1494 The Market for Philosophy
The free market and philosophy, sitting in a tree...
Oct. 28, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:39
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| Hey everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well. | |
| October the 30th. Potential podcast. | |
| We're not sure. We're out for a walk with the Bellikins, who decidedly did not want to go into the car to go to the mall. | |
| Sorry, just opening up the philosophy hatch. | |
| We're just going to go for a walk. It's a little rainy, but she's hooded and set. | |
| And... I was thinking yesterday that I've always been kind of curious. | |
| What free market philosophy might be like? | |
| What free market philosophy might be like? | |
| And of course, I've talked about this before, but I was really thinking about it yesterday. | |
| The degree to which FDR sort of conforms to that model of free market philosophy. | |
| And philosophy really has three phases in history. | |
| The first is aristocratic, right, in ancient philosophical sort of 2,500 years ago, Socrates, Plato, et al., That they did not need to work for a living because they had slaves and property. | |
| And so it was an aristocratic pursuit, not a market-driven pursuit. | |
| And Socrates didn't charge and so on. | |
| He'd take, I think, food donations or whatever, but it was an aristocratic... | |
| Sorry, and the people who studied with Socrates tended to be the kids of the rich, almost invariably, because everybody else was slaves or working or soldiers or whatever. | |
| And that is not really a market-driven philosophy. | |
| System at all. And then the Romans didn't do that much innovative stuff when it came to philosophy. | |
| I mean, they did some great stuff with laws and imperialism and the general corruption of late republic democracy, but they didn't do much innovative stuff when it came to philosophy. | |
| They mostly inherited the Greek ideas as well as they inherited and adapted the Greek gods. | |
| And so there really wasn't much, but what there was was, again, aristocratic in nature. | |
| And then philosophy moved really under the Choking, fetid umbrella of theology for over a thousand years and was not something that was pursued in a market situation, right? | |
| The priests had certain aspects of philosophy. | |
| They loved Aristotle for reasons that are quite interesting, which we'll get into at some point. | |
| It's a very interesting story. They just called him the philosopher, not the, right? | |
| In the same way, they just called God, God, not a God. | |
| And theology was not a market-driven philosophical situation at all. | |
| And from there, we moved from theology, and again, these are very broad generalizations, but... | |
| I am wearing a dress. So, from theology, we moved to academics, to academia. | |
| And academia is not a market-driven environment, right? | |
| In that people who study philosophy in academia do so not to engage with the general public in unphilosophical or in philosophical items, but rather to get jobs in academia and so on, right? | |
| It is a It's a statist, monopolistic, and fundamentally kind of aristocratic, but certainly not market-driven approach to philosophy. | |
| And those sort of three major phases, aristocratic, theological, and academic, have really kept philosophy out of the free market. | |
| Now, populist philosophers like Ayn Rand, to a much smaller degree, and to a much worse degree, John Rawls and Saul up here in Canada, But Ayn Rand in particular was philosophy that was driven by market forces, but it was not nearly as two-way as FDR is, right? | |
| Thousands of listeners, you know, I get like 40 plus or more emails a day. | |
| With sort of feedback and comments and YouTube comments and comments about particular podcasts and questions and, of course, I have had hundreds of conversations with listeners on a variety of topics. | |
| So Ayn Rand, you know, again, a great philosophical and to some degree literary genius, but not somebody who was intensely engaged with her audience, I think, in the way that I am. | |
| All right, let's go around here again, darling. | |
| And she was not an entrepreneur or did not have entrepreneurial experience in the way that I do. | |
| And again, please understand, I don't want to compare myself to Ayn Rand, but I'm just happy to be a small part of her shadow. | |
| But I think that it's interesting the degree to which FDR is driven by the market, right? | |
| So there are two aspects to the free market, or sorry, two aspects to the organization of resources in an economy. | |
| And they can be broadly categorized as a push market and a pull market. | |
| So a push market is... | |
| I've written a book and I sort of push it out and see who's interested in buying it. | |
| A pull market is where you do all the market research, figure out if people want the widget, get orders ahead of time, and then build to meet demand, right? | |
| So in one, you're creating a product and just seeing who wants it. | |
| And in the second, you are consistently and constantly tailoring that product To the shifting forces of consumer or customer demand, client demand, listener demand. | |
| And Ayn Rand was part of the push market, which, you know, is perfectly valid. | |
| And I'm really part of the pull market. | |
| And the two aren't completely distinct, right? | |
| I pushed out some podcasts, and it was only then that I really started to get involved in getting listener feedback. | |
| So there were some push aspects. | |
| But it really did become a pull market, in that I would put particular ideas out. | |
| And then... I would see who was interested in them and what topics they were interested in. | |
| And through the listener conversations and the board, I get a sense of what is actually interesting to people. | |
| And so there is such a strong aspect of a pull-free market in this conversation. | |
| I can't think of a philosophical conversation or community or group or whatever that has had such A close alignment to market forces, to consumer or customer requirements in the past. | |
| So it's very interesting to me, and it's not because of any entrepreneurial genius on my part, it's just because the technology exists. | |
| I mean, the fact that I have always been customer-driven in my career has helped that along, but it's the technology that allows me to get so heavily involved in conversations, in feedback from listeners. | |
| People can email me for free, the board is free, conversations with me are free. | |
| And, of course, on the Sunday shows. | |
| I've done, oh gosh, what? | |
| Two or three hundred Sunday shows by now. | |
| And that is something that is, again, a great... | |
| Because I don't sort of set the topic. | |
| I maybe do a short intro, but people then talk about what they want to talk about. | |
| And that is a very interesting thing. | |
| And it's also very far away from... | |
| I mean, aristocracy is not a market situation, and theology is a push market insofar as you inflict lies upon children, and then you create a demand for priests, right? | |
| It's a push market in the way that heroin is a pusher market when you get people hooked as children, and then they have to come to you for heroin or methadone for the rest of their lives. | |
| And academia is a push market, but it's not even a market, really. | |
| There's small aspects of market in terms of people competing for jobs, but it's not customer-driven at all. | |
| It's almost completely funded by the state, and the only reason people study it... | |
| You know, they couldn't get into non-humanities, maybe the marks were low in high school, or because they want to get a job in academia. | |
| So it's not something that faces the world. | |
| And I was also curious, what would philosophy look like if it were really embedded in a customer-driven market situation? | |
| What would philosophy look like if it was driven by the actual, legitimate, objective, empirical, economic... | |
| Requirements or demands or preferences of customers. | |
| If people were actually consuming philosophy as a product, what would it look like? | |
| And I think it's fair to say that the way FDR has sort of shaped out is a pretty good example of what philosophy would look like or what philosophy does look like when market forces are present. | |
| And I think that's something really worth meandering over in your mind, you know? | |
| What is it that people want? | |
| Well, they want sort of an understanding of the world that they live in, in an abstract sense, right? | |
| I mean, in terms of metaphysics, epistemology, economics, politics, and so on. | |
| And that is of great interest to people. | |
| But where the rubber really meets the road in terms of philosophy is the degree to which people... | |
| Feel that they can understand and appreciate the value of particular virtues, you know, courage, integrity, honesty, humility, and so on. | |
| And the degree to which they can bring those values to bear in their real life, right? | |
| And that sort of makes sense to me. | |
| I mean, take another example of diet books, right? | |
| I mean... Most diet books have sort of three components, right? | |
| They have theory, they have practice, and they have recipes. | |
| I don't think we have too many recipes. | |
| Some, I guess some of the listener combos could be considered that. | |
| So you read sort of the South Beach Diet or whatever. | |
| There'll be a whole bunch of stuff about carbs and sugars and all that kind of stuff and how your body processes X, Y, and Z. And then there will be what you need to change in your diet to conform to the scientific theory of nutrition that's being presented. | |
| And then there's examples of things you can cook and make and eat that will conform to that. | |
| And in the FDR paradigm... | |
| Sorry, so if it was only theory, if it was only just the science with no practicality, then it would not be particularly helpful or engaging to people. | |
| It would be something that would be published in an academic journal, perhaps, of nutrition, but not a populist kind of book. | |
| If it was only Change Your Diet without any science behind it, I mean, there are some diet books out there like that, I'm sure, but it would not be particularly grounded in any kind of reality. | |
| It would be easy to dismiss, you know, just some guy's belief that you should eat X, Y, and Z. And if it were only recipes without theory or practice, then it would just be a cookbook, which is not the same as a diet book, right? | |
| It would just be things to cook, not relative to any kind of health. | |
| Issues, right? So think if you're diabetic, you pick up a cookbook for diabetics and it's going to have, you know, the theory and practice of insulin production or the failure of that. | |
| Why you eat, why you need to eat, what you should eat, how to practice and some recipes, right? | |
| So I think that aspect of things where you're going from theory to practice to examples. | |
| Yeah, you know what? The listener or converse, I think, do fit into examples, right? | |
| People are actually struggling to put the stuff into practice in their life. | |
| And certainly some of the converse where I talk about that, they're important as well. | |
| So we have a theory, which is the sort of intro to philosophy stuff. | |
| We have the practice, which is the practical aspects of bringing philosophy into your life, right? | |
| So RTR and some of the other stuff, and on truth. | |
| We also have the examples, right? | |
| So me and others who are struggling with the challenge of implementing these values in our daily lives actually talking about this, which I think give people a sense of, you know, recipes that taste good, recipes that don't taste good, cooking examples that go awry, and so on. | |
| So I think it's very interesting to think about FDR as, I think, the first example of what philosophy looks like from a populist market-driven, poor-economy sense. | |
| And I think it's worth mulling over. | |
| That, in a sense, if it is the first show that really is consumer-driven, And that shapes what the show is. | |
| That the show is a reflection of demand. | |
| Just as every business that is pull-driven is a reflection of demand. | |
| Not a reflection of supply. | |
| Not a reflection of the preferences of the entrepreneurs. | |
| But it's a reflection. It's a mirror held up to what people actually want to do with the values that they are interested in learning about. | |
| And I think that's very interesting. | |
| It's a mirror to the society of those interested in philosophy. | |
| And I think that's something that is worth mulling over. | |
| And if you know of any other examples, I would certainly be happy to hear about them. | |
| I don't, but that doesn't mean anything other than I don't. | |
| So I just thought I'd mention that. | |
| It's sort of an interesting thing to mull over, and I hope that you will find it of interest, and do let me know what you think. |
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