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Nov. 4, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:46
1780 The Rally to Restore Sanity?

Relativism is not sanity, just wandering with the lost herd...

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So the Rally to Restore Sanity is done.
It was this last weekend.
I thought it would be worth talking for a few minutes about what's really going on with that rally and with a very, very common theme within society, which is that the middle is the normal and any kind of certainty falls on the two extremes on the outside.
I think it's very, very important. It's sort of like a bell curve, right?
So the majority opinion in society is the norm and anything which has any sort of certainty around the edges is considered to be the extreme.
This is a very, very common and incredibly corrosive and destructive set of ideas.
And I think it's really important to get where that comes from and why it is so prevalent.
The history of the 20th century was really the culmination of pretty medieval bigotries and absolutism that arose in two major forms, in fascism and socialism slash communism.
The fascists came up on the Mussolini side and the socialists slash communists came up on the Stalin slash Hitler side.
Hitler, of course, was the leader of the National Socialist Party.
This is something that you don't often hear about because people don't like the idea that socialism was associated with Nazism.
But if you look at the planks of the Nazi Party, it was almost exactly the same as what's been enacted in the 20th century in most Western countries.
So there was this problem, which was that certainty, moral absolutism, remained in the realm of the crazy, of the insane.
And so you have this specter of militantly certain Nazism, Communism, Fascism, and you have this sort of dithering and appeasing reality.
Western democratic country.
This was a huge problem.
And there was this great terror of certainty that arose out of the second half of the 20th century that anybody who was certain, anybody who was an absolutist, was crazy and bigoted and dangerous and needed to be mocked and marginalized.
This was, tragically and pathetically, the very best defense That 2,500 years of rational, empirical, scientific philosophy in the West could come up with.
This was the very best that we could come up with to defend ourselves against medieval, crazy, superstitious, collectivist, nationalistic irrationality.
Whether of the class or nation or God, this was the best we could come up with.
This is truly pitiful. This is one of the reasons why I have such contempt for modern philosophy.
Our conversation, I hope, accepted.
But that's really, really important to understand that there was this certainty that killed off hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.
Now, the best that could be mustered, the best defense that could be achieved was not rational certainty, but rather skepticism and relativism.
That was the very best that could be achieved.
That is truly tragic, mind-bendingly terrible response, right?
So if you've got a grizzly Charging at you who's irrationally or, I guess, biologically rationally certain that the grizzly wants to eat you, then you can't run away.
You can't shoot the grizzly in the leg.
What you can do if you're a modern Western philosopher is you can just try and blow some smoke in the grizzly's eyes and hopefully get it confused and disoriented.
So this charging absolutism of crazy irrationality Laid waste to massive portions of the world in the 20th century.
And the best that could be mustered was a kind of skeptical and snarky and ironic kind of relativism.
Like, whoa, anybody who's certain must be crazy.
Anybody who's an absolutist must be mental.
And this will never work.
And this is a remedy that has been tried very many times throughout Western history.
There was, I mean, the separation of church and state came fundamentally out of the fragmentation of Christendom after the Protestant Reformation, where Catholicism was no longer the sole religion, for want of a better phrase.
I mean, there was different orthodoxies, but Catholicism was the major religion.
And dominated society and therefore the unity of church and state was not as dangerous.
But when the certainty began to fragment into these different sects, right, Svingalians and Calvinists and Lutherans and on and on, Anabaptists, then what happened was you had a whole bunch of crazy people who were all certain and all disagreeing.
You know, for a more modern look at this, you can have a look at the Middle East.
And so people became terrified of certainty, because certainty meant well-armed, bloody, fratricidal, genocidal civil war.
I mean, if you look at the commonality of Western countries throughout the 20th century, you could really look at World War I and World War II as civil wars between...
Medieval absolutism, which went in an unchanged line from the Middle Ages through to Germany in the 20th century, because Germany skipped right past the Enlightenment because it was so enmeshed in religious civil wars.
The terrifying and terrible thing is that modern scientific philosophy can only provide goopy-eyed relativism in response to medieval dogmatic certainty.
And the Rally to Restore Sanity was a whole bunch of people saying, hey, let's all just get along.
Hey, let's all not be too extreme.
Let's respect each other.
Let's work with each other. And you see this every single time there's an election, right?
Funniest thing is they talk about election fraud as if the two terms weren't synonymous.
All elections are frauds because what is promised is not in a contract and there are no repercussions to breaking your word with the voters.
So you see this afterwards, after there's a shift, right?
So there was a shift in the House in the recent midterms.
And so, of course, everyone's saying, well, now we need to work together.
We need to put aside our differences.
Of course, if there are no differences, then what's the point of having parties, right?
So people will always try and say, like an exhausted mom with battling sons, I don't care what your disagreements are, just put them aside and try to work them out.
So if everything is opinion, which is the soul or soullessness of relativism, if everything is opinion, then anybody who's an absolutist is automatically crazy.
With lost perspective, they're an extremist and so on, because everything is just an opinion.
Of course, there are huge logical errors with this.
Is it an opinion that everything is just an opinion, blah blah blah?
If everything is just an opinion, then every absolutist must be eternally opposed, which means that you have an absolute opinion about absolute opinions being wrong.
There's lots of logical problems, but it's so common that we really can't see it anymore.
There's no way forward to fight this medieval bigotry and superstition that still remains strong in Christian enclaves and nationalistic enclaves around the world, and of course in Muslim and Jewish enclaves.
There's no way to fight irrational certainty with relativism.
Eventually, irrational certainty will just overrush and overrun the relativism.
And of course, relativism has to avoid the pockets of power, which deal with absolutes in the present, right?
So, the rally to restore sanity was all about the voters, who aren't using any violence directly themselves, the voters, the citizens, being irrationally, absolutely certain, dogmatic.
But of course they have to pass right over the greatest and most violent peddler of irrational certainties and violence in the world, which is the state.
So they can't say, look, everything is opinion, therefore particularly laws against non-violent offenders, such as drug users, need to be appealed because that is irrational absolutism where you don't just wave around offensive signs, but you actually throw people in jail.
So, it's really important, I think, to understand that relativism cannot solve the problem of medieval dogmatism.
We need, we need, we need to combine absolutism and certainty with empiricism and rationality.
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