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June 16, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:45
1089 Challenge, Philosophy and Optimism

Why we should feel joy at the challenges of our task... :)

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well, Steph.
4.30 on the 16th of June, 2008.
Hope you're doing most excellently.
And I had a couple of questions just floating out of the old call-in show yesterday, if you haven't heard it yet.
It's 1,089?
Something like that. Soon we go to scientific notation.
And it was around, debating people like the relativist, the guy who, nothing is certain, and so on.
And it's also, so it's to do with, why do that, or so on.
And the other thing is that there was a fellow in the chatroom the other day who was making the argument that if you pay taxes, you are supporting the military-industrial complex, and thus participating, at least to some degree, in war, genocide, murder, slaughter, et.
Al. And interesting question, an excellent thing to look at as a moralist.
You don't particularly want to be participating in war if you can avoid it.
And the war is not possible, or at least is not easy, without taxpayer funding.
So, you know, why debate that issue?
And I think this is all very important stuff, though.
I think that we should open ourselves wide to as many criticisms as humanly possible.
It only... Because we have nothing to lose.
We have no... Now, FDR, or at least the philosophy that I talk about here, it's not an ism of any kind.
Simply because it's just all about methodology, right?
You can't disprove the scientific method, you can't disprove philosophy, because that would require philosophy.
So whoever comes up with arguments, we should embrace and work through those arguments with them.
And if you don't have answers, then be honest, right?
This is just honesty. The RTR, I don't have answers, and it's making me anxious, and I don't know why.
Maybe I should drop out of society and stop paying my taxes and cripple the state thereby.
These are all reasonable and, I think, essential questions to be asking about what it is we should be doing, but...
If somebody does prove that everything is relative, if somebody does prove that we should all drop out of society and go live in the foothills of Montana and grow beards longer than our hairdos, that is simply something that we have to work with as a methodology, as the results of a methodology.
There's no threat to FDR from people who disprove things that we believe, because if it's disproven, that is exactly what philosophy, or at least the philosophy we talk about here, is all about.
So, you know, come one, come all, bring them on, I say.
The more the merrier, the more critiques the merrier, and so on.
Now, the other thing that I've been noticing just a little bit is that there seems to be a tad of impatience floating around.
This is different from the tension I was talking about before, and this is just my perception.
It is nothing but my perception, so if it doesn't apply to you or it's not true at all, just consider this a piece of entertaining fluff.
Hopefully entertaining, definitely fluffy.
A certain amount of impatience, you know, like with people who come in and who are coming in from a state of not knowing much about philosophy or, which is even worse thinking, they know something about philosophy, right?
So this question that was on the Sunday show around forgiveness, an excellent question.
The questions that come up around, well, won't the arrows just become a monopoly?
Well, it's a perfectly clear question to ask when you hear the theory.
And they're coming in and asking, assuming that there must be good answers to these things.
But it's sort of like if you're a professor and you're teaching first year physics and people are coming in without knowledge of first year physics, it would seem odd to me To have the approach, it's like every year you'd say, oh my god, there's more people here who don't know about physics.
It's the point of what we're doing is to educate the world, which means taking people who don't know a subject or who think they know a subject and hopefully instructing them on some more productive principles and some wiser and deeper knowledge.
So, of course, we're going to get a constant influx of people who don't know that they don't know or who do know that they don't know.
And that's sort of what we've signed up for as philosophers.
I mean, we get to work in two areas.
We get to be at the forefront of the conversation and continue to move the conversation forward and discover new truths and new knowledge, new understanding, new approaches...
And we also have the other end of the conversation, which is to introduce the basic concepts to an ever-increasing crescendo of new people.
And those are two sides of the same coin.
And we can count ourselves fortunate that we get to work at both ends.
But FDR is a survey course, and we would be hard-pressed, I think, to credibly put forward that it was a survey course philosophy.
It's more like a survey course in basic thinking, which unfortunately people come in without knowing.
So just to me, not only is it like being a physics professor every year, you get a bunch of newbies and say, oh my god, more people who don't know physics very well?
Well, that's the point, right?
That's why they signed up for the course.
Or it could be like, you're a doctor, and the eighth patient comes into the day, it's like, what?
You're sick too? Man!
What the hell? I don't want to deal with sick people.
It's like, well then... Don't be a philosopher or get yourself cryogenically frozen and be a philosopher in the future, but we are carving out old words in a new space, and that is not an easy thing to do.
On the plus side, we have the most rational culture that's ever been around and the most amazing tools for communicating the truth that have ever been invented, and perhaps it is the biggest quantum leap forward that has ever occurred in the history of communication, even more so, I would say, than oral or written language, because... These arguments we put forward are available instantaneously to everyone across time in their perfect original form.
There is no dark ages for what it is that we do here.
There is no library at Alexandria that will burn to the ground and take us all with it or all our thoughts with it.
There is no possibility of censorship.
This virus of philosophy is loose in the world in an easily digestible format.
And we'll never ever go away.
There is no possibility whatsoever that what we do here is going to vanish in the way that if it hadn't been for our good friend the Muslims the Greek writings would have vanished as well.
So we have an astounding ability to reach tens of thousands of people per podcast and that's never before been possible and of course we have a 400% growth year over year at least last year to this year which we should be enormously proud of It only has something to do with me and it has a hell of a lot to do with you.
You're the listener in terms of donations and suggestions and inviting your friends to this conversation and all the brave things that everyone is doing.
And since no singer can sing a note higher than his audience can hear and still be paid, the fact that everybody is following and driving along with this conversation and getting and bringing the concepts to life makes it all worthwhile.
And the intelligence of the conversation is not one atom greater than the brilliance of the listeners.
And that's you. You. They're squirming with the praise over there.
You can't escape it. It's not possible.
The other thing that seems to be floating up from time to time, and I just, sorry for those who sent me emails, I have just been getting an overwhelming number of emails lately, and that's, I got a couple of email accounts, I have YouTube inbox, Facebook, VO, lots of other, the board posts and inbox in the Inbox on the board and IM messages, which takes me a while sometimes to get back to.
So I'm sorry that I got a little overwhelmed.
I've been clearing stuff off, but the BBQ plus the book got me a little bit behind.
And people are, at least there seems to be a bit of a thread running through the comments, that people are a tad weary of the difficulty of the task.
I can totally understand that.
I really, really can. This is a very difficult task.
It is tough, tough, tough, tough, tough.
And I think that we should be enormously happy and relieved that that is the case.
And I'll give you a few toodles through my brain cells as to why I think that's the case.
And then you can let me know if I'm full of rabbit dung or not.
Or some other kind of dung.
So the reason that I think it is excellent that it is so hard for us to get people across the fence to philosophy, so to speak, is that the harder it is to undo cultural myths, the harder it will be to undo philosophy once philosophy and cultural myths go hand in hand.
In other words, once philosophy takes over culture...
Once the truth takes over lies, once philosophy takes over propaganda, then it will be even harder, that much harder, to dislodge it.
The harder it is for us to dislodge culture, the easier it is going to be for philosophy to remain in its place in perpetuity in the future.
And I will use a little metaphor that hopefully will make some sense.
If you are a roving band of Genghis Khan-style marauders, and...
You are being chased by a bunch of non-Genghis-style marauders.
If you are looking for a place to defend yourselves, and you see ahead of you a huge, massive, fortified castle with boiling oil on the ramparts and so on, you know that if you can take that castle, then you will have an excellent place from which to defend yourselves.
And if you look at, say, a tent city or a bunch of ramshackle shacks outside the castle, you can take those very easily, but then you cannot defend them after you have taken them.
So the harder the castle is to assault, The easier it's going to be to defend once we're inside.
And that, I think, is the great challenge of the conversation that we're enrolled in, that we are trying to drive forward.
That it is horribly difficult to make headway, even with the growth we've had, right?
I mean, it's still very difficult at a personal level.
And that, of course, is exactly what we should want, because the harder it is to make headway, the more we can be certain that The headway we make will be permanent, or about as permanent as these things can be.
The harder it is to win a customer, the easier it is to keep that customer once you've won him.
That's just something that I know from my business days.
So I just sort of wanted to put that out there that the difficulty of the task is fantastic.
Now, the other aspect I'd like to talk about, and this is just a way of putting things into context, which is always important to help us avoid the virus of frustration.
And frustration is unrealistic expectations.
In fact, one of the greatest, and I've got a podcast topic on this coming up, but one of the greatest impediments to happiness is unrealistic expectations.
And that's kind of what we're fighting, right?
The unrealistic expectation that the state or violence can solve social problems.
The unrealistic expectation that our parents are going to reform if they're not good people.
The unrealistic expectation that changing the embedded illusions of thousands of years of highly profitable human exploitation should be easy.
Once we adjust our expectations to the empirical reality, it becomes so much easier to be happy.
And when we fight reality, all we end up is broken and bruised, right?
We might as well be an ant standing in front of a steamroller saying, Stop that train!
So, we had on the Sunday show yesterday...
We had a fine Scottish gentleman, fat bastard, who came in and talked about radical skepticism, that the Cartesian demon were a brain in the tank.
You've heard of the conversation, I'm sure, if you're getting to this part.
And people were surprised at the length of the debate and also at the fact that he did not change anything.
His mind when it was revealed to him relatively quickly that his position was incoherent.
And we also had a fine long-term listener, a young lady for whom I have great admiration and respect, who had some logical problems with the phrase personal philosophy and determinism.
And so these questions of why it is that people end up with these perspectives and why it is that they have a tough time letting go of these perspectives is very interesting.
And I think, again, it's the old thing of, like, physician, heal thyself.
Why do you complain about the moat in your neighbor's eye when thou dost not see the beam in thy own?
And just to talk about the Scot...
We can understand that, well, maybe you can, maybe you can't.
Scottish culture is innately skeptical, right?
I mean, they eat hangers, right?
I mean, nothing is real and nothing tastes good and that's what they go with.
But the skeptical tradition in philosophy is entirely founded around Well, not entirely, largely founded around the Scots, right?
Smith, Adam Smith, and Hume in particular, right, who gave us the blessings of the Azort dichotomy.
He was a radical skeptic in this way.
And, of course, these people gave a lot to us.
Skepticism is a very healthy thing.
It is It skirts close to nihilism, which far too many people fall into, but again, I have yet to do my podcast on nihilism.
Oh! When this book is done, which is close to being done, there will be much rejoicing and new topics.
But, as to why this Scottish gentleman...
Did not say, I guess you're right.
You must be right.
It's not a coherent position and I'm going to withdraw my earlier positive statements and sit in my squat in my sparon and figure out what to do from here.
But instead he changed the topic and evaded and fogged and so on.
Well, I mean, we can either get frustrated about that Or we can understand what's going on.
Now, if we get frustrated about it, then we're just avoiding an empirical truth.
Or avoiding understanding an empirical truth, which is as grave a sin as that which we would condemn someone for avoiding processing illogical refutation, right?
So if we say, well, skepticism is an incoherent logical position, and he says, Then I have to work on my Scottish accent.
I used to be able to do a good one, but I'm out of practice because I've been doing vaguely mature things for a while.
but if you say to someone your position is incoherent and they do not change that position or at least withdraw their proposition and you get frustrated then they are rejecting logic and you're rejecting evidence which is that the vast majority of people do that and if you just get frustrated then you're saying things should be other than the way they are and i'm going to constantly rail against this basic reality which railing against reality is not a very philosophical position
we want to understand reality right and this gentleman yesterday he told us everything that we could possibly need to know about the reality I certainly did not expect him to change his mind, and he told us exactly why he was not going to change his mind.
He told us that very early on, there was no doubt in my mind that he was going to maintain his position and that we would get some productive conversations out of that reality.
So, how did I know that he wasn't going to change his position?
Well, The basic fact, or the basic reason, that I was able to know that is it's magic!
Wow! And also that he told me that he is not an expert in the subject of philosophy, but his friends and companions of many years who are well-educated and very intelligent have given him this knowledge over the course of hours and hours and hours of conversation.
Hmm... I wonder if 10 minutes on an internet show is going to cause him to revisit that.
Because when people tell you things that are true, then what they're doing is saying, I am a slave to reason and evidence.
This is true. Why?
Because reason and evidence say.
It's not my opinion that it's true.
I regret to inform you of this radical truth that there is no such thing as truth.
Or whatever. They give you the merely derived conclusions of reason and evidence.
That is their claim.
Not, my bigotry is that there's no such thing as truth.
You know, truth makes me uncomfortable.
Certainty makes me anxious and will cause me to confront my parents.
So I go around telling people there's no such thing as certainty because I am a chicken, right?
I mean, people don't say that.
Why? Because nobody would believe that and everybody would be onto them, right?
So there's a kind of false flag operation that goes on all the time in the realm of truth, consistently, persistently, relentlessly.
And that false flag operation...
This is a truth that I regretfully or not so regretfully bring to you.
I am but a slave to reason and evidence, and this is the truth that we must accept.
It is not my opinion.
It is a fact.
And they say it's a fact because of reason and evidence.
Even Christians say this.
I mean, if you've ever listened to the long, tortuous conversations, which I have a couple of times, about how we know there's Jesus because of X, Y, and Z in the Bible, not just because the Bible says how could there be all these miracles...
How could people believe in all these miracles and be willing to die if there weren't actually miracles that they'd observed and why would they get nailed up if they didn't truly believe and blah blah blah, right?
Like there are no suicidal people in ancient Rome, probably more than most places throughout history.
So they say, well, it's just reason and evidence, right?
And they say the truth is that.
The truth is not driven psychologically.
I didn't inherit the truth.
I didn't believe this just because people who had power over me told me to believe it.
And I was going to get punished if I didn't believe it.
All that, right?
They don't say that. They say this is a reasoned conclusion from logic and evidence.
So... That's what culture is, right?
There's a whole bunch of lies masquerading as truth, but claiming reason and evidence for their justification.
That's easy to see in other cultures, as I talked about, and on truth, it's a lot harder to...
To see on our own, right?
In our own culture, right? America is the freest country in the world.
America's free. America is all about virtue.
America has foreign policy only to bring about peace and freedom.
But when you look at the empirical evidence, right?
Does America actually support regimes that are free and working towards democracy?
No, of course not, right?
So, this Scott When, I think his name was Scott, actually.
No, sorry, McScott. He is going to have, he absorbs these arguments against radical skepticism.
And then what he does is he has the choice, right?
He can either say, well, I just...
I'm just against hate. Can we withdraw to some Buddhistic fugu, right?
Or what he can do is he can come back to his family and friends and environment and community and social circle and this, that, and the other, right?
And he can say, fellows!
I say, fellows!
What's happened is that we've made a terrible error, or at least I think we have, because it turns out that everything that we've believed for a generation or two, and I've believed for many decades, is false.
It's wrong. Oops!
And what that means is, I mean, particularly because it only takes about 10 minutes, if that, to point out the flaws in the argument about radical skepticism, relativism, and so on.
It takes a few minutes if you're being honest and precise about it.
So he's going to come back and he's unraveling the trauma of the invisible apple, which we talked about way back in podcast 70.
Oh, more than a thousand ago.
Can you believe it? Yes, I can too.
So he's going to come back and he's going to say, these truths that we thought were a result of reason and evidence turn out not to be true or at least are cast in doubt because reason and evidence is telling us something differently.
And frankly, pretty easy reason and evidence, right?
And then what happens is there's a whole lot of anxiety because you're basically calling bullshit, right?
I mean, not that aggressively, but what you're doing is you're saying, well, everybody says that the beliefs come from reason and evidence.
Therefore, when you present reason and evidence which opposes those beliefs, those beliefs should shift.
Right? Those beliefs should shift.
If you dam up the river, it should flow somewhere else.
If my beliefs result from reason and evidence, when I get reason and evidence that contradicts those beliefs, I should change my beliefs.
My beliefs are a weather vane.
They are a windsock.
When the wind changes, my beliefs should change.
They follow the flow of reason and evidence.
But, of course, it's not true at all.
And that's the fundamental lie, the root of culture, right?
The claim for reason and evidence, but then when presented with counter-reason, counter-evidence, fog out, blank out.
Swifts. And so what's he going to do?
Is he going to go back to his friends and family and say, I think we forgot something, fellows.
McFellows, I think that we may have missed something here that's a little basic and a little obvious.
And why do you think we have missed it?
Why do you think we took these things for granted that are simply not true?
And this is Christians and statists and all this, the virtue of the family people, the political libertarians, the Ron Paul people.
Why did we miss this obvious tiny little thing?
Well, this obvious huge thing.
Why have we kept repeating all these falsehoods?
Why have we made the claim for reason and evidence?
And then when we are presented with counter-reason and evidence, we get angry.
Why should we? We shouldn't be angry.
Any more than a windsock gets angry or a weather vane gets angry because the wind has changed.
Off we go to northwest, right?
Didn't be angry. To be angry...
At where reason and evidence leads you is simply to say that you're a bigot, that you have prejudice, that you prefer a particular answer, and that reason and evidence is something you only conscripted to shore up.
You're falsehoods because you know how credible reason and evidence makes things sound.
That's why this guy is using science and this and that, right?
Logic, first principles, premises, using all this philosophical language.
That's why academics do all of this sort of stuff, right?
People know the authoritative power of reason and evidence.
I am but a slave to reason and evidence, we say.
I am but a windsock.
Anyway, the wind blows.
And then, when presented with different reason and evidence, people just get angry, get upset, get frustrated, fog out, go to Switzerland, and never come back!
So this guy can go back to his friends and his family and his companions of many years, and he can say...
Hey, you know all the stuff we believe?
I don't think it's true, actually. I think we fucked up pretty badly.
Well, what are they gonna do?
He knows what they're gonna do.
He knows the actual respect that people around him have for reason and evidence.
He knows. He knows.
And... He resents being put in that position because he knows that other people are going to resent being put in that position.
That's why people get angry.
Don't expose the truth of my lies.
Don't expose the lies of the people around me.
That's what everybody says deep down.
Let me continue to pretend that it's true.
That's what people are desperate for and desperate not for and desperate to avoid and desperate to escape but fearful and terrified of escaping because if this guy goes back To mad rampant Scottish skepticism.
And blows it apart logically.
What's going to happen? Verse is going to happen!
Well, people are just going to stop talking to him.
He knows that!
He knows that, deep down, completely and totally.
This is the untruth thing, right?
This is nothing new. And that's a damn fine thing for us.
That is a damn fine thing for us as philosophers.
We should kiss the ground upon which this corruption walks on.
And why?
Why, why, why? Well, because that which is harder to overturn is harder to be overturned in turn, right?
So the anarchy...
Well, the anarchic principles, the spontaneous disorder in this case, the spontaneous falsehoods, that keep things like culture and religion and the cult of the family and politics alive, which currently makes it so hard to get the truth wormed in through the biosphere of prejudice, will be exactly what protects the truth once it gains ascendancy.
If it is almost impossible to pull a weed out, if you have to use depth charges and air strikes to get the weed out of the ground, you damn well want to be the next plant in that ground, right?
Because that's some pretty firm ground.
The harder it is to dislodge, the harder it will be to dislodge.
And this is, with all of the tension and crippling brain horror, Of lies and cultural abuse and humiliation and control and falsehoods and corruption and propaganda.
This how strong this plant is, even with all this rot at its root.
Imagine, just imagine, how rooted and beautiful and permanent philosophy will be if this how rooted and beautiful and permanent philosophy will be if this is the toughness of the weed of it's going to be beautiful.
We are not creating a temporary culture of the future.
We are creating the permanent enlightenment of mankind because this is how deep and strong these roots go.
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