Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

July 24, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

25:43

4150 What Pisses Me Off About 'Intellectuals' Who Ignore Real Problems

Recently Stefan Molyneux was asked if philosophy could really be understood by the average person - and it unleashed a flurry of passion and enthusiasm which is on display for his answer. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Great question from the comment section on YouTube here.
	And the question was, can philosophy really be understood by the average person?
	Has Steph ever made an argument to that effect?
	Well, kind of.
	I mean, I had a podcast many years ago called The ABCs of UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics, about how to explain ethics to children.
	But it's a great question, and it sat the...
	Wheels of my mind in quite rapid motion.
	And I want to share with you my thoughts about this, because it turns out I just tripped a huge vein of volcanic passion within me.
	So strap yourself in, because this is perhaps what I care about the most intellectually.
	So it's taken a while to get here, but let's go.
	So there's an interesting question Which is the relationship between ability, need, and generosity.
	Ability, need, and generosity.
	So let's say that you know the Heimlich maneuver.
	I actually had the granddaughter on the show.
	But if you know the Heimlich maneuver, you know that someone to cough up a piece of fishbone that's stuck in their throat or something like that.
	Someone right next to you.
	If someone is choking to death on something, you know the Heinlecht Maneuver, you're very good at it, do you have an obligation to go and help that person?
	This is a very, very interesting question.
	If you are on a boat and you see someone stranded on the ocean, do you have an obligation?
	You understand, right? If you have the ability and there is a need What is your requirement to be generous?
	So if you go and, you know, help the person cough up whatever's stuck in their throat, well, you're potentially saving their life.
	It certainly interferes with your meal, right, and may interrupt a great story that you're telling.
	And do you do it?
	If you're Jesus, if you're Jesus and you have the power to heal lepers with a touch, How much of your day should be spent touching lepers?
	Very interesting questions.
	Very serious questions as well.
	Now, I do have this babblefish-like ability to translate complex abstractions into easily consumable arguments with the allegories and the analogies and the vivid speech and the personal anecdotes and The occasional flowering into song and all the kind of things that I do to help get ideas across.
	Now, if I have that ability, what is my relationship to a world that is desperately in need of philosophical certainty?
	Desperately in need of philosophical certainty.
	Now, the question of whether or not we can instruct the average person, let's say somebody who's not particularly smart, not well-versed in philosophy and so on, can we explain philosophy to that person?
	Well, of course.
	And we actually have the empirical evidence every day of billions of people around the world of limited intellectual ability having morality explained to them.
	Said people, of course, being...
	We berns! Children.
	That's what I'm talking about. Children.
	When children hit another kid, we say don't hit.
	When children grab another kid's toy, we say don't grab.
	When children hurl abuse at each other, we say don't hurl abuse at each other.
	And we provide some...
	Reasons that are given, you know, like how would you like it if it was done to you and so on, right?
	So this is a golden rule.
	It's kind of an extension of the Kantian categorical imperative, which is not a very snappy way of saying do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
	Kant said act as if your own action became a principle that was applied universally.
	So if you want to go steal something, would you accept that stealing became a universal principle and so on.
	It's a kind of what would the categorical imperative do?
	Bracelet is not quite as catchy as what would Jesus do, but it's not a bad introduction to ethics, but it fails the test of universality, right?
	Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
	If you're the biggest and strongest guy in the village, then you're fine with physical size and strength being the arbiter of disputes.
	Right? You're fine. If you're the biggest kid in the playground, then you may be fine saying, oh yeah, no, the biggest kid should get the lunch money of all the smaller kids, right?
	Bigger kids should bully little kids.
	And you know you're not going to be bullied because you're a big, mean kid and everyone's scared of you, right?
	So it really doesn't go that far when it comes to universality.
	You know, if... If you're in charge of the government and you want to do bad things, you have no problem saying, yeah, anyone who's in charge of the government should be able to do bad things, because you're currently in charge of the government.
	And I understand that there are arguments against it, but it kind of doesn't work when it comes to universality, which is why it's never taken on as an adequate substitute or substitution for Christian ethics.
	Because, of course, Christianity has the commandments, the all-perfect, all-moral God, this is what you have to do, so the source of morality exists.
	It's not that complicated.
	And what you have to do is not that complicated, at least in terms of just establishing civilization.
	You know, don't steal, don't murder, don't...
	I guess a couple of other things which we've added in the modern world, but the basics of respecting property rights and so on are sort of well established in the Ten Commandments.
	There are more complicated things to do in the Christian world, which is, you know, forgive your enemies and so on.
	But as far as just getting things done, well, not that complicated.
	So you could say, well, the average person needs a God, a set of commandments, they need heaven, they need hell, they need to be scared out of their...
	We need breaches and they need to be lured with the infinite anglerfish of heaven in order to be able to act right, but I don't.
	In a lot of ways we're kind of past that.
	Science has simply proven to be too efficacious and too powerful for us to go back to more mystical explanations of the source of morality.
	So, we instruct children on ethics all the time.
	Even atheists will not say to kids, you know, go hit another kid or go steal from another kid or whatever it is, right?
	So, we instruct children all the time on ethics.
	And so... The question then becomes, how do we instruct adults on ethics?
	So saying that people of limited cognitive ability can learn virtue, can learn philosophy, can learn principles, well, we do that to kids all the time.
	The question is, how do we do it with adults?
	Now, the one thing that really grinds my gears is intellectual elitism.
	God, it bugs me like very little else.
	It is a true grit in the mind's oyster shell which produces the glowing pearl of discontent and hostility.
	Okay, well, that analogy may have escaped my grasp just a little.
	But no wonder we hit a bump on the road.
	We don't look in the review. We just keep going.
	So... Elitism.
	Now, to me, there's elitism that has formed way back in the day when there were religious elites, like a priestly class, before the printing press, before the translation of the Bible into the vernacular.
	In various religions around the world, there were people who had the mysteries, the Elysium mysteries.
	They had the revelations.
	They had the mystical insights.
	And this goes from what we think of as organized religion all the way over.
	To Plato's philosopher kings who have received insights from the universe about how the world should be organized and who should do what, who should be punished, who should be rewarded.
	But we can't quite get round to explaining it to you because it is the aforementioned, smoke this, maybe you'll get it, mystical insight of infinite totalitarianism.
	Do this! Why?
	Insight I cannot explain to you.
	Well, that's just a form of argument from authority.
	It's a form of intellectual bullying, and it is horribly elitist.
	Now, we can understand some of the elitism of Plato, given that he saw his beloved mentor Socrates put to death by an irrational, angry mob.
	So we can understand that he maybe wanted to give the reins of power without having to explain anything.
	How that power was being exercised and why, too, the philosopher kings not involving the Socrates murdering mob too much, if at all.
	So, this...
	Elite revelation as the basis for political authority occurs throughout history in philosophies and so on.
	In Kant, he says that there's no rational way by which the general population can oppose the will of the monarch.
	There was, of course, under Hegel, the world spirit that manifested itself in particular countries, having the right to dominate other countries as expressed through the political will of their leadership and There was, of course, the mystical insights of particular priestly classes in India and in Tibet and other places.
	And then, of course, on the more secular side, in totalitarian systems such as fascism and Nazism, and communism in particular, there was the reading of the texts by the elite, the communist texts and so on, and if you didn't agree with them, well, you were just infected with false consciousness and would have to be imprisoned or destroyed, you know, There's nothing that cures bad ideas apparently in communism like lead poisoning, i.e.
	bullet to the brain. So having this mystical insight, having this incommunicable absolute that gives you the right to do whatever you want and no one can oppose you because they just don't have this magic mist called insight, called truth, which can't ever be explained to anyone else.
	Well, that's elitism and that is terrible.
	So to me, To me, and I'm afraid I'm going to do a little flyby of modern atheists a little bit here.
	To me, having a moral system that cannot be easily explained to children and cannot be easily explained to a reasonable adult of slightly below to average intelligence, you know, maybe IQ 90 and above.
	Ah, you know, 85.
	I think, I mean, I've certainly had conversations like that.
	And I explained the basis of my ethical system to my daughter when she was two.
	And, you know, we used little puppets.
	We used figurines.
	It took about 20 minutes.
	And she's never forgotten it.
	And it's easy.
	So to me, if you can explain something to a two-year-old, I think my daughter is obviously intelligent to a significant degree.
	But, you know, whether it takes 20 minutes or 40 minutes or a day doesn't really matter.
	Matter, there's just ways to explain it and have it make sense.
	So if you don't have a moral system that can be explained to a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a five-year-old or whatever, if you don't have a moral system that can be explained and be actionable to a person of below average intelligence, Then you're a totalitarian elitist who is shredding the empowerment of free will around the world.
	I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but that is the case and I will continue to make that case until reason and evidence convince me otherwise, because it is reason and evidence that have led me in this particular direction.
	So, if you look at someone like Richard Dawkins, he says, I don't want any objective morality.
	I don't want any absolute morality.
	Because he asserts absolute morality with, you know, the sooty burning the widow of the guy who died in India, or female genital mutilation, or...
	Death for leaving a religion.
	So he associates that kind of absolutism with irrational fundamentalism, and therefore he doesn't want any absolute morality.
	The explanation of morality is reciprocal altruism that developed in small tribes where you knew everyone, and we've got to be kind and nice, and it's just positive adjectives with some vague anthropological game theory says it might work this way.
	But I don't really, really know how that can be explainable to a two-year-old in an actionable way or explainable in a way that the average adult of slightly below intelligence or below average intelligence can understand and be empowered by and be empowered by.
	Smart people will generally be relatively good.
	Less intelligent people are more...
	They have a slightly higher tendency to grab things in the moment and not really concern themselves so much with the consequences of their actions.
	So, having a moral system that requires very high intelligence is like having a diet book for people who were already of normal weight.
	You know what I mean? Should target smokers.
	I mean, shouldn't go to some place where there aren't any smokers and paste all this anti-smoking stuff all over the place or a place where people can't even get a hold of cigarettes and post your anti-smoking.
	Diet books should focus on people who are overweight or underweight, I suppose.
	Exercise books, introduction to exercise books should be aimed at people who aren't already elite athletes and, well, you get there.
	Anti-drinking should not necessarily be focused solely on An already teetotaling community.
	You understand, right? You got to aim. And so the people who have lower intelligence need clear, concise, actionable comprehension of morality, of philosophical principles.
	And so if you have a system that is, you know, this kind of modern stuff, which is this vague mix of scientism and consequentialism and pragmatism and, well, you know, we can order a world in which the best water is delivered to the right people and the best food and the most growth and the best science and the this and the sewage and the that.
	We can do all of that.
	And it's like, how does that tell the average person don't lie, don't steal?
	Well, that's a... That's a big problem.
	Now, Richard Dawkins, who I still have some residual affection for, by the by.
	But Richard Dawkins, of course, takes his money from the state, right?
	So can he really get down with property rights?
	No, he's got to get into this vague, for the good of society, and he's got to get into this vague, positive adjective territory, and he's got to get into this vague, here's how it evolved.
	Here's how it evolved is not an argument at all.
	Rape is an evolutionary strategy that can have some significant advantages genetically.
	I mean, look at Genghis Khan. Killed off, what, a quarter of the world's population and 10% of the people in the region and now directly descended from his rather spinning and overspraying balls.
	Well, that's an evolutionary advantage for him and for his genetics.
	So the fact that it was around in evolution does not really give you much of a moral standard in the here and now.
	And saying that its reciprocal altruism is productive in particular in groups Well, if you believe that, then of course you should be very much against diversity and multiculturalism because then you get all these ethnic and religious groups who prefer their own members to other people coming into a society that's nominally under an objective legal framework and they're all going to manipulate that law and those politics for the advantage of those within their own clan or group and at the expense of everyone outside their own clan or group.
	So to be consistent, for people like that to be consistent, If they say, well, you know, morality comes out of in-group evolutionary genetic proximity preferences and reciprocity, my tribe, my family,
	my kids, my group, my religion, my ethnicity, my race, my whatever, Well, then they should be enormously opposed to the inevitable balkanization and fragmentation of society that occurs because the ethics developed on reciprocal genetic proximity altruism end up crashing together and all fighting each other left, right, and center to gain control of the state, much like religions did in the past when the state controlled religion.
	Because the state controls the economy, everybody who wishes to transfer resources unjustly through the power of the state in the economy tries to control the government to get the leaves of the power to send resources to To their friends and their ethnicity and their religion and their culture and their race at the expense of other people.
	They don't really care. So even if we say, along with people like Dawkins, that it was reciprocal genetic proximity altruism, That is the cause of why we have morality.
	Well, then you should say, well, we can't really mix all of these genetics together then because that's going to cause a massive fragmentation in society.
	I don't know if he's made that case.
	I haven't seen it. But let's just say...
	I wouldn't be overly surprised if he hasn't.
	Oh, people like that. If we say, well, it's the greatest good for the greatest number...
	Guess what? The greatest number don't have a voice.
	They don't speak as one. So then what you have to do is you have to appoint an elite group to perform the central planning calculus of which allocation of which resources will result in the greatest good for the greatest number.
	Who knows? Who knows?
	I don't know what the greatest good for the greatest number is.
	I mean, I can certainly say...
	Freedom is the answer.
	The non-aggression principle, respect for property rights, don't initiate force against other people.
	Sure, but that's a principle.
	That's not a consequentialist argument.
	There's no if there.
	If you want the greatest good for the greatest number of people, you should do this, this, and that, because a lot of people don't.
	You can't have universality and then say people have evolved for in-group preferences with their own tribe or religion or race or culture or Whatever, right?
	I mean, you simply, you can't have both.
	You can't say, well, there's a universal morality, and at the same time, morality was developed and is justified by genetic in-group preference.
	Reciprocal altruism over time.
	Pick one, right?
	Universalism is the opposite of genetic in-group preference as a whole.
	So, the greatest good for the greatest number, it's hard to argue with.
	But what does it even mean?
	The greatest number of people are of average intelligence.
	And what is the greatest good for the greatest number of people?
	Well, can they speak for themselves? No.
	The greatest number of people often disagree.
	Look at most elections. Certainly in the two-party bichromatic rainbow dichotomies like America, they're usually decided within a few percentage points.
	So what is the greatest good for the greatest number when...
	There's very little overlap in oppositional worldviews, like left and right, our selected case, selected libertarian and socialist and so on, communist and free market and so on.
	Very little overlap between those two groups, so the greatest good for the greatest number is simply another excuse to elevate people into this elitism.
	Well, clearly the greatest group can't possibly know what's good for it in the long run, so I'm going to appoint myself with my tweedy little mustache and my elbow patches and my blackboard.
	I'm going to appoint myself arbiter of what is the greatest good for the greatest number because the wee little sheeple can't speak for themselves, so I will speak on their behalf, thus gathering a massive amount of political and economic power for myself and my friends.
	I can't do that guy on one breath for too long.
	Major general blah blah blah.
	You can actually search on YouTube.
	Somebody made a video of it years ago.
	It's pretty funny. There's an elite situation, right?
	And to me, if you're not coming up with a moral system that can be easily explained to people as a whole, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily easy for them to get if it goes against their programming, right?
	I mean, UPB, the system of ethics that I have developed, universally preferable behavior, pretty simple to explain.
	I've done a whole bunch of PowerPoints.
	I got a free book at freedomandradio.com.
	And I've had tons of debates on it with people.
	Most people get it, and certainly when people aren't programmed to the opposite, then they get it pretty quickly.
	I've explained it to a couple of kids here and there, and...
	It's all been perfectly fine.
	And the children of the people I know who follow peaceful parenting, who reason with their children and so on, the kids get a tickety-boo, no problem at all.
	So if you aren't creating and working your tail off to create a system of ethics that is easily explainable to children and people of below average intelligence, then you're setting up, you're laying the foundation or the groundwork for Totalitarianism,
	right, for dictatorship. Because if the average person cannot easily understand ethics, why be good, what goodness is, then you're not empowering them to make rational decisions in their own lives about virtue.
	And so if you have this big collectivist concept Well, we experiment with a bunch of different things and we figure out what's best for humanity as a whole, right?
	They're human beings. They're not pawns in your psycho scheme of utopian control.
	They're genuine human beings.
	Work to empower them.
	Don't work to create...
	I mean, I should say, it sort of reminds me of the biologist.
	Well, we need a Latin name for everything.
	Now, I understand that because the common names can overlap and so on.
	What is a turd? Well, it's something that's useful in Scrabble.
	But anyway, what is stuff like that?
	Well, you have to know Latin in order to understand the mass.
	If you haven't read Michel Foucault and understood the relationship between his psychotic pursuit of pseudo-masochistic torture-fetish sex and his analysis of the relationship between power and the insane, I don't want you talking about it if you haven't read this person and if you haven't read it in the original.
	It's crap. Yeah, I've studied a lot of philosophy and the purpose of all of that, studying a philosophy, is to bring down the tablets from the mountain with easy to digest rules for people who don't have my particular obsession with consistency and philosophy and reason and evidence and all that kind of stuff.
	To, in a sense, democratize philosophy is the goal of philosophy.
	And of course, one of my central heroes is Socrates, who spoke in terms that people could understand.
	You know, Socrates never used words like metaphysics and epistemology and so on.
	And that was because he was trying to talk to people about how to become good in their own lives.
	Now, he was highly constrained.
	By the ethics and the power of the state of his day.
	His universalism was constrained by the fact that the Athenian economy rested on the backs of countless slaves.
	But this idea that you speak to people reasonably about truth and virtue and values, and if they like what you have to say, if they find it useful what you have to say, they can buy you lunch.
	That's what I do. I have a marketplace here, a free domain radio, and I speak to people reasonably about ethics and virtue and goodness and truth.
	And... If you like it, you can buy me lunch.
	You can donate at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Because I really, really hate elitism.
	I don't just hate it because it's kind of hypocritical and annoying and pompous and self-glorifying and so on.
	I hate it because I know where it leads.
	It leads to totalitarianism.
	That if you have the ability to be a wordsmith and you're good at nimbly navigating through the idea maze of thought, Then bring, serve the people!
	Serve the people! Serve the people!
	You have an obligation, right?
	Said at the beginning. If people are, if society is choking to death on irrationality and you have the Heimlich of philosophy, go help society!
	Help the average person!
	Don't set up this elite world where you have to understand all these vague things that can't really be defined and you have to somehow make your feather-bedded nest of complacency in polysyllabic positive adjective bullshit.
	Just strip it down to the essentials and build a phone that people can use.
	You know, back in the day, when you wanted to control a very complex computer, you needed command lines, you needed studies, you could go wrong.
	Really easily. I remember having to edit computer code on a TRS-80, also known as the Trash 80, and having to put codes in to edit text.
	I mean, it was insane. Go back to WordPerfect 5.1 on a 286, push reveal codes, and enjoy the Rosetta Stone of what the hell is going on here.
	Make something that people can easily consume.
	That's your job. Engineers do it all the time.
	Engineers take incredibly complicated ones and zeros and create a touch swipe screen so you can play Candy Crush and phone people by talking.
	Ah! I got a camera here.
	Costs a lot of money.
	One button makes it go.
	Beep! It's going. People make ideas user-friendly.
	Bring concepts to the people so they can use them to better their lives, to understand the truth, to fight back against unjust authority, to push back against irrationality.
	Don't embrace complexity and think you're serving the world.
	When you hide the truth from the people, you serve them up.
	To dictators all the time, every time.
	Serve the people, not your ego.
	Serve the truth, not your vanity.
	Make things simple enough that you look like an idiot for saying them.

▲