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Jan. 1, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:24
1547 The Philosophy of Truth and Beauty

Some thoughts on the philosophical relationships between truth and beauty.

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Truth and beauty.
A very interesting topic that has been floating around for quite some time in my brain and on the message boards.
So here are my thoughts, such as they are.
Well, true, we know.
Truth, we know. Truth is that which conforms to reason and evidence, and where reason and evidence is lacking to a reasonable standard of integrity that has been proven in prior associations, right?
So, you know, people call me up and say I had a dream about gargoyles ripping me out through a tree, and then gargoyles eating my family.
You know, I had this dream 30 years ago.
I have no way of knowing whether this actually occurred or not, but I'm going to treat it as if it's true, though.
There is, in fact, no evidence for it.
So... It could all be an elaborate lie and hoax, but my guess would be that if somebody tried to tell me a dream that they made up, there would either be some elements that would be valued because they made them up, or the dream simply would not have the kind of power and aha moments that you can sort of hear in a good dream interpretation.
So, reason and evidence, or at least no particular reason to lie, and a history of plain dealing.
So, you all can't prove, and I guess, who would care, right?
Did I actually go to boarding school when I was six or seven or whatever?
I guess you could go and look it up, but why would I lie?
And I think that's a reasonable history of me telling the truth in this conversation.
So, truth is something that we've kind of got down philosophically.
Beauty is, of course, a fascinating phenomenon.
Culturally specific, yet there are commonalities and can be applied based on particular prejudice to describe the same thing as both the most beautiful and the ugliest thing in the world.
So, a marine biologist with a fetish for sharks might consider the great white the most beautiful inhabitant of God's green earth, whereas Richard Dreyfus may not.
So, somebody being attacked by a shark, a great white shark, may consider it the ugliest and nastiest thing in the universe.
So, the same words can be applied, or opposite words can be applied to the same thing in terms of beauty and terror.
But there are some things which most people would consider beautiful according to a particular interpretation.
So, you may look at a sunset and say, that's a beautiful sunset, and most people in looking at a lurid sunset would say, that's beautiful.
But then, if being told that this sunset was only the result of vitriolic and acidic pollution in the air, might feel that they were looking at perhaps a glowing shroud over the grave of Mother Earth rather than a beautiful happenstance sunset.
You may look at a cloud and say, what a beautiful cloud, and somebody says to you, no, no, this cloud is carrying asbestos from a plant explosion.
Then you would not be absorbed by its beauty, but instead would run inside and, I don't know, breathe through a terracloth or something.
So, there are, I think, some commonalities to the question of beauty, though, that I think are worth mentioning.
First of all, beauty cannot equate with destruction.
So, you think of, I don't know, a succubi, or a female vampire, say it.
Ah, the cliché is, ah, this woman, this undead monstrosity, she had a terrible beauty to her.
You know, beautiful, and then it's, ah, it eats you like a black widow spider or something.
And the beauty would be physical, but there's no way that somebody being eaten by a succubi would say, that's a beautiful experience being chewed alive or whatever.
So, a terrible beauty is, the beauty is the lure and the terrible, like the anglerfish floating above the Titanic with the Duracell over its forehead.
There is beauty in the light and then terror in the being eaten, but the two are not the same, right?
The beauty is the lure, the terror is the being eaten.
And so beauty is something that is not synonymous with or cannot coincide with horror or terror or agony or pain or whatever, right?
Now, that having been said, there are some people who would be a masochist who would say that pain is beautiful, like I feel resplendent and transcendent and so on, but it's not the pain that's beautiful.
I think even the masochist would say that, right?
The pain is not beautiful, but the endorphins of the pain...
Releases is beautiful, right?
Whatever brain chemistry is being patched up by exposure to personal agony, it's not the pain themselves, right?
So, if you got a masochist and you caused them pain and could somehow block the endorphins or whatever was being released that was giving them relief, then they would just say, well, that's pain that sucks.
And so, again, we have this sort of separation.
And so, if something can't be composed of something, Then it must have something to do with its opposite.
It sounds like a mental trick, but it's actually quite useful.
I mean, if I hate to be away from someone, then I must find value in being with them.
I mean, there must be something that's the opposite, that's the truth about the relationship.
You can, you know, look at a thing according to its outlines to begin with.
So, if beauty cannot be, or cannot exist, concomitant with pain or horror or destruction, then it must be composed of the opposite of these things, since in their presence it cannot exist.
And, of course, the opposite of pain is pleasure or happiness.
The opposite of horror is wonder or love.
The opposite of destruction is creation and so on.
So, beauty would have to do with, in my opinion, these things which cause pleasure and creative and life-affirming and so on.
The puppy's not the dead carp on the sidewalk.
And there are other things that beauty, I think, must be associated with.
To some degree, it has to be rarity.
And that doesn't mean rarity of experience.
It means rarity of occurrence.
So, if there was a perpetual rainbow in the sky, we would not look at that and go, oh my gosh, how beautiful.
Let's stop traffic to have a look.
Let's take the camera out and take a photo or whatever, right?
We wouldn't really do that. It would be because rainbows are unusual.
Now, people that I love, I, you know, my wife, I love her every day and I love spending time with her every day.
So it's not that she is a rare occurrence in my life, but she's a rare occurrence in the world in that there's nobody else that I want to spend time with that much and love that much and I'm attracted to that much.
So she's rare among people, but she's not rare in my life.
But that doesn't mean that she's less beautiful there by.
She's still rare, but just not Not in my life, but it's her uniqueness and the surprise of her, who she is, that helps me experience this ever-growing love.
My daughter is not rare in my life.
She's there every day, but she's my only daughter and she's the only child that I have a genetic link with in this way and who I've been present with since day one.
She's rare among children to me, but she's not rare in my life.
I think that's an important distinction to remember.
I think that it's also something that has to be somewhat hard to reproduce.
So not only is there a rarity, but there's a scarcity of reproduction.
I think that's important as well.
So if you could snap your fingers and you had a clapper attached to a little digital picture photo frame, you could snap your fingers or clap your hands and a beautiful picture would come up, then you would say, well, that's easy to reproduce, so I'm not going to stare at it and go, oh gosh, whatever, right?
But an eclipse, of course, is hard to reproduce.
You kind of have to wait for the moon and the earth and the sun to align in the right way.
And therefore, we flock to go and see it.
So that which we can will and reproduce at any time, we tend not to find as beautiful.
I mean, if you have the same picture on your desktop background every day, I mean, you may look at it and say, well, yeah, that's beautiful if you focus on it, but it's not something that you go, ooh, gosh, whereas the first time you saw that picture, I guess because you put it on your desktop, you found it beautiful or whatever.
So there has to be something to do with the difficulty of reproduction that helps you focus on the beauty, whereas if you could control it and want to do it whenever you want it, Then you find a particular singer or band beautiful, the music is beautiful, you can't summon them, I guess, to play live in your living room whenever you want, so you go to a concert and it's hard to reproduce and, of course, it's rare because they don't tour in your town every day and so on.
So, I think those are aspects that have to do with beauty that I find important and useful when thinking about the term, which is an important term to think about, in my opinion.
Now, there also seem to be two fundamental types of beauty.
And those are the contemplative beauties and the active beauties.
And what I mean by this is the contemplative beauty is that which we enjoy and appreciate and may wish to share with others around us, but which does not drive us into sustained action.
So, for instance, looking at a sunset, I am receiving beauty.
I am not creating beauty.
I am receiving beauty.
The beauty that is there in the world.
I remember when I was about 19, when I was walking up north, I saw the Northern Lights.
And I saw them quite a bit, but the first time I saw them, these dappled ripples of giant neon curtains floating down from the sky with the stars peeking through.
Stunningly beautiful. But I was not creating any beauty there.
I was merely receiving the beauty that was in the world.
And I said to a friend of mine, look at that, that's beautiful.
And I shared the beauty, but it was contemplative beauty.
It was receiving beauty, not creating beauty.
And there was no plan, no proactive plan that came out of the beauty that I was experiencing.
Now, think of that versus something like, I paint a beautiful painting.
Well, that is not contemplative beauty.
That is not me receiving beauty in the passive sense from the world around me.
That is me actually and actively creating beauty.
And this kind of beauty is quite different because it is a project.
It is beauty the project, not beauty the experience.
And that's very different.
So, when I create a beautiful play or painting or novel, then I'm not just going to...
I mean, I may just say to a friend of mine, hey, this is beautiful, you should read it, but there is a goal to reproduce it out into the world.
In a way that there's not, if I'm merely receiving it.
Now, I could take a film, you understand, this is not black and white.
I could take a film of the Northern Lights and share them and so on, but it's not the active kind of beauty.
Now, philosophy falls into the category of active beauty.
It is something that we do not passively receive, but rather that which we identify and create.
And so, to me, the inclusion of philosophy in the contemplative sciences or the contemplative disciplines that you sort of sit back and contemplate in the Platonic or Confucian or Buddhistic sense You simply contemplate the beauty of the world of truth.
That's not what philosophy is to me.
Philosophy is not that way at all.
Philosophy to me is more like engineering.
Engineering is not contemplative.
You don't sit there and contemplate how nice it would be if there were a bridge across this gorge, right?
You say, I'd like a bridge across this gorge, and you go and make a bridge across the gorge.
So engineering falls into the category of practical or applied beauty.
Or disciplines, hard to say necessarily, that engineering falls into the category of beauty, although a bridge can be beautiful, but it is not contemplative.
It is not that which we receive.
That which comes from nature, that which is spontaneously created outside of ourselves, like an eclipse or a sunset or a butterfly or a cloud.
We can contemplate and we really can't reproduce it because we didn't produce it in the first place.
Whereas something that we create, like a truth, like my arguments for anarchy or against rights or against God or whatever, that which we create, we can recreate in others because it is something that is created and thus can be more easily reproduced through argumentation, through reproduction. I create a painting, I can photocopy the painting, I can copy the painting and send it around.
The same is true of a photograph of a picture, but we tend to value paintings more than photographs, in general, because they're created and not merely reproduced.
Now, why is this distinction important?
Well, it's important because we will often mistake the two.
So, I'll give you an example.
So, a dream that you dream at night is contemplative, it's received beauty, if it's a beautiful dream, whatever.
But the work that you do to understand the dream is active, right?
So you can tell somebody about the dream or whatever, but it's sort of pointless unless you infuse that with some sort of meaning that is larger than just yourself.
And that comes through dream analysis.
Obviously, a bunch of podcasts where people talked about their dreams and then we hung up.
Recounted their dreams and then that was it.
Would not be of interest to anyone, really.
But where there is a transfer from contemplative to active beauty, from the mere receiving, in a passive sense, of stimuli, whether it's external in the realm of a sunset or internal in the realm of a dream, to an insight, to bring conscious rationality and empiricism and curiosity and emotionality To bear on something which is passively experienced, that is something that is, to me, more beautiful.
In the way a painting is more beautiful than a sunset, in many ways, because it is something that is created, not something that is active beauty, it is not passive beauty.
A philosophical argument that is powerful and valuable and good and true is more valuable Than some accidental aspect of humanity, you know, interesting set of parked cars or something that's not planned or is sort of accidental.
It's more beautiful because it's conscious and created.
I would say that a philosophical argument is more beautiful than a sunset because it has conscious purpose and virtue.
The sunset has no virtue. A painting contains more morality than a photograph, because everything in a painting is chosen, whereas in a photograph only the subject is chosen.
Whereas if you paint a junkyard, assuming you're not just painting straight from life, which is sort of like a bad photograph, then everything that is chosen, you know, the topic and every bit in the painting is chosen, whereas...
In a photograph, only the subject's chosen.
You can't sort of say, well, I want this piece of garbage over there.
You just take a picture of whatever's there.
So, where there's more choice, there's more virtue.
We understand this in a person.
If the person is incapable of exercising choice, then they cannot create virtue.
Man in a coma, man insane, and so on.
Where there's more choice, there's more virtue.
And virtue is more beautiful than non-virtue, right?
Virtue is better and worth more than non-virtue.
And a sunset is not virtuous.
Or, I mean, it's beautiful, but it's not virtuous.
Whereas a philosophical argument...
Or a courageous action or a virtuous habit.
That is something that has choice, is consciously willed and created and understood, and therefore has more beauty than that which is found in nature accidentally.
And Sam, when I say more beauty, I certainly don't mean that nature is not beautiful.
Nature is beautiful and wonderful, but nature does not have the beauty of virtue.
At the same time, the works of man can be far uglier and almost always are, if they are negative, than the works of nature.
So there's no spectacle in nature as ugly as a man-made rubbish dump or a dead and polluted lake or something that human beings have done that has caused widespread death and destruction.
It's more ugly than I don't know, some place in nature that's ugly, that's natural.
And so, where there's greater virtue, there is also greater ugliness, where nature has been despoiled.
And again, this is all related to public lands and something.
It's not really the case as much with private lands, but that human beings have the capacity, because virtue is more beautiful than that which is accidental, human beings have the capacity to create more beauty and more ugliness in the world than nature ever can.
However unpleasant it is to see a shark eat a seal, that's still less ugly than watching a man beat a child to death, right?
I mean, we understand that there's no immorality in a shark eating a squid or a seal, but there is, of course, great immorality in a man who's not insane beating a child to death.
And because of that, the relationship between beauty and truth enhances beauty, where conscious intent and willingness is present.
And truth also can create enormous ugliness, right?
The truth of a man beating a child to death or whatever.
So, the relationship between the two is you can have something true and not beautiful, right?
That is a man beating a child to death.
If it's true, it's certainly not beautiful.
You have cancer. If it's true, it's certainly not beautiful.
Or it can be neutral.
You're wearing a hat.
It's true. Is it beautiful or not?
Well, not really. In and of itself, it has no particular content of virtue or beauty.
So, you have the basic virtue if the man is wearing a hat of honesty, or if the man's not wearing a hat, dishonesty, but Fundamentally, it has no particular moral content.
So, something can be true without being beautiful, and something can be beautiful without being true.
A sunset, for instance, or a butterfly.
Is a butterfly true or false?
Well, the statement is kind of meaningless, but butterflies are beautiful.
Rainbows are beautiful. Are they true or false?
Well, there's no moral content to that which is not conscious.
So, it is or it isn't, but there's no virtue in it.
But where truth and virtue coincide, so where man makes a philosophically true statement, I think?
And so, the beauty in the mind that is derived from true principles then becomes beauty in the world when combined with consistent and virtuous action.
Not perfect action. I mean, there's no such thing.
But consistently virtuous action.
Good enough. Good actions.
Now, virtue cannot be achieved without truth, right?
So, truth is a necessary but not sufficient condition or prerequisite for virtue.
Beauty can exist without virtue.
But the interesting question is, you know, I mean, do animals, like a dog looks at a sunset, does the dog experience feelings of beauty?
Well, I don't know. It's tough to say.
A dog with an affection who has a great love or an affection for his master is overjoyed when the master comes home or the owner comes home or whatever you want to call him, the dog wrangler.
And we would assume that that level of joy has something to do with an experience of delight and beauty and so on.
It's hard to sort of say, of course, what's really going on in a dog's mind.
But we can certainly understand that pleasure in witnessing alone is not enough to establish a criteria for beauty.
So a sadist enjoys watching people be tortured, and so he experiences pleasure in watching other people be tortured.
We would not say that watching someone be tortured or that someone being tortured is a beautiful thing.
So you can experience the pleasure in Seeing something or experiencing something that gives you delight without that thing being virtuous or even your delight being virtuous.
I mean obviously a person being tortured is not virtuous and the person who enjoys watching the person be tortured is not acting in a beautiful manner or a wise manner or we could even say a virtuous manner in that they're supporting this activity even through watching it.
So the standard really for true beauty has to be virtue, right?
So we know that there are sort of twisted and ugly and broken people who are into twisted, ugly, and broken, screechy, discordant, angry, screaming music.
They are attracted to this stuff, you know, in the way that somebody who's been abused may be attracted to Drugs or alcohol or tattoos or piercings or whatever.
But I would not necessarily say that that's virtuous.
I would say that that's a tragic scar tissue of history.
So it's not enough to say, well, somebody finds it pleasing and is attracted to it and so on for that thing to be beautiful.
There is a more objective standard to beauty.
And hopefully we can talk about that a little bit more if you are all interested in this topic.
It's a bit of a departure from some of the stuff we've been doing lately, but it's been a great topic that's been floating around.
For, what, six to eight months, I think.
And I did want to share some thoughts about it, but I'll wait and see if this is something that is of interest to people before we go on with it.
So, thank you so much for listening and supporting the conversation as always.
All the best. Yo, Truth and Beauty Part 2.
So, the question I always ask myself is, why would we have this capacity at all?
Why would we have this capacity to appreciate natural or world beauty at all?
I mean, I don't take it for granted in any way, shape, or form.
That's the beautiful thing about evolution, which is there must be some reason, some way in which it serves the survival of the species, so why on earth would we have even developed this capacity?
Or, to put it another way, why is it that those who took pleasure in the beauty of a sunset survived more Thank you.
it's such a universal phenomenon, there must have been some survival advantage.
It could have easily gone, given that the universe is nihilistic, it could have easily gone the other way, that we feel horror, shame, regret, and bemused resignation at the sight of a sunset.
But that's not what happens, is that natural beauty does bring a positive feeling out in people, and why would we even have that capacity?
It doesn't make any particular sense objectively, but it must do something to serve the world, to serve the universe.
Sorry, to serve the survival of the species, not to serve the universe.
Well, I don't know. I mean, this is, of course, way deep in the interstellar depths of rank speculation, but a possibility could be something like this.
Well, Pleasure itself has a survivalist aspect to it.
And we can clearly see that those who did not take pleasure in living would have been less proactive in saving themselves.
They would have succumbed to despair.
They would not have had a proactive life drive, but rather a reactive life drive, which is not nearly as powerful.
And the reactive life drive is...
I'm not going to go and find food because I enjoy the taste of honey on wafer, but instead I'm going to go and look for food because I'm hungry.
A proactive life force, a planning life force, is nearly infinitely superior to a reactive life force, a reactive life drive.
A proactive life drive is the one that figures out, man, I better not eat everything now because I'm going to really need food to get me through the winter, right?
Whereas the nihilist will say, well, I'm hungry now, so I'm going to eat now and then starve to death later.
So the deferral of gratification requires the conceptualization of pleasure and pain, right?
So if you only work in the dogs don't plan for later, I guess squirrels do, but if you only Plan for now, or if you're only reactive, then you're barely above, and you're not even above some animals in terms of your survivability.
So, in order for human beings to optimally survive, we must have some capacity to conceptualize pleasure and pain and project it into the future.
So, we have to abstract the principle of pleasure, and that way we can pass it through into the future and say, well, I might be kind of peckish now, But if I eat this food, I'm going to be really starving come February and I might die.
So that sort of fear of the future and the desire for the pleasure of the future and avoiding the pain of the future is what gives human beings the capacity to plan, to organize.
And because of that, we survive so much better, or those who do survive so much better.
And so, the conceptualization of pleasure and pain, which is required to project it into the future, has to be done beforehand.
It has to be done beforehand, because come February, when you're starving to death, it's a little too late, right?
So, it has to be ahead of the disaster.
And I think that finding pleasure in the everyday is practice for anticipation and the deferral of gratification.
It is practice for the anticipation of pain and pleasure, right?
So, I don't like going to the dentist.
I mean, who does, right? But I don't like going to the dentist.
So, for a day or two before, I'm like, ooh, what if there's a problem?
And so, I am anticipating these negative consequences, and it is the anticipation of these negative consequences that keeps me brushing and flossing and using antiseptic mouthwash and all that kind of stuff, right?
And so, if you are somebody who likes a pretty sunset, then, you know, at the end of the day or for the afternoon, you're looking forward to a nice sunset.
And you're sort of practicing the projection of pleasure into the future.
In the same way that if you are on a long walk or on a long hunter-gathering section and you see storm clouds gathering, you are in the future.
You begin to say, oh man, that's going to be a bummer.
Because... I am going to get rained on or hailed on or something like that.
So I think that our appreciation of beauty, which is combined with our dread of negative consequences, is practice.
It tunes the brain to remember that we should anticipate and plan for, in a sense, positive consequences and avoid negative consequences or negative events.
And so the reason is, well, why would we have both?
Why would we have both natural beauty and, like, why would we have received beauty and why would we have willed beauty?
Why would we have these two, right?
The things that just happen in nature versus the things that we can plan.
Because it's important to differentiate these two.
So, if you're looking forward to a pretty sunset, And clouds begin to gather.
You don't say, oh man, I'm so stupid.
I shouldn't have, you know, done X. I mean, I guess you could think that if you're sort of superstitious.
But fundamentally, there is a distinction in the brain and it's practiced through these two kinds of beauty.
There's a distinction between the positive things that happen that we have some control over and the positive things that happen that we have no control over.
And we need to be trained in the distinction between the two because it's not the kind of mental habit that can help us after the fact.
Like if we've already eaten our winter stores and it's February and we're starving to death, you know, we will get those negative consequences, but we need to be trained ahead of time to avoid those situations.
And I think that those who took pleasure in natural events, you know, sunsets or sunrises or whatever, rainbows, were practicing their positive anticipations of things and also reminding themselves that It is something that they don't have any control over, fundamentally. I mean, I know that there's lots of superstition that was invented for all of that, but that superstition was fundamentally different than actually storing stuff up for the winter, right?
It was fundamentally different.
There was no ritual to summon food in February, if there wasn't any, because there was no food and everyone kind of got that.
But there were rituals for good crops, which is all around anxiety management and so on.
But when things were impossible, like there was no rituals to regrow A limb that had been cut off, right?
Because everybody got kind of that that was impossible and it was important that they got there.
But I would say that most fundamentally the beauty that we're trained for and the beauty that is most advantageous from a biological standpoint is that And this is the male perspective, typically.
We buy beauty with the resources.
I mean, this is the fundamental. And it's throughout the nature.
It's throughout the natural world.
But the optimization of genetics, of reproduction, is around the evenness, right?
So, the...
Female beauty is around the evenness.
It's around the quality of the genetics.
And the quality of the genetics has to do with the evenness of the features and the wideness of the hips and the ability to maintain full breasts, which indicates correct processing of nutrition and access to nutrition.
And so, the male appreciation of female sexual beauty is foundational to the development of civilization, right?
Men, and we can't help ourselves, we are inexorably drawn towards the most beautiful woman, physically beautiful woman, and in order to win her affections, we accumulate resources, and we display those resources.
That's why you don't see ugly women on a Playboy's yacht.
I mean, it's a clear trade of Cash for beauty, as the song says, your dad is rich and your mama's good looking.
And that's what he buys with his wealth.
He buys physical beauty.
So an appreciation of physical beauty, which has to do with evenness and vitality and health and so on, and that which is good for nesting your fetuses, that is very, very fundamental to human beings.
And the currency of resources and female beauty is very clear.
It's very clear, and of course, it's been massively exploited to the point of pathology in modern culture.
I mean, we have...
Normally, physical female beauty would be a rarity, particularly in the Stone Age or the Middle Ages or whatever, right?
Look, she still has a tooth. And we would very rarely see it, and it would be something that we would aspire towards.
And, you know, the nerd who loves the cheerleader is a common staple of films for good reason, which is that the reason that the nerd works out or becomes cool or gets a job or, you know, gets resources or whatever...
Is in order to secure the interest, at least, of the attractive female.
Carlo Ponte, I think, was the name of the movie producer who bagged Sophia Loren.
And, I mean, the guy looked like a troll.
Look at Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Onassis.
I mean, the man looked like a creepy uncle.
But he is fabulously wealthy and therefore bags the attractive female.
That's a little less common now because of women's emancipation from dependence upon the man, male beauty has now become much more important.
And that's why you see all this nonsense like six-pack abs and chiseled features and bed head and all that kind of stuff where men have to become the show mates in order to attract female attention because women don't need men to survive, which is all as it should be and is good.
So as women have gained financial independence, male beauty has become a currency and And, I mean, it's always been there, but because these sort of pubescent girls and their boy-crazy and sighing over Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp and the Jonas triplets or whatever, they go through this dreamy phase.
but, uh, adult women generally make more, used to make more practical choices when it came to people who could, uh, men who could secure their wellbeing while they were pregnant.
Because of course the length of pregnancy and combined with the fact that for the first 10 or 11 months, or at least nine months out of the womb, you basically have a fetus outside the womb to help this baby.
It's only born early so that it can pass through its mother's, uh, vagina.
But, uh, So the degree of helplessness and dependence, particularly when childbearing was a pretty continual enslavement of the woman's loins, meant that women couldn't go for the pretty boy.
And there is, of course, an infinite number of stories about women going for the pretty boy at the expense of their virtue and their practicality and so on.
And in the fairy tales, I mean, it's always a prince, right?
And the prince is, I mean, yeah, he's usually considered fairly pretty, but it's usually depicted as fairly pretty, but the prince is the man who has the resources to take care of the woman while she is constantly baby-making and breastfeeding.
And baby making and breastfeeding item for item.
And so the appreciation of beauty, which the sort of lust for beauty that men have, to use, you know, the stereotypical historical example, the lust for beauty that men have is foundational to the acquisition of excess resources.
And you have to have excess resources in order to have children.
It's not like they earned their keep for quite some time.
And civilization is fundamentally the acquisition or creation of excess resources, because you can't have reading and writing and books and music and art and theater and painting and all.
You can't have that without excess resources, because they consume without producing, in a very different way than...
Farming, you work and you get food, right?
Hunting, you hunt and you get food, but painting, you paint and you get what?
Well, people have to have excess resources, so it is the pursuit of beauty which generates the drive for excess resources, for efficiency, for profit, so to speak.
And with that profit, we buy beauty, and beauty comes first and foremost biologically in the form of attractive females, and then, in a pretty significant way, Beauty comes in the form of the paintings and art and sculpture and music and all those kinds of wonderful and beautiful things.
And painting and art and sculpture and music are the male attempts to create beauty to attract the female, because the majority of artists throughout history were men, and the creation of art indicates, you know, good hand-eye coordination, a good visual eye, a skill, patience, and also to be a good artist is to have deferred Gratification, because it takes 10,000 hours to become good at anything.
So art is an example of the capacity to delay gratification.
Art is also an indication of a resilient personality, because art involves a huge amount of rejection, and so it is indicative of a A resilient personality with the capacity to defer gratification, with good hand-eye coordination, with a good visual cortex, and all these kinds of things. So, basically, what I'm saying is that art is man's boobs.
Right? Art is men's lustrous hair and butts.
And that's, you know, to me, as it should be.
The man is looking for A good genetic receptacle for his sperm, and the woman is looking for a man with particular characteristics, which art has in spades, which is why women scream at the Beatles, and why girls swoon over successful and famous artists, particularly, of course, if they're pretty, because it indicates confidence, an ability to overcome criticism, patience, resilience, and all the other genetic markers that mean that that is an alpha male with a good seed.
And so that's why you have The pursuit of beauty and the drive for beauty in men's life.
It is an amazing ritual.
It's an amazing aspect. And singing, of course, is one of those things as well.
It indicates good breath control, deep lungs, and the ability to memorize music and songs and lyrics, and pitch, right?
Good pitch, which indicates high brain functioning, and all these kinds of things, which And again, it's a kind of self-confidence, right?
Art is a form of a pacified battle, right?
I mean, in that you have to display great courage to become a famous artist or a good artist.
It doesn't mean that if you have courage, you will, but those who have, have courage.
And so it's a way of proving oneself in battle.
And I would say to some degree that that's true of those who oppose the social mores of the day.
They can be very attractive, the bad boys, right?
Or the good boys who are going against the bad boys of culture as a whole.
And so, art, the pursuit of beauty, is fundamentally, even in the realm of art, the pursuit of women, but it is a way for a man who is not necessarily handsome, and of course, a woman has always been trained to not go just for looks, because...
Men who are handsome are likely to be fickle and do not delay gratification that well, and so a woman has been strongly urged throughout history to make the sensible choice and not give in to the base lust of appearance, whereas with men that's not really so much the case because, of course, men don't need the excess resources Because they need to provide the excess resources in order for women, for their offspring to survive.
So the pursuit of beauty is a genetic demand and requirement, and that to me does not mean that it's any less beautiful and good, any less powerful.
Rock singers get groupies, right?
Because they are displaying Highly powerful and potent and positive genetic markers.
Not, you know, in the harem kind of way, right?
There's two kinds of ways that human beings fundamentally reproduce.
One is in a sort of functional, healthy, peaceful society, you pick a mate of virtue and invest everything into your kids because you have some control of your environment and can ensure that they survive.
In a dysfunctional, destructive, or abusive environment as a whole, not just a family, but environment as a whole, Promiscuity is the way to go because you don't have much control over your environment.
You just need to scatter your seed as widely as possible and hope for the best.
And that's why promiscuity is associated with high adverse childhood experiences because adverse childhood experiences are training you to reproduce in a chaotic, destructive, and abusive environment, which fundamentally nature doesn't care about.
The toenail just wants to make another toenail using you as the vehicle.
So I hope that this at least gives you some things to think about in terms of beauty.
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