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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:10
Bad Philosophy
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Time Text
Hey, am I on?
You are on!
Oh my gosh, awesome.
Hey, Stefan!
How are you?
How are you doing?
I'm doing really well, man.
Hey, am I wrong in guessing this?
Do you have a really nice singing voice?
Yes.
I thought you did.
That's a nice voice, I'll tell you.
That's good stuff.
Okay, which duet are we going to sing today?
No, I'm kidding.
What's on your mind?
You know the words, too.
Well, I have been just tossing back and forth what I should call this man about.
Because your words and your mind are just so beautiful.
And, um, I actually wanted to talk about that.
About indecision.
What?
My words and my mind?
Nothing about my abs at all?
Nothing?
I have one.
Well, actually, most of your videos only display, you know, like your collarbone up.
But, uh, no, as a woman, as a woman in today's society, actually, I'll just say this, as a woman in general, I have a bit of a problem with indecision.
It's kind of like, if I go shopping with a guy, I'll be like, hey, you like these shoes?
And he'll be like, yeah, get them.
Yeah, let's go.
And if I, you know, if I'm with another chick and we're shopping, it's more like, oh, I don't know, you know, like maybe this way.
It's awful, but... How do I start?
And do you have a domino effect, like, I love these shoes, and if only I had a top to go with them?
Oh, I have those tops.
This is great.
Now I need a skirt to go with the top.
Did you get those dominoes thing?
Exactly right.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for keeping the shallower sections of the economy afloat.
It's very important.
But go on.
I try to... Well, I try to shop like a guy.
But here we are.
Here we are.
So, let me just give you a brief back...
Background, as brief as I can make it.
I was raised in a great family, or I feel like it was as good as I could have gotten.
My dad's a psychologist.
My mom was into child development.
Those were their studies, and I learned a lot from them.
But also, it was very, very religious.
As in, dad's dad's dad was a preacher, you know, and dad went to school to be a preacher, He turned out to be a psychologist.
It's just very, very legacy-minded, as in, we are building this Christian legacy.
I have cousins-cousins that are in Papua New Guinea right now as missionaries.
What does Christian legacy mean?
That sounds like an interim that I'm just not familiar with.
It's subjugated a little bit.
First off, legacy, we have that word, and it means the torch that is passed on to future generations, and Christian as in spreading of the Christian faith.
Can you hear me?
Yep, go ahead.
And so, then I emerged, and I mean, I got vocal training and all that, and I actually was a worship leader.
for thousands of people every Sunday and Wednesday, led people in worship.
Wow, you must have made a joyful noise.
Yeah, and so I got a Fulbright Arts Scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art, and my dad said, well, that's not really how we're going to do this, because it's going to corrupt your morals, and you're going to go to a Christian college.
And I did that for like a year, and I was like, this is kind of stupid, and I got out Why was it stupid?
Because, you know, it's pointless as in you're going $17,000 in debt for something that you already know about and something you've been doing for, like, years.
And also, it's not a very lucrative, you know, subject of study.
And also, just the whole backing out of the whole, you know, just accepting things for what they were told to me as reality.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so at the Christian College you were learning theological principles that you were already familiar with, having studied in the religion for many years already, is that right?
Exactly, and I just wanted to check out the world and see what other theologies had to say before I actually just put all my eggs in one basket.
Now, where were your religious beliefs slash skepticism at this time?
I guess this was your late teens, early twenties?
Exactly.
Yeah, so where were you in your belief systems at that time?
Kind of like, what's going to happen after we die?
Oh, I don't know.
We'll put it off for later.
So you had some, obviously some skepticism, some questions, some doubts, so to speak?
I just wanted to experience the world.
Oh yeah.
Right, okay.
And so I ran away So to speak as in like moved away far far away across the country down to Texas and actually lived with some Muslims for a while you know and went to a couple Buddhist temples and I don't know.
My point is this.
This is the major point.
I have influenced people and they are actually going onwards I'm becoming this version of my old ideal self, my old ideal version of self.
And they're just blowing up.
And I'm a little worried about that.
Because I'm not even sure... What do you mean they're blowing up?
As in, you know, they're becoming well-known musicians, artists with followings.
You mean in the Christian community?
People I've trained and mentored.
Yeah.
Right, right.
People I've trained and mentored.
You're funneling people into the sort of Christian conveyor belt and they're taking it at a full clip, right?
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Okay.
And now I'm just kind of stuck with an indecision because I've kind of just gotten out of the theology game and I've kind of more so put it towards a just humanity game and what's best for humanity and I just really don't want to turn into a Hitler You know what I'm saying?
That last part was a bit of a lane departure without a warning for me.
But what do you mean you just don't want to turn into a Hitler?
I think it's a given that most people other than Hitler don't want to turn into a Hitler because he blew that game for everyone.
But what do you mean when you say you don't want to turn into a Hitler?
Right.
Is that the secular curse?
Like if you become secular and powerful that means you're Hitler?
No, no, no, no, no.
It's more so the guy, you know, he just He was a normal guy, I'm sure, at some point, and he went to some sort of art school when he was younger, and then he developed this ideology system in which he had his own purest form of, you know, utopia, and that actually got a lot out of hand, and he, you know, everyone knows him as this bad guy, and it's, what, 73 years ago, you know?
Well, I don't want to go into the full biography, but It was not art school that made Hitler Hitler.
The fact is that Hitler was beaten so viciously when he was a child that he actually would go into comas regularly.
His father would count beating him viciously with implements hundreds of times until Hitler passed out.
Hitler was turned into a complete psycho by his own family.
Then, of course, he was served in World War I, was gassed and thought he was going to die.
and so on uh it really was not art school that that was the issue with hitler and of course hitler's childhood was unfortunately all too commonplace in germany at the time uh what alice miller calls the poisonous pedagogy and it may be worth i mean i think it's worth just you know if you're gonna fear turning into hitler if you read alice miller's um work on hitler's childhood it's uh probably important to recognize that that's not going to happen uh you're going to
You could get a Charlie Chan mustache and start screaming at all the obedient blonde people you know.
It's never going to happen from you.
So I just really wanted to point that out that if you're going to look at the transformation effects of Hitler's life, and this is not to say he was not a bad guy.
I get it.
I just want to point that out because the Hitler thing kind of came up for me out of nowhere.
I just want to point that out.
It seems a little foggy to me.
Are you an atheist?
Are you agnostic?
Are you pantheistic?
Are you a Rastafarian?
Where are your beliefs at the moment?
Currently, if you had to put me on the spot, which I suppose you are, I would say that whether there is You know, any sort of higher power, whatever.
I just think that it's kind of as if every form of life is like cells in a toe, if that makes sense, or your finger, even.
It's like, well, you all know what's best for the toe and or the finger.
You know what's right.
You know what's wrong.
You know what's going to, you know, make it better or worse.
And I just think that if everyone can adopt their truest version of what's going to make this world better, you know, based upon the very instinctive principles of right and wrong that children are automatically born with.
I mean, it's the world and families and I love that you do try to, you know, bring up the whole family thing.
But I don't know.
Did any of that make sense?
Can I ask you perhaps a tangential question?
Go for it.
Would others describe you as pretty?
Depends on who you're talking to, honestly.
That's all, you know, subjective.
Because I'm afraid I must award you a rather ignomious prize, which may be related to prettiness or not.
I don't know.
Obviously, you're an attractive person, but, you know, for a philosophy show, that's some of the worst philosophy I've ever heard in my life.
I just wanted to point you out that as far as prices go for incomprehensible statements of personal preference when I'm asking you about a belief system, that's pretty high up there.
And I don't mean this insultingly.
I'm just, you know, because you asked about indecision and I can certainly understand why you're facing some problems with decision because when asked about your belief systems you talk about cells and toes and instinctual knowledge.
And I just want to point out that for a philosophy show, you might as well be bringing chicken entrails to a physics conference.
I'm sorry, could you go about wording that in a different way?
Just so I'm sure that I understand what you're saying.
Yeah, okay, so when I sort of ask, are you atheist or agnostic, or where are your belief systems at the moment, you know, this is a philosophy show, and so we're looking for first principles, I'm looking for first principles or reasoned arguments or, you know, evidence or whatever it is, right?
And you talked to me about cells and toes and instinctual best for humanity and so on, right?
And now, when you hear this back, this may be obviously in the circles that you move in, this may be considered some sort of philosophical conversation, but if you listen to it back, there's no reason or evidence, no arguments in anything that you put forward about where your beliefs are at the moment.
And the reason that I'm pointing this out is not to be critical, but to point out that if this is where your philosophical thinking is, you are going to end up being wildly indecisive in perpetuity, because you're not working from first principles, right?
You're not working from reason and evidence, and if you have these vague feelings about selves and unity and spirituality and we are appendages and so on, that's not going to give you any clarity about how to make decisions in your life, because they're all just kind of vaguely incomprehensible emotional impulses with no philosophical content or rigor, if that makes any sense.
It does.
It does.
And I completely agree with you.
If you and I were discussing, you know, how to build a bridge across a canyon, and you were to say, well, you know, the canyon is all rock, and the canyon is kind of joined at the bottom, and so the canyon is kind of one in a way, and do we even need to get to the other side?
That's an interesting question.
I don't know.
And maybe we should build it out of the dreams of fairies or whatever.
That would be kind of an incomprehensible series of things to bring up in an engineering meeting, right?
Amen to that, that's for sure.
Right.
I'm being, you know, for comic effect, making it sound more silly than you were sounding, but it would be kind of like that.
You know, as opposed to, well, I think we should use these trusses, the bridge is this far across, it's going to have to carry the weight of these many cars, and maybe an engine goes under the bike, like a locomotive or something.
We would start to work on the principles of engineering, or we'd say, I don't want to build the bridge, I want to do something else.
Talking about the unity of the canyon would be incomprehensible when it came to figuring out whether to build the bridge or how to build it or not, right?
Right.
And can I just make sure that I understood?
I like to make sure that I'm gathering the point correctly.
So what you're saying is this dodging of spirituality needs to be reckoned with before I can progress any further Because if I'm, like, honestly, it's just, it's on the back burner.
I don't care.
I don't, I don't care.
And, uh, what I am caring about is... You don't care about what?
About, you know, God or any of that right now, or, you know, what's after or anything.
Like, I just really care about reforming education, reforming parenthood, reforming nutrition, stuff like that.
Okay, let me ask you a couple other questions.
When you were a child, were you taught about hell?
Uh, yes.
Around about five years old I was exposed.
Okay, so your parents either, did they tell you directly about hell and this is where you go if you are not adhering to these beliefs?
Uh, not in Not in the scare factor way.
More so in the tender, loving, supportive way, but yes.
Wait, the tender, loving, hell way?
Oh yeah, definitely.
Can we square that circle a little bit?
I mean, hell is a threat of everlasting torture and damnation, right?
So how's that, the loving way?
Well, in our family, You talk a lot, and hell was basically not really talked about as a reality for us, if that makes sense.
So, wait, so when you were five you were told that there was hell and that's where sinners went, is that right?
Exactly.
And we need to help them and all that.
Yeah, no, no, but if you didn't adhere to the beliefs that your parents put forward, that you would end up in this place of eternal torture and damnation, right?
Yeah, that's their fear.
Exactly.
Well, no, when you were five, you're kind of evasive, right?
It's like an evasive maneuver, Sulu.
Because you were told as five that this was not a place of language or metaphor, but this was a real place that you go to if you don't adhere to the religious beliefs, right?
Exactly, okay.
Yes, yes.
So, that is not kind and loving.
That's a threat.
Okay.
Okay.
Don't say okay to me like I'm making something up here.
I'm happy to hear how threatening a child with eternal torture is not a threat, that it is in fact loving.
I mean, help me understand it if I'm missing something.
It's like, well, you're so lucky because it was God's will for you to be born in this family and we're going to make sure that that's not your worry and you can help others.
You know, that type of story.
Okay, so obviously then by proxy, did you have friends who weren't part of the same religious ideology?
Or did you know other kids in the neighborhood who weren't?
Yeah, eventually there was some immersion.
Okay, so you were lucky you happened to be born into a family that was going to steer you clear of hell.
God liked you and put your soul in that family.
Obviously, the other kids weren't quite so lucky, right?
That was the message.
You got it.
Right, so the poor Muslim kids, the Buddhist kids, the Jain kids, the Zoroastrian kids, the Anabaptists, the Swingalians, the Lutherans, you name it, those kids, like, wow, sucks to be you, drew snake eyes, short straw, you go to hell, right?
Yeah, very, what's that word, you know, high and mighty type of Yeah, exactly.
So your parents taught you an ideology in which the vast majority of children, through no fault of their own, are very likely to end up eternally burned and tortured, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, and that was a big wedge for me.
I can imagine.
I can imagine.
Okay, and you started off by telling me that you had a very happy family life, right?
Great family, you said.
Yes.
Okay, except for the burning of children for eternity through no fault of their own, right?
Except for the religion, yeah.
But the religion was pretty core, right?
Very core, yes.
Very core, okay.
And do your parents know of your existing perspectives on these things?
Yeah, they do.
And what has their reaction been?
They kind of just treat me in conversations just like they would treat anyone else that they're really trying to win over with, you know, God with, you know, loving, caring reminders of, we're praying for you and, you know, you know Jesus loves you and blah blah blah and, you know.
But I feel like I have bigger fish to fry than that type of fish, if that makes sense.
But I'm just worried that if I'm climbing up a ladder, only to see at the top that I've added to destruction to the world, that just sounds awful.
What do you mean by that?
Sorry, I know I use metaphors, but I missed that one.
Which ladder?
Just for instance, like, if I wanted to... Or, let's just take it towards you.
So, Stefan Molyneux... Molyneux, I'm not sure.
Doesn't matter.
At first, you were a programmer.
Just from my very vague knowledge of you and your background.
So, in the beginning, at some point, you decided, yes, this is so me, and this is what we're gonna be pursuing.
And then you climb up that ladder, and then, at some point, I don't know if you're still doing it or not doing it, or, you know, you might do it for fun, like playing Sudoku, but, uh, but, now you're, you're doing something else, and, and it's, it's just, uh, and now you're gaining momentum, and followers, and,
And you're really getting your message out, and I like your message, and I don't believe it's destructive in any way, shape, or form, but it's that type of ladder system.
I assume by followers you mean Facebook followers.
I don't have any followers, like people who phone me up and say, what should I do today?
I don't have followers, like Richard Dawkins doesn't have followers.
There are people who accept his arguments or reject them, but anyway, I just want to point that out.
Not what philosophers aim for, right?
I just wanted, again, unless people want to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, that's fine.
If you don't like that verbiage, then, you know, disciples.
I don't know how you want to say it.
Disciples even worse!
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
I just wanted to point that out.
So, are you concerned that, what's the ladder that you're concerned about climbing?
At this point, any of them.
Let me just give you a couple personal examples.
I worked at Apple, and now I work at Verizon, selling cell phones, and I thought Verizon was going to be it until I could come up with something else, such as, you know, either an arts thing, or a music thing, or a community thing, and so just recently I got offered some money to do some mural work for a local business and it's some some work outside of work.
I just don't want to be tied in to too much to one thing and then being stuck in it and or finding that it was you know useless and or you know not as impactful in the world as I as I want it to be or impactful for the wrong reasons or end.
I don't know.
So what was your question again?
Was it about indecision?
Exactly.
How does one take this world and prioritize and specialize?
That's truly my problem right now.
To prioritize and specialize?
You mean in terms of what you want to do with your future?
Yeah.
Well, I'll give you a little speech here.
And hopefully it will make some sense to you.
Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
And again, it's all just my opinion.
I don't think we can be any clearer about our future than we are about our relationships, particularly our past relationships, because they condition us so much, particularly our relationship with our parents.
And I think that the fogginess that you have, or at least that I experience, the confusion and fogginess that you have, I think stems out of a confusion and fog that you have about your relationship with your parents, about your relationship with your community.
It's not just your parents, the extended family communities.
You say religion is big all through the gene pool.
And my perspective, of course, is that it is not right to inflict superstition on children.
It is not right to tell children about hell and burning and torture and for non-compliance with edicts.
And your parents obviously are very well educated, your father's a psychologist, your mom is into child development and so on, and so they would have had exposure to the dangers of inflicted and threatened ideologies upon children and all of the problems that that causes in cognitive development, independence, reason, thinking, and so on.
So, if religion is not a good thing for children, and if your parents are very big in spreading it, Then that's the problem.
And if you haven't cleared that up... Look, maybe you have nothing to clear up.
I'm just telling you from the philosophical perspective, religion is false.
And from a developmental perspective, inflicting threatened falsehoods on children is not good.
It's not good.
Right.
For me, it's worse than spanking.
Because Spanking is obviously wrong.
It's hurtful.
It's an invasion of the child's physical autonomy.
It's the use of pain to get compliance, but at least it's physical.
At least it doesn't get in your head in the way that hell does get in your head, which is infinite spanking for noncompliance with commandments, not even reasoned arguments.
I'm not trying to tell you how you should have experienced your childhood and I'm not trying to tell you your parents did all these terrible things.
I'm really not.
But what I'm saying is that from a philosophical standpoint, since you're interested in philosophy, you listen to the show, from a philosophical standpoint, that's a problem.
Now, I don't think that, I hope that when you have kids you're not going to tell them that if they don't comply with the edicts of invisible beings that they're going to be burned in hell forever and they just happen to be lucky and other kids in Somalia, God just doesn't like them but really like them.
I mean, that's so...
destructive to a child's thinking, capacities, and capacities to stand up to and be independent of authority and think for themselves and so on.
Again, I don't have to go, I've gone over that a number of times before, I don't think I have to go over that.
But it's not as simple to say, I came from a really good family who just happened to threaten me with hell for non-compliance.
That's a circle I can't square.
It doesn't mean your parents are terrible or mean.
It doesn't mean that they had all these mean and terrible intentions or anything like that, but the effect is for a five-year-old to be taught about eternal torture for noncompliance.
I could have picked any number of things that came out of religion or religious ideology.
I just happened to pick that one.
I could have picked, you know, any one of hundreds of other things that, you know, that they teach you the story of Noah, that this great god drowned fetuses in the womb and drowned babies in the crib for the supposed non-compliance of their parents.
He literally wiped out the entire planet, not just the people, but of life itself because of non-compliance.
Murdered innocent baby.
It doesn't matter.
You could pick up six million of these things, any number of them, and come up with how insane they are to tell children these true stories.
Right, right.
And those are important aspects of how you were raised.
You say religion was core.
And if you have skepticism about these things, I mean, I was going to ask you, is there a God?
Because that, to me, would be something which philosophy can help you with.
I mean, but I have a feeling I just get back, I'm not that interested, or it doesn't matter, or, you know, maybe, but who am I to know?
And all this kind of, again, it's fog, right?
Now, where is this fog coming from?
Why do you have, we're not born with fog.
My daughters She's incredibly decisive about everything that she wants and very clear about what it is she put forward.
We're not born with all of this fog and this confusion.
So where does it come from?
It must come from some contradictions that we're taught or things that we can't reconcile about our primary relationships.
So if you were to work on decisiveness, again as I always say to people, sit down and talk with your parents.
Don't accept that we pray for you and Jesus loves you, but just talk about your experience.
I think you have some skepticism now, as you say you live with Muslims and hang with Buddhists and listen to this show, God help you, but if you have some issues with how you were raised or how you were indoctrinated in these particular Tragic and horrendous, hellish, literally hellish belief systems.
Sit down and talk about it with your parents and don't accept the catechisms as a response, but really try and connect with them about issues that you had if you have them with how you were raised in this or other areas.
I try not to be the bull responding to the red flag, you know, but when people come and say, I came from a great family and I was told about hell and how lucky I was when I was five, that doesn't mean that it's a terrible family, but it means that it's not as simple to say that it's just great.
Because that's just not right to tell people.
My daughter is four and a half.
She's going to be five this year.
The idea of telling her that people are going to burn in hell for disobedience, I can't imagine telling her anything like that.
Even if I believed it, I can't imagine telling her anything like that.
Even if I believed that it was true, I don't know that I would, I would not inflict that on her.
Like, it's true that people get horribly burned every day in the world.
That doesn't mean that I have to take my five-year-old child to a burn unit and hold her right over these people's horrible burns and scars and say, this is what happens, people get burned every day!
But she's five.
Even if it's true, even if it was as true, even if hell was as true as a burn unit in a hospital.
It still would not be right for me to inflict that on my five-year-old.
Anyway, and given that it's not even true, and religions vacillate on this stuff all the time.
No hell in the Old Testament, it's just Jesus who came up with the enduring power of verbal abuse rather than physical abuse by moving from getting blown up and drowned and stabbed to going to hell forever.
But it's not something you tell a five-year-old.
Even if it's true, even if it was objectively true and you believed it and it, you know, it's not something you tell a five-year-old and you shouldn't tell a five-year-old because a five-year-old, at least according to most religious traditions, can't go to hell anyway.
Don't reach the age of reason until seven.
That doesn't mean you put on the surgery channel and have your five-year-old strapped to a chair to watch it.
I'm afraid I think we've lost her.
Is she coming back at all?
Have we lost the whole connection?
She's gone.
No, she's still connected.
I think maybe her microphone is out of order or something like that.
Yeah.
Well, maybe we can pick up with her another time, but I think we've gone kind of over the show as it is.
But I just, I filmed this one.
We haven't done this for years, but I thought I'd give it a shot and I think it worked out okay.
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