Sept. 8, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:02
3816 The Myth of the Noble Savage
Are we better in a state of nature, before authority brings down the hammer on "misbehavior"? Do you ever yearn for a simple life, deep in the woods, free of social constraints? What do you think would happen to us all in the absence of the rule of law? Would we learn to cooperate, or end up fighting endlessly? Dr. Duke Pesta joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the ancient idea of an earthly paradise that existed before the fall of man. What was it really like? Better, or worse? Where would you prefer to live?Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgYour 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
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio, back with a good friend, Dr.
Duke Pesta. He is a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy Alive Online School, offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
For more from Dr. Pesta and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.com.
And thanks so much, Dr.
Pester, for taking the time today.
We are going to talk about The Noble Savage.
My original plan was to do this in full Warpoint and Topless, but I was talked out of it by a wide variety of people with decent aesthetics.
But The Noble Savage, we see it a lot in movies and in television and mythology.
I wonder if you can help people understand what it is, where it originated from.
It's a very, very important topic.
Yeah, you know, the first of all, people, everybody thinks it comes from Rousseau.
And there is no doubt that the Enlightenment thinker Rousseau is a hallmark of that way of thinking.
But he never used the actual phrase noble savage.
It actually goes back to the little bit before Rousseau.
The first usage of it is from John Dryden, the English poet and critic.
And it comes to denote this idea.
It's a very much an Enlightenment idea.
It's the idea that institutions, culture, religion in particular, these are inventions of human beings that corrupt people.
They take kids from little ages and dump them into schools and dump them into churches, and this corrupts them.
That if we could just get rid of all of the societal institutional influence and let people be people in their native wild way, then everybody would be perfect.
The inherent goodness of man.
And of course, in the late 17th, early 18th century, Europe was so built up That they looked to Native cultures.
Native American culture was being explored more as British ships traveled the world, European ships traveled the world more, and encountered more what we would call primitive peoples.
They began to romanticize them.
And so this idea that somehow, and it even goes back to Montaigne a little bit as well, this idea that primitive cultures, cultures without sophisticated education or even writing systems, mythologically based cultures without a lot of progress and technology, that they somehow preserved an innocence and a native purity that we have lost.
And so you can see where that vein of Enlightenment thinking then gave rise to Romanticism or Neopaganism, where the sort of Pagan cultures of these primitive tribes became romanticized, and then you've got poets like Wordsworth, for instance, and Coleridge and Keats in England, all reanimating nature as a kind of pagan system of belief that is much purer and simpler than what European religion otherwise had.
Yeah, and there is – I mean, I can understand where it comes from.
I love nature myself, and I can really understand thinking back sort of like 18th, 17th century Paris or London, which were foul cesspools of stinking disease and awful and excrement and poverty and so on.
You know, there's the old story of the French king.
he opens up his windows and takes a deep breath of the Parisian air and faints.
There's no sewage, you know, people are dumping crap out of their windows and so on.
So I can understand when you're sort of wending your way through that open sewer of a society that it's like, oh man, I could really use some Ansel Adams lakes and woods right about now.
And there is this romanticism.
And the further you get from nature, the easier it is to romanticize it.
You know, You know, see these pictures of the women cross-legged doing their yoga in front of a big lake with pristine mountains and so on.
And it's like, well, that's wonderful until you get a toothache or you get some horrible disease from a mosquito.
And so it is really easy to romanticize things.
And it has been a little bit, as you point out, misunderstood.
Because first of all, savage back in the day didn't always have the same connotations of brutality as it does now.
There was references to the savage cherry blossom, which was not some genocidal fruit, but was rather just meant wild.
And also noble didn't just mean, well, they're wonderful and stand upright and so on.
Nobles in a lot of the European countries, it was only the nobles who were allowed to hunt.
And so one of the things that people would say about the Native Americans or other indigenous populations is they say, well, these guys have the right to hunt.
They have the same privileges as nobles here.
And why is it that the hunting privileges are reserved for nobles when anyone can hunt in a state of nature?
So noble savage, in a sense, didn't always mean what it means now.
But it was an incredible debate that still goes on to this day.
Yeah, and you know, I think where it becomes problematic is the idea that we return to nature.
I think it's always a good idea. The idea that the natural world, it gives rise to conservationism.
Conservative conservationism, the words are related.
It gives rise to a lot of useful things.
The problem is when you insert the human animal into the equation.
It's one thing to be out in the wilderness.
The other question is, do we start to associate human behavior with the natural or with the rational?
And this is what the divide that arose in the Enlightenment.
And there's two books primarily important in the development of this.
You have, of course, in the late 18th century, or late 17th century, 1690s, 1680s, you have Hobbes' Leviathan.
Hobbes comes out with the idea that religion is all bollocks, that the institutions of culture are all constructs and therefore morality itself is abstract and unobtainable.
And so the view of nature put forth, mankind put forth in Hobbes' Leviathan, of course, was the famous human behavior.
Human life is short, nasty, brutish, right?
That we need a strong authoritarian central state, Hobbes argued, to control this jungle.
And then there was the third Earl of Shaftesbury.
Who wrote in 1699 an important treatise on virtue which took exactly the opposite from the Hobbesian argument.
That nature, that morality was inborn in all of us and that it was beneficent.
And that if you just let people be people without the encumbrances of a strong central state or schools or churches, then you can see the birth of the noble savage idea here.
If you let people just be what they are, uninhindered by discipline, by religion, by culture, they will inherently have the right worldview.
That's always puzzled me, too, because if you've ever been around a three-year-old kid, the idea that you're going to let that kid just follow its own instincts and expect it to become moral is a pretty dicey situation.
But these two books, right, and both by Enlightenment thinkers or proto-Enlightenment thinkers, they gave rise to the two really branching forks of Enlightenment.
One is the kind of naturalist argument that we see much more today, that we are just animals, and we're animals in a larger animal system.
And in the same way that animals don't have a qualified morality, it's all about power, right, and instinct.
You've got that strain, and then you've got the romantic strain, which we talked a little bit about already, the Shaftesbury strain, the Rousseauian strain, which is also naive in its own way.
Obviously, if we understand – human beings obviously are more than mere animals.
You and I have talked about that many times.
So there's that naturalistic argument that seeks to reduce human beings to animals in an animal environment, and the romantic worldview, which seeks to poeticize and mythologize primitive peoples and the young.
Remember Wordsworth's famous maxim.
The child is the father of the man.
Whitman in America, Walt Whitman did the same thing.
This argument that adults, with all of our experience, are also fallen.
We have been corrupted by the institutions of our culture.
The younger the human being, the more morally absolute their sensibilities are.
And so you get this really freaky concept where the youngest and the most naive and the most unlearned of us then somehow become the most noble.
And these are the two strains we've been juggling in Western culture for the last 300 years.
And it has a lot to do with forms of state organization.
If you take the Hobbesian view that human beings in a state of nature, in other words, without a sort of centralized coercive government, human beings in a state of nature, red and tooth and claw, like cannibalism and endless war and so on, goes on.
And of course, these people didn't have access to the primate studies, which I'll sort of reference a little bit later, that reinforces what Hobbes talks about in terms of the brutality of we as the bald primates and...
And this idea that human nature is this fairly satanic volcano that needs to be tamped down by oligarchical power is very, very strong.
And you hear this all the time.
This shows up even now. When people say, let's deregulate this section of the economy, what do people think?
Ah, maybe they're going to swarm in and they're going to do terrible things.
And if you get rid of these laws, then it's just going to be like horrifying.
You know, the word anarchy just means like, well, it's just going to be...
Death, destruction, criminal clubs, shoot-ups, and all this kind of stuff.
And so they had this idea that human nature was nasty and brutish and violent and didn't think about ethics in particular.
Therefore, as Hobbes says, you need this totalitarian state to control it.
But then the problem is, of course, that flies in the face of democracy.
If you say human beings are sort of evil by nature and need to be rigidly restrained by state power, then you can't let them vote because they're evil by nature.
Whereas Rousseau, of course, would say, well, there's this weird thing called the general will, which was never very well defined.
But he was much more in favor of democracy because he said, look, if people are naturally good, then the existing institutions are making them bad.
And so if we remove the control of the existing institutions, then, you know, human beings will flower and we'll have all this wonderful stuff.
And this question is still really, really central to where we are in the West.
Is more freedom going to breed more violence and chaos, or is violence and chaos a result of increasing state control?
Well, I would argue that the combination of these two strains of thought, right, the sympathetic, sentimental version of Rousseau and the more authoritarian version of Hobbes, I think you see the meat in the rise of fascism, particularly communist, socialist, Marxist fascism.
The idea of...
Because it's utopian, isn't it?
All socialism and Marxism is utopian.
It's this idea that if we liberate people from the chains of religion, the opiate of the people, we liberate them from capitalist systems and economy and money, we liberate them from those things.
They will be innately good and everybody will be brothers and sisters.
It's that fairy tale, utterly...
False conception of human nature that the socialist has.
On the other hand, the same Marxist and socialists and totalitarians and fascists who've embraced this sort of quasi-sentimental view of human understanding are also the autocrats who say the only way that system flourishes is with a strongman or some oligarchial rule.
And it goes all the way back to Plato, doesn't it?
The benevolent philosopher king.
The idea that you have to have, on the one hand, people are so good in their primitive state that they need no regulation.
On the other hand, the only thing they can guarantee that they can be what they are is this incredibly structured system that cramps freedom and comes down really hard on anybody for any reason who deviates.
Well, I mean, the whole question of democracy, there's a famous Churchill quote which says, the best cure for any delusions about democracy is five minutes conversation with your average voter.
So, I mean, Plato, I was much harsher on Plato's totalitarianism when I was younger, but given what the mob did to Socrates, the man he loved the most...
It's a little bit more understandable.
Now, the thing, too, in the time of the genesis of this, this was really the first time that Europeans had come in contact with this kind of noble savage.
They'd been, as we talked about, at war with the Muslims for many centuries.
But this question of sort of Stone Age or primitive people in an unspoiled landscape, so to speak, this was the first time it had dropped into their consciousness, and it happened during a very difficult time.
In European history.
Well, I don't know. I'm trying to think of a non-difficult time in European history, but 16th and 17th centuries in particular, it was easy to fall in love with the idea of the noble savage.
We've got the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years' War.
There was this very famous St.
Bartholomew's Day's Massacre, which is in 1572.
Either 10 or 20,000 men, women, and children massacred by Catholic mobs.
This was in Paris and other places in France.
So there was this sense that Where Europe is really, really bad and these guys are unencumbered by all of that and live free with regards to nature.
You're exactly right.
One of the problems was that Europeans in the 16th and 17th century had first-hand experience with Islamic culture and its violence.
The accounts from the New World and accounts from East Asia, for instance, that were filtering back to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries Or the prisoners, the representatives from those cultures who were brought back on ships.
What the Europeans didn't see in their European palaces I think we're good to go.
All the gold, all the rare species, all the bounty and plenty.
So it really did.
It gives you an example of one of the problems of the romantic view of human nature, the idea that we are innately good, and if you just leave us alone, the more you leave us alone, the better we're going to be.
All they saw, because they weren't living among them, We're the beneficent aspects of those cultures.
They didn't see the brutality.
And I think it's a real good lesson here that if we so romanticize human nature, then that we refuse to believe in something as simple as the concept of original sin.
Original sin, right? It's one of the banes of people who despise Christianity.
But original sin originally wasn't about the idea that children are born evil.
It was never about that. It was the difference in the Bible between iniquity and sin.
Sin is what you do as a conscious, rational person.
But I think the Bible, Christianity has an idea that was dangerously lost in this period.
It's the idea of iniquity, that we are all in our own way culpable to some degree.
We're all prone to ideas, to attitudes, and to behaviors that are destructive.
We can't get away from them.
And when we got rid of religion, when people stopped taking seriously philosophical ideas behind Judeo-Christianity in Europe, they jumped to one of the two extremes.
Either we are just animals, and then therefore instinct is everything and you can't judge us, or we are so pure and innocent that we are almost like angels without the need of God or forgiveness.
And in throwing out the idea of sin that way, or original sin, iniquity, the idea that every human heart Is capable of both good and evil, right?
Lies and truth, virtue and sin.
Throwing out that essential idea, and I'm going to give serious credit here to Christianity, and many of the world's religions believe this, that if human beings are capable of good and evil, then education matters.
It doesn't in Romanticism.
I think we're good to go.
Then there's no place of free will, right?
The romantic child who's corrupted, it's never his fault.
It's always his culture's fault.
The savage child who lives in nature is brutal, but that brutality is part of his nature.
You can't criticize him for it.
In other words, there's no free will.
If there is no free will, you can have no morality.
And if you look at modern progressive liberalisms, this is why progressive mobs of dumb college kids, dumbed down college kids, can think they're being virtuous in tearing down statues.
They think by shutting down fascists, anybody who disagrees with them, they're being somehow noble.
And you see how confused the two things get.
Christianity really was, and a lot of other religions too, they were a via media between the dark side of our nature, which religion clearly acknowledged, but also the bright.
And by cutting that out, you get the two extremes and nothing else.
Well, and it's always troubled me how socialism and this sort of economic environmental determinism strips away free will as well.
They say, well, you're just a product of your class.
They're just a product of your relationship to the means of production, whether you're close or far away.
That's always really bothered me because defense of free will, well, it's essential for my job as a philosopher, as an intellectual.
If there's no free will, I don't have a gig.
So, you know, I just want to point out that conflict of interest, but I think that there are very strong arguments for it.
Now, regarding this Noble, peaceful, you know, primitive groups that live in harmony with nature.
The data seems to be, I just want to point out some data points here, just so we can discard that as a hypothesis, and we can talk about why people like it so much.
So, there was a Dr.
Chagnon, he was arguing that the Yanomamo, Indian's chief motive for raiding in Fighting, which they did an enormous amount of, was to basically abduct, recover, or avenge the abduction of women.
Control of the eggs seems to be pretty key in primitive societies.
There's some significant evidence that Indian men who had killed people had more wives and more children than the men who hadn't killed, which of course promotes brutality as a Darwinian advantage.
Recent studies have confirmed that mortality from violence is very common in small-scale societies today and In the past, these are primitive societies.
Almost one-third of people in these tribes die in raids and fights.
The death rate is twice as high among men as among women.
This is a far higher death rate than that was experienced even in countries worst hit by World War II. So as far as this sort of noble savage idea versus the war of all against all in a primitive society, the data seems to be pretty clear and pretty decisive on the side of Hobbes rather than on the side of Rousseau.
Yeah, I think you're right. I think left to his own devices, man is much worse than he is better.
That's why we have education, right?
This is, to me, as a professor myself, this is the convincing argument to me.
If, again, people are born innocent, then, again, education can really only corrupt them.
All the attributes of culture, education, police, the need for armies, the need for discipline, the need for hierarchies, people with more experience and more practice Overseeing people with lesser experience and less practice.
That'll make sense. And our human nature seems to conform to that.
This idea that child is the father of the man, it's been, as Shakespeare mocked it in King Lear, right?
All athwart goes all discorum.
The child beats the nurse, right?
The young man kicks the crutch out from under the old father's arms.
This idea that when you invert this, when you deify the young and then you condemn the old or you condemn the experienced.
The best way I can phrase it, think about William Blake, the romantic poet, his two famous poems, right?
Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night.
What a mortal hand or I could frame thy fearful symmetry, right?
This idea that nature is, like you said, comes from Blake, red in tooth and claw.
And then to balance that out, Blake wrote the poem, The Lamb.
Little lamb who made thee, dost thou know who made thee, gave thee life and bid thee feed by the forest and the mead.
And so in Blake's two poems, you see that the contradictory nature of the problem is nature, Bungle in the Jungle by Jethro Tull, right?
The idea that the same god who put crocodile nasties in the woods Also made kittens.
And that's the reality.
And I go back again to pre-enlightenment methodologies, all the religious worldviews, most of them anyway, and the Confucianism certainly, the Confucius worldview, the Shinto, all of them.
This idea that we are, free will is predicated on the fact that we can choose good and bad, true and false, right and wrong.
And if that's true, then somebody wiser and older has to school us in those things.
We have to be discouraged from the worse or geniuses within us.
And we need to be lured to the higher, more angelic aspects of our being.
Under all these modern systems that the light enlightenment spawned, that's all irrelevant now.
As you said yourself, the entire premise of modern universities is everything is a social construct.
Everything. You are not responsible for anything.
And so we see again, Dumbed down college kids acting like tyrants or the spoiled child who's given no boundaries as a child, who eats what he wants and goes to bed when he wants.
They become monsters.
They don't become civilized people.
And, you know, without a doubt, for me at least, babies are born selfish monsters.
And that's exactly how they should be.
Because the baby who says, well, mommy might be tired.
It's two o'clock in the morning, you know, she's already been up twice tonight.
I know I need some breast milk, but let's let mommy sleep.
Well, that baby doesn't generally do very well in life.
the baby is born as a monstrous narcissistic black hole of need and preference with no regard to anyone else's feelings whatsoever, which is entirely right and beautiful and wonderful and fitting.
But of course, we need to be lured out of that cave of narcissistic self-regard into the world where other people's feelings matter, but not to the point where we become slavishly devoted to other people's feelings because that's not having an identity of your own, And of course, whenever you do good in the world, you're going to be upsetting a lot of bad people.
So it is a very, very challenging thing to have integrity to one's own feelings, to have integrity to one's identity, and to have integrity to abstract moral principles that are going to cause great upset.
Your integrity is going to cause great upset to other people.
This is all very, very complex.
And the idea that we're just going to somehow...
I mean, it's kind of funny to me because if the state of nature is true, then we should never have had to domesticate wolves and wild cats.
We should never have had to do any of that.
We should have just, you know, bring the wolf in and put him in with the sheep.
You don't need to domesticate wolves for thousands of years and choose the most friendly ones and then train them to become sheepdogs.
Just dump a pack of wolves in with your sheep and I'm sure they'll defend them from all predators.
I mean, human society itself is based upon domestication.
It's based upon domesticating animals.
It's based upon domesticating wild crops.
I mean, you find a piece of corn in the wild, it's barely going to give you enough to pick your teeth with, but you grow it domestically for thousands of years and choose the most fruitful ones.
So even nature has to be tamed in order to have any utility.
But somehow we are not part of that and don't need to be tamed or organized or imprinted on by any higher virtues and values.
It's just going to happen on its own.
I don't even see...
And of course, the Marxists say that this is the case, but then they spend 20 years indoctrinating people.
It's like, well, then how does that make any sense?
Yeah, you're exactly right. When this comes up in my classrooms, I ask my kids all the time, can any of you Give me an example of one person, you're 20 years old.
Have you ever met anybody that's perfectly good?
And almost all of them are like, no.
Have you ever met anybody that's perfectly evil?
And they shake their heads, no. Okay, I said, well, there you go.
One time I actually had one kid say to me, well, my mom is perfectly good.
And so I asked the kid, I said, okay, would your mom agree with you that she's perfectly good?
And the kid said, oh, no, absolutely not.
So either your mom's lying, and she's not perfectly good, or she's telling the truth, and she's not.
It's so easy to pull this apart.
There's no experience.
This is why the abstract nature of things like socialism is They only exist—I mean, they exist in places like universities until they get power, until they get the kind of political power they go for.
Once the kind of socialist theorists are put in power, then they become tyrannists, don't they?
Because they recognize quickly that you can't get people to live that way simply by forcing people to have the same thing only by outcome-based education, outcome-based culture.
Do away with everything that might differentiate people in any way, shape, or form.
They're still not happy.
There was crime in the Soviet Union.
There was tremendous crime in China.
This idea that somehow it's this utopian idea.
And to me, it comes back to the same question again and again.
The utopian idea that sprung out of the Enlightenment is much different than utopianism prior to it.
Prior utopianism, religious utopianism, was always predicated in the next world, right?
That you understand that we're fallen, that we're capable of evil, that we can be bad and good, we can be redeemed, and we can be condemned.
You understand that.
That means whatever virtuous, perfect utopianism exists, exists after you're dead, right?
But what the socialist Marxists did is they compacted that, right?
We're going to make heaven on earth. You go all the way back 3,000 years BC to the book of Genesis.
It's the Tower of Babel.
Do we get to heaven from Earth, or do we build heaven on Earth?
I'm not suggesting one is absolutely true and one is absolutely false, but everything we're talking about here today is predicated on which of those two systems you choose.
Right. So let's talk a little bit about why this...
This idea is so appealing to people.
Why does it move people so much?
Because I think this is one of the great divides in society is this idea of the noble savage.
And, you know, I invite listeners and watchers to this.
Go talk to your friends and get a sense of what they think about it.
You'll find that it probably goes down, about 50-50 down the line.
Now, one of the things I think may be appealing to this is...
There are certain people who seem to be, I don't know, maybe it's a younger sibling thing, I say this as a younger sibling, but there are certain people who really care not about equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome.
Because these are the two big differences in, you know, equality of opportunity is freedom, equality of outcome is tyranny.
Because you have to control everything to make sure, you know, if everyone starts a race and they can run as fast as they want, that's equality.
If they all start at the same spot, that's equality of opportunity and you just need to Have a starter pistol and off they go.
If you want everyone to end the race at the same time, well, you've got to micromanage everything they're doing, where they start, how fast they run, what they do.
You've got to be obsessively controlling.
Now, one of the things that's true in a free society, particularly a free market society, is you end up with...
Significant disparities in income.
And the people who can't compete or don't feel they can compete or who are sold a bill of goods that say all wealth is unjust and therefore if you're poor you're virtuous and if you're rich you're bad.
I think those people look at a primitive tribe and say well there really wasn't much differentiation.
In terms of sexual market value, there wasn't like a guy who had 100 times the resources as the next guy who could get all the cool chicks or whatever.
So I think that the people who find the opportunities inherent in a free market system and the disparities that result from that, I think they view that as unpleasant or threatening or it denigrates them somehow.
Maybe they fall prey to the sin of envy.
I don't know. But I think when they look at a more primitive tribe, And they look at that kind of togetherness, and they look at that egalitarianism of outcome, because there's so few opportunities.
I think they find that very tempting.
And also, the last thing I want to mention is, in the free market, to some degree, you have to win your relationships.
You have to win your friendships.
You have to win your companions, where in a sort of 50-person or 75-person tribal society, your friends are just kind of delivered up to you.
And your companions and your family are delivered up to you, and you...
You know, you have to really do terrible things to be ostracized.
So you kind of have companions without having to win them over, without having to earn them through virtue or conversational skills or humor or whatever it is.
And so I think this lack of competition is very, very tempting for people to think I have no big disparities.
Everyone's around. Everyone's my friend.
And I think for a lot of people who find it exhausting to compete, that's really, really tempting.
It is. And of course, as we all know from practical experience today, it's also tremendously philosophically insignificant.
It's a lie. Because when you do that, when you artificially level playing fields, you're just persecuting a different group of people, right?
We talked about Common Core.
My first talk with you was on Common Core.
And that's what Common Core is.
We spent trillions and trillions of dollars and decades and decades and decades trying to get low-performing kids in public schools up.
So Common Core just decided, you know what?
We can't raise the bottom.
What we can do is take down the top, right?
And so that's what we're doing. This is the entire progressive mindset in universities, where African Americans, for instance, Can never be guilty of racism.
White people now are always guilty, and the white privilege means the color of your skin makes you a racist.
And they don't recognize that they're doing the exact same thing.
They're making racist statements about African Americans.
If you're an African American who hates people of other races, you're a racist, right?
But the fact that the academic left won't say that means they're discriminating against blacks, even as they're trying to Protect blacks by discriminating against white people.
This is the mindset of socialism, too.
The few people at the top get everything.
This is why socialism has given birth to really nothing but poverty.
Because that's the only way you can make sure that everybody's the same.
Everybody can't be rich. There's not enough resources.
We're going to make 99% of the population poor and call it equality.
I'd rather have a system like our free market American system where You know, there are winners and losers.
Most of the times, the losers chose it, right?
And that's why you have the safety net.
In those instances, much rarer than people think, where people suffer through no fault of their own, you have the social safety net.
Right. So, this hatred and fear of competition, I think, is one of the things that draws people back.
But it is a delusion.
And because, as we pointed out, there is competition in more primitive societies.
It's just competition in bloodlust.
It's competition in murder sprees.
It's criminal, like what we would call now criminal competition.
I mean, there's evidence of the Native Americans that there was a slave ownership and slave markets.
there are.
They found pits with like 500 bones of people tortured and murdered and so on.
And so this idea that there's somewhere out there in the world where you won't have to compete, where you can, in a sense, have this swaddled infancy forever.
Because I do, I mean, babies should receive unconditional love.
Adults should not.
It's really, really great for babies.
I think it's really, really terrible for adults.
Because as an adult, you have to earn what you're supposed to I think people who didn't receive it as babies may go through this feeling of, I need this in my life.
Or babies, of course, shouldn't compete with each other for parental affection or parental resources should be doled out equally.
If you didn't get that, maybe you still have a deep-seated need.
For this kind of equality, this lack of competition, this unconditional love, which you then transfer to the state, or sometimes it happens to churches as well.
And I think that this incompleted infancy stage has a lot to do with this very visceral and powerful yearning.
I mean, if you look at the extreme left these days, they're having irrational tantrums.
Of course, they're bigger than babies, so they're much more dangerous.
But it is this kind of infancy that goes on forever that seems to me to drive a lot of this fantasy of the egalitarianism and peace of primitive societies or...
That having a tantrum makes you right and it's a legitimate way to get what you want.
Sure, it's fine for babies because they're babies.
That's all they can do is sometimes have a tantrum until the parents figure out or they escalate until the parents figure out what they want, which they should then be provided with through no effort of their own.
We don't ask the baby to do a dance to get some milk, right?
And I think that this infancy aspect that remains incomplete in people if they had a very bad infancy or toddlerhood I think drives a lot of these fantasies and ends up creating the very hell that they were trying to escape originally.
Yeah, the idea that we project adulthood on babies is criminal.
But the idea that we treat adults as babies is criminal, too.
And we've lost that. It goes back to the duality thing we've started talking about.
And I really think this is, you know, it's important that we do this.
We talk about pre-Christian, pre-Enlightenment Christian cultures, and we're very keen to point out that all the Horrible things that have been done in the name of religion.
When horrible things are done in the name of religion, we, I think in many instances, justly point to the religious ideology behind it.
But we're very, very reluctant to look at the Enlightenment and say, well, these are consequences of Enlightenment thinking, and we have to chalk it up to that.
You can't have the Enlightenment and not have the brutality of the 21st century.
What did we get because of the Enlightenment?
We got a much greater focus on science and material progress.
That's fantastic! The vaccines, the air conditioning, all the things we love, but you also got a much, much more advanced way of killing people.
You got a much more advanced way of using technology.
I love what General Omar Bradley said at the end of World War II. He gave a speech at a local college in 1948, and he said, Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
We have split the atom, he said, but we have forgotten the Sermon on the Mount.
And if you just go back again, one last example of this, I think that makes a really great point.
Thomas Jefferson, tremendous enlightenment figure.
I love the argument.
President Kennedy once said when he had a group of hundreds of Nobel Prize winners at the White House, Kennedy gave a speech and he said, This is the largest collection of brain power ever assembled in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.
And a lot of truth to that.
Having said that, Jefferson, as a rationalist and Enlightenment figure, also had a very fraught relationship, as we know, with Christianity.
We know that the Jefferson Bible, right?
We know that he loved Jesus' teachings and ideas, but he didn't like all the Son of God, and he didn't like all the miraculous stuff.
That seemed irrational to him.
So Jefferson cut out all the miracles, And he cut out all the references of Jesus as Son of God.
And he gave us just the teaching.
And there's a reason nobody anywhere has read the Jefferson Bible in 200 years.
Because if you take Jesus Christ and you divorce him from all that other stuff, it doesn't make any sense.
If, however, Jesus in theory is the Son of God, right, who's entitled to everything, The only sinless man entitled to all this stuff, and you kill him, and that son of God who's entitled to everything, who's born back to babies, right?
He's born as an infant. If you take him and crucify him and subject him to the spitting and the beating and the whipping, that sends a message, doesn't it?
That you can't have the balm without the blood.
One of the things I love about the idea of Christianity is the most powerful and most innocent figure in it suffered more than anybody else did in many ways.
And that's a reminder, right?
That the baby doesn't stay a baby, and that even, theoretically, God in human flesh must suffer too for the consequences of human behavior.
What I love about it is there's a balance there that we've really lost in the modern age.
Well, I think Jesus and Socrates, not to mix the theological with the philosophical, but it is a great example in history of what Ayn Rand talked about, which is the hatred of the good for being the good.
Why was Jesus attacked and condemned?
Well, in large part because he was asking people to take responsibility and to be better in their own lives.
And, of course, the more that people take responsibility, the more that people become virtuous, the less control that people in power have to offer.
There's less value.
I mean, if everyone was good, you know, the idea is that we wouldn't need these hierarchical structures to control people.
So the more that moralists hand virtue to the people, the less those in power have to sell to the people.
And therefore, he's cutting in on their turf, man, and he's got to go.
So now the question of innocence and innocence lost, you know, we've talked about this in terms of the noble savage.
I think it's fairly false, you know, both in theory and in practice.
But it does tie into, to me, one of the greatest stories or the greatest analogies or the greatest myths in the known universe, which is the Garden of Eden.
Because in the Garden of Eden, we do have the noble savage.
And then we do have the exit from the Garden of Eden.
And to me, the fascinating thing about the story is that there is disobedience, of course.
And God says, do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
There is disobedience, but it is a knowledge that is gained that kicks people out of paradise.
The knowledge of good and evil.
And so what's being sort of complicated is a very, very powerful and complicated story.
Where do you think it fits in terms of this noble savage versus human beings that are infinitely corruptible by nature?
That's a great question, and I think it comes back to free will, doesn't it?
You have these noble savages, right?
They are savage in the sense, not that they're brutal, but that they're innocent, right?
The word in the Renaissance was sauvage, right?
Savage, not in the sense of violent, but primitive, naive.
So you've got these two creatures who don't know, who've got one.
In order for there to be free will in the Garden of Eden, there has to be something that Adam and Eve can choose that's not God.
If every choice Adam and Eve make in the garden gets them back to God, the decision to love each other gets them God.
The decision to kill each other gets them God.
If that happens, there's no genuine free will.
So it's like saying you have a maze with only one path.
It's not a maze then. It's just a corridor.
And so you have one thing that God does.
And he puts the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden.
And Adam and Eve are told, that way lies death.
Now, to me, it's not a 50...
People will come back and argue, well, how can you condemn Adam and Eve When they don't know what death is.
I would argue, and I think this is the brilliance of that story, most religions have a garden myth.
What blows me away about the Hebraic one is how forethoughtful it is.
So we know that God walks with Adam and Eve.
We know that God made Adam and Eve in his image.
He walks the garden with them.
They can converse with God directly.
In other words, Adam and Eve have absolute knowledge.
They have no need for faith.
Well, they have absolute knowledge of the good.
The only thing they do not know is evil.
So when the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is put in the garden, the only thing Adam and Eve can gain from it is the knowledge of evil, because they already know the good.
And that's brilliant, because God has not stacked the deck against them.
They know the face of God, they know their Creator, they know His goodness.
They just don't know evil, which God characterizes in that story, Genesis 1 and 2.
God characterizes it as death, right?
And so they know that by choosing that tree, they will get something that's not God.
And so to me, the parameters of free will are upheld, and God is absolved of being a tyrant because they know him.
Right? And again, what does it say about the God of the ancient Israelites, the God that has carried us through in Western culture for 2000 years?
What does it say about him that he loved his creation so much that their freedom Meant more to him than their obedience.
And that, I mean, it's one of the great humanizing things in Western culture.
It's one of the things that sets Western culture so far ahead of other cultures is that Argus, the founding fathers, right?
We choose freedom, not obedience.
The free market system, we choose freedom, not obedience.
The socialists, the Marxists, the progressives, they want to go back to a world where all human beings deserve the Garden of Eden like Adam and Eve, but they owe God no obedience for it.
In other words, the threat of the Old Testament, the first commandment, that you'll become God, right?
If you don't recognize that I am the Lord your God, then you will become gods of yourself.
And also, not only from the Enlightenment do you get the fallacy of romanticism, the natural goodness of man, and the fallacy of naturalism, morality is irrelevant because we're all animals, you get Nietzsche, right?
Right? And when Nietzsche said at the end of the 19th century, God is dead.
We philosophers have killed him with our knives.
But, he said, men must become like God then to be worthy of it.
The only way modernism exists, the only way all these modern socialist, Marxist, fascist, whatever you want to call it, utopian dream schemes exist, is if man assumes he's a god, not an animal.
And there's your corruption.
There's commandment number one down the drain.
Yeah. Well, and of course, that is, you know, God as a ceiling for human vanity, to me, is a very, very powerful concept.
Because the idea that you can get a group of people who are going to organize and control the wages and the salaries and the production and the resource allocation on some giant technological economy is the very height of human vanity.
The idea that some central planners, as we talked about with Common Core, the idea that some central planners in Washington are going to be able to determine the ideal educational environments for, you know, 100 million children scattered across a giant country, different cultures, different languages, different histories, different religions.
It's the height of mad vanity.
The idea that Barack Obama is going to have some great idea about how health care should be provided to a couple hundred million people is the very height of human vanity.
And this hubris and this lack of capacity to recognize the limitations of one's abilities is absolutely astounding.
And it really has erupted since the fall of Christianity as a central guiding principle because Christianity, you know, they say, well, it's too much humility, it's too much humbleness.
But we are all tiny relative to the truth.
We are all tiny relative to perfect virtue.
And keeping yourself small keeps you humble, keeps you looking for principles, keeps you looking for elevation and increase and keeps you back from the greatest temptation, which is to point a gun at your fellow man and say, I know what's best for you.
And, you know, to me, the penultimate example, analogy for this in the modern world is the environmentalist movement.
I mean, the idea that the environmentalists are so convinced that mankind is so altering the cosmos, so altering the world in which we live, that what kind of a weird god is it?
If Gaia is the Earth Mother, what kind of a god is she for all these liberals?
What kind of a god is she if scurrying ants on her surface can so destroy her?
You see what happens? In that world, the god of nature, the god of the Earth, is so weak that it's the people on it that are the gods.
And so, as Michael Crichton pointed this out before he died, the great writer who was also a scientist by trade, Jurassic Park, he pointed it out.
He said, you look at the modern environmentalist movement.
It is a complete rewriting of the Bible just without God.
You had the Garden of Eden, the world before mankind existed, right?
But we forget that was a world where dinosaur species were extincting each other left and right.
Bigger dinosaurs were swallowing up lesser dinosaurs.
In any event, you had the Garden of Eden, the world before the fall.
Then you've got original sin, man in the garden, right?
Then you've got the sinners and the saints, the saved and the damned, right?
And then it ends with an apocalypse, right?
It ends with the Book of Revelations, where the world is judged and everything is a big conflagration.
And so you see what happens.
I think Nietzsche was right. Nietzsche, who I don't philosophically agree with, I think was absolutely right.
If you get rid of the idea of God, to your listeners out there who are getting ready at the keyboard to yell at me, right?
I'm not arguing God exists or doesn't.
We're talking about the idea of God here.
You get rid of the idea of God and what it means.
And you're going to get Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's right. The socialists are right.
Hitler was right in a way, right?
That the state has to become God.
Something has to fill that void.
Whether you call it evolution, you call it culture, there is something that's evolved in us as human creatures that requires something in the God slot, right?
We need something.
Anthropologically, if that's as far as you're willing to go, we are not just creatures of reason.
And Final comment before I turn it back to you.
Sorry for being long-winded. Notice this.
All the great dystopian literature of the 20th century, whether it's Huxley or whether it's Orwell, whether it's Ken Kesey, over and over again, almost all of it was written by leftists.
Almost all of it, Orwell was a socialist, Fabian socialist for a while, almost all of the great warning books of the 20th century were not warning us about God and Christianity and Christians.
It was warning us about two rationalistic And too utopian a view of human nature.
From 1919 and H.G. Wells all the way to the 20th century, everybody's warning you on the left not about religion but about what happens when man begins to think he's God and that reason is all he needs to make society perfect.
Well, and for those who are recalling from the theological aspect, you can substitute to some degree reason and evidence, philosophical principles.
You need something to subjugate your will to.
You need something to subjugate.
Your will unrestrained becomes a river of poison across the world.
We need some way to restrain our will and to confine our behavior.
And traditionally that has been religion.
Philosophers have tried with varying degrees of success, mostly very little, myself included, to substitute reason and evidence for God.
But here's what I want to mention as well.
So, to me, the origins, of course, of Christianity were with great skepticism and fear of state power.
Of course, it grew up as a sense of a rebellious religion, a religion that was greatly threatened to the existing Roman conception of the state and of religion.
It also grew up threatening existing Judaism, of course.
And to me, this origin within the religion of a fear of the state, it was a rebel religion in its origin.
And then, of course, it gained power for a variety of reasons.
And then it seems to me there was quite a lot of centuries of the state and Christianity working sort of hand in glove, right?
So, the Christian clergy would give the divine right of king sanction to the king, and the king in return would give them a monopoly over religion.
And this, of course, stagnated things in just about a reconceivable way.
Now, after the Protestant Reformation, there was, of course, very, very simplified there.
There was, of course, hundreds of years of religious warfare, which culminated in this desperation of, well, monarchy doesn't work.
Unlimited democracy was a failure in the ancient world.
The unity of church and state is incredibly destructive because then a lot of religious powers, knowing that either they gain control of the state or they're wiped out of existence, you end up with this grabbing of the gun within the church, which is a terrible situation.
This separation of church and state and this recognition that Christianity united with the state so easily turns into theological tyranny, to me, returned Christianity to its origins, separated compulsion in the name of religion, which is the great temptation of religious people.
I know virtue.
I know the truth.
God has spoken to me. I must force you to get into heaven.
You know, in the same way we might make a kid go get an inoculation or go and get a cavity filled and so on.
Sorry, I know what's best for you.
I have to make you do this.
Now, this... This return of free will, which is the separation of church and state, this return of free will to theological matters to me, returned Christianity to its original form, and I think it had great power in that, but not sustainable power, as it turned out. I wonder if you could tell me if that analysis makes any kind of sense, or what you think.
I think it's a really great encapsulation of where we are, and I think a couple of things I would point out.
Even when the church, the idea of the church, the human institution, was conveying power on kings, and it was co-opting power for itself at the highest hierarchical levels, we must not forget that on the ground there were unpowerful Christians.
Creating hospitals and orphanages and doing dangerous missionary work and tending to the sick that too often modern people, and we've talked about this on your show before, too often modern people see the evils of Christianity but are unwilling to acknowledge the countless billions and billions of people over the last 2,000 years who did strive in their daily lives to love and to sacrifice, who did live for an ideal.
They have to be taken into account.
And I think that's true today as well.
I think that the sustainability, my argument is, and I started writing a book about it, my argument is that we've reached the point now in culture where what we would call the assumptions of 2,000 years of Christianity are no longer assumptions.
We've reached the point where even bad people 50, 100, 200 years ago, even bad sinful people, recognized that they were deviating from a generally assumed cultural norm Christianity.
They don't assume it anymore.
I believe the future of Christianity is outside the churches.
I think the churches have failed.
Our churches more or less have conformed.
Many of our churches from the Catholic down to the Baptist now I think we're going to quickly get to a place where Christianity is both persecuted again, like it probably was meant to be because it stood a thwart power, and a place where Christianity lives on the streets, not in buildings anymore.
I think we're going to get back to, in the same way that we're moving culturally, not to the Enlightenment.
Is not making us more an atheist.
It's making us more pagan. It is reinstating, think about the global warming argument, right?
Which how much mythology, how much quasi-religion do you have in the global warming movement?
I think we are becoming pagan again.
And what was it that convinced pagans, was not an easy strat, but convinced pagans, primarily ideologically, convinced pagans that there was a better way.
And it was Christianity. I think we're going to go back to that sort of primitive struggle again.
The church will be persecuted.
Christians will be persecuted more.
They have to be. Because every aspect of culture now, by progressives, is a reaction against 2,000 years of established morality.
So it's just a matter of time before those that Christianity participated in persecuting will persecute them again.
But the ideas behind the faith, whether God exists or not, or how we choose to envision him, whether we're talking...
Denominationalism goes out the window.
The idea of Christ, stripped bare, the basic life of Christ, both the duality in his divinity and in his humanity.
I don't believe that there has been a more profoundly acute view of human nature, a more true view of human nature.
The one that saves us from both the excessive naturalists who want to argue we're just animals and saves us from the utopian leftists who argue that we're mere chattel.
And it's funny, too, because I think if you're in a room, you're in a crowded room, or you're in society, or you're in your country, or whatever, and if you can't point to the person with the capacity for evil, it's probably you, right?
I mean, this is something that...
This humility... I mean, I know that I have...
I have a lot of power as a public moralist.
I know that I have a lot of authority with some people, and I'm telling you, like, every single time I do a show, particularly when I'm talking to listeners, I am acutely conscious and aware of the authority that I have, and I'm acutely aware of I'm never ever wanting to misuse that.
Should it be there for people?
Like I never tell people what to do.
I'll make suggestions, I'll give some perspectives and so on, but I will not say you need to do this, this, this, and this, and then everything will work out.
And I think that recognition that power corrupts, which was an essential part of Christianity in its origin, and which, of course, you know, power does corrupt, and it corrupts Christians, and it corrupts atheists.
In some ways, it seems corrupts atheists even more, because then they turn to the state rather than to religion.
But I think once people remind themselves, and it's one of these sort of daily mantras, because biologically, we strive for power.
Biologically we strive for resources.
That is the Darwinian urge.
And, you know, we've seen studies where you get dopamine hits for climbing up in an ape camp.
Tribe, you get actual literal dopamine hits for climbing up the ladder of power, and people get hits for controlling other people.
I mean, we are programmed to gain resources, and what needs to oppose that, the essence of civilization, is to say, I am not a blind, reproducing, resource-acquiring bag of protoplasm.
I will not... Devolve to my animal nature, because that is red in tooth and claw, and we are rewarded for evil in a state of nature, so to speak.
I mean, the lion is evil to the zebra, and one tribe that conquers another tribe is evil to that tribe.
We are rewarded for evil in the state of nature, but we have built civilization on a repudiation The dopamine hits of controlling others.
That's what civilization is.
Civilization means I'm not going to throw bricks at people or bottles of urine.
I'm going to reason. I'm going to get evidence.
There's no cage matches at a scientific conference.
And the rejection of the animal acquisition of power and resources is the essence of civilization.
And if we don't damn well find a way to restore that in our minds, we're going to lose the civilization like it was never even there.
And that's why the Jefferson Bible failed.
Jesus is an idea.
If he's just another poor slob slave in the Jewish empire, the Roman Empire that had conquered Judea, he's like any other teacher, right?
Who paid the price for trying to tell people a better way.
If, on the other hand, however, he is the king of kings, he is God in human clothing, human dress.
If that's who he is, then there is no greater act of humility than he who is all powerful in the universe, subjecting himself for the good of others to the worst torments and degradation.
You can't cut that out of the story.
And C.S. Lewis was right.
Either you believe that aspect of Jesus or throw it all away as nonsense.
But you can't do what Jefferson did, right?
And your argument is the right one.
Give me another flip on this.
You remember the famous World War II poet, Randall Jarrell, who had seen the misery of World War I, seen the misery of World War II.
Two wars, by the way, that whose epistemology is anchored firmly, not in religion, but in the Enlightenment.
Absolutely.
The rise of science, all those two, the most devastating wars in human history were anchored in certain strains of Enlightenment thought.
Cannot be denied.
After watching this and seeing World War I and World II, this really great poet, Jarrell, made the following observation.
Randall Jarrell said, he said, most of us know now that Rousseau was wrong.
That man, when you knock his chains off, sets up death camps.
Soon, we will know everything that the 18th century did not know.
And we will know nothing that it did know.
And it will be hard to live with us.
What he means by that is pretty soon everything that the 18th century didn't know, they didn't know that fascist utopian forms of socialism and Marxism were going to lead to the death of hundreds of millions of people.
They didn't know. They thought that by getting rid of religion, they didn't have the experience to know.
They thought that by getting rid of the religious structure, people would live in freedom.
They didn't know it. Soon we'll know.
We now know everything they didn't know.
But more importantly, Gerald says, we have forgotten what the 18th century did know.
Free will, the basic nature of humanity, capable of good and evil, the need for ways to educate and lure people to virtue, and ways to dissuade them from vice.
We now know everything the 18th century didn't know, and we have forgotten all it did.
And that's the world today.
And after Darwin, we get state control of the educational system.
And after you get state control of the educational system, you get World War I. Why?
Because people bond like ducks with whoever raises them.
And if the state raises you, and if the state has more influence over you than your parents or your pastor, your priest, your community, if the state raises you and the state orders you, you will almost inevitably obey.
And this, to me, is one of the great prices of the fall of religion is the idea that a secular power can impose its vision of the world on children and have it do anything other than serve the needs of that secular power.
And look at the way the state is usurping the role of parents.
Take this in California.
This school in California where the five-year-old kindergarten teacher is reading transgender books to five-year-olds and then stops the class and allows a five-year-old boy who has not developed reason, who has not developed abstract thinking, to declare in front of the rest of the class that he is no longer a boy, he's a girl, and to force all the other kids in the class to acknowledge this reality.
This is the idea of, you just said, the state taking over the role of the parent to change children And what do they want them to become?
They don't want them to become better people.
They don't want them to become who they were born to be.
They want these kids to become good little wards of the state.
They want them to become servants of state ideology, not the ideology of the local religious traditions or the local family needs.
This is really Orwellian.
It's going on here right now.
And it's not just as China is trying to shake itself loose in some weird ways from its oppressive Soviet history.
We're heading full bore into that worldview.
And the most dangerous reason, Steph, is that it's our intellectuals who are doing it to us.
Christianity, in many regards, was a movement from the ground up, right?
All the high ranking, both in Jerusalem and in Rome, the high ranking rejected it, but it swarmed up from the mass.
One of the few ideas in human history that came from the masses first and came to dominate the elites.
What we've got now is a situation where all of our elites, academic, media, intellectual, have rejected the worldviews of pre-Enlightenment Christianity and have bought the idea that there should be one power source, maybe even one leader, who has absolute authority over countless millions of others.
That's a dangerous game, and that's what all those books warned us about, whether it's Brave New World or 1984, same thing again and again and again.
Yeah, and the idea that your very essence can be defined by the state, that you are a member of a class or a race or a group, and all of that is defined by the state, this class conflict, this racial conflict, this race baiting and so on.
It's an update of, well, you're now defined by communism as a proletariat or a bourgeois or a...
A landowner who's bad and the idea that your identity is provided by the state means that the state can take away your identity and people will fight to retain their identity even to the point of self-destruction.
So thanks very much for a great conversation.
Just wanted to remind people.
You like what Dr. Pesta has to say?
You'll love it even more! Online, individual classes, complete curricula for students in kindergarten through to high school.
You can find out more about the Freedom Project Academy at fpeusa.org.
We'll put links to that below. Always a great pleasure.
Thank you so much, my friend. You'd think with all our overheated brains we'd grow hair.
We'll just have to try harder. I feel that my brain needs more protein and it's just, it's sucking the hairs in, you know, like a kid with spaghetti.
