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Jan. 24, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:07
1265 The Trial and Death of Socrates - Part Six - Conclusions
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Hi, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is the trial and death of Socrates, the last part six, which is the conclusions.
Thank you so much for your patience as we have been rolling through this challenging and highly relevant content and say relevant why.
Well, The reality, if you study philosophy and have for a long time, the reality that you see when you meet people is that they are, for the most part, when it comes to ideas, I don't mean in their personal lives necessarily, but when it comes to the big ideas of truth and virtue and so on.
They are empty vessels who have been filled by what is often the passive aggression of some philosopher, hundreds or thousands of years in the past, and that you debate with Socrates all the time when you are talking about freedom, voluntarism, nonviolence, and so on, that you're not talking to people, you are talking to a haunted house of historical thought.
So, if you don't understand the original murder that led to the ghosts of history that we will talk about in this show, You will simply not understand the depth and the resonance of what people are simply echoing and repeating in the present.
They have no idea where it comes from.
For the most part, this is a virus that is not transmitted through text, but through a variety of other means, the family and state schools and so on.
Most of these are original ideas.
Maybe they've been talked about before, but I'm not going to give credit for them because I haven't heard about them before, but if somebody knows how unoriginal I'm being, please let me know.
The basic crazy-making question about the argument that we just saw about obedience to the laws of the state and not returning injury for injury when the state treats you unjustly is absolutely mad.
It is completely insane and so insane that the fact that its insanity is not common wisdom is also insane, but it's an effect of the original craziness.
Socrates says throughout his life, and particularly in the trial and death, that the wisdom of man amounts to nothing.
That anybody who claims knowledge of a certainty of virtue, of truth, of honor, of justice...
Is wrong, is foolish, is ridiculous, is a pretender, professes that which he does not have, is a hypocrite, is vile, is evil, is ignorant.
This is his constant attack.
Upon the majority, and he says that we should take instruction not from the majority who speak evil, but from the one who speaks the truth.
Now, he would say that, but as I pointed out in the last show, he says that he is always guided by reason.
In other words, he says reason is that which we should accept as our master, and not the opinions of anyone, only reason, which I agree with, but There's such an absolutely contradictory and massive gap between what he preaches and what he practices that it's worth pointing out.
The fact that it needs to be pointed out is also kind of nutty.
If I were to come up to you and put forward the following syllogism, the following one, two, three, would you accept it?
If I were to say, everything that Bob paints is ugly, Here is one of Bob's paintings.
This painting, which Bob made, is sublimely beautiful.
What would you say?
Everything Bob paints is ugly.
This painting of Bob's is sublimely beautiful.
Would that not just blow your gourd straight out of your inner ear canal?
Of course. It's completely illogical.
Everything that Bob paints is ugly.
This painting of Bob's is sublimely beautiful.
When he speaks to the judges and he speaks to the Athenians and he speaks to the multitude and he speaks to the world, he says, your wisdom is foolishness, you know nothing, you are evil, you are corrupt.
And therefore your actions, that which comes out of you because your thoughts are incorrect, evil, corrupt, and you're hypocritical and morally vile, your actions are also hypocritical, right?
Bob is a bad painter, the paintings that he produces are ugly.
The laws are a production not of the gods.
Because there were no gods. Zeus wasn't sitting at the head of the justice table at the trial of Socrates.
The laws are productions of mankind.
And Athens, which was at the time what we would call a democracy, not a republic, but a democracy, a rule of the majority.
The laws were productions of men.
The vast majority of men are evil, says Socrates, unwise, hypocritical, pompous.
The vast majority of men are evil.
I live in a majority rule, democracy, and therefore the laws are produced by the majority who are evil.
Therefore the laws are evil.
I mean, this is not complicated, right?
This is simple, based on his own premises.
So, how then does he end up with The vast majority is evil.
Athens is a democracy.
The laws come from the majority of people, but the laws are stupendously virtuous and should be obeyed, regardless of their injustice.
It makes no sense whatsoever, except in one particular context, which I'll talk about in a second.
The prophecy that we talked about two shows ago that he provides to the Athenian people, the curse, really, that he puts that the young, who he has formally restrained, will attack and overwhelm and destroy the state.
This, of course, became true.
Athens did not last as a democracy slid into dictatorship.
The curse of Socrates has sat upon the throat of mankind.
Or rather, put its hobnailed boot on the groin of mankind repeatedly over the last 2,500 years, almost continuously, and we will talk about that in a second, to the point where, after the Second World War, Greece almost became communist, to the point where there was intervention on the part of the US, as there always is, for the worst.
So, what the hell is going on?
Why would this? Why would he say, the majority of men are evil, laws are the productions of men, the laws are sublimely beautiful and should be obeyed?
It makes no sense. Well, the great challenge Our philosophy in terms of communication is how do you deal with idiots?
How do you deal with fools?
How do you deal with the pompous, self-inflated, grandiose, annoying, irritating people who constantly give you feedback from a completely brain-dead and retarded standpoint?
I mean...
Look down. There are some comments down there that I'm sure will fit right into this category, and if there aren't yet, have a look at any of the other videos I've done.
I don't mean anybody who disagrees with me, of course not, but it is probably about a tenth of one percent of the comments that I get That actually address a point of reasoning or a point of evidence.
Everyone else just says, oh, it's stupid.
Well, it's just wrong. It's just bad.
Well, I just don't agree. Well, you're just doing this.
Well, you're just equivocating, you know, with no proof, with no, you know, and here's where the logical sequence broke down, and here's the evidence that, right?
So maybe one in a thousand responses that I get, which means 99.9% of people are retarded philosophically and have no idea what they're talking about and are just acting out of some emotional crap, which they haven't dealt with, right?
So... So the challenge of a philosopher is, how do I deal with the vast majority of idiots who swarm me, right?
I mean, this is the challenge, right?
And Socrates chose a passive-aggressive response, and this has been kind of a template, and I've wrestled with this throughout my time.
as a public philosopher over the past few years.
The problem of passive aggression, right?
So Socrates, you know, is like the jujitsu guy.
You come running at him and he'll use your momentum to overthrow your argument.
So what Socrates does is Someone comes charging at him and says, oh, Socrates, I know all about virtue and honor and dignity and truth and all of these wonderful things.
And Socrates says, wow, how lovely.
I think that's excellent.
Clearly, you are far wiser than I am, so I kneel at your feet as an eager pupil.
Please tell me what the truth is.
And of course, Socrates knows the guy's full of shit, right?
The guy's full of complete, utter bullcrap.
But he says, instruct me, and the guy starts to pompously lecture Socrates and Socrates does these little hidden jabs and these questions and these things which mess the guy up and cause him to get angry.
So Socrates knows the guy is full of crap, but will keep asking these questions and then the guy will, after this needling, this gadfly mechanism that Socrates does, the guy gets angry, right?
This is passive aggression, right?
I mean, I'm susceptible to it.
Everybody's susceptible to it. It is kind of a fun thing to do in a weird kind of way when somebody is pompously coming at you with the truth, but I'm sort of leaning away from that more over the past six to twelve months.
So, when Athens, when the Athenians, when the majority decide to kill him because he is virtuous, What does Socrates do?
To me, it's absolutely fascinating.
And we should always be wary of the vengeance of passive-aggressive people.
And we should especially be wary of the vengeance of passive-aggressive philosophers, because it is a terrible thing.
The great way to destroy people, the great way to destroy a society, the great way to destroy the world, frankly, is not to teach it to hate virtue, but to teach it to love evil.
That is how you destroy a man.
You teach him to love evil.
You are not indifferent to him.
You do not teach him to hate the good.
You teach him to love the evil.
The way that I view this story, this is not proof, this is not conclusive, this is a way of looking at it that I think has some real value to it, but you can of course make your own mind up, is that This completely illogical and contradictory worship of the laws that are slaughtering the best and most virtuous man in the world,
the only way to understand why Socrates claims to love that which is killing him is that that is his vengeance upon the Athenians.
That is how his prophecy is going to be fulfilled.
About the growing evils and injustice the Athenians will have to suffer after killing him.
That the speech he gives a Crito which is transcribed by Plato published throughout Athens is the speech which places the power of evil over the majority.
He teaches Athenians to love evil as his revenge for his death.
I'm not saying that he planned this, I'm not saying it's conscious, but we know that Socrates does not recognize the unconscious because he's superstitious.
Superstitious people project the unconscious into the universe, so he will not be self-conscious.
He will not be conscious of his motives in making this speech.
It's so completely illogical that it can only come out of Aggression.
Vengeance. And it is the most terrible curse.
It is the most terrible curse.
It has resulted in thousands of years of dictatorships and enslavement and murder and brutality and genocide and war and famine.
Socrates faced what most philosophers, if not all philosophers, faced, if not all philosophers, faced, at least from what I've read and what I've experienced.
Okay.
They're kind of like these three groups in society.
Well, let's go, I guess, I don't know, right to left, whatever it's going to be on your screen.
There's the virtuous, there's the evil, right?
And then there's this big, cloudy pile of human goo in the middle called...
The evasive, the indifferent, the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus.
There's the good, there's the evil, and then there's all the people in the middle.
And all the people in the middle claim to be virtuous and honorable and decent and blah blah blah blah blah, do the right thing.
And what occurs is that there is the good and there is the evil who are in conflict in human society.
There's this great indifferent middle group.
And what happens is, when virtue arises, the evil attack the virtuous.
The virtuous don't necessarily attack the evil.
They will expose the evil, right?
And the evil as predators who slither in the grass don't like it when you cut down the grass, so they attack the virtuous, right?
They attack the virtuous.
And the virtuous look to The middle group, they look to the middle group for protection, or at least for some recognition, right?
There's all these people, right?
Imagine there's a hundred people, and there's one guy who's being attacked by a wolf, and he looks to everyone else for some sort of protection, some sort of affirmation, some sort of help.
And everybody just kind of takes these huge, massive steps back, you know, slithers out of the frame, and pretends that they haven't seen anything.
Because this is how heroic this middle group is.
And philosophers, when they are being mauled by these lions, by evil, look to the virtuous majority, the, quote, virtuous majority for aid, for help, for sustenance, for protection, for sympathy, for recognition that anything is going on, that anything is going wrong. And we get...
None. People won't even say that there are wolves.
They won't say there are lions. They won't say there's virtue.
They just beam out of the picture, continually and forever.
They just, oh, we don't want to get involved.
We don't want to call the cops. We don't want to take a stand.
They're ghosts. They don't exist fundamentally.
Empty vessels. And the philosophers are not angry at the predators.
The philosophers are angry At the middle group.
At those who could.
I mean, when you're evil, when you're that corrupt, you don't think, you don't really have a choice.
That's all in the past, right?
I mean, you're just a predator.
You have no more particular conscience than a shark.
So it's hard to hate The evil.
They're beyond recovery. It's like if you've smoked five packs a day for 20 years or 30 years, you get lung cancer, quitting smoking won't help.
It's beyond recovery.
They're just acting in an unconscious, aggressive, predatory manner.
I mean, they're responsible for their evil because the guy who gets lung cancer is responsible for that, but he's beyond a cure, right?
So the philosophers don't get angry, particularly at the evil.
We get angry at the indifferent majority who claims virtue and vanishes from any substantial conflict, who pretends that nothing is happening.
And the inevitable response of most philosophers throughout history is to say, fine, okay, I got it.
Virtuous people are being attacked by evil people.
The vast majority are slithering out of the picture, not taking a stand.
I will go down under the wolves and my vengeance for your indifference will be to elevate the wolves into mastery over you.
If you will not help the virtuous against the wolves, the virtuous will elevate the wolves into power over you.
That is our revenge for your indifference and cowardice.
That we will make your worst fears come true because you claim to be virtuous.
You are Inactive and evasive and vanishing in the face of an attack upon the virtuous by the evil, which shows your fear of the evil.
And we will make your worst fears come true, we philosophers, because we will elevate evil into ultimate power over you.
This is the only way to understand what Socrates is doing.
It is the most perfect, bloody, disastrous, genocidal vengeance upon the indifference and cowardice of the majority.
Not against Meletus, or Annetus.
See, Socrates is not creating a world where Meletus will suffer.
When he praises the state and the laws, he's not creating a world Where Miletus will suffer.
He is creating a world where Miletus will rule Athens and slaughter the majority who has betrayed Socrates at his leisure.
Which is exactly what happened, not with Miletus, but with Athens.
You will not come to my aid when I am mauled by evil because you are so afraid of evil.
Well, too bad. I now give evil ultimate power over you.
Human beings are evil.
They lust for power. So I will train the majority to worship the laws, which will be the inevitable products of evil people.
I will train the majority to worship evil, and that is my vengeance on your lack of aid when I am attacked by wolves is to give the wolves power over you forever.
And that's the prophecy that Socrates is not making, but creating and fulfilling through his elevation of the laws.
And to virtue, he is training the majority to worship evil.
well.
And he is inflicting upon the majority that which he is suffering himself, which is subjugation to brutality and evil.
The German philosophers, when they attempted to bring the Enlightenment to Germany, the most religious country in Europe, they had the same experience. they had the same experience.
They were rejected, they were attacked, they were dismissed, and in return they gave Germany Nazism.
We will do to you what is done unto us.
There is no escape from the need to defend the virtuous.
If you do not defend the virtuous, the virtuous will recreate their subjugation for you in far worse terms.
I believe this happened with Rand as well.
Well, she could not make it to the love of anarchism because she was too angry at the world that continually betrayed her unjustly.
The last words of Socrates.
He says, Crito, I owe a rooster to Asclepius.
Will you remember to pay the debt?
Asclepius was a Greek god that when you were cured of an illness, you gave a sacrifice to this god.
And clearly this means that Socrates saw life as an illness for which he wished to be cured.
or during the illness, the demands of the body, the sexual impulses, hunger, cold, thirst, all of the things that he felt interfered or violated the purity of his thinking.
It is my belief, it's not proof, it is my belief that Socrates actually viewed, when he had done a speech like the one he gives when he had done a speech like the one he gives about the It's been my argument for many years that the state is, in fact, the family.
We cannot undo the state without improving the virtue of the family.
And he makes that very clear.
The state is one step above The father and derives its power from the initial power of the father.
I mean, this is very clear.
When Socrates elevates the power and brutality of parenting, right, that you cannot, no matter what wrongs or evils your father and your mother do to you, you cannot no matter what wrongs or evils your father and your mother do to you, you cannot do anything This, of course, is license for parents to beat and savage and brutalize their children, which creates a society of predators.
The links between child abuse and adult criminality are so well established, we don't even need to go into them here.
It's not inevitable, but it is strongly correlational.
So what kind of future is Socrates creating with this speech about the laws?
He is creating a future where children will be abused, where criminality and brutality will be the inevitable result of that, because he is all about training the virtue of the young.
And Socrates does not beat the young.
He does not violate the young with brutality.
But he is recommending this for parents in the future.
What kind of world is he creating?
What kind of conveyor belt is he setting the Athenian society on?
To what hellish depths will it fall from where he is pushing them?
And he is creating a world where soldiers must obey the evil.
Men who run the laws and must never desert their posts.
Children who are abused who will become violent soldiers, hitmen, death cult worshippers, violence against society.
where the average, the majority, will end up slavishly worshipping the evils of their parents and the evils of the state and joining the military and never deserting their post.
It is my belief that what Socrates says when he says, sacrifice a rooster to Asclepius, is he is saying, that death is preferable to that death is preferable to living in the world that I am creating through my speeches.
I would rather die than live in the future that I am summoning through my speeches, through my praise of evil, through my praise of violence, through my praise of child abuse.
I would rather die now and enter into the potential dark night of limbo and nihilism or conversations with better men and women in the afterlife than stay on the train that is going down the tracks to the genocides that I am creating through my words.
I don't know of philosophers who have managed to overcome the feelings of betrayal by the middle group, right?
The vast majority of people who claim virtue and pretend that nothing has happened.
Nothing is happening when the good is attacked by evil.
Thank you.
I think that philosophers need to overcome their hatred and feelings of betrayal by the majority, these feelings of nausea, of disgust at looking at the majority of humankind.
Because it certainly hasn't worked.
To curse them with the violence that is inflicted upon us.
That kind of passive-aggressive vengeance is the worst and greatest evil in the world.
And we must find it within our hearts, within our souls.
To love even those who betray us enough to put them on the path to a better world rather than to the hellish retaliations that philosophers have created for the silent majority throughout history.
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