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Nov. 13, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:38
2839 Death by Incentives: What Makes The World Go Round

Stefan Molyneux breaks down the unspoken power of incentives and why society incentivises failure.

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One of the most fascinating things about human society is the degree to which the incentives of life, the most fundamental incentives of life, are reversed depending on which side of the gun you're on.
This is really so fundamental.
If you want to look at the disasters in the world, then you really need to look at incentives.
Incentives, you know, it sounds kind of cheap, you know, like here's a discount coupon and so on.
But those discount coupons work because people respond to incentives, the basic principle of economics and really of life itself.
Life responds to incentives.
Being hungry is uncomfortable.
Being full is nice.
So this aspect of things is really, really important to understand.
Sexual desire is a yearning.
Sexual satisfaction is...
Oh, sorry.
I'm back.
Yes, I'm that fast.
So this is, I think, essential information to really ponder.
Life itself survives only due to incentives.
You think of the crazy birds who have to go out and find nutty amounts of food to feed their kids.
Like, why bother?
Well, because...
Nature has layered in, or evolution has layered in, all of these disparate incentives so that the male warblers or whoever the hell they are build these elaborate nests to lure the female.
The male dung beetles build these massive shit palaces in order to attract the females and all that.
Men acquire resources in order to gain access to eggs.
It's a good thing how little changes as you move up the evolutionary ladder.
So life itself depends upon rewards and punishments.
The reward is companionship of love.
The punishment is loneliness.
So once we really grasp, and it goes so deep, right?
That's why I sort of wanted to push back at the idea that it's just sort of discount coupons for car washes and stuff.
The question of incentives goes very, very deep into the very essence of Of life itself.
DNA which produced the wrong incentives does not last.
DNA that fine-tunes the right incentives lasts.
So DNA that has no aggression fails.
DNA that is psychotically aggressive fails.
Absent, you know, politics and government, militaries and so on.
But this question of incentives is so foundational to life itself.
And when we look upon failures in the world...
What we really need to look at is not failures of ethics, but failures of incentives.
And one of the basic realities that moral philosophers and we thinkers need to sort of understand, sorry, sort of understand, but we really need to grasp.
To grok at its essence is the degree to which moral philosophy loses against incentives.
The reason that I'm allowed to do what I do is because I'm not changing any of the fundamental incentives of power.
Not cutting laws changed, not cutting the welfare state, not privatizing the military, none of that.
If the incentives that serve power are in place, those in power don't care what you say about ethics.
You can nag and whine and complain and bitch and moan, as I regularly do, and it will have no effect on the existing structures of power.
Of course, we aim to influence future structures of power.
But once the power-serving incentives are in place...
You can have free speech because appeals to ethics almost never overcome incentives.
I mean, imagine trying to get someone to become a nun or a monk with no threat of hell and no promise of heaven.
A few people would, right?
They want that quietest gay disco on the planet contemplative life, but most people would not.
You have to have the incentives and the punishments In order for these structures to work at all.
Now, just look at something like the CDC, Center for Disease Control, or the World Health Organization or whatever.
So, Médecine Sans Frontières, the Doctors Without Borders, they were begging for more resources throughout the initial Ebola outbreak in West Africa earlier this year.
And they were begging and they did not get the resources they need to contain Ebola.
The outbreak.
One of the presidents, I think it's of Liberia, one of these countries, the president is saying, you must send us doctors.
You must send us doctors to deal with this outbreak.
His son is a doctor who's hiding in the United States saying, I think I could do more and better stuff from here rather than, you know, actually in Liberia where the disease is occurring, right?
So this is all silly.
It's all nonsense, right?
If you look at these governmental organizations that are charged with preventing these disasters, but what happens when these disasters occur?
It's really not hard to see.
When has a federal government charged with preventing a disaster ever been dismantled and everyone fired because that disaster occurred?
Of course not.
This is unthinkable.
This is not how the status system of reverse incentives, not just perverse, but completely reverse.
Perverse is like sideways.
Reverse is like complete opposite.
Going south is not a perverse way of going north.
Never happens.
Never happens.
Educational outcomes keep falling.
And for the most part, government educational budgets keep increasing.
Welfare has failed to solve poverty problems and therefore...
And in many ways, poverty has increased.
The line stays fairly constant, although certainly the number of people on SNAP and...
These grocery debit cards and so on is vastly increasing.
But when you look at the national debt, the national debt is all deferred poverty.
It's poverty in the here and now, but it's deferred.
To the future.
Like, smoking is deferred discomfort, right?
You don't have to quit smoking now, but you are going to have probably a lot of discomfort in the future.
So poverty is getting worse, educational outcomes are getting worse.
Remember how the invasion of Iraq was going to bring peace to the Middle East.
Remember how Obama said, you know, you can keep your doctors, it's not going to add a dime to the deficit, and your premiums are going to go down, and all this sort of stuff, right?
Well, I mean, of course these are all lies.
What happens to the CDC if it fails in its mission to contain illnesses?
What happens?
The CDC gets billions and billions of dollars a year and spends about 6% of its money on its core mission, right?
Because its mission has sort of been expanded to promote goodly healthiness on the planet, which can encompass, right, they do like motorcycle helmet laws and trying to make kids' playgrounds safer, as if the other 9 billion agencies in charge of driving and playgrounds can't do their job.
So what happens to the budget of the CDC if it fails to effect its mission, to complete its mission of keeping America infectious disease-free and safe?
What happens to the World Health Organization if it fails to send the resources necessary to contain an Ebola outbreak, which have occurred semi-regularly from 1973 onwards?
In other words, for almost 40 years.
Well, their budgets get increased.
If you fail, you get more money.
It's hard to fathom just how unbelievable and shocking a set of incentives and what an insane environment this is.
So, SAP, a big giant software company, and their salespeople are, you know, impressive and skilled and all that, knowledgeable.
And SAP, of course, like a lot of companies, has some commission elements to its sales.
And I remember talking to a guy in business once, Well, this guy used to work.
I think it was Microsoft.
And the head of sales came into the office and there were a bunch of salesmen there working away.
And he said, what are you doing here?
And they're all like, oh, we're working on our numbers.
We're doing our expense accounts.
We're plotting our strategies.
He says, okay, all right, fine.
Go somewhere else.
I don't know what you're doing here, but I know what you're not doing is you're not actually out there in front of customers.
I don't care.
Go walk on this stuff in a Tim Hortons.
Go to Starbucks.
I don't care.
Get out of the office because every time I see you here, I know that you're not out there selling something in front of a client.
So go somewhere and talk to someone about buying our software.
So all of that is, you know, motivating salespeople and getting them to do their thing.
Now imagine, just imagine, If every time a salesman made a sale, he was docked $10,000, and every time he failed to make a sale, he was paid $10,000.
This is, in fact, in reality, literally, how we pretend the government can work, how we imagine the government could potentially and possibly work.
Because if the CDC is incredibly fast and efficient at preventing the outbreaks of illnesses, and let's say 10 or 15 years go by, and the CDC has been incredibly great at preventing outbreaks of illnesses, well, inevitably, governments need to cut money from places, right?
So the first place they go is they go to the CDC, or they go to governments, and they say, well, what's your mission, right?
And the CDC says, well, we're here to prevent outbreaks, right?
And the politicians say, well, when was the last outbreak?
Say, 15 years ago.
What's the politicians going to do?
It's going to cut its funding, right?
Because then the idiots and the newspapers and whoever are going to say, you know, we keep funding the CDC. There hasn't been an outbreak in 15 years.
Time to cut their funding.
Right?
Whereas if they can say, well, do you remember the outbreak last year of this?
Do you remember the outbreak the year before of that?
I mean, we're essential.
Woo!
Here's some more money, babies!
In other words, if the CDC succeeds in its mission of prevention, its budget is cut.
And if it fails in its mission of prevention, its budget is increased.
It's just shocking that we could even remotely expect this stuff to work, this approach to work.
To give you another analogy, if you do well on a test when you're 10 in school, you fail.
If you don't study and you fail, you not only pass, but you get a PS4 or an Xbox One.
We know what would happen to children in that situation.
I mean, I guess a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage would rise beyond incentives and say, well, I mean, boy, PS4s are fun, but it is really important that I learn algebra and logic and science.
Well, sorry, I'm kidding.
Like they teach logic in schools.
The idea is unthinkable.
If you don't study and fail your test, you get a PS4 and a pony!
And a month off school.
If you study and pass your test, You fail and have to stay in school for the summer.
There would be like not one child in a million that would study and work hard to pass that test because 10-year-olds understand what voters resolutely oppose understanding.
People say, well, how would a free society deal with an outbreak or with a potential outbreak?
Let's say America was a free, voluntary, stateless society.
How would it deal with an outbreak?
Well, I mean, the first group to stop flying were commercial airliners for fear of liability.
The first people to stop flying in and out, right?
It's the government that's granting all these visas.
So the way that I would want it dealt with in my society, in other words, what I would vote for with my dollars, would be I don't want visitors coming to my society who have zero health insurance.
Because out of simple human compassion, we don't want to turn away people who are injured or sick just because they're on vacation.
But I don't want people flying to...
America, right, to get, quote, free health care because out of compassion we're going to treat them or people are going to treat them and they have no money to pay.
Thomas Duncan got half a million dollars of free health care, quote, free health care, right?
The guy who first flew from Liberia to Texas.
He got a million dollars of free health, half a million dollars of free health care.
Not to mention infecting at least, I think, one other person, two other people.
I can't believe nobody's pissed at this guy.
You know, if that nurse dies, he's a murderer.
But it won't be spoken of.
Because of white privilege, remember?
And so if you require, in order to come to your country, and you don't need governments to require things to come to your country.
You simply, there would be lawsuits against airliners who transported people who didn't have health insurance.
Because you're bringing a liability into the country.
And plus then health tourism would be significant, right?
So people from poorer countries would just try and get themselves to a free country and then their sickness would be probably dealt with through charity.
And some people, you know, whatever, right?
Charity is legitimate, but you have to be very careful with charity as an incentive, which is why government can't do anything nearly so complicated.
But I would imagine that the airlines would say, if you want to fly here, you've got to show that you have health insurance.
Because We get hit with the bill if you get sick.
Because airlines control who gets to the country.
And I'm just talking about America, right?
I mean, land masses and so on is a sort of different matter.
But you would not allow people into your area.
And remember, everything would be privately owned in a free society, so you couldn't set foot on anywhere if people didn't want you to because roads would be private and malls would be private, houses would be private, and so people just, you know, where's your health insurance?
And of course, if there was an outbreak in some, if the current Ebola happens, well, good luck trying to get health insurance if you're trying to fly out of Liberia.
I mean, you might be able to get health insurance, but for sure, you would have to have a test for the virus before you'd be let out, right?
There are virus kits that can give you a result for Ebola in an hour or two.
So you would simply do that and you go to the airport.
As soon as you sign in, you give a blood sample.
And if you really want to go somewhere, they test it for Ebola.
And if you're clear, you can go.
There was actually one of these machines in the hospital that was treating the first patient from Liberia, Thomas Duncan.
But the FDA doesn't allow it to be used except for research purposes.
So they actually had a machine that could test for Ebola in an hour or two in the hospital where he first went, complaining of symptoms.
But they weren't allowed to use it because the government is so freaking helpful, it defies imagination.
So if people who visit your free country are required to have health insurance, then the health insurance companies who would be liable not only for the costs of the individual, but for all associated costs.
So if somebody was coming from an infected country and wanted health insurance, the premiums would be astronomical because you'd have to not only pay for the half a million dollars, the insurance company, for the half a million dollars of care that Thomas Duncan required, but all of the extra care and precautions and so on that are necessary but all of the extra care and precautions and so on that are necessary because of people he's infected and people he might have infected and people that the people he infected have infected or might have
And so there's no way that health insurance would be provided to anyone flying out of an infected zone without establishing a non-infection to begin with.
Solved!
So, coming over land, we'll talk about another time, but just sort of in the current instance, talking about Africa to Liberia.
I don't, you know, if there were infectious diseases, and there's some indications that some of the South and Central American diseases have made their way to America through people fleeing their regimes and coming into the States, I think five or six American children have died from one paralytic, enter a virus, something like that, that has caused problems.
Well, It's an interesting question.
I think that if you brought an infectious disease into the country, you would be personally liable.
If you didn't have health insurance, you would be personally liable for all of the costs.
And those costs would be huge if you brought some infectious disease in.
So it would be...
It would be a pretty bad situation if you tried to do that.
You'd just get the living crap sued out of you.
Now, some people might still choose to do that, in that being sued is better than being dead, of course.
So there's lots of ways that you can prevent this stuff from occurring.
And of course the other thing too is that, you know, this sort of cascading of personal responsibility and liability is really essential to the working of a free society.
All the people who advocated the invasion of Iraq, are they personally liable for the unbelievable, repulsive destruction that has occurred?
No, of course they're not liable.
Of course they're not liable.
FUMU, or F-U-C-K-U-P-Move-Up, Fudge-Up-Move-Up, is fundamental to the government.
Who's liable?
Who's liable for the failure of the schools?
Who pays?
Who loses their job?
Who's liable for the failure to contain Ebola?
Who's liable for the destruction of foreign policy?
Who's liable for the failures of the drug war?
Who's liable?
Who is liable?
And the answer, of course, is that not only is no one liable, but the worse things go, the more you get paid.
The worse things go, the more you get paid.
And the better things go, the more you lose.
It just can't happen.
It won't happen.
The incentives are entirely reversed.
And if we try thinking about these Reversed incentives in any other field than the government, we recognize just how mad they are.
So if we say to an oncologist, every patient that you cure of cancer will cost you $10,000, but we will pay you for every patient who dies of cancer, Once you reverse the incentives, then to have a conscience becomes a torture.
Turning conscience into a liability is a fundamental goal of all power systems.
To make the good people doubt themselves and torture themselves and all of that is foundational.
So if you have an incentive structure where if you kill a patient, you get $10,000.
If you save a patient, you pay $10,000.
You know, your average sociopath is like, yeah, well, okay, fine.
He's got the same relationship to the people as a farmer does to his crops.
You know, harvest away, right?
That's what makes me money, and that's what I'm all about.
And that's what he would do, and he wouldn't really think twice about it.
If you have a conscience, though, you would feel bad about people dying under your watch and this, that, and the other.
So your conscience would then become your torture, and that's wonderful for people in power.
They love that stuff.
And so when you see morality being derided as a sucker's game, that good people are fools, that only suckers take the high road, and that morality is a beta or weakling attempt to ensnare the strong through universals,
universal rules, sort of a Nietzschean view, that morality is invented by the slave to attempt to harness the energy of the master through guilt, Or, of course, as he also said, as a method of turning slavery into a virtue, you are looking at a situation where there's a very great deal of truth in what is being said about ethics.
That ethics is a sucker's game.
In many ways, right?
I mean, just look at the war on drugs, right?
I think it was a Bronx tale of Chaz Palmentieri and Robert De Niro.
Chaz Palmentieri could make a fortune off drugs, gambling, and prostitution, which are profitable largely or almost exclusively because of state prohibitions, then it does become a sucker's game to be a bus driver, as Robert De Niro was.
Robert De Niro can have this speech saying, he's not the tough guy, I'm the tough guy, because I get up and I make money as a bus driver and so on.
I get up every day, I work hard and so on.
Biology doesn't really care about that now, does it?
Biology cares.
Do you have resources for your children?
That's all biology really cares about.
And one of the foundational requirements of a society wherein ethics works is to create a society where resources flow to the ethical.
And that's a voluntary society.
That's a non-statist society.
That's a non-hierarchical society.
It's an anarchic society.
In an anarchic society, resources flow to the virtuous because everything is voluntary.
And by definition, those who are engaged in voluntary interactions, in voluntary trade, in voluntary dating, in voluntary romance, in voluntary businesses, Are virtuous because they are not initiating the use of force.
Or even if you want to say that virtue has to be more than the negation of a negative, like more than, I didn't rape someone today.
I'm virtuous.
They are fulfilling the necessary but...
Perhaps not sufficient requirements for virtue.
In order to be virtuous you have to not currently be engaging in immorality.
Like in order to be healthy you have to currently not be committing seppuku with a rusty spoon.
And so a society where resources flow to the virtuous is a society that bans at every level and in every instance the initiation of the use of force.
That's foundational to making a moral society, which is why I talk a lot about the society of the future, rather than say to people, accept what is and work to be moral regardless of incentives.
And the reason that I don't say be moral regardless of incentives is because I do not wish to besmirch the honor of ethics by pretending that they can surmount incentives.
They can't.
Ethics cannot surmount incentives because incentives are driven by biology.
Which is 99.99% of our body, and that little neofrontal cortex post-monkey beta expansion pack that's buggy as hell that we got going on, it's like trying to turn the tide by blowing on the foam bubbles at the top of the waves, expecting morality to overcome...
Incentives is ridiculous because morality only exists because of a multi-billion-year history of incentives and biological development.
It truly is expecting the tail to wag the dog.
So, I mean, I won't do it.
This is why I say when you are in a status situation, then the ethics don't apply, right?
I mean, people say to me, You pay your taxes.
You're a hypocrite.
You're not really into a free society.
I just laugh at that sort of stuff.
I mean, it's such an obvious and ridiculous trap because they're saying, Steph, your personal ethics should overcome every single conceivable incentive and you should place Abstract philosophy above biological survival.
But that's completely ridiculous.
Abstract philosophy only exists because of biological survival, which for approximately four billion years was not driven by philosophy, but by trilobites and amphibians and reptiles and all that seeking advantage.
So when you look at ethics in society, you must look at them in the context of incentives, and it is essential to understand that incentives cannot be overcome by ethics.
Now, does that mean that there are no people who act in a, quote, ethical manner, regardless of incentives?
Yeah, there are a few people.
There are a few people, for sure.
And there are a few people who commit suicide.
And there are a few people who set themselves on fire.
And there are a few people who go to jail rather than pay their taxes.
Absolutely.
For sure.
But saying that there are people who commit suicide does not deny the power of evolutionary incentives.
Saying that people set themselves on fire does not negate the reality that the vast majority of people prefer themselves in a non-flammable state.
Or non-inflamed state?
And it's a great sophist trick of cheats and liars to separate ethics from incentives and say, well, we've set up a situation that punishes virtue and rewards vice, but people should be virtuous, and if they're not, virtue is weak and has no meaning.
Oh, no, no, no.
The virtue, the fundamental virtue that we need now It's the advocacy of a society wherein people are rewarded for virtue and punished for vice.
But that means a voluntary society.
That means universally preferable behavior.
My free book on ethics at freedomainradio.com slash free, that means the rejection of the Initiation of force and the rejection of the moral validity of statism.
And since none of that will fundamentally achieve anything in our lifetimes, that means a rejection of violence and the advocation of violence and those who advocate violence in your personal life.
Well, that's what it means.
So it's really important to stay sane, to not dissolve yourself into the endless butterfly wings of heart-beating hatred that characterizes people who are constantly frustrated by disasters while having little To know knowledge of the cause, well, that is frustrating.
It's frustrating when you keep seeing the disasters of the state without understanding that the power of incentives drives effectively all human behavior.
People respond to incentives.
And the state is like a charity, in a way, but without competing elements.
So, a cancer charity that is aimed at palliative care, aimed at helping people face terminal cancer and so on, their budget is dependent upon the continued existence of cancer.
That doesn't mean that individuals wouldn't like cancer to go away, of course, but that is not going to be the group that invests heavily in a cancer cure, or a prevention, really.
The company that makes cancer Or the groups that make chemotherapy drugs is not the group that's going to be investing heavily in non-chemotherapy cancer cures.
Again, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong.
It's not bad.
It's not mean.
Because in a multiplicity of solution environment like the free market, it's called the division of labor.
The people who are interested in and competent at Developing chemotherapy drugs, it's a different skill set.
As my friend the econ professor says, Michael Jordan doesn't do his own typing.
It's the division of labor.
Conversely, the people who are trying to find a cure or way to prevent cancer are not the people who are investing in the chemotherapy drugs.
And investors would ask you that.
If you said, well, I want to develop drugs to treat cancer and I want to develop drugs to prevent cancer, they'd say, well, wait a minute, which business are you in?
They're not the same business.
And it's just harder to make a profit if you are working both ends of the aisle, so to speak, if you are working to both treat cancer and prevent cancer.
At the same time, it's harder to make a profit because you're investing a lot of money In developing cancer prevention techniques, which if successful will destroy your chemotherapy business.
At the same time, you're investing in refining your chemotherapy business, which if successful is only successful because your other business has failed.
So you have a situation where you have a split and opposing focus.
It's very clear.
That charities that aim to help people who are poor will run out of charity money if there are no more poor people.
And again, I know this sounds kind of sinister, like they're not out there giving some reverse flowers for Algernon scenario where they're trying to make people dumb to make their money.
People respond to incentives.
There's an old example of this.
I think it was sending convicted criminals to Australia.
The standard of care and survivability...
It was extremely low when the shipping companies were paid for the convicts on departure.
In other words, if you shipped, like for every convict that was crammed onto your ship, you got paid X amount of money.
So, of course, they had every incentive to cram as many convicts as humanly possible onto the ship and not to have as much food and then deliver the few straggling survivors in Brisbane, Australia, or wherever they were heading.
And all they had to do was to switch the incentives so that they were paid by the healthy specimen delivered rather than the number of convicts transported.
And that changed everything.
Then they made the berths bigger, they got more fruit, they got more food, they aired out the cabins, they got them out to exercise, and so on, right?
So in the, what, eight-week voyage or whatever, they wouldn't...
So then they were paid to keep them alive rather than just being paid to transport bodies.
And in fact, those bodies got progressively easier to transport since they just throw them overboard and let the sharks eat them.
And that is kind of foundational.
So you could sit there at the docks and you could lecture at the ship owners.
On the London to Brisbane circuit, you could lecture them and say, but the humanity, oh, these poor men, these benighted souls, you have tender care for their health, and you could go and create a campaign and this and that and the other, right?
Or, you could make the economic case that they should be paid per healthy man delivered rather than per convict put on the ship at the beginning.
which makes sense, which is why FedEx and UPS are guaranteed delivery, right, if they simply got paid for as many parcels as they picked up rather than and then didn't get paid for any parcels they delivered.
Well, that'd be quite a backlog.
You can fight incentives with ethics, which is why I'm not focused on telling people, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good, be good.
Because it doesn't...
The incentives are all wrong.
The incentives are all wrong.
I'll point out that there's bad behavior.
I'll point out that there's bad behavior.
And some people will make better decisions even in the face of bad behavior.
Right?
But changing the incentives...
Is the only thing that will, in the long run, make virtue a pleasure rather than a punishment.
And as long as virtue is a punishment, only the masochistic attempt to act with perfect integrity in a world of perverse incentives.
Well, there's a bumper sticker for you.
Feel free to make it.
So when you read your newspaper or open Drudge or the HuffPo or whatever, when you...
Go through all this consumption of the disasters.
Don't brace yourself for more disasters.
Accept that the disasters are inevitable.
And in fact, if the disasters weren't inevitable, then biology would make no sense.
In other words, if people did not act based on incentives rather than ethics, And when forced to choose between the two, they choose incentives almost every time.
Don't brace yourself for the next disaster.
Don't be shocked at the next disaster.
Because that shows a pattern recognition that is designed to make you frustrated and angry at people.
Yes, the majority of people are pretty craptastic with regards to real ethics.
But as I, again, talked about in many shows, if you are the head of a corporation, you have a fiduciary and legal responsibility to maximize profits.
And if a government contract has to do that, and if lobbying for the government, which pays off ridiculously high returns, if all of that...
Is what is required for you to follow your legal and fiduciary responsibility?
Well then, that's what you're going to do.
And there's a...
Particularly in positions where there's a self-selecting bias, everyone who gets to the top of corporations is self-selected according to their capacity to respond to incentives rather than to be ethical in a narrow and abstract manner.
But there are some exceptions.
There are some people who put...
Who put ethics at a higher ratio and try to work more ethically.
And I think that's fantastic.
I think it's great.
And that can be beneficial in the long run.
So all of this is really designed to give you some relaxation.
Basically, we're trying to build a sandcastle.
If you're trying to make a better world in the present, you're trying to build a sandcastle and the tide is coming in.
And the tide comes in and it laps up against your sandcastle and it pulls down some of your sandcastle.
And you build up the sandcastle, another wave or two comes in.
And, you know, they come back and forth, right?
It's not totally even.
But the tide is coming in.
And is it really sensible to continue to be incredibly frustrated by the fact that the tide is coming in and it keeps swamping your sandcastle?
The sandcastle is ethics.
Oh, it can stand in the right environment.
It simply can't stand against the tide.
And the tide, of course, is incentives.
I just don't want you to be shocked by the next wave and then shocked again by the next wave and shocked again by the next wave.
One's wisdom is pretty much determined by one's capacity to not be shocked by the inevitable.
And since life requires and has grown from specifically out of incentives to be surprised at the inevitable workings of incentives is like being shocked that A white couple has a white baby.
Racist wombs?
Where's your diversity?
Well, this is biological reality.
This is biological reality.
And to be shocked and appalled and upset and outraged when a system of reverse incentives produces negative outcomes is to portray ethics as rank foolishness.
What?
Another wave?
No!
No!
There could be another wave!
What?
Another wave?
Right?
No.
Here come the waves.
Here come the waves.
And...
We removed our sandcastles to friendlier climates.
This is the Van Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
FDRURL.com slash donate to help out the show.
If this makes you feel good, if this releases you from the prison of illusion, if this makes you happier, well, take what you want.
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All the best.
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