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June 8, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:21
Individual Happiness VS the "Common Good"
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It's interesting.
Is philosophy still widely taught at university?
No, no. The opposite of philosophy is taught.
So postmodernism, subjectivism, and relativism.
So what's happened is...
The objectivity that philosophy pursues, right?
So philosophy was responsible for the foundation of the scientific method because there's two basic approaches to philosophy.
Ooh, and it's so great that I get to talk about this stuff on the show because it's kind of rare.
So two basic approaches to philosophy, and they both have to do with the validity of our concepts, right?
So, you know, you and I have the concept of time.
You know, we're meeting at a particular time in the afternoon.
We have a concept of a chair and a microphone and a human being and so on.
And so the big question is, okay, where do these concepts come from?
And there's two answers in philosophy.
So one comes from Plato, although he's not the only one, obviously, who originated it.
It's generally associated with Plato, and it's called Platonism.
So Plato, and it sounds like I'm dragging on a bong and paraphrasing here, but this is literally how it goes.
So Plato says, okay, so you and I look at a chair.
We know it's a chair. How do we perform that feat?
Well, I'll tell you, man. Okay, so before you were born, you were floating in another dimension, and that other dimension was full of perfect concepts.
You saw the perfect chair.
You saw truth. You saw justice.
You saw virtue. You saw the perfect woman.
You saw the perfect table.
And then you hold on to this memory, and then you squeeze out through your mom's snug harbor, out into the world, and you have this vestigial memory of these perfect forms, these perfect concepts you saw before you were born, and then...
You look at a chair and it connects in your mind to your pre-life concept of the chair that you saw for real, not like a concept like an idea.
But you saw the perfect chair and you recognize a chair or a table or a justice or virtue.
You recognize those because you saw them before.
Now, that's a pretty wild concept.
It's not overly scientific.
And it's contrasted with what Aristotle said.
Now, Aristotle said, okay, like...
Good try. Nice try, man.
But if I'm not smoking what you're smoking, I don't see the perfect chair before I'm born.
The way that you figure out what a chair is, is you see something with a flat spot for your butt, four legs to raise you to a comfortable sitting position and a backrest for your back.
And you see this being used, you see this being built, you see this being deployed.
And after a while you're like, okay, I get what a chair is.
And it's different maybe from a stool and it's certainly different from a table and plates and so on.
So it's repeated exposure to the same empirical data and its purpose that gives you the concept of a tree or a chair, right?
You don't see these things before you're born and have a perfect memory of them buried deep into your neocortex.
You just, over repetitive use and language and seeing how they are built and what they're used for, you develop these concepts.
Now, this all sounds very abstract, very, very concrete.
So if you look at society...
Then society is composed of individuals, and individuals pursue their own happiness sometimes at the expense of other individuals, right?
I mean, there was some other guest who might have come on today.
You chose me, which I appreciate.
The other guest is quite sad and is probably crying in a corner somewhere.
And if somebody's watching your show rather than somebody else's show, that other person is unhappy.
There's a lot of win-win in society, but there's an immediate win-lose that goes on if you...
Try and get a contract. As a business person, you get that contract.
Everyone else who wanted that contract is kind of unhappy.
So if you accept that we're composed of individuals, then there's no such thing as the common good.
There's no such thing as the social good that exists abstracted from the happiness of particular individuals.
That's why the Founding Fathers talked about the pursuit of happiness.
And by that they meant each individual should be free to pursue his or her bliss And there's no collective good that can overcome and undermine our individual pursuit of what we want to do to make us happy.
For instance, during the next hour 20 minutes, hour 40 minutes, we have a two-hour conversation.
This is what I want to be doing with my life, is having this conversation with you and your listeners.
If I wanted to be doing something else with my life, I'd be doing it.
So this is my greatest pursuit of happiness in the moment.
Now, other people who wanted me on their show, well, I guess they don't get me, or at least not now.
So if you're looking at philosophy, the philosophy of individualism, which is where, well, what is society?
Society is a group of individuals, all of whom are pursuing their own happiness, sometimes at the expense of each other.
Now, some of that is illegal, right?
Like you murder and theft and assault and rape and so on, and that's wrong.
But, you know, a lot of it is just kind of soft and intangible.
I win, you lose, and so on, right?
But there's no common good, there's no social good that overrides the freedom for happiness of each individual.
Right now, if you look at censorship, censorship is the idea that if you upset certain groups, certain people, certain others, then you're bad and you should lose your right of free speech.
It's the concept of hate speech that in every country except America has been formally inscribed into law and so on.
In other words, there's a collective good called not being upset that trumps your individual right to free speech.
speech.
That's the concept of a collective being more important than the individual.
Now, in the Aristotelian universe, there's no such thing as a concept that trumps the individual.
Like, you can't say, lizards are cold-blooded, and then throw a duck-billed platypus in there that's a mammal, and say, well, we're going to throw that in there as well.
Because it's like, no, the concept has to be rigorous.
It has to be absolute.
And you can't have a concept that overrides the rights and possibilities of any individual.
That's called an individualistic society.
Now, in the Platonic universe, the concept of the social good Can absolutely override the property rights, the free speech rights, the liberty rights of the individual.
You must be sacrificed for the greater good, the collective good, the social good, whatever it is, because concepts are more important than individuals because there's perfect concepts and then there's just bad individuals that may or may not reflect to some degree but don't really matter relative to these perfect concepts.
And so philosophy in the modern world Has said that individual reason is impotent and what we need to do is surrender ourselves to larger collectivist movements.
So in the Marxist analogy or in the Marxist view of society, individuals don't matter.
What matters is the class and they call it class consciousness, right?
Which is that if you're poor, you think a certain way.
If you're middle class, you think a certain way.
If you're rich, you think a certain way.
And your individual thought patterns don't matter because what dominates your thinking is class collective concepts.
And this is why you can't negotiate because reason can't find a meeting ground between opposing economic strata or opposing economic groups.
They do this with racism as well, that the races are somehow conditioned by particular thought patterns and so on, rich and poor and men and women.
Conditioned by particular thought patterns.
And if you don't fit into those categories, you have a false consciousness, right?
So if you're poor, but you don't mind rich people and you're ambitious and you want to get out of being poor and you're confident you can do so, which was kind of my history, well, it's called false consciousness.
You're just wrong because you don't fit into the collectivist mindset that the Marxists have prescribed for you.
So individual reason, individual thought, objective reality, That is the hallmark of philosophy.
That is the great gift that philosophy gives to the world, is for us to reason together, to resolve our disputes.
But modern philosophy, this social justice, this collectivism that has occurred, We're good to go.
And all that's left really now is brute bullying, deplatforming, political power, and the slow decay of civilized conversation.
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