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Aug. 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:23
1720 Another Fine Error
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I'm going to tell you about one of the biggest mistakes that I've made with regards to this show.
I think it's important to talk about mistakes and limitations, as well as successes and progress.
I have urged people, and urge myself, of course, pretty continually, to not mistake the world for yourself.
I don't think that just because you have a particular attribute or characteristic that is shared by the world as a whole, and...
I was thinking about this the other day, in sort of reviewing, I think it's coming up to the sixth year of FDR in one form or another, in October.
After October, we'll be in the sixth year.
One of the things that I have...
I mean, I have a number of characteristics that I'm aware of.
One is that I'm a sort of nice and friendly fellow, but I have a kind of core of steeliness that is surprising to people very often, because I'm nice and accommodating, and I don't have a particular ego investment in being right, so I'm willing to be deferential where it's not important to me,
and so on. So people mistake that for I don't know, a lack of resolution or a lack of spine, and people are surprised, I think, when, if push does come to shove, that I can be pretty goddamn resolute in that stuff.
I've never seen the movie Roadhouse, but I remember this from the clip.
The guy, I think he's a bouncer with a PhD in philosophy, who says, it's important to be nice until it's time to not be nice.
And that's, I've mentioned that before, but that's something that I should probably watch that film someday, but...
That's something that is part of me that I wanted to sort of mention.
I don't know if it's particularly relevant to this insight, but the insight is that for me, truth has always been, sometimes it's been a long time coming, but it's always been inaccessible or irresistible.
If I meet a better argument, I may fight and twist and turn, but eventually, and it's usually not too long, although it can be, it goes down.
I think the only reason that I was a Objectivist for so long with regards to the government was I had simply not encountered any other ways of thinking.
I had not encountered any kind of anarchic thinking.
So when I came up with this DRO thing, that was a huge revelation to me.
I know it was a little bit reinventing the wheel, but I think there's value in that sometimes as well.
But for me, when I'm faced with a better argument, I will give up.
Even at that point, it was more than 20 years of heavy investment in objectivism that I had to give up.
And that was true with UPB as well, as compared to Objectivist Ethics, which had been my lodestone and my guiding star for over two decades.
Give that up once I realize the limitations of objectivist moral theory and wanted to come up with something more comprehensive and more irresistible.
To me, if I can't have philosophy with a crowbar, you know, to just pry open bullshit and expose its steaming gunkiness to the light of day, I'm just not going to do it.
I'm not going to do this silly fencing with language and semantics.
I'm going to only be interested in the kind of philosophy that, frankly, goes at people like a canon.
And I know that that's an aggressive metaphor, but that really is how I feel.
I'm so sick and tired of philosophy being this angel's dancing on the head of a pin, semantic, post-modernist bullshit that, as I mentioned, I'm not going to do it unless I can...
Philosophy with a crowbar is what...
pry it open. There's no resistance.
Because that's how I experience it.
I mean, I experience a better argument as a crowbar.
It just pries off whatever prized knowledge that I have and tosses it aside.
And that is...
That is how I've experienced it.
And I think I mistook the world for myself.
And particularly because I sort of came in through my entree into the libertarian world and there was a lot of agreement and so on.
And I mistook the world for myself in that, for me, a better argument just prized bad arguments out of me relatively quickly.
It really was a flash of insight and a couple of weeks of fevered work that dislodged objectivism within me.
Not renunciated, but, you know, it revealed the weaknesses and gave me something to do, right?
Something to add to. And I think that's praise for objectivism that it took me that long, but anyway.
So philosophy comes at me with a chainsaw, with a crowbar, and it violates me, I tell you.
And I made the mistake for a long time to imagine that better arguments would be irresistible to people.
In the way that they're irresistible to me, that there would be fighting and fussing, my friends, but there would be an abdication of error for the sake of truth, of an ironclad argument.
I thought that with stateless society to some degree, and then I realized that there'd been a lot of work done in that sort of area before.
And so I wasn't doing anything massively radical there.
I think the first article I thought that about was the state is the health of war, which was my argument about how war can't exist without the government, and with some pretty damn fine arguments.
The four arguments against government was, I think, pretty decisive.
The Ron Paul stuff I did was pretty decisive and pretty predictive, I think.
But for me, Because the better arguments are irresistible to me, they're gravity well.
I really, really thought that the better arguments would be irresistible to others.
You know, like you move a planet into an asteroid belt and the asteroids change course.
That's the physics that is the reality of that situation.
And for me, better arguments are like physics.
They're irresistible. They just are irresistible.
And I think I know that I made that mistake of thinking that better arguments would be irresistible to others.
I wanted to point this out because I put so much passion and energy into making what I believe are better arguments that the fact that they are entirely resistible to a great many people is something that is quite important.
It's quite important. And that is something...
I don't even want to talk about whether you're making that mistake.
I mean, this is something for you to review.
This is just sort of a... Bearing of the soul for what I'm mulling about.
Of course the stuff with the family was a shock that this was considered to be so radical.
You know, there's a court case somewhere around that...
A mom who abandoned her son at the age of 15.
He was homeless for a while.
He hasn't spoken to her in decades.
She's suing him for support.
And the government is so far siding with the mom.
And that is mind-blowing.
I mean, really mind-blowing.
It's a terrible mom, obviously, abandoned and did nothing for her kids.
Other than feed and clothe them for a couple of years.
And the fact that the mom is suing to get and it's going along in the system.
And the arguments are like, well, you know, the courts must intervene where the morality and social mores don't hold sway.
And I love this language. It's exactly what I talked about at Borkfest.
They say, well, I have to intervene.
Courts don't intervene. Courts force.
Courts will rob money from the children to pay off the mom.
And it just... The parent-child relationship is so involuntary that it makes a child bride look like the very meridian of free will.
Median. The apogee of free will, let's go with that.
And can you imagine that if somebody was sold to, like a woman, a girl of nine was sold to a man to be married, and then he abused her and abandoned her, and then 40 years later, He sued her for money.
Can you imagine a court saying, oh yeah, you were a child bride, you were sold to this guy, and so now you have to pay for his retirement, though you escaped him 40 years ago.
I mean, this would never happen in a million years.
And yet, a parent-child relationship is less voluntary than a child bride.
So, this is just something that people can just will that away, right?
So, I mean, those sorts of thoughts, those sorts of comparisons and ideas, you know, that, gosh, well, women have the right to divorce abusive husbands.
In fact, it's considered a good thing to do it.
If you can't solve the relationship, you try to work it out.
But if the abuse won't stop, you've got to get out for the safety of you, for the safety of your children.
But if adult children do it, suddenly it's heinous and bad and evil and wrong.
So for me, I mean, I grew up in the same culture as everyone else.
I didn't come from Mars.
I grew up in the culture which is a veneration of parents.
But when those analogies were made clear to me, or when I came across them, or when I thought of some of them...
Actually, I think I just thought of them.
I can't remember them being made to me, because it was such a struggle for me to even...
There was nothing around when I was going through my defu.
But when those analogies occurred to me, they were irresistible.
It's like, oh, well, of course. How can you argue that?
I have been continually shocked, though I'm less so now, by people's ability to ignore an ironclad argument or an ironclad analogy that reveals the moral truth behind a situation.
That is something that is very important to keep in mind, that you may be living among mad people, people who do not have a conscience called reality that nags at them To abandon irrationality.
They don't have that. They're anchored.
They are unanchored. They are free floating.
They are free agents of irrationality.
With no tether. With no anchor.
With nothing cajoling them back to reason.
And that's an important thing.
If you're that way, it's very easy to mistake the world for that and to imagine that the better argument will almost automatically create the better world.
But I think the evidence, certainly after the Bomb and the Brain series, the evidence I think for that is pretty clear that it's not going to be arguments that are going to win the day.
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