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May 28, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:43
2393 Should You Stay In Frustrating Political Conversations? - A Skeptically Yours Post Mortem
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Hello, everybody.
It's Stefan Moly from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, this is a post-mortem.
I've had a lot of interest and comments and questions about the conversation, rant, shriekfest, coke-addled brain-bashing that occurred on Skeptically Yours, which was a show I did with a bunch of atheist comedians a couple of days ago.
And, I mean, I think it's worth listening to.
I do.
I think it's worth listening to.
I think it's...
I mean, it's a lot of fallacies, a lot of fundamentalism on the statist-atheist side.
But...
It is very instructive.
So...
Now, for those who said, you know, how do you stay in the conversation?
You know, I wouldn't really have stayed in that conversation if it wasn't for the fact that they have a listenership.
And I try to get on shows with different perspectives so that I can reach a new audience.
Or, to put it perhaps more accurately, so that I can introduce a new audience to a kind of philosophy, perhaps, that they have not seen before.
I like to call it a consistent philosophy.
And so, I mean, I'm talking to their audience.
I am only interacting with them to get at their audience.
So that's why the conversation...
Now, okay, it was a long hour and a half, a little bit, and it is...
It's a lot of cliches, of course, but they're only cliches...
To people who've exploded them, you know, like Somalia.
I mean, I was waiting for them to bring up the roads and national defense, but all that kind of stuff.
But that's normal for people who are raised in the government, right?
So, let me sort of help you understand what I think is occurring.
So, if someone was raised...
By Jehovah's Witness parents.
It doesn't matter whatever religious denomination.
I just picked that popped into my head.
So Jehovah's Witness parents, and they put their child into a Jehovah's Witness school.
Five days a week, six hours a day, eight hours a day with homework.
So it's a full-time indoctrination, and it's a church-run school.
Now, in that school, the child will learn some mathematics, some geography, some geometry, some maybe a little science, but it's run by the Jehovah's Witness Church.
And let's say that the only...
People that the child had exposure to were other people who'd been to exactly the same kind of schooling or education, right?
Let's take it even further, and let's say that all over the world, these were the only types of educations available to people, which would be to be in a, not just like a Jehovah's Witness church.
And what if Jehovah's Witness was not differentiated from any other belief system, but was simply the way things were?
Well, that kind of person would be entirely immersed in Jehovah's Witness thinking and justifications, and they would have been taught catechisms, right?
So, I mean, catechism is like an automatic response to any particular question.
So, if you watch the documentary, Jesus Camp, you can see the children at the Creationist Museum being told to chant particular responses to...
Claims by people who accept evolution.
It doesn't teach critical thinking, it's just like a magic spell that you have to ward off doubt and to shield yourself from questions.
And this is the average statist.
I mean, this is by far the average statist.
They don't know that they've been raised in a specific belief system because that belief system has the universality and consistency of physics to them.
It is the equivalent of religious belief in the Middle Ages.
Statism is the equivalent of religious belief in the Middle Ages.
Actually, it's worse than that.
No, because I was just thinking of the Middle Ages.
They had access to some skeptical thought.
They had access to people who had different religions and so on.
So, I think it's really important to understand There are two things that are important to understand.
The first is the degree to which people are propagandized in state schools, and the second is propaganda reaches the status of physics when it's universal, when it becomes universalized.
In other words, there's no anarchist school down the street.
There's no anarchist county over the hill.
There's no anarchist country.
Reported in the news, you know, I mean, other than silly pseudo-examples like Somalia, but that's really, really important to understand.
They have been propagandized.
It's not their fault.
And they don't know that they've been propagandized.
That's the important thing to understand.
They don't know that they've propagandized.
They've been propagandized.
Now, emotionally for people...
And look, I mean, again, I say this with all sympathy.
I was propagandized.
You were propagandized.
I mean, it's all over.
But they don't know that.
They don't know that.
Now, for your average atheist as well...
I mean, science is to some degree associated with statism.
And so to be anti-statist is to be anti-science to some degree.
And I think this is more unconscious than conscious, but, you know, I mean, look at all the science that occurs from state-sponsored academics that is funded by government money, that is protected by government money, and so on.
Science is considered to be statist.
I mean, it's not like the free market came up with the Hadron Supercollider or the Hubble Telescope or NASA or anything like that.
This is all government stuff, right?
The fact that the great advances in science are almost always made by people outside the system is a topic for another time.
But Darwin was not a tenured scientist and Einstein worked in a patent office while he was doing his great discoveries.
But to be anti-state is...
To be anti-science to some degree, in some ways.
I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson is all about government funding for science.
So if you're against the government, you're perceived at probably an unconscious level to be against science because science and the government are so intertwined in the modern crypto-fascist state.
So I think that's an important thing to understand as well.
Now, the one thing that I've really tried very hard in this show to be consistent about is to not have any area where reason and evidence don't hold sway, don't rule.
And that's really important for me to...
To get across.
I mean, it's been hard at times.
I mean, I have my own biases.
I have things that I would prefer to be true.
I have things that I would like to have different than they are.
But I've always wanted to stay in the reason and evidence thing.
I've really tried not to ego identify with a conclusion or a position, but to ego identify with a process.
In other words, I am intellectually, emotionally invested in the process of reason and evidence, not in any particular conclusion.
And don't get me wrong, I would love for global warming to be disproven.
In fact, I'm basically just waiting for it to be disproven because the data is diverging so wildly from the projections that it just seems more and more nonsensical.
But if it's not disproven, then, you know, the experts and the facts and the data will win out.
And if anthropogenic global warming is established, then that will win out.
And I will put aside my emotional distaste for the endless environmental bullying that the planet has endured for the past, yay, 50 years or so.
My resentment against that will just have to deal with the fact that it did turn out to be correct.
So I've tried to not partition the show and say, well, we're really rational here, but over here, things are pretty nutty.
Dream analysis excluded.
So, even in the dream analysis, I tried to provide reason and evidence within the dream for any possible interpretations.
And I, of course, stress that it's only an opinion.
But where facts are in play, where evidence and reason hold sway, I want them to hold sway everywhere.
So I've really tried to stick to that.
So there's no place you have to go in this show where you have to hold your nose.
And say, yeah, well, you know, he's pretty good about a lot of stuff.
You know, he's got a couple of quirks here and there and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, I've really, again, have I done it perfectly?
My God, I can't even imagine that I would.
But I've really tried to have that be, you know, the bungee cord around the steering wheel.
You know, let it go.
It should snap back to that.
It will drift a little, but we should snap back to that perspective.
And I think when you listen to a show like the one I did with Skeptically Yours...
I think it's important to understand the degree to which atheism, as it is generally understood and practiced, is not philosophy.
I mean, these guys would have...
I don't know, we didn't really talk about atheism, but they would have wonderful...
Arguments against the rational authority.
And they would, no doubt, roll their eyes at all the catechisms that would come rolling off the sweet syrupy tongues of the theologically inclined because they'd heard them all before and they would recognize that they were in the presence of people who'd not been taught how to think, which is terrible, and had not shown any curiosity in examining the opposing viewpoint, which is really terrible.
And that I really want to be clear about.
The one thing that's great about philosophers, philosophically inclined people such as ourselves, is that, particularly if you're working for non-aggression principle, property rights and so on, I mean, especially if you're a libertarian, if you're an anarchist, you already know the opposing position.
I mean, I've done a credible job in a variety of situations.
I've argued for the social contract, I've argued for the existence of religion and gods, and I've pretended to be a priest throughout an entire podcast.
I mean, I get and really do understand and can inhabit the opposing position because I was raised a Christian and I was raised a statist.
Which is like saying I was raised carbon-based, because, you know, carbon-based life form, because that's what people know of as reality.
I mean, the idea, there's not even a word for it.
You know, statism is kind of a new word.
I mean, there wasn't even a word for it.
Because it just, it wasn't an ideology.
It was...
Like, we don't say it's an ideology that human beings breastfeed their young.
I mean, that's just a fact.
There's no breast-feed-your-young-ism, right?
It's just a fact.
It's not ideology to say that when there are no clouds, the sky is generally blue.
That's not...
No clouds, blue-sky-ism, right?
I mean, because it's just a fact.
And so the fact that we've put jammed an ism...
We've unloaded an ism on the face of the state.
We've jammed ism at the end of state means that we're beginning to identify it as...
Not a fact, not a law of physics, but a perspective or opinion on how society should run.
Simply inventing a word for it is really quite important.
There was no word for racism in the 16th century, because of just the way...
There's no, like, blacks are generally darker-ism.
I mean, it's just a fact, right?
But when you start to invent a word for something, you begin to differentiate the moral parameters, and that's, you know, we're starting...
It's very early on.
But when atheists go up against theists, you know, there's this eye-rolling repetition of the same arguments that have all been disproven, the prime mover argument, the ontological argument, all the arguments for the existence of the unmoved mover and all that, the alternate dimensions, the outside of space and time, I mean, the Christians must have seen something remarkable in order to be willing to die for it, and that's evidence for miracles, and All this kind of stuff.
I mean, we've all heard it, and I mean, I had those arguments too.
I get it.
I understand.
But what it means is that Christians who have these arguments have not read the critical perspectives on those arguments.
They've avoided them because they've been taught catechisms, which are these magic spell words to ward off the demons of doubt that grow your brain and your soul.
Still trying to cure myself of that word.
It's a work in progress.
Now, these guys had not been exposed to libertarianism before.
It seemed any competent arguments for libertarianism, with the exception of Dean, who had some very competent arguments.
I left the LASIK argument because it is about improved sight, which is kind of what philosophy is supposed to be about.
For the eyes of the mind, blow away the cataracts of culture with the lasers of philosophy.
I know LASIK does not procure in cataracts, but still not a bad metaphor.
And these guys had not been exposed to alternative viewpoints.
And they had not arrived at atheism as a result of philosophizing from first principles.
Atheism is just one branch on a many, many branched tree.
You know, the roots of which reason and evidence, the trunk of which is, you know, consistent philosophy.
And then you come to all of these conclusions, these buds flower, which are conclusions.
You know, you move the tree and the limbs move as well.
And so, you know, when the reason and evidence changes, the beliefs should flow, should follow from that, right?
I mean, the people who stick to conclusions, regardless of reason and evidence, are like people whose GPS keeps yelling at them that they're going the wrong way, and they are, but they still keep going on, because they said, well, originally the GPS said this.
It's like, well, yeah, but the GPS, either you went wrong or something changed, the GPS has changed his mind, right?
Or if you sort of print out a map, you say, walk south to get to the Bronx, and you keep walking into a river, Because that's what the map says.
You just don't change based on new evidence, right?
I mean, we all do that.
You know, we're driving along, and we're looking for street names, and if the street numbers are going the wrong way, say, you know, we're trying to get to 100, and it's going 3, 4, 500, we recognize that we're doing the wrong way to turn around, right?
Because the data's changing, so we change our course.
I mean, of course, you can't live without doing that.
But in the realm of ideology, of course, it seems to be how people live, not whether they can live.
So they had a sort of encapsulated, sister-based reason and evidence.
So in terms of reason and evidence, they were entirely committed in the realm of theism versus skepticism.
Fantastic.
But the great challenge is not critical thinking in the areas that you enjoy.
That's not the challenge.
Critical thinking in the areas that you enjoy is like chocolate tastes good.
Nothing wrong with it.
It's great.
The critical thinking in the areas that make you uncomfortable, well, that's where you need to work on.
And that's the first thing, the most focused thing you need to work on.
Critical thinking in the areas that make you uncomfortable is where you really need to focus your time.
If you smash up your knee and the physiotherapist comes over and says, I'm going to work on your elbows and then I'm going to work on your ankles and then I'm going to work on your earlobes, you'd say, well, but my knee is the thing that was smashed up and needs to be worked on.
And she'd say, well, no, that's going to be uncomfortable.
And you're like, well, I know that's going to be uncomfortable, but that's what I need to do to regain full mobility.
Right, so I will take the discomfort for the sake, but I'm going to do that which is uncomfortable because that which is broken is not going to heal unless we push it through some range of motion discomforts.
And it's the same thing.
We all have areas in our brain that went dark as a result of trauma and indoctrination and culture and patriotism.
There are areas in my brain, areas in your brain that go dark based on propaganda.
And bringing those areas back to life is a painful process, but that's, you know, after we learn the principles, that's where we need to focus.
First and foremost, to become healed, to become whole.
For me, it was bringing philosophy to the family.
That was the most agonizing aspect of philosophy.
To bring philosophy to my family of origin was, I mean, just the brutalist.
The brutalist, that's not even a word.
The most brutal aspect of philosophy.
Everything after that came much easier, but that was the part that was really hard.
Like on the plane, I was watching this show called The Middle.
One of the actors in the show is actually a fan of the show, so hi!
Hope you get more screen time soon.
But in the middle, Norm Macdonald is a molasses-voiced, nasal-drawing Canadian comedian.
He played the brother of the dad, and he asked...
I can't remember the guy's name.
He was the...
He was the janitor on Scrubs.
But anyway, so we'll call him Bob.
So Bob is the dad and his brother, let's call him Jim.
Jim asks Bob to come and help him move.
And so it seems odd because it's the middle of the night.
So he helps him move a bunch of stuff from a house into...
Jim's garage, right?
Into Bob's garage, into Dad's garage.
And then it turns out that basically he may have won, although it's heavily disputed, he may have won some money in a card game and he got his brother involved in a felony.
And it was a cop's house that they were stealing from.
Now, I mean, that's pretty egregious.
You just got your brother involved in a crime that could send him to jail for years.
That's extraordinarily destructive.
And that's completely abusive behavior.
And then he wouldn't come to pick it up.
And then when he came to pick it up, he was in a tiny car and I think needed to borrow money for gas and all that, right?
I mean, if they put the stuff back and they dust it for fingerprints, then they'll find the guy, right?
And then he might go to jail for years.
And there were other things that happened that were just wretched and problematic.
So he said, I'm done with my brother.
Like, he's too dangerous, he's too irresponsible, he's too destructive.
He just got me involved in stealing from a cop's house.
And of course, this is...
And he says, don't tell me.
I know, I know.
You do for family, right?
This is the magic spell that people say.
You do for family.
And, you know, his completely narcissistic, borderline...
Whatever you want to call it.
You couldn't fire a cannon of labels at that guy without hitting some piece of meat.
But at the end of the show, he basically reconciles with his brother.
Nothing got solved, right?
His brother was still a borderline, if not outright criminal, and was getting him involved in criminal activities and risking his entire family, his life, his future.
So, he was still an extremely dangerous brother to have around, but they had reconciled.
And they'd reconciled because their littlest boy was making sort of goofy little dances in a school play, and it was like, "Well, if my son can put up with his brother, I can As if making goofy dances at a school play is the same as getting you involved in felony break-and-enter accessory to stealing from a cop.
You know, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of household equipment and then having it stuck in your garage.
and every time you open the garage door, there's this feeling of fear that you might get caught, right?
Well, that's propaganda, right?
So even if your brother is getting you involved in criminal activity that will send you to jail for years and shows no remorse and in fact is angry at you for pointing out that there may in fact be a problem with this behavior, shows no remorse, no conscience, no guilt, acts even more entitled and leaves you with the stolen goods for days in your house and then comes by Eventually,
and demands gas money, and asks that you apologize to him for the inconvenience, that amount of entitled, selfish, ridiculous, horrifying, dangerous, narcissistic nightmare, you just apologize and have him over.
Because you do...
Like, that's the propaganda, right?
And, of course, it's not loving, it's just guilty.
It doesn't help someone to enable that kind of behavior or pretend that it's not occurring.
And I mean, all we have to do is imagine that a woman is married to a man who tricks her into...
Committing felonies, stealing from policemen and so on.
I mean, what would everyone say?
Would everyone say the really important thing is to stay married to the guy and, you know, toast his good health at Christmas and, you know, because you do for husbands?
I mean, it would be unthinkable.
But this is a whole different situation.
At least that's the way it's portrayed.
And it's propaganda, right?
That's different.
And then you erase the difference.
Because you have to explain the difference if you point it out, right?
Why is it different for a brother than it would be for a husband?
I mean, you chose a husband, didn't choose a brother, right?
Well, that's different followed by an erasure of the difference is what propaganda is all about.
And this is what was showing up.
In the atheist show, right?
And people were saying, well, you know, Steph, you should have used the argument for morality, you should have taken charge of the conversation and so on.
Well, that is not particularly easy and I would argue not even really very possible to do when you are remote audio only.
You can't take over.
I mean, if I were in the studio, that would be a different matter.
But if you're just a little speaker on the desk, I mean, how can you take over the conversation?
It's like trying to draw focus when you're off camera in a movie.
You really can't.
The camera turns this way.
So there were no visuals.
So it was hard to take it over from that standpoint.
And so, I mean, one of the arguments that came up was...
Well, slavery is only 100% of the products of people's labor.
And so, when you own 50% of the products of people's labor, is that not half slavery?
I mean, that is not the most challenging syllogism.
I mean, that's the kind of math that they teach to kids who are like 5 years old or 6 years old.
My daughter already gets half, right?
If this is a whole orange and I cut you half, how much will you have?
Half.
Okay.
So, that's sort of at the level at which people are...
We're operating.
That's not complicated.
I mean, if 100% of something is X, then 50% of something is 50% X. 100% slavery versus 50% slavery.
But in the true genius of being able to avoid a variety of things, We end up discussing what is the exact percentage, right?
It's just, it's a wonderful smoke clearing, sort of smoke bombing kind of stuff that occurs, right?
I mean, that's wonderful, right?
So, if 100% of owning somebody's labor is slavery, then what is 50% of owning somebody's labor?
Well, I don't know that we can definitively establish that it's 50%, and it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Right?
The reality is it's far more than 50%, but, again, I mean, it's a way to avoid answering the question.
I could have said, okay, let's say it's 10%, let's say it's 5%, let's say it's 1%.
Do we at least understand that that is right?
And that is a...
It was a great trick.
It was a great trick.
Now, to me, if somebody is obviously avoiding a question, I don't know that it's particularly valuable to point out that they're obviously avoiding a question.
And the reason, like, I will sometimes, when the guy kept saying, well, this is an extremist Jew, you're such an extremist, and I had to say, you do understand that extremism is not an argument, right?
It's an argument from consequences, which is like saying, atheism is an extreme position, and therefore it's false.
Atheism produces immorality, and therefore it's false.
I mean, you understand that hearing arguments about Somalia and the poor and the roads for...
An anarchist or a libertarian is exactly the same as hearing arguments about Hitler and Stalin were atheists and therefore God exists.
I mean, it's exactly the same nonsense, exactly the same unthinking, knee-jerk, propagandized, catechism, empty-headed response.
And again, I know that sounds harsh, but I do mean this with all sympathy.
What was happening was we were sailing into a place of unreason for them.
And that is very, very emotionally difficult for people.
But we were sailing into a place of unreason for them.
Emotionally, that's brutal.
Because this is where we are the most harmed and the most traumatized.
Because reason and evidence is all put forward for children as a value.
Think, we're always told.
Where's your proof?
Show me.
Show me your work.
That's what they always say.
Don't just...
Type in the right answer.
Show me your work.
Show me that you actually know.
Give me the evidence that you actually know.
Don't just tell me you're good at spelling.
Show me.
Don't just tell me you're good at math.
Show me with a test.
Give me the evidence.
Don't just tell me that you understand photosynthesis.
Describe it to me.
Write it down.
Show me the evidence.
Right?
So, knowing how to reason and providing evidence is something that is drilled into us repeatedly and, dare I even need to add, abysmally hypocritically, when we're children.
Of course, I mean, that's just used to create, test anxiety around authority, punishment, humiliation.
I mean, teachers don't care.
For the most part, they don't actually care whether you learn how to think.
In fact, learning how to think is kind of the opposite of modern teaching.
And I hate that we have to use these words for what is really the opposite of what is really going on in the world.
But...
You know, it's like calling the butchery of hacking people up into the Middle Ages surgery.
I don't know, I guess you have to use the word, but it's not really a very accurate description of it.
But reason and evidence is pounded in so much to us as a value, as a virtue, as a necessity, as the sin qua non of intellectual excellence.
And the huge emotional challenge occurs when reason and evidence is applied to a field or an area which is dominated by cultural superstition.
Then what happens is there is a massive short circuit.
The unstoppable force hits the immovable object and the emotional universe implodes into a tiny white bleeding light of pain.
And the reason for that is that The reality of impossibility hits us.
So, if these guys were told about, you know, reason and evidence is a value, and I'm sure that they've used it consistently in their pursuit of atheism, right?
Show me the reason for God's existence.
Show me the evidence for God's existence.
They've used reason and evidence.
As a weapon, for want of a better phrase, to, you know, with which to bash or club or, you know, I don't like the word bashing.
It's just so-and-so bashing.
It's just as a terrible, it's not an argument, right?
It's just an appeal to emotional immaturity, as so much of modern communication is.
So this is the big challenge, that they can't then say, well, reason and evidence is not a value, because that goes in the face of their childhood.
It flies in the face of all the values that were inflicted on them by authority, that of course authority excluded themselves from.
A teacher can say to a child, show me that you know what you're doing, and the child can say to the teacher, should be able to say to the teacher, well, prove to me that you're a good teacher.
How do I know that you're a good teacher?
Well, the teacher would, of course, be offended by such a statement, because it's not, you know...
These standards are used to hurt, punish, and traumatize, right?
This is why philosophy awakens such trauma in people, because values are almost exclusively used to harm children.
They are upheld as a way of pretending that the standards are punishing you when really it's the adults who are punishing you.
You understand?
The standards we were taught as children were excuses for punishment.
The adults needed to punish us so that we'd be frightened of them and submit to their authority when they had no good reasons for that authority.
So, they needed to punish us, and almost all of culture and standards, I mean, they're all created so that adults have an excuse to punish and humiliate children, and they can then blame it on the standards, right?
You get an F. You failed the test.
Now, you've got to take this home, and your parents have to sign it.
You failed.
You failed the test.
You didn't study, you didn't work, you didn't do the right thing, you didn't learn, you didn't blah blah blah, right?
The whole point is the humiliation and the punishment.
The test is merely the excuse.
The standards are merely an excuse.
The stuff that is taught to children is only an excuse for punishment.
I know that sounds very cynical, but the reality is that if reason and evidence and testability were such wonderful values, then, by God, the teachers would be most eager to submit themselves to these standards, right?
And so, if standards are great for evaluating children, then they should be far better for evaluating teachers.
And therefore, teachers, school administrators, and so on should demonstrate the value of standards by actually submitting themselves to objective standards of...
The tests for excellence, but they don't.
Of course, the entire purpose of government education is to avoid testing the teachers and avoid having the dollar democracy of having the parents evaluate the teachers by choosing whether to give them their hard-earned money or not.
You understand?
The test of value in a free society is money.
Right?
You don't need to test teachers because if parents want to give them money, the teacher is doing a good job.
I mean, are they doing an objectively good job?
Well, who knows what that even is.
But they're certainly satisfying the wants and preferences of the parents.
Like, if you're a car salesman, you don't need to go through annual tests of your ability because it's actually quite simple.
To figure out whether or not you have the ability to be a good car salesman.
Can anybody guess?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Yes, that's right!
Have you sold a lot of cars?
That would be the test of that, right?
And it's not anything that needs to be...
Sort it out from that standpoint at all.
I mean, you don't need continual testing, right?
They don't need to test to find out if you delivered your paper to the paper route, right?
Because you did or you didn't.
There are complaints that there aren't, right?
People keep you as a paper boy or girl or they don't, right?
So, where there's money, we don't need tests, right?
But where there's no money and there's no tests, you know that the first test that is being avoided is the money test.
For teachers to go to parents as potential employees and to sell their services and to compete with other teachers would be anathema to them.
Because, I mean, the vast majority of them are...
I don't know.
Do I even want to say it?
Malignant and entitled.
And the idea of submitting themselves to the dollar democracy of parents' choice, to be answerable to the parents, to be answerable to the students, is anathema to narcissists who just believe that they're entitled to all these goodies and anybody who wants to put a voluntary test on anything that they're doing, a test of voluntarism, is evil.
And they know that because they're not providing value.
Anybody who's not willing to submit themselves to the test of, at the very least, financial voluntarism, Knows that they won't pass that test.
Knows that they won't pass that test.
I mean, Michelle Rhee, when she was, you should read The Bee Eater, it's a good book, but Michelle Rhee, superintendent of, I think it was New York schools, she put something in place which, you know, the bad teachers would get fired and the teachers who did really well could like double their salary.
And the union wouldn't even let them vote on it.
The union would not even let them vote on it.
Because the union is there to protect the people who are shitty.
And the idea, of course, that the most, I mean, everybody says, the most tender young minds, the most important and valuable thing is the quality of the education of children.
And then we simply refuse to let any voluntary quality tests go.
Go within a million miles of trying to improve that by even a tiny percentage points.
This is what I mean when I say that these standards are just said.
They're not real.
The standards are raised so that they can be used to frighten children, but they're not standards that the adults would in a million years dream of even imagining about voting on submitting to.
So that's really important.
So the reason and evidence thing, which is drilled into us so consistently, so persistently, so relentlessly when you were children, and then there's whole areas where you can't talk about reason and evidence.
What's the reason and evidence that more money makes better schools?
What's the reason and evidence that the existing school system is remotely the best?
What's the reason and evidence?
That's more important than whether a kid knows how to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, right?
But you can't ask those questions.
I'm not saying you would, but just imagine standing up in class in grade 7 and saying, well, Mrs.
Smith, you have now evaluated us for years, and I think that's been very interesting, and you keep telling me how important it is.
You keep telling us how important it is That we prove that we are good at what we're doing.
That we prove that we know what we say we know.
And that having your word for it is not...
Not valuable.
So, I'm just wondering, Mr.
Smith, when is it that we get to evaluate you?
Because you are providing a service to us called education.
When is it that we get to evaluate you and when is it that we get to say whether we think you're a good or bad teacher, whether we want to stay or not stay in this classroom?
Because, you know, when I go to the mall, I don't have to go shop at any particular mall.
If I go to the theater, I don't have to see any particular movie or any movie at all.
When I have commercials, they say this stuff is really great, but nobody forces me to go and buy it, so I'm allowed to make a lot of decisions for myself, and I just wonder, in the realm of education, why is my feedback never solicited, since the school is continually saying that testing and empirical evidence is really, really important.
And the school is continually telling me to be responsible for my choices.
Well, when is it that I get to make a choice about my education, whether I like you or another teacher or a different system or homeschooling or unschooling?
Am I allowed?
Am I family allowed?
Is my parents allowed to make that choice without thugs in blue coats coming to take us away to jail?
I mean, can you imagine what would happen if you take the standards that are inflicted on you as children and attempt to apply it to your teachers or to the school environment as a whole?
Do you see the trauma?
I mean, my palms are sweating just thinking about it, right?
Because that would be terrifying.
That would be terrifying.
Because that would reveal the environment as not attempting to serve objective standards for the excellence of children, but inventing subjective standards and calling them objective because it makes it more painful to inflict it on children if the children believe that those standards are objective and virtuous.
Virtue is invented to enhance cruelty.
There are some drugs which will make you hypersensitive to pain that truly sadistic torturers will give their victims before they start to torture them.
Well, that's what virtue is.
That's what standards, that's what consistency is, for the most part.
In the modern world, certainly, and throughout history, I would think, of course, even more so.
But morality is used because children have a universal brain, and children have a universal blank-out for hypocrisy.
This is really important.
And again, I know it sounds like a tangent, but I'm really still talking about this conversation I had.
So people have a blank out for hypocrisy.
Because culture fundamentally is hypocrisy.
It's all the stuff that's not true that's portrayed as true.
It's all hypocrisy and nonsense.
But pointing out hypocrisy is incredibly dangerous throughout our evolution.
Stone Age tribes, ancient religions, Egyptian culture, civilization.
Pointing out hypocrisy on the part of the ruling class would get you killed, would get you abandoned.
Being skeptical about that which cannot be talked about Is dangerous.
That's why we sweat profusely and why our brain scars over all of this stuff and separates it and isolates it.
Right?
Right?
Reason, evidence, consistency, virtue, telling the truth.
Tell the truth!
Well, you're only told the truth when someone in authority has something that they want to get out of you.
Then you have to tell the truth.
But if you tell the truth about your thoughts and feelings to somebody in authority who's doing you wrong, well, then you're called rude and disrespectful, right?
Because now the truth is something the authority doesn't want to hear, so there's a whole different set of moral standards put in place.
When the authority has something they want to know, then truth becomes a virtue.
When you're telling something the authority doesn't want to know, then it becomes rude and disrespectful.
And whole other standards are put in place.
And our brains are, I think, evolutionarily constructed to gloss over, to seal that stuff up, to gloss over it, to make a cyst out of it, and to avoid it.
And that's very painful because we all know why we avoid consistency in our interactions with authority figures when we're children.
We avoid consistency because it will trigger an attack if we demand consistency.
If we demand, you know, 10% of the consistency from authority figures that they demand from us as children, I mean, we'll get attacked, right?
Not just by the authority figures but by all the other children and, you know, generally you couldn't really survive without the tribe and certainly couldn't reproduce without the tribe.
And so, any kid who was really comfortable pointing out the hypocrisy of the rules of his tribal structure did not live long, or if he lived long, was very unlikely to procreate, and therefore these genes didn't.
Whereas the genes that were like, oh shit, hypocrisy alert, I'm going to blank out, I'm going to avoid, and I'm going to simply never approach this point of terror and anxiety again, Now, of course, that terror and anxiety comes out in, you know, horror movies.
It comes out in bloody video games.
It comes out in, you know, in goth, in dark music, in tattoos.
I mean, the horror of avoiding the rage trigger of authority hypocrisy comes out in myriad, myriad, myriad ways.
The ugliness in the world That can sometimes be quite artistic.
It comes out of all of that.
All of that.
And I should probably do at least some of the stuff like Pink Floyd's The Wall, some stuff that I'm very familiar with, do some analysis of where that shows up.
But all of that seems to me to come out of avoiding the hypocrisy of rules claimed to be universal that are far more applicable to authority than children that authority will attack you for attempting to impose back up the chain.
And so, the panic that erupts from people when you begin to be consistent, right?
I hate to put it, it's really a whole lot more complicated than that.
But the panic that erupts from people is really important.
It's really, really important to see and to understand.
Because the panic erupts because they cannot...
Erase the standards.
In these cases, it was the guy's reason and evidence.
They can't erase those standards, but they also cannot apply them to a particular authority.
Now, that authority may be God, or it may be the state.
Or it may be their parents, or it may be some cultural absolute or something like that.
So they can't abandon the standards because the standards have been so drilled into them, but they cannot apply them to authority, and that creates an existential panic.
And one of the men very courageously said, well, I think I'm just going to kill myself.
And that is a part of despair and horror that has occurred as a result of this kind of hypocrisy that is almost unbearable, which is why I tell people to get emotional support when you're working on this kind of stuff.
Anyway, I mean, there's lots more to say about it, but I think those are the major points I wanted to get across.
I really do.
I mean, I appreciate the conversation.
It's worth listening, not for the logical stuff, but really listen carefully for the emotional stuff.
That's really, really important.
The people who are going to get to the truth are the people who can find ways to process the agony of having been lied to and the resulting relationship with their I hope that makes sense.
Thank you, as always, so much for listening.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of the wonderful listeners who came out to see me speak, and it was just great spending all day chatting and all night chatting with you.
So, thank you everybody so much.
Donations, massively and eternally welcome at fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
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