4134 The State of Philosophy | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
It's my great pleasure to welcome Stefan Molyneux to the show.
Stefan hosts the largest, most popular, and most influential philosophical show in the entire world.
He has published 10 books on philosophical issues, he has compiled more than 3,500 podcasts, and he has been downloaded more than 250 million times.
He has been kind enough to host me on his show for a number of episodes, and now I'm very happy to return the favor.
Steph, you've discussed a staggering array of issues and ideas on your show, always from the perspective of sound, rational, and philosophical reasoning.
Your commitment to logic and liberty is legendary among the million or so followers who tune in regularly.
And today I want to talk to you about the state of philosophy in the modern world.
What can be done to promote a revitalization of philosophical rigor and critical thinking?
Well, sadly, it seems to be, Dr.
Pesta, that what's necessary is for disasters to accrue to the point where people are willing to change their thinking.
The goal, of course, of philosophy is to promote rigorous rational thinking that conforms to the evidence, that adapts itself to new evidence.
You know, reason plus evidence is the key.
And it's really tempting to not use reason and evidence.
If you want to stay confused, if you want to stay predatory, if you want to exploit people, of course, then you need to invent different rules for them than for you.
That's sort of the basis of hypocrisy.
And philosophy, by demanding absolute rational universals that conform to evidence, It tends to break down the barriers of power, it tends to break down the barriers of exploitation, and it tends to break down the barriers of misinformation and propaganda.
So, of course, it is the hope of rational thinkers that the sweet nectar of reason is going to be enough to get people to get off the slothy couch of irrationality, and for some that is certainly true.
That certainly was the case for me, for you, for others, but for a lot of people, It's like an addiction to irrationality, like an addiction to any dangerous substance.
For a lot of people, it's like they kind of have to hit rock bottom before they start looking for alternatives.
But of course, we want to say, we are here, waiting and ready with your alternatives when you're ready to see the path to reason.
Yeah, and you know, for me, as a 25-year university professor, I see a lot of this originating out of the schools.
Can you tell me when, and I've seen this from the 25 years I've been involved, back in the 1990s, there was much more of an emphasis on reason than there is now.
It's all been displaced by emotion.
How and why have universities who have been Absolute stalwarts for over a thousand years in Western culture of trying to promote a rational worldview and to encourage critical thinking.
How did that get lost? What do you think happened that changed it around so quickly?
Philosophy is more or less a dead issue on college campuses now.
Well... There's kind of a sweet deal for a lot of intellectuals.
Being an intellectual is a pretty good gig for the most part.
I mean, you're a university professor.
You know, a lot of them, I'm not saying you, but a lot of them don't work a massive number of hours.
They get months off in the summer.
You get sweet conferences in exotic locations.
You get sabbaticals where you get to be paid To write books.
It's kind of a sweet gig.
It is kind of an aristocracy.
And society, I think, historically has been willing, more than willing, to give this sweet gig to intellectuals on one condition.
Well, I guess two conditions. Number one, speak the truth.
We'll lavish you with all the perks that you can imagine.
You can get tenure, you can get summers off, but you've got to speak the truth.
And number two is, corollary to speaking the truth, is you have to endure discomfort.
Because whenever you're confronting Accumulated error.
There's a lot of power and sometimes even money invested in accumulated errors.
And so we expect the vanguards, the intellectuals, to speak truth to power and in return will lavish them with praise and summers off and all that kind of stuff.
And I think that gig has kind of fallen away for a lot of academics.
And now it is about avoid the angry pitchfork carrying mob And appease the angry and try not to ruffle too many feathers.
Now, of course, the moment that you pivot from speaking the truth to trying not to upset people, you empower the most emotionally volatile in society.
You say, I will speak the truth unless people get really upset.
Then what happens is the people who get the most upset, who tend to be the most immature, are the ones who end up dominating the discourse.
And now you end up with like, you know, rooms with little videos of puppies playing and hug machines.
And I think that's a crying chamber in a library somewhere in the U.S. So what happens is the fear of offense empowers the most emotionally volatile.
You step back from speaking the truth that upsets people and you kind of break The bond of what society is paying you for.
Yeah, I think that's a really good overview of how we got here.
I would add one thing, and I've seen this over the last five to ten years.
What used to be the faculty more or less caving in to emotionalism, not wanting to push back against irrational philosophies, primarily on college campuses from leftists.
What I'm seeing now, and this is true of many philosophy and history and sociology and English professors as well, we are actually now driving that irrationality.
We went from... We're cowardly, not willing to push back because we didn't want to be viewed as politically incorrect.
We didn't want to run afoul of institutional prerogatives.
Now it seems to me that so many on my side of the university, outside of the hard sciences, so many in the humanities and the social sciences now, are actually leading the charge to unmake reason in the name of hysteria and left-wing ideology.
That seems to be what's dominating the campus today.
Well, this, of course, is one of the great challenges of the postmodernist Movement, which is radical subjectivism combined with a weird kind of universal whiplashing morality.
Like, you're a racist! You know, there's no such thing as truth, but you're a racist!
There's no such thing as virtue, but you're a racist!
I mean, these things make no sense.
And this fundamentally comes out of the thirst for power.
The thirst for power is fundamentally anti-rational, because the way that you gain power over others is you convince them that your rule is necessary, and that that which is What is essential for your rule is denied to them.
So, of course, human beings, morally, should never initiate the use of force.
But the initiation of the use of force is basically the definition of the ruling state and the ruling power.
So they get to initiate force against you, but you don't get to initiate force against anyone.
This fundamental contradiction in what's called the non-aggression principle of the NAP, this fundamental contradiction that, well, it's good for me, but not for thee, is foundational to massive Ideologies that were so destructive in the 20th century,
from fascism to national socialism to communism, as these ideologies began to unravel, the promises, like the devil's promises, are always of wonders and wonderful things that communism was supposed to grant workers, you know, additional resources and peace and everyone could choose what they wanted to do and it would all be a paradise.
As that promised vision began to fall away, in other words, as the empirical evidence began to steadfastly pile up and deny Marxist ideology, I guess everybody faces a fork in the road when the accumulated evidence begins to go against your theory.
You know, if you think you're just some ladies man and real player, but no woman wants to go out with you, at some point the evidence is going to go up against your ideas.
And so when The evidence piled up against collectivism, against hierarchical oligarchism, against statism as a whole.
What did the leftists do?
Well, a rational response would be to say, well, we kind of got something wrong because the evidence goes against us.
But what they did was they said, let's get rid of reason.
Let's get rid of rationality.
And that way our ideology can't be judged as a failure.
Right, and of course, the same stick that they beat you with, they make themselves immune to.
Power itself, the pursuit of power, the elevation of power as the only ultimate good is a contradiction in terms.
It's also an absolute, right?
But it's an absolute that takes us back to a kind of jungle mentality.
It took us how many thousands of years to rise out of that jungle state by reason to higher understanding, and the quasi-philosophical left on college campuses seems to want to be dragging us back there.
Let's talk for a moment about the history of philosophy.
This is something that, you know, I get philosophy students all the time.
It's an odd thing.
I've taught at seven different universities.
And many of the philosophy students I get will tell me things like, you know, I don't understand, Dr.
Pesta, because when I come to your class, I tend to get a more...
I have a more tolerant view of philosophy than I find from my philosophy professors.
You allow us to talk about different things.
You allow us to speculate. You allow us to try to make arguments.
In my philosophy classes, what seems to have happened on the modern college campus is that there's two aspects to a typical philosophy major.
One is the history of philosophy.
It's a dead thing. This is what great philosophers thought for thousands of years.
We don't think this anymore. We've rejected the parameters of truth.
We've rejected the parameters of objectivity.
And then what happens, you got the history of philosophy, and then you're followed up by how philosophy is being co-opted or subordinated to science or to different kinds of technological imperatives or communicative imperatives.
You have the history of philosophy, which is a dead thing, and then basically an overview of how philosophy is morphing into something that's not philosophical at all, and they're very grieved by that.
What can you say about this evolution, and where did it come from?
So, I mean, all the way back to Socrates, this question of, you know, reason equals virtue equals happiness has been one of the foundational holy trinities of philosophy as a whole.
Now, there are great challenges to the history of philosophy because free speech as we understand it, and as we may in fact be losing these days, free speech is a very recent phenomenon in human life.
And I would actually argue that genuine free speech without gatekeepers has really only arisen over the past decade or so through the medium of the internet, our capacity to have and share this conversation without anyone saying, well, you can't say that or you guys can't talk about that.
So genuine free speech is very new.
So what happened, of course, throughout history is The rulers had control over who was called a philosopher, who was promoted as a philosopher, and the rulers generally did not particularly like the philosophers who did not serve their desire for power, for rule over others.
So this is not an argument regarding the content of any philosophers, but it's not a random sampling of great thinkers throughout history.
It is those allowed to publish, allowed to flourish, and those that professors like to teach.
So they tend to be pro-statist, Certainly since the 19th century, they tend to be skeptical or openly hostile towards religion.
And the opportunity to have a rational discussion without a gatekeeper, which really is what philosophy should be, is so recent that I would say that the history of philosophy started about 10 years ago and everything else beforehand was cherry-picked based upon what served the needs of the rulers.
Socrates. And we know about Socrates, of course, through Plato.
Socrates didn't write down anything himself.
Now, Plato, of course, saw his beloved mentor put to death by the angry mob in Athens through the court trial and so on, and then being forced to drink hemlock.
And the question is, why is Socrates so popular and so famous?
Now, he had some wonderful arguments and some great skepticism.
He was more like something that, like, you know, when you're trying to fix up old Metal, you use sometimes acid to get rid of the rust, so you can see the shine.
He was more like the acid than something that you would build.
Like, he undid a lot of things, which is very important.
You know, you want to build a new house, got to knock down the old house first.
But why do we know about Socrates?
Could it be? Because he said that you must obey the state.
That he said, I'm going to drink the hemlock because I have survived, as to my age of 70 or whatever it was, I have survived based upon the protection.
I will not run because I must obey the government and you all must obey the government.
Now, if he had not said that, would he have been so promoted and defended and so on?
So it's important to be skeptical when you look back through the tunnel of time and say, okay, this guy has very interesting ideas and so on, well worth discussing.
But what about all the other 20 guys that we don't hear about who also wrote but maybe weren't able to publish or their writings were destroyed?
We don't hear much about them.
So the history of philosophy is not a neutral survey.
It is very much cherry-picked, I think, by those who helped serve those in power.
Yeah, I think it's a great overview.
And, you know, you think about the history of philosophy from Socrates and Plato moving forward.
Generally, this is a huge generalization, but it does seem to be more or less apparent in the historical record that one of the things that seemed to join Western philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks till about the middle of the 18th century was the understanding of the pursuit of something like an objective philosophical.
Even if philosophers recognized pure objectivity on their part was impossible, the idea that we pursued objective values, universal truths, the idea that we had something in common as human creatures beyond just rhetoric or beyond just our cultural imperatives.
And to me, something really different happened when you got to Hegel, when Hegel basically – Kant is a very dense and difficult philosopher to read, and it's almost impossible for any two people to conclude that he meant the same thing.
However, along came Hegel and basically turned what Kant was doing into dialectic, sort of ideologized Kant in some meaningful ways.
And ever since then, that sparked off on Nietzsche and Marx, even Freud to a degree.
After all that happened, it seemed that philosophy threw its lot in with subjectivists and ideologists and sort of went away from those larger narratives.
Is that a fair statement?
And if so, what does that mean today?
How much of what is going on in modern campuses today where we've now pretty much embraced only ideology?
Is that a track that you see taking place?
And is there something we can do as modern thinkers to try to push back a little bit?
Well, of course, Bacchus.
both Kant and Hegel Served the state.
And both of them said basically that collectivism rules and that you must subjugate yourself to the will of the ruler under almost any circumstances that could be conceived of.
Okay, so big problem, I think, was posed to philosophy by the success of science.
Now you go back to Francis Bacon and the development of the scientific method.
And that is a very powerful thing.
The two things that really challenged philosophy was, number one, the free market.
And number two, science.
So these two mental disciplines, or these two mental paradigms of free trade and scientific inquiry that subjects all conjectures to physical evidence, these two, I think it's not even arguable, Dr.
Pesta, that they have been the most successful mental structures in human history, because we're able to do everything we do, including this conversation in the modern world because of the free market, the remnants thereof.
And science has been extraordinarily powerful.
I mean, just over 200 years ago, human beings didn't even know that blood circulated around the body.
And now you can swallow robots to cure things, at least tomorrow.
So these two paradigms have been extraordinarily successful.
Now, they did come to some degree out of philosophy.
Francis Bacon, John Locke, and others who talked about free trade, individual rights, and the value of the scientific method.
But these two are objective, universal, rational, empirical disciplines, free market economics and the scientific method.
And science, sorry, philosophy has had a big trouble, a big, big problem with all of these because how is philosophy supposed to compete with these objective, rational, universal disciplines if it caves into subjectivism?
So I think what happened was the scientific method and free trade produced a huge amount of wealth and value.
And what happened was, as Darwin came along in the middle of the 19th century, there was a shift from the Christian ethics of self-restraint to Darwinian ethics of survival of the fittest.
And of course, we all know the sort of phrase social Darwinism, that there's this idea that we should not be guiding ourselves according to universal values and universal ethics and so on.
But kind of Kennedy style, we should simply seek to manipulate, to control, to be a sophist, to gain as many resources as humanly possible For ourselves, our family, our gene pool, our tribe, in a Darwinian sort of multiplication sense.
And so, this challenge of some paradigms leading to great wealth, but that great wealth being then very attractive to those who wish to gather those resources through Darwinian survival of the fittest has been a huge challenge and contradiction.
Philosophy should be working very hard to resolve this contradiction, but what we have now with survival of the fittest, well, how do you survive?
You survive through aggression.
You flourish through aggression.
What's happened now is, to the victor go the spoils, might is right, aggression dominates, and so what we have now is less debate and more aggression in college campuses, because they can get that brass ring of power, they can get those jobs, they can keep their enemies away, not through rational discourse, which is what philosophy would promote, but rather through aggression, through violence, through pulling smoke alarms, through throwing smoke bombs, through hitting people with bike locks.
This is pure Darwinian evolutionary power.
Yeah, and I think what's really disturbing about this is that when we divorced philosophy, we recall that, right, in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, science was actually referred to as natural philosophy, that there was a much more holistic relationship between philosophical thinking and quasi-scientific thinking,
right? The argument that philosophy That not just theology, we don't just study the philosophy of God, but in the late Middle Ages, we opened the universities and we decided that we can apply philosophical thinking to the natural world.
And somewhere in the middle of the Enlightenment, philosophy got jettisoned, really.
And what we've seen is the growing ideological imperative that you just said.
But what really scares me is we're already beginning to see the consequence of making no room for philosophy within the dictates of science or the dictates of the free market.
What happens is that you see the free market now being deconstructed, the very free market that gave rise to this freedom, and more ominously, you see what's happening on college campuses with science.
Now global warming, regardless of the paucity of real scientific evidence to prove certain aspects of it, is being taken as gospel.
We are now ignoring biologically demonstrated male and female.
I make this point all the time to my college kids.
If you could step on a modern university, Steph, they'll tell you that absolute male and female are social constructs.
They don't exist. Even though biology and chemistry can verify them, they don't exist.
Yet, 76 different made-up variants of gender, you damn well better treat them as if they are absolutely true, or the power of the university will come down upon you.
So science itself now is being corroded away because we've removed philosophy from it, and the free markets now are being viciously attacked by Marxist imperatives that are only about, as you say, power.
Well, it is one of these kind of wild contradictions when people can say, That gender does not exist when they only exist because gender exists.
You know, you need an egg, you need a sperm, you need some friction, if I remember rightly, and then you get a real-life human being after about nine months, hopefully.
And so this idea that we're going to throw out gender when we're only here to throw out gender because gender wasn't thrown out by nature is one of these contradictions that any sort of rational, critical thinker would expose in about 20 seconds, but remains opaque to many.
Now, I think the big problem, Dr.
Pesta, is this. That within a theological construct, ethics are universal within the confines of that religious tradition, right?
So within Christianity in general, I know that there was lots of infighting among various Christian sects, but in general, you can have a universal morality within a religious framework, and that is to be respected and understood.
However, when you get science, science goes beyond culture.
Science goes beyond country.
Science goes beyond borders. It's like mathematics or logic itself.
It is not confined to any particular cultural context.
In fact, cultural context will often get in the way of the universality of science and mathematics and engineering and physics and so on.
Now, the problem is, of course, that when the – sorry, free trade as well.
Just to jump back for a sec. Free trade is also international.
People often forget that 150 years ago, there was more, quote, globalism in trade than there is even now.
And this is one of the reasons why the 19th century, at least in Western Europe, was a relatively peaceful time.
When goods cross borders, soldiers are much less likely to cross borders because countries are sort of intertwined.
So there was an internationalism and a lack of cultural relativism or cultural context for reason, for evidence, for science, for mathematics, for free trade, for engineering, you name it.
What needed to happen, in my view, Dr.
Pastor, was that philosophers needed to work very hard to find a way to bring universal ethics to an increasingly secular world.
Now, the rulers did not want that to happen.
They loved absolutism in the realm of science.
Why? Because the realm of science gave them wonderful weapons with which to disassemble their enemies.
They loved objectivity in the realm of medicine, of course, because it gave them cures and it helped keep their population healthier and thus more productive.
They loved objectivity and rationality in the realm of the market because it produced a massive amount of wealth that they could then tax and so on.
But if objectivity then begins to swing to ethics, then the whole pyramid structure of societies throughout history begins to be questioned.
Like, okay, why do you get to initiate the use of force, but I don't?
And so I think what happened was rationality was promoted in various human disciplines that helped, I mean, definitely grew freedom and all of that, but helped to serve the power of the rulers.
Extending it to ethics as a whole, which has certainly been one of my major endeavors over the past sort of 11 years as a public intellectual, extending it to the realm of ethics has proven very, very challenging.
And so what's happened is because ethics was left to be relativistic and subjectivistic, religion was taken out of ethics to a large degree in the West and was filled by the void of anti- Yeah, and I really want to touch base on that.
That's an important issue. You and I have done, and you've been gracious enough to have me on your show almost a dozen times now, and not always, but many times we talk about theological or religious, historical and contemporary issues with religion.
I'm always absolutely stunned, Stefan, looking through the comments for those talks.
How there's a significant part of your very great audience, there's a significant part of it that doesn't even want to acknowledge the fact that you can talk rationally about things like religion or about things like God.
There's an immediate knee-jerk reaction that if you're talking about the Ten Commandments, if you're talking about the devil as he manifests itself throughout Scripture, you're talking about Christian history, suddenly they'll want to turn you off and say, this is not an argument.
Sort of the opposite. Of what you get from the campus ideological radicals, right?
This argument that somehow you're demeaning philosophy by talking about religious impulses in human beings or spirituality or even historical manifestations of religion in real meaningful ways that have impacted culture.
Can you talk about this other side of the coin there?
Because it's puzzling.
On the one hand, your audience demands from you, and you've given them high levels of philosophical thinking.
Yet when you apply that same philosophical rationalism to ethics or to morality or to spiritual concerns, boy, they get angry quick.
How do you account for that? Well, so people think that there's freedom often in a lack of personal responsibility, in a lack of self-restraint.
You know, I'm free to eat whatever I want.
It's like, yes, but then you're not free to control your weight anymore now.
You know, I mean, so people like philosophy a lot until it comes to their own personal life and their own personal decisions.
Are you willing to speak the truth?
Not just to, you know, typing on comments on the Internet or saying, I don't want I don't like the Federal Reserve, which isn't really going to budge one digit in one computer in the Federal Reserve accounts.
But when it comes to your own personal life, that is where people have often, the taser of philosophy hits them kind of in the belly and they like to jump back.
And so people have grown up with a lot of relativism, a lot of subjectivism in ethics.
And when you then begin to try to resurrect universal objective ethics that are binding on everyone, that require you to pursue particular levels of responsibility, people do recoil quite a bit from that.
And I think that's a real shame because we think that there's freedom.
In hedonism, we think that there's freedom in license.
We think that there's freedom in the dissolution of self-restraint.
But there isn't. I guess there's a certain momentary burst of lack of consequences, but those consequences simply get pushed down the road of time and accrue to later in life and particularly into your society as a whole.
Now, I do believe that all people of good conscience, religious, agnostic, atheist, you name it, really, really need To have universal ethics.
We really need to be able to have moral statements that we cannot just make as a matter of faith, as a matter of personal conscience, as a matter of social expediency and so on.
We really need to have that solid rock.
You build your house upon rock and not sand.
We need to have that solid rock of universal ethical commandments that we can rationally and morally bind others to and bind ourselves by.
And if you want to call it God's work, that has been my goal.
Because a lot of people now, we have multiculturalism.
It's been a huge problem as well in terms of the universality.
Because when you have people from different religious faiths all trying to live in a particular community, it becomes very difficult, if not downright impossible, to teach universal ethics.
Because each religion is going to have different emphases.
On various ethics. So you used to, of course, get Christian teachings of ethics in government schools until such time as, you know, the Marxists and other religions and other belief systems and atheists and agnostics and the atheists can be highly litigious about this.
Now values have been stripped out of the teaching of children in terms of universal ethics because of multiculturalism and also because philosophers have not worked to create a secular Proof for universal ethics.
So I think that is the major goal.
And I am actually very angry at philosophers, particularly atheist philosophers as a whole, for ripping down the church without giving people another place to live, because it is one stormy world out there.
Yeah, and I think that's a really well-said argument.
I make the same one to my university kids, that what theology does, and all theology is, and this drives people nuts when you say this, it is philosophizing about God.
There is a room for deductive philosophy as well as inductive, right?
I mean, that many of our scientific assumptions started first as deductive thoughts that were then inductively proven.
And while you can't prove religious arguments the same way, that doesn't mean there's not value in those conversations.
And one of the things I like about the theological history, particularly of Western culture, I mean, we've got to separate, right?
We know that religions and religious people do bad things of all walks of life, as do secular atheist people.
Set that aside for a second.
The inability, I think, of some people out there in the audience to distinguish religion from the philosophy of religion, I think, is a tragic loss for Western culture.
Because one of the major arguments of the arc of Western philosophy for the last 2,000 years has been that right thinking, critical thinking, talking about moral values, it engenders in people responsibility.
Like you just said, personal responsibility, boundaries, self-restraint.
And when you took the philosophy out of our understanding of religion, when you made theology just seem stupid because you couldn't somehow—theologians couldn't somehow take a 50-foot-tall Q-tip and swab a cloud and grow God spores in a Petri dish, that therefore all moral responsibility went away.
And you just said—what I love what you just said is that this idea that I'm philosophical until you tell me— I have to restrain my behavior some way, and then it all falls to pieces.
Well, here's a fascinating thing as well, which is atheist intolerance.
Oh, I'm going to get some emails on this.
But nonetheless, you know, I can't say it's important to speak truth and not speak the truth.
So here's the thing. As you very well know, in particular, the Catholic Church, Dr.
Pastor, had enormous respect for non-Christian thinkers.
I mean, in the Quattrocento, they referred to Aristotle as the philosopher.
And to study Aristotle was considered to be getting closer to God.
Aristotle, of course, born hundreds of years before Christ, not a Christian, was a pagan and, well, we don't really know his private beliefs because, again, it was not very popular to speak about private beliefs publicly if it didn't conform to popular narratives.
But if you look at the degree to which the Catholic Church, the Christian tradition as a whole, has embraced non-Christian philosophers, they didn't get a hold of the Greek texts written by non-Christian thinkers and burned them all as sacrilegious to the faith.
They absorbed and said, listen, this guy didn't know Jesus, but man, he knew how to think, and we've got a lot to learn from him in terms of teaching us how to think.
And these people have a lot to say about ethics, even though they did not get their ethics from the Christian tradition.
And I just sort of gave the one example of Aristotle.
There are, of course, many, many others.
But if you look at Christianity's historical embrace of non-Christian thinkers saying, well, you're not a Christian, but you have important things to say about ethics, I would, of course, invite My atheist friends to say to the church, you're not an atheist, but you have important things to say about ethics, which were developed over thousands of years, which are very, very important.
We really, really should have a conversation that isn't just mud-throwing.
Well, no less a Catholic figure than Dante Alighieri, right?
I mean, in the 14th century, he referred to Aristotle as the master of the men who know.
It's a beautiful title, right?
I mean, so you're exactly right that there wasn't this tension that one of the things I think that made Western culture so remarkable, even beyond its religious, I think the religious philosophical tradition sort of Laid the foundation for it, but it's this idea that the West has always done that, right?
The West has been willing both, A, to criticize itself philosophically in ways that non-Western cultures don't.
You will not hear a critique of Islam in the schools that Islamic kids are going to in the Middle East.
You won't hear it. In places like China, Japan, the former communist states, you are not hearing a critique of communism in those schools.
You're getting pure ideology. And one of the things that the West, and I think a lot of it has to do with that theological foundation of thinking and philosophy, We are willing to criticize ourselves, to look at our own.
The history of slavery, we're willing to consider where we have fallen down.
We're even, huge factions inside modern churches are more than willing to critique the history of churches.
And so we have that here, but as we move away from that, it's funny, isn't it, that the secular atheist progressives who run universities are becoming vastly more inquisitorial, aren't they, than what we've seen in churches over the last couple hundred years, and they're becoming more fascist, too. Well, of course, one of the great criticisms of the Church involves the Spanish Inquisition, which, you know, obviously wrong, but, you know, a couple thousand dead, not to be trifled with, but compared to communism's hundred million, it's a rounding error.
And so what is tragic to me is that the West was founded on self-criticism, on the willingness to challenge the most cherished assumptions.
And, you know, as I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said something like, bring every opinion, every idea, every argument before the throne of reason and see if they If they pass the test.
So this idea that there was no such thing as untouchable thought, there was no such thing as blasphemy in terms of arguments, has unfortunately under the secular largely leftist left, well, they have created these kinds of witch hunts.
They've created a kind of Spanish Inquisition where people get dragged in front of Star chambers and shadow courts and grilled for their adherence to often confusing and contradictory doctrine, where people's lives are destroyed, people are attacked, people are even sometimes killed for deviation from doctrine.
That, of course, is a very foundational feature of totalitarianism.
And the foundational features, as we know from Lenin's show trials, from Hitler's crushing of dissidents and execution of dissidents from the gulags, Under a wide variety of Soviet leaders, this idea that there's a confusing, challenging, contradictory doctrine, but unless you follow it, which is fundamentally impossible, the state has the right to harm you.
The mob has the right to destroy your livelihood and smear your reputation.
This is a very, very challenging time.
I think that it's inevitable because now we do have the free speech of the intellect.
Now, everyone's like, yay, you know, we can have these unfettered, un-gatekeeper conversations.
That's fantastic. It's going to be wonderful progress from here on in.
Everybody forgets the blowback.
There's a lot of human society that for hundreds of thousands of years has been heavily invested in keeping certain ideas at bay.
The fact that the internet has opened them up is wonderful, but the blowback is going to be considerable, and that is what is occurring at the moment.
Yep, and that's, I think, where we are with our college campuses.
That's the blowback, right?
We come up with speech codes, this idea.
We've had to, literally in the West, we've had to invent microaggressions because the macroaggressions just don't exist anymore.
I mean, we don't have anything like the kind of racism or the sexism or the homophobia that a modern university has to keep peddling to its kids, even without evidence, because if we recognize progress, if we recognize this This arc of history and philosophy as you and I have spent the last half hour talking about, if they recognize that, then they have to concede that there is more good and there is more good in freedom and there is more good in liberty and markets and absolute freedom of speech.
There's more good in that that benefits all of us than the consequences, which are this quasi-Marxist shutting down of everything, the political star chambers, the reimposition of failed Marxist governments, the destruction of speech itself is what follows in the wake of that.
Well, you always see this coming up, Dr.
Pesta, when these crises occur, and that is thought crime.
Thought crime has become the foundation of the modern mentality, and we see this all the time when you read about people on the internet.
People who are disliked are given pejorative labels, you know, alt-right, far-right, whatever it is.
I mean, that's not an argument.
A label, of course, is not an argument, but what they're saying Is not, I'm going to evaluate the content of what someone is saying and find the logical flaws, the empirical flaws, and push back against the argument, but rather I'm going to attack the person.
And that requires not just, of course, a personal kind of linguistic sadism, but it also requires that you grant yourself the ability to read people's minds.
I mean, just look at the term racist, right?
Now, of course, if somebody is saying, well, this group is inferior and this group should rule.
Okay, absolutely. But then you don't need to call someone a racist.
You just need to quote them.
It's going to be pretty evident from there on in.
But when people don't say that kind of stuff, but they're called a racist, what people are doing is giving themselves the ability to read intention In the absence of evidence.
And we see this again all the time in Stalin's show trials, where people could have been perfect communists, so to speak, for decades, but people in the court know what the contents of their mind is, know that they're reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries.
They don't have to provide any evidence because they've given themselves the power to read minds, to read intentions, and therefore you don't need evidence.
Now, the idea of mind reading as the way in which you judge people rather than looking at the empirical evidence of their arguments, their statements, and so on, It's wonderful for sadists and power-hungry people because you don't have that inconvenient barrier to get over called feel like proving anything or really not so much.
Do you feel like evaluating anyone's arguments or not so much?
You can just call in a linguistic airstrike and then unleash the mob on people without the inconvenient barrier of having to prove anything.
It's a very, very dangerous time because thought crimes, and again, It's funny that the secular left, which would have decried against a priest who said, well, I believe you're motivated by Satan.
It's like, well, I haven't done anything.
I haven't said anything. No, no, no, but I know.
I can see. And it's like, here, mob!
They would have said that that was a terrible thing, and it would be, but it's certainly no better when the left does it.
Right. And it's also an attribute of God, isn't it?
This idea that without having to have any proof, without being able to actually know what you're thinking, we can condemn you because we know better.
It's one more way in the absence of real philosophical thinking that man plays God.
What I love about talking to you, Steph, as we wind down, and I want to throw this out there for the readers.
Somebody wants to take one of my classes, they have to take an ACT test, they have to spend thousands of dollars to go to university, only 25 kids get it at a time.
But you're a philosopher who is teaching everybody at your site, and you're not asking a dime for it.
You're not charging anybody anything for it.
You're giving people this kind of deep philosophical discourse generously and openly.
And so it's always a pleasure to speak with you, my friend, and I urge all who watch this interview to head immediately over to freedomainradio.com, become part of the movement, and see what's going on there.
As long as we keep this free, as long as we keep this open, take advantage of free markets, and take advantage of our ability to speak without censoring ourselves, we are going to be in great shape.
