All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 25, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:46
1184 The Truth as Psychotic Drug...

...and so this philosopher jumps out of the shadows with a needle...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's Saturday, October the 20X, and I'm going to do some baby shopping.
I didn't realize that instead of having one, it's just easier to buy one, so we're going to go down to the mall and check out eBay.
Ooh, jokes that will have to be scrubbed before the precious one reaches the age of reason.
Which, in my case, I think will happen around 50.
That's the goal. With your help.
So I hope that you're doing very well.
I wanted to have a chittle-chattle today in a good old-fashioned podcast style, rambling in the car, but without the visuals for people to complain about my dangerous driving and how the moment I talk about public education, a yellow school bus flies by in the background.
I have received these comments, and I'm sure they are accurate.
But... I think...
That it's really important for us...
Sorry.
Let me not be overly pompous and annoying.
Let it happen in its own course without me getting behind it and pushing it.
I think it's very... I have found it very helpful for me, for me, to try and put myself in the empty shoes of others.
And by others, I don't mean you, my precious people who, you know, feel free to donate this week.
That would be nice. And to understand what occurs emotionally for people when you bring first principles into the conversation.
And here, as in a lot, right, I rely on the great Rand, the amazing Rand, for this issue of social metaphysics where somebody embeds himself...
His sense of reality and ethics and most fundamentally this question of identity, who am I? And when you begin to mess around with first principles, with someone who has embedded himself mostly or almost inevitably unconsciously, but sometimes consciously, but usually unconsciously, into the dominant social ideology, right?
So someone sent me A post written by a 12-year-old.
And this 12-year-old was talking about how heroic John McCain was because he was a prisoner of war and he was brave and this and that and the other.
And, you know, those are real kinds of heroes.
And he escaped, or, sorry, when he was freed, he went back to do more bombing missions.
And, you know, that's this kind of hero that you don't see anymore.
Whereas poor, sad Obama was a Muslim.
He was registered as a Muslim at the age of six.
Go look it up! Right?
And so on. And again, this poor 12-year-old kid, right, is just embedded in...
This mythology, this horror of lies and manipulation.
He didn't make this stuff up himself.
He's just surfing his parents' bigotry like we all have to.
It's like a monkey with kibble or a dog with kibble.
If I say this, I get approval.
If I say that, I get disapproval.
And this, of course, is how people...
This is how people's beliefs develop.
It's like water, going down a mountainside seeking the path of least resistance.
I get praised for this belief, I get praised for mouthing these words, and I get attacked for mouthing these words, or usually for asking these questions.
It has nothing to do with an analysis of the world, it has nothing to do with philosophy, it has nothing to do with even with belief.
It's just mere indoctrination.
It's as objective as some kid in a Soviet brain farm in 1960 going through the tenets of capitalism and communism, right?
If I say workers should control the means of production, I get a kibble.
If I say property rights seem to me essential human values, then I get a gulag, right?
And so this is all. It's just...
You know, sticks and carrots.
The way people's beliefs are created and molded.
Now, what happens then is that this becomes their physics.
The physics of their mind.
This becomes their physics.
I've always been fascinated by computer-generated physics.
I remember being really impressed with the graphics in Unreal Tournament when we used to play at Caribou.
And, you know, there was a CD and you would install the additional textures for certain graphics cards.
I was like, wow, you go up to this wall, it looks real, right?
And I just remember one woman, you know, quite sensibly saying, you know, that there's also great graphics outside the building.
If you just look at trees, they appear remarkably lifelike.
She was right. I mean, it's much more tactile.
But I've always been fascinated with the simulation, and I think a lot of people are.
It's one of the reasons why... Alternate worlds, Dungeons and Dragons, even soap operas, but video games.
Alternate worlds are fascinating for people, down to the last detail.
I remember Steve Jobs talking about Pixar, saying, you know, what was amazing to me is I'm standing in the room with a guy who spent most of his life studying how best to represent water on a leaf.
Using a computer, right?
I mean, we are fascinated by alternate or human manufactured world, manufactured landscapes, manufactured worlds.
And I think the reason we are fascinated by these things is because we live in them.
I mean, we live in them when it comes to what we call ethics, virtue, truth, honor, goodness, courage, and all these kinds of things, right?
We live in this simulated universe, right?
We live in this physics, right?
X being cultural prejudice.
So I think it's important to understand that when you begin to question or to ask these questions, obviously you bring up memories of Explicit or implicit punishment on the part of people, right? So they were punished for questioning the bigotries of those around them and they were rewarded for mounting them.
And like all children, we try to find the path of least resistance where possible, right?
Because we can't survive on our own and we can be easily killed.
Or at least we could have throughout history and a lot of children still fear that.
Someone just posted about that on the board.
Very interesting.
Sad and terrifying, but interesting.
So, this becomes reality, right?
It was that old thing, it's a cool hand, Luke, the drill sergeant or the prison guard.
I am reality!
These beliefs become physics, they become reality for people.
And it's really, really important for me, and I think for you, let me know if you find this helpful, it's really important to understand that we are dismantling reality for these people.
If you've ever seen the movie The Truman Show, it's not a good ending, but a good movie, a good concept.
This idea that we live in this simulated world, right?
Cue the sun, a great line in the movie.
Wish I could pull off a beret like Ed Harris.
Oh man, that's all I'd be wearing.
Sorry for the image. So, people live in this simulated universe of bigotry, which they perceive as reality, as the truth.
But at an unconscious level they know that it's just fear-based conformity.
That that which they call virtuous is in fact evil because it was inflicted through the threat of punishment or the withdrawal of affection for a child.
Religion is evil because it is inflicted on children through brutality.
Explicit or implicit brutality.
Political addictions.
Patriotism. What people call virtue.
We often see this as fundamentalism, as republicanism, but exactly the same thing is true.
When it comes to the left-wing or the Democrats or whatever, I'm reading a Naomi Klein book.
I mean, she's a very successful author, which means that she's evil in a very significant way.
Because she is successful and I think it's important to understand the mythologies that we're attacking, right?
And she has a mythology, right?
And the mythology is that the free market is fine for And she's going on this rampage.
Against Milton Friedman, this book, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, basic thesis is that when disasters occur, this is used to spread free markets.
Because we all noticed how much markets were freed after 9-11, right?
Remember all of that? They got rid of farm subsidies after 9-11?
Oh wait, no, they didn't. Nope, but they did cut wealth.
Nope, no, they didn't. Oh wait, military.
Nope, they didn't cut military spending.
But it's a convenient fantasy, right?
That... That there are these people who want to rip the bread out of the mouths of the poor for the sake of oligarchical, powerful corporate interests and so on.
And so she gets mad at corporations, but of course everything that's bad that happens is done by the state.
Anyway, I'll do a more detailed review of that at some point.
But, of course, her audience is people in the public sector, and it's important to remember that People who are in the public sector are between a quarter and a third of the population in most countries.
And if you put all those together who are dependent to some or a large degree, You're talking half the population.
So she's talking to people in the public sector, and she raises the specter of privatization, and they're terrified of privatization because they're crap at what they do, right?
Teachers are terrified of privatization because they're shitty teachers, and they're entitled to all of their perks and benefits and months off in the summer and so on.
So when she says privatization is evil, they get it emotionally because they live in this fantasy universe where voluntarism is evil and coercion is virtue, right?
And, of course, the whole book is a studied evasion of the gun in the room, right?
What's wrong with free education?
Why would anybody not want to give children free education?
I mean, it's a ludicrous question, right?
Of course, we'd want to give children free education, and we'd also love to give them free ponies and space rides, and of course, right?
But there is nothing in the world that is free.
And there's nothing more expensive in the long run than that which is procured by violence.
So... This is the physics that people live in.
It's the physics of bigotry.
And this fellow on the board was asking, you know, how should I respond to this post that this 12-year-old boy wrote about John McCain and Obama and so on.
And it's a tough question.
It's a really tough question.
There's no easy answers. I mean, of course, you could do the basics, right?
And you could say, well, wait a second.
If bombing people because you following your principles is good, then how is John McCain good, and the 9-11 hijackers, how are they evil?
Help me parse that one out, if you could be so very kind, right?
He's obeying orders, and he's going in...
And what do you know about the causes of the Vietnam War, where the U.S. slaughtered millions of people by getting involved in what was essentially a civil war, civil conflict?
What was the purpose of it?
What was the virtue of it? Why was he killing these people?
Why was he bombing and slaughtering and dropping Agent Orange on the farm, crops, and children of Vietnam?
What was virtuous about it?
I think it takes more courage To fight in the rice paddies than to bomb from 10,000 feet.
That's just my... Of course, you get shut down, but...
I'd rather be in the plane than on the ground.
That's... You know, that's my...
That's my basic contention.
It's 50-odd thousand Americans killed, two to three million Vietnamese killed.
And as far as airmen went, I think it was pretty...
Relatively safe.
But, I mean, compared to being a Vietnamese.
So, it's just those basic questions.
How is it that John McCain, following orders...
And slaughtering innocents is virtuous and courageous and those who shot him down are evil or those who followed their ideals and their values and acted with great courage.
I mean, suicide mission in some ways requires more courage than...
A mission where you are well protected by height and armor and intend to come back, right?
So you just ask those basic questions.
And the kid will get all kinds of freaked out, right?
Because it lifts the lid on so many things to ask those questions.
And you could also say, well, do you think that we should hold a six-year-old responsible for what his parents do, right?
Like if his father steals a car, should the six-year-old go to jail?
Right? And the father be set free, and of course the kid would say, well, no, that's completely unjust.
It's like, well, then why would Obama be responsible for being registered as a Muslim when he was six, which was a choice of his parents, and certainly not his choice.
Why would that be something that would be relevant to be discussed in the virtues and vices of presidential candidates?
And, um, his, uh, It's Islamic evil, which is, you know, I mean, obviously there's some, right?
It's Islamic evil. In terms of body counts, right?
Have Christians killed more Muslims, say, over the past 20, 30, 40 years?
Or have Muslims killed more Christians?
Which religious fundamentalism is the one that is really violent and destructive in the world?
Because, of course, all of the American leaders, military and civil, political, have been Christians, right?
So... These kinds of questions are things which you could ask that kid, right?
Now, the moment that you ask these questions of the kid, or of any adult, but we'll talk about the kid because this is where the beliefs are forged or founded, right?
When you ask these questions...
What you're doing is you're unraveling the universe that they live in.
It's like you are undoing their landscape like it suddenly becomes a jigsaw puzzle and you're starting to pull out pieces.
It's so important to understand what happens to people.
They go through a semi-psychotic episode.
I'm trying not to exaggerate here.
It's very fundamental to understand.
This is what happens to people. It is like you are suddenly plucking trees from their line of sight.
It's like you are flicking your finger and dissolving houses.
It's like their view...
I mean, it's the Matrix metaphor, right?
It's like you're suddenly pointing out that they're living in a fantasy.
It's like you turn a switch and the sky changes color.
And you throw another switch and the sky is replaced by static.
It is that delusionary universe that they live in.
And the delusions are, of course, all their relationships.
Their relationships with their family, with their church, with their government, with their friends, and with the truth, and with virtue, and with nobility and courage.
Heroism. Heroism is not conformity to bigotry.
Heroism is not bombing innocent villagers with incendiary bombs because you're told to for villagers who would never dream of harming you.
In a feud state in America.
Not like these people would, I don't know, create big catapults from the rice paddies and then vault up from there.
So, you are unplugging their reality.
Now, when somebody goes through...
That experience with regards to the physical world, right?
When somebody has what is called a psychotic break with reality, where they literally see demons coming to attack them.
They see all of these terrible things in the real world.
They hallucinate.
They have terrifying or ecstatic visions of a reality that doesn't exist.
That is called a psychotic break with reality, and it is about the most catastrophic event that can occur in your psychological makeup, right?
Because it means that you're not having a panic attack, you're not having an emotional breakdown, you're not having a neurotic...
Having a complete break with reality.
And this is when people kill people, right?
And of course, this is why it's so involved in things like the military and church.
This is where kill and rape children and women, the church and the state, right?
A psychotic break with ethics, a psychotic break with relationships is what is actually being provoked when we start to talk about these basic issues.
So, I think it's really essential to understand what is really occurring when we bring first principles to people.
And I'll give you sort of a scenario that would be, I think, equivalent or analogous.
And see if it makes sense to you.
So, if you were...
A guy who was being pursued by a fellow, a criminal, I don't know, someone from the CIA or something like that.
And what he wanted to do was to inject you with a drug...
That would permanently give you psychotic delusions that would cause you to have this break with reality.
This is the scenario, right?
There's some chase movie and the guy's got an injection.
He wants to inject into your forehead a drug which will permanently disrupt and dismember your brain's ability to process sensual reality.
And... Not only would it mess up your depth perception and it would mess up your ability to navigate the world, the sky would be replaced by static, trees would be replaced by people, people would be replaced by bushes, all randomly, all back and forth, right?
Then... That would obviously be terrifying, and it would be permanent, right?
Maybe you could figure ways to master it or figure it out or whatever, but your life would become managing this disruption in your perceptions, right?
That would be a terrifying and horrifying thing to experience, and you would do just about anything that you could to avoid being injected with such a terrifying and terrible and permanent drug for which there is no cure.
So that's how it would work on the material side.
On your relationships, though, or in your relationships, what it would do is...
I don't know if you've ever seen those movies where...
Oh, I think it was an old Conan movie with Schwarzenegger, where I think it was the first one.
He's having sex with some hot girl, and then she turns into this wizened, screeching, gnarly, wrinkly, smelly...
Witch or something like that.
And that is an interesting analogy or, again, a comparison of how philosophy works in terms of your relationship.
That it turns everyone into a master.
That everyone you love and treasure, if you get injected with this drug, will be replaced by someone hissing and fetid and mossy and evil.
Like a troll or something like that.
And this may sound like an extreme analogy, but think of this poor 12-year-old kid when he asks what the difference is between McCain bombing innocent villagers in Vietnam and 9-11 guys flying planes into innocent workers in the World Trade Center.
Or why is Obama's registration at the age of six a Muslim something that he's accountable for, responsible for?
And what is the implicit slur about Islam there, which is not also equivalent to a slur you would put against Christianity?
Well, what would happen to the people in his life if he asked those very basic and very sensible questions?
Well, they would return on him, right?
They would attack him.
They would roll their eyes.
And they might start off smilingly, but if he persisted despite their warnings or despite their opposition or despite their aggression, then they would eventually blow up at him.
And it would be an unresolvable situation.
He would be revealed as somebody who was controlled through moral bullying in the ugliest, ghastliest kind of way.
And this would happen to virtually everyone in his life.
And there would be this... There's a period where the blinders are ripped off and you see the moral nature of those around you, which is what First Principles does.
It rips off the skin and shows you the soul, right?
And for most people it's not a very pretty sight at all.
It's a decidedly ugly sight.
So your relationship with reality would be unhinged and everyone that you love would be turned into a monster who would attack you.
This is... This is how people unconsciously down in their gutty-gutty bottom-of-the-soul area view questions from first principle, philosophy.
And they're right to view it that way.
Those we frighten, those who attack us, they understand more about the power of philosophy than we do, I would say.
Because we're constantly surprised, right?
Why should someone react with such fear and hostility?
All I'm doing is talking about ideas, but that's not true.
What you're doing is you're attempting to wrestle them down as they perceive it and inject them With a Venom that is going to turn reality into a kaleidoscope and all their friends and lovers and family and children, not children so much, but into monsters, right?
And that's really only half the horror, fundamentally, right?
That's half the horror. The other half of the horror, and I think the most fundamental part of the horror, is...
That when you begin to bring first principles to people's lives, or when you even threaten to bring first principles to people's lives, what happens is they look into the mirror and see a monster, right? So, why would...
These kids, the parents or whoever is teaching these kids, this 12-year-old kid, this horrible, bigoted patriotism, why would they want to attack the kids so much if the kids dared to bring first principles into the conversation?
Well, because, my friends, Because they would be revealed as monsters in first principles coming.
Monsters for two things.
For their own bigotries, obviously.
For their own unthinking bigotries.
And also for their infliction of those bigotries as moral truths on helpless, dependent, innocent, and innately virtuous children.
Children are innately virtuous.
That's why virtuous arguments work so well on them.
Children are innately virtuous. Innately consistent, let's say, and since UPB is the argument that consistency is virtue, children are, their concept formation is all around finding these consistencies, right?
So, children are innately moral because...
Morality is consistency and children are innately consistent and all concept formation of children and object consistency and so on is around the development of consistency and the link between language and object and all that kind of stuff.
So, you would be revealed, as the parent of this child, you would be revealed as yourself, a monster.
A moral monster, a spreader of contagion and plague and vileness and destruction and lies and slaughter and justifications for slaughter and murder and genocide.
Bombing innocent Vietnamese civilians who never aggressed against the United States is what we call heroic.
Slaughter is virtue.
Genocide is goodness.
And this mask would be ripped off you as well as the parent, right?
So half the horror is that the world becomes destabilized, right?
And these edifices that you lean upon, right?
Things like country, right?
USA! USA! God!
USA! Family.
All of these things which you think are real, more stable to you than gravity, they are revealed as non-existent, right?
So reality fritters and shakes and fades into a kind of whirling, terrifying static.
And everyone around you turns into a kind of monster.
There's a terrifying existence, right?
A terrifying existence.
And it's incurable, as you see it, right?
But all of that is external, right?
You can still have, in the Cartesian approach, a stability of personality, even in a chaos of experience.
But what really happens, and what fundamentally happens, is that you yourself become a monster to yourself.
You are revealed as a monster to yourself, right?
And the fact that you have taken as beauty your symmetry with other monsters, right?
You have taken as integrity your participation in vile moral lies and your dissemination, your infliction of these vile moral lies on others.
Conformity with patriotism is conformity with, you know, mad and evil moral lies.
And you have taken as your virtue your symmetry with evil.
That is, your conformity to evil.
So all of that is revealed to you should the basic questions of first principles rise up.
The beast within you that rages and rails against first principles will arise.
Will arise. And that is not something that people want to experience, right?
They want to go through their whole life with these blinkers on, right?
That's how they roll their dice.
That's what they have gambled on, right?
That's what they have gambled on, is that they can conform to these evil fantasies, these black mythologies, right?
These blood-red stories.
These tales clogged with bodies.
That they have sided with this moral evil, this madness, and they have conformed to it, and they've taken that chance.
And I would say that throughout history, it's been a pretty good gamble, right?
I mean, the first principles has not been around for quite a long time, right?
Really since, I mean, in my opinion, since Socrates and Aristotle, Aristotle more.
But first principles, reasoning from first principles, and objectivism to some degree as well, right?
But objectivism got all monstery as well.
But it's been pretty safe to conform with evil because virtue has been so long absent from the stage, right?
But, I mean, it's coming back, right?
I mean, the atheists, the Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and the drinker, they're bringing it back, right?
Christopher Hitchens. And those unravelings are occurring.
We're working to bring back the question of objective ethics and basic reality and the non-existence of concepts, which destroys the gods and countries and other sorts of fantasies.
The co-joining of concepts with objects, like virtue with individuals within a family, right?
Virtue doesn't exist and it isn't or precedent to the family, and then the family is an expression of virtue always.
Virtue is derived from the objective actions of people, and the concept family has no bearing on it, right?
Any more than you can weigh the concept gravity.
Spent the idea of money.
So, the people who, you know, years ago, I mean, decided to make that choice to conform to first principles, to not ask questions, out of genuine fear as children, and we can all, I think, understand and sympathize with that fear, they didn't count on...
What's happening now in the world, right?
They didn't count on the rise of the internet, on the re-rise of philosophy and rationalism, secularism, and so on.
Skepticism with regards to concepts and objectivism with regards to reality, empirical reality.
That is not something that people bargained on, right?
So they kind of rolled the dice and came up snake eyes, right?
So for a thousand generations, you've been able to abuse your kids and then use guilt and manipulation to keep them around, if you have been that kind of parent, to keep them around when you get older.
And so you roll the dice.
You say, well, am I going to treat my kids well?
Why should I? It provokes a lot of anxiety and fear in me to treat my kids well because that's breaking the pattern, revealing the evils of my own parents and my own upbringing.
So I'll just treat them like crap and then use manipulation, right?
I mean, why save for your retirement when everyone wins the lottery?
It's sort of pointless, right? Don't let yourself pleasure in the moment when you're going to get all the goodies later either way.
But, again, this movement, which is not singular to us, but is gaining some ground in psychology that, you know, the family can be as great a force for evil as it is for good and no unchosen positive obligations.
Well, it's a bummer that you just happen to roll your dice when your family...
your sort of family timeline...
It came up Snake Eyes, right? It's a bummer, right?
And people get mad, right?
They bet on a boxing match that's supposed to be fixed, supposed to be a sure thing, and they lose.
They get really enraged, right?
Because it was supposed to be fixed, right?
So the rise of the skepticism with regards to the virtue of the family and the existence of gods and the existence, as we say, of countries and the virtue of government and the virtue of violence, the virtue of the initiation of force in any context, the lack of respect for such concepts as the army and so on.
I mean, that's a bummer for a lot of people, right?
And they're going to fight it like crazy.
Because if you've poured your whole life savings into a fight that's supposed to be fixed, and the guy who was supposed to win, who you've bet everything on, everything, and gone into debt over, when he doesn't win, You are completely erased.
You feel like you've been tricked. You feel like there's something fundamentally unfair and you're going to lash out, right?
So, I think to understand that first principles is the injection of what people experience as a psychotic monster-generating self-monster generating delusion, that's why they fight us so hard, right?
And, of course, the ambivalence and the torture they experience is that they claim first principles as the basis for their beliefs.
But when real first principles come along, boy, it just freaks the hell out of them.
Anyway, I hope that that makes some sense so that you understand the power of the weapon that you're using and the need for gentleness and positivity in this sort of arena.
And again, if people aren't going to make it, if they just lash out to exit and find more boon companions is well worth it.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
Please, my friends, I will talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection