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Jan. 3, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:28
1551 Why We Are Different
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Hey everybody, hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
Early January, let's say, 2-0-10.
And share some thoughts.
I had a question on the Sunday show today that was a good, fine question, as most of them are.
Which was, why are we different?
Why are we different? Why do we like philosophy so much?
Why are we willing to take those hits?
Why are we willing to live with that integrity?
Or, you know, as we all do, or at least as I certainly do, strive to live with that integrity.
And it's a great, great question.
And the answer awaits a better science than certainly I and I think the world at the moment can produce.
But I will share some of my thoughts about the necessary but perhaps not sufficient characteristics required for the possibility of a philosophical life.
The first thing that I've noticed, and this is not true of everybody in this conversation, but it is true, I think, of those who are most successful in this conversation, we've focused a lot on the effects of child abuse on the victim and the physical characteristics that accrue to those who have received or been the victims of child abuse.
And I think that's fascinating and I think it's very, very important for us.
And I think that it is equally, if not perhaps more important, To recognize that the perpetration of abuse upon a smaller, weaker, in the case of children, helpless, independent human being, the perpetration of abuse, I believe, produces physiological characteristic changes that We'll end up being equal to, if not actually greater, than being the victim of such abuse.
And I also think, just by the by, that there will come a time in a free society where child abuse will be very, very rare.
Otherwise, there will be no such thing as a free society.
But child abuse will be very, very rare.
And where it does occur, it will be simply brain scans.
Right. And the brain scan of the child will show the effects of abuse, and I believe that the brain scan of the parent or the primary abuser, whoever that is, will show the effects of being an abuser.
Being an abuser causes aversions to ethics along with the desire to manipulate ethics.
It creates splits within the personality.
It creates the externalization of control.
My child, I did it because my child is bad.
My child made me do it or whatever, right?
It creates endless self-justifications that create great hostility towards any empathetic or probing questions.
And so I believe that the perpetration of abuse creates brain changes as significant if not more significant than being the receiver or the victim of child abuse.
Even if we don't accept that that's true, we can understand that the personality of an abuser is very different than the personality of the victim, as long as the victim does not, of course, succumb to temptation and become an abuser.
So the one thing that I have noticed that is centrally characteristic of those who are participating in this conversation, and particularly those who continue, who don't hit a plateau and just kind of stop and circle slowly, is that they have not harmed others.
They have not harmed others, despite very often Having the provocation of enormous and intense abuse heaped upon themselves, they did not turn around and become bullies or harm others.
This is, to some degree, though not limited to birth order.
In other words, if you are the smallest and the youngest, you're really going to have a tough time putting the hurt on others.
Although, of course, you could do it in the playground.
You could do it at school. There are always going to be kids who are younger than you that you can pick on and bully and take their lunch money and so on.
But the people who are drawn to this conversation and succeed at it the most are those who have not harmed children, obviously as children themselves, and not as adults.
In fact, they seem to be kindly disposed towards children.
And I think that's something that's very important.
And look, I mean, if I'm wrong about any of this, you know, email me and tell me now.
These are all just very, very tentative theories.
I mean, I've been thinking about them for many years, but I don't obviously have any kind of conclusive proof.
But we'll see how many of us fit the pattern.
Certainly, that was the case with me.
I never became a bully. I've never hit anyone.
I've rarely raised my voice at anyone.
I don't think I've ever called anyone names.
I just did not become a bully.
I did not take out the abuse that I was receiving on others.
And what that means is that I can, you know, pick up the sword of ethics without decapitating myself.
Why is it that people become so hostile towards ethics?
Well, clearly, it must be because ethics damns them, right?
And they can't handle that, right?
So, I think that those who have not victimized others, I don't think you have to have been victimized, but certainly if you've not victimized others, you do better in the realm of philosophy because ethics is not something that strikes at you like a hissing, bevenomed cobra, but something that I think helps.
Certainly, it takes a hell of a lot of moral strength or psychological strength, whatever you want to call it.
It takes a lot of strength to pursue a topic which causes you great pain.
It's like do-it-yourself dental surgery with a hand grenade.
Sort of what it's like if you're a bad person picking up philosophy.
And we certainly understand that one of the fundamental characteristics of bad people is that they cannot defer gratification, right?
They lash out, they abuse to discharge negative feelings in the moment, and they simply can't defer gratification.
In other words, defer abuse, treat people better, become a happier person thereby.
They must, it seems, or they end up Because they can't defer gratification, they end up lashing out and causing others pain to momentarily feel better themselves, and then they take the defense of, you're a bad person, and I'm a good person, and you made me do this, and I'm just for your own good.
All these justifications, because they can't handle self-criticism, You could say they don't really have a self, all smashed up and broken.
So because they can't handle self-criticism, they have to externalize and lash out, and they can't defer gratification.
The deferral of gratification is an act of self-esteem, you understand, right?
The deferral of gratification is saying, I'm worth feeling better in the future, right?
It's worth it. I'll take feeling not so good now in order to feel better in the future.
My future self is worth.
Something. And so that's what I'm going to focus on.
To not defer gratification is basically to say that my future self is worth nothing.
It's the equivalent of piling on national debt for the sake of immediate political gratification or the avoidance of political negatives.
We as a society have a problem deferring gratification because we lack value for ourselves in the future.
We exploit. In the same way that a parent who abuses a child lacks any sense of value of that relationship in the future.
Of course, right? So deferral of gratification is fundamental to the development of ethics and it is fundamental to empathy.
And it is foundational to self-esteem.
In other words, you need a little bit of self-esteem to defer the gratification of hurting others.
And that, of course, will get you levering upwards towards better self-esteem.
If you hurt others and then morally justify it and do not change, obviously you have a toxic level of self-hatred.
Rather than any kind of self-esteem.
And why would you want to defer any gratification?
For what? I mean, you're not worth anything anyway to yourself.
In fact, you have negative worth, which is why you have to keep attacking others.
So, I think that it's fairly safe to say that if somebody has a problem with deferring gratification, in other words, if they're an abuser, that person is going to have no capacity to process philosophy.
No capacity to process philosophy.
Because philosophy is all about the deferral of gratification, as I was talking about.
In the Sunday show, 3 January 2009.
1549? 1550?
Something like that. So, if you're a bad person, you can't defer gratification, which means you will forever be enraged by the fruits of philosophy, right?
Because where there is something genuinely that is worth deferring gratification for, and you don't have the ability to do it, you're going to be enraged at that thing for the implicit criticism of who you are.
Implicit, not explicit.
So, you have to have not hurt others.
You have to have not hurt those who are weaker, and you have not to have hurt children.
Let me rephrase that. Not to have hurt others is a misnomer.
Certainly, if we get bad people out of our lives or we get ourselves out of the lives of bad people, they get hurt.
They're hurt and upset and angry and so on.
But you have to have not hurt those who are helpless and dependent and subject to your power.
You have to have not abused Power against those who are helpless and subjected to your power.
And of course, you could say, well, what about your parents are old and dying or whatever, but that's not how the relationship is formed.
The relationship is formed with the power going the other way.
So that's the first thing.
You have to have not hurt others who are dependent and helpless upon you.
Now, one of the reasons we don't hurt others is we have a care for our future self.
So you have to have the capacity to process the value of deferred gratification, to have the capacity for abstracting your choices into the future, right?
In order to protect yourself in the future, right?
You know, like if you're going to go into the jungle where you could get malaria, you're going to take your quinine tablets and you're going to take your bug repellent, right?
Because you don't want the future you to get malaria, so the present you is going to pack the stuff that, right, you understand.
So we have to have a value for our future selves in order to not hurt and harm others in the present and the moment, right?
That's essential.
So, while we may not be able to achieve self-esteem in the moment, we at least have to hold out the hope or the possibility that we will be able to achieve self-esteem in the future or at least lay the foundation for the capacity in the future, the hope that it will be possible at some point in the future, which means that we can see beyond the suffering that we may be experiencing as children, like in the present. We can see beyond it and we can plan for it, right?
So you think some guy goes to Vegas and he knows he's going to die in a week, he's going to blow all his money if he's interested in that.
So he's got no future self to take care of, so he's not going to defer gratification.
But if he only has the mental capacity to work on the next week, then he's going to blow all his money.
But if he has the mental capacity to scan beyond the next week into his future self and to defer gratification for the sake of future gain, I understand all of this, right?
Then he's going to act with restraint and if he knows he has a problem, he's going to stay away from the gaming table altogether and You understand how this all works.
So, that's another capacity we have.
Empathy for our future selves, which is fundamentally the driver for the deferral of gratification in the present.
Empathy for our future selves.
Which means that there is an implicit sense of virtue, right?
So there's an implicit sense of injustice and virtue, right?
In other words, we are being abused.
We do not discharge that abuse against others.
Therefore, we understand that happiness means not abusing, which means that unhappiness is abuse.
Abuse leads to unhappiness.
We don't want to be unhappy. We're not going to discharge it.
We want to be happy, so we're going to do the opposite of that, which is making both us and our abusers unhappy in the present.
And so we get implicitly that abuse is wrong and destructive to happiness, to health, to relationships and all that.
We understand that. Otherwise, there'd be no point.
There'd be no point deferring gratification.
If we thought abuse made us unhappy and we wanted to be unhappy, then we would simply do that abuse.
If we thought that abuse made us happy now but unhappy in the future and we wanted to be unhappy in the future, then we'd just abuse now, which is the fundamental paradigm of abuse.
But the only way that we would end up not abusing if we were abused, if we understood it hurt, had some sort of sense of self-empathy, wanted to be happy in the future and thus would not do the things that made Us and others unhappy in the present.
We would not do the abuse.
We would not do the abuse. So there's an innate sense of happiness and unhappiness, appropriateness, inappropriateness, justice, injustice, self-esteem, self-destruction.
These two paradigms float in our heads, because that's the only way that empirically we would ever end up making the decision to not abuse others, though we had received abuse ourselves.
So that's the third, right?
The first is not to hurt others, which is to defer gratification, and to have an inbuilt sense of what makes us happy, and what makes others happy, and what is a universal standard for happiness, and what makes people unhappy, right?
To hurt others makes others unhappy, so we don't want to do that, and it doesn't mean we'll be happy in the present.
In fact, we may receive some release from hurting others in the present.
I certainly had lots of fantasies of hurting others when I was a kid.
I just didn't follow through on them because I really sensed, it wasn't a reasoned argument, But I just sensed that that way the pit with no bottom lay.
That way the true horror of an evil existence lay.
And I just recoiled from it.
In the same way that I recoiled from shoplifting after a month or two.
I just... I was scared.
And I wasn't scared just of getting caught.
I'd already been caught and just released with nothing more than I don't do it again, right?
So I'd have been caught by the cops and released.
And I just...
I was scared of where that was all going to go.
So, if we have this innate sense of ethics, and I know innate and determinism, and I understand all of that, but let's, you know, just bear with me while we plow through the standards, and then we'll look at the causes, either in this show or another one.
But if we don't hurt others, even if we've been hurt, it's because we sort of sense the reason equals virtue equals happiness thing.
And it's irrational to hurt others, therefore it's bad, it's immoral, and therefore it's going to make us unhappy, and we want to protect ourselves in the future from that unhappiness, and so we don't discharge the poison container aggression in the present.
Now, I don't think that makes us necessarily good.
It certainly keeps us from being bad, and that's good.
Oh, what a convoluted sentence, but you understand my meaning, I think.
But if we have acted on this innate sense of care and empathy for our future selves and lack of willingness to hurt others because of the immorality and injustice and future unhappiness that that results in, then, you see, when we come across a philosophy that systematizes our moral instincts,
then we cannot help But holler out to the depths of our being the most profound and universal YES that can be imagined.
Yes, yes, yes, that's what I knew all along but could not voice.
That's what I got but could not speak.
That's what I understood but could not say.
The codification of implicit knowledge is fundamental to human thought, right?
We all can catch a baseball, though we do not know physics.
It's the codification of that which is instinctual.
We all understand how physics works because we can catch the ball, but we don't know how it works in a codified way.
But the moment we codify it, it expands and extends and empowers us to do more than catch balls.
And it's the same thing with ethics.
If you can catch the ethical ball, so to speak, instinctually, then you're going to say yes when physics and science confirm the knowledge that you're already acting on, and it extends it, empowers you, turns it from athletics to science, from instinct to knowledge to truth to principles.
And so, given that we've been acting on a gut-level instinct for ethics, then when we come across freedom in radio and we see, ah, you know, or it could be any philosophy, but I obviously think this is the best, otherwise I'd be pumping or pimping somebody else's philosophy, but I think that this philosophy is the truest and best and most accurate and most honest and most productive and most virtuous, of course, right? I mean, otherwise, you understand.
It would be hypocritical and silly for me to say otherwise.
So this gets at that, cuts to the core of that, exposes the truth, the white light at the heart of our instincts, the sunbeam at the center of our soul that has made us act virtuously and codifies and extends it and confirms our instincts.
The other thing is that free-domain radio is fundamentally empirical, as all science is, all knowledge is derived from percepts, from sensual data.
So, because freedom in radio is fundamentally empirical, and it is an empirical truth that other people are hurt when we hurt them, and we do not like it when we are hurt, and therefore other people will not like it when we hurt them, that is a fundamental empirical truth.
It does not require genius.
Empathy is not a wild, complex skill like cordon bleu cooking that you have to acquire at the feet of a Jedi Master over decades.
It's something we're all born with.
It's something that's fundamental. Isabella, at the age of six months, said, I have a mouth.
I like to eat. This food tastes good.
My dad has a mouth. He likes to eat.
This food will taste good for him as well.
I'm going to share it. Six months.
She couldn't speak Mandarin at six months.
She couldn't cook a cordon bleu meal, but she could understand basic empathy because that's entirely natural.
Of course it is. I'm a human being.
They're human beings. They have hands.
I have hands. They have a tongue.
I have a tongue. Eyeballs. Eyeballs.
It all matches up. It all matches up.
This can't just be a coincidence, right?
And so, for a baby, it is completely obvious and empirical and self-evident that others have feelings and so on.
Now, she's got a ways to go, obviously, right?
She's still trying to understand certain things.
But it is basic and empirical.
That we have feelings we don't like being hurt.
Others have feelings they won't like it when we hurt them.
And what I mean by that is it takes...
Narcissism in that way, sociopathy in that way, is fundamentally anti-empirical.
I don't like it when others use me, but I'm going to use them.
It's fundamentally anti-empirical.
It's anti-reality. It's anti every conceivable piece of evidence that you could imagine in the world.
And so, to even have a gut-level instinct for virtue and a care for your future self and to not want to hurt others because they're going to make you unhappy, and to get that to hurt others is to have them experience what you experience when you're hurt, which is bad, and we don't want to create those feelings.
All of those basic things requires a fundamental processing and respect for and allegiance to reality, and a very obvious and basic reality.
I mean, the degree to which those who hurt others, particularly those who hurt children, the degree to which they are fundamentally insane and disconnected from any kind of reality that you and I would inhabit, or we can't even conceive what it is like to live in that kind of skin, that kind of scaly, burning armor.
Itchy, ugly, unpleasant, difficult, monstrous.
I get this as a parent.
I mean, my daughter is so beautiful and so helpless and so dependent and so precious.
I mean, to live in the skin of somebody who would hurt her and then justify it?
Who would hit her and then justify it?
It can't be conceived.
I can get it.
I can't conceive it. I can't empathize or process with it.
Right, you understand. Empathy, why do I talk about it so much?
Because empathy is philosophy.
Fundamentally, right? Empathy is reason, or it's evidence plus reason plus feeling, right?
Empathy is evidence plus reason plus feeling, right?
So if I slap you on the face, Well, what's the evidence?
Well, I slapped you in the face.
We both have faces, right?
So if you think of slapping me back on the face, the evidence is that we both have hands, we both have cheeks, we can slap each other.
The reason is that it's going to be reciprocal.
And the feeling is, the projection of feeling onto somebody else is to say that we both possess similar neurological systems, which we do.
If you slap me in the face, it's going to hurt.
If I slap you in the face, it's going to hurt, right?
So it's evidence plus reason.
Plus, sensation or feeling.
That's all empathy is. And those who lack empathy have no capacity to process philosophical principles of any kind because they don't even get the basic one that my daughter got at the age of six months.
Like, you'd have to take them all the way back to the beginning and reparent them probably from before they were even born.
And unless you have a big vat of some sort of bio-liquid that can reproduce all of this stuff, I think it's not going to be a particularly helpful thing to do.
So, you have to have empathy to...
You have to have gone through some sort of process of developing empathy in order to be able to grasp at a really deep emotional level, or any kind of emotional level, really, to be able to grasp the basic principles of philosophy, right?
Philosophy is reason and evidence.
Moral philosophy is reason and evidence and feeling, right?
Because it's the feeling that makes the moral, right?
It's the emotion that makes the moral, right?
Sex plus desire is lovemaking.
Sex without desire is rape.
It's the emotion that makes the ethics.
It's the emotion that makes morality.
I don't want you to steal my car.
That's a crime. I want you to steal my car.
That's insurance fraud, right?
Which is a different crime. But you understand, right?
I don't want you to drip hot wax on my nipples.
That's assault. I do.
That's 200 bucks an hour S&M bondage, right?
It's the emotion that makes the morality.
And so people who don't have emotions, people who are fundamentally dissociated, disconnected from their emotions, can't understand ethics and will just constantly try and baffle-gab you into being confused about ethics, right?
Because if you don't have any access to your genuine feelings, you don't get ethics.
Ethics are just annoying and an irritating reminder of how disconnected and dissociated you really are!
If you have exploited others, you have done so because you have rejected the empirical evidence that they're kind of just like you.
If you've hurt others, you have denied feeling, you've denied evidence, you've denied reason.
So then when you come across a rational and empirical and emotional philosophy, a philosophy that respects feelings, which if it's a moral philosophy, it has to because feelings are the differentiator between morality and immorality, I mean, if we got pleasure from being slapped in the face, it wouldn't be a crime.
You understand? It wouldn't be a crime.
It's not a crime to give people $50 because they like it.
It's a crime to hit them in the face because they don't like it.
Because it hurts, right?
So the sensation, the feeling is what makes the ethics...
And so people who have heard others, they can't get philosophy.
They can't. They fundamentally have missed the whole developmental phase, or they've made choices that have ended up with them.
Like, if I make a choice not to study Mandarin, and you make a choice to study Mandarin, you're going to end up speaking Mandarin, and I'm not.
And I'm not.
And if you chose to start doing it when you were four or five or six or your parents chose you, you're going to end up speaking it fluently.
I may never, no matter how hard I study it, or if I'm 50 or whatever, I'm never going to study it.
I'm never going to speak it as fluently or as well as you.
And if you and I decided to be good and took the struggle of being good and not discharging our negative feelings onto others through abuse or whatever, If you and I made that choice to be good when we were two or three or four or five or six years old, that's when we started learning Mandarin.
That's when we started learning virtue.
So then when we come across something which formalizes and codifies and confirms what we've already been doing, which is in fact virtue, then of course we're going to be enthusiastic towards it.
And if, on the other hand, The philosophical conversation exposes our ugliness, then we are going to rail against it, and we are going to hate it, and we are going to attack it, and that's inevitable.
I hope this has been helpful and useful, and please let me know if you'd like me to continue, because there's lots more to say on this, but I'm no test of water.
See if people are interested. Thank you so much.
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