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Sept. 15, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:09
1992 Philosophical First Principles - Finally!

A great listener question from the 2011 barbecue - what on earth do I mean by first principles?

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So one of the many excellent questions that came out of the barbecue from a fine young couple was, Steph, dude!
Actually, it didn't sound anything like that, but they said, Steph, you're always talking about first principles.
What are first principles?
That's a fine thing, and you'd think that I would get to that somewhere before the close to 2,000 mark in the podcast series, but that would just be too easy for everybody involved.
So I will talk about First principles, and hopefully it will make some sense.
I mean, I've talked about them in a general way in the Intro to Philosophy series many moons ago, but it is still something that needs, I think, a compact place of elucidation.
So first principles...
Are essential to philosophy.
I mean, if you're not using first principles, then you're not doing philosophy.
At least that would be my argument.
And so the question still remains, what are first principles?
Well, first principles are the base of knowledge, or the base of the pursuit of truth.
That require no assumptions.
Assumptions are the enemy of philosophy.
Assumptions, I believe, are the enemy of truth.
As many a drill sergeant has said in the army, spelling out the word assume, never assume!
It makes an ass out of you and me.
See? Assume. Anyway, assumptions are the enemy of truth, and truth, of course, is the enemy of assumptions.
Now, assumptions are the things that you need to believe are true in order to continue whatever topic is at hand.
These things are simply perceived as true without foundation.
So, for example, if you are If you're an adherent of the worship of the goddess of destruction, Shiva, then you kind of have to assume that Shiva exists and listens to you and responds to your supplications and prayers and so on.
That's pretty much wrapped up or bound up in the issue of believing in Shiva.
Those of us who argue for a stateless society know that government almost never needs to be proved.
This is the problem with a non-philosophical society, is that the lowest common denominator so often wins in social or cultural discussions, right?
So you say, well, you know, we really should look into the possibility of a society without a government, and that's just, well, no, we need government.
See, that's not working from first principles.
That's just having an assumption.
Government is necessary. Shiva exists and listens to your prayers.
All of these sorts of things.
My country exists.
The government exists. These are all things that are assumptions.
They're not actually coming from first principles.
So, it's sort of like A listener put this to me many years ago with regard to UPB. What he liked about UPB was you're not just sort of planting a flag and saying, okay, if we assume that this flag is in the right place, we can start doing X, Y, and Z. But of course, there is no reason to assume that the flag is in the right place.
I have really tried and continue to try to challenge myself and to challenge others with the question, why?
Why should I accept or believe that this is true?
So this idea about certain principles like the Kantian golden rule, Or the categorical imperative, sorry, act as if your action were to become a general rule.
Well, why?
Why? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?
Well, why? It's vastly more profitable, in many ways, materially at least, to not do that.
And the satisfaction of material wants, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, proceeds.
Moral considerations. If you are not alive, you cannot be moral.
And if you are alive, it doesn't mean you're moral, but it's necessary but not sufficient.
Criterion for morality.
And so, if there's no thief in the world, if there's no thief anywhere in the world except for you, you're going to make out, well, like a bandit, right?
Because no one's going to lock anything up.
Everyone's going to just assume they lost it.
Whatever. There's not going to be any police.
There's not going to be any, right? So, you are just going to do wonderfully if you are the only thief in the world.
Or Ayn Rand's, that which is good for man is the highest standard of value.
Well, why?
You know, that which is good for someone individually is, if they're the only thief in the world, is good to just take stuff rather than work.
It's, you know, greater resource acquisition and less resource expenditure.
I say, ah, but it won't make you happy in the long run.
Well, that is a problem in ethics because what it does...
It says there's a secular hell called conscience which is going to make you feel bad if you do the wrong thing.
And that's you should do the right thing because you'll go to hell long before you die and that hell is called you've done the wrong thing and by golly you're going to know it.
Well, I'd like to know what the evidence is for that.
I'd like to know what the evidence for that is.
It doesn't seem to be true.
So, you know, George Bush Jr.
started one obviously unjust war and one more subtly unjust war and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and so on.
Well, he sought re-election and he seems to be doing just fine.
He's not sitting in his room sucking on a shotgun.
He seems to be quite happy.
Bill Clinton... Got involved in the war in Serbia and did some other pretty nasty things and he seems to be doing just fine.
He's out there negotiating the release of North Korean hostages and running his charitable organizations and making happy, glow-headed speeches all over the world.
So, it's hard to see this secular hell called guilt and self-attack So when we say that which is good for man, well, the people who are enjoying political power really enjoy it.
They work very hard to hang on to it, and they work very hard to re-achieve it when it comes to re-election time.
I mean, look at the congressmen who've got eight, ten or more terms under their belt.
These are people who are not writhing in a guilty masochism of self-attack, no matter how much wrong they may have done.
So clearly they believe that political power is good for them.
A value, as Ayn Rand says, is that which one acts to gain and or keep.
Well, political power is a high value for these people.
They make a lot of money.
Strom Thurmond married, if I remember rightly, a series of Miss South Carolinas or wherever he was from, and hung on to his political power pretty permanently.
And so, that which is good for men, well, political power is good for men.
That individual. And you can say, well, but it's not good for the collective.
It's not good for the group.
But, of course, the anti-collectivism of objectivism means that we must reject the moral standing of the group, the moral status of the group.
There is no moral status of the called the group.
That is somehow different from the moral status of the individual.
And so each individual in this situation...
He believes that he is better off by pursuing, achieving, and maintaining political power.
And even though some of them may be enormously hated and so on, they like it.
Now, I mean, I couldn't do it, right?
I mean, there was an article.
I know this doesn't sound like first principles, but believe me, we're drawing the line around the body.
There was an article...
In the newspaper recently about a guy who claimed to be able to figure out bite marks and identify them with particular individuals and so on.
And his testimony was used to convict a large number of people.
And the science, such as it was, turned out to be completely bogus.
And the government was using this guy...
to convict people even after he'd been thoroughly or at least largely discredited and lots of people were in jail because of this guy even though his testimony was shaky at best and discredited at worst and this guy kept doing it and the prosecutors kept doing it and they kept putting people in jail now I mean I feel bad if,
I think, for the first time ever, the admins, we ask somebody to start posting on the forum.
And we were wrong.
It was wrong. It was a miscommunication, a big series of errors which we're going to work to rectify.
So, you know, I felt bad.
I apologized and fixed the situation.
That's pretty minor relative to throwing somebody in jail for...
One of the women had a 44-year sentence.
It was 10 years in.
Imagine how that would gnaw you if you have any kind of conscience or any kind of soul.
But these people don't.
So, I mean, this is not supposed to be a big critique of objectivism.
I'm just talking about that you have to just kind of accept that which is good for mankind as a whole and in the long run is the highest moral value.
That is what defines morality.
But why should we accept that?
Especially in the case of a pretty compelling, near-universal set of evidence to the contrary.
Obviously, the royal family is pretty parasitical in England, and I don't think I've seen the one guy...
Edward relinquished being king to marry Wallace Simpson.
I also want to say Wallace Shawn, but that would be a different kind of wedding.
And they don't renounce it.
They just hang in there and hang on and keep doing what they're doing.
Even though what they're doing is not good for society as a whole.
Anyway, so I think you sort of understand that you simply can't Assume something.
You can't say, well, okay, so we've got the categorical imperative.
Let's assume that and then work from there.
No, we can't. Or we've got that which is good for...
Man's life is the valuable, or that which is valuable for man's life is the good.
Let's assume that and move on.
Well, nah, we can't.
We can't if we want to be really rigorous when it comes to philosophy or some sort of pragmatism, that which is good for the greatest number.
Well, there's a number of problems with that because that always involves politics, and politics is not the greatest number but a minority deciding on, quote, behalf of the greatest number.
There's no way to have general social policies enacted which provide the greatest good for the greatest number without having politics, because you've got good in there, you've got good, i.e.
virtue. And, of course, that's a bit of a circular argument to say that we need some sort of utilitarianism as a value, as a virtue, so that we can create the most virtue in society.
Circular, right? I need a knife so I can have a knife.
Well, it doesn't really add anything.
And of course, the only way, if you substitute value for virtue, then you can have that.
That's called the free market, right?
So that which creates the greatest value, i.e.
that which somebody values, rather than something which is morally good.
Something which creates or provides the greatest value for the greatest number, well, that is the free market.
But that doesn't have anything to do with politics, in fact.
That's always undermined and diminished by politics.
So this, for me, has been the problem with moral systems.
If we assume this as our starting point, then we can build these elaborate mansions called morality.
But what I always do is I don't look at the spires, I don't look at the windows, I don't look at the latticework, I don't look at the roofing, I don't look at the front door or the landscaping.
What I do is I look at the base of the house.
I don't ask, what does the house look like?
I ask, why is the house here and not over there?
And what I've seen is that people either say there is no morality, which is a UPB violation statement, or they say there is morality, but they have built it, built it on a cloud. They've built it in some arbitrary cloud and said, this is the solid ground we start from.
And it's pretty hard not to miss that there's no solid ground there.
It's just an assumption.
It's just an assumption. And, unfortunately, this assumption cannot be accepted by anyone with a genuine thirst for a desire for truth.
You can't accept an assumption.
You certainly can't in the scientific world.
Well, I shouldn't say that.
When I was reading a book on how they solved one of the nastiest equations in the world, there was some equation that people said, well, if we assume this is true, Well, the difference, of course, is that it works.
And systems of morality that I've looked at don't work.
And this is, you know, a little frustrating when you're reading through Aristotle's ethics.
Okay, well, if we assume that the pursuit of excellence and blah, blah, blah.
Well, why should we assume that?
And this is why morality remains fragmented.
And this is why morality appears subjective to people.
Because they say, okay, well, if you like living in this house, this is the best house, universally.
Well, no, that's not the case.
So, people who want universality say, okay, well, if you follow the edicts of the goddess of destruction, Shiva, then you are a good person.
Universally. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
If you like this house, that doesn't make it the best house ever.
And so, people who want universality in their ethics say, this is the best house ever.
And people who, I think rightly, are skeptical of universality in ethics say, no, no, this is just the house that you like.
So it's similar to the critique of anyone, a Christian or whoever, who says, you know, my religion is true.
It's like, okay, so all the other 10,000 religions are false, but the religion that you happen to be born in is the universal truth.
Doesn't that seem a little suspicious to you?
And it should. And so this is what is so problematic with ethics.
That everybody really wants ethics.
And both good and bad people want ethics for different reasons.
But there is a subjectivity of assumption.
At the root of ethics.
And this is true even of libertarians and this is true even of anarchists.
So, the fact that you happen to be correct doesn't mean that you're not being subjective.
So, libertarians will say, property rights in the NAP. If we assume that these are valid, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And other people come along and say, well, no.
There are other kinds of aggression other than violations of the NAP. Poverty.
The limiting of opportunities through poverty is a form of aggression, and therefore we are going to violate property rights in order to rectify the lack of opportunity that the poor young face.
I say, well, no, but property rights are inviolate.
Well, no. Other people say property rights are not inviolate, or they redefine aggression or whatever, right?
And this is where the whole mess dissolves into yet another Pressure group, warfare, special interest, lobbyist mess.
If you want to know why we have a government and all these lobbyists, just look at the mental map of morality in the mind of any reasonably multicultural society.
The state is analogous to morality, and everybody who wants to gain control of the state for their own ends while claiming a universal good It's analogous to everybody in the world of ideas who is attempting to lay claim to universal morality, claiming universality while in fact it is for their own benefit or for the benefit of their particular group.
So, you know, the welfare advocates say that the poor have a right to these particular services and this kind of money, and it's a universal right and blah blah blah, right?
And they claim that this is a universal value while in fact it is a special interest pressure group.
And everybody's trying to gain control of morality while claiming universality, but in reality it is merely an assumption that you then work from.
Some assumption or series of assumptions at the base.
And this is why it's so hard for people to disengage from the concept of the state.
It's one of the reasons. It's because The reality of the attempt to gain control of the state is directly analogous to everybody's wrangling in society to gain control of morality.
And so when you say, well, we shouldn't have a state, people think that that means that we shouldn't have morality.
That's because the state is morality for them.
Everybody understands special interest groups because we all do it.
We all do it at work. We all do it as parents.
We all do it in religion.
We all do it in our political arguments.
We attempt to try to gain the moral high ground by pretending that our assumptions are universal.
So, I'll give you an example.
So...
Scott Walker, I think his name is, Wisconsin.
Political leader who has attempted to pass legislation that limits the collective bargaining of government employees in the state to wages only.
To wages only.
You can only bargain about wages.
You cannot bargain about benefits.
And the reason for that, that he puts forward, is this.
If you are Bargaining for wages, then those wages come out of general revenues in the here and now.
And therefore, when people vote for or against these particular requirements or demands on the part of the public sector unions, then they're voting for Relative tax increases in the relative present.
Whereas if you vote for benefits to be paid in 20 years, then you are not voting for increases in the benefits you're receiving in the here and now.
What you're doing is you're voting away money in the future from people who may not even be born yet.
Clearly, that's not fair.
That's one of the reasons why the public sector pensions are so bloated and messy.
That's clearly not fair.
Even if you're a statist and a Democrat interested in democracy, you simply can't make that as a fair argument.
Because the people who are voting to allow or voting for politicians who allow these kinds of bargains are not paying for them.
The people who, 20 years down the road, are going to end up paying for them Who knows, right?
Where they are or what their thoughts are and so on.
So that's his approach.
But of course, the reality is that the media says that he is voting to strip historical collective bargaining rights from employees.
Strip them, I say, right?
Nobody frames it as he is attempting to get people to negotiate with Benefits that are going to be paid for by those who are also voting in the present, not stealing from people in the future whose Lord knows what they're thinking or believe.
And so everybody's attempting to gain control of the moral narrative of these Wisconsin votes, and that determines or that decides how in the long run it's really going to go.
And so everyone's trying to gain control of the state using a kind of moral narrative or some sort of special interest or pressure group or whatever.
And in the same way, everybody is trying to gain control So this is what I mean when I say that The structures within society mirror the structures within our minds,
and the structure within society as a whole mirrors the structures that we have in our social environment.
So in our social environment, again, this is a generalized statement, it doesn't mean everyone, but most of us will attempt to gain control of a moral narrative in order to impose our will upon others.
And this is not always of malevolent or malicious intent.
Society has to make decisions and if we don't have a rational basis for making decisions, it's not like those decisions don't then need to be made.
We just make them according to less rational standards.
Well, irrationality is not a standard, but it's a necessity.
So, I mean, again, this is why I say we can't change the structure of society until we change the structure of our thinking.
If we believe that the state is morality, and also that in the absence of the state, evil will preside, then we first need to question our knowledge of morality.
And the only way that we can really question our knowledge of morality is to question our moral teachers, priests, the parents, the teachers, who instructed us on morality and to ask them the basis of their moral reasoning.
And if they don't have it, then we're a step forward.
The most dangerous thing in the world is the thing that you think you know that you don't know.
If you know something and you do know it, that's good.
If you know you don't know something, you can go and look it up.
But it's the things that you know that are false that is where society stagnates.
And the last thing I'll mention about this general idea, which I think is a very useful one, It's that the one thing we know when we're talking about a stateless society, the one thing that we pretty continually and consistently experience, is that people say that it is voluntary because they don't like the gun in the room.
They say that statism is voluntary, and then we point out that if it is voluntary, then we should be free to choose or not choose to participate in it.
Then they say, well, no, it can't be voluntary.
So there's this switcheroo.
That is really, I think, mirrored in the battle between objectivity and subjectivity.
Because there are these two poles in morality.
So when people say morality is objective, often to children, it's presented as an absolute and a certainty.
And then when the children get older, it's portrayed as more relative and culturally based and so on.
And that is the way that things work.
So if you are a subject or a citizen, then you are threatened with aggression and it is hoped that you will comply without complaint.
But if you do point out the aggression, then it's fogged in a sort of, well, you can vote and you can participate and you can change the system and so on.
I think these two things are quite related.
Anyway, so this is sort of an example of what happens in the absence of first principles and the degree to which first...
Sorry, in the absence of...
Yeah, in the absence of first principles with morality.
And so, we get...
We've... Rounding many turns, we come to the question of first principles.
What be they? Well, first principles...
are the standards without which no pursuit of truth is possible.
The first principles are the standards without which no pursuit of truth is possible.
And another way of putting it is that they are standards which are implicit, hopefully made explicit, but they are implicit in any pursuit of truth.
And they revolve around these self-detonating statements that I've talked about before, i.e.
I'm going to pray to God to reveal to you that God does not exist.
I'm going to pay you to accept in advance the argument that money has no value.
I am going to speak to you clear and cogent sentences attempting to establish the proposition that language has no meaning.
These sorts of things.
I'm going to write you an email, well spelled and with good grammar, arguing that you should not spell well and use good grammar in the communication of ideas.
These sorts of things. I am going to exercise self-ownership to argue against self-ownership.
I'm going to hold you responsible for the effects of your actions in terms of argument.
This was your argument and it was false.
Using that to argue against property rights, i.e.
ownership of the effects of one's actions.
Now, first principles are very tricky.
Very tricky. Because I generally believe, there's no particular way to prove this, I think, but I generally believe that ethics, and I've argued this before, but ethics were invented by bad people in order to control their betters.
Ethics is a form of invisible internal mental electrical fence designed to keep you in the enclosures of your farmers.
And so, if you can be the only thief in the world, the way that you achieve that is to convince everybody else to respect property rights and then don't respect property rights yourself.
You see? The argument for the respect for property rights...
Far more likely originated from a thief than from an honest person.
And the reason for that, the reason we know that, is that in every system of morality that has ever been implemented in the world, as far as I know, there are these magical exceptions.
So, thou shalt not steal unless you're in the government.
None can talk to God directly except for this particular class of priesthood.
Or, you know, for some parents you cannot yell at and hit your parents or your siblings, but your parents can yell at or hit you.
And these exceptions are the purpose of morality.
And by this I don't mean true morality, I mean morality as a tool of evil.
The purpose of property rights is to convince people to respect the thief's property rights and to respect each other's property rights, thus creating less competition for the thief.
Do you understand? Morality was invented as a way of reducing competition among the criminal classes.
Among the fraudulent classes, among the political classes, morality is invented as a form of protectionism for corruption.
Because if you can convince fewer people to steal, you do much better as a thief.
So morality was invented to further swell the immoral coffers of evil people.
It was not invented as a universal virtue.
It was only pretended to be a universal virtue to hook into our power of conceptualization, the automatic universalization of our minds.
And this is why when you actually try To truly universalize ethics between parents and children, between priests and parishioners, between rulers and subjects, people look at you like you've just grown a unicorn head out of your ass.
Because everybody gets sort of deep down that morality is invented to reduce the competition for masterdom among the slaves.
And the whole point of morality is not the universalization, but the exception to that universalization.
At least that's in the development of morality.
So when you actually try to extend immorality to the universality to which it is always claimed to possess, people look at you like, what are you trying to do?
You're mad! It's sort of like in the Mafia, right?
You have a loyalty to your own, quote, family, right?
You have a loyalty to your own family and a loyalty to your own hitman.
And this is considered to be a value, a moral value, a sort of primitive and tribal moral value.
And so if you were to go to the Godfather and you're supposed to say, and you say, listen, we should extend this protection, right?
Of thuggery to all the rival gangs.
He'd look at you like, what?
That's not what this is for.
That's not what this was created for.
That's not what this is invented for.
He would be like, well, you don't understand what morality is.
You have no idea what morality is.
Because if you're trying to actually universalize it, you don't understand what it's for.
And that is another example of using first principles or attempting to use or pretending to use first principles to create an exception in the moral framework which creates far greater profits for the corrupt.
So, first principles are the things which you cannot argue against because the very act of establishing a truth preference And attempting to impose it on another contains within it a vast plethora of assumptions which everybody attempts to bypass if they are not being intellectually honest or if they're simply doing or using the habits of existing moral thumb-whackery as it has sort of been invented in the past,
right? Which is rule plus exception, rule plus exception, rule plus exception.
The rule is deemed universal, the exception is unconscious.
So, I've gone over a bunch of these arguments before.
I just really wanted to start with the sort of first principles thing so that people could more genuinely understand what I meant by it and what it really is meant by philosophy, at least as far as I understand the term and as I've worked with the term lo these many years, which is no assumptions. No assumptions.
No assumptions. No assumptions.
We can't plant our flag in some random field and say, this is the best field.
Everybody has to agree because people are either going to agree or they're not going to agree.
And if they agree, there's not a whole lot of point being philosophical with them.
And if they don't agree, then philosophy will not change that kind of philosophy or that non-philosophy will not change their minds.
It's like, I have a Mandarin class, and I'm only going to teach people who are already fluent in Mandarin.
And I refuse to teach anyone who is not already perfectly fluent in Mandarin.
Well, that's a sort of pointless class, right?
That's the problem with morality. If people already accept the non-aggression principle and property rights, then morality has far less utility for them.
The whole challenge is to bring morality into the orbit of people who don't like your moral conclusions, to get them to accept moral conclusions that they don't like.
Because if they already like them, there's no problem.
You can't have a diet book for people who are already eating really well, or a nutrition book for people, or an exercise book for people who are already really, really great at exercise.
And these of course are introductory.
An introduction to exercise for somebody who's already excellent at exercise.
No, the point of an introduction to exercise book is to get people who aren't exercising To exercise.
Anyway, I think we sort of understand that.
So, this has been why.
So, if you're drawn towards objectivism, then you'll accept objectivism.
But the problem is, what about people who don't like objectivism, or who aren't drawn to it, who don't feel the same way about it?
Well, those people have a much tougher time.
And in fact, don't. This is why morality has such a tough time spreading, because people are either kind of get it and are into it and accept it, yay, or they're not.
In which case, you can't lever them out of stuff because of this, just plant my flag somewhere else.
Sorry. Sorry.
So, first principles are things like...
You exist and I exist.
So if you're debating with me, then you kind of have to logically accept that I exist.
Otherwise, you're arguing with yourself and I don't need to say anything.
And if I don't say anything, you can't blame me.
You can only look in yourself.
I don't get offended by a character in my dream who says something nasty to me.
I mean, I guess I could, but that would be kind of crazy.
I may debate with someone in my dream, but only because I don't know that it's a dream.
In the dream. The moment I realize it's a dream and wake up, or wake up and realize it's a dream, then I no longer believe that I'm in a debate with someone, because the dream is a manufactured and internal reality.
Somebody grabs my ass in a dream.
Oh, I love those dreams.
Then I don't attempt to find and slap them when I wake up.
So, that's something that needs to be accepted.
That there is a medium between two minds that transmits the evidence of the senses in some reasonably consistent manner is another thing that must be accepted in order to have any kind of mutual pursuit of truth or relationship-based pursuit of truth or debate.
Because there is no psychic knowledge that can be transmitted from one brain to another, and therefore all communication between minds requires the evidence of the senses to some degree or another.
And so, if you're in a debate with somebody, they exist and you exist, the presence of an intermediary Medium.
That's an awkward phrase, isn't it?
Stuff which transmits sense data or carries sense data in some form, whether it's touch or sight or sound or the smell-or-arma sniff test of excellence in philosophy.
This intermediary, relatively objective reality that transmits sense data must be accepted.
Must be. Well, it is accepted in any sort of debate.
I can't talk to you and say there's no such thing as sound.
So that needs to be accepted.
Another thing which needs to be accepted is the preference of truth over falsehood.
Because we don't have debates about whether butter chicken is better than shrimp vindalu.
Because those are personal taste preferences.
So, there is some objective medium of truth that it is infinitely preferable for all parties to adhere to, to submit to, to accept.
That is also in the nature of a debate.
If you're just talking about movies you like, that is not a debate, right?
If you're just talking about, oh, I like Room of the View, oh, I like The Bicycle Thief...
I like this about this film.
I like this about this film. That's just a sharing of preference and information and is nice and friendly and good and positive and is not a philosophical debate.
And so, these are other things that need to be, that are accepted in the very act of debating.
That language is not only the acceptable but the best language.
Methodology for communicating about truth is also implicit.
You don't use smoke signals and you don't use touch alone or mime to discuss philosophy.
You have to use language.
So, language is not only the preferred, it is the only preferred way to discuss ideas, and that means that language is not always perfect, of course, and definitions are key, but it means that language must be accepted as the best tool for communication.
I would add to that, that logically there must be Accepted, at least by libertarians, that there is some emotional resistance to the acceptance of simple truths.
There must be. Taxation and theft is not complicated.
Property rights resulting or deriving from self-ownership is not complicated.
I mean, there are some aspects of property rights which are complicated, but the actual essence of property rights is not that complicated.
Or even if you think that it is, certainly taxation is the initiation of force, is not complicated.
But it is something that libertarians have been saying for many, many, many, many decades.
And it remains a truth almost universally rejected by society.
Now, if a simple truth is rejected by the vast majority of society, that is a piece of empirical evidence that needs to be processed by any reasonable thinker.
This comes from my days as an executive in the marketing field of software.
If you have the best product and nobody wants it, that's a challenge.
You can't just blow past. You have to kind of figure out why.
And this, of course, has been a lot of my work, which is trying to figure out Why the relatively simple and clear truths of the libertarian movement are so venomously and violently rejected by society.
That's an important thing to accept.
That's not exactly a first principle, but it is something that is very important if you want to be successful rather than just right.
So these are the first principles that I talk about when I talk about philosophy.
It's having no assumptions. Now, the first principles do not exist in reality like a rock does or a cloud does.
They don't exist in reality like atoms.
But that doesn't make them subjective.
The law of gravity does not exist in the same way that mass does or the effects of mass like gravity do.
But that doesn't mean that it is subjective and you can just make up whatever you want.
It is still something which requires objective definition and empirical validation and logical consistency with...
Itself and evidence and so on.
So, again, I don't want to sort of say because it doesn't exist that there can be anything that you want, right?
Imaginary animals don't exist and you can create whatever you want out of that and they still fall into the category of imaginary animals.
So, in a sense, imaginary animals as a category is subjective once we accept the definition that they don't exist in reality that we know of.
Then you can create impossible contradictions like the fire ice beetle which has no mass or something like that.
So there is a certain amount of subjectivity in an exclusionary category like that which does not exist in reality or cannot exist within reality.
But that's not the same as philosophy.
That sort of exercises in imagination.
But in philosophy, it has to be stuff which is firm and solid and rooted in reality and rooted in empirical evidence and rooted in the very nature of human interactions.
And this is sort of why I continually compare philosophy to science.
Science really is a subset of philosophy.
Because that's the way that science works.
Science works through the rational and empirical examination of reality.
The creation of hypotheses and theories and laws which are verified by the behavior of matter and energy in reality.
And, you know, hopefully have some predictable or some predictive element to them that can be verified ahead of time.
So, this is what I mean by first principles.
Take nothing for granted.
Accept nothing as arbitrary.
No matter how pleasing it may feel, yeah, categorical imperative feels great.
But it has to be, to be true philosophy, there can't be any magic in it.
There can't be any, you know, insert crazy step X here and it all comes true.
There can't be any magic in it.
Right, so if you think about the ancient Aristotelian four elements model, earth, air, fire and water and soul bands, then it was that fire who wanted to join with air and that's why The fire leapt upwards towards the sky.
And Earth wanted to rejoin the ground, and that's why it fell when you opened your hand.
So there was sort of this magic called desire or preference in this model of the motion of matter.
This magic. And if the Kantian argument requires a soul, then it's like, okay, so then this magical step makes it all true.
If we accept this magical step, philosophy is there are no magical steps, in the same way that in science, there are no magical steps.
And that is something that I've really, really focused on returning to.
However imperfectly it may be, that's still the standard that I hold.
And remember, the quality of my standards is in no way...
Entirely determined by my adherence to those standards because I am fallible and full of nonsense like everybody else, but That is still the standard, that the moment that magic comes into the picture, we're no longer talking about philosophy.
And so the first principles of that, which simply, they can't be denied, except by people who are willing to throw overboard intellectual integrity entire.
I hope that helps. And of course, if you have any questions, as I'm sure you do, please feel free to call into the Sunday shows, 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. Drop me a line.
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