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Sept. 25, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:35
1157 Truth as Fetish

Opinions are ugly lovers...

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's stuff back from my trek through the lovely land of government paperwork, my health card, and my driver's license renewed.
Amazing! And just another indication of the inefficiency and horror of government that I'm in a mall.
The stores are all empty and available.
Not empty, but not highly populated and available.
Except there's one.
I turned the corner to the driver's license office.
It's like all the stores are open and inviting and cashiers ready to leap to your service.
And then I see one place where there are about 100 people in a lineup to get into.
And I was like, hey, I wonder if I can figure out which one is the government store.
Ah, the horror. Anyway, it's all done for another couple of years, at least this part.
So I hope that you're doing well.
I wanted to talk a little bit about, it's the 23rd of September.
Don't forget to donate! Oh, it's been a little bit of a lean month, so throw the philosopher a few bonies, if you could.
Bonies. And I wanted to talk about what it means to debate people with ideas.
There's some pretty good scientific evidence.
I posted some on the board.
Or evidence, let's say.
It may not be. Exactly scientific, but evidence, which says that people have emotional responses to ideas to begin with, and then they create justifications for those afterwards.
So, for instance, people who are more fearful of the world, why those people tend to be much more receptive to Ideas around national security and crime punishment and so on, right? So people who have been raised in an environment of fear have been made afraid, obviously, by their families.
I mean, there may be some predisposition genetically to be more afraid of things, but fundamentally, it's families that are the catalyst.
When people have been raised in more brutal environments, they tend to be more afraid of the world.
And because of that, Questions around national security and violent crime and punishing criminals.
All of that makes sense to them fundamentally emotionally.
First and foremost makes sense to them emotionally.
And as a result of it making sense to them emotionally, they're then drawn towards finding empirical support.
For what it is that they do.
I mean, if you sort of look honestly back at your own responses to various things, whether it was subjectivism or libertarianism or FDR or whatever, people have said sort of repeatedly, and I think it's true, people have said repeatedly that they like, you know, the way I say things, what I say, the content of whatever, Ayn Rand, whoever. And as a result of that, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, right?
And You then are drawn towards things that are similar to it, which builds up your worldview and formalizes your emotional instincts, so to speak.
And that's one of the reasons why I try to keep what it is that we're doing so emotionally challenging.
Because if all we did was stay on the intellect, we would simply be affirming the biases we have emotionally, which is unfortunately the case with all too...
Too much to do with libertarianism, philosophy, objectivism, and, you know, things like Marxism and so on, right?
Marxists are drawn towards workers are exploited stories in the same way that libertarians are drawn to government as bad stories and so on.
So, that's one of the reasons why it's so important to keep challenging ourselves emotionally so that we don't end up with confirmation bias, right?
That we see what it is we're looking for and it becomes sort of closed, airless loop of repetition.
So... One of the things that I guess I'm most proud of with my own intellectual development is that I really went against the grain of things that made sense to me.
So having an affinity towards militarism, which was part of, of course, a fearful upbringing and a lot of propaganda when I was a kid, Going against that was really tough for me.
Really tough. Going against objectivism, rejecting the minarchist theories of Rand and others, Hayek and so on.
It was long before I ever read or heard of Rothbard or other people like that.
But going against those things was really hard for me.
I had an affinity for those things.
As I've said, I was For the Iraq War when it first came out because I was like, well, you know, poor Iraqis groaning under dictatorship will come and liberate them.
I mean, it seemed like a good thing to do, but of course it was an emotionally driven, which I then found intellectual reasons for as an emotionally driven argument.
And going against those emotionally driven arguments was really hard for me.
And I think it's really, really hard for most people because it challenges us.
You can't You can't gain knowledge without doing emotional work because most of our pursuit of knowledge is driven by foundational emotional realities.
And so, for instance, I mean, there was a study that was done, not a very extensive study, but the results are interesting where the more you school conservatives or Republicans, the dumber they get, right?
The more you educate them with facts, the more idiotic they become.
So, when...
A bunch of people who were Republicans or conservatives, when they were asked whether WMDs had been found in Iraq, I think it was like 35% said yes.
And then you gave everyone the facts about it.
And as a result of the comprehensive report on WMDs all destroyed in Iraq in the early 90s, when you gave these conservatives or Republicans this report and they went through it, And then you tested them again.
65% of them believed that there were weapons in WMDs, right?
So the more you educated them, the worse and more idiotic their opinions became, right?
The more you present facts, the more you get the reaction formation of defensiveness and skepticism, so to speak.
And people say, well, this is a doctored report.
It was the same thing as true, of course, of 9-11 people and so on, right?
So the emotion...
Emotion-driven, quote, intellectualism that is the norm, right?
This is the norm for human beings, right?
I mean, people trust their parents, which is why they end up being fetishistically attached to religious iconography, Jesus or Muhammad or whatever.
And then they go and find all the justifications for it, right?
It's the emotional false attachment, the emotional loyalty that comes first.
Everything else is subsequent, right?
And this, of course, is why it helps us to understand why reason and evidence has so little effect.
I mean, don't you find that to be the case?
That reason and evidence has so little effect on people?
And it is my sort of basic understanding.
And, of course, I only came to this emotional work after I realized that it was my own emotional work that gave me the creativity to do FDR. It was the uncovering and undoing of the emotional biases that gave me The creativity to do the work that is FDR. And so understanding that, undoing and unraveling the emotional biases is absolutely key.
And if you don't do that, if you don't challenge your own emotional life and your own emotional preferences, your habits, your biases, and so on, then you simply can't do.
You can't think. You can't think.
Because all you're doing is navigating the hidden, like instinctively navigating the hidden rocks of Sailing your ship around the hidden rocks of your emotional biases.
Unless you uncover and understand your emotional life, you just can't think.
Because all you're thinking is just scar tissue around these emotional traumas.
At least it was for me, and it has been for most people I've talked to, if not everyone.
There seems to be a fair amount of experimental evidence to prove this.
And, of course, we've all understood that reason and evidence have...
Almost nothing to do with what people believe.
They have their beliefs, and then they find reason and evidence, right?
We have a response to an idea, and then...
And of course, this is, you know, as I've always said, this would be my experience with objectivism and certain philosophers.
You love it, and then you find good reasons to love it, right?
So in this way, we can see...
Or this is sort of a metaphor that I would invite you to play around with and see if it works for you.
When we're young, and sometimes not so young, we are attracted to someone, and it's physically attractive.
It's a physical attraction.
And then we date that person because they're physically attractive to us.
And then what we do is make up all their virtues that justify dating them, right?
I mean, this is so often the case, right?
And we've all... Either done this or heard it.
We've said it or heard it.
This is a speech, something like, well, yeah, I know, she has some challenges for sure, but, you know, she's got a decent education, she likes to read, she's got a great sense of humor, she's smart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But all of that is ex post facto, quote, reasoning, right, to justify the pursuit of what is essentially a physical attraction.
We don't honestly say, oh, I don't care what the hell her personality is, she's You know, sexy, right?
I mean, that's the way that our minds actually work, right?
But when it comes time to explaining our attractions to others and even more fundamentally explaining them to ourselves, well, then we come up with all of these justifications, right?
Well, you know, he's got all these great qualities and so on.
But we know, if we are honest with ourself, that the attraction, the physical attraction, And then we came up with all of the reasons as to why the attraction was justified.
And the same thing is true. You know, we see an ideology with great curves, right?
And we react at a very basic, instinctual, emotional, primal level to that ideology.
It fits our worldview.
It slots into, like that last jigsaw puzzle piece, it slots into the topography of our traumas, our histories, our childhoods.
And then we say, by God, there's every wonderful reason in the world to believe that this ideology is true.
And we go out to websites and we go out to read books and listen to podcasts and And so on, and we find out afterwards, right?
And I would sort of suggest, if you haven't gone through this process of challenging a core belief and finding the emotional driver behind it, feeling that resistance, that incredible resistance, that falling-off-a-cliff feeling that comes from really challenging the emotional topography behind your, quote, reasoning as, you know, and I don't mean this with any condescension because, I mean, I did it and I still have to fight that urge as we all do, I think, all the time.
Not all the time, but, you know, I don't want to get all Catholic on you, but I think you know what I mean.
That to fight to stay loose, the fight to stay loose in our thinking, to stay uncommitted, to stay responsive and fluid, responsive to reason and evidence, to be willing to overturn all that is holy for the sake of what conforms to reason and evidence, that is really tough.
And, of course, when you have a philosophy like objectivism or libertarianism, which gets a lot right, Without necessarily the best reason and evidence, but without...
Now, when you have a philosophy like that, which gets a lot right, it's really hard to reject parts of it as being incorrect.
So, I think that when you're debating with someone, when you're talking to someone, I think it's important to sort of work to see it this way.
That a guy with a fetish for long legs found some flamingo stilt woman and then called her all kinds of virtuous and wonderful because he had to justify his own non-fetishistic, or he had to create a non-fetishistic attachment to her.
Like if you just said, I have an attachment, I'm turned on by long legs, so this is the biggest stilt woman I could find, and that's the only reason I'm with her.
Well, Now, of course, they both collude in that, right?
She's got to say, well, you're not with me because I've got a lengthy pair of getaway sticks, but rather because I am all these wonderful virtuous things.
So, I think that when you're talking to someone about ideology, you want to, I think, you want to talk to someone and understand that this person has a fetish.
For a particular ideology that preceded his justifications for this ideology.
It is why he has justifications for his ideology.
The only reason that he has reasons is because prior to reasons he had a passionate, instinctual, automatic attachment to these things, right?
He had a fetish.
Now, I think that FDR... It's not like it's not that way at all, but I think it's less that way because there is quite a lot that is startling and unsettling and original, and because it pounds away continually at the emotional work, right, at the work of self-overcoming of emotional habits and so on.
So I think because of that aspect, Of FDR, the originality of a lot of what's going on, and therefore it can't fit into prior trauma in the same way, plus the constant pounding away at emotional work helps keep those emotional biases, the confirmation biases, from forming and hardening, like crust over the fluidity.
We don't want the ice to freeze over our ocean, right?
There's no good for the life that passes between water and air.
So I think it's better at FDR. But let's just say that when you're talking to someone about libertarianism or a Democrat or a Socialist or a Marxist or a Republican or whatever, that they have this emotional need that is fulfilled by these and that they keyed into very early.
When you're really drawn to something, it feels true.
Because... If it's not true and you're drawn to it, then you have to figure out why, which requires a lot of self-knowledge and self-examination.
And why was I drawn to objectivism?
Well, I mean, obviously, it was partly because of my own potential, which objectivism...
Objectivism was the first philosophy that sort of said, really said in a way that wasn't cheesy, corny, or Nike-induced for me that the sky is the limit and...
Intellect and reasoning is very powerful.
And of course, I'd grown up in a completely insane environment, so the sort of crystal impurity of rationality and evidence and the impersonality of that kind of thinking was wonderful for me.
I obviously, in both outwardly and inwardly resisting the craziness of the people around me, particularly my mother's clinical insanity, I had developed a lot of great skills around reasoning and reality testing.
Because I constantly had to reality test With regards to my mother, of course, right?
Because she just said so many things that were so completely nutty, I had to reality test with regards to my mother.
So, of course, since I had these preferences to begin with, it was a useful and healthy thing for me.
I was drawn towards a philosophy that capitalized on my existing strengths.
And, of course, which confirmed the evil of irrationality which I directly experienced as a kid, right?
I mean, I know people try to analyze me from time to time, and I think that's great, but, I mean, I've got, I think, a fairly decent handle on it.
Things that I don't know because I can't see for myself, but I think I got a pretty decent handle on what all that was, right?
So I had this confirmation bias, and I went, you know, full tilt boogie into finding justifications for it, and anything which supported it clicked into place, and anything which rejected it was manipulative, right?
I mean, that's... I mean, that's the danger.
And if that's your relationship to FDR, you know, you have not yet become a philosopher, right?
You have become a rhetorician.
So, you know, that's why you've got to keep working on that emotional stuff and keep the ocean heated.
It doesn't freeze over and become rigid so that you stay fluid to reason and evidence and can overturn opinions, however painful that process is, that don't conform to reason and evidence.
So, when you're talking to someone, just recognize that they have a fetish for their ideas that comes out of their nature, their history, their parenting in particular.
They have a fetish for this stuff.
They're just drawn to it, you know, like people who like breasts.
Oh, she's got big breasts.
I'm attracted to her. Now I must make up all these virtues.
So, you're dealing with an irrational fetishistic attachment when you're talking with just about anyone.
About ethics and about virtue and about politics and economics.
There's a whole fetishistic attachment, confirmation bias.
And, you know, it's sort of like if you see a guy or you know a guy who, you know, just was obsessed with breasts and pictures of big-breasted women all over his room when he was a kid and then, you know, grows up to, I don't know, he marries Chesty Morgan or something like that.
then it's clear that at least the initial impulse was purely physical.
The initial attraction was purely physical.
That doesn't preclude there being virtues in the woman, but if he doesn't admit to that and say, no, that wasn't a big deal, but now, I guess so, but it was all really about her personality and so on, then you know that there's not somebody who's comfortable with that initial attachment, that initial fetishistic attachment to a particular then you know that there's not somebody who's comfortable with that initial attachment, that initial fetishistic attachment to a particular object or idea, objectification of woman, She's not comfortable with it and is not honest about it.
In which case, you're going to get into that really twisty, kind of crazed, frustrating, head-spinning justification, right?
And you can see, at least I can, you can too, right?
Think about it. You can see this stuff.
Talk to nihilists or determinists or relativists.
I mean, determinists didn't sit there saying, I really want free will.
I really want free will.
But, you know, unfortunately dragging me unwillingly step by step, the evidence is X, right?
No, they are fetishistically attached to determinism for any number of reasons we could speculate about, but until I get an honest determinist who's willing to break it down for me, I'm just going to keep it all as a theory and we'll talk about that perhaps another time.
But it fits for them. Determinism fits for them emotionally.
And then they go and gather the science up to justify the emotional position.
The same way that, you know, when I was in my teens, I dated a woman just for her looks.
And then I would constantly be on the lookout for anything remotely intelligent that she said to say, Ah, look, she's smart too, right?
I mean, that's... I think we've all had that problem at one time or another.
I know that I was just a himbo that people used for arm candy.
Actually, not so much. But...
I hope that this sort of makes sense, that it's a fetishistic attachment, that the reasons come up afterwards.
If someone has arrived at a true viewpoint, not accidentally true because your emotions happen to click you into that compatibility mode, but actually true, if somebody has arrived at something that is actually true in that way, Well, they will have more compassion for the difficulty of overcoming your own emotional prejudices, right?
I mean, if you've actually worked through something like this yourself, then you're going to have a lot of compassion for other people, right?
I mean, I'm not perfect, good heavens, but I do sort of try and keep that level of patience when people are struggling with this kind of stuff and to understand that it takes a long time.
It's It's convoluted, it's difficult, right?
But when people are like, oh, you should just believe this, right?
And they don't bring any compassion to it, or, you know, they don't seem to have any understanding about the emotional nature of these kinds of beliefs, well, then from my standpoint, all it means is that their beliefs are the way that they are because of their own emotional prejudices.
And if they don't see it in themselves, they won't be able to see it in others, they won't be able to effectively help other people to come to a more rational position.
And I mean, I've said this a lot, right?
And When people claim to have all this wonderful knowledge, but they are just sort of scornful and contemptuous about other people's beliefs, Then, yeah.
I mean, I'm not, right?
It's just after a certain amount of time, right?
And other people don't get it, then that's fine.
But in terms of people who are struggling to get it, you know, the way that you can tell whether somebody's gone through that emotional process is to see whether or not they're sensitive to it in themselves and in others as well.
So, anyway, I hope that this metaphor helps.
Thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations.
Again, if you could help top up September just a little, little bit, I would hugely appreciate it.
And thank you so much for your support.
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