June 23, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:27
3005 Do You Hate The World? | #RageQuitEarth
Listener Question: "The world is not exactly chock full of people who are voluntarist, who've got self-knowledge, people who've been to therapy, people who have good relationships, people who reject the state and the initiation of force." Nor will it ever be, not even close. And therein lies the fundamental flaw in your brand of philosophy. Your ideal society requires for the average human a minimum threshold of intelligence and morality that cannot be met. I find many things you teach very useful on a micro level and they will help many individuals in their quality of life and their relationships, but the debate about extending them to a large enough population to change our societal structure is moot."
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Listener question from Gabriel.
He quoted me when I said, the world is not exactly chock full of people who are voluntarists, who've got self-knowledge, people who've been to therapy, people who have good relationships, people who reject the state and the initiation of force.
And he writes, nor will it ever be, Steph, not even close.
And therein lies the fundamental flaw in your brand of philosophy.
Your ideal society requires for the average human a minimum threshold of intelligence and morality that cannot be met.
I find many things you teach very useful on a micro level, and they will help many individuals in their quality of life and...
Their relationships.
But the debate about extending them to a large enough population to change our social, societal structure is moot.
I think that's a great question, and it's a great comment, and it's a great objection.
And there's no argument to it, right?
Self-knowledge will teach you this, Gabriel, that if you respond to someone and deny their arguments without making a counter-argument, you are clearly and obviously revealing emotional resistance.
Pushback without reason is an emotional defense, and you're not making an argument.
Now, If you put on the not making an argument, nah, not an argument, N-A-A. If you put on the nah filter, we might as well have closed off our comment section for the most part because very few people make an actual argument.
Or if they make an argument, they make an inconsequential argument, completely tangential to the main issue.
If I made some minor error in math or, you know, ah, right?
I mean, it's not relevant.
So the world will never be full of people who are voluntarists, who have self-knowledge, who've been to therapy.
Well, of course, in the future, we hope to build a society where people won't really need to go to therapy.
When the polio vaccine was created, the hope was for a future without iron lungs, and it's largely been achieved.
So the hope is to not have children who are broken and who need therapy, and who don't live in a society to whom self-knowledge Puts them at odds with their society, right?
Because right now, self-knowledge, philosophical consistency, integrity, virtue, really living in and acting on your values puts you directly at odds with society.
And not just like in terms of people won't like you or people will be bothered by you.
In terms of like you'll go to jail, right?
Like if you...
I never advocate Disobeying the law, but the reality is that if you don't want to pay your taxes, if you find funding wars and the military-industrial complex and the enslavement of the poor on the new plantations of the welfare state, if you find these things objectionable and you wish to not submit to violence and not be forced to fund things that are morally repulsive to you, you go to jail.
Guys will come with guns to your house and take you in a wagon and put you in jail.
So, integrity at the moment is incredibly costly.
It's not even as beneficial as a black market is in terms of economy and payoff because there's no personal profit in it for the most part.
So, not that I'm advocating a black market.
So right now, people are incredibly punished, both socially and legally, for integrity, for morality, for ethics.
And so saying, well, if that ever changes, people's behavior won't change, is just false.
I mean, people respond to incentives.
And the social cues are obey and conform.
And surrender.
Or we will break you.
We will break you in two.
We will throw you into the rape rooms of modern prisons until you are like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, back in love with Big Brother.
That is the reality of the society that we live in.
Your ideal society requires, he says, For the average human a minimum threshold of intelligence and morality that cannot be met.
What I'm trying to do is gooey up philosophy.
Probably that doesn't make sense.
That's going to be taken out of context.
So what I mean is that most people, like your average grandmother, is not logging into a Unix workstation or a TRS-80 or some sort of tandem workstation and DQ Bang A typing in command lines in order to do stuff.
Originally there was command line only, Back, boy, my first computer, I got a tiny inheritance.
I guess it wasn't that tiny.
I got an inheritance from my grandmother when she died.
And I used it to buy an Atari 800, the one with the keyboard, and, I do believe, 16K of RAM. Oh, yeah.
You could do Graphics 8 or GR.8.
And that's when I learned to program and all this kind of cool stuff.
Thanks to my math teacher, a guy, who let me off math class and let me go to the computer lab, which was fantastic.
Thanks, Mr.
R. But, um...
Your average grandmother is not going to be logging in and doing command line stuff.
Then, of course, there was DOS, and then there was ASCII graphical, quote, pseudo-graphical layers over DOS. And then there was Windows, which was a GUI over DOS, and GUIs got better, graphical user interface, it's a GUI. And then we got to touchpads, touchscreens, and so on, and we got voice commands, and, like, it's basically become as friendly as possible.
So saying, computer use will never spread to the general population, because you need a whole basement full of vacuum tubes, and you need command-line interfaces, or you have to scratch out.
You know, this is government education.
The only class I ever failed in high school was a computer science class when I was doing computer science all the time on my spare time because you had to fill out these cards to run your assembly commands.
So saying, well, no, nobody's people.
The idea that people are going to get involved in computers in any...
because you need a basement full of vacuum tubes and command lines or scratchy on...
I mean, no, it's not going to happen.
But that's because...
Computers weren't user-friendly enough.
Computers were not user-friendly enough.
The right supply will create a demand.
So people who never would have imagined buying a Unix computer will buy an iPad.
Because it's pretty easy.
I mean, it's almost infinitely easier compared to command line to get done what you need to get done.
Although I still know people who love reveal codes in WordPerfect 5.1.
But that's a topic for another time.
So, when you make technology or when you make complexity user-friendly, then you spread its adoption by the general population.
You know, cars used to be hobbyists, nightmares, right?
I mean, I guess for a hobbyist, a nightmare is a plus, right?
But cars, they used to fall apart all the time.
You had to stop and keep cranking them.
You needed basically to travel with a mechanic because they broke down all the time.
There really weren't any roads.
So if you said, well, cars are going to be the dominant method of transportation in the future, people would say, that's never going to happen.
There are no roads.
You can't travel with a mechanic.
They're too unreliable.
People even believe that if you traveled over 20 miles an hour, you wouldn't be able to breathe enough oxygen.
You had to wear goggles.
No, right?
But things change.
When things improve, their adoption becomes more widespread.
When things become more user-friendly and more reliable, then their adoption becomes more widespread.
This is basic economics.
So, my goal is to make philosophy User-friendly, to GUI up philosophy, to put a graphic user interface on philosophy, to make it actionable, because if you make philosophy actionable, then there's a point to listening to it, right?
If we're talking about, like, if all I did on this show was talk about, you know, Kierkegaard's definition of that and Aristotle's approach to this, I mean, there'd be some people who'd be mildly interested, but it would not spread because it would not be actionable.
And it's sort of like selling people a computer and saying, you should use this to write stuff, but there's no email and no printer, and so you can't ever get the writing off the computer.
Wouldn't be that valuable to people, right?
So my goal is to make philosophy user-friendly, and that is to...
I don't use a lot of technical language.
I was very influenced by a philosophy professor in graduate school who reminded me That Socrates never used the word epistemology, or nuomenal, or metaphysical.
He used the language of the land.
He used the language of the people to talk about philosophy and to goad them into...
Well, his first command, know thyself, was to...
You can't know the world unless you know yourself, because it's like trying to figure out colors.
If you don't know what color glasses you're wearing, you're going to get confused.
You need to know your own perceptions and prejudices in order to see the world clearly.
So, my goal is to take philosophy and make it approachable, make it valuable, make it actionable, make it useful.
And I'm really constantly focusing on philosophy that can be explained to four-year-olds.
Now, I've been a father for six and a half years, a stay-at-home dad for six and a half years.
I have talked about just about everything to do with ethics with my daughter, starting when she was about two.
She gets it.
It's not brain surgery.
Basic ethics is not brain surgery.
I'm not saying that, you know, if I read her universally preferable behavior, which is my book on ethics, you can get at freedomainradio.com slash free.
I don't read that to her as a bedtime story, but I've got a podcast, which you can find at fdrpodcast.com called The ABCs of UPB, which is how you explain ethics to little children.
Because you can't have...
Moral responsibility without moral understanding.
And if you can't explain your ethical system to children...
Good luck, Kent.
Good luck, Plato.
If you can't explain your ethical system to children, then you have done something wrong.
You've made a mistake.
It's what Aristotle used to say.
Like, if you've gone through some ethical system and what's come out as rape is moral, then I don't care what you've done.
You've made some kind of mistake.
And, you know, if you've got some...
System, some hypothesis in physics, and if you put all the numbers and all of the variables into your equations, what comes out is a rock should fall up from the earth.
I don't care what you've done, you've made a mistake somewhere.
I don't even need to, you go find it if you want.
And so, you know, this is why the ethical system that I have proposed, universally preferable behavior, exists independently of states.
States and governments requires no commandments, no assumptions.
It's not just plant the flag, and if you like it, let's set up a kingdom here.
It is rational, objective, empirical, it explains history, and it bans rape, theft, assault, and murder, the four major bans that all moral systems have to deal with.
I mean, it's inconvenient to existing hierarchies of power, but that's sort of the point of philosophy, isn't it?
To be inconvenient to falsehood and to immorality.
I mean, I hope that a cancer doctor is inconvenient to cancer, otherwise he's not much of a doctor.
And so, philosophy is supposed to be inconvenient to wrongdoers and liars and cheats and sophists, and that's one of the ways in which I steer this ship of thought.
And so...
Yeah, so right now, of course, you know, philosophy is considered to be abstract, you know, pointless, useless, right?
And it's sort of, as I often do, go back to Bill and Ted's excellent venture.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K, dude.
But...
There's actually a pretty good, like, it's sad when, if you've ever seen, if you've not seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and the following bogus journey where they go to hell and they say, dude, this is nothing like our album covers.
But you've got to see it because there's a great bit of Freud in there.
Dude, she's your mom.
And philosophy is Socrates' dust in the wind.
You know, it's just dust in the wind.
I mean, that's not philosophy.
I mean, that's not even great music.
Actually, it's pretty good.
So, if you make philosophy valuable and useful and powerful and actionable and comprehensible to people...
Then you've just gooied up philosophy.
It's no longer a command line where you can't print off anything you've written.
It's a touch screen, it plays music, it's easy to work with, and it has utility.
It's actionable.
So that is how philosophy is going to spread.
And I guarantee you, if I had taken an academic approach to philosophy and talked about how, well, you know, Rousseau talks about our brains in a tank being manipulated by a demon and how will we know, right?
Yeah, there'd be a couple of people listening.
Listening to me in one ear, Pink Floyd in the other.
And a whole plate full of exciting brownies on their lap.
But we wouldn't be doing, you know, 100, 120 million downloads.
We wouldn't have the hundreds of thousands of listeners or more.
I have no idea.
But this is because it's actionable.
So...
When you raise children peacefully, you make them smarter, right?
There are genetic components to IQ as far as I understand.
You could say, some people say like it's a half of your IQ potential is genetic.
You can't really test it as much when you're younger because the full expression of IQ waits to brain maturity until 25.
You know, like boys and girls when they're born about the same height, but boys end up taller on average than girls.
Or not these days.
There's these Amazon Xeno warrior princesses who I guess are getting steroids from meat or something, giant women.
But so some IQ you can't particularly alter.
But some IQ you can, according to research.
So if you don't hit your children, you get a couple of IQ points right there, negotiating with them rather than hitting them.
If you stimulate them with philosophy very early on, I'm pretty sure that helps in terms of IQ. And there are just a couple of other things that you can do, which, again, whether it actually increases IQ or simply doesn't retard the development of the brain, I don't know, right?
Like, I mean, if you don't give a kid enough food, he ends up growing up shorter.
But if you give him excess food, he doesn't end up taller.
He just reaches the natural maximum of his height.
So the goal, of course, is to have kids reach the natural maximum of their IQ potential and...
There's stuff that we can do around that.
And in particular, peaceful parenting, I believe, is going to give children their greatest IQ boost.
And that's not insignificant.
You can check out the research in thebombinthebrain.com or look at my conversations with Alison Gopnik on this channel or with other experts.
Elizabeth Gershoff talks about it, that you can get a 4-6 IQ point boost just by not hitting your children.
And it's not even like reasoning with them and so on, but just not hitting them.
Don't traumatize them.
Trauma costs IQ. And trauma causes a warp in otherwise intelligent people because trauma gives us this avoidance mechanism.
You know, the trigger warnings and so on.
This is all nonsense.
I mean, the best way to deal with stuff that upsets you, which used to be common knowledge, is you confront it.
You go and deal with your fears.
You confront your fears.
This avoidance and running away to teddy bear rooms with frolicking puppies, if you hear an idea that's troublesome to you, is ridiculous and counterfactual and actually just makes people worse.
But anyway, that's a topic for another time.
You can check out The Factual Feminist for more on this.
She's got a great video on trigger warnings.
So...
Yeah, right now there are not a lot of smart people who are into self-knowledge who recognize and accept the non-aggression principle and so on.
And I get that.
But again, that's like saying in 1969 there aren't a lot of people who enjoy using computers.
Saying that the present is a pure predictor of the future is ridiculous.
And the fact that there isn't this argument...
This argument of contempt for the masses is very prevalent.
Whenever you talk about improving the lot of human beings, people will attempt to...
To woo you, to seduce you into a contempt for the masses.
And I accept and I understand that people reject information based on trauma.
They reject data, facts, arguments, reason, evidence, and empiricism based on trauma and based on bigotry and prejudice and so on.
Well, of course that's the case, right?
I mean, naturally...
That's the case for evolutionary reasons.
The conformity with the tribe gained you access to eggs, for the women's eggs.
And so anybody who was not conformist to the tribe would not breed, would not reproduce.
So all non-conformist genes, they only really emerge in the species as a weird random mutation, testing the waters to see if society evolves.
Evolution requires a vast stability in the gene set along with a small amount of mutations, and most of which are non-beneficial.
The same thing with society as a whole.
Look at it as a social animal.
It requires a large degree of stability, which is conformity, and a small degree of people like me and people like you who test whether nonconformity and therefore growth and improvement, if it's the right kind of nonconformity.
Nonconformity with error, with prejudice, with bigotry, with the dull inertia of historical falsehoods.
We test and we see.
Sometimes people test and they see and they get shipped off to a gulag or thrown off a cliff or fed to sharks or sacrificed to the gods.
But sometimes, if the technology and the times and the conditions are right, they get the biggest philosophy show in the world and set their minds towards improving the human condition as much as humanly possible.
And that's how society progresses.
So saying contempt for the herd, well, it's the inertia of the herd that creates the stability that allows for The progress of the species.
So saying, well, I have contempt for the herd because they're all so conformist and so on.
Well, yeah, of course.
But I mean, if every single gene mutated from one generation to the next, I mean, you wouldn't have any life.
You wouldn't have any progress.
It is the vast ability.
And inertia and conformity of society that creates the relative stability that allows people who want to improve society the stability to be able to create that.
I mean, the vast majority of people, vast, vast majority of people who are involved in having us have the capacity to have this conversation.
The technologists, the entrepreneurs, they're statists, they're religious, so the people who are working Against us philosophically are the same people who have created the stability that allows society to have this kind of communication mechanism.
So I can't really get wooed into contempt for the masses because if everybody was a revolutionary, there would be no stability in society to the point where we could have conversations about improving the human condition.
Just as if every gene mutated at the same time, generation to generation, there'd be no such thing as life.
It would all be Chaos.
So, trying to lure me into contempt for the masses is not going to work.
I have a great appreciation for the masses.
I'm sure that almost all of my food comes from people who significantly oppose me philosophically.
I'm not going to boycott their food because Big Chatty Forehead likes to eat.
So have hope, have faith in the future.
We are working on a presentation about genetics and ideology, which hopefully will clarify some of this stuff.
I look forward to your continued questions.
You can send them in to us at freedomainradio.com.
And also you can leave comments and we'll pick out stuff that is valuable.
Gabriel, great, great question, great comment.
Have hope.
The methodology of the progress of the species is fortunately well delineated and proven in society.
Do not give up.
Do not end up hating the hoard that gives you food and sustenance and keeps you alive.
It is really an act of intellectual seppuku to imagine that everyone must be like you and I. That would not be valid or valuable and would create too much chaos for society to continue.
And I like having some stability on the planet.
And also, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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And if you find these conversations valuable, we really, really need your help to flourish and to survive.
