Sept. 3, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:53
4183 More Truth About Untruth | When Truth Doesn't Matter
What is the intellectual history of postmodernism and what impact does it have on the world today? Stefan Molyneux outline the origins of the controversial intellectual movement and discusses the existence of truth. Part 1: The Truth About Untruth | Postmodernism Exposedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGe_uPzozNoYour 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
So socialism has the effect of turning individualists into collectivists.
It has the effect of turning objectivists into subjectivists and has the effect of Of turning wolves into sheep, which of course is great if you want to be the tiger to rule the sheep.
So this reality that occurred, that Marxism and socialism had scientific, economic, objective, empirical, rational...
Testable claims that all fell apart and socialism, Marxism, communism produced the exact opposite of what was claimed.
Well, that was a big problem, of course, for people who had achieved legitimacy through an ideology that had a null hypothesis, right?
So a null hypothesis is how do you disprove a proposition?
If a proposition has no disproof, It's worth nothing.
It's worth less than nothing because you've wasted time trying to evaluate something with no disproof.
You know, you've seen this in debates.
This moving goalposts.
Well, if you prove this, then I'm wrong.
And then the goalposts move and so on.
It just means that there's an emotional or most likely a genetic or biological drive behind the ideology.
The ideology is merely the grass that the predator of biology hides in.
And so when people are constantly moving the goalposts, it means that there's an emotional drive or desire that they have for a particular goal.
And the ideology is just a cover for it.
So when you put forward...
You know, an oligarchical collectivist hierarchical tyranny called communism, claiming that it's going to result in higher productivity and peace and kindness, generosity, support for the poor, and it turns into a ruthless A continent murdering dictatorship, then you have a problem.
You don't just have a PR problem, you have a logic problem.
If you claim that your ideology is valid because of science, reason, and evidence, and then science, reason, and evidence, utterly disprove your ideology.
And don't just disprove it.
Like, again, I wish there was a word.
I'm sure there is in German that makes it sound like you're cuffing up a hairball and a cat at the same time.
But it's worse than wrong.
You know, if I say...
This little salve, this little ointment, is going to deal with your mosquito bite and make it better, and then your arm falls off.
I haven't just failed to cure or heal your mosquito bite.
It's a clusterfrag of near infinite proportions.
So not only did socialism not produce better outcomes than the free market, but it produced far worse outcomes on every conceivable level.
Like there's not a level, I guess, unless you want the collection of omnipotent power in the hands of murderous sociopaths to be your goal.
There is no metric under which socialism helped or outscored or was more productive or more humane than the free market.
With the exception that when you immediately or initially institute a socialist redistribution program, those who are on the receiving end of it do better for a short amount of time.
They get the material once taken care of.
Like, Obamacare has provided some health care to people.
But, of course, in the long run, it's like going into debt or taking drugs.
Hey, I got a toothache, but don't worry, I'm going to smalt some cocaine and feel fine.
It's like, well, yeah, you do feel fine for a while, but your toothache gets worse and the rot probably spreads to your heart.
And if you just go into debt to pay your bills, you'll do okay for a little while.
And it looks like working is a sucker's game, but then...
You don't. It's an old saying.
Some rich guy went bankrupt.
Somebody said, how did you go bankrupt?
He said, very, very slowly, and then very, very quickly.
And that's where we are. So, reason, evidence, logic, facts, utterly rejected, repudiated, and revealed the leftist fantasy as...
A universal and near-bottomless evil.
So, what do you do when evidence and logic has utterly overturned your fantasy?
Well, you get rid of reason, logic, and evidence.
Right? So, a socialism, an ideology, founded and justified and proposed and promoted on the basis of its empirical, factual, logical, scientific nature, when all of those Metrix disproved it, said, well, enough of this reason, science, logic, and objectivity.
All of it has to go, which is how you know.
That they never had any intention of helping people.
They never had any intention of coming up with a better world.
All they did was, well, they were reproducing from a biological standpoint based upon their belief systems.
And beliefs are, to some degree, genetic.
And genes advance beliefs in order to disarm opponents and win against superior opponents.
You know, things like immigration and so on.
So you say, ah, logic and evidence, they're not objective.
They're subjective. You can't prove anything.
And you had this weird, like Marx was at least claimed to be sort of scientific and sort of a post-enlightenment.
It was supposed to be an improvement and refinement of the free market to have communism.
And then they did this weird turn back to, you know, rank romanticism, pre-enlightenment politics.
Monstrous indulgence in emotionality.
Some of the worst aspects of Rousseau's philosophy.
Remember Rousseau, that wonderful guy who taught the world how to be great and then dumped his kids into an orphanage where they almost certainly died because I guess he was busy or didn't care.
So then what you do is you say, well, our feelings are superior to logic.
And then what you do is, artistically, what you do is you promote the stereotype of rational people They're nerds.
They're pimply. They're really thick glasses.
They got weird haircuts.
They're sexually unsuccessful.
You know, all the cool people are feelings-based.
Logic is dweeby.
Passion is Fabio.
Passion is the cool.
All the cool kids are doing passion and all the nerds are doing reason.
And, of course, that is a sophisticated emotional argument.
And it's been actually quite effective.
So, yeah, if the light comes on and shows you committing a crime, you shoot out the light.
And if reason and evidence show that your ideology is horrible, monstrous, evil, and destructive, then you shoot out reason and evidence, right?
Because, you know, there was no predictive category that succeeded.
I mean, the three main ones, right?
The number of manual laborers had declined, right?
I mean, not just in terms of overall numbers with an increase in population.
As a percentage of the total population, the number of manual laborers had declined.
Like at the turn of the 20th century, early 1900s, between 70% and 80% of Americans were involved in agriculture.
That number went down enormously because manual labor for the most part, right?
It's not like it's dumb labor.
It's hard to grow food, but a lot of it is manual labor.
Now it's like 2% of Americans involved in farming down from like 80% or 90%.
So, the number of manual laborers had declined, the exact opposite of what's predicted by Marxism, and the manual laborers had become better off.
Now, again, remember, Marxism says that there's two lines that divide.
The poor get poorer, the rich get richer, the middle class gets eviscerated.
Well, that's actually happened under increasing socialism, and it happened in the Soviet Union and China as well.
But the middle class had grown.
Not, again, relative to population growth.
It had grown as a percentage of the population, and it had become much wealthier, and the upper classes had become wealthier as well.
So, didn't work.
Didn't pan out the way that was predicted.
So, yeah, the poor got richer.
Manual labor declined. More people moved into the middle class.
The rich got richer. Everybody was doing better off.
So, absolute poverty could no longer be claimed as the justification for socialism.
And so, what did they do?
Well, they switched.
They said, well, the original socialist mantra was, from each according to their ability to each according to their need.
I mean, brilliantly described in Atlas Shrugged in the 20th Century Motor Company, but the decline and demise of it.
But they switched.
They said, okay, it's not absolute need.
It's not people starving to death.
It's not the kind of coal miners described by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier.
You know, the guys who had to crawl two miles just to start their job and who died of black lung, you know, because this is how absurdly and horribly patriarchal Western society was, of course, that they developed labor-saving devices for women before they even bothered to develop life-saving devices for men.
And so this had all declined.
So now they said, okay, well it can't be absolute need anymore.
Because capitalism, the free market is certainly satisfying people's needs.
So now we're going to switch from need to equality.
So now the problem with capitalism is not that people are starving because people were doing far better under capitalism and certainly far better than they were doing in history and far better than they were doing in communist countries.
So now it's just that there's inequality.
And this goes back to the Plato Weeble blob of people that sociopaths like communists see the world as.
And so now it's like, well, people aren't getting an equal share.
Now implicit in this, of course, is the idea that there's a fixed amount of money in the world.
Because communists don't produce anything.
They don't make things.
They don't run businesses for the most part.
I mean, I guess there was Engels, but he inherited his business and shoveled all his money at Marx.
Marx never worked a day of honest labor in his life.
And, and, you know, the fat, lice-ridden pig also banged his maid and dumped her out into the street with his child and then hit up his affair.
Because, remember, it's the capitalists who exploit the working classes, right?
So, you have to change this new definition of poverty.
So now it's relative poverty. It's not absolute poverty, it's relative poverty.
And so then you have to pretend that everyone's equal, as I talked about before, and therefore all inequality results from injustice.
So then what they did was they also said that the problem of capitalism basically is that it's too successful, and therefore it's raping Mother Earth.
Now, of course, if you're concerned about environmentalism, Then you should be absolutely opposed to government debts because government debts are consumption of scarce and precious resources in the present, which are over and above the needs of the people because it's debt, right? If you go into debt to buy a car, well, you're going to have to pay that debt off at some point and reduce your consumption.
So you're increasing consumption in the here and now at expense of consumption in the future.
So you should be resolutely against national debt, but they don't care, right?
They don't care about the environment.
So they hit environmental issues, they hit women's issues, and they hit...
Now, it's generally talked about as minorities' issues, but it's not minorities' issues.
Jews are a minority, and not a lot of stuff going on with regards to inequality with Jews, and Orientals are a minority, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
But, of course, so they're talking about minorities, what they mean, of course, blacks and Mestizos, or Hispanics.
And by that, they mean people who are on the lower end of the IQ spectrum, on aggregate, and therefore are going to do less well.
In a free market environment that pays IQ. A free market environment is an IQ-paying environment as a whole.
In other words, if you take IQs of groups and you normalize economic data by IQ, it all averages out.
Everyone, whether you're Jewish or white or East Asian or Mestizo or you are black, everyone with an IQ of 85 makes about the same amount of money.
It's just that there are more of them or fewer of them in various groups.
So, and of course, women make less money because they work less hard and they have more children, which is nothing wrong with that.
It's great. I'm glad that there are people in the world.
Otherwise, I'd pretty much be talking to myself.
I'm not talking to myself, am I? We'll find out.
So... This was a huge problem, and so they switched, right?
So they switched from trying to convince people about the virtues of socialism in 1965 and in other places.
They simply switched to immigration from the third world because they knew that people from the third world were going to vote for the left.
Because when you import people who are less able to succeed or flourish in a free market, IQ-based environment, then they're going to want free stuff.
Because they can't compete, right? They're going to want subsidies.
They're going to want welfare. They're going to want all this free stuff.
And so they're going to vote for the left.
So that is kind of natural.
And the postmodernists, of course, grabbed on this.
And, you know, there's lots of people talking about subjectivism and relativism and all this kind of crap.
But the question is, you know, think of society.
You know those infinite dials in a recording studio?
I mean, everybody's... But you can dial up and dial up certain things, dial down certain things, certain spectrums and so on, right?
The equalizer thing.
And so, yeah, people have often been muttering about subjectivism.
The question is, why was there such a demand for relativism and subjectivism at the time?
Well, it's because socialism collapsed and the arguments for the free market became stronger.
And so the postmodernists came along and said everything's relative.
People have been saying that all the time, but now the needy socialists whose worldview had collapsed greedily grabbed at that for two reasons.
One is that it covered up The catastrophes of socialism.
So you could say, well, socialism has been proven to fail.
Say, what is proof?
In reality, socialism and communism fail disastrously.
What is reality? Like you distract people with that stupid shit.
Rather than actually having an analysis of the objective facts in the world that have occurred, right?
The death count, the depression, the incarceration of people in gulags and in mental institutions and so on.
You do all of that, right? So when people say, well, it's like, you know, you borrow a thousand bucks from some guy and he comes by...
To pick up his thousand bucks and you end up trying to distract him into some massive argument about what is currency?
What is money? What is reality?
And it's like he leaves kind of baffled, confused and bewildered.
But that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that he leaves baffled, confused and bewildered.
In fact, it might even help. The important thing is he doesn't leave with a thousand bucks that you don't have to pay him, right?
So... There were students in the University of Rome.
They ended up closing down the University of Rome.
They had a banner. And they said, Marx is the prophet, Marcus is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.
And this is the same kind of crap that's been going on forever.
It's going on now.
So they could no longer expect socialism to spontaneously materialize.
They did not believe that That they could get socialism by appealing to voters.
I mean, people forget.
I mean, and I go into this in my presentation, which I really recommend on Joseph McCarthy.
Joseph McCarthy was enormously popular among the population.
Enormously popular with regards to exposing communist infiltration into the entertainment industry and other places as well.
It was a real rat's nest of totalitarian-minded people.
And, you know, what he did for communism, Enoch Powell tried to do for immigration with his rivers of blood speech and did delay it to some degree for a generation, just as Joseph McCarthy bought a generation to push back against communism.
So yeah, it wasn't going to happen on its own.
There couldn't be a military coup, which they're more than happy to do when they want.
And they couldn't get it by appealing to the voters, because the voters were fully aware of just how terrible things had after the 50s.
And there were, of course, leftist terrorist groups, but they...
Had to go into hiding or they ended up in jail or, shockingly, the weather underground, a lot of them ended up in academia.
I remember being, that was quite a red pill moment when I read Ann Coulter writing about that.
I think it was in Demonic. Great book.
So what were they supposed to do?
They had lost in reason, they had lost in evidence, they had lost with the electorate, so they weren't going to give up on their ideals, because remember, the ideals are just a base cover for the acquisition of resources in order to reproduce the genetics that are the foundation of the ideals.
So, what do they do?
Well, what does a squid do when you try and grab it?
It squirts a bunch of ink in your face and tries to escape.
It's like a blur spell, right?
I mean, they just had to blur everything.
If you've ever been cornered in court when you've done something wrong or told a lie, a lot of people's first impulse is just to baffle, to obscure, to defend, to fog.
I do this on my show, and I do this call-in show, and the callers, when I ask them a direct question and they just give me a whole bunch of fog, my sound is...
It's the fog machine.
Of course, you know, if you want to look younger, jack up the HDR and beauty metrics on your selfie.
You know, in the past when they wanted women to look younger when the stars were getting kind of grizzled, they put Vaseline on the ledge to blur it all out.
I mean, when you want to, you know, if you're going to pick someone's pocket, you want to have someone else bump into them to distract them, right?
So distraction and fogging and obfuscation is key when you're caught, when you're wrong, when you're fundamentally wrong about something, but you can't give things up.
So what they did was they attacked, like, when reality and clarity and logic, which is clarity and logic are all language-based, right?
So they had to attack reality.
Reality, they had to attack metaphysics, and they had to attack epistemology.
So they had to attack language, right?
So epistemology with regards to language, okay, they say, what is the connection between language and reality?
And what is the connection of language to action?
Now, A lot of the postmodernists said that the goal now was to use language not in the pursuit of truth, but in the pursuit of political action.
So they had not given up on their goal of gaining power over people through socialism, through communism.
They had not given up on their goal, but they gave up on, or they attempted to dismantle any weapons that could be used against them.
In other words, facts, reason, and evidence.
Now, so what they did, of course, is they said that language is self-referential, language is an invention of the human mind, and therefore, since language is not directly propelled or hooked into or linked to reality as a whole, that language is self-referential alone.
It's sort of like, I mean, if you've played role-playing games, not online, I guess online you could, but, you know, Dungeons& Dragons is the one that I played, a little bit of Traveler.
But in Dungeons& Dragons, if you create some monster, right?
So there's this monster called, I don't know, like a Beholder, which is this big floating Pac-Man with multiple eyes which shoot death rays and so on, also known as CNN. And if you create some imaginary monster and you say, the monster has the ability to cast a sleep spell and it has 40 hit points or whatever, right? Who can tell you that you're wrong?
Well, no one. No, the beholder, of course, if it's written down, if you have some kind of reference, but let's say you're just making up your own monster.
My monster is a flippity gibbet, and it has the capacity to pass through keyholes.
Okay, who can tell?
No, it doesn't, because that's self-referential.
It's something that's made up in your imagination.
It's like saying that the physics in your dreams is not rational.
Well, yeah, okay. I guess compared to the real world.
But you can't compare dreams to the real world.
Well, I guess you can. It's how you know their dreams, because they are irrational.
But if you have something that you've made up for yourself, like if you're writing a novel, and you have a character who's kind of dissolute, some sort of Bukowski template, and you say, the character looks to the left, pulls out a cigarette, and takes a deep drag.
It's a novel. It's made up.
Character's made up and so on. Is someone going to say to you, no, he doesn't.
This is all self-referential stuff.
It's not hooked in directly to reality.
So the question is, if you can make everything into a novel or a made-up Dungeons& Dragons character, then you separate any capacity to validate information by appeal and To facts, to reason, to evidence.
And since socialism is a made-up Dungeons& Dragons character, except it larps you to death in real life, if socialism, which is a made-up, it's an ideological system, if you can convince everyone that words have no connection to reality, then you can't use reality to disprove words.
And therefore, when someone says socialism has been disproved, when you say, well, that's only in the naive view that there's any such thing as proof or reason or reality or evidence or logic, facts...
There can be no null hypothesis, no way of disproving whether your made-up monster can pass through a keyhole or not.
And because there is no null hypothesis to made-up stuff, socialism, by moving everything into the world of made-up stuff that has no connection to reality, there's no such thing as disproof anymore.
Right? There's no way to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood.
And that's very powerful.
It's very powerful. Because the logic is inescapable, that if you don't believe in reality, if you don't believe in truth and reason and evidence, then you clearly don't believe in virtue, and therefore the idea of political action is ridiculous.
But the fact is that they're leapfrogging over this huge chasm of nihilism and anti-rationality, anti-reality.
I did a podcast many years ago.
I called it Jennyism about a woman who had written in to say that she didn't believe in objective reality, but she accepted that there should be gay marriage in Europe.
It's like, well, I don't believe in Europe.
I don't believe that there's anyone in Europe.
I don't believe that you exist or this microphone exists or the camera exists or my words exist.
I don't believe in any tangible material reality whatsoever.
But I'm sure there should be gay marriage in Europe, right?
I mean, it makes no sense.
If you don't believe in reality, the idea that you should organize The idea that you should attempt to achieve something, particularly the wielding of political power in reality.
It's like, I don't believe in the existence of the White House, but I'm 100% committed as to who should be in there, right?
You understand? It makes no sense.
So the purpose of this is that it's a mere rhetorical trick, and a very, very deep and dangerous one that is in the process of currently potentially unraveling Western civilization as a whole.
And it kind of goes like this.
When, like if you're a naturally common sense, logical person, then when you're questioned on essence of metaphysics and epistemology, you're going to take those questions seriously, and you're going to think about it, and you're going to worry about it, you're going to wonder about it, and that takes you out of the game.
Takes you out of the game.
The will to power, as Nietzsche kept talking about, means that you should not only Sorry, let me rephrase that.
If you can remove a standard of disproof from your own forward thrusting of your ideas in the squalling Darwinian will-to-power of ideologies, if you can reduce or eliminate people's capacity to judge your ideas negatively, and at the same time you can take the most logical and consistent people out of the equation, you win, you win, you win, you win.
If you can infect the rational people with self-doubt about rationality and reason and evidence and metaphysics and epistemology, if you can get them racked in self-doubt and get them to turn inwards Cartesian style and try to figure out what is reality, what is the nature of language, what is its connection to reality, if you can pull all of that crap, all of that Wittgensteinian crap.
I don't believe in language reality, but I'm going to be a Nazi anyway.
That makes no sense. Because radical nihilism should result in radical skepticism, which should result in inaction and a refusal to engage in that which you do not think is real or cannot prove is real or do not believe exists.
And this is the weird thing about the left, right?
So the left says there's no such thing as truth, reason, evidence, and therefore of morality.
I mean, if there's no is, there can't be an ought for sure.
If reality doesn't exist, then moral obligations certainly don't exist because they're about acting in reality.
If there is no is, there can't possibly be an ought.
And so the idea that you would be politically active while being metaphysically and epistemologically nihilistic is a complete contradiction.
It's a complete contradiction.
It literally is saying, there's no such thing as the elves.
I want to conquer the elves.
Literally, it's that mental.
And so you know that it's a rhetorical trick designed to disarm the rational and fog their own irrationality.
Why? To win.
Animals use any trick to get ahead.
There's no such thing as immorality in evolution.
If the animal can cheat...
The cuckoo can lay its eggs in the nest of another bird and then get the other bird to raise its offspring.
Is that bad? Is that cheating?
Oh, there's an insect that's trying to look like a bee so that it doesn't get attacked.
That's cheating! It's like, no, it works.
If you just look at, and this is part of the relationship, like, evolution is an extremely dangerous idea in the absence of moral philosophy because it means that you have no standards.
If you can trick your opponents into committing intellectual seppuku, then you just step over their bodies and grab the ring of power.
It's an amoral universe of base biological dominance-seeking.
You've got a bow and arrow. That's cheating!
Well, if it wins, it wins, right?
It's very Genghis Khan style, right?
If you can just spread your genes, spread your ideas, spread your legs, you got it.
And that is...
It's a terrifying world.
And it is a world...
That the philosophers who were the products of the Enlightenment and afterwards who failed to fulfill the Enlightenment, who failed to build the rational foundations of ethics, who failed to close off the issues and the problems of the limitations of certainty engendered by the scientific method, right? Because faith is certain.
Scientific method involves a lot of doubt and uncertainty and humility.
And when you have uncertainty and humility, it opens up Vulnerabilities to the blindly passionate and irrationally hungry for power, because they can overpower you very easily because you're asking questions of yourself rather than endlessly demanding the subjugation of others.
So Foucault, as a gay man, ended up sleeping around with a lot of Guys, when he had AIDS and also was into brutal sadomasochistic practices.
Someone whose mental health and virtue might be somewhat open to question.
And this is the left too, right? I mean, this guy was kind of a monster.
But, you know, when Trump makes jokes about women giving up sex in return for attention from famous people, right?
I mean, their own heroes are just monsters.
Their own heroes are almost universally monsters.
Che Guevara executing people, shooting people.
Kids as well. Marx, a complete monster.
Chairman Mao, who a lot of them idolize.
Complete monster. Murdered tens of millions of people.
Their own heroes are monsters, but anytime someone on the right does something even vaguely questionable, you get this hysterical moral brigade raining down on them.
Trump's colluding with Russia.
Turns out that the real collusion is Hillary, Podesta, Uranium One, all of that.
I mean, this dossier.
So now it's vanished.
Vanished. News agency spent, what was it, 10 minutes on Donald Trump Jr.
meeting with some Russian woman to talk about changing the adoption laws, perhaps.
10 minutes on that, 31 seconds on Hillary and Russian collusion.
Astonishing. So Foucault...
He said, all my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.
He said, it is meaningless to speak in the name of or against reason, truth, or knowledge.
So you can't argue for reason, truth, or knowledge.
You can't make any claims based on reason, truth, or knowledge.
And you can't argue against them.
It is meaningless.
And this gives this intensely punchable response when you start bringing up reason and evidence and people say, well, that's just naive.
Oh, that's so adorable.
Oh, you're so cute the way you talk about reason and evidence.
It's catastrophic.
It's catastrophic. And of course, the reality is he's making an argument here.
He says it's meaningless to speak in the name of or against reason, truth, or knowledge.
He's organizing his words in sequence that communicates a set of ideas or communicates an idea which is an argument against arguments.
Because reason is irrational, you should not argue for or against reason.
You should not cite reason. You just made a syllogism while at the same time Saying that, there's no such thing as a syllogism, or syllogisms are never valid.
Syllogism. Foucault also wrote, Reason is the ultimate language of madness!
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh because it's so important, but how this crap gets taken seriously is utterly beyond me.
Another postmodernist, Richard Rorty, He took this further and he said, you can't say that post-modernism is true or that it offers knowledge or establishes facts.
That's self-contradictory.
You can't say it's true that post-modernism is true.
I mean, it's the argument which never has been rebutted.
It is absolutely true that there's no such thing as absolute truth.
Massive fail. Philosophy isn't even that hard, really.
It's not that hard. It can be hard to develop something.
Mostly it's around unlearning.
Philosophy is hard like the way that doing a math problem is hard when people are yelling random numbers in your ear.
It's hard because we're programmed and distracted and punished with Irrational rewards for irrational behavior and irrational punishments for rational behavior.
We're conditioned and traumatized and screwed up with regards to our thinking.
Otherwise, it would be easy.
I know this is a father now, too.
I raised my daughter rationally. She's very rational.
So this guy says, you can't say the postmodernism is true if it's any facts or reasons or evidence or knowledge.
So because it would be self-contradictory to say postmodernism is valid or true or factual or right or correct so basically you just have to use language and I quote ironically ironically this is the annoying air quotes you know well if we're going to talk about existence or facts it's like these are like horny bunnies oh I guess there are selectively little two little rabbit ears right Air quotes are not an argument,
right? It's stupid. Two are selected bunnies reproducing, which is what they want from the welfare state.
Another guy, Stanley Fish, talked about deconstruction, which is basically the disassembly of certainty, reason, evidence, and knowledge, according to principles that are denied by the very deconstruction principle.
So Stanley Fish said, He was very happy about this.
deconstruction, quote, relieves me of the obligation to be right and demands only that I be interesting.
So, when reason, truth, and reality have proven that socialism is wrongheaded, destructive, murderous, violent, expansionist, rampaging, and imperialistic, what do you expansionist, rampaging, and imperialistic, what do you do?
Well, you say, no, no, no, no, it's Western civilization's focus on reason, truth, and reality that has made it so oppressive and racist and sexist and imperialistic, blah, blah, blah, right?
Jean-Francois Lyotard, never go full tard.
He said, reason and power are one and the same.
Reason, you see, and power are one and the same.
Power is unjust and exploitive and destructive.
And so is making a syllogism.
If you make a syllogism, you're literally Hitler.
Which is why when conservatives come to make objective, reason-based and evidence-based arguments to these crazy leftist-infested campuses...
They feel justified in using violence.
Because reason and violence are one and the same.
So if you make a rational argument, you are deploying violence against me.
And hey! Hey man!
It's just self-defense.
And I thought all these conservatives were for self-defense.
So what do they care if they get a bike lock to the head after they pull a rational syllogism on me like a shiv in an alley?
So reason and evidence.
He said, they lead to and are basically the same as, quote, prisons, prohibitions, selection process, the public good.
So if you make a rational argument to me, you are doing exactly the same as throwing me in prison unjustly.
You are declared...
Well, actually, it wasn't that unjust.
So... Reason is tyrannical.
Reason is violence.
Right, so they get to define reason as violence and violence as virtue.
Of course, if I mean, if you just, again, look at this sort of base biological DNA replication mode, right?
R-selected, K-selected, if you don't know what I'm talking about, just look at my presentations on the gene wars, G-E-N-E wars.
But understand that significant proportions, sometimes the majority of personality is genetic.
And the kind of irresponsible employment-resistant personality, those genes want free resources because they can't compete in the free market.
And so, if you bring rational arguments against the welfare state, against government redistribution of resources, those genes view that as a direct predation upon them.
They view that, like if you're walking through the Serengeti, right, in the tall grasses, one of those Weltskudels with the shoes, I love those things.
Anyway, you've got these tall grasses, and you see a lion creeping up to you, about to pounce.
You shoot it, right? Or you run, or you do something so the lion can't eat you because it's about to eat you.
Now we've got enormous sections of the population in the West, all around the world, but in the West we'll just talk about for now.
Enormous sections of the population who feel and may in fact be utterly dependent on state power for their resources.
Certainly, I think that most of them could get better, but who knows, right?
And so the conservative argument for a small state, less redistribution, private charity, well, to get private charity, you actually have to become a better person.
Like if you keep drinking, if you keep going, keep using drugs, if you keep sleeping around, if you keep having bastards, illegitimate children, then charities are going to say, sorry, we're going to apply our research.
You have to actually become a better person.
And if your personality and your entire identity is so invested in this lazy, loose-hipped, sashaying your way through life, leaving a trail of bodies, disasters, debt, and horrors in your wake, then it's going to be very tough for you to reform and become a better person.
It's a necessary process, and charities would pursue that well.
But when you get people coming on your campus, basically making the argument that you should not get free stuff at the expense of the taxpayer, Well, you believe that you,
your mom, your single mom in general, that they're all dependent on this free stuff, and so by interfering with the flow of free stuff, they are interfering with the sexual market value, reproductive capacity, and general all-round respect, according to those dependent on state power.
It is a literal predator interfering with resources.
Like if you're a farmer and you're facing a long winter and you see some guy out there about to set fire to your fields, right?
Like back in the Middle Ages or whatever.
And if your crops burn, you're going to starve to death.
Your family is going to starve to death.
It's all over. You will do anything to stop the guy about to set fire to your crops.
You understand? Because he's going to kill you.
I mean, that's an objective perspective.
So people who talk about limiting the science and power of the state, who question or attack the welfare state, well, that is, to the minds of people dependent on it, that means you're burning my crops.
I'm going to starve to death. So the idea that you're going to use violence to protect the resources that you feel essential for your survival, well, of course.
From that standpoint, from a mere Darwinian biological, got to have sexual market value, got to reproduce standpoint, it makes perfect sense.
Again, once you get rid of ethics and once you look at pure Darwinism, any trick is valid.
And this is, of course, the leftist argument.
I mean, the funny thing is they're so honest.
Everyone tells you all you need to know.
Everyone tells you all that you need to know.
They openly say, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Do whatever it takes. We have no standards.
We know they do, so let's use their standards against them.
They're interested in rationality, reality, consistency.
Great! Let's get them, burrow off into the F.U. land of epistemology and metaphysics so that they cannot oppose and stand against our political aspirations for power.
You know, if you want to rob a house, there's a guard dog.
What do you do? You take a piece of meat, you drug it, you throw it to one side.
I'm not speaking from experience. It sounds very authoritative.
You get your piece of meat, you drug it, you throw it to one side, and then the dog goes off to eat that, falls asleep, and you can rob at will, right?
So you understand that postmodernism is that drugged piece of meat, throws off to one side.
All the rational people go, oh, yeah, well, I guess I have to spend a lot of time explaining and understanding epistemology, metaphor, blah, blah, blah, right?
Good! There are no longer standing...
Barring us from going up the bloody staircase to the summit and height of murderous political power.
Postmodernist Frank Lentrichia says that, okay, he says, seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth.
Postmodernism does not seek to find the foundation and the conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.
You understand? That makes no sense.
Postmodernism seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.
There's no such thing as reality, but I really, really want to get the right political party in power.
There's no such thing as truth, but exploitation is immoral.
There's no such thing as virtue, but imperialism is evil.
Jacques Derrida identifies The philosophy of Marxism, right?
The philosophy of Marxism, that deconstruction never had any real interest or meaning than as a radicalization.
That's the entire point.
So deconstruction doesn't really matter, except to radicalize people.
Because deconstruction, what it does, conservatives have internal social rules.
And civilized societies have internal social rules.
Now deconstruction breaks the dam of internal restraint and do what you will.
It takes the restraint of Christian ethics away from the individual, thus unleashing their Darwinian, Nietzschean will to power dominance, resources at any cost.
And that's what it's all about.
Jacques Derrida, one of the patron saints Of postmodernism.
Says deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization.
That is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.
No rules, no rules, no restraint.
Look at the hedonism, right? The hedonism, the materialism of the 60s and the 70s.
They say, you can't speak meaningfully about anything outside of your own consciousness.
Language is only self-referential.
It's your own made-up Dungeons& Dragons monster.
There's no external test for anything.
Of course, because the external test had demolished socialism.
So, instead of there being objective reality out there, Tangible, material, measurable reality.
What they say is, reality is what we make up with language.
Whatever I speak is...
And you can see this.
Look at the war...
A biological classification versus self-identification.
If you accept this argument, then if you self-identify as a North American river otter, who can tell you that you're wrong?
There's no objective characteristic of a human being versus a North American river otter, or a water buffalo in Taiwan, or a Turkish wizard, right?
There's no... Objective reality by which you can compare people's subjective definition of themselves and say that they're wrong.
So again, if I make up some Dungeons& Dragons monster and say it has 40 hit points, nobody can tell me that I'm wrong because I just made it up myself.
And if I self-identify as some hentai anime squid porn monster, there's no objective reality that can be compared to my statement to prove me wrong.
Now, of course, if you can't say that anyone's wrong, logically, right, it's the free will thing, right?
If you can't say that anyone's wrong, then you can't criticize anyone for criticizing people who define themselves in contradistinction to empirical reality.
Sorry, that was a long and not very comprehensible sentence.
Let me take another run at that and try that again.
So, if you can't say that anyone is wrong, then if I tell someone they're wrong in that they're not a North American river otter, Nobody should tell me that I'm wrong.
But of course they do.
You can't tell anyone that they're wrong.
You're male. That's wrong!
Right? You understand. It's about disarming reality.
It's about disarming and undermining one's connection to reality.
And the reason they do that is because they don't want to be disproven.
So, once you reject the very idea of objective empirical reality, Then you can very easily, it's just dominoes, you very easily then say, well, reason has no validity.
Because reason is that which describes things in reality.
We have laws of logic because there are laws of physics.
And so when you deny it, Objective reality, you immediately or consequentially deny the validity of reason.
This is why I say it's the counter-enlightenment that is going on, and it's fundamentally religious in nature.
Or I should say it's theological crisis in nature.
Now, when you get rid of reality, And you get rid of reason.
You get rid of the argument, right?
There's a reason why I wrote and strongly recommend my book, The Art of the Argument, which you can find at theartoftheargument.com, also on audible.com.
But once you get rid of objective reality, then you get rid of reason.
Now, once you get rid of reason, how do human beings deal with conflicts?
How do they negotiate? Well, through abuse, dominance, sophistry, pleas, manipulations, whining, crime-bullying, violence, state power, aggression, bicycle locks, beating people up, punching Nazis.
Of course, if you take away reason as our means of interacting with each other, all that's left is coercion.
All that's left is violence. And so when postmodernists describe society, they just describe endless, massive, bottomless conflicts between groups.
And since there's always going to be competition for resources among individuals, between groups, ethnicities, genders, you name it, there's always going to be competition for resources.
Human beings are an ecosystem of competing interests.
If you are against the free market, if you don't believe in objective reality and reason is invalid, how are these conflicts going to be resolved?
Through force. Through force.
And because that's the world they live in, they imagine, of course, to some degree, that the conservatives are just trying to screw them with ideology, because that's what they're doing, is trying to screw everyone else with ideology.
So because people that are going to try and screw you with ideology, ideology is violence.
Ideology is always a cover for coercion.
And this is another weird contradiction, is that the state is an agency of force, and a lot of postmodernists, Thaddeus Russell included, accept this and say the state is an agency of violence.
But violence is really bad.
So then you should want to get rid of the state.
But they don't. They want to create control and expand the power of the state.
Again, it's just another one. I'm not talking about Dr.
Russell, but it's just in general. Crazy.
Crazy. So...
What happens is then there's no such thing as truth, reason, objectivity, reality, and morality...
But there's this weird emotional codependent bonding with groups identified as victimized and a massive bottomless violent hatred against groups that are perceived to be oppressors, patriarchs and so on, right?
I mean, that's astonishing and horrifying stuff.
And this is, it comes out of the Germanic philosophers that I talked about earlier, Hegel and Nietzsche and others.
On the other side, and it's, you know, there's a Frenchie in there too, right?
So on the other side, there's Francis Bacon, founder of the scientific method, a couple of, 500 or so years ago, John Locke and Rennie Descartes.
Now, René Descartes, I'll do a whole other show.
I think I've done one before.
René Descartes basically said, I can't know that anything's true except that I exist.
Even if I'm a brain in a tank being controlled and manipulated by some external demon.
I remember philosophy class that I took in my undergraduate.
I took some good philosophy in my undergraduate.
The course on Aristotle was fantastic.
I remember the woman who taught it.
I was really having trouble understanding certain arguments.
So I wrote a whole bunch of syllogisms out and I sat down with her and she's like, well, this is actually pretty good.
I mean, like, what's your background?
And it's like, I just came from theater school.
Anyway, she was really great.
And I found her encouragement. Thank you.
If you're still out there, your encouragement was helpful to me.
But I remember there was this one really old guy teaching about Descartes and this idea, the Cartesian demon, the idea that we're brain in a tank matrix style being manipulated by some demon.
And I just remember putting my arm up and said, okay, well, what's the evidence for that?
And just getting this thousand-yard stare like, your purpose is to write things down, not ask questions.
Because apparently I only get to observe philosophy, not actually do it.
Can I join the orgy? No!
Sit in the corner, cuck.
So... Yeah, so people like Locke and Bacon and Descartes, to a certain degree, they believed in reason.
And because reason is something exercisable by each individual, reason leads to, like, objective reality leads to the validity of reason, leads to the empowerment of the individual, strikes against collectivism, and leads to the free market.
Because it's humble. If everyone can exercise their own reason, if everyone's an individual, they're going to have different preferences and desires.
And the idea that some central planner can organize even 100 people, even 10 people, let alone 100 million people or more, organize the economic affairs of all those people, no, you're an individualist, right?
So if you take individualism and you apply it to politics, you end up with a free market and a small or a no government.
Individual freedom and negotiating power and free markets and so on.
And you see this, right?
You see this when there is the scientific revolution.
There is the then separation of church and state, a focus on the individual, and an end of feudalism, and then an end for the first time in the entirety of human history that anyone knows about, the end of slavery.
End of slavery. And that is a very, very powerful thing.
And there are very practical consequences to the spread of reason, individualism, and free markets.
So there's a guy, NFR Crafts, so he estimated British average annual income.
And his numbers are accepted by people who are against capitalism, people who are for capitalism, and so on.
So in 1700, The British, on average, made $333.
1700. 1760, $399.
1800, $427.
1830, $498.
1860, $804.
That's astonishing. And of course, this is normalized, right?
So this is adjusted for inflation, of course.
And so when you start looking at how much things have exploded since then, there are very practical consequences.
Like if you don't believe in objective reality or math, how many of the bridges you build are going to stay up?
If you submit yourself and subject yourself, nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
If you submit and subject yourself to reason and evidence, your bridges will stay up.
Your society will stay up.
From 1730 to 1749, in that sort of time period, in London, 74.5% of kids died before the age of five.
Three-quarters of the children died before the age of five.
A lot of women died in childbirth.
1810 to 1829, less than a century later, that had been cut from 74.5% to 31.8%.
Millions and millions of people alive because of philosophy.
It is the life-bringer, the life-giver.
Now, postmodernism rejects reality, rejects reason, rejects individualism, which is why postmodernism is always talking about groups.
The oppressed, the oppressors, women, minorities, groups, groups, groups.
Never the individual. Never responsibility for the individual.
Of course, they want to strip you of responsibility so you're dependent on the state, so that they can control you and bully you and hold your life in their hands.
Give up your health care to the state so the state can tell you whether to live or die.
And so postmodernism is nothing new.
The Enlightenment fought against this collectivism and this subjectivism, which itself was limited by Christian individualism and free will, the Christian focus on moral responsibility and free will.
Now you have the collectivism and the irrationality and the mysticism, but it is unrestrained by a Christian focus on free will, which is why it's so cancerous.
It's so toxic. You had a personal conscience under Christianity.
You have only collective power struggles under post-modernism.
So they end up attacked by attacking reality, reason, individualism.
All of the results of the Enlightenment are being attacked.
Science is being attacked.
Oh, wow, the conservatives are anti-science.
Really? Try talking about race and IQ and the limitations of climate change, computer modeling to them and to the left and see how you do.
They're against technology.
A lot of primitivism going on.
You know, that fight club thing.
I dream of stretching the hides of deer that I've hunted under the shadows of the decrepit.
Golden Gate Bridge.
What's it? Empire State Building?
State Building? Anyway, this kind of primitivism is important.
They reject the free market, of course.
And they reject small government, of course.
And... They focus on identity politics rather than mere quality, right?
So this is why they're dumping Shakespeare.
They're dumping, what is it now, the To Kill a Mockingbird?
Because it might lead people to not believe the victims of rape.
So that's got to be dumped. You've got to dump Huckleberry Finn because of the N-word.
You've got to, like, you've just got to start dismantling.
Because now you've got to focus on writings of blacks and mestizos, of women, the poor, the oppressed, the overseas, the third worlders, and so on.
And of course, any time that anything bad goes on among the, quote, ruling class, the white males, the rich, and so on, you've got to really hyper-emphasize that.
And that's why you get Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
Which, of course, he was originally portrayed as white, but this is a way of provoking conflict.
So if conflict doesn't exist, you have to provoke it, because that's what the inevitable result of the anti-philosophy is.
And now we've got to the point where, you know, science and math are racist.
Because IQ tests are racist, right?
Because the IQ test hierarchy, Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, whites, Hispanics, and blacks, while it's best tested by IQ, also math tests can do it and science can do it.
So now math is racist because East Asians or Orientals do better than blacks.
Therefore it's racist. And this is one of the horrible things is that, you know, if you want to hire a good employee...
The best thing you can do, give them an intelligence test.
It doesn't have to be a full IQ test, it can just be a general intelligence test.
You can even make it up yourself.
I've done it in the past. Just give people an intelligence test, and whoever does best, you hire.
And that's better than anything, for the most part, that can be figured out in terms of how to hire people.
But you can't give IQ tests.
You can't say, an intelligence test is how I hire people, it's colorblind, it's genderblind, particularly if you're hiring for very intelligent stuff.
Because men vastly outstrip women at the higher levels of intelligence, like 8 to 1, 10 to 1, 12 to 1.
And so it's sexist and racist to give an IQ test.
And so what you have to do is go to college.
And you have to go to college. And that's your IQ test.
So rather than something that could be an hour or half an hour, 10 minutes for that matter, you have to go for four years, be indoctrinated, and be in debt, tens of thousands of dollars, because you're not allowed to have an IQ test.
It's terrible. So truth, according to post-modernism, is just a myth.
Reality, what a concept!
Reality, what a concept, right?
It's a great phrase. Reason, objective empirical rationality, well, that's just white, male, Eurocentric, patriarchal oppression.
Equality of opportunity, well, that's just another word for oppression of minorities.
And anything like, you know, peace, reason, progress.
All interpretations are equally valid.
Objectivity doesn't exist.
Although, of course, that's what reporters always claim to be objective, although they often follow a philosophy that says that there's no such thing.
I am both a podcaster and an orc.
So there's no truth, there's no reason, there's no evidence, there's no right way to do anything.
And values are cultural products based on language that can be redefined at a whim.
No groups, values.
It's all competing, right?
I mean, there's no better, there's no worse, and no culture is better than any other.
But still, there's massive evil and oppression because they dilute reason and evidence.
And then what happens is...
Everything should be relative and you shouldn't have any opinions about anything.
But what they do, they're just trying to break down again.
It's the drug to meet after one side.
They're trying to break down the will to resist of the rational.
Not me, baby! Not me!
I feast on this kind of opposition.
So if you disagree with someone, on the left, what happens?
You don't get reason and evidence.
You don't get... Any kind of benefit of the doubt, what happens?
Well, they try and destroy you.
They uncork the rage.
Uncork is probably true. They uncork the rage.
Because you see, if you're trying to use arguments, arguments lead to objective reality.
They lead to reason.
They lead to individuality.
They lead to a small government. They lead to a diminution of resources that their genes are dependent on.
So it's a physical attack against the survival of their genes.
So, by any means necessary.
The resistance to reality.
It is literally a resistance to reality.
I don't believe in objective reality, but I'm going to meet you on this street corner at 2 o'clock and get paid to write it.
And so, of course, they flock to the humanities, not to the sciences, because the sciences deal with objective empirical reality.
And, of course, it's cynical, it's nihilistic, they're just generally exhausted, and this shows up all over the place.
I hope I've given you some mental constructs and hopefully some memorable analogies and metaphors to understand this kind of stuff.
There is this radical doubt, and I'll do a separate one on postmodernism and scientific method, but there is this radical skepticism and relativism While at the same time, there is this brutal assertion of Darwinian or Nietzschean willpower and the willingness to use violence.
I hope you understand that one is the natural consequence of the other.
When you give up on objective reality, when you destroy the capacity for people to reason out their differences, you basically, like, if you have a contract in a court system, you have a relatively peaceful way of managing and negotiating and resolving your disagreements with someone, right? In the criminal world, there's no real court system, and so everything escalates to violence, or those most willing to use violence end up dominating the others.
So, of course, criminals and courts are in opposition, just as thugs and police are in opposition.
And I hope we understand that we're turning the whole world...
First to an asylum and then into a crime gang by pursuing these horrifying, cancerous, anti-ideas.
Stefan Moly, Free Domain Radio, thank you so much for listening, for watching.
Please let me know what you think in the comments below.
Don't forget theartoftheargument.com.
It's my antidote. And also, you can help out the show, which I would enormously appreciate.
A lot of work goes into these things at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
