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Sept. 10, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:06
The Revolt Against Intelligence
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Are you ready to be scared?
Into action? God alive?
I hope so. Because we are right in the middle of an incredibly dangerous period in human history.
It's happened many times before.
It is my desperate hope that with this communications technology and you sharing these kinds of conversations, we can avert it, slow it down, perhaps even turn it back.
But we are facing this Mounting and dangerous groundswell of a revolt against intelligence, a hatred of intelligence, a fear of intelligence, a superstition about intelligence.
There's a reason why zombie movies have become so popular and the only thing you can do is outwit zombies, right?
Because they're slow, but there's so many of them, and that's this revolt against intelligence.
And it's not innate to human nature.
It's because specific information is suppressed about the value of intelligence to everyone.
And heaven's sakes, just look around you.
Look at this technology.
I mean, how many brilliant people had to be struck by inspiration and workaholism to produce our capacity to just have this basic conversation?
It only takes one guy to invent penicillin or one guy to invent a polio vaccine and one guy to figure out planting turnips in the winter and one guy to figure out crop rotation.
Just a certain small amount of brilliance and you can change the course of the entire world.
Now, of course, the reason why smart people work very hard and make enormous sacrifices in order to drag the world up the staircase of peace and plenty is because of the incentives, because of the rewards.
I mean, know this because when those incentives and rewards are taken away in a centrally planned socialist or fascist or communist economy, productivity It squelches.
It ceases. And I've been an entrepreneur for about a quarter century now.
And, you know, without the incentives, you wouldn't take the risks.
You wouldn't sign the papers that put you in massive debt.
You wouldn't take the slings and arrows of outrageous pushback if there was not the pot of gold, so to speak, at the end of the rainbow.
And so incentives matter.
It's a basic principle of economics that incentives matter.
And so the only way that you unleash and unlock the genius of the species is through the free market and through incentives.
And then what happens is, of course, you see those people become very successful.
They become very wealthy.
They seem to have better lives.
They have expensive homes.
They have maybe the best-looking wives.
Rather than saying, well, that is a tiny price that we pay to unleash all the benevolence of genius in the species, which we could do.
We could do that. We could look at people who are successful and say their success is a measure of the value they provide to humanity.
By God, let them have their yachts.
So that I may get running water, electricity and medicine.
Let them have their private jets.
So that I may have the efficiency of their brilliance.
Let them have their beautiful wives.
So that I get something like antibiotics.
It's a fair deal.
It's a fair deal.
Now if that is put forward and people actually understand that, Then we can praise and...
I won't say worship, although it's not far off.
I mean, if you're a classical music lover, what's your relationship to Mozart?
You kind of worship the guy.
He's a phenomenon. And you don't sit there and say, Mozart is only famous because he stole all of my music.
He stole my genius.
He stole my talent. You don't say that because you're sane.
You look at Mozart and you say, wow, that was a pretty short and often unhappy life.
And if Tom Hulse is correct, had a very giggling, shrieky, banshee laugh.
But look at the legacy he left behind.
Who sits there who loves theater and says, that son of a bitch Shakespeare stole my iambic.
He stole my pentameter.
He stole my speeches.
And if it wasn't for him...
I would be as famous as...
I mean, you don't. You sit there and say, wow, I'm really glad that guy decided to put quill to paper and write.
It's the same thing with Charles Dickens.
Same thing with music, right?
I mean, even popular music.
They're not stealing from you.
They are contributing. And they make your life better.
They enrich your life. Music is such a foundation...
I've actually thought of just doing a whole series on music that I love.
But music is such a foundational passion of mine, I don't sit there and say, well...
Those bastards who are rich.
You know, boy, that Paul McCartney guy, whew!
I'm not even that huge a Beatles fan, but that Paul McCartney guy, you know, he needed to make a lot of money so he could give it to his one-legged divorcee.
I mean, he needed, well, why not?
So what? The measure of the man's money is the measure of the pleasure and joy and thought and depth that he brought to the general population.
So you can look at that.
So you can look at someone like Jeff Bezos.
Now I know there's about $600 million contracts with the CIA. Look, there's dirt in just about all the money that is in the world.
Expecting pure money is like expecting there never to be any germs on any piece of coinage or currency that you fondle, right?
I mean, you can look at that for sure, but it's still a long way.
It's a long way from the Federal Reserve counterfeit money printing scheme that destroys the poor at the expense, well, enriches the rich at the expense of the poor.
So you can look at some, oh, Amazon, oh, it's put these people out of business and so on.
So you can look at all of that and you can see the going out of business signs and you can say, well, they're destroying the neighborhood and so on.
It's like, but... It's like eBay.
Think of all the businesses that have been generated.
Think of all the people who don't have to commute anymore.
Think of all the people who can pursue their dreams of running their own business without needing a massive amount of investment.
Think of the efficiency that is occurring.
Think of instead of people driving to stores, instead of 10 people on a block driving to stores, one truck can come by and deliver 10 things.
And think of how environmentally friendly it is.
Think of how efficient it is. Think of how secure it is and how safe it is.
So you can even look at the people who are wealthy and say they're thieves and exploiters and stealers, or you can say, wow, The money is a measure of their benefit to the planet.
And again, I'm talking about a free market in its ideal and blah, blah, blah, exceptions.
Who cares, right? Who cares?
I mean, this... If I say it's a sunny day and you point out that there's one tiny little cloud on the horizon, I'm not a violent guy, but it's a little punchable.
It just is. Oh, there's a little exception.
Yeah, yeah. I understand.
Generalities. I know.
A tall pygmy? Naxos.
Not all X are like that.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. I mean, I get it.
But still, there's a difference between North Korea and a relative free market like exists in the West.
I get all of that. So let's just put all of that aside because that nitpicky crap is, you know.
Anyway, so the reason why there's this backlash against intelligence is It's because intelligence is seen as predatory rather than beneficial.
Intelligence is seen as exploitive rather than generative.
Intelligence, so some brilliant guy comes along and starts a factory that ends up employing a thousand people, that guy gets very rich.
And instead of saying, wow, he created a thousand jobs, That's 1,000 people making $50,000 a year who otherwise wouldn't have jobs.
And it even benefits the people who aren't working there because he's taken out of circulation 1,000 workers, which bids up the wages of all the other workers.
So he's benefiting everyone.
You say, well, he's very rich.
And you can look and say, well, but you see, he's paying the workers.
Less than he makes from the product of their labor.
And it's like, of course he is.
Of course he is. The pursuit of profit is foundational to evolution.
It's foundational to life.
I mean, good God, just think of the basic equation of profit.
Do you spend more calories getting your food than you get out of your food?
Not that complicated, right?
If you crawl to McDonald's, it costs you 500 calories, and then you order a wrap that's 250 calories, you're down 250 calories.
You know, there's no life without profit.
You have to exceed profit.
Your calorie expenditure in your calorie consumption or you die.
Profit is foundational.
You're watching this video because you hope and I believe that you will gain more wisdom out of this video than you would by doing something else and I think this is the greatest show in the history of the world and the greatest show in the present certainly in philosophy so I share your optimism about the profit that you hope to accrue.
If you want to go and ask a woman out If she will go out with you, you've profited from that, right?
You buy a new suit and you want to get a job.
If you get the job, you've profited from the new suit.
Like, you understand? Profit is not some immoral thing that is exploitative.
We all want that.
We all want that. We all need that.
And so if you go out and get some wood to put in your stove over the winter, over a winter night, you need to profit from that, right?
You need to stay alive.
And for that you need heat.
So you profit from going to get the...
It's just so foundational that anyone who rails against profit...
Well, they're infected by this virus, this hatred of intelligence, this hatred of competence, this hatred of genius, of brilliance.
It's really, really tragic.
Because what happens is, for most of human history, the only meritocracy has been sociopathy.
The only meritocracy has been our capacity for violence.
And the free market kind of changed that around, kind of mixed that up a little bit.
So instead of killing people, you served their voluntary needs.
You served their voluntary needs.
Now once you started serving their voluntary needs, rather than killing people, then society did the great catapult leap upwards, which started in the 18th century, a little bit earlier, but agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the...
The manufacturing revolution, the information revolution, like all of this stuff happened because we turned the meritocracy from violence, right?
Who was the king?
The king was the best murderer or the guy who rewarded the best murderers, who were the aristocracy in general, the people who served the king by murdering his enemies.
So basically it was just this big giant mafia meritocracy throughout most of human history and still is across most of the world.
Now changing it from a mafia meritocracy to a money meritocracy is the most stunning change that has ever occurred in human history.
And it's really great.
It's really great for people who are intelligent, for people who are hardworking, for people who are productive, and for people who are empathetic.
Everyone thinks that the market is some sort of cold-eyed, you know, dry calculations of mutual utility, exploitation, and blah, blah.
It's not... You know, there's people who've never run a business.
I mean, people who've... I mean, Marx, for heaven's sakes.
I mean, the guy couldn't even get a job as a clerk at a railway station.
And as his mother said, I wish Karl Marx would stop writing about capital and start making some.
And Karl Marx, of course, exploited the workers through Engels, who had inherited a factory and gave all the profits to Marx.
And he also exploited his own maid, who he had perhaps consensual sex with, got pregnant and threw her out on the street, refused to acknowledge his own Son, but this switch to a meritocracy of money, a voluntary exchange, a voluntary trade, was the single biggest staggering advancement that society has ever had.
And what it did, of course, was it produced massive, truly incomprehensible amounts of wealth.
I mean, go back a couple hundred years and tell people how you live.
They will think you live in a perfect and pure paradise compared to where they are.
You know, when half the children died before the age of five.
And no defense against disease.
Going to a doctor until the mid-19th century actually was more dangerous to your health than staying away.
Regularly losing teeth and just absolutely appalling war and regular famines and so on.
Like, without communication and transportation systems, you literally had villages 15 miles from each other.
One had too much food. It was rotting in the fields.
The other would be starving to death because they just didn't know.
They didn't know. I mean, you have push-button houses that maintain comfortable temperatures year-round no matter where you are.
I mean, this is truly astounding.
Just, I mean, think of this. I think about this sometimes when I get a cup of water or a glass of water and I put some ice in it.
Just think about that.
Think about that cube of ice.
Go back a thousand years.
It's really hot. Where can you get ice from?
Can you imagine? I guess if you're in the bottom of some high mountains, you could pay some courtier to hack off some ice and ride down as quickly as humanly possible, risking life and limb, and then you could get one or two cubes in your water.
But you'd have to be a king or fantastically rich.
So just think of ice, for heaven's sakes.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine's father ran an HVAC company and he gave me a leftover air conditioner.
And, you know, man, if you spent time, Canadian summers can get pretty hot and pretty damn humid.
And it's tough to sleep, you know, when it's too hot.
And I remember being out and working.
This is when I think I was about 16.
Yeah, I was already living on my own.
We had roommates. And I remember coming into the apartment building.
I would open the door and there was this breeze of cool air.
Like just base physical pleasure of a comfortable temperature.
Just little things. I mean, just amazing stuff.
Amazing stuff that occurs in the modern world.
And we all benefit, right?
But here's what happens. So when there's a meritocracy of murder, people are too scared to complain.
Because when it's a meritocracy of murder, you're not going to live very long if you complain about the best murderer with the tallest crown, right?
But when it's a meritocracy of money, that's different.
And also, you can only murder so many people when you have hand-to-hand combat weapons and so on, right?
It's why the guillotine was invented, right?
That the originator of the guillotine or the inventor of the guillotine ended up succumbing to under the reign of terror in the French Revolution.
But... It's hard to kill that many people, but so the meritocracy of murder doesn't end up with massive disparities.
The king doesn't have access to much better medicine or any better medicine than the commoner.
The king has a bigger house, but it doesn't have air conditioning, right?
The king doesn't have electricity while you don't have any.
So the king lives in a bigger house, but the king has gout, and the king has weird infections in the sebaceous glands on his scalp, like one of my ancestors, right?
So it's...
There's a difference in power and so on, plus of course there's a whole great chain of being, right?
The king is the head, the priests are the soul, the peasants are the arms and hands, and the soldiers are the swords.
They're all supposed to fit together in some particular way.
So there was a theological explanation and the disparity Between rich and poor was not nearly as great as it is now, because the murder meritocracy doesn't end up with as great a differentiation between human beings.
Well, and of course, you can't, in a sense, hand down your murder meritocracy to your kids.
Certainly with the king, you can. I understand all of that.
And there was lots of hereditary monarchs and so on, but it's not quite the same as cash, which you bequeath to your children or real estate or resources or whatever assets you have.
So, when you get a free market, you get a meritocracy, which almost begins to look like a different species.
Now, okay, rising tide raises all boats, but what is Jeff Bezos worth now?
Like, well over $100 billion, right?
And people do this regularly.
They say, ah, well, you know, the CEO's salary is 2,000 times the salary of the worker.
But... Think of a rock band that's on tour, right?
Katy Perry's pay is 2,000 times that of the roadies.
Why? Because Katy Perry is not replaceable and the roadies are, right?
So if you're a Katy Perry fan, you go see Katy Perry, not the work of the roadies, right?
So it's, you know, there is no job for the roadies without Katy Perry, but Katy Perry certainly has a job if she fires a roadie, right?
So it's just supply and demand, uniqueness and meritocracy.
And Katy Perry is, you know, very good looking.
She's stacked.
She, well, she used to be very good looking until the leftists got their hooks into her.
And she's a great singer, great songwriter, great performer, and all of that, and obviously is not sane enough to avoid marrying Russell Crowe, who's now going through his inevitable middle-aged hippie Jesus phase.
But, yeah, that's just the reality.
It's a supply and demand, right? Supply and demand.
It's not unfair, because the CEO doesn't determine his own salary.
The CEO doesn't just get there and say, well, I want $2,000.
It's not some guy who comes into the building and says, I want $2,000 times the pay for the workers.
It's not the CEO who chooses his salary.
It's his customers who choose his salary.
His customers' needs as interpreted by the board of directors, by the shareholders, and so on.
I mean, I was involved in a pair.
My company was bought by a company that then went public on the Alberta Stock Exchange, so I know quite a bit of the ins and outs of how all this stuff works.
And if you want to raise, as a CEO, I was chief technical officer, if you want to raise, you've got to show value.
And if you do show value, if you can make the case as to why you should get a raise, they'll generally give you a raise, otherwise they'll risk losing you to someone else, right?
So it's not the CEO who determines his own salary, and it's not Katy Perry who determines how much the roadie is paid.
It's Katy Perry's audience who determines that.
Because if you said, well, I want to pay all of the roadies the same as Katy Perry, which means the tickets are going to be $16,000 each, people won't come to the concert.
They'll come to the concert, and they won't come to the concert if there's no roadies, right?
If not a single roadie is hired, because then it's just her on a stage with a guitar and no amp, so they can't, right?
You can't hear it. So it's the audience who determines the value of the roadies.
It's the people who buy the tickets who determine the value of the roadies.
Like, who is it who determines how valuable a movie star is?
It's not the movie studios.
It's not his agent. It's not the movie star himself or herself.
It's the audience who determines how valuable a movie star is.
If an audience were going to see a movie just because eco-hypocrite Leonardo DiCaprio was in it, then he's going to get paid more.
So it's all a big complicated relationship.
And it's incredibly beneficial to the average person that we allow profits to maximize for those who are the most productive and who provide the most value.
This is why you say you've got to have empathy.
You've got to ask your customers what they want.
This is why I regularly put out surveys.
I ask people how I can serve people.
There needs better. Please, if you've got comments below how I can serve your needs better, let me know.
I regularly ask my family.
You know, I sit down with my wife and my daughter and say, okay, how's your enjoyment of my contributions to family life?
What is it that I could do better?
Is there anything I'm doing that's annoying you?
I mean, good heavens, you get a survey when you order a slice of pizza sometimes.
You get a survey when you order a sub.
How about a survey to the people in your life saying, how am I doing?
Am I producing value for you?
So you get a free market, you get a meritocracy, which widens.
Now there's an increase, right?
It's like you're getting taller an inch a year and other people are getting taller a foot a year.
And then you say, well, I feel shorter because they're taller than me, right?
You understand how it works.
So there's two kinds of people who come along in this scenario when there's a rising gap between...
Wealthy and poor.
Or wealthier and poorer, right?
I mean, the poor in a free market economy live infinitely better than the richest people in a non-free market economy.
No question of that. Certainly in the past.
So... There are people who come along and say, look, there's the seen and then there's the unseen.
This is Bastiat's differentiation about understanding how a market economy works.
There's the seen versus the unseen.
There's this old fallacy of the broken window, right?
Like some guy comes along and throws a...
A brick through the window of your store, and then you have to spend $5,000 getting a new window.
And people say, ah, $5,000 of generated economic activity, that's an addition to the economy, right?
It's like, when there's a war, it's good for the economy.
It's like, no, it's good for the military-industrial complex, which is statist in nature.
But if you think that destroying things is good for the economy, then just smash up your cell phone and wait to become rich.
Now, the cell phone company is happy if you smash up your cell phone because you go buy a new one and that cell phone company is happy.
But it's still a net loss.
To the economy, right?
I mean, if I steal $1,000 and give it to some guy, that guy's happy, but someone else is unhappy, right?
Because the unseen, right, if you go and buy a new cell phone for $1,000, the unseen is all of the things you would have bought if you didn't have to spend money replacing your cell phone.
Now, the cell phone manufacturer, that's a scene.
He knows that you have bought a cell phone from him.
He's up $1,000.
That transaction shows up in the GDP. It's the scene, right?
But the unseen is $1,000.
That you didn't save or spend.
Now, if you save it, that's more money available to entrepreneurs to go and start a business.
There's whatever, right? It's just more money for people to go buy a house.
So if you save it, then it's usually available as some sort of investment or lending income.
If you spend it, then let's say you...
I don't know...
What would you buy 10 off?
That's $100.
Let's just say you buy 10 presents for friends for $100.
Okay, well, then you've got 10 other people who are happier.
And the other thing, too, is when you smash your cell phone, you get a new cell phone, you're not wealthier.
And you're poorer, in fact, because you're down $1,000.
And so there's a transaction that's recorded, but society is poorer.
Because society has not had a net addition to the number of cell phones in society.
Same thing, you break the window.
The guy who you spend $5,000 to replace the window, he's happy, he's up $5,000.
But the $5,000 that you might have spent on some big grand family vacation, okay, well, everybody...
The resort operators, the restaurants, the airplane companies, the hotel, whatever, right?
I mean, they're down. But see, they don't know.
Because you went and spent this money getting a new cell phone or replacing that window, nobody sits there and says, Aha!
Aha! I didn't get paid because that guy bought a cell phone because that never shows up.
That never materializes.
And so, less intelligent, more concrete, kind of looking two feet in front of their face people look at it and say, oh, well something got broken, you bought something new, so we're up $1,000.
And that's because they can't conceptually see easily Or imagine all of the things that weren't bought because you got a new cell phone or a new window.
It's the seen versus the unseen.
Governments tax people $5 million, go create a bunch of jobs.
People are like, wow, that's good.
People have work. And it's like, it's not good.
You can see the people that the government is paying, you can't see all of the things that didn't happen with the five million dollars that were taken from people by force.
All of the spending and investment, you don't see that.
To take a particular example, it's theoretical but certainly within the realm of possibility.
Taxation might be why we don't have a cure for cancer, right?
Because people are getting taxed so heavily, they're postponing having children, they don't have as many children.
One of those children might have been a stone genius, if taxes had been lower, a stone genius who would have cured cancer by now.
It's certainly within the realm of possibility.
I mean, it only takes like 20 people to not be born for medicine, modern medicine, to not fundamentally exist in its current form, right?
So, the seen versus the unseen is the dull versus the intelligent.
And when you don't see the benefits of the free market, but only see the exploitation because the boss is richer than the employees.
But no, no, the employees are richer because of the boss.
The employees are richer because of the boss.
And the boss can't be paid more in the long run than the product of his employees, than the value of his employees.
I mean, if you're paying a CEO $10 million, but his employees are only producing $5 million worth of value, then the company's going to go out of business, right?
So there has to be more value that the employees are producing.
And the other thing, too, is people say, oh, well, the boss is making a lot of money, and he owns the means of production, and the employee is not making as much money, but, no, the employee is making more money than he would if the means of production aren't there, right?
I mean, I was a waiter for many years as a teenager, and, you know, just try going and carrying around a bunch of plates in the woods and see how much money you make.
Somebody has to build that restaurant around you in order for you to make money as a waiter.
I never felt exploited.
I never felt ripped off.
It's crazy. I was happy that there were restaurants.
What am I going to do? Start my own restaurant when I'm 16 or 17 years old?
No! I'm not going to be doing that.
So when you allow our scarce resources to end up in the hands of the most productive, which is what the market does, they create an absolutely staggering amount of wealth.
But that widens wealth disparity.
Now what I'm saying about is the true and factual explanation of how it's valuable and how it works.
But there are other people, like the socialists and the communists, who come in and start rabble-rousing and sowing the seeds of resentment.
You know, like I just saw that there's this new Monopoly game out that's for women, and women get like $240 instead of $200 when they go around, and they get cheaper prices for this, that, and the other, so they can feel what it's like to be a man.
It's like, come on. Come on.
Women make a fortune. First of all, women outlive men, so women get the inheritance, right, and men, this huge amount of money.
Women get massive income redistributions through the state, through the welfare state, it's basically the single mother state, through socialized medicine, which women use far more than men.
Women get alimony.
Women get child support.
Women are disproportionately represented in high-paying government jobs.
And, in a more voluntary way, moms who stay home with their kids have their bills paid for generally by their husband, which is an income.
It's just not counted as an income because you only count the man's income like the woman is living in the basement on grubs and worms.
So, no, it's not that way at all.
But this disparity creates a wedge for...
I called them the languicites before, but the people who create division, antipathy, and hatred, and sometimes outright murder, through the constant provocation, not just the salting of wounds, but the creation of wounds that aren't there before, the sowing of hatred against the more successful.
And those people are everywhere in society these days.
Oh, there's white privilege and that's why whites are doing better.
Of course, they don't talk about Asian privilege.
They don't talk about Jewish privilege.
Well, there is actually quite a bit of Jewish privilege and Jewish supremacy in the world.
I've tweeted about that if you want to follow that.
But there's all of this sowing of hatred.
And the sowing of hatred...
This gap between the wealthy and the less wealthy and the false explanations that it's due to exploitation is all incredibly brutal.
And this is why we can only get so far.
This is why we can only reach so high.
I was doing a trivia game with my daughter this morning and one of the questions was, when was the last time that America sent a manned mission to the moon?
That was Apollo 17.
I think it was 1971. We were going to reach for the stars.
We were going to get the universe.
We were going to be able to have zero gravity sex in high orbit.
We were going to conquer nature.
We were going to see the stars to the benefit of everyone.
What do we get instead? Mass migration, debt, race baiting, gender baiting, class baiting, decay.
In San Francisco, or in California as a whole, you know what's making a comeback?
Leprosy. We are boats in a riptide Striving to go forward but endlessly sucked,
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