Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Dec. 31, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:18

1817 Despair - E-Mails of the Week, Christmas 2010

Emails of the week, from Freedomain Radio, http://www.freedomainradio.com

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, it's Devan Mullen from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Happy imminent and almost new year to you at the end of 2010.
	So I am really backed up on emails of the week, and I'm so sorry it's taken me a while to get to them, but we will attempt to put in a few today.
	This is a comment that was posted on my last video, Faith, Virtue, Christianity.
	Man writes, I think a general criticism I would have of all your arguments is your adherence to empiricism.
	Empiricism is reliance on the five senses and instruments that send information to those five senses.
	Taking that as the methodology for truth, Einstein would never have figured out his theory of relativity, and many other great scientific breakthroughs would not have occurred.
	Also, using logic based on pure empiricism does not give new insights or creative discoveries that would increase mankind's knowledge.
	You know what's really tragic?
	It's genuinely tragic and a very, very sad thing about the world and the lack of love in the world.
	When I get something that's irrational, like this crazy, really, you know what I think of?
	I think of a man and he's got a whole community around him of people.
	Who probably say that they've got parents, kids, extended family, brothers, sisters, who all say that they love this man.
	What I think of, and it's such a sad and heartbreaking thing to think about, is I think how people who claim to love this man have let him get away with this kind of stuff, this kind of nonsense, without challenge.
	You know, if you really love someone, I really believe that you owe it to correct their crazy.
	You owe it to love.
	You owe it to health. You know, if you really love someone who's drinking too much, you owe them an intervention, if you want to claim to continue to love her.
	We really need to help each other as human beings.
	We really need to aid each other, which means to peel back the dead skin, old rhino hide, and bad exoskeleton of stupidity and ridiculous thinking.
	We really need to help each other with that.
	I need help. You need help.
	We all need to collectively help and love each other.
	Where I see somebody who has this kind of delusion, I don't see them as an individual.
	I see them as surrounded by a community of people who aren't helping him, who aren't helping him.
	Please, my brothers, my sisters, help each other to think more clearly because we need that so much in the world.
	So why is this nutty, I guess?
	Well, empiricism, he says, is a reliance on the five senses and instruments that send information to those five senses.
	So he's basically saying that empiricism is limited, empiricism is weak, empiricism is flawed, five senses are flawed.
	Why is this crazy? Well, it's crazy for one very simple and obvious reason.
	How is he sending me the criticism?
	He's sending me the criticism using my eyes.
	If empiricism is a lower standard, if there's a higher or better standard than empiricism, fantastic.
	So send me a critique through that medium.
	If I say that email is efficient and great, but carrier pigeons are really terrible and bad and inefficient, then it makes no sense for me to send my criticisms I need to send them through email, because that's what I'm saying is superior.
	You can't say to me that my senses are invalid and use my senses to communicate that information.
	If there's a higher standard than senses, if the mind of God is going to bungee down and implant the idea in my head, fantastic.
	It's not like there's a lot of interference up there.
	Send me the criticism about the senses using a higher medium.
	So, it's very sad.
	Now, Einstein would never have figured out his theory of relativity.
	Nonsense. Reason is derived from the objective behavior of matter and energy.
	That's why we have the three Aristotelian laws of logic.
	That's why consistency is important.
	If you want to describe something about reality, it damn well needs to be consistent and rational and conform to the evidence.
	Einstein himself As a direct opposite to the ideologues of the 19th century, the communists and the fascists and the socialists and the Fabian socialists and all these kinds of people.
	Einstein was incredibly self-critical, and he said, if empirical evidence can be found against any of my theories, those theories fall, and their world waited with bated breath.
	I think it was in 1913, just before the First World War, where the measurement of the bending of light around an eclipse was being tested to validate his theories.
	So he was an absolute and complete empiricist, as is every Reasonable, rational scientists who we can even affix that label to.
	This idea that empiricism is somehow the enemy of creativity is nonsense.
	The only reason that we know that somebody is creative is because they're creating a painting which we can see through our eyes, or they're creating music which we can hear through our ears or feel through our fingertips.
	The idea that empiricism somehow limits creativity is nonsense.
	The only reason we know creativity exists is through empiricism.
	And if you're going to use my senses to communicate an argument...
	Saying that my arguments are incorrect, it means that you have perfectly understood my arguments and found them to be incorrect.
	If you've perfectly understood my arguments, then empiricism is working.
	If you're using the evidence of my senses to return the argument to me, or to return the criticism to me, you are relying upon the evidence of the senses as the medium of your communication, which means you can't say that there's something higher and better.
	You can't! I mean, you can, but it's ridiculous.
	And the people around you who've let you get away with this sort of stuff have a deficiency not of reason, but of love.
	Next. Somebody writes, What do you think of those people who blame capitalism for imminent threats, such as the increasing gap between rich and poor, peak oil, and global warming, and propose that we get rid of it in order to survive them?
	I'm talking about ideas like those of the documentary Dystopia, What is to be Done?
	I consider myself an anarcho-capitalist, but I'm willing to admit that freedom might be the least of our worries in a dying world.
	The world isn't dying. Make sure you don't go overboard in your metaphors first and foremost.
	Look, philosophy is dead at the moment.
	We are trying to resurrect it.
	We are trying and working very hard to bring reason and evidence.
	The remnants of philosophy exist in two spheres, in the realm of free market economics and in the realm of science.
	This is where reason, empiricism and evidence hold sway.
	It's shrinking and it's diminishing.
	Science has been crowded out by state-funded quasi-mysticism, and the free market has been crowded out by violence and aggression and status edicts.
	And normally rational thinkers like Sam Harris, he just put out a ridiculous and embarrassing article about the need to provide free education to anybody who wants it at the college level.
	That this is going to solve all of these problems.
	As if Sam Harris doesn't...
	Like, does he know that education is free or not free?
	Does he know that there's no such thing as a free lunch?
	He himself is an academic.
	Does he work for free? No.
	So someone's going to have to pay his goddamn salary to provide free education for others.
	It's embarrassing, but the reason that people invent all of these silly arguments and ideas is nothing to do with reason and evidence.
	Our enslavement is a psychological phenomenon.
	The reason that people, like Sam Harris, who has some, I think, very intelligent things to say about religion, and of course is a very intelligent fellow himself, the reason why he calls for world government, the reason why he calls for increases in state power to solve social problems, is because he cannot face the despair Of seeing the nature of his society.
	I have no problem saying this.
	I'm completely confident of it.
	And Sam, if you're out there, let's have a conversation about this.
	I would love to chat further. But it is because people can't face the despair of a system that is steeped in violence and bullying, imprisonment control, taxation, indebting the innocent and the unborn.
	They can't face that. And because they can't face that, they think that to solve problems They have to call for expansions in state power.
	The reason that they do that is because the state will gratefully and happily expand and extend its power over its citizens.
	So if your quote solution to some social problem is the expansion of state power, you're going to feel like you have some control Over your environment.
	Because you're going to say, well, we need to solve this problem using state power.
	The state's like, yup, give me more guns, give me more fiat currency, give me more debt.
	I'm down with that. And so because you're swimming with the current of increasing violence, you feel like you're a great swimmer.
	But if you say that the solution to social problems is less violence or no violence, is a diminishment curtailing and elimination of state power, Well then, BAM! You run straight headlong into the reality that this current river of blood flows only one way, and to swim against it is to be eliminated from the competition.
	So a thinker who says, let's solve the problem of poverty with less government power, not another government program, he has to face the helplessness that comes from trying to oppose the dominant social paradigm.
	People think that they're in control of the government because the government always wants to expand its power.
	So whenever they say, I need a new government program, the government's like, I'm right there.
	I'm in. I'm ready.
	Let's do it. And they say, oh, so look, we have control over our government because we can make it do stuff.
	No, no, no. You can make it expand its power because that's its nature.
	But you cannot make it diminish its power.
	That doesn't work. Too many embedded special interest groups, too many lopsided economic incentives.
	There's just no way. Like I was reading the other day, the average stagehand in New York and Broadway, these are not highly skilled people, they...
	They make $270,000 a year.
	Because they're a government-controlled, government-protected union.
	Fascist monopoly enforced by the state.
	You try and eliminate that power, well, you've got $270,000 worth of incentive for people to fight you.
	Whereas the average ticket-goer is paying a couple of bucks a ticket to support all of that.
	What's their incentive? To prevent it, right?
	So, people don't have any clue.
	Well, I guess they do, deep down, have a clue, which is why they consistently only ever argue for the expansions of state power, because then they feel like they're doing something.
	They feel like they've done something.
	See, the government is responsive.
	When I ask it to expand its power, it does, right?
	So people do that. They can't face the despair of a system that only ever works to increase the amount of violence in society.
	They just can't face that despair.
	They can't face the social ostracism that they know.
	They're going to experience, as we all have, who are committed to the non-aggression principle.
	They know what's going to happen if they come out against state power and violence.
	They know what's going to happen to them career-wise.
	They know what's going to happen to them socially.
	They know that they're going to get a full-on gladiatorial epic of slave-on-slave ostracism, violence, and emotional abuse.
	So people don't step out of line.
	This is another way that we know that the government is not necessary, is that these are all enforced socially, these rules.
	By the by, it's also, I think, a completely powerful argument.
	When people say we need the government to enforce contracts and therefore we need to vote for political leaders, the question you can ask them back is, well, can we enforce our contracts through voting with political leaders?
	No, of course not.
	Some guy promises 20 things.
	Maybe he doesn't deliver on any of them.
	Maybe he delivers on the 10 you don't want.
	You have no way of enforcing your contract with your government.
	Right, it's only ever one way.
	They can enforce their, quote, contract on you to pay taxes and obey the laws, but you can't enforce your contract upon them for what you vote for.
	So people who say we need the government to enforce contracts has to eliminate democracy from the equation because democracy is a completely unenforceable contract.
	So if we don't need enforceable contracts through democracy, we don't need the government to enforce contracts because the government relies on unenforceable contracts like the vote.
	Anyway, so as far as...
	People who blame capitalism, look, they have no idea what they're talking about.
	People are in a panic. The system is falling apart at the seams.
	Everybody's completely aware of that.
	All that's happening is that people don't understand the basic principle that the only people who invent demons are demons.
	The only people who invent enemies are your enemies.
	So, capitalist and corporatist and, you know, whatever you crony, it's all become a big bag wherein people can put their hysterical and frightened prejudices.
	There's no one more hostile than a person with a guilty conscience.
	And people who've been talking about and calling for expansions of state power for the past couple of decades are seeing the fruits of their labors, which is an increasing extension of the divisions between rich and poor, a creation of a permanent financial oligarchy, a stripping of the wealth of the lower classes, and a demolishing of the middle classes.
	And so they feel guilty.
	They feel guilty that they didn't listen to people like Rand, to people like Mises, to people like Rothbard, to people like Lou Rockwell, to people who have been saying for many, many years that the escalation of state violence is going to lead to the opposite of what is claimed, the opposite of what is planned for.
	This has all become completely obvious, and we really do, don't we all feel like we're living out the last two or three hundred pages of Atlas Shrugged?
	These ideas have all been in the mainstream, they've all been perfectly available to everyone, and everybody who's rejected and ignored them now feels really guilty.
	Really guilty people who are responsible for an increase in evil, whether it's parents or priests or politicians or teachers or general citizens who've advocated this sort of stuff, feel really guilty.
	And rather than take ownership for what they've advocated, they have to invent new enemies and project all of their self-hatred onto those new enemies.
	This is an age-old thing.
	It used to be blacks and still is in some parts of the world and even in some parts of America.
	It used to be women.
	It used to be other kinds of minorities and still is when you look at Mexicans in the south of America.
	And it's also capitalists, right?
	So it's just Another lynch mob.
	It's just another big bag of conceptual emptiness that people can project all of their self-hatred and their guilty conscience into.
	I mean, I feel some sympathy for the people who are unemployed in the U.S. at the moment.
	It's a catastrophic unemployment in the U.S. And these people, they seem very sad and they feel very desperate and they talk about how bad things are and how sad they are.
	And that's something to feel some sympathy for, but...
	If you ever want to get to the real truth, try talking to somebody about the real reasons that he or she is unemployed, which is state power and fiat currency, and see them scurry away from those answers as fast as you can imagine, and your sympathy will be turned into a more realistic view of their complicity in their own unemployment.
	So, I mean, you can...
	Prejudice is still alive and well.
	I mean, you can create some conceptual bag that you can put all your crazy dystopian fantasy bullshit into, and...
	It used to be blacks, now it's capitalists, or it's atheists, or it's anarchists.
	Anarchists, ooh, big, scary anarchists.
	That's the problem, right? So, it's all nonsense.
	People don't know what they're talking about.
	They're just taking all of their self-hatred and guilt about the system that they've supported and projecting it into somebody else.
	Last one. Hi, Steph.
	I firmly agree with your idea that a human who does not Source, his inner past pains and traumas will manifest it externally into himself and others around him.
	Oh, it's an idea I support.
	It's not really my idea. Either through physical or psychological abuse, no matter how subtle.
	Are we not putting too much emphasis on exposing the way things are, rather than dealing with showing others that there is a way to dis-identify with their egos?
	I'm not sure what that means, so hopefully I'll answer in a way that will not require that sentence to be comprehensible to me.
	Someone who acquires their identity of who they are from their past pains will clearly perpetuate it for years to come, as you have put in more eloquent terms many times before.
	Most people are unaware that there is a way and stand up strong on the notion that this is who I am.
	I have to make the best of it.
	I speak for myself and others around me when I see this delusional behavior happening daily.
	Yeah, look, people will say this a lot.
	They'll say, hey, this is my past, this is who I am.
	Deal with it. Make the best of it.
	It comes out of excuses for parents and priests and teachers.
	They did the best they could with the knowledge they had and so on.
	I have no problem whatsoever with people who say, you have to accept me for who I am, this is my past, this is who I am, and that's about it, right?
	Yeah. I have no problem with that.
	This is who I am. I have to make the best of it.
	No problem with that. But it has to be a universal statement, right?
	I mean, it has to be not something that just applies to you.
	The true ugliness and evil of power is encapsulated in the single action Of creating a universal standard and exempting yourself.
	Creating a universal standard and exempting yourself.
	Creating a universal standard and exempting yourself.
	That is the perpetual cycle of power, which is why power and philosophy are so eternally opposed.
	Because philosophy creates a universal rule or recognizes and accepts a universal rule without exceptions.
	It eliminates the exceptions that are the true root of evil.
	So a thief wants everyone to respect property rights except him.
	A counterfeiter wants currency to be valid except for what he's printing.
	The government wants nobody to steal except them.
	The police want nobody to initiate violence except them.
	The army wants no one to invade a country or initiate violence except them.
	It's always the except them, and you're never allowed to see it.
	You're never allowed to see it, because the moment you see it, the whole society crumbles into a catastrophe of old and ruined history.
	So, yeah, people come and say, hey, this is the best I could do, this is the best I could do, this is who I am.
	Fantastic, then make that a universal rule.
	Don't ever impose it on your children, and don't ever impose it on other people.
	You then cannot create higher standards for other people than you're applying to yourself.
	That is the great challenge.
	If you create excuses for yourself, you are automatically creating exactly the same excuses for everyone else.
	And if you can live with never criticizing other people because of their limitations, then you can claim that your limitations make you immune from criticism.
	But the moment that you criticize other people, you create a standard that can absolutely and justly be applied against you.
	Never, ever Have higher standards for others, particularly children, than you have for yourself.
	So people who are parents who say, well, I did the best I could with what I knew, fantastic.
	No problem with that.
	Then you have no right to impose higher standards on your children of behavior because they were doing the best they could with what they had and they had the excuse of immaturity, which adults and parents don't.
	But you will always be damned by the highest pedestal on which you place your values.
	The greatest god you worship is always the one who will strike you down for inconsistency.

▲