July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:49
Does Power Corrupt?
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope that you're doing magnificently.
It is time to dip into the deep brain well of the listener mailbag.
Let me fondle the listener bag.
You can email Mike at operations at freedomaidradio.com if you would like to push a question back out through my molars.
And we'll start with Andy who says, who asks, is it better to be alone or to have friends you can get along with and laugh with, not particularly in a fake way, but don't like?
I know what your advice will be, but I'm going to ask you to treat this as a true dichotomy.
Is it better to be alone, or to have friends you can get along with and laugh with, but don't like?
Well, if you don't like them, how can they really be funny?
That would sort of be a question for me.
Like, I've liked people's comedy in the past, and I find out more about them, and I really don't find them particularly funny anymore.
That's me.
It could be different for everyone.
Is it better to be alone and have friends you can get along with and laugh with?
I think this is a false dichotomy.
And it also really depends on what you mean by the word alone.
I mean, are you lonely in a crowd?
Can you be lonely in a subway?
You know, as the comedian used to say, hey, now that our groins have been mashed together for 45 minutes, you want to start a family?
So I think that you can be very alone with people.
It's another great quote by Oscar Wilde, it says, be yourself, everyone else is taken.
And I try not to be around people who want me to be somebody else.
I mean, fundamentally you can't be somebody else, you can only be less of who you are.
And so I would say there's a bit of a false dichotomy because the obvious question is, why don't you find people that you can laugh with and who you like?
We have this belief with relationships, because we're social beings and we rely on the tribe and others to flourish and to feel happy, we have this belief with relationships like, you know, like a drowning man with a barrel.
Like we just hang on to them no matter what and letting go of them feels like death.
And there is a little death in the transition from A dead soul to live flesh, so to speak, like when you cast off the old and you embrace the new.
It is a kind of death, as I wrote, I guess, when I was 18 or 19 in a poem.
I believe we must bury ourselves in order to be resurrected.
Although it usually is, in fact, coming to life for the first time.
Leaving dead relationships feels like throwing yourself into a grave.
And it feels like you will not have anything after that.
Overcoming that fear of the nothingness that comes after habit is one of the great essences of philosophy.
To have the courage to face the dark space after the over-bright and teary light is really essential.
To travel outside the solar system knowing that there's heaven in the unknown, that is really essential.
To cling to the known is to sink into the swamp of history and not even produce useful oil for the future.
So I would definitely question hanging with people you don't like and ask you to raise your standards.
Because that's really what it's all about.
Just raise your standards.
And try to find people that you do like.
Because then you can have sustained and happy laughter.
The laughter of relief, of not having to contort yourself into something that you're not, in order to wring a few giggles from the empty souls around you.
Dustin writes, what are your thoughts on why Secretary of State John Kerry said, this little thing called the internet makes it much harder to govern?
Crazy little thing called web.
Well, it does make it harder to govern because the first thing you have to govern is information.
The first thing you have to govern is language.
It's really important to recognize that language is just another government program.
And this is so obvious.
Here in Canada, some years ago, they came up with this thing.
It was a tax.
And it was supposed to pay for health care.
And the reason they say that this tax is supposed to pay for health care is because then if you oppose the tax, obviously, you oppose health care.
Like, you know, if you oppose the welfare state, it's because you want to, you know, fry up the poor with fava beans and a nice white sauce.
So, I would say that Recognize the language.
The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act.
In Canada, the taxes, believe it or not, the tax is called the fair share health levy.
Levy.
You see, not tax.
Fair share.
If you're against a fair share levy, then clearly you're against paying your fair share, and it's a health levy.
So, are you against health?
And this is literally the level at which we work at as thinkers and opposers of the status quo.
We have to fight the language.
What do they call it?
The Patriot Act.
Are you against patriotism?
Social security?
Security?
I mean it's all... they invent the language and then you have to refer to it that way and for ninety-nine percent of the population that clinches the argument.
I really should have called this the excellent and most perfect in Un-erroneous philosophy show.
No, that's too big.
The Always Right Stuff.
And then, you know, people will be like, well, I mean, it's called that.
It must be that.
And so that's the level at which we're looking at.
And so what the Internet is doing is it is exploding the government monopoly over the fundamental means of production for power in the world, which is language.
And so you have new words being invented all the time, things are being revealed very quickly and very easily as corrupt.
And all of this is just making it fantastic.
It is also so simple now to get out of the biosphere of your own culture that you can go and find out what Saudi Arabian newspapers are saying about the Iraq war.
or what Palestinian newspapers are saying about the Israeli occupation.
And you can go and find out what Chinese investors are saying about the U.S. dollar.
All of this information was incredibly tightly controlled.
Back when I was growing up as a kid, there were like three TV stations, and you paid a licensee.
I think you still pay a license in the UK for your TV.
But now you can get information from anywhere.
Like when I'm doing research for my presentations, I mean I go all over the world basically to try and get information.
And it's instantaneous, it's incredibly available.
And you know politicians and some pundits are saying, well you see the The internet is becoming like an echo chamber.
Like, if you're a libertarian, you just get your news feeds from libertarian sites.
And if you're a Marxist, you just go to Marxist sites.
And if you're a feminist, you just go to feminist sites and so on.
But the government has no problem with a monopoly on narrative.
I mean, that's what the fuck public schools are.
It's a complete monopoly on narrative.
And the only reason they teach you any reason In high school, or junior high school, is to make you bored of reason, right?
So you learn Euclidean geometry and so on, and you say, well, what use is this in my life?
It's perfect!
So now you think that reason is useless.
It's beautiful.
And then you're taught all this history, it's all just a bunch of lies and garbage and state-serving propaganda.
But then they say, well, you see, the Internet makes people in echo chambers, like, Jesus, Government schools my whole life, it was a complete echo chamber of, here's why we need the government, here's why government is good, and boy, wouldn't it be great if we had more of it?
So, the fact that the central narrative is fragmenting makes it impossible to govern, because people are getting their own thoughts, they're getting other perspectives, they're getting different words, and it's a beautiful thing.
It can't be undone, it can't be reversed, we just need to make sure that we keep pointing the redefinition of language towards reason and evidence, rather than towards anger and resentment.
All right.
Brent writes, I was recently having a discussion with someone associated with the Libertarian Party.
They mentioned that when they get into a discussion of morality with someone who is inclined towards socialism, this person typically makes the argument that the moral goal of helping the poor is a higher goal than the moral goal of non-aggression.
To which our libertarian friend, of course, gets into the argument of the more practical and pragmatic arguments for minarchism and anarchism explain the ways in which it is more effective at achieving the goal of helping the poor than socialism and welfarism.
Here's a perfect example of what we were just talking about, where the state controls the language.
Because when you refer to the welfare state as helping the poor...
I mean that's like referring to a rape victim of somebody who was helped to get sex.
The welfare state has nothing to do with helping the poor.
I mean surely by now this is all completely obvious and does not need much iteration.
If the goal was to help the poor from the welfare state, the state and all the state programs, if the goal was actually to help the poor Then the programs would have changed to reflect the reality that the poor are not being helped.
I mean, I find it remarkable that this even needs to be said, but I guess that just goes to show how powerful state propaganda is.
It's the Department of Health and Human Services, so they're into health and servicing humans.
It's like, that's just...
The mafia can call themselves your friendly neighborhood Italian man and it doesn't mean that they're not going to break your kneecaps if you don't pay the protection money.
I mean, the language means nothing.
In fact, with government it's the opposite world.
I mean, whatever they say in terms of help the poor, it's nothing to do with helping the poor.
The welfare state is to do with taking money and gaining power and creating a dependent class that will always vote to keep the government in power.
Once you create a dependent class on the state, that dependent class will resist fiercely anybody's attempt to restrain the growth, or even the size, of the state.
The Democrats get voted for a lot by Hispanics and other minorities, so they want to import 10 million more voters by relaxing immigration rules.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a no-border kind of guy, but just recognize it for what it is.
I mean, it's like saying public school education is about educating the young!
Come on!
Give me a break!
Record dropout rates, illiteracy, it's got nothing to do with educating the young.
Whatever continues in its course is doing what it is designed to do.
Whatever stays the same is doing what it's supposed to do.
If the government were about helping the poor, There would be no such thing as the national debt.
There'd be no such thing as inflation.
There'd be no such thing as the welfare state and its current manifestations.
Nothing to do with helping the poor.
At all.
Because it's not helping the poor.
At all.
And yet the government's not changing it, because it's doing exactly what it needs to do, which is to create a dependent class that's always going to vote for the government.
I mean, it's like saying the heroin dealer, his goal is to have you enjoy your drug trip.
No.
His goal is to create you dependent upon him so that he can stop milking you for money.
Anyway, so, anybody who says that the welfare state is about helping the poor, I mean, they're just living in, you know, such pink unicorn icing hellscape of deranged seduction to the propaganda from the powers that be that, well, I mean, why even bother talking to them?
I mean, it's the people who say that spanking is there to help children become better people.
No.
Spanking is there to discharge sadism.
That's what it's for, because that's what it always does.
The fact that kids get worse doesn't change that spanking continues.
Spanking continues for 40% of Americans into their high school years.
Right?
I mean, if I say I'm going to hit my dog with a rake to make him more friendly, and every time I hit my dog with the rake he gets less friendly, and then I hit him because he's not friendly enough, you understand that my story about hitting him with a rake to make him more friendly is bullshit.
I just want to hit my dog with a rake because I'm an asshole.
So, that would be my particular idea, that helping the poor is a higher goal than the moral goal of non-aggression.
My God in heaven, what would help the poor more than a universal non-aggression principle?
Because the universal non-aggression principle would bar the poor from hitting their children, which would raise their IQ, their social skills, their negotiation skills, their economic skills, their win-win skills, and they'd no longer be poor.
There's nothing that would help the poor more than the non-aggression principle, because it would involve the peaceful and benevolent raising of children, which is the single biggest factor in determining whether somebody ends up rich or poor.
All right.
I've encountered, says Danny Boy, I've encountered a unique type of Christian argumentation as presuppositionalism.
Ooh, I like it.
The arguments usually start with a series of questions such as, is it circular reasoning to use your reasoning to justify your reasoning?
Or, if a person's reasoning can be wrong, how do you know that your reasoning is not wrong?
Or, how do you know that you're not in a mental hospital and think that your reasoning is valid when it is actually not?
The difference is I actually know that I'm in a mental hospital with a few sane people around, but a mental hospital is It's a country.
A country is a mental hospital.
And a mental hospital has no particular interest in making you sane, but rather profiting from your madness.
And a country is a mental hospital that in no way profits from you being sane, but profits from your continued madness, your allegiance to your rulers, your belief in imaginary magic flags and carpet rides of delusionary nonsense.
So, I know that I'm in a mental hospital, because to see the farm is to leave it, at least in your mind.
And if an atheist would ask, how do you know your reasoning is valid?
The presuppositionalist would appeal to divine revelation and say, God made me certain.
And the atheist would ask, how do you know that God made you certain?
And the presuppositionalist would respond with, because God made me certain.
Wait, am I getting a pattern here?
The atheist would respond and ask, isn't that circular reasoning?
The presuppositionalist would respond and say, yes, that is circular, but your argument is viciously circular, because God's knowledge and reasoning is perfect, and man's reasoning and knowledge is not.
The same argument applies to the validity of the senses as with reasoning and the conversation goes to hell from there.
The presupposition list would go on a rant on how that there are no atheists and that God has revealed himself to everyone and that the atheists are not really atheists and are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.
Isn't life too short to talk... Anyway, with these people, any objections to the claim results in the presupposition as saying, but you could be wrong about that, like a childish sophist, like the childish sophist that he is.
I have a gut feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with the arguments.
I just don't know how to express it into words.
If you could address these arguments, I would very much appreciate it.
Is it circular reasoning to use your reasoning to justify your reasoning?
That's the first question.
Use your reasoning to justify your reasoning is an incomprehensible statement.
So the question is asked, well, why is reason valid?
Or how do you know that reason is valid?
And so on.
Well, first of all, you can't ask the question without using reason.
I mean, we organize our sentences according to rational principles.
We use words that mean what we hope they mean and what we hope the other person knows that they mean, in particular sequences.
We use the objective reality of physical properties and physics and so on, physical laws, in order to communicate.
Because we don't do mind melds that much, at least as yet, I have to communicate to you using my voice.
And using my voice means that I'm going to rely upon the objectivity of sound waves and the capacity of your ears to hear what it is that I'm saying.
It doesn't mean we agree, it just means that you sort of understand what I'm saying.
These are all rational assumptions.
You simply, you cannot argue against the senses without using the senses.
Like, read this argument that I wrote that says your eyes are fallible.
It's like, okay, well which part of this argument are my eyes not seeing correctly?
Well, no, you understand the argument because you just read it back to me.
So you used your eyes in a very accurate way to read the argument that says that your senses are fallible.
It's like, well, then we just proved that they're not fallible, at least not in this instance.
It doesn't mean that they're omniscient.
It just means that they're not particularly fallible.
And if they're fooled, we check them in other ways, right?
So if I'm in a desert and I see a mirage or a lake or whatever, then I say, well, I think that's a lake.
And you say, well, we're in a desert.
Light waves are going to bounce between differently heated layers of air, and you're going to end up with this thing that looks like a lake, but it's actually just a mirage.
And I'm like, oh, cool.
Let's go see.
And then we walk over there, and if the lake vanishes from where I thought it was, I'm like, yeah, I guess it was an optical illusion.
Why?
Because I'm standing here, there's no fucking lake.
Now, if on the other hand, what I do is we walk over there and I jump into the lake and I blow my nose in it.
And, you know, because I'm not circumcised, I wash the inside of my foreskin and thus eliminating the need for that kind of brutality.
If I do all of that stuff and you say, no, I don't think it's a lake.
I think it's a mirage.
It's like a pretty fucking good mirage, man.
This is like Sandra Bullock thigh-sized IMAX.
I mean, that's just incredible.
So we check our senses with our other senses and so on.
So you can't argue against the senses without using the senses and assuming their validity.
You cannot argue against reason without using all the rational and empirical faculties of language organization, sound production, the physical properties of communicating.
I mean, if you tap it out on someone's skin, you're using their touch.
If you create some braille made of smells, you're using their scent.
But we have to communicate our arguments using the census in some fashion.
or another, and so you can't deny the census without assuming the census, and you cannot attempt to argue against rationality without using objectivity, rational organization of language, and so on.
And so, you know, that which we must assume to be valid in order to make an argument, we cannot rationally argue against.
It's like me saying the sentence, language is meaningless.
Did you understand that?
If yes, then language is not meaningless.
If no, then why would I say it?
Because language is meaningless.
I have to assume the meaning of language in order to communicate that it's meaningless.
Or, to give another example I've used before, if I send a letter to you saying that letters never get delivered, and I need you to know that, that would make no sense.
Because if I genuinely believe that letters never get delivered, why would I bother?
The important thing, of course, is we have this temptation.
I'm going to fall into it myself.
We have this temptation, which is to say that people have incorrect beliefs, and if I correct those people's beliefs, they will now have correct beliefs.
This is not true.
And you can go to fdrurl.com forward slash bib to see my presentation on this, which is lengthy.
If you're at all interested in changing people's minds and making the world a better place, at least spend the little bit of time that it takes to understand how people are merely pretending to think in almost everything.
that they do.
And this is very well understood in brain science, that people have an emotional impulse usually arising from early childhood trauma, and then that flashes through their brain and gives them the impetus for a particular emotional response, and then only later, a few seconds later, do they actually come up with some rational reason to explain away their do they actually come up with some rational reason to explain away their emotion Right?
So, I mean, you'll see this all the time, once you see it.
And so this is why I talk to people about their childhoods.
It's not because I'm fascinated by everyone's childhoods.
Okay, I am.
But the reason that I want to ask people about their childhoods in this show is because I actually want to help change their minds.
And if you want to change something, you first have to understand what it is, right?
If you want to change a lightbulb, you first have to know what a lightbulb is, what a new one is, how to unscrew it, how to screw it in, and all that kind of stuff.
And if you want to change people's minds, you kind of have to put the time in to find out how the mind works again.
It's stuff that I can't believe I need to say, you know?
Like, if you want to be a doctor, you should learn something about the human body.
And if you want to be a change agent in the world, you should learn something about how the human mind works.
These people do not believe in God because someone came along with a great argument.
But there are no great arguments for God or any of the gods.
And they already don't believe in 9,999 of the gods in the human pantheon.
Nobody believes in God because they heard a really good argument.
They believe in God because they're traumatized.
They believe in God because they were told to believe in God and they were punished if they didn't.
I mean, nobody in Stalinist Russia in the 1950s was a communist by choice.
They were all just forced to do it.
And if they didn't do it, they went to a concentration camp.
So it's trauma, and fear, and dependence, and abuse that results in false beliefs.
and if you can't address that or at least help people to understand that that's the source of it, you're totally wagging the dog.
You've mentioned the old adage that power corrupts.
This is Lord Acton.
Power tends to corrupt.
He said absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
But perhaps the problem is not that power corrupts, but that those who gain and desire power are psychopathic.
Do you believe that extremely empathetic individuals would be corrupted if placed in a position of power?
I think that's a bit of a false question.
I would never want to be in a position of power.
I would never want to be in a position of power, because I can empathize with those I was ordering around.
And I know that I don't like to be ordered around, so why on earth would I want to order someone else around?
And of course, you know, we talk about this position of power like it's some abstract thing, like if I were king of the world, or if I became the president, or I became the prime minister, or the pope, or something.
But it's not.
It's not an abstract thing that may happen to someone in our gene pool at some point over the next thousand years.
We're all placed in incredible positions of power, particularly, of course, when we become parents.
This is when we're placed in enormous positions of power.
We're also placed in positions of power when someone around us is vulnerable and scared and so on.
We're placed in positions of power there.
If you empathize with other people, then you will not want to rule them.
Right?
A farmer who falls in love with a cow is going to invite him into his house.
They're not going to keep him in a stall in the cold, right?
And somebody who has genuine empathy would understand the limitations of power, right?
So I'm sometimes not sure what to do with my time.
Right?
Because we have options, we have choices, particularly in the first world, right?
Should I exercise?
Should I go for a walk?
Should I do a show?
Should I play with my daughter?
Should I chat with my wife?
Should I go see a movie to review?
Because these are the kind of bullets I take for philosophy people.
I don't know what to do with my time and I don't know that there's a right answer, right?
And I sure know that nobody else can order me what to do with my time and have that be a right answer.
Like, I know that for a fact.
I mean, there are a few bans, and if I'm going to go strangle a homeless guy, then yes, please stop me if I'm on my way.
But it is not the case that I would want to order anyone aroused, because I don't know what you should do with your time.
I genuinely don't know.
A couple of things I know you shouldn't do.
There's some things that I would suggest would be helpful to you.
I say, well, you should study philosophy, but I can't answer that question for you.
You know, what if you're going to be dead in a week?
What if you've got some horrible terminal ailment?
What if you're going to be dead in a week?
Should you study philosophy?
I'm not sure that you should.
I think you should go and experience all the things that you wanted to experience in life and die as peacefully as you can.
I think people should exercise.
Again, if they're a week away from dying, I don't think they should.
You know, there's a reason why everyone eats crap for their last meal, right?
Because you don't have to worry about your cholesterol when you're about to die.
So I don't know what people should do with their lives.
And I recognize that, and this is why I just have no interest in having a position of power over people, because I know that I'd be annoying to them, I'd know I'd be disruptive of them, I know that I would be keeping them from the exploration of their potential.
Potential is all about the unknown, which is why it's called potential, and not actual, right?
Potential is all about the unknown.
You order people to do stuff, all you're doing is interfering.
With their possibilities interfering with their creativity.
I could put a gun to Steve Jobs' head in 1980 and say, you have to produce a calculator and a rotary dial phone and keep doing that.
Sure.
Again, we just don't have all the cool stuff like iPads and iPhones and stuff like that.
Because that stuff was all unknown.
The moment you start ordering people around, you kill their possibilities.
Which is why violent societies, coercive, centrally planned societies, become poor because the arrogance of people in power to think that they can order people around and have those lives, those people's lives be better than if they were free to make decisions for themselves is lunatic.
So I would know for a fact that I would be making people's lives worse by ordering them around.
And I don't take pleasure because I'm not a sadist.
I don't take pleasure in making people's lives worse.
And if somebody forced me into a position of power over others, I would feel horrible and bored and futile and like a complete waste of my precious existence.
So, extremely empathetic individuals wouldn't want to be placed in a position of power.
If they're forced to be in a position of power, of course they'll try and minimize the damage that they do.
It is possible that they may be corrupted, but again, this is not a Maybe.
I mean, we know that people don't hit other people for the most part, but we also know that 80 to 90 percent of parents in America at least hit their children.
So that is a position of power I think that is most essential to address when talking about the non-aggression principle and corruption.
Most people are turned into devils by the very act of procreation.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, fdrurl.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show and thanks as always for your support.