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Dec. 27, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:57:44
3542 FETUS SLAVE DRIVING WELFARE GUY - Call in Show - December 21st, 2016
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Hello, hello everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, hope you're doing well.
So, I have a theory, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which you can find for free at freedomainradio.com slash free, and the first caller did not really believe that this was a good approach to ethics and took his mental machetes to the base of the boh-bab tree of reason.
Welcome to my show!
Well, she was friends with her best friend for many, many years.
Went social justice warrior insane.
And then found out that the caller, this young lady, was actually a Trump supporter.
Which may be the final straw in the relationship.
What is going on?
How did this come about?
What might have led her friend to be so susceptible to all of this social justice warrior lefty stuff?
Good, deep, meaty conversation.
Now, the third caller runs a prepper podcast, and preppers are people who believe that there may be interruptions in electricity or food supply because of social upheaval, economic upheaval, and so on.
And we had a good conversation about what to do, if it's worth doing anything, and why.
The fourth caller, oh, oh, didn't you just know it was going to end up this way?
A determinist.
And I try to be as polite as I can to most of the callers.
Occasionally it's a little bit more challenging.
I think you'll see why.
And the fifth caller wanted to know how...
How, how am I going to know how to fulfill my potential?
Do I even have any potential?
And how on earth will I know how to go about maximizing what I can do in this life?
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Please, please, don't forget to go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
Massively, massively appreciated.
Got some shopping?
FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
Alright, well up for us today we have John.
John wrote in and said, I've read your book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a half dozen times or so, and I have listened to the audiobook at least as many times.
I have listened to many of your podcasts, including some where you defend your claims about UPB being an objective standard of morality.
Given your expressed understanding on page 30 where you state, quote, when I speak of a universal preference, I am really defining what is objectively required or necessary, assuming a particular goal, end quote.
How can UPB be objective when the choices of goals, ideals, and values remain subjectively chosen?
Aren't you simply assuming an egalitarian, anarcho-libertarian goal, ideal, and values?
You also state, quote, naturally, preferential behavior can only be binding if the goal is desired, end quote.
What about those who do not share your egalitarian or anarcho-libertarian ideals, values, and goals?
Would UPB apply to them?
That's from John.
Well, hey John, how are you doing tonight?
I'm doing alright.
How are you doing, Stephen?
I'm well, thanks.
I'm well.
It is always an amazing thing for me as an author, and I hope that people will go and read.
It's free to download and review the book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
And...
Check it out.
It's a great book.
And one of the problems is when you call in and you say, well, you make this statement.
Well, a statement is not an argument.
A statement is part of a larger series of arguments.
So maybe what you could do if you've read the book a half dozen times or so and listen to the audio book, I wonder if you could step me through the basic argument for UPB, even if you don't agree with it, and then we can see where the argument deviates from what you want.
Because saying, well, here's a quote of yours and how does this fit into the whole framework is not something too helpful to me.
So what is the argument that you've gotten out of UPB for the book?
Okay, so basically my understanding, and please do correct me if I'm misunderstanding something.
My understanding is that you approach UPB in much the same way that you might approach analyzing a problem from the scientific method.
So you basically say, we need to define morals in a way that is both internally or self-referentially consistent, and then also in a way that's externally consistent or basically something that, you know, basically most everybody would agree with in a general sense, at least on the most important things like rape, murder, assault, and so on.
And so...
You go through the process, and I think you do a fine job for defining a very consistent, very rational concept of morality, based on what I would term to be an anarcho-libertarian set of values or ideals.
I'm sorry, I'm just going to stop you there.
Yeah.
What is an anarcho-libertarian system of ideals?
Because I don't make a case for anarchy in that book or libertarianism.
But I do work to show that the sort of four major moral bans in every decent ethical system, the bans on rape, murder, assault and theft, are upheld by the universally preferable behavior approach to ethics.
I don't think that labeling, like I hope that you wouldn't think that every society that frowned upon rape, theft, assault and murder would automatically be defined as an anarcho-libertarian society, whatever that is.
Putting a label on it doesn't help in terms of the argument.
Oh, no, no.
I'm not saying that at all.
What I'm saying is that when you break it down, when you basically come to the conclusions that you do, you do so based on a few assumptions that seem built into it.
One of the main assumptions that you make is the assumption of universality.
And when you apply this to people...
No, no, no.
Sorry.
No, let me interrupt.
It's not an assumption.
It's not an assumption.
Morality...
Must be universal, otherwise we have to use another word for it.
So for instance, a dream is not objective and universal, it is a subjective experience.
Science or mathematics or objective disciplines, engineering, right?
I mean, there are very few people who would say, well, with the exact same conditions, a bridge will stand perfectly in Thailand and fall apart over the Mississippi, right?
So when you have a discipline that claims to be objective, then universality is not an assumption.
It is a requirement baked into that very definition.
So if I say I have a theory in physics, right?
That is going to apply to all matter and energy throughout the universe.
It's not assuming that it's universal.
That's baked into the very idea of calling it physics, right?
So when you call something morality, it is different from a subjective preference, or as I call it, an aesthetic preference.
So I like ice cream, you know, maybe you like carrot cake.
Neither of these are binding on the other person.
There's nothing that says, well, if I like ice cream and you like carrot cake, one of us can be proven right objectively and one of us can be proven wrong.
It is a subjective preference, like a preference for music or for food or anything like that, subjective colors.
Now, if on the other hand, though, I make a universal claim, About facts, about truth, about reality, right?
So if I have some...
The world is, in general, a sphere.
It's not banana-shaped, it's a sphere.
Well, that's different from saying, I like ice cream.
Because in one, I'm saying, here I have an objective fact.
If I say that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than the Sun going around the Earth, I'm making an objective claim that is testable in the...
Here and now, in reality, right?
According to science, according to measurement.
If I say I had a dream that the sun went around the earth, there would be no way.
Like I had a dream last night.
I wasn't hooked up to any machines.
I had a dream last night that the sun went around the earth.
Then that would be a subjective statement for which we would expect no empirical proof.
Like, you wouldn't say, let's say, imagine that we get our little jetpacks and spaceships or whatever, you wouldn't say to me, if I said to you, hey man, I had a dream last night that the sun went around the earth, you wouldn't take me in that No, look, man, clearly the Earth goes around the Sun, right?
Because I would say, well, I wasn't making a statement about reality.
First of all, thank you for the ride because that's really cool.
I've always wanted to go to space.
But secondly, I'm not making a claim.
About objective, empirical, material reality.
I'm saying I had this subjective experience.
And so when I'm talking about morality as universally preferable behavior, and morality is just a subset of universally preferable behaviors, then I'm not saying, well, I just have to assume that universality is part of morality.
Morality is that which you can legitimately inflict upon other people.
So if some guy likes cheesecake and I like ice cream, we don't get to violently inflict our preferences on each other because it's a realm of aesthetics.
We can both enjoy what we're doing without violating each other's persons or space or whatever it is.
But if you run at me with a machete, well...
We're kind of in a different situation because you are now trying to impose a particular view upon me through force and all that.
So there is in morality a requirement for universality.
Now, people can, of course, say...
That there's no requirement for universality in morality, right?
And that's sort of a different argument, but generally morality is something which we accept as being binding on other people.
There are very few people who say that the rapist's preference to rape someone It has nothing to do with morality and it's exactly the same.
Like if a man likes the color tangerine or the fruit tangerine, that's a particular subjective preference.
If he says, I want to go and rape some person, we put that in a different category because one can be enjoyed without inflicting it on the other.
The person can enjoy the color tangerine without inflicting his choice on another person.
But the rape, of course, is violently inflicted upon another person.
And so it's not that I just sort of mix in like I'm stirring in chocolate into a recipe.
I don't sort of mix in universality into the question of universally preferable behavior.
And we don't start with ethics in the book, right?
We start with universally preferable behavior in terms of Truth in terms of telling the truth and rational consistency and empirical evidence are both, in philosophy as in science, required for universality.
So sorry for that.
I know you've read the book a bunch of times and you know some of this stuff, but...
Other people may be new to this particular topic, so I just wanted to sort of go over that.
It's not just something I plucked out of thin air and inserted into the system.
Anybody who's going to make claims of universality, anyone who's going to make claims of objectivity does have universality and objectivity baked into that very statement.
Like if I say something is true, if I say I like something, That's a personal preference.
If I say something is true, that is an empirical or universal statement.
Does that make sense to differentiate?
I agree with the differentiation.
What I'm disagreeing with is with the notion that morality is objective at all.
I don't believe it can be.
I believe it is necessarily subjective.
It's something that we are imposing upon other people.
Who's doing the imposition?
It's not just A fact of nature that it's imposed.
It's we, as either a society or as an individual or as a parent, we are imposing our will upon another person.
And that's what morality is.
It's basically we're imposing our desires, our preferences, whether they are universally held or nearly so.
Obviously, the rapist doesn't hold such preference.
But whether they're universally held or not, they're still our subjective preferences.
Okay, sorry, you're just racing around here like a pinball.
I have no idea what the arguments are.
So let's just take these one at a time, right?
Because this, like, drinking from a fire hose thing isn't going to get us anywhere.
Okay, so, your statement that morality is imposing one's will on someone else, is that what morality is supposed to oppose?
I wasn't quite sure what that was.
I'm saying morality is inherently the imposition of preferences upon others.
Well, but no, see, but then you have morality and violations of morality both being the same thing, right?
So, hang on, hang on, hang on.
No, no, no, no.
We cannot talk over each other.
I'm going to move on if we talk over each other because this is really delicate stuff.
And if the moment I start saying a sentence, you're sort of bellowing in my ear, we're not going to have a very successful conversation.
I know we're both enthusiastic, but let's just take a deep breath and try and take this step by step, all right?
Okay, thank you.
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
If a man rapes a woman, he is imposing his will violently on her, right?
Yes.
In most moral systems, let's just say moral systems, in moral systems that is an immoral action, right?
I agree, yeah, definitely.
Okay, now moral systems would give her the right of self-defense in that if she uses violence to prevent him from imposing his will upon her, she's perfectly justified under the umbrella of self-defense, right?
Oh yeah, most people would consider it so.
So you have a problem in your definition in that an immoral action, rape, is defined as the imposition of will on someone else, and a moral action, which is defending against rape, is also defined as the imposition of will on someone else.
So you can't have morality and immorality under the same definition.
Okay, and so where I would differ with that notion is that when it is not imposed upon another person, and it's an action that's not imposed upon another person, it is not I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's not what I asked.
You said that morality was the imposition of will on someone else.
Now, rape is that, and self-defense against rape is that, right?
The man who rapes the woman wants to rape her, and he's going to try and violently impose his will, and that's immoral.
The woman is able to use self-defense and violence to thwart his will, right?
So he's imposing his will on her to rape.
She's imposing her will on him, which is to not be raped.
So you can't say that morality is the imposition of will, because here we have two people, one doing something immoral, which is the rape, and the other one doing something moral, or at least permitted, which is the self-defense.
So you can't have, as a valid definition of morality, the imposition of will, because the rapist and his victim are both imposing their wills, but we would not say that they're morally equivalent.
Okay, and I guess I didn't quite speak clearly enough the idea.
The idea of morality is that we are to adhere to this certain set of rules.
And that is what's being imposed, is those preferences, those rules.
And that is the violation of those rules, which is considered immoral.
Now, if somebody voluntarily does something that another person voluntarily accepts them doing, that's not a violation.
That's not an imposition of will.
I mean, if I give you a Camaro and you really want a Camaro, I'm not imposing a Camaro on you, right?
Right.
But if the rapist wants to go ahead and go out there and rape, and society says, no, you're not allowed to, we're going to put you in a cage if you try and do that, or we're going to exile you to some foreign island somewhere, then that's an imposition of society's will upon the rapist's behavior that nobody recognizes.
Okay, I understand that, but that's not what universally preferable behavior is about, and no argument like that is put forward in the book.
So I'm asking you to try and replicate the arguments in the book to see where we differ.
So maybe you can help me out by telling me what is the argument against rape being universally preferable behavior in the book.
Okay, now, the argument that you make in the book about rape being rape, not being, I'm sorry, can you repeat it one more time?
In my book, I make the case that rape cannot be universally preferable behavior.
And I do it for theft, assault, and murder as well, but rape is the easiest to define.
So maybe you can help me understand...
I just need to know what your level of understanding is, because I'm not going to read the whole book, right?
I mean, you've read the book a bunch of times.
So what is the argument that I make in the book as to why rape cannot be universally preferable behavior?
Well, one of the arguments that you make about it being...
Incapable of being universally preferable is that two people can't do it at the same time.
That it cannot be considered moral in that it requires somebody else to basically be vicious or anti-virtue in order to enable that person to be virtuous by raping.
There's no way for rape to be virtuous or a moral behavior.
I think you started off okay.
I'm not sure where you went off at the end.
So very briefly, the argument is that if a man is raping a woman, then clearly she does not want the sexual attention.
She does not want the sexual violation because she doesn't want it.
Right.
And so rape can only occur if one person wants the sexual contact and the other person really does not want it.
The sexual contact.
And therefore, rape cannot be universally preferable because it requires one person to not want rape.
If everybody wants to rape and be raped, then rape doesn't exist.
Because if I want to be raped, then it's a role play or some kinky thing or whatever, right?
So rape can only occur if one person really, really doesn't want it and the other person really, really does want it.
So it can't be universally preferable.
In other words, if everybody prefers...
Rape?
Then there's no such thing as rape.
It is defined out of existence because rape is not wanting the sexual contact.
So rape can't be universally preferable behavior.
Murder can't be universally preferable behavior.
A theft, you know, if you want to borrow my iPod and I say go ahead, clearly that's not.
Theft.
Theft has to be if you take my iPod and I really, really don't want you to take my iPod.
So this is sort of the argument, and this is very, very truncated, but that is the argument as to why theft, rape, assault, and murder can't be universally preferable behaviors.
Now, to not rape can be achieved by everyone all at the same time.
Just don't rape, don't steal, don't murder, don't assault, and so on.
And so, humanity can, in theory of course, perfectly achieve universally preferable behavior, respect of property rights, respect of personal integrity, and all of that.
It can all be perfectly achieved, and therefore it can be universalized.
However, any ideology or moral system...
That would put forward rape, theft, assault, and murder as universally preferable behaviors would run into insurmountable, logical, and frankly practical impossibilities, and therefore we know that those moral theories would not be valid.
Okay, granted.
And the point that it's universally preferable, really, what exactly does that mean?
It means everybody shares that particular position about that particular act.
No, no, no, not at all.
No, and this is a point I make repeatedly in the book, that it's not, hang on, it's not universally preferred behavior, because that would be to indicate no free will.
Like, there's no theory of gravity that says, well, this only applies to you if you believe in it, right?
I mean, there's no such thing as, well, I can wish my way away from gravity because that's dealing with the effects of matter and energy and mass and attraction and so on.
And so a physics theory is not open to the choice of anyone in terms of its applicability.
And so because it's beyond the realm of free will, it is not conditional.
However, because morality and choices are dependent upon free will, it is impossible, it is absolutely impossible for all human beings to simultaneously respect Bans or oppositions to persons and property rights violations, right?
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
It's never going to happen.
I mean, even if we could get every single adult to perfectly consistently do it, well, someone's got a brain tumor and he gets really aggressive and goes crazy.
Someone has some other brain degenerative disease.
Someone is sleepwalking and, you know, hits someone or someone, you know, or, you know, someone, some kid just belts some other kid to get a toy or whatever it is, right?
So there's no possibility that all human beings will ever perfectly agree at all times On UPB. So it's not universally preferred behavior.
In other words, it's not an empirical test.
And the moment you find someone who doesn't believe in UPB that somehow UPB is failed, that's like saying, well, if I find a witch doctor, then science is meaningless.
It's like, well, no, people can choose to reject logic.
They can choose to reject reality.
They can choose to reject empiricism.
That doesn't mean that logic, reality, and empiricism are harmed in general.
It means that that person will probably not do very well.
Like if I think I can will my way out of gravity, I'm going down Wile E. Coyote style to leave a little puff of photogenic dust on the bottom of a drawn canyon.
So no, it does not require one person alone.
One person alone.
I mean, I was the first guy to formulate universally preferable behavior.
That didn't mean that it was false because I was the only person who had formulated it or who was thinking in this kind of fashion.
So no, it does not require, of course, that people accept it.
It requires that it be logically consistent, which it is.
Okay, so basically what you're saying is that any kind of behavior which can only be participated in by all persons at all times, under all situations, all situations, all scenarios, all places, and so on That's the only behavior that would be considered moral?
No.
No, as I talk about in the book, there are lots of different categories, right?
So there's moral behavior, which is rape, theft, assault, and murder in general.
There's aesthetically preferable behavior, such as being on time, being relatively polite, and so on, being diplomatic.
And then there's morally neutral behavior, like running to catch a bus, which has no moral content.
So, you know, everyone in the world could simultaneously decide to go and sit in an armchair.
And they could go and sit in that armchair.
So they could all achieve, let's just say there are enough armchairs, or they could just choose to sit on the ground.
Let's make that easier, right?
Everyone could just say, my legs are tiring, let's sit on the ground.
And everyone could perfectly achieve that in the world.
But there's no moral content to sitting on the ground.
Alright, let me rephrase them.
Let's take it the opposite direction.
The only behavior that would be considered immoral is behavior which could not be engaged in by two or more people simultaneously?
No.
Could not be engaged in two or more people simultaneously?
No, of course not.
I mean, this is exactly the same question.
You just reversed it, right?
It's like saying, well, this is a picture of me, and I'm going to flip the colors.
Is it still a picture of me?
Well, yeah.
Look, if you ever play tennis, one person serves and one person receives.
In tennis, you can't both serve at the same time, right?
And so, is that saying, well, that's immoral?
If one person has to act and the other person can't act according to the rules of the game?
No.
No, I'm talking about when it comes to immoral behavior.
You're talking about inflicted behavior.
So it's not just that it can't be done by both people simultaneously and it's something that is inflicted by one person on another.
Is that what would be considered immoral behavior?
Well, here's the thing, man.
I can't just go read through the whole book again, right?
I mean, if you want me to go through UPB from A to Z, you have a free book, right?
No, I mean, this is the basic premise of UPB, as I understand it.
It's, you know, it has to be logically, internally self-consistent.
So, you know, two people can't engage in it simultaneously for it to, you know, be considered moral.
That would make it immoral if two people can't do it simultaneously.
And if it's being inflicted upon someone.
I mean, is that not correct?
Universally preferable behavior, of course, for it to fall into the category of universally preferable behavior, it must be achievable by all people at the same time, right?
And so, if we were to say, well, it's morally preferable, or it's universally preferable behavior for everyone to sleep, well, some people have insomnia, some people just aren't tired, right?
You can't all possibly achieve it at the same time.
You can achieve not beating someone up, right?
I mean, everyone in the whole world can simultaneously not be beating someone up or initiating beating someone up.
Everyone in the whole world could not rape.
Everyone in the whole world could not murder, could not steal.
That's all perfectly achievable.
So it can be universally preferable behavior.
It has to be negative.
It can't be a positive.
You can say, well, it's universally preferable behavior for everyone to give the poor $1,000.
Well...
What about the guy in the coma?
What about the guy who doesn't have a thousand dollars?
What about the guy who doesn't know any poor people?
What about the guy on a desert island?
You can sort of go on and on, right?
So it has to be a negative, in other words, a ban on behavior rather than a positive, because a positive behavior cannot be universally achieved by everyone at all times.
The guy in the coma is not stealing, he's not raping, he's not murdering, he's not assaulting, and therefore he's perfectly able to achieve UPP-compliant behavior.
So yes, it does have to be something that everyone...
Can achieve at the same time because it has to be universally preferable behavior.
And to refrain from doing something is capable, is possible for everyone at the same time.
Like in the same way.
Just to take a sort of silly example.
Let's say there's some tiny island in the middle of the Pacific.
Nobody knows where it is and nobody goes.
And I say, to be moral, everyone has to be on that island.
Well, Not everyone could fit.
They don't know how to get there.
They have no means.
So it would be a silly standard to have.
On the other hand, if I say, well, for everyone to be moral, at least a necessary but not sufficient condition would be to not be standing on that island.
Well, you know, everyone could achieve not standing on that island.
So at least it's a start in terms of figuring out what's moral or not.
Okay.
I mean, I can understand where you're coming from, from that position.
I'm not sure why you use subjective phrases.
What do you mean where I'm coming from?
It's either a valid argument or it's not.
I don't know where I'm coming from.
If I'm coming from a place called a valid argument, great.
Otherwise, but it's not a feels thing, right?
It's not a, well, I get your, I grok your drift, right?
Yeah, the problem I guess I'm having is the terminology that you're using.
You say preferable like it doesn't mean what people are preferring, it's not what people would prefer, and yet you use that multiple times.
I'm not talking about people throughout the entire book.
Throughout the entire book I say we're evaluating propositions, we're evaluating theories, we're not judging individuals.
In the same way that a scientific theory can be tested by an individual rock, but it's not talking about this rock.
It's talking about physics in general.
So I'm talking about moral propositions, moral theories, not moral individuals, or the morality of particular individuals.
Okay, but any kind of behavior is the result of a preference, correct?
Well, that's true of lizards.
I mean, the lizard gets too hot, it goes in the shade.
Behavior comes from some motive.
I'm with you.
Yeah, these are preferences, and then you're talking about these preferences.
There's the aesthetically negative, aesthetically positive.
Okay, but what is the moral theory that is being proposed?
Now, your moral theory, as far as I understand it, is there's no such thing as universal morality, right?
I'm saying that there's no such thing as an objective morality, something that is objectively true in the same sense that the sun exists, the earth exists.
I'm in complete agreement with that.
I say repeatedly in the book that morals do not exist.
Ethics do not exist.
Theories do not exist.
Of course not.
Morals don't exist the way that the sun or a tree exists.
Of course not.
The scientific method doesn't exist in the same way as the matter and energy it describes, but that doesn't mean it's subjective or random or has no objective measurement.
Numbers don't exist.
That doesn't mean that mathematics is arbitrary.
Right.
But, on the other hand, I'm also saying that morality isn't real in the same way that you're saying that the scientific method is real or numbers are real.
No, no, no.
I just said the scientific method wasn't real.
Okay.
No, you're saying that numbers don't exist, but you're also saying that they're not real, but, I mean...
Okay, let's put it this way.
Numbers are real in the sense that they mean something.
No, no, no.
You can't say it means something, therefore it's real.
You said morality doesn't exist in the way that the sun exists, and I completely agree with you and have said that from the very beginning.
Okay, but the number one has an objective definition.
It's...
It's a concept.
Yeah, I agree.
We put a label on it, and we call that label one.
Right.
And I'm saying morality has an objective definition called universally preferable behavior.
The fact that morals don't exist is irrelevant.
Right.
In fact, if they did exist, you wouldn't need philosophy.
You don't need philosophy to go and pick up a tennis ball, right?
I mean, a dog can go and pick up a tennis ball.
You need philosophy in order to judge abstractions, in order to formulate universal theories.
You know, a dog can catch a Frisbee.
That doesn't mean that a dog understands the equations of gravity and wind resistance or anything like that.
So, yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you.
Morality doesn't exist in any kind of real way because if it did, it wouldn't be the province of philosophy at all.
It'd be science, right?
So it's something that exists basically in the mind.
It's not an existential thing, physical, tangible force of nature or anything like that.
It's something that exists in the mind.
I don't know what that means to exist in the mind.
Of course it exists in the mind, but so what?
But that doesn't mean it's subjective.
Just because something only exists in the mind, if it claims to describe something objective and rational, it is not subjective.
Science is not subjective.
Mathematics and engineering are not subjective.
You may look at a red barn and maybe I'm colorblind and I see it as gray, but we'll both read the same wavelength if we run the spectrometer or whatever the hell it is that measures wavelength.
And so the fact that it exists in the mind rather than in reality doesn't mean that it's subjective.
In fact, objectivity is only possible within the mind.
A lizard does not know that it's in the category called lizard.
A mammal doesn't know, a duck-billed platypus doesn't know it's right on the edge of a definition called mammal.
These categories exist in the mind.
It's the only place they can exist, but that doesn't mean that they're subjective or arbitrary.
Okay, I agree that when you're referencing physical things, tangible things in the universe, things that can be sensed with the senses, things that can be measured, those things are objective.
They aren't different from person to person.
Is science objective?
Science is a discipline, and it measures or seeks to get as objective an idea of what's out there as possible.
Okay, so it's an objective discipline.
Yes.
I mean, it aims at whatever you want to call it.
We can't have the mind of God argument about perfect objectivity or whatever, but we can say that compared to numerology, it's an objective.
Compared to astrology, it's an objective discipline, right?
Right, absolutely.
Okay, good.
So we look at morality in the same way that we would look at the scientific method, right?
So the fact that the scientific method doesn't exist in reality doesn't mean that science is arbitrary or subjective.
Science makes universal claims, and therefore it is testable universally.
Okay, and the claims that we make about moral propositions, they can be testable according to certain Okay, good.
So give me, in my book, I put a bunch of moral claims forward, like it is morally wrong to rape, kill, and assault.
So give me a moral claim that is subjective.
Because you've obviously put a lot of thought into this, and this is your position, right?
That there's no such thing as morality, it's all subjective.
So give me a moral claim that is subjective.
I would say that all moral claims are actually subjective.
Give me a moral claim that is subjective.
I didn't ask you for the category, but the content.
All right.
Rape is immoral.
That's a subjective point of view.
No, no.
That's a statement.
Right.
Give me a moral theory.
So show me how rape is subjective.
How rape is immoral is subjective.
Just saying rape is immoral is subjective is not an argument.
That's me just like saying, well, I've disproved this theory by saying rocks fall up.
I mean, it's just a statement.
Give me an argument as to why you would consider rape to be, like the immorality of rape or the wrongness of rape, why you would consider that to be subjective.
Because all judgements, all moral judgements, are subjective.
No, you're just restating your case without making the argument.
You're basically saying, the defendant is guilty, but we haven't brought any.
So give me, why is it subjective?
Why is rape is wrong a subjective statement?
It's because the fact that rape is wrong is subjective is based on the fact that all our moral judgements You're saying exactly the same thing again.
All you're saying is I'm right because I've assembled some words together.
But you actually have to make the case.
I've made the case that rape is wrong according to universally preferable behavior.
I've made a very, I think, an inviolate case, a bulletproof case, and I've run through a good chunk of the reasoning.
So if you wish to counter that, then you need to tell me what your idea is.
And rather than just saying, well, it's subjective, no, that's called begging the question.
You have to prove.
That the argument that rape is wrong is subjective.
You have to make a case for it, right?
Okay.
So what you're asking then is, why does any particular person consider rape to be wrong?
Nope.
No.
Now you're going back to subjective thoughts.
You need to make a universal case or a subjective case as to why rape is not wrong.
I mean, obviously some people believe that rape is not wrong because they rape, right?
Right.
A subjective case is an individual case.
It's only universal.
No, but I'm asking you to come up with...
No, because remember, UPB or philosophy does not deal with subjective beliefs, right?
You don't say, well, science is invalid because some guy doesn't believe in science.
Or you don't say ghosts exist because some guy believes in ghosts.
You have to put forward a universal argument or at least an abstract argument as to why rape exists.
Does not fall into the category of morality or why rape is not immoral or why rape is moral, if that's your particular argument.
So I've made a case as to why rape is immoral.
And so if you want to be in the realm of philosophy, just saying, well, all morality is subjective, that's not an argument.
That's just a statement which, you know, adds nothing to the conversation.
It's a conclusion.
And you need to earn that conclusion by giving me an argument.
All right, fine.
So let me try and lay it out.
Hume basically stated that you cannot derive an ought, which is basically the idea of how things should be, ought to be, must be, from the imperative standpoint, making a moral imperative and saying you should do this or you must do this, or saying this is wrong, or this is right, you must do this, you should do this because it's right, or...
I get it.
You can't get an ought from an is.
I think everyone got that.
So the reason why you can't get an ought from an is is because declarations of what is are objective.
They aren't dependent upon any other individual.
Maybe they're Their unique perspective of, you know, it looks blue to me from this particular angle.
Yes, I understand.
You're saying the same thing.
So, basically, I'm sorry, I've just got to keep this moving along because we're kind of broken record here.
So, yeah, he says you can't get an or from an is.
Right.
And that, of course, is very true.
All he's basically saying is the scientific method doesn't exist in reality.
You can't drag the scientific method out of a bunch of rocks.
I completely agree.
So what?
Does that mean the scientific method is subjective and has no...
Objective properties?
No, of course not.
No, basically he's saying that because you can't derive logically what ought to be, what people ought to do, from what actually is, that any kind of declaration of moral judgment is purely subjective.
It comes from some point within the mind that is different.
From something outside, which is objective.
So are you saying that scientists are not bound by the scientific method because the scientific method isn't written anywhere in nature?
Well, scientists aren't bound by it in any way, but any scientist who wants to...
So you can be a scientist without following the scientific method?
Any scientist who wants to actually, you know...
Yeah, we definitely accept that.
Okay, and to follow the scientific method means to surrender your subjective judgment to two requirements.
Number one is logical consistency of the hypothesis, and number two is empirical measurement of the results, right?
Absolutely.
Okay, great, great.
And surrendering one's judgment based on further information that might contradict it.
Yes, of course.
Nowhere in nature does it say you have to use the scientific method, right?
No.
You have to obey gravity, because it's not a choice, but you don't have to follow the scientific method, right?
But if you want to use science, if you want to say something true, something predictive, something universal about the behavior of matter and energy, you have to follow the scientific method, right?
If you want, this is why I say it's conditional, if you want To say something true, accurate, measurable, predictable, whatever it is, right?
Then you have to use the scientific method.
You can't use tea leaves.
You can't use your intuition.
You have to use the scientific method.
Now, nowhere in nature does it say, well, you have to.
You ought to use the scientific method.
That's not inscribed anywhere in nature.
It doesn't follow in the same way that obeying gravity follows outside of choice, right?
Right.
You're basically describing the relationship between what two things are.
If you want this, then you must do that.
It's a relationship.
Right.
So, if you're saying that morality is subjective, right?
Yes.
Then you have to tell me why you're using the word morality rather than something like aesthetics.
I think you and I could agree that aesthetics, at least to a large degree, are subjective.
What kind of music you like and so on, there's some subjectivity involved in that, right?
Yeah, definitely.
Aesthetics are definitely subjective, just as, you know, I would say aesthetics and ethics and morality are all subjective.
And Okay, but here's the difference.
Why I would use one versus the other.
I would say that aesthetics tend to deal with things which do not have a moral judgment to them.
A, this is good, or this is evil, or this is right, or that is wrong.
But more like, this is preferred, this is desired, or desirable, whereas that's not.
Well no, I like, right?
Aesthetics are I like or you like or it's a personal subjective preference.
So aesthetics of course exist in a realm which does not impose itself on others, right?
I can like jazz and you can like hip-hop and we can both coexist and perfectly pursue our goals in the consumption of what and there's no interference with each other in the pursuit of that, right?
Yes, because we both prefer the non-initiation of force.
No, no, this has nothing to do with the non-initiation of force.
Aesthetics are not impositional by nature.
If I prefer jazz, this does not interfere with your ability to prefer and consume hip-hop, right?
Oh, I meant enjoy each other's company, but yes, definitely.
We can disagree on our particular music choices and that sort of thing without imposing them on others.
Yeah, aesthetics, and this is why there's a category of ethics or a category of universally preferable behavior called aesthetics in what I write about.
Because aesthetics can be universally pursued and achieved by everyone without interference with another person's will or choice or preference, right?
Right.
It's not violent.
It's not an imposition of will.
It doesn't damage another human being.
You're not brutalizing another person's free choice, right?
I mean, I go to a classical concert, you go to a hip-hop concert, and I come out with my hearing intact, right?
And still some respect for women.
So here's the difference.
Here's why aesthetics...
And ethics are in different categories because ethics generally deals with the imposition of, as we talked about at the beginning, the imposition of violent will from one person to another.
You and I can both pursue our aesthetic preferences without interfering or using aggression or violence against another person.
However, if you want my wallet and I don't want to give it to you, right, and you decide to use violence against me, then we're in a different category.
Yes, because that's a standard of behavior which we both use as a terminology or as a standard for morality.
We say if people are imposing their will upon us, we consider that immoral.
We don't like that.
No, that's in the category of morale.
No, no.
It's in a different category from aesthetics.
Because aesthetics we can all pursue and achieve on our own.
I can paint my house the color I like.
You can paint your house the color you like.
We can both achieve the house color that we want, right?
So without interfering with each other.
But if you want my wallet and I don't want to give it to you, either you walk away and your desire is thwarted.
Or...
You get my wallet by threatening me or whatever it is, and in which case my desire to keep my wallet is thwarted.
So aesthetics can be win-win, or in fact are win-win by definition, whereas where the relationships are win-lose and violence is involved or the threat of violence involved, we're not in the realm of aesthetics anymore, right?
And this is why there's a different category.
Yeah, and so basically agreements like homeowners' agreements and associations where they force you to do certain things, If it was something where you couldn't leave the homeowners association, if your association was involuntary, then that would be considered immoral under your definition.
I'm sorry, could you just say that again?
Under your definition, if you were forced to associate with other people in a homeowners association, you couldn't leave, you couldn't voluntarily choose to leave.
And they decided...
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, no, no, no, no.
What are you talking about a homeowner's association for?
I mean, you voluntarily sign up to a homeowner's association.
I'm saying that let's say it's not voluntary.
Let's say you're- Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't start taking voluntary arrangements and say, well, let's just pretend they're not voluntary.
But call them the same name as the...
That's cheating.
Let's say that rape is voluntary, in which case it's not rape, but let's still call it rape.
I mean, that's just muddying the waters for no purpose whatsoever, at least no honorable purpose.
So let's not talk about homeowners associations.
That's nonsense.
Okay, you're living under a dictatorial state, highly totalitarian, and they dictate the color of house that you get to live in.
That's an imposition.
Right.
So how would that be justified in a system of ethics?
How would you say?
Well, you could say that one human being has the right to impose his will on another human being.
But since you're talking about humanity as a whole, you'd have to universalize that in order for it to be ethics, in order for it to be in the category of morality.
And therefore, You'd have to say all human beings have the right to impose their will on other human beings.
That the imposition of will from one human being to another is universally preferable behavior.
But that cannot rationally stand.
It is not possible for everyone to achieve their will.
Like, if you want my wallet and I don't want to give you my wallet, we cannot both impose our wills on each other at the same time.
Because one of us is going to win and one of us is going to lose, which is why you can't have a morality which says everyone gets to impose their will on everyone else whenever they want.
It simply doesn't work.
I mean, you could even time it and say, well, you want my wallet.
Okay, so you get to impose your will on me.
So then you take my wallet.
Well, wait, I don't want you to impose your will on me, so I'm going to take my wallet back and you have to let me do it.
Like, it can't happen.
It can't work, which is why.
Now, aesthetics, we can.
Aesthetics, we can go out and go to Spotify or whatever.
We can download the music that we like and we can listen to it on our headphones or whatever it is and we can enjoy it.
We can all achieve our own particular aesthetic preferences, but we When it comes to the violent imposition of will from one person to another, it cannot be universalized.
The people in the government have the right to impose a $10,000 tax on everyone.
It's like, well, no, you can't create an artificial category called government.
You can say, well, everyone has the right to impose a $10,000 tax on everyone else.
But it all just cancels each other out.
You impose a $10,000 tax on me, would you have the right to do?
Well, I have the right to impose a $10,000 tax on you, and therefore it cancels it out.
And no, you no longer have the right because it's been universalized, right?
So this is why we're in the realm of aesthetics, right?
Because it's around the...
Sorry, of ethics rather than aesthetics.
Aesthetics can be achieved...
Aesthetic success can be achieved by everyone, and it is on a daily basis.
People come home, and they don't have to watch...
They can watch their own TV shows, the neighbors can watch their own TV shows, and there's no violent imposition of will.
However, if my neighbor has a television and I want that television and I don't have a television and I break into his house while he's at work and steal his television and hang it up in my basement, well, now I get to watch a television show, but he doesn't.
See, that's win-lose.
There's a transfer.
Of will.
There's a transfer of property.
There's a transfer of choice.
And so we do have to have a separate category.
From aesthetics when it comes to ethics.
And we can't universalize the violent imposition of will.
We can universalize not using violence to impose your will.
Like you can, you and I can both convince each other of things as we're trying to do now.
You're trying to convince me of your position.
I'm trying to convince you and the world of another position.
We can do that, right?
Because we're not, you know, violently, it's not win-lose, right?
I mean, we're both profiting from this conversation.
So here's why you can't just take Morality and just lump it in with aesthetics or culture or whatever it is, right?
Subjective choices.
Because if coercion is a subjective choice, then you have no right to impose your subjective choice on others.
The reason I say that is because if you have the right to impose your subjective subjective choice violently on others then they have the right to impose their subjective choice violently on you and therefore it all cancels each other out and nothing is achieved in terms of rational consistency therefore it can't be universally preferable behavior to violently impose your will on others because if it's universal everyone gets to violently impose their will and no one gets to violently impose their will because it all cancels
out.
And so what you're saying is that it has to be universalized in order to be considered morality, by definition.
That there's no separate categories for people like dictators or parents with their children, for example.
Well, no, hang on.
We're talking about adults.
Children are in a separate moral category.
But for sure, because there's no such thing as the government.
Right?
And there's no such thing.
That certainly doesn't exist in reality.
You get buildings and guns and books and so on, but there's no such thing as the government.
So you can't just create an opposite moral category of people and ascribe them opposite moral properties.
I mean, you can.
It's just...
It's irrational, right?
Blue is not a defining characteristic of whether you're a lizard or not, right?
So you can't say, well, all of these lizards are lizards except for the blue ones, which are mammals.
I mean, you can do that if you want.
You're just a very bad biologist.
So you can create opposite categories that aren't relevant to the moral definition, but you're simply incorrect.
You're creating a bunch of people calling the government and saying, well, they get to initiate force, they get to do taxes, they get to start wars and so on.
It's just a bad theory.
It's like saying, well, all these All these lizards are reptiles except for the blue ones, which are mammals.
It's like, well, why?
I don't know.
Blue just reminds me of a mammal.
It's just a bad theory.
Sorry, go ahead.
So why do we consider children in a separate category?
Well, you really are not taking any of my arguments and you're just jumping from category to category, right?
Like, I feel like I'm just sort of walking forward.
Every time I step, there's firm ground.
I look behind me and there's nothing but air, right?
So now we're going into the moral definition of an adult versus a child, but you've not conceded a single point that we've talked about yet.
So I have a feeling we're just kind of, I'm just chasing you, like, to no purpose.
My point is that your definition for your whole construct of morality...
No, it's not my definition!
That's not philosophy!
It's universal...
No, it's not my definition.
I'm making a philosophical argument.
We're not in the realm of aesthetics anymore.
I'm not trying to convince you that classical is better than hip-hop, although it is.
You keep personalizing it.
Like, Steph, your definition and your approach and your perspective, you wouldn't call Einstein's, well, your science.
It's like, that's not how it works.
I'm making arguments.
You can either accept them or you can find flaw in them, but you can't just degrade them by just personalizing them towards me and moving on every time we try and get to a conclusion, jumping out to some new topic.
Well, what's an adult now?
And it's like, I mean, you can if you want, but I'm not going to play.
Okay, but my point is that you're declaring, then, that morality is defined as something that applies universally.
Okay, I'm going to move on, because I just said you can't personalize it to me, and then you said, but you're declaring, it's like, no, a series of rational arguments with reference to very specific actions, with reference to aesthetics, with reference to the imposition of will, with reference to relationships, with reference to universality.
I made a series of very specific arguments, and you're back to, well, Steph, you're just stating random things.
And if that's the case, you know, I really appreciate the call.
I love having conversations about this.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really, really do encourage, encourage, encourage people.
Go to freedomainradio.com slash free and download.
It's free.
The book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
It's a great piece of philosophy, and I really do appreciate the call.
And who would we have up next?
Alright, up next we have Sybil.
She wrote in and said, That's from Sybil.
Hi Sybil.
Hi Sybil, how you doing?
I'm okay.
Yeah, I don't really know where to start.
Yes, we went to high school together.
And the thing that's so weird is that up until about six months ago she was never like this.
I mean, we both used 4chan starting around like 2006, which I'm sure you know is not a safe space or, you know, a PC place.
And then I think last year, early in the year, she dropped out of college and she told me at my grandmother's funeral, actually, that the reason why she had decided to drop out is because she was taking a computer science class.
Now, I'm 26 and so is she.
She's 27.
I'm a PhD student.
She has not yet gotten her undergrad.
And she told me that they were working on a project and one of her fellow male classmates criticized her coding and that she felt really ashamed and upset by that and that he only said that because he was male and that sort of led her to drop out.
And that was the first sign that I got that this was happening.
You've got to be kidding me.
Oh, Sybil, hang on.
You've got to be kidding me.
No, Stefan, I really need your help here.
No, seriously.
She's a feminist and she drops out of college because she's criticized and can't handle it.
So she becomes too emotional and hysterical to pursue a technical field, a STEM field.
She's too emotional, too hysterical, too hypersensitive to follow the coursework in a STEM field.
And she's a feminist who is empowered.
It's that a man was allowed to criticize her.
And the thing that's upsetting is, like I said, I'm a PhD student.
What?
Wait a minute.
Has she not noticed that feminists have been criticizing men for quite a long time?
So it's fine for men.
Men can handle being criticized, which is why feminists bitch at men so much.
So men can handle being criticized and can still go about their daily business.
But if a man deigns to criticize a woman, she just has a complete meltdown and bounces right out of the course.
That's my understanding of how she described it to me.
Again, I didn't really take this in.
Even as far as feminist goes, that's pretty bad.
You understand, right?
That's just so ridiculous.
And it's happened, like I said, over the course of the last year.
And I asked her, like, did you start using Tumblr?
She says she uses Pinterest.
I'm just concerned.
We've basically...
Pinterest?
Yeah.
I thought that was just like...
Okay, hang on.
So Tumblr...
So if Pinterest is similar to Tumblr, then the P would be penis.
It would be penis interest, right?
Is that what Pinterest is?
I don't use it, so I don't know.
I guess a lot of this is about five days leading up to the election.
She sent me some article from Cracked that was saying that the kiss scene in Star Wars between Han and Leia was raped and she wanted me to like back her up because I hadn't come out of my closet telling her that I'm a MAGA hat wearing, you know, Trump supporter.
And I was just playing along and I couldn't respond to this article because she said, isn't this right?
Isn't this correct?
Don't you agree with us?
And I had to say, no, I can't find anything agreeable here.
And so I came out She didn't want to talk to me.
I called her on the phone, you know, crying, saying, you know, we've been best friends.
I call you my sister.
And she said, well, I'm willing to talk to you now.
So that was, I guess, the ground.
Wait, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry, Sybil.
So there's a scene, I guess, in the first Star Wars, right?
Yes.
Where...
Princess Leia, yeah, she's working on fixing something in the spaceship, right?
Because, you know, princesses are just really fantastic.
You know, when Grace Kelly, she'd have a car problem, she'd just pull over, you know, the hood would come up and she'd just roll up her silk sleeves and get to work, right?
So Princess Leia is trying to fix something and Princess Leia kind of says no to Han Solo, kissing her.
He kisses her anyway and then she kisses him back, right?
Right, but she hates the Baby It's Cold Outside song.
And if you haven't heard the new PC version, it's horrific.
It's absolutely, unbelievably terrible.
Oh, that's, I really can't stay, because baby, it's cold outside.
Yeah, so it's a woman who says she's got to go, and a guy's trying to convince her to stay, right?
But the new lyrics are like, she's like, oh, I really should go.
And then he's like, that is your right.
You are allowed to.
I'm not holding you back.
And it's just, it's disgusting.
But she views that stuff as sexual assault, and she viewed the, she's very upset by the grabbing by the pussy comment.
She keeps bringing it up whenever I've tried to talk to her.
And I do have a couple conversations.
here that I've been trying to have with her because luckily for the last Couple days, I think after that first phone call, she got more willing to discuss something with me.
I think I would listen to a lot more women complain about the grab her by the pussy comment, which I considered pretty crass as well, as I think did Donald Trump.
I would feel a lot more comfortable listening to women complain about the grab her by the pussy comment if so many women weren't so keen to grab men by the wallet.
No, because look, the vagina is the young woman's sexual market value, but a man's resources, his money, is his sexual market value.
And so the fact that women seem to be very desirous, a lot of women seem to be quite desirous of using the government to take as much money as can be conceivably scammed out of the male hide and transferring it to women...
Through welfare, through child support, through alimony, through student loans for nonsense degrees like your friends.
I mean, you know, I get, yeah, yeah.
But all men here in general in the world these days is women staring at them lustily saying, grab them by the wallet!
And so it just seems a bit precious for women to be like, oh, he said grab her by the pussy.
That's bad.
That's coarse.
But it's also coarse, right, to grab men by the wallet all the time.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh no, I think it's also, if I was going to pick out a phrase that has come out from either of the two nominees from this election, I think the laughing about getting a guy off for raping a child with a lie detector test from Hillary Clinton's side was a little bit more offensive than the crass inside joke with, what's his name?
But I found that particularly disturbing.
Okay, so sorry.
So the Star Wars thing, this is her big thing, right?
Did Harrison Ford, did Han Solo, was it rape to kiss Princess Leia?
Even though they ended up having a child together and being together for many, many years and she loved him and he was willing to sacrifice himself for her and all that.
But at one point she said no, he kissed her anyway and that's her big sort of issue in the world.
And what happened after that to the point where she said, like you were crying?
What happened?
I'm sorry I missed that bit.
You know, I just came out and I told her I can't lie anymore.
I love Donald Trump.
I agree with a lot of the things he says.
And she was just like, I can't trust you.
She came out to me that night.
We were both crying and she was saying, you know, I said, you don't believe in stuff like safe spaces.
And she said, yes, I need a safe space because I'm genderqueer.
And before she had told me she was a trans man, before she told me a lesbian, then she was...
Wait, wait, wait.
Wait, sorry.
Yeah.
There's too many naughty bits rotating around the buffet here.
I don't know what's going on.
So what is genderqueer?
I don't actually know.
If I'm going to understand, so she believes as to...
I'm frightened to Google.
...that gender is a social construct, right?
So that we as a society define what is gender.
But as a part of that, the fact that she has tended to traditionally like male things, like video games and computers, that makes her...
However, not objective reason and emotional calm.
Okay.
Well, it's very superficial.
Their entire understanding of sexuality, liberals, I've found is very superficial.
So even though we're claiming that gender doesn't exist outside of the society, if you like gendered things, that means your gender is fluid.
So basically she's saying some days she's more female and some days she's more male.
So she's saying that there are traditionally stereotypical categories of male and female, but she just blends between them.
So she has categories of activity that are specifically male.
She have categories that are specifically female.
And so it seems that she's very Victorian in her definition.
Well, that's how I perceive it.
Because I remember when I was, I mean, I'm 26, so when I was growing up in the 90s, I remember it being like, hey, let's encourage girls to play with boys' toys and vice versa.
But now if you do that, it means you're the opposite gender.
So genderqueer, sorry, genderqueer also termed non-binary.
You know what's funny is that she claims to be non-binary and she bombed out a computer science.
That's actually quite apt.
Anyway...
It's a catch-all category for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine.
What does it mean to be an exclusively masculine gender identity?
I have no idea what that means.
Like, I don't know what...
What does that mean?
Listen, I mean, I've written novels where I've written very sort of convincing...
At least women have told me there are very convincing female characters.
And I've written very convincing male characters and lots of artists and lots of writers...
Right for other genders and do so in a very compelling and believable way.
So, you know, I mean, back to the Jungian idea that there's the anima and animus, right?
The woman and the man and the man and the woman.
Of course, we're all on a continuum.
I mean, and the continuum changes over the course of our life.
A woman who's 20 has a different hormone system than a woman who's 60.
Is she any less a woman biologically?
Of course not.
Does she have the same experience of gender identity when she's young and fertile or when she's old and not?
Of course not.
But it just seems weird.
Not exclusively masculine or feminine.
I'm trying to think of my behavior and say, well, that is exclusively masculine.
Women can't do it.
It's very Victorian in my, you know, women aren't allowed to do this.
And I find that very strange, but I do like, um, so I'm just trying to, so Christmas is coming up, of course, and every year, you know, we don't, we haven't lived in the same town in over 10 years, but every year we see each other for all the big events, each other's birthdays sometimes, you know, Christmas, um, What?
Wait, when did the crack-up occur?
I know it was relatively recent.
About a month ago.
Well, okay, so more than that now, so maybe a month and a half, two months ago, because it was right before the election.
And I was playing along up until then, and I would like, you know, I would say, haha, big orange carrot, that's so funny, and stuff to her, just to placate, you know.
Does she consider it a traditionally masculine perspective to like Donald Trump?
She thinks...
Oh, jeez.
So she just posted an article today from Teen Vogue, which even though I've sent her articles from Breitbart and Daily Mail and she called them fake news...
No, come on.
You're trolling me, Sybil.
I am not trolling me.
You are.
Come on, Teen Vogue.
The article was called Donald Trump is Gaslighting America.
And it's basically saying the fact that he has had different opinions in the past means that when he changed his opinions, he is...
Do you know what gaslighting is, I would imagine?
Yeah.
Yeah, from the old movie, right?
Yes.
So he's intentionally manipulating the United States public by changing his opinions.
But didn't your friend also change her opinion about you as a friend and about masculinity and about femininity and about being a feminist and safe spaces?
She changed her opinion quite a bit, right?
That's the whole problem.
And I guess what I want is...
No, no, no.
We're not done deconstructing this.
We'll get there.
I know you're an intelligent, accomplished woman, so you want to get to things.
I get that.
Just a sec.
So, she was a Hillary supporter, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume, or was it all the way to Bernie?
Okay.
I had no idea.
She has never...
So, I've always been pretty politically active.
I voted for Ron Paul in 2008.
I voted for Gary Johnson, although I would not do that again in 2012.
The high just got 10 feet waller.
Wait, wait.
Does she know you voted for Ron Paul?
Yeah.
She didn't have any problem with it in 2008.
She didn't have any problem with Johnson in 2012.
Well, because they could never succeed and interfere with her leftist agenda.
The thing is, she wasn't.
She was not.
She had no political opinion, as far as I could tell.
She liked Ron Paul.
She liked the, you know, at least I don't think she had any real...
I've always been politically charged, I guess, and she was never, and so that's why it's never been an issue.
But then all of a sudden, I see her this summer, and she's got two Hillary stickers on the back of her car, and I was thinking, like, oh...
Oh, okay.
And I wasn't even totally on board the Trump train at that point.
I liked him, but I wasn't, you know, like, full choo-choo.
So, to see those Hillary stickers, I don't know how anyone could have ever supported her.
I don't understand.
Wait, so supporting Hillary is a female thing to do, but supporting Donald Trump is a male thing to do?
Probably.
Probably.
Okay, so hang on.
So if she likes certain masculine things, and that makes her genderqueer, and therefore should be treated with, you know, respect and her differences.
But if you like masculine things like Donald Trump, doesn't that also make you genderqueer and in need of respect and all that?
I guess I am.
Well, see, that always stumps the liberals, I think, because you can always just claim, you can just say, like, I'm a trans, whatever, and you can't prove me wrong.
But, I mean, I really am trying to repair this friendship.
I don't want her to hate me because of a 15-year friendship over a political difference.
Oh, no, it's not a political difference.
I think she's been brainwashed, but the thing is, she thinks I've been brainwashed.
So I don't know how there's any mutual ground that we can reach there.
And I have the conversations we've been having on Facebook where she...
No, no, don't do it on Facebook.
Oh, well, they're...
No, no, no.
No, don't do it on Facebook.
I don't really.
Please God, don't have conversations about fundamental matters on Facebook or anywhere other than face-to-face in a quiet place.
That's what I'm hoping for Christmas, because this is not working out well.
She wants me to supply, you know, when I say, like, oh, well, look at this increase in rapes from migrants in Europe.
She says, well, give me some sources.
So I give her some sources.
She says, I don't like those.
Those aren't CNN. Well, what am I supposed to do?
How can I combat that type of willful ignorance?
And I don't know if that's what it is.
I know she's a smart person.
I know she was a salivatorian of my high school, so I know that she's not ignorant.
It's just willful ignorance, I guess.
All right.
Lauren Southern, who just put out a great book.
I just bought it.
Oh, good, good.
Okay.
Barbarianbook.com, I think it is.
She posted something a while back ago about this woman named Savannah Browne.
And it's two years apart.
And this is one year into a social, quote, science degree, is what Lauren says.
And on the left, right, so it's two pictures of this woman's YouTube account.
And on the left, you know, she looks, you know, very wholesome and attractive and smart and all that kind of stuff.
And she's, you know, got a big smile on her face, long brown hair, dressed conservatively and all that.
And the YouTube video is called, What Lies Ahead?
A Poem.
And it's lovely.
It's a lovely picture.
I've not watched the video, but, you know, she seems very positive and very enthusiastic.
Now, that was May 20th, 2014.
November 10th, 2015.
She posted this woman, Savannah Brown.
She's now, I guess, quite deep into her social science degree.
And she's got her hair cut short.
It's been dyed black.
She's basically gone all gothy.
She's dressed in a simple morgue t-shirt.
And the first poem was What Lies Ahead?
A poem.
And the second one that she did is called Hi, I'm a Slut.
A slam poem.
Savannah Brown.
And it's culty.
Like, I'm sorry.
It is culty.
And it is gross.
And it is...
Oh, absolutely.
I've studied cult indoctrination, actually.
And you talk about social science, I'm a social scientist.
But I've studied cult indoctrination.
If you look at the way that social justice and the PC police, essentially, it's like alienate yourself from your family.
For example, my friend, she lives at home with her mother and father.
Her and her mother are huge Hillary supporters.
She has not spoken to her father now in, I think, like three months.
They live in the same house.
She will not speak to him because he basically called her identity not real.
He said that there's no such thing as this gender binary.
This is ridiculous.
You know, you need to get yourself together.
And so now she won't speak to him.
She's taking his money, though.
Oh, not only that, she technically works for him.
That's her job.
She works for him.
So he gave her a job and she won't speak to him because he doesn't Maybe she's a tomboy.
This is what we called girls who liked boyish things.
It was not a bad thing at all.
It was not a negative.
I actually thought it was kind of cool.
I liked the tomboys myself.
The girly girls were sometimes a bit...
That's always been me.
And that's who I thought she was too.
I think she's just been indoctrinated by this stuff.
She's just so concerned too.
I know this.
She's come out as gay, but the problem is that...
She's always called herself a lesbian for about five years.
And that was fine.
I don't have any issue with that, obviously, but it's this constant changing of the terms.
Now I'm this, now I'm that, and I never know where to go with it.
But in terms of the radicalized feminism, thinking everything is rape, I'm trying to talk to her about Islam in a real way.
She will not hear it.
It's racist, it's horrible for you to say this stuff about Islam.
I mean, I'm trying to...
Wait, so she has a huge problem.
She has a huge problem with the intolerance, quote, intolerance of her own father.
Yes.
But she has no problem with any of the beliefs about women in Islamic countries.
Well, she says it's a minority, and I show her some statistics.
It's not the minority, it's the majority.
Well, and then I don't want to talk about it anymore.
A lot of it is cognitive dissonance, and I understand that.
And cognitive dissonance is very psychologically uncomfortable to be faced with ideas that don't match your mindset.
How long has she been out of school now?
About a year, I think, but she's never been a consistent student.
So how is she getting refueled at this point?
That's what I don't know.
Well, that's good and bad in the internet, but who's topping up for a tank of crazy?
Well, that's why I asked her, like, are you using Tumblr?
Because I know that Tumblr is like the den of this stuff.
She said, no, I don't use Tumblr.
I use Pinterest.
And she's trying to show me all this stuff from Pinterest.
I don't find funny, like, minion memes.
And I don't get it.
But she finds it very funny.
Minion memes?
She thinks that's really funny.
I don't get it.
Oh, you mean from the Despicable Me movies?
Yeah.
She finds that kind of...
I think that's how it started.
And then somehow ended up in this feminist thing.
Because like I said, at my grandmother's funeral, which was the last time I saw her in person, she told me, you know, I've become really involved in feminism.
And I tried to have an argument with her because I said, I don't consider myself a feminist.
She was appalled.
How can you not consider yourself a feminist?
And I said, well, feminism...
Like the other 80% of Americans, you don't consider yourself a feminist.
Right.
And I said, well, for one thing, I don't think it has a place in the West.
And for another thing, it devalues men.
And I started to talk about some men issues.
She says there's no such thing as a male social issue.
What?
Oh, man.
I'm sorry.
Don't even get me started.
I'm appreciating this call with you, Sybil, but I've got to tell you, looking across the landscape of this kind of stuff, I'm really having a tough time.
I'm really, really having a tough time.
Believing in this massive wave of so-called female empathy that is supposed to surround and envelop us like the force.
Men have no problems, no issues.
Yeah, because what could be more fun than being drafted?
What could be more fun than dying 19 times out of 20 in workplace accidents?
What could be more fun than dying half a decade to a decade earlier than women?
What could be any kind of problem in the divorce courts?
What could be any kind of problem with Getting 50% more sentencing for exactly the same crime as a woman.
What possible issues could men have?
I mean, that is mad.
Stefan, I will tell you, because I quoted some of those exact statistics to her, and she said, well, like, men dying more in the workforce.
Well, they chose those jobs.
However, she believes in the wage gap as not being a quality of opportunity, but she wants a quality of outcome.
So essentially, she's saying, like, it doesn't matter if women choose cushy jobs that don't mean that they die in their chair or die on the job.
But what this conversation ended up culminating in, and I do want to stress that I was at my grandmother's funeral, or the aftermath of it.
Yeah, it was a terrible time.
And so I was not really processing everything that she was saying to me in a completely logical fashion.
But why, I'm sorry to interrupt, but why is she cornering you with all of this ideological bullshit when you're there to mourn your grandmother's passing, for which I'm sympathetic, of course.
No, she was very, no, she was extremely sympathetic.
This was not at the funeral itself.
Oh, okay, okay.
And she was extremely sympathetic.
And like I said, she's my sister.
That's how I consider her.
But the argument that this turned into was I was trying to find any issue that she thought might be a male issue.
And it got down to this, where I said, if a woman intentionally pokes a hole in a condom for the purpose of impregnating herself with a man who does not want a child, And then just says, great, now you owe me money.
And he has no say in it.
She said, actually, the woman is oppressed there because she has to take care of the child.
And I was, at the time, I was like, okay, I don't understand this.
But thinking back on it, I was like, that's unbelievable.
If consistency was the only standard for friendship, she'd be the best friend ever.
Because, man, is she ever consistent.
I don't agree with the premises, but she's really, really consistent.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, it's horrific thoughts that I don't know how to combat logically because there's no logic involved.
No, you can't.
I mean, she's either going to come out of it or she won't.
But you know the way it works, too, is that the studies show, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but sometimes we have to remember the principles when we're in the weeds of the relationship, right?
It's hard.
You know the reality that if somebody has crazy beliefs and you attempt to correct those crazy beliefs with reason and evidence, what do they do?
Psychological reactants.
They will put it back there.
Yeah, they double down, right?
They will end up more certain because they've been told that everyone who opposes you is bad.
Everyone who questions you is bad.
Everyone is trying to get you to not be good anymore.
By questioning you, by trying to dislodge you from these beliefs.
So these are moral absolutes that she has for various reasons we can speculate about.
This is where she's at.
This is what she does.
This is her whole thing, right?
It's social identity.
Actually, social identity is my main field of research.
So I do understand it on a very logical and academic level.
But unfortunately, it's difficult when you're faced with it on a personological level.
So what is the history...
That gives rise to this.
I mean, I don't want to, she's got no free will, or I don't want to mean that.
What, though, Sybil, is the history that you know, having known her for, you know, how to give any details, of course, right?
But what is going on that led her to be susceptible to this kind of stuff?
So without giving away too many details, this is my hypothesis here.
She was completely normal.
Well, she was raised through homeschooling her whole life.
And then she joined.
So we went to art school together.
And if you can imagine that art high school, if you can imagine that I ended up being, you know, Who I am coming out of an art school.
They're not that bad.
But we went to school together.
Everything was great.
We both used 4chan.
We would call each other slurs without Finding it offensive and getting PC. And we went to college, or I went to college away, I left, I went to another state, went to college, got my first degree, went to another state, got my second degree, and now I'm working on my third degree.
And for her, during this time after high school, she started to get these, to get sick.
She had some sort of problem and we still, this is now eight years, nine years later, is undiagnosed.
It's some type of pain disorder no one can diagnose.
Every time I see her there's a new diagnosis for this pain disorder.
And I think that...
Is this in this sort of Epstein-Barr of fibromyalgia realm or something else?
They thought it was fibromyalgia at one point, yes.
It was no one can quantify what it is.
And it's gone through so many things that about...
And I will say this because I guarantee she doesn't listen to your show, even though I've tried to show her some of your videos.
But she did not like it.
She said, I won't watch some random guy on YouTube talk about something.
I was like, you really should.
Anyway, so she now has been convinced that she cannot remember but was raped as a child.
And that's the source of this pain.
And she told me that about a year and a half ago.
Wow.
Now, obviously, she's my best friend.
Of course, I'm going to believe her outright.
And I still do.
Believe what?
She doesn't say she was, right?
She was told by a psychiatrist that she was probably raped.
And she believed she was.
And I said something about rape one time in front of her like months later and she got really upset.
So it got triggered, I guess.
And, you know, obviously child rape is like one of, if not the most abhorrent thing that can happen.
And so, of course, I'm going to be sympathetic.
But if we go from this is fibromyalgia to this is rape and your body is misinterpreting it, which it can do, by the way, there's documented cases of that happening.
Of what?
Basically, people who have extreme traumatic disorders as a child, it's psychosomatic.
They somatize the trauma, right?
This is the Freudian argument that the women who've seen something and they can't physically see or they can't feel in their arm and so on, right?
Well, it's psychosomatism, which is that, and it's been, you know, science basically backs this up as far as I know, that psychosomatic pain is pain just because it's caused by your brain because your brain is the thing that's controlling the pain center.
So it doesn't matter if there's any pain there or not physically.
If your brain thinks there is, if your brain has been tricked into thinking there's some pain because the pain is centered around her reproductive systems.
So if she was molested or raped as a child, then that would make sense.
From my very limited medical understanding of how psychosemitism works.
But that was about a year and a half ago she came out to me with that.
You know, of course, I was super supportive, but I think that might have been a large part of it was that diagnosis.
Whether or not it's legitimate because the diagnoses on her condition have changed every six months since...
And is she still in the pain?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, gosh.
If you look at her bedside drawer next to her bed, 30 pill bottles, you know, all just trying to treat it.
It's terrible.
And I've seen it.
I've seen her have, you know, spasms.
She can't get up.
She can't walk.
She just has to, like, go to bed and take medicine and go to sleep.
It's so bad.
I don't think she's faking.
I don't like the idea that psychosomatic pain is not real because it is, scientifically speaking.
Sure.
Well, it's like the phantom limb thing, right?
I mean, if you have a limb amputated and you still feel the pain, I mean, that's real.
Then, you know, it's real.
That is extremely unfortunate, of course.
I mean, if the rape or the molestation is true and if this is a body's way of reacting to it, and don't answer this, of course, because it's just, you know, if she's also been on these psychotropic medications I talked about, With Robert Whitaker a couple of times, author of a great book called Mad in America, which people should really read, then this of course may not be helping her brain, in my sort of particular amateur opinion.
So if she's seen a psychiatrist, there may be that stuff going on too.
I'm concerned.
I mean, for me, I have bipolar disorder, so like...
For me, if I didn't have my lithium, I would be crazy.
And I know because I was crazy.
But yeah, I don't like the way they get handed out like candy.
I also think she's been put on...
She's had unnecessary surgery.
They've done all kinds of stuff.
But I think that on some level, she's also never left her home, really.
She's never gotten out into the world.
Like I said, she was homeschooled.
She went to high school with me for three years.
She came in her second year.
And...
I don't think she really has any real perspective on the world.
Like, you know, she doesn't think that there's any problem with a man paying child support because it's, quote, just money.
And I think when she told me that, that was so indicative of her.
Her family is very wealthy.
Sorry, what did she say that was so indicative?
Oh, that if a man has to pay child support for a child who didn't want and a woman tricked him even into the pregnancy, as I was saying earlier, that it's a problem for the woman and it's no issue for the man because it's, quote, just money.
And money doesn't mean anything because she's never had to work a day in her life and she's never had to want for anything.
Right.
Well...
I can give you some thoughts about this.
Please.
And, you know, then you can tell me if it makes any sense to you.
There is, to me, like I've known a few people who've fallen prey.
You know, like rabbits in a field, the big giant hawk of ideology swoops down, grabs them.
And it's a predator.
You know, ideology, and by that I mean like really anti-rational, mine your soul against intimacy, co-opt you into some crazy worldview that can't be sustained but alienates other people.
I have seen people in my life get grabbed by these god-awful, talon-clawed predators of ideology.
And I put philosophy in a vastly opposite category, reason and evidence and all of that.
It can lead you to have trouble in your relationships, but that's because of facts, not because of ideology.
That's because of truth and reality, not because of bigotry.
So, the only thing that I've been able to work out, Sybil, goes a little something like this.
Life is a whole sequence of things that are supposed to happen One after another.
You get born.
You learn to walk.
You learn to talk.
You learn to manipulate your body to achieve your goals.
You learn to read.
You learn puberty.
I mean, you go through these sequences of things.
And it's sort of like think of a big stream, right?
We're all paddling, but there's a current.
And the current is mortality.
The current is we're born, we're going to grow up.
We're gonna age, we're gonna get old, and we're gonna die.
And in order to enjoy life, we need new scenery.
We need to see beautiful mountains, we need to see glowing cities, we need to see waterfalls and volcanoes, and we need to get hailed on from time to time.
Like, we need all of these things for life to remain rich.
Now, what I've seen happen to people, and your friend reminds me of this, Is that this river is not straight, right?
It goes around these bends and sometimes you hear this roaring head and you think, oh my god, there's a waterfall and doomed, right?
Now there's some bend in this river that we're all paddling down.
We can go back and forth, you know, we can, but there's still a direction, there's still a momentum.
But there's some bend that freaks people out.
And it's in that choice.
You say, well, what am I going to do?
I don't know what's around the bend.
It looks stormy.
It looks dangerous.
I hear large animals in the undergrowth.
Shark fins.
It's a Nicaragua freshwater stream.
I see alligators.
And I hear roaring.
Maybe there's a giant waterfall.
I panic about the bend around the river.
And...
We all feel that.
It happens to all of us from time to time.
And it's that moment when we say, well, what am I going to do?
I can spend a lot of energy paddling backwards from this next thing, from this bend in the river.
Or I can grip my teeth, link arms with my friends, and we can go down together.
And the next thing in life is always exciting and it's always scary, because there's no such thing as excitement without fear, really, or anticipation.
And what happens is, in my experience, when people have failed to go around the next bend, when they have that choice.
Everyone's moving ahead, gotta get to the next thing.
And they instead strike out for shore.
Like they take their, just start paddling towards shore.
Oh, I'll catch up.
I'm just going to take a bit of a rest.
And if you've ever watched leaves sort of going down a stream or a river, you know what happens is sometimes they just get caught in the little banks, the little eddies, the little inlets right to the side of the river.
And they just go round and round.
They get stuck there.
They can't get back into the main course.
They can't get back into the main current.
They can't get around the next bend.
They're caught in a watery side trap.
And this is not always an issue of courage, right?
It can be an issue of physical infirmity, such as your friend has.
But they can't get to whatever is next in life.
And whether what's next in life is a career or Getting married or having children or pursuing a dream in the art world or whatever it is.
Whatever it is that they really, really want to do or they really feel is important or they feel that's the next thing, they can't get to it.
They get stuck in the side of the river and they can't get back out.
Maybe for a while they could.
Maybe they just, yeah, we all need to take a break and rest our arms from time to time.
But what happens is then they get stuck there.
And they see everyone going by, younger people going by, people that they babysat and now going by and getting careers and getting educated, getting married and having children.
And they're stuck in this no time side pool, this tide pool, this stagnant pool, can't move forward.
And what I have seen, Sybil, is that the people who get stuck there Some by choice, some by circumstances.
I mean, I knew a guy who had digestive issues, significant digestive issues.
And that's a big challenge.
I'm not trying to wish that away or say, oh, you know, it doesn't matter.
These are very serious and very, very big issues.
And he was like, well...
It's too big for me.
Like, I can't move on.
And he never ended up dating, and he never ended up still living in the same apartment his mother died in.
And we'll never have a wife, a family, or any particular kind of career.
Because that's his thing.
And I don't want to say, like, I didn't go through what he went through.
So I'm not going to say, you know, good or bad or right or wrong.
But I will say this.
That when people fail to move forward, when they get stuck...
When they turn from the mainstream into a dead side pool and they see everyone else continuing to go by, it is very humiliating.
It's hard for people not to feel like failures and cowards.
And again, I don't know if it's true or not.
Maybe the physical things are overwhelming, but you think if they were, if the limitations were genuinely insurmountable, then I think they'd continue just a different path.
Like, if whatever happened to them was genuinely insurmountable, then I don't think they would end up as ideologues.
Because to me, ideologues, ideologies, is like the scar tissue that forms around stagnant, Pockets of nothing in life.
People who fail to move forward, people who fail to get to the next thing.
It's humiliating.
And when you don't have anything actually going on in your life, what do you want the most?
Drama!
And what does ideology give you but a wonderful sense of drama?
Isn't this what's going on with your friend?
She is in a dramatic struggle for femininity, for truth, for virtue, for safe spaces, for civilization, for...
Oh, God, I don't even know what.
But the social justice warrior stuff, these people are stuck.
They're not able to move forward.
They're not able to get to the next thing.
And they can't look in the mirror and say, I have failed in some way.
And the problem is not in the world.
The problem is not in the stars.
The problem is not in the patriarchy.
The problem is in me.
Stefan, I have to say.
The problem is in myself.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, you are so correct.
I just read the really short little book Mike Cernovich just put out right before the election, MAGA Mindset, Make America Great Again.
And it really reflects a lot of what you're saying.
And it's funny because I basically had to take a year off of school because of my bipolar, which was, and I feel the same way.
It's like when you sit still, you, yeah, you look at little things to get mad about you.
And she's been sitting still for most of her life, I think, or most of her adult life.
We're a combat species.
Well, you know that.
We're a combat species.
We didn't get to the top of the food chain by running to safe spaces.
You know, we got to the top of the food chain by beating up, domesticating, and eating everything that crossed our path.
And so we are a combat species.
And that's not a bad thing.
I'm engaged in combat.
I think it's good for the world.
It's healthy for the world.
Yes.
The fact that we've gotten so soft is a crime, honestly, against the human race.
Right.
Right.
So I think what's happened is the people who are moving forward in life, the people who are achieving great things in life, tend to be the least neurotic people I know.
And tend to be the kindest and most generous and most helpful and greatest people that I know.
I don't even know if it's neurotic.
Because, I mean, I'm technically neurotic.
But I think that I'm...
But it's self-awareness, I think, more than anything.
Is being aware that, hey, if you're not moving forward, yes, it is my fault.
It's no one else's.
Well, it's, you know, I try not to sort of make, and I hate to sound like old and Aristotelian, but like, it's a balance, right?
I mean, sometimes there are people who get in your way.
And, you know, sometimes if what happened to this woman happened when she was younger, that's a terrible burden and her body is in full revolt and so on.
But to me, the best thing that you can do if you want your friend to be cured is...
She was not reasoned into these beliefs.
She's not going to be reasoned out of them.
The question is, what What emotional need do these beliefs serve?
Well, it gives her a sense of purpose.
It gives her a sense of idealism.
It gives her a sense of morality.
It gives her a sense of achievement.
It gives her a sense of a moral mission, or I guess I would dare say crusade, although that probably would be a tough word for her to hear.
But it gives her a sense of all of this, and she doesn't really have to go out and risk anything in the real world.
It's online crusading.
It's pumper stickers.
I changed my avatar.
Right.
Yes, and she did.
Hers is a LGBT Hillary avatar on Facebook.
Right, right.
And this is the virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling, exactly.
You know, I got to tell you, this virtue signaling, I don't even want to do a whole rant on it, although it's tempting, but the virtue signaling to me is one of the grossest things around.
There was a joke when I was in theater school that we always used to say, Tom Hanks never shows you his Oscars.
You know, can you imagine?
I don't know.
He's got like, I don't know, half a dozen or a dozen Oscars.
He's some ridiculous number, right?
But you don't go to Tom Hanks' house and he's like, oh, come here.
Look, I got an Oscar for this and I got an Oscar for that.
Let me show you.
Here, hold this Oscar.
He wouldn't do that.
Why?
Because he actually did it.
In academia, it's the same way.
I mean, you don't go say like, oh, I published this and I published that and I've been.
Nobody does that.
And I know that there is, I do have to say this to you real quick because I do understand that there's a horrible...
The social science is horrible, I should say, actually.
Not all of us.
Hashtag not all.
We'll get to your masochism in a sec, but go on.
Hashtag not all.
I mean, what I do, at least in my field, there is something called quantitative social science, which is we're just concerned with statistics.
And, you know, unfortunately, we are in the minority.
And by the way, we are...
Silenced.
No one in here could...
It's been hard enough for me to do my research basically showing that video games aren't sexist.
And that's been hard to get that research published.
But anyway, that's a side note.
Well, what you need is earrings as big as basketball hoops to convince the planet of that.
I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Shit, what the hell were you talking about just before?
Oh yes, virtual signaling, right.
So people who are actually out there doing good in the world don't need to change their goddamn icons.
They don't need to say, I pray for X. You know, I pray for X is basically like, well, I don't want to do anything, but I'd really like people to treat me like I'm doing something.
I don't want to actually take any moral sacrifices.
I don't want to take any moral risks.
I don't want to risk any disapproval.
This is the thing that's so bullshit-laced about this virtue signaling.
It's like, I'm an anti-racist!
It's like, yeah, you're going to get a lot of flack for that, really, are you?
Are you really going to get a lot?
Of course everyone's anti-racist.
Racism, by its definition, is thinking negatively of any particular group with no evidence whatsoever.
It's pure bigotry, it's irrational, it's nasty, it's ugly, it's tribal, and it's bullshit, of course.
I'm against racism.
Ooh, really?
I am going to pray for the victims of terrorism.
It's like, yeah, yeah, you're going to catch a lot of flack for that because, boy, that's really edgy.
That's really going out there on a limb, you know?
It is, but you call this tribalism.
It's actually something called social identity.
Social identity theory, which is Tosh Valentino in 1974...
Main citation.
It's basically saying that people do this all the time in order to, it's virtually just sort of a newer term to describe showing off a symbol of your involvement in a group, right?
So the problem is that this is, you call it tribal, but there's like a whole ton of theory behind this, and it can go into like basically any possible social identity you can think of, be it No, but you used to do stuff.
You used to do stuff.
You'd say, well, I go to church to signal my solidarity with the church, but you'd actually have to get up and go to church, and you'd actually have to give some money, and you'd actually have to bake cakes for people, and you'd have to bring over lasagnas for people who were sick, and you'd have to help out in a soup.
You'd actually have to do something.
Yeah, now it is just...
But sexual identity is...
And that is the problem, I think, with her.
It's moral welfare.
It's all it is.
It's moral welfare.
You don't want to go out and work for your coins of credit for moral deeds.
You don't want to go out there and risk and confront potentially dangerous people or people who might get upset with you.
So what you do is you keep spewing out all of this moralistic garbage that never gets you in any trouble with anyone sane because all the sane people stay away anyway and all the crazy people...
Love you because you're doing exactly what they're doing.
You know, welfare is the desire for the unearned.
And this is the same thing.
I want to be paid as if I'm a good person without actually taking any risks or doing anything that might get me into any kind of trouble.
Well, guess what, snowflakes?
Morality is going to piss people off.
Doing good in the world is going to piss off bad people.
And if nobody's pissed off at you, you're not doing anything.
No, I love the video that got, I think, uploaded yesterday where you're talking about just keep doing what you're doing because it will continue to piss everybody off.
Or was it today about the, you know, social Marxists and all those things?
Right, right.
Yeah, just keep academia.
Go ahead.
Please, please continue to focus on gender.
But no, it makes you feel good, though.
Social identity, as research has indicated, like the more that you...
The Zoolander prime minister up here, right, goes to a mosque and gives a speech and the women aren't allowed on the same floor as the men, I think it was, right?
Right.
Yep.
Now, listen, I mean, if you're a feminist, go to the mosque and make your case as to why that's wrong and why that shouldn't be happening.
For some reason, Islam, and this is what I don't understand, like, if you're going to, and excuse the terminology, but it is, I think, actually very apt.
If you're going to try to red pill someone like I've been trying to red pill my friends, I think Islam is generally the easiest in there because Islam is so anti-woman.
Like, you know, how could any person who considers themselves to be a, I don't know, a There's some moral cases to be made, I think, is a fairly clear way of putting it.
And of course, but people won't do that.
I mean, they will attack Christians.
Why?
Because Christians are about the nicest people around.
And that, of course, I mean, this is all the left is doing, right?
But the Crusades, don't you remember the Crusades?
I do.
I've done a whole presentation on the Crusades about how they were a defense against the expansion of Islam and all of that.
So here's the thing, right?
Don't, in my opinion, right, this is just my perspective, Sybil, but you can't reason her out of this stuff because it serves a particular need.
And she is, you said she's 25, is that right?
She's 27.
She's 27, right?
So she's kind of living a life 10 years ago, right?
And she's stuck.
Yep.
No, I think you're stuck, right?
Yeah, so the question is, Is removing the ideology going to get her unstuck?
No, because that's the shadow, right?
You move the statue if you want to move the shadow, right?
You don't push the shadow, right?
So the effect of being stuck, of being paralyzed, of being unable to get to the next thing of life, of being 27 and living at home and fighting with her dad and being sucked into extreme moral viewpoints, that's like early to mid-teenage stuff, right?
That's how it seems to me.
Yeah, so she's stuck.
And she needs to find a way to justify being stuck.
And what do all of these leftist ideologies in general do?
They say, you're powerless.
They say, there's a big structure.
There's a big monolith out there.
You can't get around it.
You can't get through it.
It's patriarchy.
It's this.
It's whatever, right?
And they say, you can't win.
It's the opposite of empowering, of course, right?
And so...
A philosophy that tells you you can't achieve something really is going to appeal to people who are too afraid to take a chance.
Right?
Determinism.
We've got a caller in about this tonight, I think.
But determinism appeals to people who don't feel that they can or should or are comfortable with willing something, with making something happen.
And so look at the need for That this ideology is serving.
Now, if you can find a way to encourage her to get out and start achieving something in this life, then...
Without being offensive, because that's the fear.
Well, no.
I mean, what have you got to lose?
I guess at this point...
Listen, listen.
The friendship is dead as it is.
There's no friendship.
All there's going to be is petty, stupid conflicts, and she's going to try and drag you down to her level.
Right?
You can beckon to people who are stuck.
In the eddies.
They're stuck in the tide pools.
They're stuck on the side of the river.
But you can't go over there.
Because they'll just hang on to you.
And they'll pretend that there's progress because you're slowly spinning around and everyone else is still passing you by.
But she's just going to try and drag you down.
Like, no, no.
Do not engage with her in the realm of symptoms.
Do not engage with her in the realm of somehow these beliefs are valid and I have counter-arguments.
That's not what it's about.
What it's about is she's 27.
She's living at home.
She's got What?
What's going on for her?
Where's she going in life?
What's going to happen with her in life?
What are her goals?
What are her plans?
If you can get her moving, then slowly and painfully she will find that the ideology is less necessary.
Right?
She's addicted to painkillers.
I'm guessing.
I don't know if she's addicted or not.
But she takes a lot.
You said 30 pills, right?
30 bottles.
So she takes a lot of painkillers.
This ideology is just another one.
Oh, yes.
I see that.
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm just worried about like what, you know, I know that at Christmas we're going to be drinking eggnog and I know that no matter how much we try, politics are going to come up and this is going to come up and should I just avoid it?
No, just say, you know, I can tell you what I would say.
Sorry to interrupt you.
No, you're...
I can tell you what I would say.
And I've tried having this conversation with people who are stuck in ideologies.
I would say, look, it's not that great for us to have these conversations about ideology, but we were friends long before we had these different viewpoints.
But I really do want to know what's going on in your life.
What are your plans?
What's going to happen next?
What's the big thing?
What's going on?
I mean, you...
Are you going to stay at home?
Are you going to move out?
I mean, are you going to get into a relationship?
Are you interested in getting married?
Do you think you ever want to have kids?
I mean, these are big questions.
Where do you see yourself in five years or ten years?
I mean, these are the things that I think are more important than do we agree on the wage gap, you know, which is some kind of an academic and abstract discussion.
But I'm sort of more curious about, you know, see if you can touch the core of pain that sits at the heart of ideologues.
It's a very painful thing to be an ideologue.
It is to me.
And addiction.
And we all have this temptation, right?
We all have a conclusion that we like, that we harden our lives around, and then if it turns out to be false, it's disorienting and unpleasant and so on.
So I understand that there's a huge amount of pain, right?
I mean, this woman's been in chronic pain for years and years.
She may have been raped as a child.
She's stuck.
She's at home.
She's been infected with this stuff, this lefty crap.
There's a lot of pain in there.
Some people, you know, I try not to touch drowning people because they'll club you by accident or try and drag you down.
They're freaking out so much that proximity is very, very risky, which is why professionals are good to handle it if they do a good job.
But that doesn't mean I won't throw them down.
A life jacket.
It doesn't mean I won't throw them a life ring, right?
And so I wouldn't get in deep and try and sort of figure out everything that's going on with this woman, but know that you're here to talk about her life rather than these structures that she's trapped inside.
That's great.
No, that's really great advice.
Thank you so much, because, you know, I think that my, like, let me show you facts and numbers, that's clearly not working in Well, it works for you, but it works for you, and it's not.
And here's the other thing, Sybil.
Here's the other thing.
You've got to have an exit strategy.
You've got to have a point of no return.
Work hard.
She's a 15-year friendship, you said, right?
But she doesn't own you, and don't have, and I've been prey to this a lot in my life, so this is Not necessarily true, but certainly hard-won wisdom.
Do not assume your omnipotence in salvation.
You can't do it.
You can.
You can lead a horse to water.
You can't make a drink.
You can bring someone food.
You can't make them eat it.
And you can bring someone sympathy and curiosity and all of that.
But you can't, they have to row their way out of that corner on their own.
You can't go in and drag them out.
They'll just capsize you both and you'll both drown.
So just go in but have a standard or a sign or at least sensitivity to your own emotions to say at some point, I gotta, I can't go down with this person if they don't change.
Yeah, I mean, obviously.
I do want to say, though, here's her response.
I'll say it real quick.
She posted something about, oh, the Russians stole the election.
And I posted your video, Truth About Fake News, Russia Hacked the US Election.
I said Stefan released a good video about this yesterday.
And she said, I won't take information from random people on YouTube, and I know for sure about the first few things he said is BS. So the whole thing is BS. And like that's just sort of indicative of how it's like she just she didn't I don't know what you said in the first three minutes of that video but she didn't like it so just it's fake like that right because the big issue in her life is Russia oh I can't I don't understand I've tried to explain that to her she doesn't that's what she's really
got to work on you know 27 living at home No real job.
No real future.
I'm sure she's got some debt from school.
No real girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever.
No, I mean, chronic pain.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
The big issue is what What Putin was typing on the back of a horse with a flowing maid.
The horse, not Putin.
But yeah, I mean, you understand that this is crazy, right?
I mean, this is not the issue that is important in her life.
That's exactly why I want to call him, because this is insanity to me.
I don't understand how someone can be, again, so willfully ignorant.
But that's because you're in motion.
You're in motion.
You're achieving things.
You're doing things.
So you need facts.
If you...
I mean, one of the worst things for a philosophy is the unearned.
I mean, what the hell are her parents doing?
You know, if she actually had to go out and get a job, ideology...
It does not help you in reality.
That's how we know it's ideology.
Philosophy helps you in reality.
Science helps you in, you know, double-blind experimented medicine helps you in reality.
Ideology does not help you in reality.
It does quite the opposite.
So if you want to sand down ideology from people, expose them to the free market.
And the free market is like this wonderful sandblaster to just take all the jagged, ridiculous, idiotic spikes off our unreality.
It is absolutely The most important thing.
People on welfare.
They don't have to go out and get a job.
They don't have to provide value.
They don't have to struggle their way through challenging negotiations.
They don't have to deal with difficult customers.
Try being a waiter and ragging on people about their gender preference.
Try being a waiter and saying, To a man and a woman out on a date, oh, oh, he just grabbed the check, didn't he?
Well, he's buying your vagina, honey, because he's just paying for it and you're just basically a whore.
You know, good luck.
Good luck keeping that job or putting it in a nicer way.
It doesn't really matter.
Good luck with all of that, right?
Good luck getting a tip or keeping your job.
And so this kind of stuff, as long as she's hiding out at home and is not exposed to any kind of reality, she can continue to indulge in this crap.
And there's no cure like the free market for ideology.
It really, really brings the conflict.
Because there's no conflict between her ideology and her livelihood at the moment.
Because, you know, daddy...
I guess Daddy is paying the bills while she rails against patriarchy.
Yeah, okay, got it.
You're really, really an independent chick there, honey.
Yeah, a terrible patriarch with Daddy paying for everything.
Her mother was a stay-at-home mom her whole life.
Her mother's never had a job.
She's lived entirely off her dad her whole life.
Yeah, it's sort of like, you know, I come from a blue-collar, working, lower-class family, and to be able to kind of go to And so you do well and your kids will be lazy.
Probably.
Let's hope not.
I don't know.
If I'm as pro-trend as I am, let's hope not.
Anyway, thank you so much.
I don't want to take up too much more time.
I know it's been a long time.
You're welcome.
And I appreciate you calling in.
And do let us know how it goes.
And do tell your friends.
I really wish you the best.
And life continues to move whether you go with it or not.
The river is always in motion.
And if she can kick her way back to the current, she'll have a much better time, I think.
Thank you so much.
Bye.
Alright, thanks Sybil.
Alright, up next we have Phil.
Phil wrote in and said, Stefan has talked several times about the inevitable market correction resulting from devaluing of United States currency, our unfunded liabilities, and the rampant welfare state.
I am a prepper and published a podcast about preparedness.
Could Stefan speak about what this market correction will result in, what to expect, what its duration will be, and what concerns a person should have to protect their family during the ensuing chaos?
That's from Phil.
Hey Phil, how you doing?
How you doing, sir?
Thanks for having me on tonight.
Well, my pleasure.
Do you want to mention the name of your show?
I wasn't going to throw it in, but since you're offering it, the name of the podcast is Matter of Facts.
Do you want to spell that for just M-A-T-T-E-R-O-F-F-A-C-T-S? M-A-T-T-E-R-O-F-F-A-C-T-S. Well, I try not to expound on expertise when I have an expert around.
I have done some prepper work.
I won't get into all of the details, but I am fairly well positioned.
For a short to medium term crisis, and I have been for some years, and I'm pleased about all of that, but you certainly sound, since you have a whole podcast on it, you sound like much more of an expert.
Is there stuff that you would like to get across to my audience that would, I'm sure, be more detailed than what I could come up with?
I wouldn't really characterize myself as an expert.
I mean, I have a fair amount of knowledge I try to share with anybody that'll listen.
But I don't disagree with what you're saying, or at least what I understand that you're saying.
I believe it's going to happen.
But whenever I talk about prepping as a subject, I always start from what's our requirement?
What are we prepping for?
And, I mean, obviously if we're talking about a short-term correction being a week, then it's a different scenario versus six months.
If we're talking about violent upheaval versus just short-term...
Say, food shortages or hyperinflation in the short term.
It's a very different scenario.
So I guess I just wanted to have a conversation with you about what exactly are you envisioning?
I mean, I'm kind of up in the air between are we looking at Venezuela or are we looking at Soviet Union breadlines?
What do you envision this is going to be?
Well, that's, I mean, that's a big question.
And I would have answered with more certainty prior to Donald Trump.
But I think Donald Trump is going to buy us time.
I do.
I mean, in the same way that computers bought us time and this platform.
I mean, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote about this wonderful machine made by the 20th century motor company that converted static in the air into electricity and was sort of infinite energy and all that.
And She died, I think, in 1982, so she really didn't see much of the beginning of all of this stuff, but the reason why we still have a civilization is because of computers, because the wages have been stagnant or declining for 20 or 30 years for most people, except for the very rich.
And the reason for that is so much government control, regulation, taxation, debt, and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, there's very little of the free market left, but what's kept us propped up Is computerization, robotization, and so on.
That has produced the kind of wealth that has allowed the system to continue.
And Donald Trump may be, or this kind of movement may be, something that buys us a little bit more time.
In the same way that Joseph McCarthy bought a little bit of time by chasing back some of the lefties from the cultural hegemony that they had enjoyed since the 1930s, in the 1950s.
And for more on that, you should read Ann Coulter's book, Treason, which is fantastic about Whitaker Chambers and all of this kind of stuff.
But anyway, so I think we have time now.
Well, America may be a little bit more than where I am.
But I think that in the long run, it's going to go one of two ways.
I mean, either it's going to be a soft landing or a hard landing.
It's going to be a landing.
I mean, mathematically, that which cannot continue will not continue.
And the soft landing is if people understand and begin to adjust, and the hard landing is if everybody doubles down.
Now, very fortunately, very fortunately, the right, the conservatives, are learning how to punch the hell back at the leftists.
And that is...
Really, really important.
The fact that leftists are getting goosed, the fact that leftists are getting outed, the fact that leftists are suffering negative consequences for all of their crap now is really, really quite encouraging.
And what that means, of course, is that if the alternative media can replace the legacy media, then we have people with actual facts and actual answers who can help guide the airplane with landing wheels or not down to a soft landing.
If we can't fight our way through to some kind of cultural prominence, those of us who are more remotely reality-based, then it's going to be a hard landing.
Now, a hard landing is something like Venezuela, where now people are handing over their children to others because they can't afford to keep them.
I was reading about this woman, I think she had six or seven children, and she survives on her father's pension or something, and it translates to like $6 a month on the black market.
And people are taking the Bolivars and bundling them together and burning them for cooking for, I guess, maybe heat if they need it.
And, um...
Sounds like 1920s Germany, honestly.
Burning Reichsmarks to keep...
Well, no, no.
Much worse than 1920s Germany.
Because 1920s Germany had a high IQ population, right?
True.
And what's happening in South and Central America, as has happened in many other places, is happening in Zimbabwe at the moment.
Right?
The head of Zimbabwe, was it Mugabe?
Basically chased all of the white farmers out, and now they're facing a food shortage, and they're demanding that white people send them foreign aid.
Of course, right?
Because what happens is when you get high IQ population coming into a low IQ area, the high IQ population organizes things, which is always seen as colonialism by the low IQ population.
And then the low IQ population, because of the extra productivity from the high IQ population, they...
Have lots of babies who then grow up to survive and you get this giant swelling of a population.
And then what happens is the Marxists come in and make everyone resentful of the high IQ population and they all chase the high IQ population out.
And then what happens in the long run is the population returns to its original level.
And that's, I mean, it's God awful.
It's God awful what is happening in Venezuela and other places at the moment.
But that's what happens when people don't understand the IQ curve.
I mean, people get mad at me talking about the IQ curve.
It's like, do you know how much compassion and kindness is involved in talking about the IQ curve and ethnicities differences in general on the IQ curve?
Because if you deny the IQ curve and view everything as exploitation, then you chase your exploiters away and then Millions of people die horrible deaths.
I mean, it is so cruel to not talk about it.
It's so vicious, so ugly, so hateful, so sociopathic, fundamentally, so callous to not talk about this kind of stuff.
So, no, in Germany, you have a very high IQ population, and so they were able to adjust in certain ways and able to come up with solutions.
But, you know, you combine a lower IQ population with a lot of Marxism and a lot of this resentment and all this kind of crap, and you just get this endless doubling down.
And, of course, it's god-awful.
I mean, the media which claims to care about the poor, the mainstream media, legacy media, claims to care about the poor.
They're not talking about what's going on in Venezuela.
Why?
Because they were all praising Hugo Chavez as this socialist warrior god who was going to lead Venezuela to a new paradise, unlike that totally evil Augustus Pinochet who was just the most evil and nasty and horrible human being Of course, Chile is doing well, and in Venezuela, they're hunting rats and pigeons for food and handing over their children like they're in some sort of god-awful 19th century Dickensian novel.
And so you won't hear about it.
So I think it depends what the constitution of the population is or how the population is constituted.
If you have a significant number of high IQ people, you get a soft landing.
If you don't, if they're outnumbered, you get a hard landing.
And I hate to say it, but I think it just comes down to that simple.
All right.
So assuming we're looking forward to a soft landing, my assumption – and please disagree with me if you see it differently – but my assumption would be we're talking about short-term inflation.
We're talking about a devalue of the currency.
We're not talking about necessarily – maybe not a violent outbreak, but we are talking about, say, widespread temporary poverty.
But not a complete breakdown of society.
If the complete breakdown of society is the soft landing, I don't even know what the hard landing is.
No, I mean, my big concern is currency devaluation leading to barter, leading to an interruption in the food chain.
That, to me, is the big challenge.
And this, of course, is a significant challenge in cities.
Cities are...
Days away from hunger at any particular moment.
I mean, you don't grow the food in the cities, you grow the food outside the cities and you exchange or trade from the farmers to the cities.
And so what happens is when the currency becomes worth less and less and less, then the farmers say, well, there's no point selling my food for money because the money is worth nothing.
And so I'm just going to hang on to my food.
And then what happens is people in the city go to the grocery store and And there's no food.
And then what, right?
I mean, then, of course, the government will often go and start rounding up food from the farmers and delivering it to the cities, which destroys farming.
And I mean, it gets worse from there.
So it really has...
A lot to do with how people understand what's going on.
So if people understand, well, the reason the currency is becoming valueless is the government has printed way too much.
And because we've got too many unfunded obligations, we've got too many people on the dole and not enough people working, and so we need to fix all of that.
And then you get a soft landing where it's uncomfortable and it's dislocated, but it can be solved fairly quickly.
But, but...
Um, if people double down on the socialist stuff, as is happening in Venezuela, right?
I mean, idiots double down.
Like, whenever you, whenever someone's confronted with counter-information and they double down, this is a mark of just stupidity.
Like, I mean, whether it's, they could even have a high IQ, I don't know, but it's just stupidity and dogma and all that kind of crap, which is kind of the same thing.
And so, if you have dumb people around, um, Then they're going to double down on all of the policies that produced the dislocations in the first place.
And then the only thing that happens from there is like literal starvation, right?
Again, unless, of course, you know, other countries are not going to want to see it destabilized and America may act if it happens in South or Central America or whatever to try and help and all of that.
But that's, yeah, that to me, I'm more concerned about the interruption in the food supply.
That's potential if...
The currency becomes worth less.
Not worthless, but worth less.
Yeah, and some of the big things I bring up in my listenership all the time are talking about having a food stock, talking about having a potable water source in your home stored up, because I keep trying to preach the idea that you can't depend on the grocery store, you can't depend on the city water supply.
You have to kind of plan for things to go wrong.
And not to get too personal, but I mean, I live in southeast Louisiana, I've seen Hurricane Katrina up close.
I've seen the flooding here in southeast Louisiana fairly up close more recently.
So, I mean, my family's been around enough natural disasters to know the only way to really come out of them unscathed is to plan for everything to go wrong and have a plan in place for what are you going to do when everything goes wrong.
So, I mean, you know, the interruption in the food supply, that's...
That and Interruption of the Water Spire are probably the two gravest concerns.
They're somewhat easily addressed, though.
I mean it doesn't take a long period of time to put together a couple of months of extra food.
It really – I mean if we're talking about nonperishable goods, rice and beans and that sort of stuff, it just doesn't take a lot of time or money.
The problem is getting people to actually do it.
Yeah.
I mean, and just for the average person who lives in the city, they've grown up with an inconvenience lifestyle where they can have TV dinners every night and the freezer's always stocked, the idea that there's never going to be food on the shelves doesn't compute.
It doesn't get all the way through their head.
They don't have a reference for it.
And here's the thing, too.
Like, okay, so let's say that it's all nonsense and Against all odds and all historical examples, nothing particularly bad happens.
So you bought some food when it was cheaper.
You know, the price of food is certainly going up.
That we know for sure.
That's already happening.
Even if it's a shrinkflation where it seems like the same amount of food, but it's actually less in the can or the tin or whatever.
And so, yeah, you go out and buy some stuff and then you just, you know, just...
Use it up over time and then buy more.
What's the worst that happened is you bought some food which you can keep and you can eat when the price of it has gone up.
It's a good investment no matter what.
I tell everybody, the freeze-dried emergency food that I keep on hand for those emergencies, that's camping food.
I mean, when my family goes out and we want to camp, I grab a bucket of that, I throw it in the back of the car, we're covered for three or four days.
And it's the same thing I preach when I talk to people about having ammunition for a firearm in your home so you can protect yourself.
Ammunition doesn't go bad.
It doesn't spoil.
And in my 34 years of life, I've never seen it go down in price.
So if you buy that 1,000 rounds of ammunition today for $250, $350, I promise you'll never lose money on it.
To me, I guess, my challenge has always been that for a person who understands prepper ideology, you don't really have to sell them on the idea.
It just makes sense.
But then for the people that it doesn't make sense to, it's a difficult sell.
Because like you said, it's what we call a low likelihood, high consequence situation, where the odds are it's never going to happen.
But if it does, you're in trouble.
Right.
And this is one of the terrible things about nature, is that there are times when nature is not kind to those who don't prepare.
Well, but you know, I would counter that by saying I think that nature is very kind, only to the point of by not being kind to the people that don't prepare, it rewards the people that do.
Oh, I know, I know.
I get that, I get that.
That probably sounds very amoral and very relativistic, but I mean, that's just the way I look at it.
It's like if you drink liquor and smoke for 40 years and you get cancer and you die young, There's, you know, it's tragedy in the individual death, but nature doesn't reward bad decisions.
It's not supposed to.
Right.
Well, the welfare state does, right?
So we've got this dysgenics going on with the welfare state, which is the transfer, usually, of money for more responsible people to less responsible people.
So we've kind of got this dysgenics going on.
The welfare state is this big, giant eugenics program or dysgenics program and lots of other things.
But nature always corrects.
And this is what people forget.
Nature always corrects.
You can have more and more less intelligent people in society making more and more bad decisions.
Nature will correct.
And everybody who's trying to...
I've been arguing against the welfare state for 35 years.
And people have thought that I'm cruel.
And I'm not.
It's the kindest possible thing that you can do.
Is to argue against the welfare state.
Because when the government runs out of money...
Which it's going to do.
And you see, we all, or most of us, live on debt.
Most of us live on fiat currency.
Fiat currency is not just a bunch of stuff that floats around the economy.
It's not like M1, M2. It's not just a bunch of numbers in the Fed database.
It's not just a bunch of paper money floating around.
You understand?
Federal reserve money, fiat currency, is what most people live on.
It's why we have the populations that we have.
I don't just mean the size, but the bell curve distribution.
When that runs out, that's the real interruption in the food supply.
The actual groceries, that's just a symptom.
But we are all living on a massive amount of debt and inflation.
And, you know, if you say, well, I'm just going to have 12 kids And I'm just going to borrow money to pay all the bills.
Well, at some point, you aren't going to have the money you need to feed your children.
And it's not kind.
You know, this whole debt fiat currency thing is an intense, poised brutality waiting to happen.
And it's going to happen.
And it is going to be brutal, just as we can see it being brutal in places like Venezuela, in places like Zimbabwe, in places like South Africa and so on.
It is going to be brutal.
And, you know, if you tell someone to quit smoking, they're going to be uncomfortable now, but they're going to be alive later.
And if all you do when someone tells you to quit smoking is like, oh, you just don't want me to have any fun, you cruel, sadistic bastard.
It's like, well, how much fun are you going to have when you've got emphysema at 50, right?
Mm-hmm.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm gathering from the conversation is you feel that the IQ bell curve is going to at least partially dictate whether or not we can expect a soft landing or a hard landing.
Right, which is why immigration is important.
Why do I care?
Well, I care about people, and it's going to be It's going to be brutal.
I mean, if there are populations that come into the West, have a lot of kids based on the welfare state, if the welfare state dries up, how are they going to feed their kids?
Well, and you know, Stephanie, to bring a moment of humor into the conversation, I always think back to this cartoon I saw, and it was a It was one of the stereotypical signs you see in a state park here in the U.S. where it says, don't feed the animals.
And the idea always was, well, if you feed the animals, they'll get used to people, and then they might walk in front of a car, or they won't learn how to fend for themselves.
And the cartoon I'm thinking of shows this sign, and it's hanging over a bear's head saying, don't feed the bears.
And then there's a split screen, and there's a man in front of a welfare office.
And I always think back to that because I'm like...
How do people just not see this, that we are teaching an entire group of people not to be self-reliant?
I mean even more than the average person who lives on dead and doesn't have food put away or doesn't heed any of my warnings, but they cannot – even within the current system, they can't pay their bills without the government.
I mean that is sadistic.
Right.
No, it is.
It is.
But, of course, politicians are not into telling people the truth.
They're into bribing them with unearned money and buying their votes thereby.
So it is a whole social system, a whole perspective, and a whole blindness that is going to have to be corrected.
And, you know, it's, of course, my hope that we can correct it through reason and evidence.
But...
That will only reach some people.
And the problem is smart people have stopped being assertive.
And that's because smart people have been so demonized by Marxism and leftism as exploiters.
Because Marxism and leftism denies the bell curve.
The leftists are very anti-scientific this way.
And therefore, everyone's the same.
And therefore, the workers aren't less intelligent than the bosses.
And therefore, the bosses are exploiting Well, that and guilt.
No, seriously, this is hugely, hugely important.
You know, I'm not calling the guy dumb, but relative to, you know, this guy has read my, the guy, the first caller, read my book like five times, listened to the audiobook five times, can't replicate a single argument in it.
It's like he's never read it at all.
It's like, no, this is not your thing.
This is not your thing.
There's nothing wrong with it.
His thing could be something fantastic.
He could be a great ballet dancer or, you know, I don't know, right?
Could be a wonderful restaurateur.
Who knows, right?
But this is not his thing.
It's really, really important to For smart people to continually remind dumb people that they're dumb.
Because otherwise, the dumb people, there's lots of people out there saying to the dumb people, oh, you're just as smart as the smart people.
But, you know, the smart people, they just exploit you and they, you know, they just have all these contacts and, you know, it's a whole system and it's all rigged against you and they're only rich because you're poor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And it is really, really important for the smart people to say, sorry, you guys are dumb.
Nothing bad, nothing wrong.
Doesn't mean you're any less of a human being.
Doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.
It doesn't mean that you're bad in any shape or form.
And there are times when I sure wish I was dumb.
Oh my god, the bliss of having half my brain scooped down like a big giant ice cream cone.
I mean, that would just be delightful at times, you know.
It's sort of like, well, would you like to make a decent amount of money?
But sometimes worry a lot?
Well, that's your price sometimes, right?
And so it's not a better or worse thing, but You know, if Danny DeVito wants to join the basketball team, there's no point them pretending that they can have him LARP and do it because he can't do it.
They have to say, sorry, maybe you can play a taxi dispatcher, but you can't do this because you're too short.
And this aspect of things, the assertiveness of intelligent people, used to be very common.
There used to be a big sorting mechanism in society.
Higher education used to be for the super smart people.
And the super smart used to lord it over the dumb.
And sorry, that's just, it's the way it is.
It's the way it is.
There's a distribution in so many different kinds of abilities.
And, you know, Sofia Vergara saying to Amy Schumer, you know, we're exactly the same level of physical attractiveness.
It just, it's a lie.
It's wrong.
For the tall guy to say the short guy with the same eye.
For the smart, smart people have to spend a lot of time Telling dumb people that they're dumb.
And I know this sounds pejorative.
It's really not.
It's for the best of everyone.
And it doesn't mean the smart people are always right, and it doesn't mean the dumb people are any less.
It just is a reality.
You're not smart.
You don't know what you're doing.
You need to stay out of the way.
Because, you know, smart people are discussing things.
Like, I don't barge into physics conferences and expect them to take me seriously.
Because they're really good at physics.
And I'm not.
But it takes intelligence to know you're bad at something.
It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
You can look it up.
D-U-N-N-I-N-G. I think K-R-U-G-E-R. Dunning-Kruger effect.
It takes intelligence to know you're not good at something.
And...
It's the period people, right?
I mean, I remember meeting a guy when I was younger.
He's like, period.
Like, period.
End of discussion.
No more.
Period.
It's just this way.
Period.
It's like, well, period is where your intelligence ends and curiosity should begin.
It's not going to happen for you now, is it?
Now, of course, politicians don't want to say to dumb people, you're dumb.
Why?
Because one person, one vote equalizes levels of intelligence to the point where dumb people think they're smart.
It's just the way it is.
You know, this everyone gets a prize, this girly.
Women don't like to, in general, women don't like to point out differences.
Men do, or men compete, it's win-lose and so on.
Women, it's a lot of collaboration and so on.
And of course, women are more clustered around the center of the bell curve, so there are just fewer differences between smart and dumb women on average, but there are huge differences between smart and dumb men on average, because men are much wider on the bell curve distribution.
So, there's this tension, right?
For society to function well, it needs to relentlessly promote intelligence so that the very smartest people are doing the most important stuff in the free market.
But for democracy to work, it has to relentlessly appeal to the vanity of the less intelligent.
And these two are fundamentally in conflict.
And there's no way to solve it while you have a state of society.
There's no way to solve it other than, you know, I mean, I guess the answer that Plato gave was for the kings to become philosophers, for the philosophers to become kings, for society to be divided up into sort of the gold, the silver, and the bronze, like the really smart people, the intellectuals, the sort of professionals, and then the manual laborers or the slaves, and just...
This is where people have to be because there's this distribution.
So the appeal to the vanity of the ignorant and the unintelligent that is the hallmark of democracy is fundamentally at war with a relentless promotion of meritocracy that is an aspect of the free market.
And that is really, really important.
If I think I'm as great a singer as Pavarotti, but only Pavarotti gets the opera gigs...
I'm going to get really angry and resentful.
Like, if no one tells me, yeah, you're an okay singer, but you're not.
Like, you're no Pavarotti, right?
Well, that gives me the facts that I need to measure my decisions, to temper my decisions, and also to make sure that I apply myself to something that is an actual good use of my talents and abilities.
So, yeah, there is going to be some kind of landing there.
When the Catholic Church monopolized the intelligent and locked them in general away in monasteries and so on, or in priesthoods, right?
When it basically rendered infertile these smartest men in society and women, I guess for that matter with the nunneries as well.
When that changed, Right?
In the 15th century with the advent of Protestantism, which liberated the smartest men and allowed them to have babies.
Well, what do you get?
You get the Renaissance.
You get the Enlightenment.
You get the Age of Reason.
You get the Industrial Revolution.
You get all of these wonderful things because, hey, look, now smart people are breeding again.
And I hope it's not going to be as brutal a correction.
But this tension between democracy and meritocracy is going to have to be resolved somehow because it simply can't go on the way it's going.
Well, it almost sounds to me like the correction, I guess regardless of whether or not it's hard or soft, that's going to influence the consequences.
But I get the impression that when the correction comes, it's going to kind of work itself out.
You know what I mean?
I mean, without any influence from society, from government, from maybe anything else, the market correction will sort itself out.
It has to.
Yeah, it's, you know, I still, I mean, I know how much suffering it's going to be.
I mean, I just, I know.
And so, yeah, I know what you mean, but I wish there was a different way.
Having seen a couple of natural disasters up close and having dealt with Hurricane Katrina on a pretty personal level, all I can say to any of your listeners that are heeding your warning is don't take anything for granted and get ready for it because...
I've seen firsthand that when the government checks stop, when the store shelves run bare, when the police abandon the roads, when things really go bad, it's going to get very interesting very quickly.
And if you live in the city, I highly suggest you find her a place to be.
Right, right.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm going to move on, but thanks very much.
I hope that people will check out your show.
I haven't, but I'm sure it's excellent.
And I really appreciate the topic.
It is a good reminder for people that...
It sort of reminds me of what some of the Jews said about leaving Europe in the 1930s.
There were some who were very optimistic and some who were very pessimistic.
And the pessimistic ones did a lot better than the optimistic ones.
And that's an important thing to remember.
So thanks, man.
I appreciate your call in.
And let's move on to who we have next.
Alright, up next we have Philip.
Philip wrote in and said, You can't change a rock's course by speaking to it, but you can change a human's course by speaking to it.
Relating that doing a thing that by your beliefs shouldn't work in an attempt to make it work is insane in no way makes doing a thing that by your beliefs can work in an attempt to make it work insane.
There's nothing insane with speaking to an AI to get an answer, pushing a rock to get a movement, or speaking towards a human to get an answer.
Do you agree that your argument, explaining, that arguing for determinism is inconsistent and not valid?
That's from Philip.
So you're asking me if my arguments against determinism, if I'm going to say that they're invalid because you've made statements unsupported by arguments or evidence?
So the answer to that would be no, no, I will not consider them to be invalid because you've made statements rather than made arguments.
Okay.
If you want to make an argument, I'm very happy to hear it.
Yeah, I'm working on it.
No, no.
See, you've had time to prepare.
You can't be working on it live, right?
What are your arguments?
I'm saying that your argument that with The Rock is not an argument.
Do you get to just say that something isn't an argument and then you think you've beaten the argument?
Well, how would I do it otherwise?
Do you just get to say I've won at tennis and then just walk off triumphant?
Well, I could but I'm not prepared to well, I mean I could try, maybe I am to settle the Standards for what is an argument and then put an argumentation.
No, no, no.
Are you saying you don't know what an argument is?
I think I got a good idea what an argument is.
You think you have a good idea what an argument is?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Okay, so perhaps you would like to make the argument.
You can't mind the argument.
I see that I haven't made an argument.
I know I can recognize when something's an argument and it's not.
And it's rare to see arguments.
No, it is.
And listen, I sympathize.
I assume you were raised in government schools or you've not been taught how to make an argument.
I think it's really tragic.
You're a smart guy, good language skills, you're very curious and interested in very important philosophical topics, and you don't know how to make an argument.
Okay, let me give you some help.
Would that be alright?
Sure.
Spirit of comradeship across the free will divide.
Alright.
So, for those who don't know, very, very briefly...
If we are machines of matter, in the same way that a waterfall, you don't know exactly how many droplets are coming down, and you probably never would be able to predict it, but you know that it's not free will.
And just because you can't predict the behavior of individual human beings, like water droplets coming down a waterfall, doesn't mean that human beings have free will, just because you can't perfectly predict it, or you don't know exactly what the weather's going to be like unless you're...
You don't know exactly what the weather is going to be like, but you have a general trend and so on, right?
So the unpredictability of human beings is not an argument for free will.
Human beings are composed of matter.
And matter is governed by physical laws.
And physical laws do not allow for free will.
We do not say that the tree is dancing unless we're into bad poetry.
We say that the tree, the branches are moving according to the physical properties of the wind and the branch and the tensile strength and the flexibility of the leaf stems or whatever it is, right?
And so since we are composed of matter, and matter has nowhere within it free will, We cannot say that we have free will unless we're going to say that we're somehow physically differentiated from matter, all the other matter in the universe.
And of course, religious people do this by saying that God has put a soul or a ghost in our body and that is the source of our free will.
But saying that a ghost did it is not really a very scientific explanation or the soul is the seed of free will.
And so this argument that we have free will Is something that doesn't really stand any kind of material test of matter and energy and the fact that we don't have any magic portal to choice outside of matter and energy, that we're not somehow fundamentally different from all other matter.
There's no such thing as a soul according to the materialistic definition.
So that sort of would be the argument against some of the propositions that I put forward.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, I completely follow.
Okay, good.
Now, the question of the rock.
So one of the ways that I've countered that is to say, well, of course there is emergent properties, right?
So in emergent properties, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There's no atom in you that is alive.
There's no atom in you that can move, can initiate movement, let's say.
However, the aggregation of all the atoms within you does give you life.
We certainly would say that we're alive, even if we don't accept that we have free will.
There's still a difference between living matter and non-living matter.
And so, although no atom of yours is alive, your aggregation of atoms produces this wonderful thing called life, and so on.
One counterargument that simply because we are bound by matter doesn't mean that we are only matter, right?
So because we are composed of matter doesn't mean that we are down to the complete sum of our parts.
That's sort of like saying, well, there are lots of carbon atoms in a car, but you can't drive a carbon atom, therefore you can't drive a car, right?
I mean, the aggregation is sort of important.
My other argument, of course, is that when people attempt to change my mind, then they are attempting to use their deterministic viewpoint to interact with my deterministic viewpoint in order to change my mind.
Now, the moment that you walk up to someone and say, I want to change your mind, you are implicitly saying that the mind can be changed.
Now, people say, well, that's just like one billiard ball hitting another billiard ball and so on, but the reality is...
Somebody has to hit the first billiard ball in order for that to happen at all.
But the counterargument to that is to say, if the determinist viewpoint puts forward the argument that the human brain is fundamentally the same as all other matter in the universe, and since we do not think a tree has free will or a rock has free will, why would a human brain have free will?
Well, the problem with that argument is that if we look at another complex Only semi-predictable system, like the weather, human beings don't have arguments with weather unless they're kingly or kind of crazy, right?
And human beings don't have arguments with computers, and they don't have arguments with forests, and they don't have arguments with geisters and so on, right?
And so if you're saying, well, the human brain is fundamentally the same as every other aggregation of matter and energy in the universe, but then you would consider it crazy to argue With any aggregation of matter in the universe other than the human brain, then you're basically saying all of these grapefruit are identical.
But everyone except these grapefruit, this grapefruit in particular, will kill you if you eat it.
It's like, well, then they can't be identical, right?
If you're gonna say they're identical, then you can't then treat one preferentially to the other if they're all identical.
And so...
It was sort of like saying, here are two twins, they look exactly the same.
I find this twin ravishingly beautiful and this twin hideously ugly.
Well, no, if they're physically virtually identical, then you can't have complete.
So if determinants are going to say, well, the human brain is just like every other aggregation of matter and energy in the universe, but then would consider it insane to argue with any other aggregation than the human brain, then they're saying, well, the human brain is just like everything else, but it would be crazy to argue with anything except the human brain.
Therefore, Yeah, I remember.
I remember it.
I wanted to...
I'll reply to two things.
First the aggregation and then where you went from there.
First with the aggregation is when you refer to the sum of the parts and the whole, you're referring to the same thing.
Is that true?
Okay, so when I say the whole is, hang on, when I say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, how can you say that I'm referring to that I'm saying that they're identical?
If I'm saying one is greater than the other, like, so I'm saying nine is a bigger number than six, and you're saying, okay, so nine and six are the same number?
It's like, no, I'm saying nine is greater than six.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so the whole is not the same as the sum of its parts.
Okay.
Hold on.
I got it.
Two seconds.
Sure.
I haven't found it, but I'll do it off the top of my head.
There's two possibilities.
When you say the sum of the parts, either you're referring to the sum of the parts when they're together composing a human body or when they're not composing a human body.
In the instance where they're composing a human body, Well, they do have together the emergent property of life.
They each are like a shareholder of that property.
They each cause part of it and together with all their causes, like the relationship between each other, they build up life, that property of life.
On the other hand, if you refer to them as separate, well, I don't think it's okay to Refer to them as being separate.
I think that variable in the argument should be kept constant.
If you refer to them in one state, you should refer again to them, maybe in a different way, but still as them being as part of a body.
Does that make sense?
No, I don't follow, but...
Human beings are what, like 80% water?
Now, water is not alive.
And if you take all the water out of a human being, that human being is now dead, right?
So water is essential for life.
Life cannot exist without water, but water is not alive.
So water, in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff, participates in this magical thing called life.
And so, no atom of yours is alive, but together they produce something called life, right?
Okay, let me...
To get this clear, when you say the sum of all the parts, are you referring to those parts in a state where they're part of a living human body or when they're separate?
Well, sure.
Of course.
I mean, if they're separate, there's no life, right?
I mean, if all of your atoms are separated, there's no life.
Well, so then you're saying the sum of the parts that are part of a human body that is alive The wall of those is greater than the sum of the parts that are part of a human body that has life.
But the wall is also, you know...
I'm sorry, the what?
The wall?
I'm not sure what you mean.
I think you said the...
Oh, the will?
No, the wall.
Like, that the wall of the sum of those parts is greater.
Oh, the hole.
The hole?
Yeah, W-H-O-L-E. Yeah, that's pronounced hole, not wall.
Whole.
It's fine.
It's just a minor thing.
It's close to a whole.
I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying, because I wasn't sure what you meant.
So yes, I mean, for sure.
So if we say, well, the human brain is governed by the same laws of physics as everything else, and everything else doesn't have free will, then how can we say the human brain has free will?
Well, I would say emergent properties, right?
So no individual atom in your brain has free will.
I dare say no individual cell or neuron has free will.
has free will, but the aggregation of the couple of pounds of wetware known as your brain as a whole can potentially have free will.
In other words, it's the argument from, you know, well, if we reduce it down to its component parts, we can't find life in any atom, therefore there's no such thing as life, even though life is entirely composed of atoms, right?
I mean, there is just the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and therefore saying that the brain is a sort of biochemical engine of atoms and all of that.
It doesn't preclude free will at all, any more than saying the body is composed of atoms, therefore can't have life.
Because atoms don't have life.
There is the emergent properties, right?
Okay.
I watched...
But first, I want to finish the part with the sum aggregation and the whole.
Yes.
When you say the sum of the aggregated parts and the whole, you're referring to the same thing.
Both the whole...
is the sum of the aggregated parts, and the sum of the aggregated parts are a whole in that sentence.
So when I say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, how do you see them as equivalent?
Well, because the whole is made of what?
The parts in a human body.
And the sum of aggregated parts, you said you refer to them as being part of the body.
It's the same amount of parts you're referring to.
I know.
And you add one and one together and you get three.
You understand?
I know it's mathematically confusing, but this is the reality.
You add one and one atoms together and you get atoms plus life.
But there's a problem.
If both of the things are the same...
You can interchange them.
It's like saying one is greater than one.
You could have said the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, or the sum of the parts are greater than the whole.
Yes, and you know if you get enough, like no atom glows, but if you get enough atoms together and it collapses into a giant nuclear bomb known as a star, then you get a giant glow, right?
No atom is enough to hold the moon in orbit around the earth.
However, you get enough atoms together and...
The Earth is able to hold the Moon in orbit around it.
So this is the 1 plus 1 equals 3.
It's just the way that physics work.
It's the way that biology works in particular, right?
They're just atoms, right?
Let's just say we have 10 trillion atoms in our body.
So 10 trillion, like 1 plus 1 plus 1, 10 trillion times, ends up with 10 trillion atoms and life.
So it's 1 plus 1 equals 3.
It's just what emergent properties means.
So go on that enough atoms to hold Whatever with the Sun.
Those enough atoms...
You can say that the enough atoms are Greater than the amount that is...
But you understand, you are alive, right?
Yes, that's not a problem.
Okay, are any of your atoms alive?
No.
No, okay, so we're done.
You're alive, but none of your atoms are alive.
You are an emergent property.
You're speaking to me with emergent property characteristics called consciousness, saying, I don't understand that there's such a thing as emergent properties, but it's exactly what you're speaking to me with, and it's exactly what you're speaking to!
Is my emergent property called consciousness?
Yes, that's true.
Okay, good!
Thank you.
Sometimes all we have to do is look at what we're doing and it all becomes clear.
Okay.
I still don't think the sentence is correct.
No, no, you were there!
No, you were there!
Where are we going now?
Well, you know, I could say...
I could deal on the second team you follow, too.
But I wanted to say, since we're close to it...
This emergent property thing does not solve the problem that you cannot have deterministic parts come together to create something that's not deterministic.
Sure you can.
Really?
You can have non-alive parts come together to produce life.
No, no, this is life.
We're going from life and determinism.
I wanted to keep it to determinism.
It's not transferable.
It's not the same thing.
Okay, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
Is there a difference in the motive power between a horse and a rock?
Yeah.
Right?
Rocks don't gallop.
They don't jump.
Right?
Maybe in your dreams.
Or mine.
But, no.
What do rocks do?
They star in fantastic action movies.
And possibly may run for office, rendering Mike's man crush invalid because he'll probably be a lefty.
But anyway, we'll weed it up.
So, he's not...
Is he a righty?
Oh.
Well, that's two man crushes.
So, anyway.
So, a rock has no motive power of its own, but a horse will wander around.
A rock does not eat, a horse eats, right?
Yeah.
A dead horse has no motive power of its own and no longer ingests, right?
Yeah.
No longer eats.
Right?
Is that fair to say?
Yes, yes.
I said, yeah.
Did you hear me?
Yeah, sorry.
I just...
No, I didn't.
Okay, I got it.
Okay, so here we have properties which are only available to a particular aggregation of matter and energy, which are denied.
We look through the universe.
It's a giant graveyard of never been born, right?
I mean, we don't see life out there.
I'm sure there is, but we don't see life out there.
We see...
Life on our planet, and I think there have been a few bacteria notices on some comets or meteors that have landed or whatever, but there ain't a whole lot out there.
I'm not looking at a lot of cities on Mars and the canals turned out to be a total lie.
So the universe as a whole is largely composed, from what we can see, at least of our solar system, of a whole bunch of stuff that it isn't even dead because it was never even alive.
It's just stuff.
And it's cool stuff, and it does cool stuff, but it's just stuff.
Now there is this life thing, right?
So we have properties that aren't more, but fundamentally different.
Like, a horse doesn't eat more than a rock.
It doesn't gallop more than a rock does.
It doesn't reproduce more than a rock does.
The rock has none of these characteristics whatsoever.
And not even close, right?
A rock has no will.
A rock has no fear.
A rock has no purpose.
A rock does not feel lust.
A rock does not feel terror if pursued by a predator.
A rock does not feel hunger, thirst, right?
And so there is a difference, not of degree, but of kind between life and non-life.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And so...
Why is it impossible to imagine that in the human brain there is something as fundamentally different from everything else as a horse is from a rock?
In other words, free will.
Well, sometimes you can say that it's impossible for a certain emergent property to come out of certain things, but I think that, logically, In the same way that you don't need to test every mathematical hypothesis that goes against a theorem that proves that it's always that case.
I think, for example, you may not be able to predict the weather, but you can predict, logically, that You may have not tested it yet, but logically, it has to also be deterministic.
Logically, you cannot have non-determinism emerge from only determinist components.
No, no, no, no, no.
You can have life emerge from non-living components, right?
Yes, you can have life, but you can have life emerge from determinist or non-determinist components, but you cannot have Non-determinism emerged from determinist parts.
How do you know?
How do I know?
You're making a statement that it's impossible for the emergent property called free will to emerge from the brain.
But how do you know?
Well, another problem is when you say free world.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not another problem.
You made a statement.
I need you to support it.
We can't just move on like you didn't make a statement that just disproved my entire philosophy and then just, well, let's just keep moving.
What does that matter, right?
You, so we understand that life can emerge from non-living components, but you're saying free will cannot emerge from the brain.
How do you know?
I don't know how to prove it.
Okay, then don't tell me that it's true.
Don't say you know for sure.
And this is just humility, right?
I'm not trying to be mad or be mean or anything like that.
It's just humility.
That if there's something that you don't know is true, then don't say that it's true, right?
Don't say it with such certainty.
Well, you can't have free will emerge.
You can't have non-deterministic elements emerge from deterministic elements.
How do you know?
Well, we already have life and there's a bunch of other things we could talk about.
Emergent properties are actually all over the place in nature, but...
And the way that you're acting is that you're assuming free will on my part.
No.
Yes.
No, I've constructed everything based on determinism.
That's not an argument.
No, that's not an argument.
That's like saying, I have built my entire stock portfolio on the idea that stocks can never go down, therefore stocks can never go down.
What does that have to do with anything, right?
Okay, go on.
No, that's all.
Have you ever had a conversation about free will that did not involve a human brain?
No.
So why do you treat the human brain as distinct from everything else in the universe while claiming it is not distinct from everything else in the universe?
Because it is distinct from...
because it's unique.
Okay, good.
So it's unique.
So the human brain possesses a property that is unique in the universe.
And the property is not just life, because otherwise you could have a conversation about free will with a dung beetle, right?
Please.
Or Lena Dunham.
Hold on.
Wait.
Sorry, that's not...
I'm sorry, Dung Beetles.
That's a terrible thing to say to you.
I wholeheartedly withdraw and apologize that you've never wished you had an abortion.
Anyway, so it's not life that is the differentiator.
It is the human brain itself.
The human brain is the only entity in the universe you know of that you would have a discussion about free will with, right?
Yeah, but it's not something special to the human brain that it's unique.
There are plenty of aggregations of matter that are in a unique form.
Fantastic.
Can you tell me the aggregations of matter in a unique form that you've also had discussions about free will with?
Well, I haven't had discussions about free will about.
Okay, so you only have a discussion about free will with a human brain.
Yeah, there's plenty of things that I would only do with certain things.
So then you're treating it as something unique in the universe, not like everything else.
Oh, yeah.
It might be a dog brain or chimpanzee brain.
Have you had conversations about free will with dogs?
No.
Or Lena Dunham?
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I keep doing this.
I'm so sorry, dogs.
You are man's best friend.
And I don't know what Lena Dunham is.
But I've talked to a cat.
You have talked to a cat?
Yeah.
And have you had discussions about free will with a cat?
No.
Okay.
So, once again, we are back to the place where you will only ever have discussions about free will with the human brain, but you think it's pretty much the same as everything else in the universe.
You understand that's a contradiction, right?
Can you say that again?
You will only ever have discussions about free will with a human brain But you consider the human brain undifferentiated from everything else in the universe.
No, that's not true.
I don't consider it undifferentiated.
I consider it sharing properties with everything else.
Some properties.
Well, you know the one property it doesn't share with everything else is your willingness to have a debate about free will with it.
Yeah.
You will only ever debate human brain regarding free will.
Therefore, you cannot say it's the same as everything else.
Because it would be crazy to talk about it with a cat.
I'm not saying it's the same as everything else.
I'm not saying that it's the same as everything else.
It shares some properties with everything else, but not all properties has some properties that are unique to itself.
Okay, I don't care.
It doesn't matter.
Of course it doesn't share all properties with everything else.
That's a completely meaningless statement.
The property that matters, though, is that you will only ever discuss free will with a human brain.
Therefore, you cannot say that it is the same as everything else.
Unless you have just returned from Thailand having a vigorous discussion about free will with a water buffalo, you cannot say the human brain is just like everything else.
Because you understand, if you came across a man Having an earnest discussion about free will with a chicken, would you think he was crazy?
Look, I'm going to be honest here.
You're struggling with me.
I never said that the brain is the same.
I don't see how I'm saying that.
Why are you talking about this?
So the brain is unique.
And it's not just preferable.
To talk about free will with a human brain.
It's not just slightly better.
It's not like, well, I could do it with a Venus flytrap, or I could do it with a human being.
Well, there's no human being around.
I'd rather do it with a human being, but instead I'll do it with a Venus flytrap.
It's insane to talk about free will with anything other than a human brain.
It's not just a little bit better.
It's insane.
You would go to a mental asylum if people regularly found you having conversations about free will with something that wasn't a human brain, right?
So it's not just slightly better.
It's the only sane thing to do.
So it's completely and totally unique.
And there's no substitute.
In fact, anything you substitute for the human brain when you're talking about free will and having a conversation about free will, anything you substitute for the human brain turns you from sane to insane.
Like if you substitute a head of cabbage for a human brain, you're suddenly a crazy person.
if you substitute a dead person, if you substitute a leftist, if you substitute anything for a human brain, you're immediately insane.
So it's not just a slight preference.
It's not even a total preference.
It's the difference between sane and insane, between doing something that can be productive and doing something that means your brain is misfiring on all cylinders.
So there is, I don't even know what the word is, the gap between discussing free will with the human brain versus anything else in the universe, but it is as great a gap as could conceivably be imagined.
And therefore, for a determinist to say that the human brain has something in common with all other matter with regards to consciousness is insane.
Because then they're saying, well, it doesn't matter whether you talk with the human brain or anything else, which no determinist actually would ever do.
What is your definition of free will?
I've watched your free will series, and I haven't...
People always say that, and then I ask them what it...
Okay, so what is my definition of free will?
Yes, please.
No, you've seen the series.
You've put a lot of arguments, but you've never put it all together.
Yes, I have an entire definition of free will in those three videos.
Is there a specific moment in which you do that?
No, listen, just tell me you don't know.
This is just the honesty time.
Steph, I watched your videos.
I really wasn't paying that much attention.
I didn't take any notes.
I don't know what your definition of free will is.
Even though I repeat it several, I repeat it many times over the course of those videos.
And listen, the reason I'm being a hot ass on you is because that's how I got to be good at what I do.
Listen, I took a course on medieval theology.
Oh, man.
I'll give you two instances.
If you want to learn something, you can't just watch it on YouTube.
It's like flipping through the math book and thinking you're ready for the test.
And Lord knows I did that.
And Lord knows I wasn't.
You can't just watch a video on YouTube and say, yeah, okay, I don't really think I agree.
You have to really understand the argument.
This woman I've talked about before, my professor, who taught me Aristotle.
Good night, Mrs.
Calabash, wherever you are.
Her name is not Mrs.
Calabash.
But anyway, we took...
Like, we would take a paragraph from an Aristotelian text, and we would break that shit down.
Like, we would break it down word by word, definition by definition.
We would break it down into its component syllables, its morphemes.
And we would draw logic trees, and I would try and restate the argument.
We'd have to argue it back.
I mean, that was one paragraph, and we could spend hours just doing one paragraph.
I had a real hot-ass professor who taught me Luther and the Protestant Reformation and all that kind of stuff.
And again, we would take an argument from Luther and we would crack that mother open and we would just dig deep, go all the way down with flashlights and proctologist gloves and all that and really just try and figure out What the hell the argument was.
To really understand an argument takes a lot of studying.
And this is why the skimming generation, which is, you know, maybe if you sound younger than me, your generation and so on, there's a lot of skimming.
There's a lot of, ooh, I got a notice on Tinder.
You know, like there's a lot of distractions.
And it's fine.
I understand that.
There's a lot of fun in that.
But it's really hard to understand anything to any real depth, right?
So you say, well, I've watched your free will videos and you've had a lot of time to prepare for this.
I'll tell you this, man.
If I was calling in to the number one, the world's biggest philosophy show, to the guy who kind of rules internet philosophy, and I wanted to talk about free will, I gotta tell you, and this is why I have a show and you're calling in, I would prepare like you wouldn't even believe.
Even when I'm just doing a debate with someone, I spend days and days and days going over their arguments, preparing speeches, preparing rebuttals, having people mock debate with me, because I don't like to...
I don't like to look incompetent and I don't like to waste other people's time by being incompetent.
And I say this to you out of love and I say this to you out of respect for your intelligence.
I wouldn't say this if I didn't think you were smart.
You need to up your game.
I put all of this stuff out already.
You should not need to call in and have me go over basic arguments.
You should know them by now.
If you want to call in to this show, and this is not just to you, but to everyone as a whole, do some damn research.
Do some work.
You don't have to agree with me, but at least understand what I say.
Because otherwise, I basically end up having to do the same damn arguments over and over again.
Why?
Because you all are lazy.
You're lazy.
I have free videos, free books, free podcasts.
You can get them all.
Don't pay me a penny.
I'd like it if you did.
Freedomainradio.com.
But dear God, write down the arguments.
Write down the logical structure.
Figure these things out.
If you don't know how to write down an argument, if you don't know what a logical structure is, wait until you do before calling in.
It's kind of important.
Don't waste my time.
Don't waste the listener's time.
Life is short.
I don't want to have to keep making the same arguments over and over again.
I wasn't trying to catch you.
You say, well, I watched your free will videos.
Okay, what's my argument?
You don't have an argument.
What's my definition?
You don't have an issue.
Yes, I do.
Well, what is it?
It's like, just tell me you didn't watch it or you watched it and you were distracted or you watched it and you didn't care, in which case, why bother calling in?
But I'm telling you, man, if I'm singing at the inauguration, do you know how long I'm practicing for?
Well, forever, basically.
That's all it's going to take for me to sing at the inauguration.
But be prepared.
Because I'm telling you, man, this is just a conversation in a philosophy show.
Let me tell you something, man.
This is going to show up in your life over and over and over again.
Be prepared.
Get ready.
Break down arguments.
Understand things.
Bring your A game.
You are not good at this.
And I don't mean that you're dumb at all.
You're smart.
You're untrained.
You're unsophisticated.
You don't know what you're doing.
And I say this because I think you have the potential to know what you're doing.
You care about these topics, you're interested, your verbal intelligence is high, in my opinion, and you kind of get an instinct as to when you're making a bad argument.
But up your game.
You need to get good at this.
You need to understand this because you're going to be out there in the world talking about ideas with people.
And again, I'm not just referring to you, the listener, all the people out here listening to this show.
You're going to go out there in the world among the muggles, among the unintelligent, among the uninformed, among the uneducated, and they're going to look at you like, wow, this guy's really thought about free will.
That's what he's talking about.
You have a responsibility.
As a thinker, as somebody with verbal intelligence, as somebody who's interested in philosophy, you have an obligation to get it right!
Because if you get it wrong, you're going to misinform people about the most important aspects in life.
Like if you're out there in the world and you're convincing people they have no free will and you're wrong, you are a giant fucking asshole.
If you're wrong.
Now, if I'm wrong, I'm the asshole.
I get that.
But that's why I work so hard to get my arguments right.
Because I don't want to be an asshole.
I don't want to lead people off a cliff.
I don't want to convince people they have no free will if they do.
I don't want to frighten people.
I don't want to say the world is doomed if it is not.
I want to make the case.
I want to make the argument.
I don't want to pretend something is objective when it's not.
I don't want to pretend that I know something about ethics when I can't prove them.
I don't want to pretend that I've told someone a good story about how to be good by telling to obey gods or governments.
I want to get it right because the people who bring ideas to the masses shape the actual physics of the future.
You are going to be out there in the world and you're going to be talking to people who are going to look up to you and going to respect you.
About the most important, deepest, most powerful ideas that will run or ruin their lives.
Well, it runs them either way.
Be responsible.
Know what you're doing.
You wouldn't hand out medicines like candy, would you?
You'd study, you'd learn.
Know what you're doing.
It is incredibly irresponsible, incredibly dangerous.
To be out there talking about things you haven't studied, you don't really understand.
And I know that because so many people, sorry, this is a speech that's been brewing in me for close on a decade and not just that, before that with other people who'd come wandering in and say, well, I know what capitalism is and blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Well, I know what this is and I know what that is and it's like, what the fuck has changed since the days of Socrates when everyone said they knew what the hell things were and they didn't have a goddamn clue what things were.
You don't have to agree with me.
If you want to call in and debate me, do me the respect.
Prepare, for God's sakes.
Don't make me go over 101 when the stuff's already out there for free.
So I'll give you my definition of free will and I'll move on to the next caller.
But I do appreciate the call.
So, my definition of free will is our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
That's all it is.
Our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
That is the only definition of free will that makes sense to me and I make the case for it.
In a three-part video or audio series called Free Will, which is available at youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
Thanks so much for your call.
I remember that.
Moving on.
One sentence.
You said that your definition cannot be with determinism.
How does determinism contradict the capacity to compare actions to ideals?
My god, man, I'd hate to have to revise what I'm saying, but let me tell you this.
Do you think I didn't answer that in my presentation?
I assume that you tried?
Of course I did.
That's the most obvious question.
I just said you need to study what I say rather than just ask me questions and expect me to do a show for you live that I've already done in the past that's available for free.
And then the first thing you do is ask me to do exactly that.
That's why I said we're moving on because I kind of had a feeling you might do that.
Maybe this isn't the realm for you.
Maybe it is.
I guess we'll find out in time.
Well, you will, not me, because you're not coming back.
But thanks very much for the call anyway.
Alright, up next we have Kirill.
He wrote in and said, During my final school years, my literature teacher told me that I was full of potential, which I was not using.
At the time, I disregarded the comment, since I had little interest in wasting more time on school than absolutely necessary.
Now, years later, I have finished my university abroad and took a year break, using welfare from the unemployment fund.
Two months into it, I realized that I am nothing else but a NEET, N-E-E-T, something I never aspired to be.
Moreover, the time off I intended to spend self-studying and developing is spent procrastinating.
Even though I really want to, I rarely feel compelled to do anything.
Sometimes I can't even force myself out of bed, but I am not depressed.
I am alarmingly content.
All of that made me reflect on the teacher's remark and question my decision.
How does one know and fulfill his potential?
That's from Kirill.
Well, hello, Karel.
How are you doing tonight?
Hello.
Great, Stefan.
Nice to be on the show.
All right.
So you're living off other people's labor, right?
Yeah, that's basically it, yeah.
So other people have to get up and go to work so that you can laze around, right?
I realize that, yes.
Do you?
Really?
Yes.
So what are you going to do about it?
Do you think that's fair?
No.
Do you think it's just?
I think the system, the setup here, it's like it's made to be abused.
I'm not saying that it's just, no.
Okay.
So, it's made to be abused, but the only way you can abuse it is if other people don't.
Okay, I got it.
Let's not do that, all right?
By the way, what is a NEET, N-E-E-T? It's not employed, not in training and basically a young person that doesn't do anything.
Okay.
And do you think you're smart?
Yes.
Why do you think you're smart?
Well, I could give you some background.
No, I don't want others like you did this education or that education because most education is bullshit.
What do you mean?
Why do you think you're smart?
I would say that I can think critically.
Really?
Because I've got to tell you, Karel, the first question I asked you, you totally bullshitted me on.
So maybe you can think critically, but you're keeping it pretty well hidden in this conversation, right?
Because I said you left off somebody else and you said, well, the system is almost designed to have you exploited and so on, which of course is not critical thinking because other people have to work so that you can exploit them.
Therefore, the system must at least allow for other people to work so you can exploit them, right?
So that's not good critical thinking, you understand, right?
I understand that, yes.
Okay, so what makes you think you're good at critical thinking?
Well, I can hear arguments and debate them, I guess.
I mean, I can realize what is true and what is not.
Okay.
Well, let's go with this.
Why don't you give me your typical day?
What do you do?
What time do you get up in the morning?
What do you do?
Okay.
So, my typical day would be I get up late.
And the thing is, I go to bed too late and I get up too late.
No, there's no such thing as too late.
I mean, you've got no schedule.
What do you care, right?
So what time do you go to bed and what time do you get up?
So I'd go to bed like at 4 a.m.
And I'd get up at 1 o'clock.
1 p.m., right?
Yeah, 1 p.m., and I'd have breakfast.
Well, not technically, but okay, yeah, I guess it could be breakfast.
All right, brunch-ish, lunch.
Oh, brunch-ish, yeah.
I'd go for a workout, and most of the time I spend on YouTube, which I… How do you afford a gym?
The building I live in has a free gym for all the residents.
How do you afford a building that has a free gym?
Well, all the other people's tax that they pay.
Oh, so the welfare is enough for you to live in a nice building with a nice gym?
I don't live in the US. Yeah, no, I'm just asking.
So it's a comfortable life, right?
Yeah, the thing is that the welfare is more than enough for me to live.
Sure.
So, like, I could have, like, a luxurious life for me by not doing anything, which is not fair.
Well, what do you care?
I mean, you're not changing your behavior, so the fact that you say it's not fair, I don't really believe you.
If you genuinely thought it wasn't fair, you'd get off your ass and get a job, right?
Well, the reason I'm calling in is because I want to change it.
Okay, okay, okay.
All right.
But why do you want to change it?
Well, because I realized that it's not fair and I realized that I'm not getting anywhere by doing so.
I want to lose something with my life and just living off other people's work is not what I want to be, what I want to do.
Yeah, because in general, I mean, people like you are paid not even from existing taxes, but from the unborn's future productivity.
So you're like slave-driving fetus guy, right?
Yeah.
Onward, onward, you little vermin.
Daddy needs some sit-up machines.
On dinner, on blixen, on...
I don't know what.
I just got this whole image, you know, these little shrimps just kind of going forward and you on this big, big-ass Cinderella ball, you know.
On you go!
On you go!
Slaves yet to be born!
Right, okay.
Got it.
I could do that for a while, but I've decided not to because I'll haunt my dreams.
All right.
Do you have friends and family in your life at the moment?
Yes, sure.
Yes.
And what do they think of what you're doing?
Well, my family is not...
My father, for example, he thinks that it's okay that I took some time off, but in order to find a job, that would be good.
So the thing that the unemployment fund is made for.
But...
He said that if I stay too long, I'm just gonna forget how to do anything.
So he's not really in favor of me being on the phone.
My mother doesn't say much about it.
She doesn't care really.
She doesn't care?
Hang on, hang on.
Did your mother work when you were growing up?
No, I'm not saying...
I mean, all she cares about is for me to be well.
No, no, no.
That's like you saying things are unfair.
Okay.
Did your mother work when you were growing up or did she rely on your father's income?
She didn't work, but she started working when I was in about second grade.
Okay, so for a while, at least when you were young, she didn't work, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Does she think that having children and having a family was a good decision for her?
Yes.
Is it a good thing?
Okay.
Does she want that for you?
Of course, yes.
Really?
Because I'm not sure how you're going to attract a good woman when you're sucking off the taxpayer's tit and driving forward the shrimp army of the feeder slaves.
Yeah.
Are you going to find a good woman?
And you say, well, I don't...
I don't really work.
I can't meet you for breakfast because that's the morning.
And I just kind of hang out on welfare and don't do much.
And I'm really happy with that.
Do you think that the woman is going to be like, yeah, this sounds like a great guy to be the father of my children.
I can see having a nice, relaxed life with this.
And that's my concern because I know I cannot...
No, no.
Hang on.
Shouldn't that be your mother's concern?
Yeah, my mother realizes that I'm not going to stay like this forever.
So...
But you said your mother doesn't say much about it.
Well, she doesn't say anything in favor or against it.
Why do you think she's not taking more of an interest in your future?
Well, she's taking an interest, but...
But she's just not saying much about it.
Is she taking an interest in another dimension?
She's not questioning my choices, I guess.
So she's not taking much of an interest in your future, which is, like, can we be efficient here?
I don't want to have to keep proving to you everything you just said to me.
Your mother is not saying much about your future, although your mother as a woman who married a man who had an income, I assume that when your parents met, your father wasn't on welfare, right?
No, no, of course not.
Okay, so your mother chose a man who had a job, and yet she is not nagging you to go and get a job and a good woman.
Does your mother not think she's a good woman?
No, she thinks so.
She's a good woman.
Then why is she not taking any interest in getting you going in life?
No, they want me to find a job.
They want me to move on from this.
Like, my mother doesn't want me to stay in welfare forever.
Yes, I get the platitudes, but she's not saying much about it is what you said.
Why?
Well, usually the father does the talking about these topics.
Oh, okay.
So it's your father's job, and your father's not saying a huge amount about it, right?
No, the father is...
Well, he's not in favor of it.
Will there be any consequences for you with regards to your family if you don't get a job?
Yeah, I think so.
And what do you think those consequences will be, Karol?
Well, that would ruin my relationships with my father, for sure.
So he might say at one point, you're welcome around here when you get off your ass and get a job.
But until then, don't bother.
Yeah.
Okay.
Like, they put a lot of faith in me, and so they would expect that I would make good choices.
I think faith might be the appropriate word.
Yeah, because faith is belief without evidence.
How long have you been on welfare for?
Just three months since the October.
So when I took the welfare, it's when you go to university here, the first thing on the introduction days, they Give out those flyers and say, hey, by the way, after the university, you can go only for the welfare.
Sure.
No, absolutely.
And there's lots of drug dealers you can get free samples from, too.
Yeah.
And there's lots of whores who will give you the clap for free the first time.
I don't know what that means, but all right.
So you say, years later, I finished my university abroad and took a year break using welfare from the unemployment fund.
Yeah.
So, if you've been, if you've taken a year's break using welfare, but you've only been on welfare for three months, I can't quite get three into 12.
Yeah, that's poor phrasing, I guess, of the question.
But I was planning to do it for a year.
That's what I meant.
And now...
Oh, you're planning to take a year's break?
Yeah.
But now...
Have you paid much into the employment fund?
No, no.
Okay, so you're not taking the welfare from the unemployment fund that you've paid into?
You're just withdrawing from stuff that other people have paid into?
Well, I have worked in this country for some time, but I was receiving very low wage, so I wasn't taxed.
Right.
Okay, so your day, you work out, you get up at one o'clock, you have some breakfast, you work out, and then you spend the rest of the time on YouTube?
I would say most of it.
Like, I try to be doing something I would...
I would make goals for myself.
Yeah, you failed.
You mentioned that, right?
You're supposed to be self-studying and developing, but you procrastinate, right?
Well, maybe your potential is just to drive YouTube views up.
Maybe that's like you're the counter-mover.
I hope it's not.
You know, like we all want to leave a footprint on the planet of having been here.
For some people, it's a great book.
For some people, it's children.
For some people, it's a great work of art or music or a company or whatever it is.
And maybe for you, you just make numbers move on a screen.
No, I hope it's not that.
Well, hope is not a strategy, unless you're Barack Obama, in which case it's a curse you put on the entire fucking planet.
So, you can't even force yourself out of bed.
Is that because you're tired?
No, I wouldn't say so.
It's just, like, I wake up and I'm thinking, like, what I should do today?
And just nothing particular, so I can just keep sleeping.
I don't like that I'm content with it.
Because...
I don't like that I'm content.
That's funny.
Because if you're content...
It is, like I have two personalities or something.
I don't like up that I'm down.
What?
I don't follow.
I don't like being awake while I'm sleeping.
All right.
Me neither.
So, let me ask you this.
Did you have a stressful childhood?
Well, I would say, like, with my parents and my family, I have a very good family.
But regarding the school, maybe the school maybe was stressful, yes.
What am I supposed to do with that?
If it's not stressful, fine.
If it was, but I don't know what to do with maybe.
You know, you go to the doctor and he says, does it hurt here?
Maybe.
Okay, I'm going to give you two pills called give me a fucking answer and call me in the morning.
Was school stressful or not?
Yeah, the school was stressful, yes.
Why was it stressful, Karel?
Well, uh...
Were you bullied?
No, no, I was not bullied.
But I guess the relationships with the teachers, maybe.
Because I didn't have conflicts in my family before the school.
school, but when the school started, the, uh, after, uh, parent and teacher meetings, mom would come home crying and like, uh, I don't know how I don't know how to David Wright: Why would she cry after the teacher meetings?
Well, the thing is that I was a good student.
I mean, my grades were good.
And at some point, I think I lost my enthusiasm in studying.
And the teacher would think that the best thing to do is to tell my mother that I'm going down on a slippery slope.
My behavior got worse and all that kind of things.
So my mother would be very disappointed after that, of course.
So you would be uninterested in school, is that right?
Like bored or not working hard, right?
You said that in your original message.
Full of potential, which you weren't using, right?
Now, I had the same thing.
I've said this before, but I had a teacher who said to me, Steph, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. But apparently the whole reason why I was not fulfilling my potential was just 100% my fault.
Nothing to do, you see.
Nothing to do with the teachers, nothing to do with the inanity of the curriculum, nothing to do with the mentally and emotional retarded statements that the teachers kept making, nothing to do with their pettiness and their vindictiveness and their narrow-mindedness and their small-mindedness and nothing to do with the boring content of the lectures and nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with sitting in rows while somebody scratched away in boring stuff.
Nothing about, no, you've got to learn French even though you just came here from England and all these people have been studying French forever but I'm sure you'll catch it up.
No context for any of the education.
No context for any of the learning.
No reason as to why we were learning quadratic equations or vector calculus or anything like that.
No, it was 100% my fault, you see, because it's really, really important to put all the onus on a fucked up system on the involuntary customer.
So, okay, so you were bored in school or you were uninterested or uninvolved in school and Your mother would go in to meet with the teacher and she'd come out crying and disappointed.
Is that right?
Yeah.
She'd return home crying.
Yeah.
Crying.
And why would she be crying?
Because you were bored at school?
No, because I've been a good child before school, like in doing this call also.
And like my parents would have an image of me that I'm a good child that doesn't misbehave.
And I wouldn't say that I did.
But then she would come to the teacher and parent meeting and the teacher would say otherwise.
I don't understand the crying thing.
Wouldn't she just talk to you and ask you what the problem is or why you're not interested in school?
I don't understand why she'd be crying.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something here, but assuming she's like out of diapers, I just don't understand why she'd be crying.
Because the teacher wouldn't just tell my mother that I'm not interested in school.
She would say that I'm going down on a slippery slope and that I swear and I pick fights with classmates and something like that, which I didn't.
So why would your mother cry If the teacher was lying to her, why wouldn't she ask you what happened and trust you?
They would believe the teacher, I think.
Over you?
Because...
So both of your parents would believe the teacher over you?
Yeah.
But I can understand...
Why?
Because why would the teacher lie?
Well, no, but they would ask you, right?
I mean, if I go...
If my daughter had a teacher who said that my daughter is going down some slippery slope or whatever the hell that means, I'd go and talk to my daughter.
I wouldn't necessarily believe one or the other.
I mean, I'd probably be a little partial to my daughter, but I would ask my daughter what was going on.
I'm not sure.
I'd just come home crying.
I don't quite understand that.
I don't know.
Because I think that...
They don't understand why the teacher would lie.
And why would they question her?
Because they entrust the teacher with taking care of her.
Oh, so they themselves had a wonderful time in government schools with teachers who never lied.
No.
Wait, so they themselves had negative experiences of teachers when they were children, but they believed your teacher implicitly.
Yeah, but after that repeated, like these parent-teacher meetings and my teacher kept saying the same things and it would be like a year after, my parents got more skeptical about it and started trusting me more.
And what have your parents communicated to you about your potential?
They always put, as I said, a lot of faith in them.
Yeah.
Like, they think that I'm very smart and I can achieve a lot.
Yeah.
Right.
And did they tell you how you were going to go about achieving a lot?
Through education, then university, then getting a steady job.
Getting a what job?
Steady.
A steady job?
In what?
Well, my father works in like production, like metal, and so he wants me to do something like that.
But he wants you to work with metals?
Yeah, like more physical kind of job.
So what the fuck are you doing getting a literature teacher?
Oh no, this was in high school, right?
That was in high school.
What did you do in university?
They gave me a free choice.
I chose not to get a more physical kind of a job and I got to multimedia.
So you did a degree in multimedia?
Yeah.
And why did you choose that?
Well, because Out of all the available courses, that was the most interesting to me?
No, of course it was.
Of course you chose it because it was the most interesting to you.
Why did you choose it?
Because I liked it.
That's not an answer.
Why was it the most interesting?
What was it that was compelling to you about multimedia?
The creativity, I guess, that you get to create something.
So you love creating things, is that right?
Yeah.
So why aren't you creating anything?
If you love it, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's what bothers me.
You don't really like it that much, right?
Because, I mean, if you love something, let's say, I don't know, let's say you like to masturbate.
Well, you're probably going to masturbate, right?
I mean, it's the way it's going to work, right?
Because you like doing it, right?
But if you really like doing something, you're going to do it.
I mean, if I have a day or two off, I love to read philosophy because that's what I love to do, right?
So my question is, if you love to do it and you have the opportunity to do it, you know, like when I... I took a break from my entrepreneurial career for about a year and a half, and I wrote like two books, two novels, under the tutelage of a pretty good writer, actually.
And I was paying for that.
I wasn't on welfare people, but I took the time off and I was offered this job, like crazy money, just like two days a week kind of thing.
And I'm like, nope, I'm working on my writing and all that, right?
And so for me, if you love doing something, Then, you know, try and stop me, kind of thing.
Try and stop me from doing it.
And, I mean, I assume you play video games, right?
No, I don't.
Oh, no?
Oh, my apologies.
So basically it's the YouTube thing, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so you love watching YouTube, and I appreciate the views.
So you love watching YouTube, and so you watch YouTube, right?
But if you say, well, I love creating things, and I've got all this time, I assume you have a computer that can do it, and I've got all this education, but you're not doing it, then empirically, you don't love it, right?
Yeah, you're right.
So why did you choose something?
Was there nothing else that you loved more?
I mean, maybe you're just not a high-desire guy.
I tend to be very indifferent to stuff or love it to death.
I'm either bored or I'm stalking it.
There's very little in between.
And that may be just the way that I'm constituted.
We're all born with different personalities and different hormones and different aspects and so on.
Was there anything in school that you would have liked to do more than the multimedia stuff?
I went to university for a couple of years for an English degree, and I liked it, but I just kind of felt like I wasn't really working, because I love to read and write anyway.
I was going to do that my whole life, no matter what, so I really didn't think I needed to go to school for reading and writing.
That's kind of what I'm going to do anyway.
So I got into amateur theater.
It was amateur, I guess it was, at the university.
And I played in Chekhov's The Bear.
And I played in A Slight Ache by Harold Pinter.
Man, that was memorizing a lot of wines, let me tell you.
And I did a bunch of theater.
And I loved it.
And I loved it so much that I auditioned for the National Theater School.
And they take, I think, out of about 2,000 applicants, they take 16 people.
And so I got into that.
And I did that for a while.
I didn't finish it, though.
And when I was at National Theatre School, I had to read a lot of history because we did a lot of historical plays.
And so I started reading history.
I'm like, man, I love this.
This is great.
And so I went and did a history degree.
And then when I was in history, I started reading a lot more philosophy.
And then I'm like, man, I've really got to study this.
And so I went and studied more of that.
And then, you know, I've always loved computers.
So I got a chance to work with computers programming and I jumped at that.
And so and then, you know, with this, I've worked my tail off to produce, I think, some really, really great I'm a leapfrog pogo stick desire guy.
And my dating life before I met my wife.
But anyway, I actually did involve pogo sticks.
No, that's another story.
So my question to you, and it's not better or worse, but my question to you is, is there anything you love more than the multimedia which you don't love that much?
Well, I got interested in psychology early on, like in fourth grade, I think.
But I never got to, I don't know, how can you do psychology?
Wait, what do you mean, how can you do psychology?
You know that's a thing, right?
I mean, it's not like, how do I become a unicorn or something?
I mean, it's like, that is a thing.
I'm pretty sure of that.
I mean, practice it.
What do you mean, how can you...
What?
Are there no psychologists where you live?
Are there no therapists?
I don't understand.
No, that's not what I mean.
I mean, like, I was interested in...
I think, like you said, you're interested in something and you go for it.
And then you jump to another thing that is very, very interesting for you.
But for me, it's more like I get interested in multimedia, for example.
And because I see someone play guitar.
I really like it.
So I want to play guitar too.
And I play guitar, I get...
Okay, I don't...
Stop, stop, stop, stop.
I don't know what you're talking about.
My question was, you know that there's such a thing as a psychologist and a therapist, right?
Well, I don't know.
This life is not good for your brain, I'm telling you.
This is like slow motion sickness.
This is like trying to sprint through underwater jello.
I mean, seriously, man, this is not good for you.
This is not good for you.
Either you're going to speed up a little or I'm going to slow down.
And when I slow down, it's like an airplane coming out of like Mach 12.
I just disintegrate.
No!
So, okay, you're interested in psychology, but you're like, and then you said, but how could I possibly make a living in psychology?
It's like, there's an entire career, an entire field called psychology and therapist and marriage counselor and life coach, you know, if you don't feel like doing the education.
I don't know, right?
So, okay, so you're interested in psychology, and then you just spun me some crap about, yeah, but I mean, seriously, who can ever make a living in psychology?
Well, quite a lot of people, in fact.
Well, I guess where I come from, people are more skeptical about psychology than in the Western world.
So it's not a career where you are?
Where I am, yes.
And you couldn't move someplace where it was a career because they don't have a generous welfare system.
Go to Europe, I hear.
No, seriously.
Get a tan.
Go to Europe.
If you've got to swim, it'll pay off.
I mean, they'll just shovel money at you.
MacBook Airs, free water buffaloes, whatever you like.
They'll just give you everything.
In fact, they'll just give you all the entire fucking continent.
It's yours.
Just take it.
You know, they'll just lay out the red carpet.
And boy, is it ever going to be red.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm in Europe and they're giving me the...
Oh, you're in Europe!
Oh, God!
Are you saying in Europe there's no interest in psychology?
Well, I guess they'd all have to figure out why they're so masochistic then, wouldn't they?
All right.
Okay, so the multimedia thing not really motivating you a huge amount, right?
No, I get to a certain point in things and then I realize that it's not my thing and I just...
Get discouraged to continue, I guess.
Well, and that's fine, except find a new thing, right?
Yeah.
I've tried and failed at more things than I can count in my life, and Doug, sorry, Scott Adams, I think you're making a mistake, our good friend Scott Adams has a great book about this, which we can link to below, which is, you know, how I failed at everything and became a success in life or something like that.
It's a good book.
The problem is you're not in motion, right?
I mean, we talked about this earlier that you're kind of in one of these little side pools and life is kind of moving on, right?
Now, again, it's only been a couple of months, although I'm not sure how it categorized your education, whether that was a big and good investment, right?
Because your skills are dying on the vine, right?
Multimedia is pretty tech intensive and your skills are dying on the vine.
And you don't really have any particular motivation or direction, right?
If you, you know, there's an old saying in business, is if you ever want to get something done, give it to the busy person.
Why do you think they say that?
Here's your critical thinking test.
Go ahead.
If you ever want to get something done, give it to the busy person.
Because busy person is emotion.
Right.
An object?
It's, you know, it's inertia, right?
An object that is in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object that is at rest tends to stay at rest, right?
Yeah.
So you're not sitting in bed, you're putting down roots in your bed, right?
Oh, yeah.
You're putting down manacles in your bed.
You are softening as we speak.
Your brain is softening.
Yeah, and I realized that because...
Willpower is softening because you're not exercising it.
And at some point, you will hit a point of no return.
Hey, you are on a slippery slope.
Your teacher was right.
But right now...
At that point...
No, and then what's going to happen is you're going to, you know, you get an expectation, right?
So you get an expectation that this is how your life should be.
And then what's going to happen is...
When you have to work, you're gonna resent it because you've set up this whole expectation that somehow you shouldn't have to because you can prey on other people working, right?
So now is the time to panic.
Now is the time to freak out.
And now is the time to freak out all the more so Because you're comfortable with what you're doing, right?
And look, let's just take the morals out of it, right?
You took a couple of months off.
Fine.
You took a couple of months off.
Forget about the taxes, forget about the welfare and all that kind of crap, right?
I mean, you're a smart guy.
I'm sure you figure out what to do with your life.
So you took a couple of months off and you had fun.
That's fine.
I've known people who've done that.
No, they...
Summer after they graduated, they're just tools around Europe.
I mean, often on their own dime.
But they, you know, they're fine.
It's survivable, right?
You've not wrecked yourself or something like that.
But you've got to stop.
You've got to stop.
Because you're going to...
Lose momentum.
And when you lose momentum, it's really hard to get started.
It's really hard to get started.
You know, a career is basically just a series of leapfrogs and catapults where you just land someplace and go someplace new.
And if you're It's hard to change.
I mean, do you feel that at all?
Maybe I'm mistaken in this, but do you feel like, maybe it's my Protestant paranoia, relaxation, I don't know, but do you feel like it's getting easier or harder to live the way that you're living?
Yeah, it's getting easier.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
Before, I always had this feeling, like, when I'm not doing anything, when I watch YouTube, for example, I always had The thought at the back of my head that I could be doing something useful at this time.
But now I can just, like, it's disappearing, that thought.
Sure.
Because you're not doing it.
And our brains are nothing if not empirical.
Right?
This is why I sort of say, you say, oh, well, I really like multimedia.
It's like, well, are you doing it?
No.
Then you don't really love it.
I'm just an empiricist that way.
And so are you, deep down.
Yeah.
So I'll tell you what I think the issue is.
And then you can tell me how much you dislike me.
You lack love.
Your teachers did not love you.
Your parents trusted your teachers more than you, at least for some period of time.
You are unguided, unmentored, And therefore you're like a sailing ship, but there's no wind.
You're just floating, idling, nothing.
Now, if I were your father, I would consider this to be a critical emergency.
And I would stop at nothing to figure out what the problem was and what the solution is.
But you're drifting, right?
People are kind of letting you bump off the stream of life into the swamp, right?
To get tangled up in nothingness, in mere consumption.
So I would consider this a family crisis, you understand?
An addiction to nothingness, an addiction to nothingness.
Yeah, you could say so.
And this is why I was asking, what are people doing?
What are people doing?
Friends should be over, like, dude, what are you doing?
Shake it off, let's go for a walk, let's get out, let's get you going, right?
Because I'll tell you, this is the big secret.
Everybody wants the secret to success.
I don't just mean material success, and I don't just mean YouTube counts or fame or whatever you want to call it, but the secret is simply this corral.
You've got to love something enough to overcome anything in your way.
You have to love something enough to overcome anything that is in your way.
Listen, if you had a child and your child was trapped under something heavy, you would not stop until whatever it was was lifted off your child, right?
Sure.
Sure?
Yes, that's for sure.
Sure, yeah, I can do that.
I mean, unless I got a notification from Free Domain Radio, in which case I'm like, oh, it's a short video, honey, because, you know, something else came up.
But you would, right?
I mean, if your mother was in danger and you could do something to help her, you wouldn't stop until you were able to help her, right?
Of course.
So...
If you really know love, then you can really love.
And I do what I do out of love.
Out of love for you, out of love for the world, out of love for the future, out of love for the unborn, out of love for the frustrated, out of love for the alienated, out of love for the lonely, out of love for the truth-tellers who are silenced.
Out of love for everything that needs to be said that could save the world, I do it for that.
The more your resistance is, the higher your ideal needs to be.
And people say, well, Staff, change the world and be the greatest philosopher ever.
And it's like, yes.
Yes.
Because the bigger my goal, the more I will love it.
And the more I love it, the more I can overcome.
You understand?
Yes.
If you have a little goal, I have a coffee here, but I kind of feel like a latte, but it's 15 minutes to walk to the Starbucks, you know, that's a little goal, right?
And it's not going to arouse in you much energy to pursue it.
Right?
Right.
Now, I saw some movie years ago about God, it was horrible.
But good.
But horrible.
But good.
Awesome.
It was a movie about...
Maybe the title would come to me.
It was a movie, and I think it was based on a true story, and it was a movie about a boat goes off with a bunch of scuba divers.
And...
A man and a woman, for various reasons, end up being left behind.
Now, this boat is like miles out where the good coral is.
And the boat heads back.
They do a head count.
They make a mistake.
The boat heads back.
These guys come up and the boat is heading off.
And they're miles from shore.
They don't even know where the shore is.
I guess they follow the boat or whatever, right?
But there's no way they could swim it.
How motivated do you think they were?
To scream and yell and splash the water and do whatever it took to try and get the attention of the driver of the boat.
Most motivated.
Right.
Because they were newlyweds, they loved each other, they loved their life together and they didn't want to die out there in the ocean.
And That kind of motivation is important.
They had a very real and very powerful motivation.
That's just, I mean, that's fear and love.
Fear and love are intertwined, right?
Whatever we love, we fear to lose.
Yeah.
And whatever goal we set, we fear to fail.
Of course.
And the more we fear failure, the more we must love what we are in pursuit.
And if you find yourself faltering in life, you crank up the love, you crank up the idealism, you crank up the stakes.
And that's the only way to overcome inertia is through love.
You see, you may have great gifts to offer the world, Karel.
You may have great gifts to offer the world.
And if you don't give the gifts you can give to the world, why are you here?
It's got to be about more than you.
We're designed fundamentally to have it not be about us.
Why?
Because we become parents.
That's why we're all here.
It's because somebody chose to become our parent.
And when you're a parent, guess what?
You gotta grow up.
You have to.
When you become married, it's no longer all about you.
When you become a parent, it becomes even more not about you.
Doesn't mean you vanish.
You just...
You gain your identity in a different context.
You gain your identity through service.
Rather than through consumption.
Through the provision of value rather than consumption of resources.
You're living like a child.
The taxpayers are your parents.
But you are without even the responsibility of a child.
And so...
Being of service to the world, being of service to humanity, being of service to the future, in whatever context, it can be a convenience store, it can be you're a good hair cutter, it can be you run a philosophy show, it can be you do some multimedia stuff that blows people's minds and informs them of important things.
It doesn't matter, fundamentally, as long as you love it enough to overcome the inertia, to overcome the fear, to overcome the restrictions.
And if you're working in a moral realm, those restrictions and those hostilities from interfering with the interests of bad people, Is going to be considerable.
I mean, just follow Mike Cerenovich's Twitter feed and you'll see what I mean.
And so you don't love anything enough to overcome your inertia.
And the funny thing is about love, you know, the Beatles were right.
The last lines on the last song on their last album.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
It's true.
The love you take is equal to the love you make.
If you want love, you give love.
I get a lot of love in the world.
And some hatred, I'm sure.
But I get a lot of love in the world because I give a lot of love to the world.
And people fundamentally get that what I'm doing is about a passion for a better world.
And not even at the expense of a lot of people, a few evil people, but it's a better world that I'm after.
And I can see it clearly in my mind's eye.
I can even see clearly how we get there.
And I am motivated by near-bottomless reservoirs of love for the world, for the future.
You are not, right?
You don't love the world enough to overcome your inertia because your world is about you.
Your world is about, well, what do I want to do?
I don't feel like getting out of bed, so I'm not going to get out of bed.
You know, I feel like heading to the gym, so I'm going to head to the gym.
I feel like watching some YouTube, so I'm going to watch some YouTube.
There's nothing of the world in that.
There's nothing of service in that.
There's nothing of making anything better for anyone else other than the people whose views you bump up, right?
Yeah.
And so if you find something that you love, that you're passionate about, Then you can overcome your inertia.
And then you actually get things done in the world.
You make the world a better place.
And through making the world a better place, you make your world a better place.
Because when you're out there making the world a better place, the world notices and loves you back.
And some people will love you a lot for that.
I met my wife because I was out there trying to make the world a better place.
And she liked that.
And she does that.
So, the answer is not willpower.
Give a man a why, and he can bear almost any how.
And people expend their willpower on utterly stupid stuff.
Oh, I'm going to climb this high mountain.
Why?
Because it's there.
I'll just work on the peaceful parenting and civilizational survival.
You all go lose your finger on a high mountain for no reason whatsoever.
Anyway, I don't know what is going to hit your soul and create a spark that you're going to love.
I have no idea.
I'm not you.
I don't know what is going to connect with you and rouse you from this slumber.
What do you love?
Who do you love?
What are you passionate about in the world?
Now maybe, I don't know, maybe not that much.
In which case, you're gonna have a not very big life.
You're not gonna have a lot of love, I think.
But you know, it's fine.
You're also not gonna have a lot of loss.
You're not gonna have a lot of fear.
But I would spend my time, if I were you, working on empathy.
Because love fundamentally is around empathy for virtue.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
The people who the government is forcing to support you, you don't have empathy for them.
Because it's not bothering you, right?
Not enough.
No, no, I'm not saying you're a cold-hearted monster or anything like that, but it's not really bothering you that much.
Yeah.
This is supposed to be for emergencies and you're a young able-bodied man who can get a job, right?
Yeah.
And because it's going to you, it may not be going to someone else who might really need it, right?
So you don't feel part of a social fabric.
You exist in this isolated universe where these like These pellets of money are just kind of coming over the wall and you don't really think where they come from, right?
You know, as Paul McCartney said, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
Because we don't think where the food comes from.
We don't think of the dismemberment of animals and we don't think of that stuff.
Or as someone commented recently, some Terrorist was being interviewed.
In the 1980s, the interviewer said, well, what about the innocent people you harm?
And the terrorist said, if you can look at television footage of the bombings and you can eat your dinner, you're not innocent.
It is about taking empathy and applying it as widely and as deeply as humanly possible.
Why do we have national debts?
Because we lack empathy for the future, for the future people who will have to pay off our debt.
Why is there imperialism around the world?
Because we lack empathy for the victims of our policies.
Why is schools so terrible?
Because we lack empathy for children enough to fight the system.
Why is parenting still in many ways so bad?
Because we lack empathy for parents and for children to do whatever we can to make their relationships better.
If we can extend our empathy as widely and as deeply and as far into the future as possible, while being very clear that there are many, many people out there and some entire cultures, I believe, where empathy is not Exactly in oversupply and that to be empathetic to the unempathetic is suicide.
But if you're having trouble getting motivated, it's probably because you have not meditated on your effect in the world and what you can do to make the world a better place and you don't feel part of a community that you can improve.
You don't feel part of a planet that you can make better.
Because once you get that, that what you do has a huge impact on the world and on the future, it becomes almost irresistible to pursue that.
And it no longer feels like work.
And that would be my most heartfelt suggestion to you, my friend.
But how, how do I love something that much to, to, How do I get so passionate about something?
Well, you first recognize that you don't love anything that much as yet and you try and figure out why.
And then you expose yourself to more and more things and think more and more deeply about the world.
Until you find something that strikes a spark in you.
And then you build on that.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's what I'm going to do.
All right.
Will you keep us posted?
Oh, yes, sure.
How was the conversation for you, my friend?
I think that's exactly what I needed.
Yes, thank you.
You're very welcome.
And listen, I really, really appreciate you calling in.
That is not an easy thing to do.
And I appreciate you sticking with the conversation.
I hugely respect you for that.
And I do not have any doubt that you will find something great to do with your life.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
And thank you everyone so much for watching and for listening to this show, Free Domain Radio, the greatest on the planet, if I do say so myself.
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Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful day.
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