2877 GIVING UP THE GHOST - Thursday Call In Show - January 1st, 2015
How can you have any type of ethical system or society without the concept of “rights” - which people will be punished for (not necessarily by a government) if they are violated? Is the belief in God more of an instinct than it is a belief? Includes: Universally Preferable Behavior, Utilitarianism, “disciplining” children, taking away responsibility through determinism, they did the best they could, the pros and cons of religion, atheist moral nihilism, godless communists, the compatibility of religion and rational philosophy.
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Wolley from Freedom Aid Radio.
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Mike, who do we have on first?
Up first today is Jack.
Jack wrote in and said, on the subject of rights, how can you have any type of ethical system or society without the concept of rights?
Rights which people will be punished for, not necessarily by a government, if they are violated.
Great.
Okay.
Thank you for calling in.
I appreciate it.
It's a great question.
And I'm sorry for those who were startled by my recent discussion of rights in its educational right.
But I've gone over this a bunch of times before, but it's been a while, so I appreciate you bringing this up again.
Yeah, and I haven't heard your earlier stuff on rights, and so, you know, I definitely wanted to clarify.
You said that it's more of a preference to you, like, you know, rights are things which people prefer.
Like, I prefer to be educated.
I prefer not to be shot.
I prefer, you know, all of these things.
Well, rights don't exist, right?
They're not real.
They're a philosophical construct, in my opinion.
Right?
They're not anything that exists.
That doesn't make them any more real.
I mean, you could say that God is a philosophical construct.
You know, it doesn't make it any more real.
So, what is a right to you?
What is a right?
God and rights is that one of them is a philosophical construct that is useful and the other isn't.
Usefulness has no value in the realm of philosophy.
I mean, that is utilitarianism.
In other words, we judge the truth of an idea by its usefulness or the validity of an idea or the value of an idea.
But utility is subjective, right?
So the value to something, well, rights are useful.
Well, to who?
Based on what?
It's like, you know, preference, the moment you bring preference into it is not philosophical, it's subjective, right?
If you want to talk about utilitarianism and the different ethical systems, each one of them has its own problems.
Kant's categorical imperative, only do what you would want everyone to do all of the time.
Well, that has its problems because there are certain instances where lying to someone could be for their benefit or from whatever, and utilitarianism has its problems.
Well, if I, you know, if I'm the strongest man in the village, then I can follow the Kantian imperative and say, the strongest man should get his way.
And I'm willing for that to be universal, because I'm the strongest guy.
So, yeah, I mean, but the problem is, is that you say, well, rights are useful, and God is not useful.
But I think that that's not defensible, because God is very useful to people who are better at talking than working, right?
For people who are better at spinning yarns than they are at spinning yarn, they find God very useful.
I'm sure the Pope finds the concept of God extremely useful.
That's true.
People do find the concept of God useful in guiding them in their life.
But let me be more specific with what I mean when I say rights are useful philosophically.
And I mean we do know that morally speaking we have to have a definition of what is right and what is wrong in order to have a society in which we can live and coexist, right?
Well, hang on, hang on.
Are you using homonyms here now?
Because you're saying rights, and then you take an S off, and you make things right or wrong, but you didn't point out that we've changed the topic, right?
No, no, no.
I'm not...
We're going to get there.
But right and wrong is a...
Would you say that's a helpful thing to know?
What is right and what is wrong?
No, it's not helpful in this context because I don't know if you mean right or wrong like correct or incorrect.
I don't know if you mean right or wrong like moral...
Like as a moral judgment.
Like when you think about someone killing someone else, there's a moral component to that.
Was it right or was it wrong?
Yeah.
Morally speaking.
What does moral component mean?
I mean, I'm going to play moral nihilist, just so you know, right?
I mean, you know I've got my own proof of secular ethics.
But let me play moral nihilist, because that's the challenge you have with rights.
So, okay, what do you mean by moral component for murder?
Is it something that attaches to murder like a remora to the underside of a shark's jaw?
I mean, is it something like a little ball of black light that attaches to the act of murder and makes it evil?
Is it a shadow that is cast by the act?
What do you mean?
No, I mean...
For society as a whole to progress and to get better.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Sorry, man.
I hate to be annoying, but now you're back into utilitarianism again.
For the betterment of society, for this, that, or the other.
No.
But I think that rights are important in a very utilitarian kind of way.
Well, but no, no, but if you're talking utilitarianism, hang on, if you're talking utilitarianism, then you can't talk about good and evil.
You can talk about useful.
Like you can say, look, if you want to dig in the ground, a shovel is helpful.
But it's not good or evil.
It's not evil to use a spoon rather than a shovel.
It's just inefficient, right?
It's just not practical compared to the shovel.
So you can't take utility and And pretend that you're talking about the same thing as ethics.
Because ethics can be profoundly un-utilitarian.
Was it sensible for people to hide Jews from the Nazis?
No.
Was it sensible or practical or helpful or useful for people to set up the Underground Railway to get slaves from the South to Canada or someplace where they could be free?
We would say that they did the right thing.
Right, but then you can't bring the good of society in.
Sorry, go ahead.
We would say that they did the right thing because we believe in the right for people to be free, you know, not just because they're black.
You know, you can't have slaves just because they're black.
We believe in the fundamental human freedom that, you know, it's not okay to make other people slaves based on the color of their skin.
And that's helpful for society.
What does helpful mean?
It means...
You know, it forwards the idea of the non-aggression principle.
Rights, I think, are fundamental.
No, no, but you're begging the question.
Hang on, hang on.
No, no, but you understand the problem is that you're begging the question.
We're trying to figure out what rights and virtue are, and you're saying, well, it's that which furthers the non-aggression principle, which is virtue.
But that's begging the question.
We're trying to figure out what virtue is, right?
Not, well, it forwards this definition of virtue.
That's true.
So what would you say that virtue is?
Well, virtue is acting in accordance with universally preferable behavior.
And what would you define as universally preferable behavior?
Well, that's the beauty of UPB, is it's actually kind of defined in the language itself.
So universally preferable behavior is...
Behavior which all people or actions which all people can prefer under all situations and all circumstances.
So, for instance, respect the example of two guys in a room, Bob and Duck.
Can they both respect each other's property rights at the same time?
They sure can, right?
They can just not steal each other's iPods or earphones or whatever, right?
Right, but then you just used the example of rights as a foundation for an example of what UPB is.
It's based on the respective rights.
No, that's not what I'm doing.
So give me a chance to go more than 35 seconds into the argument-proving ethics, if you don't mind.
I apologize.
I'll let you go for a while.
So I can say, I can logically say, and it can be logically consistent, that respecting property rights is universally preferable behavior.
Now, I know I'm using the word property rights, and I'm sorry about that, because that's just the standard nomenclature.
I can't make up my own term.
I've tried property properties, but it doesn't really work very well.
Let's just, we can say murder.
So we can say, thou shalt not murder.
Well, everyone can, that can be a rule which everyone can follow all at the same time.
However, Two guys in the same room cannot both murder each other at the same time because murder must be both wanted then and unwanted.
The act of killing someone if they don't want you to do it is murder.
Right?
If they want you to do it, then it's not exactly the same.
Then it's assisted suicide.
Yeah, or euthanasia or who knows?
It's not quite the same as murder.
At least I don't think it would be in a rational society.
So universally preferable behavior, you can't have a rule which says everyone must murder.
That can't logically be cunt.
It's like saying everyone must steal.
In other words, stealing or the forcible or unapproved transfer of someone else's stuff must be universally preferable.
It can't be universally preferable because in order for it to be theft, it has to be unwanted.
So for Bob to steal from Doug and it not just be lending or borrowing or whatever, then Doug must not want Bob to steal from him.
In other words, if you're going to say everyone must steal, then you're saying, well, Bob must steal from Doug.
But Doug must also value stealing universally, and therefore must want him to steal from him, because stealing is universally preferable behavior.
But it can't work that way.
Because the moment Bob wants Doug to steal from him, it's no longer stealing.
So, I mean, this is just a very quick example, and there's more in the book, universally preferable behavior, which people can get at freedomainradio.com slash free.
But that would be an example to me of a way of establishing and UPB or universally preferable behavior works with the four major bands in human ethics, right?
Which is a theft, rape, murder, and assault.
None of these things can be universally preferable behavior because they have to be both wanted and unwanted, pursued and avoided at the same time under the same circumstances by the same people.
Which is exactly the same as having a theory which says under exactly the same circumstances, matter behaves both one way and the opposite way.
And that simply doesn't.
It can't work.
Okay.
I mean, it's like saying two plus two equals both four and the opposite of four at the same time.
That would never pass muster from any mathematician or magician.
No, I get why you can't have those things as universally preferable behavior.
And I get why there is a ban on those things.
But what I don't understand is why you can't get to the same place.
Like, if everyone were to act under UPB, how would that be any different if everyone just respected a set of, you know, pre...
Let's try social contract theory.
A pre-agreed-upon set of rights that everyone, you know...
No, listen, man.
It matters.
It matters because it's like saying, well, what's the difference if people understand that two and two make four because they've worked it out for themselves and they understand it logically versus they believe that two and two make four because a unicorn goblin king told them in an LSD fantasy.
It matters how you get to a conclusion.
In fact, philosophy...
It says that the process matters the most.
The conclusion is relatively unimportant.
The process matters in philosophy.
The process of how we get to rights being important is their, and you're going to say this is utilitarianism again, but their benefit to society, right?
No, there's no such thing as society.
God, there's no such thing as society.
Look, The fact that the U.S. takes in trillions and trillions of dollars a year in taxes by violating property rights.
I'm not defending the government at all.
No, I understand that.
I understand that.
But there are massive sectors of society who really, really want it that way.
It benefits them.
They love it.
They will go to the wall.
They will fight to the death to keep it that way.
To keep what way?
To keep the tax system in place.
The military-industrial complex, the welfare complex, government unions, government-supported private sector unions, the financial-industrial complex, the Wizards of Wall Street, they all love that stuff.
I'm not arguing that it's an infringement on rights because when the government taxes people, it's stealing.
No, I get that.
Listen, I'm not saying that you're agreeing with that.
What I'm saying is that People at the top of Wall Street companies or people at the top of the Fed can make a huge amount of money and often do through government control of the money supply of interest rates and so on, right?
Yes.
It is massively beneficial to them to have the existing system in place.
Bad teachers who wouldn't be able to push a broom in a free market school get to run schools in the government systems.
And they get benefits, job security, summer's off.
They get huge gold-plated retirements.
They don't have to work that hard.
It's massively beneficial for hundreds of millions of people just in America for the system to be there.
So when you say society benefits from a consistent application of property theory, I don't understand what you're saying.
But I'm not arguing for any type of government to guarantee your rights.
I'm just arguing that...
You're not understanding my opposition to what you're saying.
Okay, let me try it again.
You say society benefits from respect for property rights.
Was that your argument?
Sure.
I'm sorry.
It was your argument.
It either was or it wasn't.
I'm not sure what sure means.
Like I got you cornered or something, right?
No.
Yes.
Society benefits from understanding why rights are important, and they also benefit from respecting them.
And I feel like those who don't respect rights and don't understand why they're important, they should be shunned by the rest of whatever free market.
Don't call it society, call it the free market, you know?
If there's someone who wants to steal and cheat and rob, we should not...
They're violating people's rights, and therefore we should ostracize them.
Okay.
So if I'm a government teacher, like I'm a public school teacher, and I'm terrible at my job, but I get 70, 80K a year, I get summers off, I get I can't be fired...
I get benefits, healthcare, pension, you name it, right?
Tell me how I benefit from there being no government schools.
Okay, I see your point.
Now I see your criticism, is that there are going to be some people who will benefit from violating other people's rights.
And the fewer people who violate other people's rights, the more beneficial it is to violate other people's rights.
In other words, if I was the only thief in the world, I would have a really easy time with it.
Yeah, totally.
So the more people you can convince to respect other people's rights, the more valuable you make it for everyone else to not respect those rights, or maybe just to pretend to.
So you can't eliminate...
If you're going to use utilitarianism, you cannot eliminate rights violations.
All you can do is make it more attractive to be a rights violator by convincing decent people to respect rights, and then the nasty people among us will just continue to.
Because if you're going to pull out utilitarianism absent ethics, then you are increasing the utility value of immorality, of a lack of respect for other people's rights, by convincing more and more people to...
I agree with your criticism with just utilitarianism alone, and I think that it does need some kind of modification maybe of virtue ethics or of the ethics of care.
I just think that just because an ethical system has its flaws, that doesn't mean we have to throw the whole thing in the garbage.
That's just making noise.
You're not making any kind of philosophical argument there.
I am not making any kind of philosophical argument there.
Okay, well, since this is a philosophy show, perhaps we could be making philosophical arguments rather than saying, well, just because something has been found flawed doesn't mean you throw the whole thing out, which I don't even know what that means, right?
I apologize.
I mean, yes, sometimes it does.
I'm a little bit nervous.
No, it's okay.
If I say, look, there's only five milliliters of arsenic in my mashed potatoes, so...
There's a lot more mashed potatoes and arsenic.
I guess I shouldn't throw the whole thing out.
Well, yeah, you should, right?
Throw the whole thing out.
As opposed to, well, the aerial broke off my car, you don't throw out the whole...
There's no philosophical content in what you're saying.
What it means, though, is that you can't appeal to the value of rights based upon their utility to society, right?
Which is why utilitarianism doesn't work.
Utilitarianism is...
Forwarded generally by people who want to convince you to respect their rights while they have no intention of respecting your rights.
They want to reduce your competition for their disrespect of rights.
This is almost always the case with utilitarianism.
And the way they do that is they pretend, well, you and me, we're basically just the same.
We're basically just the same.
So if it's good for you, yeah, it's good for me, it's good for everyone.
But there is no...
Just the same in society.
Society is a warring and battling, at the moment, a warring and battling ecosystem of competing interests and opposing interests and so on.
Right?
So, to say that there's one common good for society...
I'm sorry?
Why not get to a place where everyone has enlightened self-interest instead of just self-interest?
Okay.
So, you want a different kind of species?
Well...
So you want there to be lions who say, well, the zebra doesn't want to get eaten, so I'll starve to death.
I see the problem with that.
So how does universally preferable behavior...
How does it compensate for, you know, what if someone doesn't want to respect?
What if someone doesn't want to follow universally preferable behavior?
Then what do you do with them in that society?
Well, first of all, this is why I focus on philosophy, the philosophy of parenting, which is we want to breed as few lions as possible.
Like if you want a peaceful environment, breed as few lions as possible.
Now, this is a limited analogy because lions are necessary to cull the herds.
Otherwise, they overeat the grass and all starve to death.
So, I mean, forgive me for using an animal analogy, but you want to if you want a peaceful environment, then you have to breed as few predators as possible, which means raise your children without aggressing against them, without hitting them, without bullying them, without dominating them, which all that teaches them is that might makes right.
And of course, the worst thing the parents do is not just the bullying, it's the bullying co-joined with the endless moralizing.
Because then...
My mother used to say, I'm your parent and that makes it right.
I'm the adult.
Literally, might makes right.
Might gets its way, but the best way for might to get its way is to cloak its power in moral cliches.
And so the first thing to do is there's ways to raise people so that they respect and recognize other people's needs.
They negotiate rather than use aggression.
They are used to win-win negotiations rather than win-lose.
And all these things are in the parenting in the first five to seven years of life, which is why I've been hammering and focusing low these nine years.
This is going to be the 10th year of my first publication.
I really respect you for championing because it feels like no one else in this world does champion the rights of children as much as you do.
Well, yeah, I think there's certainly other people doing a fantastic job.
And I'm sort of just trying to put my weight in behind the wheel.
But I appreciate that.
So we raise more people to the point where they don't feel this endless compulsion to dominate others because they've been raised peacefully and negotiating and all that kind of stuff.
And, I mean, I'm telling you, I mean, based on my experience as a parent, watching my daughter with other kids, it works.
I mean, that's a sample size of one.
So when you say I want a whole different species, I guess I do, and I guess you do too.
You want a different species where everyone is raised properly and therefore, you know, knows the, you know, what's wrong and what's right and...
Well, yeah, I mean, because the philosophy then is not applied to the broken adults after they've been raised badly, but to the parents who are raising them.
You apply the philosophy of the non-aggression principle to the parents, and as many as possible, you convince them to use peace in the raising of their children.
And then you grow up with children who negotiate.
Like if it took everyone speaking Japanese for the world to become peaceful, you know, there was this old communist idea that you get everyone to speak Esperanto.
Right.
And that way the workers would all understand each other.
And, you know, the next thing you know, it's kumbaya and collectivism and without the slaughterhouse and all.
So if it took everyone speaking Japanese for the world to become free, then I guess you could say, well, we need everyone who's an adult to learn Japanese.
And that would be quite a challenge.
Now, another way would be if we could find some way to get children raised in a Japanese-speaking environment, then they would naturally grow up speaking Japanese, right?
Again, this is a limited analogy because you don't just spontaneously develop a knowledge of Japanese, but it's a lot easier to a peaceful parent than it is to learn Japanese.
Right.
And there are always going to be a certain percentage of the population that has the, you know, whatever warrior gene or that is just genetically, you know, psychopaths or...
Well, okay, but then if it was genetic, then they would have no moral content.
Then it would be like somebody who strangled a cat because he had a brain tumor.
We would cure that person of the brain tumor if we could, but we would not morally castigate him for strangling the cat, right?
So if it's genetics, then it doesn't have anything to do with ethics.
Because that's like having an ethics that say, well, anyone who's under 5'6 is immoral.
Like, well, a lot of that's not under your control.
Well, there's no necessarily curing someone who has a genetic predisposition towards...
Or at least there isn't now.
Well, I don't know if there's a brain researcher who...
There's a brain researcher who accidentally saw one of his own scans.
He studies...
I think psychopathy or sociopathy.
And he recognized that he has the brain patterns of sociopathy or psychopathy.
But because he was raised in such a loving environment, he actually became quite a positive person and quite a helpful person and somebody who really studies positively in society and contributes a lot of good stuff, I think, to society.
So a genetic predisposition, when it comes up against a peaceful and loving environment, I think that would do a huge amount to blunt, if not neuter, the genetic.
I mean, it takes the genes for lung cancer with smoking, plus smoking, a lot of times, to make that happen.
It's genes plus environment connecting together.
And I can't change the genes, but we can at least change The environment and through epigenetics, through being raised peacefully, you change the genes of the children.
The genetics of an adult who's raised peacefully turns out to be different from the genetics of a person who's raised brutally and that genetic imprint is less likely to pass on to the next generation.
Trauma is passed on.
You are correct.
We are altering the course of human genetics by proposing peaceful parenting for the planet.
We are creating what the Marxist thought could be done economically.
And what the eugenicists thought could be done through selective breeding, we are doing scientifically, by promoting peaceful parenting, we are changing the genetic course of the species.
Let me give you a criticism that I hear very often when I'm trying to push peaceful parenting on friends and stuff like that.
And I often get the criticism of, you know, you're going to tell my parents that they can't spank me for doing something wrong.
You know, it's their quote-unquote right.
Wait, wait, hang on.
Who are you talking to?
Eight-year-olds?
No, I'm talking to people my age, you know, 24, who… Are they getting spanked by their parents?
No, they were spanked as children.
And when I say, look, I don't think the hitting of children is right in any circumstances.
When we're discussing our history, I have a history of being hit as a child.
You know, they did as well by their parents.
These are kids that I've known since kindergarten.
We're still friends.
And they go, you know what, I think that my parents' spanking was important.
You know, it made me learn discipline.
It made me learn, you know, respect, responsibility, whatever.
They justify it.
And then they say, you know, it's no one's right to tell my parents, you know, how to parent me or whatever.
You know, like, if they want to have another kid, it's their right to parent them however they want.
What would you say to those people?
Well, I would say, what's your evidence?
I mean, people that make claims, I can say that I'm, you know, a fairy with wings who can do the Macarena on the ass end of Betelgeuse, right?
I mean, it's like, okay, well, I'd actually pay good money to see that.
Perhaps you'd like to give me a demonstration.
So when people say, well, you know, I'm a better person for having been hit as a child, I would say, well, what's your evidence?
Right?
And they would say, well, I don't, I mean, what would they say?
I mean, you've talked to these people, what would they say?
They go, well, obviously I can't, you know, prove that, you know, I'm better, and, you know, it's anecdotal, of course.
So then it's not, so then I would say, but it's interesting to me that you're making an absolute statement of truth, but the moment you're challenged on it, you fold.
Does that not appear the slightest bit like you might be defensive about it?
Which I can understand.
Right?
But you're saying, well, I'm a better person.
I say, well, what's your proof?
Well, I don't have any proof.
It's just that.
Well, but you were acting just in the previous moment as if you just knew it for certain.
And then when challenged or asked, you don't.
And then I would say, like, have you done any research on the effects of spanking and the alternatives to spanking?
And they would say, no, I assume, right?
Because they just, right?
They assume that they know what it is, right?
And then I would say, well, did you know that, you know, spanking increases the likelihood of interpersonal problems?
Spanking also has been shown to reduce IQ, you know, three points, four points, five points, depending on how it's measured.
And that meta-analysis of many, many spanking studies shows extremely negative consequences because every time you're being hit, you're not being reasoned with.
You're not learning how to negotiate.
You're not learning how to treat someone else with respect.
All you're doing is submitting to power.
Do you think that humanity benefits when people learn how to submit to power?
Do you think that works for the police that we have in our society?
Do you think it works for the military?
Do you think it works for politicians or voters or husbands or wives?
That as children and from childhood onwards they're taught that whoever has the most power makes the rules.
And it's virtuous to submit to that.
I mean, to take a ridiculously extreme example, do you think that worked out really well in Nazi Germany, which also had a significant history of aggression towards children?
Do you think that people just end up as adults thinking or feeling that you have to submit or surrender to those who have the most power around you?
Do you think that doesn't make for a frightened and over-complicit population, which, you know, in this age of the weapons of mass destruction could be Considered somewhat dangerous.
And again, I'm not sort of putting these, your friends, or in this category necessarily.
But if they haven't done any research in the matter, then my strong suggestion would be, if you want to talk about these things and state hypotheses and conclusions, like I am a better person because I was hit, you might want to have the first clue of what you're talking about and not use your own historical examples of that.
Because that's not science, right?
I got disconnected in between what you were saying there.
I caught the tail end of it.
I can't repeat it because that's boring for everyone else.
You can listen back to that part.
I'm not asking you.
But yeah, if people make a claim, if people are making a...
They need to have evidence.
And if they don't have evidence, then they need to stop making those claims.
They need to start going to get evidence.
Right?
I mean, what they're basically...
I mean, the way you can analogize it for them is it's like me saying, well, I knew a black guy...
Who stole a car once, so all black guys steal cars, right?
Now, if you put that to your friends, they'd say, well, that would be terrible, right?
I mean, that would be a racist thing to say.
You're extrapolating from personal experience to a universal that is not valid.
And in the same way, if you say, well, I'm better because I was hit, first of all, you don't even know that.
And second of all, if you're then extrapolating and saying, and therefore all children should be hit, that is a ridiculously bad piece of thinking, which indicates a cognitive problem in the area.
Because if you put that kind of thinking in any other situation, people would immediately see how ridiculous it was.
I knew a Chinese guy who had a cold once, so all Chinese people should be injected with colds.
I mean, that would just be insane.
They're standing up for a parent's, I hate to use this word again, because right, to discipline their child how they see fit.
And the problem comes down to, well, where do you draw the line?
And I don't know where you draw the line, but I think that's a huge challenge in any moral area.
No, it's not.
I mean, first of all, by discipline, you mean hit.
I mean, let's at least call the goddamn thing by what it is.
It's not called wife discipline.
It's called wife beating or wife hitting.
You're saying, I have the right to hit my child.
Why?
Why would somebody have the right to hit a child?
Well, to teach them—oh, here's the argument that they gave me.
Well, let's say my child is running into the streets, and they're too young to understand that streets are dangerous, and I pull them back, and I spank them, and I say no.
And so next time, they're going to know, you know, through negative reinforcement, that not to run— Sorry, that's so ridiculous because it's like saying, okay, if I leave the door open on an airplane, am I allowed to punch any passenger who gets close to it because I don't want them to fall out of the airplane?
So you would say...
No.
Close the goddamn door on the airplane.
Get a goddamn fence.
Stay with your children.
Keep them inside until they're old enough.
Get other children to watch them.
Hire a bodyguard.
For God's sakes, there's six million things you can do other than cracking them one over the head or the butt.
Thank you for that.
I will use that next time.
I mean, it's like a hot stove.
It's like, hey, if you're close enough to hit your kid, Then you're close enough to gently move them out of the situation.
And by the way, it's your job as a parent to keep your child safe.
And if your child is in a dangerous situation, I don't understand how the child gets hit for your goddamn failure as a parent to keep your child in a safe environment.
You know, like when you could buy these, I mean, child safety stuff, you know, playing with a fork, like get the plugs.
They cost like 40 cents each.
Get the little plugs that go into the plug outlets.
Don't worry about it.
Well, they were near the top of the stairs.
They could have tumbled down.
Get the things at the top of the stairs that you, gates that, you know, I mean, God, just be safe.
It's your job to make the child safe.
You know, it's like the parents who say, well, you know, I don't put my kid in any kind of car seat or restraint.
And every now and then they like, they crawl up to the front seat and they're about to change the gears on me.
So I have to elbow them in the head.
So that they learn not to change the gears.
It's like, get a car seat!
Prevention!
By the time you're hitting your child, you failed!
It's too late.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you for putting it in words that I can never seem to find.
And where does...
My wife keeps bringing me warm beer so I punch her in the teeth.
I mean, I have asked her a dozen times.
I like it cold.
She keeps bringing me these warm beers.
Bam!
Well, she's going to remember the cold beers now.
Yeah, you try that in court.
When I was trying to teach her something.
It wasn't sinking into her head.
Oh, and by the way, my wife is retarded and has the intellect of a six-year-old.
So I should hit my six-year-old.
Sorry, go ahead.
I think part of the problem is you brought up courts, and courts don't recognize really...
to hit their children, actually.
Do children vote?
Well, that's the problem, is children don't have the right to vote until they're 18, and therefore they can't stand up for their own rights, and so therefore their rights don't do them any good, even if they were to have them in some sort of philosophical concept.
A status society is fundamentally predicated on the imprintation of might over right on children, because there's just no way that children can fit into a status society if they're not taught that might makes right.
Otherwise they might notice that taxation is theft and cops are just guys in blue costumes.
And so you cannot ever expect a status society to protect the rights of children because a status society is predicated on violating the rights of children.
And I don't care if it's Sweden that banned spanking 30 years ago, they still taxes and they still got government schools and all of that.
So this is why you have to start working privately.
And you have to start convincing parents, grueling situations, convince young people one by one.
Don't hit.
Don't yell.
Why do children even need to be punished?
Punished for what?
There's two possibilities.
When a child doesn't do what you want, there's only two possibilities.
Either the child is too young to understand, or...
They're old enough to understand, but you have not done a good enough job of explaining it to them.
Now, if the child is too young to understand your request, then hitting a child is sadistic.
And if the child is old enough to understand, but you haven't made a good enough case, then you're hitting the child for your failure as a parent.
What conceivable sense does that make?
I mean, that makes absolutely no sense.
Yeah, I was hit as a child and I've been trying to get my parents to see for years how wrong it was and to get them to apologize and to get other people around me to see just what a negative impact hitting children has on them.
I'm bipolar and I think it's hugely to do with being hit as a child.
And how often were you hit?
You know, I remember as a child we had two paddles and one of them was wooden and had black and red writing on it and the other was a pink plastic one.
And, you know, I got hit hard enough in enough times to where I remember what the paddles look like to this day.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, it is so ridiculously unnecessary.
Thank you.
And counterproductive.
And it's not...
Children...
How on earth do you think you can benefit children by doing something which you know they specifically hate and fear the most?
I mean, what a ridiculous use of the child's innate nerve endings, body, and preferences...
What a horrible thing to set a child at odds with her own body.
It's religious, fundamentally.
Spanking is religious, and it's been heavily associated with religiosity.
In the same way that religion takes your natural drive for sex and good food and says, well, that's all evil.
And turns it into a sin, and so therefore you need to atone, and oh yeah, I'm...
Oh, do you want to touch yourself down there?
I've been an atheist since I was six, Stefan.
I knew God was bullshit as soon as I prayed once, and like...
Nothing happened.
And I'm like, okay.
And I tried it again, and I was like, empirical evidence, right?
And then I was like, nothing ever happened, and if it did, it was just a coincidence.
Nothing more.
And then I looked through the Bible, and there's no...
In the same way that your natural desires for sex and comforts and things of this world...
Are turned against you in religion, your very nervous system is turned against you in spanking, in hitting.
It sounds to me with paddles, that's more like a beating.
And that really sets people at odds with themselves.
It sets children at odds with themselves.
And...
It is unbelievably tragic.
So unnecessary.
It's so unnecessary.
My daughter is a very good listener, right?
So yesterday, I was talking with her and said, you know, what would you like to be different about this year?
Is there anything that you'd like to change, right?
She's getting older now and so on.
And I've got a childhood nickname for her.
And she says, I think I'm too old for that.
And I said, okay, if you would prefer me not to, I will, you know, it'll take me a little while to change, but I'll really work on it, right?
And she has a, you know, if I make a joke, she'd say, liar, you know?
And, you know, what I was saying wasn't true, but, you know, if I'm making a joke.
And so I said, you know, I'd rather you call me joker, because liar sounds like I'm really trying to do something nefarious.
And she said, yeah, that's fair, you know?
And she did actually, she called me joker.
Liar today when I made a joke.
And then she said, oh, I'm so sorry.
And so she wants to adjust her behavior to my preferences.
I want to adjust my behavior to her preferences.
This is part of a not too long but somewhat involved list of things that we'd like to do differently because she's getting older and we're changing as a father-daughter team and so on.
So having these kinds of negotiations is...
What it's all about.
The idea that it's like, you called me a liar, I'm going to make you sit in the naughty corner.
What the hell?
Just have a damn conversation.
I think it's difficult for people to imagine.
Because if you've never had that as a child, it's really hard for you to imagine what that looks like.
Oh no, I've got to disagree with you there, Jack.
It is actually quite easy to know what it looks like.
You just have to do It's the opposite world, right?
Everything which was horrible to you as a child, you don't affect your children.
I mean, for one thing, you know you don't want to hit your kids with a paddle, right?
Oh, no.
I've vowed to do the exact opposite of what my parents did with me in every way.
And to take up peaceful parenting.
If I become a dad, we'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Right.
And I'm sorry that your parents aren't listening.
To the case that you're making.
I really am.
That's so sad.
You know, I can't imagine if I hit a child repeatedly.
How often does this come down on you?
I'm sorry?
What do you mean?
How often did you get hit in this way?
I would say, you know, I would get into an argument with my mom at least, Once a week, if not once every two weeks, serious yelling, screaming.
A lot of them...
The paddles weren't...
They didn't hit me that hard with them, but it was a lot of yelling and emotional...
Yeah.
Like emotional attacking.
Probably more so damaging than the physical.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can certainly see that.
So, but that's not why I called, and...
Well, no, but we're talking about how in the future.
So, you know, very briefly, we aim to change the genetics of the species and to raise children into adults who negotiate rather than aggress, who do not seek out win-lose situations, but seek out win-win situations.
And if we get enough of those people...
Two things happen.
Number one, the rate of crime and predation and so on drops considerably.
Number two, when there are enough healthy people in the world, the sick people become incredibly obvious, incredibly evident, right?
I mean, if there are only a few nasty people in the world, Somehow people think, well, you know, if kids are raised really nicely, they'll be susceptible to immorality.
Oh, bullshit.
The complete opposite is true.
The more brutally you raise children, the more susceptible they are to those with power who want to do them harm.
Guess why?
I don't even need to say it, right?
It's so obvious.
And so when you have more healthy people around who are all enjoying win-win negotiations...
When some D-bag comes along and wants to impose power, everyone's like, whoa.
Whoa!
Where is this coming from?
Right?
Like, whoa, this is really different.
How would you deal with that?
Let's say we're in this new world where there's been peaceful parenting that's been going on for a really long time, and a new generation has come up, and there's very few of these people who are left that are immoral and that were treated terribly as children and that have issues and act out aggressively and stuff like that.
You know, you're always, I think, going to need something that looks like a government institution, but like a police force, for example, or a security force, you know, that responds to if your house were to be broken into, it's not the same as the police, right?
But it kind of looks like the police.
Yeah, because of course it's very rare, right, that this would happen.
But let's just say that, I don't know, someone becomes mean.
Of course, the people who protect your property would want to promote peaceful parenting.
See, governments profit from rights violations.
This is what is so hard for people to understand.
Like, an insurance company that insures you against your house burning down, do they want you to have...
Smoke detectors?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Of course they do!
Yeah, when you're starting to get your driver's license as a kid, if you take a course on how to be a good driver, the insurance company says, hey, great, here's a discount.
Yeah, put one of those sticks in your car to see how you drive, here's a discount.
Every prevention method they can take helps them at their bottom line, and so therefore they're going to be invested in preventing the crime rather than responding to the crime in the first place, at least if they are doing it under sufficient free market forces.
Right.
I mean, was it the government-run fire departments that developed smoke detectors?
I don't know the answer to that question.
The answer to that is no.
They did not.
No, they didn't.
Absolutely not.
Of course not.
Of course not.
Of course they didn't.
You know, is it the...
Was it the police...
The government-run police that came up with those anti-theft devices in retail stores.
You know, the things that they sew, these little ink things into your sweater or whatever.
Oh, yeah.
I worked at a retail store with those.
No, it was definitely not the police.
It was...
It's not the police.
Not the police.
It's the insurance companies.
It's the businesses that are coming up for ways to prevent things.
Not the government.
Because the government profits...
The more they have to respond to crime and in fact they generate revenue from crime like speeding and All that kind of stuff and red light cameras and Court fees and you know if there's crime then the government Has its existence justified because everyone thinks you need the government because of crime so the government has zero incentive to prevent crime it has zero incentive to intervene and In a positive way within families to ensure children are raised in
a way that diminishes their likelihood of becoming criminals, right?
I mean, imagine, you're some politician right now.
I can't.
No, imagine, so imagine you're some politician right now.
And you say, look, we've got these studies that show that spanking and aggression and confinement All contribute to significant dysfunction within society, to drug addiction, to alcoholism, to cigarettes addiction, to promiscuity, to impulse problems and so on, impulsivity problems.
So listen, parents, as a politician, I'm going to put a program in place which is going to really positively benefit society about 20 years down the road.
And...
We're really going to put these things in practice where it's going to become illegal to hit your kids.
It's going to become illegal to aggress against your kids.
And we're going to put mandatory education in for children.
There are going to be spot surprise visits.
And also, by the way, if you don't like any of that, you can always opt out of it very easily.
But when your kids go to the doctors, the doctors are going to give them Non-invasive, very safe brain scans.
And then we can see how the children's brains are developing and whether they're developing the right neofrontal cortex, whether their amygdala is enlarged, whether their hippocampus is enlarged, which all indicates pressured or aggressive parenting.
So we're just going to review that the same way that we review for various other illnesses.
We're going to do all of that.
I mean, that politician would...
Never make it past the third sentence before being, like, run off the stage with pitchforks.
Yeah, because the kids don't vote, right?
And the kids aren't voting.
The kids aren't smart enough to vote in their best interest, and the people who are smart enough to vote in their best interest, you know, they're looking in short-term and not long-term.
Yeah, I mean, if politicians cared about 20 years down the road, there would be no...
Deferred pensions instead of raises for public sector unions.
There'd be no national debt.
There'd be no unfunding or underfunding of Social Security.
There wouldn't be $80 trillion or whatever the hell it is of unfunded liabilities.
So the whole system now is designed to pander to people's vanities and preferences and so on which is why no politician says anything bad about single moms even though single parenthood of both genders is kind of the scourge and end and stake in the heart of society as a whole.
You just can't say these things.
I can, but they can't, right?
This is why I don't want that gig as one of the many of us.
Well, and I'm glad you are saying those things, because someone does need to say those things, even if they are politically incorrect.
Oh, because they're politically incorrect.
Politically incorrect is just this giant moat around everything you can't talk about, which disrupts the communist or leftist agenda to destroy Western civilization as we know it.
So...
A status society can't exist.
A hierarchical, might-is-right society cannot exist if children are raised peacefully, which is why peaceful parenting is the most fundamental anarchic idea that could possibly be put forward.
It is the most subversive, anti-statist, anti-theological idea that could be put forward.
To imagine That you can impose a religion on a child without any form of intimidation is inconceivable.
You cannot impose a religion on a child without bribery or intimidation.
And I will not use bribery or intimidation as a parent.
And you try and sell God and church and prayer and sin and guilt and death and Jesus died for you.
and try selling any of that stuff without intimidation.
It doesn't work very well from what I know.
Sorry?
It doesn't work very well from what I know.
I know some religious people in my extended family, and it was always they had to go to church.
Otherwise, it was imposed upon them to go to church every Sunday and whatever.
So no kid wants to go to church or temple.
And now that you have the growth of the surveillance state, you can't allow children to be under their own recognizance.
So in America recently, there was a woman who got in significant trouble with the government because her children, who I can't remember the exact age, like, I don't know, 8 and 10 or 8 and 11, were playing in a park like three doors down from her house.
How old were the kids? - I don't think so.
They were 8 and 10, 8 and 11.
Like, old enough.
I mean, God, when I was 6, I wanted an airplane to Africa.
When I was 8, I was walking like three quarters of a mile on my own to go to school.
I mean, the idea that you can't play in a park three doors down from your house without adult supervision...
But that's because we have a surveillance state now and children must be constantly reinforced with having been watched and being surveilled at all times.
The government is always there.
The government is always watching.
That's the way it has to be now.
And so everyone's watching.
And of course, everyone's paranoid.
As crime goes down, people's paranoia goes up.
I mean, violent crime has dropped like 40%.
In America over the last 10 years or so.
And child abductions are way down and so on.
And of course now everyone's becoming more and more paranoid.
Because the less there is of it, the more visible whatever it is, right?
So as poverty began to decline, everyone's like, oh my god, we need a welfare state for the poor!
Well, no, it's being solved!
Well, that's no good.
We can't have it being solved that way.
It's got to be something else.
So the most subversive thing that we can do as a community, you know, I talk about it and it's fine to theorize about how property protection works in a free society.
But property protection works in a free society in the same way that insurance against lion attacks works in Canada.
Don't need it.
Like theoretically, theoretically, a lion could escape from the zoo and walk down my street and maul me, right?
Could happen.
A lion could...
Fall out of a low-flying airplane, land in a snowbank, emerge from the light.
All of these things could happen, right?
So through peaceful parenting, you want to eliminate the, you know, we don't need these things protected because the chance of them being violated is so low now because we've done all these things to make it That's kind of what you're going to get.
Yeah, I mean, if, you know, no one's going to be trying to sell me lion insurance in Canada.
I'm sure you can get it in the Serengeti, right?
You can't get it here in Canada, even though I could be attacked by a lion.
And so we simply want to grow human beings.
We want to change the trajectory of human genetics towards peaceful, you know, we need to grow the neofrontal cortex.
We need to shrink the fight-or-flight mechanism.
And we need to increase people's verbal and linguistic skills so that they can negotiate.
People are like, oh, these video games, they're terrible.
It's like, no.
No, no, no.
The exercise of power and authority over children, which is non-negotiating, that's terrible.
That's terrible.
Oh, well, you know, these kids, they're They're watching video games.
They're playing video games instead of reading books.
I'm actually catering in computer video game design in college.
Oh, cool.
But the reality is that if you're concerned about children's verbal skills, then negotiate with them about all of the countless things that come up in a family situation.
Negotiate with them.
Teach them how to look for win-win situations.
And we're working on this.
I want to do this.
My daughter wants to do something else.
Well, I could just surrender to her, which I did when she was little, of course, because she was just a toddler.
I could get her to surrender to me, but what is that teaching her?
Well, someone wins, someone loses, right?
So reminding her, look, let's find something else that we both want to do more.
Let's keep thinking about it until we sort it out.
That's what we want to do.
And when you get negotiation-based life forms who are always looking for win-win situations and have the natural empathy of people thinking about their needs while also requesting that they think about other people's needs, you simply will grow human beings who cannot prey on each other and it never would even cross their minds as an option.
Like, they can't do it any more than my daughter's going to break into fluent Japanese tomorrow.
Never been exposed to it.
It's not going to happen.
Well, I mean, I think that, you know, a lot of people are going to really recoil from the message.
And, you know, there was a show that you did.
I think it was about IQ and intelligence and cost-benefit and whatever.
And...
You should really be titling our shows IQ, Cost Benefit, and whatever.
That would be a great name for a show.
The and whatever is usually quite key to what we do.
Yes.
But I think that there are some people who the softest appeals of a state society, you know, are more appealing than the more complicated, you know, Version of the way things should be that you're trying to put forward.
Absolutely.
And this could be the case with your friends as well.
They can be as defensive as they want.
They can turn away from the truth.
They can turn away from evidence.
They can turn away from reason.
They can be as blind as bats if they want.
And this is the challenge that I put out and other people put out to people.
Yes, absolutely.
You can completely and totally reject that.
The facts, the evidence, the moral arguments, you name it.
You can do all of that if you want.
And like the ancient Greek saying says, you take what you want and then you pay for it.
So your friends can go and hit their children for 15 years if they want.
I wish they wouldn't.
It's a terrible thing if they do it.
But they can go and do it.
There's no law As far as I know where you are, you don't have to tell me where you are.
There's no law that's going to stop them.
They can go and they can hit their children.
They can yell at them.
They can insult them.
They can bribe them.
They can put them in naughty corners and timeouts and send them to bed without their dinner.
They can do all of that stuff.
And they can roll the dice.
They can roll the dice and they can see what society is going to be like in 20 years.
They can see what society is going to be like in 20 years.
Listen, if you were a husband in the 1940s and 1950s, you could be a real jerk to your wife.
And for generations and generations, you could do that and you could get away with it.
Because there were all these priests that told the women, got to go back to your husband, got to go back to your husband.
I'm just giving you the cliche.
We work the other way too.
And those who didn't wet finger the wind and see which way the change was going, well, they hit the 60s, right?
And they hit feminism.
And feminism replaced the priests.
And the priests were saying, honey, you made a vow to God.
Your husband rules over you like Jesus rules over your husband.
Well, and feminism is its own problem now.
I mean, it's getting to...
No, no, I get that.
I'm just talking about the 60s, right?
And the 60s came along and said, I only got one life to live, sister.
Don't spend it making steak and potatoes for a male chauvinist pig.
You've got no reason to stay with him if he's a jerk to you.
And, you know, it's like, okay, well, so, you know, hitting your wife, and again, I'm going with the standard cliche.
I know there's lots of arguments against all of this and all that, but just to go with the standard cliche.
And if they choose to hit their children...
I'm not going to stop what I'm doing.
I'm only getting bigger.
I'm only going to amplify more.
There's lots and lots of other people, many with much bigger reach than I am, who are opposing spanking.
It's beginning to show up, even in the mainstream media, opposition to spanking, facts about spanking.
So you can be a hitty, jerky, retrograde, medieval parent if you want.
And there's going to be tons and tons of people.
You're going to suddenly look around and you're going to realize that That the world has shifted while you were hitting.
The world has changed while you were hitting.
And what seemed perfectly natural, if not moral and justified to you, will turn out to be brutal.
And because the information was out there and freely available, your children will not find it easy to forgive you.
I mean, not hitting your children has been around since the post-war period at a minimum.
Post-war Second World War period with Dr.
Spock.
Yeah, I'm finding it very hard to forgive my parents.
I mean, so I can see how that if people keep on choosing to do this that I just think that There is an argument that says violence furthers more violence, that if you hit kids, part of the effect is that it reinforces the cycle of violence.
But there are some people like me who it just makes them more determined to make sure that it never happens to anyone else again.
Your challenge is emotionally absolutely underway.
And again, I hugely respect what it is that you're doing and the commitment you made to peace.
But your challenge is going to be, I think, when you get older, right?
When you have kids, your parents are going to want to be involved, right?
Yeah, that's true.
They are.
And...
I mean, I'm going to assume that you're going to say, hey, no hitting my kids.
Oh, yeah.
I would have to set the strictest of boundaries.
Right.
Right.
And what are you going to do when...
Your daughter asks you what it was like for you as a kid.
I don't know.
That's a tough question.
Because I'm telling you, there are all these dominoes, right?
Your daughter says to you, well, your son says to you, what was it like for you as a kid?
How did your parents discipline you?
They hit me a lot, they yelled at me, screamed at me a lot, and so on, right?
She'll say, well, will they ever do that to me?
You say, well, no.
I mean, I've got them to promise not to, right?
Oh, so what they did was wrong.
Yes, it was wrong.
Well, do they know that?
Do they admit that?
No.
Well, why aren't they doing it to me if they think it was right?
Well, they're just obeying me.
So you have people who think it's better to hit me, but they won't because they're afraid of you?
These are difficult conversations to get into.
Yeah, I don't see how you would ever explain that to any kid.
And I mean...
But if they ask the questions, I'm not saying you sit them down and diagram it, but kids are relentlessly curious.
They are.
My favorite question was why when I was a kid, you know?
Because I'm bigger.
Well, that's the answer I got.
No.
I mean, I did get taught a lot by my parents.
They just had, you know, problems in their lives when they were growing up, you know?
And so they did the best they could growing up and...
You know, made a name for themselves.
How do you know?
How do you know they did the best they could?
Yeah, I mean, that's what I have to tell myself.
They did the best they could with the tools that they had.
Who did?
It's my job to do better.
So your parents did the best they could with the tools that they had?
I think.
How do you know?
Compared to what?
By what standard would you know that?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just...
It sounds like a very certain...
I mean, based on the fact that, you know, they didn't have the most peaceful parenting homes, you know, when they were growing up, you know, their experience...
Did you have the most peaceful parenting home?
No, but it was certainly better than the homes that they grew up in.
So you should, so let's say that it was 50% better, so you should, by that standard, hit your kids 50% less.
No.
Right.
So you're trying to give your parents the excuse of environmentalism.
The environment was bad.
In other words, the environment determines personality.
There's no choice, no free will, no option.
No.
Everyone who came out of a concentration camp was a child beater.
Well, that's not true, though.
I don't have the answer.
I don't know what the answer is.
I'm concerned when people drape determinism over...
No, I don't.
I don't think it was, you know, deterministic.
So they had a choice?
They did, yes.
So they could have done better.
And they made mistakes.
And they could have done better?
No, no.
A mistake is...
has no moral content, right?
That's true.
That's true.
You're right.
I'm just defending...
Hitting children with objects, I don't know that you can...
Put that under the cat.
And again, I don't know what the answer is.
is I just would be careful about premature elaboration.
Well, I think we've pretty thoroughly gone through rights and not hitting children, and the content of my question I think we've pretty thoroughly gone through rights and not hitting children, and the content of I Listen, I really, really appreciate the conversation.
I enjoyed it enormously.
And you're certainly welcome back anytime.
It's a real honor and pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you.
It was good talking to you as well.
All right.
Take care.
You too.
Bye.
Alright, thanks a lot, Jack.
Alright, up next is Greg.
Greg wrote in and said, I would like to know what Stefan's opinion is of my theory that people's belief in a god or a supreme being is more of an instinct than it is a belief.
I'd like to discuss the evidence that may support this theory and discuss the possibility that this could help what he is trying to do by being less offensive to people that believe in God.
Go on.
Hello, Stefan.
Hi.
Hi, so I guess the first thing is a lot of the discussion will depend on whether or not that's an original idea.
I haven't heard anybody else talk about that, but I'm wondering if it's something that you've thought about before.
Whether it's an instinct?
Yeah.
Yeah, it seems to me that I didn't need a lot of propaganda for a sex drive.
I don't need a lot of propaganda when I'm hungry to eat food or when I'm thirsty to drink water.
So I don't know if you can say that a belief structure that is anti-empirical and anti-rational needs a lot of inculcation if you're going to call it an instinct.
Also, an instinct is something that we have in common with other animals.
You know, like, say...
Voles or moles or bats, and I don't think that they have religion.
But why would, in order for it to be an instinct, why would it have to be something that we have in common with animals?
Well, because if you're going to use the word instinct, then that is something which is used by Biobiologists to talk about sex and hunger and predator avoidance drives and so on that animals would also share.
So if you're going to say it's particularly human beings then you can't use the word instinct.
And if you're going to say it's instinct to believe in a religion then you have to say how we're using the same words that would apply to a beaver.
Well I think there's probably a lot of things that are Different in human beings being so much more sophisticated and intelligent that it might be possible that it's an instinct in human beings, but it's not instinct in animals.
So a human instinct?
Yeah.
Okay.
I certainly believe that religion has a template in infancy and early childhood.
And I mean, this is scarcely an original idea to me.
Of course, you can go back to Freud or even further back for this.
But the idea that there are giant incomprehensible beings who watch over us and care for us and care what we do would seem to me to come directly out of infancy and early childhood.
Okay.
Okay.
It just seems like an easy way to explain why, you know, throughout history people have this belief in something that doesn't make sense, that there is no logic to it, but in all cultures throughout history people have this belief Very strong belief in a God, no matter how intelligent the person seems to be.
It's just so common that...
Yeah, no, you're just repeating yourself.
So what I'm pointing out is that the idea...
Let's say you have a mom.
Of course, we have moms.
All of us have moms.
So you're when you're a baby, there are these, you know, this is a giant person who comes and goes, but is mostly focused on you.
And you are desperate for that person's approval, your mom's approval, because when she's happy, you're happy and you gurgle and she plays with you.
And when she's unhappy or angry at you, she might leave you.
She might hit you.
She might not give you food.
She might abandon you.
So the idea that there are these giant beings out there whose reality we can't really comprehend, but whose approval we're completely dependent on, that they can send us to heaven.
In other words, what Freud called the oceanic feeling of blissful unity with the mother against her breast, breastfeeding, cooing, hair stroking, all that kind of stuff.
So the approval of this giant godlike being over our crib brings us to heaven.
And the disapproval of this giant godlike person hovering around our crib sends us to hell, to panic, to anxiety, to fear, to crying, and so on.
And we're helpless.
And then that our power relative to this giant godlike creature around us is non-existent.
We have no power.
Like we can't only get one ounce of milk if she gives us ten.
We can't get any milk if she doesn't give us any.
So we're helpless.
We're completely dependent.
This creature gave us life.
And we need this creature's approval madly.
So the idea that there's a God that is responsible for your existence, whose approval you must seek in order to get into heaven, and whose disapproval will send you to hell, and who's vast and shadowy, and who you think about all the time and you supplicate in your mind, but you can't speak to directly.
Of course, children prior to, you know, whatever, 12 to 18 months, don't even have the power of language.
So they're thinking about, they think in their mind what they want, but they can't actually communicate directly with this godlike being and so on.
These seem to me all very clear shadows or templates for religious thinking, if that makes sense.
So you're saying it's the way that mothers primarily, the way they raise us, the way they Bring us up from very young age is what causes us to equate that to a religion or to a God?
Well, given that most religions rely upon fear of disapproval and a desire for approval, it would seem to me that if parents are punitive towards children and, you know, significant percentages of U.K. mothers hit their children even before their children are one year old,
Then the desperate desire for the approval of the shadowy God figure floating around our cribs would seem to me entirely in accordance.
Then when a priest comes along and says, there's a shadowy God figure you can't communicate with directly, but can send you to hell or give you heaven if you obey and please him with no moral content, and you can't speak to him directly, well, that would be infancy.
But that's not natural.
It's not inevitable.
It's not universal.
It's just the way that Most parents have raised their children throughout most of history.
Look, I don't want my daughter to be dependent upon my good opinion of her in any way, shape, or form.
It doesn't mean I don't want to care what I think or anything like that.
But I don't want her to think about my pleasure or displeasure with her first.
And I never want it to be that it's negative because I disapprove or positive because I approve.
Because then she's not thinking about what's good or bad or what's right or wrong.
She's thinking about what I approve of or disapprove of.
I don't want that for her.
I never have, never will.
So if there are parents out there who are like, well, if you please me, if I'm in a good mood, if I'm happy, then you get love and affection.
And if I'm in a bad mood or you displease me or I'm unhappy, then you don't get love and affection.
Then you're creating an other-oriented personality structure.
In other words, a personality structure that mostly focuses on the needs and wants of other people as a means of getting its own needs met.
In other words...
I want to be held by my mother, so I need to please her.
I need to make her laugh.
I need to change her mood.
I need to make her feel better.
I need her to be in a good mood to get my needs met.
And so you create an other-focused social metaphysician, is what Rand used to call it, which is somebody who doesn't think what's right or wrong, but what's approved of or disapproved of.
So do Peter Keatings and James Taggart's and so on of her novels.
Now, if you create an other-focused personality structure through punishment and reward based upon mood and approval and disapproval as a parent, then you create someone who is always going to be in search of an external entity or agency to approve or disapprove, to contain the personality.
You're going to seek...
You're going to create a personality that is always seeking for an external authority to obey, to please and to supplicate in front of.
And so parents who punish and reward based upon approval and disapproval are creating children who are going to fit near perfectly into both a status or a government and a religious paradigm.
And To break that, I don't know if that's an instinct or...
I mean, I don't know what to...
Instinct to me is not particularly helpful.
I think there are instincts, but they're not particularly philosophical in nature.
I mean, someone's hungry.
But what I do think is interesting is the degree to which if we are, you know, really rational and empathetic and caring as parents, will we raise children who are going to be naturally religious?
Well...
I don't think that we are.
And, you know, I won't get into sort of the evidence that I have for all of that, but I have not seen any evidence that if you raise a child to be self-contained, to have their own thoughts and feelings, to have the natural affection that comes from a high regard for someone else without being fearful of their approval or disapproval, if we raise children in that way, will they have a need for a deity?
When we're very young, we all have this belief that death is like sleep.
When I was first explaining death to my daughter, she's like, okay, so we die, but then after a while we wake up again.
Because death has been called the little sleep, the big sleep.
Or sleep is the little death, I think Shakespeare called it.
And so we have this idea that death, we wake up, and so all of these things fit into a religious paradigm.
And of course, we have this Garden of Eden, which could be argued, and I've made this case, I think, in my fourth or fifth podcast, but you could, I think, quite reasonably, though not conclusively, make the case that the Garden of Eden is either the womb or very early infancy.
And what happens in the Garden of Eden is God gives a rule that is arbitrary.
Do not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Well, why?
If you're supposed to worship God, then eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Otherwise, it's like saying, really enjoy this music, but don't have ears.
That would be kind of crazy, right?
So surely, if you're supposed to love the virtue of God, knowing the difference between good and evil would have you love God all the more.
But God says, don't have knowledge of good and evil.
And, you know, the snake tempts Eve, Eve tempts the man.
I guess the snake had cleavage, too.
And Then, you know, Adam and Eve are raged against, violently cast out, because they disobeyed an arbitrary rule of the God, of the deity.
In other words, there was no reasoning, right?
The God didn't come down and say, well, you know, I created this thing as a paradise for you, but I accidentally put in something that's poisonous.
Here, let me show you, you know, and he breaks off a piece of the apple, throws it into the ground, and it sizzles and goes down.
You know, like a spit out from Ripley's alien predator.
He didn't do any of that.
He just said, no eating of this golden fruit.
Hung it right there in the middle of the garden.
It looks beautiful.
It looks delectable.
It looks delicious.
Plus, he created Lucifer.
Lucifer was in the garden.
In other words, somehow these children of God were supposed to stand against God.
Lucifer, who led an entire army of angels against God and had a pretty good shot.
The second most powerful being in the entire universe was supposed to be no match for Adam and Eve, who were like nine days old.
I mean, it's like putting a baby up against a Sith Lord or the Emperor.
I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
But...
It's a setup, right?
And the story of the Garden of Eden is, here's an arbitrary rule, I'm never going to explain, and the only reason you're supposed to obey it is I might get really, really angry.
Now, I'm going to let loose into this paradise, which I'm supposed to have been created for you, the second most powerful being in the entire universe, a being who thought he could beat me in a war, and who I can't even kill, can only banish to hell, The second most powerful being in the entire universe is going to go up against human beings who were created very recently and are basically babies in adult form.
And when the second most powerful being in the entire universe outsmarts nine-day-old babies, ooh, big challenge, I am not going to get angry at Lucifer.
I'm going to get angry at the babies.
Adam and Eve are babies because they're newly created and they have no experience and have not matured or grown.
How could they?
They're in paradise.
No friction, no muscle resistance, no growth.
And so the story of the Garden of Eden is, you know, as we talked earlier with the guy about, well, kids run into the streets, like, Jehovah, dude!
The snake got into your garden.
You set up this garden for Adam and Eve.
And the snake got into the garden.
That's your fault.
You're all-powerful.
You're all-knowing.
In other words, you knew that Lucifer was heading towards Adam and Eve.
You knew exactly what he was saying.
You could argue, because he's omniscient, he knew exactly what Adam and Eve were going to do, but all that.
And so it was God's failure to protect Adam and Eve from the second most powerful being in the entire universe, who had a little bit more experience, knowledge, wisdom, and power than nine-day-old babies in adult form.
It was God's inability to protect them from this evil, powerful demon.
Now, who gets punished for God's failure to protect his children, his babies, from this demon?
Is it the demon?
No.
Is it God?
No.
The babies are punished.
And this is very central to religion as a whole.
And the babies are punished because they, under the influence of a hypnotically powerful archdemon, they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which actually did them no harm.
And then they basically left the entire environment because...
Why would you need to leave the Garden of Eden and be cast away from God if you learn what good and evil is?
Well, clearly because God is evil, right?
There can be no other explanation as to why God wants to be worshipped.
Why on earth would God get angry?
Because Adam and Eve learned what good and evil is.
Because if Adam and Eve knew what good and evil was, they would have recognized Lucifer and rejected him and worshipped God all the more.
In other words, the one defense against Lucifer is knowing that he's evil, which God had denied them knowledge of by not letting them eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
So, as usual, it's the children who get paid for the hypocrisy, manipulations, and failures of the parents in this context.
Situation, where Lucifer is basically the mom and God is the father.
Now, is that innate?
Is it innate to our species to rage against our babies for our failures as parents?
I find it hard to say that that's innate, that that's some sort of instinct.
I mean...
It is our instinct to eat more sugar than we need.
It's our instinct to eat more fat than we need.
It's our instinct to conserve energy and not exercise.
All of these are our instincts, yet still there are lean athletes, right?
Still there are people who make better decisions with their food and their exercise.
So we may have these instincts, but I would argue that the instincts that you're talking about are to do with how we are treated with As babies and toddlers, and if as babies and toddlers we are treated to an immature and vitriolic display of approval and disapproval,
of praise and punishment based upon the capricious moods of our parents, then the idea that there's a vengeful deity who you need to seek approval from Or he'll send you to hell would fit into that.
I don't think it's instinctual.
I think it's early imprinted, which to me is not the same.
But anyway, that's the end of my speech.
I'm happy to hear what you think.
Okay, thanks.
That's very interesting.
I'm a huge fan of the show.
It's changed my thinking dramatically in a relatively short period of time, even though you'd think I'm pretty set in my ways being 55 years old, and so I'm But I'm thinking, if I'm going to have other people listen to the show, it's a little hard because most of the people I care about are religious.
And so I'm thinking there must be an easier way to make it easier for other people.
And so thinking that maybe if it is instinctive to believe in a God, trying to convince somebody That there's not a God would be like trying to convince somebody that they shouldn't eat or a young man shouldn't want to have sex with women.
It would be a very difficult thing to do.
So if there's a possibility that it's instinctive, maybe it would make what you're trying to do a lot easier or less offensive to people.
By saying, okay, yeah, you could have a belief in a god.
That's fine.
Just don't let religion exploit that belief in a god and bring along all the negative consequences of modern religion.
So, I mean, you raise a very essential and powerful point.
Which is, you know, the spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.
I don't mean to trivialize what you're saying, but the question, and it's a big question, I don't have a perfect answer.
The question is, to what degree should I dilute my message in order to spread it wider?
Or to what degree should I hold back on my arguments in order to spread philosophy wider?
Is that...
And I'm not trying to trivialize or say that I don't have a perfect answer for it.
Lord knows I'm constantly navigating that challenge.
Believe it or not, there's a lot I hold back on.
But is that what you mean?
And again, you may have a great point, and I don't know where the line is, but is that sort of along the lines of what you're thinking?
Like if I held back on certain things, it would be easier to woo people into the light, so to speak.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also...
Well, I think the argument you've made that it's not instinct, you've said that, well, animals don't have this instinct, so humans can't have it.
I don't know.
That doesn't sit very well with me.
And then you've said...
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
Hang on.
I'm not sure what you mean.
It doesn't sit very well with me.
And not you.
I get these comments floating around, you know, like, ah, Steph, you lost me on this one, or...
I feel uncomfortable with this, or this doesn't sit right with me, or it seems to me that, and it's like, but that's not philosophy, right?
I don't know.
What does it mean?
It doesn't sit well with you.
I don't know what that means.
Is it correct or incorrect?
There's a lot of differences between human beings and animals, just because animals don't have, maybe they do have an instinctive belief in a god.
We don't know.
We can't communicate with them.
And I didn't say they didn't.
I said it doesn't seem to be that bats have a religion.
I don't know.
Maybe they have some highly complex theology.
I don't think they do, because they have no spoken language, and it's hard to imagine a religion without any spoken language, or written language, for that matter.
I think we can pretty much say bats don't have a religion.
I'm comfortable with that.
Go out on a limb there.
Right, I agree with that.
But just because animals don't have religion, I don't think is a good argument to say that...
The belief in a god is not instinctive in human beings.
No, no, no.
That wasn't my argument.
My argument is that if you're going to use the word instinct, then you have to tell me, since the word instinct applies to all animals, you have to tell me why you're using a word that applies to all animals but reserving it exclusively for human beings.
It was just a matter of confusion, right?
Well, the reason why it would apply to human beings is because human beings are much more intelligent.
But then you're talking about intelligence, not instinct, if that makes sense.
Or you're talking about instinct combined only with human intelligence.
It's just precision, right?
It's like if you say, well, all mammals believe in God.
Obviously, I would have to say, well...
I know humans are mammals and humans believe in gods, but how would all other mammals have that?
And if you say religion is an instinct, well, most if not all animals have instincts, but most if not all animals have religion.
So it's just a clarification.
It's not like, well, that proves my case.
It's just I don't think we can use the word instinct as the basis of religion because all animals have instincts, but only one animal has a religion.
Right.
Well...
We need another word, or we need to join the word instinct with another word so that it's not confusing.
Because otherwise, it's logic 101, and I apologize to put it that boldly, but it is.
If we say religion is an instinct, bats have instincts, then logically bats must have a religion, which they don't.
It's just syllogism, right?
Okay, so another word, maybe it's innate in human beings to believe in a god.
No, innate is begging the question, because then we're saying, well, why is something there?
Well, it's innate.
That doesn't answer the question of why it's there.
We're just assuming it's there permanently or in some metaphysical way.
So if we say, you know, if I say, well, why does the sun rise?
Well, it's innate for the sun to rise.
Well, that doesn't answer anything, right?
I'm just putting my non-answer in the word innate and thinking I've solved something, which I haven't.
I'm not saying I know what the answer is, but...
Okay, well, so it's possible that I mean, it would explain a lot.
What would it explain?
Let's say that it was instinctual in the way that you mean it.
What would it explain?
Its prevalence?
Well, how could...
The question is, how could a belief in a God be so consistent through all...
All cultures, all people throughout history.
And what you've said is that it's the way that kids are raised by their mothers.
That's what...
Well, no, no, no.
I put that forward as a hypothesis.
Right?
As I said, I can't prove it.
You know, it's just it could work in a way.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
But look, slavery was a constant feature of human societies, all human societies, right, until relatively recently.
You know, it's easy to say instinct until it just changes, right?
And now slavery is around, for most of the world, is considered to be a terrible thing, whereas before it was considered to be the just spoils of war and a virtuous thing and the order in which superior cultures dominated inferior cultures or whatever they called them.
And then it wasn't, right?
So was slavery an instinct?
Was child sacrifice to the gods an instinct?
Again, it is until it's not.
And then the word instinct becomes problematic, right?
Because human beings will have sex drives until the end of time, right?
Or until the end of human beings.
So that, I think, is an instinct.
You can't sort of, you know, talk people out of a sexual instinct or, you know, feeling hungry when they're low on energy.
I think those would be instincts.
Sorry, go ahead.
Certainly if people stop believing in God, then, yeah, then it wasn't an instinct.
But I don't think that people are going to stop believing in God.
What do you mean?
That's already happening.
I mean, in Canada, two-thirds of those, I think, over 55 are religious.
A half of people in middle age are religious, and about one-third of the young are religious.
I mean, the decline of religiosity in the West is significant.
I'm not saying it's all good, because what it's being replaced by is, in many ways, much more toxic than religion ever could be.
Because you don't have to go to church, but the government...
Can impose its rules on you, right?
I mean, so...
But people are...
Certainly, religiosity in the Christian world is declining in certain areas quite considerably, and there are many countries, I mean, Japan is almost exclusively atheist.
I mean, a couple of Shinto shrines and some crazy people who let loose poison in subways...
But that is a largely atheist country.
A lot of the Scandinavian countries are explicitly atheist and have very few religious believers.
It may be that you're talking about your world rather than the world, if that makes sense.
Well, maybe.
Yeah, I wasn't aware of those statistics where atheism was more popular.
Let me just...
And I've mentioned this before, but just for those who...
Atheism by country.
Let me just give you some actual facts rather than stuff pulled out of my armpit.
A religion by country.
Irreligion.
Which includes deism, agnosticism, and so on.
Let's see here.
Belgium is 68% irreligious.
Bulgaria, 58%.
Canada, 61%.
China, 82%.
Czech Republic, 72%.
Denmark is 83% irreligious.
In other words, no organized religion of any kind.
Finland, 69%.
Germany, 62%.
Hungary and Iceland, 63% and 60%.
Japan is 71%.
Luxembourg, coming in at 64%.
The Netherlands is 65, New Zealand 67% irreligious.
Atheism is the fastest growing belief system in the world.
And the UK is 76% irreligious.
And tragically, Zimbabwe is only 9%.
But we're still working on that.
So you may be...
Let me just see where the US is.
36% irreligious.
I always thought that about 90% of people believe in God.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it really depends on how you ask the question.
And who you're asking, the demographics and so on, I think are important.
And, you know, like, I mean...
I don't know, like over 94 or 95% of members of the Royal Science Society, Scientific Society in England are explicit atheists.
So if you go and ask those guys, or you go and ask, I don't know, people studying...
The arts at Ivy League colleges, you're probably not going to get much religion.
You go to the South, into rural areas, and so on.
There seems to be, obviously.
So it depends who you ask, where you ask, the age you ask, the demographic, the race, the culture, even the gender can be divergent.
So you have to be careful about extrapolating from personal experience.
I get that it would be easier for your friends if I I don't know what to put it.
Less explicit about the arguments against deities.
But unfortunately, your friends wouldn't really be my demographic, if that makes sense.
Well, if these trends continue, then there's a lot of hope for what you're trying to do with your show.
I hope so.
I mean, again, I love me some godhood compared to communism.
I would much rather live among fundamentalist Christians than I would among communists or fascists or, you know, extreme lefties, I find.
The sort of extreme lefties, like the really, like, they make my skin crawl.
I'm not, this is no rational argument at all.
Like, they really, like, oh, I just, you know, they creep me out.
And, you know, fundamentalist Christians, I've known quite a few.
I've known a lot of them in business.
Lord knows I've known a lot of lefties, too.
I mean, I was in college and graduate school in the arts in Canada, God help me.
It's like lefty central.
In fact, one of the schools I went to, the head of the school dragged us all in and said, well, you all seem very young, white, and bourgeois, don't you?
It's like, oh God, here we go, right?
Let's do more mother courage and her children.
Bertolt Brecht, one of the most repulsive human beings who ever lived, but that's another example of leftist power-seeking hypocrisy that we can talk about another time.
But certainly in the business world, did a lot of business in the South, have known a lot of Christians, very fundamentalist Christians, and Have a lot in common because we talk about ideas.
We talk about ethics.
They have a greater appreciation for the wider spread of non-PC art that forms the foundation of most of the Western cultural experience.
And so I would certainly have a lot more in common with your friends in the pursuit of virtue and truth and the acceptance of universal ethics.
The shifting, foggy, crazy sands of pragmatism and utilitarianism and all this kind of crap that goes on among lefties.
I find pretty hideous.
It literally is like entering into somebody's dream physics nightmare.
At least with the Christians, you know, they, hey, objective morality, you know, they focus on the family.
The great thing about Christianity and religiosity is That it has absorbed and communicated very hard-won and received wisdom about what is best for society in many ways.
Christians don't imagine that humanity can be reinvented to be free of sin or free of temptation or free of malevolence.
They accept that we are beings poised between good and evil, and whichever way we set our foot, it's whichever way the plank tips in our hearts follow.
It's a kind of Manichaean view of the duality of good and evil, and that the choices we make about good and evil in our life are foundational to our existence, and we are responsible for them.
They do not ascribe, Christians gloriously do not ascribe Our ethical choice is to environment alone.
A lot of the lefties are like, oh, yeah, I grew up poor, so this is how he is, right?
And so the lefties focus so much on environment because that's what they promise to change to make you better, right?
The Christians promise to give you Jesus, and that gets you to heaven.
So they promise that this is stuff that's going to make you better.
The lefties say, well, we'll give you government money and free education, and that will make him, you know, welfare payments and snap, and that will make you better.
And the Christians say, well, accept Jesus and do these things, and you're saved.
And because I find it so creepy to think that we are just empty water poured accidentally into the containers called the environment, and that's the only shape we have, I find pretty hideous.
The degree to which lefties exclude themselves from merely environmental forces because in order to change the environment to make humanity better, they must automatically put themselves in a Overlord position over humanity, right?
I'm going to rearrange the maze so the rats get through there quicker when you can't be a rat who doesn't even know it's a maze if you're going to rearrange the maze.
They've got to automatically lord it over humanity as a whole in order to change the social cues and environments and economic relationships that apparently just produce who we are no matter what.
But it hasn't somehow produced who they are because they can see it all and change it and so on.
So I do not like this overlordism, this ubermensch stuff that comes with the lefties.
And there is a humility among the Christians.
There is a Respect for philosophy among the Christians.
There is a focus on free will among the Christians.
There is a focus on universal ethics and virtue and the importance of pursuing virtue.
And there is a civic-mindedness among Christians that I have yet to find strongly expressed in the atheist community.
You know, Christians, if you're sick, they'll bake you food and come on over.
I don't know that that happens a lot with the atheist community.
I could be wrong.
But, so, as far as, you know, recognizing that there's no God and that the arguments for gods are easy to puncture and so on, doesn't mean that I dislike religious people or that I think that they're all monstrous and so on.
I do disagree very strongly and always have with the degree of aggression that is applied towards children and In the imprinting of religion.
You know, I think many, many years ago, just dating a woman.
Actually, it wasn't even a date, really.
We never kissed or anything.
We never even held hands.
But we were just kind of hanging out a lot.
And we were both interested in each other.
Anyway, it turned out she was religious.
And this is back in my salad days.
And because I'm not an idiot, at least not often, not too often anyway.
We talked about what it was going to be like if we got married, because I'm an atheist and she's religious.
And she said, I remember very clearly, she said, oh yes, it's fine, my dad's not religious.
You know, my mom takes us to church, my dad sleeps in.
Like, oh, I like to sleep in.
Wait, wait, that's not right.
And we were able to negotiate that, but then one evening I said, ah, but the kids, you know, I said, this is the challenge, right?
This is the challenge, is that if the kids want to become religious when they're older and can understand religious arguments, philosophical arguments, the history and context of religion and so on, if they want to become religious when they're older, okay, that's their choice.
But religion can't be told to them when they're young as if it's true and without doubt.
And yeah, her whole body went tense.
And she's like, nope, can't do that.
Can't make that deal.
Can't make that deal.
Religion, I have to tell them.
I mean, religion has to be when they're young.
And that was, you know, we never went any further in the relationship.
I mean, we hung around still a little bit more, but it basically petered out after that.
Peter and Paul died after that.
But that struck me.
And I think I would have...
A better relationship with religious people if they didn't, and this is not true of all religious people, of course, right, but if they didn't go overboard with Hellfire and Brimstone with kids.
And, you know, for those who want, you should read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce for how religion was and hell was described to kids in the past.
I had some of that, though not quite as bad as in that book.
The description of hell is psychotic and absolutely terrifying and was pounded into kids' heads like nails over and over again.
And so there's a lot that I admire and respect and appreciate about religiosity.
Religiosity had a lot to do with the end of slavery.
Religiosity combined with the Enlightenment.
And religious people...
Do great good in the world, and they have great community-minded spirits, and religion understands the value of community in a way that atheists often don't.
Again, this is all just conjecture and thoughts, nothing proven or anything.
So, my philosophical arguments bother people.
I get that.
I don't think anybody would fundamentally respect me If I did not make philosophical arguments because they would bother people, then I don't think...
I certainly wouldn't win over your friends and I wouldn't have the friends that I have.
Do you know what I mean?
If you stand for something, you'll be loved and hated.
If you stand for nothing, you will neither be loved nor hated because nobody's ever bothered by things you don't really do.
And I think that it is important for me to...
to speak the truth as far as I can explicate it as consistently as I can with as much humility and correction as I'm capable of which I think is a fair amount but I don't think if I start going down the rabbit hole of it's a valid argument that people can't rebut but it bothers people therefore I shouldn't make it I think if that's my approach I need a different line of work I just need a different
line of work.
Everyone's success is someone else's failure.
If I go and see one movie, I'm not going to go and see someone else's movie.
Maybe I will, but not at the same time.
Everything I do is an exclusion of everything else.
Me doing this show tonight, on New Year's Day 2015, It's me not doing anything else, not spending any money or going anywhere or doing anything else or watching anything or writing songs in a ukulele.
And so I think that the job fundamentally is speak the most important truth that does the best in the most consistent and rational and empirical way possible and bring experts in where Your expertise is clearly deficient when you wish to make empirical arguments that you do not have the training or credentials to make.
I think that's kind of the gig.
That's too long to fit on a business card unless it's cyber landscape.
I think that's the gig.
That's the deal.
As a philosopher, you make arguments from first principles and you do not shy away for fear of upsetting people because, I mean, there used to be this paternalistic approach to medicine.
I think up until maybe the 60s or 70s, A doctor wouldn't tell someone who was terminal that they were terminal.
They would just withhold that, saying, well, what's the point?
It's just going to upset them.
I think that's kind of changed now, where people say, look, you just give people the information, and they have to make their own decisions.
They have to come to their own peace with it.
Because people have this—it's not just me.
It's people who put out important thoughts in the public arena— Like, I put out an argument years ago about how statists support the use of violence against you.
Once you make that case clearer and clearer and clearer, at some point, it's going to have to have an impact.
You either drop the philosophy or it's going to have to have an impact on your relationships.
And people are bothered by that.
But I don't see how it's written in the job description of a philosopher that I shouldn't make arguments because it upsets people.
I don't think that's everything you do in this world is going to upset someone, right?
I mean, you put one thumb up to hitchhike, there's going to be 10,000 people somewhere in the world who said it should have been your other thumb or whatever, right?
So I don't think that I serve philosophy by withholding truth or withholding arguments that are important for the sake of manipulating people into liking me more or into not being bothered by what I said or what I say.
Because I'm trying to not just...
Do philosophy but show philosophy, which is to show how you can positively speak the truth and stand in the face of disapproval and hatred with courage and poise and equanimity and so on.
I want to show it and live it as well as just talk about it.
And I'm not saying you don't or anything like that, but I do think that the idea that I'm going to withhold important arguments that can really change people's lives is Because it might bother some people.
If that was my concern, that would be, to me, like being a surgeon but not wanting to cut anyone.
If you faint at the sight of blood, you need a different job.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
I'm not saying do you agree.
Does it make sense?
Yeah, it makes sense.
Very helpful.
Very interesting.
I definitely have to go back and listen to this one over again.
I think there's probably a few things I didn't completely understand that you probably Put it out very well.
But very helpful.
Very interesting.
I've got a lot of Christian fans.
Like, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I do.
A lot of people write to me and say, like, I'm a Christian, but I love what you're doing.
And what can I say other than I appreciate that, right?
I mean, because, look, I mean, I like Christians too, and other religious people as well.
Because a statist can send me to prison, but a Christian can't send me to hell, if that makes sense to you, right?
Sure.
And so the fact that Christians and other religious people really like what I'm doing, I think is great.
I mean, what I'm doing has a lot in common with Christianity.
I mean, Christianity is founded on a revolution against the ancient order.
And the substitution of abstract punishments for real punishments, right?
I want ostracism, not jail.
Jesus wanted hell, not brimstone into the towns from the pillar of fire from God, right?
Jesus wanted abstract punishments rather than real punishments.
And I like the idea.
You know, for Hell for many Christians is merely the absence of God.
It's not the presence of punishment.
It's not devils with pitchforks.
It's the absence of God.
And that is supposed to be like God is glorious enough that the absence of God is punishment enough that you wish to.
And I think that that directly translates to I don't want jails.
I want ostracism.
Ostracism is an incredibly powerful social mechanism for getting people to do the right thing.
But of course it's been elbowed aside by By the state, by the police, and by the courts, and by jails, and all that kind of stuff.
And it would be fascinating to me, like right now, as we speak, I think since the 22nd or 23rd of December, the police in New York have basically stopped most of their policing.
Drug arrests are down like massive amounts, traffic violation arrests, minor arrests, down like over 90%.
And arrest rates are down 60-70% of the whole.
They've been told, do not arrest people unless absolutely necessary.
Which of course begs the question, what the hell were they doing before?
And this is blowing holes in the...
It's going to be an interesting test to see whether spontaneous social self-organization springs up in the absence of external coercion and structure.
And also whether crime increases or decreases.
I'm going to assume because of the paucity of drug arrests and the price of drugs is going down.
Which is going to put the marginal producers out of business, I hope.
And it will be fascinating to see what this does.
It blows holes in the broken window policing, which is basically, well, you know, if there's a window that's broken, if you deal with all the little crimes, somehow the big crimes are going to get better, which seems to me just people wanting to go home at night rather than take on well-armed drug dealers.
But that's perhaps a different topic for a different time.
But no, I think that if people remember the radical elements of what Jesus was doing and that Jesus didn't come down like God kept coming down and blowing people up and drowning people and making people sick and sending signs and so on.
But what I thought was most powerful about Jesus was that he was a radical of language.
I mean, he did his miracles and so on, and you could say that that's just selling the God to the cheap seats and so on.
But the most famous things that people remember about Jesus is, you know, the Sermon on the Mount and his arguments.
Let he is without sin, cast the first stone.
What an argument to humility that is, to stop the mob in its tracks.
However implausible the story is that the only person who remained as a witness was the woman, who probably wouldn't be believed anyway, but that doesn't matter.
His love your neighbor as yourself, his radical pacifism to...
Turn the other cheek, and if a man asks you for your cloak, give him your shirt as well, and if he asks you to walk a mile with him, walk two miles with him.
This radical, I mean, it's not philosophy, they're like homilies, but he was a revolutionary in language.
He did not lead an army.
He did not perform miracles great and grand enough for the entire world to convert to him.
He did not bring hellfire and brimstone down from on high.
I mean he couldn't even get saved from the cross though.
He begged to be saved from the cross.
He was a radical of language.
He overturned visceral punishment with abstract punishment and he attempted to reshape a highly invasive and highly centrally planned moral system of punishment and reward from the Old Testament deity.
I would argue he sought to replace that With exhortations and language and arguments.
And that to me is a very powerful thing.
So I think that there are things in common that...
This all sounds ridiculous, right?
Oh, I'm like Jesus.
I mean, it's not anything like that.
But in terms of making the case through language rather than through punishment, I think that's what Christians find valuable about what it is that I do.
And of course, when I got cancer in O2... A lot of people were praying for me, and I guess I never tried to reject anyone's good thoughts if they're there to be had.
So you think that religion may be a part of the evolution of society?
Well, it certainly has been.
It certainly has been.
You know, the problem with saying that then it's an instinct or somehow embedded within our neofrontal cortex is to say we shouldn't evolve beyond it.
It's like saying, well, we should evolve beyond our sex drive.
It's like, nope.
Nope!
Because without the sex drive, there's no evolution.
So...
But I also think that...
I also think that Christians come to this show as well because...
I'm digging deep into some very essential ideas about good and evil, and right and wrong, and how society should be structured.
Whereas a lot of the moral nihilism that comes out of the left, I think, is pretty repulsive to a lot of Christians, just as it is to me.
And of course, I was raised as a Christian.
And it's impossible and ridiculous for me to say that, and it would be false for me to say that my passion for ethics was uninfluenced by My Christian upbringing.
No.
I only missed the universality of ethics because I expected it and it didn't pan out.
Do you know what I mean?
Like when I was a little kid, let me tell you, this is like...
A friend of my mom's was going to go to play bingo.
And she said to me that if she...
I can't remember how old I was, maybe five or six.
Five, I think, because it was before boarding school.
She was going to bingo and she said the prize was 500 pounds.
Huge amount of money, especially back then.
And she said, if I win the 500 pounds, I'm going to give you 18 dollars.
18 pounds.
Now, in my mind, because I was five, I'm like, well, I'm getting 18 pounds.
You know, all the candy, all the toys, everything.
I've got 18 pounds.
I've got 18 pounds.
Or mentally, you know, thumbing through the money in my mind and kissing it and rubbing it all over me.
18 pounds was mine, I tell you, right?
Which was a crazy amount of money because I grew up doing poor and all.
And part of me was like, plus we'll have heat this winter.
You can feed the coins into the meter and get some heat.
Anyway, so after licking my Midas-based chops all evening and And so on, the woman came back and she'd only won five pounds or she gave me 18 pennies.
Oh my goodness, I was like ridiculously inconsolable because I'm like, I cried, I cried, I couldn't, you know, because I just, I don't know if it had not been explained to me well or whatever it was, maybe I just didn't understand it, but I thought I was getting 18 pounds when that woman came back and I wanted to do a lot with that money.
I came back at 18 pennies and I was like, phew, So for me, religion promised me the 18 pounds.
And when I didn't even get the 18 pennies when it came to universal ethics, I'm like, ah, this is terrible!
I want the universal ethics!
Daddy wants the universal ethics!
Give me the ethics!
Give me the morality!
I need it!
Because I thought I had it!
Jesus and all!
Ten Commandments!
I thought I had the whole thing!
And then, it's not there!
It's a ghost!
There's an exorcism called reason.
There's no ghost.
You don't drive the demon out, you drive the concept of demon out as something that can exist.
And so because I've been promised the riches of universal ethics and I didn't get the riches of universal ethics, it's like, hey, I thought I was getting 18 pounds.
I got nothing but a poke in the eye.
So now I got to go out and make 18 pounds or more.
Right?
So for me, Growing up religious, for me, when I became an atheist, it was very important for me.
I've always been really struck by that phrase, do not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
And that to me is really, really important.
It means, of course, as you know, right?
I mean, you throw the bathwater out because it's dirty, but you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater to keep the good stuff even if you're getting rid of the bad stuff.
A lot of people throw the baby out with the bathwater and they grow up religious and then they say, ethics and objectivity and truth and universality are as much of a lie as a deity.
Out it goes.
And this is where the endless manipulations of the centrally planned moral nihilists we call the lefties come in.
And yuck!
I recognized that I could not get universal ethics from a fictional being.
It's like saying, I'm going to write a character in a novel who's going to pay my bills.
Well, I guess you could if the books sell a lot.
But my relentlessness was wanting, needing the universal ethics while accepting that their source could not be religiosity.
And that was like a 20-year struggle for me.
Before I coughed up the hairball of UPB. So, if people are religious because they want to be good, then they'll find great compatibility in what I do here.
If people are religious because they enjoy torturing children with stories of hell, I'm not saying that's any of your friends or anything, then they're not going to find much of compatibility here.
If people are yearning for the truth, searching for the truth, and they have found what they need in religion, Ethics, community, and so on.
Well, they'll find ethics, I think, here, and better, rational ethics.
Community?
No.
No, not really.
I mean, because we've still got a long way to grow, which we're going to do.
So, you know, I hope that in my railing against religiosity, I am merely attempting to clear the brambles out of people's journey towards truth and virtue.
I certainly don't want to strip people of their desire for and joy in reason, truth, and virtue.
People believe that it's empirically provided through a deity, but it's not.
And I'm shooting up a flare saying, if you want the goodies of reason and virtue without obedience to ghosts and guys in funny hats, we're here.
You can do it.
It's right here.
Right here.
You can get the good without the crazy.
Because when you gotta take the crazy with the good, it's a pretty unstable relationship.
You're dancing with nitroglycerin.
But if you can get the good without the crazy, without the irrationality, without the superstition, I mean, wouldn't you want that?
I mean, isn't the purpose of religion to make you good?
Not to have you subservient to ghosts, but to make you good.
And if there's a way of being good, and knowing good, and understanding good, and being able to rationally defend goodness...
With all the power of rationality, philosophy, science and empiricism if there's a way to do that without this bullshit of pragmatism and utilitarianism and categorical imperatives and stuff if there's a way to be good and rational and consistent and know that you're right isn't that worth giving up the ghost for?
Because the ghost is going to give you universality but Superstition and subservience.
If you can get the universality with neither the superstition nor the subservience, isn't that much better?
Because the question is, why would you let go of that?
Well, most people don't want to let go of that because they want to be good and they want to be right and they want to know they're doing a good and right thing.
And the atheists and the secularists and the leftists and the secular humanists, they can't give you that because they're not philosophers.
They're scientists or socialists and so on, right?
So science is great, but value neutral and socialism is a virus in the brain of humanity and the spine of humanity.
So that's sort of my goal and invitation is, yes, I can be harsh and scathing against the deities.
Yeah, absolutely.
If there's a lot of rust, you need to put some elbow grease in to get the shine underneath the rust.
But The reason to let go of that is that you cannot be consistently good through superstition and subservience.
You can't be any more than you can be a great archer blindfolded.
Occasionally, you'll hit a target, but it's just not going to be consistent.
But through philosophy, you can get reason, evidence, virtue, goodness, community without Superstition and subservience.
Without having to hold your nose and believe stuff because you want to break through the brittle stink of religiosity and get to the glowing heart of virtue that we all want, we all need.
Most of us anyway.
Well, philosophy can provide that to you with certainty, with structure, with rationality.
And you don't have to split yourself into someone who's willing to put up with the taste in order to get the nutrition.
You don't have to have bad taste to get good nutrition.
Philosophy tastes great and gives you good nutrition.
And that is certainly my appeal to religious people who, again, I argue I have much more in common with in many ways than most of the people who are secularists, atheists, and so on.
Because those people have given up on both God and goodness, which to me is very toxic.
Very toxic.
And opens up, as Nietzsche pointed out in the 19th century, you give up God, you open a black hole where superstition and subservience to deities is then replaced with nationalism and subservience to a secular state.
It's infinitely more dangerous in many ways.
You push out the priest, in comes the demagogue.
You push out the rabbi, in comes the central planner, with all the awesome might and power of the state, which you cannot say no to.
You know, you can suffer ostracism from a religious community, you cannot suffer ostracism from a statist community, because they won't let you alone.
Because they got laws and you got to obey them and you go to jail and so on, right?
So I apologize because I don't think, I'm just thinking about this, I don't know that I've made that very clear.
That has been my goal.
You know, when I talked earlier about, even in this show, about the Garden of Eden and so on, I'm like, yes, it's crazy, it makes no sense, right?
So let's not hang our ethics on that wobbly foundation of ancient superstition.
Let's find a You know, as Jesus said, build your house on rock, not on sand.
And if we want ethics, we need to build them on philosophy.
We can't climb up the ghostly spines of ancient deities and think that we can shoot a light to illuminate the world.
Again, does that make any sense to you?
Absolutely.
It's amazing what you do.
Very interesting.
Again, you're changing my thinking Pretty dramatically and really appreciate what you do.
Actually, the one last thing, just summarize what you're saying about how people have developed this belief in God so consistently through history How did that happen?
Well, the beliefs in God may be consistent to you because you're around people who believe in the same religiosity.
But beliefs in God are very varied throughout the world.
I mean, there are like 10,000 different deities that people believe in, and there are religions that are more aggressive.
There are religions that are more peaceful.
There are religions where there's no afterlife.
There's religions where there's no heaven and there's no hell.
There's religions where, you know, in Zoroastrianism, it is your decisions that determine whether the evil gods or the good gods win in the end, right?
I mean, it's that closely balanced.
There are religions where the evil deities triumph, right?
I'm thinking sort of Ragnarok and so on.
There is a huge variety in religiosity around the world.
And of course, if you throw statism in as a form of religiosity, which I would, then that makes things even more challenging and complicated.
But I think, again, to me, so much of our most abstract belief systems I find so firmly rooted in our earliest childhood experiences.
My first sentence when I was a baby...
Leave me with what I'm doing.
I didn't like interference.
I didn't like people bothering me.
I like to play with other kids and all that, but I just didn't like it.
Kids are kind of grabby.
Oh, let me fix that for you.
You're not drawing that right.
Let me fix this letter for you.
I was like, no, leave me with what I'm doing.
I want to figure this out by myself.
I want to focus on this myself.
If you can't participate, then don't take over.
In other words, don't make this moment a win-lose for me.
Like, you write it right and I've been wrong.
Let me figure it out.
Leave me with what I'm doing.
That was my first sentence reported when I was a kid.
And, you know, now I have a desire for the state not to Interfere with what I'm doing.
I have a desire for deities to not judge and interfere and send me to heaven and hell and so on.
I have a desire for freedom from interference.
That doesn't mean freedom from people because when people are interfering with you, they're not close to you, right?
I mean, then a jailer is intimate to the cellmate because he's controlling where he's at, right?
And so I think that A lot of our most abstract ideas come from a lot of our very early experiences.
So if there's a commonality for you in religiosity, the first place I would look, it's not the only place, not the last place, the first place that I would look is I'd say, okay, well, is there something in early childhood, infancy and early childhood, maybe even in the womb, is there something that might be occurring for people that would be common enough that it might give rise to a phenomenon such as Again, that's not the only place that I would look.
It may not even be the last place, but it's the first place that I would look.
And I will sort of leave you with those thoughts to say the fact that it's Mother Mary, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
You know, the fact that the priest is called Father in many religions.
Again, the Mother Mary.
The fact that they're not hiding it very well if it's to do with Mom and Dad when you're little.
They're not doing a very good job of hiding it, right?
And in many ways, the more primitive the religions, the more, quote, masculine the men look.
They get these crazy long beards and stuff like that, hyper-masculine looking.
So, you know, you never see a clean-shaven Jesus outside of a Willem Dafoe movie, right?
And so...
I would look at early childhood experiences because that we all have in common and early childhood experiences are very common throughout many cultures in terms of parental approval and disapproval and I would argue as well and this you can get more of this from psychohistory.com but I would argue as well that the more harsh the religion the more harsh the early childhood experience which would be another pillar of support for the thesis so that would be my suggestion on where to look again I can't give you an answer Off the top of my
head, that's any more comprehensive or useful than the one I gave you already, but that's where I would start to look if I were you.
Very good.
Very interesting.
Really enjoyed it.
Anytime, man.
Great topics.
I really, really appreciate what everyone's bringing up tonight, as usual.
It's wonderful, wonderful stuff to think about.
And again, I love you guys so much.
I can't even express it without leaking earthling feeling fluid from my eye sockets.
So I feel so grateful that people are willing to call in and talk about these very important topics, these vulnerable topics, these powerful topics.
This is where the marrow of the matter really lives.
This is where philosophy really lives.
I also love and hugely respect this audience for putting philosophy into practice, into actually making choices in your life based upon philosophy, as I try to and succeed and fail in regular intervals.
And, you know, I love this conversation.
As much as I can express my love of anything, I love this conversation.
I am deeply, deeply honored.
Well, thank you very much for what you do.
Thank you to be a part of this conversation and to enable and facilitate this conversation around the world.
Thank you, everybody, so much.
If you want to help out the show, as usual, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
We need you.
We can't do it without you.
And I would argue that the future...
It needs all of us to contribute as much as we can comfortably to bring about better thinking and clearer thinking across the world and into the future.
