All Episodes
Previous Next
July 17, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:02:25
3026 Reincarnated Tumblr Dragon People - Call In Show - July 15th, 2015
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So, hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux, Free Domain Radio.
Listen, I mean, if you've been listening for a while, like you've been waiting for a while to come on the show tonight, I really want to apologize, because it's probably going to be bad.
Mike, how's your energy?
I've completely burnt myself out this week.
Mike, come on.
It's been 15 days and only 11 giant presentations.
Yeah.
Well, who knew that, you know, China and Puerto Rico and stuff with the Euro and it's all going to happen at the same time?
So I'm afraid we've expended our energy on our slutty mistress, the YouTube viewers, and we have none left for our faithful, devoted wives called the Colin Showcaller.
So I'd like to apologize in advance, and I don't think there's any way around it.
It's going to suck, but hopefully it won't suck, like, really badly.
Boy, that's inspiring.
Well, honesty is the first virtue.
That's really all I can sort of point out is that...
I don't know.
Sorry, what were you talking about?
Oh, dear.
Oh, dear.
Well, I'm well caffeinated, so I'll pick up the slack.
All right.
I can't do any more caffeine because I'm basically...
Oh, no, the caffeine overload point.
Oh, I've been there.
The arc of the show, like the apogee of the show has been reached because at this point I'm simply peeing good old Colombian into a cup, adding a smidge of cream and recycling because that's basically where I'm at biologically.
Oh, dear.
We did say we were going to pump you full of caffeine for the Euro presentation, which everyone should check out, by the way.
Just got that one out.
Yes, and to our French listener...
I'm sorry.
Who's actually the first caller for today.
We were just talking if we had any French listeners which would be offended by our horrible French accent within the context of the Euro show.
I appreciate you attempting to take the bullet, but I think everyone knows where that comes from.
For a man with the last name of Molyneux.
Alright.
Well, our first name is Tiago.
And Tiago wrote in and said...
What?
The French guy, Tiago?
Are you sure you've got this?
Did you immigrate, Tiago?
I don't know.
My mother is Brazilian and my father was French, so it's a bit of a mix of...
More goddamn French raping of South and Central America.
You know, if it's not the Spaniards...
Anyway.
Low quality, remember?
Well, welcome, Diego.
I'm sorry that you came on a burnout night.
So, please reassemble this show to approximate something helpful in the future.
We'll give you the raw file.
I'll try it.
Alright, well, Tiago wrote in and said, But the exam in France used to be like a real diploma, as in you could get a job out of it.
Now it's become more of a rite of passage and has no valor.
So the question that's been asked regularly in France is simply, is it worth it?
Student spends many days at the library.
The stress that accompanies the exams is massive because if you fail, you have to redo the whole year and risk failing again.
However, for some, the exam is supposed to be about something that teaches the student things that are essential for their lives, notably philosophy, where you have to learn about the 22 chapters, about consciousness, about perception, time, existence, desire, art, language, technique, history, religion, the list goes on.
It also teaches a student about the most important philosophers.
So the question is, in education, what should be considered harsh or too difficult, and what should be considered necessary?
Well, hang on a sec.
First of all, they teach them a lot about philosophy, do they?
That's the idea behind...
Not the foundation of the euro or economic policy, but that's...
No, do they say taxation is theft?
Do they ever deal with anything like that?
Or is it all like, what is time?
If I push a galatoire up my nose and it comes out of my ass, have we moved backwards in time?
Is it just French bullshit?
Or is it actual practical philosophy of value?
Is it like fiat currency is predatory counterfeiting?
Is it anything like that?
Or is it basically just time and life?
Okay, so the Americans are magazines, but to us they are...
Anyway.
I mean, it depends on the teacher.
They all teach something different.
My teacher was pretty good, but I know some teachers will go for a kind of...
It depends, really.
I mean, sometimes it's either they teach you what's necessary to get the baccalaureate or they teach you philosophy and then you have to Yeah, you do whatever it needs to be done to have the baccalaureate.
But even in philosophy, is it right that they're teaching different things?
What do you mean?
Well, so I sort of asked what philosophy do they teach and you said they teach different things.
Oh, sorry.
So, yeah.
I mean, for instance, at first they teach us, for an example, of course, Marx.
And we were taught about his ideology, but then when you go further in the philosophy, a few months after, you realize Marx's ideology is a real philosophy since it's determinism and thus it doesn't really live for You know,
freedom, since you're not free because you're determined by your social economic background.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's what most people who labored in Stalin's concentration camps felt, that they were somehow deterministically unfree.
It could be that.
It also could be the guy with the machine gun who shot them if they tried to escape, which seems a little bit less philosophy and a little bit more hot lead.
And plus, of course, Marxism has been so ridiculously disproven by events that to teach it as a philosophy is like teaching astrology instead of astronomy.
I mean, it's just...
The idea of teaching Marxism these days as anything other than a failed religion is incomprehensible to anybody with half a brain, but...
So, you learned Marx.
What else did you learn?
Well, Descartes, of course.
And we saw that Descartes was a bit opposed with empirism.
And that's how you see how the French think and the British think.
And that's how the French society is determined by Descartes.
We think like Descartes and the British people are empirists.
Yeah, some more human, some of the more practical, some of the Scottish philosophers, some of the more practical philosophers.
So empiricism and sense data versus gymnastically sticking your head up your own ass and trying to find out if there's a sparring.
Theory is not so bad.
I'm sorry?
You just have to mix.
Then we learn that, yeah, you can mix...
The practical part and the theory and it's way better than just saying yeah in theory it works or in practically it works like you have to mix up and I forgot which philosopher did that but yeah because I forgot most of what I learned that sucks.
Now the philosophy that you learned does any of it inform your daily life or your choices?
I mean Honestly, at first, I thought, yeah, I mean, before starting philosophy, I thought, oh, it's going to be great, I'm going to learn a lot of things.
Then when I started, it's like, oh, so we're just being taught how to pass the exam.
But at the end of the year, you can see how the ideas are conflicting, and it's really useful in the end.
Oh, okay, so what did you learn in the philosophy class that you find useful in your life?
So, good question.
It's a British question, I'm afraid.
I'm looking for empirical evidence for the value of what you study, but go ahead.
For instance, Sartre with existentialism and how he speaks about your responsibilities, how you're responsible for everything you're doing and you're not You can't blame someone else for what you did and there's no way to escape what you did.
I mean, it's not 100% true, of course, but it's really useful because sometimes people just make up excuses and you realize that even you have made up excuses for yourself because in the end, maybe if there was some things that have happened,
in the end, you made the decision and it's only you that is That's responsible for these decisions.
Not anyone else.
How do they square that with the determinism of Marx?
Well, yeah.
It shows that Like, pick one, right?
I mean, either economically determined or you're 100% responsible for everything you do.
I love the French too.
It's like, can we get maybe a 70-30?
No!
No!
100!
Oh, zero!
There is nothing in me!
Like, come on, what are you, Germans?
So, I just, like, how do they square this?
You are responsible for everything you do with the class determinism of Marx.
I mean, that's actually funny because I've read...
A bit about Sartre, and it's really strange because when Sartre was alive, he wanted to get close to the PCF, Parti Communiste Francais, so the Communists in France, and people in the PCF didn't like him because, well, in the PCF everyone is a Marxist, and his existence isn't...
In his book, he tries to explain how, yeah, okay, existentialism is about responsibility, but it doesn't conflict with Marxism.
And then a few years later...
Wait, was that his argument?
He just...
Yeah, like...
This complete opposite idea, just, you know, it doesn't conflict.
And then a few years later...
These are not the droids you're looking for.
It's just strange.
Yeah, exactly.
And then a few years later, when the USSR started to collapse...
Of course, he died before it collapsed.
But he just said, you know what?
Fuck Marxism.
It's shit.
Because it's a determinism and it means that you're not responsible for what you're doing.
So yeah, in the end, he says...
At first, he thought he could kind of fuse existentialism and Marxism.
I think he just wanted to be close to the communists.
I don't know why he would do that.
Because were they the cool kids?
At the time, probably.
Okay, so the existential argument that existence precedes essence, that you are 100% responsible for all of your choices without any prior influence, is obviously not valid.
People may have believed that in the past if they believed in the soul.
And if I remember my sartre correctly, that was not his stance.
He's not a Catholic or anything.
Where you could say, well, you have a direct communion with God and there's an essence to your identity that is untouched by material experience.
Because you have this eternal soul which cannot be harmed, which cannot be fundamentally changed.
But when you rely on a material brain, your material brain can be fundamentally changed by experience, not just in terms of its configuration, but in terms of its genetics, right?
I mean, people talking about sort of human nature and consciousness in the 1960s are like people talking about cosmology during the Dark Ages.
They just didn't have the information that we have now about genetics and epigenetics and the brain structure and all the stuff I've got in Bomb and the Brain and in the Gene Wars series and so on.
So, the idea that we're like 100% free of any kind of influence is obviously completely false.
And of course, he's trying to influence other people.
This is what's so funny, right?
We are not subject to any...
Any outside influences?
I hope you'll believe this.
That's an outside influence to change your mind.
I mean, if you're writing books, then you're trying to influence people's minds, influence people's thinking, and then saying we are independent of our influences is just kind of contradictory.
And so going from like the 0% to the 100% in the Marxist situation is, well, it's all just kind of Silly, right?
And so I'm trying to sort of figure out, you know, okay, so he says be more responsible.
I guess that's not really philosophy.
You can cram that into a fortune cookie, right?
It's not really philosophy, but if he says be more responsible, okay, great.
Push the limits of personal responsibility.
I think that's a good thing to do to find out where the end might be.
But what else have you got that you got from the philosophy that you studied that has some practical value?
Subjective views and objective views that you can't be 100% objective and you can't be totally subjective.
I mean, maybe you could be totally subjective, but not objectively.
You can't be 100% subjective, which is weird.
And we learned that with history, as in...
No, no, hang on, hang on.
We can't go from subjective, objective to history.
So when you say you can't be 100% subjective, okay, if you were, you'd be speaking in a language nobody could understand, right?
Some weird thing that twins would make up with each other when they're in the crib.
And the idea of being 100% objective also wouldn't make any sense at all.
But can certain statements you make be 100% subjective?
You know, I dreamt about an elephant last night.
Or can certain statements you make be 100% objective if you point at an elephant and say, look, that's an elephant.
That is like an objective and true statement.
So saying, this is the 100%, you know, this is the extremes, right?
Philosophy loves to mess around with the extremes and claim that it's doing something deep, but it's simply stating the self-evident that four-year-olds can usually understand.
But in the philosophy that you studied, was it acceptable to say that you could say some things that were true and objective, and you could say some things that were subjective, and In other words, it wasn't everything about you 100% subjective or objective, but statements that you could make would be one or the other.
Was that what you got, or was it something else?
As in, it's more objective than subjective?
Like, I make that as assumptions due to reality, and so it cannot be subjective.
Okay, but if I say I like jazz, I'm speaking about a subjective preference, right?
Yeah.
Whereas if I say jazz is music, then I'm speaking about an objective categorization, right?
Yeah, that's the thing with philosophy.
You can always find a backdoor to something.
I mean, jazz is music, but hey, maybe jazz isn't music.
Like, oh, the Nazis, they thought that jazz wasn't a music at all.
So, you know, it's...
No, no.
The Nazis didn't think that jazz wasn't music.
They just thought it was degenerative music.
Like, when they looked at the art of the Weimar Republic, they didn't say it wasn't art.
They'd say it was degenerative art.
It was nasty, evil, Jewish art, right?
But I don't think they'd say, we have to eradicate this dust storm called jazz, right?
I mean, they'd know that it wasn't a cloud or elephant dung, that it was music.
And they may have violently disliked it, of course, as they did.
But they wouldn't say it wasn't music.
They just said it wasn't elevated, square-jawed Aryan, triumphal march into Poland music, right?
Well, yeah.
If I take another example, at some point, when we found statues in Africa, no one thought it was actually art, because people thought, yeah, art, that's what is made in Europe, right?
Because you can't make art and that's African statues, From the tribes and stuff, that can't be art.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I've never heard this before in my life.
I remember growing up, and I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just expressing my surprise, because when I was a kid, we were introduced to cave art, right?
A cave art from tens of thousands of years ago.
You know, the guys, they, I don't know, use some sort of animal pigment or dye, and they were daubed.
Guys running after buffalo or running after elephants or whatever.
And cave art was 10,000 years or more old.
And that was called art, so I don't know how African statues would be excluded from that.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, at some point, we decided, yeah, art can be from Africa, but at some point, we were just thinking that...
I think it was before the...
No...
17th century, we didn't think that there could be art in Africa.
Well, hang on, hang on.
Like, no art at all?
No, I mean, you know, like, what people didn't consider art, they considered it like something of a tradition and that is not contemplative.
Like a craft of something, right?
Hmm?
Like a craft or something, right?
I mean, I will certainly say that a lot of the arts that I've seen in Africa could just be my Western sensibilities.
It's pretty ghastly.
We had these African masks hanging in my In my little apartment where I grew up, we had these African masks hanging on the wall.
They always gave me the bejeebies.
You know, grotesque.
It's like the native Canadian totem poles and stuff.
It's pretty horrible stuff.
And again, that just could be culturally relative stuff.
But I can look at pictures of Japanese art and say, wow, there's some beautiful stuff there.
Netsuke.
There's some beautiful stuff there.
But when I look at some of the other art from what would be termed more primitive cultures...
You know, it's not exactly the Sistine Chapel, a lot of that stuff.
But, you know, it's still art.
It's just what I would consider a pretty rudimentary or primitive art.
Yeah.
Then, yeah.
Okay, so other than categorizing potential arts versus crafts, I'm looking for something practical you've got out of the philosophy.
Well, I thought the existentialism part was a bit interesting, but then...
There was the...
I forgot the name of the philosopher which said that there are...
I think it's Husserl or the teacher of Husserl.
I forgot his name.
He was German.
What?
Sorry, you said the teacher of someone.
Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it because Husserl, like H-U-S-S-E-H R, L. I don't know that at all.
I don't know the answer to that.
It's also about responsibility.
That's pretty much...
At some point, when you have a choice, you have...
In either way, there's two options.
In one way, you find excuses and you let yourself die, in a way.
Because you're not making a choice, you're not being proactive, you're not doing something that will get you out of a bad situation, for instance, and you're letting yourself die.
Or you can do something about it and fix yourself and do something proactive.
So, hang on.
So, in this, and I guess this is somewhat of a French formulation, but in this formulation, there can't be any excuses for things that go wrong, right?
Like, you can't make excuses, you can't cry circumstance, you can't cry self.
Like, there's no sympathy, right?
So, I mean, these guys must be totally harsh on, like, single moms.
They must be totally harsh on the poor, because the poor don't have any environmental circumstances that might lead them to have more difficult lives.
So they must be totally harsh on anybody who says that it's not...
I mean, the French philosophers must be going crazy On the Greeks at the moment, because the Greeks are saying, well, you know, there's this austerity and it's terrible and it's, you know, it's the banker's fault, it's not our fault, and so on.
Right?
So this 100% personal responsibility philosophy, these guys must be going crazy against single moms and the poor and all this kind of stuff, right?
And the Greeks and anybody who's not taking full responsibility for their choices.
I've never heard of that, but maybe I'm missing something.
Depends, because I forgot to say that, but For the baccalaureate, there's three different sections.
There's the scientific section, the economic and social section, and then there's the literary section.
The literary section has a huge philosophy subsection, and it has the most weight.
In the exam...
I'm not sure.
In the philosophy, there's a literary section.
No, the contrary.
Oh, in the literature, there's a philosophy section?
Yeah.
Like in scientific or economic or literary, there's philosophy, but the way is different.
For the literary, it's huge.
It has the most weight.
In the exam, so if you fail philosophy, you've pretty much failed everything else, unless you've succeeded in your speciality, which is something else.
Well, hang on, sorry.
I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I made a comment, and I feel like we're not...
We can choose not to answer it, but I feel like it's just sort of vanished.
And my comment was that if the French philosophy is 100% responsibility, then they must really rail against people who claim excuses.
Like single moms who say, well, it takes two to tang or the Greeks who are complaining about austerity or poor people who complain that they had a difficult start in life and so on.
So all of the French philosophers must be very critical of these groups.
And I've never heard of French philosophers being critical of these groups.
So I'm not sure what this supposed responsibility adds up to.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that would be why...
French have a huge welfare state, right?
And they have this huge, you can't fire people, you know?
It's like, if you're 100% responsible, then you get fired, then you're 100% responsible for getting fired, so why would you have to have laws to protect you?
It seems like this 100% responsibility thing doesn't translate into anything that's actionable or practical that would flow from those beliefs.
Well, the 100% responsibility was really mainly Sartre.
The one I stated was German, but I mean, we can see that it has its effects.
That would be why we hate our president.
Okay, but there must be some philosophers who follow existentialism in France, right?
Yeah, but most of the philosophers are either really bad or dead.
Or really unknown in France.
No, but even if they're bad, right?
100% personal responsibility would be you can't blame anyone else for your situation.
I can't blame my parents.
I can't blame society.
And also, boy, if they're really into 100% personal responsibility, they must really write a lot about how black people in America should just stop whining.
Because it's 100% personal.
You can't blame slavery.
You can't blame racism.
You can't blame, right?
100% personal responsibility.
Yet I've never heard of a single French philosopher doing that.
And that isn't like you have to be really great at your philosophy.
That's just like obvious.
Anytime anyone creates what they would term an excuse for some problems in their lives, these existential philosophers should be railing against that.
Yet they never seem to.
Well, that would be probably because right now the mood of the population is more on the left side, if you know what I mean.
Oh, I know what you mean.
And first of all, philosophers should not give two shits for the mood of the population.
The mood of the population, that's the enemy of a philosopher.
If there's one thing that you're going to rail against as a philosopher, it's the mood of the population because, of course, you're supposed to be promoting critical and rational thought, not, oh...
They're moody.
A philosopher doesn't get to say, well, I was on my period, so of course I strangled a hobo.
I was moody.
The whole point is self-control and discipline and mental clarity and all that.
But no, they're just a bunch of hypocrites, is I think what you're trying to say.
They promote all this personal responsibility, but they don't apply it consistently with any group that might get really upset, right?
You can lecture a bunch of sort of white Western Europeans about personal responsibility, and they're like, yeah, okay, yeah, that's right, you know, because we're guilt-prone and hypervigilant about self-ownership and stuff like that.
But, you know, I don't see them going to a lot of...
A lot of black power rallies saying that they should stop whining and take 100% responsibility and stop blaming history and institutions for their problems, right?
Because that would be an unpopular thing to do.
I mean, yeah.
So they're just mass enslaved cowards, right?
I mean, isn't that what you learn from your philosophy class?
That you don't actually have to live?
And if there's massive contradictions, 100% personal responsibility, 100% determinism.
You can't blame your environment for anything.
Your environment is 100% responsible for who you are.
And then you can just wave this magic bullshit wand called, well, these positions are not contradictory, and then somehow they're not contradictory.
So, didn't you just learn that philosophy is complete bullshit?
Yeah, I learned that it's...
I mean, at first I thought, oh, philosophy is going to teach me what is right.
And then you realize, oh, okay, so philosophy doesn't really teach anything, but nothing is right, nothing is wrong, just go and do...
Whatever you want.
Well, that's the problem, though.
The idea that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, that's not how it plays out in reality.
There's this weird thing that when you break down objective standards in right and wrong, Everyone thinks that you end up with this laissez-faire, easy come, easy go, hippy-dippy soup of relativism.
You don't.
You don't.
It's like saying if you get rid of science, you don't get any increase in superstition.
If you get rid of rationality, you don't end up with a lot of relativism and laissez-faire and so on.
When you get rid of reason, You end up fueling the mob.
Right?
And so the idea that, well, you know, there's no right, there's no wrong, there's no good, there's no bad, all that does is take conscientious people and disarm them.
The mob doesn't care a bit about those things.
But what they do say is, great, now my emotions are no longer opposed.
By anyone with intellectual authority.
My passions, my hatreds, my collectivism, my bigotry, my bias is no longer opposed by anyone.
No one is guarding the gates.
The store is unguarded.
All policemen are banished.
And you end up with this wild, crazy mob mentality.
Diversity is a strength.
This is one example.
Multiculturalism, diversity is a strength.
Multiculturalism has been showed repeatedly to cause unending social decay.
Multiculturalism is so bad that you might as well have vampires pee into the water supply of a neighborhood.
And yet, you can't ever say anything about that.
Because of political correctness, you see?
So this, when nothing is right and nothing is wrong, then if somebody says, well, diversity is sort of well-proven to be not advantageous.
And I don't mean diversity of thought, I don't mean diversity of opinions, I don't mean diversity of arguments and so on.
Just radically different cultures all trying to squish in together and live together and so on.
It just doesn't work very well at all, according to like decades of research.
But you can't bring any of that up because apparently diversity is good unless that diversity includes a criticism of diversity, which of course is the very definition of diversity.
And so when the philosophers climb down from the only job that they have, like Jack Nicholson and a few good men, they're supposed to stand on a wall and they're supposed to turn back diversity.
The mob with sternness.
That's the one job that a philosopher...
You turn back the mob with sternness, with your intellectual authority.
That's the only job.
That's the only thing you have to do.
The mob is constantly boiling over, racing back and forth, finding witches to burn, finding...
Minorities to attack, whether they're racial or intellectual or whatever.
The mob is this constant churn right now, right?
In the future, you know, hopefully we get people to be more rational and so on.
But the mob is, you know, traumatized by bad childhood, bad schooling, bad religion and so on.
And the mob is just boiling over, racing back and forth, picking up pitchforks, looking to swarm someone, right?
And the job of the philosopher is to stand in front of the mob like the guy...
In front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square, supposed to stand and say, stop!
You are wrong.
Go home.
Put down those pitchforks.
You are wrong.
Stop.
That is the job of the philosopher.
And people suddenly say, well, if I abandon that, then everybody will just, nobody will even pick up a pitchfork.
It's like, nope.
That's not what happens.
When the philosophers stand down, the mob boils over.
And society collapses relatively quickly.
And that's the job.
You stand in front of the mob and you tell them to back the fuck down.
You crazy bastards.
That's just, you know...
I mean...
Let me give you a tiny example.
Like, I'm not just...
I try to practice what I preach.
I do my best, right?
It's not always easy.
But...
With, you know, we've got the race stuff in America, right?
You've got Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and these terrible situations.
Walter Scott is terrible situations in America.
And a lot of libertarians are anti-cop, right?
I understand.
I mean, again, I get it.
I get it.
I'm not blind to that.
But the rush to judgment in these matters, right, with the aggression of cops against blacks, the rush to judgment, the lynch mob mentality, It's my job to say no.
No, no, no, no.
No rushing to judgment.
No calling people murderers.
We have to wait until the facts are in.
Innocence until proven guilty is an essential element of mob combat, fighting against the mob, right?
There is a due process.
It's flawed.
It's still government but it had its roots in common law so it came somewhat out of a somewhat free market of ideas and that was very costly.
People really got upset.
Even people who'd been on this show who I'd sympathize with about their experience with the police, they're calling me racist and a cop lover and suddenly when there's a cop involved, Stefan is all like, oh yeah, I love the cops.
Just this sort of crap, right?
And it's just a mob.
It's just a mob.
But you have to stand in front of the mob.
And the reason being that A, it's the right thing to do.
That's the job.
Right?
Like, you know, in certain sports, there are the guys who are...
Mike, you know this, right?
You played hockey for a long time.
Oh, yeah.
I hate to say this.
They're the protectors, right?
But they're the...
Don't touch the goalie!
Yeah, don't touch the goalie, right?
So tell me, like, these guys, they block...
Anytime you touch the goalie, I mean, this was ingrained in me from, like, you know, on skates, holding a chair to keep my balance.
Like, if anyone touches the goalie, you know, you don't let them do that.
You don't let them get away with it.
There must be consequences.
You know, because if someone just bowls in your goalie, you know, goalie gets hurt, got a lot of pads, that could be a big problem for the team.
So if your goalie gets hurt, you're kind of screwed.
And it's kind of cheating, right, to intimidate the goalie and to make him nervous.
He's already getting a piece of rubber fired at him.
Yeah, he's already tied to a stake in a Mexican prison system anyway.
But it's kind of like cheating if you intimidate the goalie to the point where the goalie feels nervous about putting up a good block for the net.
That's kind of like cheating, so you can't do that.
And there are other, right, the smaller and weaker players who may be really fast, they might have enforcers around them.
This happens in football as well.
Like, obviously, you protect the quarterback when he's making the throw, right?
If somebody tries to charge the quarterback, you try and take them down, right?
Oh, and I mean, just because hockey is more of my experience, there's a lot of finesse players that are, you know, the centers and a lot of big goal scorers and that.
And, you know, they're not very...
Can't say they're very tough.
They don't have a whole lot of brawn.
They got a lot of speed and a lot of skill, a lot of finesse.
Mostly the European players, oddly enough.
And same thing, you know, if you touch one of those guys, it's kind of like the unwritten rule.
If you really cross a line with a hit or something, you're going to face some repercussions from, you know, the C-level enforcers that are pretty much there to make sure that the goal scorers don't get messed with.
Yeah.
It's like Ugluk the troll is released from the basement.
Pretty much.
And they rub the opposing team's jersey in his giant snuffling nose and they release him on the ice where he actually skates with the backs of his hands because they're long enough to reach down.
Ug!
Get!
Skater!
Well, every team has at least one of those guys who maybe plays 45 seconds each game, and it's just like, alright, you're...
But you know what?
They're almost the 45 seconds that are played back endlessly in slow motion, so in terms of actual time...
It's the crowd's favorite 45 seconds, oddly enough.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they were in that Paul Newman movie, right?
The hockey movie there with the twins, right?
Slapshot!
Slapshot, yeah, the twins.
There were three of them, actually.
They were the enforcers.
There were three.
I'm sorry?
Three of the Hanson brothers, Steph, not two.
You've got to put on the foil, coach.
It's important to put on the foil, so when you throw a punch or two, it makes some extra damage in there.
I know way too much about hockey movies, so I'm sorry.
Now, my only other question is, what the fuck was I talking about before?
Ha!
Responsibility consequences for bad behavior.
Okay, good.
Got it.
Okay.
And I'm sorry to take over this conversation.
I'll be done in a minute or two.
But so, you know, I had to put this out.
A, because it's the right thing to do.
Like, we can't have this rush to judgment.
We have to wait until the facts are in.
There's a counter-narrative that may be being suppressed and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
And it's until proven guilty and all that.
With regards to the cops and the minorities in the states.
So partly, of course, it's just the right thing to do.
And I'm sorry if it's unpopular, but I get it.
That's the job, right?
You know, it's like you don't become a policeman and then say, well, what do you mean I have to arrest people?
I thought stern language was going to be the order of the day.
So that's the gig.
And you take those hits and you know that they're going to come and all that.
And so I put these videos out.
And yeah, they cast subscribers and they cast listeners and they create hostility and so on.
But that's the job.
And the reason being, not only is it the right thing to do because we have to remind people of innocent until proven guilty and all that trial by media is a bad idea.
That's just...
Linch Mama on your screen.
But also because it's really nice when people don't get fucking killed.
You know, it's really, really nice when that doesn't happen.
And what happens is we all know that the purpose of trolling is to attempt to get people to be averse to particular positions.
And, you know, like so the people who are skeptical of global warming, they get a lot of trolling.
And the point is to show as a sign to everyone else, don't fuck with the global warming stuff because we're gonna harsh your buzz in a bad way.
And the purpose of trolling the police with all of this, you know, the police are horrible, racist bastards who just wake up every morning and try and figure out how they can...
Shoot people because it's just so much fun when you shoot a minority in America.
Nothing but enjoyment.
That's just their way of getting through the day.
Darren Wilson's having a great time right now.
Great time.
Pregnant wife.
He's in hiding.
George Zimmerman, just a wonderful time.
Great life.
He's, I think, got his own talk show coming up.
Just a wonderful, wonderful existence.
Officer Slager.
Also, I'm having a fine old time now.
I think charged with murder, if I remember rightly.
But the reason is that when you troll the police in this way, people start to die a lot.
Mike, if you can just look up...
I think Baltimore or Ferguson.
Baltimore, LA, New York City.
Chicago.
This has just been coming out a lot lately, especially the last couple weeks.
We just did a video talking about the decrease in violent crime over the course of the last decade and how, hey, that's something to be hopeful about.
Like, look, violent crime is down.
Well, that seems to be turning around pretty severely, and it coincides with a lot of the anti-cop stuff.
Yeah, the cops are forcing things.
The cops are working.
They don't want to get out of their cars.
They don't want to intervene with people.
They don't want to chase people down.
I mean, the Freddie Gray situation...
Questionable.
At least, there's questions to be asked, right?
This is not a cop in the middle of the night in a KKK uniform shooting up a black nursery, right?
I mean, there are...
Well, it's six police, three of which...
Yeah, six cops.
Six cops are facing...
Now, I mean, prison is god-awful enough, but if you're a cop, it's like staggeringly...
Awful, right?
I mean, you basically have to be in solitary for the entire length of your sentence.
I mean, it's cruel and unusual punishment by any definition of the word.
And so the cops are backing down.
The cops are not enforcing as much as they used to.
They're scared.
A lot of them feel locked in.
A lot of them feel like, well, this is my pension.
And a lot of them believe in the mission, right?
They believe they are the thin blue line between order and care.
They believe the mission.
And I understand that.
Don't forget, too, there's a lot of cops with options that are, you know, the more intelligent cops with a whole lot of options are saying, yeah, the cost-benefit analysis to being a cop right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me, and they're getting out of the field.
So you're left with the less intelligent, probably more violent.
It's a vicious cycle, right?
I mean, you drive the good guys away, and then the bad guys take over more.
And the violent crime rates in America are undergoing, at the moment, A giant staggering reversal of, I think, about a 20-year trend.
A 20-year trend in decline in violent crime in America.
And this is recently, I think, six to eight months.
They're undergoing a staggering reversal.
And hundreds and hundreds of people have been murdered who statistically should not have been murdered.
And so, to all the people who just go full-on troll against the cops...
The important thing, okay, you had your indulgence, you joined the mob, you screamed down the cops, and you have blood on your hands.
Because you're part of the phenomenon that is putting some significantly vulnerable members of society in significant harm's way.
A lot of people screaming down the cops, they don't live in these neighborhoods with these gangbangers and drive-bys, and they don't live in these neighborhoods.
So they're screaming about cop brutality, and there is cop brutality.
I'm an anarchist, for God's sake.
I get all of that.
But this is the world that we live in.
And just screaming your hatred at a particular category of people who are taught that they're good, not evil.
And the result being that they back away from certain kinds of enforcement.
It doesn't mean that the violence goes down.
The violence goes up.
And some of the victims, of course, are children.
And...
The completely innocent are getting gunned down in drive-by shootings and so on.
If you remove the police, it's not like you automatically get freedom.
It's similar to your argument you've mentioned, which is one of my favorite ones you've thrown out over the years.
Just because the church collapses doesn't make everyone that was formerly a churchgoer an atheist.
We know this exactly because there's been a giant experiment that was pretty god-awful that occurred in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Which is when the bubonic plague came in through the Mediterranean on the backs of the rats, the bubonic plague spread throughout Europe, and it killed between a quarter, a third, sometimes a half, sometimes even more of the population in various areas.
And the people it killed the most were the priests, because the priests were the ones who would be at the deathbeds, right, their last rites and so on.
And so the priests died the most and the fastest.
And does anybody remember whether the, you know, say 10 or 20 years after the Black Death, I saw a massive flourishing of atheism and skepticism and science and free...
Was there a renaissance?
Was there a wonderful explosion in human creativity?
No!
What happened afterwards, after the priestly class was decimated, which is to some degree what's trying to be inflicted upon the enforcer class at the moment in America, What happened was there was continual social chaos.
There was descent into a brutal war of all against all, followed by about 300 years of religious warfare.
That's what happened when a lot of priests died.
So we've had a perfect example of what happens when you get rid of a particular class in the absence of the evolution of human understanding.
If you just wipe out the efficacy of a particular class, you don't get liberty.
You get hundreds of years of famine, starvation, war, further disease, and cannibalism.
I mean, we know.
We've seen this happen time and time again.
And the idea that you're just going to let this hatred against cops...
Which pours out of a very black, emotional, dark place from a lot of people.
Which I, again, I sympathize and understand with.
But the whole reason we have principles is that the mob fundamentally is not out there.
It's in our hearts.
And the desire to join in and scream at the heretic and scream at the...
And label them with dehumanizing names and, you know, the cockroaches that they used to call in the Rwandan massacres and so on, the hook-nosed, rat-faced Jews in the Nazi genocides or attempted genocides and so on.
The idea to create an alien other, which you can then pour all of your frustrations and anger and despair into that other person, then join the mob in slaughtering them as if that's going to make you any freer, that is in all of us.
And it's the job of the philosopher to confront the mob in his or her own heart, and then to use that clarity, that barrier to The unleashing of the darkest impulses in the human psyche, it is the job of the philosopher to stand tall against that, and I believe that we've saved some lives by doing that.
I mean, yes, hundreds and hundreds of people have been killed, but I think that we've helped keep some of that back.
To a small degree, we do our part.
So that's the job of the philosopher.
So when you say, well, you know, the common mood of the people or that was left and so on, well, that's exactly what the philosopher should always be, exactly the opposite of where the crowd is running.
Almost always.
Because the crowd will always, the crowd, many legs never run straight or true, right?
The more people running in a particular direction, at least with human nature as it currently stands, The more people are heading in a particular direction, the more wrong they are.
Because a clear conscience and deeply rooted principles don't need social reinforcement, right?
And so wherever there is a momentum of many legs in society, they are heading to disaster, right?
A millipede always walks into the fire.
That's the only thing that I can say.
So that's what I find when you talk about this Philosophy that you were studying, and I can't for the life of me figure out, A, what part of it is even remotely callable by the name philosophy, and number two, how any of these so-called philosophers are delivering their values.
I just want to mention a quote, too.
It's been attributed to Mark Twain.
I'm not sure if it's actually a Mark Twain quote or just one of those internet things that tends to be attributed to someone.
But the quote is, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
And this certainly applies to...
I think also while we're on possibly misattributed quotes, I've heard Some rumblings that the quote that I and many, many others have attributed, I think, to Randy Weingarten, who was one of the head of the U.S. teachers' unions, where he said, I'll start representing the interests of children when children start paying union dues may be problematic.
I just wanted to mention that just in passing before we go.
I haven't done a huge amount of research into it, but I've heard rumblings to that effect.
Alright, I'm so sorry, dear listener, for that long diatribe.
To me, the job of a philosopher is the most serious job that there is.
And the idea that, well, I wouldn't want to do anything that might upset the masses.
It's like, okay, so then you're not a philosopher.
I mean, that's by definition, I think.
Yeah, but the issue is that, yeah, we used to have a lot of philosophers, but now, well, we can see how the society is a bit Degenerative and goes a bit against knowledge.
And mostly, in France, you can go to a university that teaches philosophy, but the issue is that you'll never get paid for that, and that's why most people don't usually go to study philosophy.
They'll never get paid, and they don't see why, they don't see how it concerns them, even if it's They just think, yeah, I could do something that's going to pay me.
Because I know right now in France, there's no real philosophers that you can really state.
I mean, that are either interesting, really, or really known.
There's only one which is really, really bad, which is called Bernard-Henri Lévy.
And he caused...
He was the reason why France went to Libya to liberate the people, if you know what I mean.
He's literally the reason and he's the people that...
He's the guy that you see constantly on the TV that's being called a philosopher by many people but really doesn't Kudos to the French, at least, if they're willing to ask a philosopher what's important, right?
Or what they should do.
If there's some public health crisis, then you get a public health official, right?
When there's a public health crisis, get the doctor, right?
And when there's a moral crisis, then the first people that should be on, speed dial the philosopher, because we've got a moral crisis.
There should be this giant red, whatever, not red, maybe it's the color of commons.
The bat phone.
The bat phone, like send up the signal, right?
It's like Socrates' poofy hair out of some guy in a toga.
I don't know, right?
Oh, there's a lot of frat boys coming too.
But you just, oh my god, society's hit a moral crisis.
Call the philosopher.
You know, I mean, that would actually be a pretty funny skit, come to think of it.
There's only one person left to turn to.
No, not him!
The old guy with the patches on the elbows of his tweed jackets.
Get the philosopher.
I think he's in the library.
And you know how in those movies all the guys strapping nine million weapons onto his body before heading into combat?
You know?
Philosopher, I have my glasses.
Okay, I'm ready.
Ah...
Well, at least in the States, instead of having the philosopher to talk about the important issues, you get someone whose blonde hair is very nice and her blue eyes are very, very large.
She's pretty.
I was watching...
I just have to say this.
I'm sorry.
I was just watching a couple of...
For the show.
For research.
Yes, yes, yes.
I was watching some people talk about...
I was watching some pundits talk about the Donald Trump situation.
Is what he said about immigrants, is there truth or facts behind it or not?
And we'll talk about Donald Trump at some point in the future on the show.
But they're having a discussion about the issues and going back and forth and presenting data and that type of stuff.
It was a decent discussion, which, hey, nice to see.
And then a very attractive woman on the couch said, but his hair...
But look, his comb over hair, and it's just like, oh my god, for Christ's sakes, we're trying to have a discussion at the big boy table over here about facts and important things.
Can we stop talking about the man's hair?
We're talking about illegal immigration.
Is this a problem?
Is there violence going on in these communities?
Is this something that needs to be discussed in more detail within mainstream society?
Can we stop talking about his hair?
I get it.
I get it.
I get his hair.
I get you don't like his hair.
Can we talk about something important for one minute without being interrupted?
Oh god.
Right.
I need a hug room!
Give me a puppy!
Quick!
Help!
Yeah, that's how things are handled in America, but in France, most likely when someone states a valid opinion but that is not really liked, well, mostly on the show, people are like, oh, this is a really interesting point of view.
And we were glad to see on the show and then the guy just disappears and you never see him on any TV show again.
And he's literally dead.
That has happened a few times in France.
But yeah, it's the mob effect, I think.
Like you said, people get mad.
And the more people there is, the less reason there is in a mob.
And that's what's prevailing right now.
Mostly in France because it's really contradictory since we have a lot of things in the government which is really well you could say existentialist because France deep down like in the hearts of the laws it's a really elitist society and the new laws are completely against that but we are not really removing the old laws And
for instance, you can see the French education is completely flawed compared to the socialist government.
So right now, in France, you have primary school, then college.
And in college, which ends like when you're 15 or 16, you have to have good grades for four years.
Then it will affect where you're going next.
But if you have bad grades, you go to a bad school with people that have bad grades and so you have bad teachers.
So you're not going to get better, you're just going to get worse.
And that's because good schools will only take good students Because they care about their rate.
They only want students that they know will get the baccalaureate at the end of the three years you have in the lycée, which is after the college.
And it's completely opposed to what we're going to do right now, which is, oh, you know, it's not really your fault.
Well, it's Society that's this way and you can do anything.
It's the fault of the white people because you're getting oppressed and that's why.
I mean in France we don't have that thing yet.
We don't have the white privilege thing.
It might not arrive in France because of how we think, but it might.
Oh, like the white privilege that, like, somehow in white countries there's white privilege?
Hmm.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's weird because, I mean, I would imagine that in Japan there is Japanese privilege.
In other words, people who grow up in that culture, who natively speak that language and so on, you know, they probably have some advantages as opposed to people who...
Don't.
So it's just, I don't know, this idea that there's white privilege.
I mean, I don't know who people to go.
They go to Uruguay and they say, you know, in Uruguay, there's Uruguayan privilege.
The people who are born there seem to do better in that culture.
In China, there's Chinese privilege.
All those people who speak Chinese and look Chinese have an easier time in Chinese society.
There's Chinese privilege.
No, it's always and forever this just stupid, boring, repetitive focus on white people.
And it's like, oh, how boring, how dull, how ridiculous.
I mean, just so, I mean, stupid ideas die when people just yawn.
Like, it's not even, like, worth fighting it.
You know, the number of times that people say, oh, yeah, well, you're really sympathetic to Dylann Roof, and you go into his childhood.
How about going into the childhood of a black kid?
And it's like, I actually did that, right?
I did the truth about Freddie Gray.
And, of course, but people, there's just this assumption, right?
It's just this boring, oh yeah, white people are racist and there's white privilege and it's just, oh God, you know, it's just so ridiculous.
I mean, in Saudi Arabia, there's Saudi Arabian privilege.
Like, you know, yeah, I get it.
You grow up native to a particular culture, a particular country, you got some advantages.
But still, people want to brace white privilege to get here, right?
I mean, there's this god-awful thing that goes on.
Like, 80% of the women coming across the south border from Mexico to the US get raped.
I mean, it's mental.
It's horrifying.
And it's like, what?
It's like horrible, racist, white society not fun to see from a distance.
Like, you're willing to get an 8 out of 10 chance or a 4 out of 5 chance to get raped.
You want to come see white privilege up close?
That's how god-awful white privilege is.
Is white privilege like the giant dinosaur exhibit in Jurassic World?
It's like, I'm willing to risk death to see a dinosaur that cool.
It's like, is white privilege so enticing to everyone that you're just willing to swim?
Like, here in...
There's these Pan Ams going on in Toronto at the moment.
I didn't even know.
It's so embarrassing.
I didn't even know.
And a bunch of Cuban rowers just defected.
They were allowed to walk around and they just defected.
They absconded over to the US, right?
And see, they've got Cuban privilege by being from Cuba, but they're willing to give all of that up because apparently...
White privilege is like fucking Captain Ahab and his white whale.
You know, I am obsessed.
I must get close to it.
I must find it.
And it's like, I can't see it from here.
Let's get closer.
Let's get closer.
White privilege.
It's moving through the...
Whoa, that is some really white privilege.
Maybe we'll give that guy a...
A little bit of bronzing or something like that.
These guys, they walked away from their family, from their history, from their culture, from their island, just to get right up, right up, nose up in a horribly racist and exclusionary society.
Like America.
I mean, that is like...
White privilege has got to be like some weird snake charmer that draws people in.
They're like the sirens in the ancient Greek mythologies, right?
They just...
White privilege, you've got to come and see it.
Don't see it from afar.
Come and touch it.
Twirl its nipples.
Bring some ice.
Like, that's...
You've just got to be like...
We've got to be like...
The white privilege sirens just drawing people from around the world, Vietnamese boat people and Cuban refugees and the white privilege.
My God, don't the people coming over from Libya and Tunisia into Italy and Greece know that they're entering into the god-awful nightmare snowy hell of white privilege?
My God, don't they understand that they're just going into institutionalized racism and a living horror to which anybody with even three freckles is just cast down into the pit of perfidity forever?
I mean, it's just so bizarre that everyone comes, a lot of people come over and scream, white privilege, white privilege, white privilege!
I don't know.
It's rude.
I can't imagine if I wanted to go and move to Japan that I'd go over and just start screaming at Japanese people that there's Japanese privilege.
It's like, you're here, aren't you?
Isn't this the best place to be for you?
If this is the best place to be, then shut the fuck up and be a little polite.
These are some pretty still great countries.
The world is not...
As a whole, America or Canada or Australia or New Zealand or any of the other white Anglo-Saxon-derived colonial entities.
The world as a whole is not Western Europe.
The world as a whole is Darfur, right?
The world as a whole is Yemen, I mean, and it's Zimbabwe and, like, these are just generally terrible places.
And no, it's not the fault of white privilege.
It's not the fault of white people.
And so, there's some pretty great countries.
I can't imagine working really hard to try and get an invitation to someone's party and then just going over and taking a long, slow dump into the punch ball.
It just seemed to me to be kind of weird.
You know, like, man, I'd do anything to get to the great Gatsby's party.
Great!
Now I can take a shit on his wedding cake.
That's horrible.
And I just, you know, because the one thing that's true of the people who've left, wherever they're coming from, is they're not staying and fighting.
You know, obviously the situations in their own countries are unbearable, right, to the point where they're willing to just leave and whatever.
I mean, god-awful things going on in Mexico to the point where people just are willing to risk this, like, god-awful things.
Now, the one thing we do know is that they're not willing to stay and fight.
They're running away from their problems.
I'm not blaming them.
But this is a fact.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm not saying it's a bad decision.
I'm not saying I would make a different decision.
But the basic reality is that they are running away from their problems.
They're not staying and fighting.
And there's a place where there's sanctuary for them.
And, you know, if...
If a giant Arthur Dent-style asteroid was about to hit the Earth and space aliens came down to my house and saved all the Free Domain radio listeners I have packed in freezers in the basement in case of just such an emergency, especially the casket-marked Fertile Women Thor in case of asteroid emergency.
And let's say that all my friends and family were saved by space aliens from certain death from an approaching asteroid.
And, I don't know, give me the name of an alien race.
Martians.
Something more imaginative.
Something funnier.
A moochie pineapple head.
A moochie pineapple head.
I'm with it.
Okay.
A moochie pineapple head, right?
So they have just saved my life and the life of my friends and the life of my family and they have saved earthly culture, you know, such as remains in our heads and hearts, right?
And they took me to this glorious planet We're virtually limitless opportunities and a completely free market.
And I just sat around on a street corner screaming, a moochie pineapple head privilege!
You racist bastards!
Institutionalized interspecies racism and moochie pineapple head privilege!
I mean, wouldn't people say...
You know we saved you, right?
Should we put you back into the giant cloud of vaporized rock that your fucking planet was?
Would you like to go back there?
Stop being annoying.
Just be a tiny bit grateful.
We went out of our way.
We picked you up.
We beamed you on board.
We didn't anally probe you, which is a first for us according to most residents of Arkansas.
Just a little gratitude.
Look, I'm grateful.
I didn't even make the West, obviously, right?
I mean, I'm trying to extend it a little further, but I'm grateful that the ancestors of these lands did all of these amazing things to carve out a little bit of freedom from the dim, dismal, blood-soaked tapestry of gore known as human history.
Yeah, they just pushed back the darkness a little bit.
I'm grateful.
I'm grateful for what they did.
But the idea that there's this sanctuary, this place where people can come and live lives of unimaginable freedom compared to where they came from, and then they scream white privilege, well, it's the pineapple head planet.
Okay.
I mean, I'm glad they saved my ass.
I'm not sure that I'm going to scream at them for being bigoted if it's not that easy for me to adjust to living on a planet full of people whose heads are, in fact, fruit.
So, anyway.
On that note, Steph, have you heard of the new MTV show which is coming out later this month called White Privilege?
Wait, wait, Mike, Mike.
You know that there's supposed to be a sound when I'm supposed to assume the philosopher's brain-splody-head crash position.
Hang on.
Hang on.
I've been working on my yoga moves, so I might be able to get my head this far where it needs to go.
Okay, hang on.
Wait.
Do you know anything about this?
Because we haven't talked about it yet.
I think we're going to have to do a review.
But I do know that it's marketed at younger people.
I don't know necessarily about that, but I just...
I love the fact it's being produced by a Pulitzer Prize winning Filipino journalist who's in America illegally.
Oh, is this a show called White People?
White Privilege is the name of the show.
White Privilege is the name of the show.
Oh, sorry.
It is actually White People.
It's not White People.
Yeah, I think I saw it.
I just love the fact that someone's in the country illegally to do a show Yeah,
we've talked about this before, but White people have a really bad habit of being overly nice and then overly not nice.
Bad habit.
I'll tell you this.
I remember years ago, I went with a girlfriend to go and see a show, a play in Toronto.
And I was walking up.
It just went and got in the line.
I thought I was in the line.
You know, there are always these jerks.
Let me tell you something.
This is the only thing that really bugs me about the world.
Everything else is fine.
But whenever there's...
Let me tell people something.
You need to understand this basic 101 of human decency.
When there is a line...
Be in the line or don't be in the line.
But don't fuck around at the end of the line.
Just milling about.
Because then people have to come up and say, are you in the line?
Are you not in the line?
Am I budding?
Just be in the line or be somewhere else.
There's a line and then there's not a line.
But don't be this cloud of vapor around the end of the line that nobody knows where the end of the line is.
Anyway, so I went up and I got to the end of the line.
And it turned out there was a British couple behind me.
And What did they say?
Did they say, hey, the fuck out of the line.
Stop butting.
Get out of the line.
And I said, I say, that's a bit much.
But the way they said it, it was like, there's nothing like that British ice spear of superiority that goes straight through your heart, at least if you're from England.
French people don't give a shit.
Oh, British disapproval!
No, it's British disapproval.
I grew up in boarding school, so British disapproval usually came with a cane at the end.
But there's nothing like that.
Oh, I say, that's a bit much, isn't it?
It's just like, oh, God, right?
And that's like, that was, I remember this years later, and I remember thinking like, wow, what an effective method of social control.
I feel terrible now.
Whereas they're the ones who were at fault because they weren't in the line or out of the line.
They're just milling about.
Oh, yes, I'm supposed to know.
Whether you're seeing this show or not, or you're just hanging around, just driving me completely insane with your non-commitment to the line.
And yeah, you know, white people as a whole...
We're like all apologies and then it's like two fucking nuclear bombs.
It's like, can we find something in the middle here?
A little assertiveness without necessarily having to go full Nagasaki on people.
It's like the Chamberlain To Churchill, right?
Chamberlain was this British politician who appeased Hitler throughout the 1930s.
Oh, I've secured peace in our time.
Oh, let's not worry about that funny little Austrian man.
I'm sure he's going, ah!
Right?
And then, you know, he was just appeasing, appeasing, appeasing, lets him take all these various territories and countries and so on.
And then the British people are like, oh shit, in case of emergency, break Alpha.
We need to have a full K backup coming out of the Madame Tussauds wax museum.
Quick, get Churchill!
Yeah!
And Churchill is like, ah, I do love me some war.
And Churchill is like, I think we will bomb them until most of Germany is dust.
I want it to be floating above the landscape.
That's what I want for Germany.
And they were like literally bombed the living shit out of Germany.
Whereas in the First World War, they didn't even bother invading because the Americans came and tipped the balance so far.
But in the Second World War, they get rid of like R-selected Chamberlain.
I actually had a whole bit.
Oh, yeah, I did this bit, right?
R-selected Chamberlain and they put K-selected Churchill in charge of things.
And Churchill was just like, oh, yeah, time to roll.
He loved war.
He said, God help me, I'm just filled with the most unholy enthusiasm for this grim venture.
Everyone looks at the Chamberlain white people up front and forget that there's an emergency K backup white people that tend to go...
I don't know.
Hard to say whether they go too far to another extreme or not.
I'd like a healthy medium of assertiveness.
Healthy assertiveness.
Yeah, because you only end up with Churchill because of Chamberlain.
And this is what bothers me about these philosophers who don't oppose the mob.
It's like, you think it's going to get easier?
Yeah.
Do you think the mob is going to get bored and disperse?
I mean, do you think they get...
Oh, hang on, guys.
Sorry.
VCR is broken.
It's not recording.
I just got this message on my...
I gotta go.
I gotta go.
I mean, The Apprentice, you know, season 23,000 is on.
Gotta watch it.
It's not recording.
Can't fix it from here.
Nobody...
They're not consistent and dispersed.
The mob feeds on itself, and the mob feeds on its victims, and appeasement creates more bullies.
So this is the weird thing.
It's like, did...
What do people think?
Like, the clash between Islam and the West, do people think it's...
Is it going to get easier later?
Is it, like, what do people think?
Is it somehow going to...
Well, you know, they have been doing this for quite some time, but I'm sure they'll get bored of it soon.
Yeah, they'll tire themselves out.
It's alright.
Yeah, come on.
Plus their knees hurt.
You know, all that kneeling.
And so, you know.
Later!
Next!
Ah, it's fine.
I'll tell you about it later.
You know, it's like having some giant lump growing in your chest, you know?
It's like, ah, you know, I'm sure I'll, you know, I'll just jump up and down a little bit and it'll probably dissolve.
It's like, it does not get easier later.
Right?
The longer you leave it, the worse it gets.
And that's what bothers me so much in particular about these supposed philosophers who should be standing in front of the mob.
And, you know, we are the sheepdogs of the carnivorous sheep known as humankind at the moment.
Sorry, Mike.
Well, imagine if, you know, after the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman thing, there was a big uprising where people said, hey, you know, the fact that the media digitally whitened George Zimmerman's photos and edited 911 call tapes to make him sound racist and make him out to be, you know, worse than he was within the context of this situation.
They showed a picture of a 12-year-old.
Yeah, versus like a 300-pound photo of George Zimmerman looking all kinds of tough.
If people stood up and said, you know, this is not acceptable.
This is not acceptable at all.
We're not going to stand for this anymore.
We're not going to buy any products that's advertised on, whether...
I forget which company.
MSNBC? I don't want to get that wrong.
I think it was MSNBC that did a lion's share of it.
You know, we're not going to buy any products from anyone that advertises on MSNBC. We need a formal apology.
This can't continue in the media.
If that type of assertiveness happened then...
What would have happened in the Michael Brown situation?
What would have happened to the dozens of kids and hundreds of people who've been murdered in the streets as a result of police paralysis?
Yeah.
Exactly.
Well, that would have been a very different situation.
The other thing, too, is that this fear, this weird fear, actually not that weird a fear, but this fear that everyone has of being called a racist.
I mean, clearly screaming racist is not a civilized way to have a discussion.
It's a pathetic, immature...
Unless there's clear evidence that someone's a racist.
Unless you're wearing a hood at the time that they're calling you a racist.
Unless someone has publicly stated, I hate X, Y, A, B, C, or whatever for no...
Okay.
But do people think that if we back away from these topics for fear of being called a racist...
That things are going to get better.
Somebody asked Eric Holder.
I can't remember if he's half black or black, but he was high up in the Justice Department.
I asked Eric Holder and he said, well, okay, so it's been 20 or 30 years of affirmative action.
When do we wind this shit down?
And he's like, oh, we've barely even scratched the surface.
We've barely even begun in terms of affirmative action.
And it's like, oh, really?
Wait, you say there's a government program that's not going to end?
But, I mean, the idea that if we're just not going to have honest conversations about race, I mean...
Because of fears of being called a racist.
I mean, at some point, we're going to have to bite this bullet.
We're going to have to start having honest conversations about race.
And we're going to have to put aside our fears of being called a racist.
And we're going to just have to deal with the facts.
And the facts are fairly clear and fairly evident.
We've talked about this on this show a bunch of times.
But this hide, just extend and pretend, hide, duck and cover stuff.
I mean...
It's not going to get easier because all it does is it puts the verbal bullies largely from the left in charge of the conversation.
And when the left is in charge of the conversation, soon they're in charge of the country and, you know, large numbers of people don't breathe anymore.
That's just a sort of basic fact.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I know we've drifted a lot and my apologies to the caller.
Yeah, it's fine.
As long as it's interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, there's something also that you kind of pointed out that I found to be interesting in philosophy because it made me think that we're kind of heading to a society where we're being taught to not be someone with an opinion or someone that can survive,
as in Let's imagine tomorrow my government collapses because, well, first of all, it's bad, but let's say it collapses.
What's going to happen to the people who are pretending to be, oh, I'm Dragon King.
Yeah, go ahead, be a Dragon King against that scavenger who is going to loot your house.
I mean, I don't know if you...
Wait, what do you mean by Dragon King?
Yeah, dragonkin.
Like, people who are pretending, they say that they are inside them.
They feel like they are actually dragons, and they are not people.
Like, you know the people from Tumblr who are...
I'll look it up, maybe, but...
Urban Dictionary.
Dragonkin.
Tumblr, sorry.
Urban Dictionary, Dragonkin.
One whose spiritual form is that of a dragon.
I don't know what that means.
What?
I don't know what that means.
Is this a Game of Thrones episode?
Is this like My Little Pony with fire?
I don't understand what this is like, your spirit animal?
I mean, what is it?
You're familiar?
I don't know anything about Tumblr.
What is that?
Is that like Monkeys in a Circus?
Well, it's a place where stupid people get ideas.
Oh, reality!
Okay, got it.
Got it.
Other people.
Humanity.
Carbon-based lifeforms.
The media.
Okay, got it.
Hang on.
I've heard about it.
I just didn't know.
Okay, Tumblr, what is...
I mean, the Dragon King thing is related to something called Other King.
You can look it up and that's when it gets a bit scary.
But it's also like the trans-racial people, like they say that, yeah, I'm white, but deep down I feel like I'm black, you know?
That's also what they say.
Or that if you're wearing an Afro haircut, well, that's cultural appropriation and you can't appropriate the culture of the African people because… Yeah, no, I mean, you'll notice this a lot, of course, with people who like they appropriate freedom of speech and civil liberties from white people.
But somehow that's not cultural appropriation, right?
Because the really important thing is your fucking hairdo.
Not whether you have, say, separation of church and state, and not whether you have, say, a dictatorship or the remnants of a limited democracy.
So they'll take all of that cultural, quote, heritage from Western Europe.
That's not appropriation somehow, but a hairdo really matters.
Okay, I need to read this Urban Dictionary section on Otherkin, just because, well, I just need...
Wait, Otherkin?
Otherkin.
The caller said Dragonkin is similar to Otherkin, so I had to find out what Otherkin was.
Otherkin are a fringe group of human society who, for one reason or another, believe themselves to be the reincarnation of mythic creatures, typically elves, through other groups.
They also include dragons, demons, vampires, ogres, deities, and so on.
And sensible leftists.
Related groups also include some long word I can't pronounce, who believe themselves reincarnations of animal souls.
Hey, Mike, hey, if I have to do Greek names for your presentation, you back the fuck up and you do that name.
Hey, you should see the ones I've omitted just for your sanity, so...
It's somewhere.
Seems like someone just opened the phone book and picked something horrid and then added three together.
Maybe they just fell asleep in their forehead.
That's my name, right?
Is there supposed to be that many S's and P's in a name?
I don't know.
Oh, come on.
Okay, give it to me in Skype.
Okay.
I'm barely good with English name pronunciation.
I don't know about this.
I managed to make it through the gene stuff without embarrassing myself too much.
Well, you're a professional.
I'm still...
Wait, which one did you put it in?
It should be in your account.
I'll put it in both so you can see.
It's coming.
Anyway, so...
Oh, wait, here it is.
Therianthropes.
Therianthropes?
Something.
And then there's other people who think they are reincarnations of fictitious characters from Japanese anime, manga, and video games.
Do you think any of these people are fictitiously confusing themselves with people who ought to have, say, a job?
Because I can't imagine this is, like, highly employable stuff.
Steph, are we hiring any vampires right now?
Any reincarnated dragons?
Do you put that on your job application?
I don't know.
Okay, get it.
You had a bad childhood and escaped into myth.
Okay.
Other can often find themselves a subject of ridicule.
In the majority of cases, it's because their beliefs fly in the face of rational, critical thinking and tend to fall apart very quickly under hard scrutiny.
I don't know that we need to get...
Wait, they're not like people who like, I like unicorns?
They're people who like, I have the soul of a unicorn?
Yes.
I think so, yes.
Okay, I gotta just ask one basic question.
How pretty do you have to be for anyone to take that seriously?
Okay, big tits.
Could be two unicorns in there.
Don't care.
Tits.
The rational calculation that's being made.
Okay, she's an eight, but she's completely insane.
Well, I am into banging horses.
She has a soul of a unicorn.
Well, my dad wasn't equestrian, so I guess I kind of...
Do you come with a saddle?
I'm sorry, I have to keep going.
One of the most common beliefs is of an elven holocaust, in which humankind supposedly wiped the elves from the earth, despite the fact that no such evidence exists anywhere on the geologic record, either for the supposed holocaust, let alone the existence of elves.
It was like an elf genocide?
Yes!
Have they not seen Broadway?
Just watch a Lord of the Rings movie.
That would qualify.
But yeah, this is a thing, apparently.
Oh yeah, it's big.
I love the aspects of the show where it's both enlightening and god-awfully depressing at the same time.
Yeah!
And they vote!
I mean, most of them are hiding in their...
Plant's basement, I think.
Yeah, that's the place where probably I think...
That's the same people who are against fat shaming or stuff like...
Wait.
Oh yeah, triggers.
Sorry, yeah.
Triggers.
Trigger warnings.
That's probably where it came from also.
It's...
It's literally hell, I think.
I mean, to me, I tried to go there, and it's so stupid.
I wonder if some of these people are reincarnated elves and not reincarnated elves at the same time.
That's our callback.
Oh, man.
I mean, it is obviously funny, but it's pretty tragic.
I mean, gosh, what must have happened to you in your life that that's where you end up?
Well, it's funny because sometimes they disagree with each other and they think, well, deep down I'm black because I feel like I'm black.
But that's cultural appropriation.
You can't say that you feel black because you're white and you have white privilege.
And they just go arguing with themselves about things that are just...
It's like blind people are arguing about what blue looks like.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, when political correctness collides with insanity, you know, it is...
Well, it's dragon versus unicorn, right?
I mean, it is pretty horrendous.
Yeah, I just found this woman...
Although my skin is human and my wings are in my mind, my soul is ancient splendor and my heart was forged in fire.
And she's really pretty.
So, you know, it's like, okay, crazy eggs are still eggs.
Crazy omelet is still food.
There really is a dark comedy in this kind of stuff, because some of it is so absurd, it's hard not to chuckle.
Like, for example, people will see in the Grease presentation that I'm working on now, I mean...
The actual origins of the Greek financial crisis go back to the 80s.
We have a chart where there's a massive spike in inflation in Greece that's just absurd.
My question was, what happened then?
That's kind of an interesting question.
It appears something occurred.
They elected a socialist that decided to buy everything and turn it into a socialist utopia.
And just looking at this, and then, you know, here we are, decades later, and Greece is in a massive financial problem.
Yeah, you know, that's...
And no one is talking about this fact.
No one even recognizes that, hey, maybe electing a socialist that just went and ran up the credit card to an absurd degree, I think to a larger degree than any other politician in the history of mankind from a proportion of GDP for a country...
That that might have an impact.
No, it's...
You see the banks lied to the Greek people or it's IMF or something.
And I'm sure the IMF, there's lots of problems with the IMF. No doubt in my mind.
But maybe it has to do with electing the socialists several decades ago.
I don't know.
But it's just a dark comedy looking at it.
It's like, this is so absurd.
I can't help but laugh.
This means that people are growing up in poverty now.
You know?
People that don't have futures because their parents spent their seed crop.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it's the issue with left-wing governments during crisis.
Why would you go in a way that, like, why would you increase wealth when you're in deficit?
You should go the other way.
Because they want votes!
They want votes!
People like it when you give them stuff.
They love it!
People have become fundamentally allergic to reality.
And, you know, this is, again, the only way that I can really frame it is these gene wars, right?
I mean, these genetic expressions of ideas.
It's a fight to the death.
And it's, you know, the idea that a Greek politician...
I mean, what would happen if you basically just said to the Greek people, look, party's over.
You all knew it was coming.
Like, please don't be surprised, right?
Like, right now...
They are burning down parts of Athens because they've run out of money.
That's what happens.
Yeah, I know, and I was chatting about my daughter, but, you know, I go through the news with my daughter, and, you know, she's really been saving up her money, and for a while she was interested in buying a little video game, handheld video game unit.
And, you know, we talked about it, and I said, you know, if there's One more tablet comes in the house, her mom's going to go post.
But no, and we talked about it, and she ended up not buying it.
And I said, okay, well, so if, like I said, you know, Izzy, like if you had decided to buy that tablet, and then like a month later you realized you're not really playing with it, it's not really fun, it's not, you know.
And we went over a sort of buyer's remorse, like you buy something, then there's a high, and then after a while you're like, ah, was that really worth it?
You think of all the other things you could have done with the money, and this, that, and the other, right?
And so to imagine, you ended up deciding to buy it.
She saved her money instead.
She said, you decided to buy this thing.
About a month later, you feel disappointed and upset Because you spent your money on the wrong thing and now you don't have the money and you're not really enjoying what you bought.
And so, what would your response be?
And she said, well, I would do more chores to get more money so that I could build up my savings again.
I'm like, no, you say that because you're not Greek.
If you were Greek, you'd set fire to the house.
Yeah, things are...
I just looked at the news right before the show.
Things are heating up.
Like, literally.
Literally heating up.
Some pop dancing away from these Molotov cocktails.
You can burn someone's skin off with that stuff.
Like, this homicidal.
It's not good, and it's not going to get any better, unfortunately, short term.
I'd love to go to Greece, man.
I'd love to go to Greece.
Are you cold?
It's not winter.
I know.
I'd love to ask the kind of questions that would get me punched in the head.
Donate so we can get stuff bodyguards, so we can go to Greece.
I just duck and weave and ask some basic questions.
Like, have you passed grade two math?
Did you not know that you can't borrow and spend forever?
Like, what did you think?
Did you think that the deficit was a unicorn?
I mean, is it a myth?
I don't understand why.
If any country should have a philosopher getting out ahead of the mob to tell them about economic realities, you'd think it'd be Greece.
Well, but there is a time after which philosophy is no longer helpful, right?
I mean, because the mob...
I think at this phase, as you say, this has been building since at least the Second World War, and you could argue further back even than that.
So this is just going to have to run its course.
Yeah.
This is like one of those, you know, in the 19th century or 18th century novels, there's always some girl who gets sick, usually because she disobeyed someone.
But she gets sick and the doctor comes over and says, we just have to let this run its course.
There's no medicine for this, right?
Because they didn't have any antibiotics and all that back then.
And that's the way it is.
There's a time up to which you can stop the mob.
And then there is a time after which you cannot, and you must just flee them off, right?
It's like an avalanche, right?
I mean, if you see the first couple of snowflakes start to rumble, maybe you can stop them.
But once half the mountain's coming down, it's got to get out the way.
Yeah.
Ultimately, though, it's, uh...
If you still believe the cause is evil bankers, which there's a whole lot of evil bankers.
Don't get me wrong.
We just did a massive presentation on evil bankers with the Euro.
And if you don't look at your own spending and you think you have an answer to a problem, that's not the real answer, the fundamental answer, which is that violence doesn't work, socialism doesn't work.
They're just going to repeat this for the next how many generations?
Well, I mean… You ever open up your mail and there's like zero APR financing for 18 months followed by 9,000% in fine print, right?
But you get all this shit from the credit card companies.
We'll transfer your existing balance, pay things off, you'll give your free credit cards, $10,000 limit.
And I remember when I was a kid, younger or whatever, right?
In high school, in college or whatever, right?
They target the college people because there's nothing that says I'm willing to take on death and go into college.
But they...
And a free t-shirt.
Because you're an arts major.
Because you're an arts major and can't do any math.
But with a dragon on it.
And so it's like if I order 10 of these credit cards and max them all out, it's the evil credit card companies.
Yeah, well, it was just an offer.
Of course the politicians are going to offer you something for nothing.
But when did we ever, like, when did we ever lose this skepticism?
Like, when did we lose this skepticism as a culture?
What do you mean someone's offering you something for nothing?
Give me a break.
They're just, that's not right.
That's not, that's not how it works.
And we just completely lost this.
I don't know if all the, I don't know, the case elected people got killed in the world wars or something.
That's a topic for another time.
But it's like this, we just left with these people who pretend.
I don't know if they're pretending or not.
I hope they're pretending because they're pretending they're not.
We're even more doomed than I think.
But these people who just like reality, I mean, that's just my whim, isn't it?
Alright, listen, we've got to move on to the next caller.
I appreciate these questions and comments.
I'm sorry.
I don't know if we got into anything useful, but I certainly enjoyed the conversation.
Yeah.
I enjoyed the conversation as well.
I just wished we could have finished the education part, but it's fine.
Call back in.
Like, honestly, let's not leave that foul.
Yeah, we'll schedule you for an upcoming show again, Tiago, if you'd like to come back and we can finish it up.
Well, I'll try, but in the next month I'll be in the US, but I could try even during that period.
Yeah, we'll talk about it through email and we'll set something up.
Okay.
And I'll even have to, I mean, I'll get to not have to sleep at four in the morning, so that will be it.
That would be better.
Not only did we tangent you to death, but you're exhausted, too.
Other than that, it was an experience for you, I'm sure.
Well, thanks for confirming, though, that we do actually have a French listener, because as Steph was doing the Euro presentation, we were just talking about this.
We were just talking about this when you did the French accent.
Do we have any French listeners?
You know, Diego, if I ever have to, like, really annoy French people again, I'll have to have you read a speech, and then I'll just imitate you, because your French accent is way better than mine, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
All right, man.
Take care.
Have a good time in the States.
We'll talk to you soon.
Thanks.
All right.
Thanks, Tiago.
Up next is Nicholas.
Nicholas wrote in and said, Do you think things like religion fulfill some emotional need brought on by consciousness?
I'd assume that such a timely and costly social construct would falter eons ago if it wasn't necessary in some capacity.
So I realized after asking my question that perhaps consciousness wasn't the best choice of words.
And, you know...
Hello?
Hello?
Are you still there, Nicholas?
Yeah, sorry.
I must have had an internet problem or something.
No problem.
Go for it.
Okay, what did you hear that I've said?
Nothing or...?
Steph, you're totally right.
And here's a huge donation.
And then we signed a contract in the blood of an elf.
After that, you got a little fuzzy.
Well, I'll have to hear the podcast on that.
Yeah, we may have had a few problems here too, but it's true!
You said that you wanted to reformulate the question a little bit.
Yeah.
So I looked up consciousness in order to assure myself that that was the correct word to have used.
And I quickly found myself in a rabbit hole where, you know, what is consciousness?
And I was like, oh, okay, I don't want to use that word.
Never mind.
Oh, no, that's French.
And so I think that perhaps a better phrase question would be, does religion satisfy some necessary human emotion on a biological level?
No.
No, it doesn't.
I did a whole show on this, which we never released.
I don't know what we're going to do with it.
But very, very briefly, very briefly indeed, religious susceptibility is a gene set.
There are particular genes or gene fragments that render one to be susceptible to religious experiences, even particular religious mythologies.
They can stimulate a part of the brain and have cherubs dance around you.
There is this feeling of oneness, this feeling of unity.
These are all genetic predispositions.
And so religion is the manifestation of a particular gene set that instructs children in religion in an attempt to, you know, through epigenetics, to turn on the same gene set in sequence.
So religion is...
A mechanism by which genes reproduce.
Religious genes think of like religion as a body part, right?
And your liver will do what it does.
What does it clean your blood?
I don't know.
But the liver will clean your blood so that you're healthy enough to have sex and make another liver.
And religion, fairly extensive work has been done on this to figure out that religion is significantly genetically inheritable.
So twins raised apart often end up with very similar religious beliefs.
And if you have one sibling who has a particular expression of a gene set and another sibling who doesn't, then the odds of that one sibling with the gene set being religious are very high.
The odds of the other sibling...
Not being religious are very high, and this is not to say that there's no free will or reason involved.
There are.
When I talk about genetics… Yeah, when I'm talking about genetics, that doesn't mean, well, then we can't do anything about it.
Now, it's true you can't talk someone into having a third eye, but with epigenetics, you can give people arguments that will reshape their genetics.
Well, I mean, it's no different from having a predisposition to having some sort of being overweight and then ensuring that you eat healthy and exercise in order to try to avoid that, I think.
Yeah, exactly.
If you've got a family history of diabetes, then exercise and eat well, and at least, you know, I think the type B or whatever it is that's more to do with your lifestyle choices.
So, you know, we're attempting to genetically change the species.
It sounds so eugenics-based, right?
right?
But philosophers, good philosophers, are those who effectively switch the genetics of the species to the point where the arguments no longer need to be inflicted, but rather become self-perpetuating through genetics, right?
So if you can convince a religious person to be non-religious, then they're going to raise their children to be non-religious.
And it doesn't mean that their children will for sure be non-religious, because there are genetic tendencies, but it will certainly increase the chance of those gene sets not being switched on through exposure to indoctrination.
And so, yeah, it's this giant, vast genetic experiment that we're not experiment, but genetic work that's going on here, which is using arguments to reshape genetics in the world.
And so, you know, one way of looking at history—and again, when I— Look at gene wars or the religious gene wars and so on.
They're not the final answers, but they're ways that history can be looked at that give some clarity.
One of the reasons we got the age of reason was because religious warfare killed off the religious gene set.
The religious warfare that went on for 200-300 years in some European countries, up until the 17th-18th centuries, killed off a lot of religious people.
And the most religious were the most fanatical, and they're the ones who got killed and killed others the most.
So that gene set was largely diminished in its capacity to influence society.
And, you know, like, I mean, if every Japanese person decided to commit seppuku and kill themselves, then the Japanese gene set would be pretty much wiped out, right?
We'd live on in sort of others in some diminished way.
In the same way, if religious warfare is always going to kill off the most religious people, and that then creates some breathing room for the skeptics and the rationalists and the scientists and the mathematicians and all that.
And this is one of the reasons why, after the religious warfare of the middle of the last millennia, you have the age of reason.
In terms of great leaps forward in intelligence, the genetics behind intelligence are an incredibly, well, historically very scarce resource in society, and the Black Death in Western Europe had a huge influence on the progression of and spread of the genes for intelligence, because in general, the more intelligent you were, the less you were mired in the city, right?
You had some country estate, you had some breathing room, you had some, you know, your own water supply and so on.
And so in a very broad brush, it wiped out the less intelligent and preserved the genes of the more intelligent, who then bred more to fill the vacuum.
And in the same way, Jews were not considered to be remarkably intelligent up until a couple of hundred years ago when relentless eugenics to breed smarter Jews, in other words, people in the Jewish community were often the rabbis, and the rabbis were encouraged to have the most children, and the rabbis were also encouraged to mate, not with the prettiest, but the smartest women in their
After like thousands of years of relentless eugenics to breed smart Jews, a couple of hundred years ago, they popped a baby, right?
And now Jews have, you know, at least the Ashkenazi Jews, the non-Sephardic Jews, have what is arguably the highest IQ as a population, you know, 112, 115, and they're shaved back in terms of their spatial skills.
There's not a lot of Jewish engineers.
They have Slightly below average spatial skills, but language skills, it's insane, right?
Like 120, 125, 130, like on average, right?
And so this religion is just simply, it's a gene set, and it uses a symbology and resources in order to reproduce itself.
So that...
So you would say that...
Religion may be something that helps fulfill some emotional want, but not a need?
No, it is the intellectual expression of a genetic susceptibility to a particular kind of experience.
Now, obviously, to some degree, religion is associated with insanity.
Because religion is founded on people hearing voices, right?
And people reporting things which can't possibly be true.
Like, nobody walked on water.
Nobody healed lepers with a touch.
Nobody turned water into wine or, you know, took one filet of fish and made a whole McDonald's chain out of it and so on, right?
These things just never happened.
And...
There was a guy who commented on a video a while back, you know, just saying, well, you know, Steph, you've got to open yourself up to spiritual experiences.
You know, I myself have seen, you know, supernatural phenomenon that simply can't be explained through natural forces.
You've got to open yourself up to this, that, and the other, right?
And, you know, my sort of thought is, okay, well, what's more likely?
That the laws of physics have been completely violated or that someone is lying.
Now, either they are lying or they're not.
Like, they genuinely believed that they...
Like, I had a friend when I was younger who says, like, he woke up and he saw a spectral Victorian woman floating above his bed, slowly turning like a chicken on a rotisserie.
And, you know, of course, it's not that hard to figure out.
That he had a dream where, you know, we've always had these, you know, like these switcheroos, right?
Like you wake up, you're in your dream, you wake up, and then you wake up again, and you just woke up in the dream.
So he just dreamt that he was awake and saw this thing, right?
But he was very committed to this actually was the case.
This was the case.
And I remember saying to him at the time, I said, look, This is a fork in the road, man.
Like, this is a fork in the road.
This is when we were teenagers.
This is a fork in the road.
If you continue to believe that there was a spectral Victorian ghost floating and turning above your bed in the middle of the night, your life is going to be a disaster.
Your life is going to be a disaster because that has such foundational metaphysical ramifications.
Yeah, yeah, I talk just like every other teenager, right?
but that has like foundational reality belief systems like you are going to believe in life after death you are going to believe that there are ghosts walking all around you like this is you you are you are courting the derangement of your brain you are sowing the seeds of the destruction of your cognitive faculties you are um you're like a guy who's going out every day trying to lift a tractor like you You're going to break your back.
You're going to literally permanently harm your body.
You are trying to do something which is not healthy.
This is super important.
I fought with him because you have friends.
If a log falls on them in the forest, you try and lift up the log even if they're screaming in pain.
You try and help them because they're going to die if they stay there.
I fought tooth and nail with this guy.
No.
Look at all the options.
Look at the possibilities.
Look at the reality.
Do you think if there was a camera that it would have seen it?
And the moment you start dodging those questions, you're training your brain to avoid reality.
You're training your brain to avoid reality.
Like this guy we had calling in about the God who was there and not there.
I think this was in the last call-in show.
Last call-in show before that.
The moment somebody asks a relevant and pertinent question and people fog or avoid, you are training your brain to avoid reality.
In other words, you are physically taking your brain like a stick, bending it over your knee.
Sooner or later, you keep plying about that pressure.
It's going to snap.
Sadly, this guy did not listen to my advice.
At some point, you have to stop because then you're just going to follow people into their madness.
Also, then their defiance of your rationality It becomes a source of power for them.
Like their power to deny your rationality gives their irrationality strength.
You know, like any muscle works on resistance, right?
And if you're opposing irrationality in someone, if you keep opposing it, when they've dedicated themselves, you're simply strengthening their resistance, you're strengthening.
And this, again, has been well proven, that when you oppose people's beliefs, quite often you simply strengthen those irrational beliefs.
And so I had to stop, and sadly, my...
Prophecy, which was not really anything supernatural, of course, was true.
And his life became a disaster because you harm your brain.
So he had, you know, obviously a susceptibility.
Now he had the chance to intercept that susceptibility with reason, and he didn't.
He made that choice, right?
I mean, nobody fought for him that hard, I'm sure, before or after.
And...
So I wouldn't say that it serves some deep emotional need, because it certainly doesn't serve any deep emotional need in me, and I'm a human being as well.
But we are not all the same people, right?
I mean, this is part of the myth of the soul, which has been my enemy for many years, which I've talked about before.
We are not all the same people, right?
There's R's and there's K's, and there's people with the religious gene set, and there are people without the religious gene set, there are people with the skeptical gene set, and we're all fighting.
For superiority.
One of the reasons we can't have a state is because human beings are engaged in genetic warfare pretty continually.
We don't all have the same self-interest.
Males have a different reproductive strategy from females.
Ours have a different reproductive strategy from Ks.
The reality that the religious mindset or gene set lives in is radically opposed to the reality that the skeptics and the rationalists live in.
And we are not all the same.
We are all warring and competing gene sets Which would be fine in society without a state.
That would be fun, it would be creative, and there would be some tension and friction that goes on.
Sometimes the rationalists can be a bit dull and pedantic.
There aren't a lot of really great atheist novelists, in my humble opinion, but that's a topic for another time.
There can be some imagination that is sort of lacking.
Like people on the right, like the Bill Whittles and so on.
Really great guys, love listening to them and so on, but Not a lot of rhetorical flourishes and deep Shakespearean power in what they do.
So it was people on the left.
You know, it's like I think she did Weeds and she's doing Orange is the New Black.
I mean, it's fantastic writing and fantastic acting.
Deeply repulsive human beings, you know?
Like, it's weird to watch a prison show where you sympathize with the people but you're like, yeah, I can see why they're in prison and I'm actually pretty happy that they are, right?
I mean, that's tough.
But, so, without a government, these things would be decided, you know, through breeding choices.
They would be decided through art wars, right?
Which, you know, are very, very important.
Wait, is it art wars?
Art wars, yeah.
It's combat, art combat.
You know, where, you know, the communists are always trying to portray, you know, evil capitalists, right?
And the capitalists are not as good at portraying, like, evil parasites.
I mean, other than Ayn Rand, who was like the...
The Dickensian master of the villain.
Dostoevsky and Dickens were masterful in villainy.
And Shakespeare, of course, going further back.
Ayn Rand is, to me, the unquestioned master of the villain portrayal in the 20th century.
So, in a free society, these gene wars would be great and, you know, fine and exciting and cool.
But with a state, they become like battles to the grim death of the species, it seems like so.
And everything you've said, I don't oppose or anything.
But I think that...
I guess what I'm saying is...
I see that religion arose for a reason.
Whether or not it is still helpful is a different question.
And in a lot of ways it's not.
Like you said...
Religion arose out of laziness.
I'm praying for you.
Really?
Can you bake me a quiche?
No, I'm praying.
And it's not to say that religious people are lazy.
There's some great, wonderful, hardworking religious people.
But fundamentally, religion arose out of losing and lazing.
The two L's of religion.
And sorry to give a speech again.
I'll keep this brief.
I've used this example before.
So if you're a tribe and you've lost out so badly that you have to live under a volcano, well...
You have a problem, right?
And so you've got to live under this volcano, and because you're a weak tribe, you can't fight your way into better lands, right?
So you've got to live with this volcano.
The volcano can erupt at any time, so what do you do?
You've got this anxiety of living in the volcano.
Well, you can either toughen the hell up in your tribe and go beat up some other tribe and get better land, or go explore some new area, I don't know what, right?
Go do something.
Go get out of the shadow of the volcano, right?
Or, and that's one way, that's what the K would tell you to do.
Your K-selected genes would say, volcano, not good, right?
And Mount Vesuvius, not good to live under a volcano, so let's go someplace else, right?
And that would be the K. But the other part of you would say, hey, I wonder if I can invent a story.
I wonder if I can invent a story that makes living under the volcano Fine.
And the story that you make up is some guy was dancing a jig when the volcano erupted, so now no more jigs.
Right?
Because we angered the volcano god, you know?
And, you know, that time when the sheep escaped, that also the volcano erupted, so now sheep have to be kept very tightly in a pen, and you end up with this layer of neurotic bullshit rules.
Right?
It has no effect on the volcano, of course, but it's designed to give you the illusion that it has an effect on the volcano.
Or an illusion of control.
Yeah, and so it gives you real control over your anxiety, but only illusory control over the real source of your anxiety, which is the fact that you're living under a damn volcano, which is not good, right?
And so your choice of fight or move, those would be proactive...
Things to do, right?
Look, if this is the only place...
If the rest of this island is taken out with more aggressive tribes, we don't want to live under the volcano.
We're either going to merge with those tribes, or if there are enemies, then we're going to have to fight them.
We're going to have to drive them off, right?
And so you make this fight, right?
Or if there's places in the island where you could go...
You go find those places, right?
Or you figure out, you know, maybe nobody's figured out fishing yet.
So you go figure out fishing.
You go live by the sea or whatever or by the lake.
And so it's laziness.
It's like, well, I don't want to go fight and I don't really want to move, so I'm just going to sit here and make up a story that lets me live by the volcano because I'm too lazy to fight and too scared to move.
And that's our thinking, right?
Bill Whittle...
I've seen one speech of his and one show of his.
I know I've seen a couple of shows.
He does, I think, Firewallet's call.
And he's worth having a watch.
He's worth a W-H-I-T-T-L-E. So when I was doing this RK stuff, somebody sent me a little sort of webcam speech that Bill Whittle gave.
It was good.
It was good.
He was saying, you know, if you really want to understand the RK stuff, He said, you know, like myself, he went to this book that I talked about in the presentation, but he said he wanted to add his own little bit to it.
And it's a good bit.
I'll just give it to you very briefly.
Maybe, Mike, you can put the link to this below the video.
But he said, imagine if we were suddenly transported into the bodies of antelopes in Africa.
Okay.
And we have all our brains, all our personalities, we're suddenly...
Because we're K, right?
As humans, we're K no matter what, right?
But I mean, there's still a continuum within humanity.
But let's say the K is in humans, right?
We're put into the brains of antelopes.
Now, would we suddenly say, well, you know, as long as I can outrun my kid, well, the kid gets eaten by the lion, well, I can always make another kid, so it's not a big deal.
Or, you know, if my friend has got a bit of a lame leg, it's great because I can outrun him and all that.
We wouldn't.
We'd say, you know what?
I've had it with these fucking lions.
I have had it.
With these motherfucking lions on this motherfucking plane.
I've had it with these lions.
No, we're not doing this.
You know what we're going to do?
We'd call a circle.
We'd all sit around.
We've got horns on our heads, right?
I said, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to go out real quiet, because lions often sleep at night.
Or sleep during the day, whenever the hell the lions sleep.
We're going to go find out when they sleep, and we're going to go find out where they are.
And you know what we're going to do?
We're going to kill these lions.
We are going to surround them.
We are going to charge them.
We are going to hoof them in the head.
We are going to gore them.
We are going to kick them.
A lion chasing a zebra, the zebra can break the lion's jaw just by kicking.
We are going to stomp all over their babies.
We are going to drive these.
We are going to kill them or we are going to drive them off.
We are not submitting to these lion attacks anymore.
Fuck them.
That's what caves would do if they were suddenly in our bodies.
And if I was, you know, suddenly in charge of this tribe, shaking with fear at the bottom of a volcano, I'd be like, man, this is no way to live.
We can't live like this.
I mean, what's wrong with this?
Like, let's get up an hour early every morning.
Let's go lift some logs.
Let's go figure out which...
Frog's asses give the most potent poison.
Let's figure out some blow dots.
Let's go figure out how to make nunchucks out of starfish.
Whatever the hell we've got to do, we can't live here like this anymore.
This is barely living.
We've got six million different rules, none of which is going to affect what the volcano does one little bit.
We've got to stop fantasizing that We've got any control here.
We've got no control.
And all we're doing is we're being enslaved by our own delusions.
We're creating more and more rules which have nothing to do with whether the volcano erupts or not.
We're being enslaved by our own rules.
We're burying ourselves under regulations for no purpose whatsoever.
So we're being enslaved not by the volcano, but by our own cowardice, by our own refusal to do what is necessary to get to a better living situation and condition.
That's what I do.
I'm sure that's what you would do as well.
You sit there and, okay, we need another rule because the volcano just erupted again or whatever.
And so, to me, religion is pretty R-focused.
And this is one of the reasons why the K's of the Roman Empire gave way to the R's of the Christian empire, the slave mentality, and so on.
And this is why the case of the warrior class in the West that built up colonialism and expanded the West around the world, the sun never set, on the British Empire, which owned a third of the globe, then they all get wiped out in World War I or World War II, and now you've got these appeasers who are like, yeah, Muslims, come on in, right?
I mean, and political correctness and all cultures were equal and all that relativistic, non-competitive R crap.
This is just the gene wars that we're You know, these rabbits have got teeth because of the state.
Anyway, does that make any sense?
Yeah, I mean, most of what you're saying is sort of what I... So basically what I did is, in order to prepare for the talk, I just had some bullet points with sort of a progression of where my thought was on religion.
And most of the points that you had regarding sort of the soothing effects of religion and how they...
It's sort of a construct that allows you to be at ease in your surroundings, wherever they may be, however dangerous they may be, and however much you don't understand them.
All the mystery of the world around you can be reduced into something that doesn't matter anymore under the veil of religion.
And in that regards, I definitely agree.
I mean, I think that from what I was going to present it as, I guess, or talk about it as, is in the discussion of what is known in psychology as System 1 and System 2.
Are you familiar with those things?
No.
Okay, so basically...
There are two modes of thinking.
And it's not to say that this is hard and fast.
It's just an easier way to categorize things.
And there are a lot of studies to show that there are basically two modes of thinking.
And I'll explain it.
So System 1 is...
This sort of faster intuitive thinking where you don't really deeply think about it.
You're not really rationalizing.
You're just kind of absorbing your surroundings and making whatever coherent conclusions about the surroundings you can as quickly as possible.
And it's sort of the mind-numbing when you're just not really thinking.
You're just walking around.
You're just watching TV, whatever.
And then System 2 is the more The one where you're actually thinking, you're solving problems, you're solving a math problem, or it is occupied when you're doing even physical labor.
If you're doing physical labor, an example of this is if you are walking and you ask someone next to you and you said, hey, solve this math problem 17 times 21 in your head, it's very likely that they'll stop walking and try to answer it.
Because the system 2 This categorization of system 2, when you're thinking hard trying to solve a problem, is associated with an expenditure of energy that you want to preserve when thinking.
So it's very hard to think clearly and very hard about a subject or problem while running or walking very fast.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I mean, I actually really enjoy moving while I do my show, like I haven't done my show sitting down.
Right, but you're moving at a languid pace, right?
Yeah, I'm not doing crunches while hanging upside down like a bat.
Yeah, I get it.
Right, right.
Yeah, so a Langwood pace is still okay, but if you were doing a five-minute mile, you probably won't be doing very much thinking other than the thinking that's focusing on trying to get you to keep running.
At least myself, I'm not motivated.
Yeah, a great thinking time for me is, I don't know if it's the same for you, but a great thinking time for me is the time in the morning After I wake up, before I get up.
It's a very, very creative time for my brain to be cooking its magic brew.
And that, of course, is a very physically languid time.
But it's a great time to let my mind wander and to explore new thoughts and new ideas.
There's a lot of creativity in that time for me.
So, yeah, I think that would certainly accord with what you're saying.
Right.
And so, basically, the...
With these two systems, it's not too hard to think about a bigger picture with those systems.
With System 1, from an evolutionary standpoint, you want to save your energy to do things that are constructive to, first of all, surviving, and secondly, to reproduce.
Correct?
And so what I think is that there was a time when the majority of our efforts were spent doing those two things.
There wasn't very much else to living other than doing what is necessary to live and then to reproduce.
But that is clearly not the case anymore.
You have a lot of free time to tackle whatever problem you choose that is expending energy that is not used to gather food or to, you know, you know what I mean?
Yep.
Okay, and I think this obviously correlates with about 12,000 years ago in the agricultural expansion driven by, you know, Realizing we could use crops and stay put.
That gave an evolutionary advantage.
When you had a surplus of food by taking advantage of the surroundings, you could have other people specialize in things.
First of all, you could have a higher population.
You could sustain that, of course.
But secondly, you could have people specializing in things that weren't...
That wasn't directly surviving and trying to live.
And so people could specialize in things that allowed you to, say, militarize and take over other lands and completely increase the amount of arable lands, increase the amount of food you have, increase the amount of people you can have to specialize in military efforts and in thinking and whatever else you want your city to have.
There's a clear evolutionary advantage to having a societal benefit if you wanted to.
But you get what I'm saying, right?
But now that you don't have to use your time by only living, you don't have to just do what is instinctually necessary for just any animal, you have a lot of leisure time to think.
And that's a lot of leisure time to choose what to think about.
And so I think that with this came a lot of fear and uncertainty because certainly you're thinking about, you know, you have more time to think about things that can bother you.
You can think about, you know, what is it that I'm supposed to be doing?
What is life after death?
What is all these mysterious things?
You know, what are the stars?
What is this comet?
Whatever.
Or asteroid, you know.
And clearly this is very unsettling.
It's almost just like, you know, this instant existential crisis where you don't know your purpose in life and there's a lot of things to be afraid of.
Right?
Well, okay, but I kind of get what you're saying, but I would argue that...
I don't think it's oppositional, but I think it's complementary.
I would argue that telling men that there's a life after death is going to make it more likely that they'll fight to the death, right?
If you have two groups of warriors, one of whom is afraid of dying, and another of whom is willing to embrace the death, then it's not too hard to figure out who is going to be more likely to prevail.
And this is one of the ways in which the religious gene set spreads, right?
By immunizing people to the fear of death, it makes them into somewhat, right?
There's recklessness, right, too, but somewhat more deadly warriors, right?
I mean, because in the Kamikaze versus the Manhattan Project, right, I mean, the Americans won out because they were less willing to die than the Kamikaze pilots and so on, so they fought smarter.
Because willingness to die will make you fight harder, but it won't necessarily make you fight smarter.
And so in that war between those who are not afraid of death and those who wish to fight, preserve their lives by fighting smarter, that's, I think, the scientific versus the religious mindset there.
So I think there are some advantages to the religious mindset in the short term in that it will help you to win battles, but in the long run, the cunning, the art of war stuff that wins out.
I didn't think about it in the perspective of war, so that was an interesting insight.
Well, can we imagine what kind of society we'd be living in if Muslims had developed the nuclear weapons first, right?
I don't have much doubt of what kind of society we'd be living in, right?
So, yeah, the fact that some of them are willing to be suicide bombers doesn't mean that they're going to win.
It just means that that, right?
So, it's just one strategy, which is the willingness to forego the fear of death.
But I think that it, of course, has transcended...
Of course, I don't know what started, what phenomenon started.
Was it people's fear of death that made them think of the supernatural?
Was it just mysterious things occurring around them that they couldn't explain?
They didn't have the tools necessary?
I mean, science does so beautifully with many things now.
I mean...
And one analogy, or not analogy, but story that is very apt in describing that is in my English class, we had to read a lot of, it was a survey of English literature,
you know, American, and so the first thing we read was some Puritan stuff, and very dry, very boring, but one thing that very clearly stands out is a A complete reliance on God to explain phenomenon in every way, right?
You thank God.
Okay, you see something you don't understand, you know it's God's will.
Someone dies, it's okay, it's God's will.
Someone gets sick, you just pray, it's God's will.
But...
You know, you get sick.
You don't consult God.
You consult medicine.
You consult the internet.
Maybe you look at symptoms.
You consult your doctor.
And so there's been a shift.
Joe Kingley said, it's not God, it's Google.
No one looks towards God as their answer.
Most people that want a solution that can actually be obtained will look towards something scientific.
Yeah, no, but even Jehovah's Witness won't do blood transfusions, and there are people who don't do chemotherapy or other things and so on, right?
But you're right.
I think the majority of people go to the doctor.
Right, and it's just that, you know, when you're reading these texts, there's just a clear distinction between you as a reader, hopefully, and these Puritans who had a complete reliance on explaining all phenomenon by God's will.
And Clearly we've both pretty much established that this sets forth kind of an ease in uneasy environments, correct?
Sorry, you mean the religion puts forward an ease in uneasy environments, is that right?
Yes.
Yeah.
I guess what I'm saying is that in light of...
I brought up System 1 and 2, and the reason I did so is because the expenditure of energy is like the law of least effort.
You want to accomplish things by spending the least amount of energy.
By using System 2 at any point, you're expending more energy than if you use System 1.
Any environment, it was advantageous to not expend that energy in despair and not knowing what you should do or what the outcome of tomorrow will be to instead become at ease.
So anything in repetition becomes something that is more at ease in your mind to see.
So something that you're uncomfortable with for the first time that you see, if you continue So if you hated clowns or something, I don't really know what kind of irrational fear people have, but a lot of people say they're afraid of clowns for some reason.
But if you're afraid of clowns...
They're not afraid of clowns per se.
They're afraid of being around people who think it's a good idea to spend their life learning to become a clown.
I'm just kidding.
I don't know why.
Go ahead.
Or they saw the movie It or something.
But...
Basically, the idea is that if you continually see a clown throughout your time, and nothing bad happens, hopefully, otherwise maybe their fears were justified, then you will eventually become in an environment and it's no longer taxing on your psyche in order to be around it.
Yeah, this is training the amygdala or progressive exposure.
You train the amygdala to not respond properly.
As a sort of life or death emergency when it's a clown, right?
Right.
Unless the clown is hovering over your bed with a machete.
In which case, that's just different.
But go ahead.
Well, I think the same process was occurring in the creation.
I say creation, but I use the word loosely.
I don't want to say evolution either, but the sort of The process of making religion something that people used as a tool to get over that sort of despair with their surroundings and their misunderstandings and all the mystery and questions...
Wait, wait.
Sorry.
I think we took a turn here because my argument was that it doesn't help people deal with the fears in their surroundings.
But I think that...
By externalizing the course as God's will, it makes them feel less bad about the immediate...
It's a short-term solution which creates long-term chronic problems because, you know, you can say the volcano god is angry, but then the solution isn't let's move away from the volcano.
The solution is let's appease the volcano god, which paralyzes you in terms of being able to move away from the volcano.
But I think that...
Well, there are many situations, if not most or all, that lying to yourself is not good.
And I agree with that.
But what I'm saying is that it's not that it's...
There are some things...
Okay, so if you lived in a volcano, yes, the best solution would just be to get the hell out of there.
But there are some things that are mysterious, that are unsettling, that you can't really avoid.
You can't avoid the truth that you will die.
You can't avoid the horrors of maybe having to live in an environment that has a terrible winter or something like that.
I mean, I guess you could move, but you may not have the resources to do so.
And so, when you're faced with those situations, it's that amount of despair for something you can't fix.
You can leave a volcano, but you cannot prevent the fact that you will die, correct?
Well, you can influence it, right?
Well, that would be true for something like medicine, where putting your faith in God would not be a good thing if you wanted to extend your lifespan.
You would, of course, choose medicine.
But, at the time, they didn't have those tools.
They didn't have medicine.
But why didn't they have medicine?
Right?
The reason they didn't have medicine was that they thought it was God's will.
I'm not saying that it is a preferable stance to medicine or anything, but just that it was satisfactory.
No, hang on.
I mean, I know what the issue is.
It's that you're saying, well, when you don't have control, you're more likely to believe in God.
And what I'm saying is that Okay, let's say that's true to begin with.
The problem is that then you end up in a situation where you continue to have no control because of your belief in God.
But I guess at that point you don't care.
I'm not saying that's good, but I'm just trying to understand.
You're saying that all people don't care about control after they get religion?
I think that's a pretty broad statement.
No, but just that...
I think that many religions epitomize giving your control to a central power.
And that if you're saying that as you progress through a religious mindset, that you begin to, while you felt like you had control, you eventually begin to lose that control over time.
As you begin to continually stop I'm saying that you can do things or that you can intervene in God's plan.
And I agree that's completely reasonable and it does happen.
I mean, going back to the Puritans, they didn't try to medicate themselves in the same ways because they did think it was God's plan or whatever.
But...
First of all, there are a few things that make a religion, of course.
Religions are just a belief in some supernatural or divine force.
Usually that is constructed into the idea of a personalized god.
It doesn't have to be, but usually it is.
And there's a reason for that, and I can explain in a second.
But then there are culturally inherited traditions and guidelines for behavior, right?
And then there are practices, like you have rites or sermons or whatever.
I'm most familiar with Catholicism, simply because I was raised into Catholicism.
I've since left it, but I was raised in it.
And so things like taking the Eucharist and things of that nature are sort of the examples of the sermons, or even just going to church.
And so I think that this idea of you're losing control is not good, but I think it's almost part of your faith.
As you increase your faith, you You are giving more idea that you are giving more control to God.
And so, you know, it's not good, but you're saying that, you know, that happens.
But I think that it's not just like, oh, it happens.
I mean, it's almost like a goal of a religious thing, right?
I think we're getting progressively more incomprehensible, at least I'm not following.
The goal of a religious thing is, to me, not a very technically precise or comprehensible statement.
But I will say, of course, that you end up with, you know, when you take the religious approach to anxiety management, right?
The slave has to manage himself because he can't manage his environment, right?
Now, the degree to which he is a slave because in the past his ancestors refused to manage their environment, I don't know, right?
That's obviously an unprovable...
Vague speculation.
The slave has to manage himself because he has no capacity to change his environment.
This is back to Nietzsche's Superman and Underman or whatever.
The slave says, well, I can't not be a slave, so I guess I'll make a virtue out of being a slave.
Oh, this religion is telling me that it's virtuous to be a slave and it's bad to be an owner.
Well, that I'd rather take that because I'm not going to revolt against my slave owners, and so I might as well get a virtue, pretend that it's a virtue to be a slave.
Now, that gives him some significant advantage emotionally in the moment, right?
And, you know, it's not a criticism, it's just like an observation, right?
I can understand and we all have these habits and all of that.
And the problem is, of course, that it means that by pretending to have control in the here and now, they lose control with regards to the future.
In other words, because I'm going to manage myself rather than rebel against my environment, my environment becomes permanent.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
So, and of course, when it comes to the priestly class, what happens is you end up with a group of people who make an enormous amount of money and have a huge amount of power by telling other people that they're powerless.
Right?
I mean, because in a Catholic religion, you need the priest to get into heaven.
And so you have to pay the priest to cure you of the imaginary disease called sin.
Which, by the way, of course, would be fraud and prosecutable offense in any other situation or environment, but, you know, there's no point creating rules if you intend to follow them for most people.
And so, you create a group with a huge vested interest in continuing the narrative, right?
In other words, because there's a volcano that can erupt at any time, and some people would rather manage themselves than manage...
The actual problem by fighting or moving away or something like that.
What happens is you end up with a huge power structure in the tribe that requires proximity to the volcano.
The priests of placating the volcano god, they require that the tribe stay near the volcano.
Does that make sense?
Right.
I get what you're saying.
And so the kings and I think what Rand used to call the witch doctors and the warriors, the warrior kings, the whole tribe is then trapped at the base of the volcano.
And anyone who then suggests we should move away from the volcano is like a heretic and is someone who must be pursued and prosecuted and distant the other, right?
And this is how the approach or the methodology of managing yourself and managing your anxieties through illusions It turns from a temporary solution to a permanent problem into a permanent non-solution to what could have otherwise been a temporary problem, i.e., we're living by a volcano.
And you're then fenced and attached to the volcano by delusion and addiction.
Well, I think an interesting thing to note here is, you know, so clearly...
People find themselves believing in religions for whatever that we've already discussed, and oftentimes rational people who aren't religious don't really understand why someone would allow themselves to live near this volcano, right?
And submit to such a thing.
But just as some information that is interesting and pertinent, so when I was discussing the System 1 and System 2, so one thing that's interesting about System 1, which is the default state of mind, the sort of intuitive thinking like I was saying, is that it is...
System 1 judges the truth or falsity or falseness of a statement or a story or whatever based on its coherence and not the amount or quality of the information.
And so as long as a story can be constructed that makes sense, since it's not really a very hard-thinking process, then You'll accept it as true, and it is the job of the harder thinking of System 2 to question that assertion that System 1 has created.
A lot of the times, we'll find things that don't add up.
What I'm saying is, you mentioned a genetic predisposition to I'm not sure.
I don't know what that means.
A more consistent story is more believable?
I'm not saying that it actually is, but for the way that psychologists have understood how people take information and judge its truth value or false value, whatever, on a first glance basis without actually putting forth the effort to Being lazy, in other words, when you just read something and you're like, how do I feel about this immediately?
The coherence, which is basically just, can you make a series of events that makes sense in terms of cause and effect, in a sense?
So for God, for example, you could say, oh, well, God, his will made me sick and I'm sick.
So that's a cause and effect that's a very – it's coherent because it has a clear cause and effect, but it's not true when you scrutinize further.
Does that make sense?
I'm honestly not sure what we're talking about here.
The stuff that feels true is easy to accept and stuff that doesn't feel true?
I'm sorry if I'm dense, I'm maybe not just following what you're saying, or maybe it's simpler than I think, or maybe it's more complex than I think, but...
Well, no, it's just things that seem...
Okay, so if I gave you a series of words, right, and I said, you know, or a couple sentences, you know, or three sentences, and I said, you know, John is angry, the maids showed up late for work, and the movie starts at two, You know, you can...
Those three sentences, you know, you can quickly create a coherent story that John is angered because the maids were late for work, and it has nothing to do with movies, right?
Okay.
Right, so it's just the ability to take in information and see...
So system one, which is your initial check for information, your way of just analyzing things for face value, cares about the coherence of a story for its believability.
And so...
You would believe a story like, oh, John is angry because his maids were late for work because it's coherent and not because it's necessarily true.
And you have to then scrutinize and think further.
And so I think that I'm mentioning this in the context of religion because religion has a coherent story and it has a clear cause and effect.
It even has, you know...
People who are personified beings that interact.
And so it is easier to believe, even more so than a genetic predisposition, but just from the way that we process information.
Are you saying that people who don't believe in religion are bad at processing information?
I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm just sort of understanding if you're saying that...
Based on the way human beings process information, religion is believable, then it would seem to me that there would then be a deficiency in people who weren't religious in processing information.
They process it the same way.
But then people who don't believe in it are typically more likely to scrutinize and be skeptical and therefore employ system two, which is the one that expends more energy for deeper thought.
So those people are more likely to question things.
I mean, it's thought, not deeper thought.
It's just thought, right?
Right.
Right.
And so, the sort of this, like, it's the idea between having, like, unconscious and conscious thought, sort of, basically.
So, like, you can unconscious, or just, like, without thinking about it, you can look at the surroundings and tell what the surroundings are, right?
You don't have to think very hard to say, oh, that's a table, that's whatever.
And so, it's that same kind of thing.
You can take these statements for face value and believe them, and religion being one of those things, if you never critically think about it with this system two thought.
But I think that what often ends up happening is when you are in a state of distress, you're expending that energy, and you're basically what is known as ego depletion.
So ego depletion is just the concept that when you expend too much energy, you're less likely to be critical and skeptical because you'd rather be lazy and just accept things for face value when you're really tired.
Well, I wouldn't say that tiredness is the same as lazy, right?
Well, in both cases, if you're really tired or you're really lazy.
If I've been working at a physical job all day and I don't feel like going jogging, that's not really because I'm lazy, right?
I'm tired.
Right.
I'm sorry for saying that the two are the same.
But what I mean is just that if you're tired from doing some physical labor or thinking really hard, you're less likely to try hard again when you've already expended your energy.
Or on the flip side, if you're lazy and you haven't done anything, but you're aversive to doing work and thinking, then you're more likely to accept these things.
So-called arguments that don't really actually contain factual information.
And so if you are in a distressful environment, then you're expending energy distressing.
And so it's easy to find yourself not scrutinizing and just accepting things that will make you feel better.
That's sort of that you were talking about, that quick solution that is bad for the long term.
And so I think that...
Yeah, like it's easier to drink than to deal with your personal problems, right?
Right.
But the problem is the more you drink, the more personal problems you end up with, so it turns out to not be a very productive solution.
I think I agree with that.
I mean, I don't see how that would be too arguable.
Right.
And so perhaps like, you know, so I'm just saying that in order to add another perspective of why people would come into something like religion other than a genetic predisposition.
Well, and the propaganda, of course, right?
As we talked about in the beginning, that they're told that it's true and they're punished if they don't believe that it's true, right?
Right, and then you can once again employ that same sort of thought.
If you are in a state of distress by not believing, it is easier to put that off, right?
And just believe it.
Especially if there's something that can actually happen to you that's very bad, like you get killed or something.
Right.
Listen, man, I think I've certainly got enough from the conversation to make sense of it for me.
Do you mind if we move on to the last caller?
I think that's fine, especially considering that...
I mean, when I indicated in the email that I had some other things to discuss, but I think that you are tired, and so I'm going to go ahead and let you go.
We can schedule for another call down the road, Nicholas, to bring up your other questions.
It's kind of tough sometimes to get to two, especially if they're long ones within the context of one call.
Yeah, we can't do all of religious etymology and motivations and so on.
No, it's not that I'm tired.
It's just that we do have another caller to get to.
It's not bad, but I feel like we're...
Not getting to anything too radical.
I'm not saying radical.
It has to be radical or anything like that.
But if we're saying that tired people have a tough time thinking and that people who drink to solve their problems end up with more problems, I just think that's not necessarily the best use of listener time.
But I'm certainly happy to talk more if you want to call back in.
But I guess the only thing I will bring up, but you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.
I don't have to tell you that.
I actually worked on a research paper in which I described this process of believing in religion, but more so on the side of I'm not sure what you mean by what religion might do in the future.
I don't know what that means.
In short, I think the concept of a religion will not go away anytime soon.
I agree.
But that the concept of a god may come under scrutiny.
And so, whenever I was looking at this, and the reason why is because I think that science exerts levels of control that are extremely, you know, empirically obvious, whereas religion is not.
What do you mean by control?
You mean control over the world?
Yes.
Okay.
So you can control a phenomenon, and you can see, oh, if I do X, Y, and Z, it's very...
It's provable.
It's provable and it's very algorithmic.
What does algorithmic mean?
Just that you know with a certain set of processes that you can have an expected outcome.
Okay, got it.
Predictable.
Right.
But I think that basically there are big problems that we must face.
Overpopulation is And we'll have to face, like, do we have enough resources?
How do we use these resources?
Whatever.
And the science is increasingly coming on the brink of having more and more control over our environment, and even more recently, ourselves.
It's not a long shot for things like eugenics to become a huge...
issue when when we can manipulate our own genes at birth or for birth all right and so with this increased level of control that science will exert I think that it will be less likely for people to to justify the conceptualization of a God that has control right and but the thing is I don't think religion would go away still Religion hasn't gone away among atheists.
It's just switched to statism.
The belief in an all-powerful being that somehow can respond to human demands and has no agenda of its own.
I don't see how religion has vanished at all.
Marxism is just another kind of religion.
In light of that, though, I just wanted to amuse in this paper that what I'm not sure what you mean.
I mean, you seem to be taking like an observational stance, and I would sort of invite you to take more of an activist stance.
You know, like, well, religion is there, and it's like, well, why don't you work at having religion not be there, and so on.
Well, I guess like, I think I find it more of, the reason why I don't take such an active stance and more of an observational stance is because I don't think, it's almost sort of a cynical thing.
I just don't have belief that I can change humanity enough to make them, you know, make radical changes like that.
I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm just genuinely curious.
Do you think that I'm mistaken in my attempt to try and bring more rationality to the world?
No, but I don't think that it's possible to have a completely rational...
And by completely rational, I don't mean like you are rational all the time, but I just think...
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
First of all, when have I ever said completely rational as if that's even possible?
I don't even know what that would mean.
Would that mean your dreams would be rational?
Would that mean that all of your sexual tastes would be completely rational?
I mean, I'm not sure what you mean by completely rational.
I don't mean completely rational as an individual, but like...
I think that ideally, and I guess you're aware of the fact that idealisms in terms of trying to change the world are, you know, it's not, whatever the case, I don't think that I can make people stop believing in religion because I think it's just like...
We've established that.
That wasn't my question.
Well, because I don't think I can change people in that fundamental of a way, I can't change their human nature to avoid believing in non-rational things.
You're still not answering my question, right?
Because if you think that it's human nature to believe this and any attempts to change it are futile and foolish, right?
Then that's my question.
And I'm not trying to be confrontational.
I'm just genuinely curious.
Do you think that my goal to bring more rationality to human thought is erroneous?
Is it like a fool's quest?
In other words, do I have the capacity to change people's minds for the better but you don't?
Or nobody does and I'm fooling myself?
And the reason being is that, you know, to me, belief systems are very, very important.
And if you have an insight about the lack of capacity for people to reason that is something that you believe to be true or have very strong evidence for, you know, that would be pretty important for me, right?
I want to spend my life doing things that don't make sense, right?
I mean, I suppose I think that I guess I'll just be honest and say that I haven't thought about this particular topic enough to really have anything worthwhile to say.
What do you mean?
You just told me that you don't think you can change people's minds.
Well, I mean...
And then I'm asking, do you think that anyone can?
And that's a pretty important question, right?
I mean, the thing is, I guess what I thought, but I haven't actually been questioned in this thought and haven't put enough time into it in order to have, like, that's why I felt like I didn't have anything worthwhile to say.
But what I've thought in the past is just that people who are reasonable...
You don't always start reasonable.
Sometimes it is an enlightening person.
And even for myself, I was inspired by other people to become more rational.
I watched a lot of Richard Feynman.
Oh, so it can, right?
It can, but I just feel like, in my experience...
But you don't want to.
So you want other people to do it, but you don't want to do it?
Well, I mean, I've tried.
It's just, I guess, I feel like my attempts...
Perhaps...
Again, I'm not trying to be confrontational.
I'm just generally trying to understand.
Do you want the world to become more rational?
If yes, but you don't want to do it, then you want other people to do it for you.
And that's fine.
I'm just curious what your thoughts are.
I mean, I've tried it on a small scale, but I feel like I've never really been successful.
And...
I mean, perhaps I am just bad at convincing them.
You've put a lot of effort into trying to understand these things, right?
Which, you know, I think is great.
But, you know, I wonder if it may not be more productive for you to put more effort into actually figuring out how to change people's minds so that you can have the kind of environment that you want, right?
Which is a more rational world.
I mean, I oftentimes find myself in a polar opposite environments where I'm either with people who are very irrational and I kind of give up on even trying to talk about rational things to them or in an environment where it's completely irrational or not, sorry, where it's much more rational and I don't have to worry about trying to convince them to be rational.
I can just worry about Discussing ideas the rational people would discuss.
So you spend time with people who can't think or who already agree with you?
Yes.
Well, that's not really going to help make the world more rational, right?
But I'm saying that that's just what I've ended up doing because I went to a not a great high school and then I switched over to a magnet school.
My experience in those two environments has left me in those two places.
Left you?
That's very passive, right?
I actively sought after a more rational environment and people who cared about education more and stuff like that.
That's why I went to the magnet school, so I guess it was more proactive.
Right, and the reason why, I'm sure you're aware, right, but the reason why I'm bringing all this stuff up is that, you know, it's not like we have a real excess of people who are working hard to make the world a more rational place, and I think you clearly care about making the world a more rational place, place or you'd like the world to be more rational and, you know, why not join us in that goal rather than saying, well, I guess I'm just not good at it or I don't think it's going to work or whatever.
I mean, it seems sort of unfair that you want the world to be more rational, but you want other people to take on the tough stuff of making it happen.
Thank you.
You know, I mean, wouldn't it be more satisfying to, instead of worrying about this abstract religious stuff, to just focus on, you know, what...
My friend Peter Boghossian talks street epistemology, right, which is you go out and you try and get people to become irrational by challenging their belief systems and taking on that sort of personal challenge.
I think that would be a more satisfying use of your considerable intellectual gifts than mucking about in the etymology of religious thought.
Um, I, and I, while I agree with you, and I, I hope that one day I will have the confidence to do so, and, and, and, and, and, well, no, I'm not going to say I won't.
No, because I don't.
Like, nobody's like, yay, you know, I get to deal with irrational people and, and confront people and challenge, like, it's never like, yay.
I mean, I think you have to be a sadist to like, yay, you know, I get to really, like, it's not going to happen to you.
It's something that you make happen.
Well, what I'm saying is I think that before I do that, I should focus on personal developments in order to Because I don't think that assertiveness and putting my ideas out there is something that is a very comfortable zone for me, and so it would be pushing myself to do so.
In the last year or so, I've been focusing a lot on personal development in order to change other aspects of my life that I think were brought upon me from my childhood or whatever that I didn't want.
But I'm glad that you have brought up being more assertive because I guess I've actually had several instances with my very good teacher who's like a mentor to me and he was my physics teacher and I had a friend who both tried to make me more assertive,
more confident in my abilities and It is something that I feel like I should...
For some reason, you saying it to me and thinking that all these people will see that I'm not assertive has made me much more interested in changing that developmental thing.
Good.
Yeah, I mean, I just think that would be a better use of your considerable gifts than this stuff, which, again, is interesting.
To me, the etymology of this stuff is really important.
But, you know, in a sense, do we care where cancer comes from?
So let's just cure it.
Especially if knowing where it comes from doesn't help us cure it.
I mean, the etymology of these belief systems, again, it's interesting stuff to speculate about, but I don't think that it's going to be the case that we're going to say to people, well, see, this is where religion really comes from, and then they're going to say, oh, okay, well, then I guess I'm not religious, right?
Yeah.
So that's just my thought about, I think, a goal, right?
A goal to have.
And it's not like we're overflowing with people who are willing to take this on.
So that would be my request, you know, is that, you know, pick up your mental armor and join us on the battlements because I don't think there's any other way for the world to become better.
And you clearly have a lot of gifts this way and it would be great if you could.
Well, I'm glad that I tried to talk about something else then.
All right, man.
Thanks, Emil, for calling in.
Let us know how it goes, and we'll talk to you again, I hope.
All right.
Well, if I ever have anything that I think anybody will want or I want to talk about or you want to talk about, then I'll just let you know.
But, yeah, thanks.
Thanks, man.
Alright, well up next is Aaron.
Aaron wrote in and said, Something along the lines that abuse tends to drop IQ or intelligence.
I seem to have the impression that many famous intellectuals, inventors, and creative types were subject to childhood abuse, brain injury, or illness-slash-mindsets, such as Asperger's.
What are your thoughts on how their illnesses interact with their success?
Yeah, I mean, you do hear a lot about the geniuses of history and so on, but there were lots of Great people in history who did amazing intellectual work who weren't massively messed up or anything like that.
So I'm not sort of convinced in the necessity for trauma for people to be brilliant and contribute in that way, if that makes sense.
Shakespeare had a very happy marriage and all that.
No, Dickens didn't, and neither did Einstein, but I don't know that we can say that there was a requirement, right?
I mean, there's lots of people who are traumatized who aren't geniuses, right, obviously, and there are lots of people who are geniuses who aren't traumatized, and so I think it's very tough to make that case.
So, does that help at all?
Yeah, I can understand that.
I mean, I don't think that's really what I was suggesting, per se.
Oh, sorry.
Let me make sure I get what you're suggesting correctly.
Oh, no, that's okay.
It was more just a curiosity, I guess, between the role of IQ and success, in a way.
Like, I would never really suggest that, you know, abuse is a way to lead to genius, per se, but...
That IQ isn't necessarily one-to-one with success or something along those lines.
Right.
So, I mean, I think whatever we can do to make people smarter, I think we will end up with a better world.
I mean...
Intelligence is one of these things that lets you control impulse, right?
And they've done those experiments, which I've talked about in the show before, where they say to kids, I'll give you one marshmallow now and you can eat it.
Or if I come back in 15 minutes and there's still a marshmallow here, then...
You can have two, right?
So can you defer gratification?
And it does take some intelligence to defer gratification.
And so I do think that intelligence will help us.
And again, this is not to say that all intelligent people defer gratification and so on, but there is, I think, a reasonable tendency that way.
So...
I think whatever we can do to increase people's intelligence, we can, you know...
Why do some people give up difficult, like, crazy belief systems?
Well, I think it's because they recognize that those belief systems are destructive and difficult and dangerous for them and bad for them and so on.
And other people don't give up those belief systems.
And...
Is it all to do with intelligence?
I think it does, right?
I mean, because the trauma of giving up an irrational belief system is considerable, right?
It's very painful and very difficult.
And giving up destructive relationships is also highly traumatic.
And so why would people do it?
Well, they would do it because they recognize that the payoff is worth it.
And recognizing when the payoff is worth it is one of sort of the fundamental things Capacities of intelligence, right?
So I'm very keen on upping the IQ of the planet, which is why I sort of try and propose things over and over again that really help with that.
So whether that will make everyone a genius, well, statistically, no.
It certainly won't.
But I think it would really help to make the world...
Able to put aside immediate stressors and focus on long-term benefits if that helps?
Okay, yeah, I can understand that.
That makes sense.
There was a second question I had too that went with that.
And I was just curious if you had any advice for people who went through abuse and trauma that would help them I don't know, get through some of their issues, get to being more productive, things of that sort.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the number one is don't expose yourself to more.
You know, I think that's, you know, for some people, I guess this is controversial, but it's not for anyone with half a brain, right?
I mean, you know, if you want to say, well, how do I get over the The stress of being in combat, well, you know, the first thing to do is to not be in combat, right?
I mean, the Army does that.
I mean, if somebody's freaking out because of PTSD, I think they don't consider treating them, at least ever since the First World War, they wouldn't consider treating them absent actually getting them out of the combat situation, right?
So if you have had a traumatic history, then you want to not...
Be traumatized as much as possible, right?
Which means if there are people around who are traumatizing you, then you need to either get them to stop traumatizing you or you need to not be around those people at least for a while.
And that's first and foremost.
Now, of course, people who are traumatic to others don't like that advice for obvious reasons and that they want to continue to be able to traumatize others because that's their fixed way of being or their habit or whatever you want to call it.
But, yeah, that to me is a very, very key part of stopping.
You know, how do you stop the effects of trauma?
Well, stop exposing yourself to trauma would be a pretty good first start.
And that's a very big task.
You know, finding non-traumatized people in the world is, well, what do you think?
A bit of a challenge sometimes?
Yeah, I would think so.
And I think there's, to that also, to people who are Exposed to trauma or in traumatic situations, and I think I can speak to this personally.
Sometimes it's even hard to recognize that the trauma is there.
Like when it becomes just your regular, like if you grew up in an environment, that just becomes your environment.
It's hard to see beyond that until maybe you can experience beyond that.
And that's why you need to surround, so the first thing is get away from traumatizing people.
I mean, that to me is the 101.
Now, the other part of that is get non-traumatic people around you, right?
Non-traumatized people around you, you know, they can help watch your back, right?
And that's quite important.
So, keep those kinds of things going and I think you'll be, you know, well on your way, right?
Less trauma, more non-trauma, right?
Because you need people around you who can tell you, oh yeah, you know, she's hot, but...
But she's crazy.
Or whatever, right?
Yeah.
And especially because, you know, we have the biological urge to reproduce with our initial clan, right?
If you erase crazy, you're going to want to bang crazy.
I say this, you know, in an abstract sense, right?
Yeah.
And, you know, it's not like, you know, that stupid is or stupid does from Forrest Gump.
It's like, nope.
Crazy is as crazy bangs.
And...
Crazy bangs as crazy is probably a better way of putting it, but that stuff is important as well because our sexual predilections, if we're raised by crazy, well, our genes don't care about crazy, they care about You know, reproducing whatever came before, and that's very tough for us because, you know, our penis is going to pull us into the crazy hole at the same time as our brain is going to want to make us stay away from it, right?
So having people around who can remind you of that, I think, is very important.
Yeah, I can agree to that.
And I think of personally...
Friends don't let friends get dicknapped.
That's kind of what I'm saying.
I think I've personally surrounded myself with, or I'm in the right direction, I guess you could say.
Good.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
Keep us posted.
And thanks so much, everyone, of course, for calling in and for sharing your thoughts in this, I believe, the most essential conversation in the planet and perhaps for all time.
So, thanks everyone so much.
Please, of course, drop by and, you know, show your support.
Be our bra.
That's really what I'm trying to say.
Show your support for the show, for the conversation.
And you can do that, of course, by going to freedomainradio.com slash donate and signing up for a Wii subscription or we take some...
Some electronic currency or, you know, good old fiat currency.
You know, it's gone to toast anyway.
So, you know, turn it into some philosophy before it loses its value.
That's my suggestion.
Have a great week, everyone.
▲
Export Selection