July 23, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:49
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| Society's feeling kind of wild lately, right? | |
| Kind of out of control and increasingly hostile and fractious and so on, like the fine people on both sides myth, like it doesn't matter what you say, no one's listening anyway. | |
| And it's not, to me, too complicated to understand. | |
| There is the general issue or caveat that I've talked about for many years, which is when we abandon reason, We first end up with manipulation, begging, which quickly switches to verbal abuse when those reliant on the public purse get large enough. | |
| And then there's escalation of verbal abuse to verbal threats and then to actual and outright physical violence. | |
| This is all the natural pattern that comes from rejecting reason, from rejecting logos. | |
| But I do want to talk about something that I think is often... | |
| Overlooked which is the role that culture is supposed to play in remediating disputes between people. | |
| So culture is a very powerful tool of social enforcement. | |
| Now, of course, there are a lot of people out there who are like, oh, social enforcement, that's a terrible thing, you know, you've got to be free, man, to express, to be, to involve yourself in intergalactic happenings on the nth dimension and so on. | |
| But given that rules do need to be enforced in society, right, anarchism is not... | |
| No rules, it's no rulers. | |
| Because when you have rulers, you don't have rules, because rulers and democracy and so on can just make up whatever they want. | |
| So the only way you can have rules is without rulers, and then the only way that those rules are enforced It's through the wonderful mechanism of ostracism. | |
| Now, ostracism is a very powerful social tool. | |
| In fact, there have been studies that have shown that when you are ostracized, it actually activates the same brain patterns as if you're being physically tortured. | |
| And I think we can all understand that. | |
| We're social animals, and particularly because we have the fourth trimester of the first year or two of life when human babies are worse than Helpless. | |
| I mean, they massively consume resources. | |
| We need other human beings in order to survive. | |
| So, of course, we would experience ostracism as incredibly painful because ostracism in general would lead to gene death. | |
| It's a form of predation, right? | |
| If you go out and get wiped out by some saber-toothed tiger before you reach sexual maturity and before you reproduce, well, you know, genes are gone, right? | |
| They are backspace control, alt-deleted. | |
| And If you are ostracized, it's exactly the same as if a saber-toothed tiger had taken you out before maturity. | |
| Now, if you're ostracized after you've had children, then often your children would be ostracized as well. | |
| It may not be as harsh as the male lion who, if he comes across a single mom female lion, first thing he does is kill the offspring to make sure he's not investing in offspring not his own. | |
| But we experience ostracism as a very painful thing, which is one of the reasons why. | |
| I mean, the left in particular uses ostracism to attack people because it's hard, you know, as Aristotle said, whoever can live alone must be either a beast or a god. | |
| And so what ostracism does is it raises the value of love in your life because if you're loved, ostracism is... | |
| Usually just a sign that you're going in the right direction. | |
| So ostracism is very powerful. | |
| Very powerful. And it's how social rules get enforced and it's also how they adapt and grow and change because social rules are open to the challenges of language and of rhetoric and perhaps even of sophistry, of reason, of evidence and so on. | |
| They can adapt and change in a way that laws don't really do because laws are very, very... | |
| Sticky and not open to the free will of ostracism. | |
| Ostracism is fantastic because you don't, I mean literally you don't have to do anything to enforce it. | |
| So if there's some restaurant that opens up in a neighborhood that's bad, like I was in a restaurant that opened up once in a neighborhood I was in, that was like soup and fries. | |
| And it's like, it's kind of specialized. | |
| It just didn't last more than a month or two because people didn't want to go. | |
| So ostracism, you literally don't have to lift a finger. | |
| The default position of everyone all the time, no matter what, is ostracism. | |
| I mean, think of the billions of people in the world you don't interact with. | |
| You're ostracizing them and so on, right? | |
| So ostracism is the lazy man's rule enforcement because you actually have to go patronize someone or be friends with them or date them or hire them or something. | |
| And most times we have this inertia of You know, already existing relationships. | |
| And just by the by, if you're in your 20s, you know, have and hold good friendships because in your 30s and 40s, people get busy with kids, with travel. | |
| And anyway, so ostracism is wonderful. | |
| It's powerful. And it's how we guide the ship of society and how we adapt to new cultural challenges and new economic challenges and so on. | |
| And so if there's a particular belief system that people don't like, The members of that particular belief system Well, you won't hire them. | |
| You won't lend to them. | |
| You may not rent to them. I mean, and this will give social feedback. | |
| Can this be used in a prejudicial manner? | |
| For sure. But of course, laws can be used infinitely more in a prejudicial manner. | |
| So if you don't like redheads, then you don't have to hire redheads and so on, right? | |
| Now, of course, if redheads are actually very valuable to your business, then you not hiring them will cause you to lose a significant competitive edge vis-a-vis other businesses over time and so on. | |
| But this power of ostracism is something I've constantly focused on, and you can get my books at freedomainradio.com forward slash free. | |
| They are in fact free, and I talk more about this. | |
| But I wanted to mention this fundamental thing, which is how do we solve these deep and intractable problems within society? | |
| Well, of course, everybody wants to run to the law, right? | |
| Everybody wants to run to get laws passed, and then that's a difficult, complex process that is highly politicized. | |
| Like, whatever law you propose, as Bismarck said, there's two things you don't want to see getting made. | |
| Hamburgers or meat dishes and Laws, right? | |
| It's a pretty unpleasant thing to watch get made. | |
| So whatever you say the government, oh, I want the government to do X. Well, by the time it goes through the grinding, lobbyist, malformed, demonic, lower intestine regulatory tube of Congress or the Parliament building or whatever, it's going to be unrecognizable to what you wanted because everyone with power, authority, or a son-in-law on the committee is going to get their way. | |
| Well, you're not, right? | |
| So everybody wants laws, but if you recognize the power of ostracism, then you can deal with so many social issues. | |
| If you look at something like abortion, people say, well, should it be illegal? | |
| Of course, if you make it illegal, then you're forcing women to come to bear the child to term, or you're punishing them for not. | |
| If you punish them and they've had a child, then the child doesn't have a mother. | |
| It's all very complicated stuff. | |
| And the way, of course, that it used to work was through the power of ostracism, which is that if a woman got pregnant outside of wedlock, well, she had to go to great lengths to hide it. | |
| Usually she'd go away to visit an aunt for a time and so on. | |
| Because if it became known that she'd had a child outside of wedlock, then a lot of men wouldn't want to marry her. | |
| And there were charities, of course, that said, sure, you know, we'll support you, but only the first kid, right? | |
| We won't support you if you keep having kids, because... | |
| That's having kids outside of wedlock is a bad business model for society. | |
| It may be good for your bank account in the welfare state, but it's very bad for society as a whole. | |
| So ostracism is this really powerful tool, and how does society deal with something it disapproves of, or which a lot of people disapprove of? | |
| Well, the refusal to engage is very, very important. | |
| But unfortunately, this is the great problem, is that the forced redistribution of wealth... | |
| destroys our capacity to ostracize those we disagree with. | |
| If you disagree with the mass influx of pretend refugees, well, too bad. | |
| I mean, you have to pay for them anyway. | |
| If you disagree with the BBC, right? | |
| I mean, if you disagree with whatever state broadcaster is local to your tax form, well, you can't boycott it. | |
| You can't cease to fund it because it's paid for. | |
| Anyway, if you disagree with a particular war, too bad. | |
| You know, you're forced to pay for it or your children will be forced to pay for it. | |
| So this capacity that we have to ostracize has been destroyed. | |
| And so now, how do we make decisions? | |
| Well, we run to the government or we run to the streets and we threaten violence. | |
| Because now, instead of passively ostracizing people, we have to actively attack them in order to get our way. | |
| And this escalation of violence that comes from the larger violence of the forced redistribution of wealth has destroyed. | |
| Our culture. If you don't agree with a particular professor, well, you still have to pay for him. | |
| So that's where this escalation is coming from. |
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