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Feb. 13, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:40
1582 Discipline and Philosophy

What role does personal discipline play in the philosophical life?

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Hey, it's Steph. I had a great topic from Der Greggel G., the question of discipline in the philosophical life.
And I'll jump straight in, I suppose, and give you at least my thoughts on discipline and how it's worked.
And I've tried quite the gamut of discipline, from hedonism to asceticism and a lot of stuff in between.
And I've got off that treadmill, and I hope that this will make some sense to you.
Discipline, I am not a fan of.
I am not a fan of discipline.
In fact, I think that discipline is entirely detrimental to happiness, to well-being, to self-knowledge, to mental health, to all the good things, and to integrity.
Discipline is really the opposite of integrity.
And we should know this as anarchists, or those of us who are into voluntarism and against the non-aggression principle, is that bullying is not a fit way to deal with any human being.
Bullying is not a fit way to deal with any human being.
And verbal abuse is not a fit way of dealing with any human being.
We recognize this in society, that aggression is not the right way to organize society, that society is voluntaristic and for mutual advantage, and I believe, given the universality of UPB, the U in UPB, E, C, S, A, B, C, that it applies as equally to one's relationship with oneself, with one's various parts, because we are internally a society, and I can't for the life of me imagine...
How the principles that we would use to organize society as a whole or at large would be different from those that we would use to organize society inside, internally.
So, what is discipline?
Well, discipline, frankly, is the infliction of consequence on choice.
And when I say infliction, I don't mean the natural consequences, like if you eat ten candy bars a day, you're going to get fat and sick.
I don't mean that, because that is not reality imposing its willpower on us.
It's not reality imposing its discipline.
Those are just the natural consequences.
If you jump off a cliff, you are going to fall down.
And technically, I think they say, go boom.
So, I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about internal consequences.
So, discipline is a stick and a carrot to be used internally, and not based on reality.
So, let's say that you're overweight and you want to diet, and you want to lose weight.
Let's say you don't want to diet, you want to lose weight.
There are two fundamental ways that you would go about this.
The first is to say, I have a goal called losing weight, and so I'm going to get the knowledge that I need to get.
I'm going to sit down with a nutritionist, keep a food journal and figure out what I'm eating and why, and if there are any particular patterns.
People who are overweight tend to consume the majority of the obesity calories at particular times in the day.
I know that for myself, I barely eat in the morning and have a relatively small lunch.
I have to sort of make myself have two pieces of toast in the morning and just don't want to eat.
But come evening time, I tend to be a snack junkie.
Well, why? Because when I was a child, the mornings were relatively stress-free because my mother would leave for work just as I was getting up.
I'm going to go.
But what I can do is snack more healthy.
Cookies, chips, chocolate, candy or anything like that.
Now I'll have some dried apricots or a handful of nuts or a stick of cheese or something like that.
But the reason that I'm able to make those adjustments is not because I have this massive craving for soul-numbing sugar.
But because I have figured out the causation, sympathized with the correlation and the cause, and so the effect is really not that compelling anymore.
It doesn't mean that it all vanishes, right?
But it does mean that I can sort of make some adjustments.
So the one route that you can take is just say, well, I want to lose weight, so I'm going to figure out why it is that I'm overweight.
I'm going to look at the emotional causes, the psychological consequences, the cause and effect, the patterns, the whatever, right?
All of the stuff that goes on that...
It gives us the habit of overeating.
I don't believe that overeating is in any way central or causal to a human condition.
It's true that we have a greater desire for fats and sugars than for other things, but we also are more easily sated by those things than other things.
We also have a natural desire for pleasure, but that doesn't mean that everyone becomes a heroin addict, for obvious reasons.
So, I would say that it is emotional stuff that goes on.
I mean, you know, outlawing medical issues, my opinion, is that it's emotional stuff that's going on, and it's mostly to do with stress management, anxiety management, and self-punishment, and particularly distancing from sexuality that goes into being off-away.
And so you look into self-knowledge.
You are curious and honest with yourself, look for the patterns, and you confront the emotional issues.
Not for the sake of losing weight, but for the sake of discovering the truth, for the sake of being happy, and all those kinds of good things.
Or the other thing that you can do if you want to lose weight is you can just become an ascetic.
You can say, I'm not going to eat this.
I'm going to force myself to go to the gym.
I'm going to do that. And none of that works in the long run.
None of that works in the long run.
And that's just not my opinion. I mean, this is fairly well proven that willpower, just gutting up, gritting your teeth and powering through it, will work in the short run, but it does not address the underlying issues, psychological issues, self-knowledge issues, and so on.
And therefore, willpower It follows the law of diminishing returns, right?
So you get a pretty big boost, and then it all sorts of fades away because you're not dealing...
So basically what happens, and it's very much like what goes on with the state, right?
So the state passes a law...
And you get a pretty quick compliance factor, right?
So the state passes a law, makes something illegal.
And lo and behold, it vanishes from the streets.
And let's say they make Coke illegal, right?
Coca-Cola. Well, it vanishes.
And you can't get Coca-Cola, kids are drinking less Coca-Cola, and so on.
And so everyone goes, ah, it works, right?
In the same way that when you first privatize...
As I've argued before, you get all of the discipline from the pre-socialized environment, and it continues over, and it looks like it works magnificently, and you haven't got the deficits, and people haven't adjusted their lifestyle habits to adapt to the new socialized healthcare, and so on. But then, after the initial shock of aggression wears off, you get the counter.
Surgeons, right? So, you make Coca-Cola illegal, Coca-Cola vanishes, and your kids stop drinking it.
And then... It becomes cool, and it becomes funky, and it becomes alternative, and it becomes this, that, and the other.
And lo and behold, a supply network is set up in the grey or the black market, and suddenly it appears.
And suddenly kids who want to appear older and cool and alternative and...
Funky, they will start getting at it younger, and free cokes will be given out to children to entice them into the black market and the grey market, and the quality goes down, it becomes more dangerous.
So, there is an initial shock of compliance in society when the government passes a law, and then you get the inevitable...
Right? Countermeasures, right?
The insurgency, so to speak.
And the same thing happens, right?
You know, if you're physically aggressive with children, then you will get their compliance when they're young, you build up this resentment, this anger, and this hostility, and then they get older and stronger, and you get the teenage years, right?
Which is when the power shifts, and so on, right?
So, all of that stuff is inevitable, and we understand that in society.
And again, I have no idea why we would consider it to be different with ourselves.
We would know more, I think it's no more valid and productive to inflict discipline upon yourself than it is to pass a law within society.
Yeah, you'll get some short-term compliance, and then you will immediately set up the conditions for the revolt, right?
I mean, we are all suspended like a pendulum, and you can push it one way, and all that happens is it will come swinging back and even harder.
And so, the same thing happens within ourselves as happens in society.
So, discipline, to me, is like statism for the self.
Discipline is statism for the self, and it doesn't work, I mean, empirically and scientifically, it doesn't work with the self any more than laws work in society.
In fact, they do quite the opposite of working.
And that, to me, is consistency in terms of philosophical principles.
Bribery and punishments do not work because they do not allow the rules to be internalized and because they create a dichotomy with a good authoritarian figure and a bad subordinate figure, right?
And this is so fundamental, and I was going to do a whole series on this.
It's so fundamental to what we're talking about.
The moment that you inflict a discipline rather than pursue self-knowledge, inflict discipline upon yourself rather than pursue self-knowledge within yourself, you immediately say, Good superego, bad id, right?
Good inner parent, bad inner child.
And the inner child can't be reasoned with.
The desires for whatever negative behavior is occurring can't be reasoned with, are not evidence of trauma, are not evidence of a hurt that needs to be listened to, integrated, sympathized with, and incorporated into the personality as a whole.
But you split yourself into good self, bad self.
Good self says we need to lose weight.
Bad self says, give me chocolate cake.
I want to live in a German forest of scaffolded icing.
And that is ridiculous.
That's not how the personality works.
That's not how society works.
You don't have sort of a good authority figure and a bad...
Subordinate figure, and then if you have the good authority figure, and the reason that the subordinate figure is considered bad is because it will only respond to external incentives.
It cannot internalize a reward system, right?
So, do your homework and I'll buy you an ice cream is automatically saying that the child doesn't want to learn.
Understand, if we don't think that people are bad, we can't have a state.
This is why it's all to do with childhood.
If we don't think people are bad, we don't need a state.
We can't have a state. We only have a state because we think people are bad.
They won't be generous, won't give, won't care.
We can only inflict public schools on children because we fundamentally believe that children are lazy and corrupted and selfish and don't want to learn and don't care about others.
And so we need to force them and box them up and inflict discipline on them and coerce their parents.
Well, their parents don't really care about their education, which is why we need to force them.
So good authority, big or bad subordinate is good state, bad citizen.
And the worse the citizen, the more we need a state.
And the more that children are told that they're basically bad and selfish, the greater they will end up feeling the need to justify the infliction of unjust authority on themselves.
And it's all externalized.
And the same thing occurs within the personality, in my opinion, and experience, and significant experience of self-control.
It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
And it needs to be opposed on principle.
It needs to be opposed on principle because we need to be empathetic and curious with aspects of ourselves.
The aspects of ourselves that are self-destructive are simply the true self aspects of ourselves that threatened the false self of our authority figures when we were young.
And therefore, they were cast as bad, right?
I mean, the greater the lies that society inhabits, the greater the aggression it needs to inflict upon the national rationality and empiricism of children, right?
So, the more false a society is, the more aggressive it needs to be with its children.
And thus, what is termed the bad self is, in fact, the rational and empirical self in an irrational and superstitious or statist or patriotic society.
The less reason in society, the more aggression needs to be inflicted on children.
Why? Because children are naturally healthy and rational and empirical and so on, and affectionate and kind and curious.
But the more we believe bullshit, the more we have to aggress against children because they reveal that and they reveal our prejudices, our cowardice, our lack of thinking.
And, of course, the brutality that was inflicted upon us to get us to believe ridiculous and cancerous cultural nonsense.
To me, aggression is always a response.
It's an immature response to error.
A wise response to error is curiosity.
I don't mean to evil, right?
I mean to error. A wise response to error is curiosity.
And, I mean, just by the by, in my opinion, a wise response to evil is curiosity about evil, not the person, but curiosity to...
To evil itself, as to why the person is doing, but not curiosity about the person.
In the same way that when somebody runs at you at a knife, you don't want to empathize with that person in the moment.
You may want to empathize with what might drive someone to be violent in the long run, but in that moment, you simply need to protect and defend yourself by whatever means necessary.
That's my approach to evil as a whole, but it's neither here nor there at the moment.
I guess it's a little bit here and, oh, in fact, a little bit over there as well, but...
When we believe something that is false, it is because we have been bullied and frightened into believing that, or at least claiming a belief in that.
Children do not believe things that are false innately.
In fact, the whole purpose of a child's consciousness, as far as I've seen as somebody who spent a good deal amount of time around children and have the rare privilege of being a stay-at-home dad, And this is important.
I'll do another podcast on this at some point, but it's kind of tough to take parenting, take fatherhood advice from people, from fathers who, for the most part, are really not around that much, at least relative to what I've been doing.
I think it gives me quite an insight, and I hope that it's valuable to the community as a whole.
It really has validated all of the theories that I've worked with and more.
So I hope that me being home, although it results in fewer podcasts, and in particular fewer listener conversations, because they're very hard to fit in, but I hope that it's been of use for me to be doing this.
I certainly feel that it has been for myself and for philosophy as a whole, and I hope that it is the case for you as well.
But the entire purpose...
of a child's consciousness is to differentiate between illusion and truth.
And the purpose of a corrupt society is to realign the child's sense of reality to the collective delusions rather than to objective, rational, and empirical reality.
To reorient the child not to thinking what is true, but what is approved.
That is the fundamental way that we break Children, we break their backs, we break the spines of their mind by forcing them, on pain of death really, I mean, since all parental rejection is perceived by the child's risk of death, by forcing the child to realign her perceptions away from objective material empirical reality and towards the corrupted, vicious, bigoted prejudices of her society.
That's how we break the spine of a child's mind.
And that is fundamentally achieved, I believe, through the imposition of this thing called discipline.
You don't need discipline to believe in something that is true, right?
You don't need discipline to believe in something that is true.
You don't need discipline to believe that a ball is going to drop when you open your hand and you're standing on the Earth's surface.
You don't need discipline like, oh, I've really got to focus on this.
You don't need discipline to believe in things that are true.
Now, you do need discipline to acquire skills and so on, but that discipline is the discipline of self-knowledge.
It is not the discipline of achieving a goal.
And I'll sort of go into why we focus on one versus the other in a minute or two.
But we don't need discipline to believe in things that are true, and we don't need to be bullied into believing things that are true.
When Izzy rolls a ball under the couch, she has object constantly and is immediately fascinated to dive down, press her eye to the carpet, press her eye in line with the carpet and try and find this thing and grow up and reach and retrieve it because she knows that it's there.
I don't need to discipline her to get her to do that.
That is exactly what she wants to do, to develop object constancy, to learn the properties of things.
She loves to put, you know, the three and a half millimeter jacks.
She loves to clip them back into themselves if there's one which has a male and female.
I don't need to teach her to do that.
To continue to do that until she's mastered it does not require any discipline from me.
I don't need to set her to this task.
She naturally wants to figure this stuff out, naturally wants to explore and find out how it works.
When I take her to a new environment, we took her to another play area recently, which has a big room of those multicolored balls.
Those are great fun.
She loved them, of course. Now, it's, of course, stressful as all hell there as a parent, because every time she gets up, she trips on them.
But she loved it.
And I did not need discipline to get her to do stuff that is enjoyable and to get her to do stuff or to get her to believe stuff or accept stuff that is true.
Now, I will... I mean, if I were lying to her, and again, I know that she's young, but if I were a Christian or a Sikh or a Hindu or Buddhist or whatever, if I were trying to get her to believe something that wasn't true, God lives in the sky, you died, Jesus died for your sins, well, then she would need repetition, aggression, passive aggression.
She would need rewards and punishments.
Why? Because the thing itself was neither true nor valuable.
In fact, it had negative value.
It was destructive. So we need to put...
These incentives and punishments around things which do not themselves have value.
Now, you could talk about work versus starving, but we're talking about just discipline here, not you've got to eat in order to live.
That's not exactly discipline.
So if we have questions about that, we can talk about that further.
But fundamentally, we have to put sticks and carrots around things that are not in and of themselves valuable or meritorious or bring happiness.
Isabella seems to show no particular preference to sugary things over broccoli.
She just, I mean, because it's all new to her.
She just enjoys the taste.
So we don't have to get her to eat her vegetables.
We don't need those sticks and carrots.
We don't need those power plates.
We don't need to frighten her. But if you don't eat your vegetables, you won't grow.
And if you eat too much sugar, you'll throw up and, you know, all that.
We don't need to do any of that stuff.
So, be very, very wary.
Wherever you feel the need to impose discipline on yourself is exactly, to me, the marker for where the errors are in your thinking and the avoidances are in your history.
And the reason that I think this is so important...
It's because I view discipline as a very, very powerful tool of the ruling classes.
So, you know, there's that old...
Oh, gosh, I can't remember the Philadelphia story.
I can't remember the name of the movie.
Originally, it had Angela Lansbury and Montgomery Clift about some guy who...
It was remade with Denzel Washington.
Sorry, I can't remember that. I'm sure 1,200 people will tell me, but...
who is trained as an assassin and he doesn't even know it.
And then there's a word which he is programmed into his unconscious.
And when that word is spoken, he switches into a trance-like state and goes and assassinates some dude.
And that, to me, has always been a wonderfully powerful metaphor for the purpose of language and propaganda.
So, we talked about this in a Sunday show last, words like selfish and self-indulgent and arrogant and all that.
These are all just words that are made up in the hopes that you will attack yourself, right?
So, in some debate, this is the sad thing that happened with objectivism.
Not from objectivism, but objectivism is a very powerful, interesting, fascinating, deep and rich philosophy.
And, of course, people just say, well, Well, it's atomistic and it's selfish and it's arrogant, right?
These are just words that people say, like magic spells to ward off ghosts.
I mean, it is really in the land of pomo magic that this stuff occurs.
And to me, discipline is something that is a word that is used to trigger self-attack and compliance.
So, think of military discipline.
Military discipline is considered to be the sincron of discipline, right?
The meridian of discipline.
And it, of course, is entirely at the surface of the ruling classes.
I remember Crystal, I think his name is, the guy who's in charge in Afghanistan, was introduced as a guy who, you know, rises at fire.
Five o'clock in the morning and runs five miles and only eats one meal a day, you know, like some sort of monk-like superhero.
And the military men are supposed to be, they're always portrayed as these real ascetics, right?
Of course, it's not true. Golf courses and resorts all over the place for top military men.
I mean, it's a pretty sweet life to be high up in the military.
It's flown all over the place.
You get, you know, pensions and pay and Massively wonderful accommodations and so on.
It's only for the privates. They've got to sleep in a cot.
For the guys further up.
For the ruling class, within the ruling class, like the military elites, it's a pretty sweet life.
And yet discipline, if somebody is disciplined, that is supposed to be a very good thing.
And so I'm sort of concerned.
I have this apprehension that the word discipline is...
It's a word that is laid into our unconscious as a trap, as a bear trap, as a bear self-attack trap that is invoked, like a command word, like a hypnotic command word, to get us to self-attack and stop questioning those in power.
And the reason that I say this is that...
And you can test them. Again, don't take anything I say on face value.
Just test it out for yourself, right?
So if discipline is supposed to be such a good thing, if discipline is supposed to be such a good thing, Then there should not be a place where it is rejected.
So, discipline and honesty and integrity are all considered good things by the ruling classes, like teachers and priests and maybe your parents.
And so, when you apply discipline to the pursuit of truth and you attempt to live with integrity, this should not be something that is opposed.
If it is not a self-attacky bear trap command word, then it should not be opposed by those in power.
And therefore, when you are in, let's say, high school, and you start to study the history of public school education, and you are disciplined in that, you are disciplined in that, and discipline is required because the truth is hard, right?
And the truth is hard because of cultural bigotry.
I don't think the truth is hard naturally.
The truth is hard because we lie to so much.
But let's say you're disciplined in your pursuit of knowledge about the history and moral, immoral basis of public school education, and you're honest about your findings, and so you're disciplined in the pursuit of that knowledge, and you're honest, and you are living with integrity to your values, then the teacher should be very pleased, because you are fulfilling the virtues, right, of society, that society is telling you are virtuous.
But of course, the teacher will attack you, or reject you, or mock you, or whatever, right?
As will most other people that you bring the truth to.
So you understand that discipline, integrity, and honesty, these are not virtues to be practiced in and of themselves, which means that they serve some other purpose, which means that they are laid down as brain bombs to get you to sweat and be afraid and comply when they are invoked.
They are laid down as self-attacky harbor mines to blow up any ship that attempts to get out beyond the pier of prejudice, to tread the metaphor into the ground with an elephant's foot.
So I would be very, very wary about the word discipline, and I think it's very important to be curious.
Discipline, why?
For what?
For what purpose?
Who first taught me about discipline?
What was the nature of discipline?
What were the moral qualities of the man or the woman or men or women who taught me about discipline?
And if the moral qualities of that person were not very great, or in fact were very bad, then I would suggest a real course of intense journaling, curiosity, mycosystem conversations, and so on, about this shibboleth called discipline to find out its root and its fundamental purpose.
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