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Dec. 8, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:22:29

3924 The Truth About Untruth | Postmodernism Exposed

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	So this is going to be a long chat, but I promise a very illuminating one.
	The kind of chat that it's going to assemble.
	Jigsaw puzzle pieces to give you a coherent view of the world and its current battle, probably literally to the death of one side or another, of...
	Objective versus subjective.
	Objectivism, or the idea that there is an objective, tangible, material world that exists outside of consciousness that is accessible to consciousness through the evidence of the senses, through reason, through philosophy, through science. We can build certainties based on sense data.
	And our view of the universe.
	Or there is, of course, subjectivism, also sometimes called postmodernism, which is the argument that we can never get to any kind of truth, that we are locked inside subjectivity, that there's no way to gain any certainty outside of the skull prisons of our encased brains, and we are forever doomed or liberated, I suppose, to make up our reality as we go along.
	Now this is an old conflict and an old battle.
	Is it possible for our minds to achieve any certainty?
	Do we have actual connection to the objective universe?
	These are essential matters.
	Essential matters. Reason is how we achieve certainty, and through certainty that's where we gain our moral strength.
	If we're not certain of anything, then we have nothing to stand for, where there's no capacity for integrity, there's no real reason to have any intellectual combat.
	In other words, if everything in your mind is a subjective taste, Then people who are arguing philosophy, as if it's true, as if it's logical, as if it's objective, as if it's certain, people who are arguing philosophy are like toddlers battling over who is the best superhero or people mistaking their personal taste in ice cream for some objective moral fact and having massive ice cream wars of giant armies representing chocolate versus vanilla.
	Mistaking subjective taste for objective facts Is a huge mistake if we actually have no objective facts and we end up fighting over opinions, which is kind of pointless.
	If, on the other hand, there are objective facts that we can ascertain, that we can derive and define from sense data coming in from the outside world into our minds, then we have something to stand for.
	We have something to fight for.
	So, just a sort of very brief background as to where things are now, and also I will be providing an answer to this issue, that succeeding waves of refinements in scientific hypotheses and scientific theories mean that we can't ever be certain.
	Of anything. You know, well, we used to think the world was flat.
	Now we know the world is a sphere.
	The sun and the moon are the same size according to our eyes, but they're not the same size in reality.
	And because we're constantly refining Our scientific understanding of the universe, that means anybody who claims any kind of certainty is akin to someone saying, the world is flat, the world will forever remain flat, nothing will change, you're just setting yourself up for a fall,
	and therefore certainty must be done away with as immaturity, as dogmatism, as of course if everything is subjective taste, then being absolutely morally positively certain that chocolate cookie dough is the best ice cream flavor Which it kind of is, is an irrational and immature position.
	So, there is, or has been, a fundamental break.
	In many ways, well, it's always Plato versus Aristotle, but in some ways, this question of reason versus mysticism, reason versus irrationality, the value of irrationality, the value of reason, is a battle that has something to do in European ways, Philosophical history, particularly political history, in a split between German and British philosophy.
	And we're talking late 18th century, maybe to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
	This is sort of one of the big breaks in the modern era.
	It's like 35 years, let's say.
	You have this Anglo culture, which of course is strongly tied up with American culture.
	And you have Germanic culture.
	And there was a very big split between these two cultures.
	And one of them followed what's called the Enlightenment.
	The Enlightenment was the emergence of reason as the oracle, so to speak.
	Reason as the standard by which...
	We determine what is true and false.
	With reason comes individualism.
	These are two very associated ideas.
	With mysticism, you get collectivism.
	And with reason, you get individualism.
	For the basic reason that individuals can reason.
	Individuals, you know, you can think for yourself.
	We can both compare our arguments to evidence, to reality, to each other, to reason.
	We can individually reason.
	And so if reason... If it's the standard of truth, then you get individualism.
	If irrationality, subjectivism, or mysticism is the standard of truth, or if there is no standard of truth fundamentally, which is basically the same thing as saying mysticism is the standard of truth, means there's no standard of truth, then individuals cannot achieve truth.
	Because individual reasoning...
	It's not how you get there.
	You get there through some kind of revelation.
	You get there through some subjugation to an ideology.
	You don't get there through your own individual efforts.
	And so you end up with collectivism.
	You end up with, well, basically totalitarianism is the way that you have to organize society.
	That goes all the way back to my master's thesis.
	But... If you don't believe in reason, then, well, society still needs to be organized, and you can't explain the good to people.
	Like, I have a whole book, a whole series of books at freedomradio.com slash free, and also you can check out The Art of the Argument at theartoftheargument.com.
	But I have a whole series of books, mostly free.
	Which explain, I've got a whole 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series, I explain how you can reason for yourself and why reason is valid, why empiricism is valid as a means of ascertaining truth, so I don't need to command you, I can reason with you.
	Society needs to get things done if you can't explain what needs to get done and why to people.
	If it's just revelation, well, I heard a voice, or I had some sort of revelation, or I see I am a vehicle of God's will on earth, I am a vehicle of the greater good of the social contractors, and you can't explain it to people, then you just have to order them around.
	Whatever you can't reason with people, you end up, and something has to get done, you end up having to force them.
	And so this sort of Anglo-American culture and the Germanic culture took a big split after the Enlightenment.
	The Enlightenment was called the Age of Reason because that's, I think it was Ben Franklin who said something like, you know, call every fact, every opinion, every piece of evidence before the Oracle of Reason and submit these discussions to her judgment.
	And a lot of this had to do with...
	Religion versus science, right?
	This was the big sort of emergence.
	People say, oh, well, there was a science in the ancient world.
	Well, kind of in a way, but as far as it being a central defining force in human thought and society, nuh-uh, right?
	I mean, they knew about the steam engine in ancient Greece, but they never had an industrial revolution because they had slaves and therefore the people who had money didn't want to lower the value of their slaves by introducing labor-saving devices.
	So... The relationship between religion, as it was practiced at the time, fundamentally in terms of the nature of reality, versus science.
	Science said the age of miracles is over.
	God doesn't interfere. There was this deist concept, which basically said God wound up.
	The universe like a clock or like a child's toy and then just let it run its way forward in time.
	So the deist said, okay, well, the origin of the universe, that's God.
	God wound it up, but he's not in there poking around and setting fire to bushes and making people walk on water and drowning the whole world because reasons.
	So deism kept a sort of religious foundation to historical metaphysics, but said that given that God created the universe, wound it up, stepped back.
	Well, there's no point praying to God.
	There's no point expecting miracles.
	Instead of waiting for miracles, instead of expecting miracles, what we're going to do is we're going to understand nature and thereby gain control over nature through science and create our own miracles.
	This is important.
	I mean, have you seen those?
	I don't know what they're called, but they have these water jets that go flying off your feet and there's a tube attached.
	They pump the water and you can basically walk on water.
	You can do flips over water and so on.
	And that's a kind of miracle.
	We can fly, right?
	It's a kind of miracle. But we gained these, quote, miracles.
	Through removing divine intervention from nature and substituting or using instead a scientific submission to the rules of physics and chemistry and biology and so on.
	So rather than praying for good crops, we instead learned the science of agriculture and fertilizer and They did things like there used to be this harness that would actually choke the horse the more it pulled.
	And they sort of made a shoulder harness where the horse could pull a lot more.
	That actually helped them plow deeper and so on.
	So instead of praying for miracles, which is the mystical approach, a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers moved God to the sort of wind-up clockmaker way back in time and said, okay, but to get things done now, there's no point praying to God because they don't intervene anymore.
	He's got this Captain Kirk thing, except fewer sex with blue tentacled aliens.
	Less sex. And so what we need to do is achieve our own miracles through science.
	And that allows for a rational epistemology.
	So the metaphysics, which is the nature of reality, okay, God created it and that's why we're here.
	But epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, if you want to know the truth, particularly the moral truth, If you are religious or a mystic, then it is introspection, it is prayer, it is feasting, it is peyote, it is submission to some kind of inner impulse that is perceived to come from outside in the universe.
	And if you are not that way inclined, if you are a deist or an agnostic or an atheist, then you say, epistemology, how do we achieve knowledge?
	Well, we study our immediate sense data and we then take the principles that we extract from our immediate sense data.
	In other words, you know, matter is consistent.
	You know, this t-shirt isn't going to turn into an anaconda before the end of this conversation.
	So nature... And reality and sense data is consistent, and it is predictable, and it is stable, and it appears to be universal.
	You drop a ball in Brussels, it's the same as dropping the ball in Somalia.
	Although, actually, I guess it's more Brussels that's dropping the ball these days.
	But anyway, enough politics for now.
	So, if you move mysticism out of the equation, you get a rational epistemology, a rational way, or reason and evidence is your way of achieving this.
	One of the challenges, and it's funny because it's kind of like a specialness thing, like everybody wants to feel special, and I do, you do, and if you want to feel special, you can either go out and achieve things in the world so that people value your existence, offer them some good, some value, something positive, or you can be loved by the divine and not do as much of that, although the two aren't, of course, mutually exclusive.
	So science itself worked by eliminating mysticism from metaphysics.
	The nature of reality was stable and predictable and objective.
	Not the mind of God, which can change at any moment, but a stable and objective set of matter and energy and the effects thereof.
	And so it was very successful.
	You know, it's really, really important to think.
	We'll touch on this a couple of times in this conversation.
	It's really, really important to understand that Mental systems are in competition with each other.
	Like, if you want to understand postmodernism, you have to understand that it's in competition with free market theory.
	If you want to understand this combat between mysticism and science, between subjectivism and rationality, between subjectivism and objectivism, these things are in competition and evidence is continually accumulating for the success or failure of each.
	So prior to science...
	Prior to science, like three quarters of babies in cities under the age of five just died.
	After science, that was down to like 30-35%.
	Before science, people made a couple of hundred bucks a year.
	Sorry, before the free market, people made a couple of hundred bucks a year.
	After the free market, their wages more than doubled, their consumption of calories more than doubled, their lifespan extended, their infant mortality, of course, declined.
	And so you have empirical evidence as to the success or failure of various approaches to reality.
	And science was really successful when it looked at nature not as the dream of a deity.
	But as simple, bare, mechanistic atoms and energy.
	Well, no atoms back then.
	But when they looked at it as bare, bald, inert matter, well, science was extraordinarily successful.
	And that's important, because mysticism had ruled.
	You could argue for the late Roman Empire through the Dark Ages and so on, mysticism had ruled.
	For a thousand years. And there had been almost no progress.
	There had been no increase in lifespan.
	In fact, if you count god-awful things like the Black Death, when a third of Europeans died...
	There was depopulation in many areas.
	There was no particular free market, no accumulation of wealth, no saving, no capital, no investment.
	And prior to science, there was, of course, the agricultural revolution.
	It started sort of 13th century and beyond because you need an agricultural revolution to have the excess crops.
	That allow for the development of an urban intellectual population, which are scientists and so on.
	So you had the agricultural revolution, which everyone forgets.
	I wrote a whole novel about the importance of this called Just Poor.
	It's a great book. And people always forget the agricultural revolution.
	They only talk about the industrial revolution.
	Even that worked because people stopped praying for crops and started experimenting with better ways.
	Like you got winter crops like turnips.
	There was crop rotation that was put in place and better methods of harvesting.
	A lot of improvements and a lot of these improvements came out of monasteries and churches and so on.
	So I don't want to make this artificial divide like, you know, religion just mysticism and retrograde and science is rationalistic and progressive.
	There was an interesting and fascinating interaction between these two and I did a talk with Tom Woods some months back about this.
	But here's the thing.
	You have this reductionist.
	There's no God interfering with science.
	We're going to treat matter as bare and inert and understandable, comprehensible, and not like somewhat comprehensible, completely comprehensible.
	That model of objectivity and science, reason, was up against mysticism and subjectivism and the associated collectivism.
	And the collectivism versus individualism is where the real challenge is here, which we'll get to in a sec.
	These two were in competition and which one produced the best outcomes?
	Science, individualism, reason, free markets.
	Boom! They blew the lid off all of the starvation in one throughout history.
	But you can, and I did this again many years ago in my study of introduction philosophy series, you can look at human productivity.
	It's a freaking flat line.
	It is completely flat lined.
	It's like a crazy person's sexual arousal in the presence of sanity.
	Flat-lined. And then, you know, 18th, 19th, 20th, goes through the roof.
	And even massive things like, you know, god-awful wars and so on weren't enough to stop that kind of progress.
	And so... Reason, empiricism, science, individualism, free markets were in competition with all of the other views.
	You know, collectivism, subjectivism, mysticism, central planning, and serfdom and so on.
	Slavery was in competition with free markets.
	And that's just amazing stuff.
	And the empirical evidence kept accumulating.
	Now, why do people care that much about these abstractions?
	Because... If you have mysticism as your epistemology, then you have, as I mentioned before, totalitarianism as your ideal political model.
	And I mean, Hegel and Kant and all of these others had this totalitarian essence, as did Plato, to their political models.
	Because with Plato...
	There were revelations that the philosopher kings received about truth, this sort of higher reality, what Kant called a new aminal reality.
	This higher mystical reality would give you these amazing visions, and you couldn't communicate them objectively to other people.
	And therefore, since they had to do what you told them to, but you couldn't persuade them, you had to force them.
	Obviously, right? And the collectivism that results from mysticism promoted a small cadre of people to the very top of society.
	I mean, the deep state has always been fascinated by and dependent upon collectivism, which is why the deep state, all the way from National Socialism to Marxism to other various forms of fascism to the modern soft fascism of the welfare state, always promoting collectivism, always promoting collectivism, which is collectivism is the root of identity politics.
	That we are fundamentally defined not as individuals, but by oppressors, victims, privileged, unprivileged, race, gender, you name it, right?
	And when you have irrationality as your epistemology, you get totalitarianism, soft or hard or in progress towards, as your political system.
	Totalitarianism draws and floats and ensconces You know, psychopaths and sociopaths at the top of the political arena because to be so confident of your visions that you are willing to drench the blood of millions into the virgin soil in order to fulfill your objectives.
	Of liberating the proletariat or saving the nation race state or whatever it's going to be.
	You have to be completely psychopathic or sociopathic and have no empathy and have an absolute almost schizophrenic addiction to abstractions and be willing to sacrifice people on the altar of your abstractions to the tune.
	With communism, for instance, there were over 100 million people just in 100 years alone.
	Less than 100 years, in fact, sort of 1917 to 2000.
	So, 83, 83 years.
	So the people who've gained power as the result of collectivism and mysticism want to stay in power.
	And so they view the accumulating evidence of Of reason, science, individualism, and the free market as an enemy to their power.
	If people can think for themselves, if people can reason for themselves, then they can bring reason to bear on the pronouncements of their political masters, of their sophists, of their controllers.
	And I don't just mean people in politics like at the top.
	That's... That's like saying, well, only the king has power, but it's the king, the aristocracy, the priesthood, whose monopoly on religion he protects and so on.
	So it's not just the people in political power in the modern West.
	They're important. But there's all the associated, you know, Grimer, Wormtongue, Court, toady, hangers-on, right?
	There is academia, of course, highly dependent on state power for licensing, for protection from competition, for tenure, all of these things.
	There is the mainstream media are highly dependent on state power.
	There are government workers of every kind.
	There's a public school institutions.
	There's the industrial military complex.
	Everyone dependent on welfare.
	Like, it's fully half the population these days dependent either directly or indirectly on all or most of their income from the state.
	And they're all part of that apparatus.
	And if the collectivism is undermined, then state power is inevitably going to diminish.
	That's how it's all always happened, right?
	That the founding fathers were mostly dais, some Christians for sure, but mostly dais, who believed in individualism, in objective reality, in reason, and Individualism, which is why they set up the system that they did.
	Ideas have consequences.
	So when you start promoting reason, when you start promoting objectivity, you actually empower individuals to think for themselves and to ask those difficult Socratic questions.
	to those in power that those in power desperately don't want to have asked and therefore to the predators at the top of the human political and power food chain those predators view individualism and reason as the ultimate predator that can take them down which is why they attack all of this so Now,
	let's start talking about some of this postmodern stuff that is floating around, disembodied, rootless, in many ways, soul-destroying, mind-destroying in the modern world.
	So the Enlightenment put forward this idea...
	That, you know, it's the old random, existence exists.
	There's something out there that we can directly access that's different from the subjective impulses of our mind if we discipline and subjugate our mental processes.
	To the dictates of objective reality and its consistency.
	Why do we have reason? We have reason because there are atoms in physical laws.
	Because matter behaves in a predictable, universal, consistent manner.
	And therefore we can have reason.
	A ball doesn't suddenly turn into an elephant and then into a fire and then into an idea and then into a feeling.
	Objects have permanence and consistency, which is why we get the first law of logic, Aristotle's three laws of logic.
	A is A. A thing is itself.
	We have that because that is actually how it works in the real world.
	So there was a power structure that was tearing itself apart.
	Hundreds of years of religious warfare after the introduction of And people have corrected me on this, and I appreciate that there were Bibles in the vernacular before Luther, Martin Luther, but he popularized it and spread very quickly with the invention of the printing press and so on.
	You had a chance to spread books throughout the world.
	One of those books was the Bible in the vernacular, which was Luther's translation, although there were prior other translations.
	They didn't kind of hook into the same thing with the printing press and the spread of it quite as much.
	So when people got a hold of the Bible, could read it for themselves, The unity of Christendom fell apart, and you had Catholicism hiving with Protestantism, which itself hide into a variety of sects, as Evangelians, Lutherans, Anabaptists, you name it, right? And they all fought like crazy to gain power over the state, and eventually there was this idea of separating church and state.
	And we'll get that idea eventually.
	We'll separate state and economics for the same reason.
	That when the state is united with the power to transfer income and control resources, everyone and their dog tries to get a hold of state power to gain resources from the collective and profit individually, right?
	And it used to be the same thing with religion until there was a separation of church and state.
	We still haven't gotten to that place of the separation of state and economics, and it is my big hope and one of the reasons I work as hard as I do.
	It's that I would really, really like for us to end up with a separation of state and economics without having to go through hundreds of years of warfare, as was the case in the past.
	We have better communications technology now.
	I mean, it's funny because there's a flip side to just about everything.
	It's like, yay, we have a printing press!
	We can spread knowledge and reason and evidence and also religious texts, which now people can interpret subjectively and turn into magical God-given absolutes, which they can use to attempt to beat other people, gain control of the state, and we end up with hundreds of years of religious warfare.
	And the separation of church and state and the Enlightenment, because the same technology and methodology which allowed for the spread of religious texts also allowed for the spread of scientific texts and...
	It wasn't just Luther, it was also John Locke, a century or two later, that benefited from all of this.
	So, there were the Dark Ages, largely mystical, there was the Enlightenment, which was rational, and then everybody always forgets about the blowback, right?
	So, there was a counter-Enlightenment attack on rationality.
	This was led by Immanuel Kant, who said that he has found it necessary to destroy reason in order to make room for religion.
	There was, I think it was 19th century, this is after Kant, but there was a priest who said mankind is in danger of being laughed out of religion.
	So there were people who had jobs, and a lot of it just comes down to jobs.
	A lot of it just comes down to, well, this is how you make your money, so you don't want your gig to go away.
	And so there was a countering.
	Enlightenment attack on rationality.
	And so postmodernism, it's funny because postmodernism is actually pre-modernism resurrected.
	It's like the thousand-year-old vampire comes back to life and says, I'm fresh, I'm new, I got the moves, I bust things.
	And it's very old.
	It's very old, this attack on rationality.
	And again, it serves those at the top or on the receiving end of state power.
	And so this question, is reason capable of knowing reality?
	Or is it not? What is reality itself?
	Well, according to The counterattack on rationality.
	Well, there's this, you know, and I'm going to try not to be cliched and do my, you know, hey man, there's like this world out there that's vibrating and we're all connected and, you know, it's hard to explain, but it's beautiful.
	Like, I'm not going to try and do that stuff forever because, I mean, that makes me want to punch myself.
	Lord help you, I can understand you're going to end up with a cracked screen.
	But, so reality...
	According to Kant and others, and even people we would think of as more rational, like Hegel.
	Hegel had this world spirit, collective willpower, and some very dangerous stuff.
	Let's tell the Germans that there's a world spirit that chooses particular nations to conquer everyone else.
	I'm sure there's not going to be any problems with that.
	Take German engineering combined with Kantian mysticism and Nazi ethics, and...
	So...
	The counter-enlightenment said that there's a reality that's closed off to reason.
	This higher reality, this alternate reality, and people resurrect this idea all the time.
	All the time. And then they give it new labels, right?
	Like fools and sophists and chopras.
	Oh wait, I'm sort of repeating myself there.
	They talk about, well, you see, there's this Quantum physics and quantum physics is the real reality that we can't ever get a hold of.
	Or people look at the edge of scientific knowledge and they say, well, there's certain phenomena in gravity that we can't explain right now and therefore reality will never be certain.
	They always have to find some place where you can't be certain, where reason can't go.
	It used to be religion.
	I mean, Tertullian, a theologian of the Because early Middle Ages said, I believe because it is absurd.
	Reason can't, I mean, that was, I believe because it is absurd.
	And that's what you need, faith, right?
	Faith is belief, not just in the absence of reason, but against reason and evidence.
	So this making a home for irrationality and then promoting rationality to the highest peak of human knowledge, that's an old gig.
	That's a way old gig, all the way back to Plato, all the way back before And it is, to me, it comes out of animalistic nature.
	Animalistic nature has, like animals have a tough time differentiating between themselves and other things.
	Themselves and reality, themselves and people.
	We see the cat attacking the mirror and so on.
	And so when we're very primitive and are thinking, there's a big giant wave.
	Ah, the sea is alive and must be angry.
	In other words, we project our own living status onto nature itself.
	We think that nature is alive.
	And there are cultures where you apologize for a rock if you move it in the...
	If you have to move it out your way, you apologize.
	The rock is alive. Love is alive.
	And trees are alive.
	Nymphs live in trees and the dryads.
	And the universe is alive through God and so on.
	So this lack of differentiation between our conscious minds and our living status, projecting that onto an inert and not even dead because it was never alive universe, is a function of a lower form of thinking, a more primitive form of thinking.
	And I think it comes right out of The animalistic, you see these videos of, in these funny videos online, you see these women getting humped by dogs, right?
	Not by trees, but by dogs.
	And so the dog thinks that the human is a dog.
	And this lack of differentiation, this projection of our own nature into the universe, this lack of maturation, When, you know, people take nature personally, like it's raining, you know, they're mad.
	They take accidents personally and this idea that the universe is alive or things in it are alive, it's primitive and it's immature thinking.
	Because you are projecting irrationally your own status as a living conscious being onto the universe itself.
	There's not this clear line between self and other, between animate and inanimate, between living and inert.
	And that is a...
	A big challenge, but it's a very old gig, trying to find a place to stuff your crazy.
	Like, I'm nuts!
	I don't want to deal with my own insanity, so I'm going to pretend that the world is crazy somewhere and that it's really great that it is.
	The highest thing is madness, right?
	So there's this reality And somewhere out there is a world where two and two make unicorn, and up is down, black is white.
	You can have consciousness without matter.
	Things that would be crazy if you asserted them to be part of this empirical universe.
	But rather than say, well, I need to subject myself and submit myself to nature, to reason, to philosophy, to science, nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
	Rather than gaining real power over nature by confronting my own insanity, I'm going to pretend that there's a realm That is superior, where insanity is sanity, where madness is truth.
	And again, this is a self-knowledge question, fundamentally.
	It is a self-confrontation issue.
	We all need to confront our own craziness.
	We all need to tamp down and control our own capacity to spill over into the universe and to mistake the world for ourselves.
	To be like a cat with a mirror.
	There's another cat over there.
	It's not. It's just a mirror.
	We understand that. It's one of the intelligence tests.
	When as a child do you recognize that that's just a reflection, not another eye?
	And so, this is why I sort of preach self-knowledge.
	You have to have, if you want to be mature, if you want to be an adult, fundamentally, you have to confront your own craziness.
	And not just like it was there in you, it was implanted in you by society, the wish is to make you crazy, so that you don't trust your reason, so that you're easier to control.
	If you can't think for yourselves, you have nothing to defend.
	You can be more easily ordered about, which is a fundamental part of post-modernism.
	So if there's a reality out there, closed off the reason, and that's the most important stuff, then you can be crazy and call it superiority.
	You can be irrational and you can claim it as wisdom.
	You can be fundamentally confused about yourself and the universe and consider it to be a higher calling of some kind.
	And there is sort of characteristics of reason, of rationality that are important.
	Objectivity. Rationality has to be objective.
	Which is why you can reason about things in nature.
	Gases expand when heated or whatever, right?
	Mammals have hair, warm blood.
	You can reason about things in nature.
	It's objective. Your own personal taste, your own personal...
	I had a dream last night. It may be a statement, but it's not a statement about an objective occurrence that occurred outside your mind and so on.
	There's no particular physics of your dreams.
	And you have to be competent at it.
	You have to be able to do it.
	It also has to be something that you can pursue individually.
	And your claims, because they're objective, they have to be universal.
	And it has to be a faculty that is within you, a possibility that is within you.
	And so thinkers such as Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and so on were, to one degree or another, anti-rational.
	And it's funny, you know, because in a sane society, being anti-rational would be a confession of madness, of dysfunction, of craziness.
	But because the Germans are such excellent writers...
	I'm looking at you, Goethe.
	Sorrows of young Werther, my ass.
	But they are excellent communicators, excellent writers, extremely artistic and powerful in that.
	And there is...
	This is the problem.
	I know we don't have the original writings of Aristotle.
	We mostly have stuff cribbed together from student notes and so on.
	But Plato was a staggeringly great writer.
	And there is, you know, one of the reasons that mysticism stays alive is that the communication's abilities of mystics are extraordinary.
	You know, I know I'm treading on dangerous ground here, but I'm confident enough to do so.
	But if you look at sociopaths, one of their characteristics is incredibly poetic and compelling language.
	And if you look at a nutjob such as Charles Manson being interviewed, you can see he builds these word castles.
	He builds these amazing, compelling statements.
	I mean, epistemologically, they're crazy.
	Metaphysically, they're insane, but compelling.
	And he has a personal charisma, which is common.
	If you lack reason, you often make up for it with charm.
	And one of the things that happens in the mystics, in the mystics world, is they're incredible communicators.
	And that's because that's what they spend their time dedicated towards.
	And also because they are connected through insanity to their emotions.
	And therefore they have a very compelling kind of communication style.
	It really sweeps people along, especially if they've been told that they shouldn't question those in authority or those who have power.
	It has actually kind of struck me that all these great thinkers that I've heard about over the years, whenever I sort of dig into their actual writing, it's pretty bad.
	Maybe it's just my Anglo-Saxon kind of empiricism and common senseness, but it's actually pretty bad.
	I mean, I remember being enthralled by Nietzsche when I was younger, and I ran a book club some years back ago in the show, and we picked up The Antichrist, and I was reading through it, and I'm like, I think I've outgrown this.
	It's not really that great.
	So, the anti-rationalists, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, and so on, and the anti-rationalists are cited by continental post-modernists, like Foucault and Derrida, like the two biggies.
	Well, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, they're all German thinkers.
	And the post-modernists cite them as their major formative So there is this line from the Teutonic dedication to mysticism that characterizes a lot of the German soul, along with a radical pragmatic engineering practicality, which is one of the reasons why they were so great at manufacturing in and after the Second World War, one tragically, one beneficially.
	And the Germans were wracked with...
	I mean, not only did they oppose, but the Enlightenment somewhat bypassed them because they were wracked with these internal...
	Religious civil wars that just went on and on and I mean there were tales of travelers that gone through Germany and they say I never saw a tree but had a heretic hanging from it and it was a bit of a mystical based slaughterfest that missed out on some of the best elements of the Enlightenment and that was partly because of historical circumstances and also partly because there was this opposition to the age of reasons.
	So This is important to understand about postmodernism.
	Postmodernism has characteristics, and we'll get into some of the ideas behind it, right?
	But postmodernists...
	They're not composed of people who have started from a blank slate and who have said, how can I build sort of Cartesian style or from any Descartes?
	How can I say, I know nothing, Socrates style, Cartesian style, and say, what can I build in terms of knowledge from a complete blank slate?
	That's not how it works.
	Postmodernists are driven by a desire to defend Marxism and they work backward from there.
	And the reason we know that is postmodernists are staggeringly, unbelievably, brobnabagnianly, monolithically, almost completely, totally far left in their politics.
	That can't be a coincidence, right?
	If a big group of people claim to love diversity and there's nothing that's true and there's no values and there's no reality, there's no objectivity, reason is incapable of understanding the world...
	Then you should have a wild variety in political opinions.
	Well, logically you should have no political opinions.
	How could you have political opinions when you don't even know reality exists?
	I mean, come on.
	I know who should be in the White House.
	The White House which I don't actually believe exists in any objective way.
	I mean, come on. That's like saying, well, I know that orcs aren't real.
	But I'm going to study for 30 years to become an orc surgeon.
	Pick one! Pick one!
	But the fact is that the postmodernists are so astoundingly prevalent as left-wingers in their politics that you know that it's a left-wing political position.
	They're working backwards, right?
	And this is new.
	For those who don't know, if you're a modern person, the left looks like a bunch of irrational subjectivist nutbags as a whole, like metaphysically, epistemologically speaking.
	But that's not how it used to be.
	In the past, remember, it was scientific socialism.
	And so, back in the day, sort of late 19th century, up until the early 1950s, 1953, to be precise, the reasons we'll get to in a moment, the left said, we're the scientists.
	Social science, come on.
	Science deals with inanimate objects.
	Social science is an oxymoron populated by morons.
	But in the past, socialism said, well, we're rational.
	We're scientific.
	It is the scientific organization of society.
	It is a scientific analysis of class conflict.
	And Marx, you know, the most prevalent of the far-left thought, scientific socialism, that's what Marx called his system, scientific socialism.
	And Marx's socialism, Marxism, I just called Marxism, said four big things that were empirical, objective, and, most important, testable.
	He said, uh...
	Well, this is not just Marx.
	This is Marxist socialism as a whole.
	Four major claims. One, capitalism is exploitative.
	You know, it's a rip-off.
	The capitalist hires the worker, makes 20 bucks off the worker's labor, and only gives them 10 bucks.
	That 10 buck difference is stealing.
	So, the rich enslave the poor, and under capitalism, when we get to that, the rich enslave the poor.
	It's brutally competitive and Domestically, it's viciously competitive, wages are going to be driven down, widening gaps between rich and poor, all of that sort of stuff.
	And internationally, it's imperialistic.
	So that was their big definition of capitalism.
	That's testable. They said socialism, by contrast, is humane, peaceful, nice, ponies, rainbows, everyone shares, they get along, they cooperate, they're all equal, there's no exploitation, and there won't be any of that nasty capitalist imperialism.
	And so, you know, capitalism, predatory, destructive to the poor, socialism was nice, non-imperialistic, and so on.
	That was a second test.
	The third thing they said was capitalism is going to be less productive than socialism.
	Right? That's really, really important.
	The rich accumulate the wealth, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, the middle class get hollowed out, everyone gets poorer, the whole system's going to collapse in and of itself.
	There was very little revolutionary fervor in early Marxism because they thought, you know, I mean, it's like, you know, if you want your great-grandmother's fortune and she's on her deathbed anyway, you're not going to strangle her because she's going to die as nature takes its course.
	And this was the idea, of course, behind Marxism, that you start with...
	This sort of agrarian serfdom, you start with feudalism, then you progress to capitalism, and then from capitalism you get socialism.
	Again, this is another testable theory.
	Is that the way that it progressed?
	The most advanced capitalist countries should be the ones who inevitably get to socialism when the system collapses and all of that.
	So you didn't need to push anything over.
	It was going to tip of its own accord.
	So the third claim, capitalism much less productive than socialism.
	Socialism is going to vastly outstrip capitalist production.
	And it's going to sort of fall in on itself because the rich are going to get richer, the poor are going to get poorer, and the class conflict that results means that capitalism collapses and you get socialism.
	And socialism, more productive, and it ushers in a new era of peace and prosperity and cooperation.
	That's sort of the fourth claim. Socialism is inevitably going to replace capitalism as capitalism collapses, and it's going to be more productive, it's going to be peaceful, and no one's going to invade everyone, and prisons will be emptied, everyone will be happy, and so on.
	Now, these are all testable phenomena.
	So, according to Marx's theory, There's absolutely no way that China and Russia should have become communist, according to Marxist theory.
	Because you can't skip that step.
	You can't go from feudalism to communism.
	You have to go from feudalism through capitalism, and then you get communism.
	Now, the fact was, of course, that economically speaking, Russia, counted as European, was the most retrograde and primitive of the European economies, for the most part.
	Only recently got rid of serfdom and so on, and it was a kind of slavery.
	And, I mean, serfdom was pretty brutal.
	I think it was Dostoevsky's father, Dostoevsky's father, the writer, who was so brutal to his serfs, and such a terrible drunk, that the serfs on Dostoevsky's father's estate tied him to a chair and force-fed him alcohol until he died of alcohol poisoning.
	That is not a pretty good way to go.
	And I'm sure that Svidrigelov came from something like that.
	So, yeah, it should have occurred.
	Capitalism should have occurred in the most advanced economies, particularly England, maybe the Netherlands.
	But the fact that it occurred spontaneously, or not spontaneously, the fact that it was inflicted on the most primitive economies, China at the time and Russia, was a complete repudiation of capitalism.
	A socialist of Marxist theory.
	So again, if you claim to be scientific, you're going to put forward testable hypotheses.
	And if those hypotheses fail, then your theory takes a blow.
	And the holodomor, the mass starvation of people in Ukraine as the result of collectivized farming, It was just unbelievably horrible, right?
	I've talked about this before, and Jordan Peterson's talked about it, the Pareto principle, that the square root of workers produces half the value, like 10,000 workers, 100 workers are going to produce half the value.
	It's just a bell curve of productivity and intelligence and ambition and competence and so on.
	And so in a free market, sure, you're going to get fewer farmers controlling more wealth.
	The good news is that their kids, because of regression to the mean, their kids are not going to be as smart, most likely not going to be as competent, and there's going to be this constant churning of property.
	Rags to riches to rags, they used to call it, or shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, right?
	Shirt sleeve, physical worker, nice collar, their kids blow the money, Eaton's family style, and go back to shoveling coal.
	And so Ukraine used to be the breadbox of Europe.
	Incredibly fertile soil.
	Like more fertile than a bag full of Kardashians.
	And so they took the land, right?
	They said to the people who didn't have much land, who were working the land of the most successful peasants called the Kulaks, they said, those guys, it's not that they're better.
	It's not that they're more competent. It's not that they work harder.
	It's not that they're smarter. It's not that they're more ambitious.
	They stole from you.
	And that's the system. We're going to go steal it back.
	Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles.
	We're stealing it back. And so they took all the land from the productive people, parceled it out to the unproductive people who squandered all the resources and everyone starved to death.
	It's the same thing that's happening in Venezuela, right?
	When the currency goes haywire, when the currency loses value, farmers don't want to ship their goods to the city because the money they get back in return is kind of worthless.
	Like, would you trade your iPad for some toilet paper?
	Well, you may have to at some point.
	But when currency goes south...
	But agricultural products, food, stops flowing into the cities.
	And the cities, everyone starts to starve.
	And so Cambodia-style, what they did is they moved everyone out of the cities, put them on the farm, because they knew that was coming.
	They'd already seen the example of the holodomor.
	But before that, what they do, and they're doing this in Venezuela now, the farmers don't want to ship their food to the cities, because they're getting nothing but asswipe fiat currency toilet paper in return.
	So the government sends out troops to go and get food.
	The food from the country.
	And if you're found to be hoarding, then they can arrest you, they can do horrible things to you.
	But the farmers are so desperate and the soldiers are so hungry, I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, okay, we'll give you 100 eggs, just go away and keep 50 for yourself.
	So even then, the food doesn't make it into the cities very much, which is why they're hunting rats and pigeons in the sewers these days.
	So there was, and even like Lenin, When he first collectivized everything, there was like immediate starvation.
	There was like immediate, massive catastrophic drops in productivity.
	And he introduced something called the New Economic Plan.
	And there were these people, NEP, they're called NEP men.
	And this was sort of like the early breakdown of communism in the 90s in China.
	This was the allowance of some profits, of some private personal property, of some personal ownership of small means of production, like shops and so on.
	And that staved off the worst of things.
	But there was of course these predictions that communism was going to be much more productive, much more humane, much more beneficial than capitalism, and it was proven false.
	Now, the media as a whole, heavily communist, heavily socialist, covered this up like crazy.
	The New York Times, still writing pro-communist articles here in 2017.
	The New York Times and Walter Durante wrote a whole series of articles praising how wonderful everything was.
	Because they're called Potemkin Villages.
	What they did was they brought leftist media figures and celebrities and so on over.
	I think George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, went as well.
	They took them over and they said, oh, look, here's this wonderful, happy village.
	And what they've done is they've taken people out of the concentration camps, out of the gulags.
	And they had fed them up for a while and they jammed them into these lovely places and it was all theater.
	It was all make-believe, but a lot of intellectuals fell for it and reported that, oh, it's wonderful and so on, these five-year plans and it was all considered to be wonderful.
	And because it was totalitarian and had borders, it was hard to get any good information.
	And everyone who was allowed in was heavily stage-managed and very few facts ever came out.
	And... So the theory and the practice were deviating.
	Now, that's not so bad if you're mystical in nature.
	Theory and practice, who cares about reality?
	Don't doubt the evidence of your senses, right?
	So, theory and practice were diverging in the implementation of communism, but it was bad because it was claimed to be scientific.
	Scientific socialism, scientific Marxism.
	Now, because of that, Deviations in empirical data were really important.
	It's one thing to say, I have faith.
	You can't be disproved because you don't believe in proof.
	It's another thing to say, this is a testable objective scientific theory.
	Then when the data comes in, what do you do?
	This is why I say they're not empirical.
	They're not interested in facts, truth, reason, and evidence.
	It's more manifest now, but it was always the case because when the evidence started to accumulate that Oh, and when Stalin made a pact with Hitler, that was considered to be pretty bad as well, because Hitler grew to power by battling against the communists, right? One extreme shows up in society, you provoke another extreme, and then everyone blames the reaction rather than the course, right?
	Which is why increasing left-wing stuff is provoking increasing right-wing stuff, and everyone's blaming the right-wing, which is only going to increase more right-wing and left-wing aggressions and blah, blah, blah.
	Same story, different costumes.
	So... When Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, this was a pretty big blow to the communists who viewed National Socialism as an enemy.
	They created this artificial scale where National Socialism was on the right and communism was on the left.
	They're two left-wing groups battling for each other.
	It's like saying two mafia families battling each other, one of the cops and one of the criminals.
	It's made up categories.
	And I sort of get into more of this, but there was a lot of empirical evidence that countermanded or repudiated the predictions of Marx and Marxism.
	I said 1953, so I meant to say 1956.
	So in 1956, after the Second World War, now after the Second World War, capitalism was supposed to collapse because it was poor, it was broken, so on.
	Capitalism didn't collapse. So 1956, you know, we're talking 11 years after the Second World War, capitalism has flourished.
	You know, they had these plans for socialism.
	Everyone talks about, oh, the Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan, and they sent all this aid into Germany.
	Oh, it's nonsense. German economy was recovering because they implemented free market principles, and that could have been done under Hitler, but he didn't do it because he was what?
	A national socialist!
	Also, of course, communism was supposed to be international in scope.
	It was never supposed to be nationalistic because class is common across all capitalist economies.
	And the fact that it turned out to be fiercely nationalistic repudiated, again, the scientific predictions of communism.
	And so in the post-Second World War period, they also were supposed to have all these war boards, right?
	Because under the Great Depression, caused by increasing socialism and government control of the money supply and the effects of the giant god-awful government program known as World War I... Massive amounts of government boards and union controls and public works had all been set up.
	And it took World War II to smash a lot of these things, and then they had all of these government programs that were supposed to find jobs for the soldiers coming home, but by the time they actually got implemented, the soldiers all had jobs because the free market had absorbed them and put them to good use.
	So basically the effect of the Second World War was to give massive amounts of money to the Middle East, because when the Western powers who had developed the petrochemical industry, petroleum industry, In the Middle East, when they were weakened, when the Western powers were weakened from the Second World War, well, basically they got all their stuff stolen because that's the kind of compassion that the Middle East has for a war-weary Europe.
	Europe takes in their refugees.
	They stole untold amounts of trillions of dollars from the West by nationalizing and stealing and otherwise establishing subterfugee categories to transfer ownership.
	Of Western companies to Middle Eastern governments and thus reaping all of the profits of the resulting...
	I mean, this is one of the reasons why Islam is spreading, is that there's a demand for oil.
	The environmentalists restrict the supply of oil in the West by not allowing drilling, and then you get lots of money to spread your ideology.
	This was not going according to plan in the post-war period, and of course the Communists were happy that Eastern Europe fell to Russia.
	This is one of the great tragedies of many of the Second World War, was that it was ostensibly fought.
	September 1939, England went to war to protect Poland, and Poland ended up being surrendered to the brutal, psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator named Joseph Stalin.
	And in 1956, and television had spread to the point where people could see this in their living rooms.
	It's one of the things that ended Vietnam as well, or prevented it from spreading.
	So in 1956, Hungary wanted to...
	Get out! Wanted to be free.
	You know, there's a reason why they don't want so many migrants at the moment.
	And what happened was the Soviet government sent tanks into Hungary to smash demonstrations.
	And these were students and workers and all of the people that Marxism was supposed to benefit.
	And... That was shocking.
	And a lot of, like, I don't know if you've ever had this.
	I certainly have. A number of times.
	If you've ever had, like, a really important, powerful, deep belief in an ideology, when evidence just, boom, hits you in the face about the limitations, if not the downright immorality of that which you formerly believed to be the very best thing in the known universe, it is devastating.
	I still remember the word that I used when I began to see the limitations, both...
	Philosophically and emotionally of objectivism, I remember saying to my girlfriend at the time, I feel desolate.
	I mean, this happened when I became an atheist.
	It happened when I moved beyond objectivism.
	It happened when I got red-pilled on a wide variety of modern race and immigration issues.
	I mean, it is hard, hard, hard, hard, hard to navigate and negotiate these kinds of disappointments.
	And of course, a lot of people throw the baby out with the bathwater.
	They say, well, I've had this ideal.
	This ideal is proven false.
	Therefore, there's no truth, no virtue, no goodness of any kind.
	And that is a petty overreaction to a natural course correction of increasing knowledge through access to new data and arguments.
	So the fact that the revolt in Hungary was put down brutally, violently, destructively by Soviet tanks was a blow to the image, the supposed virtue, kindness and niceness of...
	Marxist theory, Marxist practice.
	Remember, only capitalism is imperialistic.
	But when people who wish to be free of Soviet domination start to agitate for reforms or separation, and then the Soviet tanks roll in and drive over them, Then one of the major predictions that communism isn't going to be imperialistic is rejected, repudiated, right there in front of you.
	You can't miss it. It's recorded.
	It's transmitted. Everybody saw it.
	And it wasn't just that.
	I've talked about this before, but Nikita Khrushchev, former head of the Soviet Union, he actually acknowledged...
	I mean, this is one of the great things that he did...
	Cuban Missile Crisis, not so great, but pounding his shoe at the table of the UN. But he actually, one of the great revelations, you know, people say, well, why are you focusing on this Weinstein stuff and the Hollywood stuff?
	It's because these kinds of revelations can be world-changing.
	Nikita Khrushchev spoke.
	Openly and publicly that the facts, that Stalin had a cult of personality, that Stalin's regime was totalitarian, brutal, vicious, that he had slaughtered tens of millions of people, and that he was, in terms of domestic body count, worse than the Nazis, right?
	The Nazis killed millions of their own domestic population, and Stalin killed tens of millions.
	So socialism being nice, communism being nice, it's just blow after blow after blow after blow.
	That all came down.
	The facts about Soviet lack of productivity came out.
	The fact that the Soviet Union, with some of the richest soil in the known universe, was continually starved of wheat and had to have wheat shipped to it from the capitalist West.
	It always confused me. They're enemies.
	They're going to kill us. Let's send them food.
	Anyway. So this really began to come out when, I think it was the early 70s, that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich came out by Solzhenitsyn.
	And then after that came out...
	His writings on the Gulag Archipelago and how these brutal prison systems worked.
	And this sort of concentration camp revelation, his very powerful writing, which came to some degree out of his Christian mysticism and the amount of courage the man had is almost beyond imagination, that he would have to write on scraps of paper, bury them in his backyard every single day in case the NKVD came by and he was dragged away.
	Back to prison.
	He spent, you should see, his prison writings are just astonishing, as are Dostoevsky's.
	Notes from the House of the Dead.
	Anyway, so this constant stream of information came out specifically repudiating all of the predictions and foundations and rationality, supposed scientific objectivity and testable hypotheses of communism.
	And that's a big problem.
	You know, when you get blow after body blow after body blow against something that you truly believe is great and virtuous and glorious and good, and it turns out to be a monstrous evil, then you have a big choice to make.
	You have a big choice to make.
	And that choice is, do I reject the evil and turn towards the good?
	Or do I... Create a system that destroys the legitimacy of reason and evidence.
	If reason and evidence is going against my ideology, damn reason and evidence.
	Now that is a religious response.
	When you talk to religious people about the various arguments for and against God, some of them will engage and some of them will be positive conversations and both people can emerge better and wiser.
	And some religious people...
	When they say the existence of God is not supported by reason, so damn reason.
	To hell with reason. Empiricism doesn't support the existence of God, so the arguments go.
	Damn empiricism. Now, when communism said that we have these predictions, it's scientific, we have these predictions, and when the predictions go the exact opposite direction, what does that mean?
	It means the theory is faulty. Theory is faulty, theory is false.
	And what do you do? You're a communist, what do you do?
	Well, it depends. If you're interested in truth, then you do a Whitaker Chambers, right, who was originally a communist, then turned against communism, partly as a result of his Christianity, and you then testify against communists, you point out the prevalence of communists, you end up helping out the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, and rooting out communism from public life.
	From Hollywood and other places, which they were.
	I mean, they're just without a doubt.
	The Rosenbergs were guilty. They sold atomic secrets to the Soviets, thus placing the most deadly weapons in human history in the hands of the most brutal totalitarian regime that has ever existed, I guess, alongside with China, the communists there.
	And he was mostly right.
	And he was actually more right than he knew.
	And we know this. It's not right.
	This is not... The Soviet cables were decrypted, I think, in the 90s under the Venona Project, and it's all confirmed.
	It's all confirmed. Of course, you don't talk about this any more than you'll hear about the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who had spent a lot of time in Russia and had a Russian wife.
	Because only the right, apparently, is violent.
	That's true. I mean, all of the assassins, almost all the assassins are on the left.
	So... So, late 1950s, mid to late 1950s, 1960s, this was a big problem.
	The left is sort of staring down the nihilism of their belief system because of empirical evidence and rationality, and this is the same thing that happened to religious thinkers in the late 1700s.
	The evidence is accumulating against their position, so what do they do?
	What do they do? Well, it's tragic what they did.
	What they did was they married leftist politics together with a radical skepticism in epistemology, in knowledge.
	So this is just talking about the empirical evidence.
	There had been many thinkers, Ludwig von Mises among the most powerful thinkers, Who had proven that socialism can't work.
	Who had proven that central planning and communism can't work.
	And I won't go into all their arguments.
	Suffice to say that the free market provides instantaneous information about supply and demand called price.
	If there's too little supply and too much demand, the price goes up and vice versa.
	And so... When you have central planning, you don't have a price mechanism and therefore it's like trying to...
	you can pull something with a piece of string.
	You can't push something using a piece of string.
	The string just folds up. You can't push.
	You can't have a push economy where central plans determine where resources go because they don't have enough knowledge.
	They don't have the knowledge called price.
	Price is an astonishing amount of information in just a couple of numbers about supply, demand, future expectations, current saving rates.
	Even if you look at the price of money, which is interest rates, massive amounts.
	If people are saving more, interest rates go down, which stimulates people to expand their capital productivity, to expand their capital goods, to upgrade their factories and so on, because that saving is deferred spending.
	So when they save, the price goes down, which means it's profitable to borrow and increase your factory for the future.
	Change in that. Which is when people spend.
	And then when people spend, rather than save, the price of money, interest rates in a free market goes up, which means that you're going to cut back on upgrading your equipment and focus on producing more.
	Instead of upgrading your equipment, you're going to buy more raw materials, more workers to produce more, which is amazing.
	Incredible stuff. Fascinating complex.
	Could spend forever studying it and still have only scratched the surface.
	But von Mises and a number of other thinkers had...
	And von Mises in particular, I think he takes the crown.
	And this was in 1922, I think his book on socialism was what came out.
	So von Mises, of course, had a theory about where communism was going to go.
	He said, it's going to fail.
	It's going to fail catastrophically.
	It is going to be far less productive.
	Remember, this is the complete opposite.
	So the Marxists had a theory about their own system.
	Kind of peaceful, nicer, more productive, better, paradise on earth, no imperialism, no totalitarianism, equality, egalitarianism, right?
	Because remember, the left is really concerned about the power disparity between the rich and the poor, between the capitalist and the worker, between the owner and the employee.
	Really concerned about that power disparity.
	So power disparities in Marxism must be really bad.
	Well, is there a bigger power disparity between the guy who owns the restaurant and the waiter, or between Joseph Stalin and the average Soviet citizen?
	Joseph Stalin can write a piece of paper, have the guy committed, killed, thrown into a gulag forever.
	I can declare him insane and stuff him in an asylum and have horse tranquilizers shop off his nose from here until the end of time.
	What's the big power disparity?
	So von Mises had a theory...
	Reasoned through it with evidence that socialism was going to fail, and he's a free market guy.
	And the communists had a theory that socialism was going to be successful.
	And then, a couple of decades after von Mises wrote, it was revealed that socialism was behaving exactly as the free marketers had predicted, and was behaving the exact opposite of what the Marxists had predicted.
	Boom! That's it, baby.
	Game over. Everybody go home.
	It's done. Stick a fork in it.
	Flip it. Over. Done.
	Back in the rear view. History.
	Error. Sorry about the hundred million dead, but you know, sometimes you slip a couple of digits when designing the future.
	Bad job. It's over.
	So, mounting logic and evidence.
	Evidence, logic, objectivity, facts, reality, you name it.
	All of it undermining the leftist idea.
	So... What do you do?
	What do you do in that moment of crisis?
	And it was an astonishing crisis.
	Because it's not only like you've just made a mistake.
	You know, people who support in Venezuela...
	I mean, there are people dying.
	Children being sold. Women selling themselves into prostitution just for a loaf of bread.
	If you've supported this stuff...
	I mean, the amount of blood on your hands is absolutely beyond staggering.
	I genuinely think that if you've served an immoral doctrine to this degree and for this long, holy crap.
	I really, I just, I really believe.
	It's not an argument. I'm just saying what I believe.
	I really believe that if you actually process the amount of harm that you've engendered in the world, the amount of destruction and deaths and suicides and murders and...
	Evisceration of human potential and opportunity.
	And if you really process that, you'd kill yourself.
	I think that when you've dedicated yourself to that demonic doctrine for long enough, And if you've defended it and extended it, right?
	Because if the people on the left had said, oh, wow, there's this big experiment going on in Russia.
	We better go find some way about it.
	We've got to go find out if it works.
	They find out it's not working. They should push back against it right away.
	That can be an honorable and good thing to do.
	They could have saved decades and 100 million lives if they had done what their doctrine damn well suggested and gone to find the empirical evidence that was associated with its implementation.
	They could have saved decades.
	Korea? We'd have no North Korea.
	They could have saved China, no Chairman Mao, no, what is it, 60 million people killed or 50 million people killed under Chairman Mao.
	It's so weird when you can't even round it off to the nearest 10 million sometimes.
	They would have saved Cambodia, they would have saved Eastern Europe, they would have saved North Vietnam, they would have saved the Vietnam, like an enormous amount of human suffering, more than the two world wars put together.
	They would have saved all of that.
	If instead they covered it up and extended it, if you really got that, like if you had the capacity, if you had empathy, you wouldn't do that anyway.
	But I really think that if, like it becomes life and death, they have to destroy logic and evidence, otherwise logic and evidence will literally destroy them.
	Literally destroy them.
	They will become so brutally depressed and suicidal, they will take themselves out.
	Or they'll be so disgusting and vile and viewed so negatively that nobody will want to have sex with them and their genes will die out, which is an intergenerational predation that organisms do an extraordinary amount to avoid.
	Reason and evidence have destroyed Marxism.
	What are we going to do? Well, we're going to destroy reason and evidence.
	Communism has been proved both false, destructive and immoral beyond individual imagination.
	Communism has been disproven.
	Therefore, the concept of proof must be abandoned.
	Can't really prove anything.
	There's no reality. Feelings are more important than thoughts because we really want socialism.
	We really feel that socialism is a great thing.
	So emotions must become the supreme arbiter of human values.
	Under communism, the number of manual workers is supposed to increase, but the number of manual labor has actually declined in capitalism.
	Awesome.
	There was supposed to be a declining middle class.
	There was an expanding middle class.
	There was supposed to be a concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthy.
	There was instead a spread, an equalization in wealth.
	In the 1950s, Free market reforms that came out of the destruction of the Second World War allowed for Western economies to recover from the Depression and the war.
	And everybody was doing great.
	The Soviet Union couldn't even provide for its citizens' basic needs.
	In the Soviet Union, in a lot of areas, the productivity of its industries had actually fallen to levels below that.
	Of pre-1917 Russia.
	In other words, after decades of communism, productivity in many areas was lower than it was before communism came to be in Russia.
	So, a lot changed.
	A lot changed. If you want to understand, there's two fundamental ideas.
	I talked about this in a recent call.
	I'll repeat it here briefly.
	And then we'll take a break and I'll get to More of the details in a bit.
	But if you want to understand the two fundamental ideas behind the left, number one, everyone's equal.
	Everyone's equal. And number two, the means of production, a product of nature.
	Now, if you understand that, if you accept this idea that everyone's equal, then one person being in charge is unjust.
	Like, Think of a choir.
	If everyone's completely equal in their singing ability, nobody should get a solo.
	Or everyone should get a solo.
	But if only one person gets a solo, that's unjust and unfair.
	Because everybody wants a solo and everyone's got the same level of ability.
	There should be no lead singer in a band because everyone's the same in terms of voice and performance ability, capacity to connect with the crowd and charisma and blah blah blah, right?
	Everyone should be the same. In fact, everybody should be in the choir.
	Everybody should be in the band whether they can play or not because everyone's the same.
	And when people think everyone's the same, to me that's a sociopathic humans or blobs without any individual characteristics.
	Completely sociopathic perspective.
	There's no bell curve of intelligence.
	There's no bell curve of ability or ambition or capacity or drive or anything like that.
	Or capacity to take risks.
	So blacks are the same as whites, are the same as East Asians, are the same as Indians, are the same as men, are the same as women, blah, blah, blah.
	So if you get this, everyone's like this generic Weeble Play-Doh blob with no individual distinguishing characteristics.
	Everyone's like those little daubs that you have in the back of pointillism pictures representing a crowd, just blob, blob, blob, blob, blob, blob, blob, undifferentiated blobs.
	Well, that's part of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is if you're not really good at anything, you can't judge other people's expertise.
	But if everyone's the same, then all disparities in group outcomes must be the result of prejudice.
	Must be the result of bigotry.
	So if blacks are making less than Jews, it can't be because there's like a 30-point IQ difference on average in America.
	It must be because the Jews are racist towards blacks.
	Of course, it's never presented that way for reasons that are too obvious to mention.
	But if everyone's the same, if men and women are exactly the same, then the fact that women earn less because they have babies, work less, work fewer hours, and usually take jobs that are less technically demanding, or take education in sort of feminist theory rather than petroleum engineering and so on, everyone's the same, and therefore the fact that women earn less is because of sexism.
	So if you get to this idea that everyone's the same, everyone has exactly the same Basketball ability.
	Therefore, whoever's chosen, if it's not completely random, whoever's chosen 10 out of 100 people who want to play basketball, it's innately prejudiced.
	It must be the result of bribery.
	It must be the result of injustice or prejudice or whatever, right?
	So everyone's the same.
	Therefore, all disparities must result from prejudice.
	That's one thing that you need to understand to really grasp the left.
	Of course, it's false. It's completely false.
	There's a bell curve in just about everything in human life, from height to sexual market value to intelligence to ability to talents to beauty.
	I mean, there's a bell curve in everything.
	People aren't the same. And you have to be pretty sociopathic in my view.
	To just view that the entire complex symphony of human abilities is just somehow a bunch of blobs that are undifferentiated.
	What kind of sick worldview is that?
	We love diversity, but everyone's exactly the same.
	It's like, pick one, people!
	Of course, asking them to pick one would ask them to be rational.
	They're specifically rejecting rationality because it rejects their own system.
	So, that's one.
	Number two... Is that a factory is a product of nature.
	It just appears.
	It just pops up. Or if someone had the money to build a factory, it's because their parents stole from the workers and therefore they had the savings to start a factory.
	So everyone's the same.
	Everyone's just undifferentiated Play-Doh blob.
	Everyone's a weeble. Everyone's an egg, basically.
	Number one. And number two, the means of production are either unjustly acquired or somehow are just kind of part of nature.
	So the guy who saved and scrimped and struggled and risked to build a restaurant shouldn't get paid more than the guy who just shows up to work there and can quit anytime.
	Everyone's the same. And because everyone's the same, anybody who's accumulated resource must have done so unjustly.
	And therefore, when I worked in restaurants as a waiter, I got paid less than the boss because I didn't create the restaurant.
	And I saw the boss working and I saw that he would throw up after the lunch rush because he was so stressed about whether he made money or not.
	Because it was his house, his life, his livelihood on the line.
	And his, you know, 15-year investment in building up the restaurant.
	I respected that. I'm like, well, yeah, you should get paid more because I'm not the one throwing up.
	Non-vomit! I'll take less pay for less vomit.
	That's one of my central philosophies.
	You go to work in a factory, the factory was created by somebody who risked their capital.
	Even if they inherited the capital, they still risked it and didn't end up doing backpack trips in Bali.
	I'll say that three times fast.
	So they decided to risk and create all of this stuff.
	So that is kind of important to understand.
	The means of production, factories, restaurants, whatever, you name it, they don't come out of nowhere.
	They're created by people who sacrifice their savings and take on enormous amounts of risks and sometimes stress to create them for you and you're paying them for that.
	I made more money in a restaurant than I would wandering around with food in the woods because there was a restaurant around me.
	I didn't have to pay for advertising, for heating, for taxes, for costs, for other people's labor.
	I just made money.
	Why did I go to a restaurant?
	Because it's profitable. So you say, oh, well, I'm going to make $20 off what the laborer sells, and I'm going to pay him $10 an hour.
	But the reason you do that is because he'd only make $5 an hour without the factory.
	If the factory allows him to build a car twice as fast as he would on his own, then he's making twice as much being in the factory.
	If the factory didn't come out of nowhere, it's a fair trade.
	It's a fair deal. But of course, because everyone's the same, everyone's a blob, no one's differentiated, all inequality is injustice and all accumulations of capital and therefore the means of production which result from accumulations of capital combined with risk and desire, it's all.
	Unjust. And therefore, because everyone's equal, everyone should end up with equal stuff.
	But because everyone isn't equal, it means that nobody works.
	And it's really not that hard to understand.
	I mean, all you have to do is talk to students, or just think of a university situation.
	And you say, well, in a university situation, we can call this Marxism, with a different spelling, but in a university...
	What we're going to do is we're going to take everyone's final mark, split it up by the number of students and everyone gets the same mark.
	Everybody knows what's going to happen.
	Everybody knows instinctively, immediately.
	My daughter at the age of five and a half knew exactly what was going to happen.
	It's not that complicated. If everyone's marks get added up and divvied out, nobody has an incentive to study.
	Therefore, nobody will study on the expectation that they're going to get...
	Other people's marks who do study, but because no one studied, there's nothing to distribute and everybody fails.
	And that's the reality.
	That is the empirical data, overwhelmingly, without exception, that has accumulated.
	And if you want to understand postmodernism, you understand that because reason and evidence rejects leftism, rejects communism, rejects socialism, destroys them, Reason and evidence is considered a deadly predator on the delusions and survival of those invested in the leftist narrative.
	And like all predators, they want to destroy it.
	Reason and evidence destroys socialism.
	Therefore, socialists destroy reason and evidence.
	And that is called postmodernism.
	And that is what is spreading.
	And that is why it is spreading.
	And that is why we must fight back.
	Because when you destroy reason and evidence, my friends, you destroy us all.
	Thank you so much for listening. I'll come back with more on the scientific method soon.
	Really appreciate your time.
	Please let me know what you think of these rather lengthy expositions.
	I love them and I hope that you like them as well.
	And please don't forget, if you find this stuff helpful and useful, this is the distillation of decades of thought and study.

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