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Nov. 1, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:32
REVELATION! Forget my other videos, this is all you need...
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I just turned 18, right?
And I found myself with a lot of new responsibilities.
Things suddenly changed in my house.
I'm currently living alone because my mother, she's living in another state.
And my three-year-old brother, he's living with his father, right?
My ex-stepfather.
He used to be my stepfather. So, I mean, this last year in my life was...
Very different from the previous years because...
I mean, what had I mentioned?
I had my first real relationship, right?
And I had my heart broken for the first time as well.
And with everything that happened, I noticed that I didn't really have a real reason to live, you know?
And being interested in philosophy as I am, I noticed...
I'm sorry, I'm a bit nervous.
Oh, no problem. Well, I noticed that I needed a reason to live, right?
I mean, what's the point of life I'm not a religious person.
I try to be, but I can't.
And what I noticed is that the first thing you need to know before starting to live is to know where you want to end up, what you want to achieve, what is the point, the meaning, the final cause, the end goal of life.
And in this last year, I had a lot of problems, right?
And difficulties, and I could talk to you about every one of them, or talking to anyone, but we don't have all this time available.
So if I'm only capable of convincing myself of one worthy, true meaning in life, I'm going to have enough motivation to solve all the other problems, and I'm going to be able to live, and I'm going to have a standard of quality That I can compare with life and see how well I'm doing.
Without that, I just don't see how I can live.
Yeah, no, listen, I mean, that's a very admirable perspective, right?
Which is, I want more than meat, muscle, sex, food, sleep, and work, right?
I mean, that's really the life of a mammal, the life almost of a slave.
And you want a higher purpose, you want a higher meaning, you want something through which you can organize your thoughts and your actions.
Why do we do what we do?
Why do we get out of bed in the morning?
It can't be just to seek pleasure.
Because pleasure... We're so hardwired that pleasure diminishes over time.
You know, whatever we achieve...
I mean, even people who win the lottery, they're thrilled for a day, a week, a month maybe, and then their problems return and they get new problems, which is now they're concerned that everyone is only interested in them for their money.
I've actually known someone who won a staggering amount of money in the lottery and...
Within a couple of months, they were in many ways worse off than they were before.
Now they had, you know, family members who wanted things and they had people who were begging to get them involved in business deals and people they bought stuff for complained and got upset.
I mean, we do have this fantasy that there's something out there that's just going to make us happy forever.
Forever. And we adjust.
Of course we adjust. I mean, if we didn't adjust and return to a normal level of happiness, even when something great happened, we would still be living in the mud.
You know, discontent and reaching for more.
And whenever we get to a new plateau, we get...
Bored or restless and we reach for a newer plateau.
This idea that we can sit like a hippo in mud in the stink of our own happiness for eternity is one of the ideas that causes the most unhappiness in the world.
So hedonism or the pursuit of pleasure is not something that is sustainable, is not something that can be the center of any life purpose.
Now, of course, you said you're not a religious person.
In the religious worldview, in the Christian worldview, of course, the purpose is to resist sin, to pursue virtue, to worship Jesus, and to get to heaven.
That's your narrative, right?
That's how you organize your life.
I mean, how the hell are we supposed to organize your life if we don't have higher values, if we don't have a purpose?
We're just going in circles, satisfying physical wants, physical needs, physical desires, for the most part.
We're just on a dopamine chase, which scarcely seems...
Enough for, you know, a species that can create cathedrals and plays and civilizations and so on, right?
So, listen, I mean, I really respect this question, where you're coming from.
It makes perfect sense to me and it's a very, very important question to ask.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you mentioned about pleasure, right?
So, the first tip, the first clue, actually, the first clue we can find when looking for What is the purpose of life?
It's what we are wired to seek.
And that would be pleasure, right?
And happiness and amour.
I mean, pleasure or happiness, right?
So, I mean, I could live...
If life was only pleasure, I could live fine without meaning, right?
I could... If I could just eat and...
So, let me sort of jump in here because the question is, what is it that makes us human, right?
So, I mean, the way that I look at it, Which is, you know, probably vaguely scientific, but the way that I look at it is like this.
So we have the lizard brain, and the lizard brain is what we share with pretty much all living organisms, you know, avoid pain, pursue pleasure, eat, satisfy carnal sexual reproductive desires, and don't have any particular sense of meaning, you know, like your average frog, your average gecko.
It's just following the programming of its pain and pleasure centers and does not think in terms of abstracts, of course, of eternity or universality.
It has no capacity for concepts as a whole, but it's just being programmed by sense data, pain and desire and pleasure, right?
The desire being the pursuit of pleasure.
And then, of course, when you achieve that pleasure, then it resets and starts again.
You have something to eat, and then you're full, and then you're hungry again, and it's just this hamster wheel, this merry-go-round, right?
There's nothing wrong with it. You're tired, you sleep, you wake up, you have energy, you're tired, you sleep.
It's, you know... It's a circle.
It's a circle. It's a cycle, I suppose, right?
So that's like the lizard brain real down deep.
Now then there's the mammal brain, which is, you know, slightly more sophisticated.
Mammals have bigger brains and you can pursue some more abstract things like you can fashion tools a little bit.
You can have some primitive kinds of language and so on, although I guess the birds share that as well.
So we got your lizard brain, you got your mammal brain, but then we got the human brain.
There's a neofrontal cortex like the post-monkey beta expansion pack that still seems hella buggy, but is the essence of who we are.
Now, we can try and live at the lizard brain level, and we can try and live at the mammal brain level, but those will not be satisfying to us because it's not the essence of what defines us as human beings.
And what defines us as human beings is our capacity for abstractions.
Now, abstractions, of course, are extrapolations of immediate sense data and the mortality of life into universals, into, you know, we live for a while so we can think of eternity.
You see a straight line, you can think of an infinite straight line.
You see money, you can think of infinite wealth.
And so this is where we get things like, you know, mathematics and physics and philosophy and logic.
These are extrapolations of our immediate sense data into concepts, into absolutes, universals, eternals.
So where we live as human beings is in the universals.
In the concepts, in the abstractions, in the absolutes, in the eternal.
That is where we live as human beings.
And if we try and live at the reptile level and we try and live at the mammal level, we will get short-term satisfaction, but we erode our sense of identity as human beings.
We're living at too low a level.
There was a movie years ago, many years ago now, I guess, called Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson.
And he plays a guy who's brilliant, who's a concert pianist and so on, but is working on an oil rig.
There's nothing wrong with working on an oil rig.
We need oil and so on, right?
But this idea that we're living or working far below our station...
Is really, really important.
If somebody who is brilliant is working at some sort of low-rent job, we consider that a kind of tragedy.
And, I mean, when I worked a lot of manual labor jobs, I worked at cleaning offices, I worked as a waiter, I worked as a gold panner and prospector, and I did these menial jobs knowing that this is, like, kind of what you got to do.
And I actually don't really have much respect for people who've never worked any menial jobs because it's really easy to get lost just in the abstractions, right?
So, the reptile brain processes our sense data.
The mammal brain is more sophisticated in the processing of that sense data.
But the human brain is where we find our sustained contentment, our sustained meaning.
Now, this, of course, used to all be served By religion, right?
Used to all be served by God, universality.
The way that we connected with the eternal nature of our capacity for concepts, the universal nature of our capacity for concepts, was we hooked ourselves into an abstract thing called the soul, called God, and heaven, and so on.
And in this way, consciousness was the overarching theme of the universe, which is as it should be, because the universe only comes into existence as a concept through the human mind.
The universe has no concept of itself as a universe.
A hydrogen atom doesn't have any concept of itself as a hydrogen atom.
The concept of the universe and origins...
And evolution and progress or regress, these are all concepts that only come into the universe as the result, at least so far as we know, of the human mind.
So religion, and I'm particularly talking Christianity here, is an acceptance that what defines us as human beings is the abstraction, is the universal, is the eternal. And this is why concepts are larger than the universe, which is kind of true in a way.
The universe has no sense of its own scope, but we of course can look at the hundred billion galaxies with the hundred billion stars apiece and get a sense of the size and scope, ancient nature and incredible width and breadth and height of the universe.
So placing God above the universe, outside the universe, in other words, the idea that a mind contains the universe, which is true.
I mean, an astronomer or anybody with a reasonable knowledge of physics can conceive of the universe, and that whole conception fills and fits into this tiny couple of pound of wetware called the human brain.
So making a soul which was eternal and saying that is the essence of our humanity, which we do not share with the animals, Only the human being has a soul granted by God is a recognition that the eternal and the universal is the essence of our humanity.
Now, philosophy, of course, as I portray it and have developed it, recognizes all of that.
But philosophy, of course, and the soul, well, it remains a challenging relationship, which I sort of won't get into now.
But in the absence of In the absence of the understanding that we are universal Abstract, in a sense, perfect entities.
And I don't mean morally perfect or physically perfect.
I mean that abstractions are perfect.
A perfect circle is perfect.
The number two, like you get two coconuts, they vary slightly in height and weight and width and texture and so on.
But the number two is perfect.
Geometry is perfect.
A right angle you cannot create perfectly in nature, but it's perfect in its abstractions.
Truth is a messy thing in the real world, but truth is a powerful thing in the abstraction, right?
You say, oh, an object falls to Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second, but it never actually will because of, you know, wind resistance and buoyancy in the air and the texture.
You understand, you never get—but the abstractions are perfect.
And so in religion, in Christianity, you have all of these abstractions that are themselves perfect, which we must pursue and attempt to achieve.
And that is the power, of course, and the truth of Christianity, which is that we are eternal beings, in that what is human about us, essentially human about us, It's our capacity to encapsulate and inhabit universals.
Now, for people, and I'm not sure, I think you mentioned something about video games and we crackled out a little bit there, but in general, you have, when human beings, here men, when we don't have this hooking into the universal and the abstractions and the eternal, we descend to video games.
Of course, video games, they're fun and they have no particular opposition to them in principle, but But it's mammal brain, right?
I mean, it's shooting, it's running, it's, you know, immediate puzzle solving.
It doesn't have anything of the universal, the abstract, the perfect, the eternal in it.
And so video games, I mean, pornography is more lizard brain, but video games are at the mammal brain level.
It's more sophisticated than something a lizard would do, but, you know, you can probably train your average ape to work with video games in a way, at least some of the simpler ones.
So when we lose our universals, we try to live at the level of the mammal, and it doesn't work for very long.
We end up depressed.
We end up alienated.
We end up with a sense of futility, right?
A sense of, well, what's the purpose?
What's the point? Because chasing dopamine, it's fine for mammals.
You know, chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, it's fine for lizards.
Perfectly fine. For us to live as lizards and mammals is as ridiculous as lizards and mammals attempting to live as us.
But we are eternal.
We are universal. We are abstract.
We are perfectible in our ideas.
And that's unique.
Not just in the animal kingdom, but in the universe as we know it.
Probably isn't unique. Of course, 100 billion galaxies, 100 billion stars.
But I think... That you, because of your wisdom and intelligence at such a young age, I'm saying, well, I can't just live like a mammal.
I can't just live without a larger abstract purpose.
Is what I'm saying, does it sort of make sense?
Not just as I'm saying it, but with regards to your life, or am I missing a lot?
Yes, it does. It's perfect.
You explained perfectly the fact that The human brain is this extraordinary piece of matter that can look at all the things that are finite and extrapolate to the eternal, right?
And abstract, and we can get to the concept of the eternal and the perfect, the perfect ideals of all things, the perfect good, the perfect truth.
And I I need to know what you think about one thing.
I mentioned that I'm not religious, right?
But I've tried to be.
And I was raised for at least some part of my childhood as a Jehovah Witness.
Later I tried to become Catholic, but I really can't achieve the faith, you know?
So I look at the arguments.
It seems to me that Christianity is...
Something that you need to prove historically, right?
Because it's a historical event, the revelation and Jesus and who was born and the death and resurrection and the miracles.
It's something that you solve historically.
When you can prove historically the truth in Jesus, God and all the other things, they come afterwards, right?
Well, but the philosophy of religion is such that it has to remain in the realm of faith.
Because once it is passed from the realm of faith to the realm of science, it's no longer religion.
So, with regards to this conversation, religion is closer to humanity than atheism for the most part.
And this is why a knowledge of our desperate and foundational need for abstractions, for universals, which is because that's the only thing that makes us human, the only thing that really defines us as human.
I talk about this constantly in my philosophy, right?
Or in philosophy.
The title of my book on ethics is Universally Preferable Behavior.
Because without the universally, we're not human beings and we don't have free will.
And with regards to the argument I've put forward many years ago and consistently since for free will, our free will is our capacity to compare proposed actions to universal standards, to abstract standards.
And I have always focused on because philosophy deals with abstractions and universals in the same way that physics isn't just about the ball you drop in your house.
And biology isn't just about your pet snake, right?
These are universal. Mathematics is not about the numbers in your cash register.
It's about numbers as an abstraction as a whole.
Now... Because we are so susceptible and we are run by abstractions, our greatest vulnerability, as I've talked about before, our greatest vulnerability is...
False abstractions, right?
This is why, what are we threatened by in life?
Not natural predators, not wolves reliance, not even thieves and murderers and so on, because we can mostly take preventive measures against those and we can have a gun or we can learn self-defense or we can move to a good neighborhood or live in the woods.
So we can survive those things.
What we cannot survive... Toxic abstractions like the state or the universal good or the social good or whatever crap is put forward and that hooks into our capacity for abstractions and the enemies of humanity, who are composed of humanity of course, but the enemies of humanity know our capacity for abstractions and that's why they play.
Upon our sympathy and our universality, and this is why Christians are uniquely susceptible among most of the world's major religions, because Christianity is founded upon universals, whereas other religions are generally founded upon in-group preferences.
And so Christians are uniquely susceptible to what used to be called, say, the white man's burden, you know, which is that the Christians have to go around the world and save the souls of everyone and turn everyone into Great Britain or France or Germany or whatever.
And Christians are uniquely susceptible to that kind of stuff, which is why Christianity has been such a great boon to humanity as a whole, because it says thou shalt not kill as a universal abstraction, not thou shalt not kill members of your own religion, but everyone else is fine.
And the great strength of Christianity, it's its universals, but the great weakness of Christianity is its universals, in that those universals can be turned against itself.
So Christianity says slavery is wrong, and Christians worked all around the world to end slavery.
But that means that other groups and religions can use Christianity's moral condemnation of slavery to say, oh, well, yes, but you guys were slaves, and therefore your descendants should pay reparations and so on, like, until the end of time, right?
So it's really a dangerous situation, and this is always the question of if you have a universal moral philosophy, how do you deal with those who don't share that universality?
Well, I mean, this is the most foundational incompatibility in the world, as we're finding out as a whole through mass immigration and so on.
So I don't think that you can get to saying, well, I need the fruits of religion, the purpose, the meaning, the depth, the universality, the eternity.
be.
So I'm going to find a way to epistemologically verify religious claims, right?
So the moment you're into epistemological verification, which is reason and evidence and so on, then you're not in the realm.
Of religion, which is based on faith.
So my challenge, the challenge I think of those who listen to this show, if you don't get to the place of faith, is to say, okay, well, how do I get the universality and eternity and depth and meaning and purpose of religion if I can't get to religion?
Mentally, if I can't allow my metaphysics to include the anti-rational, anti-empirical, the supernatural, if I can't get my epistemology to verify and validate That which goes against reason and evidence.
How do I get the meaning and purpose?
And, of course, the public work of my last 15 years has been really centered around this question, which is why I was quite thrilled about your call to get a chance to sort of accordion squish it down into one digestible, jagged little pill, I suppose.
The question is, how do we get the purpose without...
If we cannot accept religious edicts, how do we get the purpose, the meaning, the depth?
Well, I think philosophy has an answer to it, and that's one of the things that I have focused on, which is why I'm so condemned, right?
Those who bring universality to a fragmented and subjectivist universe are generally condemned because there are huge power centers and structures, both religious and political, that rely upon subjectivism, postmodernism, relativism, and so on, and only pretend to have universals relativism, and so on, and only pretend to have universals in order to manipulate and control others.
When genuine universals come along, those people are condemned virtually beyond all others.
And this is why, you know, the mainstream media, as I pointed out in a recent video, has very positive things to say about recently deceased ISIS chief al-Baghdadi, but has only negative things to say about me, because genuine universals are the greatest threat to because genuine universals are the greatest threat to the power structures that either only pretend universals or genuinely reject them as a whole and have only tribalistic in-group preferences.
is.
Now, I'll stop lecturing for a second to see how this is all ending for you.
Yeah. There's one thing I've been thinking about.
I mean, I think...
I think someone mentioned it in your Twitter, this book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
And he suggested that you would read it.
He asked for you to read it.
I don't know if you did. I don't know if you know the book.
But I've read this book a few, I think a few years ago or a few months, I don't know.
And it enlightened me on...
The argument of the unmoved mover, right?
And there's something similar to that in the whole question about meaning.
So, most people live thinking about the next day, right?
So, someone that has my age, right?
Just concluded high school.
And the whole purpose, the purpose of all those days...
That they lived was to get to college and then get a job and then a family.
But all of those things, they end eventually, right?
Which gives a sense that it was all for nothing.
It gives a sense that it was meaningful.
Well, the family doesn't end, but reproduction in a blind biological line is the mammal level, or you could even say the reptilian level, although because we nurture our young far more than the reptiles that abandon them, we have...
Greater investment, of course, than almost any other creatures, even on our selected side, in our young.
So we can say, of course, that our young continue, but the same is true for all the mammals who invest in their young, which is most mammals.
Platypus, I guess, somewhat accepted, but it's not enough.
We can't live at the mammal level, because we're not just mammals.
We're human beings. Now, but with regards to the question of the five proofs for God...
The problem with that is that it is based upon the assumption that atheists have disproven God because they're in hot pursuit of truth.
And if an atheist receives a compelling or ironclad argument proving the existence of God, that the atheist will then say, oh, well, I'm not an atheist anymore.
But that's not the purpose of atheism, at least modern atheism.
And by this, I mean the vast majority of atheists, not all.
But I gave the greatest gift to the atheist community that atheism has ever received, which is a rational proof of secular ethics.
And I was naive enough, of course, back in the day, this is 12 or 13 years ago, I think, I was naive enough to think, oh my gosh, having finally proved rational, secular, universal ethics, ethics without God or government, atheists would be perfectly thrilled and would say, oh my gosh, you have given to us a greater gift than the theory of evolution.
The one unsolvable historical problem in philosophy is how do you get ethics without God?
And I was quite thrilled and I thought, wow, an atheist is going to be really happy.
This is like handing a bottle of water to a guy dying of thirst in the desert.
He's going to be very grateful. And, of course, what I received was near-universal indifference and or hostility towards this, from the atheist community as well as others.
And that was eye-opening, to say the least.
Well, what we start in optimism, we often end with the temptation of nihilism, right?
Because we think, oh, I've got these great gifts to a world that says it desperately wants it, and you provide these gifts to the world, and then...
The world scorns and spits upon those gifts and attacks you for the provision of these gifts and resents you more than their supposed actual enemies.
So the atheist community, of course, is designed to reduce human beings to the level of mammals and reptiles.
It is designed to infect us with a spiritual, or rather anti-spiritual malaise, to disconnect us from universality and eternity, and to turn us into striving mammals seeking power, relief from pain, and pursuit of pleasure.
That's the purpose of the atheist community, and this is why it is so relentlessly socialist and Marxist and leftist, because if you can disconnect people from universals, you can control and bully and subjugate them Very easily.
Because we go from human beings with virtues to defend to animals very easy to domesticate.
Why can we domesticate mammals?
Because they don't have abstract principles, concepts of rights, concepts of virtues, concepts of goodness and evil.
So they're relatively easy to subjugate, and you can either completely domesticate them, sort of cats and dogs and so on, or you can at least subjugate them to the point where you can cage them and use them for fur and meat and so on.
Like think of those Jerry Seinfeld U-shaped horses that are plodding around a circle with obese women on their backs, right?
Because the horses are just mammals, right?
And so they're easy to subjugate.
So when you take human beings...
And you separate them from the universal, from the eternal, from the depth and power of what it is to be a human being.
When you downgrade them from human to mammal and reptile, they're ridiculously easy to control, which is why atheism separates us from universals.
At the behest of the totalitarian so that we can be more easily controlled.
And this is why, you see, when I came back and said, no, no, no, you can have atheism and a deep connection to universals.
You can have atheism and perfection and eternity and universality.
The atheists hated that.
It's like someone coming in To the farmer's fields and teaching the cows about ethics and rights.
Well, the farmer doesn't like that.
Except it's not possible with cows.
It is possible with human beings.
So this idea that, well, if I come up with a good argument for God, the atheists are just going to accept it.
Well, they're not. They're not.
Because they're there to scrape off your humanity and turn you into cattle to be ruled by others.
Because I was able to give atheists universality that was rational and empirical.
Universally preferable behavior is rational, consistent.
It explains history.
It explains communism and socialism and capitalism, free markets.
So it was robustly rational, empirically utterly verified and verifiable.
So in a sense...
More digestible, infinitely more digestible to atheists than any of Augustine's or others Five Proofs for God.
But the atheists hated it, didn't want it, rejected it, even though it supports atheism and couples atheism back up to humanity with the depth and power of a religious narrative.
But see, the purpose of atheism is to downgrade you from human to mammal, and therefore universally preferable behavior, re-upgrading you back to human from mammal, very much goes against the grain and purpose of atheism, which is to strip us of our metaphorical soul so that we can be owned, controlled and subjugated like every other mammal in the goddamn universe.
So I don't think that's a great plan, although I certainly understand its appeal.
So...
Yeah, it's true.
When I think about what you just said, the gift that you gave the atheists, you solved the greatest of their problems and all the good that you do to so many people and the way you're bashed.
I've seen comments about your theory in This is hatred of it, right?
It's this peculiar hatred.
Let's say it only got 80% of the way or 60% of the way.
Or let's say it was a spectacularly wrong theory.
Like, even... Richard Dawkins says about a theory that's really bad, it's not even wrong.
Like, it's not even good enough to be wrong.
So let's say that I took an approach to ethics that turned out to be completely wrong, but it's a pretty wide and broad approach to ethics, and so at least there's value in saying, okay, well, let's not go that direction.
But you understand there's this visceral, peculiar, deep, and powerful hatred.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Endlessly early on in my podcast series and wrote an entire book that I released for free back in 2007, 2008. I think it was released.
And it's really, really eye-opening to see that their purpose is not to find truth and not to find virtue.
Their purpose is to degrade us to mammals.
And there are a lot of people, of course, who get very relieved to be degraded to mammals.
A lot of people are very, very relieved because it takes away moral responsibility.
It takes away free will for a lot of people.
It allows you to sink into the squalid pit of your own dopamine chasing.
It allows you to avoid the confrontation with evil that is really the essence of Of humanity and the only reason we're able to have this conversation and able to have any space or capacity for free will and therefore virtue is because people confronted evildoers and sophists and liars and manipulators and controllers in the past.
And of course they want you to skip out of the fight.
If you get to be the heavyweight champion and make $5 million without actually having to fight anyone, well, that's vastly preferable to most people.
So they want you out of the arena so they tell you there's no God, and then they steadfastly push back and resist against anyone who can couple you back to eternity, meaning, depth, and power, like me.
That's the purpose. And everybody who has downgraded and attacked Universally preferable behavior without calling in for a coherent argument and a rational rebuttal.
Well, they are a traitor to virtue, to humanity, and to the future.
They took their 30 pieces of silver of virtue signaling, sink back into their Black Ops video games, And then turn the future over to just about the worst human beings imaginable.
Good job, everyone. Well done.
Good boy. There's your dopamine kibble on a screen.
I know I sound bitter.
I'm a little bitter. But I'm very grateful for the illumination that everyone has provided me over the past 15 years.
I really am. I'm very grateful. You have reason to be.
I mean, it's not easy to be a philosopher.
That is true. It's not easy to be universal.
It's easy to be a philosopher if you're dismantling universals because that serves the powers that be.
It's easy to be an in-group, fetishizing, tribal, pseudo-religious cult.
Because that serves the powers that be.
It's hard to be a Christian.
It's hard to be a philosopher who's promoting universals.
That's tough. Because universals are the opposite of power.
The power is about convincing people that there's more than one category of human beings.
Like there's the state and then there's its people.
There's the woke and then there are Nazis.
There are the enlightened and then there are the fascists.
Once you can convince people that there's more than one, in fact, many, often oppositional categories of human beings, well, humanity is no longer a single species but a warring tribe that needs to be managed and controlled by near-universal, oligarchical, hierarchical, totalitarian power.
If you can get the kids to squabble, you can constantly come in and tell them to get their act together and control their behavior.
Now universals come along and people who are interested in universals and promoting universals come along and say well here's what we have in common and here is a universal methodology for resolving our disputes and once people accept that they don't need the state anymore.
So the state and those who engage in the exercise of power or wish to over human beings must fragment our conversation into warring tribes of utterly oppositional narratives.
We've got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out there seeming to impugn that white people create hurricanes to harm brown people.
You tell me where we can have a civilized and rational discussion in that kind of world.
You can't.
That's the point. So I think for you, the question is, How do you use philosophy to hook into the universal and the eternal, right?
Yeah. Can we break down one idea first?
I mean, there's one idea, this thing that I was mentioning, that's why I mentioned the book, that I was talking about family, right?
How you live for one day after the other, but Eventually, even your family is going to end.
Humanity is going to end.
The fact that it's going to end, it brings a sense that It was all meaningless.
It was all empty.
Do you mean sort of, sorry to interrupt, do you mean sort of like the sun's going to burn out and the planet is going to go dark?
Are you talking that level of time frame or are you talking about 90% of the species who've ever lived have gone extinct and will be along that line at some point?
What sort of time frame are you talking about with regards to extinction?
Yeah. Why do I live today?
I live today for tomorrow.
I study because I want to work.
I work because I want to get money.
I get money because I want to build things and be happy and have a family.
Why do I own a family so that they can have more family later?
Eventually it's all going to end.
And the fact that it's not eternal.
Why did I do all this?
I'm not saying that's the case, but it's just that Ascends this lack of reason for existence.
Now, this is very analogous to the argument for the unmoved mover.
So if I owe you money, and you ask me if I have the money, I don't.
So how I'm going to pay you, someone else is going to have to give me the money.
So Luke is going to give me the money, but who's going to give the money to Luke?
Mark. Who's going to give the money to Mark?
Matthew. Who's going to give the money to Matthew?
John. Someone has to have the money to begin with, yeah.
Yeah, at the end, there has to be someone that gives the money without himself being given the money.
He needs to have the money.
And that's, of course, the argument, right?
So, the argument for God, this argument of the unmoved mover, is...
About act and potentiality.
So if we see that things in reality, they have actuality and potentiality, there's got to be something in the end that is pure act, right?
He causes other things to be without himself being caused.
And this thing, which is called God, he, it, or he is, the most important Fundamental level of reality.
He just is, right?
And regarding existence, it's more or less the same thing, right?
So what gives meaning to today is tomorrow.
What gives meaning to tomorrow is after tomorrow.
So thinking like this, the only way to make sense of all this is for there to be an eternity.
So this is something that is in my mind.
What do you think of that?
Well, I mean, there's logical challenges with the first course.
I mean, this sounds like a complete cop-out, and I will do a show on the five proofs for God.
But here's the thing. That's great.
I'm sort of concerned about spending more time disproving the existence of God if what that does is downgrade people from human to mammal and put more people on the path of being crushed under the caterpillar wheels or tank treads of socialism, so I have some concerns about it.
But I'd like to sort of put that one aside for a second, because even if we accept that this proves the existence of an omniscient and universal consciousness, it doesn't prove that that consciousness is good or virtuous or have a best interest at heart.
It could be a totalitarian consciousness.
But the big challenge, of course, is how do we hook our daily lives into the universal?
Now, of course, for Christians, that problem is solved by the existence of God and the existence of the soul and the existence of heaven.
Because we have within us a soul which is universal in its essence.
So that problem is solved.
How do we partake of the universal?
Well, our essence is universal.
We're going to survive our death and live forever and go to heaven or hell or purgatory, depending on where you go on that grave-sent fork in the road.
So that is solved by Christianity, but again, that requires the faith and the proof and so on, right?
So with regards to philosophy...
The challenge is how do we hook our faltering and failing and mortal bodies and minds into the universal, into the perfect, into the eternal.
Now, if you accept...
The materialistic nature of the universe, you'll say, well, you know, we could all be wiped out by a comet.
Human beings could war themselves into oblivion.
During the last ice age, we were down to like 10,000 souls, so to speak, in humanity, and that could happen again, or it could be even worse.
We could be wiped out and so on, right?
But the way that I work with that problem or that issue is to say to myself something like this.
If I accept that there are no universals, the chance that humanity gets wiped out goes up astronomically.
Because if I accept that there are no universals, then it just becomes a war of all against all.
But because of the universals that we have accepted in the realm of science, humanity has been gifted with so many powerful weapons by the universals of science that if we abandon universals now, And we go to subjectivism and relativism in our social and political lives.
Well, we can't afford to anymore.
Because we have accepted universals to the point where we have these incredibly dangerous weapons and we have computers that can surveil everyone.
And rummage through your emails and your private messaging and your texts and all that kind of stuff, right?
We have all of that because we had universals.
We had universals in terms of property rights with regards to the free market.
We had universals in terms of engineering and physics and so on to the point where we have these weapons and this incredible capacity and power.
So we've already crossed the Rubicon of accepting universals.
So if we accept universals enough to create these terrible weapons and...
Surveillance and other things, but then we reject universals when it comes to ethics and values in society and virtue and truth and so on, then we are guaranteeing almost virtually certainly our demise.
Whereas if we accept the value and power of universals in physics and in math and in engineering and other sciences, And then we say, okay, look at the power of universals in that area.
Now imagine the power of universals in the realm of ethics, virtue, truth, goodness.
So if you're concerned that what we do might turn to ash and to dust and to nothingness, then the only way to preserve humanity and therefore perfection, eternity, universals and absolutes in the universe is Is to accept and promote absolutes in the realm of ethics.
To go from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to politics.
So, it's one of these self-fulfilling prophecies.
Well, I'm concerned that universals might not survive humanity, so I'm going to abandon universals, which then puts people with terrible weapons in control over us, which virtually guarantees the end of humanity, not to mention the aforementioned platypus and lizard and ape and all of that, right? And fish and bird.
We've already crossed over the value of universals.
The question is, do we abandon universals in their most important realm, which is ethics and truth?
Or do we accept, expand, and fight for universals in order to maintain the existence of the greatest gift in the universe, which is humanity?
The only purpose of the universe is humanity, insofar as purpose only exists in an abstract conceptual formulation because of humanity.
So, in a sense, we're already in the storm, and you can jump over if you want, but I prefer to fight to right the ship and sail to a better place.
Because we cannot undo the history of the universals that gave great power and surveillance to those in authority, great weaponry to those in authority.
We can't undo the universals.
That have provided bioweapons and nuclear weapons and biochemical weapons and chemical weapons.
That's all. All those universals have already delivered that power to the powers that be.
We can't just say, well, to hell with universals.
I mean, we can, but that just means we'll be subjugated and most likely destroyed.
And not in too long a time frame.
So... If you value universals, we should fight to preserve them, and the only way to do that is to extend the universals that have so empowered us, or so empowered our rulers in surveillance and weaponry, extend that to ethics, which undermines the moral legitimacy of the rulers and gives us an actually real conversation about power and how to combat it.
So, if you value universals, which, as a human being, you should, and you value the continuation of humanity, because universals are the only value that exists in the universe.
There's no value in nature.
No values in nature. No abstract values, you understand.
You can look at dopamine, pursuit, and sex, and all that, but in terms of abstract conceptions of values and truth and virtue, that's humanity alone.
So... It's kind of like being strapped into a pilot's chair and there's no other pilot around and saying, well, I don't know.
I don't really feel like flying.
It's like, well, that's not really an option at the moment.
And the idea of withdrawing from the fight for universals at the moment is saying that, well, universals should only serve those in power.
It should never serve those they wish to subjugate.
Universals should only deliver weaponry and surveillance to those in power.
It should never deliver moral arguments to those being subjugated.
But that is to turn philosophy and universals into a tool of exploitation, subjugation, tyranny, and destruction.
Well, to hell with that.
As a concept, to hell with philosophy serving the mad power lustres over mankind.
Philosophy should fight those bastards with every syllable of its existence.
Regarding something that you mentioned a few minutes ago, you mentioned God, right?
Maybe you're going to do a show about this subject.
You are the extraordinary case of an atheist that noticed that perhaps it's not a very good idea to make everyone an atheist right now.
Perhaps it's better for people to be Christian until we can Well, the mammals will war with the humans.
The civil war is going to be the mammals versus the humans, so to speak.
Yeah, we need these universals, right?
And since the atheists don't have this, they don't have this ethics.
No, no, not that they don't have it.
They do have it. They just hate it.
Oh, right. I mean, they have it as of 2008.
They just hate it.
But sorry, go ahead. Right, so that's good.
So we need ethics, right?
And the atheists hate it.
So to just turn everyone into atheists right now is probably not a very good idea.
Right? So I understand that.
It's very interesting.
But when you decide to I recommend that if possible you talk to the author of the book.
I think his name is Edward Fazer or something like that.
If he's on the show and you can have a debate, it's going to be amazing.
It's going to be the debate of the decade, right?
All right, so I will think about that, but if you have sort of...
I don't want to make this show too long because I'm a little bit concerned that sometimes these shows are...
So if this is enough for you to chew over, that would be great.
I can offer you sort of one more question, and I hate to be sort of stingy, but I do want to not make this so, so long because I think people kind of veer away from some of the longer shows.
I understand that perfectly.
So... Perhaps you can sum this up in, you know, the four causes, right?
The concept of four causes.
So the things that define what something is.
We have the...
We're dealing here with the final cause, right?
So you understand a lot more about Aristotle than me.
You can correct me if I'm wrong.
But the final cause...
It's the purpose of something, right?
Which is one of the things that defines what that thing is.
So, the final cause of the chair is for me to sit in it, right?
The final cause of the cup is for me to drink.
It's very easy to see in man-made things, but it's also in nature, I suppose.
So, what is the final cause of the human being or the human life?
Well, it is to pursue that which most defines what humanity is.
Now, a chair, of course, is passive, and therefore it is used to put your butt on, and therefore its purpose is not active.
It's made with one purpose, and then it just kind of sits there, right?
And, of course, you can use it to stand and change your light bulb or whatever, but...
So the purpose of humanity is not static, but continual.
It is a striving. And the purpose of humanity must be something that is most specific to humanity.
Now, other creatures have some kinds of abstractions, obviously, right?
I mean, a lion recognizes a zebra as a zebra even though it may not have seen that particular zebra before.
So it has classifications and abstractions and to some degree universals.
I mean, you take a lion to a zoo, put it next to a zebra on another continent, it still recognizes it as a zebra.
So... We're good to go.
Like the top of Mount Everest sits on Mount Everest, right?
So it shares Mount Everest.
The peak is what matters.
People don't climb it because it's short, right?
So if you take sort of the top 500 feet of Mount Everest and put that on the ground, nobody's going to bother really climbing that or training for it.
So the top of Mount Everest is the essence of Mount Everest, but it's only there because it sits on everything else.
So the top of our brain, the human brain, Sits on the monkey brain, sits on the lizard brain, and we wouldn't be there without it any more than there'd be anything interesting about the top of Mount Everest if it wasn't on miles of rock already.
So the purpose of humanity must be that which is most specifically human about us.
And purpose, of course, implies resistance.
If you say I'm sitting on a chair, you can't really say my purpose is what?
Well, your purpose is you're just sitting on a chair, not doing anything, so to speak, right?
So purpose must imply resistance.
And so the purpose of human life is to promote virtue and fight evil.
For two reasons. One, that is the essence of humanity.
All creatures...
Perform what we would call evil.
They lie, they deceive, they sneak, they steal, they murder.
All creatures act in ways that we would call evil and that's really the foundational driver of evolution.
But we are the only creature that has the concept or the choice of evil and the concept and the choice to spread universal virtues and oppose evil.
There's no other creature that can do that.
It is the one thing that human beings can do that no other creature can do.
And it is something that we can apply ourselves to and it sure as hell is something or an activity that generates massive resistance and opposition in other human beings.
The greatest predator we face are immoral ethical theories.
Not direct evil, not, as I said before, a thief or a murderer, but those who promote false, immoral, ethical theories.
Statism, democracy to a large degree, socialism, communism, fascism.
These are all moral theories that have slaughtered hundreds of millions of human beings just over the last hundred years.
Duty, the social good, the common good, tribalism to some degree, racism to a large degree.
These are all theories.
The division of human beings into opposing moral categories, these are catastrophic theories.
The one thing that we can do is promote virtue and fight evil.
That is an activity that That defines us as human beings, because human beings are defined and divided into good and evil.
And fighting evil and promoting virtue is the essence of a meaningful life, because it is the only thing that human beings can do that nothing else can do.
A lion can maul a dictator, right?
Let's say Robert Mugabe was out roaming around and a lion jumped on him and chewed out his jugular.
Okay, well, evil ended, but not by virtue, but simply by hunger.
That's the one thing we can do, is promote virtue and fight evil.
Now, not only does that define us as humanity and is the promotion of that which is most essentially and quintessentially human about us, It's our capacity for abstractions in the realm of virtue.
Again, animals have abstractions in the realm of sense data and hunger and sex.
You don't see a lot of lions trying to mate with a rock or a wildebeest.
They know enough about lions and wildebeest to mate only with lions.
But the one thing that we can do, and nothing else can do, is promote virtue and fight evil.
And That is the greatest and deepest meaning of humanity.
Not only is it the essence of what we are, but it also has the rather invaluable benefit of preserving human life and extending and expanding humanity's good relations with each other and power over nature and power over themselves, which is freedom and free will.
So that, to me, is the only choice we have about happiness and meaning.
To promote virtue, to fight evil, is not only quintessentially human, but it keeps humanity alive, which preserves our connection with universality and eternity.
It's all we got.
It's all we can do to be fully human.
So I will give you that stuff to chew over, and I really, really do appreciate the call.
I'm glad to be able to clarify for me, and I don't think it's just for me, my perspective in these areas.
I certainly look forward to other people's thoughts about this.
Let me know in the comments. Of course, you can find my email on the website, freedomain.com.
So keep me posted about how things go.
Let's do this again. I will have a look at that book.
And let you know what I think, but I really do appreciate the call and let me know what your thoughts are afterwards, okay?
Yes, thank you so much.
Thanks, take care. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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