3090 Bypassing the Gatekeepers - Call In Show - October 3rd, 2015
Question 1: [1:48] - What do you say to the notion that no word has a single element that is consistently present throughout all its uses, or more precisely that a word’s correct use does not come from some generalized element(s)? The alternative being what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “family resemblance” where different uses of a word share some things in common, but not any particular thing being common to all.Question 2: [1:16:08] - I am really confused about one aspect of your “End Selfishness Now” video, and I think many of your loyal listeners may be as well. Ayn Rand's explanation of "selfishness" as a virtue is a concept that really motivated me to work harder and take pride in everything I do. I feel less shame, and have gained an enormous confidence boost from that very concept. Isn't being selfish a good thing? Question 3: [1:46:42] - How is "I did the best I could with the knowledge I had" not a valid excuse?
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Oh, we had three callers in this show that you really need to dig into.
The first was a great caller who wanted to know about language, subjectivity, and we talked about the philosopher Wittgenstein.
And had a really great conversation about the fuzzy edges of philosophy and knowledge and ethics, where things blend into each other and how much basically time you can waste trying to differentiate stuff that is relatively unimportant.
So I think it's a really good conversation for helping you focus on what's most important in life.
The second caller, and I get a lot of these pushbacks, which is all of course very fair, the second caller...
Was trying to understand why I seem to be against selfishness, while of course, as a big fan of objectivism, recognizing that Ayn Rand penned quite a bit about the virtue of selfishness.
And so I delineate what I think is a really rational approach to selfishness and in particular reciprocity.
Not having higher standards than the people around you refusing to take the high road but rather selecting people in your life with whom reciprocity is a win-win situation.
So I think that's very important as we sort of navigate through a somewhat treacherous world.
And the third was a rant that erupted out of me like a well-bombed Mount Vesuvius about this idea that people say about mistakes they made in the past.
Well, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
And in particular, he was talking about his mom and daycare and so on.
And yeah, I had a pretty good rail against this proposition and in particular the habit of many parents of dumping their kids in daycare.
So they can go and make a couple of bucks an hour.
So it's a great show.
I hope you really enjoy it.
Of course, always look forward to your feedback.
And here we go.
Alright, well up first is Ben.
Ben wrote in and said, What do you say to the notion that no word has a single element that is consistently present throughout all its uses, or more precisely, that a word's correct use does not come from some generalized element or elements?
The alternative being what Ludwig Wittgenstein called family resemblance, where different uses of a word share some things in common, But are not any particular thing being common to all.
What impact does this have on UPB, seeing as how UPB works on certain principles being foundational or common to all inquiry?
That's from Ben.
Well, hi, Ben.
How are you doing?
Very well, thank you, Stefan.
How are you?
Good.
Well, rather.
And I appreciate you bringing this topic up.
It's...
It's one of these real forks in the road with philosophy where I will make a case that the way, the Wittgenstein way is where madness lies.
So we'll hopefully take a swing at that.
But do you want to break it down a little bit more for people, I'm going to assume not wildly familiar with Wittgenstein, about what he meant in terms of language?
Yes.
When we're applying...
So it would be the difference between saying that a word gets its definition from a rigid constant, something that's present through all its uses.
Like, let's say in the case of, I don't know, consistency, that Things go together.
Let's say that that's the thing, whenever you use the word consistent, things go together, will always be present.
And Wittgenstein instead says that when we use words in different instances, that in fact the instances resemble each other often, have shared elements between each other, but if you look at the full spectrum of Of valid uses, you would actually see also dissimilarities, areas where those commonalities don't arise.
Is that about right?
Well, break it down.
Can we use something more concrete?
Because if you start describing an abstract philosophy using an abstract term, it becomes quickly unnavigatable for most people.
And so let's just talk about a tree.
Sure.
So what would Wittgenstein's criticism be of the accuracy of the word tree?
Right.
So you might say that...
Something about trees is that they all have leaves, a trunk, and roots.
And at first glance, this might seem accurate.
Many trees do have leaves, and many of them have that in common.
But then you can think of other trees, like willow trees, or I'm sure there's a variety of trees that actually don't have leaves.
And in this way, they have other things in common, like the trunk, But not necessarily the same set of elements, right?
The leaf element is not there, right?
Right.
So, again, you may be more of an expert in this area than I am, but my understanding of it is something like this.
Okay, so we've got the word tree.
And there's times when we look at a tree, like some big giant oak tree standing alone in a field, and it's really not that complicated.
Okay, it's a tree, right?
Nobody's gonna get that confused about it.
But...
There are other trees that look like shrubs.
There are Japanese bonsai trees, which have been trimmed down to these miniature Danny DeVito trees.
And there are all of these areas where, I don't know if it's a tree, I don't know if it's a shrub.
Here's another one.
I was talking about this with my daughter today, and I said, okay, let's, I said, Izzy, let's suppose that we put a sign out front which says, Christmas tree, only $10.
And it's eight foot tall or whatever, seven foot tall.
And people stop by and they, oh, that's great, you know?
And they give us the $10 and what we do is we bring out a dead Christmas tree from two years ago that's been lying around in the backyard, right?
Technically, it is a seven foot tall Christmas tree.
But it's pretty gamey at this point, right?
And it's like the saddest suicide Christmas tree that you can possibly imagine, right?
Right.
And so does the word tree include dead tree?
Or do you have to say dead tree?
By default, we assume it means a tree that's alive.
Right.
Right.
But does it include a tree that's dead or do you have to pre-stage tree with dead tree?
Right.
Is, you know, tree ends up as oil, right?
I mean, oil is just old vegetation squished down by millions of years.
So is, you know, do you say, I want to go down to the tree station and fill up my tree tank with tree?
Right.
And so we have words that we have common usage for.
And even something as simple as a tree, you can hack around at the edges and go mental, trying to figure out, like, all the exceptions and confusions that can occur.
Right.
And for a human being, a tree is green.
For a blind person, a tree is rough in terms of the primary characteristics we would assign to it.
Right.
And so language is a challenge, and why it's such a challenge is it works really, really well despite the fact that it seems like it shouldn't.
I don't know.
Have you ever had someone turn to you and say, hey, look at that tree, and they're pointing at a barn?
Like, it doesn't happen, right?
Right.
That's absolutely right.
And so, yeah, go ahead.
Well, so I think another way to frame it is also that there's not some master list of things you can point to in, say, tree, and then you've got what a tree is, right?
So the thing about language is that we can use it in an infinite or uncountable number of ways.
But they do make sense.
That's the weird thing.
Like you said, we can go around the edges, but it You never point to a barn and say that's a tree.
Right.
And even when we look at science fiction movies and so on, like you look at forests in Avatar or the Star Wars films and you say, hey, that's a tree.
Like it might be a weird tree.
Or we look in Lord of the Rings where there's the ants, the walking and talking.
What are they?
People don't say, oh, look, a walking and talking piece of corn, right?
It's a walking and talking tree.
So we're very good at knowing what things are, even if we've never seen anything like it before.
Nobody's ever seen a walking and talking tree.
And so we're very good at categorizing these things, even if we've never experienced it before.
And I think part of the madness that goes on is that the derivation of essence, what Aristotle used to call essence, essence is kind of like the last thing that you can change in something before you have no idea what it is anymore.
And we'll get to that example in a second.
But the derivation of essence from sense data, the organizing of it all, Is a subconscious process.
I mean, we don't sit there and say, whoa, there's a weird shimmering blob of green and brown.
The fuck is that?
Oh my god.
I know I've seen this before.
Let me look up a botany book, right?
Or something like that.
It's just like, boom, tree!
Now, the operations of the subconscious have been recorded at running up to 7,000 times faster than the conscious mind, right?
And if you've ever seen a startled cat, then you'll know.
Or a social justice warrior presented with an uncomfortable truth, you'll know just how jumpy and quick and reactionary consciousness can be even in non-human species, right?
I mean, watch a mongoose fighting with a cobra and damn, those little bastards are very fast, right?
Wait, the social justice warrior or the mongoose?
Well, they're both pretty fast, but there would be no mongooses, mongoese?
I don't know.
There'd be no multiple mongooseoidal noidals if they didn't actually get around to eating the cobra at least once in a while.
So I think that one of the reasons why it's so tough is we're using this clunky little neofrontal cortex to try and figure out the unbelievable speed and complexity evolved over...
A biological base that goes far beyond the neofrontal cortex.
Neofrontal cortex, a couple of hundred thousand years old.
Base of the brain reptile, Billions of years old.
It's pretty optimized.
We've got this trundly little 286 that's trying to figure out what's going on in a cray and it doesn't work that well.
This is why I say this is where madness lies to some degree because you're trying to use I've called it the very buggy post-monkey beta expansion pack called human consciousness which really is a wonderful piece of crap.
It is just a deliciously wonderful junky Amazing piece of crap.
And so we're trying to use the conscious mind to analyze what goes on deep down in the unconscious that's heavily optimized over billions of years that Not only is heavily optimized, but also runs at speeds thousands of times faster than the conscious mind.
And that's what I mean when I say this is kind of where madness lies.
We're like a mouse saying, you know, I will consider myself a philosophical genius when I can swing an entire elephant around my head using the tail of the elephant, right?
This is not really going to happen.
So that's a sort of semi-poetic caveat, which I still think that the question is well worth examining.
But I think that's one of the problems, that we are chasing a heavily optimized, blindingly fast integration system called the subconscious using this crappy post-Monkey beta expansion pack called modern consciousness, which has wonderful capacities but kind of sucks at delving that deep into the mountain of biological history.
Yeah, that seems totally fair, actually.
And it would seem that Those limitations, trying to jump ahead of our own biology, is something that would naturally catch us up.
And I didn't really think about it applying to the philosophical debate, but that's a unique perspective.
So, there is incredible value in the blurry edges.
I just call them the blurry edges.
Right.
And the blurry edges are, okay, that's a tree.
It's some big, giant oak.
That's a tree, for sure, right?
Some stumpy little thing in an obsessive Japanese gardener's greenhouse.
I don't know what that is.
Oh, we were going to mention essence.
Sorry, just to circle back.
So, again, examples from my day's conversation.
So...
We look at a human baby and we say, oh, that's really cute, right?
And then we look at a human baby that's 10 feet tall and we say, whoa, what the hell is that?
But we don't say, what is that?
Like, I have no idea what it is, even though it's a dimension that we've never seen before.
We'd say, oh my God, that's a 10 foot tall human baby.
So we still know what it is, right?
We're surprised, but we're not confused.
Now, if we see a 10 foot tall blue human baby, what do we say?
That's a big blue human baby.
Wow, that's weird.
Yeah.
And now, what if his arms are replaced by tentacles, and its eyes are furnaces, and its ears are bats?
Like, at some point, we're going to look at that thing and say, I give up.
I don't know what the fuck is anymore.
Right, right, right.
And so the last thing that changes before you have no clue what it is anymore, Aristotle would call sort of the essence.
And knowing what the essence of something is, is a real problem.
Plato tried to solve this problem.
Bullshit.
He tried to solve this problem.
And Wittgenstein was very interested in Plato, although he did not do any systematic review of...
Philosophical history, history of philosophy.
But Plato tried to solve this problem by saying, okay, smoke this and it'll all make sense.
Well, before we were born, we were floating.
We were floating in a void.
And that void had in it perfect forms.
It had a perfect tree.
It had a perfect microphone.
It had a perfect podcast called Free Domain Radio.
It had a perfect everything.
And we float tumbling through this forms, you know, like a lost sock in a dryer.
And When we are born, we carry within us this vague memory of these perfect forms.
And the forms aren't just physical, but they're abstract.
We've seen the perfect good, the perfect morality, even the perfect evil, which was something that was heavily criticized by Aristotle, but we'll talk to that another time.
So when we're born, we look at a tree, and we know it's a tree because we have a memory of the perfect tree that we saw, the perfect shrub, the perfect blade of grass, the perfect brick, whatever it is, right?
And...
So, that's how Plato tried to solve it.
And Aristotle said, that's crap.
The forms is, you know, it's this famous quote that I love, you know, we must love our friends, but we must love truth even more than our friends, for without truth, we cannot maintain any valid friendship.
And he said, no, it all comes in through our senses, and we abstract and put together concepts.
So, you see a bunch of chairs.
And then you figure out what a chair is used for and how it's generally built.
You come up with a concept called chair which you can then apply to new things and call them chairs.
Obviously that's a big simplification but that was Aristotle's basic approach.
So Plato said that we saw something because of a memory of stuff before we were born.
And Aristotle said, I think that Occam's razor would say that if you have philosophical theory that requires an alternate universe as new or mean perfect forms that we all float in before we're born, then you have, of course, the spirit that transcends life, dimensions that we can sense without organs, without organs.
We have dimensions that exist outside or through or within or beyond or among, the sort of mere sensual existence which we can't detect in any way.
Like he said, that's really, really overcomplex.
And we should just go with something more simple like...
similar and we can figure out what that similarity is and it very quickly becomes automatic.
And for those who've been parents and spent time raising kids when they develop language, it is freaky, freaky, freaky how quickly this happens.
You know, like my daughter, you know, I taught her the word for elbow.
The next day, she's pointing at my elbow, daddy's elbow.
I'm like, hey man, you're freaking me out.
That's like less than a year old.
She's still surprised by her toes looming into view, but she's able to abstract bendy human parts and know what they are.
Even newborns, you stick your tongue out at a newborn and And the newborn will stick their tongue out at you, those rebellious little bastards.
And that's freaky, because how the hell do they know what a tongue is?
They've just been in a warm, amniotic sack that most closely approximates Canadian graduate schools for nine months.
Anyway, so...
So, going to the fuzzy edges of things is really, really important, right?
So, you know, whenever I say, oh, mammals, you know, they're warm-blooded.
They give birth to live young.
It's like, don't build platypus, man.
The platypus gives birth to eggs.
And it's like...
But these things are very helpful because this is where you get physical and biological categories, amphibians, lizards, mammals, birds, all that kind of stuff.
So you get these really great divisions from people who want to buzz about at the edges of things.
But you can, like many a great mind, has drifted too close to these black holes of the fuzzy edges and spent massive amounts of time trying to untangle the fuzzy edges.
Well, how short does a tree have to be before it's a shrub?
Right.
And how many kinds of shrubs are there?
And, like, there's a freaky tree that's got characteristics of both.
What do we do with that?
And I'm serious.
Like, when I say that way, madness lies.
And to me, we've got enough of the basics figured out in the world.
if my daughter can figure it out, you really shouldn't spend the rest of your life trying to delve around, not you, but people shouldn't spend their whole life delving around these fuzzy edges.
Sure.
They should work on the bigger problems of how to make people stop hurting each other.
You know, like Wittgenstein was, I don't want to, you know, ad hominem, the guy up the yin yang, but he taught in a rural school.
He was born to a very wealthy family.
And he was, the family was very wealthy, very intelligent, and rather crazy.
Three of his brothers committed suicide.
He contemplated suicide.
He tried to run away from his family name.
He hired himself on as a gardener in a monastery under a false name.
And then he ended up hiring himself out as a schoolmaster.
He was so depressed after, like in a rule of age, so depressed after the First World War that he gave away his inheritance.
And what happened was he got into a lot of trouble as a schoolmaster because he would beat children for not getting their math answers right.
And if you're in a rural village in Europe...
and people are upset at how harshly you're treating their children, you're kind of like out-Nazi-ing the Nazis.
That's not really a good company to be in.
So I don't want to add how I'm the guy up the yin-yang, but he was not a massively stable kind of guy.
And I think that the people who've got a lot of these problems, emotional problems, I find a real...
And again, I'm not putting you in this category at all, but I find that they're generally drawn towards...
The fuzzy edges.
In other words, the fuzzy edges reflect the instability that they feel deep down in their personality.
Certainty for them is kind of anathema because they're neurotic.
And to a neurotic, certainty is the predator that takes down their very sense of identity.
And that's not an argument.
I'm fully, fully aware of that.
I'm just sort of giving you my particular perspective on it.
Because the reality is language works incredibly well.
Like if you think of the amount of complexity that you and I are exchanging at this very moment in this very conversation, It's mind-blowing.
And, you know, we're able...
You know what I'm talking...
You may not agree, but you at least generally understand what I'm talking about.
And yes, words don't match the things, right?
What Immanuel Kant called the things in themselves.
I say a tree.
Yes, it's true.
I don't see the tree from every angle.
I don't see the tree including the roots.
I don't see the inside of the tree and the outside of the tree.
I don't see the tree when it's a sapling.
I don't see the tree when it's a seed.
I don't see the tree in summer.
I don't see the tree in winter.
I don't see the tree as...
Dead firewood going to feed someone's furnace.
I get all of that.
I'm just talking about a tree that I'm seeing right now.
It is not the entirety of the thing.
I don't see every atom in the tree.
And this also, I'll stop in a sec, but this also falls into the very question of personal identity, right?
I said, if I held up a picture to you and said, this is a picture of me eight years ago, I'm kind of lying.
Because there is no me from eight years ago.
Because every cell in the human body is pretty much replaced over a seven year period.
So every piece of matter that made me up seven years ago is no longer part of my body.
I'm entirely new.
Like if I bought a new car that matched the old car, I wouldn't hold up a picture of the old car and say, that's my new car.
I'd say, oh no, that's my old car.
It's been replaced.
So if you're holding up a picture, even from yesterday, part of your nose has been replaced and one of your eyebrows has been replaced and stuff like that.
So even when we talk about personal identity, oh, this is a picture of me.
And if you really want to blow your mind, try and figure out how every single part of your brain has been replaced from seven years ago, but you still have your memories.
That's just freaky to me.
And if I go seven years ago, there's things that I accept and advocate and believe now that I may have strenuously resisted and rejected.
Seven years ago.
So it was a picture of me from seven years ago.
I think quite differently, or hopefully better, than I did seven years ago.
And, and, there's no part of the matter in that photograph that is still part of me.
So even the very question of identity, when you use the word I, I went to, this is a true statement, I went to Morocco with my best friend in the year 2000.
Mm-hmm.
But I've been replaced more than twice biologically since then.
I have beamed out and beamed back.
New star stuff has come into my body and the old star stuff has sprayed off somewhere useful.
And so when I say I, 15 years ago, went to Morocco for Y2K, what does that even mean?
I wasn't even an anarchist!
15 years ago.
None of my body matter is now in me that was there 15 years ago.
What does it mean to say I? And again, you can go insane with this stuff, this fuzzy edges and the instability of matter, let alone language.
But I think there's a solution.
So, sorry for that long blah blah, but unfortunately, because you send your questions in ahead of time, I've got time to think about it ahead of time.
Tell me what your thoughts are about what we're talking about before we dig more into the language problems.
Sure.
I'm actually very interested in Aristotle's take.
And it brings to mind, I think, Wittgenstein's own solution, right?
So he doesn't just solve it through family resemblance, but I believe to what is referred to as a form of life, where he talks about the customs, habits, practices, and the actual language acquisition itself, the learning and the teaching.
The instruction being where we get the proper understanding of the bounds of language, right?
And that doesn't seem altogether contradictory to, you know, a parent teaching their child or, you know, learning the rules of some particular, let's say, like a sport or a game, you know, through demonstration, through Through actual practice, we gain our understanding of our words.
Does that sound at all similar to...
I mean, for me, at least.
Yeah, I mean, the degree to which the mid-century linguists placed their emphasis on social convention of language, to me, both solves and creates a problem, as mid-century philosophers of the last century tend to do.
Right.
A big debate went on and on among linguists of the last century, and mountains of forest literal trees were turned into academic fodder for this, which is, okay, let's suppose somebody grows up entirely on his own.
Would he develop language?
Would he develop grammar?
And I think it's not even a good theoretical question, if you don't mind me barging in, you know, whatever.
People can take it as skeptically as they want, but...
It's not even a good theoretical question because I don't imagine that any human being growing up alone could invent language any more than they could invent a cell phone on their own.
Language is something that still has significant vestiges of the free market.
You look at language, memes and phonemes and language needs to be looked at as an ecosystem, right?
Like I'm reading these books, Mallory Taos, my daughter, and the kids all say, wizard!
When they think something is great, right?
You say that now and people think you're hallucinating about Harry Potter, right?
Back then, that was a very well understood phrase.
Boffo!
I don't think we're allowed to talk about that in mixed company, but it just means good, right?
And so language arises, language goes, bling bling has seemed to have boomeranged its way in and out of human consciousness.
And so the idea that some human being could invent language or have, you know, that doesn't make any sense, right?
And you certainly wouldn't say, let's say you're in some Middle Eastern country, you wouldn't want to, wizard!
What?
Where?
Burn him!
Anyway, so I think the idea that we say, oh, well, language is just a social convention.
And I think they meant more grammar than sort of nouns.
Of course, it's a social convention to call a tree a tree, right?
Like I did a show last year, The Forest of Infinite Blowjobs.
Like, what happened if you just messed up your kids by teaching them the wrong words for things?
I don't think anybody should.
But of course, it's a convention that when I say tree, you're assuming that you're not making up your own word, right?
And when my daughter makes mistakes, as kids will want to do, I drawed something.
No, no, I drew something.
Can't I just say drawed?
No, you can't.
Sorry, this is not I like...
Blue, you've got to get this is correct, right?
Again, that sounds very similar to actually Wittgenstein's take, and maybe you're getting to somewhere where you branch off, but I believe it was that language is a shared practice and that there's something to the element of verification, that Robinson Crusoe,
if he's left alone on his island, even if he comes up with a sophisticated system of language to describe something, there's no way for him to really verify whether he's Right.
And this is what's so annoying to me about these questions is that it's so impractical, particularly a century where a quarter billion people were murdered by their own governments and people are talking about what language Robinson Crusoe might have.
It's like there may be more important issues to deal with, you lazy sons of – anyway.
Right.
But yeah, I mean so somebody who's coming up – growing up alone, well, we have some examples of things like that, that young babies who are lost in the woods or who are whatever, their parents die and they get adopted by wolves.
Well, they end up not speaking any language at all.
It's not that much of a theoretical thing.
But certainly language is a shared convention, without a doubt.
I mean, because you go to some place where they speak some African clicking language, Then you're not gonna know what they're saying now they may point to something and you could figure out oh by that they mean boobab tree or whatever right but Language is a shared convention, but we also share it with reality Right,
there's no word tree embedded in a tree I get that and you and I have to agree to use the word tree which we do sort of just by learning at our parents knee and reading and so on right but Right.
Right.
arbitrary.
You know, we share a convention with each other and with reality.
Because we know that because people who share languages with each other, but not with reality are called insane twins, and they're usually heavily medicated, right?
And so we need to recognize that what goes on in our head, and that we, for convenience, we have to choose something, right?
Because you can't just point and imitate a tree every time you want to talk about a tree.
You have to come up with something, and it's evolved, and it's arbitrary, and, you know, maybe the first guy had a lisp, and that's why we have that word.
It doesn't really matter, right?
Like the word plough, which is O-U-G-H, was originally pronounced ploch.
Ah, bring me the ploch!
Can we just do a language without growling?
Okay!
But we've still got to spell it like crap.
So these are the words that...
It's all convention.
But that convention that we share, we subjugate to and is dependent upon external physical reality.
And I think that to me is where it became a little bit of an inward-facing circle jerk to talk about language...
Growing up in isolation and the degree of social convention, I think that what it does is it gives people the impression that language is somehow arbitrary because we have agreed on it and it could have been anything else, but I don't think that it is.
And yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I think that you can look at Wittgenstein's reactions to people calling relativism or calling basically what you said, that language is arbitrarily defined.
And he responds to these.
Whether or not his responses are successful is neither here nor there.
But again, that is a reasonable concern.
And Shakespeare, of course, because I've got background in In theatre, as well as the history of philosophy, Shakespeare is just perfect about this.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
There's a whole thesis of many years in that very short sentence, a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.
Doesn't matter what we call it.
The physical properties remain the same.
It doesn't matter.
We can call it a pig turd.
It's still going to smell as sweet because it is in fact a rose no matter what other language we might use to call it.
The physical properties of it remain the same.
I might have actually missed the mark when I tried to pin Wittgenstein's attempt to break away from foundations exclusively on family resemblance.
And not to move the goalposts on you, which is probably exactly what I'm doing.
Oh, no.
If you explicitly do it, you can totally do it.
It's the people who don't explicitly do it that's fine.
It's when they knock you out, move the goalposts, and say, hey, no goalposts are moved.
If you want to say, let's move the goalposts, I'm totally fine with that.
Okay.
Great.
Then let's jump in.
I think the main concern I have here actually stemmed from Wittgenstein's attack on foundations of belief, right?
So you would say it's grounded in reality or experience.
And he would say that when you're reasoning, the end of the chain of reasons isn't grounded in some sort of self-evident principle or experience or But the shared context of ordinary life, you know,
shared practices, and that it's not an ungrounded presupposition at the base of our motives, but an ungrounded way of acting, that we act in such a way and that is the correct way.
We know that through our practices.
What do you mean by ungrounded?
That's not a very technical or specific term.
Right.
So, I mean, if you were to say that an axiom...
I'm sorry.
If you were to say that a reason is generated by another reason, that it's grounded by that other reason, right?
So, at the bottom of our reasoning, we have these axioms, like...
A is A, or like the three laws of logic and so on.
Or the axiom that there's something outside of my brain.
Right, that the world exists, that it's...
It's not another, you know, some other reason that grounds it or justifies it.
It just is, right?
You can't say, using words like true or false about the idea of non-contradiction, it doesn't make sense.
It's inapplicable.
Well, also, if you use the word false with regards to non-contradiction, you're already deploying the laws of logic to attempt to validate the laws of logic, which is circular, to say the least.
Oh, absolutely.
And he would say that these actually come from just, not just, but they come from ordinary life, what he would call a form of life.
And yes, there are certain propositions like 2 plus 2 equals 4 that are fundamental.
They ground a whole network of ideas, but it's the network of ideas and not something about...
Something deeper about the concept like the fact that it's a part of some you know greater metaphysical truth or something like that That that make it hold fast that that that make it true that the the full network Right, so it's anti foundational.
It doesn't build on one principle up.
It's it's a network of ideas Does that make sense is that coherent at least yeah, I mean Yeah, so there was a G.E. Moore, another philosopher from Wittgenheim's time, and he denied this radical skepticism, this sort of Cartesian skepticism about the external world.
His famous philosophical argument was to hold up, here is one hand, he would say, holding up his hand, and here is another.
And, you know, okay, we know these things exist, like, let's move beyond this, let's accept this, and so on.
And Wittgenstein, he wasn't a radical skeptic.
He wasn't Cartesian, like it's all going on.
It could be a demon dream that I'm going through.
But he did question, at least question, G.E. Moore's claims that he could know this.
And I find that...
I think these things are testable.
And again, I mean, I can choose to think of a dragon and then I can change my mind and choose to think of a unicorn, right?
That makes sense.
And so I can close my eyes and in my mind's eye, I can picture what it is that I want to picture, right?
With some limits and after a while my mind will wander and so on.
But there's some, you know, control.
It's a peak of control and then it diminishes as maybe I get distracted or something.
Yeah.
So within my own mind, I can bring things into being and put them away.
And of course, I know that happens every night when I have fantastical dreams or whatever it is.
I mean, the things are coming into my mind that certainly don't exist.
I don't expect, you know, if I dream I'm in Australia, I don't wake up and check my air miles balance like, woo!
A new flight!
And so we can test what goes on with the mind versus what goes on outside the mind by simply attempting to replicate the Behaviors which happen within the mind, outside the mind.
Right?
So, if I close my eyes and I can picture a unicorn, that is an operation within the mind.
Right.
And I am in control of that which I'm going to spend my time imagining or picturing or whatever, right?
Now, if I open my eyes, can I picture a unicorn that accords to the evidence, combined evidence of all five senses?
In other words, can I summon a unicorn in reality...
Outside of Skyrim, can I summon a unicorn in reality that I can touch, that breeds hot, stinky horse breath on me, that I can feed a carrot to, that shits on my rug, and that I can go for a ride on?
Well, no.
If I can, I really need to change my meds.
And so we have things which occur within the mind, which we have significant amounts of control over, our imagination and our focus, our concentration and so on, But we cannot replicate what goes on inside the mind through our senses.
And so there must logically be a differentiation between that which occurs within the mind and that which occurs within reality.
I have control, significant control, not universal control, but I have significant control over what I can close my eyes and picture and imagine and manipulate within my own mind.
I have no control over...
Trying to change things out in the world.
I actually did this as a ridiculous philosophical kid, right?
So when I was a kid, my first.45, no, no, no.
It's not a gun.
My first.45, which is a way that cavemen used to listen to music.
My first.45 was 10cc's The Things We Do For Love.
The Things We Do For Love.
And it was a good song, although I really didn't like the fact that they really milked that, you know, repeat and fade.
The repeat and fade went on for about four days in that song.
It's a good song, though.
And so I put the song on and, you know, I'd go sit on the couch and listen to the song.
And then at the end of it, if you're old enough, there'd be this where the needle would be going against the end of the record and coming back.
And I remember sitting there on the couch as a little kid saying, fine, that's really annoying.
I'm going to try and lift it with my brain.
Because, you know, what can I tell you?
It was the 70s.
This telekinetic shit was all over the place.
I actually got in the newspaper.
When I was 12 for bending spoons with my brain.
Yuri Geller.
Yeah, that sort of stuff.
I mean, it was all nonsense and you rub it until it gets warm.
It was all crap.
Anyway.
But, yeah, mind-bending power.
My friend Jamie and I were sitting there and we were showing spoons and I was in the newspaper, The Toronto Sun, I think it was, when I was 12 or 11 or 12.
Anyway, so...
I tried, you know, honestly and clearly and open-mindedly.
You know, again, it was the 70s.
Reality was optional.
And so I tried, and I was never able, of course, never able to do it.
And nobody has ever been able to do it in any replicable kind of manner.
And James Randi's got a movie called An Honest Liar.
It's all nonsense, right?
Not James Randi, but it's all this telekinesis phenomenon.
But I honestly, and with great open mind and in repetitive ways, you know, when I would be out with a kite, I would try to summon a wind, right?
I mean, or when I was playing tennis and the wind was against me, you know, I'd blow back and, you know, and of course nothing ever worked.
But, you know, I gave it the good old college try.
And I think anybody, of course, who's honest with themselves say, well, yeah, I can change what goes on in my own mind to some degree.
But I cannot, I do not have the same power and control over things external to my mind.
And, you know, I can imagine having six fingers.
I cannot will my hands to have six fingers.
Or a vagina.
Well, let's not get into all of my teenage experiments in telekinesis and ghost fist fucking?
I don't know.
Anyway, so...
So, that to me is testable.
Is there something outside the mind that is fundamentally different from what's inside the mind?
Well, sure.
Because you can test that.
You can see.
Go and try and lift the record needle up from 10cc's things we do for love when lying on a couch.
It's not going to work.
And if you think it does work, you really need to call a doctor and get yourself looked at.
Some sort of tumor.
So this idea that it's all just self-referential and we just have to plant this flag.
Well, I'm an empiricist.
I'm just going to call myself an empiricist because that's what I like.
That's what works for me.
But if you call yourself a subjectivist or whatever or a Cartesian or an irrationalist or a mystic, then you're just planting your flag over there.
I'm planting my flag here.
Who's to say?
Well, we can say.
We really, really can, which is do these experiments.
See if you can change things outside of Your mind the same way you can change things inside your mind and you will very quickly find that you can't.
And so I don't think it's solipsistic or a tautology to say that there is an objective reality that exists outside of our mind.
And we know that as well because we've been to funerals.
Right?
Because if...
If the world only exists within the mind, then we knew someone and we existed in their mind.
They died.
Why are we still here?
Again, this stuff isn't brain surgery, right?
There's a saying that, what is it, thousands of solipsists have died in history and the world is still here.
Right, right.
So, you know...
I'm not vain enough to imagine.
Not quite.
Vain enough to imagine that when I die, you all wink out of existence because you're just a fantasy of mine, you know?
I mean, if life was a manipulatable fantasy, I wouldn't have spent as much time playing Dungeons& Dragons as a kid.
I'd have been out with girls.
But anyway...
So, I would say that these are not just, you know, we don't just have to decide that we're an empiricist.
We don't just have to put our faith in the fact that external reality exists independent of consciousness and so on.
Because, of course, any cursory knowledge of evolution means a complete and clear understanding that our capacity to reason, to process abstract philosophical thought, to understand and examine concepts...
It has arisen because of billions of years of evolution.
Billions of years of nature throwing the dice and most times it comes up snake eyes, but every now and then you get a little step up the ladder towards human intelligence.
And so if the world was a product of our mind, then evolution is false.
Because the world had to exist.
Nature, evolution, life had to exist for billions of years in order to produce the most complex organism in the known universe, which is the human, and in particular the human mind, and in particular the post-Monkey Beta buggy expansion pack called the neofrontal cortex, or the seed of reasoning.
And so there's no way that the world can...
The only religious people can believe this, because...
Because God can create a soul like that, right?
Doesn't even have to snap his fingers.
But if you understand the material world and evolution and so on, then the world cannot be a product of our mind because our mind is a product of the world and it can't work both ways.
And not to put my foot in my own mouth, but where would you say this radical skepticism arises from that type of holism that Wittgenstein advocates?
Just to go back a few, many steps.
Now, so when you say, where does it arise?
That is a...
I don't want to misinterpret what you're saying there.
I want to be precise about what it is that you mean.
Because you could mean emotionally, you could mean philosophically, you could mean culturally, you could mean...
Where does it arise philosophically?
Yeah.
So, yeah, from the holistic standpoint that...
We only have these self-supporting networks of beliefs.
Not even self-supporting, because I would just basically say circular, but these networks of beliefs.
I can't say that it arises philosophically if I consider it to be an error.
That would be like saying, where does the belief that the world is 7,000 years old come from scientifically?
Something that I think is relatively easy to disprove and which very few people can even remotely live by.
And which, if true, could have no effect on others?
Right.
Because why would you be a philosopher saying that the outside world is only a product of my own imagination, writing it down and publishing it?
It's like, that's just insane, right?
Right.
I mean, I have debates with people in my dreams, but I don't get a debating trophy after I wake up because that wasn't real, right?
Right.
And so I don't think there's a philosophical origin for radical skepticism.
I think there may be emotional origins for it.
And there are certainly very important political considerations to radical skepticism.
Very briefly, very intelligent people consistently pose a threat to the ruling class.
And it's a great insight of mine.
And by that, I don't mean it's some sort of genius insight.
I just mean it was a great and important insight for me, which is to say, we look at the history of philosophy and we think, oh, well, there were these great philosophers.
And, you know, you could go back through the list of all the Humes and Kant's and Hegel's and Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's and, you know, all these, including Wittgenstein and Sartre, all these great philosophers, as if there was some honest competition.
But the question is, who are the great philosophers and who are the useful philosophers?
Right.
One of the reasons Hegel was, you know, Hegel believed that certain countries would be possessed by the world spirit to go out and dominate other countries and thus fulfill the unfolding of the universal blah blah blah bullshit.
Yeah.
Well, is that useful to a ruling class that's hell-bent on imperialism and expansionism?
Sure is!
Right.
And so the idea that...
That there's this honest competition throughout history and these guys got to the forefront by being better and more rational and so on is not true.
It's fundamentally false.
It's like asking where were all the great scientists in the early middle ages?
Well, for the most part, they were eating their own scribblings whenever there was a knock at the door in case it was some sort of inquisition, right?
I mean, it was very dangerous to think outside of the theological absolutes of the time.
Right.
So this was not an honest competition, right?
It's, oh, there were really bad scientists in the 8th century.
It's like, no, there were smart people in the 8th century.
They were smart enough not to become scientists, right?
And so the question is not, oh, these history of great philosophers.
The question is, which of these philosophers were the best known?
Thank you.
And why?
Why were they the best known?
Now, the question is, for me, why is...
And again, Wittgenstein was too irresolute even to be a committed skeptic.
Right?
He always questioned and pushed back.
And he's promoted as this, you know, because he apprenticed under Bertrand Russell and Bertrand Russell called him the stone genius and so on.
Right.
So you what you do is you promote these guys to the position of stone genius.
And then you use them as an argument from authority to be.
Well, this is what Wittgenstein says.
Are you saying that you're smarter than Wittgenstein, who is considered to be one of the great genius philosophers?
Right.
So the question is, why is radical skepticism, why is intrinsicism or radical subjectivism is probably the best way of putting it, right?
Like it's just all a dream and we don't know for sure and so on.
Well, you've got a lot of really smart people continually being born in the world, and they are a big problem because oligarchical hierarchies, political hierarchies, are such obvious falsehoods, right?
They're such obvious lies.
Why should one man be in charge...
It makes no sense.
Like Rousseau's famous opening, right?
Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.
Why should one man have violent dominion over another man?
What is the difference between statism and slavery?
Well, propaganda, and that's about it.
Because statism takes more money from you than the slave owners ever took from their slaves, in terms of proportion of income.
And so, what is the political value Of radical skepticism, of subjectivism, the political value is that by driving the most intelligent people out to the fuzzy edges, the way is kept clear for the growth of political power.
Because you're getting all these neurotics.
And of course, highly intelligent people tend to have some significant neuroses.
Because I'm not very neurotic, it means I'm either very mentally healthy or just not that smart.
I'll let everyone decide for themselves which it is.
I think I know which I... I've always seen it as Moses in front of the Red Sea trying to get away.
Part the Red Sea so that we can storm through.
Well, you've got to drive the smart people...
Into the OCD useless land of what would happen if a man tried to develop language on a desert island?
How do I know I have two hands?
And what if everything's just this dream?
And it's like, good, you guys go off and do that bullshit, we'll take over the world.
Because you are the only people who could stand in our way.
Sure.
And as far as usefulness for dictators and oligarchs, that definitely makes sense.
And you would think that the type of skepticism, radical skepticism rather, arises from Wittgenstein, right?
the reading of Wittgenstein that you've given, right?
Well, again, he was not even committed enough to be a radical skeptic.
He just pushed back at everything.
Again, I'm scarcely an expert on Wittgenstein, but from what I've read, he did chip away at these fuzzy edges, which, again, can have some utility, but that's kind of a hobby.
It shouldn't be your main job.
You know, if you want to go out and spend eight hours fighting evil in the world, then, yes, if you want to go home and you're, say, a bachelor and you want to go whittle away at some fuzzy edges, yeah, more power to you.
Right.
You know, it's one thing in the middle of a plague to spend 12 hours a day curing the plague and then go golfing.
It's quite another thing to golf all day and never cure the plague.
I mean, one is like you're blowing off steam off for a difficult day.
The other is you're just a selfish clusterfuck who's stepping over people's bodies to get to the nine hole.
What I find really interesting actually is that, so he didn't view himself in a, well, some people call him the ultimate agnostic and that he's agnostic and doesn't commit to anything.
And I mean, that's kind of fair, I would say.
But what I find really, really interesting is that he went about solving the problem of other minds or solves such a problem.
In a way that you similarly solve the problem of, well not solve the problem, but lay out the idea of rational consistency and logic being unquestionable.
And the idea being that to say that you doubt other minds exist is itself nonsensical because you're using language And in the way you said it would be crazy for a skeptic to go write a book, this ultimate skeptic to write a book, it's crazy for someone to even pose the question, right?
Those words are nonsense that when you speak the utterance, I doubt that I exist or I doubt that other people exist.
You can't really mean that.
It's impossible to say that, really mean it, because there's something about the linguistic act itself that comes with certain gravity to it, right?
So in your case, you said, well, actually, I don't want to put any words in your mouth, but take it from there.
Well, no, and it's a good point.
I mean, what I call self-detonating arguments is the idea that if I mail you a letter saying that letters never get delivered to the right person, I've contradicted myself already.
Like, if I really believe that letters never get delivered to the right person, why would I mail a letter?
Right.
If I say to you the sentence, language is meaningless, and you understand that, then I've detonated my own argument.
So, simply to communicate with another human being carries with it an implied package deal of both metaphysical and epistemological and language-based assumptions that only con artists try to pretend aren't there.
If I'm talking to you saying that I don't think that you exist, or you don't exist, well, this...
You know, things that I know don't exist, you know, my daughter has pet cats.
I don't change their litter box because, you know, they don't shit because they're not alive, right?
So, it is actually quite a bit more simple.
And I know that this sounds like, oh yeah, this, you know, crazy Canadian guy is just talking shit about Wittgenstein and who the hell is he.
But the reality is that without the internet, you would never have heard of me and that's not an accident.
Right.
Because there are gatekeepers between intellectuals and the population.
And the gatekeepers are primarily in the media, and by that it doesn't just mean television, but historically book publishing and so on, in the media and in academia.
Absolutely.
And I fought my way through a couple of undergrad universities, got a grad degree and so on.
But it's just tiring.
I remember when I was 16, I went to go and stay with a friend of my father's who was a marine biologist in Newfoundland for the summer.
And once we had to go hike up a river.
And it was like a fast-moving river in the north of Newfoundland.
Newfoundland.
And we had to go like literally miles.
He wanted to find the source of the river.
It was some important thing.
And occasionally he would shark fish and take samples and so on.
But oh my God, let me tell you, man.
This guy was fit.
And I was not bad.
This was right before I really went through my fitness break and really started exercising a lot and joined the cross-country team and did lots of tennis and soccer and stuff.
So I was okay fit, not super fit.
But man alive, walking up that current, climbing those slippery rocks, it's tiring.
There's two times in my life I've been truly, truly exhausted.
Number one was after doing that for five hours, climbing up waterfalls, going all the way up this river.
And you couldn't do one on either side for too much foliage.
And you have to just keep surging away and clawing away.
And it's just tiring.
Every step, you get tired.
Going back is easier, right?
But going up is tiring.
The second time was after I went...
Skydiving for the first time.
When I landed, I was so full of adrenaline that I basically just wanted to curl up in the parachute and take a nap.
But that's a story for another time.
But that's sort of what it's like when you're plowing your way through higher education.
Nobody actually said, don't do it, you're crazy.
But there was just such resistance and such indifference and such, you know, not outright hostility, but more like passive aggressive eye rolling.
The goal was not to resist me because I think people sensed that when I hit resistance, I hit the gas.
You know, like I'm the kind of guy when I hit resistance, I put my shoulders down, you know, I square my hips and I just fucking dig until I get through.
But that sort of condescension, the eye-rolling and so on.
Now, academics in my past were wrong.
They were wrong because I'm getting four out of five million downloads a month.
150,000 book downloads a month of philosophy books, for God's sakes, right?
Correct.
In Canada, 5,000 books is considered a bestseller in a year at 100,000 to 150,000 book downloads a month.
So I am very good at talking philosophy to the people.
Whether you agree with me or not, I'm still very good at getting people interested in philosophy.
Sure.
So the academics were all incorrect.
And so having faced that, someone who can face the general public and hit them with the electric eel of philosophy and make them dance a happy dance, they were wrong about my capacity to positively influence the spread of philosophy, which you think academics would kind of be interested in.
And so there's a reason why Wittgenstein, whose entire academic output consisted of one 75-page book, one paper, and a children's dictionary.
I mean, it really was not a very voluminous, you know, like Bertrand Russell wrote on everything.
George Bernard Shaw wrote on everything.
Wittgenstein barely wrote anything.
There's a reason why he was elevated.
And it's similar in art to the reason why someone like Picasso is elevated is because it helps the powers that be to have these people be considered the very best.
Now the internet has taken down the gatekeepers and so people like me can have a direct conduit to the audience without bypass, without having to go through The people who are in the way.
I don't have to...
I'm whitewater rafting downstream rather than fighting my way slugging upstream, which eventually you just run out of strength to do if you've got any sense.
Otherwise, you burn out, right?
Right.
And so, you know, where does this come from?
I think it comes from emotional disturbance than I think it comes from...
I'd rather go to the blurry edges than stand and fight.
You know, the picture of the guy in Tiananmen Square from years ago, the guy standing in front of the line of tanks?
Mm-hmm.
I bet you there are like 10,000 fucking Chinese academic philosophers saying, well, the word tank is pretty much a social convention.
And who even knows what a tank is anyway?
And do you know they use it for other things too, like a tank of water or a tank of gas on the back if you're breathing underwater?
There are all these pedants out there who are questioning whether there's any such thing as a tank and whether that person really exists.
And the picture is blurry, but he's not.
So what does the picture mean relative to reality?
Right?
Right.
And it's like, go stand with him in front of the tank, you selfish, stupid bastards, you lazy, cloud-confusing motherfuckers!
Go and help the guy standing in front of the tank, you moral philosophers!
That's the job!
Right.
No!
I want to go and try and figure out whether a guy in a desert island would develop the word stupid motherfucker by looking in the mirror.
No, that would be you.
Yeah, okay.
That's, yeah, more than fair.
More than fair.
And that is an insult to motherfuckers.
I apologize to motherfuckers everywhere by comparing them to these kinds of douchebags.
But anyway, and I now apologize to douchebags.
I can keep doing this, but I should stop.
Well, that pretty much covers just about everything I wanted to ask about as far as Wittgenstein and his philosophy.
I'm taking up your time and probably the next caller's time.
A quick side question.
So you mentioned Bertrand Russell.
Are you familiar with the Principia Mathematica, his attempt to basically take language and make it to, reduce it to, you know, these core logical statements and prove it via math?
Only as a general theory, I have no knowledge of any of the specific proofs.
Okay, okay, sure, sure.
Well, I mean, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor, not only because they failed, but because of what, like, Later became Godel's incompleteness theorem, which basically says for any formal system, like let's say a system of logic, there's going to be a proposition that is true but unprovable within that system.
And it's a limitation of all formal systems.
I mean, it might seem irrelevant, but when you talk about reality being grounded in this system of logic, or logical truth, excuse me, That begs the question, well, is that system of logical truth unprovable within its own method?
Is there something about it?
No, things only remain unprovable if you cut off sense data, right?
So if you say that mental constructs are unrelated to sense data which transmits information about the objective world, then it all becomes self-referential, right?
I mean, it's like saying, are the rules for Dungeons and Dragons true or false?
Right.
Doesn't make any sense, right?
Are the rules of tennis valid or invalid?
Well, social convention, right?
They're not embedded in reality in any fashion whatsoever, right?
These are just social conventions that we use.
Are the rules of poker moral or immoral?
I don't know, right?
Doesn't make any sense, right?
And so if you cut the brain off from direct, valid contact to the outside world by either ignoring, bypassing, or denigrating the evidence of the senses, Then sure, the brain is entirely self-referential.
But if philosophy is fundamentally the attempt to codify, to conceptualize, to abstract, to universalize the evidence of the senses, and the origin of the evidence of the senses being objective and universal reality external to the brain, then logic is the shadow cast by reality.
And nobody says that there's a shadow without something casting it, right?
Right.
And so if logic is the shadow cast in the mind by objective reality, then logic is not self-referential any more than a shadow stands without an object in front of it.
And do you mind if I just make one other analogy?
Because I thought of this earlier today and I didn't want to...
I'll kick myself if I don't use it.
Do you mind?
Go ahead.
Okay, thanks.
It's not a perfect analogy, but hopefully it will at least make some sense.
Language does not fit the thing itself perfectly.
It's not even an ill-fitting jacket, you know?
It's like spraying yourself in whipped cream and running through a car wash sometimes, right?
That's not the analogy, but that was off the cuff.
So, yes, reality is an imperfect thing in reality.
And if you're sort of OCD-based, like obsessive and compulsive, and you want language to be a perfect mirror of reality, then you'll sit at the blurry edges masturbating using a rolled-up copy of Wittgenstein's thesis until you expire, leaving no children but only dark shadows of statism in your wake.
But what I want to do is invite you to look at language as a methodology for solving problems.
Now, if language is a methodology for solving problems, it doesn't have to be perfect.
It only has to do the job that it's supposed to do.
Because there is no such thing as perfect in the solving of problems, right?
Sure.
It's good enough, right?
And so, like, are antibiotics perfect for getting rid of all illnesses or at least bacterial infections?
No, but they're pretty damn good, right, when rationally used and so on, right?
Right.
So, like, even engineering, these are very highly accurate, precise, but they're approximate.
It's still approximations, but they're useful, and that's what makes them valuable, right?
Yeah, and engineers could make everything perfect.
costs and so on right you know there are ten thousand dollar apple watches i don't know they better than the four hundred dollar ones i guess in a way you know you could you could design a tablet like a computer tablet to last 200 years if you wanted you could just build it with the very best and most pristine material humanly possible and you could build it so that it could survive an earthquake a direct meteor strike you know kim kardashian sitting at Well, no, not that.
Limits on physical reality.
But...
Who the hell wants a tablet that lasts 200 years?
You could build a house that's going to last longer than the sun, right?
But who cares?
Who wants to pay $12 billion for a tiny house that lasts?
So it has to solve the problem and the idea of perfection in the solution of problems is completely irrational.
I would agree.
So here's language, right?
You have a square acre A forest on fire.
And you don't have time to cut a break around it.
You just got to go.
And you've got a water bomber that can drop approximately an acre of water.
Maybe an acre and a bit, right?
Okay.
But it's a lot.
It's a lot of water.
But it just, you know, the way maybe you can't fly too high.
It's too cloudy or something.
You got to fly low and you can drop an acre of water on an acre of fire.
Right.
And let's say that if you hit it accurately, it's going to put the fire out.
Right.
Now the fire is not even.
The fire, you know, some parts, like this tree's burning and then there's a little gap and then this shrub is burning and then, you know, there's some flaming bunny rolling around or something.
So the fire is uneven and when you drop the water, the air resistance, the speed, it's going to cause the water to spread.
And so, the fire is uneven and the water is uneven.
And there's no possible way that the water is going to perfectly hit the fire.
There's no way that the water is only going to hit the fire and nothing else.
Because the fire is uneven and the water is uneven.
It's never going to happen, right?
Right.
So you've got the job called put out the fire.
You've got the plane which drops the water that puts out the fire.
They don't perfectly match, but does it solve the problem of the fire burning?
Sure.
It does.
It does.
And in the same, so it doesn't match, but it gets the job done.
And nobody would sit there and say, well, you know, it's not going to hit the fire exactly.
There's going to be little bits of the fire left over.
Okay, it won't be able to spread because there's water all around it, but there will be little bits, and some of the water is going to hit stuff that isn't even on fire.
So you've got a mismatch between the water and the fire, and that's a huge problem, and therefore we should not take the airplane up and water bomb the fire, because you just can't get it to match exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
You shouldn't have that praxis.
Like, you shouldn't be paralyzed.
It doesn't matter.
Just drop the water.
I get that.
Right.
So, language is the water.
Right.
And what it describes is the fire.
Gotcha.
They're not the same.
Mm-hmm.
And they don't match perfectly, but they get the job done.
You point at a tree and everybody kind of knows what you're talking about.
Do you get to see the inside of the tree and the tree all through history and every leaf and every maggot and every...
No.
But everybody knows what you're talking about.
You fire the water at the fire of reality and you hit it enough to put it out and you've got your job done.
Because the question is, and this you have to go back to the Platonic forms, as well as all...
God concepts of knowledge.
Because in order for us to think that for the word tree to be valid, we have to know every conceivable thing about the tree, both now and forever.
That is an omnipotence and, sorry, that is an omniscience standard of knowledge, which does not exist.
If you're an out-and-out atheist, then you know that there is no standard of knowledge called omniscience Which human consciousness falls short of and which language falls short of.
Because if you're comparing anything to infinity, it vanishes, right?
And if you're comparing human language and human knowledge to some godlike form of intelligence and knowledge, then of course it looks pathetic and insignificant and inconsequential and erroneous and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
Right.
But if it gets the job done and there's no higher standard of value...
as perfect as something can be.
In other words, you don't have a better way of putting out this fire than dropping the water from the airplane.
Therefore, it is the perfect solution.
Now, if you have a solution called, I can will the fire out of existence by thinking about it, then the plane sucks.
It's a huge waste of resources, right?
But if the airplane is the very best solution that you have and it will get the job done with the least amount of effort and the highest level of effectiveness, it's the perfect solution.
There's nothing better.
So the people who say, well, it doesn't match, but you're not comparing something to something else that's possible.
And so when we look at human language and look at human consciousness, that, to our knowledge, is the highest standard that we have.
It's got a long way to go.
We've got to expand philosophy out to the masses, but it's the highest standard that we have.
And so to say, well, the airplane water bomber on the fire is ridiculous and bad and wrong and self-referential and solipsistic and tautological because you can just pray to God to have God put the fire out for you is not a valid statement.
There's no brain power that's going to put out a fire.
You've got to go bomb the sucker.
Sure.
And so I think that this is an echo still of comparing human capacity, human language, to some form of divine knowledge.
I mean, Immanuel Kant expressly talked about our senses don't show us the things in themselves.
It's only our sense impression of things that we get.
We don't know the ball in itself.
We can't see it from the inside and the outside and all throughout time and so on.
Well, so what?
You know, I'm not short Because I'm not 90 feet tall.
Because nobody's 90 foot tall.
Right?
Right.
I'm not dying early if I live to 100 because of Methuselah in the Bible who lived to like 900 or something.
Nobody lives that long.
And so Immanuel Kant's express goal was to save religion from reason and science.
Right.
And so he implicitly compared human standards of knowledge to a divine standard of knowledge and said human knowledge is woefully inadequate.
Well...
Yes, I guess that's true.
If you compare anything to a fantasy and think the fantasy is true, whatever you're comparing to is probably going to, you know, look woefully deficient.
Right.
And, you know, what do you mean you have cellulite?
My Barbie doll doesn't have cellulite?
You must be ugly.
It's like, no, Barbie dolls don't exist in real life.
That's not a valid comparison.
Right.
And so I think that this was still an echo and still remains an echo, that there is some form of divine knowledge that we must compare human capacities and language and consciousness to and figure it wanting, which is another reason why anybody who believes that, and this is not just religious people, it's also socialists, collectivists, particularly central planners, right?
Right.
I mean, you can't believe in central planning unless you have some fantasy about divine intelligence, because those guys would have to be omniscient in order to make it work.
But I think that you have to cut off the validity of the senses and the objectivity of sense data and therefore the capacity for individuals to reason competently.
You have to cut all of that off.
In order to create this radical skepticism and the best way to do it is to compare to the echo or ghost of some sort of divine intelligence Which makes everybody who's not infinitely tall feel ridiculously short.
And of course, all the rulers love it when people feel small.
So if you get people to compare their merely mortal characteristics and capacities to some sort of divine or universal standard, they're going to feel smaller, incompetent, helpless, and therefore a lot easier to rule.
Right.
So you're saying be wary of these highly skeptical and not necessarily practical philosophies.
No, no, no.
I'm not saying be wary.
I am saying loathe them with the burning fire of a thousand red-hot suns.
Hate them.
Spit on their graves.
Burn their works.
I'm just kidding.
Read their works because, you know, you've got to know your enemy.
But no, I'm not saying be wary of them.
I'm saying that they are lackeys and tools of the ruling class designed to cripple and castrate and turn your mind into a futility of blurry edge-seeking infertility rather than having you go out to the masses and have them strengthen their capacity to reason, strengthen their capacity for knowledge.
Because if what these guys, these radical relativists and skepticists are saying is that, man, if philosophy is this tough, if...
The most genius philosopher of the 20th century can't figure out if he's got two hands or not?
How the fuck are we supposed to use philosophy for anything?
Right.
Give me a hook!
Give me some bait!
So I can go get some fish so I can have some food!
Well, I don't know if we're really in an ocean and I don't know if the fish are really there or just projections of the universal unconscious through platonic idealism and the third family didn't...
Yeah.
I'll tell you what, I'm going to use you as bait and catch me a sperm whale, because at least that's got some substance.
Point well made.
Point well made.
Thank you.
Thank you for answering my question.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome back anytime, and a great chat.
I love doing the philosophy stuff, and Lord knows we don't get as much of it as I'm constantly demanding, so feel free to come back anytime.
Thank you very much.
I will.
Thank you.
Have a good night.
All right.
Thanks, Ben.
Up next is Alex.
Alex wrote in regarding the End Selfishness Now video that we just put out, which was a good rant that I edited down.
And he said, I did not understand this until I started listening to your show.
I would like to offer one suggestion because I am really confused about one aspect of this video, and I think many of your loyal listeners may be as well.
Ayn Rand's explanation of selfishness as a virtue is a concept that really motivated me to work harder and take pride in everything I do.
I feel less shame and have gained an enormous confidence boost from that very concept.
So while I agree with the message in your video, I would greatly appreciate it if you could explain, one, if there is a flaw in Ayn Rand's logic from a moral point, and two, whether you are defining selfishness differently than her.
I like to use self-centeredness, but I'm not sure if that's accurate.
Also has a couple other questions.
Isn't being selfish a good thing?
Here's how I think of it.
I'm selfish in helping my sister write her college essay because I am doing it to feel good about myself.
Does this mean that there are two kinds of selfish people?
Maybe morally healthy people are supposed to be selfish.
Me, I hope.
While morally unhealthy people, i.e. the people you described in the video, playing video games and complaining about nobody wanting to help them when they get sick, are not supposed to be selfish in order to possibly affect the world in our transition to a free society.
That's from Alex.
Where do I begin, Ben?
Welcome, Alex.
Hello.
Are you there?
Yes.
Hi, how are you doing?
Fine, thanks.
And yourself?
Yeah, well, thanks.
Do you give to charity?
Do you do that kind of donate your time or money stuff?
Not...
I'm not trying to corner you or say that's good or bad.
I'm just curious where we can start referencing from.
Oh, of course.
It's more of a personal interaction thing.
So with total strangers or with people I interact with on a daily basis, I help people out when I can.
With various things, sometimes financially, sometimes professionally.
So you do give to charity, it's just it's not a formal charity, it's an informal charity of you, right?
Yes, I'm sorry, that's what I meant.
Okay, so what's the biggest thing that you've done over the last little while?
And again, I'm not trying to corner you, I'm just trying to get a reference point.
What's the biggest thing that you've done in the last little while to help someone out?
The biggest thing?
Let's see, well...
I have a bunch of examples.
Yesterday, I helped somebody who was interviewing for a job.
I gave them a lot of interview advice and they were very appreciative.
But I've also done things like I lent a little over $100 to somebody, a coworker, but that was a couple of years ago on Christmas Eve, and he really needed the money.
Well, that wasn't money well spent, so I was kind of used.
But there are a bunch of...
I don't know.
Would you like more examples?
Or is that helpful?
Dude, I just asked for the biggest one.
I didn't ask for the laundry list.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what you mean by biggest.
Do you mean biggest financially, the most important one to me, the one...
I'm not sure how I should interpret biggest.
Most time, most resources, most energy...
Most money, whatever.
Whatever was the biggest thing for you.
Okay.
Or for the other person.
Oh, in that case, then I would say for my bosses, probably my last boss at my last job, I did a huge technical writing project that I totally just volunteered my time to do.
It wasn't part of the job.
I don't know if charity flows up to your boss.
That's sort of like a career move to some degree, isn't it?
Well, okay, but I wasn't, I mean, I wasn't getting paid for it.
And it was, you know, it's for training purposes.
So I saw that.
No, no, sorry.
Sorry.
That's like saying that I'm charitable because I'm interning.
No, that's, I'm sorry.
If it's charitable towards your boss, there's usually some consideration down the road at some point of some return.
So let's give something more private.
Okay, then.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever donated to this show?
Oh, yeah.
Many.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay.
And I hugely appreciate that, A. Okay, so B, why?
You don't have to.
And, you know, it's likely that if you don't, enough other people will, that the show will survive.
Oh, well, um...
That's...
You had to have some reason for doing it, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, many reasons.
I think the most basic and essential reason is that...
And having integrity, being a moral, virtuous person, it's very important to me.
The amount that I've benefited from the show, I feel like giving back makes a lot of sense in a variety of ways, and that's one way to do it.
Does that answer the question?
Sorry.
Is it...
That you feel...
I mean, there's two basic reasons why people do stuff.
To relieve a negative or to pursue a positive, right?
Why did you take that aspirin?
I had a headache.
Why did it go away?
You know, why did you go dancing?
Because I like to shake my booty and my moneymaker at the same time, right?
It makes me feel good.
And so, I guess my question is...
And it can be both, I guess, right?
But when you donated to this show...
Because some people, you know, like I say, dude, you've got to pay for the show.
We asked for 50 cents a show.
It's not really that much, right?
And people are like, man, you've got to stop making me feel guilty.
So if they donate, it's probably to relieve a negative, which is that I'm pointing out that they're kind of free-riding.
They're expecting other people to do the right thing.
They're not doing the right thing.
It's kind of crappy in the long run, and it's pretty exploitive, right?
Oh, yes.
And so they don't really, it's like, oh, fine, you know, just so I don't feel bad when you talk about this.
I'll give you some damn money to, you know, that's the Catholic approach, you know.
Yeah, I won't go to hell.
I'll give you some money, whatever.
And other people are like, yeah, you know, I have got a lot of value out of it.
Plus, I want the world to be a better place.
This guy and his team are doing a lot of work to make the world a better place.
So I'm going to do it.
It's in accordance with my values.
I'm going to feel good about it and so on, right?
So I guess if you had, it's not always one or the other directly, but if on that continuum in that pendulum, where would you sit?
Oh, very much positively motivated.
I feel way better about myself.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I should have just said I feel better about myself by doing all of that.
Right.
And obviously that has something to do with empathy as well, right?
I mean, if you were in my position, you'd like it if people donated to support the work that you do, if they're consuming a lot of it, right?
Yes, of course.
Right.
And, um, I don't want to, you know, toot my own horn.
It doesn't really matter.
but just was the last Christmas.
I was walking someplace and there was a big Christmas tree on the wall and they were all kids whose parents were not available for whatever reason.
It doesn't really matter why.
Parents were not available for Christmas and they were staying with strangers or foster care or whatever.
And the idea was to get them a really nice present, you know, to say it's not that bad or make them feel better.
These kids had put in their wish list for stuff, right?
And I just went in and bought the whole wall just here.
How much is this going to cost?
Let's get these kids a great Christmas.
Because it's Christmas, you know, and of course I remember when I was a kid, you know, like when we grew up poor and I remember my mother gave me, one Christmas, a glove.
Maybe next year I can get another one, right?
But one Christmas I got one glove, a used glove.
I'm not sure if she found it somewhere or what.
I don't mean to laugh because it's pretty tragic at the time.
I remember for my 11th birthday, the only person who remembered my 11th birthday was a friend of mine's mother who gave me $5 and my family forgot and the extended family forgot and so on, right?
And so I kind of, you know, I'm not trying to put my sort of situation where parents are disabled and so on.
But, you know, I remember what it was like to not have the best Christmases in the known universe.
And, you know, a nice big present would have been nice.
So I sort of remember that.
I want, you know, the kids to feel good and have a nice Christmas and so on.
So just how much is it going to cost?
Here's your check, right?
And I'll cut back on other things, right?
Not the end of the world, right?
And that's, I feel, you know, I think that, you know, these people were in tears, because, you know, it was like four days before Christmas, and like three quarters of the tree, they didn't have presents for, and they felt terrible.
And these people were like, oh, thank you.
It's like, no, honestly, I mean, do you want us to put your name up?
No.
It's anonymous.
I don't want anyone to know.
And now I'm saying anonymous and I'm telling you just because it's in the context of this.
But I did it because I want the kids to have a good time.
Because I remember what it was like to not have a good time at Christmas.
And these kids are going through tough stuff.
And it's not like materialism is going to make them feel all better.
But it does give them a sense that someone out there hopefully cares.
And this is why I sponsor families around the world.
Because you can cut back on other things.
And, you know, the money that you donated to this show is not money that was available to you to do other things.
So I appreciate that kind of prioritization.
And this goes back to the objectivist question of selfishness, to act for the benefit of oneself.
Now, the reason why people have a tough time with this, why this even seems radical to a lot of younger people, is that coming out of Christianity and coming out of Rand's particular joker, why so serious, right?
The Immanuel Kant, who said that he would say that what you did was immoral, and what I did was immoral.
And do you know why it was immoral?
Oh, no.
Because you derived pleasure from it.
In other words, I wasn't acting generously because of the kids' need, but because I would gain pleasure.
I was buying pleasure by giving to these kids at Christmas.
And I mean, it's all nonsense, right?
And I don't believe that for a second.
Because there are some people who gain pleasure out of torturing cats, God help them, right?
The sadists and sociopaths and cruel people of every streak, they genuinely get endorphin-based pleasure out of cruelty.
That's not me.
It's the exact opposite of me.
And so just because you get pleasure out of something...
Doesn't mean that it's good or bad, right?
Lots of bad people.
And it's, you know, recognizing that we live in a world with a variety of subspecies whose aims, let's just say, are not exactly compatible.
In fact, violently opposed in many ways.
It's a basic reality.
But they'd say, no.
He would say, no.
You are not a moral person because what you did gave you pleasure.
And so you weren't doing...
You weren't doing your generosity for the thing in itself.
You were doing it so that you would feel better.
You would either avoid pain or you would receive pleasure.
And that's therefore not moral.
That's all nonsense.
Morality has nothing to do with how you feel.
I mean, that's like basing a physics argument on emotionalism.
It is completely incompatible.
So the objectivist argument is, well, no, of course you should do something because it gives you pleasure.
That doesn't mean that it's bad.
In fact, that probably means that it's good.
And everyone who tells you to do stuff against your own self-interest is only trying to castrate and exploit you.
And my goal, though, in the sort of speech that I gave, and we'll put a link to this below, I just want to shake people out of their digital isolation in particular.
and get them to understand that doing good in the world is a deeply satisfying and motivating thing.
Because when you're young, oh, it's such an annoying phrase to hear.
I get that.
Ah, you young whippersnappers who do nothing.
But, you know, when you're young and it's perfectly valid, you tend to live life more for your own pleasures.
It's perfectly valid.
When you get older, particularly when you have kids, you become very interested in the state of the world in the future.
And when you're young, you're healthy, usually, right?
And you don't get a lot of cavities.
You don't need to floss your teeth with giant fire hoses of gum cleansers and crap like that, right?
And But when you're young is when you need to start investing in the quality of the relationships around you.
Now, when I say go be generous to people, I don't mean give evil people your kidney.
What I mean is generosity is intensely liberating.
Because generosity that does not result in reciprocity results in liberty.
You give to people if they don't get back.
You can talk to them about it or whatever, but...
Nagging people will never create empathy, only guilt, right?
And you want relationships based on empathy rather than obligation for a variety of reasons.
So if you're generous to the people around you and they don't reciprocate and they just expect more and so on, then you gain liberty from that relationship.
Generosity is a really, really great way of finding out who the empathetic people around you are and are not.
And I don't want to get into particular details, but I had a relationship with one person.
And his wife was having a baby.
And it was the first baby around for a lot of us.
I mean, I was excited.
And I spent the whole weekend helping this person clean his house.
It's like a fundamental thing you do when you get a baby home.
You clean the house, right?
It makes perfect sense, right?
And this was like 12 hours a day, like a crazy clean, like literally pull the fridge out, clean behind it kind of stuff.
Yeah, like the baby's going to lick back there.
But, you know, it becomes this healthy obsession.
Anyway, it just sort of struck me.
I was sitting across the end of this Friday, Saturday, Sunday, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.
And stocking up and, you know, just generally nesting, getting the nest ready for the kid.
And I remember sitting there on a couch and it just really struck me, like viscerally, these things just boom.
I was looking at this person thinking, you know what?
If I ever have a baby, I cannot for the life of me imagine that this person will come to my house for three days and clean.
This is not to say this person had never been generous or anything like that, but I really got it.
That it was not going to come back.
That changed things very fundamentally for me.
Generosity without the biofeedback of reciprocity is a recipe to be exploited.
You lend, sure, lend money to people.
And you said this, you lend money to a co-worker just before Christmas, the $100.
It was a bad investment.
Okay, good.
Then it was, in fact, a good investment.
Because hopefully you've figured out the patterns and you make sure that you lend to people who are worthwhile, right?
And some listeners I've helped out.
It's worked out really well.
A few I've helped out.
Nope.
It's tough to help people.
It's very tough to help people.
And which is why I generally leave it to the experts these days if at all possible.
But I think that we should be generous, and there's no contradiction between generosity and selfishness.
It's just if you take generosity as some sort of commandment, like you just have...
You have sort of an inward-outward physics of ethics.
These are my standards.
I must enact these standards like a robot that has been programmed to be good.
The robot expects no reciprocity.
Morality has become my programming, and I must go out and be good.
Beepie burpee booper.
And that's not, to me, what morality is.
That's like saying, I must eat this particular diet.
If I get diabetes, I cannot change my diet, and I will die.
No, you need to be nimble and flexible.
There are principles, for sure, but the principles are universal.
Which means that if other people are not enacting them, you don't have an obligation.
And we all understand this sort of fundamentally, right?
Like if I sign on to go work someplace, and they say, well, we're going to pay you, I don't know, $1,000 a week or something like that.
And I go and work there, and they stop paying me.
Do I sit there and say, well, I agreed to come and work here, so I'm going to keep working here because that was my agreement.
No.
They're not holding up their end of the bargain, so you don't have to hold up your end of the bargain at all.
I mean, 500 bucks, ship me an iPad.
And then the guy, he says, pay me when you get it, right?
And he ships you an empty box, are you going to send him the 500 bucks?
No.
He didn't keep his end of the bargain up.
You don't have to keep your end of the bargain up.
Morality is a relationship because it is about regulating the affairs between human beings, which is why a bee that stings you doesn't end up in court for malicious prosecution with a butt, right?
And so morality is a relationship and to take it as programming is a disrespect to morality because it turns morality from a strength into a weakness.
It turns it from, you know, incredible Hulk-style musculature to Pee Wee Herman target on the forehead, suck out all of my blood like a giant mosquito and leave me deflated like a spent condom on the floor, which probably has quite a bit to do with Pee Wee Herman, but that's a topic for another time.
And so, yes, be generous and be sensitive to the effects of your generosity.
Show up to work and do a good job, but check they're still paying you, right?
We don't just make commitments and act in isolation to other people's reciprocity.
Honesty is a virtue.
Yes, and like all virtues, it must be earned by reciprocity.
Integrity is a virtue, yes, and like all virtues, it must be earned and maintained by reciprocity.
Affection is a virtue, yes, and like a virtue, it is to be earned and maintained by the virtuous actions of another.
The Ten Commandments...
It is only the arrogance and insolence and coldness of a deity and his representatives that would imagine that philosophy has anything to do with a commandment.
A philosophical commandment is non-universal by definition because everyone could then command everyone for anything and you've lost universality.
Everything to do with ethics is a relationship.
We don't put people in jail.
Yeah, until they start killing people, then they can go to jail.
Because it's a relationship.
If other people change, we must change.
But a lot of people want to avoid conflict with exploiters around them by creating a rule or an absolute called be kind, be generous.
And we get so much bullshit propaganda.
Ooh, I feel a rant coming.
Starts in the spleen.
Begins to move around.
But we get so much bullshit propaganda.
Tell me, you ever heard stuff like this?
I know he didn't act the very best, but he means well.
I know he didn't treat you very well, but he loves you.
He just doesn't know exactly how to express it very well.
He's got your best interest in heart.
Sometimes he just goes about it wrong.
Well, you could descend to his level, or you could take the high road and do the right thing and show him How to do the right thing by example.
How many times are we morally sensitive souls told to take the high road?
To do the right thing regardless of the actions of the other person?
To have our ethics turn us into easily mineable robots of guilt, shame, hope and obligation.
Faith in virtue.
But all that is valuable must be earned.
You want health?
Exercise.
Eat well.
Earn it.
You want muscles?
Lift weights.
You want knowledge?
Learn.
Read books.
Listen to podcasts.
You want creativity?
Practice.
You want excellence?
Rehearse.
Everything that is of value must be earned.
And ethics must Our value, your trust, your honor, your integrity, your honesty, your courage, your loyalty.
These must be arduously earned by the integrity and virtue and mirror ethics of everyone around you.
Generosity is a virtue.
When practiced among the generous, it is a vice virtue.
When handed over to the greedy.
Courage is a virtue among the courageous and the virtuous.
It is enslavement to a hierarchy when it is courage in overcoming the fear of obeying orders from your supposed superiors.
Honesty is a virtue among honest people.
It is a vice to demand that you be honest to a liar because that puts the liar at an unfair and significant advantage over you.
Virtue is turned from wife to whore by applying it without standards.
Want to fuck me?
Got a penis?
All right.
Go to it.
I don't care.
Don't even have to be human.
That is not an elevated view of human sexuality.
Desire, lovemaking, sex, union, these are to be earned.
Be haughty in this world.
Be discriminatory.
Be discriminating in this world.
Be skeptical in this world.
There is an old maxim that 99% of everything is crap.
I think they're rounding down.
Be skeptical.
Most of the people you meet in this life are of significantly low quality.
I say this because I'm pushing a half century.
I've spent a lot of time around a lot of people.
Go read my YouTube comments sometime.
Put on a crash helmet and bring yourself a barf bag, although there's some good exceptions.
I can't.
But most of the people you interact with will be Short-term, pompous, self-congratulating, exploitive windbags who are only there to see what they can get out of you while providing as little as possible in return.
And you must reserve your virtue as a precious gift, as a hot candle in a cold and windy world.
And you pass the light of your virtue to others when they earn it.
You don't whore it out.
You don't make a commandment.
I gotta have sex with everything that moves.
And I don't care if it's just after death twitching, I'm jumping that thing.
I'm on it like a fat kid on a smarty, like white on rice, like Steph on a contradiction.
You must resist the temptation to apply your ethics to those who don't deserve it.
And they will always tell you that that's what you have to do.
If you want to be a good person, you take the high road.
You be virtuous.
Doesn't matter what the other person does.
You follow your own standards.
You do the right thing.
I don't care that they behave badly.
You've got to do the right thing.
Why?
Tell me why.
Tell me why.
Jesus, when I was growing up in school, all the goddamn teachers, with maybe one or two exceptions, were terrible, boring, pedantic, aggressive, stupid, whiny, immature, yelly, scary, bullying, crap people, bottom of the barrel.
Where was their interest in reciprocity?
Hey kids, how are you enjoying the lesson?
Is there anything you'd like to learn about more?
How's it working for you?
What could we do better?
Let's fill out the forms.
Let's sit down.
Let's design a curriculum that you kids are really excited to get up and come to school in.
It's not impossible to teach people about difficult things and have them love it.
People love this show.
People listen to this podcast.
They consume it like a humpback whale swallowing up krill.
And this is really difficult, really challenging, really volatile stuff that we talk about here.
And people eat it up.
School wasn't just boring, it was easy.
And there's nothing more boring than something too easy.
Where's the reciprocity in the government?
Where's the reciprocity among the tax collectors?
Where's the reciprocity among the poor or the rich who feed off the body politic?
When was the last time a single mom came to a men's rights group and said, thank you all for working so hard to pay her taxes?
We know we made terrible decisions.
We really care that you guys are having a tougher time raising your own kids because you've got to pay for our kids too.
We really appreciate it.
What can we do?
Going to make you a sandwich.
No.
So, the ultimate selfishness is to respect the hallowed and treasured and glorious and cathedral beam lit glories of the universal virtues that we practice and And to snatch them away like we would a gun from a toddler from the grasping hands who wish to use our virtues against us by enslaving us to standards that they have no fucking intent of reciprocating ever.
Here endeth the rant.
Wow.
That was very helpful.
Okay, so...
Yeah, so, I mean, again, that one example, the lending the money example, that was before I discovered the show, so the show has definitely helped with me raising my standards for reciprocity in relationships, and so I haven't had something quite that extreme happen since then, but, I mean, So the show's helped a lot with that.
Well, I mean, I also had another kind of related point, back to the sellers.
Hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry.
We've got a bunch of other callers who are already two hours into the show.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Do you mind if you hold that for the next time?
And I'd certainly love to have you come back, but do you mind if we hold that for the next time?
Sure, okay.
All right.
Thanks, Matt.
Great question.
And I'm not saying that I've answered everything to everyone's satisfaction.
So please, please call in if you have issues with what it is that I'm saying.
I'm certainly happy to talk further.
Okay.
Thanks.
Thanks.
All right.
Well, up next is Martin.
Martin wrote in and said, How is I did the best I could with the knowledge I had not a valid excuse?
Did you go to school when you were younger there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you knew you had a test on Friday and you chose not to study, was that a valid excuse?
Did you get an A? Yeah, but then they told me that I had a test and they told me what information that there was going to be on the test.
And if there was something they didn't tell me that was on the test, you could complain and get points back.
Okay, so what is an example where...
Because I always hear this in terms of parents, right?
And if you're a parent, you have at least nine months warning, or eight, I guess, if a kid's going to be born a little early, but you have at least nine months warning to get ready to be a parent.
And you can read the books, and you can get up to speed on the latest and greatest.
And so I don't see how parents can claim that they just...
You've got nine months to study for a test.
That's the most important test you're ever going to have.
And then people say, well, I never got around to reading a parenting book.
It's like, well, then you can't claim a lack of knowledge, right?
That's an excuse.
Yeah, well, that's a good point.
But most tests will tell you, like most teachers will tell you what to study, but then, okay, that's, yeah, okay, with a parenting book, This would be parenting.
There's lots of parenting books out there.
And the vast majority of them talk about how to negotiate with your kids, how to reason with your kids.
They don't just sit there and say, hit them with this book.
Buy a hardcover if it's a boy, right?
That's not how parenting books work.
I mean, for the last, since Benjamin Spock's book of baby and childcare, there's been very, very strong Negotiation over spanking recommendations.
So that's 60 years.
60 years!
People have seen television shows, right, where People who hit their kids are roundly exoriated, right?
Dr.
Phil has had the biggest self-help show, daytime show on television for like over 10 years.
And he's constantly telling people how to negotiate with their kids.
This is true of almost all the self-help shows that I've ever seen.
Plus, people have seen sitcoms going back from the 1950s.
Leave it to Beaver and so on where the parents negotiate and don't hit their kids.
So for a little over 60 years, which is quite a long time really, a little over 60 years there has been massive amounts of media and information and books and experts and radio shows and television shows and sitcoms and so on all showing the same thing, which is how to reasonably negotiate with your kids rather than to hit them.
So for people to say, I didn't know it was wrong, I didn't know it was a problem, is ridiculous.
I mean, literally willing yourself to not see that which is in front of you, right?
Whatever god-awful things Bill Cosby seems to have been up to since, at least the Cosby show, along with Family Ties, along with Full House, along with, you name it, these shows, they all talk about how to reason with your kids, how to negotiate with your kids.
Sometimes it's a little heavy-handed, and the Cosby show in particular, Felicia Rashad could turn into quite a she-witch, But they still weren't hitting their kids.
And so for people to say, well I had no idea.
I was like, of course you did.
And there's a reason why these sitcoms don't show hitting kids.
It's because when people see kids getting hit, when they're not currently in a state of dissociated rage, it's morally horrifying to them.
Everybody knows how bad Hitting Kids is, which is why if any sitcom ever showed a full-on spanking of a child, people would faint.
They would scream.
Advertisers would leave in droves.
They would get letters of protest.
They'd get boycotts.
They'd get God knows what, right?
I mean, the entire careers of everyone involved would be completely toast.
Because you have to be in a state of dissociated rage and cold sociopathic anti-empathy in order to strike a child.
And when you're sitting in front of a sitcom, you know, having a decaf and having a couple of laughs, if you see when you're in an unprepared state, when you're in a not dissociated homicide, well, you're not in a dissociated rage state, if you see somebody hitting a child, it scolds you to the core.
Because you've not mentally jacked yourself into the place where somehow your self-righteous rage, your inner parental alters have taken over, and you can pull that kind of crap and feel justified.
If it hits you out of nowhere, it's horrifying.
And so everybody knows.
I mean, if people were comfortable with spanking, it would be all over the sitcoms, and it never is.
I'm not so sure that everybody knows, because I think this show is the first show that told me that you should read a parenting book before you have kids.
Most people just assume that they know that their parents were good enough teachers or that, yeah.
And what's your cultural background there, brother?
I'm Swedish and I've spent like three years in the U.S. Now, Sweden was one of the earliest countries to ban spanking, right?
Yes.
In the 70s?
Yeah.
And what's Swedish parenting like?
I don't know much about it.
Um...
There is no hitting.
I don't really know if my parents are the ideal Swedish parents, if you know what I mean.
I don't know what you mean, because I don't know what the ideal Swedish parents are.
Most Swedes are pretty passive.
They're conflict avoidance.
The Swedish parenting, I would guess, is there's some neglect when the kids are young.
The kids are usually put in daycare pretty early, like from one, two-year-old.
And then the parents The parents usually don't talk to their children as much as I've heard you talk to your daughter.
Oh, no, listen, I mean, I don't want to tell tales out of history or whatever, but I certainly would not put my family right at the center of the curve when it comes to quality conversations.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying that, like, if parents don't do what I do, that's, you know, automatically damned, of course, right?
I mean, I had to work a lot to sort of figure this stuff out.
Yeah.
But I guess, you know, the question for me would be, if a parent drops a child off at daycare, is the child very unhappy?
Because that's important, right?
And if the child is miserable in daycare, or at least it doesn't want to go, and if Of course, what child wants to go to daycare?
God, of all the crazy things in the world, this is the womb I grew up in.
These are the tender hands, soft voice, and crying eyes that first greeted me into this world.
These are the boobs I well know and love.
This is the body smell and the hair smell and the odors that I'm familiar with.
This is the comfortable nesting place of my earliest existence.
This is the only person I'm fundamentally familiar with.
And, um...
What possible benefit could it be to a baby to go into a daycare?
It just takes a moment's thought.
This isn't, you know, got to split the atom in your spare time using popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue.
This is like, okay, what is the upside of a kid going into daycare?
What is the benefit?
Why would they want to do it?
What's better than mom and home and familiarity and a connection?
It's like saying, well, I could go out with my wife for her 10th anniversary or I could hire some stranger off the street to go out with her.
I'm sure she won't care.
Of course she will.
Yeah, well, I guess the Swedish society is subsidizing daycare.
So it's very cheap to put your kids in daycare so you could make money by going out working.
And it's also, I don't think anyone thinks that daycare is bad.
Well, they haven't read the studies then.
So in Quebec here, Quebec is, hang on, so Quebec is a province here in Canada where they speak what some people charitably call French.
And exposure to this study, we'll put a link to this below, exposure, this is directly from the study.
It turns out that exposure to childcare in Quebec negatively impacts children in both the short and long terms.
Compared with their peers in other provinces, young Quebecois children had higher rates of anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity.
Now, Quebec has very cheap subsidized daycare.
The other provinces, not so much.
This is why they're compared to these other provinces.
As teenagers, these children commit more crimes and were generally less satisfied with their lives.
The program had no long-term positive effects on children's standardized test scores or cognitive abilities and may even have had A negative effect.
So kids in daycare, higher rates of anxiety and aggression and hyperactivity, they commit more crimes and are generally unhappy, less happy with their lives.
Doesn't help.
Their test scores may have had a negative effect.
May have made them dumber and more violent.
And for people to say that I mean, Sweden is a pretty secular society, right?
Most people are atheist diagnostics, right?
Okay.
So, is it fair to say that people in Sweden are fairly comfortable with the idea of evolution?
Yes.
Okay, great.
Now, do they think that babies evolved to be raised by their mothers or by strangers, with no mother around for most of the day?
Well, the...
They would probably say mothers if they were asked a question like that.
Right.
This is not that complicated, right?
Yes, but Sweden is also the most progressive feminist country in the world.
I talked with my cousin the other day and she said, oh yeah, but it's very important that women work so they're not dependent on a man and stuff like that.
Okay, well, but that's fine then.
Okay, but so if the moms should then just openly say, I want to have children, but I don't want to raise the children, really.
I want to go and work.
I choose money over my children.
In other words, my motherhood is on sale to the highest bidder.
I will sell my time with my children.
I will sell motherhood itself.
To whoever can offer me more than $12.50 an hour.
Okay, well that's...
I mean, at least a whore only sells her vagina, not her children.
Right?
So she just...
Okay, so she's put her motherhood on the highest block of bidding.
And she's saying, well, I'm going to choose what's right for me.
What I want...
I want to get it done.
I want to go to work.
I don't want to be dependent on a man.
Well, first of all, choose a man you can depend on, you idiots.
Choose a man you can rely on and then be helpful and useful to him so he continues to love you.
And it's true for the man, for the woman as well.
Be helpful.
You know, it's that old thing from Bill and Ted.
Be excellent to each other, right?
I mean, just be good.
Be irreplaceable.
I mean, God, do you know how many stupid podcasters there are out here in the known universe?
I've got to keep you entertained year after year, night after night.
It's driving me crazy, right?
I mean, you've got to compete.
Of course, be so wonderful to the man that he can't think of leaving you.
Be so wonderful to your wife.
The security is not to abandon your children, but to be a better spouse and mother.
God, why does this even need to be said?
Okay, so you sold your motherhood so you could go sit in a cubicle and staple shit and answer the phone.
Or be a physicist.
I don't care.
You still sold your children off to be raised by strangers.
Okay, fine.
Then children accept that.
Accept that.
That your mom preferred a paycheck to you.
She chose money over you.
Now, what consequences should that rationally be?
What consequences should that rationally have?
Like, working when you have babies is being unfaithful to your children.
Now, A man who's unfaithful to his wife is exoriated, is condemned as a pig, as a cheater, even if he does it on a business trip long away and it doesn't interfere with the time he has with his wife.
Now, what if a man cheats on his wife for 10 hours a day because his mistress is paying him to screw her?
Ten hours a day.
He's not spending time with his wife because his penis is on a bidding block and some skank is offering him $12.50 an hour to bang her senseless rather than be home with his family.
What would we say to such a man?
We'd say, that's pretty horrible.
You're being unfaithful to your wife.
You're not spending time with your children.
For money.
But I like sex!
So what?
My wife's vagina is loose since she had kids.
I don't care.
Kegel it up, baby.
Get back in the saddle.
But so somehow, a man being unfaithful to his wife once for 20 minutes, in a foreign town, doesn't interfere with the time he spends with his wife, that's terrible.
But a woman having a baby who desperately needs union with her flesh and body and soul and breast milk, dumping her in a fucking daycare, waltzing off to work for $12.50 an hour or whatever the hell she's making, that's somehow considered not being unfaithful?
At least your husband has a choice.
Your kids don't have a choice.
They didn't choose you as parents.
And they don't want to be raised by strangers.
And it doesn't take a lot of brains to figure this out.
Just do the damn math.
I mean, maybe it's easier for me.
I worked in a daycare, but just do the damn math.
You have a daycare worker who has five babies.
Those five babies are going to have probably a bowel movement or a pee every hour or so, give or take.
It takes 10 minutes to change a baby's diaper if you're going to do it competently, right?
If you're not going to be transferring fecal Illnesses and bacteria from one baby to another.
So if you've got five babies and it takes 10 minutes to change a diaper properly, you are going to spend 50 minutes of every hour changing diapers.
Is that interacting with the children?
Again, they'll wake and they'll sleep and so on, but just this math.
When they're all awake, is that interacting with the children?
No.
You're just changing their diapers.
Can't go and interact with the other kids because you're changing these diapers.
That's assuming that you do it properly, you wash your hands, desanitize and all that kind of stuff.
How many daycare workers do that?
I don't know.
You can judge by yourself from how sick kids get in daycare.
It's not their natural environment.
They're not being played with, moms.
They're not.
They're babies in a daycare.
You might as well put them in a folding basket and put them in the back of a truck.
Well, I guess then at least they'd get some rocking.
They're getting less stimulation than if you sat them in front of a TV. They get picked up, their diapers get changed quickly, they get put back down, and then it's good luck with the blocks, Judy, because there's no human being around to interact with you.
Your baby's evolved to be with you, ladies.
And if you're going to have the goddamn children, stay with the goddamn children.
Why this needs to be said is astounding to me.
It's like saying, well, if you promise to be monogamous and you're in a monogamous relationship and you're in marriage and you expect monogamy and you think being unfaithful is bad, you really shouldn't be screwing everything with a pulse that twitches by in the neighborhood.
If you're gonna have a baby, how about this?
You raise the fucking baby.
I don't mean to shock you.
You have the baby.
The baby's dependent on you.
Baby can't go anywhere.
Baby didn't choose to be there.
You owe that baby breast milk.
You owe that baby cuddle time.
You owe that baby reading time.
You owe that baby sing-song time.
You owe that baby wiggles watching until the Australian rot of banal music bursts out of your head like an alien out of a grapefruit.
But you owe the kid all of that.
That's the deal.
You want to have a kid?
How about you be a parent?
Guy who gets married and says, well, I want to screw everything that moves.
It's like, well, choose one.
If you want to screw everything that moves, don't get married.
And if you want to go have a job, ladies, go have a job.
More power to you.
I'm not telling you what to do.
I'm just saying that if you do choose to have some children, how about you spend some time with the children?
I talked to a woman the other day.
That's why it's on my mind.
I talked to a woman the other day.
I'm not going to even say what I said, but I'll just say what she said.
Oh yeah, it's a challenge.
I just came back from mat leave and...
Yeah, I gotta get up pretty early.
I live pretty far from here, and I get up pretty early.
It's pretty rushed in the morning, you know, and I gotta take my kid.
He's a year old, and...
I say kid, not baby.
It's a baby.
I take my baby, he's a year old, and I drop him off at the daycare, and then I gotta rush to get to work here by 8.30 in the morning.
I try to finish at 5.
I try my very best to finish at 5.00.
Sometimes there's a bit of traffic.
I gotta drive.
I gotta get to the daycare.
You know, sometimes I don't get him home until like 6 or 6.30.
And then he goes to bed at 7.
So you get half an hour to an hour Of quality time with your baby, wherein you have to feed the baby, you have to change the baby, you have to bathe the baby probably, you maybe can play with the baby briefly, and then the baby falls asleep.
Yay baby!
Daycare, unattended, diaper changed, staring at blocks for 8, 9, 10 hours a day, and then half an hour with a very rushed mommy, and then bedtime.
Who the hell would choose that who had any other possible choice?
Your babies are in your jail.
They can't escape.
They can't get out.
They got no place to go.
They can't file a divorce.
They can't find somebody better.
They're stuck with you.
So respect that.
Spend some goddamn time with them.
This woman...
This is how insane things are in the world, in the West.
And this is where, like I think other cultures must look at the West and just say, what the hell are you people doing?
This is how insane things are, man.
Her phone kept buzzing while we were chatting.
I couldn't help but ask her as I was talking about other things and giving some advice.
I said, what's that?
She said, oh, they text me.
When my baby poops.
Is that what we call in motherhood these days?
You get a text.
Not even a photo.
I can understand not getting a photo.
You get a text.
I'm so connected.
Because you see, the phone, the text is right next to my heart.
She said, but my baby loves, loves daycare.
Loves daycare.
Really?
Your baby prefers daycare to you?
How bad are you?
As a mom, that your baby prefers daycare to you.
Yeah, my wife, she'd rather eat alone than with me.
She'd rather eat with strangers than with me.
Isn't that great?
She loves not me.
She loves new people as opposed to me.
She loves everything that's the complete opposite of me.
I couldn't be happier.
Do people even listen to themselves?
I have no idea.
I feel like I'm in an asylum.
Half the time I'm out among the muggles.
I literally feel like I'm in an asylum.
Where is this famed maternal instinct?
Can't tear myself away from the baby.
Gotta resurrect.
I gotta figure out some way to stay with my baby.
I gotta do it.
Can't go to work.
I gotta move to a smaller place.
I'll live in a car.
I don't care.
I gotta live in a trailer.
I gotta stay with my baby.
Now I get half an hour and texts about my baby.
Jesus Christ, you might as well get a baby app on her phone and breastfeed her iPhone.
Why need a baby when you can get a text?
God, what are we doing?
What are we doing as a society?
Well, the conformity of women, of course, that's a whole other issue, right?
I just did an interview with a researcher who pointed out that amongst all the religions that have ever been studied, men leave in general and women don't.
Women just stay.
Well, this is the right thing to do.
I've been told what to do, so I'm going to do it.
Kiss boobs.
Well, people tell me I should go back to work.
Kiss empowerment, so I'm going to just toss my baby into a daycare and off I go to deal with strangers because they'll be where they wipe my ass when I'm 89 years old and dying.
Oh, God.
What is going on in this planet?
How ideologued and idealized and abstracted and programmable have we become where some bitter narcissistic feminist can snap her fingers and women scatter from their babies like crows before a gunshot of the newborns?
How the hell did we blow some distant trumpet of delusion and cause all the women to charge the opposite way that nature intends them to go?
I mean, we've heard stories of moms who lift up cars because their children are trapped underneath.
Isn't that the way it used to be?
And now it's like, well, the empowerment and independence and, okay, off you go.
It's like, okay, I'll leave my babies behind.
He goes, okay, I'll get a text.
I can save my texts.
It's going to be beautiful.
I'll print them out later.
Maybe I can change the diapers of the cell phone.
That'd be excellent.
And, you know, it's on vibrate, and that's very much like a baby cooing.
Sometimes I sing to my phone, and that's pretty cute, that's pretty sweet.
I can have my phone, I can change the ringtone so that there's a baby's gurgle every time a text comes in.
That's pretty much the same.
You know, your baby doesn't give you radiation.
You might want to switch that out a little.
Baby proximity to breast?
Good for your breasts.
Cell phone proximity to your breast?
Bad for your breasts.
I don't know.
And how has it become shocking to simply provide the simple truth that these secular people should understand?
That babies don't want to be separated from their mothers.
I mean, why do we even need to say babies don't?
Babies do not want to be separated from their mothers.
You know what's going to happen?
Short-term gain, long-term problems.
Because when your children grow up, ladies, and guys, your goddamn fault too.
Husbands, no.
No.
You're having a baby.
One of us is staying home with the baby.
I suggest it's the one with the appropriate plumbing because my nipples, all taps, no plumbing.
You got the plumbing.
You got to stay home with the baby.
If you don't want to stay home with the baby, that's no problem.
Let's not have a baby.
But if you want to have a baby, stay home with the baby.
How about that?
How about doing what nature intended?
How about we don't try and have sex with you by pushing a cucumber in your ear because that's kind of unnatural and how about we don't try and raise children by being absent for 95% of their day and thinking that we're really connected with them because texting.
Guys, come on.
I mean, you've got to pry the feminist lampreys.
The radical feminism is like this alien that's laying this bastard egg in your wife's belly.
Like that John Hurt alien thing.
Go back to work.
Insecurity.
Patriarchy.
Get out of here.
No work.
Be taxed.
Your kids don't need you.
They'll love having strangers change their diaper once an hour in daycare while they stare at the ceiling.
It'll be wonderful.
No.
Guys, reason with your women.
Women are a little bit...
Women are a lot more conformist than men are.
That's why propaganda focuses on women.
It's why you've got to have the women are wonderful effect, where everyone thinks that everything that women does is wonderful because they're kind of fragile, a lot of them, and they can't really think for themselves very easily.
help them out.
Men don't believe in the patriarchy because we're alive, but we've got to pretend that it's there because otherwise women get upset.
Some women.
Sorry, you were saying?
Yeah, one theory I have that why people might want to put their kids in daycare is I've heard that moms of like pregnant women and like toddler moms are like the most sensible, like they're the most easily scared group in society.
So because they're like, oh, if I put the kids on the stomach, he will get cancer or like if I feed him like peas, he will, I don't know, like start shitting fire.
So I'll just leave it to the professionals to do it.
So I don't mess up.
Yeah, no.
And you know who's really, really good at fucking is prostitutes.
So don't have sex with your husband.
Hire a fucking professional to come in and bang your husband's senses.
She's got all the Benoit balls.
She's got all of the equipment.
She's got all of the fucking things that you hang people from and swing them around and, you know, bang them with a baseball bat and whatever orifice happens to present itself to you at the right angle.
Don't Don't let just amateurs fuck your husband.
Hire a professional, for God's sakes.
They know what they're doing.
They've got the elbow pads.
They've got the crash helmets.
They've got the Madonna textbooks.
Don't leave sex to amateurs, professional, this shit out.
Yeah, well, prostitutes, they lack the love, which is the most important part of sex, right?
Right, but daycare workers, they lack the love!
The daycare workers aren't the parents.
I'm telling you, I've worked in a daycare.
I'm not saying this is a universal experience and the daycare was pretty good and I cared all I could.
But dear God, they're being paid $8 an hour.
This is the best they can do.
These are not high quality people of intellectual capacity.
If eight bucks an hour is the best you can do, they might not be stimulating your kids as much as you can.
I mean, at least hire an expensive prostitute, not someone who just rolled out of Hugh Grant's car with a mouthful of toothpaste, for God's sakes, spits it out and squats again.
Dear God!
Okay, I gotta pee, but I can blow you at the same time.
Is that okay with you?
Because, you know, that really cuts things down.
Is that alright?
Can we do that?
At least hire an expensive prostitute.
At least hire a live-in nanny.
At least there'll be some continuity.
Just don't buy a cheap baby whore.
Yeah.
Because the kids are going to grow up, ladies, and they're going to say, oh, so everything in your life was a higher priority than me when I was a kid.
You wanted to go to work.
So having money was more important than spending time with me.
You managed to squeeze in half an hour of busy time with me five days a week.
Okay.
So what you've taught me is that family really doesn't mean much at all.
Now that is one of the greatest tragedies of all.
Because, dear God, if feminists had been in charge of evolution, we never would have got beyond the single-cell stage.
The whole point of evolution is you prefer your own genes to strangers.
It's the whole point of evolution.
It's the only reason it works.
It's a preference for your genes over other people's genes.
That's the only reason it works.
There's no evolution without genetic proximity preference.
That's the whole deal right there.
Because it's your genes that you need to prefer being passed along.
Otherwise, it never works.
There's no such thing.
The egalitarianism of the primordial soup means, hey!
Hey man, you have two cells?
Fuck you.
One cell.
One cell, that's it.
This is communist evolution time.
This is feminist evolution time.
No fucking two cells, people.
Two cells is stealing from the one cell people.
You only have two cells because there's someone out there with no cells.
So you give me that fucking cell, I'm going to put it over there in some other part of the primordial soup, and no fucking evolution.
Hey, hey, hey, hey!
Is that a gill I see?
Get rid of that shit, man.
Get back in the water.
Get deep in the water, then come out to breathe.
No breathing underwater, man.
That fucks things up.
Hey, hey, hey!
Lungfish, put those fucking legs away.
Get the fuck back in the ground.
That is not fair.
Are those leaves outside the water?
Well, I can't reach those.
I don't have any legs.
Fucking elitist.
Rothschild scum.
Get the fuck back in the water.
No evolution.
No progress.
Fuck that.
No genetic similarity proximity preferences.
None of that shit.
Get the fuck back in the water.
Evolution is a false flag.
Yeah, I'm going to use the word false flag because I'm a false flag.
I just use false flag every time I see anything I don't like.
Jesus.
How is it possible for four billion years of evolution to produce people who seem to have virtually zero preference for their own offspring?
God, I just don't know how is it possible.
Ah...
Well, this is just an evolutionary quirk brought about by communism, idealism, statism, welfare state, borrowing.
It's just this weird biological backwater that can't possibly continue.
So, yeah, when people say, well, I had no idea.
Everyone else was doing it.
Okay, fine.
Fine.
Then why was I told when I was a kid...
When all the other kids didn't want to go to class and ran across the field and I ran with them and we all got in trouble and I said, well, all the other kids were running across the field and they said, well, if all the other kids jumped off the bridge, would you jump off the bridge too?
Oh, so it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing.
I see.
It doesn't matter how popular or widespread this decision or perspective is.
I'm responsible for my own And then parents say, well, everyone around me was putting their kids in a daycare.
Well, why the fuck wasn't I allowed to get away with that shit when I was seven years old?
And I was told it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing.
You've got to think for yourself.
I'd like to think you have a little bit more intellectual maturity and self-will when you're 30 than you expect me to have when I'm 7.
So I don't buy it.
I mean...
It's a secular country.
They believe in evolution.
Evolution functions on genetic similarity preference.
I prefer my own family to other people's families, and I prefer my own tribe to other people's tribe.
I mean, we can overcome this to some degree, but it's evolution.
You know, I mean, it might take a little while to unscrub four billion years of genetic proximity preference.
Sorry to burst your bubble, right?
But So, no, I don't buy that.
Oh, we just did that.
Everyone else was doing it and we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
Did you think about it for 10 minutes?
Did you think about this baby you raised in your womb who was breastfed with you, who was careful, who knew your schedule, who knew your rhythm, and you knew his schedule and what he liked and what she liked and what she preferred, how she liked to be played with, what songs she liked?
You knew all of that stuff and you figured, well, you know, some stranger who's going to come and go...
Making eight bucks an hour, well, pretty much do the same thing.
How shitty a mom are you that a stranger making eight bucks an hour can replace everything that you've learned and done for a year?
Are you kidding me?
Oh, is Brad Pitt sick?
I don't know.
Pick a fucking random extra.
Put him in charge.
Make him the lead.
You know, we'll fix it in post-production.
Holy shit.
If Brad Pitt is that bad an actor, he shouldn't be paid as much as he is if some random idiot can replace him.
You're the mom.
You're the leading lady in your baby's life.
Everyone else is just a whoa, whoa stranger.
Kids who are in daycare for more than 30 hours a week experience exactly the same symptoms as babies who've literally been permanently abandoned by their mothers.
He's a baby.
He has no fucking clue that you're ever coming back.
Every single day.
You're dropping him off at daycare.
You might as well be putting an Inuit kid out on an ice floe and pushing him out into the Arctic in a snowstorm.
They don't ever think you're coming back.
They freak out.
They panic.
They paralyze.
They're terrified.
Well, he doesn't complain that much.
Yes, that's because his soul has left his body in sheer terror of abandonment.
He's reacting to you like he's disposable, because he is.
And disposable children, children who don't have a secure maternal bond, they can be kind of compliant when they're young, but they don't stay that way when they get bigger, when you're no longer finger-wagging down, but you're finger-wagging up.
Ooh, it's blowback time, baby.
And I would really, really like for moms to avoid that.
Yeah, you scare, you threaten the attachment of a kid, yeah, he'll be compliant.
He won't complain.
Oh, but when he gains his independence, you'll feel it then.
And bad.
And I'm not going to be one of these people who are like, well, I did the best I could with the knowledge that they had.
And so you've got to give them a break because everybody was doing it and they were told what to do and they never thought for themselves and they believed in evolution but apparently they didn't believe in evolution and they didn't have any particular bond with you otherwise it would have been too painful for them to dump you in a daycare and they didn't care that you were crying and screaming and wanting them and then you went inert and compliant and they didn't really care about that because, you know, There was shit to staple and phones to answer.
I'm not going to be telling them that.
I'm going to be like, bad call, ladies and gentlemen.
Bad call.
You dumped your kids in daycares.
You dumped your babies in daycares.
You're breastfed, maybe.
You pumped out half a quart in the fucking toilet and you got texts.
And this didn't strike you as weird at all.
This didn't strike you as, I don't know, Maybe this isn't entirely natural.
Maybe this isn't exactly how God intended people to raise children, by pumping their milk out in a toilet stall and getting a tax when their children shit 14 miles away.
Yeah.
And here endeth this rant.
Here, wait, this might be a side tangent, but in the U.S., high school system...
How you get graded in school, it's like the tests are never pass-fail.
It's like you always get a percentage point of the answers you got right.
Well, I don't know.
It's been a long time since I was in high school, so I don't know.
Yeah, so you could fail in the test category, but because you're good in homeworks and presentations, you could still pass the class.
And I don't know if this has affected the way people think in the US now.
We could still talk about Sweden, but I think...
I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Why are we talking about test scores in the US? Yeah, in the US, like how you get graded in the class.
I think this might be how parents think their kids will grade them.
Or like...
Oh, like I was out all day, but I took you to the park on Sunday?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Or it's like I was gone like 70% of the day, therefore I get like 30% in like being present category.
But I, you know, made sure you stayed alive and I like gave you Absolutely, yeah.
I had sex on a business trip, but I came back with some diamond earrings and a bag of flowers.
I passed, right?
I don't know if men can buy their way out of trouble with good behavior.
Aren't they just called manipulative then when they heap on the good behavior in order to get out of crappy things they've done?
I don't see why we'd have any different standard for women because I'm a radical egalitarianist and let's treat women as equals.
So I don't think that you can do really crappy things like dump your kids in daycare and go off to fulfill yourself, stripping them of regular breastfeeding with a mom, stripping them of comfortable and familiar and secure attachment, stripping them of a sense of devotion from the part of their moms, stripping them of a sense of devotion from the part of their moms, which is the foundation for emotional security and their capacity to love and commit and be responsible And then say, well, but I did take you to the park that time.
I mean, that just, I don't know.
I mean, okay, I embezzled.
I did embezzle, but I did come into work a half hour early every day.
I did a little bit of extra work.
Does that mean, okay, great, you stay and you're a good employee of the month for coming in half an hour early before embezzling, right?
I mean, I don't see how that, if you do something fundamentally, so fundamentally wrong as dump your kid into a daycare, I don't see how you can make up for that.
Yeah, that's true.
Like if you get caught cheating in school, you get a zero on the assignment.
So I guess that would be something similar.
Like if you cheat your way, like have someone else raise the kid for you, that could be cheating.
So therefore you get a zero.
Okay, damn it.
Yeah, it would be like someone else writing your essay, handing in someone else's work as your own.
You're handing in someone else's parenting as if you're the parent.
That's a very good Good way of putting it.
You're plagiarizing your parenting, right?
I was your parent.
Well, who raised me?
A success of minimum wage strangers over the course of about 15 years.
They actually know more of the kids graduating from high school at 18.
No, let's say they go to college, right?
So you put them in daycare at a year and they finish college at 22 or 23.
So let's just say they round it down a little, 20 years.
So I was your parent.
Well, who raised you?
Mostly minimum wage strangers and government union employees who didn't give much of a rat's ass about me except as a source of revenue and summers off.
They spent the vast majority of time raising me along with my lowest common denominator, terrifying Lord of the Flies peers.
They're pretty much the ones who gave me my value lessons and they're the ones who quote raised me.
So I'm not sure why I'm calling you a parent.
Parent is not a noun.
Parent is a verb.
It's something you do.
And if you're not doing a whole lot of it, I don't see why you get the label.
You know, it's that old thing from Working Girl, this one woman with shockingly 80s hair.
You know, this is a woman who, Melanie Griffiths, she wants to be this big executive.
She's doing all this stuff.
She's starting a secretarial pool.
And this other woman is basically deriding her ambitions, saying, you know, sometimes I dance around in my underwear.
That doesn't mean I'm Madonna.
And yeah, sometimes I hang around my kids.
It doesn't mean I'm a parent.
I'm a sperm donor and a bungee parent, which is not a parent at all.
You know, women are always fucking complaining about men and their inability to commit.
Really?
Inability to commit?
I just can't get him to commit.
He's kind of flighty.
You know, he just, he won't commit to me.
He won't marry me.
He's not going to settle down with me.
He's not committing to me.
Hey ladies, how about committing to your babies?
To your children that nobody forced you to have that probably don't even really want to be there.
How about that?
That is a commitment that you can make.
Maybe men have a little difficulty committing because they were raised, not raised, by absent mothers who slam dunked them into strangers' houses and then ran off to staple stuff and make phone calls.
Maybe they're having a little trouble committing to a woman because their moms didn't even remotely commit to them but wanted security and independence.
Well, guess what, ladies?
Boomerang time.
Until women say, ooh, bad mistake.
I'm sorry that we got propagandized into dunking our children into strangers, like throwing them out of an airplane and hoping they're going to land on a soft straw mattress of somebody else's indifference.
Ooh, that was kind of a mistake.
We really did something bad there.
We didn't commit to our children.
So let's stop blaming men for not committing to us.
Let's stop blaming men who have problems with us.
And maybe some of the problems that men do have with us and some of the inability to commit comes from two generations of mothers...
Not committing to their children, but still demanding to be called parents.
Well, I guess the label parent now only means that you have the final say in whatever decision is made.
Like, oh, should the kids go to daycare or not?
Well, I decide that.
Actually, sorry.
That's the category called dictator.
I have the final say!
No, actually, in a relationship, you're supposed to negotiate.
And when you're a parent to a baby, you negotiate with the baby's obvious physical distress, pain, upset, and horror at being dumped with strangers by the mom.
So somebody who says, I have the final say in this relationship, is pretty much totalitarian and not egalitarian.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's pretty much it.
And for those who don't know, I'm sorry to interrupt.
For those who don't know and are going to call me all kinds of sexist, sorry, I hate to pull this on you.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for almost seven years.
Stay-at-home dad for almost seven years.
Okay?
So don't give me this, oh, he's such a patriarch.
He just expects women to take care of the babies.
Sorry, sisters.
Can't pull that one on me.
I got the stay-at-home dad card.
I got the stay-at-home dad card.
You can't get me with that one.
Pfft.
Yeah.
But most jobs are outside of the home, though.
So if you want the two parents...
No!
Oh, God!
Oh, God!
I feel like I'm speaking to a feminist robot.
I know you're not this way inclined.
You're just playing devil's advocate.
Yeah.
Actually, no.
When you're a parent, by definition, your job is inside the home because that's where your children are.
True.
You know, I find that as a married man, my affairs are outside the home.
Yes!
By definition.
Matt and Christina accepted.
By definition, your affairs are outside the home.
Because your wife is in the home and if you're having sex with her, it's not an affair.
So no, if you're a parent, your job is inside the home because you're a parent and that's where your children are.
But don't you also have to, like...
Compete with other parents.
Like, for example, don't you have to compete with other parents that both parents work so they get more money and resources and then that pushes down wages?
Do they really?
Do they really?
I don't know, again, I don't know how it works in Sweden, but I don't think they do.
Probably not.
No, because you need two cars, usually, if you have two people working.
You need a bigger house with a two-car garage, probably.
You, of course, I know in Sweden it's heavily subsidized, but that doesn't mean it's free.
It just means you've got to pay more in taxes, right?
Yeah.
So you're either paying someone to take care of your kids, you know, which is probably 2,000 bucks a month or 1,500 bucks a month after tax money, which means you've got to earn 30 or 40 or 50 or maybe even higher than that in Sweden to take care of it.
Or it's government subsidized, in which cases your taxes are 50 or 60 or 70 percent like they are in some of those countries.
Right.
And so, is it really make you twice as wealthy if your wife goes out to work?
Well, no.
Because you're either getting them crappy daycare, which is terrible for your children, you know, cheap baby whores, or you're getting high-class baby hookers, in which case it's really expensive, and then all the money that your wife is making is going into paying other people to raise your children.
So I don't really think that it is, you know, unless you're both neurosurgeons or something, right?
I mean, I don't really think that it makes any economic sense fundamentally for the woman to go out to work.
And it's certainly not double the income, because again, you go into a higher tax bracket, you pay more in taxes, and you've got to pay people to take care of your kids.
And you need an extra vehicle, which itself is around $6,000 to $8,000 a year, $500 to $600 a month that you're paying just for that, along with $2,000 a month or $1,500 a month for childcare, along with gas and insurance and all this kind of crap that goes on.
With this extra wardrobe, right?
Women like to look presentable when they go to work, right?
I mean, unless she's going to some real low-rent job, in which case you're definitely losing money because, you know, McDonald's will give you a free uniform.
You don't have a lot of extra Hermes bags expenses to go to work at McDonald's, but you ain't making enough to cover the overhead of having strangers raise your children badly.
So if you have any kind of...
If you have any kind of professional job, then the woman also needs a wardrobe.
It needs dry cleaning.
It needs to upgrade and get the right shoes and get the right outfits and all this kind of crap.
It's all very expensive stuff.
And so the idea that there's just this magic money fountain called a second income if you have a bunch of kids around is a complete fantasy.
And let's say it does make you an extra $500 or $1,000 a month when all of the smoke clears.
Really?
Really?
Really, if you break that down to an hourly rate, that is pathetic.
You know, let's say it makes you $1,000 extra a month to go and work.
After you pay the higher taxes, after you pay for the second car, after you pay for the daycare and the aftercare and all that kind of crap, right?
After you pay for all the extra clothes you need because you can't go parent in your sweatpants.
Let's say that you make the princely sum of $1,000 extra every single month for dumping your kids in daycare and going to Staple and phone people.
Okay, you know what that translates to?
Six dollars an hour.
You are making an extra six dollars an hour rather than being a parent with the children who love and need you and who are supposedly the joys of your life, the happiness of your middle age, and the comfort of your dotage.
You are trading in Being a mother, you are trading in the love, the security, the intimacy, the trust, the happy teenage years, the security, and non-criminality and happiness of your children are all going out the window for the grand and princely third world sum of six whole dollars an hour.
That sucks.
Let's say it's $2,000 a month extra that you make by going to work.
$12 an hour!
Great job!
What a wonderful sense of prioritization that is!
And how much you're going to pay later!
When your children have problems, and they don't like you, and they don't have a bond with you, and they don't respect you, but it's okay.
You can have ultra-high criminal possibilities, and you can have promiscuity, and you can have drug use, and you can have alcoholism, and you can have shoplifting, and you can have horrible attitude, talk-back, bitchy, bastard kids when they're teenagers, and forever, perhaps.
But it's okay, because you...
Only had to get paid 12 bucks an hour to balance all that shit out.
Half wrecking your children by dumping them with strangers and breaking their bond with you and having them lose their respect for you and losing their capacity to bond and having them peer bond with their lowest common denominator dupe shoot friends.
It's okay.
You did trade away their happiness and future and their immune systems and their IQ by not breastfeeding them but it's okay.
That's only on one side of the scale.
On the other side of the scale, you didn't spend time with them, but at least you got paid $12 an hour or maybe $6 an hour or maybe zero.
I don't see how any sane person can look at that equation and not do the right thing.
But if you are a stay-at-home parent, when would you recommend going back into the workforce?
Is that like after the kids move out?
Or is that when they're old enough to take care of themselves?
I don't know.
I can't answer that for everyone.
But the science seems to indicate that around the age of five or six or maybe seven...
The child's personality is largely formed.
And after that, it's more nudging.
So my particular approach, and I can't recommend this to everyone because I don't think anyone knows the science, and I certainly don't.
And it depends on the kids' capacities and where they are and what they want to do.
But I think that if you can at least stay home until the kids are five or six...
Full-time?
I think that's a significant boost.
I mean, nobody's saying you've got to, you know, stay home when they're out all day and all night as teenagers.
I mean, I don't know that there's...
There's not that much parenting to do later, right?
Parenting is like the luge.
It's long and it's slippery and sometimes you just get thrown clear.
But the luge is all about the beginning, right?
It's all about that.
That's why they get those, like, Kenyan explosive leg pusher guys at the beginning, right?
So the luge is all about that beginning run, and then you pile in.
Then there's a little bit of steering, but, you know, 20 feet from the finish line, it's not like you can unload a jetpack and blow past the competition, right?
It's all about the beginning of things.
Later on, it's not a huge amount you can do.
It's like, you know, like diving.
You can't fix a bad dive four feet above the water.
I mean, you either dive well or don't, right?
And so, to me, it's the first five years in particular seem to be the most significant focus.
And I think that's when the brain has grown like 80 or 90 percent.
And the child's personality seems to be largely fixed at that point.
And so, to me, at least the first five or six years are the most crucial time.
So, it's really not the end of the world.
We're not talking about being chained to a stove for 30 years.
We're talking about if you have two kids, seven years or eight years of your life.
Well, that's not the end of the world if you want to have kids.
I mean, you can go back after that.
Maybe that can be managed.
And, you know, if you have sisters, friends, family, extended family, grandparents, whatever around, they can pitch in after work.
I think that particularly for teenagers, the latchkey kid thing is kind of a problem because I was a latchkey kid and I don't want to get into all the details, but let's just say it's not...
Always the most positive of environments for kids as a whole.
A lot that you can get up to between sort of 3.30 and 6.
But no, I mean, as far as I understand, my general broad-based understanding is that if you can do it for the first five or six years, you have done the most good for the least amount of time.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah.
My daughter's personality went through a lot of changes in the first couple of years.
Very shy, and now she's very outgoing, but before she wouldn't say anything to anyone.
And now she'll go up and chat with anyone and engage them and is just delightfully charming and all that.
A lot of changes in personality over the first couple of years.
You really need to be sensitive to all of that stuff to know, to have that intimacy to know.
You know, your child is your little marriage partner, so to speak, right?
I mean, you really can't replace the intimate knowledge of somebody with a stranger's low rent in attention.
You just can't.
And...
So, yeah, you need that knowledge.
You need that intimacy.
You need to help guide them.
And you need to lay the values in deep and early so that they become part of their personality.
You're not trying to layer on rules later when they don't trust or respect you.
That's just never going to work.
It's the old lock in the barn door after the horse has left.
There's no point now.
If you layer in the values early, your job gets easier.
And if you don't, your job just gets harder.
And then when it gets hard, it gets really goddamn hard and horrible for years.
And then the extra couple of vacations you took with your extra six bucks an hour aren't going to add up to jack shit when you're trying to figure out why your kid isn't coming home till midnight smelling of weed.
Yeah.
Did your mom stay home?
No.
Well, I think she stayed at home for the first two years, but then I went to daycare.
Do you have any memories of daycare?
I remember my mom being...
Yeah, I have some memories of daycare.
I had one friend there that I used to spend all day just building stuff out of bricks.
Do you remember much interaction with the teachers or daycare providers?
No.
No, right?
I mean, you pretty much left to your own devices.
Yeah.
And people don't know.
I don't know if they don't remember that or what, but I mean, it's...
When I was there, we had two teachers for like 25 to 30 kids, age 5 to 10.
I mean, it was hard to try.
I mean, I remember telling the kids the story of the Silmarillion by Tolkien, keeping them wrapped day after day with that.
So I tried to give them as much individual or at least collective attention as I could.
I wasn't just sort of managing and yelling at people to put each other down and stuff.
I mean, to interact with each other in a negative way.
But I remember from when I was in daycare, I remember drawing the pictures of the planes and playing with friends and all that.
I have no memory of who was in charge.
Same.
Also, like, I've been told by my aunt and stuff that when I have a little sister who's four years younger, and when she came, I became like a very sad person. and when she came, I became like a very sad Because I would cry all the time because I felt like I wasn't getting enough attention.
I'm going to go back to the next one.
I think that if you have a secure bond with your mother, I think that if you know that you're loved and that you have come first for your mother, I think that it's less difficult to accept a sibling.
Right?
But if you already feel that your bond with your mother is shaky or broken, then when another sibling comes on, there's a lot more reason to mourn.
That makes sense.
It's like if you have a very strong bond with your husband, or let's say, if you have a very strong bond with your wife, and she loves you and she respects you and you don't doubt her for a moment, and then some really Brad Pitt-looking hot co-worker starts working with her, you're not particularly threatened, right?
Yeah.
But if, you know, she keeps dropping hints that she would like to have an affair, she's interested in another man, and so on, then when...
Studley McThundercock comes along, you're going to get all kinds of freaked out, right?
Because your bond is not strong, the trust is not strong.
So that's my, obviously, quite inappropriate analogy.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
And how is your relationship with your mother these days?
It's not as strong as the one I have with my dad.
It's like, I feel like after I started listening to this show, I got...
It got a lot better because I could talk about all of these.
In our family, there's a lot of stuff that we haven't really talked about for a couple of years.
And then I felt like now I could bring things up.
But I feel very disconnected to her because she works a lot.
Well, I'm sorry about that.
It's not wildly unheard of for Northern Europeans to be a little bit emotionally constipated.
I hope that you will keep talking to her about these things.
I mean, my goal with all this kind of stuff is, you know, let's rip the scabs off the family wounds.
Let's talk about the stuff that troubles us, gets the communications opened up so that if you decide to have kids at some point, your mom gets a do-over where she can do things better.
But of course, if she doesn't admit fault in the past, she can't do things better in the future.
Yeah.
All right.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
No, I'm really excited.
I read the first draft of your peaceful parenting book, and I'm really excited to see how it shapes.
Oh, thanks.
Yeah, that's what inspired me.
It's still grinding its way.
We've got a lot of research stuff to do, and of course, it's such an ever-changing field in terms of the data that maybe we're waiting for a break in the innovation of the scholars, but I appreciate that.
It's still something that we're poking away at, but it does take time.
Yeah.
I've been listening a lot to your show lately.
It helps you.
It's kind of like meditating.
It keeps you grounded.
You get way better at spotting when anything is wrong that you would previously think was bad.
If this is your first call, I think it is, how was the call for you?
Was it helpful?
I hope the rants weren't entirely off base.
Yeah, no, it was pretty good.
I was getting a little worried that we, like, because I thought it was going to be a pretty, like, short call that was just like, oh, here's this argument that you made.
I don't think it's valid.
Or, like, because, and then we started talking about daycare and stuff like that, which I do enjoy.
Like, I've been, like, I've been thinking I've been pretty sad over the fact that, like, I was, quote, unquote, neglected and, like, left into daycare.
As a kid, it was nice talking about that.
And I don't know, like, yeah.
But yeah, I like to call.
And I feel like all my questions got answered, and we broke some new ground there.
First time for everything!
Woo!
Let it be known from this day forth that eight years into the show, he actually...
I appreciate that.
Well, thanks a lot for calling in.
And thanks a lot, of course, everyone for listening.
And if you're feeling bad and upset about the stuff that I'm saying, please let me know.
Let me know if I've gone astray.
Let me know if I've gone too far by comparing daycare workers to prostitutes.
No, that can't be conceivably too far.
It's an analogy.
Anyway, so thanks everyone so much.
If you like the show, if you want us to help continue to have the capacity to spread philosophy like Nutella on the collective wonder bread of mankind's consciousness...
Please, please, please go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
We, of course, need your help to grow, to continue, to spread all of the, oh, God, constantly breaking down technical equipment that needs endless replacing.
So, yeah, if you could help us out, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Massively, massively appreciated.
Thank you, everyone, for your open hearts, your open minds, and your pushback.
It's all greatly treasured in these hallowed halls.
