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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:16:53
The Tragedy of Ethics (A Preview)
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All right, so I have 45 minutes to do my speech to Mari-Ari-Ari-O.
And so I'm going to just ramble for as long as it takes for me to get the ideas down.
And then I am absolutely convinced, like a jigsaw puzzle cannon fired up into a high hurricane, they will land in the perfect pieces tomorrow.
So, we have a tendency to look at the history of ideas as if they were generated by individuals.
Yes.
Yes.
Now, I mean, I accept and believe that it takes courageous individuals to advance better, more consistent systems of thought.
Many of them in this room, he said, kissing up to the audience magnificently.
But there are other factors at work
in particular in political science and when you look at the history of philosophy and in particular the history of ethics it's so insane it's so completely mad that it's really hard to think that these all came from rational people pursuing the truth independent of external circumstances
I mean, we have this bit of a tendency and I'm going to talk about these sort of two main trends in Western thought.
Sadly, one of them remains only in Western thought.
I'll talk a little bit about the cultures and societies of the philosophers and help to understand what effects these trends have.
on our society and on societies throughout history and hopefully clarify a little bit of what has gone on in the history of ethics.
So first, I think it's important to understand that people really haven't changed that much over the years.
I think it's a very important thing to understand.
People haven't changed that much over the years.
And how many times when you pick up the newspaper or watch TV Not so much on the web.
How many times do you see any foundational criticism of your existing society?
A little bit from Ron Paul.
Absolutely.
Ron Paul and Paul Ryan in his Transylvania haircut objectivist throwback moments.
But not a huge amount of Self-criticism of society as a whole.
Now, why do you think that is?
I mean, there are lots of disciplines that self-criticize all the time in the free market.
I mean, every new revision, every new upgrade of a software is, in a sense, a criticism of the previous software.
Here's what was missing, here's what we can do better.
Some of them are technological and some of them are just, you know, to keep up with competition, so businesses reinvent themselves all the time.
In science, I mean, there are these two trends in science, right?
So one of them is that we pursue truth no matter what.
And, you know, if it turns out that something we believe turns out to be false, well, it sucks to be that idea.
And Dawkins has this statement.
He says there was this professor who had believed the same thing for like 40 years.
Someone came along and disproved it.
And the professor thanked him for... And now that's maybe a bit more apocryphal than true.
We all have confirmation bias.
We all want to know.
We all obviously want to believe things that are true.
That we already believe.
Especially when we have morality invested in those.
And especially when we've made public declarations of morality with regards to those.
Backing away from a public moral statement takes a high level of integrity.
If you look at fashion, which is not to say look at my outfit today, but if you look at fashion, then this is a constant reinvention.
Constant reinvention, all the time.
But as far as the structure of society goes, It is extremely uncommon for people in the society to have any foundational criticisms of that society.
There are times when it has happened, of course.
I'm thinking of sort of Marxism in the 19th century, Fabian Socialism, late 19th, early 20th century.
But they always tend to... Or, you know, of course the criticism of monarchy that went through Europe.
in the Renaissance and Enlightenment phases, culminating in the American Revolution and the savage slaughter of priests and the aristocracy in France during the French Revolution of the late 18th century.
A few upwards, but generally not... and these are all prepared for by, you know, significant amounts of Century after Locke was writing, and around the time Adam Smith was writing, you have the American Revolution, founding the Constitutional Republic, and so on.
There's a significant lag.
And it's always annoyingly inconsistent, which we'll sort of get to in a sec.
But there's not a criticism of the existing structure of society much at all.
You're never going to pick up a newspaper and read, um, I have doubts about democracy.
Uh, government.
Necessary or not, right?
I mean, great arguments for it, I've been around for many years, but, Lisander Spoon ain't going to be taught in public schools, sort of what I'm saying.
Why is that?
Well, I think there's two reasons.
There's two reasons.
One is that There's a ruling class, and the ruling class has made it to the top of that existing structure and does not want that structure criticized because it's going to undercut their rent-seeking.
Government is fundamentally rent-seeking.
Political power is rent-seeking.
And those who have successfully sought those rents very successfully, they They don't want it to question, and so they will.
I mean, they used to be much more aggressive, right?
Here's a cup of hemlock, burn you at the stake or whatever.
Now it tends to be, if you have any success in questioning a particular hierarchy, whether it's in the family or in the church or in society as a whole, then, you know, the vicious slander and all this kind of stuff, that's more the flavor of, and this is, you know, massive progress.
I mean, slander requires your participation to think badly of yourself, whereas you don't have to think that fire is hot in order for it to burn you, and you don't have to think that hemlock is bad for you in order for it to stop your heart.
So, yay.
This is what we call progress after 2,500 years.
So there's a ruling class, and that ruling class doesn't want to see things changed, clearly.
But with the ruling class come the dependents to the ruling class.
And the dependents to the ruling class don't want to see the structure changed.
That's why you have dependents to a ruling class, so that you have more, like you have the top and the bottom who don't want the system to change.
And always it's the Bruce mechanical shark bite on the middle class's future and fortunes.
Right, so why does the government give away, why does the king give away goodies?
To create a constituency of people who want the king to continue.
Right, because their goodies were given to him by the king, sanctioned by the king, so if the king stays, the goodies are legitimate.
If the king goes, the goodies are not legitimized.
So this reality that anyone who questions the moral nature of the society he or she lives in is going to face sanctions from the ruling classes and is going to face a sort of horizontal attack from the dependent classes, the slave classes, the serf classes, the welfare classes, and the dependents are broken largely into rich and poor, right?
And particularly when you get a significant growth of state power in society, everything adapts to it, everything wraps around it.
And because everything has adapted to it, if that changes Then people's adaptive skill sets become much less economically valuable, right?
I mean, if you spent your 30 years, you know, greasing up your electric oil skin as a lobbyist, and then some stateless society comes along, your intellectual capital has just been blown, and that which was formerly respected, or at least feared, or at least desired, has become hateful and vile, and economic costs, social costs, moral costs, all that kind of stuff.
So people become heavily adapted to and invested in their environment.
Now, the creative destruction of the free market, which is what overturns all of the existing capital investments in everything.
Oh, do you like trains?
No, no, no, we've got planes.
Hey, how do you like horse poop on your sidewalk every morning?
Nope.
Okay, well, we've got cars.
And all this kind of great stuff.
Pony Express gives way to train mail, gives way to airplane mail, gives way to email.
So, where there's voluntarism, this reinvention tends to occur very rapidly, very continuously, and frankly enormously enjoyably.
This is one of the reasons I love the tech sector, is I have the attention of a ferret on a triple espresso, and so I really like all the new shiny stuff that comes along with that.
So, this reality conditions Ethics.
Why are there so many monetarists in the economic profession?
Because they have adapted to the hiring potential and almost limitless capacity for the intellectual support of evil that is the Federal Reserve or other central banking institutions.
Frankly, so much of economics depends on the power of the state at the moment that Without the state, economists would just be accountants, in my opinion.
But everybody's invested in the existing structure.
The rich, the poor, the rich dependents, the poor dependents, and the self-made people are afraid of attacks from both.
And of course, the necessary compromises that you have to make in order to survive in a particular social environment Lend you open or render you susceptible to the endless charges of hypocrisy.
Ah, he's a hypocrite!
You know, Steph, when he was in business, he would take government contracts, contracts, contracts.
Well, I mean, I wasn't... I wasn't an anarchist at that point.
But I believe that the government had legitimate roles and in those legitimate roles, I would take government contracts.
I worked to get government contracts and take them.
I forgot them.
And so then if you're against slavery in ancient Greece, well, ah, but you survive on slavery, your toga was made by slaves and all that kind of stuff.
Maybe they could fashion you some underwear or something.
So these conditioning aspects, I would argue, they don't just shape, they almost, almost completely dictate the ethical norms of the society.
They almost dictate.
I can think of sort of two, and we'll sort of touch on these, two areas in history where this has broken down, where the monopoly of ethical arguments have broken down.
And we'll sort of get to those in a sec.
Now, there are three main areas in philosophy.
Reason, evidence, faith.
To me, this is the big trinity that ethical philosophy works around.
Reason, evidence, and faith.
Now, some societies are very much into the reason.
I would say about ancient Greece, an amazing advancement of the Socratic method and geometry and some theoretical areas of physics, mathematics, I mean, it's amazing what they did with reason.
Empiricism, not so much.
They did not really make it to bring reason into the practical activity of daily life.
An argument I read many years ago that I still think is quite valid is that the reason the Greeks did not have an industrial revolution.
The reason that the Romans did not have an industrial revolution was that they were slave-based societies.
And when you have slave-based societies, you don't want to reduce the value of your slaves.
And introducing machinery reduces the value of your slaves, creates unemployment among the slaves, and so on, right?
So if you get a whole bunch of machines to do slaves' work, then you have too many slaves.
I guess you could put them to other work or whatever, but It's not usually... I mean, they're not very motivated and a pretty inert, obviously, slave population.
So, the translation of reason into practical value, which really was the... I mean, the Scientific Revolution, 17th century, all the way through the Industrial Revolution of the 18th, Agricultural Revolution, 17th, 18th century, Industrial Revolution, 18th, 19th centuries, and so on.
This really was when reason and evidence co-joined and created that virtuous cycle to me, which is that here's my theory, right?
I have this hypothesis, I have this rational belief, so I'm going to put it to the test in the real world.
A business plan, a scientific hypothesis, whatever, right?
And then the feedback is, does it work scientifically?
Do customers like it from a business standpoint?
And you continually refine what it is, right?
Theory and practice, reason and evidence together is very powerful.
Now if you have a sort of mostly rational based society, usually that's because the problems of production have been solved in a way that capital investment is negative towards, right?
Slaves, basically serfs and so on.
If you look at the Roman society, again the very poor chance I would argue in the Roman society, what is more common is that they were very pragmatic.
As a famous, at least for me, at least famous saying from Petrarch, where he said, the object of the will, sorry, the object of the mind is to know the good.
The object of the will is to do the good.
It is better to do the good than to know the truth.
To know the truth than to do the good.
Mental note, please make that better in the actual presentation.
And so the Romans were very empirical.
But they didn't have the feedback loop of empiricism conditioning ideas.
And so Romans did make some very significant empirical or pragmatic utilitarian advances in weaponry, in plumbing, in engineering and military organization and so on.
But they languished.
They were sort of practical, impatient with the frou-frou, right?
Basically, the Greeks were elves and the Romans were dwarves.
They were more pragmatic.
They don't like the frou-frou, semi-gay nature of pure abstract reason.
They want to get things done, build things, make things, all that kind of wonderful stuff.
And so the Romans, and I think this is very much where we are now, but the Romans were just, well, we're going to do stuff that works, right?
We've got a problem of poverty.
Like, if we have a problem called poverty, then we are not going to look to principle.
We're not going to have a debate about principles.
This is the terrifying pragmatism of the present, which is typical late-Empire stuff.
We're not going to appeal to principle.
We have a problem called poverty.
The appeal to principle is property rights, non-aggression principle, and so on, and the patience of allowing the poor to climb the way out of poverty as they were doing in the post-war period.
You say, oh, well, you look at it from a sort of, frankly, idiot, pixel-based movement scenario.
Oh, these people have a lot of money, these people don't have a lot of money.
So the pragmatic thing, you know, it's like if you want to make something flat and you have a hill and a hole, well, you put the hill in the hole and you're flat.
Right?
That's pragmatic.
You don't appeal the principle.
In the utilitarian worldview, which is really the central planning worldview, people are, you know, things, money is things, stuff to be moved around, right?
I mean, this recent Cyprus thing where they decided to take all the money out of the bank accounts.
Well, any idiot and their dog could have predicted what was going to happen.
It just doesn't run on the bank and all this, right?
I mean, but, well, we need money.
There's money over here.
Let's take it, right?
The reaction is, always seems to be baffling to central planners.
I said, I said, get into the hole.
I'm sorry, perhaps you didn't hear me.
Get into the hole.
Well, it just tells you how they were raised.
And after the fall of Rome, right, so the sort of reason and evidence was sort of swinging back and forth in the ancient world, at least in the West.
And, you know, I mean, I hate to say the ancient world was just Greece and Rome, but 45 minutes cut me some slack.
And, therefore, the Dark Ages.
Dark Ages.
Ah, you know, it's hard to say.
I mean, the Dark Ages You know, when the population of Rome went from like a million to 17,000 in half a generation.
I mean, complete collapse.
And again, it's the same thing, right?
What happens when you make a whole bunch of pragmatic, non-principles quote solutions to things.
You just set yourself up for more and more violations of principles and more and more of moving stuff around, right?
So one of the brief, I think, and fairly reasonable explanations of the fall of Rome was, you've got the military-industrial empire.
Hey!
I wonder when that will ever happen again.
And so you began to have to tax people more and more and also you had to sort of You had to steal people from their farms and families and send them off for 20 years to go hack up recalcitrant foreigners.
And, you know, it was not exactly a lot of medevacking or anesthesia in those days.
And so what was the best you could hope for?
It was to come back in one piece and you get a plot of land and, you know, die three years later of a toothache.
So people didn't really want to pay the taxes, but they could only tax cities.
The resources required to tax the countryside was ridiculous.
You just couldn't find people, couldn't get the money from them.
And so people began to depopulate the cities, began to flee the cities, which meant that they had to raise taxes, which meant that more people began to evade the cities, and the young people would move out of the cities.
Raise taxes and then finally you can't pay the barbarian.
And so because you have fewer people, you need more taxes because you stop paying mercenaries.
And then these mercenaries raise your capital requirements, you've got lower taxes.
Eventually you can't pay the mercenaries.
Mercenaries come and sack Rome and, you know, bye-bye to the supposedly pragmatic.
Ah, pragmatism is horrible.
It's horrible.
I mean, imagine a doctor.
Uh, I've got a pain in my belly.
Well, we'll just cut open and start hacking at things until we find out what works.
Well, I'd really like a bit more of a principled approach, if you don't mind.
Let's do a few theories first.
So, I mean, the Dark Ages, I mean, things really went over to, um, to faith.
To faith.
And that was a big problem.
That was a big problem.
Understandable.
See, when pragmatism fails, and you can't go back to reason and evidence, right?
Reason and evidence is really hard to co-join in a slave or serf-based society.
Because the reason is for people, the evidence is the slaves are just like us, so for us to rule the slaves and exploit them is not very justifiable.
So it was pretty hard to put reason and evidence together until there was a chance of escaping serfdom, which happened as a result of the friendly black death of the 14th century.
14th, 15th, 16th century.
Decimated so many workers that the value of each individual worker rose and You actually began to need capital improvements because so many workers were dying from the plague and so, for the first time, it actually became profitable for the society as a whole to start investing in capital improvements, which increased the productivity of agriculture, which in turn, of course, allowed cities to grow.
You can't have cities without agricultural excess because cities can't grow enough food to feed themselves.
With cities, you get the reinfection, the reinfliction, the rediscovery of Roman law.
And through Roman law, Roman philosophy, around the late 13th century, you start to really get good translations of Aristotle, say, coming back from the Muslims, from the Arabic lands.
And start the whole process again.
But so, this recent evidence in faith aspect of History is really important to understand.
I mean, it's such a complex field, you can't sort of boil it down to just, ah, it's only these three things, but there are three very important things to figure out.
You know, you study the solar system, you study the sun and the planets.
Yeah, there's an asteroid belt, which is not unimportant, and there's some comets and stuff, but you know, the real busy work is going on with the planets and the moons and the sun.
So in the Middle Ages, sorry, the Dark Ages, I mean, it was really, you know, a whole bunch of subsistence stuff and so on.
But there were some agricultural improvements.
So there was not, I mean, it wasn't direct slavery, I mean, it was serfdom, right?
You were sort of tied and bought and sold with the land and so on.
It was sort of a serfdom.
And because there was a constant problem of starvation, they had a desire to improve the agricultural life.
So, sort of fall of Rome, sort of 6th, 5th, 6th century A.D.
through to 9th, 10th, 11th century.
We don't know a lot.
At least, I don't know a lot.
We've studied it, but don't really know a lot.
Not a lot of written records and so on.
But there is an emergence of, you know, I mean, a lot of people copy and calligraphy In, I guess, the medieval gay bars known as monasteries.
But there were agricultural improvements, because there was an empirical need for just some more crops.
I mean, five to ten percent of the European population, it's been calculated, just die of starvation any given time, any given moment.
Wretched!
Brutal!
And because the roads were so bad, you could have one village starving to death, while, you know, two villages over, they had food rotting in the fields because they had too much.
Wow!
Sorry, I'm just driving past.
I'm down here in Texas, going to Nacogdoches, and there's a huge, fiery burn-off of, I guess, oil or gas.
Gas, I would imagine, from some huge refinery over there.
Man, those things are monstrous achievements of pragmatic and principled economic and intellectual activity.
Just magnificent.
My daughter would be quite excited.
Don't look at it too long.
Afterimage burning.
Road darkness ahead.
But throughout all of this who is it who is risen to prominence?
Who survives?
Who is it who survives and is retained?
Well from Plato who by many accounts wasn't even at the trial of Socrates so Plato of course who was He's a drug-addled totalitarian asshole in many ways.
Not that he... I don't know if he took drugs, but man, in theory the forms require some serious PCB rearrangement of your neofrontal cortex to be willing and able to accept it.
Plato's interpretation of the trial and death of Socrates is... Oh!
Socrates was accused of Corrupting the youth, which is a badge of honor for a philosopher.
If you're not accused of corrupting the youth, you don't get your merit badge.
The existing hierarchies who are in fact corrupting the youth will call bringing rational arguments to youth the corruption of the youth.
Of course they will.
But his reinterpretation was, oh my goodness, it's a great and wonderful thing to obey the state.
You know, he could have escaped, but he chose to die.
Now, I've made the argument before.
I won't really make it here.
You can look at it on YouTube, The Trial of Death and Socrates.
Socrates made the case, I think, out of a disgust and hatred of his fellow man.
It was a terrible curse to teach them.
I mean, he basically says, most men are idiots, but you should obey the state in a democracy, or at least a democracy of his peers.
In other words, you should obey the majority of people who I've defined as idiots, and that's called virtue.
I mean, it's a terrible curse on literally the next 2,500 years and counting of Western thought, you know, love it or leave it kind of thing, all this crap that's still the shadow of that That terrible death and the terrible reporting of that terrible death.
But also when Plato looked at the smoking crater where his mentor had been and saw that this came about because Socrates was teaching the young to ask uncomfortable questions of their elders.
I mean, that's the only way to make change in the world.
Any kind of fundamental change.
I mean, I don't mean like economic or whatever, right?
But, I mean, real ethics and the real meat of what defines humanity.
You have to have the young ask uncomfortable questions of their elders.
This is sort of my very first book, Onto the Tyranny of Illusion.
I mean, I was very aware of this.
You have to have the young ask the elders, what is virtue?
Because if the elders know, then they can rationally explain them.
We know that they don't know, so then at least the young can see that the question of virtue has not been answered.
Once the young can see that the question of virtue has not been answered, then the truly political nature of ethics, which I'll continue to make the case, the truly political nature of ethics is revealed.
And that's really important, because if people think that the virtue that they're taught is some disinterested third-party, you know, let's just kumbaya, we've discovered the truth, and you know, be all kinds of goody-two-shoes about it, and they don't see the political nature of ethics, which is really sort of the case that I'm making, if they don't see that, then they will mistake
The preferences of the rulers, which is always put forward as some disinterested moral virtue, and for more on this, read anything that Noam Chomsky writes, they will look at the self-interest of the rulers as put forward as this supposedly disinterested, third-party, validated, moral, right?
They will look at all of that as if it's really, you know, just virtue.
As if that's just virtue.
And of course it's not.
I mean, we are run by the good.
The good is what defines everything about who we are.
And if the young believe that their society reflects an indifferently defined and created virtue, then they will not be able in any substantive way to change their society.
If virtue is a statue and your society is a shadow, you can't move the shadow.
You just can't.
And if the statue is exactly where it's supposed to be, and if the shadow, of course, falls from the statue, depending on the light source, well, you can't!
You can't change it.
And so if there's this third-party goodness out there that our society is a perfect reflection of, well, you can't change the good, because the good is, you know, like any more than you can change the scientific method, right?
So what the rulers allowed to survive in ancient Greece was the edict that the city, the government, is your mother and father and they give you life and they keep you safe and educate you and protect you and since you take the protection of the rulers you have no right to complain about the rulers.
You just can't do it, because you would not be alive without them, and you have taken all their protection and so on.
And Socrates explicitly says this, as does Immanuel Kant, of course, over 2,000 years later.
But these are not what the people found useful, right?
I think this is really important.
These philosophers are not what the people found useful or valuable.
I mean, it wasn't a buffet.
It was... I mean, most of these people published under very strict censorship rules and very strict censorship.
I mean, you didn't get a strike against your YouTube account back then.
You would get, you know, thrown in prison, deported, killed.
I mean, just look what happened to Spinoza.
Or my ancestor.
Who was afraid to meet with John Locke because of his... William Molyneux, I mean, because of his fear of the government.
I mean, they were lifelong friends and they were desperate to meet and it just took them forever to do so because it was so politically dangerous to do it.
Right, so this, I mean, this is like the menu in a Soviet restaurant.
You know, in a Soviet... I don't really get those jokes, but something like, in Soviet Union, the restaurant orders you or something, I don't know.
I don't quite understand this Dolph Lugnut kind of a joke, but I think that's something along the lines of it.
Oh!
I am so far from my youth!
I'm gonna be doing the Harlem Shake soon!
This is not a buffet!
It is what was of value to the rulers.
Because who remained unmolested?
Who remained unmolested?
Well, the people who told you to obey the rulers.
And the philosophers who told you to obey the rulers were the philosophers who were more on the mystical side.
Because in mysticism Truth is revelation.
I mean, it's not science, right?
It's not, I mean, there's no pope of science that scientists go to to get their disputes resolved, right?
The arbitrator is the scientific method.
The arbitrator is reality.
You know, government funding accepted.
So those philosophers who teach you That the evidence of your senses and empirical reason and all these science and so on who teach you that you are as competent as anyone else in the known universe who's got functioning senses and a non-mad brain.
Those philosophers who teach you that you cannot determine unaided truth from falsehood.
Well, those philosophers are serving you up, bound and skewered to the ruling classes.
Bound and skewered to the ruling classes.
And there's a long tradition of them.
Kant and Hegel, I mean two of the most important ones, both taught that there was a higher realm, and Plato of course, taught that there was a higher realm than reality, mere empirical sensual reality.
And this higher realm is absolutely necessary for political hierarchies.
I mean, it survives, of course, in the common good, in the government, in the country, all of this crap which doesn't exist.
It's all just made-up nonsense.
The fundamental aspect of fundamental ridiculousness of voting, that you are perceived to be able to vote for a candidate who is going to enact policies in a monstrously wide number of fields.
And you are somehow going to be able to judge the quality of that candidate.
Right?
So you, oh, he's going to do health care.
Well, I'm an expert in health care.
I know exactly what's right in health care.
Oh, he's going to do finance reform.
I got to vote for him because he's an expert in finance reform.
Right?
I mean, no human being can be an expert in all these things.
Jeez, I'm barely an expert in one.
I think I'm making a bit unclear in this speech.
I mean, it's madness.
Say, oh, well, you're able to choose your representatives in this wide variety of fields because you must have expertise in this wide variety of fields.
And yet you are not allowed to choose your own representatives of your own choice.
You can only choose people to represent you as a whole.
So you can choose someone, because you're an expert in regulation and finance, you can choose someone to regulate finance for you.
To keep you safe from people who will do you wrong in the financial world.
But A, you can choose your own finance company and just say, well, why don't I just, you know, I don't need the government to keep the finance.
In fact, if I'm such an expert that I can choose a government guy to regulate finance, then why don't I just choose my own finance company to be the most honest?
Well, of course, that makes perfect sense, right?
That makes perfect sense.
I mean, it's like saying, I have such a great, deep and wise knowledge of nutrition that I'm going to appoint someone and give them the right to deliver me meals.
I mean, I mean, if you're such a goddamn expert in nutrition, go choose your own meals!
And if it requires you to be an expert in nutrition to choose the person who's going to choose your meals for you, then you already have the knowledge to choose your own meals.
Anyway, I'm going to go off on that tangent for a while, because it's a little hard to get, but once you get it, it's just lunatic.
So the first thing is, You have to have a deep knowledge.
Your vote is meaningless if you're just voting for who's taller, who has the wider teeth, or who's more politically correct, or who has the better speaking voice, or the cuter wife.
This is what people generally vote on.
According to the theory of democracy, you have to have expertise in the field to choose someone In the field, right?
And one of the big problems of reality is that in order to judge whether somebody's good in the field, you have to be good in the field.
Right, so in order to judge whether somebody is good at, like whether Obamacare is a good or bad thing, you have to be an expert in economics, you have to be an expert in politics, you have to be an expert in healthcare and finance and so on.
I mean, it's impossible for anybody to be sufficiently expert, which is why you have to go back to principle and say, hey, don't steal.
Don't initiate force and we're done.
The second thing is that you are choosing.
Let's say that you are that smart.
Well, obviously not everyone is that smart to be able to choose someone who's able to regulate a wide variety and near infinite variety of the modern economy.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
So clearly you are not able or allowed To choose your own representative for yourself, right?
So if I'm smart enough to choose Obama or Stephen Harper or whoever, David Cameron, to manage and regulate and control the finance industry, that their plans are the ones that are working, their plans are the best, because you have to be an expert not only in their plans and the industry as a whole and government and force and finance and economics and all that, but you also have to have reviewed everyone else's plans as well, right?
So if the government regulates 50 things and there are five candidates, you have to be familiar with 250 plans, at least, and be able to weigh their merits.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, right?
Hundreds of thousands of regulars.
So it's completely impossible, obviously, right?
I mean, this is why it's so ridiculous to think of democracy as anything other than a popularity contest of idiots voted for by clowns.
Or clowns voted for by idiots.
Clowns are more entertaining.
That's probably better.
Note, if you use that motor whore, please replace idiots with clowns.
Or just call it an election cycle.
Stay on target!
Get back to the topic.
So you can choose the representative in politics who's going to manage all this stuff, but you can't choose for yourself a representative who's going to manage all this stuff.
In other words, you are going to Choose Obama because he's going to take on Wall Street and make it all better.
But you can't choose the most honest Wall Street company and you also can't choose your own broker based upon his ability to tell you who's the most honest broker.
Right?
I mean, it's completely mad.
I mean, it's completely deranged.
And this is why voting is just such a ludicrous and ridiculous farce.
But, of course, you're told to do it because voting is... Whatever legitimizes the rulers, they are desperately seeking.
They are desperately seeking.
So, the intellectual classes, of course, they legitimize the rulers.
And, in return, the rulers give kibble to the intellectual classes.
And intellectual classes, they can be philosophers, they can be the media, they can be priests, they can be whatever, you know, the verbal sociopaths as opposed to the, you know, strangle-you-in-your-sleep sociopaths.
As opposed to, you know, I think after I did my series on sociopathy, some self-proclaimed sociopath wrote to me and said, hey man, don't harsh on us so much.
And you know, when a sociopath criticizes you, it generally gets your attention.
And they said, you know, we can be, you know, we can actually be very helpful.
We're good under fire.
We're good at violence, which society does need sometimes, which of course I agree.
We're good surgeons because we don't really feel any empathy for the people we're cutting into.
If you need an emergency tracheotomy, it's not Carrie Bradshaw you want.
It's Steven Seagal with a nice knife.
So, yeah, I mean, fair enough.
So whoever it is that is going to legitimize the rulers... Now, of course, Plato had Socrates do this, and Aristotle took a different approach.
I mean, he ran, saying he's not going to allow philosophy to be sinned against twice.
I mean, hey, you get a good line, you can get away with just about anything.
Everybody lies about sex.
And so this They pick and choose, and who is on the buffet of ethics for the people to consume?
Well, the thinkers and the communicators who are the most valuable to the ruling classes.
And the effect of this cannot be overestimated.
I mean, the history of philosophy I mean, I call it the tragedy of ethics.
The tragedy of ethics is that people think they're ethics.
Like that it's some disinterested pursuit of truth.
But you have to be able to write.
Throughout most of history, you just get killed.
Or expelled, you know?
We went from sort of just killing with a rock, right?
You question the witch doctor and his minions just crush your head with a rock, to, you know, a slightly more refined hemlock, to expulsion, to the Spinoza kind of ostracism, to, you know, generalized slander and so on.
I mean, this is, if you don't fulfill the Because, I mean, the ruling classes, again, I don't want to sort of make them some hydra-headed entity that can all talk to each other, but there is a continuity in the ruling classes.
The ruling classes saw relatively clearly what happens when the central narrative of ethics fragments, right?
So now we'll talk about the two aspects of the two great breakdown scenarios that have happened in history.
So the first, of course, is the printing press.
And the printing press was essential in two areas.
It fragmented religion and it consolidated science.
The scientific revolution could not have happened without the printing press.
I wish that were just my opinion, because it's obviously a pretty smart one, but that's just generally accepted wisdom, I think, throughout most of the humanities.
The communication of the Baconian method, which Aristotle actually was fairly close to.
It's just that there was no particular impulse, no drive, and lots of economic interests against the implementation.
I mean, they knew the steam engine in ancient Greece.
They just, hey, that's cool, let's make a toy.
No, no, no!
You know, make railways, save the world.
But when Martin Luther nailed his, what was it, 98 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, and started the fragmentation of what used to be called Christendom and then became Christianity because it flowered into a hundred pretty much semi-eternally warring sects.
His rebellion would have been, I believe, short and invisible which is to say he would not have been nailed to the perch but rather pushing up the daisies Other than the fact that he was a really great writer and a very powerful thinker.
And powerful, you know, means like a bomb too.
But a very great thinker.
Great communicator.
And because he was able to translate the Bible into the vernacular at a time when there was a printing press and this could be distributed, So the blindness of the medieval serfs to their religious instruction, which is that they couldn't hear anything of what was going on.
It was all in Latin and so on, right?
Well, they could actually read the Bible for themselves.
And because the Bible is a kind of a disco ball, right, it will reflect back to you what, you know, if you're into the, you know, fire and brimstone stuff, hey, we've got this Old Testament character who will ride up your alley.
I mean, he'll just, he'll blow the whole world up and save Noah and a bunch of koala bears who mysteriously eat eucalyptus leaves, although they're only native to Australia and the ark lands in the Middle East.
We have that guy, if you're sort of more dewy-eyed, hippy person, you know, want to hug lambs and stare soulfully at children, then we have the, you know, the gentle, bearded, Allman Brothers missing third member Jesus guy, who will appeal to that side of you, and so on.
Oh, is feminism becoming more popular?
Hey, in the 1930s I think it was.
They venerated Mary and all that kind of stuff.
Or was it St. Oralus?
Augustine?
I'll have to check this.
Whose books were condemned along with some of Aristotle's texts and then I think 30 or 40 years later he was canonized because he turned out to be quite popular.
So, when original arguments, when the original text gets into the hands of people, the unity of ignorance, which is really the only unity that's possible.
There is only unity in ignorance.
There is no unity in knowledge.
I'm sorry, that's a bit of a... I'm thinking of exceptions to that, even as I'm sort of... I mean, there's unity in knowledge of 2 and 2 make 4 and so on.
In terms of propaganda, there is only unity in ignorance.
And with that, of course, came the fractioning of Christendom and the result being that since the state and religion were united, every religious sect wanted to grab power of the state in a really ancient and bloody form of intense lobbying efforts.
Right now they're just taking your money before they really wanted to either give you adult baptism as the Anabaptists did or take away all joy and color in your life like the Puritans and the Evangelians did and the Calvinists did and so on.
The Puritans, what's that old phrase?
Great phrase.
Puritanism, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
And so this all fragmented and all the religious groups, because there could be only one who would run the state, but they just started warring on each other to gain control of the state.
And this is why you ended up with three popes at one point.
I mean, it was just a war of narrative.
It was a war of the narrative which justified the ruling classes.
And there were, of course, genuine evangelical and passionate energies in the people who genuinely believed that you had to do X, Y, and Z in order to save your soul and so on.
And eventually, of course, with the horror of this eternal war of who would gain control of the religious power of the state, you have to separate church and state.
And this was not, I mean, so then suddenly when this becomes a necessity, the writers who support it are then supported by the ruling classes.
Right?
See, one of the main problems with aristocracy is that it is only legitimized through religion.
But because the peasants had the texts themselves, you could not get a unified justification for the aristocracy.
The aristocracy, the king, divine right of kings, placed there by God, God's representative on earth, and so on, right?
I mean, this is the way that the damnable, itchy-robed sophist Martin Luther justified, right?
An eye for an eye is the king to you.
Turn the other cheek is you to the king.
If he does you, quote, wrong, which he can't do because he's put there by God.
So, of course, the reality is that When it became impossible to sustain the legitimacy of the monarchy because of the fragmentation of Christendom and the religious wars that that produced, well suddenly the ruling class was willing to separate the state and religion.
And then those writers who argued for the separation of church and state gained prominence.
And that's important.
When people get hold of the original text, you can't have unity.
If you can't have a unity of narrative, you can't justify the aristocracy.
And therefore you have to find another way of justifying the ruling classes.
And that became democracy.
I mean, democracy is a lie on so many levels.
I mean, with this audience, I don't have to go into it in any particular depth or detail, I'm sure.
But democracy is completely ridiculous, because it has no conflict of interest provisions.
I mean, one of the many reasons it's so.
So people who are on welfare, can they objectively vote on welfare?
Of course not.
Massive conflict of interest.
Massive, unsustainable, catastrophic conflict of interest.
So they shouldn't be doing that.
But they do, right?
They have to.
Democracy is about conflict of interest.
I mean, because otherwise people would actually have to know what they're studying, and they would actually have to study these things, they'd have to really understand them, and since they would very quickly realize that that's impossible.
And because they cannot understand it, you know, they get that it's impossible, you can't understand it, and therefore the whole thing's a lie, right?
So the only, I mean, people just vote on their economic self-interest, which is a conflict of interest, right?
So that people only vote on their economic self-interest, the only reason why people vote.
And this is true for libertarians, right?
We vote to minimize the state or it's the economic self-interest for producers.
But without that economic self-interest, nobody would bother voting or if they had to vote based upon actually knowing something about it, then people would recognize.
Like if you actually had to invest the time and prove your knowledge of a wide variety of fields that the government works in, that policymakers are proposing solutions for, then the amount of studying you would have to do to be an informed voter, and that you'd have to prove that, of course, would not be worth it.
Right?
So why do people vote?
They vote on economic self-interest, on, you know, dogma, on cuteness, on trends, on who their friends are voting for, on whatever, right?
I mean, but it's all just, I mean, it's all economic self-interest or social self-interest.
It's all conflict of interest fundamentally, at least on the economic side.
But when the original justification for the ruling classes, i.e.
religion, failed because of the fragmentation of the narrative, well, I mean they tried their best, saying obey the king no matter what, but given that the king imposed religion and religious instruction, everyone wanted to get a hold of the king's power to inflict their religious instruction on others because
indoctrination is easier than conversion well it couldn't be sustained and because it couldn't be sustained you had to swap out the justification for the ruling classes and that meant democracy and democracy was facing some not inconsiderable intellectual challenges
And so people didn't really want to obey the government and there was a great fragmentation of values.
I mean Americans were incredibly literate in the sort of 18th and early 19th centuries and very skeptical of the state and the government could not get a whole bunch of stuff done that it wanted to get done.
And so Democracy really only works when the will of the people is individualized.
I mean, even in theory.
It can't work in practice, but even in theory.
I mean, if you indoctrinate people, then their resulting opinions are not their opinions.
They're your opinions, right?
I mean, they're indoctrinators' opinions.
It's like pushing a signet ring into a mound of wax and saying, look what wonderful art the wax made out of itself.
No, it just received your impression and that's what happened.
And so the ruling classes, you know, particularly America and in Canada too, they did not have the kind of power that they were used to under the monarchy.
They didn't have the power that they used to have.
They certainly didn't have the power that they wanted.
And the reason they didn't have that power was that there was individualization of education.
In the same way that when you got a hold of the Bible, it would allow you to read it yourself, come to your own conclusions, think for yourself.
The Bible is a very wide paradigm, to say the least.
is a very wide paradigm, to say the least.
A very wide paradigm.
So this was what happened.
This is what the fragmentation that occurred.
And in the absence of government control of education, then people go their own way, they come up with their own thoughts, and they're not particularly able to be put into a straight line.
They certainly are not going to think of the government as the center of society.
So, to gain the kind of power back that they had under the aristocracy, the ruling classes knew that they had to Governmentalize the education.
Socialize the education.
To socialize the education, you socialize the society.
I mean, whatever happens to children is what happens in society.
Whatever happens to children is what happens in society.
And you can go to psychohistory.com for much, much, much more on that.
I am certainly no expert in that area, but I defer to those who are.
And so they got the power back relatively quickly after the takeover of government education.
They got their power back quite quickly.
And in the 20th century, I mean, who said no to war?
Well, even in the First World War there were a couple hundred thousand men in America who just didn't want to go get drafted.
They just vanished.
That became less and less the case as government education and indoctrination really began to take over.
And I've seen both sides of this.
I mean, I've been part of the make-you-into-a-drone Prussian-style education for the lower classes, but I've also been in charge, like I've also went through a couple years when I was young, of the Ruling classes, private boarding school, whip the boys if they misbehave, create massive amounts of senseless competition, and show no shred of human empathy for any living soul on the radar.
And so I've seen some of this.
I mean, I've seen both sides of the coin as far as the ruling class, surf classes goes, and the education, how powerful it is, how unbelievably powerful it is, of course.
As the Jesuits used to say, and I think it's true, give me a boy until he's seven and he's mine for life, and that is mostly true.
So, things trundled along.
Ruling classes got their sadistic pleasure out of watching the surf ants fight each other in endless wars, made their fortunes off the blood and treasure of their victims, did the usual squid-parasite-brain-sucking stuff that they've been doing since the dawn of time, and then, holy cannoli, along came the internet, which was really the second round of the Gutenberg press.
And now we have a breakdown of narrative.
Which is decried.
Ah, it's confirmation bias.
Ah, people only see what they want to see.
They only go and find all the Fox people go to Fox, and all the CNN people, all the PBS people go to PBS, and there's this fragmentation, and blah blah blah.
And what that is, is saying that there's now a multiplicity of narratives.
Right?
There's a Fox narrative.
Right?
Which is that I was talking to a guy on the airplane.
He was saying that, you know, America's gone to hell in a handbasket because there's too much welfare and too little Jesus, too little God.
So we had a spirited discussion about that and this is also the fear of immigration.
But what it says is that we don't have any way to get to the truth.
Right?
All we have is competing narratives.
We don't have any way to get to the truth, to resolve the truth.
And if individuals don't have any way to resolve truth, then a monopoly of propaganda is really the best that can be hoped for.
And that's a great tragedy.
It's a great tragedy.
And there is, of course, a fragmentation in America.
I mean, when I grew up, there were like three channels.
And two of them were too boring to watch.
And I guess they featured a pedophile.
It's Jimmy Seville.
Or at least it's an accused pedophile.
And there was a unity of narrative.
I mean, the narrative I got about the Second World War was entirely state-based propaganda.
But now you can find lots of alternate and different opinions on your world as a whole.
You can view live World War II footage from the German side, or from the Japanese side, or those lazy, good-for-nothing, green-beard, drinking shamrock, twisting Irish who stayed neutral.
Southern.
Smart, my boy!
So you get a live, live feedback.
I mean, for instance, you can see bodies of Iraqis everywhere on the internet.
But that's unprecedented.
Now, of course, it's a great argument for voluntarism, we don't need to stay.
There's no law that says you can't print these pictures, but nobody does.
Right?
Because the outrage of a ghostly fingertip of reality poking through the status bio-fear storm clouds of ignorance that protects the tender mind of the average zombified American, too terrible to bear.
I mean, a ghostly whisper of the reality of imperialism finding its way back to the average American's brain is, you know, the anti-war people were just anti-Bush people.
What has happened to the anti-war movement since 1B Obama got in power?
Well, nothing but crickets and avoidance and they all went to occupy Wall Street.
And so now I think that there is possible for the first time ever in human history A chance for a narrative to be unchosen by the ruling classes.
By the ruling classes, I mean those that are innately immoral, right, like the political ruling classes.
Those that are hangers-on and feeders of the immorality, right, the media, the military-industrial complex and so on.
And the parents, I mean parents who use violence to the raising of their children are part of the ruling class.
They condition people to be part of a hierarchy and of course they are opposed to ethics because They have violated ethics.
And if they have to admit they violated ethics, then they threaten their future return on their investment in terms of... I put a video out recently where I said there's not an economic incentive to have children.
And that's... I mean, somebody wrote back and said, well, yeah, but I mean, of course there is.
I mean, they're the ones who take care of you when you get old.
It's like, well, I mean, that's...
That's kind of taking the individuality and choices of those children for granted.
I mean, I hope that my daughter wants to spend some time with me when I get older, but I mean, that obviously will be her choice, and it's up to me to sort of woo her parentally from that standpoint and make it enjoyable and positive enough an experience for her to do that.
But they're not, you know, they're not fruit trees.
There's no economic incentive to plant a fruit tree.
Sure there is, you can pick the fruit later.
Well sure, but that's only because the fruit tree doesn't have free will.
Children grow up to adults who do, and children have free will.
But now, there's this amazing, unbelievably electrifying moment in history where a narrative can arise Without the sanction of the ruling classes because of the internet.
And you can create a market, really, for the first time in history.
An intellectual market.
I mean, many years ago I wanted to write a book about the welfare states and lots of proposals around the publishers and I was a good writer.
I'm a good writer and a good researcher.
I was doing my master's after I did my master's.
And nobody was interested, because they say, what's the market for that?
There's no market for that.
Now, I mean, if you're a Christian conservative, there's a huge market for Christian conservative books, right?
Huge market.
I like those books.
I really do.
I mean, I just went from Breitbart to, he was my last lesson, Righteous Indignation, Although he's more secular, but I like... I mean, Ann Coulter is a great writer and a very provocative and stimulating thinker.
A quite delightful thinker in many ways.
Challenging.
I love her stuff.
Her anti-evolution stuff is wonderful.
It's really worth reading.
Just as you can get, just that a lot of what you learned about evolution was propaganda too.
I still accept it, but it was really fascinating to see that the monkey scopes trial was a complete setup and the light and dark moths on the trees all nailed there to prove a point and all that kind of stuff.
It just goes to show you how effective propaganda is.
But for the first time in history, because of the internet, we have the capacity to create a market.
Right, so, I mean, if I say, oh, I'm going to do a show about anarchism, atheism, voluntarism in relationships, personal integrity, and it's going to be anti-state, anti-violence, anti-fraud, and so on, people would say, ah, let me, you know, who's that going to appeal to?
That's what you're supposed to say.
Who's your target market going to be?
Couples on a first date.
Couples who are tired of Nora Jones and want to have something else to have nice, pleasant middle-aged sex to.
Well, there would be no audience.
I mean, no audience.
I mean, who would have imagined, frankly, that what I do would be the biggest philosophy conversation in history?
You would not have been able to predict that.
I certainly wasn't able to predict it and I knew what I was going to say.
At least a lot of it.
There was no way to predict that in advance at all.
At all!
Astonishing!
Staggering!
Wonderful!
This is a market that could not have been identified ahead of time but has now grown to this colossus.
of impact.
I mean, it's the biggest impact philosophy has ever had in the world.
And I say that not because I'm so great, but just because I'm the first philosopher not chosen by the ruling classes.
Now, I use the word conversation, right, because Ayn Rand certainly started a movement and she was not chosen by the ruling classes, but she worked her way to the forefront of a lot of people's consciousness simply through her passion and incredibly engaging plots and characters and true, true originality and a storytelling sense that really is only rivaled by Plato's.
Because, I mean, we're often asked what is the requirement for a free society?
What is the requirement for?
Like, what is required for a transition to a free society?
I mean, there are lots of answers.
I mean, nobody can corner the market on this.
And I've got, I mean, I think that bringing voluntarism to the family is important because, as I said, whatever happens in the family happens in society.
And if we have an unchosen hierarchy in the family, we will have an unchosen hierarchy in society.
I think that's inevitable.
But another thing that I think is really essential, and really predates that, is we need a fragmentation of the narrative.
Because when narratives fragment, you get the possibility of static in the matrix, right?
The possibility of people, like if you hear, like if you are an intelligent, curious person, if you just grew up with one narrative, well, it's really hard to criticize people for believing in a narrative when it's not narrative, it's reality.
But when you hear credible opposing arguments, which is why it's so important to expose yourself to opposing arguments, when you hear credible opposing arguments to your position, it has the effect of shattering a particular narrative.
A narrative, I mean, I wish there was a better word.
It's like the Matrix.
It's the reality that you live in.
I'm an American and the government does the wrong things but it's basically there to protect my rights and if you don't like it you can leave it.
All of the basic programming that people have, the answers that are given to people so that they don't have to think for themselves because if they think for themselves they'll find out that those answers are terrible and control them.
If you don't like it, leave, means everyone who's around you has to agree with you, and anyone who disagrees with you isn't around, and therefore you're not going to be exposed to any contrary opinions.
It's just a magic wand to keep competing narratives at bay.
I mean, if you look... I mean, the precedents aren't that great.
I mean, I think that we can avoid... That's why the family stuff has to improve at the same time.
Because if the narrative fragments Then, when the family remains tyrannical, then you get competing tyrannies, I think.
I mean, if you can fragment the narrative while pacifying the family, while making the family a peaceful environment, then you actually have the capacity for true and genuine human thought.
My first time ever.
Most people are far too traumatized by their culture, by their families, by their religions, by their public schools.
They're far too traumatized to be able to think.
I mean, that's not even my opinion.
That's just very well established psychological science.
I mean, you can see this in the brain scans.
They make up reasons after the fact.
It's all ex post facto justification for the avoidance of fight or flight activation.
If we can pacify the family, if we can make the family peaceful, at the same time as we can fragment the narratives, then we create a wonderful space, a wonderful possibility for human thought.
Human thought remains almost exclusively a potential, tragically at the moment.
I mean, I think we've all experienced this, bringing reason and evidence to people and they just freak out!
But if we can clear away the cobwebs and clouds and gremlins and goblins and matrices from the human mind, the truly clogged brain arteries of subjugation, my goodness, I mean, we will see an explosion of philosophy that will be even greater because of the low barrier to entry and low capital cost requirements for you.
Order by midnight and receive.
We will see a flowering of human thought.
It'll be unprecedented.
It will vastly outstrip and be far faster than the scientific revolution.
Vastly outstrip and be far faster than the industrial revolution in terms of productivity and value.
But we have to shatter the dream of the matrix.
We have to shatter the dream of the narrative.
Culture.
The only thing that's relevant in culture is the first four letters, cult.
And if we can do that, if we can fragment the narrative without maintaining the violence in people's upbringings, then if we can fragment the narrative without maintaining the violence in people's upbringings, then we will have people who aren't bound by a particular narrative, but also aren't too traumatized I mean, the 19th century was a huge fragmentation of narratives in many ways.
I mean, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche was one of these, Henry James was one of these varieties of religious experience.
Nietzsche, his slippery bow shafts of the smog dragon heart of existing culture were electrifying.
But you did not have a reduction in violence against children at the same time as you had a fragmentation of a central narrative, which was the same thing that occurred during the Reformation.
In the Reformation, children were still being treated abysmally.
I mean, Martin Luther was satanic in his hatred of children and of reason.
So if you have a fragmenting of the narrative, Without an improvement in the childhoods of children, then you end up with civil wars.
I mean, Europe, if you sort of fast forward from the dissolution or the disintegration of Christendom through to the First World War, I mean, Europe was essentially involved in a post-Catholic civil war.
It was a fragmentation of narrative.
Without a reduction in the violence towards children, Which is why I attack culture and why I constantly promote peace towards children.
Because a unity of delusion is less violent but still incredibly destructive.
But if you destroy the illusion without reducing the violence towards children then you end up with a multiplication of fragmentation and that is brutal.
If you have a state And there are competing narratives.
Each narrative is going to try and gain control of the state.
And then you have civil war, whether the narrative is religious or secular.
You had a competing narrative between the Dementieviks and the Bolsheviks and the Tsarists in early 20th century Russia and it resulted in the Cold War, the deaths, the murders of 70 million people and so on.
Well, that's probably going to be way too long, but that's the general gist of it.
I'm going to try an experiment where I'm going to just talk with no notes at all.
And this will be my practice.
Let's find out how the speech goes, shall we?
Stephen Molyneux out.
Please help and donate.
I don't get paid for these speeches and it would be very helpful.
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