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March 14, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:30
1301 Dodging Rules and Control

Why many people reject rationality.

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Time Text
Good evening, everyone.
It's Steph. It is quarter to twelve on May the 2nd.
March the 2nd, 2009.
Hope you're doing most excellently.
I'm just going to grab a little food.
And I wanted to mention an idea that I've been cooking around in my brain.
Hopefully it would be of some interest or utility to you.
And the idea is...
You know how angry people get?
You probably have seen this.
I know I have. I mean, I see it pretty continually.
Perhaps you do as well. You know how angry people get?
By the way, you know it is minus 26 degrees outside with the windchill at the moment?
That's what I call a dead cheerleader.
They get so angry when you put rules on them, right?
The people expostulate, they say stuff, and they get mad.
And when you sort of say, well, there are these rules, then they're resentful.
When you put the rules of laws, or of logic, or of physics, or of evidence, or of facts, or empiricism, or whatever, when you disprove something by someone, they get resentful.
Like they've been tricked, or some bamboozled in some way, or confined.
And this sort of came to my mind.
I was watching, when I was unwell, I was watching Kill Time.
And it's not a bad show, but it's not that great.
And of course, it's a cliche to all get out with, you know, the sleazy businessmen and so on.
But at least the lawyers are sleazy and the cops are sleazy too.
But there's a show called Damages with Glenn Close, and I watched some of the episodes.
And Glenn Close is really good at playing enigmatic characters that you can't quite figure out.
Their motives seem to be sort of random, and they seem to have hidden agendas, and they are oblique, you know, and oblique people are...
They drive me nuts.
They drive me a nut eve on Nutbaggy Kings.
And, of course, first and foremost was my mother, right?
Never figure out what the hell was making that broad tick.
I'll tell you that.
And I remember I spent a long time...
Some psychologist said a man who fails to understand his mother carries with him that tragedy for his whole life and his relations to women and blah blah blah.
If you have to plumb the depths or get to know you, figure out what makes your mother tick or you're going to be doomed with women and so on.
And that was all nonsense as it turned out.
It was the struggle to try and understand my mother that messed me up with women.
And watching this Glenn Close character in this TV show, Damages, kind of reminded me of my mother.
Oblique and intense, but to what end, it's hard to know, right?
To what end these people have.
And maybe you have someone in your life who's like this.
They're intense, they're volatile, they're driven by these emotions that are powerful and they really are driven by these feelings that seem to be sort of random.
Like you can't sort of tell what What is going to be triggering them next, or what the central purpose is of what it is that they're going for.
They're very intense about what they're doing, but you can't sort of figure out what they're up to as a whole, like in their life.
So this woman is a lawyer, and she's pursuing people and so on, and you don't know why she's pursuing this Arthur Frobisher fellow, played by Ted Danson, who plays him pretty well, I think.
But you can't feel like, why is she so angry at this guy?
And this, of course, is a big question, right?
That people mistake a lot when it comes to attempting to understand the state.
You know, they think that there are these Robocop robots that are out there, you know, just driven to try and pursue justice in the long run and to try and nail bad guys and do right.
And it's nonsense, right?
Those people simply are not out there.
Everyone thinks that there are these people who are statists.
They think, oh, there's this group of people out there selflessly dedicated to finding the bad guys and rewarding the good guys.
And they're just these machines.
And they're not. Those people don't exist.
They're not out there looking out for the little guy.
I mean, they're just doing their own thing, advancing their own careers, trying to get a raise and trying to keep their jobs and trying to feed their families and so on.
And when... This woman, the Glenn Close character, goes after this industrialist or this entrepreneur.
It's never stated what he does.
The motives are obscure.
Nobody knows why she's so driven to hound this guy, to hunt down this guy, to get this guy.
She talks a little bit about the little people and so on, but it's not credible, believable, or actually even that well acted in my opinion.
And as I was watching this show, I was sort of idly thinking about this question of predictability in people.
And I know a lot of people who are really unpredictable.
You don't know what's coming next!
And you don't know why their moods are the way their moods are, or what their motivations are, and it all seems murky and confused.
Rand used to talk about it, and I think Nathaniel Brandon does as well, about this random grab bag of things they've heard and things that they believe in and things that they've half-ingested from half-thought and so on, right?
That this is the detritus and clutter and mess in people's minds that just has them bouncing around like a pinball and this and that.
I never found that to be a particularly satisfying explanation.
I'm not saying mine will be any more, but if I'm not satisfied, at least I'll try and come up with something different that hopefully will be useful or make some sense.
Watching this character, sort of mulling about it, and thinking about all the people There's probably thousands of people by now that I've debated with over the last quarter century.
And most of them, though not all, most of them change topics when they get cornered.
They go off on tangents when they're disproven and this and that and the other, right?
And it could be a dominance thing or a humiliation thing or something like that.
But none of those explanations particularly satisfied me.
And the reason for that is that in other areas, people aren't like that, right?
I mean, people have these half-grab-baggy things and half-digested and half-masticated thoughts and so on.
In other areas, in work, in health, in finance and so on, and they don't act with complete randomness or Or even semi-randomness in those areas, right?
So why would it just be in this particular area of values and philosophy that people's behavior is so oblique, right?
I mean, why is it that they're so hard to pin down and so defensive and so on and so on, right?
And what I thought about, and I thought I'd share it with you.
If this is of any interest, you can let me know.
Or not. But what I thought about as a reason why...
Is that, you know, people like, a lot of people like behaving badly.
A lot of, can I just tell you, I just had this thought of driving past this man, this person standing in a bus shelter.
In minus 26 degree weather.
And man, the number of years...
I didn't get a car until I was in my 30s.
And the number of years I spent freezing my ass off in a bus shelter.
It is actually quite nice to be in a heated seat Volvo.
And I appreciate it every single time it's cold out and I go and get something.
But a lot of people really like the freedom to act badly.
Because government really is the freedom to act badly.
The freedom to be evil.
It's freevil. That's what the government wants.
Freevil. Free evil. That's the nature.
That's what government is. Free evil.
Evil in a bag. And they like being able to behave badly, destructively, randomly.
To bully, to frighten, to intimidate, to wheedle, to appease, to manipulate, to lie, to prevaricate, to defend, to attack, to sleaze, right?
I mean, people like doing that.
One of the reasons that they resist, I think, that they resist rules or philosophy or reason or evidence and so on, is because they just want to continue behaving badly.
Whether for emotional or material profit.
I mean, think of a priest, obviously, right?
He disproved God and he's out of a job, right?
We understand that. But people like behaving randomly and they resist rules.
And they resist rules because...
They feel that rules give you power over them, right?
Because that's how they use rules, right?
They use rules to make up rules or whatever, to have power over others, right?
And so when you impose a rule on them, they feel like you're trying to have power over them.
They take it personally.
It's not rules.
It's your rules.
And if you can get me to believe your rules, you have power over me.
All laws, all rules, or evidence, all reason is a kind of dominance game for people.
And they want to push back if you impose rules.
My mother, why did she not want to have any rules of behavior?
Because if she had rules of behavior, She couldn't, you know, lash out when she was angry, right?
And you see this in married couples as well, you know?
And I remember in dating relationships I had, particularly one that was volatile.
It's like, you were just trying, look, can we at least not raise our voices?
Can we at least not call names, right?
And you're like, well, don't provoke me, you know?
You know, like, it's just a refusal to live by any rules because if...
They're gonna live by rules, then they're gonna feel that you have power over them, that you're controlling them, that you're intimidating them, that you're cornering them, that they lose their freedom.
If they agree to rules.
And the freedom, right? Free-vil, right?
Free to be evil. Free evil.
They lose the freedom to act in a destructive or abusive manner, which to them is freedom, right?
And if you inhibit them with rules and you bring UPB or whatever it is that you bring to bear, logic and evidence, they lose the ability to just act out in this lazy, stupid...
Bullshit manner that people do.
They like that, right? Because, you know, people are kind of like Jabba the Hutt when you peel back the surface layers, right?
It's kind of lazy and quivering and greedy and nasty, right?
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