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Dec. 6, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:49
2274 The Fascists That Surround You - Part 5: Nature vs. Nurture vs. Ethics

Is evil born or made? Is sociopathy genes or environment? Are sociopaths responsible for their own behaviour?

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is The Fascists Among You, Part 5, Nature vs.
Nurture.
So let me start off this discussion, and I really appreciate everybody's feedback on it.
It's a great discussion.
Let me start this off with an analogy.
If there is a lion in your neighborhood...
Then you will take your steps to protect yourself against that lion.
Let's just say he escaped from the zoo or a circus or something.
There's a lion in the neighborhood.
Across it comes the radio, the TV. Well, you're going to stay inside.
You're going to bring in children inside.
You're going to wait until that lion is caught.
You're going to take steps to protect yourself against the lion, although we would not morally condemn the lion as being evil for attacking someone, for trying to eat someone, because that's Kind of what the lion is all about.
It is programmed that way.
So, whether or not the lion has moral responsibility, because the lion doesn't, it doesn't fundamentally matter.
Who cares?
You still have to protect yourself against the lion.
And in a way, if you believe that it is simply the lion's nature and there's nothing that can be changed, it doesn't really matter whether or not the lion has moral responsibility, what your relationship is to, whether it's nature or nurture or whatever.
So in the same way, most dogs are pretty friendly.
But if you beat a dog long enough, you're going to turn him into a pretty mean dog and a dangerous dog.
And if there are a lot of beaten dogs in your neighborhood, then you should move your neighborhood, you should protect yourself, I don't know what you do with dogs, pepper spray, I don't know, who knows, right?
Well, somebody does know, but it ain't me.
So, let's say that it's not the nature of a dog to want to bite you, but if it's beaten enough, then nurture turns its nature violent.
So if you're already in that situation, then you have to deal with the dogs as they are.
If all the dogs around your neighborhood or most of them are beaten and they get mean and they get vicious, that's the reality you have to deal with.
And if you describe it as nature, okay, if you describe it as nurture, it doesn't matter.
The nature of the dogs around you is that they're aggressive and violent.
Now, obviously, if you can determine that it's because they get beaten, then you can encourage people not to beat their dogs in the future, and that will, in the future, make things safer.
But right now, you have to deal with the way that things are.
So, self-protection doesn't fundamentally have anything to do with the nature versus nurture argument.
If there are sociopaths and psychopaths around you, then you need to take steps to protect yourself.
And the nature versus nurture argument doesn't really matter around your immediate protection.
Now, if it turns out to be that it's nurture, it's how children are raised, it turns them into...
Okay, then a generation or two down the road, there'll probably be a whole lot less.
But that doesn't really have much to do If you've got a pack of wild dogs in the neighborhood that are going to be around for another 10 years, you need to deal with that.
Because that is the nature of the dogs around you at the moment.
And if dogs are raised more peacefully than a generation or two, there won't be nearly as many, if any, violent dogs.
But that doesn't have much to do with your need to protect yourself right now.
So I really want to fundamentally point out that the nature versus nurture argument is a completely long-term strategic argument for the reduction of violence or around the reduction of violence or possible reduction of violence.
It doesn't have much to do with how you deal with things in the here and now.
So I really want to point that out.
Now, some of the consequences, let's say that sociopaths are born and not made.
No amount of positive, peaceful parenting, no amount of a positive and peaceful culture is going to stop them.
This goes against the evidence, but let's just say that that's true.
Well, then it's exactly the same as if you have, I mean, this is the Battlestar Galactica scenario, that you have killer robots disguised as human beings.
I mean, sadly, it's the Lord of the Rings argument.
There are no nice orcs, right?
I mean, there can be kind of greedy dwarves, there can be kind of flighty elves, there can be some litigious hobbits, but there are no nice orcs.
There are no friendly goblins.
And so you have, it's a killer robot scenario.
Then human beings will occasionally give birth to free will-less killer robots or vampire robots or whatever.
They can't be changed.
They can't be reformed.
And there's no amount of positive intervention from conception onwards who will change their nature.
Well, then they're just killer robots.
And what you have to do is segregate them from society.
I mean, clearly.
Because nobody's to blame.
It is just the way it is.
And of course, the moment you take away free will, then you take away freedom.
Of course, those with diminished capacity cannot have freedom.
We understand this with regards to children, which is why we do not let children enter into legal contracts when they're four years old.
Or have sex, right?
Because they cannot process the consequences.
They don't have the experience, the brain maturity, the physical maturity, the long-term planning and consequence processing.
So if somebody does not have free will, then they can't have freedom.
They can't be free to operate within society.
So if there was a reliable test of a killer robot...
Then, of course, you would identify those killer robots and you would segregate them from society.
You'd give them their own little island to play on or whatever it was.
But you would have to segregate them from society.
Because they would be a predator.
They would be like a wolf.
You don't let wolves into the daycare.
You don't.
You keep the wolves away from people.
You don't put sharks in the swimming pool.
So, I mean, that would be the consequence, and I think that's a pretty negative consequence.
I think that's a pretty horrific consequence, and I would do a lot to avoid that.
It doesn't mean that it may not end up in some wild scenario becoming true, but let's talk about the arguments against nature.
As I've mentioned before, the people who talk about nature are, you know, kind of fundamentally talking about A fixed personality structure that is impervious to any form of pre- or postnatal experience or environment.
And the problem with this, of course, is that, to my knowledge, there's never been a gene associated with personality that is not subject to the law of epigenetics.
The law of epigenetics is that genes are switched on and switched off by environment.
There is no fixed gene that I know of that personality depends upon that is not itself dependent upon environment.
So, anybody who says it's nature or argues for nature...
I don't think, like in a sort of final way, like it's this way, they are not processing the reality of epigenetics.
Now, the way, of course, that people try and figure out the nature argument is through twin studies.
Oh, you see, twins, they share 100% of genetic material, and if one, you know, the twin separated at birth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
All similarities must be genetic or argue for the genetics.
But this is unfortunately largely wishful thinking and nonsense.
First of all, twin studies are not studying normal human circumstances.
So twin studies require that one of the twins be separated at birth and one be kept in a maternal environment.
You already have a screwed up family situation here already.
Or that twins be given up for adoption and raised in separate households?
Well, any mom who is going to give up her twins for adoption is in a terrible situation to begin with.
She got pregnant.
The guy's not around or he's not willing to parent.
And the extended family is so dysfunctional that they will not...
She's not giving the kids to her sister or to her mom or to her best friend or to her aunt or whoever.
So she is in an isolated, family dysfunctional, highly stressed, irresponsible environment to begin with.
And it is well known that maternal stress...
Has a strong effect on the developing genetics of the child.
So you're already in a stressed and messed up situation.
So that's number one.
Number two, it's exceedingly rare for twins to be separated at birth.
So it's usually a year or two or three after they're born that the twins are separated.
You know, the mom gives it a go and then she turns out to be unable to handle it or to manage it and then and therefore she ends up giving up one or both of the twins.
And of course the first nine months of fetal development followed by the first year or two or three of early childhood experiences are going to have massive effects on the genetics of the child.
And so if they get separated later, to say, well, any similarities must be because of their genetics, is to not understand that the genes that are switched on and off are switched on and off depending on experience in the womb and afterwards.
Furthermore, you know, I mean, a good argument for genetics would be twins separated at birth, one of them raised in Kansas and one of them raised in Istanbul, and the one in Kansas becomes a Christian, and the one in Istanbul, despite being raised by an Islamic family, becomes a Christian.
That would be pretty cool.
But of course, that's not what happens.
Twins separated at birth are going to go through...
Different cultural programming.
Religiosity, nationalism, the racism of my culture.
There's no word for cultural bias.
There really should be culturalism.
Fantasy infliction.
And so, even if we accept that the gene studies have some validity, you would have to have gene studies of twins raised in entirely opposite cultures, because the cultural effect on genetics is very strong.
In fact, some researchers argue that the cultural effect is the strongest effect on sociopathy, on the development, on our development of sociopathy.
So, Given what is known, which is that all personality factors that are genetic are subject to the epigenetic phenomenon of genes being switched on and off by experience, given that the disparity of clinical sociopathy varies by factors of hundreds or thousands across different cultures,
the fact that twin studies are extremely unreliable It's extremely unreliable, yet still considered to be the gold standard.
And of course, the gold standard is driven by, as Robin Grill was talking about in my show recently, it's driven by parental guilt.
So, the argument for sociopathy being genetic is extremely, extremely weak.
I would argue it's invalid.
Because there's so many factors which can't be explained by the theory.
So, I think that it's not true.
I think it's not.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, what am I? I'm just some guy talking on the internet.
So, I could end up being proven completely wrong.
But from the research that I've done, it is...
Look, and we all know that researchers are heavily biased by cultural expectations.
And...
I've had tons of researchers on my show and press them on the issue of it's considered mentally healthy to separate from an abusive spouse, but why not an abusive parent?
There's no research that's done on this.
It's not a standard.
That's completely obvious.
So there's a huge amount of cultural bias that goes into research and what comes out of it, and I think I've proven that fairly well.
Not conclusively, but fairly well.
So, The people who talk about the twin studies, they just don't want to piss off a lot of parents.
I can understand that.
Pissed off parents can be a challenge.
So, the argument for genetics is so weak and so contradicted by the evidence that I think it's not even worth particularly considering.
Now, let's say, though, that it is.
Again, I have no problem giving the benefit of the doubt to an argument.
It will still fail if it's a fundamentally flawed argument.
You can go around every premise except one, and it will still fail.
But let's say that there is some X factor of genetics.
Well, we'll never prove it.
We'll never prove it, because you simply cannot have...
I don't know, can you?
Identical twins raised in different wombs, in different environments?
I mean, it's never, and even that, I mean, it would be such a rare thing that you could never gather any body of evidence.
You basically have to have some sort of in vitrio fertilization of twins separated, put them in, plant them in different wombs.
I mean, this would be a pretty sinister experiment, and you'd have to do it often enough to try and replicate something.
So, fundamentally, it seems doubtful that we will ever know, based on twin studies, what's going on in terms of genetics.
Plus, you'd also have to have opposite cultures, right?
So you'd have to have twins separated at the moment of conception, implanted in different wombs, and one of them would have to be in a truly free, philosophical, superstition-free, stateless society, and the other one would have to be in a statist religious society.
I mean, cultures are not different enough yet.
For us to be able to tease out philosophy versus the bigotry of culture and its effects upon personality.
So, it's unknowable.
And it can't be known for probably many generations to come, even if these sinister experiments ever were put into practice.
So, it remains unknowable.
But let's say there's some X factor that is called genetics that has an effect.
Well, so what?
We don't know what it is.
We don't know what the degree of it is.
And so, we must act as if it's not there.
Because the moment we act as if it's there, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Right?
So, if your kid has a mean streak and you say, oh my God, he's a built-in born-in sociopath.
Nothing's going to change.
He's permanent.
Well, this is going to change your parenting, of course, right?
It becomes more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And so we have to act as if there is zero genetic influence on the development of personality.
Because to act otherwise is to parent worse.
Right, so it seems to be genes plus abuse that triggers these particular changes.
So clearly, we want to take abuse out of the equation.
But to take abuse out of the equation, it means that we have to treat children as if there's no genetics.
Because to treat children as if their personalities, the negative aspects of their personalities are genetic, is to be more susceptible to acting in an abusive manner.
So if we want to take abuse out of the equation, as far as personality development into sociopathy or psychopathy goes, we must take Treat children as if there's zero genetic components to their personalities.
Zero genetic components to their personalities.
That is the only way to reliably take abuse or the possibility of abuse out of the equation.
So people, somebody was saying, I think on the message board when I was talking about this, I said that If we don't know how many things are movable and there's no way to find out, then the only thing we can do is act as if everything is movable.
And that way, if something is not movable, right, then let's say you've got 50 buckets and one of them is glued to the floor.
You have no way of knowing ahead of time.
Well, you have to just act as if you can lift up all the buckets.
It's the only way you're going to find the bucket that you can't lift up.
Do you have to try and lift up all the buckets and then the one that you can't lift up?
Or let's say there's some unknown amount of buckets that are glued to the floor out of the 50.
Well, you just have to keep lifting up the buckets to find out.
So you have to treat every bucket as if they're liftable.
If you don't know how many things are movable, you have to try moving everything.
So you have to treat everything as if it's movable in order to find out what is not movable.
In other words, you have to treat everything as environmental in order to find out what is not environmental.
So even if there is some x-factor percentage of personality that is strictly, quote, genetic nonsense, but let's say that there is, you still have to treat the entire personality as if it's not genetic.
Because that's the only way you'll find that out.
And in fact, you probably never will find that out anyway, but you still have to act as if everything is environmental, even if some things are not environmental.
Because you'll never know what they are, and you'll also never know if you change your behavior because you believe that something is genetic.
You'll never know if the genes that result resulted from innate geneticism or from the epigenetic result of your changed behavior by assuming some of it was genetic.
If you believe that your kid is just a natural-born sociopath, then it's going to change your parenting and you'll never know whether their resulting sociopathy is entirely genetic or was the result of you believing that they were a sociopath.
So you have to treat every aspect of a child as environmental, even if you believe that there's some parts that aren't.
It's a quantum physics kind of thing.
You change the experiment by interfering with it.
By believing that something is genetic, you change the genetics of the child because you will relate to that child in a different way, thus turning on and off different genes than if you had never had that belief to begin with.
In other words, the genes of a child depend upon the beliefs of the parent.
At what point will you give up on the child?
At what point will you withdraw from the child?
At one point will you start treating the child differently?
At what point?
I mean, you understand, right?
So, A, it doesn't matter.
And B, the genetics argument is extremely weak, in my opinion.
And C, even if the genetics argument has some potential, it doesn't matter because you still have to treat the child as if everything is environmental.
Because your parenting will change and trigger genetic changes if you don't.
So, that's sort of a couple of arguments about...
The importance of parenting in these areas.
Now, let's talk about whether there is moral responsibility on the part of the sociopath.
Well, yeah.
Yes!
Done and dusted.
Well, of course there is.
Of course there is.
The moment you use a moral argument, you are subjected to that moral argument.
You live by the sword, die by the sword.
Use ethics subject to ethics.
Use ethics subject subjected to ethics.
In the legal realm, it's called estoppel, right?
It's the idea that if you use violence against someone else, if you initiate violence against someone else, you can't morally object to violence because you've started the ball rolling, you started the dominoes going down, so...
You can't use a road and say there's no such thing as roads, right?
I mean, you can, but you're insane.
And wrong.
And lying.
Because you just used the roads.
Now you're saying there's no such thing as roads, right?
If you say, I deserve respect, but you don't give respect to other people, then you're a hypocrite.
And you're responsible because you're using ethics.
So, the sociopath who uses ethics is subjected to ethics.
Now, sociopaths are reportedly, right, the people who don't have empathy.
Now, you don't have to have empathy to be a good person.
I think it helps, but you don't have to have empathy to be a good person.
I think that's...
You don't have to be a sculptor to appreciate good sculpting, right?
You don't have to be a good painter to appreciate a good painting.
Because if you lack empathy, all you have to use is UPB, my theory of ethics, universally preferable behavior, to universalize your principles.
You can do it intellectually if you can't do it emotionally.
Which is fine.
I mean, you don't have to be a fluent native speaker of Greek to use Google Translate and some rough knowledge of Greek to get your idea across.
I mean, you're never going to be running for office in Greece based upon a fairly hackneyed grasp of Greek.
But you can order a coffee, you can get a hotel room, you can haggle for goods.
I mean, I haggled for goods in China.
Using a calculator, I'd enter a number, they'd enter a number, I'd enter a number, they'd enter a number, and we'd haggle that way.
So you don't have to be fluent in a language in order to get things done in that language.
You don't have to be fluent in empathy to act as if you're empathetic.
All you have to do is universalize.
I don't like it when I'm defrauded, and even if I don't have empathy for the other person, I recognize logically that they're another human being and that they also have feelings and that they, even if you don't actually feel what they feel, you can reason it out very easily.
I don't like it when I'm defrauded, so I'm not going to defraud other people.
Because you know they're human beings.
We know that fraudsters, we know that con men know that other people are people because they try and con people, not blades of grass or tires or deer.
So they know that the people are people like them because they put their evil manipulations on people.
We also know that con men understand empathy because they know what makes other people tick.
They know lonely, vulnerable old widows really want company, and they know that people are attached to their dogs, so if they kidnap their dog, they're going to get something.
They know that people have family bonds, and they know how to, like sadists know how to hurt people.
They may not feel the pain themselves emotionally, but they know what makes other people tick.
So, a sociopath or a psychopath or a sadist cannot claim that they don't understand what other people feel because they couldn't succeed in their nefarious evil schemes, right?
So, a blackmailer doesn't have emotional sympathy for his victim, but he knows that people don't like to be humiliated.
Somebody was telling me that Penn Gillette was blackmailed because someone stole some files from his computer and pictures from his computer.
He was blackmailed.
How horrible that was.
Now, whoever was blackmailing him I don't know what the hell you'd blackmail Penn Jillette for when he's talked about banging chicks underwater with coconut juice and not having enough jam or sperm, as he calls it, to successfully climax underwater.
I don't know what you're going to blackmail the guy for, but anyway, the blackmailer fully understands that he has leverage over Penn Jillette because Penn Jillette does not want these pictures to be published.
So, whoever's blackmailing him cannot claim that they don't understand human motivation, that they don't understand what makes other people tick, that they don't understand what is painful to other people.
So, they may not have empathy, sympathy for the other person, but they can certainly understand and appreciate and operate on what makes other people tick.
Like, sexual predators, they know that their victims don't want to have sex.
Because they keep it hidden and so on, right?
And they also are able to find the most vulnerable, right, through obviously looking for kids with dysfunctional families, kids without a strong parental bond, kids who are incredibly lonely, whatever it is, right?
But a sexual predator knows immensely what makes other people tick, reads people immensely well, just like any other con artist or any other criminal or predator.
Like, I don't imagine a lot of people pick fights with The Rock because they know who to win or lose, right?
So, sociopaths use moral arguments all the time.
In fact, in defense of their own actions, they pull universal crap.
People are going to screw me if I don't screw them, so I might as well get them first.
That's a universal moral argument, that it's all predator-prey, and I'd rather be predator than prey.
That's a moral argument.
That's a Hobbesian moral argument.
But they use universal moral arguments.
They know intimately that they are the same as other human beings.
They know that other human beings are different from rocks and trees because that's all who they con and prey on and so on.
They know what makes other people tick at a very deep level.
I mean, in a way, they know people better than on average, right?
I mean, lions may notice a bit about each other, but the antelope know a lot about the lions.
And the lions know a lot about the antelope.
They can pick out the weak, the sick, whatever, right?
So that's, I think, all very important to understand that they do use universal moral arguments to justify their own behaviors and actions.
So they are subjected to moral standards because they use them.
They do recognize that human beings are like them because that's who they con, right?
That the human beings have needs, right?
The con man has a need for money and he preys upon someone who's got a need for companionship or attention or whatever it is, right?
And they know what makes other people tick, what other people's deepest motivations are, fears are.
They can very quickly map.
Very, I would say almost instantaneously over time, they can map.
Other people's relationships, whether other people are embedded in healthy relationships, which will immediately push the sociopath back out, or whether they're dysfunctional relationships where the person does not have the external committed and intimate witnesses to help them to see what's going on in the world and so on.
Anybody who manipulates understands the threads of human nature intensely well and can play them like a concert-level harpist.
So, yes, of course they are subjected to moral standards because once you use morality, you're subjected to morality.
Lions don't use morality.
Lions ain't going to kidnap your dog and say, let me chew on your arm and I'll let your dog go.
I mean, this is not how lions just jump and chomp, right?
Tigers in particular are so adapted to killing that they have sense nerves in their teeth which can figure out where your artery is and chomp there.
So, yes, of course they're predators, but they are moral predators.
They are UPB predators, UPB violators in their predation.
And they do deeply understand what makes other people tick.
So, I would argue that they are subjected to morality.
A natural-born predator, like a lion or a shark, and I get it, right?
Lions and sharks don't eat people very much and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, just, you know, crap meat.
I need some animal that eats people.
Mosquitoes aren't scary enough.
But...
The natural-born predators are not manipulative in that way.
They don't hoodwink you.
They don't target you.
They don't slowly disarm your defenses with verbal diarrhea.
They don't manipulate you.
They don't play upon your deepest fears and hopes and dreams.
They don't work to separate you from other people by planting negative seeds in your relationships.
They don't...
All of this sort of stuff.
They don't try and marry you and then...
A mosquito is not going to try and marry you and then suck your bank account dry, right?
They'll just stick their proboscis in and do their thing.
Proboscis?
Anyway, let's not get hung up.
So, these are sort of my arguments around, you know, of course we're going to focus as much as humanly possible on the environment.
A, it's the only thing we can change, and B, it's the only way we can be sure that whatever is left over that shows up over time is, in fact, genetics.
And yeah, they're completely subject to moral responsibility, which is why punishment, ostracism, whatever it is going to be, is the response.
And you're allowed to shoot a lion in self-defense, and if somebody runs at you with an axe, it really doesn't matter whether it's genetic or not, your response is pretty clear.
So I hope that makes some kind of sense.
Thank you again for everyone's interest in this topic.
I think I just have one more, and then we're done.
And, of course, I will continue to listen to people's comments and criticisms, which I appreciate hugely.
Please, if you've enjoyed this series, it's taken many years of thought to come up with this stuff, freedomainradio.com is where you go to donate.
Thank you very much.
Have a great week, everyone.
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