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May 22, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:43
Life Without Violence: A Blueprint for the Future
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This is Ben Crockett on CSHSJSA. I'm joined today by Stéphane Molyneux, host of Freedom Main Radio, philosopher and author of many books.
Stéphane, it's great to have you on.
Yes, it's great to be here.
Thank you very much for the invitation.
I look forward to the chat.
So let's start off by talking about anarcho-capitalism.
You know, a lot of our listeners have never been exposed to anarcho-capitalist worldview.
Could you break that down for us?
Sure. Okay. So I guess the basic question which I invite you and, of course, your listeners to ask is, what if morality was truly universal?
So in the history of our species, I know that sounds like a big old pretentious phrase, but let's start from the beginning.
I have this memory of being a single-celled organism, and then I doubled in size.
It was magnificent. So what if morality was universal?
And the whole history of our species is taking morality that we all accept in our personal lives and trying to universalize it.
So we don't want to be slaves.
Hey, what if slavery is wrong?
We don't like to murder.
What if murder was universally wrong, regardless of costume?
We don't like to steal.
What if stealing was universally wrong?
And of course, it's the same thing that's been happening in physics, right?
Everything in our life drops, right?
You let go of something and it drops.
And what if everything drops, right?
That's how you get the sun as the center of the solar system and you get an accurate view of the universe with gravity and momentum and all of that.
Everything, you know, the earth is falling around the sun, the moon is falling around the earth, the sun is falling around the center of the galaxy and so on.
So taking our personal preferences, universals, morals, all the stuff we teach kids, you know, don't lie, don't cheat, don't hit, don't steal.
What if we just made those universal now?
If you do that, you end up with a pretty wild view of the universe, and particularly the human universe.
So what if we say, okay, there's no such thing as valid theft, right?
So you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions, and people should not use force or fraud to take away your legitimate property.
And people say, well, we need a government to enforce that.
You see, without a government, you can't protect your property.
But of course, a government is instituted on the very basis of violating your property rights because a government has the power of taxation.
And taxation is a violation of your property rights.
Taxation is from a universal moral universe, indistinguishable from theft.
You know, like if I put on a spacesuit and sit on the ground, I don't suddenly become immune to gravity.
If I put on a scuba gear, it doesn't give me the power to fly simultaneously.
So merely changing my costume does not grant me the right or the power to violate basic physics principles.
But somehow we believe, oh, well, you know, that person's in a funny dome-shaped building, so they gain the magical power to use force against others.
And this guy's got a costume, so he has the perfect right to initiate force against others.
And what if we're able to, say, overleap?
Halloween costumes and look at universal morality, but then we say, if theft is wrong, then taxation is wrong.
And saying we need a government to protect our property rights is like saying we need a rapist to protect our virginity.
It just doesn't really work from a logical standpoint.
It's called the non-aggression principle.
You put the non-aggression principle right at the center.
You know, just as Copernicus did with everything falls and just as Einstein did with the speed of light is constant.
What if you just take the non-aggression principle?
Do not initiate force against others.
You can use self-defense as we're of course finding out in this whole Arbery case.
But what if you just say the initiation force is wrong?
Put that as your universal moral constant.
What happens to your view of society?
Well, it kind of radically changes.
Now, I want to just sort of address the utopian question, right?
Which is, well, what you offer, what you want could never exist because it's never existed before.
Well, you know, I mean, there's no PS5. Does that mean that there isn't going to be a PS5 ever?
Well, of course there is, right? Things change.
For about 150,000 years of human history, slavery was the norm.
And then, boop! A couple hundred years ago, largely as a result of European Christians, we kind of ended slavery, you know, fairly consistently around the world.
There's still some of the Muslim countries and so on, but we can change and we can improve.
And if we look at the state...
The government as the legitimate agency of initiating the use of force and put it in the same category as slavery.
Yeah, it's gonna take a while. Don't get me wrong, it's not about to happen tomorrow.
But you know the old saying, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
The understanding that the state is a violation of universal morality at least gives us a place to start talking about what society would look like in the absence Of centralized coercive power.
And so yeah, I mean, technically, I'm an anarchist.
Of course, the words be kind of corrupted by a bunch of crazy balaclava wearing leftists who generally speak about the free market and talk about property rights.
But anarchy simply means without rulers.
And then everybody takes the extra R out at the end and says, Oh, what that means is you have no rules.
And it's like, No, there's no rules now.
There's no rules in a state of society because the rules can change at any time.
You have no capacity to really participate in them.
You know, Hillary Clinton can get away with shipping all the classified emails along using Dove smoke signals in the Pony Express, it would seem.
Barack Obama can initiate spying against political opponents.
There's no rules now.
The only chance that we have for rules Is a stateless society where we can, as consumers of the people who set up the rules, you know, there'll be people who set up rules and there'll be negotiations and they'll be figuring things out, how to make it efficient, how to make it cheap, how to make it effective, all the competition that happens in the free market.
And that's the only chance we'll ever really get to have justice and fair rules and a negotiated social contract rather than one that's kind of clapped on us like leg irons on an escaped slave these days.
So, Stephan, my next question is, where do you get those universal moral values in lieu of religion like Christianity or Judaism?
It's funny, actually. They came with this shirt.
They're in this shirt pocket, and you can't see them from where you are, but they're totally there.
Trust me. Trust me.
Okay. And that's a good question.
It's a fair question.
It's a good question. Okay. So, people...
People who reject universals have no place in debates.
You've just got to eject people from debates if they don't believe in universals.
So you may have a particular taste for, let's say, a hairstyle.
You've got that sort of Hawaii Five-0 swept right-to-left kind of hairstyle going on.
I do not prefer that variety of hairstyles, although I may try and recreate it in my armpits.
Personal tastes like hairstyles, personal tastes like the style of music that you like, the kind of foods that you like, these are not universals in that I can't objectively prove to you that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla ice cream and it's bad for you to think the opposite, right?
So subjective tastes are fine.
If you're a radical subjectivist or relativist in that everything is personal taste, you can never correct anyone else because we correct other people with reference to universal values.
If you point at the Antarctic and say, that's called Africa, well, there's a bunch of atlases and things that we can actually refer to and say, sorry, you're objectively incorrect.
If you say, I prefer to live in the Antarctica than in Africa because you're paranoid about COVID, okay, I can understand that.
I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong.
I may sort of work on you about COVID, but if you have a particular preference, I like living in the city versus living in the country.
These are subjective preferences, and there's costs and benefits to both.
So if you reject universals, then you can't ever correct anyone.
It's kind of like the determinism question.
If you don't believe that people can change their minds, you should never expend any effort to change people's minds in the same way that I don't give my computer lectures when it hits a blue screen of death because I just got to find some...
Way to sort that out. So by participating in a debate and correcting someone, you are automatically accepting a whole bunch of things.
And we kind of skate over that and get into the debate without looking at all of the assumptions kind of baked into having a debate.
So, you know, if you are going to have a debate with someone, you have to accept a couple things.
I mean, I guess you don't have to, but logically you must.
So you have to accept that both you and your debate partner exist as independent conscious entities, right?
Because, you know, you don't spend a whole lot of time debating with people who are themselves debating with their hand about which person to slap because they're obviously kind of crazy, right?
So you do have to accept that you and the other person exist in an objective universe.
You have to accept that the senses are relatively valid because you're using sight in typing or...
Sound in debating in order to communicate your ideas to that person.
You have to accept that there is a universal medium, whether it's, you know, light or sound or whatever it is to communicate.
You also have to accept that the senses have some degree of validity, because if I'm using your ears, in this case, to communicate my idea, someone could transcribe this and probably will, and then you'd be using your eyes or so on.
You know, you could be drawing...
Anne Bancroft style, you could be drawing letters onto someone's hand, it could be braille, it could be any number of things.
But whether it's sight, sound, touch, or other senses, you have to accept that there's at least some validity to those senses.
If I say that the senses never transmit accurate information, but I'm telling you that using your ears, I've just detonated my own argument, right?
And you also have to accept that language has some capacity for meaning, right?
If I argue that language is meaningless, if I've effectively communicated the idea, I've just proven that language is not meaningless because I've used it to communicate the idea.
So there's a whole bunch of things.
And also you have to accept that Universals exist, and somebody who's making a statement about universality should have that statement accord with universality, right?
So there's ways of, I'm sure this isn't going to trigger your audience, although it does sometimes for other people, there's ways of figuring out that the earth is a sphere.
So if you say that the earth is banana shaped, you're making a universal statement, not like I like ice cream, but making a statement about universal, objective, measurable, tangible reality.
And if you say that the earth is banana shaped, however But if you're going to make a statement about objective reality, then it needs to accord with objective reality.
And if I come in and say to you, no, the earth is not banana shaped, the earth is shaped like, you know, Danny DeVito's head, which I think it kind of is on my head for that matter.
Then I'm correcting you according to universal statements using language, relying on the objectivity of your senses and at least the reasonable objectivity of language.
So the moment you come in and correct someone, there's a whole bundle of philosophical absolutes that you have accepted.
And everybody wants to get the debate, but they don't want to accept the universal.
So in any debate about morality, we first have to accept that there is such a thing as universally preferable behavior, right?
If you're going to make a statement about reality, it should in fact accord to the reality that we accept and process through our senses and all of that is subjective, it's true, it's valid, it's, you know, all that.
So when it comes to morality, if you're going to say there's such a thing as universal preferences, then there is universally preferable behavior.
As in, if you're going to make a statement about the world, it should accord with the actual shape of the world rather than some fantasy that it's part of Carmen Miranda's hat in the form of a banana, right?
So these are all kind of things that you can vault over fairly easily, and a lot of philosophy gets mucked up in this what's called metaphysics philosophy.
The study of the nature of reality or epistemology, the study of the nature of valid knowledge and so on.
And a lot of these questions are asked and answered in isolation or separate from all of the things that you have to accept, all the axioms that you have to accept when you are debating.
So once we have a debate, we say, okay, well, there's universally preferable behavior, which is speak the truth, speak accurately about objective statements.
Once we accept that there's universally preferable behavior, Then we have the question of what is morally universally preferable behavior.
And there is a morality involved in debating, which is, if I say the world is banana-shaped and that's false, I should retract that because there's a virtue in speaking the truth.
Once you correct someone, you're saying truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood.
Accuracy is infinitely preferable I like pasta, but I like seafood a little bit more.
Or, you know, I don't like pasta, but I dislike rutabagas even more.
Because you don't sit there and say, well, you know, You're, you know, 40% okay with the statement that the Earth is banana-shaped.
We say, no, the Earth is not banana-shaped.
The Earth is shaped as a sphere.
It's 100%. Like, it's an infinite preference.
It's not like a relative preference.
Like, yeah, okay, maybe if 3 out of 10 people believe, it's fine.
But, you know, generally it should...
Like, we make it an absolute statement.
So once we have accepted that, you know, truth and accuracy are universally preferable behaviors, then when somebody proposes a moral theory...
Then we have to say it has to be universally preferable behavior.
It has to be accurate. It has to be consistent.
Once we get to that stage, and I know this is a little bit like squeal, cassette tape fast-forward time, so I have a whole free book about this available on my website.
But once we get to...
Truth is preferable to falsehood.
Accuracy is preferable to inaccuracy.
Consistency is preferable to inconsistency.
This is the scientific method.
If you have a theory that says gases expand when heated or...
Mass attracts mass through the form of gravity.
You don't say, well, you know, gas expands when heated, except in Philadelphia, when it contracts and turns into a squid, right?
It has to be universal. If you're making statements about universality, i.e.
gas is irrelevant to time.
Or to place, then it has to be universal.
It's almost like what's called the tautology, like if something is universal, it has to be universal, but it's still useful because people try and sneak all this stuff in all the time.
So then you say, okay, well, what is universally preferable behavior in the realm of ethics?
Well, there are four things that ethical systems tend to ban, right?
Rape, theft, assault and murder.
And the question is, why? Well, I mean, so we get an instinct like, yeah, rape is bad.
We get rape is bad, right? I mean, it's always a tough question if they were, why is it bad?
Well, it hurts people. Well, a tracheotomy is going to hurt someone, or telling someone they're wrong is going to hurt them, or getting a fail on an exam you studied for is going to hurt you, or, you know, going to physiotherapy hurts you.
Like, this is just not enough to say it hurts someone, because sometimes that can be too...
To great benefit. And of course, a tracheotomy would be hurting someone without their permission because they're choking and they can't sign a form or anything.
So it's tough.
So the way that you deal with this in philosophy is you say, okay, why is rape wrong?
And taking the emotional considerations out of it, which are not unimportant, and I think are good for like a lizard brain revulsion at such an act, we say, well, why is it?
Because it can't be universally preferable behavior.
The reason being that rape is unwanted, in fact, counter-wanted, like you really don't want the sexual activity to take place.
If you want the sexual activity to take place, it's lovemaking or whatever, right?
But if you don't want the sexual activity to take place but it's forced upon you, then can that be universalized?
Well, it can't be. Rape cannot be universally preferable behavior because one person wants it and the other person doesn't want it.
And therefore, it can't be universalized.
It's the same thing with theft. Like if you say to me, here, take this pen.
I don't want it anymore. And I take your pen.
I've not stolen from you. The only reason that I would ever steal from you or the only way to categorize as a theft is if You don't want me to take whatever it is that I'm taking.
So theft can't be universally preferable behavior, i.e.
everyone should always want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
Because if you want to be stolen from, the category called theft ceases to exist.
And it's the same thing with assault.
It's the same thing with murder, which is unwanted ending of life.
Of course, assault is unwanted punching.
If you and I get into a boxing ring, we kind of accept that...
At least one of her hairstyles is going to get messed up, right?
Maybe my eyebrow. Sorry for the long exposition, but it's kind of a tough thing to go from zero to ethics in a relatively short order.
And then people can say, well, I don't believe in universally a preferable behavior.
And they say, okay, well, is that a subjective statement?
Or is it an objective claim?
And if it's an objective claim, then they automatically do believe in universally preferable behavior.
And if it's a subjective claim, then you say, well, you're making a subjective claim about a universal, which is different from saying, I don't like ice cream.
You're saying, I don't believe that ice cream contains dairy.
Like, okay, so one of those is a purely subjective statement.
I don't like ice cream. But the other one, It's a purely subjective statement about an objective fact.
And you can't link those two together.
They know worky. You know, it's like when you go to Europe and you're trying to plug something in and you didn't bring the right adapters and you're just trying to jam things in randomly.
Electrical socket rape? I don't know what that would be called.
But you can't make subjective statements about universal phenomenon unless you say, well, I don't like the fact that the world is shaped like a sphere.
Okay, well, I guess you prefer bananas or whatever.
You would have designed it differently if you'd been in charge.
But you can't say...
I disagree with the fact that the world is shaped like a sphere.
I think it's shaped like a banana.
Okay. Or people often cheat and they say, well, I just feel that the world is shaped like a banana.
It's like, okay, that's a weird feeling, but is it actually an objective truth claim or not, right?
So that's my sort of very, very brief sprint through.
Again, my book, Essential Philosophy, is also available for free at EssentialPhilosophy.com, but that's the real brief intro onto how you can get a hold of universal ethics.
When you get those universal ethics, society really changes in the same way.
That our view of society changes a lot when the earth is no longer the center of the solar system or even that the sun is the center of the universe.
We get an accurate but disorienting view of where we are.
Like, we don't feel like we're screaming through space at thousands of kilometers an hour, but we kind of are, right?
And it's the same thing with ethics.
When you accept universal ethics and the ban on rape, theft, assault, and murder, well, society looks kind of messed up compared to the ideal.
So now I want to apply some of those universal abstract ethics into specific situations.
So a lot of our listeners are... Can we just stay on the abstractions?
That's much less volatile. I'm kidding.
I'm kidding. Go ahead. A lot of our listeners are high school students.
And so how would you apply the non-aggression principle to relationships?
To relationships? Okay, so we went from high school to relationships, so I guess this is like in the generally premarital dating phenomenon, right?
Okay, okay. That's, you know, that's a great question.
So... First of all, the initiation of the use of force.
So when you're an adult, the most prevalent manifestation of that is taxation, which is also the soft taxation of, unfortunately, the young people are being born, you know, in the States into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and more than a million dollars of unfunded liabilities.
Like, I'm real sorry about that, guys.
Like, that really sucks.
You know, that really is a terrible, terrible situation.
You should in no way, shape, or form ever have the right, ever.
Have the right to sign other people up for intergenerational debt slavery and I wish there was a nice way to put it but that's just the way that it is and it's terrible and it should not have happened and it only can happen because of the power of the state.
Like I can't go and buy a car And have you and your descendants pay for it ad infinitum?
Well, there is, in fact, no ad infinitum because the system collapses long before that.
I can't, in the free market, go and buy something and then have you pay for it.
But politicians can bribe a whole bunch of people with, quote, free stuff in here and now and send the bill down the generational chain to you guys, which really, really sucks.
And I'm sorry about that. If it's any consolation, I've been fighting against it for about 35 years.
But so...
When you're an adult, violations of the non-aggression principle tend to be centered around taxation and debt and so on.
But, you know, when you're a kid, it generally is around physical violence in the home, right?
So, I mean, we're talking about circumcision to begin with, of course, as babies, a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And spanking is a very big one.
And people always get, I get this like mental, wait, we just went from talking about the earth being banana shaped to spanking, like, what are you doing?
Well, that's the joy of philosophy is you get to be all kinds of universal with these things, right?
So spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle, because people say, well, spanking is used to correct behavior.
It's like, okay, well, if spanking is good at correcting behavior, why can't adults do it?
Why can't you say, hey, man, this DMV lineup is moving too slowly.
I'm just going to start hauling off and hitting people.
You can't do that, right?
Because, well, adults vote and children don't.
Or people say, well, the reason that you spank is because children have cognitive deficits, you know, called being children as opposed to being adults, and therefore you should use...
But we don't allow that in other circumstances.
We don't allow that with adults who have developmental disorders that prevent them from reaching full maturity in their brain functioning.
We don't allow... We don't allow the hitting of those.
What about elderly people or older people who might have dementia, who might have Alzheimer's, who might have other cognitive deficits?
We don't allow the hitting of those people.
So cognitive deficits is not the way to do it.
Training people is not the way to do it.
The only way that violence is justified is in self-defense, right?
Some guy runs at you with a chainsaw.
Yeah, you can take him out to protect yourself.
But of course, children are not spanked because they're coming at their parents with chainsaws, or at least, I hope not.
I hope that's not the case, right?
So spanking is, you know, still ridiculously common.
It's, I think, 60% in the East Asian community, 70% of the white community, 80% of the black community.
I mean, it's really... Really prevalent.
And that's just the people willing to admit it.
I assume that those numbers are even higher.
And even into junior high school, 40% of children are still being hit.
It doesn't work. And I've got a whole bunch of interviews on my channel about this.
You can go to youtube.com forward slash freedom in radio.
Look up spanking. It's probably the safest spanking search you're ever going to find.
So you might want to just make sure you're in the right browser before you click that search button.
But... It's not self-defense, because the children are not aggressing against the parents.
It is the initiation of the use of force.
And I think it has a lot to do with why people accept coercive authority in the form of state when they grow up, because they're used to coercive authority in the form of spanking or other kinds of, even neglect.
Neglect is a very, very hidden, powerful form of child abuse, because...
Children are in the household not by choice.
Now, you can't really say against their will because they were born, right?
But you choose your spouse, you choose your girlfriend, you choose your boyfriend, you choose your job, you choose your school after you get out of high school.
But you don't choose your parents.
You are born into the situation.
It is the least chosen relationship in your life.
And, you know, I'm a parent.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for...
11 plus years now.
And, you know, my wife is with me voluntarily and she can pick up and leave tomorrow, but my daughter is not.
And that means that I really have to have the highest standards of morality and integrity with regards to my daughter, because she's the one person who's not there by choice.
Now, when it comes to neglect, which is a lot more subtle, but I think in some ways, or in many ways, a lot more harmful, I'm not obligated to feed a guy in India who's hungry, because you can't go around feeding everyone.
And again, it can't be universalized.
If everyone should feed everyone else, then he should also come and feed me.
It doesn't really work, right?
So if you accept that, but if I take the guy from India and I lock him in my basement, If I don't feed the guy in India and he starves to death, it's a tragedy, but it's not my fault, right?
It ain't on me. But if I take that guy from India and I lock him into my basement and then I don't feed him, well then it's a different moral situation because I've caused his death.
Now children are, and I know this sounds a bit odd, but morally children are similar to prisoners.
Again, because they didn't choose to be there and they can't leave.
And that doesn't mean that, you know, children are incarcerated like Solzhenitsyn archipelago style, but it does mean that we do have a higher obligation to children.
And so if you have a child in your home and you don't interact with the child much, you don't talk to the child much, you don't educate the child and all of that, that's different from the general obligation or non-obligation we have to interact with and educate and all that people.
I don't have to provide the guy in India healthcare, but I do have to provide my child healthcare because she can't get it any other avenue than through me.
And so when it comes to parental relationships, you know, I'm strongly encouraging, you know, interaction, peaceful negotiation.
I call it peaceful parenting, where you take the non-aggression principle and you apply it into your own household.
I think that's been the most beneficial application of the philosophy that I have put forward.
Of course, because it's the most Because it's the most effective application of philosophy, it also kind of tends to be the most controversial.
You know, it's one thing to say, well, I really don't like the Federal Reserve and fiat currency is counterfeiting and foreign adventurers are just murder for hire according to costumes.
So you can make all of those sounds and those are, you know, reasonable sounds to make, but they don't really change much.
But when it comes to philosophy, you know, my motto has always been the logic of personal and political freedom.
And the personal comes first.
What is it that you can do to bring philosophy to life in your own life?
Well, the non-aggression principle applies in the family and in your relationships first and foremost.
And if that can be achieved, I think we're a long way to making society as a whole a lot more peaceful.
So before this interview, my team and I Googled you.
Always a very scary thing to do to Google people.
Wait, you used Google? Okay.
Wait, did you want to find facts or did you want to use Google?
DuckDuckGo, actually.
DuckDuckGo. And so many controversies came up, and I just want to talk about a few of them.
So are you a racist, Stephan?
And could you explain the facts on race and IQ? Yes.
Sure. No, that's a fair question, and I understand why people are troubled by it, and I was troubled by it, and I remain troubled by it as well.
So people's discomfort I fully, completely share, but I do have an obligation to tell the truth, particularly about important social matters.
And the place to go to, and I will explicate it here, but if you want more details, like I'm a guy, my training is in...
Philosophy. Well, my graduate degree is in history, but my graduate thesis was on the history of philosophy, so I'm not a scientist in this area.
However, I have actually interviewed 17 world leading experts on the subject of ethnic differences in IQ.
And so people can go to FDRURL.com forward slash IQ.
And, you know, my suggestion is, you know, don't shoot the old messenger, but have a look at the data and have a look at the interviews that I have conducted to find out the general information.
And the general information is pretty consistent across the world that major ethnic groups do have different average IQs.
Now, first caveat, which is so important to remember, is that you never, ever judge an individual by group averages.
So every time you interact with any individual member of any particular ethnic group, you do not bring group averages to the fore.
And that's really, really important.
But when you zoom out, and we're talking about society as a whole, these ethnic differences do have significant effects in economics, in crime levels, and so on.
And trying to understand Different outcomes according to ethnic groups with no reference to any of the scientific studies that have been going on well over a century.
IQ is just about the most validated metric in all of the social sciences.
It is robust. There's so much data there.
Again, it's one of the earliest metrics that was ever invented.
It was actually invented or it came to be Out of the First World War, because they wanted to make sure that they got more intelligent people to be officers and less intelligent people to be infantrymen, which, you know, it's not a very, very nice sorting thing when it comes to the army, but it certainly does help you win wars in the long run.
And the studies have been consistent, and there's significant genetic components, right?
So by the time we're about 18 or so, which I guess is similar to the age of some of your audience, IQ is about 80%.
Genetic. Now, 20% is a lot to work with.
That's a lot to work with.
But that's sort of an important consideration to make.
And that's why, to me, the communication of philosophy is so important.
So for those who, like me, might have been a smidge on the nerdy side when they were teenagers and got into Dungeons& Dragons, right?
There's these two categories in Dungeons& Dragons, which is intelligence versus wisdom.
Now, philosophy can do something to help you with your level of intelligence, but where philosophy really helps is in your wisdom.
And wisdom is much more important to happiness than intelligence.
Intelligence doesn't have a very strong correlation to happiness.
It has a strong correlation to a variety of other things which are important, like income, educational level, general health, and so on.
But as far as happiness goes, it's kind of tough to find that correlation.
And since the goal of philosophy is happiness, And we achieve happiness through pursuit of truth, then for me, communicating good, solid, sound, sensible, actionable philosophical principles is more important than simply saying, well, there's a sorting mechanism called IQ and there's nothing that I can do.
Or to put it another way, I'd rather have a far lower IQ but far greater wisdom, which is certainly possible.
In fact, smart people tend to be able to talk themselves in and out of all kinds of crazy positions on a regular basis.
You can look up French existentialism for more on that.
But so for me, I think the IQ issue is important to talk about because when we start talking about group disparities in outcome in terms of income and crime statistics and so on, it's important to talk about.
But my major focus is saying, OK, well, that's something that is important.
And recognizing that the answer, which is always provided generally by the left, which is to say far left is socialist and often communist, is to say all group disparities, whether they're between ethnicities or between the sexes, all group disparities are the result of prejudice.
Like the only reason that women earn less than men is because men hate women and are sexist.
And the only reason, blah, blah, blah.
But when you find that there's a lot of other answers that, you know, is there sexism?
Sure. Is there racism? Absolutely.
Is that the complete soup to nuts, alpha to omega explanation for everything in society?
Well, of course not. You know, things are just a little bit more complex and complicated, which means interesting, which also means solvable.
And it's like there's a story.
I don't know. It's a joke I heard when I was a kid.
It always kind of stuck with me. So there's this guy.
comes out of the bar stumbling drunk right and he's out there for quite a while and then one of the bouncers comes out and says dude what are you doing here like he's up the street he's sort of ferreting around feeling around the sidewalk and the guy says oh man i i can't find my car keys and he's like well first of all i don't know you should be driving but let's just say you know we can get you a car key so you can get some money so you can take an uber home or whatever right and so the guy's looking around the base of a street lamp right And the bouncer helps them and they search around,
searching around, like doing all the gross stuff, like lifting the leaves off the sewage grates and skirting the it clown glare and all that kind of stuff.
And then finally, the bouncer says, dude, the keys aren't here.
Like, the keys aren't here.
Are you sure this is where you dropped them?
And he says, oh, no, I dropped them right in front of the bar.
And he's like, well, why are we looking here then?
And the guy says, because there's no streetlight in front of the bar.
Right. Now that's, I mean, that's kind of a funny joke in a way, but it's also kind of philosophical in a way too, right?
Because if we're going to say, well, the only reason for group disparities in outcome is because of endless, usually white racism.
Okay. If there's more to the question, but we keep trying to nag whites to be less racist and it's not solving the problem.
And of course we've been doing this for more than a half century and the problems in many ways are getting worse.
So we do have to start saying, okay, just because that's where we think the light is doesn't mean that's where the car keys actually are.
And we need to start looking elsewhere in order to complement or supplement or flesh out or round out these kinds of issues.
So, yeah, when I focus on the wisdom aspect, that is really, really important.
And Somebody who has good philosophical principles can achieve far greater happiness than I actually believe can use their intelligence in a far more leveraged manner.
You get super strong guys who can lift a truck, and then you get pencil-neck, skinny-armed guys who can barely lift a 12-pound barbell.
But philosophy is like the forklift truck, right?
So then what happens is if you have philosophy, the differences in IQ tend to diminish in regards to the pursuit of happiness.
In the same way that if you get a forklift truck, the stronger guy is going to be able to deal with it slightly better because he's a little stronger, but they both end up with similar lifting power.
And that's really been my focus.
Now, Stephan, I want to ask you one of my favorite questions to ask people.
And that is, what type of books would you recommend for young people to read?
What type? So if you are philosophically inclined, and listen, I mean, it's a whole bell curve, right?
There's some people who are going to get into philosophy no matter what.
There are some people who are just going to hate philosophy no matter what.
And it's not a smartness thing.
I mean, there's lots of smart people who hate philosophy and lots of people of other aspects of intelligence who love it.
So you'll generally have an idea.
That you like philosophy because you're reading a book that's not philosophical and some question gets posed.
So like, I'll just give you an example from my own life.
So when I was a kid, there was a book, I don't know, I guess it's been remade a couple of times in the movie.
So the book was called Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
And, spoiler, it's about body snatchers.
And they invade. So, and I was reading that book, and in it, the author had a little section, I can't even remember why, about how human beings...
Can't really create things.
So if you say, oh, I've created a unicorn which doesn't exist.
It's like, yeah, not really.
You just took a horse and you stuck a horn on it.
It's not really that original.
Or you say, ah, but dragons don't exist.
And I've come up with a dragon. It's like, yeah, you got a lizard.
You made it bigger and you stuck some wings on it.
All these things exist in the world.
And, I mean, it probably sounds a little OCD and probably is, but I was sitting there going like, okay, if that's the rule, I'm going to find a way to break it.
And I would come up with all of these crazy things, and then I'd break them down to their component parts, and I'd say...
You know what? It's actually kind of true.
Everything I come up with is an assembly of other things that, you know, like you've got those Aztec gods, which are the snakes with wings.
It's like, yeah, but there are snakes, there are birds, so you're just jamming two things together.
So that's sort of an indication that you might be somewhat philosophical.
Or I'd also sit there and have a game with myself.
I was a little understimulated as a child, as you can imagine.
I'm a bit of a stimulus bot.
But I would have this game as a child where I'd be sitting, I don't know, I'd be sitting of a, I'm thinking of a red steam engine or something like that.
And I'd say, ah, I wonder why I'm thinking of a red steam engine.
And I'd say, well, I thought of this before and that reminded me of the red steam engine.
Okay, but what made me think of that before?
And I just like, you follow the trail back as far as you can to try and figure out what are the dominoes that end up with you thinking about a certain kind of thing.
So if you're that way inclined, then you will probably get very into philosophy, almost whether you like it or not.
So, but books, the books that are great to read.
So, Plato's dialogues, Plato was technically insane, but he was a very, very good writer.
You know, so this big dichotomy between Plato and Aristotle is really, really important, and it's way cooler than it sounds.
So... What is real, right?
What is real? It's kind of a fundamental question.
What is real? Now, Plato said that everything here, like what we touch taste, it's not really real.
It's like a shadow cast by a shadow cast by a shadow.
It's not really real. What's real is the stuff that's concepts, ideas, things outside of reality, things outside of the universe.
Those are the real things, and everything that you perceive is just kind of a weird shadow.
Like, you know, how do you know what a table is, man?
How do you know what a table is? Well...
Plato and Aristotle have two different answers.
So Aristotle says, well, the reason you know what a table is, And you might need to smoke some of this before I tell you, but the reason that you know what a table is is because I always use my Cheech and Chong voice here.
No, I won't do that because there's a reference lost on your younger audience, but maybe my big Lebowski voice.
But it's like, hey, man, if you really want to know what a table is, I'll tell you.
A table, you know what a table is?
Because before you were born, man, you were floating in another space, another universe, another whole dimension.
And in that dimension...
You saw the perfect table.
The absolute perfect table.
I can't even describe it to you, man.
Like it was perfect. It was glowing.
It was n-dimensional.
It went through time and space.
It was the perfect concept of the perfect table and you saw it with your own pre-existing eyeballs.
And then what happens is when your mom squeeze you out like a pup through a balloon and then you see a table The reason you know it's a table, even though it's a pale, sad, broken, stained little copy of the ideal table, the reason you know it's a table is because you have a vague memory, like a primordial memory of that perfect table you saw when you were floating around the universe before you were born.
And he says that about everything, all of our concepts, everything that we buy.
How do you know it's a tree? Well, you saw the perfect tree, man!
Now, That's why I say that's functionally insane.
Like, it's mad. And I know that's not an argument, but I've got a whole four-hour presentation on Plato, which people can check out.
I go, I flesh it out a little bit more.
Now, Aristotle, to me, falls into the four-letter category called sane.
Because Aristotle says, okay, why do you know what a table is?
Well... What is a table?
A table is, you know, usually it's a four-legged device that's aiming to put something at a reasonable height for eating or working on, right?
Because it's tough to eat off the floor, and if it's too high, it's a shelf, you can't see what you're eating.
So it, you know, brings you to like a waist-high level, you can sit and eat stuff or whatever.
And so you see this four-legged thing with the flat top being used for this, being used for that, and then over time you accumulate...
This concept called the table, and you can apply it to new things.
And, you know, it's really cool. I mean, again, I was staring at my daughter as she was growing to sort of see this whole process in motion.
And it's really cool to see when they can start to identify the abstracts from the concretes that they've been exposed to.
So, Plato versus Aristotle is pretty powerful stuff.
But Plato, when he's writing about Socrates, isn't giving you all of this crazy stuff for the most part.
I mean, it's in there some places, like the symposium where they talk about what's ideal love.
But Plato, I'll just sort of give you an example.
So, there's a guy in one of Plato's dialogues who says, okay, the purpose of life is pleasure, man.
Pleasure is like the best thing ever.
Now, I guess that's kind of true in a way, in that happiness is a form of pleasure.
But Aristotle will say that happiness is what you get when you exercise your faculties to the best possible way in the greatest possible manner, right?
So if you're really good at speaking, try and find a way to become really great at speaking that convince people to be good.
That's going to get you happiness.
And happiness is kind of the end goal because...
You know, if somebody gave you a bunch of money in your bank account, but you were never allowed to take it out, you wouldn't be very happy, right?
Be kind of frustrating. In fact, you'd probably feel worse than if they never gave you any money at all.
So happiness is a means to an end.
And so why do we go and buy something?
Well, because we want to own it.
Well, why do we want to own it? Because it makes us happy.
Well, why do we want to be happy?
Like, that's it. Like, that's the end of the question, right?
Like, you're happy. Like, that's it, man.
That's what you want to be. It was the guy in Plato's dialogues who said the purpose of life is pleasure.
And then Socrates says, okay, you ever had like a really bad itch?
You know, someplace it's hard to get to.
And then you finally, you get your claw in there and you just like, you scratch and it's like you get this claw, like this flood of pleasure, right?
And he said, oh yeah, we've all had that experience one time or another, right?
And then Socrates says, okay, so for you then, since the purpose of life is pleasure, the ideal pleasure, like the ideal life would be to have an itch that you could continually scratch.
And it's like, hmm, so logically that kind of works, but we kind of get a sense that that can't be the right answer.
I mean, of course, if you keep scratching an itch, it's going to start hurting and it's going to bleed and all of that.
Like we've all had that, you know, chicken pox when you were a kid, stop scratching, you're going to make it worse.
Right? Right. So he asks you those questions.
So somebody will say, well, justice is X, right?
This is justice. And then people say, okay, according to your definition, this action would be justice, but that really doesn't seem right, does it?
And that's kind of an important thing.
So the Socratic method where somebody proposes a universal and you try to find an exception to that universal, and then you kind of rework the definition until you get it right.
That's really cool stuff, man.
That's why we have a civilization, because we've been...
You know, figuring out this kind of stuff.
If you look at the legal system, that's a whole bunch of, yeah, people lie, people fake, people want to use the legal system to get their own vengeance on people, and so you've got to have cross-examination, you've got to be able to confront whoever's accusing you.
Physical evidence trumps eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable.
And so we've got these whole series of questions, you know, what is truth, what is justice, what is virtue, and Trying to figure these things out is super important.
I mean, it's why we have a civilization because we're not just acting like a bunch of lizards who are, you know, mating and eating and sleeping because that's what the pleasure is in the moment.
So yeah, read yourself some Plato's dialogues.
It's a real shame. You know, it's one of these couple of horrible things in the history of philosophy, death of Socrates, the burning of the library at Alexandria, which had some incredible works that we only know of because of some of the leftover index cards, so to speak.
And another one, of course, was the fact that Aristotle, we don't actually have his writings.
Like, we only have a student's notes, we have recreations from others, and he was considered to be as good a writer as Plato.
Now, because we have Plato's writings, we have all of this cool, beautiful dialogue with these great analogies and metaphors and all of that.
And with Aristotle, we have this kind of dry, brittle, bare-bones logic tree that is not particularly inspiring.
And if we'd actually had Aristotle's writings rather than Plato's, the whole history of Western...
Our relationship to reality could be completely different, and I think we would have...
Overleaped a whole bunch of, you know, Fall of Rome, Dark Ages crap that was really kind of set us back a ways.
And, you know, whether there's another one coming is kind of up to us.
So yeah, read yourself your Plato, read yourself your Aristotle.
Aristotle's probably worth a little older and you kind of have to work with someone who knows what the text is.
I also have a presentation on Aristotle for those who are interested.
Pick up yourself some Ayn Rand.
She's got some great and vivid and powerful stories that...
You know, it's funny because people talk about, well, she's just a novelist.
It's like, hello, what do you think Plato is?
They were dialogues.
Plato is a form of theater.
And so this idea that somehow explicating philosophical principles through stories is something bad.
I mean, just look at the Bible. I mean, there's a lot of allegories in Bible stories that have very powerful impacts on morality.
A lot of the French existentialists communicated their ideas through novels.
and so on so um uh she'll really get you thinking about stuff particularly free markets and uh what money is and also really really great great stuff um but yeah whatever it is that gets you really thinking and read stuff that opposes you like sit down with it for me sit down with a copy of the communist manifesto and just say well this rankles me this is like petting a dog the wrong way with like a flamethrower but you've got to figure out why it bothers you And just being bothered by something is not an argument.
You have to sort of figure out why.
And then you'll get knowledge both of the text of your better arguments and also your emotional nature, which we all have, which is important, and why it bothers you.
So I could sort of go on and on.
But yeah, if you start with your Greek philosophers, you're going to go a long ways.
It's worth dipping into Nietzsche.
And Nietzsche is great because he's what's called an aphorist, which is like a fancy way of saying he has really, really vivid ideas.
Fortune cookies, right?
Because he didn't make systematic arguments.
He basically just had insights, and his insights are very thought-provoking and very powerful.
It was true for me a lot more when I was younger, which is kind of an annoying middle-aged guy card to play, but I enjoyed Nietzsche a lot more when I was younger.
When I dipped into him again more recently, I was like, eh, okay.
It's thought-provoking, but where the hell does it go?
It's a treasure map with no references.
You can get some treasure, but you can't ever get it back home.
So, he's good to read.
Pascal also, his pensées, thoughts.
Pascal is also really good to read, but more for the paranoia of a universe without morality, right?
Which is really a terrifying place to be.
This is sort of the left versus the right.
The right has inherited Christian morality.
And the left has inherited Darwinian will-to-power, Nietzschean amoral striving that generally uses the weakness or the susceptibility to morality of their opponents in order to destroy them themselves.
They don't care about virtue, but they know you care about virtue in the same way that, you know, some guy who wants to threaten you knows.
He doesn't care about your family, but he knows you do.
So he'll use that against you.
So, yeah, there's a lot of really great stuff out there.
And all of these texts are freely accessible and available, which is wonderful.
They're great lectures on there out there.
You know, you can certainly dip into mine.
I've done a lot of the major philosophers and, you know, but also dip into people who disagree with me completely, of course, right?
You get yourself around it perspective, but just recognize that it is the kind of investment that is going to bring you unhappiness and happiness, right?
That's the dichotomy, right?
If you're in a sane world, if you're in a sane society, then philosophy is going to bring you great happiness.
But if you're in a society that is anti-rational, and we're pretty far down that road at the moment, then it's a lot more combat and a lot less comfort.
But me? I like the combat.
I mean, I'm not sure I'd be that great in a truly rational society.
I guess I'd have other things to do and all of that, maybe extend and expand, but I'm sort of a Genghis Khan combat-based life form, and whether that's by necessity or by nature, I don't really know, and it doesn't really matter.
But just recognize that you're suiting up.
You're putting on the armor. They always have these in movies where the guy's like, I've got to go into combat.
And they see him slapping knives on and tying bandanas around his head and flexing his stomach abs.
Well, I'm doing two out of three of those things.
But yeah, it's going to get you into some combat.
But it's a necessary combat.
And man, if we lose, we lose just about everything.
Okay, well, I think we're just at time.
But Stefan Molyneux, thank you so much for the interview.
My pleasure. Thank you very much.
And if you have any follow-up questions from the audience, just shoot them in and maybe we can do this again.
Okay, will do. Thank you.
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