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Nov. 4, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:13
1499 The Joys of Humility

Most of the good things in life come from humility...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Moleni from Freedom In Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is a little chat on the challenges and joys of humility.
Now, this may come as a surprise to some people because I have been occasionally accused of not being perhaps the most humble person on the planet, which I would certainly agree to, but perhaps not even possessing a scrap of humility.
And I'd like to talk a little bit about why humility is so, so, so important for your happiness and self-respect and for receiving and giving love and all of the good things in life that come outside of the bare minimums of non-aggression principle and respect for property rights, which I'm sure we are all following.
As you may or may not know, I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
It caused some controversy, I suppose.
People say, oh, he's so arrogant coming up with a theory of ethics.
But I think that's a complete misapprehension, and I hope an unconscious one, but a misapprehension of what the book is about.
I'm just using this as an example.
It's not the be-all and end-all.
But if I write a book on ethics...
It's a very humble and humbling experience.
And why is that? Because to write a book on ethics is to fundamentally say, I don't know how to be good.
I don't even know what virtue is.
And I wrote the book when I was, I think, 40 or 41, something like that.
And imagine, imagine being 41 years old and having to confess to the mirror That I don't know what goodness is, what virtue is, and it's so important to me, and I don't know.
It's very, very important to me, and I don't know what it is, and I don't know how to achieve it, and I don't know why.
I should even bother trying to achieve it.
It's a very humble thing to do.
It's a very humble thing to do.
And I think that's sort of a misunderstanding that people have of philosophy as a whole.
When philosophy asserts things, when philosophy says, you know, reason and evidence, and basically most of what it says is reason and evidence.
When philosophy asserts things, It is a very humble thing.
So when a philosopher or somebody who likes to philosophize or is good at it comes along, well, you can't be good at it if you don't like it, but if they come along and say, this is truth, this is false, this is how we establish, people perceive that as arrogance on the part of the philosopher.
In that they're saying, you know, who are you to tell me what the truth is and things like that.
But the reality is that a philosopher is the opposite of a priest or what Ayn Rand used to call a social metaphysician.
Somebody who bases his value on the opinions or manipulating or controlling the opinions of others, right?
Because the fundamental fork in life is we either try to control reality And nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
So that is a humble experience to control reality.
If you want to chop down a tree, words, willpower, tantrums, arrogance, manipulations, tears, and so on, won't budge a single atom or a single cell of the tree.
You actually have to subject yourself to objective reality, and lo and behold, you have to go and pick up an axe and cut down the tree.
There's no other way to do it.
I guess you could carpet bomb, but just talking about a woodsman, you have to subject yourself to the demands of reality.
You can't manipulate reality.
You can manipulate people.
You can bully people and so on, right?
If you want food, then you can either choose to subject yourself to the rational discipline.
Of agriculture or hunting, growing or killing some food.
And again, tantrums and tears and bullying and foot-stompings and holding your breath till you turn blue won't put a single morsel of food on your plate.
Or you can go and bully some kid for his lunch money and get some food that way.
Philosophy is really around subjecting yourself to the constraints and demands of objective reality, which is rationality and empirical evidence.
In the same way that science is that, right?
Science is a very humble thing.
People talk about arrogant scientists who proclaim themselves as gods and so on.
And there may be scientists who are individually arrogant in other areas of their life, but the degree to which they are good scientists, the degree to which they are valuable and valid scientists, is the degree to which They respect the scientific method.
And the scientific method, like the Socratic method of philosophical inquiry, is profoundly humble.
And it's profoundly humbling.
Because we are basically saying, when we say reason and evidence, we're basically saying, I'm not imposing something on you.
You know, like a priest will impose something on you, will tell you all sorts of horrible and vile lies about undead Jewish zombies toppling into your crib and covering you with the dust of original sin that you must choke and claw your way out of and be forever guilty in bed.
I mean, these kinds of suffocating, shroud of Turin, wet and on the face kinds of fairy tales.
are profoundly destructive to the mind and to the soul and they are entirely arrogant because somebody is saying I know that these fantastic and impossible things are true and I know that they apply to you and I'm absolutely certain that they apply to you and you must subject yourself to Me, right? Because there is no God, right?
So anybody who tells you to obey God is telling you to obey them, right?
Anybody who tells you to obey a deity is telling you to obey him or her, because there is no deity, right?
I mean, if I say, I have an invisible friend whose word is law and absolute truth, and you must obey him, but he only speaks through me, then clearly I'm commanding you to obey me.
Religion is subjugation to human corruption, manipulation, and irrationality.
This is why I oppose it so much, because I oppose falsehood, fundamentally, right?
The first virtue is always honesty.
And for religious people to be honest, they have to say, we don't know.
We don't know. And so it's very, very important to understand that a philosopher is the opposite of a priest.
A priest will tell you to obey him and then pretend that it's some absolute commandment from an invisible friend.
But a philosopher will never tell you to obey him or her as an individual.
I mean, that would be crazy. A philosopher will say the standard of truth is reason and evidence.
A scientist will say, a mathematician will say, an engineer will say, a physicist will say, a biologist and so on.
The standard of truth is reason and evidence.
And that is not...
When a science teacher comes and tells you that to be a scientist you need to follow the scientific method, This is the complete opposite of a priest coming and saying that if you want to save your soul, then give me money and get on your knees, boy.
That is the complete opposite.
And people misunderstand because we get so much exposure to people who use the argument from authority, which is, you must believe me because I am this great authority or I have this great hidden pipeline to the divine mind or whatever.
And teachers in public schools in particular do the same thing.
That's just this aggressive authority.
These commandments, these punishments, these permanent records.
When I was a kid, there were canings and beatings, and there's not that now, at least in a lot of places, which is a fantastic victory for the progress of childhood.
But there was always this aggressive kind of authority, and that is profoundly anti-philosophical, anti-scientific, anti-humanist.
The first virtue is truth, and the truth is that Error always and forever can only exist in the human mind.
Consciousness makes errors.
You look at a lake in a desert and you may mistake it for a lake when it is in fact a mirage.
It's not reality that's making the error.
There's not a lake that when you get close it suddenly vanishes and turns into a sand dune.
No. Whenever an error occurs it is within consciousness.
And because we are capable of error, partly as a result of confirmation bias and the fallacy of sunk costs and so on, and partly because we have a sort of close to the ground, limited eyeball perspective of the universe, right, in which The Sun and the Moon look the same size.
The Earth looks flat.
It's just a limited perspective.
We don't see infrared. We don't see x-rays and so on.
So we have to find ways to translate these other mediums of observation into a spectrum that we can actually perceive with our eyes.
In the same way that we can turn sound into vision through a spectrograph or something like that.
So, because error always exists within the human mind, and we are always capable of error for a number of reasons, and we always make errors for a number of reasons, we have to have a standard by which error can be corrected.
And the only way that errors can be corrected in a rational way, or in a true or scientific or philosophical way, is through reason and evidence.
And so when somebody comes to you and says, your beliefs are irrational and therefore they are incorrect, if you claim that they If you claim that they apply to reality, if I tell you about some crazy dream that I had, I'm not wrong or irrational, I'm just not claiming that my dream is representative of objective material reality.
But if I'm making a claim about objective and material reality, and my claims are irrational or contradicted by evidence, then my claims are false, are incorrect.
That's a profoundly humble thing to say.
That's a profoundly humbling thing to do.
To me, The only true arrogance in the world is to make claims about reality based upon mere preference.
I want there to be a Jesus.
I want there to be Abraham.
I want Paul to have written the Gospels.
I want the Gospels to be true.
I want to have not been lied to by everybody who raised me about the nature of truth and virtue and goodness and the existence of deities.
I want to believe that my country is the best country.
I want to believe That the American Revolution was a noble undertaking that did not rest on the genocide of 20 million corpses of Native Americans.
I want to believe that the early American Republic was a virtuous place and forget that it denied rights to women, to children and rested on a foundation of slavery.
I want to believe these things for various degrees of emotional comfort and therefore I'm going to cherry-pick and ignore certain pieces of evidence and focus on others and so on.
Because people want these things, they then just say that they're true and will make up things to support those things.
That is an inevitable human tendency.
I do it, you do it, we all do it, but we always have to go back to reason and evidence, and we always have to go back to the humility of, I could be wrong.
I mean, I say this in almost every single podcast.
This is just a theory. I could be wrong.
There are some things which I hold fast to.
Reason and evidence, I hold fast to.
I hold pretty fast to universally preferable behavior because in the couple of years since I've written it, I've never seen somebody successfully criticize it.
And I've certainly, where people have written long stuff, I've asked them to debate and they haven't wanted to and so on.
So... I haven't ever seen a contradiction.
That means that for me, it remains conditionally valid and true.
I remain open to counter evidence.
But, you know, there is this balance in life, right?
There is a balance in life wherein you can't act without values.
You can't act without some sort of values, without some sort of preference.
And if you're interested in virtue, I think it's just about everybody is.
You can't act without believing.
That what you're doing has some positive relation to truth or integrity or virtue or whatever.
And yet at the same time, we have to always hold it possible that something can come along to overturn our beliefs.
And that is a challenge.
It's a bit of a tightrope. We have to act As if our beliefs are true, otherwise we wouldn't get out of bed.
We'd say, I don't even know if I'm in a bed.
We'd be stuck in the deranged brain soup of the Cartesian demon.
You know, the being that is manufacturing reality for us, the matrix, at any moment.
So we have to act as if reality exists, and we have to act in a way that is consistent with values that we have developed or inherited.
But at the same time, we still have to be open to the possibility that we are completely wrong.
That is one layer of which there is a tension in life which is inevitable and natural and why I focus so heavily on being able to process ambivalence from an emotional state.
However, there is another standard which cannot be overturned, and which we can always and forever rest our houses on rock, not on sand, right?
Our mental houses, we can build them on something absolutely firm and solid.
Which is to say, yes, it's true that all of my beliefs can be overturned through reason and evidence, if reason and evidence contradict my beliefs.
However, however...
I will accept no other standard for the overturning of my beliefs other than reason and evidence.
That's the important distinction, which most people miss, right?
Because you throw both the evidence and the law into the same category and say everything is subject to be overturned.
But it's true that every conclusion can be overturned.
A conclusion like the world is round, the sun and the moon are the same size, gases do not expand when heated and so on.
It is true that every conclusion can be overturned, but it is not true, it is never true and never will be true, that they can be overturned by any methodology other than reason and evidence.
Do you see the difference?
Every conclusion can be overturned.
But it can only be overturned through reason and evidence.
There's no way that reason and evidence can be overturned as a methodology for figuring out what is true.
Because the only thing that reason and evidence can be overturned by is mere opinion.
But mere opinion cannot overturn reason and evidence because reason and evidence is how we distinguish an opinion from a fact.
Reason and evidence is how we distinguish an opinion from a fact.
And so you can't use opinions to overturn reason and evidence because that's how you know that they're opinions in the first place because reason and evidence contradicts them as universals.
I hope that makes some sense.
It's clear to me. Let me know if it's not clear to you.
If I have an opinion that Chinese waterboarding devils live in bowls of onion soup, Then that is, and I say that's a fact and reason and evidence contradict it.
They're in fact Japanese. Then my opinion is proven to be false and therefore should be discarded.
If I say I like ice cream, then, you know, that's not a universal because I'm talking about a personal preference.
And you could apply reason and evidence to say, well, he never eats ice cream, though he likes it.
Well, maybe I'm lactose intolerant.
You can kind of go down that road.
But I'm not making a universal statement.
Such as, ice cream contains dairy products, which is a universal absolute.
That can be tested empirically and so on.
So, we can never overturn the methodology of philosophy and science because the only thing which could replace it is mere opinion and rank assertion.
But we only know that those things are opinions and rank assertion because we've already applied the methodology of science, of reason and evidence.
So, humility, first and foremost, is...
The simple statement of limitation in one's cognitive abilities.
And it takes a certain amount of emotional, mental, and intellectual maturity.
And I put the emphasis on the emotional maturity.
It takes a certain amount of emotional maturity.
To say, I am inevitably and enormously capable of error.
Therefore, I need an external objective methodology for knowing when I'm wrong and correcting myself.
Like a GPS, right?
I mean, there's not many people who argue with a GPS. There will be a few.
Especially, you know, when your house is in sight and it's straight ahead and the GPS says turn left.
Right? We know that that GPS is wrong because boom, boom, boom, right?
Or if we ignore the GPS and just drive, do the opposite of what it says and never arrive at our destination, we have some idea that the GPS is correct.
But we're capable of making mistakes.
And so we need a third standard.
We need an objective external standard for helping us separate truth from falsehood.
And it requires a great deal of humility To subject ourselves and our beliefs and our most cherished errors, which is really what culture is, our most cherished errors, to subject those to reason and evidence.
It's really challenging and fundamentally humbling and humiliating.
It can be humiliating at times to just realize how completely wrong we've been for many years.
And it does, of course, cause problems in our relationships, as I've always said from the very beginning of the show, even from before the show, from the articles I wrote at freedomang.blogspot.com.
Because when philosophy reveals to us the lies that we have in our head, it also will inevitably lead us towards those...
Who told us those lies, right?
So if we believe in Zoroastrianism as a religion, then we, through philosophy, we realize that it's a false religion, false doctrine, false religion, but I repeat myself.
It's a false doctrine. And that leads us to those who told us that it was true.
And then we bring those philosophical principles, reason and evidence, the Socratic method of questioning, to those who told us these things which we now know are lies.
And how will they fare?
When confronted with the requirement for humility in the pursuit of truth, how do those around us fare when we confront them with the requirement for humility in the pursuit of truth?
And I'll talk a little bit more about this tomorrow, but I really wanted to get this across that philosophy is profoundly humbling.
And that doesn't mean you can't ever assert anything because the methodology is always and forever true.
But the conclusions Whip around like seaweed in a strong and turbulent current.
And that is the part that is really challenging.
And that is the part where you hang on and ride the white water rapids of your own flush thinking.
So I just wanted to really, really talk about the virtue of humility and the subjection of our opinions and thoughts to objective reason and evidence.
That is a humbling but profoundly liberating experience because when we hold that as a standard, not only do our own thoughts, like salmon in a strong current, begin to align With reality, with the truth, but we gain immunity from the manipulators.
We gain immunity from the emotional or physical aggressors who would have us conform our thoughts to their prejudices because it's no longer personal.
It's not about me rejecting your opinions.
It's about, if you want me to believe something, show me the proof.
Show me your reasoning. And if you can't, I'm not going to accept What you say.
It's no longer personal.
It is a human shield against the corrupt, the manipulative, the aggressive, because it subjects them to the same standard that you subject yourself to, which keeps them at a very, very far distance from you.
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