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July 13, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:03
1951 The Statistics of Corruption - A Conference Call

How much of virtue should we really expect from our fellow men and women?

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Time Text
Hello. Oh, hey, how's it going?
All right, how are you? Not too bad, not too bad.
Hello. So, are we all three on?
Are we all three on? Can you hear, Kyle?
Yeah, I can hear fine.
All right, my friends, what can I do for you?
Do you want to start? Yeah, sure.
One second. I want to shut off my audio, because otherwise...
I have to deal with the delay between your speakers and my audience.
Yeah. Well, I was excited to have a chat about this conversation that me and Ben are having about...
It's a conversation about a conversation, actually.
We pretty frequently talk about his work situation, and it might be You know, I don't think that that...
It doesn't necessarily need to be too much a focus of the combo, but it might be...
Maybe it would be useful for Ben to...
If you wanted to summarize what his work experience was.
Well, basically...
My job is...
Well, I work for...
I think management's pretty corrupt, and it's a stressful work environment, and I've been bringing that...
Stress home a lot and I talk about...
When I come home and we have conversations, one of the more frequent conversations is I talk about stuff that I'm really unhappy with at work and it's been leading to some...
We've been having some kind of frustrating conversations about it that aren't the kind of relaxed and flowing kind of conversations that...
That our other ones are and that we'd like more of our conversations to be.
Alright, so work problems are sort of interfering with more pleasurable conversations that you might be having?
I think that's part of it.
What I'm feeling is that we've been talking about kind of the same things for a long time in terms of His work experience and my experience is that a lot of his conversation is focused on particular people and the things that he does at work that he doesn't like.
One of my thoughts is that I'm tired of talking about these people because I don't care about these people.
I care about how Ben is feeling and I care about his experience but I don't care about these people and I already understand the ways they're corrupt because we've talked about that a lot.
That's one of the thoughts and kind of frustrating Feelings connected to that that I'm having and I tried and I feel like I'm trying to help Ben and not just like shut him up you know like I don't want to hear about this anymore and I guess I'm feeling like our conversations are they haven't really progressed you know at least I don't think that way.
In terms of being happier you know like Ben finding a way to be happier in his life.
I've been at this job for just over three months and I was kind of It didn't take long for me to become aware that it was a crapshoot.
Crapshoot? I'm not sure what that means.
Just a bad environment, a bad working environment.
Right, okay. And did you not know that going in?
Well, I should have known when I... For my interview, I had set it up for like 1.15.
And my manager...
Didn't show up to the interview for like an hour and a half.
Right. Luckily, there was lots of paperwork, so that filled up most of that time before he got there, but that should have been like my first signal that he's not...
Well, sorry, just to be more precise, there could have been some highway closure or something.
That can happen, right?
Car breaks down, don't have cell phone, can't get cab, whatever.
The key thing is how he is when he shows up, right?
Is he like, oh my god, it's just wretched, or is it like, hey, you know, stuff happens, whatever, right?
Hello? How was he when he first got there?
Yes. Well, he seemed like he was in a hurry, and he was, like, sweating, and he's just kind of like, hey, I'm Chris, you know, and we...
Oh, no apologies. I'm sorry, I shouldn't use the name, but hey, I'm Bob.
That's all right, that's all right. And we started...
There's a guy in the business world named Chris.
We just don't use any other names, I think.
Yeah, yeah, sorry. I'll try.
And we went back to his office and did the interview.
I was actually...
And the interview was actually...
I was pretty much over-prepared for it because by the time he was satisfied, I was feeling like, wow, I don't feel like I've said enough.
I did a lot of preparing for this and I want to showcase my preparedness more than...
Well, let me just ask you a general question, which I think is sort of important, which is this.
How many really moral people do you know?
Have you ever known?
And that doesn't mean perfect and whatever, but just, you know, get it, you know, have sensitivity, empathy, can be trusted generally to do the right thing, even if it's tough and so on.
The only person that I actually know face-to-face is my roommate, Kyle.
Yeah, remember we're not going to do so much with the names if you could.
I mean...
Oh, sorry.
Yeah. Okay, so there's one.
And anybody else?
I mean, it seems like there's more in the community.
I mean, and I've had a few conversations with people in the FDR community who...
I'm working very hard on self-knowledge and even people who I haven't talked to who I can tell from their posts that they're working very hard on trying to understand the truth about themselves and the world.
Right. And so, how many people do you know?
No one else I've ever met in the flesh.
Sorry, go ahead. I mean, nothing, just not many.
Right.
So how many people do you think you've known in your life as a whole?
Like, known how well?
No, just known enough to have some sense of whether they're a good person or not, or can be trusted to do the right thing reasonably often.
I don't know. I guess 100, 150?
I don't know. Okay, so 150.
And I mean, of course, you would have known people in school.
I'm not saying you would have known them all intimately.
But in school, you'd have had some sense of their reputation, right?
Yeah. And so how many people went to your school in your year, roughly?
About 500. Right.
And did any of them have this reputation...
Of, you know, sort of high moral goals or ethical approaches to life or whatever?
Not in my opinion.
Or no. Was there in other people's opinion?
You know, if you want a good advice on the right thing to do, go to this guy or this woman.
No. Okay, so that's 500, 600 or so, right?
And you've probably met a lot of people or seen a lot of people's actions online.
And by that, I mean sort of on message boards or Comments, sections in newspaper websites or other kinds of websites.
And of those people, how many people's comments do you think you've read online or whose work have you followed online?
I know it's a tough number, but you know, just roughly.
I mean, I've probably seen at least something from a thousand people online or more.
Right. Okay, so 1500, 1600, again, these aren't perfect, but it's just some place to start statistically, right?
Yeah. And of those, you've met one person in the flesh who you would consider to be a morally striving and successful human being, right?
Yeah, pretty much.
And online, how many have you found?
I've had a couple pretty good conversations lately with some people from the FDR, but that's just a...
Yeah, hopefully that's a bit of a slanted community, but I know what you mean, right?
And the reason that I'm asking you these questions is to give you, you know, I'm all about the empiricism, right?
The empiricism, and I get into trouble in my life When I forget about the empiricism, right?
Which is rather than to live in a world...
I should put this best.
Well, to live in the real world, we need to look at the evidence that we've accumulated.
So you're a young man, I think, and so you've had some experience living, and so you can judge, you can begin to judge the prevalence of virtue in the world, right?
And if you've had, you know, you've got one virtuous roommate, which is fantastic, great, yay, and you've had a couple of conversations, let's say maybe three out of 15 or 1600 people, right?
Is that, you know, I'm not trying to stack the deck, I'm just sort of asking you if that's a reasonable place to start, you know, you may think of more, right?
Sorry? I'm sorry?
Yeah, yeah. It's a very small number compared to the total experiences.
Right, right. Okay, so I worked it out that you've got 0.25% of the people that you've met in the world would be virtuous.
Now, that's one way of putting it.
Of course, another way of putting it is to not count the people online at FDR because that's a bit of a skewed community.
So to speak. It's not a random sample of the world, because these are people who've already self-selected because of their desire for virtue.
So that would leave you with zero, because of course your roommate's interested in philosophy through the Freedom Aid Radio community.
But even if you count your roommate, you're looking at 0.06% of people that you've met in your life being interested in, like really interested in and committed to virtuous behavior.
Yeah. Right.
So, with that in mind, what is not surprising about your work environment?
That the people I work with are not virtuous people.
Right. Right.
Right. Right.
Now, does that...
Because I would assume that some of the conversations that you're having with your roommate are around, hey, they're really not very good people.
Yeah, that's a lot of it.
Right. And so your roommate...
Again, may be frustrated because it's like, well, yeah.
Right? Because that's the empirical evidence that we have as people.
That there's just not a lot of people out there.
That is a thought that I have. Right.
And, you know, he's probably too nice to say, like, duh.
But I'll say it for him.
No, because it's alarming to look at those statistics.
Yeah, I've been...
I'm sorry?
Yeah, it's a bit daunting.
It's very daunting, right?
Because I'm going to give you a tiny little speech here and then ask you what you think.
And I'm sorry for not asking more, but I've had some chance to sort of mull over what you've written to me about in terms of having an issue.
Yeah. So I will tell you what I think is the great challenge in what you're facing at work, and I think this is going to be useful for other people too, so I hope that it's of value to you.
So, where are we going to live?
In what mental space are we going to live in this life?
And the reason I say mental space is that we didn't invent language, we didn't invent philosophy, we didn't invent morality, we didn't invent economics, we didn't invent culture or religion or the mass media or any of these things, right?
These things are all there and they have a momentum and energy and focus all their own.
So, the Big essential question to ask in life is, in which mental space am I going to live?
And the mental space is one of two things, right?
It's either something that you're going to figure out for yourself, or it's something that you're going to slide in, you know, like a sword into a scabbard, slide in.
A pre-constructed one, a...
A sort of rabbit hole of preconceptions, right?
So clearly, if you're raised in the Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, or whatever, these sort of people, then if you're raised a Mormon, you have a prefabricated mental space to live in called Mormonism, right?
And if you're a Mormon and you're an American and you're a patriot and you come from a military family, then you have three, right?
I mean, you have the Mormon thing, you have the military thing, and you have the American thing.
The nationalism thing.
The USA, USA, USA! And this, I think, we all sort of understand pretty well.
I don't think there's anything too startling at what I'm saying there.
But I think what is much more interesting and much harder to recognize is that there's a massive mental space in the world called We are virtuous, and it is almost exclusively inhabited by people who are almost the exact opposite of virtuous.
Right? So, when you meet someone, I shouldn't say that, when I meet someone, a civilian, so to speak, somebody who's not into philosophy, part of me says to myself, okay, so this, let's just say I meet some woman.
Okay, so this woman thinks she's a really good woman.
She thinks she's a really good person.
And she's wrong. And she's wrong.
And it's not because I'm prejudicial or negative towards people.
It's just a fact. She's wrong.
Because virtue is something that is still being invented, I think, to a large degree.
I think we've made great strides in this conversation in moving forward the picture of virtue.
But it's like if Einstein and five other guys know the theory of relativity and they just go walking around, everyone they meet Does not know the theory of relativity, by definition, right?
And certainly people who've never studied it, right?
And if you and I go to some primitive tribe in the Amazon that has never had access to science or medicine or books or whatever, right?
And they have a theory about what the Sun and the Moon and the stars are doing wheeling around the sky, we don't know the exact contents of that theory But we sure as shit know that they're wrong, right?
Because it's going to be some crazy-ass peyote-induced myth, right?
They're just wrong. And I believe that virtue is still being forged, so to speak, in this, you know, hopefully second wind or third wind or tenth wind of philosophy that we're all working on here,
right? And so when I meet someone, I know for a fact that their relationship to virtue is a pygmy in the Amazon with a big hunk and bone through his nose.
It's his relationship to the solar system.
He's going to have a story about it.
It's just going to be wrong. And people that you meet are going to have a story about what makes them good, what makes them virtuous, what gets them through the day, has them look in the mirror without flinching and not wake up, screaming like a baby every three hours at night.
They're going to have some story about why they're good.
And that story is wrong.
And it's not wrong because they're innately bad and it's not wrong because they're just stupid and it's not wrong because they're pompous or selfish.
They just, they don't know.
And so, the mental space that is the most subtle and the most insistent and for which you're going to face the most hostility in your life, that mental space is called, I have a story about being good, don't you dare fuck with it.
Because if you fuck with my story about being good, I will fuck you up.
And that's a mental space that is more common, I think, than oxygen and nitrogen in the air sometimes.
And my guess is...
You know, tell me where I've strayed off into the dark alleys of cantankerous bullshit...
But my guess is that at work, you're surrounded by people who think that they're good people, who are insistent, not probably openly and vocally, but unconsciously, that they're good people.
And they're not!
And there's a threat, a constant threat, like a little ghostly swinging, spinning ninja sword floating around above everybody's head, that is It's like a sniffing attack dog scimitar that is constantly sniffing for anyone in the environment who's going to question the moral virtue of the person whose fragile, empty head it is currently guarding.
And we all see these little sniffing attack dog scimitars floating and whirling above everyone's head.
And we're scared of them.
And rightly so.
And so you probably are in an environment where Everybody believes.
It doesn't mean that they sort of got it printed on their forehead or they're actively saying, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good all the time.
But they have this mythology called I'm virtuous.
It's clearly false to anybody with any philosophical training or understanding.
Certainly people who've delved into UPB get it very quickly.
And it is...
It is dangerous to question that.
In the same way that it's dangerous to question the mythology of the Amazon tribe which supports the power of the warlord and the head priest, right?
You fuck with their mythology and they will try to fuck you up because the mythology is the source of their self-esteem, their identity, their relationships, their income usually.
So here's my...
Very quick tour and I don't know anything about your work environment and it doesn't matter any of the details but just tell me if this is way off base as far as content goes.
But you go to work and you step into the mental space of amoral, crazy and or immoral people all believing that they're good and all in one way or another dumping their crazy on everyone else and particularly on you.
And that washes away that little sand dyke we call philosophy like a tsunami going over a toy sandcastle, a little kid's sandcastle on the beach.
And then you come home filled with these fantasies, these self-deceptive, slippery, elusive and divisive fairy tales of virtue.
And you dump.
And the reason that you have to dump again and again and it doesn't get resolved is because you haven't looked at the statistics and the rarity of virtue in the world that you've lived in today.
So tell me if that's anywhere close to the ballpark and if not we'll try something else.
So like you think that if I come to If I can come to grips with the fact that, with the reality of the situation of people's understanding of morality, that this should help resolve this.
It's less stressful if I understand Well, no.
Sorry, it's not less stressful.
It's not less stressful in the short run.
It's much more stressful in the short run because it gives you some pretty nasty stuff to process.
But what I'm saying is take the mathematics of your experience seriously.
Right? That you didn't just have a bunch of bad luck and didn't happen to meet a lot of good moral people.
People who are willing to make sacrifices for virtue.
People who are willing to confront immorality.
People who are willing to do the right thing even What does that look like, taking the statistics seriously?
Well, it means that the default position is that you're surrounded by crazy, amoral or immoral people.
I mean, I'm not telling you this.
You've told me this based upon the statistics of the people that you've met, right?
Yeah. So I'm saying, look, until evidence to the contrary, accept that as a fact.
Because the way it sort of seems at the moment is you go out every day eating mushrooms.
And once in your life you ate a mushroom that tasted really well, but the other 1600 mushrooms you've eaten have all made you sick, and you keep going out eating mushrooms, coming back and saying, damn it, those mushrooms!
They're making me sick!
Right? And at some point, someone has to say to you, well, yeah, because you ate one good mushroom.
Once. Right?
You keep just going out and eating mushrooms, they all make you sick.
And so why are you coming home and saying, the mushrooms keep making me sick every single day?
Sorry? So, this is the other housemate.
So can eating mushrooms be considered analogous to expecting people to be good?
Yeah. Like, going out and expecting people to be good, and so then disappointed when they're not, or even outraged when they're not.
Right. Yeah, I mean, it's like the people who write to me, like, can you believe this has been printed in the mainstream media?
It's like, my only shock would be if it wasn't, right?
Right, so someone just sent me someone which said, you know, oh, a guy has just suggested that...
I don't know, Obama give $10,000 to everyone and that's going to jumpstart the economy.
Can you believe this stuff gets printed?
It's like, I would be shocked if it didn't.
I would be shocked to see an intelligent exposition of the Austrian business cycle in the mainstream media.
That to me would be like, not the other nonsense.
Well, I think I mean, that's like going to the Vatican and saying, Lord above, they still believe in God?
That's their job. Well, I think the question that I would have then is, why do I keep going out with this false, I guess, false hope that I'm gonna find more good than empiricism should tell me is realistic?
Well, because that's what other people need you to do, right?
That's why I was sort of making that thing, right?
Other people need you to not mess with their sense of virtue.
They desperately need that.
You know, I genuinely think that people go around with this unconscious terror that someone of virtue and integrity is going to show up in their lives and show them the hollowness that they live in.
And that's devastating to people.
I mean, obviously it's good, you know, in the long run, but it's really devastating for people.
It's one of the reasons why philosophers are so often disliked, right?
I just wanted to share that when you were giving that speech, if I can call it that, I feel really sad.
Right. I feel very sad right now.
And this is, again, this is a housemate without the job.
It's kind of hard without names. But I just wanted to share that I feel really sad.
Well, talk more about that, because I think that's why we don't do it, because that's why we stay in this fantasy.
We get secondary gains out of it.
Other people get significant gains, but we get secondary gains out of it, which is avoiding that sadness.
Tell me more about that. I feel really sad that I accept it.
I agree with you.
I'm not sure exactly beyond that.
I don't see any other thoughts in my mind around it.
I'm really sad that that's the case.
Is that...
Go on.
I was going to say, could that be the reason why I keep going out there with the false hope is to avoid the sadness?
Yeah, it's to avoid the sadness.
And also because I think we feel that with knowledge must come action, right?
So now that I know that the people in my work environment are, you know, whatever, amoral or corrupt or crazy or whatever, now I have to do something.
Well, you don't really.
You know, if you suddenly realize that everyone around you, except for ten people, are flesh-eating zombies, you don't have to do battle.
You just got to be careful now, right?
Do you feel like or do you think that my housemate could be accepting of kind of the state of the people around him and not be miserable at work?
Well, I think you'll be less miserable in the long run, which I think truth is a prerequisite for happiness.
It's not the only thing that brings happiness, and truth doesn't always bring happiness, right?
Someone, doctor says, you've got cancer, it's true, it ain't gonna make you happy.
But I would say that it is the expectation that breeds the broken record, right?
You know, like people who are in abusive relationships, right?
So, oh my god, my husband who beats me up, beat me up again, right?
And as soon as you accept that without massive intervention that is voluntary on the part of the husband, that is going to keep happening and keep happening and keep happening, right?
So once people get that it's not going to change, then they can get out of those abusive relationships.
Now, by that, I don't mean leaving the job.
The abusive relationship is not with your job.
It's not with your work environment.
It's not even with their delusions.
It's with your illusions, right?
Abuse is fundamentally our own illusions.
That's what abuse is, right?
So a woman who's being beaten up by her boyfriend Is only continuing to be beaten up by her boyfriend because of her own illusions about who he is and her role in it or whatever, right?
As soon as she rejects her illusions about her boyfriend and recognizes that by far the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, then she will leave the relationship and she will no longer be being abused.
You see, the abuse is Fundamentally, her illusion about him.
Not his actions or his illusions about himself or whatever.
But the abuse is our own illusions about the world.
It is not the world, fundamentally.
So, I'm not saying there's any abuse in this, right?
But the negative experience here is predicated upon your illusions about the prevalence of virtue in the world.
And I say this as someone as deep in the trenches as you are, and I have to consistently remind myself about this, so I'm not floating on some zen castle of benign and pure enlightenment on this issue.
I struggle with this literally every day.
But it's something that I have to keep reminding myself.
That the only abuse that I'm going to suffer in my life is my own illusions.
About the people and about where the world is.
It is not other people.
So if you accept that what is going to happen, I don't know if you've seen the bomb in the brain stuff, but this is really, really common.
What is likely going to happen in your work environment is people are going to act selfishly.
They're going to act impulsively.
They're going to act destructively.
They're going to act to maximize their own benefits at the long-term expense of others and maybe even of themselves.
And they're going to have probably dysfunctional relationships at work and at home And what they're going to do is they're going to act in ways that are not virtuous, and then they're going to make up a story called, I'm virtuous, or I'm practical, or I'm pragmatic, or it's winner takes all, or it's a dog-eat-dog world, or if I didn't get him, he was going to get me, or whatever they're going to make up afterwards that legitimizes, justifies what it is that they're doing.
Or, most likely, People will proclaim that they have particular mission statements or particular virtues.
Beware the company that says, we value integrity.
That's usually a massive, massive evidence that the last thing they ever want to have anything to do with is integrity.
but they want to camouflage it.
And so that is the reality.
If you accept that, then you won't be so frustrated.
So the last metaphor I'll give you is if you are a math teacher and you think that you're teaching a graduate class in mathematics at a prestigious university and you don't know that you're in a kindergarten, your life is going to be enormously frustrating, right? Until you go, oh, wait a minute, they have plastic scissors, glue that you can eat, Right?
And most of them are heavily involved in sticking paintbrushes up their nose.
Maybe I'm not a graduate school teacher at the moment.
Right? Because if you recognize the maturity level of the people around you and their moral level.
Because to not expect that is to expect people to have knowledge of philosophy without studying philosophy in an environment that actively opposes and discourages the studying of philosophy, i.e.
public school or a lot of families, if not most families, or This is actually pretty similar to another conversation that we were having earlier this evening.
Go on. Are you interested in talking about that?
I'm not sure, but there was one other One question I wanted to definitely get to, but sure maybe.
Which was just, what do you suggest I do to try and face this more?
To face this more? You mean you have been facing it, but you'd like to face it a little more?
Well, I want to get it.
Right, right, right.
So that I can stop feeling like I'm banging my head.
Well, I think, I mean, there's no magic to this.
There's no magic to this.
But what I will say is that it's very important to be receptive to the information that the laboratory called humanity is giving to you.
Right, so a physicist doesn't just scream his equations at rocks, right?
What he does is, okay, I've got a theory, so I'll go out and test it.
And then he goes and he tests the theory.
But what he does mostly is observe, right?
Science is like 90% observation, 1% theorization, and 9% testing.
I mean, this is sort of my way of approaching it.
And so what you want to do is go into the world and simply observe.
People will try and distract you with their stories about themselves and, you know, just pretend that they're talking to you like Charlie Brown's teacher on the cartoon, you know?
What are they doing?
What are they doing? What are they doing?
What are they doing? What are they doing?
Not what are they saying, not what are they blathering on about.
What are they doing? And just accept.
Just listen. Just try to absorb the information that the world is giving you, that people in the world are giving you at all times, from all directions, in everything that they do.
People are telling you the reality of the world.
It's not even a murmur.
It's a full-on megaphone blast.
And so I would suggest, and this can be a sad thing to do, but I think it's really, really essential, is just say, hmm, what is the world telling me?
Right? So, I mean, I've been at this for, I don't know, six years, maybe five and a half years now.
And before that, I've been at it for 20 years before that, so I'm pushing over a quarter century of talking philosophy with the world.
And the world has been pretty clear about its receptivity towards philosophy.
And you can look at this not just from my example, but rational economists and philosophers have been talking about the evils of state intervention in the economy for about 300 years.
And how well is the world listening?
Well, it doesn't want to listen.
Doesn't want to listen. And so the important thing is to go out into the world And absorb the information.
I know this is all very abstract.
It doesn't give you anything practical to do.
But instead of having expectations of the world and being frustrated that the world is not meeting your expectations, let go of those expectations and say, what is the world?
I always think of a lot of philosophers are like guys blindfolded in a very small room But they think they're in an open field, so they keep running, and they keep getting incredibly frustrated.
Because they've got great legs, they want to run, and they run, and they take four steps, and bam!
They go straight into the wall. And they're like, oh, that must have been a tree or something.
It must be a tree somewhere in the middle of this, so I just have to run in another, bam!
You know? Wow, maybe I got turned around, I ran into the same tree again.
Okay, we go to 30 degrees, run, bam!
Right? We just have to take the blindfold off.
Or maybe you can climb over the walls or something, right?
But if you think you are somewhere other than where you really are, and you don't see where you really are, then you're going to be somebody running into walls all the time unexpectedly.
So take the blinders off.
Take the expectations off.
And these aren't expectations that you just generated magically.
It's not like you're dumb or don't know how the world works.
It's just that there's this consistent, insistent, Propaganda machine coming out of everybody's mouth and everybody's gesture about how great they are, about how wonderful they are, about how good they are.
And it's really easy to get sucked into that propaganda mill.
Propaganda is not something that's in the media, it's something that's in just about everybody.
Because nobody knows how to be good, at least philosophically or conceptually.
And so they have to make up this mythology.
Like the pygmies don't know why the sun goes up and down.
They're gonna make up some shit.
But then whatever shit they make up becomes their identity and then they don't want the truth anymore.
They become addicted to the false fruit of fantasy.
And so just you go into your workforce and you say, I wonder how people are.
I wonder what the world looks like today.
I wonder what I'm going to observe today.
Be passive. Be absorbing.
Listen. Because we go out and we want to change people's minds and we want people to be better and we can't believe that people did this and we can't believe that people didn't do that and we can't believe that people said this and we can't believe that they said this and then did that ten minutes later.
Well, believe.
Believe it, baby!
Just go out without the expectation of how people should behave and rather with the openness to accept How they are behaving.
So instead of mentally resisting, right?
Because, you know, the libertarians or anarchists read the paper and it's like, oh, my God, I can't believe.
It's like, no, no, no, no. This is what the world is telling you very clearly where the world is.
The world is telling you very clearly where the world is.
People are telling you very clearly where they are.
And if you don't listen, um...
A, you've given them a lot of power over you.
I mean, you come home frustrated from work every day.
Who's winning? The good guys or the bad guys?
Well, ain't the good guys, right?
You just have to accept.
What is the world telling me?
Where is the world? Who are these people at work and what are they telling me?
Just absorb, absorb.
Like an anthropologist, you know, you go in among the tribe, you don't start ordering around and give them iPhones and Flashlights and grenades, right?
You go in, perhaps dressed as one of them, if they have a dress code at your work, and you observe, and you observe, and you make notes, and you observe, and you understand the world that you're in, not the world of people's fantasies, the most danger of which is your own, about the world that you're in.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, I think that's really good advice.
I think I understand that.
Totally. And I think I trust the words that people say to me too much instead of focusing more on the actions, which are a much better indicator.
Well, and I'm sorry to interrupt you just as you start talking, but I want to cut you some significant slack.
You don't just do it, do it, you stepped off the bus from, you know...
Butthole Arkansas and just trust people no matter what, that's not the reality.
The reality is that you get punished for questioning people's virtue.
Right? You don't just trust people because people in your life have been so moral and trustworthy that how could it be otherwise?
You quote, trust people because if you don't, you get attacked, right?
Yeah. You know, how many teachers in your school were happy and eager to be corrected by surprising information?
You know, when you started reading about philosophy.
I can tell you in my school it was statistically and approximately after I did the zero.
I did not meet one teacher.
And I met hundreds.
So I went to school in a bunch of different...
I didn't meet one teacher who was happy to be corrected by surprising information.
I mean if they made a mistake based upon what they were doing then I'd be like oh yeah yeah sorry thanks right...
But if you brought something new to them that they hadn't heard or seen before and had a rational argument for it, they really didn't like that at all.
And the teachers, these are supposed to be the paracons of curiosity and virtue.
And it was zero.
How many priests did I ever have productive conversations with?
Well, zero. How many members of my family listen to reason?
Well, for me it was zero.
Hopefully for other people it's more.
For me it was zero. How many of my friends listen to reason?
Well, zero.
I have new friends now who I've chosen with much better care, but it was zero.
And so, you get attacked.
People feel humiliated.
You hold that red pill up and they get a glimpse of the real world and they attack you.
So it's not that you just trust people.
You're just too trusting, because that's a negative judgment on you.
It is a very wise course to not question people's virtue.
Because the unvirtuous outnumber the virtuous 1,600 to 1, right?
So they've really got the numbers on us.
And biologically and genetically, it wouldn't have made much sense to provoke 1,600 really enraged people in the Stone Age, right?
So no, it's not naivete.
It's not...
I'm just so trusting.
No, it's that we all have long experience...
Of being attacked for bringing the truth to the world, right?
Because the vast majority of profits in this world, I mean just economic profits alone, run on staggering amounts of bullshit.
And so, yeah, you don't mess with people's income by bringing the truth.
Sorry, go on. I just wanted to hopefully get you to cut some slack on that.
Yeah. And the only thing I might add is that if it was the case that I had not been attacked for bringing new ideas or whatever, questioning virtue in the past, then I wouldn't have trouble with people in the present because the difference between what I was raised with and these people that I see now, I would know that they weren't virtuous.
Sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to make sure I understood it.
Like, if it was the case that I had grown up around people who were virtuous and didn't attack me for questioning things around virtue, then I couldn't just be...
I wouldn't be naive either, because when I ran into people who weren't virtuous, it would be obvious.
Yes, I quite agree with that.
Yeah, for sure. Everybody used to be racist, and now you run into a real racist.
It's like, whoa, dude, what time portal did you step out of?
You know them immediately, right?
So yeah, I just really try to get people to avoid self-blame in this.
Because we all work in this highly predatory environment.
And dangerous environment.
And so, yeah, I think it's really important to be kind and gentle with yourself and saying, yeah, well, okay.
So I grew up with a bunch of people who couldn't admit that they were wrong and all that.
So yeah, I had a sensible survival strategy, but maybe it's not so sensible anymore.
Yeah, I think that all makes sense.
Thank you.
I don't feel like I... I don't think I have anything else to add to it at the moment.
I mean, was this useful?
I know I sort of jumped in with some thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, I know we can do this short.
Shorter is better. Is there anything else that I could add?
Does that give you enough to work with?
I think that, I mean, it's pretty simple.
Just drop...
Drop my assumptions.
Go in and just be more of an observer.
But I think that that's a huge thing.
Good. Well, and if you do get a chance, drop me a line and let me know what you think.
But yeah, I find going in as an anthropologist is really, really helpful and can help you make a lot of mistakes that will be very stressful.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
So keep me posted.
And I'm glad that the conversation was useful to you.
And best of luck as the anthropologist.
Yeah, thank you. Alright, take care guys.
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