3683 Enslaved by Freedom - Call In Show - May 10th, 2017
Question 1: [2:29] – “Why is it considered a bad idea to be in a an age gap relationship? Almost everywhere in the world. If someone is already in a successful one, what do you advise them on a philosophical level to ignore the haters and live happily ever after?”Question 2: [1:06:55] – “I am an instructor at a prestigious ivy league school. In my day to day interactions with my coworkers and students, I can taste the liberalism in the air, and it is absolutely disgusting. Do you have any advice for a conservative/libertarian instructor who wants to help fight the indoctrination of college students while not committing career suicide in an academic environment dominated by leftist ideologies?”Question 3: [1:47:17] – “Since UPB has to apply to all people at all times, there can be no universally preferable positive actions, because that would fail the coma test. Does a philosophical approach to ethics have anything to say about positive ways we should live, as opposed to simply avoiding immoral actions?”Question 4: [2:08:58] – "In my past I experienced 'revelations' about reincarnation and the nature of a reality beyond our own, although I no longer live by them or think of them, having reconciled them with a dedication to living out a material existence for its own sake. Can the lessons of mysticism and reincarnation be reconciled with objectivity, purpose, and a sense of urgency in the material world?"Question 5: [2:46:25] – “Morality, as I understand it (and as you seem to understand it, as well, as best as I can tell) is a matter of what one ought to do. You propose the concept of Universally Preferable Behavior as the solution to the “ought” question of morality. If UPB does, in fact, exist (and I have no objection to its existence), why, though, ought I behave in a certain way simply because it is universally preferable? Isn’t a universal preference still simply that? Merely a preference?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Hey, you ever have those conversations that you think are going to go in one particular direction and then they just seem to do a 180 Mobius strip backwards upside down rinse cycle spin?
Well, the first call with what started out as a woman and then ended up being a couple Was just such a conversation.
I think you'll find it very interesting.
It started off with, what do you think of a 28-year age gap between husband and wife?
And then, where it went, my friends, was quite a ride.
I think you'll find it very interesting, and I hope you'll listen to it very carefully.
The second caller works at an Ivy League school and is nervous and scared because there's such a claustrophobia of political correctness in the institution that he's nervous even to open his mouth about approximately 98% of what he believes and what is my advice to someone in that kind of situation?
The third caller, oh, UPB, love it, universally preferable behavior.
So UPB generally defines thou shalt not, like don't kill, don't rape, don't steal, don't murder.
What does it have to say?
What does UPB have to say about positive moral action, courage and honesty and so on, integrity?
And it's a great question, very, very important.
I've had a good conversation about that.
The fourth caller.
Okay, this was a really good self-knowledge call.
It started off with a caller saying that he had revelations about reincarnation, but we really got in deep to how I believe identity and the self operates and how much self-work is necessary to help the world in any consistent or productive manner.
And the fifth caller, back a little bit to UPB, which is a well I don't mind at all going back to drink from.
But isn't universal preference just a preference?
Why should I follow morality?
Why should I be good?
It's a great and fundamental question.
It was a great conversation about that.
So thanks, of course, everyone.
I hope you enjoy the show.
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Alright, up first today we have Rania.
She wrote in and said, why is it considered a bad idea to be in an age gap relationship?
Almost everywhere in the world this is the case.
And if someone is already in a successful one, what advice do you give them in a philosophical level to ignore the haters and live happily ever after?
That's from Rania.
Oh hi Rania, how are you doing tonight?
Hi, Stefan.
I'm doing so great.
I'm so proud to be with you.
Oh, thank you very much.
I'm looking forward to the conversation.
You know, can I tell you, I have a little bit of a weakness.
Weakness, I actually got to indulge it today, but my weakness is gossip.
Now, I know that your relationship is not gossip, it's your marriage and it's very, very important.
But I do like people's personal lives and people's personal stories, so I appreciate you calling in about this question.
So, do you mind if I could ask a couple of questions to sort of get the lay of the land first?
I'm open for that.
Go ahead.
And what's the age gap we're talking about here?
28.
I'm younger.
28 years?
Yeah.
You have out-Macron-ed Macron.
I know.
I hope he didn't meet you while you were...
Okay.
So 28 years.
Is he wealthy?
Yeah.
No, he's just working and he's a middle class.
I mean, he has no properties, even his flat, we are paying for it monthly.
Right.
And do you work in the marriage?
At the moment, I'm still young, I study.
You study, okay.
So he's paying the bills for you studying, right?
Well, no, I pay for them.
I mean, my mother and my father pay for me also somehow, personally.
So no, he's just paying for a living and for me being with him, but not a big deal.
No, he's not paying for my studies because we live in Germany, so it's not so much money to study.
It's close to free, right?
Yeah, close.
I mean, 300 euros per semester for six months, so it's almost nothing.
So he's basically paying the bills while you're going to school.
I'm not meaning this in any critical way.
I'm just sort of trying to get an understanding of things.
Of course, he's taking care of me how I live because I'm his wife.
I mean, what to eat.
But when it comes to paying for studies, no, he's not paying for my studies, no.
Right.
And do you want to have kids?
Yep.
We plan to have kids.
I want to have three kids for him.
It doesn't matter what to me.
I want to have three.
But he's open for children.
He loves to have that.
You want three kids?
Yep.
Just out of curiosity, roughly how old is he going to be if you end up with three kids?
Now, sorry, but just before that, how much further do you have to go in school?
Maybe for another five years.
I mean, because I'm just planning everything from you, I have to start studying from zero.
So, wait, you have five more years of school to go?
Not school, it's university.
Sorry, that's what I mean.
So, five years of university.
And what are you studying?
So, I will study maybe English.
So, I'm studying now something German, but it seems somehow too hard for me.
I thought I will make it, but...
So, I'm someone who loves literature, loves languages, but I will change next semester to English, so...
I think I can make it.
So something in literature, something that I don't know if it has a future or not.
Who knows?
But I'm someone who has passion, never gives up, and loves what he's doing.
So I'm someone who trusts himself in this field.
But Rania, just out of curiosity, you said you wanted three kids, right?
Well, not exactly.
I mean, I just want to have...
Three kids in the term of ten years or something.
I understand that.
So why would you want to go to university for five years now if you want to have three kids soon?
Well, I don't want to have three kids soon.
I just want to have one kid now.
But it's for me, if I stay at home and have no...
I did academic studies, so to me, it's like you have done nothing with your life.
What do you mean you've done nothing with your life?
You're raising three children!
I don't understand.
Look, you could be entirely right.
I'm just, from my standpoint, I don't know, maybe as a taxpayer, but why do you want to go to college if then you're basically going to spend...
I would assume, you know, and if you listen to this show, right, home, breastfeeding, having other kids and so on, you're going to be out of the workforce for like 10 years or so?
And so why do all this education and then stay home and have kids?
I'm not sure I quite understand the reasoning.
And plus, how old is this dude going to be?
When, if you want to have three kids starting in five years, I mean, I don't need to know exactly how old you are, but assuming you're, say...
Legal, like I'm not speaking to Anthony Wiener in a voice encoder.
He's got to be in his 50s, so plus five years for you to finish university, that's mid to late 50s, then three kids, maybe two years apart.
I mean, the guy's going to have some pretty slow tadpoles.
You know what I mean?
Well, we are planning to have our first child soon, so it's fishing these five years.
Oh, so are you going to have your first child while you're still in university?
Exactly, yeah.
We're planning to do that.
But why would you want to combine the two?
I mean, don't you want to be home with your baby?
I want to be home with my baby.
But the problem is, I don't want to give up an academic degree.
This is so important for me personally.
I mean, I could be at home.
I have no financial problems.
I have a wonderful husband, wonderful home.
But for me personally, I cannot just keep I have to do something with it, at least.
But why?
Because I have bigger dreams.
I love literature since I was a child.
Nobody's saying you can't read books, right?
I mean, if you love literature, then you can read all the literature you want.
You can have a book club.
You can read to your kids.
You can do online courses.
But I'm just not sure I quite understand.
Maybe I'm crazy here.
I just don't quite understand why you'd want to have kids...
While in university, why not do university later?
I don't know.
I mean, it could be something that I can just wait for.
It's one, two years that the child is a little bit older.
So I don't know what will happen, but I just want to be...
Wait, wait.
What do you mean you don't know what will happen?
I don't know what that means.
It means that, for example, when I have a child, I have to make a pause, you know...
Six months that the child has to be with his mother, so I cannot go to university.
So university accepted that a woman has to stay at home.
They have no problem with it.
You will not be kicked out of university or something like that.
So it can be...
Who's going to take...
Let's say that you're going to have to do some...
I mean, German universities are tough, right?
Because they're free.
They have to have very high standards and, you know, good for you for getting in.
But it's going to be a lot of work.
And particularly, I mean, I'm going out on a limb here and your English is fantastic, but it's not your native language.
So it's going to be a challenge.
So your husband works.
He's middle class.
So, Rania, who's going to take care of your child while you're doing your university degree?
Daycare that we pay for.
You're going to put him in daycare?
I don't know.
I mean, we have to do...
Well, what do you mean you don't know?
This is the point of planning.
He can take six months or at least till up three years.
Oh, your husband.
So your husband is going to stay home and take care of your child so that you can go to university.
He does not have to.
No, but does he want to?
For six months it's fine, but more than that, I don't think so.
So you've talked about it with him and he's like, sure, I'm happy to take time off from my career for six months so that you can go to school and I can help raise your child or our child.
Yeah, for six months it's fine, but more than that, I don't think so.
Now, the breastfeeding recommendations are 18 months, ideally, definitely a year.
So are you going to try breastfeeding while you're in university?
I think so, yeah.
And where are you from originally, Rania?
I'm from Algeria, so North Africa.
North Africa, Algeria.
What, you couldn't make it to France?
No, I'm just kidding.
And how long have you been, I think you're in Germany, right?
So how long have you been in Germany?
Three years now.
And how did you get to Germany?
Did you, was it immigration or your parents or how did you end up in Germany?
Mannheim.
And how did you meet?
Well, we met over Facebook because we are both atheists.
So the theme that we met over was atheism.
So we had a friend that was an atheist and was a famous writer, a philosopher and so on.
So over him, we met each other as friends and so on, but it developed more than that.
Right.
If you were a German taxpayer, what would you think of you?
I mean, in terms of coming to the country, going into university, which the taxpayer pays for, and then, I'm just curious, I mean, do you think that would be a net positive for the German taxpayer or not so much?
Well, I think in the same situation that we are living in right now, so I'm very young, I'm like his daughter, in the age of his daughter, and so on, so I would think that it's fine for him, because he's just living single since 15 years now, he was divorced, and So it makes no problem.
He does not see that it is pain for me or anything.
And also my parents are pain for me.
So it's not a big deal at all.
And my parents also are intellect.
So they are both professors at university.
So we met someone on an intellectual level.
It was not something like, oh, please take care of me.
I'm running out of a horrible place.
No, my family was very intellectual, very atheists.
So it's a different situation.
And I think as a payer of taxes, he has to think more of what's going on with the government that is taking care of a lot of refugees.
And between Brahmins refugees that I hate so much that it's horrible.
I'm totally against Merkel.
And I was so, so upset that Le Pen did not win.
Tell me a little bit about your perception of what's going on in Germany with the refugees.
I mean, some of them certainly are coming from North Africa, and you'd certainly have more of an on-the-ground view of the people who are coming into Germany.
What do you think?
Well, I was really shocked.
I mean, like six months since I came in or something, and started this shit with refugees, and they were coming on millions of Into the country and just storming in.
And it was really horrible.
And I was thinking, did I come here wrong?
What the heck is going on in Europe?
Why is this happening?
And everywhere I walk here in the cities, I see more people with hijab on, with scarves on.
And I was thinking, I should really leave this continent very soon.
It will be an Islamic country because I know what Islamics are.
I come from such a place.
I left because of that.
And what are your concerns about what's going to happen in Germany?
You said where it's going to head.
Well, I think it will head to an Islamic country in, let's say, 20 years.
I give them 20 years maximum.
Right.
Right.
Now, how many children does your husband have?
He has one child.
Oh, there's only one child.
And you said he was divorced for 15 years.
Was that when he met you or when he got married?
No.
He divorced in 2002 or 2003, I think.
And he met me in 2013 or 2012.
So it was a really long time after that.
Nothing to do.
And what does his child think, I guess his adult child, I guess your age, are you saying that she has some negative views of the relationship?
Yeah.
And what are they?
What does she think?
She's just thinking that she feels that she has lost her father forever, and she's just jealous of me, and her father made a younger woman, a prettier woman than her, and so on.
That's all.
Right.
That's her fault.
Well, the issue is that When it comes to age gaps, particularly an age gap like this, I think a lot of people's question is, what do people have in common who have almost three decades difference?
Now, you're a very intelligent woman.
You've had, I would imagine, a challenging life and so on.
And...
So, if you're extraordinarily mature, then it sort of gets you some way towards where he is in terms of maturity.
If he's not mature, then he is sort of closer to where you are in terms of your physical age.
But when there's nearly three decades between people, then I think people's concern is that it's a relationship based on looks, on physicality, on sexuality, not necessarily...
On maturity and compatibility, because the question is, how much someone, a woman or a man, in her early 20s, how much do they have in common with somebody in his early 50s?
You know, with three, almost three decades difference, it's sort of hard to, it's hard for somebody to bridge that and wonder where the connection is in the relationship, if that makes sense.
I totally understand it.
Yeah.
And what's your response to that?
My response to that is, I am a person that was born to a father that was very older than her and in an intellect family, so I learned to be really mature than my age.
I never ever in my life looked at people in my age and I thought they are the right person for me.
I could have never ever made a reasonable natural conversation, an intellect conversation with a guy in my age.
That could have never ever been possible.
No matter what culture he comes from.
So you've sort of felt, I guess what some people call an old soul, or you felt older than your physical years.
And I would assume that has something to do with your intelligence, right?
Yes, I think so.
And also because the age gap between me and my father.
And what is the age gap between you and your father?
41.
I'm sorry?
41 years old.
Difference.
41.
Well, I'm one to talk, so I'm not going to have to brush past that one.
And you're saying that his daughter is not really talking to her father because of you?
Yeah, since our relationship, she had problems with him and now they barely talk.
And it's because of his marriage to you?
Yeah.
And what does she think the relationship is based on?
I don't know.
At first she was saying, I give this relationship six months and then six months pass and then another year and so on.
So, I mean, I have to say that in any relationship in the world, you have to get to know this person.
We had problems in the first six months that it will work or not.
But we somehow, yeah, we got this working out.
I mean, it worked at the end because we both understand each other.
We both came to Same level of thoughts in a lot of ways, because somehow he was a liberal before he married me, but he met me and then I introduced him to somehow the background I come from, so he now understands what Islam is.
He read a lot of books about it because of me.
He was introduced to a lot of things because of me.
So he grown up, I grown up, we learned from each other, we understand each other, we are a very happy couple and a very successful couple, I have to say.
Just because you mentioned it again, and you mentioned that you were upset that Macron won rather than Le Pen.
What is it that you would...
I mean, we have a lot of French listeners.
What is it you would like to say to the people of France about the decision that they've made?
Well, I don't know what the fuck is going on in France, but I had a lot of hopes that Le Pen will win exactly like Trump did.
But obviously, there are not so many people left in France to vote for her.
Somehow, the only people who can vote there are Muslims.
Which are millions there.
I mean, we know that at least 12 millions are from North Africa there.
And the rest are whether females who are liberals or what the heck was the percentage of female French males who are left there.
I think it's very, very small.
So I maybe did not see that coming.
So I was somehow, yeah.
I was an idiot, so I did not see it coming that people win because there are not so many people who will vote for Le Pen, so there are not so many people who see the truth.
It already happened, so the immigration has already won in France, so that's what I mean.
I'm really upset for France, and I don't know what to say.
I mean, it's horrible for Europe.
It's coming everywhere, in Sweden, in Germany, it's coming everywhere.
Where they took a lot of migrants.
It's a very, very sad story for the Western Civilization in Europe.
Very sad story.
Right.
So, you mentioned earlier your looks.
Would you say that you're a pretty woman?
I would say so.
I'm at least an age.
Right, right.
Do you think that the daughter may be concerned that, you know, exotic beauty coming in from overseas and living to some degree off her father going to school and so on, do you think there may be a perception that she sees you as, I don't know if the phrase makes sense to you, a gold digger or somebody who's coming for citizenship and money?
Of course, I think so.
And a lot of his friends also thought that at the beginning.
The moment they met me and they have seen that I stayed with him and everything was fine.
We are not some just people who are just trying it out.
No, I'm someone who comes from a culture who believes the guy you marry is it.
So he did not believe that at the beginning.
His friends didn't, his daughter, everyone didn't in this society.
But I think I have led them into this belief that me personally, not just any woman from my country, but me personally, As an atheist, even though I'm an atheist, but I still have a lot of background morality from my religion or from my society culture that makes me a person who loves marriage, who value marriage, who value a future stable relationship and a loving husband.
And what was the relationship between your husband and his daughter like before you came along?
Were they getting along well?
Did they have their issues or distance between them before?
I think they had a good relationship.
But after all this happened, I asked him, did you really have this deep relationship?
And it stopped because of me.
So he said, I don't think that I have so much a deep relationship with my daughter before.
So he thought it was just fake.
She was just being nice with him because of what he did for her.
It's somehow the mentality in Europe.
I don't get it anymore.
So I don't know.
And where's the mom, her biological mom in the picture?
She was eight years older than him.
And she's old and now with another guy since he divorced him.
She was with this guy together.
But is she around?
Does she see her daughter?
I mean, is she part of the...
She's with a great relationship with her daughter since they divorced.
And have you met her or talked to her?
What does she think of you as, I guess, the second wife?
No, she has no problem with me.
She even invited us, like, a few weeks ago to come to her husband and her house.
So she has no problem with me at all.
The ex-wife.
Right.
Well, I mean, it's tough.
I mean, with regards to the daughter, I don't think...
I mean, Rania, it can't be your problem to fix.
I mean, it's his relationship with his daughter.
He's obviously known her, and he was fairly involved in raising her, is that right?
Exactly, yeah.
I mean, I think you can facilitate them talking, but he is going to have to try and talk with her and try and figure out what the real issue is.
I mean, I obviously can't possibly guess with any degree of accuracy.
I could make some guesses, but what would that do?
Not much in particular.
So, yeah, he's going to have to sit down with her and have her unpack her heart as to what her issue is with the relationship.
Was her father not dating for a long time before he got involved with you?
Well, if you want to ask him, he's right here, so he will tell you a written detail.
I hope he will.
Okay.
So, go ahead, Chuck.
Hello, hello.
So, I've got the chance to talk to Stefan Molyneux.
Now, there's someone who knows how to pronounce my last name, let me tell you.
That's a beautiful thing to hear.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm honored very much.
Yeah, and thank you very much for this.
Oh, my pleasure.
So just for the records, in Germany, it's now half past one.
And my wonderful wife woke me up.
And yes, anyway.
So, yeah, what is the question?
Oh, were you, did you have, with regards to your daughter, were you single for a long time before you met Rania?
Yes, I was a very, very long time single and I was very, very fine with the situation.
You know, there is a saying here in Germany, if you can't live alone, it's the best thing you can have.
If you don't, it's the worst on earth.
And so I belonged to the first version and I was very, very happy to live alone.
I had for a long time no relationship I had some short relationships before Rania.
But yeah, they were only very short time.
And that was it.
Do you think That it's possible that since you didn't have a girlfriend and you had divorced your wife, is it possible that your daughter feels displaced?
I mean, this is a very obvious thing.
I'm sure you've thought of it.
But in my experience, single parents...
Can sometimes end up in a quasi-spousal relationship with children.
Now, I've known more single moms with single sons, where they get kind of promoted to the man of the house, and there's this kind of spousal relationship that occurs between single parents and single children.
I'm just wondering if you think that might have happened to any degree with your daughter.
Well, you have to look at that.
When we got divorced, my daughter was 12 years old.
And yeah, we had a good relationship together.
I had no problem with my ex-wife.
It was just a short time after the divorce, but I think this is normal.
And we were good friends and everything worked very well together.
Hang on, sorry to interrupt, but if you had a good relationship with your ex-wife and you were friends and it was all very civilized, why not just stay married?
No, because it didn't work anymore.
This is a very personal thing and I think it takes too much time to tell that now.
And it was over.
It didn't work anymore.
And it was...
Yeah, there are always two people who belong to this situation.
So if it doesn't work anymore, it doesn't work anymore, and it didn't work anymore.
What is your daughter's complaints?
Has she voiced them clearly about what issues she has with Rania?
Yeah, of course.
She has a problem with Rania.
You know, on the one hand, Somehow I can understand her if I try to imagine her situation and being a young woman and your father is marrying a woman that is younger than you and so there is something Yeah, that she has a problem with that, I can understand that somehow.
Yes, but what is the problem in specific that she has?
What is the problem?
What does she think?
Does she's a gold digger?
Does she think you're being foolish?
Does she think that it's just sexual?
What is it that she has as a criticism of the relationship?
Yes, of course, yeah.
Yeah, of course, as you said, as you mentioned, she thinks she is a gold digger and she thinks she is doing that only to get free and everything.
And yeah, these are all the complaints that I hear a lot of times regarding the relationship to Rania.
And, yeah, okay.
Now, why do you think, because either she's right or she's wrong, right?
I mean, I'm just bungeeing in here from the internet.
So, either your daughter's right to a large degree or she's wrong to a large degree.
Now, Rani, of course, says that you're happily married and it's lasted more than the six months your daughter thought that it might last.
And...
I guess my question is, was there anything in your relationship with your daughter in the past, before Rania came along, that may have given your daughter reason to question your judgment?
Because your daughter obviously feels, I guess, or believes that you're making a very bad decision.
So she must, I would imagine, have had some reason to question your judgment in the past.
You should ask this question to my daughter.
Maybe too late to call her now.
Unfortunately, not here, but the only thing I can tell you is I was a very tolerant father.
And this is the moment that I don't understand.
She was allowed to bring everybody here.
We shared the time with our daughter.
She was, you can say mathematically, one week with her mother and one week with me.
And so we shared this together, my ex-wife and I. We don't live long distance from each other.
It's very close and it worked very fine.
And I was a very tolerant father.
And I think so, yeah, all the things that I have experienced also with her friends, yeah, Sometimes she was complaining she had a new boyfriend and she brought him in and so I was talking with him two hours and then she was complaining, oh, when I bring a new boyfriend and you are talking with him two hours, yeah.
But that was a nice complaint, yeah.
It was fine.
I even worked at the school as a theater teacher because I have an actor background and Yeah, it was working very fine with these young people, and they liked me.
And it was nice.
I cannot say that I was a bad father at some point.
And what efforts have you put in and what have you tried to do to solve the distance in the relationship?
So my...
My daughter and I, we didn't talk to each other for more than one year.
And that was a very, very bad experience for me because, anyway, so in this one year, which is not long ago, ended, I always thought about her and I thought, oh, damn hell, shit, how can we solve this problem, yeah?
At the beginning of the year that you didn't talk, was there a big conflict?
Was there a blow-up?
Or were things pleasant and then nothing?
Yeah, there was a blow-up and there was an incident that caused this massive lack.
And it was, damn, yeah.
It's somehow shameful, so Rania's watching me right now.
And so Rania had the idea.
She said she wanted to have a tattoo.
I said, yeah, go ahead and have a tattoo.
And she said, wouldn't it be a nice idea if you had that too?
And I said, yeah, I never wanted to have a tattoo in my life.
But so that's somehow a nice idea.
And we planned that for months.
And then There was one day in January.
I'm sorry.
You're in your 50s.
Yes.
You meet a hot young foreigner and you get a tattoo.
Did you buy a sports car too?
Did you get a hair plug?
I mean, it's kind of a midlife crisis cliche, right?
No, this is not a midlife crisis.
You know, I have nothing to do with that.
I didn't want to have a tattoo, but then I thought, yeah, why not?
This is like a second...
Ring that you were after your marriage.
This is something that...
And it was a word that was very important for her.
It's freedom in Arabic.
And so we tattooed that on our arm.
And yeah, so that's just what we did.
And I published that on Facebook.
Are you still there, Stefan?
Yes, yes.
You published your Arabic tattoo of the word freedom on Facebook.
Yeah, and so she was complaining.
She wrote me a message, and this message was the point.
Yeah, okay, I still have this message.
Okay, to make the long story short, the message was an insult from the first word to the last word.
And I thought, no, no, this is not too much.
Sorry, the message was she was insulting you from beginning to end for posting the tattoo.
Was it for getting the tattoo?
Was it for posting the tattoo?
I mean, what?
No, for getting the tattoo.
And she herself has tattoos anyway.
But she was really upset about this thing, yeah?
And I thought, no, this is too much.
This is really a little bit too much because, no, I do not deserve that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, because to get insulted for something like that, no.
Yeah, I mean, she, like most young people, is very focused on her peer group, right?
And it may not have been a high-status moment for her in her peer group when her father gets a tattoo of the Arabic word for freedom and posts it publicly.
I mean, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the decision.
I'm not a huge fan of tattoos myself, but as far as...
I'm just sort of putting myself in her shoes.
I could see that as not a high-status moment with her peers.
Yeah.
But anyway, I mean...
What is that?
Her father is getting a tattoo under which circumstances, whatever.
And so why does she complain so much about that?
Did you know that she was going to be bothered about the tattoo before you posted about it on Facebook?
She was not informed about the tattoo before I offered it.
She had no idea you were getting a tattoo?
No, she had no idea.
Why wouldn't you talk to her about it?
Because we didn't talk very much in this time.
No, no, this is before the break.
This is when you had a good relationship, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry to interrupt.
Since we married, they had to break up somehow.
Oh, so this is after she stopped talking to you?
Of course.
No, after six months we got married, she still talked to him.
Okay, so when is this tattoo thing happening?
Six months after we married, something like that, yeah.
So before you got married?
It was six months after we married.
No, no, but I'm asking for the blow-up that caused the non-communication, and this is the one.
So the relationship was bad before the tattoo, then you got the tattoo and posted about it.
So as a father, like this is my question, so as a father, Shouldn't it be your job to know what's going to really bother your daughter?
I'm not saying you have to guide your life by it, of course, right?
But that's part of intimacy, right?
Like, I can tell you this, if I came home with a tattoo, my wife and my daughter would be very upset.
Like, I know that for a fact, especially if I'd never talked about it with them beforehand.
Now I know that she's grown and all that, but did you not know that your daughter was going to be bothered by the tattoo?
May I say something?
No, no, this is not a question for you, Rania, with all due respect.
It's a question for the father.
Yes, I mean, okay.
Somehow this tattoo story gets now very important, but anyway...
But this was the blow-up, right?
Yeah, this was somehow the straw that broke the camel's back.
So, did you not know that it was going to be bothersome to Your daughter that you got an Arabic word tattooed on your arm without talking to her.
Can you ask this question again, please?
Sure.
Were you very surprised that it bothered her that you got a tattoo without discussing it with her?
Yes, I was somehow surprised.
So that means that you don't know your daughter that well in this moment if you do something that's very upsetting to her.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying you can't do things that are upsetting to your daughter, but if you don't know ahead of time that it's going to be upsetting, it means that there's a disconnect between you, if that makes sense.
Okay.
Which disconnection is it?
The disconnection is you don't know when you get the tattoo that it's going to bother your daughter.
Because the reason I'm saying this is that if you had known ahead of time that it was going to bother your daughter that much, I assume that you would not have just posted it on Facebook, right?
You would have sat down with your daughter maybe even beforehand and said, this is what I want to do.
It's going to be a permanent change to my body.
Did you ever speak negatively to your daughter about her tattoos or were you fine with her tattoos?
I was absolutely fine with her tattoos.
Right.
But they were her thing, right?
And I assume that they're kind of a youth thing, and a sailor thing, or at least they used to be, right?
So it's kind of a youth thing, and it's kind of her thing.
So if you had known that posting the picture of the tattoo would have cost you a year of conversation with your daughter, I'm going to assume that you wouldn't have posted the picture.
You would have found some other way to break it to her.
Like, it wasn't worth it, posting the picture, if it cost you a year talking to your daughter, right?
It's not about the tattoo.
Yeah, I don't know.
Well, no, no, come on.
It can't have been worth it to post that picture if it cost you a year of talking with your daughter, right?
I'm sorry, Stefan, but I have to say it's not about the tattoo.
She called him the next morning of our wedding, the next morning, crying and saying, I lost my father for the rest of my life.
So the problem began long before the tattoo story.
Okay.
No, I understand that.
I understand that.
But if this catalyst, if the tattoo posting was a catalyst for him not talking to his daughter for a year, then it wasn't worth it, right?
I mean, maybe you looked cool to some people because you posted this picture, but it wasn't worth it in terms of not being able to talk to your daughter for a year, right?
So it was a mistake to post the picture in terms of how it affected your relationship with your daughter, right?
Ah, well...
Was it a mistake?
Look, the relationship between my daughter and me was somehow, as Rania mentioned, somehow destroyed from the moment on I married Rania.
She was complaining about that all the time.
Maybe I could have posted a picture of our holiday in Egypt when we are sitting in the ocean and that Would have caused the same amount of anger in my daughter.
And so, yeah, it was for me, somehow she was looking like an incident that makes her feel free to attack me in a very, very bad way.
And so that happened then.
So what you're saying is you don't regret posting the picture of your Arabic tattoo?
No, I don't regret that.
Why?
Because it triggered a break with your daughter that lasted for a year.
Yeah, but maybe 10 other people liked it very much and thought, yeah, well, it's fine.
What?
What do you care about 10 other people?
We're talking about your daughter.
Yeah, but anyway...
What's the crime to post a picture on Facebook about a tattoo?
This is nothing.
No, no, no.
But it's not nothing to your daughter.
Yeah.
And you can't decide for her what bothers her and what doesn't.
And again, I'm not saying she's justified.
I'm not saying anything like that.
But what I am saying is, given that you did not talk to your only child for a year, it wasn't worth it to post the picture.
And not knowing...
The effect of posting that picture means that you were disconnected, I think, from your child's preferences at that point or your child's state of mind.
And if you are defending posting the picture, even though it costs you a year of conversation with your child, I can understand now more and more why it bothers her.
Oh, yeah, this is very interesting.
So go ahead.
Well, you tell me what you found interesting, because I think I made my point.
May I say something?
Okay, but try and keep it brief.
I'm trying to talk to the guy about his daughter, but go ahead.
It has nothing to do with the tattoo, okay?
It has nothing to do with the tattoo?
And how do you know that, Rania?
Because they had big problems when we got married.
Yes, I know.
You've said that.
I understand that.
I understand that.
But I'm talking about this particular incident, which your husband brought up as the catalyst for not speaking to her for a year, right?
When she calls him crying and said, you did something bad, he told her that's it.
I don't want to hear this anymore.
So he stopped the relationship because of this incident.
She was always complaining since we got married.
She was complaining about everything in his life since then.
So it was a very good relationship between them.
So you don't like her?
Since the tattoo, not her.
Sorry, Rania, you don't like his daughter?
I don't even know her.
I met her while ago.
No, no.
You are speaking negatively about his daughter, that she complained about everything, that she was negative.
It wasn't about the tattoo.
The problems were before that.
So you don't like his daughter.
I don't like how she thinks of me and how she thinks that she can control her father because he gave her all...
Wait a minute here.
Wait a minute here, Anja.
Control her father?
You talked him into getting a tattoo in his 50s.
What are you talking about his daughter controlling her father?
Wouldn't you say that you've had quite a bit of influence over him getting him to tattoo something in Arabic on his arm?
Well, it's not a big deal because it was something that it meant something for us.
No, it meant something to you!
He wasn't going to get a tattoo otherwise?
No!
He was convinced.
If he would have said, I'm not convinced, just have it yourself.
I would have no problem with that.
But we were...
Thinking about it since we got married as a second ring.
No, no, you were thinking about it and he went along with it.
Listen, Rania, I'm a guy and I'm not dating you and I'm not married to you, right?
So I'm just telling you and, you know, your husband can tell me if I'm wrong.
He wasn't going to go out and get a tattoo if you didn't want it.
Of course not.
Okay, so then don't say it's a we.
It's a you and he went along with it.
But since he had it, he's proud of it.
Well, I don't think it's worth losing your daughter over a tattoo myself.
I mean, if I had to trade between a painful permanent skin inking operation or being able to talk to my own daughter, I'd have a tough time choosing the tattoo, to be honest with you.
Well, I don't think the tattoo was the trigger.
The trigger was marriage, me, me and me.
Well, yes, I understand that.
I understand that.
But I can also understand that you have an enormous amount of influence over this girl's father.
Right?
Well, she doesn't even know me and she does not want to know me.
But she knows.
She knows.
You understand why she got upset about the tattoo is a tattoo is a mark of your control over her father.
It's a brand!
Yeah, but you can't understand that the tattoo also means that the father has the freedom to do whatever he wants with his life, marry a woman, have a tattoo, do whatever he wants with his life, and she has no control over him.
She cannot tell him, do this and don't do that.
No, that's apparently your job now.
Go get a tattoo.
Okay, I'll get a tattoo, right?
But what the heck is this?
Is this guy not an adult?
He's even the father.
He has the control to do whatever he wants with his life, with his body.
So if she thinks she can tell him do the tattoo, don't do the tattoo, I'm fed up with this woman.
I mean, I had a problem with him in the first six months that she was telling him she can do whatever with him.
Come visit me in my house.
I want to come take some things from your house and so on.
What the heck is going on?
I was really upset and this was one of the triggers to say I was really seeing this man not being a man and standing up for his words, because he was telling her, oh, go ahead, tell me whatever, I can do it for you, because you are my daughter, you can control me.
But when it comes to personal freedom, okay, he He's not delivered anymore.
He cannot tell to a woman, you are a woman, you are better than me, I do whatever you want.
Whatever you say, even you are the daughter, I'm the father.
No, I'm from a culture that says, I'm the man, I do whatever I want, yeah?
I have to stand up for being a man.
So I want this guy to stand up for his daughter and tell her- Wait, wait, wait, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
You have to stand up for being a man?
Yes, you are coming over the line.
You are telling me to do things I don't think it comes up to my freedom.
Like who I date or what I do with my body.
Because he gives her the freedom, she does not give him that freedom.
Right, so she understood what the tattoo was exactly.
She understood that the tattoo was a sign of your ownership of her father.
That you were setting the boundaries, that you were setting the rules, that you were setting...
What rules?
If he gets a tattoo, what other rules?
I don't see other rules.
I see her rules that she's calling in the next morning and saying, oh, father, I feel so bad.
I lost you forever.
What the heck is this?
Did I come from the Arabic world where women are oppressed or she?
Yeah?
What's going on?
So you have no sympathy for her perspective, right?
I don't, because if my father...
Married a 28-year-old, younger woman than him, I would have never, ever had a problem with her if she would have been a nice person and have values.
Yes, but Rania, you're in Germany now.
You're not in Algeria.
So the fact that your father in Algeria or in that custom or in that culture would have done X, Y, and Z, what does that have to do with going to Germany?
I don't get to go to Japan and say, what are you people sitting on the floor for?
Yeah, but there's a line between freedoms and telling you what to do.
Obligation.
She's obligating him to do what she wants, not what he wants.
It was their relationship for 20 years, right?
I know!
And now you're coming in and saying that their relationship is wrong and it needs to conform to your culture and your history.
No, I'm not saying that.
That's exactly what you're saying.
My father would never have done this.
If I was her, I would have done this.
It's their relationship, which was around for a lot longer than you were.
Or who he marries.
Why does she have to control that?
And tell him this is good and this is bad.
And not just that.
She has to control who he dates.
So what you're saying, Rania, is they had a good relationship until you came along with your values and your history and your culture and you said that their relationship was wrong.
You made him get a tattoo and then you're worried why she...
You can't imagine why she has a negative view of anything.
She has broke up with him since he made me.
She, not me.
Yes, I understand that.
But you understand you're bringing in values.
You said the relationship between the father and the daughter was good.
And then you came in and viewed that relationship as bad or as poor or as deficient or he wasn't being a man or whatever it is, right?
Because based on your culture...
Hang on, hang on.
Don't talk over me.
I'm not married to you, okay?
Let me finish my point.
We all right?
Are you ready?
Okay.
The relationship was good between the father and the daughter.
You come in and you view the relationship as bad because of your own cultural lens and your own cultural history.
Your family's values, let's say, from Algeria.
And then you start causing trouble in the relationship.
And I can hear you describing it very, very clearly.
And you'll hear it if you listen back to this, which I hope you will.
So then you come in with your values and the relationship, after you arrive...
In his life, his relationship with his daughter has gone from good to absolutely terrible, virtually non-existent.
But it was not because of me.
No, it absolutely was because of you.
No, it absolutely was because you're the only thing that changed.
The only thing that changed was that you...
And I'm trying to help you guys here.
I'm not trying to cause problems here.
But if you're this self-righteous, and like, well, he just wasn't being the man, and she was just whining, and she just wanted him to do everything, and blah, blah, blah, blah, then you're coming, barging into this relationship in Germany that existed for more than a quarter century or so before you, and you're coming in and saying, this relationship is problematic, and basically you kicked her out of the nest.
You kicked her out of her father's heart.
I didn't kick her out of anything.
I'm sorry?
I did not kick her out of anything.
You should hear yourself when you make fun of this girl.
You have contempt for her.
I have something against her behavior because her behavior is not to be tolerant with.
Where's your tolerance?
You're saying that his relationship with his daughter is bad based on your values from Algeria, and where's your tolerance for how their relationship was?
Do you have no sense of the fact that your entrance into this relationship has to some degree cost your husband his relationship with his daughter?
Do you have any sense that you might have had anything to do with that?
I do, but it's not about me.
I did not wake up anything.
So your contempt for her and your contempt for their relationship has absolutely nothing to do with their problems.
Me as a person, no.
Her has a problem, she has a problem that we are married, yes.
Sorry, I just want to be really clear, because I get you're not going to listen to this, but maybe I can get through to the husband, or maybe I can get through to the listeners, or maybe I'm just talking to my hand.
I don't know.
But Rania, what you're saying is that your negative view of their relationship, your contempt for her, has absolutely nothing to do with the negative relationship that has resulted after you came into her father's life.
But Stefan, you don't get something right now.
I had no contempt for her.
I was very, very nice with her.
And then suddenly, she dresses in black and comes to our wedding and then looks like she is in a funeral.
And the next morning, she doesn't even say hello to my mother in the wedding.
And then next morning, comes on and calls him and cries and says, I have lost you forever.
So I have nothing against her.
Every time they had a fight on the phone, I told him, please make it good again.
I want to meet her.
I want to do everything.
I remember a time after they did not talk somehow for two months after the wedding.
And then he called her and said, please come meet us at this place in the restaurant.
And she said, I don't come meet your wife!
And so on and so on.
She has everything against me.
So it's all...
I understand.
So...
That is her problem.
Sorry to interrupt.
So the 100%, 100% of the problems in the relationship is hers, and 0% is yours.
You've done absolutely nothing wrong.
It's 100% her issue.
I didn't know what it was wrong.
Against her personally, I did nothing wrong.
I never ever talked to her bad.
I never ever told her father to do something bad against her.
I always even wanted to repair their relationship.
Okay, so you're entirely innocent.
You've done absolutely nothing wrong and the fault is all in the daughter.
Is that right?
She does not even value...
Just answer the question.
You've done everything 100% right, she's done everything 100% wrong, and the blame is all hers.
It's just a yes or no.
The blame is 100% hers, there's nothing you could have done differently or better.
I could have done something differently, maybe if she had let me, yes.
So basically you're saying there's nothing you could have done differently.
There was no choice you could have made that could have been different.
Do you think that it was worth, like, if you could go back in time...
given that it was the tattoo that seemed to be the catalyst for this, not speaking to her father for a year, do you think that the tattoo was worth it?
Well, I don't even know what the heck does the tattoo mean, Nancy.
If you could go back in time and not get the tattoo and he had a chance to have a better relationship with his daughter, would you go back in time and not get the tattoo?
I don't know if the tattoo means a lot, but for me, if we had to have the tattoo or not, it would have been the same situation as now.
I don't see the tattoo as a big move or a big difference in the relationship.
But Rania, the issue isn't whether you see the damn tattoo as a big deal.
You understand that?
The issue isn't whether you see the tattoo as a big deal, the issue is whether his daughter sees the tattoo as a big deal.
If you could go back in time and do something to heal the relationship between your husband and his daughter by not getting the tattoo, would you go back in time and not get the tattoo, if you had that wish?
If it would have made the relationship better, yes, I would not have had the tattoo, but I'm positive it's not about the tattoo.
Okay, you've said that also a million times.
So, if you could put your husband back on for just a second.
Yes, of course.
Hi.
Why is she doing all the talking here?
I'm not quite sure.
This is your...
You say you were a good father, right?
So you raised a good daughter?
Yes, I raised a good daughter.
Do you think that Rania, as she believes, is 100% right, did absolutely nothing wrong, and your daughter is 100% wrong in this situation?
Yes, in this situation my daughter...
So then you can't have been a good father.
Why?
No, no, no.
We're done talking to you for a sec, Rania.
Just hold your britches there.
So, if Rania did everything right, but your daughter is prejudiced against Rania, or is negative towards Rania...
Then there must have been something deficient or wrong in your parenting to raise her in such a way that she would have this negative view of your, I guess, girlfriend, fiancé, and then wife for no reason whatsoever when she does everything right and your daughter just dislikes her for no reason whatsoever.
Well, you might be right if I have done something wrong with my parenting, but I would be interested in what have I done wrong.
Hmm.
Do you understand that Rania has some contempt towards your daughter?
All right.
That she makes fun of her in a public forum like this?
She mimics her whining and complaining and all that?
Well, that's fine.
That's okay.
That's fine?
No, it's not funny.
It's fine.
It's okay.
No, you have no problem with your wife doing that?
No.
Why?
I feel this is one of these questions that I don't even know how to answer.
That your wife is publicly expressing contempt for your daughter and you have no issue with that.
It depends on the words she's using.
It was a tongue.
She mocked her and portrayed her as a whiner and a controller and a manipulator and all that, right?
Wait just a second.
I want to answer this question before.
If she would insult my daughter in a very bad way, I would not be okay with that.
Oh my god, man!
She has insulted your daughter.
She's mocked her.
She's made fun of her.
She portrayed her as a whiner.
She's portrayed her as negative and prejudicial and hating her for no reason whatsoever.
She says she's 100% right.
Your daughter is 100% wrong?
And you think none of this is negative or nasty or destructive towards your daughter in any way, shape or form?
That was not actually an insult, how Rania said that.
Oh, you agree with Rania, then?
No, you don't get the full picture, because, yes...
I was insulted by her.
He did not have the chance to take part of all these situations we have.
Yes, I understand.
Now, Rania has thrown your daughter under the bus again and said that your daughter insulted her, and again, she's 100% right, and your daughter is just mean.
So, man, where's your loyalty to your daughter?
Do you have no capacity?
Listen, Rania, I'm sure you're a lovely person, but I guarantee you, you're not 100% right in this situation.
Guaranteed.
Guaranteed.
And your arrogance in believing that you are is kind of jaw-dropping.
You can be surprised.
No, I'm not surprised at all.
I've heard enough.
I guarantee you, you are not 100% right in this situation.
And if you are 100% right, it means that you married a guy who's a bad father, which I don't believe.
Well...
No, no, Rania, we're done with you.
I just wanted to point that out.
I just wanted to point that out.
No, Stefan, I have to say something.
The questions you ask, that's the reason why we like you.
Because you ask questions that nobody else asks us.
And that's why I'm honored to talk to you.
But in this situation, right now, you don't get the full picture.
And it's very hard to give you the full picture because you have never been in these situations.
And how shall I say that?
If a person is arguing with you, And you get the picture of the person.
And sometimes persons arguing with you, and they have a really bad manner in this, what I want to say with that, is they are negatively.
They just want to destroy you.
Wait, are you referring to your daughter now?
I'm talking about my daughter exactly right.
So your daughter now wants to destroy you?
This is where your loyalty has been after being a father for a quarter century?
That you raised a child that you're now publicly accusing of wanting to destroy you?
I was talking about a situation to talk in generally with people and you have some people...
God, man, no, no.
How whipped are you?
Are you kidding me?
This is your daughter!
She just wants to destroy you?
Uh...
Do you hear yourself?
Does it...
Do you hear any loyalty to your own flesh and blood?
Do you understand why your daughter might have a problem with your relationship with Rania?
That you're now saying that she wants to destroy you?
That she's 100% wrong and you have no problem with Rania mocking her and making fun of her and...
I'm a good father, but I raised a child who wants to destroy me.
Oh man, I don't even know what to say.
I'm sorry, I literally can't continue with this conversation.
I have no idea what to say at this point.
If your daughter is such a horrible person, I don't know what to make of you as a father.
If your daughter isn't such a horrible person, I don't know what to make of you as a father.
But the loyalty deficiency here is truly appalling.
You have a loyalty.
To your daughter.
You should damn well have a loyalty to your daughter because she's your flesh and blood.
You raised her and you cannot throw her under the bus as a parent.
You cannot make her the bad guy to appease your wife.
That is unjust, unfair.
And I'm beginning to have just a little bit more sympathy for the daughter here.
Stefan, you got me wrong.
You picked up one point in my statement that Destroy.
And you made a big deal out of it.
Because I used this word.
No, I checked with you as well.
And you confirmed it.
I would have known that before I would have not used the word destroy.
I was just explaining people that have negative feelings against you.
And that was what my daughter had.
She had negative feelings against me and I couldn't understand it.
Parents are never victims, man.
Don't ever, don't ever try to portray me to me.
Don't ever try to portray yourself to me as a victim when you're the parent, okay?
You're the parent.
You raised her.
You instilled in her values.
You modeled behavior to her.
Do never, ever, to me on this show, Crawl up to me and complain that you're a victim of your own children.
You are the parent.
You set the tone.
You raise them.
If they have problems respecting you, that's on you, not on them.
You don't have the right to play the victim as a parent.
I'm just telling you that right now.
And there are lots of studies that show that diversity...
Decreases social trust in countries, in communities, in neighborhoods, and perhaps even, in this case, in families themselves.
And I'm sorry, in order to retain my emotional energy for the rest of the show, I am going to move on, but I do appreciate the call.
I do think it was enormously instructive.
Okay.
Thank you.
Alright, up next we have John.
John wrote into the show and said, I am an instructor at a prestigious Ivy League school.
In my day-to-day interactions with my coworkers and students, I can taste the liberalism in the air, and it is absolutely disgusting.
Do you have any advice for a conservative-slash-libertarian instructor who wants to help fight the indoctrination of college students while not committing career suicide in an academic environment dominated by leftist ideologies?
That's from John.
Well, hey John, how are you doing tonight?
I'm doing well, Stefan.
How are you?
I'm all right.
Which school is it?
No, I'm kidding.
Don't answer that.
Okay, what does liberalism taste like in the air?
Does it taste like chicken?
What does it smell like?
Give me a sense of what it's like.
Unfortunately, it does not taste like chicken because if you know how to cook chicken, chicken tastes pretty tasty.
It's kind of like...
There's a willingness to ask some questions, but not willingness to ask questions that might interfere with how they see the world.
Right.
So if you've sort of challenged victimology and if you challenge class baiting and race baiting and gender baiting and identity politics and so on, is that where you sort of run into challenges?
Yeah.
I... It was a lot easier kind of formulating this question when I was writing it down.
Well, you didn't have to be as careful when you were formulating the question, right?
It's challenging walking the line in real time.
I know what you mean.
Yeah.
Um, there's, it's, it's, it's one of those, like, they'll ask good questions when it pertains to helping them understand the topics that we're teaching them.
But there's, it's, it's always that they kind of have these assumptions and aren't willing to challenge those as well.
Um, They kind of...
I don't know.
It's just like the students...
And the faculty kind of take a lot for granted.
Yeah, what you're saying is there's no free inquiry.
Right.
That everything has to conform to a particular false and horrifying ideology.
It's a propaganda camp.
I mean, tell me if I'm going too far here, but there's very, very strict lines that you have to color inside, and if you go outside those lines, you're not just mistaken, you may in fact just be satanic, right?
Right.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So what the fuck are you doing there?
That is an excellent question.
Well, you know, I try to get to the meat of the matter relatively quickly.
You know, I'm glad we got here really quickly.
Good.
How can I be a good concentration camp guard?
Well, I think there's another question you might want to ask first, but sorry, John, go ahead.
No, that's fine.
I love teaching.
It's great.
And I need this position to give me a leg up for what comes next.
And what comes next is medical school, hopefully.
Oh!
I'm in the sciences.
Oh, you're kidding me?
You're saying it's this lefty in the sciences, too?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Wow, politically correct physics.
I mean, boy, talk about your antonyms.
But, all right.
But in the sciences, isn't it...
Sort of more objective?
It is, so I teach freshmen and there's a lot of assumptions that are being made by the freshmen that are not correct in my one-on-one interactions with them.
Now, hang on a sec.
I'm sorry to interrupt, John, just after I asked you a big question.
I can feel your anxiety from here.
Like, you're walking through this conversation like it's a landmine of vipers.
It absolutely is.
Right, so this level of internal censorship is not good for you, right?
I'm aware of that.
Okay, good.
I just want you to be aware of that.
I want the audience to be aware of that, but sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
No, it's one of those...
Because there's so much Because those of us who don't, you know, follow the regularly scheduled programming have to do all of this internal censoring,
it's a lot harder to kind of reach out to the students and kind of help them come back from, you know, they didn't do so well on the exam or they're having trouble understanding a certain topic and they need a little bit of emotional support.
And it's really hard to Walk the line of being like, I'm also a person.
I'm not just some person, some instructor who knows the material that you're supposed to learn and, you know, has read the literature of how to teach the material.
Oh, no, no.
No, sorry.
Sorry, we've just veered into Fogland.
I have no idea what you're talking about at this point, so...
Yes, I fully accept that you're a human being.
I just don't know how this is particularly answering my question.
So when you talk about career suicide, tell me some of the things, not even saying the things that you specifically believe, but some of the things that you would consider it impossible to talk about without being targeted.
Um...
If you think that the current president has done anything of merit, that is fairly...
People will look at you, people will remember that you said that, and... that might cause some people to take issue with you.
Or it might inhibit your career potential, right?
Absolutely.
Your chance to find, oh, I mean, I remember, man, man alive.
What I had to do, what I had to go through to find an advisor in my graduate degree was unbelievable.
It was unbelievable.
I met with so many different people.
I had a great thesis and all that, got an A, ended up getting an A in my master's, but man alive.
It was crazy.
I guess word had gotten around that it wasn't on the left, but it was like, no, this doesn't really interest me.
I don't think it's a big topic.
And then you'd see the kind of people that these guys were mentoring, these men and women were mentoring.
And it was like, oh, Lord.
So this is what you wanted to do.
This is who you wanted to teach instead of me.
It is hard.
It is hard.
Because, yeah, you sort of sound like someone in one of these North Korean documentaries.
What do you think of the dear leader?
He's wonderful.
Yeah, that's...
That's a fairly...
I mean, a lot goes unsaid.
It's not like there's, like in the handbook or the employee's manual, it's not like you are forbidden to talk about this, you are forbidden to talk about that.
We value diversity, as long as it all conforms with this particular political opinion.
Absolutely.
But the culture in both the student body and in the instructors is...
It's really hard to go against if you want to have conversation about things like that.
And if you mention that you are not in the school of fish that's going the same direction as the rest of the schools of fish.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, diversity is a lie.
That's just what everybody needs to repeat to themselves over and over again.
Diversity exists on the right.
It does not exist on the left.
If anybody who values diversity and you're on the left, you're completely fooling yourself.
Okay, let me roll a couple of topics past you and give me a 1 to 10, just your gut feeling, a 1 to 10 of what might negative effects, like 10 being the worst of your career, like you run out of town on a pitchfork, and 1 just being you get funny looks in the lunchroom.
All right.
Human biodiversity, race and IQ differences.
Eight.
Oh, really?
There's worse?
Okay, fine.
I thought I was starting at the top and working my way down there.
I try not.
I'm trying to leave some room in case there is something.
No, in case you literally come back to life as Heather.
Okay.
Human biodiversity, male and female brain differences.
Seven to eight.
All right.
Life choices between men and women as a way of solving the supposed gender wage gap.
You know, that women take time off to have babies and work part-time jobs.
So, life choices as an explanation for the gender wage gap.
Probably a nine.
It's even worse than raising IQ? Wow, you must have quite an HR department down there.
Affirmative action is destructive to the aspirations of highly talented minorities.
I have no idea.
Is it infinity or just division by zero?
It's...
Not the same thing, I guess.
It would vary based on who's hearing it.
You have some homework.
Please report back to it.
I'm kidding.
You have to go in a Chewbacca outfit so nobody hoes you.
For a privilege.
You know, I do have a horse mask.
Skepticism towards systemic racism.
Probably a five.
Right.
Right.
Skepticism towards white privilege.
Sex.
Skepticism towards the welfare state.
Three or four.
Inviting Ann Coulter to come and speak at your university.
Probably somewhere in the seven range.
Inviting Charles Murray to come and speak at your university.
I don't know who Charles Murray is.
No, he's the author of The Bell Curve, Raisin IQ. Okay.
Last time he was invited to speak at a university, the woman who was there, the woman professor, ended up in the hospital.
Okay.
Yeah, I don't think I could give you an accurate answer without actually knowing.
Or having been more familiar with his work.
Not believe, openly not at all believing that Russia hacked the US election.
Two, maybe three.
Thinking that part of the reason Marine Le Pen didn't get into the presidency in France was due to rampant sexism in French culture.
Four.
Honesty about some of the more challenging aspects of Islam.
Seven.
Ooh!
Ooh!
I know!
Wanting immigration law in America to be enforced.
That, there you go.
You found the time.
Auga!
Auga!
Danger!
Danger!
Right, okay.
Border wall!
101.
Seven, eight.
Yeah.
Uh...
Pointing out that the first slave owner in America was a black man.
Probably a three.
All right, that's a bet.
So there's...
I mean, this is...
You could go on and on with this for a while, right?
But there's a lot that is at least arguably factually relevant to the questions at hand that you can't really talk about, right?
Right.
Now, the stuff that you can talk about, does it go against...
What you believe?
that depends yeah listen that's a big question I get that you're ruffling up your inner sensors.
Do you have any concern about being alone with female students if they're upset?
Absolutely.
Tell me a little bit about that.
So...
You don't enjoy being dragged into a star chamber of feminist attack with no lawyer present?
Not quite.
And to be fair, that also depends on the individual student.
That's part of the problem, isn't it?
It's kind of whim-based.
Absolutely.
But it's very safe.
For the instructor to have one-on-one meetings with students in open areas.
Whether that's, you know, if your office is adjacent to a fairly well-walked hallway rather than like in some back closet somewhere, you leave the door open or barely cracked when you're meeting with your student, that's fine.
But it's one of those, if you...
If your office is kind of like in the back of the building, in the basement somewhere, it's probably not the best idea to meet with a student one-on-one in there.
Right.
So, don't you just have to do two years of pre-med in order to get into med, or do you need the full degree, or what is the holdup about getting into medical school?
It's not the academics.
It's the, it's a combination of a recommendation from the higher ups in the department goes a long way towards getting into a good medical school.
And regardless of where I am in In my academics, it takes a full year to apply to medical school.
It's a process that starts in the beginning of summer and ends probably sometime around January the next year, maybe even later.
Hard to imagine why American healthcare is so expensive.
Let's crush supply, jack up demand with Obamacare, and then watch prices go through the roof until socialism.
Anyway, sorry.
Right.
So it's one of those, like, applying to medical school is a full year commitment.
And you kind of need to make sure that you have all of your ducks in a row.
If I was going to apply this upcoming year, it would probably be, I would start probably in the next week or so.
And you're a white male, right?
Yes.
So do you know if the medical schools you're applying to have quotas that put you at a disadvantage?
Probably.
Yeah.
On the plus side, at least that generally lowers the quality of health care, which, you know, who cares about when you're young?
But trust me, when you get to my age, it matters quite a bit.
And that's kind of one of the reasons why I want to be a doctor is because I know I can do that job well.
Right, right.
Right.
So how much longer do you have to go before you might be able to get into medical school?
Probably not more than one more year at the most.
Yeah, and it's a school year, right?
So what's it, like three or four months where you don't have to?
No, so I would...
I'm talking calendar years here.
Play that out for me?
For me it was like September through April, maybe early May.
Right, so the application process.
I would be working at this place for another two academic years before I was off to med school.
Okay, but isn't that two calendar years?
Right, but I'd apply essentially a calendar year from today.
Right, okay, okay.
I would start that process.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, this is the way I would look at it, John, and maybe this will be helpful to you, maybe it won't.
I mean, I do have some experience in walking some delicate lines.
So I find that as long as I'm honest about...
Limitations in conversations, I don't find them to be such a problem.
So as long as you say, okay, my goal here is to get to med school.
My goal here is not to, you know, fire Nerf cannons of red pills at everyone in sight.
Right.
If what you're doing is a means to an end, then recognize it as that.
Uh-huh.
You know, like I ride the ski lift up so I can ski down, right?
I'm not enjoying the ski lift up.
That's not what I'm here for, but it's necessary in order to do something else.
Now, once you recognize it as a means to an end, then it takes off you the feeling that you must tell the truth, that it's bad to avoid certain topics, that it's a lack of integrity, blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Does this sort of make any sense?
It does.
Um...
But...
But...
I don't know.
I feel like my self-censorship is...
I'm somewhat interfering with the more personal aspects of this job.
Oh, you mean like talking to the students when they're upset kind of thing?
That's an example where it certainly is applicable.
But there's probably a little bit more to it than that.
What do you mean?
I want to make sure I get the full scope of what you mean.
Okay.
Um.
I don't know.
I think it's hard for me to kind of get in the student's mindset when I hear...
No, that's probably the vast majority of it.
I'm used to hedging a little bit.
I apologize.
No, that's fine.
That's why I'm a little leery to ask you questions because I feel like I need like a truncheon and a swinging light bulb and that melting-faced guy from Raider in the Lost Ark.
Absolutely.
So is it that you're doing some sort of TA work or helping kids who may have done badly or who are having trouble with certain material?
And is it that you then have to try and get them to understand material or regurgitate material that goes against your beliefs?
No.
It's that sometimes the students will be in situations that I don't necessarily see as a big deal because I see the world a certain way and it is very much a product of how they've been Okay, John, listen.
We either have to talk about this stuff or not talk about this stuff.
But this hedging to the point where I still don't know what you're talking about is not working for either of us.
We're either going to have to talk about this stuff openly or not.
But me trying to read these tea leaves of what you're saying, I can't get there.
What are the challenges that you're facing with the students?
It's really hard to connect with them because I believe that it is hard that we should work for what we earn rather than having it be given to us.
But despite where I work, it's a little different where there's A huge culture of everyone has to succeed.
Ah, right.
And this may be the first time where the students have come up against those kinds of limitations, right?
Because there's a lot of social promotion.
A lot of girly stuff has kind of gone into the educational system, particularly in the earlier grades.
And I've said this before, you know, women are wonderful for toddlers and young kids.
They're not that great for older kids.
Women raise wonderful children and men are required to raise wonderful adults, right?
And you see this all the time.
I mean, because I spent a lot of time around moms being a single – sorry, not a single, but a stay-at-home dad.
And moms were like, you did it!
Yay!
You know, all this kind of stuff.
Like, good job!
And a little clap.
And they're enthusiastic about, you know, stuff that toddlers are learning how to do, which is great and it's wonderful.
But they don't know when to stop that.
To go from like, yay, you did it, good job, to like, that sucks.
What you did is just terrible and you're going to have to do it again, right?
I mean, that's more of a dude thing to generalize.
And since there's been such a feminization of education, there is a lot of this participation trophy, woo-woo, you're breathing, you get to pass stuff, and people don't know how to handle it.
how to handle rejection or failure or not being good enough.
It's very, very cruel the way that we're raising a lot of kids in the West these days.
We're making them very soft, very neurotic, and they need their safe spaces.
And they genuinely, they get this weird narcissism of everything I do is like, yay, good job.
And it's like, no, most of the times what you do sucks.
It's true of me.
It's true of you.
It's true of a lot of people, you know, a lot.
I mean, the number of show ideas we come up with versus the ones that we do, the number of ones that we do versus the ones that are really successful, not just in terms of views, but in terms of changing stuff, you know, 90% of everything is crap.
I don't mean this show as a whole, because we try and filter out all the crap ahead of time, but nonetheless, it is hard to be really good at stuff, and there's a lot of failure in everything that you do.
I mean, you look at this with Shakespeare, right?
80% of Shakespeare's plays are barely ever produced.
And people know the best novel writer in Western literature, you could say, European at least, Dickens, right?
Dickens wrote dozens and dozens of novels, and people know maybe five or six of them.
So even the very best people on the planet have a, quote, 80% failure rate.
And if it wasn't for the 20% they're great at, I mean, how many people would do Shakespeare's non-great plays if Shakespeare hadn't written his great plays?
Well, he'd be like the other playwrights of the time.
So even the very best among us have an 80% failure rate when it comes to works of greatness.
And most people aren't among the top tier of human beings in terms of productivity.
So they just don't have this understanding that...
Most of what we do is not going to work out.
And most of the ideas that we have aren't very good.
And most of the things that we produce, unless we have very tight quality control, aren't going to be lasting for a thousand years of excellence or whatever.
And there's no humility and no sense of darkness and no sense of perseverance.
You know, that old idea that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Everybody wants to get rich because they had a great idea.
They don't understand that it is the work that matters and the persistence that matters.
And I'll just mention one story and then I'll get your feedback on it.
I haven't said, hey, it's like a new story because I haven't told it in a while.
But I think it's the guy who developed, maybe it's Ethernet or it was some protocol for transferring data over a network.
And he ended up teaching at a university He had people over to his big, giant house.
He had this big, beautiful house because he'd made a huge amount of money.
And his students would come over, and he said, every year it's the same damn thing.
Students come over, and they say, oh, man, this is a beautiful house.
I wish I had invented Ethernet.
And the guy says, you think I got this house because I invented Ethernet?
Good Lord, no, I didn't get this house because I invented Ethernet.
Do you know how many networking standards there were around at the time that I developed Ethernet?
Hundreds, dozens at least, if not hundreds.
The reason why I have this house is not because I invented Ethernet.
It's because I spent 10 years going to every podunk remote conference and writing for magazines and staying up all night to do demos and getting in front of people and wearing out my shoes, pounding up and down hallways and convincing people and conjoling people to adopt the standard.
And that's why I have this house.
The idea was like 0.0001% of the success that ensued.
But everyone thinks it's like some flash of lightning.
You get some great inspiration and then boom, you get a big giant house.
And that, of course, is not at all.
It's how a lottery works for one in a million people, but it's not how success works for the rest of us.
Right.
Bye.
I mean, that's pretty much how it is.
I think I have some good ideas, but I put them in the book and I don't do any work behind them because I don't have the resources or the contacts to make those things happen.
I don't expect much to come from them unless I actually put the time behind them.
It's exactly that.
I know applying to medical school is going to be a huge undertaking and it's going to require a lot of work and a lot of perseverance.
It's one of those, like, it will pay off if I put the effort in there.
If I put the work in.
Have you talked to current working doctors?
Yes.
What do they think of the profession?
Of being a doctor?
Yeah.
It's rather varied.
Some of them got into it for noble intentions and kind of...
Got beat out a little bit in med school and are kind of just like, well, I'm a doctor now.
I guess I'll be a doctor.
Whereas others genuinely enjoy making people better because bad things happen to good people.
And it is really hard to go through that, both as that person and as the loved ones of that person.
And if you can be somebody who is competent at Getting people who are in those bad situations back to living their lives, then that's something worth doing.
And it's really just like somewhere in between those two extremes.
Yeah, I mean, the statistics are not great, as more and more paperwork and fears of lawsuits and so on have taken over, right?
So this is from 2014.
By the end of the year 2014, about estimated 300 physicians commit suicide.
Depression among doctors is fairly endemic.
It's the second most suicidal occupation and physicians are fairly unhappy.
There's a recent study that said nine out of ten doctors would discourage anyone else from even entering the profession.
And I'm not, you know, I'm glad there are doctors.
I mean, it's fantastic, but I just would hate for you to go through all this stuff and find out you didn't like it as much on the other side.
You might want to, I mean, I don't know if you get to shadow doctors or something like that, but...
Yeah, I've already done a lot of that.
Okay, all right.
I just wanted to make sure you did your due diligence because that is a challenge for a lot of people.
Oh, absolutely.
Right.
So...
Can you be comfortable, or would you be comfortable, knowing you can't solve...
You as an individual, as a TA or whatever, you simply cannot solve the personality problems that have been embedded in a ridiculously oversensitized school environment that's gone on for 15 years before you ever showed up.
You can't fix that.
You cannot...
Fix that.
I mean, I don't want to sound deterministic.
It is an absolutely massive undertaking.
I totally understand that.
No, no, no.
It's impossible for one person to do.
You can't do it.
Yeah.
You can't do it.
It's sort of like, as a doctor, you would never try and talk someone out of type 1 diabetes, right?
It's like, okay, let's just, you know, words won't help.
And this stuff is so ingrained in people.
It doesn't mean that it can't ever be done and so on, but you would need...
Either a purely voluntary environment or much more authority than you have.
Right?
I think I can help people because I'm not giving degrees.
I'm not charging people.
You know, it's all donations at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And so I can help people because the people who come and listen to this show, you know, we're going to do 150 million views and downloads just this year alone.
They're coming here voluntarily.
So I kind of have an authority of...
Charming people into listening to reason, so to speak, right?
So I can help change your mind because you're already mostly, I mean, you want to change your mind, you recognize the problem, whereas this is not even the case.
With a lot of students these days, they think the problem is that the professor is too tough or the environment is sexist or racist or dysfunctional or there's ableism or I don't have enough safe spaces or, you know, whatever, right?
And so they can't even identify the problem accurately, at least with this.
Like, if you have a lot of authority and you can hand out PhDs, then you can be strict, right?
Or if people are...
With you in a voluntary context and have already identified a problem and are coming to you for a potential solution like you or like the last callers or whatever, then you have another kind of authority.
But where you are, I think it would be highly risky because you're trying to give self-ownership and self-actualization to people who've had that gift robbed from them.
Throughout their entire childhoods and youths, maybe by daycare teachers, maybe by teachers as a whole, maybe by parents.
But, I mean, I think about this a lot.
You know, my daughter's having a very, very different upbringing than I had.
But I am going through this weird nostalgic phase.
Maybe it's my half century or whatever, but I'm lost in history, as I've mentioned before.
And one of the things I'm thinking about is my bad childhood.
Was it good for me?
Weird thing to think about.
It's a whole other conversation, which I'll probably do a solo show on.
But you can't, I think, go and create an identity that has been sanded down through mindless cheerleading and indifference to what is actually good for people, which is friction and challenge and toughness.
You can't go back and undo all of that and create something new.
Now, if someone comes to you and says, you know, I can't stand the politically correct environment, I can't do this, assuming it's not a trap, it's not an Admiral Ackbar substitute student, then you can have that kind of conversation.
But other than that, you know, there's an old phrase.
This is going back to doctoring from, I don't know, probably 40 or 50 years ago.
There used to be, and I remember a woman who told me about this, her father, when her father was dying, was sent to such and such home for the incurables.
You know, can't be cured.
And I guess it was morphine central.
Let's make them as comfortable as possible.
That was sort of the idea.
And, you know, this happens, of course, once.
Doctors realize that you're not coming back from that one-way tipping point to the eternal dirt nap to make them as comfortable as possible.
Right now, I would say that your job is...
Unless someone is coming to you specifically identifying the problem, try and make them as productive as possible, as comfortable as possible, but recognizing there is no rewind and do-over, there's no mulligan for 15 years, and it is not your job to fix all of that, and it would be highly dangerous to do so.
You make a very good point.
Maybe a nudge here or there.
See, here's the problem.
The problem is not so much that people are wrong.
There are people, and you know this, probably deep down, maybe you know it consciously, but I'm going to spell it out anyway because I'm a...
Going up.
I'm a verbose son of a bitch, but...
The danger is not the people who make mistakes.
It's the danger is the people who feed on those mistakes and amplify those mistakes.
You know, there are racial tensions and then there's the media.
You know, that works all of that salt into the wound and widens it and throws the maggots in and race baits.
And oh, he was shot execution style, hands up, begging for his life.
He was a disabled guy reading a book, waiting for his kid and gunned down for nothing in the school.
Like, I mean, there's this kind of people as well.
You know, like, if you have a fight...
With your wife and you go and you complain to someone about your wife and they can sort of listen and then say, yeah, but you know, you guys love each other and you'll work it out, right?
And...
There are the other people who get in there, maybe they've divorced themselves, like, oh, I knew she was trouble from the beginning, man.
She never listened to you.
She's always at you.
You're not the same when you're with her and she strips you down and she's wearing your balls in her purse and whatever, right?
They get in there and they work.
They work the wound.
And so the problem is each individual...
I don't think it's particularly volatile, but there are these people who circulate around, and I think they circulate around a lot in universities, who are going to whip people up into a frenzy.
You know, like, so let's say you drop something about something that's not politically correct.
Now, each individual mostly would probably say, oh, well...
Kind of weird, a little different, but you know, I mean, it's a frame of mind, it's a particular perspective, and it may sort of come and go in their minds.
But if they mention it to someone else, you know, they get their hooks and they start widening and envenoming and poisoning and whipping people up into a frenzy, that's a sad, sad occupation, but a very powerful occupation.
And, you know, some feminists are that way.
The race baiters are that way.
The class baiters are that way.
The communists are that way.
Just get in there and work the disagreements, work the resentments, stoke everyone up, set everyone against each other.
It's a horrifying profession.
And I think the danger doesn't necessarily come from individual students.
The danger comes from a chance comment you make that could be misinterpreted, that someone else is going to fasten on and whip into a frenzy.
And there are some people who...
It's their hobby.
You know, I am a sower of division.
I am a creator of problems.
So I would say that recognize the limitations, that what you're doing is a means to an end to become a doctor, and you can't solve these problems.
That's not your job.
And recognizing our limitations, what we can and can't talk about, makes it a lot less stressful.
Because then you just say, nope.
Not gonna go there.
Not gonna go there.
It's not my job.
I can't fix it.
It's only gonna mess me up.
It's not gonna help other people.
If you're not in a position where you can withstand negative feedback, and this is not a personal judgment, John.
I mean, I respect your courage in even calling up and having these conversations.
It's not like, well, I do it, so you should.
It's like, what's my job?
Why do you get paid for us to talk honestly about often difficult topics?
That's my gig.
That's my job.
And I am peculiarly well-suited for it because I have a supreme indifference to the opinions of idiots.
So...
It works for me.
I definitely agree with that.
I feel like I am at least somewhat of an idiot in this context.
I was part of the 15 years of indoctrination where everyone can change the world and that we all should just try and help one another as Much is possible, even if it means, you know, doing things that are probably not good for you.
Well, and you will once you become an actor.
Right.
Absolutely.
Right?
You might save my life, in which case, hopefully, you'll be doing a good service to the world in philosophy, right?
So everyone has their part to play.
You know, I can put that on the bucket list.
Nice, right.
Right, right.
So, you know, Dr.
Smith at the Oklahoma Surgery Center, wonderful guy.
Hope he's done his bit for philosophy.
I certainly think that he has.
I think he genuinely saved my life, and so...
Patronize him.
If you've got issues, he's a great guy to go to.
But this is not...
I wouldn't prescribe medicine to people.
I'm not a doctor.
And you don't have to do philosophy with people because that's not your goal.
And I would write this out.
You've got a 42% chance more likely of getting something done if you write it out.
So I would write it out.
I'd give myself a chart and I'd stick it up on the wall where no one could see it.
And I'd check it every morning and say, okay, here's the stuff I can talk about.
Here's all the stuff I'm not going to talk about.
I'm going to memorize this list.
I'm going to be comfortable with it.
I feel no guilt and no shame whatsoever.
This is not a demarcation of cowardice versus courage, but this is the stuff.
It is imprudent and unwise, right?
Because it's the Aristotelian thing.
A deficiency of courage is cowardice, and excess of courage is foolhardiness, and both are equally...
Dangerous.
And so I would, you know, put the dividing line.
Here's the stuff I can talk about.
I'm comfortable talking about that stuff.
I think it'll be good.
Here's all the stuff.
I'm never going to touch with a 10-foot pole.
Stick to that list and get through to where you want to get to.
And you can start doing good when you have the training, you have the authority, and you have people who are coming to you voluntarily, as people generally do with doctors.
So that would be my suggestion.
Excellent.
Alright.
Thanks, man.
Stay well.
Go heal the world.
And I appreciate the call.
Let's move on to the next.
Alright.
Take care.
Thanks.
Alright, up next we have Andrew.
Andrew wrote in and said, Since UPP has to apply to all people at all times, there could be no universally preferable positive actions because that would fail the coma test.
Does a philosophical approach to ethics have anything to say about positive ways we should live as opposed to simply avoiding immoral actions?
That's from Andrew.
Hey Andrew, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Good.
Great question.
Thank you.
I just want to start off by saying I didn't really understand the concept of irony until I heard of someone getting a tattoo of the word freedom in Arabic.
That's a new one.
Which he may have been ordered to by his wife.
I don't know.
What can I do?
What can I do?
So many layers.
So many layers.
Is that cool?
It had some onion peel to it, let's just put it that way.
I was crying too.
Right, right.
Right, okay.
And this is a great, great question.
You have uncorked a massive torrent of language because I've had this request before and I have been thinking about it for a while.
So you are my guinea pig of what needs to be talked about.
So, do you mind if I just get people up very briefly on the sort of coma test and UPB and so on?
Yeah, go for it.
All right.
So, there's a way of looking at ethics, which I talk about in my free book, available at freedomainreader.com slash free, called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
And in it, I talk about the coma test.
And the coma test is, we can't really imagine that somebody who's in a coma is doing an evil thing.
Because they're in a karma, right?
I mean, you can't, right?
So if you have something that's a positive obligation for virtue, like sell everything you have and give money to the poor, well, if that's the good, the opposite must be the bad, right?
The opposite of virtue must be evil, right?
Because it's an antonym, right?
Up, down, black, white, good, evil.
And so if you have as a good...
Like a significant good, not an aesthetically preferable action, or API as they call it, but universally preferable behavior.
Everyone has to sell half of what they have and give the money to the poor.
A guy in a coma can't do that, so he's not doing it, and therefore you have a problem with your moral system.
And it's one of the ways that I avoid...
These positive actions, like you must do this, right?
Because remember, I remember this from years ago, there was a theologian who wrote, sorry, a theologian who wrote an analysis, believe it or not, of Mad Magazine, you know, the Alfred E. Newman gap-toothed grin Mad Magazine.
Is that still going these days?
I don't even know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
You sounded like you made grunts of comprehension.
I think it is.
I think it is.
Anyway, there was Cracked, which wasn't so good, but Mad, which was actually pretty good for a while.
They have a cartoon version of it on TV. Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
And the theologian wrote an analysis of the ethics of Mad magazine.
It was really, really interesting.
And I read it, and I found it quite fascinating.
And one of the things that the theologian pointed out was, Thou shalt not is not restrictive compared to thou shalt, right?
And I've used this before.
If I say you have to go to this room and this house on this street in Denver, That's
pretty restrictive.
You've got one place to go.
The whole argument as to why the coma test is valid is in the book.
I won't run through the whole thing here, but the coma test, it's a good...
Is it perfect?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sure it's fine, but it's a good rule of thumb.
Somebody says, this is the moral action.
If it's a positive action, then someone in a coma is not able to achieve it.
It's doing the opposite of achieving it, and therefore...
And also, what is the opposite of a positive action?
I don't know.
Refraining from it?
It's tough to say.
So when I talk about...
Evil, which is violations of universally preferable behavior, and the arguments for it are in the book.
Murder, theft, rape, assault, violations of property, and so on.
Well, the opposite of that is respecting life, respecting property, respecting personal boundaries, respecting personal integrity.
Now, of course, someone in a coma actually does not kill people.
He does not steal.
He does not rape.
He does not assault.
So is he really, really virtuous?
So the opposite of evil is not quite the same as virtue.
It's necessary but not sufficient for being virtuous, because virtue should be a positive action.
And this is sort of where I think you're coming from.
So in the book, I really define what is evil, and that we should not kill, rape, assault, murder, and the reasons why are in the book.
But I don't really talk about virtue.
As in what we should do, and there's a very good reason for that.
But is this a fair way of describing sort of where you're coming from as far as the question goes?
Oh, yeah.
And this also came out of a conversation that I was having with a guy, and I was trying to make the case to him that the only real objective universal rules you can have would be prohibitions.
And he was like, no, no, no, no.
You've got to have something like, you've got to have a universal concept of good.
And I was like, well, I agree, but I don't know how to get there.
Listen, I don't care that much if people are good.
I just want them to not be evil.
No, seriously.
No, I know what you mean.
You know what I mean?
Like, oh man, given the way the world is today, can we all just stop being assholes?
Like, I don't need everyone to be an angel, but let's stop all this satanic shit.
That's my basic rant about this.
It's like, sure, I'd love to be in a place where, you know, I could espouse all of these positive virtues and everything that people should do and so on.
I'd just be happy if people stopped being crazy assholes for a while.
Like, that to me would be fantastic.
So it's sort of like when everyone around you is drinking cholera-laced water and typhus-laced water, it's like, hey, everybody, just boil your water.
It's like, yes, but what about Perrier with a nice bit of lime juice?
It's like, sure, that'd be great.
But right now, can we just boil our water and stop drinking the stuff that's making us sick?
Let's just do that.
Stop eating your own feces and boogers, and then we can start talking about a Cordon Bleu restaurant down the road.
But right now, right now, stop hitting your children, stop screaming at your children, and then we can start about how to positively coach them into virtue.
So for me right now, given that it's kind of an emergency in the world, which is why everyone's so shocked that I'm not just talking about abstractions anymore, it's right now there's a plague, there's a pestilence.
I'm basically just trying to get people to stop doing evil stuff.
And once we've got a bit of a handle on that, then we can start to talk about the positive stuff.
But there's another reason why, other than, to me at least, the emergency aspect of where things are, Andrew, there's another reason why.
Positive values are a challenge.
And let me ask you this.
So you engage in philosophical discussions, right?
Right.
Good, good!
I appreciate that.
Now, tell me, if you would, the philosophical discussion that was the most scary for you that required the most courage?
- I think it had to be Well, that one was pretty scary because I was in the presence of my girlfriend's dad.
What did you say, son?
Right, okay.
Are you saying there's no moral absolute positive actions?
No, it wasn't like that.
You want me raising my grandchildren?
Right.
No, he was really cool about it, but it was actually my girlfriend's older sister's fiancé who I was talking to in that situation.
But the dad was around, right?
Yeah, the dad was around.
You had the ancient masculine castanets clanking away in a corner.
Yeah, I got it.
Yes, yes.
And even though it wasn't that monumental, for me it meant a lot because, I mean, I've got to make a good impression on this family, you know?
Oh, yeah.
You don't want to philosophy your way out of some available eggs.
That's no good.
How philosophy spreads in the long run.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And I'm guessing you weren't counting on a lot of support from your girlfriend.
Yeah.
She was listening.
Listening, yes.
But that's not exactly what I meant.
All right.
Okay.
And what was the topic?
The topic was this.
Well, it started out with veganism.
And it got, I was like, I don't know if I, I don't know.
I was like, to be honest, I think that the whole vegan discussion kind of makes me uncomfortable because I think I really would be offended by the way animals are treated.
But I kind of don't want to think about that because it's not really high on my priority list right now.
But then we got into my girlfriend's sister's fiancé was saying, well, you believe in objective truth, right?
And I was like, yeah.
And he's Catholic.
And so it's pretty easy for him to get to that because you've got divine command and everything.
And so it was also tough because I didn't want to get too deep into talking about religion.
At the time, you know, in that situation.
So you needed some courage there, right?
Now you needed courage because you were afraid of irrationally hostile responses, right?
Rightly or wrongly, but that was your concern, right?
Right.
Right.
So in other words, you needed courage in the presence of a vice, which was an irrationally hostile response.
I assume you wouldn't be that concerned with disagreement.
As long as it was, you know, decent, honorable, respectful, and so on, right?
Right.
So you were concerned that people were going to become irrationally hostile, right?
Right.
So...
Maybe not accept me into the family or whatever.
And reject you, and there would be big negative consequences, right?
Right.
So you needed the virtue of courage because you feared the vice of irrational hostility, right?
Right.
You would not have needed courage...
If you had not felt it was possible you were in the presence of vice.
Right.
So courage depends on vice.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Uh-huh.
We don't need courage.
I mean, I assume you don't think you need a lot of courage to have this conversation, right?
So, because I assume you're not thinking, I'm going to go off half-baked, right?
No.
That's a great line from WKRP for many years ago.
Well, you don't want to go off half-cocked.
Hey, hey, I'm always fully cocked.
Anyway, it's actually true.
So, you need courage.
Because a vice, vice is required because, sorry, courage is required because they're vice.
Why is there a virtue called honesty?
There's a virtue called honesty because we fear attack for telling the truth, right?
And so the positive virtues are necessary because of vice, if not downright evil, that may be around us, right?
Right.
Would you say that of all of the positive virtues?
Let us discuss that.
I think that's a great question.
Give me a positive virtue and then tell me how it exists independent of potential immorality or vice around.
Right.
Go ahead.
The example that comes to mind would be there's an earthquake in Haiti, and I want to go – I have an excess of resources, and I want to go help people in Haiti who have had their lives destroyed.
There was no real vice there, right?
Right, right.
So that would be something that would be helpful and nice, and I guess we would put that in the category of virtue?
Yeah.
Right.
Because it's in a sense you're sacrificing the comfort of staying at home.
Right.
So there would be a challenge to doing it, which is you'd rather stay home and maybe you'd get sick when you were out there.
So you'd need a certain amount of courage to go out and do that action.
But you would not face...
So those would be physical, dangerous, but not moral dangers that you would be experiencing.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.
However, that's pretty rare.
In terms of the courage that we would want in the everyday, the courage that we want in the everyday is not going to drop bales of food in an earthquake-ridden section of the world.
But what we would, I think, in a much more everyday situation, need the courage to speak the truth despite negative consequences socially or professionally, academically.
So we're talking about the last caller, right?
So I think we can come up with those situations.
I think they're perfectly fair and valid.
I just think they're kind of rare.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
So can you think of an everyday virtue that you would have, that you would need, in a sense, right?
Because virtues are things that we kind of need.
Like, I don't consider it a great deal of, I don't consider myself like a wonderful person because I don't hit my daughter, right?
Mm-hmm.
You know, I mean, I'm not tempted to.
It would be horrifying to even imagine doing that and so on.
Yeah, and that kind of goes back to my original point.
Or my original question, you know what I mean?
Like, you wouldn't be considered a great person for not hitting your daughter.
And so what we're doing is kind of finding the things that make you stand out.
Right.
Now, there are things that in this show where I think I show courage and show integrity and show honesty in difficult situations or with difficult topics.
And I'm Fully aware that I think I deserve praise for the courage it takes to talk about certain topics or confront certain things.
But that courage is only necessary because there are potentially negative consequences for doing so, right?
People might get mad at me, they might talk badly about me, or whatever it is, right?
Mm-hmm.
So the courage is only necessary because of the irrationality and hostility of immature or bad people, right?
Right.
And so in a sense, the goal of philosophy is to try and help create a world where the positive virtues aren't really necessary.
And that's why I don't spend a huge amount of time.
I think they're important, and I think that they need to be discussed, and I'm glad that why you brought this up.
But wouldn't it be great to live...
In a world where speaking the truth about things that people find challenging was accepted because people were generally rational and did not attack the messenger, didn't shoot the messenger, didn't Get trolly, didn't, you know, do the usual stuff of attack your source of income and try and destroy your reputation and all that.
Like, if you could simply speak the truth and it would be like mathematicians discussing a particular theorem, there would be a curiosity, an intellectual analysis, but not this crazy tribal hysteria that goes on at the moment.
Now, because the crazy tribal hysteria and aggression and exploitation and resource gathering and resource redirection through the state, because all of that's going on, Then we do need courage to speak the truth about certain topics.
But the goal of philosophy, like right now, it's such an emergency.
I care less about positive ethics, and it's kind of like a full circle.
Because if philosophy wins this round for once in its goddamn existence, if philosophy wins this round of cultural conflict, we do a lot to start building a world Where the success of virtue diminishes the need for virtue.
The success of spreading reason and evidence and adherence to philosophy means that we should not need the kind of courage that we need right now to talk about challenging and controversial issues.
Does that make any sense?
The purpose of philosophy is to use positive virtues in order to eliminate the need for positive virtues.
Kind of like how a doctor wants to eliminate the patient's need for the doctor.
Yeah, like in China, in certain places, you pay your doctor until you get sick, right?
So his incentive is to keep you healthy.
Yeah.
And I think the positive virtues, in a sense, are less important to delineate because we all know them.
We all know them.
I don't have a philosophy show where I try and convince people who are hitmen to stop killing people.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm happy if that happens, but that's not my thing.
Because my listeners aren't this sort of seething goblin-like horde of ravenous sociopathic slaughterers, right?
I mean, good people.
So it's not like, well, you know, boy, I really was going to go and strangle a bunch of homeless guys, but then I read UPB and I'm like, you know, maybe not.
So the positive virtues we all know.
And so my goal is to model, I think, courage and to show people it's not as bad as you think it is.
You know, like everyone has these disaster scenarios about what happens if you tell the truth and you get attacked.
It's not as bad as you think it is.
It's fine and it's necessary and it's certainly better than the alternative, which is everyone shutting up and the world going to hell in a handbasket.
So I think I can model that kind of stuff as I've seen it modeled to me as well.
But everyone knows.
Like, you knew at this point that you were in a situation of risk, and you knew it was going to take courage to continue to be honest about the conversation, right?
Mm-hmm.
You didn't need anyone to tell you that.
Does that make sense?
Right.
Right.
So I think that everybody knows instinctively.
Like anybody with a conscience, with empathy, are the only people who are going to be able to do much good in philosophy.
I think those people, like yourself, are going to know...
When to be courageous and when to be not over courageous to the point where you're, you know, harming yourself or whatever it is.
So that's why I think, I mean, I like to model the positive virtues, but I think...
Right now, the focus is just trying to wake people up to the evil they're unconsciously doing, like supporting particular government actions and supporting those who support those particular government actions that are the violations of the non-aggression principle and so on.
That is just waking people up to the evil that they're doing.
I think evil is one of these things that, for most people, like if you're not a total sadist, Then you have to be fooled into doing evil, which is why propaganda is so powerful.
You have to be fooled into doing evil.
As soon as people wake you up to the evil that is, I think we generally recoil from it.
You know, like somebody hands you something and you think it's a piece of Jell-O. So for me,
UPB illuminates...
Evils in the world, not the obvious ones that we know about, like serial killers and so on, but the less obvious ones that we're bamboozled about, like state actions and so on.
And so I think it's, to me, just about switching the light on.
People will recoil on their own, and once they have the right information, I think our innate sense of good and evil kicks in, which is, again, why so much propaganda is thrown into keeping that knowledge away from us.
Once the light is switched on, we don't want the roach sandwich anymore.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
All right.
Well, I appreciate it.
Now, I'll work a little bit more on this.
I know that this is not a complete circling round of the topic as a whole.
So, Andrew, I really appreciate you bringing this up.
I promise I will do more work on it.
I think a nice juicy essay would be, oh, lovely philosophy essay.
I miss them so much.
But I appreciate you bringing this up.
I'm already salivating.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, it's wonderful.
So thanks for the call.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really appreciate you bringing this up, and I promise I will get back to you more on this.
Thanks, Jeff.
Thanks, man.
Okay, up next we have Brian.
Brian wrote in and said, That's from Brian.
Hey, what's up, Steph?
My curiosity, Brian, how about you?
Not a whole lot.
I'm chilling.
I'm sitting on my bed, and I am very nervous about this conversation.
What are you wearing?
I'm just kidding.
Actually, during the course of this whole call, I was actually able to shower, too.
I had my computer next to the shower.
So we showered together.
Yeah, we have.
Want to get married and start a family?
All right.
So do you want to tell me a little bit more about...
What you went through that gave you this perspective, revelations about reincarnation and the nature of reality.
Yeah, so I got this out of a sort of psychotic episode that I had encountered.
So it was after a breakup.
All right, now hold on a second.
Sorry, I need to define psychotic episode.
Well, I think I know what a psychotic episode is.
Trust me, I have them every Wednesday night right around this time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But for others, they may not want you to skate past that particular hole in the ice without sort of circling.
Sure.
Well, maybe I can kind of tell the story and then you can get an idea of what happened to me.
Please do.
I love that story.
Okay, so it was after a breakup.
I was semi-homeless, and I had made a number of decisions.
My life was really in a bad place, probably the worst point of my life.
And I basically came to a decision that I couldn't trust my own ability to make decisions.
Jesus, take the wheel.
Yeah, yeah, basically.
No, listen, this is not a bad thing at all.
Recognizing the limits of ego and willpower is very important in life, so I applaud you for that.
You know, if you keep making bad decisions, you've got to call on something deeper than whatever part of you is making those bad decisions, right?
Oh, yeah.
Usually it involves not being the penis, but, you know, it could be other things as well.
Yeah, and I was a leftist at the time, too, so that should tell you something.
Yeah, no, philosophy is a giant spray of cock-be-gone.
On people's groins, you know?
Get thee behind me, foreskin!
Anyway, come on.
Yeah, so I basically decided I would kind of voluntarily give up my reason.
And I just kind of dived into it.
And I found myself experiencing a lot of just weird things.
Like, I started using kind of magical thinking.
And I would string together...
Kind of these events that didn't really correlate with one another.
They weren't causally related or anything, but I would make them similar.
And I somehow used a sort of system of mysticism that I just made up on my own to sort of give myself the will to carry myself out of this horrible period of my life.
I did two things.
I did make my life better, but I also pushed it a little too far.
I went real crazy over my ex.
After I got a good job and bought a house and turned my life around, I then continued down this dark road.
I basically vandalized her car and I committed some other crimes.
I had a lot of baggage and a lot of weird stuff going on.
Holy bloody boiler, Batman.
Yeah, I did the time for it.
I went to prison for it and this is when I kind of thought about everything.
And so I kind of organized it all into a system and then I made it consistent with abandoning it.
And I think that when I listened to you talk to a man several weeks back about reincarnation, And you had expressed some concern that it's not a system that gives people any sort of urgency in the world, and there's so many problems that we face.
And so I basically came out of it, and I thought maybe I could put the hat on that I... That I could temporarily adopt this system for the purpose of a dialogue to maybe allow other people to sort of talk themselves out of it too, or maybe believe in it in a way that adds some urgency to their lives in a concrete way.
All right.
Does that make sense?
No, but I'll keep asking, and it's not necessarily your fault.
I mean, maybe I have a block, but I just wanted to mention something here, which, you know, I'm big into...
Free will, personal responsibility, self-ownership.
Absolutely.
And I've made these cases a million times.
There's a very underrated passage in one of my books called Against the Gods, again available for free at freedomainradio.com slash free, regarding the unconscious, the subconscious.
And the you that you know is not all the you that you are.
That is very true.
And when you're young...
The you that you know, you think is the you that you are, but it's not.
It's a subsection.
It's a small sliver.
It's a tip of the iceberg kind of thing.
As you get older, the you that you are complete begins to rise up against the you that you think you are, the top part, the ego, right?
The unconscious, the subconscious begins to rebel against the falsehoods of the ego.
The ego is susceptible to propaganda, right?
The subconscious, not so much.
Subconscious is far older than we are.
Subconscious has a processing speed that has been clocked at up to 8,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
It is all the way down to single-celled organisms, all built up, all the instincts, all...
I mean, just to give you an example, I mean, we think we have some particular ego and it's all up to us.
Remember when you were a kid and if you're a boy, right, you want to play...
Sports or you want to play tag, whatever.
A lot of times, when I was a kid, girls were just kind of annoying.
Because, you know, they couldn't run as fast, they couldn't kick as well.
So it's like, oh, a girl wants to come and play.
And it's like, oh, fine, okay, you take her.
And oh, you take her, that kind of thing, right?
And then, you know, girls are just kind of annoying.
And they play games I don't understand, you know.
And I think it's like my daughter plays, is interested in, plays a very sanitized version of Dungeons& Dragons.
Now, when I played Dungeons& Dragons when I was a kid, it was a lot to do with fighting things and winning and battling and gathering treasure and so on.
My daughter's Dungeons& Dragons seems to have a lot to do with making mean dragons nice by redecorating their caves.
I mean, yeah, yeah, because it's all a social construct, nothing biological, right?
So if you look at the difference of how you viewed girls before puberty versus after puberty, night and day, from an annoyance to something to be desperately pursued, right?
I mean, I don't know if that was your experience.
That had something to do with my experience.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, well, I don't know if this is like a – for me personally, I had crushes at a very young age on girls.
I really – Well, based on your actions, we'll get into our selected childhood in just a moment.
So, yeah, no, I get all of that.
I understand that.
And so, yeah, who are you?
Are you the person who finds girls annoying before puberty?
Are you the person who finds girls desirous after puberty?
Which, who are you?
Well, one is pre-hormones and the other is post-hormones.
One is pre-sexual maturity, the other is post-hormones.
Post-sexual maturity.
And if shortly post-sexual maturity, a good cannon fodder to be groomed by French teachers.
So this, who are you, is really, really an important question.
You know, you hit your peak mental processing in your 20s.
Who are you later on?
You know, I thought even better.
I didn't think better.
I thought faster in my 20s.
Now I'm 50, intelligence down a little, wisdom up a huge amount, at least I hope.
And so when it comes to identity, There is what we can control and there is what we must listen to, what we must receive.
There's a huge amount of wisdom built into our base brains, right?
I mean, I sort of view this sort of new part of our brain, like the frontal cortex, prefrontal, near frontal cortex.
It's like, I've referred to it as like the post- Monkey buggy as hell beta expansion pack.
You know, it's just nature's testing shit out on us all the time.
Some of it's great and some of it sucks.
And I love the fact that we have this tumor of self built on top of the ape structures of ancient evolution.
But it's not all who we are.
And people will try and keep you up at the top.
People will try and keep you, you know, as I say, living in your head, not in your body, not in your soul, not in the meaty muscle of your comprehensive being, what I've also called the ecosystem.
My identity is not just me.
It's my mom in there.
It's other people in there, people who disagree with me, people who agree with me, me disagreeing with myself.
It's a whole complex ecosystem and If we try to dominate it with our ego, we end up in this totalitarian regime where rebellion goes underground and shows up in psychosomatic, shows up in insomnia, shows up in various ailments, shows up in unhappiness, in depression, in my sort of way of looking at things.
And so we've got to get everyone at the table.
Everyone at the table.
The people who hated us are still part of who we are.
The people who loved us are certainly part of who we are.
Our self-doubt, part of who we are, and an essential part of who we are because it keeps us humble.
Our sense of power, maybe even our grandiosity to reach for things which seem impossible, certainly part of who we are.
But self-doubt needs to be in conversation with the mad ambition.
And the confidence needs to be in conversation with the caution.
Everyone gets a seat at the table in the ideal, an ecosystem, the identity which is an ecosystem.
Who rules in an ecosystem?
No one.
The lion doesn't rule.
Because if he can't get enough to eat, he dies.
And when he dies, Mufasa style, he goes into the ground, feeds the grass, which is then eaten by the gazelle.
Who rules?
Nobody rules.
It's a balance.
And it's striving for balance as well.
I remember that.
Libra, I mean, I don't believe in any of that stuff, but I just remember when I was a kid reading, Libra, balance?
Are you kidding me?
I'm up and down.
No, no, striving for balance, right?
And this is the same thing with the personality.
So when we think that we are just one thing, like we're just this one thing, Our identity is not part of an ecosystem.
It's all just about our willpower.
It's all just about what we think up top in the post-Monkey beta expansion pack buggy as hell system we've got going on here.
We're not fully human.
In fact, we're likely to make significant numbers of mistakes without being guided by a deeper self, without being guided by the layers our brain is built on, from single-celled organisms through lizards, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, you name it.
Everything has evolved with the goal of survival and flourishing and reproduction, and we can't just listen to the top part.
And everyone wants you to live in the top part because the top part is susceptible to manipulation through language.
And people who want to control you try and keep you right up at the top here, right at the top, right at the top of the speckled egg, the speckled ostrich egg I call the head.
They try to keep you right at the top here.
They try to control you through language, through manipulation, because this old language stuff, you can talk yourself in and out of stuff.
But once you get down deep into the bowels of your being and you center yourself and you know that everyone gets a seat at the table, You can't be manipulated.
I mean, I have my faults, but being manipulated is not one of them.
And that's because you can't manipulate me because if you try and control a part of me, I won't shame that part of me.
I won't put it underground.
And so you can't control me because it's invisible to me.
Because everyone gets a seat at my table.
Everybody gets to talk to me who is within me.
Even those who are my, quote, enemies get a full seat at the table.
Because my inner enemies are people who are provoked by people who hate me.
Those identities within me, they're there to help me be protected from those crazy people, like a scar tissue.
I remember you talking to people about their inside dads and stuff like that.
Yeah, they're there to help you.
They're not there to punish you.
They're there to keep you safe.
If you're scared of lions, if you've got an inner image of a dangerous lion, it's not there to torture you.
It's there to keep you away from lions.
It's there to help you.
It's there to save you.
When you were talking about You were making bad decisions.
And, you know, please, Brian, I'm in no way trying to explain you to you.
I just wanted to use that as a talking point.
I haven't talked about this in entirely too long, because politics!
But I haven't talked about this.
It's really, really important for people to understand this.
And internal family systems therapy, as I've actually had the author on, it's worth having a look and reading this book.
The MECO system is something that I think is really important.
And...
We do need a lot of strength in the trials to come in the world, and we also are going to need to be beyond manipulation.
You can only be manipulated if you reject significant aspects of yourself, and you shame them, and you call them bad, and you call them enemies, and you call them wrong.
Everyone must get a seat at the table, and if everyone gets a seat at the table, then someone's going to try and manipulate you with, say, shame, shaming, or whatever, right?
But if your capacity for shame gets a seat at the table, And somebody shames that, they've got allies.
Right?
The Alinsky tactic is to isolate and attack.
And so if you shame your shame and you drive it underground within your mind, within your heart, then it has no allies.
And therefore it can be controlled from the outside because it's not part of your conversation.
You know, like if you're a kid...
It's being bullied at school and doesn't tell you.
Then you don't have anything to say about that bullying.
You can't help that child.
And therefore that child's going to get bullied more.
Your child comes home and says, I'm being bullied.
You sit down, you go down, you deal with it in some way or another.
So everyone gets a seat at the table.
Because that way you can't be controlled by outside people finding your hidden self that you don't want to admit and controlling you through the back door, controlling you through that way, manipulating you.
Self-honesty, everyone getting a seat at the table.
Within the cathedral of the self is the only way, I think, to have consistent enough moral strength to evade and avoid being manipulated.
We can't be shamed if we don't shame ourselves, and if we recognize that our capacity for shame is provoked within us by people shaming us, and it's designed to help keep us away from shaming people.
And so if you get, quote, shamed, or somebody's trying to shame you, and you say, oh, okay, so you're the kind of predator that my inner shame wants me to stay away from, so then you don't end up being in control.
Sorry, you don't end up being controlled by the person who's shaming you.
Because if somebody provokes an unbearable shame in you and you reject it, then you're under their control because you've just announced to them you have this big button.
You push this button, I'll do what you want to avoid these negative experiences.
But once you've accepted that these negative experiences are there to help you, And they're there to inform you.
And they're there to keep you safe.
Then you don't have any buttons that people can push.
And you know, if you're out there in the public talking about challenging topics, or fuck any topics for that matter, people are trying to push these buttons all the time.
Just go to YouTube comments.
They're trying to push these buttons all the time.
Oh, Steph, you were mean to that woman who talked about mysticism.
Fritz, you were mean to that.
You're a terrible guy.
You shouldn't be verbally abusive, you arsehole!
Oh yeah, okay.
I'll listen to you who can't even notice their own hypocrisy.
Don't be verbally abusive, you balding bastard!
So, if you're going to go out in the public arena, you need to make friends with every aspect of yourself first.
Hell, if you're just going to try and do anything positive in this life and in this world, you need to become friends with every aspect of yourself and recognize there are no enemies within.
And if you make enemies within, if you take parts of yourself, reject, abandon, and shame them.
If you make enemies within, you invite the enemies from without and give them control over you.
Does that make any sense relative to your experience?
Well, it's inviting a new kind of possibility for me here.
So, like, I had a lot of these thoughts and I basically abandoned them.
And it sounds as though I should take them into consideration now if I want to invite everyone to the table.
Yes, I did it in therapy, too.
So I just wanted to imagine that.
It can be a challenge to do it alone.
I was in therapy for years as well, so...
Yeah, okay.
Now, tell me a little bit more about the reincarnation.
No, no, actually.
So psychotic break, is this your...
Because that's a technical phrase, right?
So is that your description of what happened?
It's the easiest way for me to quickly tell people what happened, where they have an idea where to start.
Now, I was never able to really afford to...
Have it really analyzed in any kind of detail.
So I just call it that so that people have an understanding that it was mentally related and it was...
I went pretty far in a certain direction.
And so I'm not using it in a clinical sense.
Right, okay.
So I wasn't sure if you had been diagnosed or whatever it is.
Okay.
No, and I'm not sure that I would believe it because it turns out there was a food allergy component as well.
But that's kind of beyond...
It's kind of on the side.
It's not related, I think, for this discussion.
Right, okay.
Nature for reality beyond our own.
So, when I was going through my insomnia many, many years ago now, it was a before and after in my life.
16 months, I think it was.
Astonishing.
Astonishing.
Brutal.
I am not good with being tired.
Some people are.
I mean, my daughter, if she doesn't get enough sleep, she's perfectly fine.
I mean, if I don't get enough sleep...
I understand.
Yeah, when I'm tired, I'm with my fiancé at night and it's like at 10pm I get tired.
And it's like no amount of her kissing me or anything.
It's just I'm tired and I can't Function.
I totally understand.
Yeah, like some people get hangry, like hungry and angry.
Oh, yeah.
I get slangry, which is just sleep-deprived and angry.
I'm just slangry.
Yeah.
And I'm short-tempered and I just don't enjoy.
I feel like I'm just walking slow motion through like acidic cotton balls in the air.
It's just not a positive experience for me.
Now, I haven't had issues with sleep forever, but during this particular time...
I was so disconnected with a fundamental discontent in my existence that I genuinely had no idea why I wasn't sleeping.
Afterwards, it was all perfectly clear.
I couldn't sleep because I was asleep.
I couldn't sleep because I was not awake to what was actually happening in my life and the low, low quality of the relationships that I had and the fact that I was being exploited in a variety of situations and ways.
I was not able to sleep because I was not able to wake up.
And it was the lack of sleep that helped me to wake up because it allowed me to, or basically cornered me into getting therapy.
And I had tried going to therapy before, but it wasn't until I met a great therapist that I really understood how great it could be.
And I remember being so...
Frustrated at what I felt was a very stern disapproval from my own self that I could not access directly.
I had names for all these characters.
I hadn't thought of them in a while, but I could list them all for like 20 people I was having these intense conversations with during this whole period.
I was so frustrated.
Like, what do you want from me?
I'm trying to do things better.
What do you want?
What do you want?
And they don't say.
They don't say what they want.
They don't sort of say, give me some scrolling marquee.
I want lasers on the moon.
Just tell me what to do and I'll do it.
Which is the exact opposite of, you know, it's like, I gave you orders for 25 years.
Now, I give up.
You give me orders.
And the whole point was that nobody gives anyone orders anymore.
Yeah.
Nobody gives anyone orders.
We discuss.
We talk.
And that was foreign to what I had understood as having itself, as having an identity.
It was foreign to sit there and say, what, nobody takes orders?
How are we supposed to have any free will if nobody takes orders?
How are we supposed to have freedom without a dictator?
It doesn't make any sense.
And that feels like you're going crazy.
It feels like you're falling apart.
It feels like you're breaking up.
Like a spaceship coming into the atmosphere too fast.
Just wings peeling off.
Windshields peeling off.
Tiles peeling off.
The skeleton.
The very steel skeleton peeling off.
And it feels like you're dying.
There's a...
Actually, I've just listened to this again.
Again, I'm back on this nostalgia kick.
It's a great song by Supertramp called Asylum.
And...
It's about a false self and an authentic self, whether they know it or not.
It's what it's about.
I believe I'm dying.
He howls, the singer, the two singers, the baritone and the tenor, countertenor almost, Roger Hodgins.
And it's about having nothing to say to people but still talking versus actually having Something to say that isn't rehearsed.
Just having something to say that isn't just for an effect.
To appear a certain way.
Oh, it really looks like rain.
Do you know I nearly missed my train?
You know, just saying things merely for the purpose of moving syllables around.
Because if you don't speak...
Nobody will know you're alive.
Nobody will know you're there.
But then when you speak, you confirm that you're not there.
Because what you say is cliched.
It's rehearsed.
It's for effect.
It's not honest.
It's not spontaneous.
It's not authentic.
It's not you speaking about reality and identity.
It's you attempting to control other people through inconsequentiality.
So...
When you say the nature of a reality beyond our own, my question is, beyond your conscious mind, beyond the part of you that was making terrible decisions, or beyond all of your mind, beyond all the way back down to the lizard brain, do you mean beyond your consciousness as a whole, or beyond the part of your consciousness that was making all the bad decisions?
I guess I was, uh, I don't know if I can answer that.
I was perceiving, uh, I was on a totally different track from that.
I perceived that spirits had enlisted themselves in the aid of helping me because they had taken some kind of pity on me.
I'm not sure how that would fit into the framework you're setting up.
Spirits had inhabited you because they wanted to take pity on you?
No, they had enlisted themselves in the service of helping me achieve my goals.
They were outside of me, and they were helping me get things done that I wanted to do.
Right.
Now, outside of you...
If you take your conscious mind and associate that with your whole body, then you have your conscious mind and you have your body, right?
Therefore, anything else must be outside of you.
But if your conscious mind is extended and expanded to include all the parts of your brain, and by this I also mean your second brain, like your gut.
We have a very complex system down in there.
You mentioned food allergies before.
Yeah, I found access to that actually meditating years later.
I kind of became aware of a gut, like an aware, like, I know what you mean by the gut.
We have a gut feeling.
We have a gut sense.
It's very real.
This is not made up.
This is not a fantasy.
This is a second brain that we have down there.
Yeah.
You know, this idea of reincarnation, of course we've all lived before.
I mean, of course we have.
Our DNA didn't arise with us.
It's been kicking around for billions of years developing.
We only have all of our DNA because it's all lived before.
And I don't just mean like the star stuff that we're made of.
I mean, everything that we are has been assembled over billions and billions of years.
Of course we have a sense of having lived before.
I mean, every night we go to bed, we close our eyes, and we dream of the most fantastic and astounding stuff.
The night after the French election, I had a terrible dream.
The night after the French election, I had a terrible dream.
That I was watching a woman who'd been captured and tortured.
And people were slashing at her face as she was tied to a chair.
And she had been tortured for so long, they had actually sawn off her arms.
She only had shoulders, no arms.
And she was trying to chat in a positive and pleasant way to her torturers.
She had normalized it that much.
A terrible dream.
Disarmed, right?
It's not even that complicated to figure out.
Right, right, right.
But it was terrible.
And it happens, you know.
I mean, the world has its impact on my deepest self.
I hope my deepest self has an impact on the world.
It's a conversation.
But it shows just how deeply we listen.
You analyze in your head, but everything falls, like gems down a bottomless well, everything falls into our deep self as well.
And so the idea that we have lived before, of course we have.
Of course we have.
Because everything we are has been assembled over about a million generations.
More.
A billion generations.
More.
Everything we are has been assembled by an accumulation of prior lives.
So, of course, I did not invent my unconscious.
I did not invent my liver, my spleen, my spine, my eyelashes.
They have all been assembled over a billion-plus generations.
And so this idea of eternal recurrence, that we've been there before, that is...
Of course, it would be crazy to never have that idea or to feel it vividly.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
It really reminds me of, like, how Jordan Peterson has been...
I've been watching his videos and how he kind of looks at the symbols of Christianity and he kind of...
He ties them to, you know, evolution and evolutionary psychology in a way that I'm like, wow, like, that's really awesome.
Like, and this is reminding me of that...
And it's...
I think you just made some art for me to think about for a while.
Well, and it is so hard to be deeply human because there's so much profit in us being shallow.
Yeah.
Can you imagine the average teacher in junior high school trying to teach self-actualized children?
Children who have a deep and empathetic understanding of...
Humanity?
Can you imagine trying to impose dumb rules?
Can you imagine trying to teach them inconsequential things?
Can you imagine trying to bully and control them?
I sometimes feel like that's what happened to me, actually.
I feel like I started out case-elected and became art-selected through this torturous process that I had to go crazy to get out of it, and then I reassembled myself on the other side, and now I'm case-elected again.
And, uh...
And, uh...
But I have a lot of time wasted in the meanwhile.
Right.
Right.
The question of wasted time is a big one.
I mean, we can always look back and say, oh, well, I should have done this sooner, I should have done that sooner.
And I don't mean that we should never look back and criticize our choices or our path.
But when it comes to being authentic, Brian, I mean, when it comes to being honest, when it comes to being a full human being...
We're so slashed and detonated and crippled early on in our life that even to reassemble ourselves into any patchwork golem of basic humanity is a miraculous feat.
It's like, you know, there are all these quests.
What are these quests in these games or in these stories?
This treasure has been broken up and scattered to the four corners of the earth and you must go with your NPCs to pick up these treasures and reassemble them for the thing of ultimate power.
But this is us.
Yeah.
This is our aspects, our humanity, our complexity, our depth, our honesty, our integrity, our positive self-relationship.
And if you're a good parent and you weren't parented well, it's a hell of a thing to see.
It's a hell of a thing to see.
My daughter It's not fractious with herself.
She criticizes herself.
She says, I could have done this better.
But there's no...
It's a course correction.
It's not self-punishment.
And it's fantastic to see that.
And now that she has it, it's going to be hard, if not impossible, to break.
But I think so many of us smashed up so early, scattered to the four winds, disassembled, disempowered, disemboweled.
And then we say, well, you know, I wasted a lot of time going to the four corners of the earth to resurrect the treasure called identity.
That's a good point.
But I blame the people who scattered us, not the journeys we had to do to collect.
Yeah, and actually I've derived a lot of meaning from my journey, and it's really a kind of a treasure that I... It's hard to share because it's hard for other people to connect to it.
But yeah, I've had lots of struggles in overcoming them.
I really value it even though I hated it at the time.
Right.
And the civilization called identity What is our choice?
We are shredded like basic cheese on a crater.
It's a terrible analogy, but it's one that popped into my mind.
You know, we're talking about identity in depth, and I'm talking about Gorgonzola, which makes you cry.
At least it tastes good.
We are.
We're broken up.
Because a monopoly of identity would destroy the monopoly of power in the world.
I mean, if we genuinely did not self-attack, if we genuinely had the empathy that was necessary to help others, if we genuinely had the conscience and integrity to reject coercion in all of its forms, if we were whole, if we were complete,
if we were without desperate need, without if we were without desperate need, without desperate self-avoidance, if we did not need to latch onto the state as a substitute parent or a substitute husband to try and gain the fruits of love, which are resources, without actually having to go through the pain of not having been loved or having been hated.
maybe even as children, if we had wholeness, if we had contentedness, if we had a true and deep self, Where would the power mongers be able to get their hooks in?
We have the armor of identity.
We would not be vulnerable to the torture of control and rejection and blame and savagery and attack, ostracism.
We are created needy as babies.
The needs are supposed to be satisfied so that we can enter adulthood free of the need to manipulate.
To try and find a way to avoid the pain of not having gotten what we needed as children by pretending we can somehow manipulate people into giving it in the present.
And if we are satisfied as infants and we grow up with no need for the unearned, Everything a baby and a toddler gets should be unearned, of course.
They don't have to work for their daily bread.
That's why I say to people, stay home.
Stay home with your children.
Breastfeed your children.
Hold your children.
Love your children.
Cuddle your children.
Be friends with your children.
Be on an authority, of course.
They're children.
But if kids get what they want, what they need, what they deserve...
They don't enter adulthood with giant holes in their heart that they have to do an endless dance of attack and manipulation to pretend they can fill.
If we grow up with no need for the unearned, with no need for the unjust, with no need to grab at resources as a substitute for being loved in the way that a drowning man grabs at a barrel with no sense of rhyme or reason and doesn't care if he breaks his fingernails or claws someone's arm off.
He just wants to survive.
If we grow up without desperation to cover up The mutilations of our early histories.
We can't be manipulated then.
We can't have free stuff dangled in front of us.
The single mother state.
Welfare.
These are substitutes for love, substitutes for intimacy, substitutes for connection.
And they just make things worse.
Of course, right?
Substitutes don't work.
There is no substitute for love.
There is no substitute for respect.
There is no substitute for virtue.
Often imitated.
Never duplicated.
And if we grow up having had our needs satisfied, then as an adult, we will not look to other people to pretend to love us By giving us the unjust fruits of stolen labor.
We will have eaten our fill as children.
We will not need to cannibalize as adults.
And this is why the state is founded upon.
The withdrawal or the withholding of things from children creates in us this need to substitute injustice for an early lack of love.
It makes us greedy.
It makes us addicted, dependent.
And because we can't be honest about it, it makes us manipulative.
And that's what we call political correctness.
So I think you experienced some very real things, Brian.
I don't think that they were outside of your mind.
I think that you should expand your mind to include everything that you thought was coming in from outside that it was coming from inside.
And I think that gives you a sense of your own scope That is more powerful than imagining it was outside.
That makes a lot of sense.
All right.
Okay, I'm going to move on to my last caller, if that's all right.
I appreciate the call, though, and thanks very much for bringing this topic up.
For sure, Steph.
Have a good night, man.
Take care.
Okay, up next we have another Brian.
Brian number two wrote in and said, Morality, as I understand it, and as you seem to understand it as well, as best I can tell, is a matter of what one ought to do.
You propose a concept of universally preferable behavior as the solution to the ought question of morality.
If UPB does, in fact, exist, and I have no objection to its existence, why, though, ought I behave in a certain way simply because it is universally preferable?
Isn't a universal preference still simply that, merely a preference?
That's from Brian.
Hey, Brian.
how are you doing tonight?
Hi Stefan, I'm doing pretty well.
How are you?
I am very well, thank you.
I'm very well, and I appreciate the question.
It's a very good question.
Hopefully, the answer will match the quality of the question.
Let's keep our fingers crossed, shall we?
Yeah, yeah.
I guess, and not to imply that my question was unclear, I hope that it was, but I guess just to further clarify, I'm trying to understand how universally preferable behavior gets around The Humean problem of deriving an is from an ought from an is, I don't quite see how it gets around that.
Do you think it's wrong to get an ought from an is?
Yeah, I don't think it's possible.
Then you just got an ought from an is, which is an ought not.
You ought not get an ought from an is.
Well, it's not a matter of ought, it's just that I don't think that it follows.
I don't think that the ought follows.
No, but it's incorrect.
Sorry to interrupt.
It's incorrect to get an ought from an is, right?
Well, yes, it doesn't follow.
Okay.
So then anyone who tries to get an ought from an is is wrong, and they ought not do that.
Sure.
So we just got an ought from an is or an is not, right?
Now, I agree with you that because there's universally preferable behavior, you can, of course...
Choose to not follow that, right?
Right.
And there's nothing in physics that will punish you, you know?
Like, if I think I can walk off a cliff and I'm not Fred Flintstone, then I'm going to have...
A bad time of it immediately, right?
So that kind of error is punished by pain.
If I think I can go and hug a baby grizzly with his mommy bear around, I'm going to find myself short of one scalp and possibly my head relatively quickly, right?
But there's nothing in nature that will punish you for not following the Morality, right?
And this basic reality that there's nothing in nature that punishes you for not following reality is one reason why hell was invented, right?
Because we would like to have something in reality that punishes people for evil doing, right?
But there is nothing.
In fact, in biology, one is often rewarded for not following universally preferable behavior.
One is often rewarded for In terms of resources, in terms of access to reproduction, Genghis Khan, crazy psychotic mass murderer, and is responsible for what?
One out of 19 current people living in that region of the world?
I mean, the guy was basically a...
He was a toad and he did a sprained baby all over the place, right?
So this frustration that if we defy the laws of physics, Or attempt to.
We are punished by pain or demise or injury or whatever.
But if we do not follow moral rules, not only are we not punished, but biologically we are sometimes rewarded.
Like, it's easier for the jackal to steal some of the lion's kill than to chase down the gazelle himself or the zebra or whoever, right?
It's theft, yes, but it's very...
It's rewarded, right?
So, and I know jackals sometimes hunt for themselves and so on, but whatever, there are sort of scavengers of that kind.
So, I certainly agree with you that there's nothing that compels us to follow morality from that standpoint at all.
And it's similar to science, right?
So you don't have to follow science if you want to try and find out something true about the world.
You can pursue Chopra-style deepities.
You can listen to mystics on this show try to explain themselves.
You can use a Ouija board.
You can go to theology.
You can go to fortune cookies.
You can go to a whole bunch of things.
Meditate and get inspiration from Krishna.
There's nothing that compels you.
To follow the scientific method if you want to find out true things about the world, it's just that you won't end up finding true things out about the world.
Because the whole point of the scientific method is we have confirmation bias, we have subjectivity, we have conflicting interests, we have...
We may profit from one particular outcome versus another outcome.
We may be going against social norms, like if people say the Earth is the center of the universe or the solar system, we find out it's not.
We may be punished for speaking out against these things.
And so we need science because we are fallible, frail-minded, error-prone meat puppets.
And so we need an objective methodology to be able to unite what we believe with what is actually empirically testable and true.
So why ought you behave a certain way simply because it is universally preferable?
Well, I don't believe that that, for most human beings, once you convince them that something is true, they generally are drawn to it.
We are confirmation bias robots.
And if the confirmation bias actually happens to be true, so much the better.
And we know this.
I mean, look, just look at Europe, where anybody who's skeptical about...
Endless waves of migrants coming in.
It's called racist.
And racist is really bad, you see.
It's terrible.
It's a nasty, naughty, terrible, you know, worse than anything.
And so because of that, it happens.
It goes on and on.
Sweden and France and Germany.
Racist.
Terrible.
Can't be racist.
So we'll take all these risks and we'll put up with all of this crime and assault and welfare roles and because, right?
So I don't, you know, if you want to say, well, I don't want to follow universally preferable behavior, I'm like, okay.
Yeah, I'm not going to, I'll try and convince you of doing the right thing.
But if you don't want to follow science, I'm not going to run around the world and nag you to follow science.
I just know that whatever other thing you're doing is not going to lead you.
To a place of truth.
Now, you don't have to follow universally preferable behavior, of course.
Of course.
But I know that you won't be able to consistently be good, to be virtuous, to live with integrity.
Because integrity requires consistency, right?
It's no integrity to say, do this thing and it's virtuous one day, and then do the opposite of that thing and it's also virtuous.
That's not integrity.
That's just conformity to random commandments, right?
To have integrity, you need consistency.
You need universality, right?
And so you don't have to follow universally preferable behavior.
You don't have to follow science.
If you don't follow science, you won't know the truth.
And if you don't follow universally preferable behavior, you won't know virtue and you won't have any capacity for integrity.
And if you say, well, I don't care about virtue and integrity, it's like, okay, well, then go live your life, right?
I'm going to convince everyone else.
And if lots of people believe me or accept my arguments and you don't, then you're going to start to be ostracized pretty quickly.
So, you know, but whereas if...
I don't convince anyone that I've wasted my time and I guess you are doing your thing.
So it is not...
It is not a commandment.
It is not physics.
There's no punishment for not following it.
Although, of course, if enough people believe it, then there will be social punishments, like ostracism.
Like, if you advocate slavery these days in the Western world, assuming you're not currently running the newly emerging slave trade in Libya from the migrants, if you, in a public sphere or a public space, openly espouse virulent racism, if you openly want to see a return to slavery or whatever it is, right— Well, you will be punished in the social sphere because enough people accept these are immoral things to advocate and definitely immoral things in practice.
And so my goal is to convince enough people about the validity of universally preferable behavior.
where if enough people accept and understand it, then those who reject it will be revealed as people who don't really care that much about ethics, who don't really care that much about virtue, and therefore are dangerous.
I'm not speaking of you.
I'm sort of in society as a whole.
And therefore are dangerous people with no conscience, and the inevitable result will be ostracism.
And that is, of course, how social rules should be enforced, and moral rules should be enforced through ostracism.
But ostracism requires a general acceptance of a set of moral rules that people understand the importance of and are willing to ostracize based on this.
Right.
Right.
I guess what I was trying to address is not so much ought in A social sense, right?
You're talking about social consequences for actions, obviously, so those exist regardless.
But I guess what I was trying to address is the concept of what you ought to do in some sort of ultimate sense, like an objectively true morality.
And I just, I don't I'm still lost on how Universally preferable behavior is necessarily what's good.
It's necessarily what I ought to do simply because it's universally preferable.
Hang on, hang on a sec.
Sorry to interrupt, but I just want to make sure I understand.
Is it universally preferable behavior as a whole, or is it universally preferable behavior with regards to morality?
Yeah, I guess with regard to morality, with regard to the concept that there's something that, in an ultimate sense, regardless of social consequences, right, regardless of social consequences, that there are things that they are intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong to do.
And so that's what I'm trying to get at because universal preferability, yes, I'm not contesting that that exists.
I just don't see how that alone can ground my idea of what is good or what is bad or what is right or what is wrong or what I ought or ought not to do.
I think we're dangerously close to me having to read the book, so I'll just try one more People always call in, and it's not you in particular, Brian.
It's just kind of an annoyance of mine.
People call in about universally preferable behavior and say, I've read the book, And then they ask questions that are completely answered in the book.
So I'll give it a run.
And if we don't have much luck, we don't have much luck.
But, you know, people should just go read the book.
And look, if there's issues in the book, like people say, oh, well, this paragraph, and we've had people call in and say, this paragraph, I can't follow this, or this syllogism I think is incomplete, or whatever.
Great, we'll talk about that.
But when I write a book called Universally Preferable Behavior, and then people come in and say, well, I don't...
You know, accept universally preferable behavior.
It's like, well, you have to come up with something specific in the book that you think is incorrect, in which case we can talk about that, but just basically having me read the book again doesn't really do much good.
So I'll take a run at this one, though, and we'll see if we have any luck.
But just for those in the future, you know, the book is free.
I spent a long time thinking about it, decades thinking about it.
I spent a long time writing it.
It is free, and so asking me to come in and explain the book to you is not...
Really very productive.
I wrote the books, I wouldn't have to do this.
But anyway, I'll give it a shot here because it's been a while.
Okay, so human beings have the capacity to take against the will of other human beings their stuff, right?
I can steal your wallet, right?
Yes.
Okay, so that is a behavior.
It's not a thought.
I can think about stealing your wallet.
But that's not the crime, right?
Outside of modern academia, there's no thought crime, right?
So it is the behavior that we are concerned about, right?
Right, yes.
Now, there are some behaviors which all human beings can achieve at the same time.
All human beings can not rape each other at the same time, right?
That is achievable within empirical reality, right?
Absolutely, yes.
Right.
Now the question then becomes, is it possible for two people to rape each other at the same time?
No, that's always, you know, because people then, oh, rape.
Let's just talk about stealing.
Is it possible for two people to steal from each other at the same time?
Not the same thing, but theoretically, I would say yes.
Yeah, two people could pick each other's pocket at the same time, right?
Right.
Okay.
Now, is it possible...
For the act of stealing to be universally preferable...
In other words, can we have a rule that says...
Like, we can have a rule that says, nobody should steal.
And that rule can be universalized, right?
Because people can exist in a state of not stealing from each other all over the world.
We could have an entire situation where nobody's stealing from each other, right?
Sure.
Okay, so, thou shalt not steal can be universalized, right?
Sure.
Can thou shalt steal or stealing is universally preferable behavior, can that principle be universalized?
I'm not entirely sure that it couldn't, but I think it's unlikely.
It can't.
Because you're thinking about the actions, and I'm thinking about what stealing means.
So stealing...
Is me taking your wallet against your preference, right?
True.
Okay, I see what you're saying.
Yes, no.
So just for those who aren't following, so if Brian says stealing is universally preferable, then he wants me to steal from him.
Because it's universally preferable.
And he wants to steal from me, and I want to steal from him, and he wants me to steal from him.
Everybody wants everyone to steal.
Right.
So Brian wants me to take his wallet.
But if Brian wants me to take his wallet, it's not stealing.
So stealing can only occur as a principle if it's not universalized.
Exactly.
Right?
So if I say, Brian, feel free to use my car for the weekend.
I'm going to leave the key someplace, right?
You can get the key.
Then that's not...
You're not stealing.
However, if you take my key from exactly the same place, your neighbor overhears this and uses my car for the whole...
He's stealing, right?
Because I said to you, yes.
I did not say yes to him, right?
So when it comes to property...
Respect for property rights is the only principle that can be universalized.
Because it is impossible to universalize a disrespect for property rights.
It is impossible.
Logically, I mean not physically, it's logically self-contradictory.
And it's the same thing with rape, right?
If somebody wants you to make love to that person, if somebody wants you to have sexual relations with that, it's not rape.
It's only rape if they don't want it.
Really don't want it, right?
Really, really don't want it.
And so if we say rape is universally blah, blah, blah, right?
Then it can't be enacted because it has to not...
Same thing with assault, right?
If you and I go into a boxing ring, we're both consenting to be injured, right?
The potential for injury, right?
So it's not assault.
But we can't have...
Assault is something you desperately don't want, right?
It's not assault if you go to the dentist and they fix your cavity even if it's painful, right?
Right.
And so when it comes to certain interactions with human beings, the principle of theft, stealing is universally preferable behavior, is false.
Because it cannot manifest as universally preferable behavior.
Because theft requires one people wants the transfer of property and the other people doesn't.
Don't, right?
Sure.
So, when it comes to what is universally preferable behavior in terms of property rights, a respect for property rights is universally preferable behavior.
And stealing is not.
And murder is not.
And rape is not.
And theft is not.
Assault is not.
Now, you can say, well, I'm going to do it anyway.
Sure!
And you can, and there's no UPP guard that's going to hit you with a thunderbolt if you do that.
And I'm not concerned about the actors.
I'm concerned about the theory.
I'm concerned about the justification.
I'm concerned about the morality of it.
The individual actors, to me, are not important.
And I'll tell you why.
It is the theft that people think is justified that is the great danger in society.
I can protect myself against an individual thief, right?
I can have a security system.
I can have a guard.
I can have cameras everywhere.
I can have triple locks.
Whatever.
I can move to some very safe...
I can do things to protect myself against the thief that everyone knows is wrong and everyone knows should be arrested and put in jail and whose crime everyone recognizes.
I'm not worried about the individual thief.
What I am worried about, Brian, very worried about, is the theft that everyone thinks is a virtue.
Right?
The taxation, the national debt, the status controls and manipulations and regulations and all of this initiation of the use of force, the war on drugs, the war on, you name it, right?
That is the stuff that I cannot protect myself against.
There's no place in the world where you can go to be free of that stuff.
And people will cheer if you disagree with that stuff and act on it, which I don't recommend, but if you do...
People will say, well, that guy didn't pay his taxes.
He should go to jail.
So, you know, as far as individual people who deviate from immoral standard...
That people generally accept.
I don't care.
Unimportant.
Totally easy to protect yourself against individuals like that.
The problem is, all the people who say, well, we need to violate property because kids need to be educated and the sick need to get medicine and the poor need to be raised up and the illiterate need to be educated and the drug addicts need to be thrown in prison.
All those people who are mistaking a vice for a virtue That's the people that UPB is supposed to target.
The individual actor?
I don't care.
They're no particular danger to me.
Or my child, or the future, or Western civilization, or any civilization.
The problem is all the people who think that violations of UPB are wonderful and conformity to UPB is evil.
Those are the people who That are the great danger to the world.
And these are the people that the book, UPB, is supposed to help illuminate and switch on the light.
Once people see what evil is, they recall from it, as I talked about earlier with the, you know, if I give you a plate of, looks like jello and you're about to eat it and someone says, no, no, no, that's a jellyfish.
You won't eat it, right?
Because you've now done what it is.
So, as far as individual actors and their deviation from morality, I could care less.
What matters to me is entire societies that think that good is evil and evil is good.
Right.
That makes sense.
I think I'm following you.
Just to clarify, I did read through UPB. I haven't come into this conversation completely ignorant of the book.
I made sure to download the book and read through the arguments in it.
If I may be a little bit unclear on something, still, I hope you'll at least forgive that.
But I have read through the book in an attempt to understand exactly what you meant by universally preferable behavior, and I I think I grasp it for the most part.
I'm trying to make this as clear as possible, trying to figure out how to articulate my exact issue here.
I still don't see how this brings us to an objective ought, because all of this has to do with I want to know
what the yardstick is here.
Well, I suppose it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that I'm coming close to something at least religious.
I don't know about divine punishment, per se.
I don't know that that's particularly relevant.
Okay, because if you're going to compare a human system of philosophy to omniscience and omnipotence, I gotta tell you, that may not be the fairest comparison.
Steph, you're not God.
That's my criticism of your philosophy.
I think I will accept that criticism.
Maybe not on my fourth coffee, but I will accept that criticism on the condition that it's insane, right?
I mean, you can't compare a human system of philosophy to omnipotence, omniscience, heaven, and hell, and divine commandments, and miracles, and loaves, and fishes, and walking on water.
It's like...
It's true, I could say, well, Usain Bolt, really, really fast runner, still not the speed of light.
Right.
Well, I don't know that's quite exactly what I'm trying to get at.
Okay, then just tell me the system of thought that you find more comprehensive and universal and aughty than UBD. Well, you see, I don't even necessarily take issue with the concept of universally preferable behavior.
Like I mentioned in my email or my question, I think there is universally preferable behavior, but I think there has to be some sort of foundation other than that.
No!
Listen, I'll tell you what you want.
Oh man, I'm telling you what you want.
What you want is someone else to do the punishing other than you.
You don't want to have the confrontation of punishing people personally who are not fulfilling moral obligations or not understanding.
Everybody wants to outsource everything else, right?
And I'm sorry to rip on you, and maybe I'm completely wrong, but I'm telling you this is what I think.
You want there to be a system out there where morality is enforced, where you don't have to do it.
You want God or something out there to punish the guilty and to reward the innocent so that you don't have to have the difficult conversations and ostracize the living hell out of people who are not following basic morality.
You want there to be a universe out there that takes the effort and impetus and necessary requirements of you acting as a moral agent in this world.
You want to outsource it and offload it.
And the same way people are like, well, I don't really want to help the poor, so let's have a welfare state.
Well, you know, I'm concerned about the sick.
Or like these people in France, they say, a reporter comes up and says, oh, do you think we should have more immigrants, more migrants coming in?
Oh, yes, it's inhumane.
It's nice.
We should be hospitable.
Oh, good.
I have a migrant right here.
He would like to come with you to your house tonight.
Well, no, I cannot tonight, right?
Everybody wants this abstract thing, like somehow morality is going to be enforced like physics or like the punishment of a divine being or something.
no it comes down to you Brian it comes down to you saying to people hey this is right this is good this is the truth what do you think give them some time to absorb it some time to digest it some time to argue back and you know go back and forth but if at some point you know it doesn't take long to figure out the theft one you and I did it in about two and a half minutes at some point The physics that is going to enforce morality is you.
It's you.
You can't offload it.
I mean, you can, but there's nothing there to take it.
There's no God that's going to punish the guilty and reward the innocent.
There's no physics that's going to strike people down with ailments, you know?
Assholes live to be 100, and good people die like dogs at 30 sometimes, right?
Nature doesn't care.
Physics don't particularly care.
I wrote a poem.
32 years ago.
And it went like this.
Are you ready?
It's a piece of poetic genius.
It goes like this.
Two men in a wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
Because you taste the same, whether you're good or bad, to a wolf.
Your virtue doesn't make you taste bad, and your vice doesn't make you taste bad.
You just flesh with morals.
And the morals don't affect your ending if you're trapped.
Eaten in a wood, Liam Neeson style.
So, you want something out there to be able to enforce moral standards that isn't you, and I understand that.
It's not fun to do.
But if it's not you, it's no one.
Well, I'm not sure that that's quite fair or accurate.
I don't think that I... I'm attempting to outsource my personal responsibility for living and acting in a morally correct way.
I absolutely think that individuals are completely responsible for enforcing that and for enforcing that with themselves and with society as a whole.
I would agree with you on that, absolutely.
Good.
And then let me ask you this question, Brian.
Since you read the book, how many people have you talked to about morality?
I talk to people about morality all the time, actually.
That's one of my main concerns in life.
I try to talk to people about it, and it typically makes me— Okay, and what are the consequences—and sorry, what do you define as a moral rule or a moral standard that would cause you to ostracize somebody who rejected it?
What are these moral standards for you?
In terms of particular, like, specifics, like, thou shalt not kill or thou shalt not steal, something like that, is that what you're referring to?
Yeah, so, I mean, my particular one is if somebody is aggressive towards their children, no place in my life.
I'll talk to them.
I'll attempt to change their mind, but...
Yeah, absolutely.
And people who are, you know, out-and-out statists, like they just want the government to run everything, or, you know, people who think I'm immediately going to hell for not believing in their particular theology and so on, there's no place in my life, right?
So I ostracize the people in my life who...
Because I know there's no divine agency out there, and there's no physics that's going to punish wrongdoers, so it has to be me.
So, if you do ostracize people for not following moral rules, then my thesis is false, which I'm just perfectly happy to accept.
I mean, it was just a hypothesis.
But if you generally talk about morality without enforcing it, then my thesis is true, that you want someone else to do it.
Oh, no, I absolutely, yeah, I think most everyone would ostracize people that they see as acting immorally, especially in a way that's particularly detrimental.
Okay, so give me an example of a relationship, and you don't have to, I'm just asking for my own curiosity.
Give me an example of a relationship that you've ended because of a moral disagreement.
And not an acquaintanceship, but you know, something where you've got some meat on the bones.
Right, right.
Well, I've met quite a few people throughout my life that I've had to do that with, or not even necessarily people close to me, because most people that I would associate with closely, I've already kind of vetted, you know?
Well, except for the families we were born into, which, tragically, there's no vetting taking place.
Yes, yes.
I'm having a hard time drawing a specific example, but in general, yes, when it comes to people, if I meet someone...
No, come on.
If you had a specific example, you would remember it.
Nobody forgets that stuff, because it's very difficult.
I suppose I don't have a specific example of someone close to me that I've had to ostracize for that reason.
And you understand, this doesn't prove my thesis, but it certainly supports it.
And I'm not saying you've got to go and pick fights and break up with everyone in your life, but if you are actually enforcing moral standards in your own life, then you don't have to call up people on the internet and ask how moral standards get enforced.
You understand?
Because you're doing it.
You know how, and you can then encourage other people to do it.
And the more people who do it, the better the world will become.
But morality is like nutrition.
You can read all the nutrition books you want, and you can talk about all the nutritional concepts that you want, but if you don't change your diet, it doesn't mean anything in terms of your health.
You know, if you, oh, you should never eat at this restaurant, and you keep eating at this restaurant, I mean, the words don't matter, your actions do.
And so if you talk a lot about nutrition without changing your diet and then say, well, who on earth could enforce nutrition?
It's like, well, if you're not willing to, then no one, right?
I mean, so we are all responsible, those of us who understand ethics, those of us who understand morality, those of us who've read or written UPB, we are all responsible for the enforcement of morality in our own personal lives and in our professional lives and everywhere we can possibly bring it to bear.
And if you are actively and actually doing that, then it won't make any difference.
Like, the question then becomes kind of incomprehensible.
Well, why should people follow morality?
Well, who does enforce morality and so on?
Because you're already doing it.
Who should follow morality?
Well, people who want to be your friend, people who want love and respect and all these good things in life, people who want to have integrity and peace of mind, people who want to experience the positive taste of courage in their mouth, which sometimes tastes like pennies and blood and sometimes tastes like a glorious God-given ambrosia.
But if you're actually out there enforcing moral standards in your own life in a peaceful ostracism-style way, Then this fog about, well, why should people obey morality and who enforces morality?
And it's like, you won't need to ask that question because you're doing it.
And through doing it, you're inspiring other people to do it.
And that's how it spreads and no other way.
Well, I think I've given you some stuff to think on.
And maybe I'm completely wrong, but if you can think of something, just let us know.
But I'm going to close the show off for tonight.
Thank you, everyone, so, so much for listening and for watching.
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