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March 13, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:52
1296 The Death of Concepts Part 1

How the mind goes down...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
A little voguing for you there, for those of you who are still into the 90s.
This is a little talk.
It's actually not that little, but I think it's very, very, very important, and I hope that you will struggle through with me as we unpack these ideas.
This is The Death of Concepts will be a multi-part series, but I want to do an introduction to hopefully wet your appetite.
Thank you so much to those who have signed up for subscriptions and donations at Free Domain Radio.
I try to bring reason to the masses.
We recently passed over one million video views on YouTube, and we are doing four to five million podcast downloads.
A year. All of my books are free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free in audiobook and PDF format.
The books themselves are pretty cheap, but if you could sign up for subscriptions and donations, I would really, really appreciate that, as I think and I hope the world as a whole will when the value and light of philosophy dawns over a bit of a dark age that we're struggling through at the moment.
So... I'd like to talk about concepts.
I've done videos in the past about concept formation.
Concepts are abstractions from physical entities.
A bunch of trees we call a forest.
The concept forest exists in our mind.
Only the trees exist in reality.
The concept forest exists within our mind.
Concepts like Violence, say, is a very good servant, concepts of very good servants and absolutely terrible and totalitarian masters.
So, violence as a servant is self-defense or surgery, whereas when it is a statism, it is a master.
It is a terrible thing.
And concepts, unfortunately, have become just terribly, terribly misused, I mean, throughout human history, but particularly in the present.
So I'm going to start off with an allegory, then provide some examples, and then give you some thoughts that I hope will help you to achieve what you want when you're talking to people about reason, truth, philosophy, and economics, libertarianism, or whatever it is that you're interested in, that you can gain the most traction and have the most effect when you have these conversations.
So, An allegory.
So, in the past, before the 18th or 19th centuries, there was the perception that natural phenomenon were inhabited by ghosts, by gods, the pantheons, right?
Whether it was Egyptian or Greek or Roman or whatever.
It was the idea that Zeus brought the rain and Poseidon made the tides and, I don't know, Hera knitted the stockings, whatever it was that was going on in the world, there was this kind of ghost in the machine of Conscious, abstract, non-existent inhabitants of these physical entities, right? Dryads lived in the trees and naiads in the water and the ponds and every stone had a ghost in it.
You had to apologize to the stone for changing its resting place when you did your plowing or whatever, right?
So, everything was animated in this kind of paganistic way.
In other words, we had taken our concepts and wildly and inaccurately injected them into Things that were, and because we had blurred the simple practicality of, you know, physics, biology, natural laws, we projected all of our personalities, so to speak, into things around us, and therefore we could not see them for what they actually were, right?
So, if the rumbling of a volcano was the anger of the fire god who lived in its base, aka Cheney, then what would happen is people would Think about the fire god and would appease the fire god and would kill goats and virgins and would not move away from the base of the volcano because they'd say, well, you know, there's this fire god and if we appease the fire god, everything will be fine.
And so they didn't actually ever understand a volcano because they thought it was...
A conscious entity that was angry.
And of course, they would do all of these rituals to appease the fire god.
And then when the volcano inevitably erupted, they would look at what they were doing in that moment and they would say, Ah!
I was getting a haircut.
The tribal chief was getting a haircut when the volcano erupted.
So clearly, The fire god was angry at haircuts, and therefore, no more haircuts, right?
And then, oh, something, I was plowing this way, and so now we're only going to plow this way, right?
So you get this progressive totalitarian restriction, which is generally called, sadly, culture.
So when human beings looked at the simplicity of the world and created all of these nutty, wild, mythological concepts and constructs, these pantheons of deities and inhabited every single thing and you prayed, they couldn't actually see reality for what it was.
What they saw was a fundamental problem which people have.
We mistake the world for ourselves.
We are conscious and therefore we project consciousness into the world.
Whether it's into a paganistic thing like a tree or a rain cloud or a volcano or into something more abstract and obtuse like the universe or what's outside the universe or whatever in terms of a more abstract or Christian God.
So, as long as we are talking about things that don't exist, wildly extending this concept called consciousness, which we have here and projecting it wildly all over into the world, we can't actually see the world for what it is.
And I would submit that this metaphor that I'm using is actually very appropriate to our discourse about society, about politics, about economics, about social organization.
Because we use these words all the time that have negative meaning.
No meaning is...
That has, hmm, tasty, but no meaning.
Good lunch. So that has no meaning, but it doesn't have negative meaning.
Whereas if I don't give you directions, if you're lost, you pull up to me and I don't give you directions, then I'm not making you more lost.
I'm just not helping you be found.
But if I give you the wrong directions, then I am actually giving you anti-directions.
I'm sending you the exact wrong way or to a more confusing way.
So whenever we talk about society, and if you start to listen to this, you will hear it all the time, and it'll make you a little squirrelly, but it's really, really important to understand.
When people talk about society, And politics and economics and government statism and whatever, right?
They use words that have the opposite of meaning.
They're anti-meaning in the same way that thinking that the Zeus brings the rain and the fire gods and the Poseidon brings the tides is anti-science because it's a pseudo-answer that actually generally makes people offended when you look for the real answer because you say, well, no, it's the moon that does the tides, not Poseidon.
Then all the Poseidon priests want to get you killed, right?
So these anti-answers, the opposite of answers, are the fundamental reason why we can't solve any problems in society in the same way that you can't understand the rain if you think that Zeus brings it and that to say otherwise is blasphemy,
right? So we have this religion called society or social discourse which is the exact opposite of truth and meaning and accuracy and then we wonder why when we apply these These opposite answers, everything goes completely wrong.
We get wars and depressions and recessions and bailouts and debts and Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and we get millions of people in prisons.
Because we're doing the opposite of thinking.
We're anti-thinking, we're anti-understanding, we're anti-communicating.
Let me sort of give you an example.
I have been reading through a book by Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine, which actually I consider to be a pretty good empirical verification of an argument that I had against the Ron Paul candidacy.
If the people aren't ready, then it would just be perceived as violent and ugly, and this really does seem to be the case.
At least the case is made strongly in this book.
But Naomi Klein is a master rhetorician, as many people on the left are, and better at it, in my opinion, than people on the right.
And she will say things, and I'll give more specific examples in the next show, but she will say things like, you know, a business needs to be regulated to secure the basic rights of workers.
A business needs to be regulated to secure the basic rights of workers.
We hear this kind of stuff all the time.
And to me, this is exactly the same as Zeus brings the rain, except that there isn't even any rain in the sentence.
So, the reality that's so hard for people to get through to, the basic reality of society, is that it's people doing stuff.
People doing stuff.
And as long as we talk about society like these abstract classes and governments and protection and workers and rights and social contracts, we're describing the weather in terms of a pantheon, in terms of a mythology.
The weather is Atoms and molecules and physical forces and physical laws.
And it's complicated as all get-up, but we don't exactly know whether it's going to rain tomorrow, but we sure as shit know that it's not Zeus who's bringing the rain.
So, as long as we kept thinking that gods were involved in the weather, we couldn't understand the weather of volcanoes or the solar system.
I think it was Copernicus or Kepler or Tycho Brahe who brought a model of the solar system.
The heliocentric, sun-centered solar system to the then Pope.
And the Pope said, well, that's very interesting.
Where's God's hand in this?
Where is God necessary to make things work?
And the astronomer said, It's not necessary.
This is the fundamental thing that I'm really trying hard to work on at Free Domain Radio through these conversations, to get you to understand that society is just people doing stuff in the same way that the weather is just atoms doing stuff.
It's individual atoms doing stuff according to the laws of physics.
That's it. And society is people doing things.
And as long as we have these cloudy, clusterfract concepts out there that are acid to the eyes of truth, we can't ever make decisions or even remotely understand.
In fact, we do the opposite of understanding what is really going on in society.
So when somebody says, well, we need regulation of business to protect the basic rights of workers, let's just take the first phrase.
Regulation of business. Regulation of business.
What does that mean? What does that mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
But the problem is people think it means something in the same way they think that Zeus does something is an answer to the rain.
It's the opposite of an answer because it prevents further exploration.
So when people say regulation of business, what are they talking about?
And this is something I would really, really urge you strongly to pursue in your political discourses.
To just say to people, I'm sorry, regulation of business, what does that mean?
I don't understand that.
Because society is people doing stuff.
Help me understand what this abstract phrase, regulation of business, means in terms of people doing stuff.
You can do this with lots of other things too.
The social contract, human rights, the stimulus package.
I'm sorry, the stimulus package, I don't understand what that means.
What does it mean for there to be a stimulus package?
Break it down for me, like who does what?
Who does what in society?
That's what I want to know. Not all this windy, bullshit, abstract nonsense, but who is doing what and how?
What are the actions being performed underneath all of these fuzzy, foggy concepts?
So regulation of business.
The problem is when you say regulation of business, There's no people in that.
So it can't be describing anything to do with society, because society is people doing stuff.
So regulation, what does that mean?
I mean, you can't be against a concept like, I don't know, regulation.
What is the opposite of regulation?
Chaos? I mean, okay, regulation is good.
I'm glad that my heartbeat regulates itself.
I'm glad that my circadian rhythm regulates itself.
Wonderful. So who could be against regulation?
That's puppies and apple pie.
It's nonsense, right? And who could be against a stimulus?
Of course, it really should be the economic cocaine blast to the nether regions.
But who could be against stimulating the economy?
But that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything.
So regulation of business is to stay on that.
Regulation means what? What are people doing?
What are you suggesting that people do or be given the ability or the right or the power to do?
Economic stimulus. What is it that people are actually going to do rather than what windy concepts could you use to obscure what people are doing?
Regulation of business. Okay.
Well, there's no such thing as regulation.
There are only regulators.
And there is no such thing fundamentally as regulators.
There are only people who can do stuff.
Right? So, Regulation of business means what?
What do people actually do?
And you'll get a lot of windy nonsense, right?
Oh, well, you know, ensure they meet best practices and they pay their workers decently and this and that and the other.
It's like, that's not a law, right?
What is it that people actually do?
Unless you sort of burrow down, and I'll cut to the ending here.
I'm sure you understand it if you've been listening to this for a while.
What people actually do in those situations is, at some point, it comes down to this.
Regulation of business is, you know, person A, Bob, who is a regulator, has the magical, heroic superpower to point a gun at person B, Doug, who is a business person, and make him do what he wants.
That's the actions that are actually occurring.
That is what is actually happening.
Until we can drill down past this unbelievable, The petty fog of obscuring counterfactual, counterintelligence, counter-understanding concepts to actually what is happening in society, we're forever just going to be manipulating these things.
I mean, manipulating concepts to the exact detriment of what it is that we're actually trying to achieve.
What is it that people actually do?
To regulate business means that one class of people has the right to take up guns and pass rules for the other class of people to follow.
And if that other class of people don't follow them, they get to kidnap them and lock them up.
and if they resist, then they will shoot them, right?
And that's a lot harder to defend than the regulation of business, right?
There's no such thing as business.
There are only people. People involved in doing stuff.
And some of that stuff is economic, and some of it is social, some of it is artistic, some of it is other, right?
But there's only people doing stuff in the world.
And if you want to help people, those who are at all interested, if you want to help them understand why everything in the world is so fracked up, it's because we think we're talking about something when we're not.
We think we're meteorologists, but we're only priests at the worst kind of smarmy, snarky consciousness, obscuring priests, anti-answer people.
Stimulus package. Stimulus package.
What does that mean? What does it mean?
Am I for the stimulus package?
Am I against this? I don't know, because I don't know what it means.
That concept is the opposite of knowledge.
As long as you think it means something, then you will forever be lost doing the opposite of what you want, or what you claim that you want.
So what does it mean, stimulus package?
What does that mean? That some people have the right To print as much money as they want, while at the same time having the obligation to shoot anyone else who also prints money because they're counterfeiters,
right? So we have a monopoly of counterfeiters who are stealing the value of people's money, particularly from the future.
No taxation without representation.
Well, of course, the representation from the unborn is relatively small.
Lacking the fingers. They cannot vote, right?
So, what does stimulus package mean?
It means that certain people, and we can call them the state, but certain people have the ability, this amazing ability, to create out of thin air as much money as they want and use it to spend on people they like.
I mean, this is counterfeiting, right?
It's not a stimulus package.
It's a counterfeit ring!
It's not a stimulus package.
It's an economic rape of the unborn.
It's a little tougher to sell.
I don't think that was ever the name of the bill.
So, what is it that this means?
Well, we can print all the money we want, and if anyone else Tries to use an alternative currency, we'll shoot them.
And if anyone else tries to do what we're doing in terms of printing money, we'll shoot them too.
You can't describe what the government actually does rather than these windy bullshit concepts.
You can never describe what the government actually does without it being completely identical to what organized crime does.
And a vast A vast lobby group of intellectuals and artists and commentators and pundits and news media, all designed to create this delicious tooth-rotting smokescreen of pure,
pure, fine, grade-A corn fructose bullshit to completely obscure the fact of what people are actually doing.
And if we can't find a way to bypass all of these concepts that are the opposite of meaning, And actually get to the truth of what people are doing.
Yes, I think Keynesianism works.
Governments should spend during a time of recession.
I don't know what any of that means.
I'm not going to manipulate these concepts, you know, like I think I'm doing something, right?
I'm not going to run around in World of Warcraft and think that I'm improving my cardiovascular.
I'm actually going to deal with the real.
I'm going to deal with what is.
And people doing stuff, not windy, opposite of thought concepts designed to befuddle, bewilder, antagonize, and confuse, and fundamentally pillage.
This is my suggestion.
Rather than coming real strong at people and saying, the stimulus package is terrible, it's nonsense, it harmed the economy, it's counter-Austrian.
I don't know what that means, I'm sorry.
Explain it to me like I'm...
Three years old. Explain it to me like I'm three years old.
I don't get the stimulus package.
Step me through it.
I bow before your brilliant intellect because I don't know what the hell people are talking about.
And I don't. People talk about stimulus package or protecting the rights of the workers by regulating Wall Street and middle America this and the middle class the other and there are the workers who are blue-collar and then there are the non-workers who are white-collar as if white-collar people don't work and I never worked harder than when I was running a company.
I don't know what anyone's talking about.
I mean, it really is just...
It makes no sense to me.
I don't know what people are talking about.
I look at the TV, I'm literally like, what?
I don't know what you're talking about.
And what's even more terrifying, of course, is that they don't know what they're talking about either, but hopefully you will.
So the thing to do, in my humble opinion, is just say, no, I'm sorry, I don't know.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Break it down to me. What is it you want people to do?
What should they have the right to do?
Well, the government should have...
No, no, no. There's no such thing.
The government doesn't act. The government is a thing.
It's a concept. You might as well try and cut down a forest without touching any of the trees.
It makes no sense to take a picture of a family without any individual people in the picture.
So don't talk to me about the state.
I don't know what the hell that means.
And you can take marbles, take peas, take quarters, put them down.
So here's society, we've got ten quarters.
So these two coins go over here and they have the right to shoot these people if they disagree with them.
So these eight people choose these two people who then have the right to use force against them.
So it's like these restaurant owners, they get to choose the mafia who extorts from them.
Can they choose not to be extorted?
No! Why not?
Like, you know, just break it down.
Forget the concepts, right?
There are people in the world doing things, and unfortunately, a lot of them are very well armed with guns, but more importantly and fundamentally with these anti-concepts called society, called the state, called social contracts, called stimulus packages, called protection of X, Y, and Z, and so on, right?
We have to regulate business to protect the environment.
I don't know what any of that means.
What is it people should do?
What should they have the right to do?
Fundamentally, what it comes down to is, who has the right to do this?
Who has the right to point a gun at you?
That's really what it comes down to.
The next time you get into a debate or an argument or whatever about politics or economics or whatever, just play dumb.
And it's worth playing dumb because you also may not know as much as you think.
I find this out about myself every day.
But play dumb.
Just say, I'm sorry.
Stimulus, it's beyond me.
Break it down to me.
So, the government is hugely in debt.
And so it's going to go into more debt to solve the problem of debt.
Like, I don't understand that.
Okay, pretend like I'm a banker and you're a guy coming to me who owes me a lot of money.
And he says, well, I'm going to counterfeit a bunch of money to pay you back with.
What would the bank manager say?
No. I'm going to get you arrested.
If you owe a lot of money to your credit card company and the way that you're going to solve the problem of all that debt is to get more credit cards and run up more debt, help me understand how that works.
Just break it down to individual people doing things.
Because then you'll find that all of this massive superstructure of craptastic bullshit that is the foundation of the statist mythology will all come crashing down because when you break it down to its constituent actions,
its component atoms, its basic physical forces, when you take the ghost out of the machine, when you take Zeus out of the weather, when you take Poseidon out of the sea, when you take the fire god out of the mountain, You end up with physics, and you begin to approach what is called a rational and empirical understanding of the world.
So don't let people snow you with all of this nose candy of crap!
Just say, no, no, no, I don't understand these cars.
Forget the guy. Okay, so Barack Obama and a couple of guys should be able to order people, and if those people don't obey, then they should be able to shoot them or have them shot or kidnapped.
Just break it down to individual people doing things, because that's really all it is.
And if we can't get...
The pantheon out of society, we can never get the boots off our neck.
So I would really, really focus on that kind of empirical, simple clarity.
Who is doing what?
Thank you so much for watching.
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