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June 9, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:19
1385 Rules

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Yo, brethren and sistren, hope you're doing very well.
It's Steph. We are heading to the gym, and I am going to do a podcast that's been on my mind, oh, for many, many moons.
But I've been waiting for the right time, emotionally and intellectually.
Which is to say, philosophically, this is the podcast about rules.
Rules, rules, rules, rules.
And I doubt this will be a one-hander or one-parter, but maybe 1.2.
Now, rules is something that standards, you know, objective standards of behavior almost always infused with moralizing, right?
Right. And rules are really, really fascinating.
Fascinating, fascinating things, psychologically and emotionally.
And they are both the curse, the worst curse, and the greatest hope of philosophy.
So let's have a tootle through them, and I'm going to use, obviously, examples from my history.
I'm sure that they will be similar to many.
I've tried to sort of pick examples that would be similar to your history, but bear with me if they don't match perfectly.
Now... Rules is something that...
I didn't really have a lot of them in my household.
My mother would sort of get angry and lash out or whatever, and she might claim rules at some point.
But she didn't sort of consistently.
So if I got in trouble, she would actually ground me.
Literally, she would ground me in the afternoon.
And if she wanted to go to a movie and needed company at night, she would ground me in the afternoon and take me out for a movie at night.
And that's all kinds of exciting when it comes to figuring out this sort of stuff.
But, where I really remember rules coming in so strongly was in school.
Oh, Lorda, Lorda, Lorda.
I don't know if it's still the same.
You guys could let me know.
But, man, it was just like...
I was pouring a mountain of pebbles on a little fern, in terms of the rules, that were inflicted, imposed, ground into us, like sand into an eyeball.
And I was just, it was so heavy and so fucking serious, always, always, always, about rules.
And, oh man, I mean, where to even begin?
And I've gone over some of this stuff before.
I'll just touch on it really, really briefly.
But, you know, rules around cheating in school, right?
Cheating. Like, you're not supposed to cheat.
You're not supposed to not...
You're not supposed to cheat, right?
And tell the truth!
And so on, right?
And tell the truth is always something that is a completely fucked up thing from those in authority, right?
Tell the truth is never, ever supposed to apply to those in authority, right?
Tell the truth is simply a way of humiliating the slaves, right?
It's not... It just doesn't apply to those in authority, right?
I mean... So, for example, right, I mean, politicians make promises, and those promises are much more important than whatever is being ground out of a six- or seven-year-old in the classroom in terms of tell the truth, young man.
So politicians are supposed to tell the truth, and they make promises, and they provide information, and it's all lies, right?
As H.L. Mencken wrote, I mean, all the government does is lie.
Everything the government says is a lie.
And as Nietzsche said, and everything it has, it has stolen.
So the moral outrage of teachers and those in authority, those in authority that we see as children, should of course place this in perspective, right?
And they should say, well, you know, you've told a little lie or you've told a lie, but...
But compared to, say, lying to get us into the war in Iraq or the number of promises broken by Barack Obama or whatever, it's inconsequential.
So I'm going to turn my moral outrage as a teacher against the political and military leaders and the priests who lie all the time.
So... Adults lying to children is worse than children lying to adults because adults have power, right?
So, of course, a teacher who is interested in telling the truth should oppose religiosity, right?
Because people say, Jesus died for your sin, God exists, and they don't have any proof for that, and so it's just a lie, right?
And it's cheating because it's, you know, pretending you have...
it's making up an answer, right?
And... And so they should really focus on that.
Everybody, of course, should be very, very concerned about lies told by those in power rather than those told by those trying to survive under the grimy, fetid boot heel of that power.
But that is never the case, right?
That's never what happens. What happens is...
Those who have authority use the rule called don't tell a lie to humiliate, control, bully, and grind down those who are in their power, right?
That much we all know for sure, and that much is completely...
I mean, if you don't see that, there's just no way that I can show you.
Like, I don't remember...
I don't remember as a kid...
Any of my teachers...
This is going back a ways.
I don't remember as a kid any of my teachers talking about the lies that were told by Richard Nixon.
I am not a crook, right?
Or I don't remember if, you know, for the next generation, the lies told by President Clinton under oath, right?
Under oath, I did not have sex with that woman.
That wasn't that mutual, right?
And I don't remember...
Like, I don't remember the teachers expressing any moral outrage to the children over the lies told by those in power, which, of course, would be...
If it was a rule, right, then the lies told by those in power would be far worse with the lies that were told to get us in, to get to the U.S. or other countries into World War I and to...
They were invading Russia at the end of World War I, into World War II, into Korea, and Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Iraq, and Iran, and the overthrows.
All the lies that were told.
I mean, those would be the lies that those in power should focus on, but they don't, right?
They focus on using the rule called don't lie to people.
Grind the life out of helpless, independent children.
But it's got nothing to do with the rule.
The rule is just an excuse to attack.
Rules are just excuses to attack people you don't like.
Right? That's all the rule is, is an excuse to attack people that you don't like.
There's an example given in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which he doesn't seem to...
He doesn't quite seem to process, in my opinion, but he's got examples of two people, and I can't remember the name.
But one guy is, you know, a stone genius, and he's broke, comes from an abusive, trailer park, drunken background, and In order to stay in school, because his car breakdowns in order to stay in school, he's got to get a lift, and he's got to switch a class from the morning stream to the afternoon stream, and he tries to negotiate that, and fails, and then ends up dropping out of school, and ends up living on a ranch, and just doesn't do anything with his mind of any particular note.
So that's...
Because the school is inflexible when it comes to the rule of switching from a morning to an afternoon stream, you see, because rules must be respected.
Right? And I believe it was the same school, but if not, it doesn't really matter.
Another student went through some mental illness difficulties or something like that and had a disagreement with his professor and tried to poison, to murder his professor.
And he stayed in school, he got his degree, and he ended up running the Manhattan Project because, you know, that obviously cured his desire to murder, say, hundreds of thousands of Japanese people.
And so, this is an example, and you can see this all the time.
All the time. The rule called, well, you signed up for this course, or we have standards of behavior from our students and all that.
It's not objective. It's got nothing to do with any kind of rule that is consistently applied.
It's just manufactured in order to fuck up the people you don't like and to protect and kowtow to the people you do like.
The guy who ended up not even being kicked out or suspended from university for attempting to murder his professor, let alone ending up in jail for it, right?
This guy... He had powerful contacts.
He came from a rich family, an established family, and a family that could do things for people.
And so, gosh, isn't it shocking they find a way to bend the rules in order to protect someone who can give them advantage.
This other guy, you know, not a good negotiator, obviously, not through his own fault, because he was a kid, grew up in an abusive household.
And so they, you know, they were inflexible with him, right?
But it's nothing to do with the rules, right?
And we see this all the time with politicians' kids, right, who...
Who get caught with drugs, right?
They don't go to jail, right?
Or if they do, it's a very, very short time, right?
But they don't go to jail.
There's a guy up here, Brian Mulroney, who accepted a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cash bribes from a German businessman.
And he kept it for years in a safe at home, and they ended up getting caught, and he ended up declaring it 10 years after the fact or something like that to the local tax revenue, tax agency.
And the tax agency said, oh, well, no penalties.
Don't worry about it. Just, you know, pay us tax.
Pay us the tax on half the amount, and we'll be happy, right?
You see? I mean, that's ridiculous.
It's completely ridiculous.
This is not a rule, right?
But of course, they're not going to drag this guy's ass off to jail because he's prominent.
He's prominent, so nobody wants to be seen as harsh openly, right?
Ever. Because he's prominent, right?
If you take Robert Downey Jr.
and you throw him in jail for 10 years, people get a whiff of the brutality of the system.
Right? Right? They can't see that.
You don't want to startle the slaves with the extent of their enslavement.
So that is not something that you'll do.
So Robert Downey Jr., he gets rehabbed.
And he's back off making movies.
Because that's how these rules are enforced.
Some poor black kid, not so much.
Because he's not famous and people aren't going to be shocked and appalled and no one's going to know.
about the brutality.
So, as I mentioned in The God of Atheists, many years ago I wrote an article called Marxism, M-A-R-C-K-S-I-S-M, where, you know, if the principle is from each according to their ability to each according to their needs, then this should occur for school marks as well, right? So, rather than worrying about income, which often is a reflection of the marks you get in school, what we should do is take the marks from the people who do very well in school and give them to the people who don't do very well in school to even it all out, right?
And this, of course, when I brought this up as an application of socialist or redistributionist principles to academics, they laughed at it, right?
Because, I mean, clearly that would be crazy and unjust, right?
To take somebody who's got a 95, take, you know, 20% off their mark and give it to someone who got a 55 so that everybody gets 75%.
We understand that that would be a very silly thing to do, right?
However, people who believe that have no problem with the welfare state, right?
And the reason being, of course, that academics or intellectuals will often end up in charge of redistributionist programs, so it's a net positive for them, whereas if they have marks taken away from them in school, it's a net negative for them, so suddenly the rule changes completely, right? And similarly, when I would go up against professors in...
University, you know, and a guy who was, of course, a leftist who was really down on Richard Nixon, right, and very pro-Kennedy.
And I said, well, if you're pro-Kennedy and anti-Richard Nixon, how do you explain that Kennedy started the war in Vietnam and Richard Nixon ended it, right?
Do you not think that that is...
And it's not like I'm pro-Richard Nixon, I just sort of wanted to ask what sort of principles would be actually going on here, right?
And he's like, well, you know, he was a right-wing capitalist ideologue, and I'm like, well, you know, he was the first guy to impose price controls in OSHA and the EPA, and he was very socialist, so...
Whereas Kennedy was not any of those things, so help me understand again what standard you're using to end up with these.
Of course, I'm asking him in public, right, in his classroom or in his lecture hall, and he gets really angry and, you know, my marks are redistributed to other people, right?
The real redistribution occurs from those who ask intelligent questions to those who blindly and slavishly worship everything the professor says, right?
So, That's not a rule that he had, right?
He just, he didn't like Nixon.
And so, because he didn't like Nixon, he invented things, the standalone rules, right, to justify his dislike.
And when those rules were universalized, he got angry and upset and so on.
So, that's another sort of aspect of, I've got this rule, you know.
Well, the rule is that we dislike those who are more pro-free markets.
Like, well, Kennedy was more pro-free market in terms of policies than Nixon, by far, by far.
So, thus you must dislike.
If you're against those who are more pro-free market, then you must be against Kennedy and for Nixon, right?
For environmentalism, well, that would be pro-Nixon and anti-LBJ or anti-Kennedy or whatever.
But see, this has nothing to do with it, right?
This has nothing to do with it.
The only reality, we're all aware of this, right?
The only reality is that Kennedy was handsome and charming with a pretty wife.
And Nixon was, well, quite the polar opposite of these things, right?
And so people like Kennedy because he's the kind of person that they like to be friends with.
He's the valedictorian or the quarterback in high school.
He's the cool kid. And Nixon is the geeky loner.
And so everybody just piles on.
And they don't have any reasons other than a visceral dislike or like based on inconsequential things like physical attractiveness.
But Kennedy initiated the greatest military disaster in the United States since the Second World War, which was Vietnam, right?
He's genocidal. He started the war that ended up with millions of Vietnamese dead for no reason whatsoever, right?
He is... He's a Hitler, right?
I mean, just logically, right?
And, of course, people don't...
They can't process that, because he's like, well, he's...
Jackie Kennedy sure was pretty, right?
I mean, that's really all it comes out to.
They don't just want to say, well, he was prettier than Nixon, so...
So that's what I'm going to go with, right?
Because that's obviously shallow and retarded, right?
They don't want to say that, right?
So they want to come up with some kind of rule...
That justifies their dislike of Nixon and their preference for Kennedy.
It's the same thing with Al Gore and George Bush.
They actually have similar IQs and similar scores, but people just think Al Gore is intelligent because he agrees with them.
That's a pretty interesting phenomenon that occurs, right?
This guy agrees with me, and therefore he must be smart.
That's the way that it works in general for people.
And they make up all these rules.
But the rules are only to...
It's all high school.
It doesn't even get to high school.
It's actually grade school. You may be lucky you can make it to kindergarten with some people, but it's all grade school nonsense.
And this, of course, shows up in a wide variety of other contexts, right?
If you look at religiosity, what you basically see is people who accept, virtually without question, the existence of the god they were raised with.
And that is a rule, right?
My god exists, and your god is not valid, is not true, right?
But that of course is, it's just again, it's just, you like Jesus and you don't like Krishna, right?
And so you make up a rule called Jesus exists, but not, or is divine, but Muhammad is not, right?
Again, this is just making up a rule.
To support and protect the people you like and to oppose and reject the people you don't like.
It's all emotionally based with nothing to do with any kind of reality processing.
Same thing, of course, is true for countries.
My country good, your country bad, but it's not a rule.
Patriotism is good. So, patriotism is contradictory, right?
Because it is like saying, the air within five feet of me is the best.
And everyone says that, but the air within five feet of everyone can't all be the best, right?
Each country can't be the best, so it's a piece of nonsense.
But it's a rule, right? There's another rule, which you'll see in bumper stickers all the time, a rule called support our troops, right?
Because you see support is a virtue.
But are the troops actually supporting anyone?
No. They're killing people and blowing up things, right?
So, if support is a virtue, then you should oppose the troops, because the troops do not support, but rather maim, slaughter, kill, and destroy.
If you were to, say, murder the troops, that would actually be in closer alignment, because murder would then be a virtue, which is what the troops do.
But support the troops? Complete contradiction.
But we're told to like the troops, and so we make up a rule to support them.
It's nothing to do with the rule.
Now, of course, the problem arises, or at least one of many problems arise, When we make up rules, universal rules, to justify our prejudice for people we like or against people we don't like because we then have to create categories of people and we have to overcomplicate in a very sort of medieval scholastic way We have to overcomplicate the truth,
which, you know, the truth overcomplicated simply is the worst kind of lie, because it's too complicated to be unraveled for the most part by many people, right?
Therefore, it's the worst kind of lie, because it's rarely detected this morning.
So if, you know, I say, well, but Richard Nixon is, you know, lied about...
A third-rate burglary which got nobody killed, and his associates, for first-time offenses, were sentenced to like 20 years in prison, right?
This is obviously just punitive, right?
Angry, punitive stuff.
Well, how do you explain, you know, if you're pro-Kennedy because lying is bad, but obviously genocide is worse than lying.
The guy who ends the war should be considered at least somewhat morally superior to the guy who starts the genocide.
But then they have to create other categories, right?
Additional categories. And they can't rely on things like, you know, handsome, charisma, pretty wife, because those things are so obviously shallow, and people have to pretend that their prejudices are philosophical, right?
Almost all philosophy is...
is the ornate icing of rhetoric over the shit sandwich of bigotry.
And so you have to keep inventing these new categories.
You know, the guy who had a detente with China, you know, not the end of the world, given where China ended up going, which is at least to a slightly more prosperous and less brutal nation.
So it's, you know, you see feminists with Clinton, right?
So feminists were all big on Bill Clinton because of his protection of abortion and abortion rights and at least verbal...
And acquiescence to certain feminist ideals.
So then when he becomes basically a serial sexual abuser or sexual predator in the workplace, they're kind of stuck, right?
Because if you can imagine if Nixon or someone unpopular with the feminists, George Bush or whatever, had done these sorts of things, they would literally be baying for his head, baying for prosecution, and the endless fusillades from the Ms.
editorial board would be endless and echoing through the caverns of canon-like indignation.
But they couldn't, right?
Because they had formally supported him.
He turns out to be a sexual predator preying on impressionable young women with surely what is about the highest disparity of power, president and intern that exists in the Western world.
And they have a problem, right?
They can't now turn on him on principle because they supported him before on principles, so they start making up new principles.
Right.
All men lie about sex.
She asked for it, you know, just making up new stuff, right, to maintain the prejudice.
And the prejudice fundamentally came from the fact that he was charming, not because he had any particular great feminist ideals, right?
Because if he had feminist ideals, he wouldn't be preying on tarty little interns, right?
So everybody just makes up all of these, quote, rules to mask their prejudice.
And that is, you read the newspaper with this in mind, right?
Watch political debates with this in mind.
It's madness, right?
So, George Bush is a popular president a year before the Obama election, and he's feted at the Republican Party, and then he's an unpopular president.
Suddenly, everybody's trying to distance himself from him, and he's pointedly not invited.
I mean, this is, I mean, you would not expect anything else.
From people who are basically sophisticated primates using words as war paint.
Now, the most important thing, though, about rules and the degree to which we use them to benefit those we like and attack those we don't like is not primarily what happens in the world.
That is, I think, an interesting illustration.
But the really important aspect of rules, bigotry, and attack is not the degree to which it happens in the world, but the degree to which it happens in you.
The degree to which it happens in you is the really important aspect of this.
Because... The reality that we use rules to attack those we dislike and protect those we like also occurs in the realm of self-attack, right?
So suddenly you do something stupid or you're caught or you realize you've done something negative or dishonorable or dishonest or whatever, and suddenly you're like the worst person in the world and you've gone from Kennedy to Nixon.
There's no rhyme or reason, it's just a kind of savage attack, which is what rules are meant for, right?
Right, so we see this continually.
We just had a conversation with a female listener on the Sunday show, 1381, I think it was.
And so June 7th, 2009.
And she was full of forgiveness for her brother, and she's full of self-attack herself, right?
So her brother, half-brother, I suppose, is, you know, she calls him an abuser, and, you know, whether he is or isn't, the important thing is she has made that I made that call, that categorization.
And yet to say, well, he's not responsible because he was abused as a kid and so on, right?
That's fine. If you want to have no responsibility as your rule, then UPB that sucker, right?
UPB it up, right? Pimp it up UPB style, brother!
Sister. Then say, okay, well, if abusers have no responsibility, then surely those who don't abuse have no responsibility too, and therefore I'm not going to attack myself for anything that I do.
But if you attack yourself for things that you do, give yourself responsibility and the right of better behavior, wow!
Bammo, baby! It's broadcasted, right?
It goes universal, and that has implications on how...
You deal with others. Similarly, right, I mean, this is about having some sort of stable self-image, right, that you can't be a good guy one day and an evil guy the next day.
You can't be a smart guy one day and a dumb guy the next day, right?
You can't be virtuous and then scum, right?
You just can't, right?
And I say this to my ecosystem when the old whirly gigs of saber-rattling start up, right, and the self-attack looks like it's a...
On the verge of looming. And I say, okay, well, so yesterday I thought I was a reasonably smart fellow.
Now am I going to start calling myself a dumb fellow?
Well, which is it, right?
Which is it? This is the question to ask the self-attackers.
Which is it, right?
Yesterday you didn't have any problem when I did something sort of dumb, maybe, and now you're just all up in my face about this, right?
So which is it, right?
Am I a smart guy or a dumb guy?
If I'm a dumb guy, then don't get mad at me for being a dumb guy.
We don't get mad at people who are mentally handicapped for being mentally handicapped.
So if I'm a dumb guy, then calling me dumb is just abusive.
I say this to my self-attackers.
If I'm a dumb guy, then I'm a dumb guy.
Have some patience. And if I'm a smart guy, then hey, you know what?
Calling me a dumb guy is abusive, right?
So it's just making up rules to attack myself when I don't like what I've done rather than be curious about why I don't like it and what I can learn from that curiosity, right?
So this self-attack aspect is really important once you see this, that rules are simply invented to attack people we don't like.
And to protect and praise people we do like, it's really important to recognize that the same bigotry and subjectivism occurs within our own sometimes cavalcade or whirligig of self-praise and self-condemnation.
That the rules that we invent, the rules that are so often invented to attack unpopular others and praise popular others, Are used within ourselves to attack ourselves when we feel unpopular with ourselves and to praise ourselves when we feel popular with ourselves.
But I think the purpose is to have a more reasonable and stable self-regard, right?
So, open to criticism, but respectful of the necessary linear...
Path of knowledge, acquisition of knowledge and virtue.
We don't start off perfect.
We attain excellence, which is the opposite of perfection, right?
But we attain that over time, and to be patient with ourselves when we did not know what we did not know, and we could not invent the wheel before there was any such thing.
At least we can't be responsible for there not being a wheel when there was no wheel, right?
So the patience and the progress that comes from being, you know, gentle, kind, and curious with herself, and critical of herself, but not to the point of self-attack, is having a stable set of values, right?
I mean, we are all children learning and growing, and it would not make any sense to be harsher with ourselves for what we did not know than it would make sense to yell at a five-year-old for not knowing calculus, right?
I mean, we would not do that to a five-year-old, or at least we would recognize that as distinctly ugly, But, you know, the rule then changes when we don't like ourselves and we'll yell at ourselves for things that we could not know in advance.
Anyway, it's sort of one example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
But when you examine how rules are, just simply weapons, right?
They're just, you know, it's a way to pump up your moral outrage that you can attack people you don't like, right?
I mean, not you necessarily, but it's what most rules are, almost what almost everyone does with them.
But once you recognize that you can't apply a rule without universalizing it, that really blunts the edge off aggression.
It doesn't blunt the edge off assertion, interestingly enough, because when people start applying these rules against you, then you can use the universalization.
You can use UPB to defend yourself, right?
Some people say, oh, Steph's a bad guy.
It's like, well, compared to what, right?
Who is the worst guy and so on.
Or people say, UPB is a terrible ethical theory.
Compared to what? Compared to the Bible?
Compared to Dawkins' relativism?
Or biological meme imperatives?
I mean, compared to what?
And that's an important question to ask.
So you can use it to defend yourself against aggression with assertiveness, and you can also use it to be assertive in situations.
But once we recognize that we cannot pick up the sword without universalizing it, That really does break the use of rules as weapons, and it really does make us much more gentle, kind, and curious, and assertive positively in the world.
Thank you so much for listening.
Listen, people, if you have not donated for a little while, it's been a little while, and I know people spend a lot of money coming out to the barbecue.
I understand that, and I appreciate it.
But remember, it was great for the travel agents, not so good for FDR. So if you've got some change kicking around, or something a little more than change, I would hugely appreciate it.
That would be very nice indeed.
Thank you so much for listening.
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