think, is something that is highly underrated. | |
| And I think it's generally put forward as, you know, don't attack the person, only attack the ideas. | |
| It's really put forward by people, I think, who are living in contradiction to their values. | |
| And I think I've had enough of it. | |
| It's a pretty tiresome argument to hear over and over. | |
| I'd say go for the jugular if it's valid and just. | |
| Thank you very much for watching. | |
| As always, remember to pick up your free free domain radio books. | |
| And as always, commercial free since 05. | |
| Thank you again so much for watching. |
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