All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 25, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:02
2780 What is an Argument?

Stefan Molyneux answers the question - what is an argument?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So I guess, why not?
Let's have a chat about what is an argument.
I've started...
The odds of it taking off are sort of like a hippo achieving wingless flight, but N-A-A, uppercase N, lowercase A, uppercase A, stands for not an argument, or nah, as in na-na-na-na-boo-boo and nah, don't trouble me with your mental noiselessness.
And not an argument.
So I get these questions, of course, and I say, it's not an argument, it's not an argument, people!
Well, what is an argument?
Well, it's bigger than it is in terms of logic, like it's bigger than just logic itself.
Because logic doesn't necessarily require or deal with the challenges of empirical evidence.
But first of all, before we get into what is an argument...
Well, what is the purpose of even asking the question?
What is an argument or what is not an argument?
Which begs the question, I guess, of what is the purpose of philosophy?
And since philosophy is simply valid thought, what is the purpose of valid thought?
Well, the purpose of philosophy is to encourage the pursuit of virtue for the goal of happiness.
Philosophy is a moral science.
It's not a physical science.
It's not physics.
It's not biology.
And those, of course, are subject to the scientific method, for which there are very strong philosophical arguments.
But what differentiates philosophy from physics is the ought, is the should.
It's the, what I call, universally preferable behavior.
The scientists aim to describe, not prescribe, right?
And so all that is and can be accurately described, catalogued, predicted, and so on, through physics, biology, and so on, this is all acts of description, a mere recording of what is.
But there's no ought in any of that.
No, you should.
Now, this question which comes up a lot from people, and I understand why.
I mean, it's something that sort of threw me for a long time as well.
You can't get an ought from an is.
This comes back to Hume.
You can't get an ought from an is.
Well, I actually don't agree with that.
Saying you can't get an ought from an is is automatically getting an ought from an is, which is you ought not try to get an ought from an is.
So, I don't want to sort of go into that as a whole, but...
So, a biologist is going to describe...
Life and its processes and its mechanics and its so on, right?
And it will describe life's needs, but there's no ought in there, right?
There's no ought in the mere description of life processes.
So, for instance, ought a lion or should a lion eat a gazelle?
It's not really a rational question.
Now, a biologist will say, yes, a lion...
We'll eat a gazelle.
Ought it to?
Well, it's got a biological drive to stay alive, so yeah, it's most likely to, right?
But the biological drive to survive is multi-generational and you will often see in nature parents risking their lives to save the lives of their offspring, right?
Birds will fight to keep kestrels away.
Smaller birds will fight to keep kestrels away from their eggs or whatever it is that the kestrels want to prey on.
So a biologist describes the processes of life, but a doctor wants to keep you healthy.
There is an ought called health.
A biologist will describe cancer, but a doctor will try to cure you from cancer.
So think of the difference between a biologist and a doctor.
A biologist describes, a doctor prescribes, I guess both figuratively and literally.
And the goal of health is implicit.
The goal of health is...
Health is simply a state that all sane people prefer to illness.
You know, outside of coercion and extremity and so on, right?
Now, with philosophy, of course, the pursuit of virtue with the goal of happiness is...
Well, it's as universal as it can be.
And we do want universal happiness because if it's not universal, then it's not philosophy, right?
If it's not universal...
It's not science, right?
And so we want universal happiness, which means happiness which everyone can achieve at the same time through the pursuit of rational virtues.
Respect for property, respect for personhood, and so on.
And those are sort of the necessary, right?
Don't jump off a cliff and, you know, you have the chance to be healthy.
Do jump off a cliff, you really don't.
And if you If you reject evil, violations of persons and property, then you have the opportunity to be good.
Simply not being evil is not enough to be good.
It's like saying everybody who doesn't smoke is extremely healthy, and that's of course not true at all.
Now, if you smoke, you're not really going to be very healthy, but if you don't smoke, it's a necessary but not sufficient requirement for physical health.
So, virtues must be universal, which is why it makes one person happy to steal money from someone else.
Say you have a crap job you hate and you go and steal some money from someone else then you don't have to work as hard and so on.
But this can't be practiced universally.
Not everyone can steal.
Stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior for a variety of reasons I've gone into a million times before and you can check out freedomainradio.com slash free in order to So the purpose of philosophy is the encouragement of moral virtues and the avoidance of evil with the goal of happiness.
Now, happiness is more than the purview of philosophy, right?
I mean, obviously, because you can be virtuous, but if you have a migraine, you will not be happy.
I guess migraines are horrible and brain-exploding hell scenarios, a true hellscape of inner cranium agony.
You may be virtuous, but you won't be happy.
And so the philosopher refers physical health to a doctor, a nutritionist or whatever it is that you want to, like however you want to aggregate your experts in order to help promote physical health.
But in the same way, a doctor can help you with physical impediments to health, but it's not the doctor's purview.
Or role to help you with moral impediments to health, or basically immoral impediments to happiness.
So you go to the doctor to keep your body healthy, which is necessary for happiness.
And you go to the philosopher to help you pursue ethics, which, if you're healthy, will be the second sort of stage necessary for happiness.
So that is, I think, the role of the philosopher is the promotion of moral virtue for the sake of the achievement of happiness.
And this is startling For a lot of people.
But it is important to know what is differentiating between philosophy and other disciplines.
Philosophy is clearly not physics because there's no point having two different words for the same thing.
That's just confusing.
And so the philosopher is there to encourage you to be virtuous, which is necessary for happiness if your other basic needs are already taken care of.
So, why is it not something like physics and so on?
Well, again, sorry, we already have the term physics, geology, whatever.
But reason equals virtue equals happiness, which is the ancient Socratic dictum as described by Nietzsche, is important.
And virtue is an argument that is put forward.
You see, in physics, there's proof without choice.
I mean, you can choose to reject proofs if you want to be mystical rather than into physics, but with physics, there's proof without choice.
I mean, no one can reject gravity.
They can reject theories of gravity.
They can reject...
Descriptions of gravity that can't reject gravity.
Human beings can reject morality, right?
In this way, it's similar to whatever your doctor might prescribe as healthy life habits, right?
Exercise and eat well and don't smoke and don't drink to excess and so on.
Well, you can choose to reject those.
You can't choose to reject physics.
You can't choose to reject chemistry.
You can't choose to reject biology.
You can't choose to not be a carbon-based life form.
I guess you could be Pamela Anderson and be mostly silicon-based life form.
But you can't choose to drink arsenic and be healthy.
But the oughts come with the choice.
The is don't.
You can choose to jump off a cliff, but you can't choose to jump off a cliff and not be subject to gravity.
So the fact that there's a choice-based discipline is important.
And that differentiates it from physics and so on, right?
So I think that's important to understand.
You have something different that is occurring, and therefore you need a different word for it.
Now, clearly physical health has little, if anything, to do with moral health.
Hitler was a staunch vegetarian, although I've heard that's sort of a myth that was invented to make him sort of seem nice or whatever, but Hitler was at least purported to be a staunch vegetarian and took his exercise and so on.
And may have lived, in fact, to a ripe old age.
Whereas many moral people may get struck down by illness or whatever at some point in their life early.
Or as I wrote in the poem when I was 17, I think, two men in the wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
So you can be morally entirely corrupt and physically healthy.
You can be morally very good and you can be sick as a dog, right?
So we need to differentiate it from doctrine, right?
And that's why.
So I think I sort of made that.
So that's sort of what philosophy is, is the promotion of virtue for the sake or for the end goal of happiness, which I think we all...
You sort of really can't question the happiness thing.
It's like saying, well, what if you really want to be unhealthy?
Well, it's okay.
If you really want to be unhealthy, you're not going to consult a doctor anyway.
So if you're a masochist and when you want to get sick or whatever...
But happiness as Aristotle said is the one state of mind we don't We don't achieve in order to achieve something else, right?
So that's a very important thing about happiness, right?
So, you know, we go to work to make money.
We make money to buy things.
We buy things, let's say, to make us happy.
But we don't buy things.
We don't make ourselves happy in order to.
That's the end goal.
Happiness is sort of the self-contained end goal of life.
If you're happy, it's not in order to win at golf, right?
I mean, happiness is sort of the goal.
You aim to win at golf because it makes you happy or whatever.
So, I think this is really important to understand as a whole the degree to which philosophy is really self-contained around this ethical stuff.
Now, people say, well, what about the other branches of philosophy and metaphysics, epistemology, a study of reality, and the study of truth and politics and so on?
Well...
The study of reality is important, but it's not foundational to physics.
Sorry, not foundational to philosophy.
It also occurs in the realm of physics and biology, and even to some engineering, of course.
So they all study reality.
So it's hard to say that, to me, it would be a base province.
I mean, if you look at the scientific method, it's got a very strict metaphysics, which is that it's the primacy of empiricism over consciousness, right?
Which is, in any conflict between the theory and the practice, or the theory and the sense data, empirical evidence, the empirical evidence always wins.
Always wins.
That's a really important thing to sort of process and understand.
And that's, I mean, that's different with religion, right, than the primacy of consciousness, right?
Faith trumps evidence, right?
I mean, if you think of sort of the ridiculous examples where they say the world is 6,000 years old, but they can find dinosaur bones hundreds of millions of years old by carbon dating, and they say, well, that's just a test of faith.
God has used to put those there to test your faith, right?
So no evidence can overturn the primacy of the conscious belief.
It's a primacy of consciousness, not a primacy of empirical, objective, sense-data-based reality, right?
So, you can't have science without a very strict metaphysics, the nature of reality.
Reality exists independent of the conscious mind, and everything that's in the conscious mind must surrender to reality, and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
All that kind of stuff.
That's all part of the scientific method.
That's how it works, right?
And so...
That, metaphysics, is very much the essence of the scientific method and the epistemology, how you pursue and achieve valid knowledge.
This is in the scientific method.
It's, well, you've got to have a rational argument because rational simply means consistent, universal, right?
Fundamentally.
And...
So if you say, well, this wavelength is blue in this area and then under exactly the same condition is red in this area, well, it's contradictory, right?
It's not valid, right?
Under exactly the same conditions, gases both expand and contract when heated.
Well, that can't be valid.
That can't possibly be valid.
So, all of these conditions, I guess, or requirements, are very much part of the scientific method.
And so here, with the scientific method, you have...
Metaphysics, you have epistemology.
So the idea that this is somehow foundationally the province of philosophy, to me, is not valid.
Now, you don't have ethics in the scientific method.
That doesn't really work.
That doesn't occur.
So from that standpoint, you do have a differentiator.
So, I'm not saying this has clinched the entire...
Case for philosophy as a moral discipline, that would be a longer and even more technical work, but that's a case to be made.
I think it's reasonable, and hopefully can be accepted, at least for the remainder of this conversation.
So...
The question then becomes, what do arguments have to do with this?
Well...
There must be some relationship between thinking and happiness.
Happiness must be under the control of thought to some degree.
If not, then it's all a scam and a sham and me promising to give you a magic cape that allows you to overcome gravity and all this, right?
Now, I know that that's not a very good argument to say, well, it must be the case, otherwise I'm a con artist.
But it's not the extreme that Hamlet says, where he says, there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
That, to me, is radical subjectivism.
That shark biting off your leg can be good if you think it.
But...
There must be some aspect of happiness that is under the control of the mind.
Because if that's not the case, then there can be no such thing as valid health care.
Because healthcare says, don't smoke.
And whether you smoke or not, to some degree, is the result of your decision.
That's why I tell you not to smoke.
Like, if you said to fat people, listen, you don't need to lose weight, you just need to concentrate on being 30% less susceptible to gravity, that would be a ridiculous con because that's impossible.
You cannot will yourself to be less susceptible to gravity, or you can't say to fair-skinned people, concentrate on creating a mental shield against UV rays so that you don't get sunburned.
Don't worry about that silly and expensive sunscreen.
It's whatever, right?
Because the body's...
The skin's susceptibility to sunburns for fair-skinned people is not under conscious control.
But...
Put on some sunscreen, it's great, right?
And go buy some sunscreen and put it on, is under the control of the individual, at least to some degree, right?
So if no part of happiness is under one's conscious control, then everyone who tries to convince you for a better behavior relative to your goals is...
He's a con man.
Now, maybe they all are.
I guess what determinists would say that they are, but then they would be predetermined to be con men, so there's no such thing as a con man.
A con man itself requires choice.
I mean, a computer program that spits out the wrong answer is not defrauding you or conning you.
It has no choice.
There's significant empirical evidence that changing one's thinking changes one's level of happiness.
Good therapy has been proven to be many times more efficacious in achieving sustainable happiness even than significant increases in income.
So, the basic idea has to be that thinking has something to do with happiness.
Now, it also must be the case that truth has something to do with happiness in the long run.
Accuracy, honesty, truth.
The correct processing of reality.
Must have something to do with happiness.
So let's take a sort of simple example that's complex and deep and tragically all too common.
So let's say you grew up, you have a dad, and your dad says you're an idiot to you five times a day.
You're just an idiot.
You're stupid.
Your thinking process is retarded, your brain is contemptible, you're never going to amount to anything, you're an idiot, you're stupid, blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
Now, let's say that this is not true.
That you have a reasonably good mind, or maybe even a great mind, or whatever, but...
Now...
It is not true that your father saying that you're stupid makes you stupid.
That is not true.
If I say that Angelina Jolie is ugly and fat, does that make her ugly and fat?
Well, no.
I guess relative to a grasshopper with the face of Grace Kelly.
Hmm.
Save that one for later.
So me saying something does not, right?
If I say your hair is purple when your hair is not purple, it does not make your hair purple.
Now, if you think that you're stupid because your father says that you're stupid, then you are making a mistake.
Right?
So last year I was diagnosed with lymphomic cancer and they did not create the lymphoma.
They did not create it by...
Doing the test, right?
By taking the tumor out and analyzing it.
Because there was an objective measure for the presence of these cancer cells and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So they didn't say, like, if your father says you're stupid, that doesn't make you stupid.
Now, if they say to me, Steph, you have cancer, that doesn't mean that they've created the cancer, but they're accurately identifying the presence of cancer cells, potential cancer cells in my body, the ones that were removed through the tumor and so on.
So recognizing that people's descriptions do not create reality, unless you believe them, is important to happiness, right? is important to happiness, right?
Happiness also must have something to do with a sense of control over one's own existence.
If happiness has anything to do with achievement, and achievement has anything to do with ambition and a sense of efficacy, a capacity to plan for and control the outcome of your goals and desires, pride being, right, You can't be proud of the accidental, right?
If you're born tall, or if you're born and grow up tall, you can't be proud of being tall.
I mean, you can be, but it's wrong.
It's irrational.
You can be proud of being virtuous because virtue is a struggle.
It's a challenge.
You can be proud of losing weight and so on.
It's under your control.
your choice.
So happiness has to have something to do with one's mental attitude and it has to have something to do with truth.
And The more control that you have, that you exercise, the greater your chance of happiness.
So, that's sort of an Aristotelian mean, right?
You don't want to believe you have no control over your life, because that is to become passive and inert.
On the other hand, you don't want to believe that you have infinite control over all factors in your life and reality itself, because that's to be megalomaniacal, grandiose, delusional, and insane, right?
So that which rationally promotes...
A sense of control over your own life that you rationally mean you can achieve it and it's true will give you a greater chance of happiness.
It doesn't guarantee happiness, right?
It's a pursuit of happiness idea, right?
You won't be happy if you're completely inert in your life and never try and achieve anything or plan, right?
Because you don't get the sort of rational pride of achieving virtue.
And so...
That which gives you a rational and honest and accurate understanding of the degree of control you have over your life is important.
Other people's words do not define you by their words, like just their words, particularly somewhat subjective characteristics.
So, of course, if you want to achieve anything good in this world, then...
10,000 people an hour are going to call you a bad person, right?
Because when you try to achieve something good in this world, you threaten the interests of bad people, and bad people don't have good arguments, and all they have is slurs and insults and so on, right?
I mean, the number of times I've been told to go fuck myself, to kill myself, that I'm a cunt, that I'm a jerk, that I'm an asshole, all these kinds of things, right?
Well, philosophy helps with that, right?
Because...
I'm the wrong gender to be a cunt.
Right?
So philosophy is because other people's words do not define who I am unless I agree with them.
It's our old Henry Ford statement.
If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
So philosophy helps because it gives me a true and accurate understanding of the relationship between other people's words and my reality.
Now, if my father, and he didn't, but if my father told me five times a day when I was growing up I was stupid and I believed him, then I would not try to improve, I would be less likely to try and improve my mind, to read books, to learn new things, to challenge myself, to aim high in terms of intellectual achievement and so on.
I mean, if I were four feet tall, I wouldn't be trying to get into the National Basketball Association, right?
Other than as a mascot or something.
I would try to become a basketball player.
And so, in a sense, stupid is, stupid does, right?
It sort of becomes real if you believe it.
Or, in reality, it becomes indistinguishable from unreal.
I know that's sort of a confusing thing to say.
So if I believe that I'm stupid, then I act in a manner, or I act exactly the same as if I was stupid.
If I believe I'm stupid, I act exactly the same as if I was stupid.
You know, exactly is a tough word, but sort of in general, right?
So if I genuinely believe I can't do something, it doesn't matter whether I can or I can't, because I won't try.
And not trying is exactly the same as not doing.
Right?
It is really important because it's something that becomes empirically true, though it is not factually true.
So if I'm told I'm stupid and I end up doing some low-rent dumb job and never trying to improve, then there's no difference between believing I'm stupid and actually being stupid.
In practical terms.
You could say it's some, I don't know, third-party observer, omniscient, where you can see all the brain cells, you can whatever, right?
But empirically, it is...
If I have the most beautiful singing voice in the world, but I never sing, am I a great singer?
It doesn't matter.
If I have the worst singing voice in the world, I'm obviously not going to try and sing much.
If I have the best singing voice in the world, but I don't try and sing at all, what's the difference between the two?
Well, in practical terms, there is none, I would argue.
So, if you're told...
You're stupid, you're a jerk, you're insensitive, you're callous, you're cold, you're condescending, whatever, you know, people fire these machine guns of adjectives and negative terms at you to stop you from bringing any kind of light to this planet at the moment.
What does philosophy have to say about that?
Well...
First of all, if an assertion is made without evidence, it can be dismissed without evidence.
This is really important to understand in terms of efficiency and basically just troll resistance in the world.
And trolls aren't just online, of course, right?
It can be your flesh and blood.
But anything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
All right.
I have a giant invisible spider on my head.
Can't be detected in any manner whatsoever.
Okay?
I could just dismiss that.
I don't have to test for anything because all tests have been rejected.
So, if somebody says...
That you're arrogant, right?
Arrogant, one of these words, who knows what the hell it means.
It's just designed to get you to self-attack, right?
And it's incredibly frustrating for trolls when all they're trying to do is make shadow puppets that have you hit yourself.
I mean, that's all they're trying to do, right?
And they've got no power over you unless you let them.
Because you're arrogant, right?
Well, they have to have a definition of arrogant, that you fit, and also some level of prioritization is important as well.
So if I'm interested in getting rid of arrogance and I have a definition of arrogance, then I'd want to find pretty much the most arrogant person in the world and work on them.
But if somebody just says you're arrogant without any evidence, without any definition, and without any reasons as to why they're focusing on you rather than someone else, then...
You just dismiss it.
I mean, they're just making fart noises with their mouth hole.
I mean, there's a different language.
The language of philosophy and the language of assertion are opposites.
So philosophy helps in this sense by helping you to understand what is true and what is false.
Now, if someone says you're arrogant and A rational definition of arrogance is X, right?
And here is the evidence by which you fit the rational definition of X. And here's my prioritization as to why I'm talking to you.
As opposed to the other person you were talking about, right?
So, I have debates and it's sort of amusing sometimes to see...
Like the other day, I can't remember why I clicked on it, but I had to spend like 20 seconds looking at the comments on my debate with Peter Joseph on the Zeitgeist channel.
And it was all, you know, Steph embarrassed himself.
He didn't know what he was talking about.
You owned him.
You cleaned the floor with him.
You pawned him.
That was all without evidence and just assertions and so on, right?
You know, rah, rah, my team, right?
And it's all nonsense, right?
It doesn't mean that I quote won the debate, whatever that might mean, but it means that they weren't making any arguments, but just making emotional noises with their breathing holes.
And knowing what you can dismiss without examination...
It's really important.
In life, it's all about efficiency.
And you don't want to try and reason with people who can't reason.
So if somebody says, you're arrogant, right?
And let's say in the debate with Peter Joseph, people say, oh, Steph, you were arrogant.
It's like, okay, well, I'm happy to hear that, right?
Give me an example.
Sorry, give me a definition.
Give me an example of how I fit that definition much more so than Peter Joseph.
And of course, people don't do that.
Anybody who starts with a conclusion, particularly an emotionally charged conclusion, can be dismissed with no further examination.
Right?
If somebody wants to make the case to me that I'm arrogant, yeah, then make the case.
But they know I'm a philosopher, which means that they know that merely asserting something is...
We're going to have them shrugged off my plate with a very quick mental yawn, right?
Like they know I'm a philosopher.
It's like if you know you're going to a physics conference and you're just going to go up there and say how you think your dreams might be real...
Then it means that you don't even understand what a physics conference is all about, and you just have no idea who the audience you're talking to or the standards that they have, and so you can just be dismissed as an utter fool and a time waster, and nobody has to sit down and rebut you.
So, particularly with me, I don't want to make this about me.
It helps you sort of understand rational thought processes.
Anybody who starts with a conclusion...
It's called begging the question to some degree, but anyone who starts with a conclusion just doesn't understand what philosophy is.
It's like starting a debate by saying, I'm right, I'm right, you're wrong, you're wrong.
It's like, then you don't know what a debate is, and you're claiming victory when you don't even understand the rules of the game.
You are a desperately deluded and time-wasting fool who will leave nary a mark on the intellectual history of the planet.
And so correct, true, valid is the result of a methodology.
It cannot be asserted in advance.
Knowledge cannot simply be asserted in advance of any kind of methodology, right?
And so knowing whether someone can make an argument...
It's really important to happiness because if you're committed to a rational methodology, clear thinking, rational thought, honesty, truth, virtue, then clearly you don't want to be wasting your time with people who have the opposite values.
I mean, that's really important.
If you're on blue team and you want blue team to win, don't join the red team.
If you're trying to quit an addiction, then you don't spend time with people thoroughly committed to pursuing that addiction.
If you want to quit heroin, you can't keep going and hanging around with people shooting up heroin all the time and drinking and so on, gambling.
You just can't do that stuff.
It won't work.
If you don't want to get a cold, then don't go and hang around with a bunch of people who have colds in an enclosed environment, right?
We all understand it, right?
So, all this is very important.
Because philosophy, when you say something is not an argument, what you're saying is that the person has no idea how to think and they substitute sophistry, emotional manipulation, the languid, hysterical bullshit of hasty emotional defenses for thought.
They don't speak your language, right?
If you're living in Japan and there's only one in a hundred people who speak English, it would be great if you could spot the English speakers right away from a distance or whatever, right?
It's efficient.
You don't want to sit there and say, well, I'm going to accept this person's invitation to dinner and then I'm going to find out if they speak English and it's going to take me four hours.
I'll know right away.
I have to stay there for four hours.
It's going to take you forever to find someone who speaks English, right?
And you want to know whether you can see people who speak Greek.
You speak of the reason?
Maybe we can have a talk.
You speak of the reason?
I've begun with you, right?
Apparently philosophy involves bad Mario Brothers invitations.
So can the person construct an argument?
Constructing an argument starts with definitions.
Just think of science.
You have a theory, you test it against empirical reality.
And if the theory tests accurately or positively enough times, then it lends further and further credence or support to the hypothesis of the theory.
Hypothesis becomes a theory when it's become more empirically validated.
So, if you want to find other scientists, you don't say, If people say, I know this because Jesus told me, then you know you're not with someone who understands science.
If that person is furthermore at a science conference or knows that they're speaking to a scientist, then they're just genuinely mental.
They're just genuinely crazy.
It's one thing to say, I know because Jesus told me when you're in church.
It's quite another thing to say at a physics conference, right?
Or submit that level of anti-thought to a physics journal, right?
So that's important to understand as well.
Can the people even remotely think?
So constructing an argument means understanding the purpose of your thought, having definitions that are objective and clear, and measuring behavior in particular, when you're talking about someone's characteristics, measuring behavior against your theory.
And, last but not least, you have to not be displaying the vice when you are accusing someone of the vice, right?
I mean, that's important, right?
So if I go up to someone and say, you're arrogant...
Well, arrogance has a lot to do with just believing that you're right and not providing proof or evidence for what you say.
Well, somebody who says you're arrogant is displaying the very virtue that they're attempting to condemn in others.
And this is very silly.
Very silly.
I mean, you can't possibly believe that.
You're just an asshole.
Well, what's an asshole?
People who insult without any evidence.
Well, okay, so I guess that comes, you know, it's like basically what happens about a thousand times a day is people call me out for Jule.
I don't show up and they shoot themselves.
Okay, well, thank you for saving me the time of getting my pistols ready because I didn't, if you're just going to go out and shoot yourself, I'm not going to get up at dawn and any of that nonsense.
So, this is, I think, why arguments are important.
Now, it's hard to let go of this stuff, right?
Because when you let go of people who can't think, well, I mean, you're sort of kicking off the planet.
It feels like heading into interstellar space to a large degree.
But it is important to do it, if you're committed, right?
If you're committed.
I mean, you can't have a relationship with someone who can't think.
It's like trying to have a conversation with a crazy person.
You can't.
You can't do it.
I remember when I was a kid, I was going to go visit a friend with a bird I had.
I was on the bus, and there was this homeless guy sitting on the bus just kvetching at me about this, that, or the other.
And I tried sort of talking to him, and eventually I saw other people just kind of rolling their eyes and shaking their head at me.
I think I was like 11 or something like that.
Now, of course, nobody actually intervened, but basically they were saying to me, look...
You can't have a conversation with this guy.
He's crazy.
Well, I'm just trying to pay it forward, people.
We're on the bus.
Crazy people are talking to us all the time and it's important to know if the bird can't leave the cage, at least we can leave the cage of crazy and look for a person's capacity to even have an argument first and foremost.
That having been said, I hope that helps.
Thank you so much, of course, for your time, attention, and pursuit of virtue.
My name is Stefan Molyneux.
My show is Free Domain Radio.
The donation is fdrurail.com slash donate.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
▲
Export Selection