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May 19, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:21
1358 Singularity

The moment of truth, and how it can pass...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Oh, yes.
There's been another very exciting 5.30 a.m.
with Der Schwietems.
So, and I cannot find my other recorder.
So, we are going with this guy.
Hopefully it won't be too bad and hopefully the wind won't be too bad.
See, the wind is pretty good. And you get to hear all of the lovely bird songs that are available here in the grim farmer's early dawn.
So, yeah, I was thinking this morning about There was a book by Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel many, many years ago, some years ago, gosh, I didn't even know,
maybe 10 years ago, maybe a little more, and he called it SIP, Strategic Inflection Point, and he based it on when the Pentiums came, one set of Pentiums came out which had some bad math tables,
and would once every long period of time produce an erroneous result and he tried to ignore it or they tried to downplay it and didn't recognize how powerful the internet forum world was already becoming in the sharing of this kind of information and they ended up having to recall and replace a whole bunch of processing chips He didn't really realize that at the time.
And so that strategic inflection point was, you know, the era plus, you know, and they claimed it was like once every 200,000 years, but other people claimed it was pretty regular.
And long story short, they ended up having to replace a bunch of Pentiums.
And he called that a strategic inflection point to recognize when things had sort of fundamentally changed.
And, you know, people love to create acronyms for commonly used terms, you know, like RTR for honesty.
Anyway, UPB for ethics.
We could go on.
MECOSYSTEM for the personality.
But, you know, you can't get ahead with that newspeak, can you?
So, I was thinking this morning about The challenge that I think is sort of most fundamental around what Andy Grove might call a strategic inflection point.
I like calling it singularity.
That's a term of physics I think related to black holes and event horizons and so on.
Singularity I kind of like.
And oh, by the way, we're out walking with Dear Sweetums.
She's on my snuggly, on my chest.
And this is Daddy's way of telling her story.
Where there is no inconsistency, where there is no perceived contradiction, there is no choice.
So, when I was making myself some breakfast, I was watching The Daily Show from last night, and they had Newt Gingrich on.
And I generally don't watch the interviews, unless they're science or some foreign policy stuff, but an interview with Newt Gingrich.
And he'd written a book with his daughter, I think, called Five Steps to a Successful Life, or something like that, from my family to yours.
And this, to me, is all just too mind-blowing for words.
That Newt Gingrich would write a book about a successful life.
And I won't get into the details of Newt Gingrich's life.
You can look up for it. But it's very hard for me to think of this as a successful life from an ethical standpoint or whatever.
But the reality is that he lives in a world where there are no contradictions.
And we say, well, you participated in the war crimes of the Reagan years and afterwards and been sort of high up in the most violent and heavily armed and arms-selling institution in the world.
I mean, to me, it's like a senior mafia guy writing a book called Five Steps to Pacifism and Inner Peace.
It's that lunatic, right?
But, of course, there are very few of us who understand these kinds of contradictions.
For the most part, people just It's just, it's the water they swim in.
You know, what water? And without that contradiction, right, so he sits down and he says, well, I'm a famous guy.
My brother Salamander didn't do very well, but I'm doing great.
I'm a famous guy.
People respect me. I wrote the original Contract with America or something like that.
Some damn thing. And so I want to write a book.
And so he goes to a publisher.
And his publisher says, well, you're a known name.
We can guarantee a certain amount of sales just from your name being known.
So, that's good. It's like a guy I knew in the music industry was saying, oh yeah, Ringo Starr can put an album, because you're guaranteed 10,000 sales from Beatles fans in Canada.
Like, they're guaranteed, right? Anything to do with the Beatles, whatever, right?
And the publisher says, well, there's an audience for that.
People like Newt, they know him, and so they'll buy his book.
It all just, you know, so he sits down and writes it, and I'm sure they'll give him an editor and someone help him write the book.
And that's how it sort of flows.
There's no contradiction in anything.
There's just that sort of dry calculation of economic utility.
And so there's really no choice, right?
Do you publish the book or not?
Well, is there a market?
Okay, you publish it. There's no real choice.
And since there is a market for Something written by Newt Gingrich.
Why then? You have a book and it is published.
And there's no real choice.
You know, where there's no contradiction, there's no choice.
Where there's no contradiction, there's no choice.
There's no inconsistency.
I don't mean after you become enlightened, but prior.
Like, so for instance, when I... When I think of going to the shopping mall, I don't say, well, I could take my car, I could walk, I could fly, or I could burrow. Right?
Because gravity is a constant, and therefore, since it is a constant, Then I know that I'm not going to be flying.
Since burrowing is fairly impractical, I know because the Earth doesn't suddenly open up into a little accelerated subway system, I know that I'm not going to be burrowing.
So because the Earth's density is constant and gravity is constant, flying and burrowing, are not options, right?
And I think that's an important thing to understand with philosophy.
How is it that philosophy provides its choice?
Well, it provides its choice first and foremost by pointing out inconsistencies and contradictions.
And that's why the choice is so unpleasant, right?
Because we base our personality on the social metaphysics of received, quote, knowledge.
And when that knowledge is proven to be false and even worse, exploitive, Our society and our personality goes through a radical revision, which is not an upgrade, but a rewrite in a different operating system in Klingon.
That aspect of things is really, really important to understand.
So you're, you know, chugging along, as we all were, chugging along with the received wisdom of our society.
Government is there to protect you, to help the poor, to heal the sick, to tend for the aged and so on.
Just chugging along with all this received wisdom.
And the next thing you know, and so it's like gravity.
It's like, should we not have a government is equivalent to should I fly to work on my own steam, using my arms and flapping them, right?
Well, it would be like, well, why would you even ask that question?
Because gravity is a constant. Why would you even ask that question?
State is a constant.
And yeah, I mean, when you're inside the Matrix, so to speak, you know of a few people who are anarchists and you have all of the emotional connotations of Mohawks and violence and glue sniffing and all that Sid Fischer's nonsense.
And so you're like, okay, well, yeah, there are some people who believe in a stateless society, but so what?
There are also some people who genuinely believe they can fly and are in straight jackets, right?
Just because people don't believe in the constants doesn't mean that those constants aren't real.
A guy who believes he can fly does not repudiate gravity, right?
A guy who believes in a stateless society does not rebuke or disprove the virtue of government.
And the same thing is true in religion, of course, right?
God is a constant, and yeah, you know of some atheists, or you've heard of some atheists, or maybe you've even met some, but, you know, they're just deluded and crazy, mistaken, perhaps malevolent, and lost, and so on, right?
Crazy, right? You know, like those people who believe in Thor?
Madness! Madness!
So, What philosophy does is it disrupts the illusory physics of cultural inheritance.
Daddy can turn a phrase this morning, perhaps not a very succinct one, but a useful one.
Are you enjoying the birds in the sky, sweet dubs?
Yes, you are! You're told you can't fly, and you're told that it's immoral to fly, and it's impossible to fly, And only crazy people think they can fly.
And then philosophy makes you float, makes you fly, gives you the option.
Right? So what before was not only an immoral choice, but an impossible choice.
And, of course, you always want to keep your eyes peeled for when something is called both immoral and impossible, because if it is impossible, it is not really necessary to make it immoral.
And if it is immoral, then it certainly Cannot be impossible, right?
You don't have moral rules against being 30 feet tall, right?
Or jumping to the moon or being incandescent of your own will, right?
So, because those things are impossible and therefore you don't need rules against them, right?
There's no law against riding a Pegasus, right?
Yes, she agrees. So when something is impossible, there is no point making it immoral.
But when something is told to you is both immoral and impossible, you can't have a state of society and it's immoral to even think it.
There must be a God that is immoral to even think there isn't.
Then what philosophy does is, because it's ruthless, and empiricism does the same thing, science does the same thing.
What philosophy does is it says these things which you thought were consistent are not consistent.
Now in that moment, in that singularity, in that strategic inflection point, in that singularity you have a choice.
A choice opens up.
You can now fly to work if you so desire.
A choice opens up that did not exist before.
And that, of course, is the great challenge.
Do we have, in that moment, when we pop out of the Matrix, do we have the character?
Do we have the personality?
Do we have the spirit?
Do we have the strength?
Yeah, we're going home, sweet dums.
To rise into that choice?
To grow into that choice?
To erupt or explode, really, into that choice?
Do we have the strength of character?
Have we retained the shreds of muscularity needed to lift the weight called choice and freedom?
Yeah, sweet dums! And It is in that moment where we are told and we get taxation equals force, there is no God.
The definition of God is synonymous with non-existence.
Statism is immoral and the government is evil.
Violence is a bad way to solve problems.
And then we face that question, you know, were we lied to or intentionally misled or unconsciously misled, right?
And that's what our truth is really about, asking that question.
And I believe that the worst we can say is that we were unconsciously misled until we bring the truth, right?
And when we bring the truth, and when people choose to continue to lie to us, then we give the moral choice, right?
That's why people hate philosophy so much, because where you are given a choice, you are given moral responsibility.
And the entire point of statism, religion, the cult of the family, is to...
It's to remove and abandon moral choice because moral choice is difficult and painful and provokes a lot of hostility and fear and anger and so on in others, right?
So people hate and fear philosophy because philosophy gives them the scalding potato of moral responsibility.
By pointing out contradictions, it creates a choice to have integrity or not to have integrity.
Because as long as you're immersed in Falsify lies.
Integrity is just obedience to craziness, right?
But once you are given empiricism and rationality, integrity becomes something quite different.
A choice to have integrity emerges for the first time once you have reason and evidence in a consistent way presented in a rational manner.
Choice is created.
Because the physics of illusion become disrupted and then we can build something for real.
I just wanted to mention that because I think that's important.
That singularity, that point of singularity, that event horizon of reason and evidence that leads to the true self of real identity is something that everybody knows in their gut is being brought to them by philosophy.
And they hate and fear and fortunately enough of us love it to keep that alive and bring it more into being.
Thank you so much for listening and for donating as always.
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