May 3, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:39
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| So a quote on Twitter this morning from a historian I have little in common with, named Howard Zinn. | |
| And the quote was this, historically the most terrible things, war, genocide and slavery, have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. | |
| And it's one of these kind of deepities that seems to mean something and then puts great value on disobedience, But disobedience itself is not a virtue, I guess, unless you're a Satanist, in which case disobedience is a virtue. | |
| But disobedience is not the problem in the world at the moment. | |
| In fact, disobedience is one of the root causes of the problems in the world at the moment. | |
| I obey a rational code of ethics. | |
| I obey it. | |
| You could say that I am a slave to it. | |
| But I'm a slave to it in the way that I'm a slave to the need for food and exercise and water and sleep. | |
| I'm a slave to these things because in being a slave to these things I gain freedom and honor and love and happiness in everything else. | |
| So this idea that you simply promote disobedience, it's a morally neutral phrase. | |
| And it's not exact enough. | |
| And in these days where free speech is even more imperiled, I'll make a case as to what the real issue is regarding these things. | |
| There is an old saying, of course, with regards to the scientific revolution, which is that nature to be commanded must be obeyed. | |
| That if you want to create an electrical generator, you have to follow strictly These strictures of objective reality and the natures and property of electricity and so on, that if you wish to gain power over nature, then you must slavishly obey nature's commands. | |
| And if you wish to gain power over your own happiness and virtue and love and a good conscience, then you have to slavishly obey moral rules, objective moral rules. | |
| Thou shalt not initiate Force thou shalt not, bear false witness thou shalt not defraud. | |
| These are all good moral rules and sort of a bare minimum. | |
| This is like don't do evil as opposed to pursue the virtues of courage and honor and integrity and so on. | |
| At least don't do evil and that way you may not gain happiness yourself but at least you will not prevent other people from gaining happiness through your evil actions. | |
| So at least don't do evil and then in the plus side Do good as well, which will add to people's happiness. | |
| Well, except for the pretend happiness of evildoers, of course. | |
| So the problem is not disobedience. | |
| That's kind of a leftist view that somehow disobedience is a virtue in and of itself. | |
| I would argue that the big issue in the world today is not obedience, it is conformity. | |
| Now conformity is when you dissolve your own individual conscience into the general madness of the mob. | |
| You say, well, I'm not going to search for happiness with regards to my own moral actions. | |
| I'm going to avoid being attacked by the mob and I'm going to seek the approval of the mob and that is the weather vane through which I'm going to guide my actions. | |
| Will the mob dislike me if I do this? | |
| Will the mob like me if I don't do something or do something else? | |
| And once you start to guide yourself by the mob, rather than by reason and objectivity and virtue and so on, by philosophy, then you are in a position where sooner or later you're going to be hunted by the mob. | |
| Because it's like I talked about in my presentation on Socrates and Plato in particular, that if you stand between the mob and what it wants, the mob will view you as an enemy and the mob Once, usually once the unearned. | |
| The desire for the unearned is the root of almost all evils in the world. | |
| So conformity is when you say, I'm going to guide my actions according to what the mob likes. | |
| I will do what the mob likes and I will refrain from doing or avoid doing what the mob dislikes. | |
| Now, of course, the mob is like one of those, you ever see these nature films where they have these giant clouds of birds and they're all kind of flying and flitting and moving all over the place based on wind currents and the perception of food and the possible invasion of a predator from above or from the side. | |
| They're just all, that's the mob. | |
| They're just swirling around. | |
| It's got a kind of collective low brain that is a dissolution to the lowest common denominator that is common to mobs and of course we generally learn this if we're put in daycares and government schools and even private schools these days which conform or obey government curricula. | |
| We end up With this mob mentality, right? | |
| Because you know how it works in schools, right? | |
| Someone does something bad, someone goes to the teacher and the teacher says, work it out amongst yourselves, or I wasn't there, I can't tell. | |
| And they don't invest themselves into what they should, which is to try and find the actual facts of the situation and punish or reward accordingly, thus giving | |
| children a sense that authority is valid and authority cares about virtue as opposed to don't interrupt me on my lunch break I'm just here to like collect my pension go work it out amongst yourselves and what happens then of course is you end up by the rule of the lowest common denominator and that's generally the mob because in order to not reason with people but rather to attack them for disagreeing with you and reward them for agreeing with you, you have to have no moral center. | |
| You have to have no moral conscience whatsoever. | |
| It has to be completely untroubling to you to attack and praise and reward based upon obedience rather than based upon any abstract moral rules or integrity. | |
| And it's more of a religion and really more of a cause because at least religions have Objective or semi objective moral standards that you have to obey and they have authoritative tax with which to which you refer it to resolve moral disputes. | |
| There's none of that when it comes to the mob. | |
| And so we generally go through this whole process of learning to. | |
| Fear the disapproval of the mob, to fear ostracism from the mob. | |
| Which, you know, makes sense because if we can be painted in a negative enough light then women won't date us, men won't date us, we won't have families, we can't have jobs. | |
| It has a form of genetic destruction to it that is very powerful and we've learned to avoid that because everyone who stood against the mob and didn't reproduce, well, Those genes to stand against the mob didn't last very long. | |
| This great power of the mob, this has been the great power of the tribe and of particularly sexual ostracism. | |
| I mean, that's been the big battle, right? | |
| That's been the big battle is can we tame the tribe according to objective moral rules? | |
| And this brings me to my major point, which is the value of free speech. | |
| The mob hates free speech because free speech is a kind of, what is it, mitosis where the cells just kind of split and further split until you get individualism, right? | |
| So the mob hates free speech and it hates philosophy and it hates reason and it hates evidence because all of these appeal to the individual conscience because we are tuned to obey the mob but we're only of value to the mob if we obey reality, right? | |
| If the mob commands you to obey it morally, it only does that in the long run if you have value that you can provide by obeying the rules of nature, right? | |
| Like, so the mob may want to steal your food, right? | |
| Like, think of the Holodomor in the Ukraine, or in Ukraine, when the centralized communist government stripped food from all of the middle class farmers and starved millions of people to death. | |
| It's only because the farmers have obeyed reality that they have grown the crops that make it worthwhile for the mob to attack and strip their resources. | |
| It's if you go and work productively in the free market that you gain the resources that make it worth taxing you. | |
| And so the mob needs you to obey the mob morally, but to obey objective reality metaphysically. | |
| So that you can produce the value which you have to wrestle from objective reality according to objective standards. | |
| You can produce the value that then the mob can strip from you. | |
| So the mob. | |
| has this terrible contradiction. | |
| Morally, you must give up your conscience and obey the mob, but you must resist the mob and obey reality in order to have or create the value that the mob can strip from you. | |
| So it's a very, very tough situation. | |
| And this is the source of this age old issue in philosophy, the mind-body dichotomy, which we can sort of talk about another time, but that the mind is somehow In a separate realm from the physical body, whether that realm is the realm of the soul, or in Plato, of course, the realm of the forms, or in Kant, the dual-menal realm, or the realm of Nirvana in Buddhism, that there's this whole separate realm. | |
| But you have to invent a separate realm, because the body has to be productive in the real world, whereas the mind has to be enslaved to the mob. | |
| So you have this bifurcation of human identity, which is Anti-rational, but highly profitable. | |
| There's nothing more dangerous in this world than a profitable delusion, because it has to promote delusion as objectivity, usually by creating this other realm, whether it's the common good, or the will of the people, or the good of the nation, or whatever it is, right? | |
| We have to create this alternate realm where you must be sacrificed. | |
| But you can't live in this alternate realm, because in this alternate realm you can't produce the value the mob needs to strip from you in order to sustain its own delusions. | |
| So free speech It's a great challenge to the mob because it interrupts the uniformity of the current flow of the hive mind. | |
| It challenges, it bifurcates, it splits the conformity of mind that the mob requires to overwhelm the conscience of the individual. | |
| And this is why free speech is under such attack at the moment. | |
| And to promote free speech, is to resist the conformity that leads to the historical evils that are often used to club free speech where it stands. | |
| Oh, you promote hatred. | |
| Oh, you promote this. | |
| You promote this bad thing, this terrible thing. | |
| You've talked to this, right? | |
| So the historical evils that arise out of conformity with the mob and the surrender of the individual conscience to the amoral will-to-power hive mind of the collective, the evils that result from conformity are used to attack free speech. | |
| Which is our only defense against the conformity that breeds all of these historical horrors in the first place. | |
| Defend free speech with all your might, my friends. | |
| Defend free speech with all your might. |
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