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April 19, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:14
1645 The Religion of the Argument from Effect

All pragmatism did was replace gods with outcomes.

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The argument from effect.
And it's all-around nastiness.
Why is the argument from effect so common, so all-pervasive?
And why did it naturally become so?
Well, I think it's really important to understand that the argument from effect, and for those who've not been listening since it would seem the dawn of the internet, the argument from effect is a kind of utilitarianism, which basically says...
It is the result of a particular plan, program, or policy that should be used to judge its, quote, virtue.
So the welfare state is good because it provides a safety net for the most vulnerable within society.
Old age pensions is good because it helps stop old people from eating cat food and each other.
And that is the argument from effect.
We need a government because without a government, it would be a lawless war of all against all.
That's an argument from effect. And all of these are arguments, and frankly, they're not even arguments, because arguments require principles.
But these are statements that you hear over and over and over again, whenever you have anything to do with arguing for virtue or peace or anything like that.
Or, when you say, well, when you hear the question, how will society function in terms of self-defense without a government, well, that's an argument from effect, which says we need a government because otherwise the effect will be no self-defense.
And these are all scare stories.
No roads. There won't be any roads.
There'll be no charity. Nobody will help the poor and all that, right?
These are all just arguments from a fact, which says that the effect of having a government is from a calculus standpoint.
Vector of calculus! I used to know a man named Vector of Calculus.
These are things that materially and calculously we're better off by having a government and so on.
And so that's the argument from a fact.
It's not an argument that has any principle to it, other than a vague kind of, we should do stuff that makes sense, which is not really a principle.
Why is it so all-pervasive?
Well, because it is merely updated religion.
That's all it is. All it is is updated religion.
The memes, not the thoughts, nor the reasoning, nor the philosophy, nor the evidence, but the memes which do the best in our sad, benighted, corrupted, and abused world, the memes which do the best are those which do not discriminate between differences of opinion.
In other words, they are thought patterns that can accommodate the splintered selves of modern mycosystem self-warring.
Oh! It's not too much lingo for one human being today.
Anyway, I think we sort of all understand this aspect of thinking.
So, religion, the religions that survive, the religions that do well, are those that contain every conceivable premise and argument that anybody could have, and that allows people to cherry-peck to turn their prejudicial, biased, bigoted opinions into absolute.
So, if you're a dewy-eyed hippy type, then you are all about the loving, dewy-eyed, doe-eyed Jesus, right, who's all about turning the other cheek and If your enemy asks you to give him his cloak, give him your cloak, give him your nipples too.
And if your enemy asks you to walk a mile, pogo a light year with him.
I'm loosely translating from ancient Aramaic and idiocy.
But it's all about pandering or reflecting back to someone his or her prejudices as an absolute...
If you are an Old Testament vengeful type, if your amygdala is hopped up, and if your sense of empathy is like a Jackson Pollock painting done by somebody holding a sketch while having a seizure, then you are very keen to go with the Old Testament God and an eye for an eye and blazes and damnation and all this kind of stuff, right? And that's why Christianity, for instance, does so well.
Because whatever your prejudices are, you can cherry-pick some damn nonsense from the Bible and turn those into divine, absolute commandments of ultimate virtue and truth.
And that's good.
I mean, it's not good if you want to avoid schizophrenia, insanity, and civil war, and going after heretics, but it's good if you want to make profit as a priest.
Religion was all about taking people's prejudices, turning them into absolutes, and so what they're paying is for the hardening of prejudices into absolutes.
That's why they give the priest the money.
That's why they can't quit the religion, because the religion is giving them moral certainty for what is just historical trauma.
The philosophizing of trauma is the job of religion, and is the job of government, and is to some degree, well, to a large, is the job of dysfunctional families.
Then people will pay good money to have their traumatized prejudices turned into absolutes because that means that they don't have to examine their own histories.
Oh my God! How much money will people give other people in order to avoid the basic commandments of self-knowledge and truth about their own histories and the confrontation of those who may have harmed them?
Oh my God!
I mean, how much money, how much of the world is run by people attempting to fill in the holes of their own cowardice in dealing with their past?
Well, think of fashion, think of expensive cars, think of interior decorating, think of any high-prestige items that don't have sort of any immediate benefit.
All the status bullshit that goes on.
Not to mention tattooing, piercing.
Anyway, a lot of the dieting stuff.
Music, some of the cool music.
Anyway, we'll talk about that another time if we haven't yet already.
So this is the reality of what passes for thought and what people pay for.
What passes for thought is creating this magic alchemy that turns prejudice into absolute truth.
It turns bias into philosophy.
And people will pay a hell of a lot for that.
Because it's a hell of a lot easier than actually confronting your own history, gathering and acting upon self-knowledge.
People will do almost anything to avoid that, because, I mean, we all know.
I can sympathize with it.
I'm not saying I sympathize with it.
Hey, there are all times when we wish we hadn't taken that red pill.
I get it. I get it.
So, how does the argument from effect fit into all of this?
Well, the argument from effect... It does exactly the same thing that religion does.
It allows you to harden your prior prejudices into philosophical absolutes and gains you all the self-righteousness thereof.
So, the welfare state.
The welfare state. The Republicans tend to be against it, the Democrats tend to be for it, and for those not in 21st century America, the left wing tends to be for the welfare state, the white right wing tends to be against it.
And the left wing focuses on the argument from effect to justify their position.
The welfare state can't be both virtuous and immoral at the same time.
It can't be both virtuous and immoral.
That violates 1,200 laws of logic.
It can't be both virtuous and non-virtuous.
Actually, just think of the law of non-contradiction.
But it can't be both virtuous and evil at the same time.
It just can't be. Unless you deploy the argument from effect.
The argument from effect says, well, the effect of the welfare state, from the left, is to provide a social safety net for society's least fortunate and prevents them from starving in the streets or eating their children.
Therefore, the effect is good.
Let's see, we put it through the economic...
It's a utilitarian moral calculus, right?
So we take a few bucks from those who have more than enough to get by, so they don't really miss it that much, right?
Take $10,000 from somebody who has a million dollars, they don't really notice it that much.
Give $10,000 to someone who has zero, and it's the difference between starving and not quite starving, which is obviously one of the biggest differences around.
So that's how you justify it if you're on the left.
If you're on the right, then, well, I don't want to slander all the people on the right, but to some degree it's kind of racist to associate blacks with welfare and all.
We don't have to get into that. When they say welfare queens, they mean unwed black moms, right?
Anyway. Well, the welfare state is bad because it encourages dependence upon the state, it weakens the moral fiber of society, and it has negative consequences on those who become addicted to state largesse, and it creates a power group of people who constantly want to expand state programs.
And it creates a massive amount of overhead, and it destroys jobs, and all of this and that and the other, right?
And all of these things, I happen to think, are pretty much true.
And it certainly is true, it certainly is true, that you take $10,000 from someone who has a million dollars, he doesn't notice it nearly as much as the person who gets $10,000 who has zero.
That's pretty hard to argue if you're on the sane side of the planet.
And so, with the magic of the argument from effect, we have the welfare state, which can be described as both virtuous, in that it saves people from starvation at a very incidental cost to the wealthy.
That is the one side.
On the other side, there are all the other arguments I put forward.
And you can magically make it good, and you can magically make it evil.
In the same way that when it comes to revenge, you can magically make it good by citing an eye for an eye, or you can magically make it evil by citing turn the other cheek.
And I'm sorry to keep repeating this.
I mean, I know that there's a million contradictions in the Bible.
You can say, well, the important thing is to have empathy, because, you know, who among us has not sinned?
Let him cast the first stone!
Stone! And people like that.
But then they also have, you know, God will not be mocked in the vengeance, and if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and all that kind of stuff, right?
If thine right hand offend thee, cut it off!
So you can justify anything that you want in the Bible, and you can justify anything that you want with the argument from effect, which is why it creates perpetual civil war in society and within individuals.
And all of us, I dare say, certainly I, when I was lodged in the argument from effect, I would go back and forth.
And anybody with any sensitivity or any brains or any capacity for ambivalence will go back and forth in the argument from effect until they twist themselves into little kaleidoscopic knots.
And lie on the floor like a bunch of kite tails that got ripped off during a storm and fluttered down and hung among the trees.
The argument from effect is a sure route to, well, it's a kind of conceptual madness, because you can argue every single side of the case by focusing on various things.
And you can invent justifications for anything that you're coming up with, right?
So, Social Security.
Well, they paid into the system.
So, they're just getting the money back that they paid into.
Well, they paid into a system, but it wasn't a system that kept their money.
The money was blown. The money's all gone.
And therefore, therefore, therefore, well, but they didn't know that.
Well, but they said that the, you know, citizens are responsible for that.
And I didn't know things as a kid.
I wasn't allowed to, you know, get by on that excuse.
And, well, but, you know, what are we going to do now?
This is the system we have.
We have to deal with What is rather than what it should be or could have been or whatever, right?
So you just go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in your own mind or with anybody you're in a debate with if you're in the argument from effect.
Which is like people citing Bible verse to try and justify or condemn something like revenge.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
Yes, but we're supposed to be in God's image.
You just go back and forth.
And listening to people do this stuff is enough to drive you completely mental.
And rightly so, I think.
So, why does this all occur?
Why? Why, why, why?
Well, we've already talked about why the argument from effect is so popular.
It's because it allows people to take the prejudices that, as we saw from the Mom and the Brain series, arise from childhood trauma.
The hardening of the brain and the incapacity to think, the incapacity to react aggressively or manipulatively, based on that which triggers traumatic responses, it allows people to normalize them.
And to take self-righteous and absolute positions that are not supported by reason and evidence.
I mean, when reason and evidence goes against the stuff you believe in, it's really, really tough.
And statism is going through the same thing now that communism went through in the 70s, and, of course, after the 80s, which is, it's all just revealed as garbage.
It's all just revealed as nonsense.
It's all just revealed as false.
And it is truly a tragic, tragic And, as I talked about over a year ago, Status is Dead, the five-part series.
It's a truly tragic evisceration of an idea when the only thing that is left to justify it is its supposed benevolent effects rather than any moral principles underlying it, when it is reduced to an argument from effect, which fundamentally always devolves to an argument from ad hominem, an argument from insult.
It's really, really a sad, sad thing to sort of tell you what that looks like in an analogous situation.
You can stay married to someone because you love her.
You love her. You love her.
You love her. She's the most wonderful woman you can imagine, and she's delicious and magical and fun and brilliant and helpful and insightful and hardworking and all those kinds of juicy things.
Or you say, well, I can stay married to someone.
I'm going to stay married to this person because...
I don't know. I'm not well, so it's going to be hard for me to date.
I don't have a lot of money, and divorce is expensive.
And I'm kind of fat.
It's going to be tough for me to feel attractive to people.
I don't know. At my age, there's not a lot of quality single people out there.
This is kind of what I'm used to, and I guess I'll stick it out.
Married this long, that's the point.
Leaving. I mean, that's a pretty sad fucking reason to be married.
And this is where statism is, right?
Nobody loves it. Nobody loves it.
Nobody says it is a virtuous, noble, and wonderful institution.
Statism is just this bitch we've been married to for 10,000 years and we just can't imagine.
And of course, where people are is not even saying, well, you know, this is used to.
What's the point? Where people are is making up scare stories, right?
I say married to this person because out in the dating world, people will kill you.
Like, they'll just, they'll stab you.
They'll stab you in the ear on a second date.
I mean, it happens. It happens all the time, you know.
It happens all the time.
Or they'll chloroform you and they'll tie you up and they'll torture you.
By sticking lead Jedis up your butt.
Like, that stuff happens, man.
It happens all the time. It's not perfect here, but it's better than out there, where, you know, people regularly will put dashins in full chainmail and ride them straight into your nose.
That happens. That happens all the time.
That's inevitable. Right?
So, I can stay in a marriage that's not perfect, or I can go out and get head-butted by silver-painted dwarfs, because that happens.
That's what it is. So when you invent reasons to stay married, because there's this horrible scare story of what's out there if you're not married, boy, you know that person really doesn't like who he's married to, right?
I mean, you've got to make up scare stories to justify your marriage.
If I'm not married and I'm out there dating, people will strangle me with their neckties.
It happens all the time.
It's inevitable. I mean, the degree of scare stories that you have to keep yourself in a relationship is the degree to which you really, really hate that fucking relationship, right?
I mean, that we can all understand, right?
I don't need any scare stories to stay with my delightful wife.
I just don't. I mean, that's ridiculous.
So the degree to which people hate and fear statism is exactly the degree to which they come up with these psychotic arguments from consequences, arguments from effects, right?
Without the government, you know, we'll all be strangling each other in a big circle joke of murder.
I mean, it's sad.
It just tells you how much people hate statism.
This is what they need to invent to stay in this abusive relationship, is that it's even more abusive.
Out of this relationship, it's like, yeah, okay, he hits me, but when you go on dates, they'll actually, you know, stab you in the elbow with flags, with flagpoles, right?
Yeah, okay, yeah, he's verbally abusive.
I get that. I get it.
But if I'm not in this marriage, then people are just going to kill me.
You know, that's what it is.
That's what it is.
Well, you just know that it's a really bad relationship.
You have to invent this stuff.
And you know, this is how much people hate statism, that they have to invent a cartoon idiot version of anarchy.
All anarchy means is without rulers.
All it means is without abuse.
This is how much they hate the system that they're trapped in.
This is how much they have to scare the living shit out of themselves with this nonsense, cartoony violence that's considered to be there if they're not being abused by and controlled and managed and exploited and eventually killed sometimes by their rulers.
that's how much they hate the subjugation that they're into, that they have to invent this incredibly awful vision of what a free society would look like.
I understand, right?
It's just a projection of their current state, of living in a state.
They project into anarchy what is actually happening in statism.
Come on, a war of all against all?
I mean, that's a mixed economy.
We all know that. It's been detailed since Mises.
Coming up for a century. That's, I mean, even before that, it was explicated by a variety of thinkers.
Some people say, oh, it'd just be a war of all against all.
It's like, dude, don't take your existing state of subjugation and project it into the benevolent virtue and freedom of anarchy.
Good lord, how sad and silly is that?
All you're doing is confessing how much you really hate, loathe, and fear the system that you're trapped in.
If you don't love your abusive husband, as you obviously can't, Don't say that everyone in the world is a ten times worse abuser and that's why I have to stay with the protection of this guy who only beats me up once a week.
That's sad. But this is what the argument from Effect does, right?
It legitimizes people's anxieties and fears and lusts and deeds and so on.
So people, they need it on the client end, so to speak, on the livestock end.
They desperately need this. I am enslaved.
Why? Well, because I've been afraid.
Because I've been cowardly. Because I've been betrayed by philosophers, by intellection.
Because my parents lied.
My teachers lied. My priests lied.
That's why I'm a slave. Well, they don't want to deal with that.
That's too scary. So they want to grab at these argument acts.
They need to. They must.
What is the alternative? And, of course, on the master's side, they're just like those Romans watching those revolutionaries attack each other in the life of Brian.
They love the argument from effect because it has us bickering at each other about the effects of various kinds of ownership.
If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
How should we be owned is not a question that ever threatens the owners.
Who should benefit from being owned most?
The poor, the middle class, the rich.
It's what it all comes down to, all the time.
Who should get the scraps that fall from the table of the warlords?
Now, that's not a very dangerous question for warlords, is it?
And that's why, whenever you bring up the argument from principle, the argument from morality, Whenever you actually begin to apply philosophy, rather than this jackal-like fighting over the scraps of the antelopes of our freedoms, well, everybody sees it.
Everybody sees it. That can't be allowed.
That doesn't process.
That's not the language of a slave.
Philosophy is the language of the slave.
Philosophy is not the language of the master, because both the slave and the master are vain.
The slave for ignoring his slaver, and the master for enslaving others.
Both are forms of vanity.
But philosophy is the language of humility, of richness, of wisdom, of depth, of the power, of the truth, of the certainty, of virtue.
Philosophy is not the language of the slave, and philosophy is not the language of the master.
Philosophy is the language of the man and the woman.
Philosophy is the language of the free soul.
Philosophy is the symphony of the free mind.
It don't speak no slavery!
Right? And that's why, when you're in a master-slave conversation, Or a slave-slave conversation, which is really the same thing.
Slaves attempting to master each other, mimicking society in every interaction, mimicking the state in every interaction.
That's how deep it goes. When you're in a master-slave conversation, and you begin to speak philosophy, it's like you've broken into the most terrifying Mandarin that can be imagined.
Because it is the language that dissolves not just vampires, but vampirism.
And it reveals what everyone has been running from, what everyone has been...
The slaves are the enablers of the masters, right?
I understand that. The person who is an addict in a marriage looks like he's in control because everybody's running around appeasing and making excuses for and funding and subsidizing monetary and emotional ways.
But the enablers are as much in control, if not more so, than the addict.
And that is something that is hard to see.
You look at your fellow slaves and they, oh, victims, oh, sheeple.
No, no, no, no. Nonsense.
That's true until they get some truth.
But once they get the truth, they instantly switch into master mode.
Because everybody in the world who is not enlightened will always try to put you into a master-slave relationship.
Always try to put you into a master-slave relationship.
We had a babysitter come over the other day, elderly.
She's not the nicest person in the world, but it's alright.
Isabel was asleep, so it doesn't matter.
And I was mentioning the weeding I was doing.
I was saying, oh yeah, the government is banned.
Weed killer, so it's really, really tough.
She's like, well, even a farm district, I can get weed killer any time I want.
Right? Boom. Master-slave relationship.
I'm superior. You're inferior. I can get the weed card.
I'm better. Immediately.
And, I mean, I don't have to get into details.
It's this kind of personality, right?
It's a constant one-upmanship.
And it's always occurring. It's always occurring in relationships.
I need you. Sorry, you need me more than I need you, so I'm in control.
I am hardworking and virtuous, and you are lazy and bad.
I am good, you are bad.
I am superior, you are inferior.
The state replicates all the way down the chain.
Why? Because it comes from all the way up the chain, from the origins of the family, the origins of life.
And so you will constantly experience this in your interactions with people.
And philosophy doesn't speak that language.
Philosophy does not speak the language of superiority or inferiority.
It speaks the language of true and false.
And it speaks fundamentally the language of humility.
Everything that people do, for the most part, the unenlightened, well, this is what I'm talking about, the unenlightened, everything that they do is to establish dominance.
And their dominance could be yours or theirs, depending on their particular forms of trauma.
But philosophy is not to establish dominance.
It is to spread truth.
And that is not a dominance.
Because truth comes from nature. Truth comes from reason, empiricism, and reality.
Truth comes from nature. And nature doesn't dominate you any more than gravity is beating you up if you trip.
Nature is impartial, inanimate.
It's not personal. And so philosophy, since it is derived from that which is non-dominatory, is not dominating.
And the argument from a fact is always about trying to gain the moral high ground to dominate.
And philosophy does.
And that's one of the reasons, of the many reasons, why people get so frustrated, angry, confused, frightened, lash out when philosophy comes along.
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