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Oct. 3, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

18:26

1163 Debating Decisions

Ways to organize major life decisions.

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	Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
	It's the 3rd of October, 2008.
	Had an interesting question, as almost all of them are, from a listener.
	Oh, by the way, if you're Diamond Plus didn't get my email, pick up your preview copy of the audiobook, How Not to Achieve Freedom, on da board.
	But an interesting question from a listener who is in a debating club, and he's trying to figure out whether to stay or leave, Said debating club, and there's a variety of reasons.
	He likes the socialization aspect of it.
	He likes the skill of it.
	But, I mean, obviously it's time-consuming, and he is surrounded by a bunch of sophistic weasels who use, as he says, sophistic tricks and emotional, like naked pleas to emotion, to get their point across.
	and he's trying to figure out whether he should stay or go.
	Ba-ding! Ba-ding!
	Ba-ding!
	And my suggestion...
	I mean, I was in the debating club for two years as an undergraduate.
	And I liked it. I really did.
	I liked to travel. I got to travel all over the country debating.
	I never have found it to be a natural thing, a completely natural thing for me to speak, shockingly, to speak to a crowd.
	I don't know, maybe some people just yell, get up, ooh, love it, right?
	I have to work myself up to it just a little bit.
	But that certainly helped with that aspect.
	I really liked the thinking on my feet.
	And I liked the rhetorical tricks.
	I like them. I think that anything which has survived since the days of Socrates as an effective means of getting people to believe stuff or accept stuff, you know, can't be all bad.
	And that, I think, is something that's well worth accepting.
	I mean, People like governments, right?
	And we accept that, right?
	Rhetorical tricks, naked appeals to emotion, you know, the Al Pacino style of my city is a palace, you know, that stuff all works.
	Religion is founded on all of this kind of stuff and religion is a lot more successful than philosophy.
	So I think we just have to look empirically at what works and Use what works in the service of good rather than leaving the most effective tools in the arsenal of human communication and convincing in the hands of those who spout a whole bunch of nonsense, right? So, I've certainly tried to not do that, you know, the Spock-Kirk dichotomy, where if you're passionate, you're wrong, and if you're logical, you're right, but who cares, right?
	I mean, that's not the way that I think that the truth is served.
	I mean, to me, And whatever dance you have to do to get the kids to take their medicine is fine with me, right?
	I mean, if you have to put a sock puppet on your hand and pretend to be Barney the dinosaur to get your kids to take their medicine, then that to me is fine.
	The purpose is to get the pill down the throat, right?
	So, I mean, this is not a very good metaphor because I certainly don't look at you all as children.
	But I think you understand what I mean.
	So, learning the tricks of the trade is, I think, a very reasonable and healthy thing to do, to recognize that human beings respond to conviction and they respond to emotion.
	And human beings, you know, reason, so to speak, with their hearts at the moment, not with their heads.
	I mean, there is this mind-body dichotomy, which we should talk about in more detail at some point, which has been a peculiar curse of Judeo-Christian Religions, right?
	Which is where virtue is in the mind and corruption is in the body and so on.
	And that's just a demonization of 99% of the ecosystem, right?
	And that, of course, gives you an endless battle to fight which others can profit from because it weakens you and makes you dependent upon their approval.
	When you demonize the ecosystem, all you do is project it into the world, into things which other people can control, which they then Can stay the inevitable self-attacks based on you giving them money and them giving you approval and release from guilt.
	But I would say that learning how to effectively communicate to individuals or groups I think is great.
	I think the other thing that I got out of the debating club was the reality that Everyone has different opinions on what is right.
	I know that sounds like a truism, but I'll give you an example.
	I was in Newfoundland for the Canadian debating finals in, I think it was A.D., not B.C., for most of you here.
	But what happened was, there was a be it resolved that the government should fund A database of personal stories from Canadians that are available over the internet to something like that, you know, that we should go around getting people's personal stories and we should store them for future generations and so on and so on.
	And I was fortunate enough to be put in the con position, though to me it doesn't matter hugely.
	I mean, if you use rhetorical tricks and appeals to emotion and illogic to get your point across, All it does, and it's the wrong point, all it does is help you understand how effective these tricks are.
	That reason doesn't have much to do with what people accept.
	In fact, it has very little to do with what people accept.
	And that's very important to understand, right?
	Because if you don't understand that, then you won't use these, quote, tricks to convince people you render your life kind of ineffective, right?
	In terms of communicating the truth.
	So I was against it, and I said, well, we already have.
	A government-subsidized way of getting stories from the average population and keeping them in perpetuity.
	It's called the publishing industry, which is government-subsidized and accepts story submissions from any Canadian under the sun or moon, and then will communicate those stories.
	Because it's sort of pointless, right?
	They go through a quality check to see if stories are worth publishing, and it's sort of pointless to have a redundant system And the second system has no quality control.
	Anyone with spelling and typos can throw any old junk.
	They can make stuff up. There's no fact checking.
	There's no corroboration.
	You could have libel. So we already have a quality and legal filter.
	Over the stories of average Canadians called the book publishing industry, which is already subsidized by the government.
	So, basically, we have something that works really well and is very positive in addition to the arts and culture.
	There's no point putting stuff in a database that no one else is going to read.
	It's sort of pointless, right?
	It's a huge waste of time. Might as well just burn the money in a bonfire.
	And what the Canadian publishing industry does, as all publishing industries, is filter out that which people will not read.
	If it doesn't read, they don't make their money.
	So we already have the system in place.
	It's high quality. It avoids legal issues and libel.
	It fact-checks where appropriate, it edits, it ensures proper spelling, it presents attractively, it already has a mechanism for getting this into the hands of readers called either the web or bookstores, and so this is zero point, creating a worse quality second government.
	Anyway, so that was my argument.
	I can't believe I remember it.
	I can't remember where my keys are, but I can remember that argument from over 20 years ago.
	So, so that is, and so one guy, one guy said, like when I was moderated, you're moderated and it's like you're skaters, right?
	But one guy said, oh, I really liked that example of the publishing industry.
	I thought that was bang on, right?
	And gave me good marks.
	Another guy said, I really hated that example of the publishing industry.
	I thought it was just not appropriate, right?
	That's all he said was not appropriate, like that's some magic word, right?
	And he gave me bad marks, right?
	And all that did was, you know, it just helped me to understand that, you know, people are bringing their own histories, right?
	You never know, right? It's always the case, right?
	If someone gets upset or negative about something, it's always some personal issue, right?
	This guy maybe had, was a failed writer, or maybe he'd submitted a bunch of stuff and didn't sell, or Maybe his mom's a publisher.
	He doesn't like to think of it as a government program.
	There's lots of things.
	It's got nothing to do with an accurate judgment.
	One guy loved it.
	One guy hated it. And those kinds of experiences are really important.
	Because everyone's going to try and convince you that they don't like something that you're doing because of objective and rational reasons.
	But it's almost always the case that it starts off...
	It doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it means that they're motivated.
	by personal issues specifically.
	The only way that I know of to gain the greatest happiness is to serve mankind in the cause of the truth.
	Um, Scientifically, statistically, volunteering or doing virtuous actions for the general good of the planet is the only proven and certain way to gain and maintain genuine happiness and a sense of meaning and accomplishment and all those good and wonderful things.
	I try to organize my own decisions around what will do the best for the planet through that which serves truth the greatest.
	I wake up in the morning.
	My day is really organized around that principle.
	I have a variety of, I guess you could say, constituencies that I need to deal with or to communicate about.
	And those are, you know, the YouTubers, the board members, the various donation levels, as well as the general already listening population who may benefit from an additional podcast and a notification of it on the board or an email out.
	And of course there is In many ways, the most important constituency, which is the groups who have yet to join in to the wonders and beauties of philosophy and what is going to be most appealing to them, right? Which is sort of why I designed the website with the landing pages and so on, right?
	So to have a principle by which you make your decisions means that you have...
	If flexible, it can change over time, right?
	But you have a way of...
	Organizing what it is that you're doing and how it is that you're making decisions so that you're not making decisions impulsively or without a framework or without a context, right?
	I mean, science doesn't make decisions about reality, but attempts to validate theories through the scientific method.
	So I would sort of suggest that you need A principle to make these kinds of decisions, should I do debating or not?
	Otherwise it comes down to immediate preference, short-term goals, and you may miss out on some genuine happiness for the sake of a relatively small sacrifice in the present, in terms of, as you say, the time that you'll spend.
	But having these... These core values that you use to make decisions in your life is very important.
	I mean, I'm trying to always figure out what is the best way to spread and expand the value and utility of a conversation for people.
	This is a philosophical conversation.
	And so when I'm working on a book, even though it can be, like this last one, completely terrifying, I try and organize it according to that principle, right?
	So if I just went with my personal preferences, of course I wouldn't.
	In a way, I wouldn't write books.
	They're horribly difficult. After the first draft, it's quite a lot of grinding and dull work, and they're emotionally terrifying, right?
	They really are. The more you synthesize your arguments, the more you can be...
	Criticism doesn't worry me particularly, but it is a challenge emotionally, and particularly this How Not to Achieve Freedom book, which I completely understand is entirely volatile and Is it as volatile as the criticisms from the people I'm criticizing, the degree to which they've been volatile towards me?
	Well, no, of course not. But nonetheless, it's not particularly comfortable for me to be that, I guess, in your face or confrontational.
	Not really my nature.
	I'm not that kind of fighter.
	But the way that I try and make that decision is saying, okay, well, what is going to best serve the truth?
	And sometimes that is advancing the cause of the truth through the promulgation of a new theory, of course, or the getting behind other people's theories like the psychohistory stuff that I read.
	Remember that if you want to pick up that book, I highly recommend it, The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
	Just go to freedomainradio.com forward slash psychohistory.
	I highly recommend it, and I think a very good audiobook recording, in my humble opinion.
	Sometimes it's putting forward a new theory, and more recently it has been involved in getting...
	Impediments out of the way of the spread of truth.
	And since I consider political, academic, and religious libertarianism to be huge quicksands that swallow up many a person on his or her journey towards philosophical truth, they get diverted to the endless squalid cul-de-sac of these three false disciplines, false in their current incarnation, in particular for academics.
	Obviously, academic research and studying is all wonderful.
	But, since I consider those to be huge impediments in getting people towards philosophical truth, philosophical examination, I want to close off those false exits, right?
	Those exits that lead you right back to futility and emotional immaturity and hypocrisy.
	I want to close off those exit as much as possible.
	I don't particularly think that it's possible to rescue the people already stuck there.
	They've invested too much, and the fallacy of sunk costs is very powerful psychologically, why people stay in those horrible long relationships.
	But I can at least help people avoid making the same mistakes in the future, and perhaps get some people geared up who were disappointed or disillusioned in what happened with these other solutions.
	So, that's the decision.
	Like, what is it that I can do with my day or my week or my month that will most, you know, given that I don't have an infinity of them left?
	I'm not old, right?
	But I'm middle-aged, right? So, I have to take care in how I spend my limited time on the planet.
	So, what is going to most productively advance the cause of truth?
	Not because I am altruistically advancing the cause of truth, But because that is what makes one happy.
	Doing good, virtue.
	Reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
	Virtue is not a state of mind, but a series of actions, right?
	Initially, of course, you have to understand it, like you have to understand nutrition, but eventually you just have to put down the deep-fried chocolate brownies, right?
	There's actions. Virtue enacted on is actually a negation of virtue, right?
	As you say, knowledge doesn't breed action, and you thus deny the value of knowledge to those who are untutored.
	You're a bad example, right?
	Like the fat man who says he knows everything about nutrition actually is telling people not to study nutrition.
	So, when you're making decisions about things in life in general, especially the big decisions about what you're going to do with your life, Then I would strongly suggest, how does this advance the perception of truth in the world as a whole?
	For the sake of making me happy and proud.
	Proud of what you do with your life.
	So, as far as the debating society goes, you can't make that decision in a vacuum.
	You can't make it in isolation.
	You can't make it without reference to a larger plan.
	It's like saying, is going east or west better?
	Well, there's no way of knowing that unless you have a destination, right?
	So what is the context in which you're making these life Decisions.
	Are you making them based on spur-of-the-moment, whim-y things, or are you making them based on their relationship to a larger goal and plan, a life goal, life plan?
	And I would argue that learning how to convincingly communicate...
	Oh, how nice.
	My wife just pulled up behind me. I'm in the car.
	How to convincingly communicate ideas is going to serve the truth and the virtue of the world, and thus your own happiness, self-esteem, and pride.
	And so I would recommend sticking with it.
	But only in the context of that larger goal.
	If you have another larger goal that you find more attractive or appealing, it's going to make you happier, then you should make that decision with reference to that larger goal.
	But you don't want to make decisions without a framework, otherwise they're just kind of randomized whims, right?
	Which is not going to lead you to happiness, but rather to...
	Unhappiness. So I hope that that helps.
	Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.

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