Is everything relative and subjective? Stefan Molyneux explains the society destroying dangers of relativism and how it is being used to erode the foundation of western civilization.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
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| There's this weird thing that goes on in postmodernism. | |
| It's a contradiction. | |
| is really, really important to understand. | |
| You've probably heard these issues that people have with ethics in the modern world. | |
| You know, everything's relative, man. | |
| You can't judge. | |
| It's all subjective. | |
| Morals are just, you know, cultural conveniences and so on. | |
| There's no absolute truth. | |
| Everything's subjective. | |
| All of this goopy soupy self-erasure nonsense that really is designed to have you bring down the walls of your most treasured cities so that barbarians can wander through and pick at your gold at their leisure. | |
| Because, one thing you will really clearly notice, that with the rise of radical relativism comes the rise of political correctness. | |
| Radical relativism and political correctness are like the sun and the moon that rise at the same time. | |
| It makes no sense logically, philosophically. | |
| From a takeover standpoint, it makes perfect sense. | |
| It makes no sense logically or philosophically. | |
| Because if everything is relative, then there's nothing wrong with being a fascist. | |
| If everything is relative, nothing is wrong with racism or sexism or whatever phobia you care to talk about, invent or imagine. | |
| If everything is subjective, if you should never judge, then there should be no justification for political correctness, for the various mob rule jacked up hysterical lynch mobs that roam back and forth across the modern cultural and political landscape for the various mob rule jacked up hysterical lynch mobs that roam back and forth across the modern cultural and political landscape looking for undefended people that they can isolate and tear down and then hold up their reputational severed | |
| You understand, this fundamental contradiction really needs to be understood because it's how the left kind of, well, was winning for a time until the scalp-for-scalp measure seems to have kicked in and the right are like, OK, we've been boxing according to the Queensbury rules and they're calling we've been boxing according to the Queensbury rules and they're calling in airstrikes, so I guess we've got to loosen things up a little | |
| This is extraordinarily unremarked upon in society, but it's really something you need to mull over. | |
| If everything is relative, why would anyone criticize anyone else's moral choice? | |
| Let's say that there is some hateful bigot out there. | |
| Well, according to the theory of relativism, his view is no better or worse than anyone else's view. | |
| Because the moment you're going to say there's some objective standard by which we should measure people's moral viewpoints or moral perspectives, you're no longer a relativist. | |
| So the question is, what the hell is going on? | |
| This fundamental contradiction. | |
| There's no such thing as truth, man. | |
| There's no such thing as right and wrong. | |
| Ooh, you're a something, something negative, something, something. | |
| Off with your head, attack! | |
| Here's some fox urine in the face. | |
| Makes no sense. | |
| It makes no sense logically. | |
| So what the hell is going on? | |
| Well, the totalitarians, the leftists, they have a thirst for power and dominance. | |
| This is what needs to be understood. | |
| They have a thirst for power and for dominance. | |
| And they're willing to enlist any distasteful ally they can possibly get their hands on, which is why you see these weird alliances among the left and various totalitarian ideological systems around the world. | |
| They have such a thirst for destruction and they're so full of hate. | |
| So full of hate. | |
| That it's hard to comprehend that level of crazy. | |
| It's hard to understand. | |
| You know, like if you have a productive life out there, you've got a job, you've got a family, you've got friends, you enjoy hearty laughter at the follies of the world over a nice glass of mulled cider. | |
| If you have a generally positive and healthy outlook in the world... | |
| Then it's really hard to understand what motivates people to come up with these crazy, brain-twisting, can't win, don't lose, the only way to win is not to play kind of belief systems. | |
| It's hard to understand what a thirst for power they have over you because your life is satisfying and positive and happy and productive and so on and you have love and all the good things that motivate you to jump out of bed every morning with a step in your feet and a song in your heart. | |
| But if you don't have these things, if you are, you know, twisted, broken, now-school, hard type of guy staring through the knothole of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle knowing you'll never get it and just wanting to call in the MOAB on everyone else's happiness, it's really hard to comprehend that kind of mindset because it makes no sense the way that they approach things. | |
| Logically, it's completely ridiculous, right? | |
| Logically, it's completely ridiculous. | |
| I mean, the number of times people have screamed at me over the years, Steph, you're an a-hole for judging! | |
| It's like, well, didn't you just judge me as an a-hole? | |
| So, that doesn't really work. | |
| Now it does. | |
| Anybody who criticizes me for criticizing others, who is hostile to me towards my hostility for others, is ridiculous. | |
| Steph, you a-hole, you should never hide! | |
| Everything's relative, man, but you're an a-hole. | |
| It's insane. | |
| It's insane. | |
| And I think that, you know, when the ACLU forced the Reagan administration to turn the mental institutions loose on the world, I think that gave a big boost to the left, in fact. | |
| That's my particular approach. | |
| I could be wrong. | |
| But it's so illogical. | |
| The question is, why is it there? | |
| The everything is relative. | |
| Is an acid that is specifically targeted, one could almost say genetically targeted, to the case-elected people that I've talked about in the Gene Wars presentations. | |
| It is targeted at people who have a desire for consistency, who have a desire for integrity, who have a desire to follow moral rules or the absence of moral rules if that's what turns out to be logically consistent. | |
| People who organize their thoughts, who try to live by principles, are specifically targeted by this everything's relative, man. | |
| Everything's relative. | |
| If everything's relative, there's nothing wrong with poverty. | |
| Why need a welfare state? | |
| If everything's relative, why have laws? | |
| If everything's relative, you can't ever get angry at somebody who disagrees with you morally because there's no such thing as right or wrong. | |
| It's like getting enraged at people who have a different flavor of ice cream that they prefer. | |
| It makes no sense at all. | |
| Everything is aesthetics. | |
| Everything is subjective. | |
| Everything is relative. | |
| But I'm going to beat you up for being a fascist! | |
| It's like, well, you can't have it both ways. | |
| If fascism is irredeemably evil, then you can't claim that everything is relative, and then you have to start organizing your thoughts, right? | |
| So there are two types of people in the world. | |
| It's an overused phrase, but sometimes it's still accurate. | |
| There are people who follow rules, and people who use rules, you understand? | |
| There are people who follow rules and people who use rules. | |
| Now, the people who follow rules are very susceptible to being manipulated and controlled. | |
| By the people who use rules for their own advantage, and they're not making anything up. | |
| It's right there in leftist manuals. | |
| It's right there in how the left says they want to operate, which is, well, we don't have any standards, but we know that the non-leftists have standards, so we're going to use their own standards against them to take them down. | |
| Right there in rules for radicals, it's right. | |
| I mean, it's not even subtle. | |
| Right? | |
| Rommel, you crazy bastard, I read your book! | |
| Well, there's a reference from back in the day. | |
| A friend of mine did that once with beer bottles. | |
| It was quite a sight. | |
| But if you have a desire to follow rules, rather than to use rules to control people, if you have a desire to follow rules, then people are going to say everything's relative, and that's going to weaken everything. | |
| Your security, your moral firmness, your sense of moral purpose. | |
| And it's particularly powerful against people who are atheists or agnostics. | |
| If you go to people, and I had this conversation with Dennis Prager recently, if you go to people who are religious, who are Christians, and you say, morality is relative, they will say, no! | |
| Back up there, buckaroo bonsai. | |
| You're going to just have to take a little bit of break from that because I've got the 411 for the big guy upstairs. | |
| He's absolutely good. | |
| He's all-knowing. | |
| He's all-moral. | |
| And he says this, this, and this. | |
| About 10 of them. | |
| Not so much. | |
| Not subjective. | |
| Nice try. | |
| Back off with your big government nonsense, people. | |
| That's what you get if you're religious, which is why the left has to continually be the termites eating away and munching away at the trenchant foundations of religious faith in the West, the Christian faith. | |
| Because the Christians push back against the everything is relative. | |
| The atheists have a tougher time with it. | |
| The agnostics have a tougher time with it. | |
| How do they push back? | |
| Everything is relative. | |
| Well, there's no ought in the universe. | |
| There's no should in the universe. | |
| If the universe is not populated by divine moral force, it's all-knowing and all-powerful, there's no ought. | |
| Physics will tell you that if you hold a man's head underwater, he will die. | |
| Without God, how do we know? | |
| It shouldn't be done. | |
| It's immoral. | |
| It's evil. | |
| How do we know? | |
| I mean, I have my answers for it, but we're talking general society, not everyone who's read my book on ethics. | |
| Free, by the way, freedomainradio.com slash free. | |
| So when they say everything is relative, they are trying to weaken you. | |
| Now, this is why first they take down religion, and then they take down the atheists who have nothing firm to stand on in the absence of a God. | |
| No moral foundation deep enough. | |
| You know, the tree is held up by its roots. | |
| Can't plant a tree in a cloud, have it grow, can't plant a seed. | |
| The tree is held by its roots. | |
| If you can dissolve or sever a tree from its connection to its roots, Its height and its strength and its size and its power, you understand, becomes a liability. | |
| The young sapling has weak roots but is not tall and doesn't have many leaves to catch the wind. | |
| The giant oak is vulnerable to the wind. | |
| Therefore it needs the depth and power and strength of its roots. | |
| If you can disconnect the tree from its roots, the largest trees fall first. | |
| The oldest trees fall first. | |
| The most mature trees fall first when the roots are severed. | |
| So first they say there is no God. | |
| Not because they hate God. | |
| But because they hate universal morality, which pushes back against their thirst, demonic thirst, for power over other human beings. | |
| You can't own people who have a direct connection to the universal ethics of the divine. | |
| Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not bear false witness. | |
| They must take down God. | |
| In order to sever the tree of the West from its roots. | |
| Now once they have done that, they can say that everything is relative. | |
| And what do you say back? | |
| We have these traditions! | |
| Well, sorry, those traditions were religious and they're gone. | |
| Can't say we have this God. | |
| We can say, we have these laws! | |
| It's positive law, not natural law. | |
| It's law justified as what is written in the books, not justified by any... | |
| Appeal to universality that can be intellectually sustained in the absence of a God. | |
| This is the old argument. | |
| You hear this all the time. | |
| People on the right. | |
| They say, rights do not come from the government. | |
| Rights come from God. | |
| But when you say, there is no God, everything is relative. | |
| And the comeback is, well, the laws are universal in the geographical region because that's the way they are. | |
| Well, the laws can be changed. | |
| The laws can be changed. | |
| There is no particular movement in Christianity to put the Ten Commandments under review. | |
| Let's get some lobbyists in here. | |
| Let's get some funny money from pharmaceutical companies in here. | |
| And let's rewrite these. | |
| Guys, it's a living Ten Commandments. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| It's not. | |
| And that's the pushback. | |
| They take down God. | |
| They cut you from your roots. | |
| Everything is relative. | |
| And then, because you're used to following rules, and rules are a good thing to follow if the rules are good, then you say, well, if there are no rules, there's nothing to defend. | |
| If there's no universal morality, There's no wall to push back against the power mongers and the tsunami of incoming human livestock man managers that get uncorked and almost summoned, pentagram style, as the values fall, as the values collapse. | |
| The wall around the West It was universal ethics. | |
| The laws were the shadow cast by the statue of the good. | |
| That statue is gone. | |
| And now we can pile up anything we want and call it a statue and we can change the shadow by changing the statue. | |
| Nothing is permanent. | |
| Everything is in flux. | |
| Who wants that? | |
| Who wants that are those who want power over you. | |
| Power over you. | |
| Without universal ethics, without the staunch spine to push back against this endless hailing wave of mosquitoes. | |
| How do we push back against the power mongers once they have told us there are no rules that bar them from the escalation of their power? | |
| Now we ride into battle with no armor. | |
| The one job, as God began to fall in the West, the one job the philosophers had was to find a substitute for universal ethics. | |
| And they failed. | |
| And they failed. | |
| And they distracted. | |
| And they co-joined with the enemy. | |
| And they collaborated. | |
| Vichy style. | |
| With the coming escalating destroyers of the West. | |
| You had one job, philosophers, to defend the universal ethics that was the shining light of the West, the city on the hill, in white. | |
| The light that should have banished all shadows from the world where they're capable of being banished. | |
| And you let that light go out, hell, you stood around and pissed on it. | |
| Yeah, Marxist, relativistic, post-modernistic piles of crap. | |
| So when people come to you and they say everything is relative, they're not trying to liberate you. | |
| They're trying to enslave you. |