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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:14
Battling Socrates
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph.
It is 6.37 on, oh my good heavens, let's see, my birthday was Sunday, it's now Tuesday, that would make it the 26th of September 2006.
Haven't you just totally missed me doing the dates?
For those of you who are more into the audio, it's been, I guess, quite a bit of a podcast where I've been putting the dates in for reasons that escape me, because of course it's all in the XML file.
Anyway, so I'm going to talk this afternoon about Socrates and...
Of course, Socrates is a rather challenging person to talk about because we have no idea what he said or wrote or thought because, well, at least according to most sources, Socrates never wrote anything down.
And for those who don't know, I'll give a brief sort of history of Socrates and then we'll talk about what my thoughts are.
I don't know, I'll talk about what my thoughts are and hopefully they'll be of some interest to you.
Socrates, of course, one of the founders of the Greek school of philosophy, one of the founders of philosophy, was at least according to Plato, because of course Socrates didn't write anything down himself, and it doesn't seem like too many of his students took notes because it was a very conversational kind of chit-chatty sort of philosophy, the kind that of course we know nothing about.
Plato wrote down what the famous sort of platonic dialogues were written down after Socrates had been killed by the democratic vote of the Athenians, I think it was 300 odd BC or something like that.
And Socrates was a great philosopher, one of the first great logicians of the Western philosophical tradition, and he had the Socratic method, which is generally the case, which you'll see in sort of lore films or lore sort of movies or this sort of stuff.
The Socratic approach, the Socratic method, is simply asking a persistent series of questions to get at definitions, to extract principles, right?
Or if somebody says, oh, I know all there is to know about justice or fairness or truth or love or honesty, you have to keep asking them questions and then see if the thesis holds in general.
Now, Socrates got into philosophy, at least according to his own telling, and there seems to have been some corroboration of this story at the trial of Socrates in that the brother of the gentleman in question was supposedly there.
But Socrates had this goal or this approach to truth, because Socrates was a radical, what I would call at least these days a radical skeptic, in that he believed that he knew nothing.
I know nothing in the manner of Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
And a friend of his went to the Oracle at Delphi, which is supposed to be where you're supposed to get all these great answers from the, I always think of as buxom and scantily dressed priestesses who worked the Oracle at Delphi,
which actually I believe was built over some volcanic holes that could have produced some sort of psychoactive vapors, so The fact that there were visions when you went might not be entirely unexplainable by science, but a friend of his went to the oracle at Delphi and said, O oracle of Delphi, who is the wisest man in the world?
And the oracle came back with the old name of Socrates.
Socrates is the wisest man in the world.
And so his friend came to Socrates and said, dude, or whatever dude is in ancient Greek, dude, he said, dude, you are supposedly the wisest man in the known universe, according to the Oracle of Delphi.
And Socrates claimed, said, my God, this is like completely baffling to me.
This makes no sense to me at all, because I don't know anything.
Every time I try and understand a particular issue or question, I end up getting completely turned around.
I don't know which way is up.
I can't seem to find any logical consistencies in what I believe, so I don't know smack.
Or I do know smack.
One of these double negatives that can be kind of confusing.
So he said the oracle has to have been incorrect, but the oracle at Delphi is never incorrect.
So what on earth can be occurring here?
I don't know anything. I'm supposed to be the wisest guy.
The oracle can never be correct.
How can these be reconciled?
So Socrates took on this mission to go and examine people who claimed to have great wisdom, and he hoped, in the examination of these people who claimed great wisdom, to find somebody who was wiser than he was,
who actually knew something, and then to go back to the oracle at Delphi with this person and say, Oh dude, God, you said I was the wisest person, but this person knows more than me, so what do you mean?
And hopefully get some clarification of it that way.
And so, Socrates said, well, first I traveled and I went to the great teachers and I questioned them, but it turned out they didn't really know very much and that a lot of their sort of, quote, knowledge was really based on making the sort of worse argument appear a better argument.
And it really didn't have anything to do with true knowledge in the way that I would understand it.
So that didn't work out very well at all.
So all of these teachers who claimed to know virtue and truth and wisdom and all that, he questioned them and found that they didn't really know what they were talking about in any particular way, shape, or form.
And then he said, I went to the artisans, the craftsmen, and I went and talked to them.
And yeah, they had some pretty good specific knowledge about how to make a boat or how to train a horse or how to make a vase or something.
But that wasn't exactly what I was thinking about in terms of wisdom.
That's just a particular kind of applied knowledge, like what we would call a good engineer these days.
Or a good doctor, I guess you could say.
So I didn't feel that that was enough to answer the oracle's questions.
So then I went to the poets, to the great poets, and I showed them sections from their own work that struck me as particularly powerful in terms of their wisdom and so on, and asked them, you know, what the heck's going on with this stuff?
And he said, you know, the funny thing is, I think that I could pick out just any random person, and that random person, if I showed them this text of a great piece of art, great writing, would be about as likely as the artist himself to explain what it meant.
Because as I found out in questioning these artists and realizing that they didn't have a clue what the heck they were talking about, I realized...
That the artist didn't have a clue, and it really was just a kind of special genius or almost epilepsy that produced the art, but the art was not produced because of any particular insight that the artist had, but rather it was just a kind of epileptic talent that produced these texts.
So that certainly wasn't the answer as to who is the most wise.
And by the by, out of character, if you have ever talked with a great artist or a good artist or an artist you admire, It is rather chilling, the lack of insight that they have into their own works and their own motivations.
In fact, I would say that it's almost the fact that they have so little insight that makes their work so powerful, because all of the knowledge and insight goes pouring onto the page, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot left for themselves.
Socrates then exhausted traveling the world and examining or asking questions of supposedly wise people.
And he then said, okay, well, I think I finally get it.
Like, I think I understand what the oracle at Delphi was talking about.
The oracle at Delphi, when it said Socrates is the wisest man, meant that Socrates is the wisest man Because Socrates knows nothing, but knows that he knows nothing.
And that is wisdom.
To know that you know nothing, that is wisdom.
Anyway, so then Socrates set up shop back in Athens, and a number of the sort of rich young men who were This is Socrates' own description in the trial and death of Socrates, which was written by Plato after Socrates was tried and killed, died by his own hand under the threat of force from the state.
Bored young men with not much to do would come by and listen to Socrates, who never charged anything for teaching or questioning, and they would bring their supposedly wise friends to come and talk with Socrates, and Socrates would just break them apart psychologically and mentally with his bare hands.
I mean, the man was an incredible skeptic and was incredibly adept, of course, in Plato's version of We're coming up with arguments or counter-arguments to accepted truisms.
Euthyphro. I can't remember the name of the dialogue, but there's one in which he talks to a gentleman named Euthyphro.
And Euthyphro is standing out front of a law court in ancient Athens because he has brought a charge of murder against his father, his aged father.
And Socrates says, good heavens, I mean, what a remarkable thing to do.
You must know quite a lot about piety and justice and so on in order to have the confidence to bring a charge of murder against your own father.
What was the circumstances? And Euthyphro says, well, we have a bunch of serfs or slaves and one of them killed the other one, so my father...
Bound up the one who killed the other one and threw him in a ditch and then sent off to Athens to get a magistrate to figure out what to do with this guy.
But unfortunately, it got really cold that night.
The guy, the slave he bound and threw in a ditch, died from exposure.
So I'm bringing charges of murder against my father because my father didn't have a methodology for dealing with this murderer and the murderer died before he could be tried and therefore my father is guilty of murder, blah, blah, blah.
And Socrates is like, wow, dude, you must like really know what's down with the whole justice thing, in which case I'd really like it if you would instruct me, because, see, I've got this trial coming up of my own, that Miletus and some other people, some other hot blood young politicians, Have sat me down and said that they are bringing charges against me because I, Socrates, am corrupting the young of Athens.
And, of course, I think it's wonderful, and I kiss the hem of their garments, that they should take such an interest in the education of the young, and that is a wonderful thing.
But I'm going to need to know a little bit about justice in order to be able to defend myself properly, and I really don't know much about justice.
I can't figure out much about justice to save my life.
But if you could tell me just a little bit more about this whole justice thing, I'm sure it would come in really handy when I have to sit down and be cross-examined, you know, in terms of I'm going to be put to death, maybe, for supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens.
So Euthyphro says, surely, I will absolutely stop calling you surely, and I will tell you everything that there is to know about justice, right?
So, very briefly, the dialogue sort of goes something like this.
Euthyphro says, justice is that which is loved by the gods, justice is piety to the wishes of the gods, justice is blah blah blah blah blah.
And Socrates goes through a whole bunch of questions around what piety means, service to the gods, what on earth could we give the gods that they don't already have, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So he takes that apart. But then he asks the most essential question of any sort of theological examination of ethics.
And the fact that we are still stuck in a semi-theological society over 2,000 years later is a pretty sad testament to what philosophers have been up to over the past 2,000 years plus, which is frankly shit all, it would seem.
But the most essential question that he asks, which I've discussed in a way previous podcast, but I'll touch on briefly again here, is the question of Do we regard that which is good as that which is merely loved by the gods, or do the gods love that which is good because it is good?
This is the essential question that philosophy needs to keep pounding into the heads of religious people so that they can understand what the heck it is that they're claiming to worship.
Do we To use this sort of Christian God, which of course Socrates would have no clue about, and boy, you should have seen the conversations that occurred in the Middle Ages trying to get Socrates out of hell because he was around before Jesus Christ came to save mankind.
But to take the Christian example, do we love God because God is good, or do we love God because God is powerful?
Are we worshipping virtue, or are we worshipping power?
In other words, is God subjected to a standard of morality by which we measure God's actions by and find Him to be the best?
Or is God simply the most moral because He is the most powerful?
Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely essential question, and Socrates was asking it 2,000...
300 odd years ago, given that he died at the age of 70, or shortly thereafter, or was killed by the people of Athens, legally, by the time he was 70, almost 2400 years ago, this question came up.
And, of course, you can answer it.
No religious person can answer this question.
And it's a pretty essential question, because, really, religion is all about virtue, right?
I mean, you don't just worship God, because he's all-powerful.
God is all good.
You worship God because he's good, not just because he's powerful.
Because if you worship God because he's powerful, then you're just worshipping the most powerful amoral being around, and you're a slave to power, which of course has nothing to do with virtue.
So, the question that Socrates is asking is very, very essential.
If we hold that a God must be worshipped because the God is the most moral entity and that we know that the God is the most moral entity because we can reference the behavior of that God with regard to some external standard of virtue, right? So if the virtue is lying is bad and God never ever ever ever lies then You could say, okay, God is the most good, right?
If not murdering people is good, and God never, ever, ever, ever murders anyone, and if God has integrity, and if God is consistent, and if God is loving, and if God is blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
If we choose what's behind door number two, which is that we love God because God is all virtuous, then of course we have to have some standard of virtue by which we can decide that.
So we have a standard of virtue that is bigger than God and that God conforms to.
And that is why we worship God.
Now, of course, there is no moral standard that any of the gods throughout the world could ever be considered the most moral by, in terms of living by, in murder and intervention and standing up for the truth and not being confusing and not giving contradictory instructions and not being abusive and not all this sort of nonsense, right? Jesus Christ wouldn't have any more luck with that stuff either.
So, given that no god can conceivably conform to any human standard of virtue, the first one being, of course, that you should intervene if you can do so without effort and without danger to yourself, that you should intervene in order to save the life of people who are in imminent danger,
at the very least, and if you are a doctor who can, without effort, heal a child, and you choose not to permit that child to die a horrible ghastly death through some sort of leukemia or something like that, And you don't do it, then, of course, you are not so much with the goodness.
We consider that to be a fairly moral thing to do.
And if you knew that there was a doctor who could instantly just snap his fingers over the phone and heal your child, and you called that doctor and got through to him, and the doctor said, no, not so much.
It's a learning curve. It's a learning experience for you.
Then you would say that the doctor is evil, right?
I mean withholding a cure from a desperately sick child when it would take no effort for their doctor to cure would be anyway.
We've talked about all this stuff before in earlier podcasts, but the important thing to sort of look at in terms of Socrates is that these questions were all being asked many many many years ago.
Now Socrates was convicted of Corrupting the youth of Athens and was sentenced to death by hemlock or according to one internet email a sixth grader once said that he was sentenced to death by wedlock and What occurred then was Some people sort of popped out of the woodwork and said Socrates don't obey this crazy rule This is totally unjust and evil and We're going to spirit you away in the middle of the night,
and not too many people were really keen on this whole thing, but they said, we're going to spirit you away in the middle of the night, and take you someplace safe, and you won't.
Don't worry, we've bribed the guards, and the people down on the dock don't want to see you killed anyway, so we'll get you out of town, and you won't have to worry about drinking this hemlock and dying.
And basically Socrates goes into this long state of speech saying, well, you know, I've lived in Athens all my life.
I've accepted the protection of Athens.
I've accepted and respected the laws of Athens.
And so if those laws then say that I should be killed, well, you don't get to sort of pick and choose the laws that you obey if you're in a particular culture or in a particular country.
You can't accept one set of laws and then reject the other.
It's a package deal, so I'm going to respect the laws of Athens and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And there is some evidence that Socrates actually wanted to die.
I mean, other than this stupid argument about why he killed himself.
But he says to Plato, I think, sacrifice a bird, a chicken or a cock to this god, which is traditionally thanks for a journey and so on.
Socrates claimed to believe in an afterlife.
Socrates claimed to believe in the gods of the state.
He was accused of not only corrupting the young, but the methodology by which he was supposed to be doing that was that he did not accept the gods of the state and would, in fact, choose other gods, was trying to invent other gods as well.
So, of course, he cross-examines his accuser and Okay, so you're saying I'm an atheist, but I'm inventing gods.
Well, which one is it? You're saying I'm an atheist, but I don't believe in these gods, but I do believe in those gods, and so on.
And so Socrates is a really annoying character.
Socrates is an absolutely glorious character, and Socrates is an incredibly annoying character.
And we don't know.
Again, Plato was...
Plato was Socrates' disciple, just as Aristotle was Plato's disciple, and Aristotle sort of the saviour of philosophy at its early days, because if it was up to Socrates and Plato, philosophy would have never made it out of a kind of parlor game.
Aristotle kind of got his shit together as far as all that went, and opposed all this nonsense that Plato had about forms and ideals and so on, and of course dictatorship.
But Plato has a great deal of respect and love for Socrates and of course you can feel that coming right through in the writings even after the translations and so on.
He had a great deal of love for Socrates and they of course could have been lovers who you don't know because of course Greek back then assumed in the Greek philosophy, philosophical tradition, the highest form of love was between an older philosopher and a younger, usually hard-bodied athlete, but a disciple.
This was considered to be the The greatest love.
It's something that Oscar Wilde and his trial sort of lamented the end of, right?
Because Oscar Wilde was kind of in a rough trade, like going down to the docks to find the hard-bodied sailors and so on.
But it was something that was in vogue back then among the upper classes particularly, but not so much then, of course, in the Victorian age and so on.
But Plato treats Socrates' desire to die, which you really can't interpret it any other way, because the logic of the speech doesn't make any sense, right?
I mean, Socrates was all about finding inconsistencies and not believing in the whole if there was an inconsistency in the part, right?
So... When Alcibiades, in one of the Gorgias, I think it is, when Alcibiades says that, I think it's Alcibiades, says that the pursuit of pleasure is the greatest happiness, and Socrates says, well, there's almost no pleasure greater than finding an itch and scratching it, so under your definition, having a constant itch that you constantly scratched would be about the best possible life you could lead, and, of course, that is not what most people would think of as the good life.
And so Socrates at that point was sort of saying, well, that really doesn't make any sense for sure.
So let's not believe that nonsense.
And so Socrates was all about finding inconsistencies in the pot.
And if you found the inconsistencies in the pot, then by George you were allowed to dismiss the whole.
And of course, it's fairly inconsistent in the part of the laws of Athens to say, ye olde Socrates should be put to death for trumped up nonsensical charges that Socrates could disprove in his sleep.
Although, I don't think he did a terribly great job in his own defense.
Who am I to say, right?
I mean, what the hell would I do in that kind of situation?
Probably just pee myself and fall over.
Socrates was kind of annoying in this way, right?
So his explanation of why he accepted the murder, the sort of enforced suicide of his sentence, is completely inconsistent with how he lived his whole life.
And we can only assume that Socrates kind of wanted to die, which is not uncommon for a nihilist, right?
For a radical skeptic, right?
I mean, it's not uncommon for them to want to...
To die, because, you know, life is not really a whole heck of a lot of fun if you're sort of in the nihilistic side of the equation.
And so, yeah, we can only assume that Socrates wanted to die.
This, of course, is rather alarming to somebody like Plato, right?
Because Plato is similar philosophically in many ways.
He certainly is a radical skeptic about material things, for sure, although Plato did come up with a more positive...
Ethics, which was around the drug trip of the symposium, plus the gated dictatorship of the Republic, which we can talk about another time.
But, of course, he was not a big fan of democracy, at least as the theory goes, because democracy killed his master.
Now, I think Aristotle had a more common...
Aristotle actually taught Alexander the Great.
And Aristotle was also arrested for impiety and for being a bad guy and corrupting the youth and this and that and the other.
And he fled, right, sensibly, fled, saying he would not allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice, referring to the murder of Socrates.
And so Aristotle, I think, didn't come up, you know, he came up with a great statement, you know, it's like the Neil Armstrong thing on the moon, it's like you just sit there going, okay, what am I going to say?
Because, boy, this is going to be written down and talked about for quite some time.
But Socrates himself, kind of annoying, at least in Plato's version of him, and the reason that Socrates is annoying is that Socrates is incredibly passive-aggressive in all situations that I've ever read about him in terms of dialogues.
Because, you see, when he begins to talk about, with this gentleman we sort of mentioned earlier, Euthyphro.
When he begins to talk with Euthyphro outside the courthouse about this trial, he's already been doing this.
He's got to be 69 or 70, because this is right before his own trial, at least according to his own report there.
So he's up there, right?
He's been pounding away at this philosophical stuff for like 50 years, and he's examined, you know, hundreds if not thousands of people, and found them all to be, you know, seriously wanting in the whole Got a Clue department.
And so Socrates by this point knows that there's no great person out there that he hasn't examined that would actually have some consistent and logical answers for him in the realm of philosophy and truth and virtue and all these kinds of things.
So He knows that Euthyphro is full of crap and is a pompous, self-important windbag who is never in a million years going to have any kind of clue about how to make sense of things like virtue and vice and all these other kinds of things.
So, given that Socrates knows for a fact that Euthyphro is full of shit, It does seem rather provocative and could be seen as directly sort of annoying to sort of say, oh,
Euthyphro, you are so wise, I am so ignorant, I know nothing, you know everything, I sit here at your feet, instruct me, oh, wise Euthyphro, on all that is true and noble about justice and wisdom and this and that and the other.
It's a total fuck you, to be frank about it.
It's totally annoying.
Can you imagine some of the following situation where, I don't know, like I'm on some show and I'm spouting off about something that I just sort of claim to know something about?
Quantum physics, let's say.
I'm spouting off about quantum physics.
In rolls Stephen Hawking, or, you know, whoever is the big physicist these days, in rolls Stephen Hawking, and hears me trumpeting on about how I know everything there is to know about quantum physics.
And so he sort of rolls up to me and burps into his voice box, you know, oh, Steph, I have lots of questions about physics that I can't seem to get an answer on, but obviously you, Steph, are so wise in the realm of physics and so all-seeing and all-knowing in the realm of physics that you should have no trouble instructing me on the things that I'm having trouble getting the hang of because you are just so very smart.
So very shiny and so very wise.
Oh, wise and brilliant physicist Steph!
Well, if you were sort of watching that from an audience standpoint, and you knew that I was kind of talking out of my ass, and that Stephen Hawking was the great genius physicist, wouldn't this be seen as sort of like Stephen Hawking being kind of like a bit of a passive-aggressive asshole?
I mean, wouldn't that be sort of...
I mean, I guess it would be satisfying in a kind of puncture-the-pompous kind of way, But all of the stuff that Socrates talks about, it's really annoying.
He's totally setting people up to be humiliated.
This is a very important thing.
This is part of the whole nihilism.
He's totally setting people up to inflate themselves to heights so he can just watch them fall and smack themselves on their own pretensions.
And this is a common enough thing, as he knows from decades and decades of questioning people, that this is absolutely part of everything to do with human nature.
This is not something that is at all uncommon, and of course this is how society works.
If you had no answers for anything, in any way, shape or form, then you couldn't organize society, you couldn't teach your children, right?
Socrates didn't have children, though I think he did have a legendarily bad marriage.
But you couldn't teach your children anything, if you had no positive beliefs of any kind.
So, society couldn't work, families couldn't work, all of these kinds of things couldn't work, if Socrates is correct, and the only wise man is the man who says, ha no nothing.
So, I mean, this is the central problem of nihilism, and of radical skepticism, that sure, absolutely, radical skeptics and nihilists can puncture an enormous number, an enormous amount of vain, pompous posturing that goes on from the supposed moral leaders of society.
But unless you have something alternative to offer, then society is absolutely going to look upon you as attacking the very foundation of everything that makes society function and work and be vaguely pleasurable to live in.
I mean, it's all well and good to say, I know nothing about justice and so on.
But, you know, at some point, someone's got to mediate the fence dispute you have with your neighbor.
At some point, somebody has to enforce or not enforce a contract that somebody's violated.
You have to have DROs, or right now they're governments or whatever, churches maybe.
But at some point, you do have to have someone, and I mean at some point in your life, in every single moment, Of a society that's risen above two guys fighting over a coconut on a desert island.
You absolutely need people who at least claim to and have the willingness to put themselves out there as far as having something to say about justice, truth, virtue and so on.
Right? Parents are going to raise their children.
Courts or DROs in an anarchist society will have to resolve disputes.
You know, it's all very good to be this guy in the clouds who says, I know nothing and that's the ultimate wisdom and that's great, but You know, people got to deal with thieves.
People got to deal with rapists.
People got to deal with people who don't keep their contracts, right?
People got to deal with all this sort of stuff.
And so philosophers saying, nothing is true.
All wisdom is that there is no wisdom.
It's like, that's great. Sorry, I've actually got a society to run here, and so I'm going to have to just fake it until you work it out, if you don't mind.
And I'm going to have to fake it kind of believably, so that people will not pretend that there's no such thing as ethics at all, and it'll be a state of nature, and society will kind of collapse, right?
So Socrates, by sort of saying to people, I know nothing and that's the only wisdom, was, in a sense, right, in a very real sense, the...
The suit that was brought against him, which was that he was corrupting the young and undermining society, that's kind of true.
It's kind of true. You know what it's like?
It's like, if I sort of say, well, all the food that you eat is tainted, right?
It makes you, the only reason you get sick and old and die is because all the food you eat is tainted with Chemical X and blah blah blah blah blah.
And you say, oh, okay, that's great.
Can you get Chemical X out of my food?
No. Oh.
Okay. Can you cure me of the effects of Chemical X? No.
Oh, dang. Kinda hoping that you would be able to do those things.
Alrighty. Can you maybe give me food that doesn't have chemical X in it to begin with?
No. Well, that's fucking great!
So, you're telling me that I'm ingesting Chemical X, which is making me get old and die.
There's no cure, there's no alternative, there's no possibility.
Why the fuck did you tell me this to begin with?
There's nothing I can do about it.
It is the way it is, right?
So, this is very similar to going around saying to everyone who's a sort of, quote, moral leader and blah, blah, blah, that everything you say is false and, you know, you say that you claim that you know something about justice and virtue and really you don't and blah, blah, blah.
You're kind of saying, well, everyone's eaten poisoned food.
But if you're not a philosopher who can come up with a viable alternative, okay, everything you eat is poisoned with chemical X. Here's a whole way to grow and eat food that isn't that way, right?
Which is sort of what I'm trying to do in my DRO model, anarchist model, right?
How to live without a government. I'm not just sort of saying government is bad.
I'm sort of saying government is bad and here's a solution.
I'm not sort of saying religion is bad.
And the religious instruction and ethical instruction that people believe in is bad, and there's no substitute, right?
Because, of course, when you get rid of religion, you end up with, well, a lot of the world ended up with communism, right?
It's not so good. So you have to have a viable alternative, in my view, if you're going to be an effective philosopher, and Socrates did not come up with a viable alternative, and his wonderful student Plato came up with a hellhole totalitarian dictatorship, the ultimate Khmer Rouge campground of blood as his alternative to the society that was, and that really wasn't so good.
So they kinda fuckin' blew it, right?
The ancient Greeks, not to put too fine a point on it, but they kinda blew it, right?
Because of this radical skepticism.
And of course, Socrates was in no sort of access to modern science or anything like that, so Socrates believed in, at least he claimed to believe in In gods and goblins and ghosts.
And not just a god, but like lots of gods with human characteristics who had sex and fought with each other and so on.
The god soap. The god soap opera is sort of what Socrates was into.
So they totally blew it, sort of in my humble opinion, in that what happened was philosophy became associated with this otherworldly skepticism, with nothing positive and nothing practical to add to people's lives.
And this sort of radical nihilism or skepticism, sorry, radical nihilism is redundant.
This radical skepticism or nihilism is going to lead you into absolute conflict with society.
To sort of switch modes for a moment, I remember seeing a Billy Bragg album many years ago, which was printed on a commercial label, and the title was Capitalism is Killing Music.
I just love those socialists.
They're just too tasty for words, right?
Because it's so funny that capitalists are distributing the album called Capitalism is Killing Music, right?
I mean, that's just kind of funny, right?
So it does lead you to be kind of hypocritical and say, well, I'm all about truth and virtue, but I know nothing, and that's the ultimate virtue.
And what happens is that you are kind of a termite in the bowels of society, right?
Society has to operate in some methodology that's considered to be objective and I believe it needs to be considered virtuous.
As a way of resolving disputes, there needs to be an authority greater than each individual, which I would call rational ethics or science, but of course most people would call tradition, culture, superstition and statism.
There needs to be some agency larger than each individual, which each individual can, wriggling or not, be brought to heel underneath.
And Socrates, in getting rid of all values, was very much attacking the sort of root of Athenian society, and what happened was he was attacked back, right?
And I think what he did was he kind of recognized the justice of what he was doing, or what was being done back to him.
I'm not saying it was a just thing, of course, but it sort of does come back to this whole question I was talking about.
A dozen and a half podcasts ago called Who Is to Blame, right?
Uh-oh, now that Howard Jones song is back in my head.
But he was very much, you know, as a termite attacks a house, he was very much attacking the ties that bound Athenian society together.
And without offering up any kind of substitute, it was pretty much a negative endeavor that he was embarked on.
And it is a very passive-aggressive thing to undo the values of society There's a kind of father hatred in that, right?
To undo the values of a society without offering anything as an alternative is very aggressive, and it's very passive aggressive.
It's a very subtle kind of fuck you that comes out of philosophers who do this, right?
I mean, you can only have a look at Nietzsche to see this in full flower, right?
And so, for Socrates, To do this, very passive-aggressive, you can very much see this as well when you read the Socratic dialogues that Plato wrote, of course.
When you read or listen to those Socratic dialogues, you can hear this passive-aggression at work.
Not in every phrase, but certainly in the outset, when Socrates, in this sort of wide-eyed, gosh, aren't I just an innocent lamb, walks up to people who claim to know something and says, ah, well, gosh, I have been studying this for many, many years, and I know nothing, and you know everything, so I'm just going to sit here and learn from you.
When, of course, he knows for damn sure that the person's just a pompous windbag who knows nothing.
And, of course, he beats everyone, and this is, of course, what you know when you're going in.
This is why I use the Stephen Hawking example.
You know this when you're going in to read these dialogues, that Socrates is going to beat everybody's ass.
Sorry, wrong Greek metaphor.
That Socrates is going to win all of his arguments, and that everyone's going to suddenly remember that they have a pressing engagement elsewhere, rather than...
And, of course, Socrates then cries after them, Oh, but my friend, you were going to teach me all about justice, and now you are selfishly keeping all of your knowledge from me.
I wanted to learn so much from you, and now you're...
And, of course, that's a total asshole thing to do, in my humble opinion, right?
You should be more honest.
I mean, if Socrates is all about being honest and so on, then Socrates should damn well be more honest and say, You know, you think you know something?
I guarantee that you don't.
And you may want to chat with me, but I promise you that if you do chat with me, I'm going to prove to you that you know nothing, and I'm not the kind of guy who's going to give you an alternative, right?
So I'm basically going to tell you all about Chemical X that's going to make you sick and die, and I have no alternative, so it's like I'm going to tell you the day of your death, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it.
You can debate with me if you want or not, just I know that you don't know anything and I can't offer you any alternatives, but I also know that certain kinds of ethical and sort of supposedly universal knowledge or universal beliefs or biases are totally required for human society to work or to operate.
So, I'm basically going to unravel this net that we all need to support us and we're going to fall forever.
So, hey, do you want to have that chat now or not?
Right? That would be the honest thing.
Suckering people in with this, oh, you are so wise, I am as nothing to your great wisdom, teach me everything, is very dishonest, very manipulative, very passive-aggressive, a very sort of fuck you thing that comes out of this kind of nihilism.
And, of course, Nietzsche had this incredibly wound up and intimate relationship with Socrates, who he called his own particular demon, that he wrestles with Socrates almost daily, and he didn't win that wrestling, in my opinion, because he was never able to come up with a positive.
It's a system of philosophy, but really was around a radical revaluation of all values, the transubstantiation of all values, and he really merely characterized all values as subjective and based on aesthetic and power-based relationships like master-slave.
But he didn't win.
I, of course, wrestled with Socrates for many years in my 20s, and I think, I won't say that I beat Socrates, that would be a rather grandiose claim, but I think that I have been able to try the same sort of Socratic approach, but not with the idea of building...
Of raising the rotten structure, right?
It's storming and hailing out, and there's one rotten structure that people are living in that's getting older and older.
It's going to fall down. And Socrates would just say, hey, I'm going to push this structure and make it fall over.
And everyone on the inside is like, no, don't do that!
It's all we've got! Whereas I'm sort of trying to build a house that's a lot more sturdy and a lot more, you know, it's got an audiovisual center and pulsing disco walls and skylights and it's got LAN, 100 megabits per second LAN wireless in the walls and I'm just hoping to lure people out of the rotten fallen over structure that's leaking all over the place.
I guess I'm trying to come up with a new definition of palace and get people to see the rotten structure that they're living in called family-slash-religion-slash-the-state.
And get them to move on over to the new palace, which we're trying to build here.
And what that means for me is that I at least have recognized that, yes, you need a rational, scientific, logical, empirical, universal approach to truth.
And yes, the world is 99.999% bullshit, right?
Which is probably where people's unconscious fear of global warming comes from, because they know that everyone's filling the world and the atmosphere, the mental atmosphere, with so much nonsense.
But I think that I have relatively successfully conquered the great temptation and danger of the Socratic method, which is that you get addicted to humiliating and tearing down people, and you don't or can't make your way through to coming up with a positive and alternative system of ethics that is rigorous and structured, universal, logical and empirical.
And that is the way out of the Socratic trap of cross-examination and the passive aggression that arises from, wouldn't be the last passive aggressive man I've ever heard of.
The passive aggressive stuff that arises from this kind of a process of the radical tearing down of existing false values, that is a real trap that you have to make sure you don't get caught in.
And this is sort of my approach to sort of understanding the history of Socrates, why people got so angry at him, both for his attack upon their society and for the constant humiliation that he put Necessary agents of social order through, right? I mean, the people who claim to know truth and justice and wisdom set up the courts and so on, which people kind of need.
So, the necessary agents of human functioning, social functioning, he just attacked his pompous windbags, deflated everyone and took everyone down several million pegs, but left nothing in its place, which is incredibly dangerous to society, and it's almost better to believe in a universal falsehood than in nothing at all, because then you're really in danger.
I hope that helps. I got a teeny tiny donation today.
I don't disappreciate it, but I'm looking for some more shoveling bags of massive cash.
So thank you so much for listening and watching.
And I appreciate everybody's time and energy in participating in these conversations.
It means the world to me to have a crew, a brilliant crew to chat with in these areas.
So thank you so much for listening as always.
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