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July 7, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:38
THE HALF-SECOND THAT MAKES US HUMAN! Stefan Molyneux in Conversation with George Bruno
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Hello, my friends.
Welcome to my show today.
I am having a conversation with someone who you know.
Now we're going to be discussing some very important, relevant issues that are relevant, even as relevant as this week.
So welcome, Stefan.
Thanks. It's a great pleasure to be here.
A few months ago, we talked about un-personing.
I'll never forget that. And it was one of those points In our conversation, where you said, unpersoning is the precursor of murder.
And I just remember silence after that, and it was profound.
Tell me what you meant by that.
Sure. We all have different ideas, opinions, arguments on the best way to organize society, the best way to allocate our scarce resources, the fundamental problem of existence and economics that human desires are infinite but resources are very finite.
How should they be allocated?
We all decide this every moment of every day.
How should we spend our time?
Should I exercise or should I eat some Cheetos on the couch?
We all make these kinds of decisions and they're complicated and challenging decisions.
I'm very much of the opinion that no one has the right answer because it's hard enough sometimes to find the right answer for ourselves let alone our friends, our family, people we've never even met, a country of, I don't know, 330 million or whatever.
Nobody has the right answer as to how resources should be allocated, how people should spend their time, who's right, who's wrong.
This is part of a social debate that we need to have.
If you're smart, you recognize the limits of your own wisdom.
People who tend to be less smart tend to be far more confident.
I used to call them, I still do sometimes, the period people.
Like, it's just this way.
Period! You know, but there's no period.
There's no period in the run-on sentence of human dialogue.
We all need to be engaged and involved in the conversation in order to try and find the best solutions to, you know, pretty obvious and challenging social problems.
There are people, of course, out there in the world, and that's an increasing number of them, it would seem, who are of the opinion that some arguments, some ideas, some facts, some reasons, some data, some evidence is blasphemy, essentially, to their worldview.
And of course, The problem with the sort of modern world culture, one of the many problems, is that with Christianity, you of course have the capacity, and in fact you're kind of encouraged to question doctrine, to engage in theological debates, and the concept of blasphemy has largely been scrubbed out of Christianity over the past years.
I don't know, 400 years, 300 years, sort of the end of the religious wars after the great schism that Martin Luther brought about.
They tried this whole let's have absolutism to complicated texts and it just resulted in hundreds of years of religious warfare.
Now, whether that killed off all the absolutists or people just learned painfully from the experience, the concept of wrong think, of bad think, of blasphemy, of things which are unutterable in the public square has largely been unutterable.
Scrubbed away in Christianity, but in leftist culture, in socialist culture, communist culture, there are large categories of unspeakables.
Now, I'm not a big fan of these particular ideas as a whole, but should they have the right to make their case?
Well, I have to grit my teeth and say, I think it's horrible, but yes, because the best way to counter bad ideas is with better ideas.
The best argument for bad speech is more speech, the best solution.
But now, increasingly, there's just a whole lot of things that you get significantly punished for saying.
In other words, you're considered to be almost evil by definition if you talk about various subjects or push back against various doctrines.
And that is a problem.
Because if you silence someone, then you're saying you're so absolutely, completely and totally certain that That not only are they wrong, but that your fellow human beings don't have the capacity to determine their wrongness and push back against those ideas.
In other words, they're kind of like an infection that could spread across the social landscape.
Then you have basically turned that person into a kind of illness, a kind of disease, which there's no inoculation of rational thought or free speech that can protect people from.
That is a very dehumanizing statement.
And of course, what do we do with diseases?
Well, in the long run, we try to eradicate them.
And so that is a big problem.
There are lots of ideas out there in the world I massively disagree with.
And they should have the right to speak.
And we should have the right to counter those arguments.
But when you say to someone, your ideas are so bad and so dangerous, you cannot be allowed to speak.
That is not a good situation because it's not even a mistrust in the person who you want to silence.
It's actually a foundational mistrust in everyone else.
Being so susceptible to this wrong thing that somehow it's going to spread like wildfire.
And of course the big issue with that is why aren't people taught how to think and be critical to the point where they can be exposed to bad ideas, terrible ideas and see the flaws, see the problems, push back against them, reason against them and so on.
We're always trying to solve problems in society that have largely been created by terrible education.
I mean, this is one of the things like why do you need a minimum wage when the government has been training kids for 12 years?
Well, because the government has been training kids in fairly useless abstract disciplines.
They've been training them on how to believe there's no future because of climate change and they've been training them to be part of this hysterical woke culture.
What they haven't been doing is training them in any marketable job skills or economically useful habits or disciplines or thoughts.
They haven't been training them how to be an entrepreneur.
They haven't been training them how to add value, how the economy works, how the market works and all this kind of stuff.
And so when kids come out of high school, they're kind of economically useless.
But rather than say, well, we really need to revamp education because, you know, in 12 years you can become a surgeon, but you can't earn more than five bucks an hour in the free market.
Come on. I mean, this is ridiculous, right?
So rather than trying to deal with foundational issues, we're playing whack-a-mole with all these symptoms.
If ideas are bad, obviously some people love what I do.
Some people hate what I do. They think it's about me, but it's really just about the arguments.
So the people who think my arguments are bad or wrong or nasty or whatever, well, Why do you fear people speaking ideas you disagree with?
It's because deep down you get that people have become very reactive, not very rational, not very reflective, not able to handle data that goes against a lot of programming.
So rather than fix schools and teach people how to think, instead they want to silence people, which is a confession that government education has completely failed.
You know, I was thinking about the, I guess the little slogan for TED Talks.
Ideas worth spreading.
And what occurred to me was it's more like the approved ideas worth spreading.
Well, I mean, I guess one would like to see a list of ideas not worth spreading.
And I'm a big, you know, shine the light on.
Now, shine the light. If people have malevolent, nasty ideas, I think that they should have the light shone on them.
They should be given a public platform, not necessarily at taxpayer's expense.
But they should be invited to make their case.
I mean, we all know that muscles only work because of resistance.
And we all know these, you know, helicopter parent bubble kids, you know, who like, oh, I don't ever touch dirt and I never play outside in any kind of muck.
And it's always wash your hands and wash your hands.
And this is sort of prior to COVID. But your immune system, it needs to work out.
Like, it needs exposure to things.
You need to be out there in the world.
You need to be exposed to bad ideas, to wrong ideas.
I mean, for heaven's sakes. I mean, I grew up in a fairly leftist culture.
I was in government schools.
I was in fairly leftist universities and so on.
And I felt that exposure to that.
I took an entire course on Marxism and other ideologies that I despise.
Great. I mean, my exposure to those ideas did not turn me into, I don't know, a Marxist because I evaluated and it helped me sharpen my arguments and realize where I stood.
That kind of resistance is essential.
You know, this is a sort of mark of an intelligence and civilized human being is to be able to entertain Opposing thoughts without believing them and to be exposed to them and to work through them and to understand them without changing your own mind.
It's called being the devil's advocate and it's something that I learned in debating 101 when I was in high school and in college on the debating team, which is you have to be able to argue both sides.
You have to be able to inhabit ideas and arguments that you strongly argue.
And if you can't do that, well, you can't actually have any great art because then good people can't create a convincing villain.
And so I just think that we lose a lot when we imagine that certain ideas are like pathogens and must be silenced.
It really is confessing the weakness of people's capacity to...
Listen and remain unmoved, but learn how to fight against a particular argument.
I mean, what do virologists do when they want to create some sort of vaccine or they want to figure out how some disease works?
The first thing they do is they get that disease and they study it like crazy.
Now, if we were to say to epidemiologists or to virologists, well, you have to fight this disease, but you're never allowed to take a sample.
You're never allowed to examine it.
You're never allowed to look at its DNA. They'd say, well, then we can't fight it.
Then you're just going to have to cross your fingers and hope for herd immunity.
And so the idea that we can't fight things, the best way to fight is to not expose people to it.
And that's kind of an old idea, too, because back in the day, you had a great deal of capacity to shut down opposing or dissenting voices because, you know, the sort of organs of the means of production of culture, the Hollywood and the TV studios and newspapers and all of that.
Well, they were generally under the control of a pretty small elite and they could shut you out pretty effectively.
And it's an old movie.
What's it called?
Conspiracy Theory, where the guy is like he photocopies and his little manifestos and so on and puts them into people's mailboxes.
And, you know, that's how it used to be and really was.
But now, you know, you've got the dark web.
You've got a wide variety of ways that people can exchange good and bad arguments, good and bad information.
You can't shut it down.
All you can do is take it out of the public discourse where it no longer has access to robust pushback.
So, again, it's really not a good idea.
If there are bad ideas, bring them out.
Let's get the herd immunity of talking back against them by silencing them.
It just it creates two separate societies that don't talk to each other.
And that can lead to pretty big schisms down the road.
I was thinking about when you're talking about virology and stuff.
When you get your blood work done, one of the things they check is the white blood cell count.
And every day, if you went and got your blood tested every single day, that white blood cell count would be different every day because your body is always fighting something.
What your body is fighting might kill somebody else.
So our bodies are adapting all the time biologically.
And that's why we have this varying white blood cell count.
What would be the intellectual mental equivalent of white blood cells?
Well, it's really reason and evidence.
We don't do well as a species when we drift too far from the truth.
And we have a unique capacity to train ourself into what is not empirical.
I mean, it's our greatest strength and our greatest weakness as conceptual beings, right?
We can understand gravity infinitely better than a chimpanzee.
A chimpanzee knows that things fall, knows that he falls, can sort of swing from tree to tree and catch fruit as it falls.
So he understands gravity at an empirical level.
A dog, you throw a frisbee, the dog can do all of that.
Physics calculation in its head can jump at just the right spot, can catch the Frisbee.
So a dog has an empirical and instinctual understanding of gravity, of heat, and, you know, it's too hot, I've got to pant and I've got to go get a drink or whatever it is, right?
So most animals understand the world at a direct and empirical level.
And we have the capacity, though, to abstract something like gravity, to turn it into a universal principle, to end up understanding that the stars operate on gravity, that the planets in the solar system, we can then not just catch a ball like a dog, but we can send a spaceship to pass Jupiter, right?
Because we understand gravity at a very abstract level.
In other words, we reject the evidence of our senses to gain universal truths about gravity.
I mean, we all know that the world looks pretty flat.
We can really understand why people believed for so long that the world was flat.
We understand that the moon and the sun look about the same size, and we understand that from our perspective, the world has particular characteristics.
It looks like we're stationary, and the sun, the moon, and the stars revolve around us, which of course is what people believed for tens of thousands of years before we learned better.
From our immediate empirical understanding, we can process the world that's right in front of us, but we can't understand the principles of the universe.
We can't understand physics or chemistry or biology and so on, right?
We don't have direct evidence of evolution, but there is lots of indirect evidence of evolution.
And so I think that our capacity to deny the evidence of our senses is our greatest strength Because then we say, oh, the moon and the sun are different sizes, and it's not that they rotate around, well, not that the sun rotates around us, but that we, in fact, rotate around the sun, and we can, through the process of rejecting the evidence of our senses, we can end up sending a probe to Mars.
Fantastic. But our capacity to deny the evidence of our senses is also a great weakness, because we can talk ourselves out of common sense and into some truly crazy We see all this propaganda, but I have some sympathy, of course.
You see these pictures all the time, which is some guy, he's living in a cardboard box at the bottom of a very tall office tower.
And this strikes us immediately, Lincoln, our sense data.
It's like, well, that's just wrong. How can there be enough wealth to build a beautiful giant office tower, but not enough wealth to help the guy who's living in a cardboard box?
And that aspect of things where it hits us, then we come up with all of these concepts.
Like, oh, well, there's so much wealth in the office tower.
Let's just take a little bit of wealth from the office tower.
We'll give it to the guy in the cardboard box.
It's not like the guys in the office tower are going to lose 5% of their income and throw themselves out of a bridge or anything.
But we just, you know, shave a little up here and give a little down here.
And boy, that's going to be fantastic.
And that's us working with our sense data.
That's working with the immediate.
That's like us trying to throw a tennis ball up and have it go to Mars.
Like, it's just not... Going to work because it breaks the principle.
The principle of property rights is the only reason why the office tower exists.
And once you start violating property rights, and of course charity is not a violation of property rights, perfectly voluntary and all that, but once you start violating property rights, you end up bleeding off the creation of wealth that you need to help the poor, and you also end up paying people to be poor, which creates a huge incentive for people to be poor, and this is why the welfare state not only has not solved the problem of poverty, but has made it much worse because it's a violation of principle.
And so our capacity to reject immediate sense data is really, really cool and gives us – that's why we're able to have this conversation without being in the same room.
All the technology that's flowing the bits and bytes back and forth and so on.
But our capacity to reject sense data also has us deal with abstractions that are very destructive to us.
Like, oh, well, let's just give a small group of people power over our property and they'll just make the world a paradise.
And that's – That's taking, in a sense, the immediate sympathy nerve that's stimulated by seeing poverty in the midst of wealth, abstracting it to a principle that ends up destroying the very wealth that we need to help the poor.
Some people are poor by choice.
Think of a monk. Or, you know, once I took off almost 18 months from my business career before I became a public philosopher, I took 18 months off to write novels.
I took writing classes.
I had an agent and all of that.
Okay, so my income was very low during that time, but I wouldn't say that I was involuntarily poor.
I just made That kind of choice.
People give up income to go to university.
They give up income to have children.
I mean, so some poverty or some loss of wealth is perfectly voluntary.
Some people, of course, are just having a very bad series of events and we should really, really help those people.
And other people are just playing crazy and knowing what to do with crazy people.
Well, there used to be a way. We used to know what to do with crazy people, which was to put them into mental institutions.
But unfortunately, communists took over and decided to dump them into society as a way of destabilizing.
The system as a whole, but poverty is a very complicated thing, and you can't just take money from people, give money to other people, and think you've solved the problem.
So I am always very concerned when people take immediate sympathetic sense data, like, oh, there's a poor guy amidst all this wealth, and then use it to abstract principles that violate foundational morality, which is really the root of redistributionist welfare state, socialism, communism, fascism, you name it.
Let's talk about silencing.
You know a little bit about that.
I used to say that in medieval times, they would pull the tongues out of people, put hot pokers in their mouths.
They would split their tongues.
We're not doing that today to people, but we are silencing them, so to speak, by banning them, limiting other people's access to them.
What are your thoughts about that?
And tell us about your recent experience with that.
Oh, yeah. I mean, there's been a bunch of them recently.
And YouTube, of course, I think it was just Monday as sort of the most recent one.
And it's a challenge.
I mean, I believe that speech that is legal should be supported.
Speech that is legal. I mean, incitement to violence, incitement, direct incitement to riots and death threats.
Okay, I get all of that. And I'm down with all of that.
Not, of course, that I've ever indulged in anything, even within the ballpark of that kind of horrible speech.
But I think that speech that is legal should be permitted and unfortunately though a big crack in principle has been that if your speech upsets people then somehow it's bad speech.
Now what this of course has done is It changes the entire dynamic of free speech when you allow offense to silence people because what you're doing is if somebody disagrees with you but either can't disprove you or doesn't have the ability or chooses not to engage, how do they silence you if they want you silenced?
Well, what they do is they say, that's offensive.
That's upsetting.
That's problematic. That's whatever, whatever.
It's racist or whatever. And so rather than engaging with perfectly legal and, in my case, rational and empirical speech, people then say, I'm very upset.
You're weaponizing an emotion.
And weaponizing an emotion, you know, like anti-Semitism, we saw where that went in Germany, right?
Weaponizing an emotion where the various sectors within Rwanda ended up hating each other.
When you weaponize an emotion, you are giving a great deal of of power to the most primitive and manipulative aspects of human nature.
Rather than our higher capacity for reason and debate and evidence, you are basically allowing tantrums and upset to dictate speech.
That's a terrible idea because those people who want to weaponize tantrums Are kind of the last people you want in control of free speech.
I mean I think their tantrums should be perfectly legal and should be able to express their tantrums and they should be able to cry and rage and get upset and speak all of that sort of stuff.
But boy, when we weaponize emotions, we're basically giving prejudice a gun.
And that is really, really a bad precedent.
And all we're doing is also creating the incentive for people to just even pretend that they're upset and outraged and hysterical and so on.
It doesn't work in parenting.
You don't give your kid a candy bar if your kid has a meltdown in the store.
If you go to the store and you say, well, like in my family, we don't have any sugar on weekdays, maybe a little bit on the weekends.
So weekdays, you know, if we go to the store, my daughter, like she never did, but if she had a tantrum, she runs a candy bar and it's a Tuesday and we've already agreed to these rules, you don't get her a candy bar.
I mean, you just buy yourself peace in the moment, but you guarantee that every time you go to the store, she's going to have a meltdown and it's going to be harder and harder to resist every single time.
You can't do that as a parent.
You can't allow yourself to be bullied in the business world.
You just can't allow these things because it's really bad for the people who are weaponizing their own emotions as well.
It's called enabling, right?
Like you don't buy a drunk a drink and you don't indulge the emotional manipulations of hysterical people.
It's a very bad idea.
It just buys you some temporary peace, but it escalates things down the road.
So I'm very much against the weaponizing of emotions.
I very much enjoy emotions.
They're kind of the reasons happiness is an emotion and that's the entire purpose of philosophy is to bring you happiness, which is a feeling, not a thought.
And so I'm very, very big fan of emotions.
I'm not sort of one of these logical spark guys who's like, oh, human emotion, how fascinating, right?
I'm very big fan of emotions, but you simply can't allow them.
I mean, obviously you can, because people do, but it's a very bad idea.
It's like this concept of hate speech.
You know, speech you hate is not hate speech.
Something that you find offensive or upsetting or angers you or frightens you or something like that, those are just emotions.
You can't take your emotions and just magically attach them to somebody else's speech or intentions.
Otherwise, every time you felt nervous around someone, you could just punch them and say, hey man, it felt like he was assaulting me.
It's like, that's not how we can make decisions.
Just because you feel something does not give you the right to violate other people's freedoms.
Like, I mean, if you really feel like you want your neighbor's car, that doesn't mean that you can go and steal it.
You're feeling your desire just because you don't like someone doesn't mean that you can go and punch them or silence them.
We've got to have that clear divide between our feelings and our rights.
And the more those two get mixed up in together, usually the worse things get.
I am finding that a lot of division is A lot of the accusations that people are receiving, especially in the past year, in the world, in the United States, in the Western world, is for what people are thinking, not necessarily what they're doing.
I was getting day-to-day commentary from Agnieszka in Poland, and of course they just had a presidential, their first presidential election.
They'll have it again in two weeks.
And The party that is opposing President Duda, all of their arguments are very emotional.
Very little fact-based.
It's very emotions.
It's how you feel about things and the issues behind these feelings.
And I'm seeing the country fight back against this emotionally driven presidential campaign.
In the United States, I'm seeing that as well.
I can get assaulted from wearing a red hat that has certain words on it.
Just for wearing that.
Doesn't matter if I'm 85 years old.
I can be assaulted just for speaking my mind about something.
Not really doing anything.
I'm not hurting anybody. But literally be assaulted for my thoughts.
Talk to me about thought crimes.
Well... When we are exposed to negative stimuli, we have a challenge.
And part of maturity is knowing how to manage your negative stimuli.
So somebody sees a MAGA hat and maybe they have some very strong negative emotional response.
Well, what separates us from the animals is that we have the capacity to override our emotional responses and say, well, I find that It's bad.
And, you know, maybe you can go up and have a debate and if the person wants to engage in a debate with you, you can do that.
But the problem is when the stimulus response gets too shortened and all of civilization is about trying to put a block in between stimulus and response to make us more than Pavlov's drooling dogs when the bell rings, right?
That's what humanity is.
That's what thought philosophy aims to do is to put An intervention in between stimulus and response.
I mean, we understand, you know, like if you're sitting there at an outdoor cafe, which I guess are kind of opening up now, you're having a nice slice of pizza and then a seagull comes and takes part of your pizza and flies off.
Okay, we don't sit there and say, oh man, that seagull certainly violated property rights, stole my pizza, I'm going to take it to gull court or something like that, because we understand that the seagull has a stimulus response, right?
It sees the pizza, it's hungry, it comes and takes The pizza.
And I think that we don't want to be bird-brained, so to speak, right?
I mean, we have to have something that intervenes.
But biologically, you only have about a quarter of a second to intervene between stimulus and response and, of course, a lot of parenting.
It's helping your children extend their window of thoughts and ideas to include the consequences of what it is that they're doing.
You know, the conversation we all have with our kids about sugar and vegetables and all that kind of stuff, right?
Yes, it feels good on the tongue, but it's bad for the body.
The other one doesn't taste as good on the tongue, but it's good for the body and your body wants you to eat vegetables, but your tongue wants you to eat sugar and like just understanding, you know, teeth and obesity and diabetes, you know, just understanding that sugar is not really food, right?
It's not really food. Trying to find a way to intervene between stimulus and response, which is where civilization is, where humanity is, where maturity is, where responsibility is, where morality is.
I mean, if everything we wanted to eat was perfectly good for us, we wouldn't need the science of nutrition, right?
If all we wanted to do was, you know, stretch and exercise and all that, we wouldn't need personal trainers or anything like that.
Our bodies, this is an old Christian reality as well, our bodies and our lusts, they lead us astray.
And Christianity with, you know, what would Jesus do and think of the Bible and the Ten Commandments is a way of attempting to, and I think quite successfully, attempting to intervene between stimulus and response.
And what the converse, like the censors and so on, what they're trying to do is to say to people that your response should never be questioned.
That your response is, you know, self-righteous.
You know, what Michelle Obama said to students, I think it was students the other day, you can never be too angry.
But that's the exact opposite of philosophy.
Of course you can be too angry.
Of course you can be too angry.
Saying you can never be too angry is saying that no rational thought should ever, ever intervene between your rage and your actions.
And that turns people into, I think, kind of dangerous machines.
Out there in the world.
So trying to, you know, that quarter-second intervention, that's what civilization is all about.
Ooh, I really hate what that guy's saying, but hey, man, if I take away his right of speech, then I've broken the principle.
They can come for my right of speech next and all that kind of stuff.
If I break property rights because I'm sentimental about the guy in the cardboard box, well, not only are there really bad practical considerations down the road, But now you're paying people to be poor and you have to appoint a whole political class with the power to move trillions of dollars around at the point of a gun.
Now, that's not going to work out very well because people can't handle power.
Human beings cannot handle power.
Power corrupts, and yet everybody wants to run to the government and have them solve all of these social problems, forgetting Lord Acton's basic maxim, right?
So that moment, that moment of stimulus that moment of stimulus response.
When I was a kid, you had to really be skeptical of your stimulus responses.
It's not like your body is the devil. I mean, but especially when people have programmed you.
So the people who programmed you to have stimulus response, like, I don't know, I hate Trump, I hate capitalism, I hate whites or whatever, right?
People who programmed you to have that stimulus response, the last thing they ever want is for people to intervene in that quarter second and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Is that right? Is that true?
Are your emotions justified? So when you program people, then you absolutely want to keep people away who might intervene in the stimulus response that helps serve your need for power.
And that, you know, a lot of the hostility is focused and directed at the people who are trying to jump into that canyon of a quarter second and say, whoa, let's reason this out a little.
Let's think this out a little. Because, you know, something that I grew up with understanding, which seems to be kind of forgotten these days, you know, like, Lynch mobs are kind of bad, right?
Because lynch mobs, they're like certain that someone is guilty and they go string them up and you don't know if they're right.
You don't know if there was a mistaken identity.
I mean, maybe they're right, but the problem is that they're still wrong because they've unleashed the mob and all of civilization, you know, court systems, free speech, property rights, all of these are designed to try and intervene into that quarter-second stimulus and response.
And there are other people who are just trying to remove that quarter-second and just like jam these two things together.
Stimulus response. I spoke this morning, I did a talk on groupthink, and I called it the insanity of groupthink.
I wouldn't let someone use my kidneys, my stomach, my eyes, but I'm letting people use my brain.
I'm giving people space, the old Rush lyrics.
His mind is not for rent to any god or government, which I love those lyrics.
Talk to me about groupthink.
Well, they're Antonyms.
It's like group digestion.
You can't have it. You simply can't have it.
It's like, yeah, as you say, nobody can directly see through my own eyeballs, at least while I'm still in possession of them.
But there is no such thing as groupthink.
All the group can do is frighten you into compliance, and then you lose your identity.
And, you know, I've often sort of thought, like, why am I such a staunch individualist?
And to me, it's similar as to why people in America who are Romanian, in dissent, are currently freaking out at the moment because they're concerned that the communist coup that's underway in America could end up with a situation similar to Romania, and it's not like there's a whole bunch of places in the world left to run to that are free of this kind of influence.
So I think it has a lot to do with the fact that when I was growing up, both in school and particularly at home, I was not allowed to think for myself.
If I thought for myself, you know, my mom would get angry and she'd always say to me, but don't think.
It's like... But if I don't think, I don't exist.
Because we all have sexual urges.
We all get hungry. We all get sleepy.
We all get thirsty. At that level, at the level of the mere body and the lizard brain, no lizard is an individualist.
They're all kind of the same in terms of their stimulus and response.
So what is it that makes us ourselves?
What is it that allows us to individuate?
But it has to be independently evaluating reality and coming to our own conclusions.
Now our own conclusions are either programmed or emotional or rational.
Now programmed and emotional are usually two sides of the same coin.
So, you know, it's either Kirk or Spock, so to speak, right?
We either come to our conclusions emotionally, which is We're going to be in common with everyone else.
And therefore, we're not ourselves.
We're not individuals. Or we're going to think for ourselves, reason for ourselves, and try to come to some accurate representation of the world that is.
And simply responding at an emotional level is not the same as being yourself.
It's really being hijacked and controlled by external others who've usually laid in the stimulus response mechanism to the exclusion of your actual Yeah,
it's funny you mentioned individuation.
I did a talk on that A couple days ago and for over two decades I was a psychotherapist.
I taught in five colleges.
I had a private practice.
I did psychotherapy two to three nights a week after my full-time therapy job.
And individuation is when that child breaks away from mother and father and I can tell when that break is happening.
Problems happened When I couldn't tell where the mother stops and the child starts.
In groupthink, what we're experiencing now, I can't see where the group stops and the individual starts.
There's this collectivism that is just leaving me.
It's blowing my mind watching all of this Membership in this groupthink and everyone flashing their membership card on social media, which varies from week to week.
Everything from posting various colors on Instagram to saying certain things and hashtagging certain things.
I can't tell where the mob starts and the individual begins.
Well, I've had sort of the same experience when I chat with people.
I'm not a therapist, of course, but when I chat with people about personal issues in my call-in show, if they have, say, an abusive parent and I start to sort of point out some of the abusive natures of the parent, immediately there's this defense that leads to mind.
And my statement is usually like, I'd really like to talk to you and not your mother.
Because it's the internalized alter ego that is doing the defense and intervening between like the stimulus response thing, right?
I mean, a mother feels attacked, internal mother reacts and then pushes back.
And I want to kind of get around that and talk to the person on the other side.
And yeah, I mean, fear breeds conformity.
This is why there's so much fear mongering.
In the West at the moment.
I mean, the fear-mongering of everyone's a racist, the fear-mongering of institutionalized racism and sexism and misogyny, the fear-mongering of the environmental catastrophes that are always imminent.
I was saying to my daughter the other day that when I was a kid growing up in the 70s, we were all robustly assured by the scientific powers that be that not only was there going to be a global winter, but the world was going to run out of food and oil by 1980 and mass starvation, particularly the cities, was going to Now, of course, if you've been tracking the average waistline of the average American, I think food shortages is not exactly where the problem is.
It is really excess food that is the issue.
And so this constant fear-mongering, when we are afraid, we tend to turn to the group.
Of course, right? Because fear in our evolution usually meant proximity of predation or war.
And, you know, if you're encircled by lions, you kind of need your tribe to help fight them off.
And if there's a war and you go into it alone, you're going to lose and die.
And so the reason why they're constantly bombarding with all this fear porn, they call it, right?
Constantly bombarding with all this fear is that what that does is it activates your amygdala.
Like your fight or flight mechanism gets kicked into high gear and then nobody mulls over abstract philosophical questions when being chased by a bear.
What do they do? They call that for help.
And the willingness to subjugate individual identity To group approval is foundational to our evolution because we either couldn't survive directly on our own or even if we survived on our own, we wouldn't reproduce if ostracized by the tribe.
And so not only for personal but also for sexual, as we've talked about for sexual survival, we are programmed particularly in times of danger to subsume our individual identity in order to gain the protection of the tribe.
And so when you continually propagandize children and particularly young adults with all of this end-of-the-world scenario, you keep them in a constant state of agitation, which means they're much more susceptible then to joining the tribe because they feel like, oh, without collective action, we can't save the planet from global warming.
We can't fight institutionalized racism, sexism or whatever is going on.
And this constant sense of threat It's really, really dangerous.
And that's why the people who push back against these kinds of threats, you know, I've been skeptical.
I mean, I accept, yeah, okay, CO2 is plant food and it does raise the temperature.
I get all of that. But, you know, the idea that you need some massive government program to deal with these kinds of things is not the case.
So when people try and intervene in this fear porn and they try to, again, put themselves into that quarter second Well, that creates a sense of fear and panic and anxiety and hostility towards men that, by the way, completely lowers the birth rate.
But also when people come along and say, well, you know, statistically women choose lower paying occupations and they do take time off to have kids and, you know, you go through the whole, you know, we know this one inside and out, the whole litany of, you know, the world may be a lot more fair than you think it is.
That's always a bit of a challenge, right?
But those of us who try to intervene into the fear porn and widen the gap between stimulus and response, which is the only place where civilized discourse and individuality can occur, Well, we are enormously attacked for that because, you know, as the old saying from Shakespeare goes, come not between the beast and its prey.
And the prey is the amygdala.
And the beast is endless fear propaganda.
And those of us who try to stand between the beast and its prey, well, we become the prey for the time being.
And recognizing that that's kind of the price of pushing back against propaganda takes a bit of getting used to, but it seems to be pretty consistent.
I grew up in an era...
Where we read On the Beach, Andromeda Strain.
In the James Bond movies, there was always a crazy doctor.
I know even Mike Myers created a parody with Dr.
Evil. There's always someone with their finger on the button that's going to destroy the world.
And there's this nihilistic kind of thing going on.
I was from a generation that went to the basement of the school and ducked down along the hallway in the basement because you never know when Russia was going to attack.
And that probably ended for me around 1968-69, but I grew up doing that through my elementary years.
The first time you and I spoke, I talked about people that were saying, I would never want to bring a child into this world, and you and I developed that.
And I asked you to look into the camera and speak to the audience about that.
And you gave this wonderful timeline of world history within just a couple minutes basically saying there's never been a perfect time to have children.
Give that speech again for my audience.
And it's funny too because my first impetus for this came from a sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati back in the 80s, right?
This Arthur Carlson I think was his name, this old guy knocked up his middle-aged wife and they were discussing whether to have the child or not have the child or give it up for adoption.
And he said, these are troubled times.
And she said, people have been saying that for 5,000 years.
And it's true. Absolutely true.
If my grandparents had decided that the world was too dangerous to have my mother, who was born in Germany in 1937, I wouldn't be here.
So for everyone who is here, who lives, who tastes the sweet nectar of oxygen every moment of every day, Who has the capacity to think and reason and feel and argue passionately for the truth and what's right.
You're only here because your parents and your grandparents, your great-grandparents all the way back to the primordial ooze decided to say, screw danger.
We choose life. Screw risk.
We choose children.
Don't let bad people take away the greatest joy in life, which is the creation of life.
There is no joy Without life, there is no happiness without life in the human context.
I'm sure a lion feels some savage satisfaction when it rips the head off a zebra, but in terms of genuine, aesthetic, philosophical, deep moral joy, that does not exist without human beings.
And if you let the evildoers and the fear mongers strip you of your capacity to have children, to create life, you're taking a four billion year relay race and dropping it because you think you hear something in the woods.
We have amazing communications technology.
We're able to have this conversation and share it with what will eventually be hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
We've never had a greater chance or greater capacity to fight for virtue.
And for those of you who were younger who don't know what it was like beforehand, before the internet, I've lived both sides of the equation.
I've known what life is like before you had mass communications in a real practical, vivid sense.
And I thank the stars and the gods of capitalism every day that we do have this capacity.
So when you've been given the biggest weapon, why would you run away from the smallest war?
When your ancestors faced far greater foes with far lesser weapons and decided to fight and bring you into the existence, do not fail them.
Do not fail life. Do not fail your own capacity for happiness.
And do not spit at the struggle of four billion years that culminates in you by refusing to pay it forward.
And it will bring you not only great joy but great courage.
See, the reason they don't want you to have children is that you won't think about the future and you'll have less to fight for.
Children are arms, in a way, because they give you something very powerful to fight for.
And so they're just weakening you, turning you into a dead-end, hedonistic, full stop on the lengthy sentence of your lineage.
Don't let them do that.
Don't let them take from you the joy of cuddling a baby and getting up in the middle of the night to make sure they're okay and helping them ride their first bike and take their first steps and teach them how to swim and teach them about the world and be challenged and have them be skeptical of you in their teenage years and eye roll and all of that incredible development.
You know, there's this old story about Atlantis, right?
There's a city that sank into the sea.
Think of that in reverse.
Think of looking at an ocean. It's perfectly calm.
Seeing some bubbles and then seeing an entire city rise up from nothing.
That is what it's like watching your children's brains develop.
You're watching something that appears but comes from nothing.
A sperm and an egg.
And from that you get the most amazing uprising of a shining city of creativity and thought and independence and challenge.
And what an incredible journey that is to be on.
Don't give that up because people are trying to get you To give up your capacity for rational thought and happiness, and the stimulus is danger, and your response is genetic death, infertility, growing old, dying with regret, and being forgotten in history, having nobody who remembers you 20 minutes after you're dead.
Don't take that path.
Don't let them rob you of your birthright, literally.
Well, today certainly was a crossroads of hope, positivity, and optimism converging with Sanity, clarity, and reason.
I like to say that. So thank you for joining me today.
And I know my audience will enjoy your message.
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