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Aug. 1, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:29
1425 Freedomain Radio - The Ethical Revolution

Stethics!

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Hi everybody, hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
July the 30th, 2009.
Shockingly, it is actually pretty sunny out.
We're going for a short walk, Debellyville and I. And I'd like to talk about the ethical empiricism that is really a sort of very core aspect of this philosophy.
And it certainly has been my journey and my experience, because let's talk about me!
It's in my journey and my experience that everybody talks seriously and dangerously and scarily about ethics when I was a boy, when I was a boy, a young man and so on.
But everybody talks about All of these things with great seriousness.
Virtue, honor, integrity, and so on, right?
It's like the speak the truth thing, right?
So when you're a kid, you must speak the truth to those in power.
Honesty is considered to be a virtue by those in power against those who are not in power, those who are subjugated to them.
Because if you can convince The lower classes that honesty is a virtue when talking to someone in power then it becomes a lot easier to control them because they won't dissemble and so you will always know what is going on.
Of course then when you talk to people in power and you ask them for honesty about the source of their power and their knowledge of ethics you get prevarication and fog and the evisceration of any kind of clear and consistent integrity And so this is how you know,
or at least this is how I believe that I know, that honesty is simply a tool that you need to convince the lower classes of, so that it lowers the cost of ownership for them to confess when pressed, for them to feel that honesty is an obligation only to your superiors, not to your inferiors.
And that has certainly been my experience, that when confronting authorities on their, well, let's just say on their ignorance, Because, you know, when you're a kid, you're not supposed to pretend to know, right?
So, like, when I was a kid, I never did my homework.
I just never did my homework. It wasn't that I really disliked homework or anything, fundamentally in particular.
It's just that home was a battleground, a survival ground, and there was neither time nor calm nor resources to do any homework.
And that was, you know, I still struggled through and so on.
I actually took Red 11 twice, hoping to Because I sort of figured what the problem was.
I never quite got everything last year, so that makes this year harder.
And I gave it a shot, but I just didn't have any resources.
It's so exhausting when you're in a problematic household.
So I just didn't do any homework.
So of course I'd spend the next day in anxiety about whether I was going to be called on.
And I knew that it wasn't going to be the case, that anybody was going to say, well, the reason you haven't done your homework, despite the fact that you're intelligent, is because, you know, clearly you must have some problems in your home life.
No, of course not. And it's just called lazy and careless and not committed to schoolwork and so on, right?
Because, of course, all the kids who had stable homes, or at least relatively stable homes, they all were just not magically lazy, but all the kids from bad homes were just magically lazy, right?
I mean, it's just, wow, there's no cause and effect there.
It's just, you know, it's random, right?
So the abuse and humiliation and lack of empathy that you get at home is neatly mirrored in the school environment, which is, well, heinous, right?
But... So, sometimes in math, I would be called on to work, and I'd just go up to the board and improvise, pretend to try and solve the math problem as it sort of occurred to me in the moment, and then I would say, well, this is as far as I got when I was doing my homework, and so on, right?
And, of course, often I would be kind of criticized, to put it mildly, In front of the class, because the implication would be clear, that I had not done my homework.
Of course, no teacher ever asked me why I wasn't doing my homework.
Why would you want to do that?
You know, just call someone lazy or a liar or whatever.
And that's a lot easier than actually asking why...
I'm not doing my homework, right?
Why would anybody want to ask that question of me in the 13 years that the public school system and the private school system had me in its grip?
You'd never want to bother asking the why.
You simply continue the castigation that is occurring at home.
It's a lot easier, right? And so I was criticized and heavily criticized and I would say even mocked and humiliated When I pretended to have a knowledge that I did not, when I would go up to the blackboard and I would fudge my way through some sort of pseudo-answer and say, that's as far as I got, and they'd ask to see my work in the book, and if I couldn't show it, blah, blah, blah, right?
It's pretty humiliating.
And you understand, the humiliation was not that.
It was that nobody was asking why, right?
Not one person ever asked why.
I wasn't doing my homework.
So, so, I was royally attacked for faking knowledge, for pretending to have the knowledge that I did not have, or for pretending to have done work that I did not do.
What happens then?
Well, what you do is you say, So clearly there's a standard in society called, if you fake knowledge that you do not have, then attack and humiliation is the adequate response.
It's the moral, it's the proper response.
Attack and humiliation is the moral response to pretending to have a knowledge that you do not have.
Q-E-D, right?
I mean, that's the way it works.
And surely, surely, surely, surely, surely we should hold adults with knowledge and freedom, at least relative to children, we should hold those adults who pretend to have knowledge Far more responsible than those children who pretend to have knowledge,
right? So when I'm 12, and I fake my way through, I pretend to have a knowledge that I don't have, which is how to solve a math problem, and I'm, you know, stuck at home in an abusive situation, and I can be, you know, mocked and humiliated for that faking, right, for that fakery, well, clearly there are, to say the least, some extenuating circumstances.
In that regard, right? Obviously, right?
We don't have to go into them. I've already talked about them.
At length, if not ad nauseum.
And so, when an adult fakes a knowledge that he or she does not have, it's far more egregious, right?
It's far more egregious. Than a child faking knowledge who's in a, you know, difficult situation at home or whatever, right?
Because the adult is free as options, legal rights, independence, and so on.
And as an educator, right?
So, oh, let me just let the garbage truck go by.
Look at that. The government's always interfering with my podcast.
Oh, I think we better go in a different direction.
That's going to be loud, my friends!
Censorship! Furthermore, my reasoning went in my sort of twenties and thirties.
Furthermore, would it not be reasonable to argue or to accept that To fake knowledge about a math problem when you're 12 is far less of a deceptive crime or an egregious action than to fake knowledge about ethics and virtue and truth and reality and the society that you live in,
what is good and bad and right and wrong.
To fake that knowledge when you're in your 40s or 50s or even older, right?
You understand? To fake knowledge about an algebra problem when you're 12 or 13 or 14 or whatever is inconsequential and completely innocuous relative to faking knowledge about virtue and truth and goodness and right and wrong and so on when you are In your fifties and sixties.
So when we put all of this together, what I took from all of this experience was this, that faking knowledge is Something which is egregious.
Because it certainly was egregious when I did it when I was a child.
Faking knowledge must be more egregious the older you get, and it must be more egregious the more important the knowledge that you're faking, right?
And certainly there would seem to be no more important knowledge than Virtue and truth and reality and consistency and empiricism and so on.
Because the purpose of life is happiness and truth.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness and therefore those who deny reason or who fake virtue or pretend knowledge of virtue that they do not have are directly interfering with the central purpose of life which is to be happy.
So that is the That is what was stored up in me from my experiences as a child.
And so when it comes to talking to adults about truth and virtue and so on, especially the teachers and those in power and all of those who claim this knowledge, It would seem to me that it's entirely logically consistent with those in power, right, which are teachers and parents and priests and politicians and so on, media.
Those who have power and influence...
Who attack children for a lack of knowledge and a faking of knowledge that the children are fundamentally not responsible for.
It was not my job when I was 12 or 8 or 6.
Fundamentally not my job to do my homework.
It was my mom's job to create an environment wherein homework could be done.
I wasn't in just sort of bare survival mode all the time that I was at home.
But... That was what was stored up in me.
And I think that's actually stored up in a lot of people.
I think another thing that was stored up in me was any excuses which were not valid for me as a child cannot be valid for people as an adult.
I mean, clearly that must be logically the case.
Any excuses That were rejected as valid when I was a child and making these excuses cannot possibly conceivably at all be valid for an adult.
That which is not acceptable for a 7-year-old or 10-year-old or 15-year-old to use an excuse cannot conceivably be acceptable for an adult to use as an excuse.
That's like saying that the test for strength for a seven-year-old is to be able to lift five pounds, but the test for strength for a 20-year-old must be much less than five pounds.
That makes no sense whatsoever because you obviously get physically stronger as you age.
You can't have a test for strength that is five pounds for a little kid and then No pounds for an adult, right?
It makes no sense. Right, so these are...
And I'm not saying this was all a conscious plan, but this is the way that this flower sifts down to the sediment or bedrock of my soul, my reason and my purpose, which was I accepted and absorbed the moral rules that were Inacted against me, or used to put me down, humiliate, and attack me as a child.
And I said, "Well, if I'm attacked for faking knowledge, those who are attacking me can't be faking knowledge that faking knowledge is wrong." Because that would be completely hypocritical, egregious, and fundamentally abusive, right?
And if I am not allowed as a child to say, "Hey, I did the best I could," when it's actually valid, right?
I mean, the fact that I got through school at all and put myself mostly through undergrad and grad school and so on, the fact that I did that at all is, to me, still a bloody miracle in hindsight.
But if I, as a child, Was not allowed to say when it, I think, would actually have been valid and fair and just to say so.
If I, as a child, was not allowed to say, I did the best I could under the circumstances.
Right? Because clearly, as a child, my circumstances were not my doing.
But for adults, their circumstances, to a large degree, are their doing, or at least are almost infinitely more their doing than a child's circumstances.
Right? I think we can all appreciate and understand that.
So if, as a child, I'm not allowed to say, well, I did the best I could with the knowledge and circumstances that I had, right, if I'd gone after the math teacher had called me up, there was a guy, Mr...
It doesn't matter what his name is. There was a guy who did mock me quite a bit.
I ended up leaving school a semester early because I did some summer school and I just wanted to get out, get working.
And he actually, I heard, felt bad after I'd left, because he thought maybe his marking had had something to do with me leaving.
although of course it wasn't that personal by any stretch of the imagination.
But it clearly, since I was not allowed to make that excuse, it can't be possibly the case that adults are allowed to make the excuse So these things all stored up in me.
Faking knowledge is so egregious that you must attack and humiliate those who fake knowledge.
Excuses such as, I did the best I could, right?
Like I've gone up in front of this guy's class, and he'd say, put your answer up, and I put my answer up, and I said, hey, you know, I did the best I could with the circumstances I had.
He would say, that's not acceptable.
I need to do better. That is not an acceptable excuse, right?
So I was like, okay, so that is not an acceptable excuse.
I did the best I could under the circumstances.
It's not an acceptable excuse.
It never was for me as a child, from anyone in authority.
They didn't say, oh, okay, well, you did the best you could under the circumstances, no problem.
All is forgiven. That's great.
Don't worry about it. It never was an acceptable excuse from parents, teachers, priests, authority figures, principals, police, of any kind.
And so, these things all...
Sort of slithered down or sifted down into the bedrock of my soul.
And with that came two things.
Two sides of the same coin.
The first thing was a great suspicion.
A very great suspicion.
That it was all exploitive.
And often abusive nonsense.
The ethics claimed by those in power was all just exploitive and abusive nonsense.
But I was by no means willing to take that as an article of faith.
Right? See, you need proof.
Right? You need proof.
I mean, I'm an empiricist, right?
So... That's why I didn't just condemn society, but rather, in a sense, and this was before FDR, but began to examine The actual behaviors of those who claimed such wonderful and deep knowledge of ethics, to the point where they were so certain of ethics that they were willing to humiliate children for failing to meet ethical standards.
I mean, you have to be pretty damn certain of your ethics in order to attack and humiliate a helpless child, right?
You've got to be pretty certain, right?
I mean, if you're going to cut open someone's throat in a restaurant, you have to be pretty damn certain that they're choking to death and there's nothing else that you can do, right?
Hey, you know, this is preventative, right?
And then you just get sued. You have to be really, really certain.
And of course, I was also marked down and failed and threatened with being left back a year if the logic of my answers was not consistent.
This is another thing that I wasn't allowed to skip steps.
I had to show my work.
Show your work. How many times did you hear that as a kid?
Show your work. You can't just...
Go through a math problem and say, I've solved it after scribbling a few things down.
Even if you've got the right answer, you'll be marked down for not showing your work.
Because you have to show the logical sequence of what it is that you're doing in order for your answer to be valid and not marked down.
Because if you don't show your work, you fail.
Even if you accidentally get the right answer, x equals 1, but there's no work, you still fail because you're not showing your work, or at least you're significantly marked down.
That was another thing, right?
Logic has to be consistent.
You have to show your work.
You can't just state conclusions and say, don't worry, they're logical.
You have to actually show your logic.
That is a deep value within the educational system that I experienced In two continents.
And probably, I don't know, seven or eight schools in total.
Again, that's another value that was held up to me as a virtue, as a necessity.
Show your work. So I was deeply suspicious that this was all abusive nonsense designed to control and humiliate children.
That virtue and ethics and truth and accuracy and logic was all just used to bully children.
And it was not a virtue.
And it was universal everywhere I went, right?
So this is not one guy, right?
This is the hundreds of teachers I had.
They were all this way. All of them.
And... Evidence, empiricism, show your work, show your reasoning.
Don't fake knowledge. And excuses don't count.
But I was suspicious.
But I was not suspicious to the point where I was willing to say, because I think you've got to have a trial.
You can't just make assertions about how bad things are and how wrong everyone is and how corrupt your culture is.
I mean, that's not fair in my Experience an opinion.
You have to give people the chance to explain themselves.
Which is why I always say to people, you have a problem with someone, sit down and reason with them.
With him or her. So, that's of course what I did.
as people would come at me with these moral absolutes.
And I would then turn these absolutes around and say, "How do they fit you?" Because error is possible, and I wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt.
That's fair. It's tortuous for people.
They'd rather you condemn them so that things can be polarized.
But I want to give people the...
The chance to, you know, hear their side of the story and also give them the chance, because if it's just honest error, if somebody is just honestly wrong, in other words, they just have never thought it through or just made assumptions, then when provided with evidence to the contrary, they should say, well, that's very interesting.
I have not thought of that before.
I made assumptions.
I definitely need to review this.
And I definitely want to have the truth.
That's what honest people with even a shred of integrity do when confronted with information or arguments which contradict their existing beliefs.
So give someone the opportunity To do the right thing.
Right? So you can sit down with the parent and say, this was a problem.
And the parent says, I did the best I could.
And you say, well, why was that excuse never sufficient for me as a child when surely I had far more reason to use it than you do or did as an adult as a parent?
And if the parent then says, you know what?
That's entirely true. I never did accept that as an excuse for you, so it's very interesting, and a little chilling, that I am now deploying an excuse with you to excuse my own behavior, which is an excuse that I never allowed you to deploy to excuse your own behavior as a child, though I was an adult, and blah blah blah, right?
Well, that's what we all hope for, isn't it?
That it simply has been a situation of honest error and confusion, right?
Honest error and confusion.
And continuing.
The desire to get things right, to get things straight, continues, right?
It's okay, baby. We're almost home.
It's a nice walkout today.
It's actually good weather. Shocking.
It's like raining for two weeks up here.
It's like England. It's like England in a car wash.
So, I mean, I'm very, very tentative.
In terms of absolutes and judgment, very tentative, right?
It's the balance, right? You have to have enough certainty to act, but you can't have so much certainty that you can't ever revise your opinions or your beliefs, right?
So it's a challenge, because if you have no certainty, you can't act.
And if you have nothing but certainty, then it's just a kind of bigotry, right?
It's ideology. Which is why it took me 25 years to come up with a system of ethics that I could get behind, right?
I'm very tentative.
People see a lot of the conclusions.
They don't see the quarter century of work that went into the degree of tentativeness that that represents.
And skepticism about my own conclusions that that represents.
But... I still wanted to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.
And assume that perhaps I'd gotten it wrong and the evidence of the contrary could well be there.
And so when I started talking to professors...
At university. And...
I mean, I remember having the last day of a class I took from a truly bearded, haggard, troll Marxist called The Rise of Capitalism and the Socialist Response.
A long, passionate speech in the last class about the free market and so on.
And he basically shrugged and said, well, if that's your opinion, this is mine.
And I thought, man, oh man...
You're not teaching it like it's your opinion.
You're teaching it like it's true. And then when confronted, you fall back onto relativism.
You're not teaching this like this is my opinion.
I like ice cream and Marxism is cool.
I like this font, so you should accept this article as true.
It's not an opinion. You're teaching it as a fact.
And then when somebody argues the contrary facts, you then retreat to opinion.
I think that's pretty cowardly and ridiculous.
Right?
But I always wanted to give people Kept questioning, kept asking.
Kept questioning, kept asking.
My professor was working through my master's thesis and he said he disagreed with certain conclusions.
Then I said, well, can you tell me what those conclusions are that you disagree with?
And can you tell me where I lacked reason and evidence to support those conclusions?
And he would never get back to me on these things.
Right? It's like, but you can't just say stuff.
Because your criticism that you disagree with stuff must be because you feel like I'm just saying stuff without evidence.
So show me where I'm saying stuff without evidence.
Show me the evidence since evidence is what you request and require.
Show me where I've made errors in reasoning or the evidence contradicts.
But since I was working with source materials, that was hard for him to do, right?
So he basically tried to mark me down.
Because he said I lacked evidence for my...
And I said, well, where's the evidence that I lack evidence?
He wouldn't get back to me. So clearly evidence was not something he cared a whole lot about.
To say the least. Alright, so I ended up getting my A. For tooth and nail.
For it. Not because I wanted the A in particular.
I just wanted to be a good scholar, right?
I wanted to have reason and evidence.
I wanted the argument to be good.
Yes, we're a few steps from home.
This has gone on a little longer than I thought, shockingly, but it's a very, very important topic.
I'm not alone in this, right?
And so this is why I say, look, this is my perception, this is my belief, and I've got, I've examined hundreds and hundreds of people in this way.
And it has been virtually universal and consistent.
Certainly among those in power, it has been universal and consistent.
Okay, babycakes. Let's give you a little breezy and we'll be home in just a few minutes.
Thank you for your patience. Among those with authority, it has been...
I can't think of a single exception to the...
This is not even a trend.
This is like gravity, right?
This is just the physics of power, right?
So you want to be fair, but you want to have some standards, right?
To give people the opportunity to explain what their position is, or to at least begin to see the contradictions.
And there have been some examples of this happening.
It's very, very rare from what I've seen.
And it's not, certainly people in positions of institutional power, not that way inclined at all that I've seen.
But certainly, some people have turned around and have tried to...
Some parents, a few parents have turned around and started to try and work on these contradictions.
And, you know, fantastic.
I mean, that is just beyond wonderful.
And that, to me, is a triumph of love and integrity.
And it's hard, right?
And you're faced with a contradiction in your own virtue.
It's hard to look at things the right way and to begin to examine sort of where the mistakes arose from and so on.
It's emotionally hard. And intellectually challenging, for sure.
But it does happen.
And that's, I think, to be entirely commended on the part of those who make their transition.
But it's rare. And I say that so that if people attempt to reason with those in power and fail, Then they should not take it personally in that sense because it's a very rare occurrence that this will turn around.
Again, you can watch these Jan Helfeld videos.
JanHelfeld.com and you can see him attempting to reason with those in power and it's all weasel crap, right?
It's all just nonsense and lies and foolishness, isn't it?
So I wanted to talk about that aspect of things, that empiricism is very important, and that's why my suggestion, and you could really say almost request, has been for people to go and reason with those in power, reason with those who have been contradictory, to say the least, in the exercise of the power over them.
Priests, parents, politicians, people in power, teachers, whatever, right?
Wherever you can find these people.
So that we can gather evidence and try to understand what the hell is wrong with society, that all of these virtues are pounded like nails into a wood, into the foreheads of children, but then when the mirror is held up to those who claim such universals and such certainty in those universals that they're willing to inflict them,
often aggressively upon children, that They do not show their work, that they simply state conclusions which is not acceptable to children being taught, that they claim a knowledge which they do not possess which is not acceptable to children being taught, and that they make endless excuses for themselves which is not acceptable to the children that they teach.
And staring that kaleidoscopic mind-frack void in the face is really, really harsh.
It's a really, really tough thing to do in the world.
And that's the challenge that we face.
And I certainly do appreciate everybody's efforts who've been asking these basic questions of those who have had power or authority over them and other people who don't, right, as friends and so on.
And to children, too.
It's very important to ask these questions of children.
In, of course, a gentle and positive manner.
But I really do appreciate everybody's participation in this experiment, because it is a terrifying thing to look at, that the abuse of power is simply and fundamentally the abuse of ethical theories.
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