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Nov. 1, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:27
1495 Projecting Virtue

Why we give up our greatest treasures to power-mad strangers.

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's a beautiful fall day.
1st of November, 2009.
Pinch punch! Firsty day of the month.
And as always, in the monthly cycles, donation requests and subscription requests are always out there.
Please help spread philosophy.
So, talk about your genius, listener.
Suggestions for a podcast topic.
I think this is just fantastic.
And I just wanted to mention that you can actually tell which season it is, even without the date, because here you have the swish of me walking on leaves, whereas in the winter you'll have the crunch of me walking on snow, and in the spring and summer, at least recently, the squishy slurp of me squelching through mud like a First World War grenadier.
But this is a podcast topic projecting Virtue.
Projecting strength. And the topic, I can't remember who posted it, but thank you so much for posting this as a topic idea.
It's just brilliant. And I will try to do it in some form of amateur justice.
These are just my thoughts as an amateur on life and being and virtue.
So, we are, most of us, generally aware of the phenomenon of projection.
Which is to take our own qualities and put them into somebody else, right?
And the term can also be, I mean, layman's term is scapegoat, scapegoating.
And this actually comes from an ancient practice, I think a Judeo-Christian practice, where The tribe would put all of its sins into a goat and then drive that goat out into the wilderness or kill the goat, with the idea that if you put your own negative qualities into the goat and kill the goat, then, lo and behold, your own negative qualities are slaughtered along with the goat and you gain some relief.
Though, of course, it becomes a cycle because everything that you do that is unjust Adds to your own negative qualities, and therefore you get involved in a repetitive and escalating cycle of scapegoatism that usually ends in war.
Anyway, I think we all understand that.
And we've talked in this show about negative projection or scapegoating, but, fascinating topic idea, positive scapegoating, or the projection of...
Virtue, or the projection of strength, or the projection of honor, or dignity, or power, authority, truth.
The projection of these qualities onto others is absolutely a fascinating topic, and I would submit is one of the central pillars of unjust hierarchies like the state and religion, and to some degree Family.
Not that all families are unjust, but where injustice occurs.
I think it would rest upon this phenomenon of projecting good qualities.
I think it also has something to do with the last Sunday show that I did, where we were chatting with our good friend Nate, and I was pointing out that there's nothing that I can achieve for people that they cannot achieve for themselves.
And if people project perceptiveness or cognitive abilities or whatever onto me, then they are automatically stripping it, in a sense, from themselves, which weakens them.
And that the purpose of philosophy is to strengthen, not to weaken.
That which strengthens virtue within the soul is the goal of philosophy.
The purpose of philosophy is truth.
I'm modifying it slightly from happiness, but we'll get into why later.
Now, Let's talk about this projection of beneficial qualities onto others.
And we'll talk about it in particular in the realm of politics, and more specifically, one B. Obamatron, the Hopenator, because that really is a fascinating thing when you think about it.
So, he strikes these noble poses, and he has these significant pauses, and he narrows his eyes, and he focuses and calls out to the best in people, and creates all of these Turgid, empty metaphors that vaguely lift people up, like, I don't know, Indian food lifts up your upper intestines, and with the same end result.
And people are projecting their best qualities onto him.
I mean, they're a little bit vain, these qualities, but they still are good qualities, right?
He is considered to be a noble guy, a straight guy, an honest guy, a guy who calls out to higher ideals, and a guy who sacrifices and so on.
And people will take those qualities that they themselves possess.
You can't recognize a quality that you do not possess any more than you can understand a language that you do not speak.
So you can't recognize a quality called, say, nobility unless you possess some respect for and capacity for nobility, or at least the idea that nobility is a good thing.
And if you believe that nobility is a good thing, You must be able to identify it in others.
Otherwise, the word nobility would be a stand-in for every conceivable form of human action, right?
From strangling kittens to founding hospitals to educating the poor or whatever.
So, when we identify somebody as noble, it must be that we have a knowledge of what nobility is and some capacity to process it emotionally, which means we do possess it.
As a state. And given also that people do not randomly ascribe the subroquay nobility to people, but rather give it to specific people for specific kinds of actions.
I'm not saying that these actions are always accurate, but they do give them to people for particular kinds of actions.
Like, nobody looks at, I don't know, a child molester and calls him noble, right?
At least, nobody sane, morally sane.
So, we do actually have some knowledge Of the virtues when we identify and, in a sense, inject them into the actions of others.
And I think that is a very important thing, the degree to which we project our good qualities onto other people.
And I mean, I guess the question is why we would do that, and we'll get to that in a bit, but I think we can plainly see The effects of doing this.
And the effects of doing this are entirely reaped by the political and religious classes, and to a lesser degree, in practice, the corrupt parental classes.
But let's just talk about the political classes, because I think we can more easily identify that pattern.
So when people look at Obama and imagine that he can solve the world's problems, imagine that he has the wisdom and the nobility and he's assembled a team and, right, this team thing is like, let's just take a brief stop here to peel over this illusory fire.
This team thing is like, well, obviously you say, well, no, Obama can't know everything about healthcare and military strategy and economics and politics and what's best for every American, right?
And they say, well, yeah, okay, he can't, but he's assembled a team, right?
In the same way that God is a trinity, yet one, yet a trinity, yet one.
He's assembled a team, and it is that team that...
But, I mean, that's all complete nonsense, right?
In order to assemble a team, you have to have an idea of what quality is.
And those team members have to be honest and to have no agenda of their own, right?
So, if Obama, let's say, has an economic advisor, and I'm sure he has many, then he has to choose what type of economic advisor he wants.
A Keynesian, an Austrian from the Chicago School.
I mean, you go on and on.
What kind of game theory economist, what kind of economist is he going to want to have around him?
And so he must claim to have some knowledge of economics if he knows which is the best school of economics ever.
To surround himself with.
And since he's not going to just have one economics advisor, you could say, well, he's going to hedge his bets and he's going to have a representative from each of the schools of economics around him to...
To advise him.
But the problem is that the schools of economics say entirely opposite things as remedies for particular problems.
So the Keynesian school says, jack up inflation when the economy is heating up and cool it down and go into debt when the recession is low and then cut back spending.
And that's the Keynesian approach.
Of course, the Austrian school is, get your mitts off my money, fundamentally, and privatize the Fed, or privatize all aspects of monetary production.
And, I mean, sort of in the extreme Austrian case, once we accept that the Fed is never going to do anything wise in general for economics.
And so he either has a particular school which gives him one answer, in which case he's judged that school to be the best, in which case he's got to have a very deep knowledge of economics, or he has a bunch of people with differing opinions, in which case...
He has to choose which economist has the best or most appropriate opinion, which means he understands not just one school, but all schools, right?
And either he consistently chooses the answers from one school of economics, in which case, why bother having the other ones, because he's obviously picked the best one based on his deep knowledge of all kinds of economics and all forms of economic theory.
In other words, he has a greater knowledge of Of economics than the sum wisdom of all economists, because all economists cannot decide on a single school, but Barack Obama can.
This is crazy, right? So, the advisor thing, he's surrounded by advisors.
You could do the same thing for military strategy.
People in the military have lots of different ideas about how to deal with particular problems, and so he would have to choose those advisors who give him The best ideas, which means he already knows what the best ideas are and just needs confirmation.
Or he has everybody tell him a bunch of different things, in which case he still has to choose one course of action, which means that he is wiser than the entire military establishment about the military course of action put together, because he's able to choose the best course of action from a wide variety.
Again, it's all completely mad!
And people take this and project This knowledge and this wisdom onto others.
I believe that Obama has even, shockingly, talked about the value of humility, which is, again, completely, quite totally mad and insane.
But let's continue with this projection.
Now, when you project A state of mind onto another human being.
It does not stay in its original form.
It tends to escalate.
It tends to become exaggerated.
The restraint tends to be gone.
For the simple reason that you no longer are responsible for your emotional state, which means that self-restraint and caution and balancing perspectives and so on all kind of vanish.
Because it's no longer an internal state.
It's no longer part of what I call an ecosystem, which is a competing ecosystem of traits, characteristics, and opinions, which I think we all have, and which we benefit from gathering together, so to speak, as a sort of tribe of collective wisdom within ourselves.
But when we take an aspect of something, right, let's say I hate...
Laundromats. I hate people who run laundromats.
Oh, it's a bad one. I don't know what the heck to call that, my beautiful laundromat.
Let's say I hate Jews.
Let's just say that. And if I recognize that my hatred is an internal state, then I will look for internal causes.
Right? Why would I hate Jews?
Right? Well, is it because they call themselves the chosen...
And I feel excluded out of a tribe, put down, and they always strike me as superior and sneering, whatever it is that I would come up with.
In which case, of course, I would continue to look for the source of that anti-Semitic feeling within myself, and I would say, well, why would it bother me that other people have a tribe that they call the chosen people and they act so superior?
Why would it bother me? That people act superior and I would look into my own history and try and figure out why I would be sensitive to this particular mindset and if it were even accurate at all.
So it would be an internal state.
I would not act out that state because I would recognize it as an internal feeling or impulse and I would deal with it as an internal impulse.
In the same way that, you know, if I am feeling gassy, then I will take a beano or I will attempt to do some research to figure out why I'm feeling gassy and food's too spicy or too many vegetables or whatever, right?
Too much roughage. I would look at that as an internal state, right?
I would not look to get mad at somebody else because I'm gassy thinking that's going to solve my problem of gas, right?
Because it's an internal state. Two things which should never be equated.
Gas and antisemitism. Anyway...
If, on the other hand, I say that my anti-Semitism, my hatred of Jews, does not arise from an internal emotion based upon my own particular history, but rather is entirely generated by the Jews themselves and has nothing to do with my own personal history, Then restraint and caution in the realm of emotional expression or acting out evaporates, right?
If it's an internal state that I recognize as my own problem and not caused by the Jews but caused by rather something in my own history or something in the way that I was raised or whatever.
It could be any number of things.
My own insecurities, my own desire for superiority that I feel is blocked by other people as an excuse so that I can stay small to satisfy people in my life who want me to stay small so I don't see how small they are.
Any number of things could be.
But if I lose the perspective that my anti-Semitism is an internally generated state not caused by the Jews, but rather caused by something else, then I no longer am going to be cautious.
I'm no longer going to look for the answer within my own history and my own thoughts.
But rather, I'm going to be free, in a sense, to act out my venom and hatred in external ways.
I join some, I don't know, white power group or some anti-Semitic group and so on, right?
And these groups all tend to be bonded together by an utter externalization of the internal states.
This is the closest they can get to having friends, is to act out a common hatred.
It's a very sad situation, but it's very common, of course, very common in human life for this to occur.
And this is why...
To take an example, if Hitler had understood that his hatred of the Jews was an internal state that had been bred by his father's circumstances, his grandfather's possible lineage, and his own...
Post-traumatic stress to amateur diagnose from a complete distance, which makes no sense, but just to put a label on it for no reason.
Here's post-traumatic stress disorder from having been gassed and blinded for a time and stuck in a smelly, stinky, lice-infested...
Hospital bed after the war.
If he'd recognized all of those as internal states, then he would not have acted out against the Jews.
He would not have ordered the genocide, the Holocaust, and so on.
He wouldn't have done it because he would have recognized it as an internal state.
And as an internal state, it cannot be solved by attacking...
The external cause, which is not causal...
External cause is not causal, sorry.
Acting out against the Jews to solve his own problems of hatred wouldn't have worked because he would have recognized that the problems of hatred that he had were internal and historical states to do with his own traumatic childhood and the traumas of his culture and so on.
We all have a desire to blame others for our own misfortunes.
I don't think it's...
It's inevitable to the human condition, but it certainly does seem to be prevalent.
And I know I certainly have that impulse, not even from time to time, but it's something I recognize within myself and have to work to undo.
We have an impulse to blame others for our own misfortunes, and the mature person says, well, that's not going to help me, because that externalizes.
It may give me some temporary relief in the moment, but it externalizes the solving of the problem.
I can then no longer...
Hitler, of course, would believe that once he gets rid of the Jews, he gets rid of his own hatred.
And, of course, that's not true.
I would have just turned to others, or when he could no longer act...
His own hatred out against the world, he then, of course, acted his own hatred out against himself and killed himself.
Once he was no longer able to lay waste to the world, he committed suicide, which is, of course, the thing that he was avoiding by acting out against the world.
I mean, it is self-hatred that people are attempting to deal with when they externalize their hatred to some innocent or third party.
And so, that is an example of projecting negative qualities, and the degree that it escalates is terrifying.
It lets slip the dogs of war, so to speak, when we sincerely and insanely believe that other people are the cause of our emotional discomfort.
It's just not... It's not true.
It's just not true. It gives us, quote, permission to act out.
And it is an extremely slippery slope, which very quickly turns into a sort of a swan dive off a cliff waterfall to a fairly bottomless chasm.
Because when we give ourselves permission to vengefully act out against those who we incorrectly identify as being the source of our emotional discomfort...
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it is an inability to take responsibility for one's own emotions that causes one to create a scapegoat and act it out and attack that group or that person.
And in so doing, in the dishonorable attack of The innocent stand-ins for one's own self-hatred, one only increases one's own self-hatred, which is why people get stuck in this hate, right?
It's why people get stuck in racism or people get stuck in anti-freedom, right?
People get stuck in an opposition to all that could actually help them in their lives, because self-hatred drives the acting out, which fuels the self-hatred, which increases the acting out.
It's why people get stuck in this stuff, and it is, of course, the root cause Of so many problems.
And, you know, in my opinion, it would go right back to the parents, right?
This is just behavior that is modeled by parents and infects children, right?
The externalization of internal states.
So, I think we understand the degree to which negative projection is destructive to life, liberty, and property.
But I think that the fascinating aspect of the question that the listener posed is...
The projection of benevolent qualities to others and the degree to which that strips people of the power to achieve virtue in their own lives.
I mean, can you not sort of get the sense that America breathed this big sigh of relief around the question of racism because Barack Obama had been elected?
Because Barack Obama has been elected, the issue of race in America is now done.
Right? I mean, this is just a form of desperate and pathetic gambling, in a way, right?
Which is like, oh, if this woman wants to go out with me, I'm worthwhile.
If I get this job, I'm good, I'm worthwhile.
Well, that's putting your self-esteem in the hands of other people, right?
And if Barack Obama gets elected, we've dealt with the problem of race, right?
Which means, you know, if he didn't get elected, right?
If something had happened, something had come up about his past or whatever, right?
If he didn't get elected, then...
You would not be able to free yourself of any racial guilt or whatever as a society, right?
I mean, it's just a kind of desperate gamble and it's very sad, right?
So, the degree to which people project their good qualities is the degree to which they diminish themselves and also the degree to which they insanely elevate their leaders.
And that's why leaders like this, right?
That's why leaders love stepping into these collective...
Projections of virtue.
Because the degree to which people abandon their own angels' wings is the degree to which the leaders can soar even higher on the crazy, airless, lofty wings of rhetoric and fool people into believing that their own abandoned virtues, the collective abandoned virtues of millions or hundreds of millions of people, accrue To the sole possibility and actions of a leader.
The degree to which people are willing to project their own virtues onto leaders is the degree to which leaders gain the power to strip whatever real remaining virtues live within the hearts of the people.
And the degree to which When we identify external unjust things as the source, quote, sources of our own hatreds, the degree to which we act out against those people really escalates.
Well, in the same way, when we incorrectly identify external actors as the receptacles of our own virtue.
That is the degree to which we can dissolve into hysterical and soul-empty hero worship and project all manner of imaginary virtues onto others.
And the two primary receptacles of these projections of virtue are leaders, secular leaders, and gods.
And the reason why leaders and priests love this so much is that it's not possible for any human being to be as virtuous as the collective wisdom of mankind.
It's completely impossible.
In the same way that it's completely impossible for any committee to organize any economy.
No... I mean, this is the fundamental...
Aspects of the free market, right?
Which is that there is no committee of quote-wise people whose decisions can productively replace or efficiently replace the decisions of millions of actors in the free market working for benevolence or self-interest or whatever.
So we understand that no individual can possibly replace the wisdom Of a free collective.
I use the word collective here advisedly.
I'm sure you understand what I mean. A free group.
And we understand this in the realm of economics.
And I think it's wise for us to understand this also in the realm of political action.
That Barack Obama and his advisors can in no way, shape, or form Be conceivably wiser than the collective decisions of the free American people.
It's simply impossible.
And the reasons for all of this are amply discussed in a wide variety of materials.
You can look at it in Austrian books on economics.
Murray Rothbard talks about this quite a bit.
But I think that's really important to recognize.
That when we project our virtues onto someone else, we are diminishing them.
It's not UPB compliant, of course, right?
I mean, it can't possibly be a phenomenon that can be applied universally, because otherwise it's a domino topple with no end, or rather one that circles back around to its beginning, right?
Because... If everybody is supposed to project their own virtues onto somebody else, then no one can actually be the receptacle at all, right?
Because then you project your virtues onto one B. Obama.
Obama, Obama, for fama, fama.
And he then, of course, must project his virtues onto someone else.
Now, this does happen to a small and sophisticated degree, right?
In that he says, well, my virtue is a reflection or, you know, the people put their trust in me and I put my trust in the people, right?
But it's not possible to do that, right?
I mean, obviously, they're all...
They're all weeping that he's elected, he's not weeping that they're elected, right?
So it's just a sophisticated trick to say that he represents the will of the people, but that's just nonsense, right?
It's like the priest saying he represents the will of God.
Well, there is no will of the people and there is no God, so he's just representing his own preferences, the priest and the politician.
Now, also the problem...
With projection is that that which you consider heinous or elevated becomes necessary to you in a very tragic and horrible way.
So, you know, Hitler's anti-Semitism meant that he hated, he both hated and needed the Jews.
That's the problem with projection, right?
You hate and you desperately need.
This is the sort of twisted tribute that hatred actually is.
And people are never more unhappy than when the object of their projections vanishes.
That's usually when people hit some sort of catastrophic depression or perhaps even suicidality, when the receptacle for their hatred ceases to be a valid receptacle, either because they've done their own work and recognize that it's not the external object that's the source of their discomfort, but their own internal ideas and histories, Or, for whatever reason, if Hitler had gotten rid of all of the Jews, he would have just turned on other groups, right?
Until he was the only person standing, and then he would have killed himself, right?
I mean, that's where the cancer metaphor, cancer attacks the body, the body dies, cancer dies, right?
That's how it works.
Or doesn't work.
And so, when you project your dark side onto others, you hate them and you need them.
You hate them and you need them.
And in the same way, when you project your virtue onto someone else, then you gain this cult of personality, hysterical style, and worship for their every move, and you can't get your own virtue back, because you need those people to be the receptacle of your own virtue.
And I think we can see this phenomenon in something like the assassination of JFK, where my mother cried when President Kennedy died.
There is this belief, everybody remembers, not me, I wasn't alive, but everybody remembers where they were when President Kennedy, and then got the news that President Kennedy had died or been shot.
Because he was somebody that people poured all of their hopes and dreams into.
Camelots, right? Even a fictional place to a large degree, right?
A handsome and secure and a pretty wife and a nice accent and all that.
I mean, the man was mental and philanderous and all that kind of junk.
But people put all of their projections and hopes and desires and...
Dreams for a better world and a better life to put it all into this poor drug-addicted bastard, right?
And anybody who accepts that kind of projection is themselves empty and vainglorious, right?
That's why we know that political leaders and priests are crazy, right?
Mentally ill. I mean, that's how I believe they'll be categorized in the future, but...
So...
And people went into a kind of depression after Kennedy died.
In the same way that people went into a kind of depression after Princess Diana died.
Because that is the real end to the fairy tale.
The fairy tale always ends in death.
And that's why the princess being plucked out of relative obscurity, or the commoner, she wasn't a commoner, but Diane Spencer being plucked out of relative obscurity, and she becomes the princess, and she marries the prince, and there's a beautiful wedding, and things couldn't be better.
She has money, she has fame, she has looks, she has attractive children, she has all of these wonderful things.
And that's... That's everybody's fairy tale.
This is what girls grow up with as their ideal, and boys to some degree as well.
Saves the maiden from the dragon.
But the reality of such a life is wretched beyond compare.
Bulimic and suicidal and borderline and, you know, I think that's the diagnosis, though.
Again, it's all third-party distance.
But we understand that this is actual hell to be living in, right?
It was Kennedy, right? I mean, Can't keep it in his pants.
Addicted to painkillers and, you know, just a...
That's a pretty wretched existence in Marlon Brando, right?
There's a picture of him, I think, making Mutiny on the Bounty with some Polynesian girls rolling around in the surf and so on.
And this was the fantasy of a great life, a movie star, handsome, rich, blah, blah, blah.
But the real life is wretched, right?
Balloons to, what, almost 400 pounds or 350 pounds and...
One of his kids is in jail for murder and another kid killed herself.
I mean, this is just the price that we pay for being the receptacle of other people's fantasies.
And, I mean, not to put myself anywhere in the stratospheric category of these people's fame, but, I mean, to my own small degree, I've experienced this a little bit.
People want to... I'm very concerned that when people idealize me, they lose the power of action and self-direction themselves, and that to me would be a terrible tragedy.
It's the exact opposite of what it is that I want.
I don't have an emptiness and an insecurity within me.
I mean, it's not like I don't have any insecurities, of course I do, but I don't have a fundamental or foundational characterological emptiness and insecurity within me, wherein the adulation of others comes as a relief and an escape from my own self-weariness or self-disgust or self-hatred or anything like that.
So... It's something that I sort of genuinely and generally push back by consistently reminding people of my own flaws and limitations, and by saying to people that I'm not important in the conversation, and reminding people that they are the geniuses and they are the philosophers, not me, and reminding people that the individuals are unimportant in the equation of philosophy.
It is only the methodology that counts, and never to identify an individual With the methodology.
We call it the scientific method, not the Baconian method.
And that's why I've also resisted coming up with a name for what it is that I'm doing.
That would be silly. I don't like objectivism because of that.
I don't like schools of thought.
I only like thought. I don't like factions.
I only like the truth. Stefan-esque, Molyneuvian, whatever you'd want to call it, would be ridiculous, and to me would be nothing more than a flag of failure over a tomb of methodology.
It would be to say that what I'm doing is not reason and evidence, but rather something particular to myself.
And that would be a failure, because that's not philosophy, right?
You would not think of Dawkinian science, right?
It's either good science or it's bad science.
It's either an honest exploration of the world and its principles, or it's not.
It's either a philosophy or it's not.
It's not a particular brand or kind of philosophy.
And it's sort of a minor problem that I have with objectivism.
That's why I've sort of refused to give a name.
And also, I mean, God, what I'm doing is so ridiculously basic and simple and non-convoluted, right?
There's no thetans. There's nothing of that kind of stuff.
There's only simply... And basically a hopefully consistent application, or hopefully somewhat consistent application of a consistent methodology that is easily reproducible by others.
The purpose of Freedom in Radio is not think like me, because that's not thinking, but here are the tools, think for yourself.
Here's an example of how effective the tools are, right?
I mean, in the way that we We do want science to be able to help us navigate across an ocean, based on the fact that the world is flat, and so when people sail and come back, science is validated, versus if they pray to God to give them their directions and die in the trackless wastes of the international oceans, We want it to show, so I think it's okay to show the thought and action, show the success of the thought, but we never want to mistake the individual with the methodology.
And that's another reason why objectivism faded off the map, because Ayn Rand, for various reasons that I would not hugely respect, much though I respect her in general, identified her philosophy as a With herself, to some degree. I am the most rational.
Well, heaven's sakes, heaven's sakes, for me to say I am the most rational would be absurd in the extreme.
I am far from the most rational, and I for sure am not going to be nearly as rational as the next generation, because I have my own histories, and my own traumas, and my own irrationalities that were inflicted upon me that they won't have, so they'll just be more rational.
I mean, I may be, you know, in the Middle Ages, everybody was five feet tall.
I may be five foot three.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to be the tallest person in history.
I may just be a little bit taller than everyone around me.
But everyone, as they get healthier, gets taller.
And the same is true for the future of philosophy.
People will look back and say, yeah, you know, he got some stuff right, but X, Y, and Z was way off the mark.
And that's perfectly fine.
Because the fact that they know I'm way off the mark is because reason and evidence have disproven me.
And that's exactly what reason and evidence should do to that, which is not true.
I just wanted to sort of point out that I don't conceivably want what I'm doing here to be associated with me.
The idea of appointing an intellectual heir, as Rand did with Picoff, to me would be entirely silly.
It's to say that there's a body of knowledge that needs to be transmitted to another individual, but that is not true, and there's nobody who can speak for me When I'm dead and gone, because I don't want people to speak for me.
I don't want people to speak for me.
I certainly don't want people to be particularly interested in me.
What I do want you to do is to be interested in yourself.
What I do want you to do is, you know, if you look at my life and say, well, some stuff he's done seems to have worked well, good.
Then that's not to be interested in me.
That's to have some validation of a possibility for you, which you should then focus on achieving, in my opinion.
But I would be more than happy.
If nobody ever wrote about me, but instead wrote about the challenges and excitements of philosophy in their own lives, that to me would be a wonderful thing.
I don't need any of that stuff.
In fact, I would consider it to be almost entirely a negative.
And I would quickly correct that as best I could, and view that as a sort of fundamental flaw in something that I had done, which had been mistaken.
So resisting projection is some part of what it is that I do.
And it's another reason, of course, other than its efficacy, that I say to people, go to therapy.
Because therapy, with a good therapist, is designed to help you honor and respect yourself.
So this is another reason why philosophy is fundamentally...
Self-knowledge is fundamentally anti-statist.
Because when you pursue self-knowledge...
As I've talked about before, you pound back your projections into your own skin.
We're all like that Clive Barker needle guy, right?
These things sticking out of us like javelins and projecting and poking into other people.
And philosophy is like a big existential hammer that pounds our projections back into ourselves and says, no, no, no, no.
You are responsible for your emotional states.
Your emotional states are not directly caused by the people around you.
You are responsible for your emotional states.
And that gives us freedom to be with the people around us.
Because if we feel that people are pushing our happy, angry, unhappy, depressed, manic joy buzzers all the time, then we can't be with them because we're too afraid of their impact on us.
We can't be with them as equals.
As somebody said in a call the other day, Not only can we only meet each other in reality, but we can only meet each other as equals, as peers.
And I think that is entirely true.
And so we don't want to project into others either our good or our bad qualities.
When we project our bad qualities, we are filled with hatred.
And when we project our good qualities, we are filled with pathetic obsequiousness.
And we imagine that these sky gods thunder through the clouds above us, making decisions that we can barely understand.
And they're always proven wrong.
They're always proven false. Statism and collectivism, as a philosophy, is always being proven false, wrong, incorrect, destructive.
I mean, just look at the supposed collective wisdom of Wall Street and the crash over the past, I guess, two years, year and a half.
I mean, that's an example of how things just go completely wrong.
And we are constantly reminded Of the fallibility of those who we project our virtues into, that they can never achieve their virtues.
Obama's going through the same thing right now with these plunging poll numbers, right?
His approval rating is going down.
And that makes entire sense, right?
And so what should happen, right, in a responsible world, what would happen is people would say, holy crap, so we had this fantasy that this guy was going to save us from all our problems and turn this world into a paradise, and none of it's happening.
And so self-knowledge would demand, in fact, dictate that we say, well, why was I so wrong?
Why did I make such a mistake?
Why did I imagine this guy was a moral hero who could save the universe and turn night into liquid sunshine daylight?
And I was so completely wrong.
Why did I get things so wrong?
That would be something which we would pursue in the realm of self-examination, self-exploration, and self-knowledge.
That's what we would do. Why?
Why? You know, we do the same thing when we imagine that some romantic partner is perfect, and then when they are not, we sort of run away.
So the healthy thing to do there is to say, well, I made a mistake, and it was a pretty big mistake.
I believed in something that wasn't true, and it wasn't like it was impossible to understand that it wasn't true, because people told me that it wasn't true, that lots of people said Obama, myself included, was not going to achieve anything that people expected him to.
So you would look into and try and figure that out, but that's not, unfortunately, that's not what most people do, because the danger...
Of projecting virtue is not well understood.
It's considered to be patriotic, right, to project virtue onto your country or your country's leaders or the Constitution or the Founding Fathers or whatever nonsense is floating around as a parasitical, exploitive, receptacle for the greatest virtues that you possess and understand.
People don't do that. What they do is they say, well, shit, this guy didn't work out, so let's project all this, let's withdraw our virtue from him and start to hate him, and now, although that's going to be limited because anybody who hates Obama can be criticized unjustly for racism, right?
Because he's always referred to as black, though he's actually not, but I guess the word mulatto is no longer politically correct, so you can't call him that, but anyway.
So they'll turn on him, and then what will happen is they will find some new hero to emulate.
And you saw this very much with the Republican Party.
It turned on George Bush, and after, you know, liking him for a long time, it turned on George Bush and started, oh, McCain is wonderful.
Palin is wonderful. People will just cycle out.
The old scapegoat and cycle in the new scapegoat, right?
Of course in this case with politics the goat which is beaten and driven out and enslaved and often killed or certainly imprisoned is themselves.
So Leaders constantly cash in on this, and they will not tell people, hey, don't worship me.
Any leader who says, listen, don't worship me.
For heaven's sakes, don't look at me as the solution to your life's problems.
And your life's problems are things to be worked out with self-knowledge, reason, philosophy, and evidence in your own life.
And I'm not going to solve your problems.
Don't imagine that I will. Leaders, of course, can't say that, because they would be rejected by a population desperate to avoid self-knowledge, right?
And what is the knowledge that people are so desperate to avoid when they project their virtues?
Well, it's a tragic tale, which we can go through very briefly.
In my opinion, the reason that people project their virtues onto others is that virtue is a terrible burden for most people in their immediate relationships, right?
As I have talked about from the very, very beginning.
When we act with honesty, with integrity, with moral courage, We are very often attacked by those in our lives, those around us, right?
So honest with our parents, honest with our families, extended families, honest with our friends, use the against me argument, bring the reality of statism, the reality of an addiction to collective violence to people, bring all of this stuff in, then what happens?
Well, they attack us.
So we want to shed ourselves off the burdens of virtue in order to stay small and inconsequential to those around us.
I went through that little pattern at the beginning about some cause for this.
I mean, the only thing more dangerous than vice is virtue.
The only thing that's more dangerous to our fellow slaves than vice is virtue.
Because virtue brings with it the humiliation of subjugation.
Virtue brings with it the terror of speaking honestly and openly.
And most importantly, virtue, particularly honesty, virtue brings along with it a knowledge of hypocrisy that is only unconscious.
So if your teacher says to you, I'm not suggesting anybody do this, but just to take an example, which we won't use parents for a change, but if your teacher says to you, don't use violence to solve your problems and be honest, and then you shoot back and say, well, isn't your paycheck funded by coercion, violence against my parents if they don't pay?
And shouldn't we be honest about that?
Well, then the teacher is revealed as hypocritical.
And this is why virtue and honesty, moral courage, philosophy is so hated and feared by people.
That we get attacked for even the basic honesty that philosophy demands and requires within our relationships.
We just get attacked for our virtues.
And so we're desperate to take our virtues and place them somewhere else because they're ticking bombs in our relationships.
We're desperate to take our virtues and put them somewhere else.
And so what we do is, because slaves attack each other for the humiliation and hypocrisy that is revealed by virtue, All slaves are desperate to take their virtues and place them somewhere else.
And leaders are very happy to be the receptacles of those virtues and continue the cycle of crushing useless, empty, and destructive oppression.
And that's why the solution is to stop projecting our virtues onto others, to stop worshipping distant leaders who know nothing and care nothing about us.
And instead, own the virtue ourselves.
But we can't own the virtue ourselves And not act on it, because then we become prey to accusations of hypocrisy ourselves.
And we cannot act with virtue with regards to our leaders, because that will get us killed or imprisoned, right?
Resisting taxes, I mean, that's just not good.
It's not good. And so the only place where we can actually have and achieve virtue is in our own lives, in our own relationships.
And that's been my constant suggestion.
That's why fundamentally this philosophy is anti-status, no matter which way you cut it.
I hope that it's helpful as a concept.
I really, really do appreciate the listener who put this forward as a topic.
I think it's quite a fascinating one.
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