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June 25, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

31:56

3008 An Introduction to Reality

A brief introduction to reality using a rational methodology. How does one use sense data to conceptualize reality? How is reason derived from evidence? What are concepts and how can we understand them? How do we understand ethics and morality? How does this apply to the world and culture?

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	Hi everybody, this is Devan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	So, given that we just blew past podcast 3000, I thought it'd be worthwhile circling back and going over some of the basics, sort of an introduction to what I'm up to here.
	Lo, these last 10 years, since 2005, I've been writing and recording my thoughts about philosophy and virtue and encouraging people to take philosophy out of the Platonic crowd and put it into their Aristotelian footprints and really bring it to life.
	In their lives and the response has been fantastic.
	I think I'm very happy and very proud and thank you everyone so much for supporting and sharing the show.
	It really means the world to me.
	I think it means the world to others.
	We've had well over 100 million downloads in the time that we've started, and we've had thousands and thousands of parents and families who've decided to stop using aggression against their children.
	Thank you so much.
	And many people rescued from military service and are taken out of the other enforcement classes, which can be a challenge for virtue and happiness.
	We've had a couple of marriages come out of the show, many long-term relationships, and some children.
	We breed.
	That's really what I'm saying.
	Basically, this is a massive aphrodisiac.
	I wanted to go over some of the basics.
	I have recorded some years back a long introduction to philosophy, like a 17-part series.
	You're welcome to peruse that.
	If you want, you can get that here on YouTube at Freedom Aid Radio, or you can go to FDRpodcast.com and get it there.
	But I wanted to do just something really, really brief.
	And, of course, to remind you that, you know, if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of listeners to this show...
	Thank you so much.
	Please help to share.
	Please help to support the show.
	And we're not asking you for 10% of your income, but freedomainradio.com slash donate to help support and grow the show.
	We have a team of researchers.
	We have, of course, server costs, other kinds of overhead, technical overhead.
	It's quite a chunk of change to run a show of this magnitude, and your support is really the only reason why it's happening.
	So, philosophy.
	Well...
	Philosophy is really around conceptualizing reality.
	So there's a reality out there which comes to you through your sense data, through your five senses.
	And we've got a little guy here.
	Oh, look!
	He looks at a bird.
	The bluebird of happiness, perhaps.
	And he, of course, gets the data.
	Through his eyes, he can touch the bird if he can catch it and smell the bird and so on.
	And in his mind, he then uses philosophy to extract conceptual principles to find ways of identifying the same bird without having seen it.
	The exact same one without having seen it already.
	You can go further and abstract from sense data so that you can say, ah, birds, yes, yes.
	Well, in general, they can fly, they're warm-blooded, they have feathers, scaly legs, they lay eggs, they have hollow bones, they have beaks, no teeth, and so on.
	So you can begin to define that which is a bird.
	And that is really the essence of philosophy.
	So, why do we use reason?
	Well, because sense data does not contradict itself.
	I mean, we may make mistakes, like you think you see a mirage in the desert, but it's actually just light waves bouncing between differently heated layers of the atmosphere.
	So, if you think, oh, that's a lake, and you go and try and dive into it, and it's just sand and all that, then you know that your eyes have, your interpretation of your eye data has made a mistake.
	So, matter behaves in consistent and universal ways.
	So, um, Fundamentally, because there are atoms and universal laws of physics, matter behaves, at least at the sense data level, I know things get kind of freaky down at the quantum level, but that's really for the philosophy of science, not for the philosophy of life and ethics.
	Reason is derived from the consistent behavior of ethics.
	We can talk about Aristotle's three laws of logic, which are largely derived from the stable properties of things in the world.
	You know, trees don't morph into elephants, don't morph into rainbows, don't morph into feminists and all that kind of stuff.
	So that's an important aspect.
	We get reason because reality is consistent and makes sense.
	The evidence is provided through the senses.
	Of course, we all recognize that individual senses, or rather our interpretation of them, can go hinky, let's say.
	So where sense evidence seems irrational or incomplete, other senses, you know, like if you see a pencil in a...
	Clear cup of water.
	It looks like it does a dogleg.
	It looks like it sort of flips a bit.
	And you just, but you run your finger down, you realize it doesn't.
	So you check out with your other senses.
	You can look at instrumentation, right?
	Subjective name for wavelength is color.
	The objective is the numerical value of the wavelength.
	You can ask other people, do you see that?
	You know, Ella, a beautiful mind style.
	And of course, you can use reason to figure out things.
	So, in contradictions between what's in your mind, your hypothesis, oh, that's a lake, and evidence, no, it's just a pile of sand in the desert, evidence always wins.
	Evidence always trumps error, error within the mind, right?
	The mind is capable of error, reality is not.
	The senses may get hinky, but you can always find ways to correct or validate them.
	So, whatever's in your mind must always bow to That which is outside in the world through evidence.
	So concepts exist in the mind and are imperfectly derived from empirical reality.
	And I'm sorry for the slightly technical talk, but it means that they're imperfect insofar as if there's a contradiction between the concept and that which it describes, then it is the concept which must always be adjusted.
	So think of the thing as a shadow Sorry, the thing as a statue, right?
	Something itself that we're talking about.
	Think of the thing itself as a statue and the concept as the shadow, right?
	You don't try and adjust the shadow.
	You simply have to move.
	If you want to move the shadow, you have to move the thing itself.
	So concepts of the shadows cast by things in the world in the mind and must always follow the things in the world.
	The mind is capable of error, of course, and is correctable by reason and by evidence.
	And the reason for that, error doesn't occur just within the mind, like there's nothing that's erroneous about a dream that I had last night about a flying elephant or something.
	There's nothing erroneous about that because the dream is a purely internal state, daydreaming or fantasizing or whatever.
	But whenever I make a truth statement about that which is out there in the world, then I'm capable of error because I say this is true, this is universal, trees can run.
	And since trees can't run, my concept which is trying to describe something in the real world and fails, the concept or the argument or the hypothesis or the proposition is erroneous.
	So, Contradictory concepts are invalid.
	This comes down to things like a square circle.
	That's invalid.
	You can't have contradictory concepts.
	The reason being that concepts are supposed to describe things in the world and contradictions in objects cannot exist in the world.
	Something cannot be both a banana tree and Freddie Mercury at the same time.
	Universal concepts, if I say this is universal, well it can't contain an exception or An opposite.
	This is really important, and this has something to do with, a lot to do with politics and with ethics.
	So let's say I'm going to say, look, here are four trees, tree one, tree two, tree three, and then this flat looks like a salamander murder outline.
	So I can't say this is four trees.
	Because trees is, you know, what's shown there, the thing with the trunk and the leaves and the roots and all that kind of stuff, and the two-dimensional lizard icon is not a tree.
	So if I'm going to say these are four trees, it cannot include an exception or an opposite, right?
	A piece of a brick cannot be the opposite of a brick, otherwise it's something else.
	So, with ethics, this is a real sprint, and if you want more, I've got a whole Introduction to Philosophy series on YouTube, like 17 videos, and you can get this at fdrpodcasts.com if you want to get the audio.
	Human choice is virtually infinite, so anything we do in any moment is chosen from an infinity of options.
	Like, I'm currently doing this audio and video presentation.
	I could be doing cartwheels.
	I could be digging lint out of my belly button with an awl.
	I could be going for a hair transplant.
	Could be any number of things, but no, I'm doing this.
	So this must be what I prefer to do relative to everything else.
	Now, as I argue in a three-part series, which you can find here, of course, at FDRpodcast.com, called Free Will, human beings have the capacity to compare proposed actions to a universal or ideal standard.
	So, this is pretty unique, as far as I understand it, among us as a species.
	We have the capacity to compare proposed actions to universal or ideal standard.
	Now, I've got a free book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics you can get at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	And so I define ethics as universally preferable behavior.
	Now, it's not preferred behavior because people can not do what is ethical.
	Obviously, if ethics were involuntary, we wouldn't need a system to encourage people to be ethical, right?
	I mean, and so we don't need a system to encourage people to obey the law of gravity because that's not really up to us.
	It's not a choice.
	It's just an automatic response to the laws of physics.
	So, I define universally preferable behavior, and as I talk about in the book, and there's a number of presentations here on this channel and, of course, on the podcast about this, you can't oppose UPP. Like, if you say, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, then you're saying it's wrong to propose universally preferable behavior.
	In other words, it's universally preferable behavior.
	Everyone must always and forever oppose that which is false.
	So it's universally preferable behavior to oppose universally preferable behavior.
	You can't get around it.
	The moment you start arguing with someone and say, those universals are false and you should stop believing them, then you're imposing a standard called truth is better than falsehood, correction is better than leaving someone alone, and so on.
	So you see these all over the place.
	In philosophy, there's self-detonating statements.
	But...
	Nothing is absolute.
	Well, is that an absolute?
	Of course it is.
	There is no such thing as truth.
	Is that a true statement?
	Well, then there must be at least one.
	How do I know you exist?
	Well, one hint would be you're asking me that question.
	And as I've talked about recently, your argument for property is invalid.
	In other words, you can't create things that are the responsibility of your actions, except for your argument, which is you've created, which is the responsibility of your actions, and so on and so on.
	So, ethics is, I'm going to argue, a very core part of philosophy, something we've talked about here.
	So, how does UPB deal with something like stealing?
	Well, let's say that you create a moral standard, a moral proposition, universally preferable behavior, called stealing is universally preferable behavior.
	Everyone must and should always be stealing everything all the time, no matter what.
	Well, so let's look at this tablet-y icon.
	Let's say that I found an icon that doesn't look wildly dissimilar for me if I'd pulled a Walden and spent two years in the bush.
	And I've got a tablet.
	And let's say I'm putting out the Anita Sarkeesian bat signal and we have this Fetishized character of infinite spandex.
	And I say, everyone should steal everything all the time.
	Stealing is universally preferable behavior.
	So, of course, she uses some sort of estrogen sticky web, pulls the tablet out of my hand, and lo and behold, she's got the tablet.
	So she has stolen, so she has done the right thing.
	If stealing It's universally preferable behavior.
	However, she hasn't stolen from me because I want her to steal from me because stealing is universally preferable behavior.
	So I want her to steal the tablet from me.
	But if I want her to steal the tablet from me, then it's not stealing.
	Like if I put an old washing machine out on the front yard and someone says, take me, someone picks it up, I can't charge them for stealing because I want them to take it away.
	I've got a sign there that says, take me.
	So if you want someone to take your property, it's not theft.
	And this is how we know stealing It can't be universalized because stealing is only stealing if I don't want you to take my property, right?
	So stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	It's simply not possible.
	Same thing with assault.
	Because if I go to a boxing ring and I'm punching back and forth with someone, then we're both in there voluntarily.
	We're both accepting the necessity of, or the possibility of injuries and so on.
	So that's not, you can't charge someone with assault if you're in a boxing ring with them.
	Assault can't be UPB because it must be unwanted in order for it to be assault.
	Same thing with murder and rape.
	Rape is a sexual assault you don't want, right?
	If you do want it, it's maybe kinky, but it's still voluntary lovemaking.
	And so, if one person has to, like, not want something, and then in order for the other person to achieve it, like stealing or rape or theft or assault, then it can't be universalized, because one person doesn't want it, the other person does want it, and therefore they're not both in the same category of UPB. So as a very rough way of starting it, universally preferable behavior or secular ethics is something, actions that can be achieved by two people in a room at the same time.
	You think Bob and Doug or whatever.
	And this leads us to, and you find out more about this in my free book, the non-aggression principle or the NAP. Thou shalt not initiate force against thy fellow man.
	Force used in self-defense is valid, but you cannot initiate the use of force against others.
	Also, ethics should really pass the coma test.
	It's hard to say that a man in a coma is immoral, and therefore it must be positive actions that are foundational to ethics, not the mere absence of doing something.
	And people have tried six million different ways to try and break this, which I hugely respect, but it has stood firm.
	So people have said, well, what if I say about UPB, no fish on Fridays?
	Does that pass the test?
	Well, no, because universality is not day-specific.
	The universe does not radically alter or reverse itself at 12 a.m.
	Thursday night or 12 p.m.
	Friday night.
	Putting Fridays in as one day out of seven is not valid.
	It breaks universality because...
	There is no fundamental difference between one day and the next in terms of universal rules, ethics, and so on.
	So again, tons of different objections which I've had in call-in shows and debates over the years, but the principle has held.
	So where does this leave us in terms of politics?
	Well, remember we talked about how concepts are imperfectly derived from instances.
	There's a bunch of trees.
	I've got to come up with a concept called tree, but the concept is the shadow cast by the actual trees.
	It can't be something different than what it's describing.
	No collective concept can contradict the individual properties it claims to universalize.
	No collective concept can contradict the individual properties it claims to universalize.
	So if I say, this tree is alive, this tree is alive, this tree is alive, this tree is alive, but the concept of trees describes that which is not alive and never was.
	Then that's a problem.
	Because I'm saying, I've got this concept called trees that describes all these trees.
	Here are the properties of each individual tree, but the concept or the aggregate does something completely opposite.
	That is literally like saying, you know, there's a statue of a man holding up a sword, but the shadow should be that of a dragon.
	Doesn't make any sense.
	So you can't just toss a lizard in the concept tree, as we talked about.
	So aggregates cannot contradict instances or the properties of them.
	And it doesn't matter how many instances you gather together, you can't just bingo, bango, bongo, pull a switcheroo and reverse things.
	So if we say, well, lizards are cold-blooded, you know, one lizard is cold-blooded, two lizards are cold-blooded, a thousand lizards, well, they all suddenly become warm-blooded.
	Or every lizard after a thousand becomes warm-blooded, but all the lizards before a thousand remain cold-blooded.
	If you proposed that to a biology conference, they'd take you away in some self-hugging suits to a very comfy room where you couldn't hurt yourself.
	Now, society is a collective concept, and thus, collective concepts cannot contradict any individual characteristics.
	So, society as a collective concept cannot contradict any individual characteristics of people.
	This is really important, right?
	So we talk about social contract or, you know, the aggregate has some different properties or characteristics or ethical standards from individuals.
	It can't happen.
	You cannot have an aggregation of people with different moral properties and qualities than each individual person.
	You simply can't do it.
	It's absolutely illogical.
	I'm not saying it's not prevalent.
	I'm just saying it's absolutely illogical.
	Now, concepts are things in the mind.
	Insubstantial, imperfectly derived from instances, universalizations within the mind.
	Concepts cannot act.
	Concepts have no moral qualities.
	Even if they describe moral qualities, they themselves do not have moral qualities.
	If I say a pie has a thousand calories, My words do not have a thousand calories.
	The concept pie does not have a thousand calories.
	You don't gain a thousand calories from hearing my sentence, right?
	I'm simply describing something which is, but that which I'm describing is not contained within the words or the language or the ideas that are used to describe it.
	And so concepts cannot contain implicit contracts because individuals cannot contain implicit contracts.
	And so concepts Can't have exactly the same qualities as that which they describe.
	Otherwise, they'd be just another instance of that which they describe.
	Another piece of cheesecake has similar properties to the first piece of cheesecake.
	The concept cheesecake does not make you fat.
	So you can't eat the concept food.
	You can't spend the concept of money.
	And this is very important.
	So the non-aggression principle is universal.
	And as a universally preferable behavior, as a definition or characteristic, Or property of human beings, it can't be reversed by aggregates.
	You can't just pile a whole bunch of people together and say, aha, opposite moral qualities, any more than you can pile a whole bunch of lizards together and say, aha, warm-blooded.
	So, the NAP, the Non-Regression Principle, is universal, cannot be reversed by aggregates, and cannot contain opposite categories describing the same instances of people.
	I can't say, these are all desserts.
	And a bag of rocks.
	I just wouldn't take the bag of rocks out or change your definition.
	So let's look at democracy and government.
	So individuals cannot morally initiate the use of violence.
	I can't go to my neighbors and say, well, my kid needs some money for her education, and here's a gun, and here's my gun, give me some money.
	I can't initiate the use of violence.
	It's illegal for individuals.
	But when you put them all together, somehow it becomes moral to have laws that initiate the use of violence.
	Laws against drugs, gambling, prostitution, alternative currencies, I mean, you name it.
	And this is completely invalid.
	Because you're saying individuals, individual people, cannot initiate the use of force.
	Aha!
	But if you put enough of them together, get them to sing the same song, and get them to have the same flag, suddenly, poof, wow!
	Oh, magic!
	Suddenly they can have opposite qualities.
	A group of individuals can have opposite qualities to each individual within that group.
	Can't happen.
	Or we have a category within society called government.
	And government, of course, is merely composed of people, and there's a conceptual label around those people called government.
	But individuals cannot initiate the use of force, and we've already talked about no concept can contradict that which it describes.
	And so, if individuals can't initiate the use of force in a moral manner, and the government is composed of individuals, then the government cannot morally initiate the use of force, which is why I am a voluntress.
	It's not the easiest thing to be, it's just one of these things that follows logically and really can't be evaded or escaped.
	So, to visualize this, I'm a physicist.
	Let's say, pretend I'm a physicist.
	I've got a hundred rocks and I say, a rock falls down.
	So a rock falls down.
	They're all fundamentally the same, these rocks.
	One rock falls down.
	Fifty rocks fall down.
	Fifty-one rocks, aha, they're all fall up.
	So let's do these.
	One rock, two rocks, I'm not going to go all the way up to fifty, but a bunch of rocks falling down on the screen.
	They're all falling down.
	Each individual rock falls down.
	But then I say something quite different.
	Well, you see, after fifty-one, all the rocks fall upwards instead of down.
	Again, if you propose this to a physics conference, there would be a long pause and then they would accuse you of being an arts major.
	So, within the realm of logic, right, this is a biological example, we've got a big, big ball here, a category called mammals, which are warm-blooded.
	Can I then create a subset of warm-blooded creatures called lizards, which are cold-blooded?
	No.
	Of course not.
	I mean, I can have a category called animals, and there could be two blobs here called lizards and mammals, but I cannot include cold-blooded as a subset of warm-blooded creatures.
	Again, all you have to do is think about writing the proposal saying, I'd really love to come and talk about this at your next biology conference, and they'd say, we'd actually really like it if you didn't, and don't contact us again, because you're crazy.
	So let's look at democracy.
	So, there's a group of people as a whole, and some of them are a minority, and some of them are a majority.
	And the majority can vote for the legalization of the initiation of the use of force according to the agents that are used by the agents of the government.
	So, we have all people, human beings cannot initiate the use of force, but there's a set of human beings, and it doesn't matter if it's a superset or a subset, it doesn't matter if it's 49 or 51, What that means is that we have a subset of human beings.
	No human being can initiate the use of force, but there's a subset of human beings called the majority in a democracy, which can legitimately vote for and it can be moral for them to initiate the use of force.
	This is absolutely irrational.
	Or, to put it another way, there's the people as a whole, and they are subject to the non-aggression principle, can't initiate the use of force.
	Then there's a subset of people which we label government, who have...
	The aggression principle.
	They can initiate the use of force.
	They can raise your taxes.
	They can borrow on your behalf.
	They can pass laws that initiate force against peaceful citizens engaged in peaceful trade.
	And so, again, here we have a giant logical fail because a concept called human beings cannot contain opposing subsets.
	And so, it doesn't work.
	It doesn't work at all.
	What does reason have to do with all of this?
	Well, of course, the goal of medicine, we could sort of argue, in very general terms, is the spread of health.
	The goal of science is the spread of material truths, truths about matter.
	The goal of philosophy, I would argue, is the spread of virtue.
	It doesn't mean philosophy is not interested in science or medicine.
	In fact, the scientific method is derived from Aristotelian philosophy and, of course, Baconian execution.
	But this is the spread of virtue, because that's the one thing that is different With regards to philosophy, I suppose, every other thing.
	The goal of science is not necessarily to spread virtue.
	I mean, if I say gases expand when heated, are you a better or worse person?
	Well, you're more knowledgeable, I suppose.
	You can do things more intelligently with regards to gases, but you've not become a better or worse person.
	The one thing that is singular to philosophy is the spread of virtue.
	Again, that doesn't mean that's the only thing philosophy deals with.
	I would say that's the one thing that separates it.
	It's the essence, as Aristotle would say, that separates it from other mental disciplines.
	Now, for over 2,500 years since the days of the pre-Socratics, philosophers have tried to spread rational virtues.
	As Nietzsche termed Socrates' argument, reason leads to virtue leads to happiness.
	And philosophers have often viewed evil as a kind of ignorance.
	While you've just got bad thinking, well, correct your thinking, you'll become a better person.
	Philosophers have tried to spread rational virtues for two and a half thousand years.
	And what have we got?
	Out of that giant mammoth project.
	Just look at the progress of science over the past couple of hundred years.
	Over the past ten years.
	Over the past ten minutes.
	Look at the progress of medicine over the last few hundred years.
	I mean, up until the 19th century, you generally got sicker by going to see a doctor.
	Look at the progress of medicine over the past 50 years.
	Look at the progress in just about any field, computers, any field in the free market.
	Look at what has happened to wealth over the past 100 years.
	It's gone up dozens of times in most of the free market countries.
	So if you look at and compare the progress of all non-philosophical, rational, and empirical mental disciplines, it's been stellar.
	What do we get after 2,500 years of philosophy?
	Well, even outside of wars, this is called democide, governments murdered over a quarter of a billion people, 250 million people plus, just in the 20th century alone.
	That's not very good as far as human progress.
	And so we have this general pattern and paradigm where there's statism and religion, and they're both irrational belief systems which create exclusions to universal ethics.
	And some people call them priests or deities, and some people call them governments and police and so on.
	And there's this terrible seesaw, right?
	So in general, as religion goes down, statism goes up.
	So you get the extremes of atheist communism with massive amounts of government.
	And then when government goes down, sometimes religion goes up, which is sort of the republican paradigm of smaller government and greater faith.
	So, reason has been, in many fields of human endeavours, spectacularly successful, a combination of reason and evidence.
	Engineering.
	However, in the realm of ethics, it is tragically not working.
	And there have been some levels of progress, but they always tend to go too far.
	So, that is a very brief overview into the approach to truth, evidence, reason, and virtue that I've taken in this show for close to the last 10 years.
	The big problem, of course, is that reason and evidence are necessary to improve the human condition.
	But, as many studies have shown, people are incredibly resistant to reason and evidence.
	If you have fixed irrational beliefs, in other words, if you're like most people in the world and like myself before I subjected myself to the joyful and exciting rigors of philosophical inquiry, if you have fixed and irrational opinions, arguments against those positions can not only and are often not only just dismissed out of hand, but...
	Arguments counter to your irrational position generally tend to strengthen your irrational position.
	It's like, we need to take this walled city, but every time we try to attack it, the walls get thicker, stronger, and higher as a result of our attack.
	You know, it's like those comic book characters, you shoot at them and they absorb your energy and get bigger.
	Well, this is how it is with people and reason and evidence.
	You bring reason and evidence to them, and you're actually making them worse.
	You're making them more irrational.
	You're making them more hostile to reason and evidence.
	This is the terrible paradox which we've all faced when trying to reason people into better thinking or...
	Thinking.
	It's really, really hard.
	And there's no particular solution to this horrible paradox.
	You can't reason with children because if their parents are irrational, you're setting the children at odds with their parents.
	The parents won't like that.
	That's why you don't get any real values taught or rational values taught in government schools.
	So you can't reason with children.
	But by the time children grow up, they're usually so messed up from being exposed to the constant irrationalities of parents and preachers and teachers and so on.
	Not all, but a lot.
	By the time they grow up, they now reject reasons.
	You can't reason with those you could save, and by the time you could save them, they're absolutely hostile to reason.
	You can't give the medicine to people it could cure.
	By the time you can give them the medicine, they can't be cured.
	This is just a horrible paradox and the reason why philosophy is so slow to advance and to progress.
	A new cell phone, everybody charges towards it because it's just benefits and very few costs, but when you try to improve the moral condition of the species, huge costs and the benefits tend to be further down the road, and some may not even live to see them.
	So that's why it's so hard to improve the moral status of mankind.
	And so, again, just to reiterate, you've got a pill that can cure an illness.
	You can't give it to those before they get really sick.
	And by the time they get really sick, they think that you're ill, they're healthy, and the pill is going to make them sick.
	And so that's the big challenge.
	And just about everything that I've done in this show...
	has been an attempt to try and solve that problem, from skepticism towards feminism, from female responsibility, the voluntary family being against child abuse, getting experts on to talk about the values of voluntarism in the political sphere, the economic sphere, the familial sphere, the relationship sphere, talking about honesty in relationships, encouraging people to find other honest people to settle down with, and against circumcision, facts against spanking.
	These are all designed to improve The environment which grows human beings capable of reasoning.
	That is why I say it has to be a multi-generational change.
	When reason makes people crazier, you have to grow saner people so that reason has a place to land and expand.
	So that's really the big secret, if it's really a secret.
	I've talked about it many times before.
	It's not bad to have it in one place.
	But that's why I promote volunteerism and virtue and honesty and curiosity and vulnerability, because that is how we create familial and social environments that raise children who can reason, who welcome and embrace reason.
	They've not been circumcised, they've not been yelled at, they've not been beaten, they've not been spanked, they've not been punished, they've not been terrorized, they've not been told they're going to hell for this, that and the other.
	And when you don't have the capacity to violently aggress against children, you have to find ways to reason with them.
	And when you do that, when they become adults, they will value and listen to reason and evidence.
	There's no other way to do it that I've ever found.
	If you can think of one, please let me know.
	This is Devan Mullaney for Freedom Maine Radio.
	Have yourself a wonderful day.
	And remember, please, if you support this show, if you support this message, if you support tens or hundreds of thousands of people giving up aggression against each other and against Children and through the state, if you support the spread of that message, we've had over 100 million show downloads.
	We'd like to go to a billion.
	We'd like to go to more.
	But we can only do it with your help and support.
	We're not a religion.
	I'm not asking you for 10% of your income.
	But if you could sign up for a monthly subscription, we will use your money to further spread the values and virtues of rational philosophy, the only hope and salvation of our species.

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