March 3, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:04
4016 Wrong Think | Sargon Of Akkad and Stefan Molyneux
Earlier this week YouTube disabled Carl Benjamin's Google account and left him unable to access his popular Sargon of Akkad video channels. Carl Benjamin, popularly known as Sargon of Akkad, joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the continued push for censorship from the radical left, the challenges of being a content creator, the failures of totalitarian government intervention, the problem with purity testing and much much more!YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/sargonofakkad100Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sargonofakkad100Minds: http://www.minds.com/Sargon_of_AkkadYour 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 Waller from Freedom, Maine Radio.
Very pleased to chat with a man whose work I've followed for years with great, great pleasure, Carl Benjamin, popularly known as Sargon of Akkad.
That's with two Ks! Just wanted to remind people.
The YouTube channel, cross your fingers for now, is youtube.com forward slash sargon of Akkad 100.
Facebook.com, of course, the same sargon of Akkad 100.
And minds.com forward slash sargon underbar of underbar Akkad.
Sargon, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.
And the feeling's mutual.
I've followed your work for years as well.
And, you know, there are small differences in ideology that we have and whatnot.
But generally, I think you've done a fantastic job of opposing the nonsense that's coming out of the progressive left at the moment.
And just like Paul Joseph Watson, anyone who's prepared to push back against that, at the end of the day, we're on the same team.
Yeah, I mean, differences in conclusions are eventually ironed out by reason and evidence over time, and you have to come to some conclusions in life, and you're always going to have incomplete data, and you're always going to encounter better arguments the next day.
So as long as you're using the same methodology, all science grows towards truth, but it must start in different places.
Otherwise, what the heck is there to discuss?
So... So, Sargon, how was your day yesterday?
Just out of curiosity, what went on?
How was your breakfast? You know, what was your morning like?
Did you enjoy your coffee?
How was your day? It was pretty good.
I've been trying to lose some weight, so I just had eggs on toast, so it was, you know, pretty low fat.
It was unremarkable otherwise, you know, nothing to speak of.
No interruptions to, say, any live broadcasts or anything like that going down?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it's been quite stressful.
And I still don't actually know what's happened.
I don't know whether I've been directly targeted by YouTube.
I don't know whether this has been a kind of malicious use of past Things that have happened but haven't been addressed for some reason, because I mean, I just don't know.
And I think that what has happened is, three years ago, I got into a, not three years ago, sorry, a year ago, I got into a spat with another YouTuber after I crushed him in a debate, and he got a bit angry about me taking a few clips from the debate that he had had with another person, And hosting them with a descriptive title and description.
And so he DMCA'd them. And so I thought, well, I'm not going to be petty about it.
I'll just let him go. It was on my secondary channel and it made him look worse if I let him shut the channel down.
So I didn't think anything of it. And the closest, the best information I'm working on at the moment is that for some reason over a year, a year later, YouTube has decided to penalize me because of that.
And I'm not even sure why.
I didn't know that was in terms of conditions.
I've had no warning. They've said nothing about it for over a year.
And it's come on the heels of what is being, I think, rightly called the YouTube purge, which after all of the outcry, YouTube is starting to walk back.
But let's be honest.
We all know the sort of ideological state of YouTube.
We know the kind of things they believe.
We know the kind of people running it.
We know the environment in which they live.
And it's all ridiculous.
It's social justice nonsense.
And they know that we use their platform and they've got every incentive to get rid of us.
Well, I do sort of have a mental image of the engineers drowning in the sea tentacles of the HR department, because I think that's the portal through which a lot of this stuff comes.
And, you know, here's the thing, though.
It's so easy. Maybe you just pick up the phone and talk to somebody in the organization.
Boy, you'd think you could just get a phone call and it's just someone to call.
It's amazing. No matter the size of your channel, it literally is like trying to speak to God.
It's impossible to get hold of someone and actually have, even if it was just a brief email exchange or something, something so simple as that.
You'd think in the 21st century, with all the amazing technology we have, they would be able to do it like that.
But no, it is exactly as you say.
It's completely opaque. And any information, the smallest dregs of information they give you are not very informative.
So, I mean, I'm not saying that I'm necessarily being ideologically targeted because I just don't know.
It just happens to have come at exactly the same time as an event that seems to obviously be ideological targeting.
So, who knows?
Well, see, that's what happens when Trump announces a run for 2020.
I think the flamethrowers come out and everyone dives for the bushes.
Because for you, it was like they really went for the heart of the spider, right?
Because it was your Google login as a whole, and so you couldn't access a whole bunch of stuff.
It wasn't just like one channel, right?
That's right, yeah. Luckily, I actually managed to get in contact with one of these trusted flaggers, who was actually quite cooperative.
But the thing is, and I feel bad for these guys, because they are in basically the same position as us.
As in, they can't get hold of people properly either, and they couldn't get any real information.
So the reason that all I have is a working theory is because he couldn't find out.
But he did find out that what I can do is, if I use my wife's YouTube account, I can set that to be a manager of my YouTube account, and even though I can't log into my one, once she's set to a manager, I can get into my one through hers, and then I can continue uploading content.
But I don't know how much longer my channel will be around, so if it goes, it goes.
If it doesn't, then great.
Now, what's your relationship to that stuff?
Because, I mean, we both have occasionally uploaded stuff that a few people might have issues with, mostly to do with hairstyles and lack of trimming of ear and nose hairs.
But how does this work for you in terms of that sort of Damocles hanging by a thread thing?
Because there is that temptation.
And of course, this is the mind virus in a sense they're trying to implant is back off from the controversies, become bland, fade into the background, become beige.
How is it for you in terms of the content that you produce?
Is there kind of like a fuse that gets tripped in you?
Like, okay, maybe I'll cool it for a bit, or some people are like, this inflames my self-righteous jetpack to Mach 12 speeds.
I mean, where does this sit for you?
Personally, I don't think I've ever really done anything wrong.
I think that my high crime is going after their sacred cows, because I think there are severe problems with the way their sacred cows are...
I guess constructed is my problem.
I find that they're on weak foundations and they lead to very negative and frankly oppressive conclusions, and I want to oppose that.
But this means I'm going against a precious orthodoxy that is the sort of thing that gets people labeled as all sorts of names, even though those labels aren't necessarily true.
At the end of the day, Facts are facts, and you have to accept those facts.
But not only that, one thing that really annoys me is the sort of ideological usurption of terms like liberal.
And, you know, they've completely stolen these words.
And I'm sorry, I am actually a liberal, like an English liberal.
I actually follow the sort of, that's my belief system.
And so when I see collectivists suggesting that we should racially categorize people, It's not very liberal, is it?
So I find myself deeply opposed to it.
But honestly, when it comes to sitting under the sword of Damocles, I don't mind.
I spent my twenties working in corporate offices and I found it kind of oppressive.
I didn't like it. I found it boring.
I found it unchallenging. I found the lack of freedom that I had to be more concerning than the insecurity of not knowing what tomorrow brings.
I guess there's a kind of person that likes living on that edge and seeing what happens the next day, and it turns out I'm one of those people.
I'm actually not too bad with it.
I'm not going to lie, it is concerning given the spotlight that's currently on, I guess, the alternative media at the moment.
It's a little bit of a one-way street too when you leave...
The mainstream world, so to speak, and you go into speaking truth to power on the internet, it's like, well, I could have sworn this door opened both ways, but there's no real way back.
So you kind of have to go forward in a way, you know, because let's say you try and get some job back in the corporate world and, you know, people Google you and then it's like, oh, well, he said this, he said that.
So... It's sort of like, you know, smokers, they go up on the roof and then they can't get back into the building, you know, after they have their smoke.
And that does give you a kind of commitment, knowing that it's kind of this or bust.
And that gives you some vulnerability, but I think it also gives you some core strength as well.
Yeah, I agree, and it gives you the motivation to carry on when you're feeling like you don't want to carry on.
But I was thinking about this a while ago, and I think that eventually, because the internet is going to be essentially forever, and everyone is using it all the time, I think eventually we will come to a point where this kind of, I guess I'll call it like bourgeois moral policing, the sort of progressive tone policing of, oh, you said something naughty five years ago, I think eventually there will be so many people who have fallen foul of this that it will just lose its power.
And I think the same thing's happening with, say, unfounded allegations of sexual assault, a la the Me Too movement.
I've noticed that they're still coming out.
There are still allegations being made.
But now a denial on social media is just enough to get people to ignore it.
Because the power and the weight of it has been completely wasted because it's obviously being used as a weapon.
If it wasn't so obvious that people were...
I mean, anyone who takes to Twitter to make a sexual assault allegation is, in my opinion, lying.
You make an allegation like that to the police.
That's what they're for.
If you want to be taken seriously, you go to the authorities.
Even if you don't have evidence, you say, look, it happened five years ago.
I can't prove it, but I want it on record.
You don't go to Twitter because that's a character attack.
That's an attempt to smear someone's reputation.
And that's the only way I would take them seriously.
But yeah, I think eventually we're going to come to a point where, honestly, this has just run its course.
There are just too many people.
Or influence.
And can't wait till that day comes because then we can have proper conversations again.
Well, I do think that when you go out on a limb with recent arguments and evidence that is not part of the general culture, then what happens is there is this shock, right?
So the left keeps facts and data at bay so that when it breaks through the matrix, people are like shocked and appalled and it's terrible and they've got the pre-assembled labels of sticky goo to throw at your reputation.
But, you know, life and science and reason, they have a funny way of marching forward and dragging even the most unwilling.
You know, of course, you can go back to the, you know, the Copernican Revolution, you know, like the Earth is not the center of the solar system.
Ah, heretic! Burned alive!
And it's like, over time, you know, it just, reason has a way of unfolding, as long as we still get to talk about things.
Once the censorship comes in, then it all...
Kind of falls apart. But as long as we have the capacity to engage in the public square with reason and evidence, what seems crazy now, like the first guy to come up with, maybe let's end slavery, that was insane.
All human societies, all throughout time, all across the world, who's going to pick the cotton?
You want the poor to starve? It's going to raise the price of their food.
We'll have nothing to wear.
Like, it was insane, and now we just kind of take it for granted in hindsight.
So truth is kind of like that ambulance whine, you know?
Like, it goes past, and then it's, like, completely obvious behind you.
As long as we still get to talk, I think what seems nutty and shocking and maybe even morally appalling, in hindsight, then becomes like, well, what was the big deal about all of that?
It's kind of obvious. And if we can hold on till then, I think that's a good thing.
Totally agree. I mean, the problem that the people who wish to deny reality, and I'm not just talking about the left when I say that, there are lots of people like that, and anyone who's in a position where they wish to make reality fit their ideological conceptions, rather than actually molding their ideological conceptions to reality, is ultimately fighting a losing battle.
Because at the end of the day, you can say anything you like, and even if you can prevent people from talking, Reality will catch up to you.
There's no getting around it.
If something is real, it's real.
And you just have to deal with that.
I wonder too about this.
It's the sort of Frodo question, I guess, which is if someone gave you – like if you were standing over this big giant pipeline of information and arguments and data flowing across the internet, I can really, really understand – I like to think I would not take that ring and put it on, but I can really understand the idea of like, well, some of this stuff is really bad and really wrong.
I'm just going to tweak it a little bit.
Like just some of the more outlandish stuff.
You know, the Nazis. Okay, well, of course, right?
The Nazis. And then, of course, everyone becomes a Nazi after that particular breach is made.
But standing on, like for the big tech companies, standing on the data with the capacity to move what they consider small levers to keep crazy people out of the conversation...
To keep society civilized and to keep things moving forward.
By God, that is a tempting power.
And, you know, power does corrupt.
And it seems...
It's funny because the phone company never fell prey to that.
They weren't like, oh, you're a libertarian, you can't have a phone number.
And, you know, the mail wasn't like, oh, you're mailing out a libertarian package or a classical...
You can't... We're not going to deliver that.
But there's this funny kind of power now.
That once you cross that Rubicon and you start to say, we're now going to mess with the content, I do not know where that ends, but I think it ends either in tyranny or alternative platforms rising to the fore.
Well, I think it ends with both.
It definitely, it'll go straight to tyranny, and then it ends up forcing alternative platforms to form against, that will be competitors against platforms like YouTube, who have inadvertently encouraged their own demise because of their own tyrannical nature.
I mean, and this is not a new problem.
This has been argued about for centuries.
I mean, this is what On Liberty is almost all about.
When John Stuart Mill's time, he was making exactly the same argument, saying, look, people shouldn't lose their jobs and their source of income just because they have a dissenting opinion.
In fact, the one man with a dissenting opinion should be protected the most, because you don't need to protect opinions that aren't dissenting.
You don't need to protect their free speech, because no one's going to come after them and try to shut them down.
But you know what I find interesting about the whole persecuting people for opinions?
Which, I mean, when you just say it, it sounds ridiculous in and of itself.
But I always find that it's weird because the argument is not just a slippery slope.
I mean, if you're going to justify going after someone's job Why can you justify them having a bank account?
How do you even, you know, why should a bank give a Nazi a bank account or a loan or something like that?
And at that point, you realize that you're going to undo the person's entire life just because you disagree with that person's opinion.
And when I say Nazi, I'm being generous, you know, they will do this to anyone who opposes what they're doing.
And it's It's really scary because ultimately there is no good argument.
If you're going to de-platform them from one thing, why shouldn't you de-platform from the other?
And the answer is you should.
And that's terrifying precedent, in my opinion.
And it's a weird kind of arrogance.
To me, it's the question of central planning in economics, which is, oh, I know how many faggots of wood should be delivered to Siberia this winter.
By the way, that It's not a rude word.
That just means a bundle of wood.
And how many widgets should be produced in Vladivostok next?
Like, there's no human being who can possibly come up with all of that stuff, who can possibly know without price where the allocation of resources should be.
I feel a similar...
I don't know.
I don't know.
What's going on? It doesn't get rid of the beliefs, just drives them underground.
We can't map them. They're not erupting.
They're not public. You can't oppose them.
You can't expose them. And you can't show their flaws, which helps inoculate future generations from those bad ideas and provides a very good object lesson in objective argumentation.
And that...
Failure to be humble in the face of the collective human pursuit of truth is to me absolutely appalling.
Maybe it comes right out of the stunning Kruger effect that people who aren't that smart don't know what smartness looks like and certainly don't know that they're not that smart.
But I just can't imagine pushing or pulling these levers and think I'm doing anything other than wrecking a very complicated social engine.
Well, you've made a really great point there, in fact, because we are generally ruled over by Platonists, people who think that they can engineer the perfect society.
And, I mean, to me, that is the complete opposite of what I think is even possible, let alone desirable.
You know, I think that we should leave people to their own devices and give them the tools they need to be good human beings, to have good critical faculties, to have self-esteem, to have good motivation, and to think, right, to empower them, I think is the right term.
And this is one of the reasons I hate victim culture so much.
When they say, oh, are you the victim of racism?
Are you the victim? No, I'm not the victim of anything.
I will be fine. Leave people alone and let them make their own lives.
And they'll make the world around them good.
I think this is why Jordan Peterson resonates with so many people.
Clean your room. Tidy up around you.
It's so simple and it's so silly, but...
You've directly improved the space around you.
You've made yourself feel like you can achieve something, and you've got an obstacle out of your path.
Suddenly, okay, well, what's next?
What else can you do?
And there's lots you can do.
But instead, you've got a bunch of, yeah, I guess...
Managerial types who are just sat there thinking, right, if I tweak things just right, then we can create all of this and make it a perfect world.
And I think that this is the problem with intersectionality, in fact.
They've developed a theory of how they can do this along the lines of race and gender, and it's doomed to fail.
I mean, there's so much hubris involved with all of this.
Honestly, it's going to end in tears.
Well, hopefully that's the only spilt liquid.
And the purity test, I think, is very interesting.
The purity test.
Of course, the Nazis had their purity test to do with your Aryan-ness or your German-ness or whatever.
And the communists had their purity test regarding your relationship to the means of production.
Were you a kulak? Were you a bourgeois?
Were you a... A capitalist, they had their purity tests.
And to me, purity tests are like how you pull back the bow in order to launch it at someone's throat.
And to me, when you have these kinds of purity tests, and let's not kid ourselves, the left have these insane purity tests that they themselves regularly fail.
And when you have this purity test, It is loading.
It is loading weaponry.
You have this purity test in order to discharge venom and hatred and violence and the mass murders that have gone on under these purity tests.
Mao had them, of course, in communism as well.
Are you pure enough for the party?
And these purity tests, to me, is a way of avoiding the engagement in the rather messy environment It's a messy business of finding the truth.
It is not a pretty business.
It is, you know, like the old statement Bismarck had about sausages and laws.
These are things you do not want to see being made.
And it's the same thing with truth. Truth is messy.
It's complicated. There's counter data.
There's arguments you never thought of.
There are counterfactuals that bring you up short.
And the purity test as a substitute for rational debate, man, that is an explosive mix to bring to any society.
Yeah, I'm very much against purity testing.
I mean, my personal motto is, is it good enough?
Because I think, no, and that's honestly, because, I mean, it's an old axiom, but the perfect is the enemy of the good.
You will ruin something that is perfectly adequate and something you can be proud of and say, look, I've done something that's good and I'm happy with it and this is, you know, good enough.
And then, but if you take that extra step and say, well, maybe I can, and you start tweaking it and you try to make it better, and suddenly you've ruined the thing that was good by trying to make it perfect.
And this is honestly, I think, the product of utopian thinking.
To ever think you can achieve the, and again, I think it comes down to the kind of Platonist mindset, where you think, right, okay, well, I can just, I can do this.
And it's like, no, you can't. This is why you really need to set yourself to be, how good could it be realistically?
Remember that you are just a mortal man, you are flawed like everyone else.
Just be as good as you can be.
Don't try and think you're going to make it perfect.
And then suddenly you notice that purity testing just falls away.
You know, no one has... Okay, you know, is there any harm done?
If there's no harm done, don't worry about it.
You know, if there's no harm done, it's not that bad.
Don't get yourself in a twist about it.
It's nothing to really worry about.
But the thing I've noticed about purity testing is that really...
They're a form of character assassination to advance the person who's attacking's social status.
That's all it is. They're not trying to find truth.
They're not trying to use reason.
What they're trying to do is drag someone else down in the perception of other people around them.
And by doing so, obviously, enhance themselves.
That, to me, it's a kind of malevolence, and I really don't like it.
Yeah. I just love that phrase you had in the middle.
No, you can't. That's almost like, that's the motto for me of classical liberalism, of small state, of freedom.
No, you can't. Maybe we can get rid of poverty.
No, you can't. Maybe we'll have no sick people or nobody will ever be.
No, you can't. Maybe we'll have no unhappy people.
Maybe the children will never stub their toes.
Maybe it will never rain on anyone.
No, you can't. You can't have it.
You have to accept that life is going to be messy and imperfect.
And this purity test to me has a lot to do with the world imposing itself and causing people to feel, I think, what is for them unbearable levels of stress and anxiety.
You know, when they come across factuals that go against their ideology, that causes them extraordinary amounts of stress.
Some people, their ideology, it becomes their personality, and facts kind of drive them out of themselves like some sort of exorcism of what they think of as their ego.
And they fight back against it like cornered animals.
Yeah. It is an old truism, I think, that if you can't control your own emotions, you will inevitably end up controlling other people.
Because if other people have the capacity to hit that red button on your forehead and cause you a sleepless night and stress, then if you can't manage that yourself, you end up having to stop other people from hitting that raw nerve that's kind of floating above you like the tendrils of a sea anemone, like you are a raw human being.
And that leads, again, this lack of self-management, lack of self-knowledge Lack of self-forgiveness almost leads, I think, to that tyrannical impulse as well.
You are absolutely correct there.
I mean, there is so much there that is easily demonstrable using examples from social justice.
For example, I mean, that's what political correctness is.
That's what things like microaggressions are.
They're the demand that you control other people's behavior for your feelings.
And that's an insane mandate that you're giving yourself, because that means that literally everyone around you has to be under your power in some way or another, or else you know you can't actually control other people, and that puts you in a state of natural insecurity.
You don't know what they're going to say.
They might say the N-word, they might say whatever it is, you know, that you personally find offensive or harmful, and because you never learned to manage it, because you never took personal responsibility to how you feel and deal with the way that you feel rather than Projecting it onto other people, now you do become totalitarian because now you have to prevent them from acting in ways that you don't want to see acted on.
And you have to police everyone else's behavior.
And so suddenly you get trapped in a kind of unhealthy cult mentality that never ends.
And it can only end in a spiral into a collapse.
And it's really deeply unhealthy.
And at the end of the day, can you honestly tell people that you're happy in a position like that?
Well, you're so vulnerable.
Could you ever genuinely be? Yeah, you're so vulnerable.
You know, self-ownership and self-possession means not being any way the wind blows with whatever's going on, the verbal gales of dispute or whatever is going on.
It means not being so vulnerable.
And if you're not that vulnerable to negative opinions, and I'm going to ask you about that, of course, because like myself, you've been described in various negative opinions.
And for a lot of people, it's kind of incomprehensible that not only do we say, yeah, fine, but we can argue against it, we can continue to flourish.
And I actually do guide myself by negative opinions to some degree.
It's sort of not quite as reactionary as the pinball bouncing around, but it is important to know where you're running into resistance because that's sometimes where you need to go to get the most fruitful discussions.
But how is that for you when the negative labels are attached, when the ostracism is attached, when the source of income is attached, the reputation is attacked?
Was that a surprise when it sort of first emerged?
How did you roll with it and what do you do about it now?
When I was first called a misogynist because I was criticizing feminism, I was outraged.
I was genuinely outraged because, I mean, at the time I must have had like 5,000 subscribers.
Give me a British how dare you.
Nobody does how dare you like the British.
How dare you, sir?
I'm just going to faint and recover myself, but go on.
Seriously, yeah. When it first happened, I... I was just thunderstruck.
I couldn't believe someone was telling me that I hated women, because I mean, obviously I know I don't hate women, and I just had problems in an ideological way with what feminism was doing, because it was portraying men as the oppressors of women, and I don't think that they are.
So I was addressing feminism on its own terms, and they were like, no, you just hate women.
I was just shocked.
But I think that I've been doing this for enough years now that it doesn't personally bother me, but the amount of grey on my chin now...
I've got a picture of myself from two years ago, my son's christening, and my beard was just jet black.
And so I was like, right, okay.
Obviously there is stress here that I'm maybe containing somehow, but...
Yeah, nowadays I expect it, though, because at this point I see the organized forces of the far left as being more like an ideological block that's operating in ways that are deliberately vindictive and malevolent and actually trying to gain power over other people when it's not justified.
And so this seems like an attack on, well, traditional Western liberal values, frankly.
So now, when they attempt to give me some sort of character attack, a label, a smear, whatever, I expect it.
That's exactly the only weapon that they have.
And I read a few years ago Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, and I found it very interesting.
I think it's the second to last page.
He describes the sort of tapestry of morality of the bourgeoisie.
And I realized that all of this was because I had bought into that sort of mindset as well the way he described it is you live in the estimation of other people and He described that as being the modern bourgeois man or woman obviously and he was comparing that to the savage the uncivilized peoples of the the time and he was saying that these people live within themselves and They don't virtue signal, they don't care about the opinions of other people, they care about their own opinions.
How do you feel about yourself?
And I was thinking, well, that's a really interesting way of looking at things, because I think a lot of people do live in the estimation of other people, and I don't think that they realize that they do.
And it's so much more empowering when you realize, hang on, whose opinion really matters to me?
And ultimately, it's obviously the people I care about and the people I love, but they obviously love me back, and so they're not trying to hurt me.
And so, really, it's my own estimation.
I'm the one who judges whether I've done right or wrong, and if I don't think I've done anything wrong, then goddamn it, I'm going to say, look, I can tell you why I have done nothing wrong, but conversely, if I think I have done something wrong, then I will be the first to admit it.
I'll be the judge of me.
And it's a far more empowering way of dealing with it.
And so I guess it's kind of like, you know, in the last scene of The Matrix where he's knocking the hand away and with one arm behind his back and he's, you know, the Agent Smith can't touch him.
Suddenly I'm just like, none of the things that you're saying actually hurt me at all because I know you don't know me.
I know you don't know my intentions.
I know you don't know why I say what I say, but I do.
And so anything you say can only be a character attack when you approach me like that.
So yeah, I guess I've kind of grown a new to it at this point.
And it's a funny thing, too, because a lot of times people would get that kind of strength of homesteading or internalizing their own conscience.
And we are responsible to our own conscience, but if our conscience is then manipulable by other people, we become their slaves.
Because then they have the button of self-attack and so on.
So when you internalize your own conscience relative to, we hope, objective and universal values, a lot of times, certainly I was raised as a Christian, and a lot of times when I was younger, the statement would be, you know, I answer to God, not to you.
I answer to the Ten Commandments, not to you.
And I think, how did you, because as an atheist, how do you find that strength relative to values when you can't personify the values in the form of a deity?
I've never felt the need to.
I mean, my parents are atheists.
I've never in any way been even vaguely religious or spiritual.
I've never needed to. I guess I'm incredibly Aristotelian.
I think that what you're doing makes you what you are.
And so if you're doing right, then no matter what they say about you, they can't take that away from you.
They can't undo your righteous action, regardless of how they want to frame it, regardless of what they want to call you or anything like that.
And so I've never needed to have that about me.
I guess maybe I'm lucky in that way.
Maybe I'm unlucky in that way. I'm not sure.
But I've never felt a need for a deity.
It's weird. I genuinely, like, prayer is one thing that I don't understand.
And the thing is, I know that scientifically there are physical benefits to praying.
Like meditation, you know, it clears your mind, it relaxes you, it reduces your heart rate, it de-stresses you.
I can understand the physical benefits, but I remember as a child, you know, in Church of England schools and whatnot, and that, okay, please pray.
And I was just sat there going, right. What am I doing?
What do I need to do? Because I've just been completely irreligious my whole life.
And the worst part is, though, it actually makes me terrible about arguing against religion, because I was never inside religion, and I never had those sort of feelings, so I don't really know how to connect with people who are religious in that way.
And if you want to try and persuade someone of anything, you have to do it on their own terms.
So I'm actually the worst atheist when it comes to being an anti-theist that you'll ever meet.
Well, I'll give you a framework, which I've actually written about in a book called Against the Gods, which I found to be quite helpful in understanding this.
Because as you point out, prayer does give people measurable benefits, and they do it, and they're not all just sitting there thinking, it's kind of cold in here, my knees hurt, right?
There is something that is actively occurring for people.
And I think if we understand that the concept of God translates into the concept of...
The subconscious, then I think we are a lot closer to understanding the religious experience.
The subconscious is an incredible mechanism of speed.
It's been clocked sometimes at 8,000 times faster than the conscious mind in terms of reasoning out.
And even people who aren't good at math can do these probability distribution of resources stuff, like who pays for what in the pub and so on.
And also, we have this idea that humanity was birthed out of a god, that we are sort of a late addition to an eternal consciousness.
And if we look at our ego, the neofrontal cortex, that was birthed out of successive layers of the brain.
I've referred to it, the humanity side, as like our post-monkey beta expansion pack.
And so I think if we look at how much...
Depth and complexity and, in a sense, answers there are in the unconscious.
And we say, okay, when people are praying, what are they doing?
Well, I don't believe that they're praying to an external deity that exists outside of consciousness, but they're kind of dropping questions into a deeper self, which has preceded our ego by, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and that there is a lot of wisdom in the unconscious.
It's faster. And I think that's one of the reasons why it seems so vivid, To people.
And certainly when I was going through talk therapy, my engagement with my unconscious was very powerful and very rapid and very stimulating.
And there was a lot going on.
Plus, of course, we have the second brain in our gut.
You know, we think our brain is just in this sort of skull prison.
It's all over our body.
And so I think that that's one way of understanding the crossover between atheists with independent conscience and people who find value In prayer, it is a form of introspection or connection with something that is deeper and more eternal in a way than our mere conscious mind, though of course the conscious mind has extraordinary strengths in and of itself.
Well, they're different horses for different courses, aren't they?
I mean, well, I recently read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and fantastic book.
If anyone watching hasn't read it, you should definitely read it, because it will tell you more about yourself than you think, or maybe even want to know, but it's something you should know.
And he likens our decision-making process to an elephant and a rider, and the rider is the conscious, rational brain.
The elephant is your gut feeling, it's your passions, it's It's the thing that, like you were saying, reacts just like that.
And often the rider is acting as the lawyer for the elephant, so the elephant will do something, and then afterwards you have to have a post-hoc rationalization for why you did that thing.
Even though the thing that you did might be exactly the right thing to do, and when I say exactly the right thing to do, I might mean in a way of self-protection, maybe, something like that.
It might not necessarily be the most moral thing to do.
But... Either way, there is a connection between them.
He goes out of his way to make sure that you don't come away with the impression that this means you have no control over your initial impressions or anything like that, because you do.
And you absolutely can persuade people of things.
Even if they're quite opposed to you, you basically have to kind of calm them down and make their elephant feel secure before you address them from the rational to the rational.
But yeah, I think your evaluation of prayer there is very interesting.
I imagine that this is something that meditation is about as well.
Clearing your mind and getting in touch with the subconsciousness in your own brain is probably something there.
I've never looked into it.
I can definitely see that there would be a genuine physiological reason that people would do it.
Otherwise, they wouldn't do it.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have persisted for this whole time.
It would be a unique cultural thing to one group of people.
But it's not. It's universal.
All human cultures have had some form of prayer.
So it must have some physiological benefit, in my opinion.
So let's get into labels a little bit.
Boy, if you ever really want to understand the media, do something that the media writes about that it doesn't approve of, and boy, you'll get a sense of just how objective the media can be.
Because there's this whole new thing about, you know, like...
You hate Nazis? Yeah, I hate Nazis.
You want to punch a Nazi? Well, no, not really.
I think that's kind of wrong. But you do hate them, right?
Okay, yeah, I hate Nazis.
Do you think they should be deplatformed?
I don't know. I don't like Nazis.
And it's like, the moment they can get you to say, I hate Nazis, and they can be deplatformed, it's like, boom!
Now you're a Nazi, and you can be...
Because the labels are very, very shaky.
You know, Nazism used to refer to a very specific flavor of National Socialism.
Of course, they had to get rid of the socialism word.
National socialism that arose in the 20s and 30s in Germany, which had very specific racial and sometimes Germanic elements.
And now, they don't like calling people Nazis, unless they've got the swastika, because they get sued and stuff like that.
So they've invented these synonyms.
Alt-right. Far-right.
And because everybody knows, you know, oh, the dog whistle.
The left is always talking about their dog whistles.
Well, that's just a dog whistle.
You know, when they say far-right, they're not talking classical liberal.
They're not talking anarcho-capitalist.
They're not talking about Rothbardian minarchist or anything like that.
They are really trying to get you out on an extreme to the point where you become dehumanized.
And I just wish... I wish, and you've probably seen this in articles written about you too, I wish that they would say, here's his methodology and here are some of his arguments.
Come to your own conclusions.
If they did that, then it wouldn't be much of a hit piece, would it?
I mean, I've had dozens, like you, we've both had dozens and dozens and dozens of articles written about us.
I mean, I remember when you interviewed Damore after the memo broke, and that was a seismic moment to demonstrate that, look, Damore didn't go to the press first, he went to you.
That meant something.
Jordan Peterson actually first, and then me, but yeah, no, he didn't go to mainstream at all.
No, no, yeah, sorry, I thought you went to you first, but yeah.
But that's seismic.
It was a definitive line in the culture war, because no one, not one of these articles that is against Paul Joseph Watson, against any of us, I've never seen them say, he said this, and this is why this is wrong.
I've never seen it. Or he just said this.
You know, they could just report and let the readers think for themselves.
But it's always some wild, out-of-context quote that is the worst conceivable thing that they could comb through and find with no...
Like... I just...
There's this fear of the audience potentially thinking for themselves or being exposed to...
I just... I want to see data without an opinion.
I want to see a picture without a review.
I want to see the movie without the subtitles of opinion.
I just... Just give me the data.
Please, let me think for myself.
But they just... It's like they can't possibly do it.
They can't present you or I or other people without these labels designed to alienate and dehumanize us and without a characterization of...
Of our arguments rather than the arguments themselves.
And that is just astounding.
And that, to me, is the real matrix they're weaving around people's brains and their futures.
Oh, they absolutely are.
I mean, it's amazing because I come from the left.
Growing up, I mean... When I was in my 20s, I read Capital, and maybe I was a bit socialist-y, but coming into my 30s, after having 10 years experience in the workforce, my socialism had dropped away, and I realised I was a liberal.
You know, I was an English liberal of the sort of classical British tradition.
But I mean, you know, I could compromise on some things.
You know, for example, I'm British, maybe it's just a cultural thing, but I don't mind the NHS, and I don't want to get into it.
But it's one of those things where it's like, okay, That's fine.
But one of the things that you notice after being in sort of left-wing circles for a while is just the term right-wing.
It's not a description.
It's just a mechanism for otherization.
That's all it is.
That's all they use it for.
It's not a description of your politics at all.
It's just to say, he's not one of us.
And it's like, okay, that's fine.
And the whole thing with just the ridiculousness of the political compass and spectrum anyway, I find it...
I've started reading some objectivist philosophers, actually, and they don't do that.
They consider themselves above it because they analyze ideologies along the lines of principles.
And I'm not an objectivist because I don't necessarily agree that, well, just certain premises that they have.
But that's not to say they're wrong. Just a sec, I'm just going to make a quick note here.
Debate to be resumed at some point.
Okay, go ahead. It's not even a debate I want to have.
I'm actually talking to Yaron Brook in two, three days' time.
Yeah, he's the head of the Ayn Rand Institute.
He is, yeah. And I kind of want to just investigate with him what he believes.
Because they were like, oh, do you want to have a debate with him?
I said, well, A, I don't think I'm on his level for a start.
But B, I'm more curious than anything.
I would like to just have it as another...
More information, another sort of ideological lens that I can attach when I want to, you know?
But one of the things I do like about the way the objectivists analyze things is they analyze things through the lens of principles.
And so they drill down to first principles and then they see where these things actually, and I hate to use the word, intersect, but it does have a valid use sometimes, I promise.
And it's very useful.
And suddenly you realize how meaningless the political compass is.
Suddenly you realize it's just for tribalism.
And at the end of the day, the best you can get out of it is policy positions.
You know, you can say, right, universal healthcare is, say, a left-wing position.
Okay, you know, free markets are a right-wing position.
And I'm just like, well, Okay, but that's, again, it just boils down to tribalism.
It's not in any way conducive to political discourse.
And the problem that we're having at the moment, I think, that's being massively exacerbated by social media is the tribal bubbles that people find themselves falling into just naturally.
There are going to be people who despise the fact that we've had conversations.
Because they'll consider themselves to be in a particular bubble and you in another bubble and never the twain should meet.
And that's just them acting like they're in a cave and there's someone else in the other cave that they need to throw a rock at.
You know, I love the fact that I can have a dialogue with literally anyone And I'm sorry if anyone's offended by that.
I'm genuinely sorry, but I like talking to people I disagree with.
I think that's where the most value comes in.
And I think it's like long-form conversations like this, where there's real meat in the conversation, and we can actually get to the bottom of, you know, and just genuinely analyze things.
I think that's the reason that we're doing so much better than the mainstream media would like us to do.
Because you never see these sort of things on TV anymore.
It's all small soundbites.
Oh, it drives me nuts. Man, it drives me nuts.
It's like, you have 45 seconds to make a complex point.
It's like... You know, it's like, sorry, Socrates, we need to pause for station identification at this point.
And so you can't figure, you can't finish your conversation with Antigua.
Like, you just, Alcibiades, sorry, you got to put, like, our capacity to concentrate, our capacity to follow through.
And it's interesting because social media is considered to fragment that a lot, but I consider it far less fragmentary in that it leads people to conversations like this than something like the mainstream media, where they're just skating on the surface and jumping in.
And of course, it It lends itself so much to sophistry and manipulation unless you have long-form dialogues.
The alternative media through things like Facebook and YouTube I think has helped people to actually maintain their concentration in a way the mainstream media can't sustain.
Oh, I totally agree. I mean, like, after Jordan Peterson had his debate with Cathy Newman, there was so much in what Newman had said that Peterson, obviously in the heat of the debate, couldn't get out.
But I had to pick through.
I mean, that video was over an hour long, and it's had like 900,000 views.
The idea that people won't watch long-form content is nonsense.
It just has to be decent content.
It has to be worthwhile. You have to have a point there that you're trying to show people and give them information and ideas they didn't previously have.
I mean, my videos are really long normally, and yet a lot of people seem to like them.
And it's because I think there's, like for any content creators or aspiring content creators, the key maxim that you just have to bear in your mind at the beginning and end of everything you do is don't waste people's time.
It doesn't matter how long you go on for, just don't waste their time.
That's it. Actually, I heard the story of a kid going up the stairs from a content creator's living room and saying, don't forget to like, share and subscribe because she thought that meant goodbye and goodnight.
But now, I was really curious about that tipping point or that turning point you had.
I was also a socialist when I was younger.
The tipping point, do you remember it clearly?
Was it kind of a subtle or was it like, you know, lightning strike that hit your brain and your spine?
Do you remember that turning point in particular?
Yeah. Not off the top of my head, but it was about 18, 19 years ago now.
So I remember coming away from Capital thinking, it's an interesting method of analysis, but I didn't find it complete.
And I didn't think that the proposed solutions were going to work, which obviously we know they don't.
There wasn't any one particular thing.
But honestly, I think that dealing with socialists put me off socialism.
Well, that was Jordan Peterson's experience, too.
Yeah, exactly. He's right.
They just hate the rich. They just hate the rich.
And it annoys the hell out of me, because I don't hate the rich.
You know, I mean, OK, maybe if someone plundered a town or something and killed it, yeah, maybe I'd hate that person.
A couple of Saudi princes, I think, we can look on the shady side.
Exactly right. But I mean, I don't look at Bill Gates and think that he's an immoral person.
I mean, I actually agree with the objectivists when they say, well, isn't he a good person?
It's like, well, yeah, he's made my life infinitely richer by giving me an operating system that gives me easy access to almost all of the information I want.
I can do anything I want. I play video games.
I can watch movies.
He's made my life better.
And what did he do?
He charged me for his work.
Okay, I paid happily.
There's nothing immoral about this.
And another thing as well, just the constant assaults on capitalism are driving me nuts.
Because I'm currently reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, and if you guys aren't sure about capitalism, read that book.
It is just a wallop.
It's totally stole their thunder, just real briefly, because the reduction in world poverty over the last 50 years as the result of free trade and free markets has dwarfed anything that the socialist has ever been able to achieve.
The socialists have this program called, take money from the rich and give it to the poor.
Take money from the able and give it to the less able, or however you want to phrase it.
And that has generally driven entire societies, if not civilizations, into penury.
But the idea of open up free markets, open up trade, and how much, like in China and India alone, in India, 50,000 people a month are moving into the middle class.
It has been the biggest single reduction of poverty, even since the 1990s, just a couple of decades.
And this should never have happened under capitalism and it should have flourished under socialism.
And now that the empirical evidence is going against everything they stand for, everything they claim they wanted, we actually find out how much they really wanted it.
Because if they say, well, we want the poor to become wealthier, if that's the real goal, they should be saying, I'm setting fire to capital and I'm going to praise Adam Smith.
But they don't do that.
So I really question whether they do really want to help the poor or using the poor as guilt clubs to beat down and take power over others.
It's got to be that because they, I mean, you would have to be a madman to suggest socialism, to try and get people out of poverty.
I mean, where has that ever happened?
I mean, we have a live-action experiment.
Well, I wouldn't say experiment, but...
Curse in Venezuela.
Right now, I recently did, again, like a 40-minute video, which hundreds of thousands of people watched.
Just going through the events of 2017 and watching the socialist government of Venezuela implement socialism in Venezuela, and it's just crushing the country.
The country with the biggest oil reserves in the world.
There should be no reason. It's insane.
I mean, if... If Chile had been Venezuela, Venezuela would be unbelievably rich right now.
You know, it's incredible how much free markets.
And it's all about freedom.
It's all about allowing people to actually live their own lives and actually make the decisions they want to make without the kind of guiding hand of the totalitarian Platonists.
Sorry, my son's just woke up.
I don't know if you can hear him in the background.
And let me know if you need to, you know, go.
And I tell you, at an emotional level, Carl, I have a really tough time with Venezuela.
I mean, so I have this Old Testament, New Testament side.
I mean, I think a lot of people do.
But for me, it's like, well, you voted for it, and we told you it was going to be bad for decades.
Decades and decades.
Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957.
You knew you were told by the Austrian economists, by the free market economists, you were told.
People warned you there are people in your own society speaking the language.
You had the example of the Soviet Union.
You had the example of China, of Cambodia.
You had the soft socialism of India.
You had every conceivable reason, example, fact, data, piece of evidence, and still...
You went Chevista.
Still, you went... You had Argentina.
You had... Oh, it drives me crazy.
Pinochet. And...
So part of me is like, well, take what you want and pay for it.
There are consequences to your decisions.
Then a part of me is like, oh, but the children!
And it's like, but the children didn't vote for it there.
And it's like, but my conclusion is, I'm going to sound cold-hearted because it really, the whole thing, you see them running through the sewers hunting like rats and seagulls and rummaging in the garbage with the dogs to try and get some food.
They've lost like 25 pounds a head.
But I can't care for people's children more than they do themselves.
And if this is the consequence...
Ah, I wish it had been different.
It's the old thing, like you tell someone, don't smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke.
You don't celebrate when they get sick, but you sure wish they'd listened when they weren't sick.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's really nothing you can do.
And the thing is, like, nothing has killed people in greater numbers than socialism.
You know, they want to...
I mean, they demonize Nazism, and rightfully so, but there is just...
You know, Nazism doesn't hold a candle to the Marxists.
It just doesn't...
It never got close.
You know, just untold piles of bodies.
But then the Marxists say, yeah, but...
But Nazism wasn't around as long.
And I gotta tell you, if that's your argument, you are not in a good place, you know?
Well, this serial killer didn't live as long as my serial killer, so of course his death count's gonna be higher.
It's like, if you're defending that death count by saying that Nazism was a piker, you are not in a good moral place, my friend.
Yeah, you've lost the argument at that point.
And that's you just admitting you've lost the argument.
And again, like capitalism, you can look at any metric, anything.
Look at child mortality, life expectation, poverty, health, just anything.
Just choose something and you will see that over time the graph has just gone like this, with bad things and like this with good things.
And that's all to do with capitalism.
So at the end of the day, when Steven Pinker says, look, capitalism, the Enlightenment, is what we're saying, is actually fixing the world and making it a habitable, humane place that people can enjoy and live long and prosper in, he's right.
You know, we have the winning argument here, and they have the losing argument, and they can just get used to it.
So let's close with this question of free speech, because to me this is...
The only possibility we have for a civilized future.
And it sort of feels... I don't know if you did this as a kid.
You know, the escalator's coming down and you start running up it to see how far up you can get or whether you can get to the top.
Don't anyone come down with a lot of bags?
And I sort of feel like with free speech, we keep making the same case in the West.
We keep making the same arguments.
We're trying to climb back up.
But it feels like that escalator coming down is just getting faster and faster.
And it feels sometimes...
It's not an argument, just a feeling, but it feels a little bit...
It's kind of inevitable that we're going to lose this capacity for free speech, but nonetheless, I can't conceive of any way of giving up the fight before it completely collapses, because if there's even a tiny sliver of a chance that we can maintain open communication with a wide variety of belief systems, it's worth hanging on to, because the alternative is so horrendous.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's just no choice, in my opinion.
Free speech is the foundation of a democracy.
It's the thing that has made the West great.
The fact that we...
And the thing with free speech is there are so many dimensions to why it's important.
It's not just a power dimension, as in, you know, if someone has the power to silence your speech, then it's going to be at some point that you lose the power to prevent them from silencing you.
And so it's in your own interest to not silence other people so they won't silence you.
It's not just that. There are deeper moral issues.
It's like, okay, what gives you the right to silence someone?
Why do you think that your opinions and your subjective view of the world is so much more important than theirs?
No matter what they're saying, no matter who they are, you know?
How arrogant! And again, it's just hubris to think, That you are so perfect that you know that you can stop someone else from talking and be completely certain that that was the right decision.
And yet you will see this with radicalized college students all the time.
I don't want to call Ben Shapiro I'm not trying to undervalue his quality as a thinker, but what I mean is he's not a radical.
He's not some insane person preaching hate, and yet he gets it almost worse than anyone else.
It's incredible. But it's the arrogance of the idea that you have the right to shut someone down.
It is terrible and terrifying to me.
It's the beginning of totalitarianism and that's where it starts.
It's only the worst arguments that want to shut other people down.
You know, like if I'm getting into a ring with Mike Tyson, yeah, I want to blow dart to shoot into his neck because I'm not going to win that fight.
You know, I'm going to take him down.
And this to me comes down to this fundamental two syllables of reason.
Reason, reason, reason, reason, reason.
I feel like, you know, that Braveheart, let me step back from the mic here.
Reason! Like, just, and instead of freedom, because to me, that is the same.
We have to have a way of negotiating disputes that aren't based upon who could hook into political power, or who can shame other people, or who can ostracize and destroy their reputation and destroy their source of income.
We have to have a way of negotiating our differences that is objective, that is independent of will and dominance.
And like the scientific method, like mathematical reasoning and so on, we need This reason and evidence.
If we let that go, if we let go our common subjugation to empirical objective reality, we will end up in a civil war.
I mean, to me, this is absolutely – because the left believes that they're perfectly moral and perfectly justified in using force.
And the right doesn't want to use force, but eventually is going to get cornered.
And we've seen this happen over and over again in history.
We have to subjugate this like weird, angry, infantile will for dominance to the strictures of reason and evidence.
If we can do that, we can all play together.
And if we can't, we will surely wage war with each other.
Oh, you're absolutely right.
I mean, as soon as as soon as argumentation is taken off the table as a way of actually resolving disputes, then the only other resolving method is force.
And I tell you what, if you think you have the power to win that fight, then you better you better be the worst person around.
You better be the strongest.
You better be the toughest.
And I tell you what, looking at the snowflakes on the left, you ain't.
So I'm telling you, you know, when it when it comes down to it, you better a no one's going to have any sympathy for you.
And B, you're going to lose the fight that you're setting up by your own actions because of your own short sightedness.
So yeah, it has to be free speech.
It has to be. All right.
Well, I really, really appreciate your time today.
I wanted to remind people, and we'll put the links to all of this below, Sargon of Akkad 2K, Sargon of Akkad 100 on YouTube, Facebook, the same, minds.com forward slash Sargon of Akkad under bars between.
A great pleasure. I'm surprised it took so long.
We'll do this again soon, I hope.
And congratulations on getting your channel back.
You know, when you reach for your scam, but there's no sword.
It's good when you find it, you know, three steps away.
So I look forward to the work that you put out.
Thanks so much for the conversation today.
Well, thank you so much. And I just want to say, I really had a great time with this conversation.
I'd love to do it again.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh, and let's hear comments below.
People have been asking for this for a while, so let's hear the comments and get the feedback.
