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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:24
Ethics: 2,500 Years of Failure! Stefan Molyneux Speaks at Stephen F. Austin University
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So, just in the audience, ethics, what does it mean to you?
What are your general sort of thoughts or ideas about ethics?
Do you think that it's social?
Do you think it can be rationally defined?
Is it just cultural? Is it religious?
Where does it come from for you?
Does anyone have any particularly strong thoughts or opinions about ethics?
Yes, sir? They have evolved over time.
I think that's true. You could, of course, argue that they've evolved over time in some areas as well, notably the Constitution, or at least current interpretation.
Anything else that people have thoughts about in terms of ethics?
Do we think it's been successful?
I mean, it's had 2,500 years, you could argue, even if you go back to the pre-Socratics.
It's had 2,500 years.
That's not a short amount of time.
So, the case I've made before is that 2,500 years culminating in the 20th century.
Who knows the head count of democide in the 20th century?
Anybody? 250, 260, 280.
They really can't get in with a couple of 10 million of the bodies.
Some of the bodies, of course, will never be found.
So after 2,500 years of thou shalt not kill, we have, not even counting war, over a quarter billion people murdered by governments in the 20th century.
I would not call that a successful program.
I'm sort of going to make the case as to why I think that it...
So, in the realm of virtue of ethics, of all that kind of good stuff, there's kind of three things that float around.
And this is going to be a lot of production, a lot of boiling down, so there are exceptions.
I understand that, but I'll try, you know, God, I'll be trying to be brief.
I was driving in from the airport last night at a two-hour drive, so I was practicing my speech in the car.
Was I finished at the end of two hours?
Right. Not even close.
So, as I said before, we're gonna...
Who's the next speaker, by the way?
Okay, yeah, so we've actually just...
The next speaker says combat.
We're gonna use combat. But he or she's a biter, so I probably will defer.
So there's reason.
The people are trying to make rational arguments for ethics.
There's evidence, which is sort of the...
Does it work or not?
The pragmatism, the utilitarianism.
We'll just do stuff that we hope works.
And then there's faith.
Which is the idea that...
I mean, it's a platonic idea.
It comes from the scholastics in the Middle Ages.
It comes from...
Hegel, it comes from a lot of people who believe that the good, the virtue, what we are supposed to do in life, is revelation will provide that for you.
And it is, in its essence, incommunicable to other people, which makes it kind of problematic when it comes to organizing society.
If I really feel you have to do something to be a good person but I can't tell you what it is, what do I have to do?
Well, I can live it, but if that doesn't work, right?
Well, you have to find some way to get people to do it.
If you can't communicate to them rationally what it is they need to do to gain the paradise that you believe in, and they really have to do it, well, they're like a toddler running towards the road.
You've got to restrain or pick them up or do something physical.
So, I mean, the scientist's sort of study of ethics began 2,500 years ago, more or less, give or take, in ancient Greece.
Now, the ancient Greeks were really big on the reason thing.
And they made rational progress that was unprecedented in human history.
I mean, I think that their explication and exploration of geometry, of mathematics, of reason itself, through Aristotle and, of course, through the Socratic method, they did this amazing stuff with pure reason.
The evidence thing was not so much for them.
Now the Romans, I would argue, were very much on the evidence-based approach to things.
Does it work? They were very practical.
And they made amazing advances in things like engineering, plumbing.
Hey, let's use those lead pipes.
What to go with? And they did amazing practical things.
And Petrarch, I think, had a quote that I think sums up the Roman approach to ethics.
He said, the object of the mind is to know the truth.
The object of the will is to do the good.
It is better to do the good than to know the truth.
In other words, the action, to be a man of action.
Which was something that didn't really come back until the Renaissance and the humanists.
To be a man of action, to do good, to be a woman of action, well, maybe most of it is men, but to do good was the important thing.
So they were really on the evidence side, they really weren't that interested relatively in theoretical reason.
Now, why do you think the Greeks were so incredible at this rational analysis, but could not combine, which I would argue didn't really happen until the Industrial Revolution, could not combine theory with practice?
What did the Greek society in the ancient world rest on?
Who did all the work?
Slaves. Exactly.
Exactly. Or, as we like to call them, 100% taxpayers.
So the slaves did all the work.
Now, if you have 100 slaves...
And somebody invents a machine that does the work of a hundred slaves, what happens to the value of your slaves?
It goes down.
Right? So when you have a slave-based society, you don't get an industrial revolution.
Because everybody who would have the capital to invest in improvements doesn't want to do it because it will lower the value of their slaves.
So you can't go from theory to practice.
And also, since slaves are human beings, when you start to bring your theory into practice, the first thing you notice is that slaves are human beings like you, and...
They shouldn't be slaves, because they're human beings like you.
So there was a significant barrier to bringing theory into actual practice.
I think it was, and somebody can correct me, I'm sure we have a very learned audience, but there's a great, I think it came from the Roman times, where they said, one senator said to another, you know, I don't even know who to be nice to anymore.
I don't know if I'm talking to a slave or not.
They've got nice clothes. They ride chariots.
We should make them wear armbands so that I know who to be nice to and who to spit on.
And the other senator said, are you insane?
I mean, if we make them wear armbands, they'll realize how many there are.
And how few of us there are.
That's not good. Now, the Romans, of course, were an imperialistic nation.
Of course, it's all theoretical to us.
The Romans were an imperial...
So they were very much around getting stuff done, expanding, getting things done, conquering people, and so on.
So they worked very much on the practical side of things, and their ethics were what works in society.
And we, of course...
I mean, we're founded on British common law, but you could argue as...
Strongly were founded on Roman civic law, which was all about practicality.
Now, practicality is a really dangerous thing, because when the Greeks had a problem, they turned to principles.
They didn't so much turn to evidence.
And so Aristotle would examine the scientific world and so on, and he did look for evidence there, but they never developed a scientific method.
They got close, they touched on it, they had some great technology, you know, that they knew the steam engine in ancient Greece.
It's amazing. They knew.
And they were like, hey, let's make toys.
No! Build railroads, save the world.
But the Romans were very much just around the practical things of what gets done.
And the influence that has is huge.
When you have a problem in society, what do you turn to?
Well, I think libertarians turn to principles.
And anarchists consistently turn to principles.
We go all the way, baby.
But so if you have a problem, you say, oh, there's poor people in society, right?
So the libertarian says, okay, well, the best way to solve the problem of poverty is to respect property rights and perhaps a stable rule of law and all, and then the growth, the rising tide, boats, and all that kind of stuff, right?
And that's really a Greek approach, which is that if we have a problem in society, we turn to our principles to solve it.
What's the Roman approach? We've got poor people in society.
What's the pragmatic approach?
We hear this every day.
Welfare. Welfare.
Okay, right. Because we've got a pile of money over here with some people, and we have some people over here who don't have as much money.
In other words, we want to make things flat, We have a hill, and we have a hole.
If you want to make things flat, what do you do?
Take the stuff from the hill, and you put it in the hole.
It's just about moving stuff.
There's no principles. It's just about moving stuff.
Right? And that's the evidence-based approach.
That's the Roman approach to ethics.
Now, after the fall of Rome...
Okay, who thinks the fall of Rome?
Good, bad, indifferent?
Well, of course, I mean, the fall of Rome, there's lots of people who have theories.
I have mine. Very briefly, I think what happened with Rome was taxation.
I mean, I know there's lead in the pipes, and they actually have done some studies.
There was lead in the paint in America, and it was phased out state by state over the years.
And they can actually see, about 10 years later, a drop in criminality State by state, after they eliminated lead from the paint, because it's harmful to cognitive abilities.
And I'm sure there's a rise in political, a rise in politicians.
People want to get involved in it. In the Roman Empire, of course, they wanted to conquer the world and so on.
And they did this by scooping up people from the countryside or the cities, the young people.
20 years you would serve in the army.
20 years you would serve in the army with an incredibly high mortality rate, of course.
No medivacs, no painkillers of any kind, right?
And the best you can hope for is come back after 20 years with most of your limbs still more or less attached to your body and give a little club of land.
Hey, three years later, you die of a toothache.
What a great land. So in the Roman Empire, they had a problem continually expanding and The continued expansion began to destroy the economy, so the underclass got restless.
So, what do you get?
Red and circuses, right? Red and circuses, welfare and reality television for the modern audience, right?
What happened was, of course, when you have the welfare-warfare state, you destroy the productive middle classes and eat away at the whole center of your economy.
And what happened was the burdens of being conscripted into the Roman army got so horrendous and the tax levels got so high that people were willing to give up cities and move into the country.
So the young people said, OK, well, if I stay in the city, I'm going to get taxed at some crazy amount, regulated to hell and gone, and I'm going to have to serve 20 years in the army and then catch me.
So I'm going to go and be a farmer somewhere.
So, back in the day, it was incredibly economically inefficient to try and get taxes from people in the country.
Sometimes they're not home.
Just standing there.
Hello? Hello?
Can you give me half of your income?
Right? And, you know, I imagine that a fair number of tax collectors, well, I guess were slowly transformed into cow food when something unfortunately fell on them.
Your taxes from the countryside, so you can only collect them from cities.
So then the fewer people who remained in the cities got taxed more, conscripted more.
They all drove them out of the cities. So they didn't have enough people to patrol the empire, so they have to hire mercenaries.
Again, history is just this complete broken record with slightly different lyrics.
And so they have to hire these mercenaries, which means they need even more taxes, because they're not getting free labor.
And then they run out of money to pay the mercenaries, and the mercenaries say, oh, that's fine, we'll go home.
Yeah. No, they said, hey, I think there's some gold in Rome.
We can find it in some people's teeth.
And so they came and sacked Rome, and Rome went from a population, I think, of over a million to about 17,000 very quickly because it was just wrecked.
So, yeah, okay, so you went to being a serf, but I would argue being a serf was better than being in the Roman army.
I mean, so there were some benefits to it.
Now, in what's called the Dark Ages, and, you know, when you're into history like I am, It's really annoying, because every time you phrase something, someone comes up with six million calories.
They weren't really the dark ages.
All these things happened, and there was all this great stuff that occurred, and so on.
But I think the nomenclature is fairly valid.
I mean, it was dark, mostly because not much stuff was written down relative to Rome, so we don't really know a huge amount of what was happening.
And you had the church was, of course, the keeper of the flame, so to speak, and as were the Muslims who kept on to the ancient Greek writings.
It just still bugs me that there was this great fire in the Library of Alexander, and unbelievably great writings were lost that could have saved humanity from a thousand years of statism.
And in the medieval period, it was, of course, Dark Age's medieval faith was the primary driver.
And again, these are lots of counter-examples and so on.
But there was a guy, you probably heard of Tertullian, who said, I believe it because it is absurd.
Or another theologian said, to understand you must first believe.
Which is really the opposite of sort of scientific rationalism, which is that you have to first, you know, have theory, you subject it to evidence, and you get that continual feedback loop where other people try to replicate your findings, and if they can't, then they tell you to readjust your theory and so on.
And so, in the Greek era, it was all about theory.
Theory, theory, theory. And that's great for a lot of stuff.
It's great for a lot of stuff.
I mean, math is theory.
My scientific hypotheses are theory, but they did not plug it into evidence because of the structure of their society and the economic...
The strictures of their society made it so impossible to contemplate.
If you got how evil the society was based on slavery, you'd have to change everything.
Most people will adapt their theories to fit their social environment, because everybody feels that their society is the best.
I mean, it's, hey, I'm poured into this vessel.
This vessel is perfect. And then the Romans, as I said, went for practical rather than theoretical arguments.
This is all to do with error, right?
We all know that we're capable of error.
And the question is, where is the error and how do we know?
Where is the error and how do we know?
So the Greeks with the Socratic method would say, it's ridiculous for me to speak for the Greeks, but I'll make the case.
They would say that you know that you've made an error when you logically contradict yourself.
And that was the whole point of Socratic reasoning, right?
So Alcibiades said to Socrates, a life of pleasure is the best life.
A life where you just are enjoying and relishing sex and food and exercise and all the things that give you physical pleasure, that's the best.
And Socrates said, oh, it's interesting, you know, I had an itch the other day.
Man, when I scratch that itch, you all have that feeling, right?
You know? You can't even do it in public, because people think that you're doing something untoward.
And so he said, basically, if you have a perpetual itch that you can perpetually scratch, that would be the best of all possible lives.
Which is a good argument, right?
Because scratching an itch, especially if you can't get to it for a while, and then you get to it.
Sometimes you even want the mosquitoes to bite you so you can get that pleasure later, actually.
Anybody? No? Just me? Alright.
Everybody has their cake.
That would be mine. Well, anyway, let's talk for another time.
So they would say, well, you've made an error when you have logically contradicted yourself.
Whereas the Romans would say, you've made an error when your stuff doesn't work.
Right? Now, stuff doesn't work is okay for your own life.
You know, maybe a steady diet of chocolate cake is really good for my diabetes.
Well, I mean, it's not good, but at least you suffer only yourself.
With statism, when you try stuff and it doesn't work, what happens?
It stays. Right?
You get more, yeah.
Well, it didn't work because we didn't have enough resources.
What happened with the stimulus? The largest transfer of money in the entire history of the planet.
Why didn't it work?
Says Paul Krugman. A. No space aliens provided it.
And B. It wasn't big enough.
Even though it was bigger than what he originally called for, afterwards he said it wasn't big enough.
Why is public school education not working?
Just don't have enough money.
Even though they have approximately a billion times more money than when they first started it in the mid-19th century.
Still, it's not enough, right?
Because, you know, you create these constituents of people who want to just keep the program going, public choice stuff and all that.
So pragmatism plus statism is, I mean, it's a suicide for a culture.
I mean, it just can't work because at least stuff that doesn't work in your own personal life, you change, right?
But in the state, because of the various horrible incentives, and because the money is on the other side of the blood wall of violence, it doesn't change.
And this is why societies get progressively more calcified when they combine pragmatism with statism.
You just get layer upon layer.
It's like painting stone on an athlete, you know?
They just get slower and slower, and eventually they just can't move.
An exoskeleton of pragmatic futility.
Oh, that'd be a great name for a punk name.
Just make a note of it. I'm not in a punk band, because they won't ever accept my names.
Now, of course, in the...
So this is all... To me, this is the annoying thing about ethics, is that it almost always is used to justify what is.
And there's another very important thing about ethics, which, when we get...
I'm going to do it for now. Pretty good?
Sorry, I can't quite see the clock.
I've got a reflection there. Yes, sir.
We've got plenty of time. Plenty of time?
Don't tease me. Don't tell him plenty of time.
Don't tell him. So any other questions or comments so far?
I don't want to just do total monologue time.
Everybody's in complete, perfect agreement with my wild assertions.
A lot of people believe that governments and public schools are the way they are because they're designed to be that way and they're working very well at doing what they were designed to do, which is extract wealth from poor people and send it to the system.
Yeah, I mean, they're not students, they're hostages, right?
I mean, that's the technical, that would be the moral reality of public school students, is that they're hostages.
And training needs to be better livestock later on.
Right, yeah, I mean, but that's working against, right, so that beyond the Prussian model, right, you're supposed to design soldiers and worker drones, right?
Yeah. But the Depression model was developed in a country that did not have much of a free market.
So the problem they're having is that they do actually want the kids to be educated in some stuff, you know, science, engineering, you know, because they need that stuff to have a productive economy, right?
So the public school educational system was developed in a pretty feudalistic society, which means that you can't compete in the modern world if you have a feudalistic educational model because you don't produce the kind of livestock who produce a lot of milk that lets you Pay the soldiers, right? Well, I just meant that sometimes people say, well, public schools aren't working, or socialism isn't working, but it is working for some people.
Well, but that's assuming that people, like, it isn't working relative to its stated goals, the cover score, right?
It isn't working relative to what, like, they don't say, well, we're going to take your money at gunpoint to turn your children into blind library cattle fodder, right?
Cannon fodder and cattle.
They don't say that, right? They have this stated objective, which is virtuous.
We care about the education of the poor children, which is why the system changes so much when the poor children aren't educated.
But there's a cover story, so it's not working relative to the cover story.
I would argue, yeah, of course it's working.
I mean, producing people who can't think.
And the moment you start thinking, hierarchies collapse, which we'll get to a little later.
Sorry, somebody else had it? Yeah? You brought up that The Romans had, well, excuse me, the Greeks had about 100 slaves, you know, basically per person.
So it's hard to tell. It's hard to put money into something like industry if you're spending all your money on that.
But the Industrial Revolution did occur during a time when the majority of the people in their kind of aristocratic society or whatever had slaves as well.
So I don't know if that kind of...
No. I mean, technically they weren't slaves by the time the Industrial Revolution.
We'll get to that in a sec, because I've got to go through the whole Black Death.
Oh, it gets better. I'm going to be, and I'm going to actually mimic the symptoms for a while.
Because I haven't had a coffee in about 13 minutes, so I'll go into convulsions.
You'll see the whole thing play out ahead of you.
Jeff, I like it a little mouth-to-mouth.
Helps me feel better. No, not yet.
Just, you know. It'll go.
So, sorry, anybody else?
Comments or questions before we plunge on?
All right, so... Anybody know what arguments Socrates made as to why he shouldn't flee his little cup of hemlock, right?
He was accused of two things, right?
Corrupting the youth, which is really the mark of honor for a philosopher.
If you're not accused of corrupting the youth, you're just not doing your job.
So corrupting the youth, like Spinoza, like...
Nietzsche, like, whoever you want.
And not believing the gods of the city.
And so, of course, he was found guilty, and Socrates, sorry, Plato wrote it up, though he wasn't there.
But that shouldn't bother him, because it should be sort of his magic wills of the forms.
And... So they sentenced him to death, and then they had to wait for a ship to come back from, I can't remember why, some ship had to come back, and they had to wait.
And people offered to get him out of the city and set him up somewhere else so that he could spirit him out.
And a lot of the people were pretty sympathetic towards Socrates.
And he said, no, I'm going to stay and then drink this hemlock and I'm going to die.
He was in the 70s, and so basically his argument was, it's like, why bother with the trial?
Maybe we'll take care of it soon enough.
But what argument?
Does anyone know the argument that he made as to why?
Yes, sir? He said it was his duty to remain in the city because he had received benefits from the city of Athens.
Since he didn't choose to leave, he chose to stay in the city, then just because he's about to get executed, he had consented to set laws in which he's about to be executed for, and he wouldn't flee when they tried to bribe the guards.
Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, so he said, Athens has been my mother and my father.
I enjoyed the protection of its laws.
Loved these many years. If the laws turn against me, I still must submit to them because I've gained their protection.
I mean, it's such a completely irrational argument.
I've got a whole series on YouTube about this, so I won't do it here, but I think it was a complete curse.
I mean, if you're a philosopher, there is nothing more vicious that you can do to society than to tell people to obey rulers.
I mean, I think he was really pissed off.
I think he was really angry.
And he hated Athens so much that he cursed it with, you should obey the laws.
Bye. Bye. In fact, if you're going to obey the laws, I prefer this hemlock, because I know what's coming.
And what came was, of course, brutal.
Now, if he had said, which would be what would make sense, because he created this entity called the laws, and again, we don't know what the hell, Socrates didn't write anything down, so we don't know, but this is just Plato saying this is what he said.
Plato has his own agenda. St.
Aristotle, I mean, his writings were lost.
We have the students know to reconstruct his arguments from there, but...
But why would Plato say, or why would he focus on this argument?
Well, I think that if you're sort of sitting there and your mentor, your beloved teacher is there, and then he's not there, there's a smoking crater where he was because he disobeyed the state, I think you might have some incentive to say...
Let's obey the state. Okay, okay, those guys who just toasted Socrates, yeah, they're okay with me.
I'm fine. And Plato had actually already tried messing around with politics.
In a place called Syracuse, he tried to get involved in politics.
Didn't work out so well. He ended up being sold into slavery and almost died.
So, back in the day, I mean, they could kill you for ridiculous things which can't be proven.
I mean, Socrates tore apart his questioner, Meletus, in the trial.
And But you could be killed.
And people don't see that.
They think that this ethics is something that, you know, philosophers just talked about ethics and they worked on ethics independent of the society that they lived in.
But we know that you don't get a lot of honesty from Soviet-era published public intellectuals, right?
Why? Because the gulag awaits anybody who asks any important questions or makes any important arguments, right?
I mean, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was thrown into the gulag for ten years because he wrote a letter questioning the value of a war he was involved in.
Ten years of brutal torture.
So ethics is fundamentally, and has remained until, for two exceptions I'll talk about in a sec, a government program.
Because the people who you hear about are the people who were allowed to publish and allowed to live.
We do not have an objective view of the ethical thoughts of mankind.
We have a view of the ethical thoughts of mankind that the ruling classes approve of and elect.
Why? But it's why you see all of these people one after another.
Obey the state. Obey the state.
Obey the state. Obey the state. Obey the state.
Obey the state. Obey the state. You see it everywhere.
Even people who should know better.
Even people whose metaphysics and epistemology completely contradict that argument.
Obey the state. Obey the state.
I mean, Emmanuel can't.
I mean, I don't... Sheeran's hatred of it, but he was still a bit of a dick.
That's a Roman term for a real dick.
But, I mean, he said, you know, the categorical imperative.
Anybody know? Act as if your action produced a universal rule that everyone lives by.
Right? You can't steal, because if everyone steals, there's nothing being produced, nothing to steal, blah, blah, blah, right?
Act as if your action creates a universal maxim.
So universality was the key to his ethical theory.
Yay! Because if it ain't universal, it's taste.
It's aesthetics. It's, you know, I like ice cream, you like jazz, whatever, right?
And then...
What does he say? He says, well, there's a bit of an exception to this rule, of course, which is the king, or the ruler, who really can do anything he wants, and is not subject to this law at all.
Dude, you just said it was universal.
And please, don't tell German people to obey those in a party.
That's not a good plan.
And you see this happening all the time.
Plato, of course, is the first totalitarian.
I mean, the way that he, I think, processed the slave thing was he said that there's, you know, if you don't have a good argument, just come up with a metaphor and pretend you have a good argument, right?
So he said that people were divided into gold and silver and bronze, and the gold should be the ones in charge because they have the revelation, which can't be communicated, but it's so important that everybody has to obey them even though they don't understand it, aka hearing the mass in Latin.
And so he did all of that and said that basically the philosophers had to be in charge and everyone just had to obey them and it was a very totalitarian system because he was, for him, faith was the revelation of virtue.
And you'll see this all the time over and over again in history.
But people will make the case for universality because if you can't make the case for universality, why the hell should I obey you?
Right? If I say I like death, you don't have to.
Right? But if I say, this is the good and it's universal, then there's an obligation on you to either refute the argument or to follow that rule.
So people will always make the claim for universality throughout history, and then they will explicitly break it for the king.
Because if they didn't, what would happen?
Welcome to your cup of hemlock.
Welcome, we've got a nice bonfire for you.
I mean, there's some of the stuff they did in the early Middle Ages.
Braking on the wheel. Anyone?
I mean, it ain't the Harlem Shake, man.
I mean, they put you on a wheel, stretched you, literally broke your body, or they tied horses to your limbs and charged them off in opposite directions and so on, right?
I mean, just astonishingly aggressive stuff.
So the people whose ethical thoughts we receive are the people who the government approved of, and lo and behold, they approved of the government.
You all heard of an eye for an eye, right?
I mean, it's a challenge in the Bible, right?
An eye for an eye versus turn the other cheek.
Martin Luther, that crazy, wild, intelligent, brilliant, fantastically eloquent monk who started his life as a monk and ended his life married, was not expecting that twist in the story.
He said, well, how do we resolve this?
God says, an eye for an eye, God says, turn the other cheek.
Well, let me tell you, he said.
An eye for an eye is what the ruler does if you do something wrong.
To your fellow slave or to the ruler.
An eye for an eye. Boom! You kill, you are killed.
Turn the other cheek is what you do to the ruler if he does something unjust.
Because, of course, the ruler is placed there by God, right?
Disobedience to the ruler in that paradigm is disobedience to the dead.
So, again, here's the rule, an eye for an eye.
Oh, but there's an exception for the king, right?
Philosophy always comes with an asterisk.
Please note, this does not apply to what he said through authority to empower me.
It's like one of those car ads with the APR financing.
The guy does it in one breath.
It sounds half like a fact. So we do not get objective views of history.
How many people had ever heard of the Santa Spooner before they heard of libertarianism?
The guy's incredible. I mean, he took on the post office, started a competing post office, wrote the most incredible repudiations of the moral validity of the Constitution.
If I'd never heard of Mark Stevens, I'd have never heard of Lisanna Spooner.
I mean, he wrote and he was published because there was some freedom of speech in the day, but he's never promoted.
You don't hear about him. So, the history of ethics, this is why I call it a tragedy, is the history of ethics which supports the state.
It's like looking at ads for Coca-Cola and saying, I'm getting objective information about beverages.
It's not true. It's all agenda-driven.
With two exceptions.
One is why I'm here.
The first exception was the printing press.
Because the ethical story that was told to people was told through the priests, and the priests kept hold of the Bible, and there was no Bible in the vernacular with what people could read.
So in order to gain access to the Bible, you had to become a priest, or at least learn Latin, which was not your average serf's major occupation in his evening time.
But with the printing press and with Martin Luther translating the Bible to the vernacular and spreading it, you got people able to get access to the text.
Itself, not to an interpretation.
The interpretation of the text is almost always propagandistic.
Like you pick up the newspaper. Why is there a story and not another story?
Why are certain words chosen and not other words chosen?
Why are certain perspectives highlighted and others diminished?
Why, after ten years of war, can you not pick up an American newspaper and see one picture of a victim?
There's no law. There's no law that says you can't publish a picture of a victim.
You can find them on the internet.
Iraqi dead? They're everywhere.
But you'll never see them in a mainstream paper because the average American, and I don't mean this in particular about Americans, it's every empire, there's this protected biosphere that you can't, things can't penetrate.
If any of the reality of what your government is doing penetrates your mind, you are outraged at the person who tells you about it, not about what the government does.
So, when Martin Luther was able to give the Bible to the people, they could read it to themselves.
They could read it for themselves. Now, the Bible, and I use this with all due sensitivity, bit of a disco ball.
I mean, because it has so much in it that it will reflect almost anything that you want, right?
So, I mean, if you were kind of an angry, you know, hit malefactors with a baseball or something like that, then you can find lots of Old Testament stuff that's going to justify that.
And if you're more into turn the other cheek and do unto others and the golden rule, then there's stuff in there for that, right?
So the problem is that when the Bible went out into the masses as a whole, what happened to Christendom?
Fragmented. Fragmented.
Who knows some of the sects?
Some of them are still around. A lot of them are still around.
Calvinists. Methodists.
Arminianism. What now?
Arminianism. Basically it's like an absolute reverse.
It's not an up-season right now.
So subjective that they don't have to say anything.
They're basically subvert all Christian.
They, but they don't say that.
Okay, so basically whatever you get out of the Bible is fine.
Absolutely. Right, right. Spengalians, are they still around?
Anabaptists? You know what they're about, right?
Adult baptism? Do you know, during the religious wars, what people would do if they found anabaptists?
Kill them. How did they kill them?
Boiled. No, they're into adult baptism.
So they must be drowned. There's your baptism, mother...
Anyway. So, a dominant narrative fragmented when people got hold of original information and could interpret it for themselves.
What does that sound like that we have now?
The internet. So when I was growing up in England, we had three television stations.
BBC One, BBC Two, and ITV. We'd watch BBC One for the news and to watch really hysterical people sweat in Mastermind, which was a game show they had, but they just fired questions at me with this incredibly bright light while people just sweated in the last years of their lives.
And BBC2, I don't even know what it was, but there were never any cartoons.
ITV would occasionally show a Bond film, which would shut down the entire country.
But you had a dominant narrative, right?
A dominant narrative. I mean, when I grew up, I mean, the Second World War, England's finest hour, and Churchill, and the Battle of Britain, I mean, there was no possible idea that there was anything other than the greatest nobility in human history in the Second World War.
First World War, it was lost over.
Second World War. And...
So you have a dominant narrative which is called ethics.
And people think that it's true because that's all they get.
Because that's all they hear.
But then if the dominant narrative is fractured, then you have the capacity for people to begin to think for themselves.
If you're in the dominant narrative, it's not even the narrative.
It just is what is.
And, of course, the whole point of the power structure is to keep alternate opinions away from you.
But with the Internet, you can get alternate narratives, and you can have those alternate narratives get you, right?
You set up your feeds, you set up your news sources, and you just get the stuff that makes sense to you.
And as you understand the world more and process the world more, you get more stuff that makes sense to you.
So the printing press facilitated, and this doesn't mean good or bad, it just facilitated the breakup of Christendom into warring sects.
Now, when you have a state and you have warring religious sects, what happens?
Or you get religious war, because every religious sect knows that either we get control of the state, or the state, or some other sect gets control of the state.
Right? God lobbied you.
So, you have religious warfare which consumed particularly, I mean, Germany in particular, was unbelievable.
It just went on and on and on.
I mean, there were travelers who went through Germany in the 16th, 17th century who said, you could scarcely see a tree without at least one body hanging from it.
And they missed out on the Renaissance.
They missed out on the Enlightenment complete, which is one of the reasons why Nazism had 20th century technology with fairly medieval hierarchies.
Not a good combo, as we can see now.
But it also facilitated the scientific revolution.
I mean, I don't think the scientific revolution could ever have happened without the printing press.
Because you had to disseminate both the Baconian theories in the 16th century, but you also had to disseminate the conclusions and the arguments and so on.
The scientific revolution, which placed the cognitive ability of human beings in every single person.
If there's revelation, if it's a Platonic, like a Socratic cave you have to get outside, you don't know the The cave metaphor, right?
It's one of the greatest, most evil metaphors in the history of mankind.
The original matrix, right? It says, most people are in a cave, they don't even know it.
And there's a fire in the cave, and there's stuff in front of the fire, and they're looking at the shadows cast on the wall, and they think that they're seeing the things itself.
A philosopher starts by looking at the shadows, then starts looking at the things themselves, then starts looking at the fire, and then walks out of the cave and sees the sun, and the world as it is.
And that what he sees is not communicable according to Plato, which means you have to force people to obey, which is why he was a fraternitarian.
If you place rational, cognitive, empirical, scientific abilities in the individual, then you fundamentally destroy hierarchy.
Because everybody can think of themselves.
There's no hope of science, right?
Nobody needs to adjudicate, based on revelation, once they just test it.
They keep testing it, they keep testing it, they keep testing it.
This is why central planning doesn't work.
Because every individual, according to, I mean, I think any rational economics, every individual knows what is best for him.
It's the best source of that knowledge.
Another individual cannot choose or force him.
I can choose for myself how I'm going to spend my time, my resources, my energy.
Other people should not force me to do it because they don't know more than I do.
But of course, if you believe in things that don't have any existence and don't have a voice, like the common good, right?
I'm sorry, I have to take 50% of your income for the common good.
It's like, well, I don't think the common good is the one taking my money.
I tell you what, when the common good shows up and asks me for 50% of my income, I will hand it over just to see the amazement of how many hands it has, because I've seen that quite a lot.
Right, so if the individual is not the, this is really, I think, where philosophy is so dangerous.
If anybody who comes to you and says, there's things you can't know that you have to do, It's things you can't know that you have to do.
It's very dangerous.
Because they have to be done, but you can't do them.
Right? If people believed that individuals could help the poor, that charity would suffice, would we need a welfare state?
Couldn't happen. The welfare state is, the poor need to be helped, the children need to be educated, the nation needs to be defended, We need the damn roads.
And you can't do it.
No individuals, no group of individuals.
You need this third party, this external agency, this fantasy, that it's the only thing that can do it.
And that's incredibly dangerous.
Any questions? I think I'm off.
I'm just coming to the end, so...
That either means it's really good or really incomprehensible.
Let's look forward, shall we?
I'm going to go down with incomprehensibly good.
So, we started by talking about reason, evidence and faith.
Now, if you accept that human beings can process reason, which is really the Aristotelian argument, the Randian argument, the Lockean argument, that human beings can process reality through the evidence of the senses and the laws of logic which we derive from the consistent behavior of stuff out there beyond our brains, then you are the arbiter of truth.
Now, if you are the arbiter of truth, anybody who wants to get you to do something has got to make a good case to it.
Because you're able to process that case.
Now that case can be rational, right?
Or it can be, you know, buy this car because I put a bimbo on it, or whatever it is.
Or it can be emotional, it can be advertising, but they still have to make a case which you have to voluntarily agree to.
Right? So the philosophers who argue for rational, empiricism, scientific stuff, they're placing the crucible of truth in your own mind between, you know, to the right of your left ear, to the left of your right ear.
And the people who argue for an abstract good that has not its own voice but has representatives, politicians, social workers, but that you don't have the capacity to know and achieve the good, And particularly those who say, well, I don't know what the good is, but let's try doing something.
Trying to do something, as we talked about earlier, is just a way of expanding the state and never having it contracted again.
Those people are incredibly dangerous.
And that is the majority of what philosophy has been doing, is serving the needs of the rulers, is serving the needs of hierarchy.
Not because philosophers are bad, they just like breathing.
And that's the environment that has conditioned What we see of his ethics.
It's sort of like looking at a leaf, saying, wow, those leaves can fly, and not seeing that he's going down a river.
If you don't see the river, then you can't understand why the leaf is moving.
The river that has conditioned human ethical thought has been the need to serve the state, the need to serve hierarchy.
And almost everything that you hear, almost every ethical argument you will ever hear, is an ex post facto justification, reasoning after the fact, justification for state power.
Obey, obey, obey, obey, obey.
Oh, do you need a reason? I can give you some reasons.
But they all follow, they all orbit the gravity well called obey.
And the government and other hierarchies will absorb anybody who wants to ask those questions and put them in an environment And publish and promote those things which are around obey, obey, obey.
I think it was Harvard professor, John Rawls, who put out a theory of justice.
He said, well...
We'll stop with that. Then it'll all come clear.
He said, well, imagine you're floating above the world before you're born, and you don't know if you're going to be rich or poor, or black or white, or male or female, or any of those things.
What do you want? Well, if you're going to be really energetic and ambitious and go on to some privilege, then you want to be able to do all these great things and go into the free market, start your companies, make lots of money.
So you want some aspects of the free market.
Ah, but if you're poor and sick and underprivileged and so on, you want a social safety net.
So we need this balance, this mixed democracy, this planned economy with some elements of the free mind.
The energetic can have scope and the underprivileged can have support and so on.
And all of it is just pay your damn taxes.
I'll create any ridiculous story About floating, you know, pre-feet of souls around the world, like rings of Saturn with no diapers, and just whatever I need to tell you to get you to obey, I will tell you.
I'll make up stories about caves.
I'll make up stories about orbiting baby souls.
I mean, whatever it is that I need to get you, but all it is is just pay your taxes.
Yes sir.
I'm voting yourself a chance, is it moral?
What is our time frame?
Voting yourself a chance, is it moral?
It's about 10 minutes or so, or 15 minutes.
Okay, I want to...
Well, first of all, when you're in a system of coercion, when you're the victim of coercion, there is no moral answer.
So, if I jump you in an alley, stick a gun to your ribs and say, give me your wallet, is it moral to give me your wallet or immoral to give me your wallet?
I don't know.
Ethics is about choice. When you're in a system of compulsion, people talk to me all the time and say, should I take this government grant or not?
You're asking for an ethical argument in a coercive environment, and I can't denigrate ethics to have it respond to violence as if it's not violence.
Does that make sense? I don't think it's effective.
Sometimes it happens on a local level that your vote could matter, and you want to defend against the regulation of something that you don't want, so you should go vote against it, and you're participating in a coercive system.
Well, sure, but you participate in the coercive system where, I mean, you walk on the roads, you, you know, you, I mean, doesn't, you, the idea, I mean, the system is so big that everybody participates.
You know, like there's people who say, well, I ran to the social security man.
He's a hypocrite. Yeah, because her arguments are tough to counter, so let's just talk about surviving in a coercive system.
Yes, sir? Well, we're all in the coercive system, and that eliminates Well, I mean, we're not in concentration camps.
There are still moral choices that you can make.
But the moral choices that we make when we are the direct victims of a gun to the net are irrelevant.
But there are still moral choices that we can make.
We are in a pre-moral stage in society.
I would argue that for all the human history we've been in a pre-moral stage because morality has been used to justify and cover coercion and get people to obey while pretending it's the good.
But the Internet, I mean, I'm only here, I mean, it's insane.
I'm only here because of the Internet, obviously, right?
I've only had, I think, 55 million downloads of my show because of the Internet.
Show. Isn't that terrible? I don't know what to go.
My show! Feelings.
Anyway, so, but it's only possible, I mean, it's the biggest philosophical conversation in history simply because of the technology, right?
I mean, I would be tiny compared to Socrates if he'd had the technology.
So this gives us the chance to actually have a moral conversation unsanctioned by the powers that be.
Right? Unsanctioned.
This is the first time in human history where we can have a conversation about ethics that does not require the approval and is not threatened by the powers that be.
This is the birth of ethics.
We're starting what ethics are.
Because we can have a conversation uninfluenced by power, and it's the danger of power, and the need for power to cloak itself with ethics.
So we can actually have a conversation for the first time in human history without fear, about virtue, about ethics.
I mean, it's mind-blowing.
We are privatizing ethics.
Ethics has been a government program for 2,500 years, which is why it serves so well the power of the state.
But we're privatizing ethics.
And until we privatize ethics, society will remain socialized and specific.
Society flows from ethics.
So if we can privatize ethics, then we can privatize society.
If we can't privatize ethics, we can't privatize society.
Because the ethical justifications will always cover a path.
Sorry. So are you saying that ethics has been serving The government has been appropriated, because Christian ideals initially were actually against the government, but then they were appropriated by Constantine, who manipulated the religious texts and practices to serve his own purposes.
Yes, well, I mean, but Christianity is still a hierarchy, right?
With revelation at its core and at its top, particularly Catholicism, right?
So it's not...
I mean, it's not the state, obviously, right?
I mean, I love me some tasty Christians a lot more than statists, right?
But it still is a hierarchy with revelation at the top.
And so it is...
It certainly has its problems with the state.
It also has, as we know, lots of support for the state as well, right?
The traditional bargain is...
And this goes back to Ayn Rand, right?
Attila the Hun says, I need people to obey me, but I'm just some dude.
Plus, I'm going to get old, right?
I mean, how many of us couldn't take John Boner when he comes to get our taxes, right?
Hey, he's not that tough. He's vaguely orange, too.
That kind of makes you very strong.
So the traditional deal is you say to the witch doctor, you tell everyone that I'm here divinely, and that way they have to obey me as they're obeying some divinity, and in return I'm going to give you a monopoly of mythology, right?
Thank you.
Kind of looking at the Bible as some sort of one piece of text and not looking at contextual.
Well, yeah, I mean, like...
Like Leviticus is one thing, then Jesus states another thing, but then Jesus states another thing.
It's not written by one person.
It's a history of all the thought and processes in the depth of change.
So, contradictory ideas.
Well, I mean, if you look at the Bible as a text that has evolved to have relevance to people's lives, then you would expect it to have many facets.
Because there are many different preferences in the human heart, right?
So I think that would probably be the best way.
I mean, if you think it's divinely inspired, then it's there for a purpose.
But if you look at it as an evolving text for social effect, then it would have those characters as well.
Yes sir? I just wanted to see if I understand exactly what you're talking about here.
That will make one of us.
Are you saying that morality is only relevant when we have choice?
Well, yeah, I mean, when you have choice, then you are morally responsible.
If you are reacting to somebody putting a gun to your neck, I would not argue that there's a moral category there.
Okay, so let's say that soldiers are in battle.
Their morality is kind of out of the window if they are defending themselves or they have been told to take position or something of that nature.
Well, most people, of course, don't want to shoot.
And certainly throughout most of human history, the number of people who were put on the battlefield far exceeded those who actually took aim at the enemy.
I mean, in the First World War, 10, 15, 20 percent of people only ever shot at the enemy.
I mean, most people did the smart thing and just hit with the rats in the bottom of the ditch, right?
So, it really depends.
If you volunteer to be a soldier, then you have some moral responsibility.
However, if you've grown up in a single narrative, right, oh, my family are all military people, and, you know, I'm from this military culture, and it's great, and the newspapers, and the TV, and the movies, they all say the same thing.
Noble, heroic, virtuous defenders.
I had a guy recently come up to me after a speech, highly offended, and said, you know, I fought so that you could say these things.
It's like, you didn't fight for Canada.
Anyway. So, if you've only grown up with that, I don't think that you can have morality if you don't have choice.
And choice is also being outside the dominant narrative.
You're not a bad doctor in the 16th century if you don't prescribe antibiotics, because they don't exist yet.
But now, under certain circumstances, you would be a bad doctor, because the knowledge is there.
So, in a weird way, philosophers create evil and good.
Because when you give people the reality, if you've never heard the argument, taxation is theft, I don't believe that you're morally responsible for sanctioning it.
Because how on earth could you be expected to generate an entire ethical theory on your own, an entire moral, I mean, I certainly haven't, my God, you know, that little thing, you stand on the shoulders of giants.
So... If you don't have moral knowledge, if you've only ever experienced one dominant moral paradigm, you don't have moral choice.
You're not morally responsible. Now, when some asshole philosopher comes along and starts hitting you with those annoying questions and giving you those perspectives and giving you those arguments, choice begins to open up in you.
And now, you've moved out of the Garden of Eden into the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, which is what hopefully good philosophers will provide you, and then you have moral responsibility, and that's why people don't like philosophers that much.
Right? Because the Eden, you know, they pick leaves and dancing, you know, it's all kinds of fun.
And, you know, the lion lies down with the lamb and so on.
You don't have childbirth, you don't have work and so on.
But the philosopher says to you, here are the moral arguments, and now you have a moral choice.
Whereas before you didn't, because you were simply propagandized.
Right? So I think there's lots of ways in which we have moral choice brought to us.
Mostly it happens through arguments.
Very few of us will ever get mugged, but everyone here has had moral arguments.
That's why you're here. You've had moral arguments that go counter to what you were told pretty consistently when you were growing up.
So we all are working to create choice, to create morality in other people that didn't exist because they're in the matrix and they don't know it's the matrix.
Sorry, long answer. Is that...
It's always a long answer.
Yes, go ahead. I have a question.
The question is going to be moral, and I would argue that it can't be moral because you are not really initiating force against anybody, even if you're trying to get somebody else to use force in your path.
The same way that if I ask you to kill or steal on my behalf, I am not acting morally.
If I hire a hitman, am I morally responsible?
I would argue that if you hire a hitman, of course the hitman is pulling the trigger, but he's only pulling the trigger because you gave him the money.
Sure. So you will have some moral responsibility.
There's a common law argument, which has survived to the current day, which says, if I go into a store and I hold up some guy for money and he shoots at me and it hits a can and then kills someone else, who gets charged for the murder?
I didn't. I didn't even pull the trigger.
Maybe my gun is made of soap.
Maybe it's a faxed 3D fax gun or something, right?
It doesn't shoot. But so if I set events in motion that result in someone's death, then I have moral culpability in that.
Now, the hitman obviously would be responsible as well, but I would be responsible because without that the death would not have occurred.
So, again, I'm not saying that voting is the same as hiring a hitman.
It's hiring many hitmen. No, I'm not saying.
But there is a moral question involved in the initiation.
But in defensive voting, again, what you're trying to do with defensive voting is not impose your will on other people, but attempt to prevent them from imposing their will upon you.
So that's a slightly different situation.
Yes, sir. And for those who are still...
Can you explain to us, or can you define ethics, why we should follow it, and what is good about ethics?
As human beings, why...
Oh, you couldn't ask that at the beginning.
I'll wait till the very end. There's no time!
Well, very briefly, I mean, my definition of ethics is universally preferable behavior.
Our brains are constantly extrapolating and conceptualizing.
That's the difference between us and every other species that I know of, is that we have concepts, right?
We have the ability to extract the essence from things and make universals.
We're always doing that, right?
So there's the argument, and it comes from religion, and in particular comes from some of the best elements of Christianity, which is the conscience.
If you do bad, that little annoying cricket guy with Disney voice, he will sort of say to you...
Anybody? Nobody with hair gets it.
But you have a conscience, right?
Now, I would argue that our conscience is simply our universalizing machine.
We have a universalizing machine in our head.
And when we have contradictions, It's bad for us.
I mean, because our brain is just trying to smooth out that paper all the time, and it gets crumpled up by culture.
We're smoothing it out all the time. So we have an element to our brain, assuming we're not sociopaths, it's like 4%, so that would be...
See, I'm pointing out.
The guy who points out is usually the Sotheby's.
Anyway. It's you!
Get them! Get them! So I would argue that consistency is important, right?
And Nietzsche characterized Socrates' argument this way.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
You have to be rational to be virtuous, because virtue is consistent behavior, consistent with universal principles, which is reason.
And if you are rational, then you can be virtuous, and if you are virtuous, then you will be happy.
I believe that there certainly are people who have no conscience.
I mean, this is scientifically the case.
I mean, they show people, you know, horrible pictures of things, and they get erections.
It's like just horribly miswired, crazy stuff going on in their head, right?
Car crash! I mean, it's just not good, right?
So those people are, you know, they're just the natural interspecies predators that we have to deal with, and I argue that we deal with that to raise children more peacefully or peacefully at all.
But for most people, if they act in inconsistency with, if they act inconsistently about the most important areas of their life, they will become unhappy.
Now, if you're in the matrix, right, you've never heard anything other than the dominant narrative, if you act inconformity with that dominant narrative, you can get by.
Because you're actually not, you're contradicting reality, but reality is pretty distant for most human beings.
I mean, reality is like, you know, they don't even know the phone number.
They don't know where it is. You know, that's outside the biodome of culture and they can't even see it.
But when people bring good arguments to you, it annoys you and it tickles you.
It's like the... The sand in the oyster that produces the shell, right?
People give you these contradictory arguments, you need to resolve them, reject the argument, or whatever.
Otherwise it bothers you and you end up being less happy.
So, you know, does spanking violate the non-aggression principle?
This is a case I've been making for years in this community, and it bugs people.
Of course, because if it does violate the non-aggression principle and we're spankers, we're hitting our children, then that's not good.
But if you've only ever heard that spanking is the only and the best and blah, blah, blah, you're kind of in that state of nature when it comes to ethics.
So I hope that answers something.
Are we out of time completely? Yeah, I think we are.
All right. Thanks, everybody, so much.
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