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May 9, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:43
1907 Corporatism, Materialism, Freedom and Death - Freedomain Radio Interviews Dr Corey Anton

The Freedomain Radio interview with Dr Corey Anton.

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyne from Freedom Aid Radio.
I am here with Professor Anton, who runs a YouTube channel called, appropriately enough, Professor Anton, and has been running for the past few years.
And he had some very kind things to say about my videos and some criticisms of the logic and arguments presented therein, which I thought was great and enjoyable.
and I really did appreciate you taking the time and the way that you structured your responses.
I thought it'd be worthwhile having a chat to introduce my listeners to you, perhaps your listeners to me, and see if we can have a fruitful exchange of ideas.
Thanks, Stefan.
It's really a pleasure to be here, and I do appreciate you making the time to bring me here.
I would say a couple of things.
One is, I have been a subscriber to your channel for some time, and I do appreciate the work that you're doing there.
This was precipitated, I guess, from a recent video that I watched of yours.
And I guess rather than immediately cut into this discussion about guns, gods, and goodness, I would maybe like to talk about how I came onto YouTube just for a moment.
Yeah, some background would be great.
Yeah, you know, when I came onto YouTube, I... I was encouraged by, at the time, the president of the Media Ecology Association, which is an organization that's international, but it focuses on the scholars like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and is concerned with the changes in consciousness and in social relations that are aligned with the changes in dominant communication media.
And so it's a big history approach toward The nature of the human through various forms of technological mediation.
And I came onto it really as a dusty old book person.
I was a book culture person.
I'm very reluctant. To this day, I don't have a cell phone.
I didn't get an email until I had already got my PhD.
I got my PhD from Purdue in 1998.
And at that time, I discovered some of the internet.
All that time, I was really very much of a book person.
And then when I came onto YouTube, I tried to bring book culture here.
And so that's really, I think, part of the background concern is the change over in social structure, in self-understanding, in notions of community, notions of work.
That's happening as we drift from, say, the last 2,000 to 3,000 years of a predominantly print-based culture, and I mean Western culture, to now an electric, communal, something more tribal, something that's problematizing the kind of aspirations something that's problematizing the kind of aspirations and values that were, I guess, just pervasive and dominant through the last several thousand years.
And so this is sort of what's in the backdrop of some of my concerns.
And I think I share, to the best of my knowledge, you and I share a concern over the state of the world, the state of the U.S., the state of just problems of violence and problems of huge social problems that need direct response the state of just problems of violence and problems of huge social problems that need direct But maybe the haggle over the appropriate strategy would be where we could have some fruitful dialogue or discussion.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, you had some questions about, I guess, my criticisms of existing social structures in your video, and your question was around anarchism.
Anarchism is one of these very tough words because it has so many negative connotations.
For me, I simply found my ethical approach, which hopefully is not just personal, but not just a merely cultural preference, my ethical approach is founded upon an acceptance of the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle, which is to say that to initiate the use of force is not...
It's immoral, not productive in the long run, not good for society as a whole.
And it's hard to escape the acceptance or the understanding that what we call the government is a group of individuals who have the legal right, in fact the legal obligation, to initiate the use of force against others.
And then you have a whole bunch of people floating around this entity, as you correctly pointed out in your video, We're good to go.
So, if you have the non-aggression principle, as I do at the foundation of your philosophy, many things go out the window, and one of those is the idea of the moral legitimacy of this centralized agency of force.
So, I just wanted to give you the two-second explanation of that.
Well, I'd be fully on board with that.
I guess, sort of at a meta-level agreement, I think it's going to take a radical transformation in human consciousness.
It's going to take a real change in the way that we understand ourselves, our sense of obligation, what it means to be able to register one's absolute uniqueness while also registering that as never in a non-social way.
So I think sometimes the individual and the societal are set in over-against orientations.
As if the person's over here and then society is over there.
But instead of seeing it that way, if we see it as a kind of networked lattice of relations, every person is unique, but never in a non-social way.
It's the unique constellation of relations that give us a unique history, a unique set of parents, a unique set of friends, a unique set of possibilities, and all these kinds of other things.
But I guess part of the concern that I have maybe in there is that In some of the videos, and I'm trying here, and again, I want you to know that I respect your videos, and I applaud what you do.
You have a lot more courage to say things that I think sometimes I would like to say, but my position prevents me from saying them.
But that said, I do think some of the videos, they have a kind of over-against orientation.
Even there, take the example of the things that you were just saying a couple moments ago.
It was as if the laws that sanction the violence are the problem.
Now we could say that that's partly true, and I don't want to deny that.
But what do you do with the problem of how do you tolerate the intolerant?
See, there's already violence that occurs that sometimes the laws are trying to prevent.
And I'm sometimes...
I'm reluctant to believe that a stateless society or a society with no government is not also going to have its whole new set of problems of having to defend its own property and just new forms of violence occur at all kinds of ways.
And I don't think it has to be a Hobbesian state.
I think, again, the issues are much more complicated than that.
Sorry, just to address that issue very briefly, I completely agree with you that if some magic switch existed where you could push the button and have a stateless society in the current environment, I think that would be pretty disastrous.
I've argued for many years that it is a multi-generational change.
This is true of any fundamental social change.
If you look at the elimination of slavery, it was a multi-generational change.
If you looked at the advancement of the rights of women and the slow and painful advancements of the rights of children to the point where we're actually having situations in the world now where schools are not allowed to hit children.
Massive, huge advances in pacifying the human spirit, so to speak.
These are all multi-generational changes.
You can't snap your fingers and create social change.
And I think that people who've adapted to a particular environment would have a very rough, if not downright violent time, adapting to a completely different environment.
So to me, it is really around peaceful parenting, non-initiation of force against children, the extension of philosophical principles to child raising, creating a world where criminal pathologies, which according to my understanding are largely predicated on child abuse, To a world where criminal pathologies are very much the exception and not, as seems so often now, a very common situation.
Right. Okay, this is very good.
I find this to be very helpful.
I think the focus on multi-generationality and upon the way that we think about children, because child labor laws and the exploitation of children is going to be the first thing that I was going to go at.
I mean, to the anarchists, why not have people just sell their children into slavery?
I mean, the whole logic starts to become scary.
So if we take that just as a way to spin this off, so in the video that you had shot called Guns, Gods, and Goodness, there was this wonderful little grid that was proposed.
Giving the strange bedfellows that occur between the statists and the atheist camp, and then the anti-statists and the religious camp, something like this.
And I had brought up the notion of guilt, and I had tried to suggest that human beings, and I'm coming largely out of Ernest Becker's work, and I have several books, but one of my more recent books was a book at Purdue University called Sources of Significance, but it's largely out of Ernest Becker's work, and it's about death acceptance and death denial. but it's largely out of Ernest Becker's work, and it's And what he wants to say is that he began his career, and he thought self-esteem was the key to humanity.
He thought that psychology, sociology, all these things, that it needed to be pruned from vanity and egoism.
But he thought self-esteem, that an organism that lost its instinctual drive and was mediated by self-relation, confidence becomes increasingly important to it.
Can't really act without anxiety if it doesn't have its self-worth continuously buffered for it, and that's what culture does.
Culture provides a kind of ongoing protection from the dissonance that could be from utter worthlessness, and it sort of staffs off organismal anxieties that usher in From the erosion of instinctual drives in the human organism in its development.
But what he comes to see is that guilt plays a larger role than he thought.
He comes to the work of the ancient role of sacrifice and how sacrifice plays, not just in religious societies, but through all societies.
And he starts to become apparent that the kind of awareness of humanity, of Of becoming self-aware somehow puts the world over there with me over here, which somehow leaves us in an awkward position to it.
And he ended up calling it sort of a natural guilt, and he's coming out of Kierkegaard and other thinkers trying to address this.
Let me just say one last thing, and I'm speaking too much.
I apologize for this.
But I think one way to say it is that for Becker, and I really agree with this, people don't kill simply because they're animals venting their aggression.
That's not right.
They kill because there's heroic meaning to be had in expiating the guilt of being human.
And this is a truth that people don't want to accept.
And this is part of the problem of how do we sublimate And deal with that without scapegoating on the alien other, which is basically the tradition in all cultures right now.
Right now, cultures deal with the problem by scapegoating on others.
I think there are other resources.
I think there are other ways to get at it, but that seems to be the problem.
People feel inward disorder, and what do they do?
They go and they hunt down some alien.
I mean, the way that people were cheering in the streets over bin Laden's assassination, it was just disgusting.
It was. And for those who don't know, a little bit of etymological trivia.
Scapegoating comes from an old practice that some tribes have, where they would pour all of their sins into the goat, and they'd either drive the goat out into the desert or kill the goat, thus expiating their sins.
And this, of course, not only was not inward-looking, to say the least, but it actually gave them, like the Catholic confession in a sense, it almost gives them permission to commit new sins, because there's always another goat.
You can project into and kill, so it's a very dangerous way of dealing with that.
I mean, I think that that's an astute analysis of contemporary psyches in general, but I think we want to be careful that we don't take the pathological personality and say that that is human nature, right?
So the comment that I always receive, objection, I guess, is, well, you know, give me an example of a stateless society working and then we'll, you know, talk.
And of course... The fact that there are governments, and most importantly, the fact that the governments spend, what, 15,000 hours and 12 years educating the young, and to some degree, I would say, also indoctrinating the young, has a huge effect on personality.
I think we want to make sure that we don't say that, you know, prior to the 17th century or 18th century, all human societies were slave-owning, and therefore it's human nature to own slaves, and you can't change it.
Well, you can, of course, right?
Prior to some point in the future, 100 or 200 years from now, hopefully all societies were statist, hierarchical, tribal, authoritarian societies, or at least that's how they resolved most of their differences or tried to.
And therefore, but we can't say that that's human nature.
We can just say that that is human habit as it stands and understand the degree to which cultural pressures, religious pressures, and political indoctrination has shaped.
I mean, the reason that people do it is because it works.
You know, that old Jesuit saying, give me a man, or give me a boy until the age of seven and he's mine for life.
It really works.
And I think that to say that that is somehow human nature is to say that there's a permanence there that I'm not sure can be justified given how things have changed.
I think, yeah, again, I don't disagree with any of that.
I think there is a great—I guess I don't want to be misunderstood, and I appreciate what you're saying.
I don't believe that this is a magic wand.
I think, again, it comes from a change of self-understanding from the bottom up because it's not simply top-down imposed.
I mean, I think there is something where it's very right to talk about the way that— How do I say it?
I wouldn't want to be reducing it to this is an essential human nature, but there is a sense in which I would want to say, like, let me begin with some that I think are essential to all humans.
Let me just start that and see if we can begin there.
One is, who am I? Where do I fit into all that else is?
How do I relate to what is obviously more vast than myself?
See, I think there are some very simple existential facts that come in with the self-aware organism and these aren't, they're not Descartes' problem of how am I self-aware, they're more like Sartre's problem or the existential problem of how did nature make room for an organism that could contemplate on the very So,
even though consciousness may have emerged after It doesn't have to be there in the beginning.
Consciousness could in fact have emerged.
But the very fact of its ability to recognize itself as having been contingently dependent upon billions of years of inorganic matter, which were its necessary conditions, that itself is fascinating.
And that is a kind of story that we tell to people to help them understand who they are.
And I think Without being able to address to people who they are, where they fit in, and how do they relate, we're not going to be able to solve these ultimate questions of relevance, self-worth, and self-esteem.
And unfortunately, it has been co-opted by the religious dogma.
But to try to simply say that it's always top-down without being able to address the fact that people are born every day, and when they're born, they have a yearning for Who am I in their emergence to self-awareness?
It's why do people become so slavish to institutions?
Right. Now, you could be right, but my counter-argument to that, which may or may not be correct, my counter-argument to that would be...
It's like saying, why do people in Stalinist Russia have such a positive opinion of communism?
Well, it's because that's what they're trained to do.
And so the amount of propaganda that was poured into the children and the adults and the amount of threat that was there for countering any of that propaganda gave the impression that somehow being pro-communist was in the Russian soul or the Eastern European soul or something like that.
And, of course, it's just not the case.
You don't want to mistake the propaganda for personhood.
And I would also argue that identity is a problem largely because children are taught from a very early age that they have these socially constructed identities that have no reality.
They have no reality.
Right.
I mean, I've seen I was at the library the other day.
My daughter is two.
I'm sorry.
I didn't understand.
Can you just clarify quickly?
You're saying that they're taught the social constructions don't have reality or they should be?
No, they're taught these social constructions as if they're true, but these social constructions have no reality, right?
So I was at the library the other day with my daughter and we were playing with some other kids and the kids suddenly jumped up and said, let's sing the national anthem.
These were like three or four year old kids and they went blistering through the national anthem and they They stood ramrod straight and I think one of them even saluted and so on.
And so they're taught, you know, be proud to be a Canadian, this is your flag, or be an American or be a British person or be a Somali, whatever, right?
And these geographical constructs are largely illusory.
I mean, they're not visible from space.
They don't exist in the same way that a mountain does.
A country is, to a large degree, a state of mind and a region of laws.
And they're taught that. They're taught perhaps their ethnic identities, like Greek is better than Turkish, is better than Armenian, is better than Martian or whatever.
And they're taught religious and they're taught political allegiances and religious allegiances.
And so in a sense, it's almost like children are born and they're fed all these drugs and then they spend their lifetimes in withdrawal.
And we say, well, human beings have an innate yearning for these drugs.
It's like, well, if you don't feed the drugs to the kids when they're young, maybe they won't have this withdrawal symptoms for the rest of their lives.
No, again, I think I agree with everything that you're saying, and I think that I could defend that position as well as you could.
And I think, in fact, I would use the position you just laid out to say the reason that all that is done and injected with such a, this is reality not to be questioned.
It's because we try to hide from the guilt of the arbitrariness of it.
See, the guilt comes out from the recognizing that your cultural practices are arbitrary.
When you look down and you see a dog, and I say it's the dog food, and then you say the dog's not food, you laugh at the people who you think treat it as food, and you're scapegoating on them because you feel guilty.
You're angry with people who do different cultural practices than yourself, partly because of the cognitive dissonance it precipitates.
I just want to back up to this.
Sorry, I just wanted to really, I think that's a great point.
But I just want to make sure I understand it before we move on.
Because in my culture, dogs are not food, and in other cultures, dogs are food.
I have to hate on the people for whom dogs are food, because otherwise I recognize the arbitrariness of my cultural content.
Is that right? Yes, yes.
And so all cultures themselves are in some way guilt-shielding structures because there's an existential terror and the ultimate fact that you could be totally wrong.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, what we call ethnocentrism is in fact a kind of guilt-shielding which vents itself by scapegoating on the other.
Although, sorry, and just to touch on that point, I mean, I think that's a great point, but...
I would perhaps break down the concept of guilt into other things, in that it may not just be guilt that's sort of bound up in the core of that.
There may be anger at having been lied to.
There may be fear of social ostracism for bringing up these cultural issues as subjective and relative.
And so there's, I think, a lot of emotional baggage that's hung on to that particular cross, so to speak.
Oh, right. Ambiguity.
I didn't talk enough about ambiguity, but yeah, I think you're right on it.
All of these things get nested.
And I would also add that all of the things that we just listed, those are words coming out of our mouth, and they don't have boundaries the way tables and chairs and rocks and things do.
I mean, they're sort of nebulous relations that get carved out linguistically.
So in some sense, yeah, I think awkwardness, guilt, fear...
You know, they do have funny relations in that sometimes I can feel guilty for being afraid.
I mean, there's all kinds of different relations.
But I want to go back to your example, which I thought was a wonderful way to come at it, to begin to bring out the degree to which we are cultural through and through by looking at the way that young people, they salute to the flag and they learn the language.
Now, the language acquired Okay, it's such a great example.
The child has an innate capacity to babble.
No child is born with an innate capacity to speak the language.
That is, they're born with an innate capacity to babble.
The babbling period goes on at a certain time, and then when people are around that baby and they respond to that babbling, it, without any instruction, spontaneously starts babbling.
With normal interaction, it will spontaneously speak the language of those who speak with it.
Now, the fact of speech as phenomena, that is not cultural.
That's a biological urge of an organism budging into self-consciousness, and it's a cry of an inarticulate yet being struggling for...
and recognition and calling out to an other to hail it in some way.
Let me just buttress that up by saying that it's really quite fascinating.
When my daughter hears a non-English word, she knows that it's not part of the syntactic or language or morpheme set that she's working with.
So I just really wanted, not only is there a specialization in language that occurs around 10 to 18 months or whatever, but there is a sense of foreignness of words, even before the vocabulary pushes one to 200 words.
I just wanted to sort of point that out.
It's quite fascinating to see.
Or, you know, like, you know, my wife is Greek, and she as a young girl learned Greek and then went to school and suddenly realized that she spoke Greek because she would use words that the other kids didn't know and suddenly realized herself as an other.
I mean, being hailed as an other sociopolitically for the words that were all part of a language, I mean, it is pretty interesting.
Especially, I guess, if you have grown up in a multilingual home, sometimes there can be boundary lines between the languages.
But I think the point there is that I would say that, and this goes back to the religious stuff, I get very frustrated on YouTube because a lot of my books are probably seen to be somewhat hostile or critical to Christianity or to religious dogma.
But I'm not an atheist.
From my own perspective, for various health reasons, other things in my life, I've had experiences that I don't need faith or belief.
And whenever people talk that way, I don't really get that sort of talk.
But I have experiences that just lead me to recognize this cosmos right here as...
Again, for lack of a better word, something that's sacred that requires a kind of reverence.
I mean, the kind of respect that you're advocating in your doctrine of nonviolence is...
I think that's sort of what I'm talking about.
If people could just achieve that, I'm happy enough.
You don't need any divine intervention, no virgin births, no afterlifes, nothing weird like that.
It's more like... A lot of the work that I was doing is in the Stoics.
It's in people like Epictetus.
It's somewhat Spinoza-esque, but it's trying to recover God as order and harmony, and some of it is hardship.
I think this is why sometimes people are surprised that I'm not a socialist.
If anything, I'm a kind of...
What I say, a gift-oriented producer capitalist.
I'm against consumer capitalism, but I'm for producer capitalism, but it has to be collective producer capitalism rather than individual consumer capitalism.
And that's some of the breakouts that I've tried to do in some of my work.
I mean, I think there is room for a social economy, especially as these technological changes are happening.
That's where it's all making it possible.
I think the kind of community that we can have today isn't the kind that was possible when Hobbes was writing or through history.
I think it just was a very different situation, at least for...
For many people in a lot of ways.
Well, of course, I'm very much sure that the history of human progress is the history of childhood.
And when Hobbes was writing, the state of child-rearing was absolutely atrocious, at least by, I think, modern, and I think better.
Better standards. I mean, the amount of child abuse, the amount of child sexual predation, the amount of abandonment, the wet nursing and all of that that went on, not to mention things that were inadvertent like infant mortality and so on, which, you know, meant that most children had seen death pretty up close by the time they hit puberty more than once.
For that kind of society to be free from a sort of hierarchical structure would probably have been quite disastrous, that you do need to raise children in sort of peaceful, cooperative, and non-aggressive ways for them to have a chance, I think, at participating in and hopefully producing a society that doesn't need hierarchy.
To me, the state is an effect of what goes on in the family, and people who try to change the state without trying to improve peacefulness within the family are trying to get the tail to wag the dog, so to speak.
Right. No, I agree.
I think the family is absolutely huge, and I think you're focused on child-rearing.
I just commend.
I think that's so right-minded.
What do I say? I mean, what do you think can be done with I mean, are there local things that can be done?
I mean, just lessening the state.
Does it come down to size?
Does it come down to anonymity?
What is the problem of anonymity that you see?
Because I feel like a lot of it's anonymity.
I don't know if you're familiar with Richard Sennett's work, but the wonderful book called The Corrosion of Character on the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism.
And it's interesting because he lays out some of these new dynamics that technology made possible.
And as much as I love McLuhan, and I really am a McLuhan sort of scholar and promoter, and I'm very interested in McLuhan's work, he's very critical of McLuhan's logic, and he talks about some of these processes, what he calls concentration without centralization.
Look at the way monopolies are able to now exist in the world, and they're like fog.
Because they're electronically decentralized, they're impossible to attack, and a lot of times they're cloaked under anonymity.
I think that's quite true.
I mean, we have these bizarre legal fictions called corporate entities, which are staggeringly wrong-headed and immoral from just about every standpoint that you could think of.
I mean, as you sort of probably know from the recent financial scandals, I mean, people can take money out of these corporations into their own personal bank accounts and keep it there forever, no matter what happens in the futures of that corporation.
So corporations where people took hundreds of millions of dollars out during the boom period from, I guess, 2002 to 2007, they made hundreds and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from these corporations, took all of that money out.
Then when the corporations get hit with fines, it's not like those fines then extend to people's personal bank accounts.
They don't.
They're shielded by this legal corporation.
And so who ends up paying?
Well, the existing shareholders, the employees who don't get raises, or the potential employees who don't get hired.
So it's a complete one-way profit cannon that only, like, shoots money this way, and then turns around and shoots the consequences at the innocent.
So, I mean, that's just my particular rant.
And so the anonymity of the corporation where individuals Don't have any long-term stake in the success of that entity, which is just wretched, to me is the inevitable result of sort of state capitalism.
It's what you give to the economic elite to protect them from the consequences of their actions in return for their financial support of the existing system.
And it goes to the media, it goes to the financial institutions, it goes all throughout society.
If you got rid of corporations and had people be personally liable for their actions, not shielded by this bizarre S.H.I.E.L.D., it would really change the way people act and it would really promote the value of personal integrity over the long run.
Oh, I mean, I think that's so much of what Senate's doing.
I mean, I'm so much a strong believer in the personal virtue orientation rather than other imposition.
And I think one of these, you know, You mentioned that slavery took a great while to get rid of that.
I agree, obviously, but there's such a way in which it's being reinstituted by drinking laws.
Just as an example, when I grew up, it was an 18-year-old drinking state.
And in Wisconsin, where everyone had a fake ID or you knew someone who did, by 16, everyone was drinking.
And by the time you got to college, you were so sick of the party scene.
You had seen so much bad stuff that you got down to studying and you were serious about your homework.
Now, these students go off.
Think of the irony.
They're there, and at 16, they can get a license to drive a car and go kill someone with manslaughter.
At 17 or 18, they go get married, have a baby, do even worse damage.
At 18, they can get a gun, join the military, and go kill a stranger for their flag.
And then they get to school, there's this utter kind of let down in all the responsibilities there, and yet finally when they're 21 they start to drink, and actually the booze is slipping down to them when they're about 19, and many of them blow their chance to really get serious about school.
Fannie Mae and these other corporations In the government, they have indentured servants for life.
And so there's a new kind of slavery class coming in of people who think that they need to go to college who then really come of age because they haven't figured out how to become responsible earlier.
Well, yeah, and of course, as I've talked about in some other videos, the most reprehensible enslavement is of the unborn through these national debts and unfunded liabilities where you are stealing from people who aren't even a gleam in their daddy's eye yet and have no chance.
I mean, taxation without representation when you haven't even been born yet, it's pretty tough to sustain.
So yeah, for sure, we are absolutely layering massive, surf-like, unpayable debts onto the tiny, scrawny necks of the conceptual human beings to come, and that's completely wretched.
So I want to get at this for a second, though.
Okay, so we started with this issue of guns, gods, and goodness.
And we circled around.
And then we talked a little bit about guilt.
One of the comments on that video was a person said, you missed a G, it was greed.
And I was thinking, oh boy, okay, greed is a fun one.
I mean, I think greed is very real.
From my own perspective, though, in the work that I've done, the bodies of literature that I'm familiar with, greed, not to deny it, greed is largely misunderstood.
It's human fear and frailty and vulnerability.
It's hiding itself.
When you see some person with a Mercedes in a fancy set of clothing, you've got to feel sorry for this person.
They don't have the courage to need little, and they're somehow in a parade of self-worth in socially recognized symbols, but it's not what it appears.
I think a lot of what passes as greed is a scared little animal right now trying to achieve meaning in a largely secularized world.
Once transcendent religious meanings People increasingly try to achieve some sort of worldly differentiation and it's become a religious, I mean consumerism is a religion right now.
Well, I think more of a Satanism, but yeah, no, I agree with you.
I think that, you know, this is a plea as old as Socrates, you know, know thyself.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
I think that's a great, horrible tragedy that no, the Shakespeare's pen could not encompass with modern consumerism, which is, you know, I have a hole in my heart the size of my heart, so I'm going to fill it with stuff.
And the idea of a virtuous life of relative simplicity, as you say, maybe a Stoic life, a Socratic life, perhaps even a Thoreauian life, the idea that you should have not stuff, not a shiny armor of materialism that is supposed to glint and get people to come and play with you, but that you should try as best as you can to be a beacon of integrity and virtue in the world, and that that will bring love to you.
Who wants stuff when you have love?
The stuff is not going to hold you when you're sick.
The stuff is not going to be with you on your deathbed.
The stuff is not going to cry when it throws dirt on your coffin.
The stuff is not going to write your gravestone or remember you in the future, hopefully with love and positivity.
The stuff...
There's a reason why the word possession is used for ownership as well as a demonic force that inhabits you and empties you out of virtue because I think that the focus on the exterior, the focus on, you know, am I fit enough?
Am I tall enough? Am I hairy enough?
Is my hair shiny enough?
Do I have the right clothes? Is all a massive substitute for a lack of love.
And the problem is, of course, it tends to feed that lack of love because people who are that shiny drive away The virtuous, curious, and inquisitive and draw other empty souls to them in a real embrace, I think, of horrifying solitude that is lit up only by these empty flashes of consumerism.
Yeah, no, that's some seriously great stuff.
I think that's so true. Oh, there's just so much there.
It's hard to put your finger on all that's going on there.
I think part of it is this, that You brought up that it's a sort of Satanism rather than a religion.
I think it's tragic on multiple fronts in that one of the tragedies is that many people have been sold the belief that the highest they'll ever be able to aspire to is consumer.
So it's not even just trying to be seen as wealthy.
I think that's part of it. But it's also that life is at its best When you just get a job that pays some money and then you go home and for about four to five hours sit in the opium den of TV while at the click of a finger you can be entertained and you snap your finger and have the next entertainment.
Thinking of the world as a pre-packaged set of experiences at your disposal, like it's all pre-packaged, ready-made, remote control accessible, all this kind of stuff.
That logic has left people bereft of virtues of cultivated talents and skills of all kinds of, I think, what were more traditional routes of happiness.
I think that's right. And the project that I've taken on, perhaps megalomaniacal, perhaps not, is that I really believe in what Nietzsche says.
He says, give a man a why, and he can bear almost any how.
In other words, if we have a goal that is noble and heroic enough, then we can take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in good stride and good humor.
And until and unless the philosophically minded among us can really work to give people not only a reason but a cogent argument for the necessity and value of virtue, I think that people are going to be like sails not in a wind.
They're just slack and hanging and drawn towards immediate gratification and drawn towards short-term satisfaction and drawn towards distractions.
Everything in the media is an advertisement, except for this show and your show.
But I think that we really need to work to fill the void of ethics, because when ethics is hollowed out from a society, as we can see with the late Roman Empire, as we can see so with the late Greek culture, when a culture no longer,
when a society no longer knows what is good or why be good, Or when the arguments for goodness have been ceded to a radical and largely superstitious few on the political or religious extremes, then I think society does end up with emptiness and distraction and an internal hollowing out, as the poem says. You know, things fall apart.
The center cannot hold. The center, I think, has to be an argument for virtue that is, you know, coherent, rational, empirical, and lived.
And until we do that, I think that things are going to continue to fall apart.
Oh, I agree.
No, I think that's...
That's just wonderfully said.
I think the thing that has come out of this conversation to me is how much I really appreciate The way that you're focusing on childhood as a strategic locus of concern, because I think it cuts exactly at the concern that I was trying to raise before of boundary lines between the individual and the collective.
From my own perspective, the truth is, it's ambiguous.
I mean, metaphysically, it's ambiguous.
That is, in one sense, you really are radically unique, autonomous.
You're an autonomous individual.
But in another sense, you are fully and thoroughly a symptom and a product of relations with others.
You wouldn't even be you were it not for those others.
Your name was given to you by others.
You have come to self-awareness and bear a cultural tradition that helps you come to self-realization.
It's the unseen ground to the figure that you have when you say, I am me.
I mean, there's so much there that it's hard to see.
And yet, all of that, I'm still me.
I'm alone. I am separate.
And again, this is part of the way culture tries to hide these deep existential ambiguities.
You know, am I the world? Well, I'm not the world, but I'm not not it.
You know, there's funny ambiguities that for culture's sake we hide from.
And I think this is...
The more that we could be open about our connectedness to the larger world, our connectedness to others, and to find those critical points where little differences can make all the difference.
And I do think childhood is that blaze.
Yeah, I've sometimes thought that if I were to try and unravel all of the influences that have helped me develop as a thinker, as a husband, as a father, as a human being, it would be like you get a ball of twine, you know, and you're like, ah, I'm going to get to the center of the ball of twine.
So I'm going to start pulling the ball of twine.
And all you end up with, there's no center.
There's just string. And there's no center.
And I think it has a lot to do with the influences.
What I really like about the childhood approach is it's something that people can do in their environment.
We all know kids.
Whether we're uncles or our kids are adult children ourselves, or we have nieces or nephews, or we have children ourselves, we all know children.
There's lots that we can do to intervene positively in children's lives.
We can, you know, if we see a child being attacked or harmed in public, we can walk up to the parent and suggest other or better ways of doing things.
We can put information out.
We can intervene positively in children's lives.
We can volunteer. We can give to charities.
We can do lots of great things to improve children because as children improve, so the world improves in the only permanent way that I've ever seen.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I think that's, it really is.
It's children are the future.
It's such a cliche, but I mean, it really is what's happening.
Just because Whitney Houston ended up in rehab 12 times doesn't mean that the song isn't true.
Listen, I don't want to take up all your afternoon.
Thank you so much.
It was so fun and really a thrill.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
I'll send you a copy of this, of course.
You're absolutely welcome to upload it to your channel, and I will just make sure that you give out at the end here ways in which people can access your material on the web.
Okay, very good. And it was really fun.
Sorry, if you want to give your URL for your YouTube channel.
Oh, right here. My channel here is YouTube, just Corey Anton.
You can find me there. Corey Anton.
C-O-R-E-Y-A-N-T-O-N, right?
That's right. All right.
Thanks, Corey. I really appreciate the conversation and I really appreciated you giving some responses and I hope to have you back again soon.
That would be wonderful. It was really a delight.
Bye. Take care.
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