All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 1, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:11
Concepts and Morality: A Philosophical Introduction
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I guess happy holidays, Merry Christmas to everyone.
It's the day after Christmas, the day of the sugar hangover and the general healing of the mass paper cuts that come from opening presents.
Actually, it's funny because we're not actually that much of a present family.
We try to bring presents to each other every day with our joy, but yeah, there's not so much on Christmas Day.
An interesting discussion has been floating around, around concepts and truth and so on.
So I thought I'd lay out a kind of framework.
Now that framework doesn't mean that it's the right way.
It's just a kickoff discussion piece, I suppose.
Because actually my very first video was about concept formation.
So it's something that I've been interested in for decades and decades.
And I find really a completely fascinating topic.
I thought we could take it for a spin and see if we can knock a few of these challenges out of the ballpark.
Seems like a good plan.
It's a nice way to spend a morning on Christmas Boxing Day, I suppose.
We'll unpack concepts on Boxing Day.
Boom!
There's your statutory dad joke for the start of your day.
Concepts, oh man, they are, I mean, they're the big thing that we have, right?
They're the big, powerful mojo that we have.
And if we can figure them out, I think we gain great traction in terms of, I mean, not just obviously truth, which is very important, but in terms of virtue, which is even more important in many ways.
So concepts, the first thing that I was asked, I always think when I come across a philosophical concept, my approach is kind of like an anthropologist or an archaeologist.
An archaeologist is probably the best way, which is you find some weird implement someplace.
You just dig it around in usually the hills of Montana, it would seem, and you come across some strange Stone Age implement, right?
And so your first question, I suppose, is, okay, well, what would this be used for?
Let's say it's some curved hook or some corkscrew thing or whatever.
In order to figure out what it is, you first have to figure out what its purpose is.
because when human beings create things, they create things with intentionality, with the goal, of course, of trying to achieve some end, usually in a more efficient way.
So it's hard to run and grab a deer because they're pretty fast and they kick.
But if you get a spear or a bow and arrow, then you can kill the deer at a distance and then leisurely walk up and gorge yourself on its soon-to-be-fright innards.
So if you can't figure out the purpose of something, it's really hard to define what it is.
Otherwise, you just have to say weird corkscrew thing or hooked thing.
But once you can figure out, you know, if you come across a scythe, then you would not really know what it was until you figured out what it was for.
I mean, you'd know what it was in terms of a physical description, but that doesn't really help you that much.
So if you figure out that the scythe is something that you use to cut down crops prior to machinery, then you say, okay, at least I know what this is as a whole.
At least I know what this is for.
And once you know what it's for, then you know what it is.
So without a purpose, you can't really have a definition.
So the first thing that I do when I look at something like concepts or truth is say, not what is it, but what is its purpose?
Because you can't really design anything or you can't really understand anything without Understanding its purpose.
I mean, if you find a box that shows a map on a computer screen, you say, oh, OK, this is a GPS.
OK, so what is it about something that displays a map?
You don't really understand it until you know what its purpose is, which is its purpose is to humiliate you in front of your wife by constantly saying, recalculating, because you're too busy discussing philosophy, to follow the traffic witch's directions from inside the magic box.
So, the question is, before what is concepts, what are concepts, what are the purpose?
Or what is the purpose of concepts?
And we're going to go singular, plural, pendulum here.
What is the purpose of concepts?
Very interesting question.
So, once we understand, I think, the concepts, I mean, obviously they're abstractions, and they are universalizations from particulars.
Right?
Universalizations from particulars.
So I'm currently pacing, because that's how I do my best thinking.
And every step I take, I assume massive amounts of things.
You know, you break down these assumptions.
And they're largely based on concepts.
So every time I take a step, I assume that there's going to be gravity.
I assume that the atoms of my foot are not going to magically pass through the atoms of the floor.
I assume just a massive number of things that are generally universal.
We don't drive to another city and say, well, I don't know if gravity is going to be operating there, right?
So we have a concept called gravity, or weight.
We have a concept called resistance, which is that atoms don't pass through other atoms, even though, you know, one of these tricky things like there's so much space between atoms, it's like Galaxies colliding, they just kind of pass through each other.
But of course, I think it's the strong forces or the weak forces, I think the strong forces that prevent atoms from passing through each other.
So we have these concepts and the individual instances that we have, which is every time I take a step in my entire life, you know, 54 years, plus every time I take a step, the same thing happens.
My foot doesn't go through the floor and gravity operates.
So there's resistance and there's weight.
That is the basics of it, right?
So the concept is something which we use not for the past but for the future.
So if I lived in some insane schizophrenic universe where gravity reversed while my feet sometimes went through the floor, some nightmare Salvador Dali painting or something like that, then I would only be tempted to make concepts in order to self-abuse myself with Delusions of consistency, which will result in actual inconsistency.
My foot would sometimes go through the floor, sometimes I would float up.
And this is one of the reasons we know we're dreaming, rather than being awake, is that lack of consistency and concepts don't apply, really, in dreams.
Because they're trying to get an emotional truth, which is often contradictory, rather than a physical truth, which tends to be empirical and scientific.
So concepts are really around prediction.
What are they for?
Well, you don't build a scythe for last year's harvest, right?
You don't build a spear for last month's hunt.
You build a spear for the future.
You build a spear or a scythe with the anticipation of achieving something through that tool in the future.
So if we look at concepts and we say, okay, we kind of know what they are.
They're abstractions, universalized abstractions from individual empirical experiences.
Then we have a sense, we can then ask what they're for.
And what they're for has to have something to do with survival.
And we know that because although, see, there's the instance, there's the concept, and then there's the concept about the concept.
Or you could say the meta-concept.
And I'm sorry to be annoying, but it'll be pretty clear if you use this language, what I'm talking about.
So we have individual weight, right?
You pick up a ball, you drop it, it falls to the ground.
That's your individual instance, right?
That's not a concept.
That's just, it's a fact.
It's a thing that happens.
The concept is, okay, everything has weight and everything falls to the ground.
That's the concept, but we share that with the animals.
You know, you throw a ball and the dog can figure out where the ball is going to land and can predict every particular instance.
of what has happened before, but because you're building things empirically, it's pretty tough to apply these concepts to new, completely untested experiences.
So we have the instance, or the experience, we have the concept, which is weight, and then we have the meta-concept, which is there is a property called gravity, which is common to all things, We can measure it, we can understand it mathematically, we can predict it to such a degree that we can send a probe from here and have it go past Jupiter some months or years from now.
Everything that is alive experiences the instance, right?
I mean, even single-celled organisms will try to reproduce and will eat and all of that, right?
So they have that empirical understanding of their immediate environment.
That's what every organism does.
The higher organisms can do more predictive stuff.
So rather than just waiting for a food source to impinge upon your senses, It's a hyena or jackal.
You can go out and hunt for the food and try and find it rather than just waiting for it to show up in your lair or whatever, right?
And you have to have concepts in order to do that.
You have to have a differentiator between, you know, creatures that are bigger than you and dangerous to you versus creatures that are smaller to you and or not dangerous to you that you can attack and eat and so on, right?
But only human beings have the meta concepts.
Which is the abstraction of the concept away from immediate sense data, away from empirical experience, so that the concept can be applied to things that we've never experienced.
Right?
I mean, that's really... I always sort of wonder what happens, like, so, you know, you have a dog, right?
And the dogs love to play throw-catch with the ball.
Yet, if you take a ball and you just put it in front of a puppy, the puppy may try to eat it, but it's not particularly excited by it, because it doesn't have the association of great fun and play and so on, right?
It's the same thing with a leash.
Dogs often don't like leashes, unless, of course, the leash leads them to go and play in a dog park, which they love, so you bring the leash out and the dog gets very excited.
The word walk, right?
Dogs will understand the word walk to know that it is going to be a fun thing.
You're going to go for a walk, stretch your legs.
But puppies, if you say the word walk to puppies, they have no idea what you're talking about.
They don't care, right?
So dogs do have this association of the word to the action, or the object to the action.
The word walk, or the object ball, or it could be frisbee that you throw, or a stick even, right?
And you can actually see there are some funny videos of dogs online.
And somebody has set up a mannequin, and the dog will take a ball and drop it in the lap of a mannequin, because you drop the ball where the human being is, and the human being will throw the ball in their experience.
And the dogs, of course, get quite confused, right?
Because it's not playing out the way that it should.
So dogs will begin to associate that.
And I remember a friend of mine had a pond when we were growing up, and he said, oh, it's 4 o'clock.
We've got to go feed the fish, right?
Is this their dining hour?
He's like, no, no, but if you go at a particular time of day to the edge of the pond, then the fish will gather in anticipation.
They'll know, they'll be there already because they've associated that time of day with feeding and they kind of got it imprinted in there.
But you know, they're not going to complain that you're late if you show up at 4.30 or whatever, right?
So animals will develop concepts In that they can use to predict immediate sense experience into the future, right?
Zebras don't sort of sit there and say, well that lion could be a vegetarian or that lion could not be hungry.
One is possible, one is not, but it's too much of a risk either way, right?
So they assume that all the lions, all the zebras are safe and all the lions are dangerous, right?
Based upon instincts and prior chasing.
There's also funny videos online where A dog is eating some food and someone will come up with a pretend dog, will have the dog, like a stuffed dog, they will have the stuffed dog pretend to eat the food and then fall over dead and then the dog will spit out its food because it says, oh my gosh, this food killed that dog, I don't want to eat it anymore.
So there is processing of abstractions.
The word walk, the ball, the dog doesn't care about the ball, the dog cares about the throwing and the chasing and the catching and the returning and all that.
So animals will work with concepts, but they cannot abstract the concept to entirely new situations.
To entirely new situations.
Human beings can, right?
I mean, the first time you sail across an ocean, Well, nobody's ever done that before, right?
So you're taking your abstractions and navigation, using your sextant, a rude word for kids, but I managed to survive it, and you take your abstractions, you can apply them to entirely new situations.
And that, I mean, that's called progress, right?
I mean, that's called progress.
And this is sort of what I'm talking about, the morality of things, right?
So universally preferable behavior is taking the morals that we all accept when we're little and we all accept in our personal lives, which is really, it's kind of an animal situation, right?
It's an animal situation where we say, well, the morals are just, you know, I don't like Being stolen from.
I don't like being hit.
I don't like any of that stuff.
So I'm going to say that that stuff's bad and so on.
That's really like a dog with a ball.
Well, the immediate experience of this has been good and all that, right?
So I anticipate that the future experience will be good.
It's very sense-based and it's not human.
The way that we work with ethics is not human.
It is at animal levels of immediacy and experience.
Now, of course, the process of science is to take immediate sense data and extrapolate it to the universal.
And through that we surmount the limitations of our sense data.
An example, of course, obvious one being that the world looks flat but it is in fact round.
So we take our immediate sense data and we universalize it.
Everything that we see, the planets, the moon, the sun, it's all round.
So, you know, it raises the likelihood That the Earth will be round.
Once we got a sense of how the solar system was formed, that you had these giant bands of matter surrounding the Sun, which then, over time, you know, they bumped into each other, they got bigger and bigger, and as they got bigger they attracted more, you ended up with these clumps of matter called planets.
Once you understand that, then you understand that in a void, in a gravity-less situation, There is zero chance, zero chance whatsoever that matter will coalesce into something like a frisbee and not something like a ball.
I'm sure I don't need to go into the math or the physics about that, but once we understand there's no gravity out in space and things formed, the solar system, the planets formed over billions of years, And matter kind of clumped together.
And as it clumped together and bumped into each other, it attracted more matter.
And the way that that's always going to play out is in a sphere.
I mean, it might not be a perfect sphere.
Of course, there's going to be rotational elements, the centrifugal forces around the middle.
And so you're going to end up with a slightly flattened sphere and all that.
But it's not going to be flat, right?
Now, if the universe was created by a conscious entity for the purpose of housing human beings, well, then that's different.
Right, that's different.
I remember thinking when I was, you know, hiking in the woods or places like that, how, and this is kind of just how my brain works, how odd a structure would it have to be for me to assume it was man-made?
Right?
Because, you know, every now and then you'll see a tree that's, you know, perfectly straight.
Okay, that's just a random chance, right?
Or you'll see a piece of wood on top of a piece of another wood, right?
Okay, well.
So how much That's an interesting question, right?
At what point do you say, okay, that's more than a coincidence, this must be man-made, right?
So, I mean, we see trees broken all the time, particularly here in Canada, right?
As the snow and the ice weigh the trees down and they fall over, especially when there's an ice storm, it can be brutal.
So when you see a tree, it's splintered, right?
A tree is never going to break perfectly flat, right?
And what I mean by that is like if you take a saw and you go through a tree, you're going to sever it and it's going to have a completely flat tabletop, right?
That's never going to happen in nature because we understand that the way things break randomly in nature, they don't snap off with a perfect top, right?
They'll just splinter and it won't even be detached.
So if you see a tree stump with a perfectly flat top, that's a human being, right?
It's a human being there.
Of course, you know, people could say, well, but, you know, it's the one in a billion jerks.
They drive me crazy.
Oh, man.
Oh, they drive me crazy.
It's the one in a billion people, right?
And it would even be that, right?
So you could say, well, theoretically, right?
And, you know, I get the possibility, right?
So theoretically, theoretically, You could have a tree that would splinter and give you a flat tabletop.
It could happen once in a billion universes, blah blah blah.
So when I say that it's impossible, I say, what I mean is, it's the quantum physics argument, right?
Brownian motion could put all of the molecules of air at the top of the ceiling and leave nothing for you and you could choke to death, but does that mean that you go into every room?
With scuba gear or a giant snorkel.
Of course not.
Of course you don't do that, right?
Although it could happen.
Could happen, right?
In a room, if somebody chokes to death because the air has just magically vanished from their end of the room, but your end of the room is fine, and they grab at their own throats and They leave mottled marks on their throat and then whatever, right?
And then they choke to death and then someone comes into the room and there's somebody with finger marks on their neck who's choked to death.
How many of us are going to say, well, you know, it could be the case that all the oxygen vanished from their side of the room and blah, blah, blah.
You know, there's proof beyond a reasonable doubt, right?
And then that's, there's never a defense called Brownian motion of air molecules means that.
There isn't going to be breathing available to that person on the other side of the room, although I'm fine, of course, right?
It's just not.
Or, you know, it could be theoretically possible, of course, that if you need shelter, you're out in the woods, it could be theoretically possible that a windstorm would come along and assemble a perfect log cabin for you.
It could happen, right?
Once in a billion universes.
But that's not how anybody That's not how anybody operates, right?
I mean, when I was working up north, it could be the case that you dig anywhere and find a big, giant, massive lump of gold or a diamond, like the Cullinan diamond, which was unearthed by somebody sticking his walking stick into the ground just having to dig up this giant diamond.
But that's just not how people work.
You know, when I was working at North looking for gold, you had a whole specific process.
I won't get into it here, but it was a big, big old process that was necessary to find the gold.
And you say, ah, yes, but you could just dig randomly and once in a million universes, you'll find a giant mine.
But nobody, nobody lives that way.
Some, you know, the one in a billion jerks, you know, it's not impossible.
It's like, but can we actually deal in the practical world here.
Because, this is what I always say to people, like, look at what you're doing rather than what you're saying.
Because the answer is almost always in what you're doing, rather than what you're saying.
So people who say, ah yes, but the tree could splinter with a perfect flat tabletop, you know, one in a million universes, they'll be like, well yes, that's true, and certainly, one in a million universes, a various set of circumstances could occur wherein I hear that argument without you saying it.
Right, something could fall far away, something else could fall and they would just happen to assemble that argument that you're making and it would then impact upon my ear or there could be some random glitch on the internet that suddenly produces that typing or I could have a virus that produces that typing if it's a text message or whatever it is.
The people who say, well, you know, one in a million universes could happen, they never rely on that one in a million universes situation to make their argument, right?
They will consciously make that argument because they won't rely on the one in a million universes.
So, if they don't act upon the one in a million universes hypothesis, then I don't care what they say about one in a million universes, because they don't believe it themselves.
They don't believe it themselves, right?
Or, you know, it's far more likely that I have some massive heart attack or get hit by a meteor while in the middle of making an argument, but people don't stop and say, well, you know, one in a million, I guess, you know, well, it's a one in a million chance he could die before the end of this argument, so I'm not going to bother having the argument.
No, no, no.
They act on the probabilities that make life possible, and so I don't really care about the improbability.
So you've got to watch out for those one in a million trolls.
I'm sorry if we have any of them.
You know, it's the actually guy, or the technically guy, or technically, right?
So, if you're in the woods and you see a tree that's fallen over with a tabletop, then you know for sure that that's a human being.
Even beavers wouldn't be that precise, right?
Or if you've ever been in the woods and you've come across an old stack of cordwood, right, like people have just cut stuff up.
I guess the winter wasn't that cold, they never got around to it.
So it's all flat-ended wood that's sort of stacked there.
Then you know for sure that human beings went out there, cut wood, and they never used it, never bothered to clear it up.
Why would you, right?
Just let it return to the earth or whatever.
So when it comes to concepts in the realm of morality, We are still in the sense data.
We are still in the world looks flat.
Because we have not taken our concepts of morality and universalized them.
And there's two reasons for that.
One is that it's dangerous to do so, as we as a community know from this year and the last couple of years and de-platforming and so on.
Number one, it's dangerous to do so.
And number two, which is kind of a corollary to that, there are huge power structures in the world that are reliant upon this lack of universalization.
If you look at the degree to which religion rules societies where concepts have not been universalized, And then you look at the degree to which religion falls away when the concepts, through science in general, get universalized.
We can see that.
Or look at the aristocracy, right?
The aristocracy relied upon religious cosmology when that religious cosmology was undermined and eventually, well, destroyed, right?
I mean, it's a sort of flat, Earth-centered universe that's been completely discredited.
And as a result, religion lost a good deal of its power, as a result the aristocracy that was propped up by religious commandments in that God appointed the king and his agents to rule over mere humanity, then what happened was the priests lost a lot of power and The aristocracy lost a lot of power, and a lot of giant, horrible messes and benefits came out of that.
Technology advanced, and morality was largely destroyed.
So, unfortunately, it's been a bit of a mixed bag, as we all know.
So, in the realm of morality, we are in the realm of immediate sense data, and it's very dangerous to extrapolate morality from sense data to universals.
Universally preferable behavior and as you can see there's a lot of well a lot of people who ignore it people who advance I think David Gordon did this this advance these really lazy trashy garbage arguments against it refused to engage in any kind of productive debate or anything like that and to universalize Can be very dangerous, right?
To universalize gravity, to at least get a sun-centered solar system where the Earth is round.
Well, it got a lot of early scientists tortured and killed by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities.
Universalizing is pretty dangerous because power is built on exceptions, right?
Power is built On exceptions.
I can't steal $5,000 from you, give you $2,000 and be called a generous hero, but the government can do it and they can call it a stimulus bill, right?
I mean, it's all nonsense.
It's all very ridiculous.
But pointing it out, of course, is very dangerous because people like being able to steal $5,000 if they only have to give back, well, in this case, only $600 based upon whatever's going to happen with Trump and Pelosi and so on.
So, with morality, we'll say to kids, don't steal from this kid next to you.
But we won't abstract don't steal into a universal because then we run into the state, we run into taxation and so on.
We will say to a woman who's being relentlessly abused by her husband, you should leave that relationship.
But we won't abstract that into we have the right, if not necessarily the obligation, to get out of abusive relationships.
Then Adult children have the right not to see abusive parents.
If you try and abstract it to that degree, well then you go from a good guy helping women to a bad guy destroying families for, you know, fun and profit as the characterization goes.
Universalization is tough if we say the moral obligations in unchosen relationships.
Let me rewrite that.
The moral obligations In relationships where there's a power imbalance, the moral obligations tend to be higher.
Moral standards tend to be higher in relationships where there's a power imbalance.
In that way, if the secretary asks out her boss, that's not as bad, because she can't fire him.
That's not as bad as the boss asking out his secretary, because I guess this is back when they had secretaries, right?
But if the boss asks out his secretary, that's bad, you see, because he has power over her.
And when you have power over someone, there's a conflict of interest as to whether they can say yes or no.
If you can fire your secretary and you ask her out, if she says no and you fire her, then that's an abuse of power, right?
So where we have An imbalance of power where one party is far more powerful or more powerful than the other.
There's a standard of care and virtue that is much higher.
But parents can hit their children or parents can abuse their children even though we may disapprove of it in the instance we have a really tough time as a society disapproving of it in the abstract.
Of course my argument has been for many many years that because parents have the greatest power there's no greater power imbalance in the world than that between parent and child.
And so the very highest moral standards should be applied to parents and their behavior, not the lowest moral standards, because adults can't hit adults, but parents can often hit children.
Or, you know, we wouldn't say to adults, well, you know, the government should pick your profession and where you live.
But we have no problem saying to kids, the government is going to tell you where you have to go to school.
And what you educated your parents and you have no choice.
We would never say to women, well, the government is going to choose who you marry.
But we will say to kids, we're going to choose your educational system.
And so, and of course, this is why communism is spreading, because kids grow up in a communist environment, completely socialist communist environment.
And that's what's so tragic about, I mean, just the example of America, right, formed in the late 18th century, and within 60 years or so when not only was the Constitution completely trampled but the government took over education and of course it's all been culturally downhill from there to a large degree.
So when it comes to concepts we have the immediate experience I feel bad and angry and sad if someone steals from me.
To the empirical concept which is stealing from me or stealing in general that's wrong To the meta-concept, which is, stealing is universally wrong.
In other words, we go from, I dropped this ball on my foot, that hurts, to, everything falls, to, there's a concept called gravity that is universal, not just in my immediate sense data, but in the universe as a whole.
And that allows us to fly to the moon and back, right?
And moving from immediate sense data, which we share with all living things, to sense concepts.
Sorry, I'm still working out the language here.
I think sense concepts is a good way to do it.
To sense concepts, which we share with the animals.
To pure abstractions.
They're not pure though, because they're still based upon empirical information.
Okay, so let's go from sense data to sense concepts to universals.
The first is not really a concept.
You know, the paramecium encounters food, it envelops it and absorbs it, right?
So that's not a concept.
That's simply a stimulus response we share with all animals.
Is it a concept for dogs to know where the frisbee is going to land?
I would say that it's an empirical concept because they're able to make predictions based upon past experience, but you can't make those predictions in the absence of past experience.
It's sort of like playing piano, right?
Nobody sits down and just knows how to play piano.
But if they practice, they will learn and they will be able to play piano.
Two are pure abstractions.
So, all animals, well, most animals can hear sound.
Some animals, like dogs and humans, can learn to respond Pavlovian-style to stimulus-responsive language.
You ring the bell and the dog will drool, if it's associated with that.
Or the fish will come at 4 p.m.
from my friend's pond when I was a kid.
Or if you say the word, Wookies, to dogs, the dogs will get very excited because they know what's coming.
And that's based upon experience.
And then there's the actual concepts which only human beings can have.
Only human beings can have the actual concepts, the universals, which allow us to predict behavior Outside, not just of our own immediate sense experience, but the sense experience of all human beings.
I mean, no human being has gone to Jupiter, but we sent a probe and got pictures there, right?
So we can go beyond sense experience because we've got pure abstractions.
Now, we've got those pure abstractions from sense experience, but we've gone through the process of universalizing them.
And I think the glory and terror of this show, to a large degree, is how much I have taken The immediate concepts, the sense concepts of stealing is bad, of stealing is wrong.
And said, okay, well let's do to morals what science did to physical laws.
And say, okay, well we understand them from our immediate experience, but what happens if we extrapolate them to everything?
To everything!
What happens if the speed of light is constant?
What happens if Gravity is universal.
What if we differentiate between things made by consciousness and things made by nature?
Because, of course, in the past, since God made the world, there was no such thing as made by nature.
And so we'd be walking in the woods and maybe you'd see the tree that was cut off perfectly, but The trees as a whole were still made by consciousness, in fact, made by a vastly superior consciousness to your own, i.e.
God's infinitely superior consciousness to your own.
So, what science did was it said, okay, there's the man-made, there's the made-with-purpose, And then there's everything else, right?
So the man-made is what human beings make.
Made with purpose would be a bird's nest.
It would be a beaver's dam.
It would be, you know, the things of nature.
A rabbit's warren, and so on.
I guess the guy who discovered that's name was Warren, I would imagine.
So there's the man-made.
There's the animal-made.
And then there's everything else, right?
I mean, so a human being will make a house, or a rocket.
A beaver will make a dam.
But nobody made the moon.
Right?
Now, when you take the hand of consciousness off the natural world, then you begin to study the laws of physics as true universals.
Now, once they're true universals, then you don't allow for miracles, divine intervention, you name it, right?
And this is the, you know, what I said, the age of miracles is over.
Well, the age of miracles is over when science became universal and was accurate and truthful about the origins of the universe.
And so once scientists were able to carve not man-made into the natural world, then it could begin to study those laws.
Not studying the mind of God, although that did motivate some early scientists and still some current scientists.
The head of the Human Genome Project is a staunch Christian and believes that he's studying the mind of God as he is studying the natural world.
Carving off nature as a whole from its origins in the mind and hands of God is what founded the development of modern science, but unfortunately, because the purpose of God was not to explain the physical world, but to create moral rules prior to philosophy, and in fact, in general, it was to create moral rules that served the leaders, which is why there is, render unto God what is God's, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Right?
So you've got a contradiction there.
Thou shalt not steal, but the Roman Emperor can use force to take from you.
But because he's appointed by God or whatever, then... And I explore this quite a bit in the story of Almost, about how dangerous it is, for one of the characters in particular, how dangerous it is to have fundamental breaks in your moral rules.
And it's one of the worst endings of any character in literary history, unfortunately.
So once you could get the hand of consciousness out of that, which is nature, and this, of course, was the amazing thing that happened in the mid-19th century with Darwin and Darwin's Bulldog, who promoted his arguments and his ideas.
Unfortunately, I never got a Darwin's Bulldog for UPB, but that's neither here nor there at the moment.
UPB is a gateway to the future.
It is not.
a power in the present.
But what happened with evolution was, of course, you know, God made the animals.
There's that old Gary Larson cartoon where God is rolling plasticine in his hands to make snakes.
And he says, hey, these are easy, right?
Because that's the first thing that every kid does is make a snake, right?
So easy.
So evolution was where we said, okay, well, there's There's a complex result without a conscious intent.
In other words, we can talk about the growth of complexity in species without a maker.
In other words, the species are not trees cut perfectly in the woods.
The species evolved in a sort of chaotic and semi-random manner.
Selection pressures are not semi-random, but mutations tend to be.
Beneficial mutations being retained tends to be how it operates.
Taking the man-made or the animal-made out of the equation is where real progress comes from.
To truly universalize immediate experiences from, I don't like being stolen from, to stealing is wrong, to theft is morally universally wrong.
I don't like being punched, which is true of all animals.
Punching is wrong, which is reciprocal empathy, right?
Don't punch me, I won't punch you.
You don't like it any more than I do or whatever.
To true universals.
And We are barely even at the human stage, the early human stage of morality.
And of course, this is because it serves so well the power of the bee.
So when it comes to concepts, I think that the purpose, the first thing we need to do is sort of figure out what are they for?
Well, they're for the future, they're for predictability, they're for survival.
You don't plant wheat and then say, well, I'm going to get nettles or poison ivy, right?
They have to have a concept of seeds and planting and all that.
So that you can harvest, so you can survive.
So concepts are around universalizing, even if it's just at the empirical level.
In other words, I don't have to know that there's gravity on Jupiter in order to be able to walk around my room.
Right?
Because I just have to have a concept that gravity is universal to my sense experience.
I don't have to know that it's universal throughout the universe.
And if you've ever, you know, like there are places in Florida and so on, they have these boardwalks over the swamp.
Why?
Because the swamp is kind of uncertain.
And of course it has alligators and all that, but the swamp is kind of uncertain.
It may look solid, but you can step through it, whereas the man-made boardwalk over the swamp is not going to fall apart, or at least probably not, most likely not.
And so you want to separate the natural from the man-made from the natural.
You need to differentiate that in order to be able to walk through a Florida swamp without Falling in, getting stuck, getting gushed, getting leeches, getting whatever is down there, alligators and so on.
So you need to be able to differentiate demand made from the natural just in a walk in Florida swamps so that you have predictability on where you're going to step because the purpose of the walkway, the purpose of the boardwalk is so that you can step with certainty into the future In a way that you could never do if it was just a swamp, because even if the swamp looked possible, there would be these little sinkholes and weird things where you just couldn't get through, or whatever it is.
And of course it separates you from the creatures that are dangerous, both small and large, in the swamp.
So, I think if we look at concepts, again, but there's certainly abstractions of individual sense data, and for what?
What's the purpose?
So we can predict the future.
It gives us power over the future to abstract principles from our immediate sense data in the present.
The greater those abstractions, the more power we get.
The greater the abstractions, the more power we get.
But, the greater the abstractions, the more we collide into the existing social and political powers that rely upon the exceptions.
I've talked about this before.
I'll just touch on it briefly and take some questions or comments from people if you like.
So, why is theft discouraged?
Well, theft is discouraged because if everyone steals, there's nothing to steal anymore.
If everyone steals, there's no excess productivity to steal because people don't bother.
Like, if a farmer knows that every single shred or scrap of excess food that he grows, more than he needs just to keep his family alive, if every scrap of excess food that he grows is going to be stolen from him, This is socialism or communism or just the warlord state or Genghis Khan style or whatever.
If the farmer knows every bit of excess food is going to be stolen from him, he simply won't grow any excess food.
He won't.
So if you allow for theft in general, you don't end up with anything to steal from.
You don't end up with anyone to steal from or anything to steal.
So you have to.
oppose theft among the subjects so that they will produce enough access that you can tax them and they won't die.
But you can't universalize theft as immoral in a UPB style because then the mechanism that you're going to use to steal the excess productivity of those whose property rights you're supposedly protecting, i.e.
taxation, well, they won't Like it, right?
I mean, the American Revolution had it half right, right?
They said, no taxation without representation.
Okay, so two of those four words are correct, and two of them aren't.
I'm sure you can figure out which is which.
So I would say, concepts are abstractions and they're at three levels.
Immediate sense data.
Sorry, there are two levels.
The first, which is necessary, but not sufficient for the subsequent step.
The first is you've got to experience something in the world, right?
You know, paramecium envelops food or whatever.
Then you get empirical concepts, which is you can hunt a rabbit, you know what it is.
You can flee a lion, you know what it is.
And you can protect your young, you know what that is, you know what your young is.
The male lion knows if the children are not his or the baby lions are not his and will kill them if the original father is driven off or killed.
So you have sense data, you have sense concepts which give you predictability in the immediate sphere of your senses, and then you have universals which give you the greatest power but also expose you to the greatest danger because universals Wash up against and threaten the existing power structures in the world that rely upon being accepted from ethics they claim to be universal.
So I hope that's a reasonably interesting and useful intro.
And I'm certainly happy, you know, comments, criticisms, whatever is going on for you.
I've got about another 20-25 minutes before I've got another call, but I'm certainly happy to hear what you guys have to say if you would like to Dive in and let me know what you think.
I'll mute now in case anybody has something.
I'm not sure if anyone's talking or... Did I nail it perfectly the first time?
Is that possible?
Yeah, go ahead, my friend.
No, I mean, it was airtight to me.
I was trying to think of, like, what happens if someone wants to be stolen from, but then I'm like, well, that wouldn't apply to their entire property, right?
That would only apply to stuff that they don't care for.
And then, like, you can't rape the willing.
So, like, I was looking for things and I couldn't find anything, so...
Well, that's good.
And just to be more precise, oh, I hate to be that annoying precision guy after just talking about the one in a billion guys, but it's not that.
But you can't want to be stolen from.
Because when you're stolen from, the property is taken against your will.
If you want your property to be taken, you can't be stolen from.
And the example, which I mentioned before, but if you're new, right, is if I put a table on my front lawn with a sign that says, take me, And I have a camera, right?
And then someone stops their car and says, oh, I like that table, puts it in the back of their car and drives off with it.
And then I go to the police and say, hey man, somebody just stole my table.
What would the police say?
Yeah, right.
Well, I was thinking more of like, you leave a ladder on the side of the house and you forget to bring it in because you're too lazy or it's too heavy or whatever.
And then someone takes it.
And some people would be like, well, that's really unfortunate, but they, like you said, it's basically like they left it for sale sign, even though they didn't, it was on their property line.
No, no, no, no.
I can't, I can't go with you there.
I really can't go with you there.
And I'll just give you a personal example.
Right.
So.
Before my wife and I got married, I borrowed her vacuum cleaner.
I'm not even going to go into what my place looked like, but I was a bachelor and I was a creative guy, so it wasn't exactly eat-off-the-floor clean.
That's post-marriage.
So she lent me her vacuum cleaner, and then I was returning it to her.
I had a whole bunch of stuff to bring to my car.
I lived in an apartment building at the time.
And so I kind of wrestled everything out of the car.
I left the vacuum cleaner by the elevator.
I literally was gone like two minutes to my car and back to get the vacuum cleaner.
The vacuum cleaner was gone.
Now someone could say, oh, well, yeah, but you just left it by the elevator.
Surely that was, you know, free, blah, blah, blah, right?
Anyway, so I put signs up everywhere saying, listen, if you thought this was a free vacuum cleaner, I understand where you're coming from, but I was just heading to my car.
I was coming back.
And what happened was, the very next day I opened my...
apartment door and and right there in the hallway is the vacuum cleaner right so somebody may have thought that it was a free vacuum cleaner even though there was no sign there saying take me the idea that somebody would just give away a good vacuum cleaner by leaving it by an elevator kind of strains credibility so somebody just had an impulse that oh this is probably free I desperately need a vacuum cleaner I'm broke I'm poor or whatever and they took it and once they found out that it was not in any way shape or form fitting into the category of something that they thought was
I want to be taken, then they returned it.
So, I think a ladder by the house?
No, you can't.
It's something that's on someone's property if it's not explicitly defined as, you know, take me, in which case it's usually on the edge of the property.
Nobody's going to put a take me sign on a table in their basement, usually, because nobody's going to see it, right?
It usually has to be on the edge of the property.
There has to be a sign that says, because you know what else is on the edge of your property is a fence, but nobody's going to take your fence and say, well, man, it's on the edge of your property, right?
Or even things that are outside your property you can't take, such as if you leave your garbage out on the sidewalk, then you can't, if you leave your garbage can out on the sidewalk for the garbage to be picked up, nobody can take your garbage can and say, well, it wasn't even your property because it's kind of understood it's got to be off your property to be picked up.
I think, in general, there has to be something pretty explicit that says, I want you to take this from me.
Well, what about, like, okay, say it's not explicitly stated, but what if it's like, oh, I mean, like, they're mad about it, but then they're like, it gives me an excuse to buy something I want.
Because I've seen that.
I've seen where people, oh, yeah, they stole my crappy 20-year-old ladder, but now I get a new one.
And they're like, I'm excited about that.
And I'm like, wait a minute, you kind of glanced over the issue that you just got stolen from, right?
And I guess people lie to themselves all the time, right?
Well, no, they were still stolen from, right?
Because there's the sort of definitional aspect of what's happening, and then there's the practical aspect of what's happening, right?
So, let's say that you're back when you could be in these things.
You're in a crowded cafe, and you're writing with two pencils, right?
You've got your backup pencil, right?
And then you go to the washroom, and you come back, and one of your pencils is missing.
Okay, well, Somebody took your pencil.
Somebody walked by and took your pencil.
Now, you have been stolen from.
Are you going to call the cops?
Are you going to do anything about it in particular?
Are you going to say, I need to review the security footage, right?
Well, you'd have the right, I suppose.
It would be a pretty low theft and I'm not sure what the punishment would be.
And it's certainly wrong to take your pencil.
But there is, you know, I mean there are cost benefits in life.
As you know, I'm sorry, you know that so I'm sort of pointing it out, which is that the cost benefit of a 10 cent pencil Versus how much time you're going to have to spend trying to figure out what's going on, and it's going to be like hundreds of hours for, you know, reviewing footage, going to the cops, making statements, a court trial, whatever, right?
And, or even if it's just 20 hours or whatever, a 10-cent pencil just ain't worth it.
And so, you're still stolen from, it's still a violation, but in terms of the practical consequences of that theft, it doesn't really, it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't add up to something that's actionable based upon the cost-benefit, if that makes sense.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
I was thinking about my boss had a $5,000 trailer stolen right out of a fenced-in storage yard when he first moved down here, and they had the guys on camera, and the police never did anything.
And so I think about like what you're saying is like for him that was a pretty decent hit, like that's a little more intense sense, but it's not like there's any justice.
Well, under the government.
This is way back, one of my employees, this is actually a good friend of mine, one of my employees that I worked with when I was a software executive, his brother had a Porsche stolen.
And he went to the cops, and he said, hey, I got a GPS tracker on this thing.
I know exactly where it is.
I can show you on the map.
And the cops were like, yeah, but, you know, just go to your insurance say it got stolen, right?
And he's like, no, no, no, but go get the thieves.
And they're like, basically, that's kind of dangerous.
You know, the chop shop, they could be armed.
My life is worth more than your car, especially since you're not going to have to pay for it, because apparently there's this magical pit called government spending and insurance.
It's like that old Kramer joke in Seinfeld.
They just write it off.
And Seinfeld's like, you don't even know what that means.
Just write it off.
And so yeah, of course, under the current system.
There's nothing.
I mean, nothing's going to happen.
But again, that's because the reason that you have very little protection for your property is because you have no protection for your property.
Because the government can force you to pay for the, quote, defense of your property rights, which is ridiculous.
Of course, you can't violate property rights in order to defend property rights.
It's like trying to rape a woman into virginity.
It just doesn't make any sense, right?
So the reason why our property rights are not defended is because our property rights are assaulted by being forced to pay for the system that doesn't do anything to protect us.
Right.
There's only one other thing that I wrote.
When you said something about the parent-child relationship or just the unequal balance of power, you said it tends to be that there's a higher standard there.
And I just wanted to... I mean, this is being the nitpicky, like you said, but is it tend or ought?
And does it matter?
I'm sorry, could you... tend or ought?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Yeah, you said it tends to be that you need a higher moral standard.
unequally balanced power.
Oh, no, I'm just so yeah, I mean, so, in general, and this is so, you know, you know, judo, right, where you use the momentum in general, you would use the momentum of your attacker, in order to take him down.
So the best way to have moral arguments is to take moral positions that somebody already agrees with, and then just universalize them.
And so when I'm making these cases, I will say things that society already accepts, and then just universalize them, right?
And so when it comes to, in general, society will say that where someone has more power over someone else, they're held to a higher moral standard.
And this is actually enshrined in Law.
I mean, if you look at the Me Too movement, right, the Me Too movement is, I mean, this is the sort of cover story, I mean, we can sort of talk about it in more detail another time, but the Me Too movement is, these men, these producers, these executives, they have so much power.
They can make or break someone's career.
And therefore, when they say, you know, I want to have sex with you, I want to go on a date with you, Because there are so many consequences.
And Mira Sorvino, Paul Sorvino's daughter, the late Paul Sorvino, I suppose, a very attractive and talented actress.
And she, I think, refused Harvey Weinstein's advances.
And I mean, he just He just toasted her career and she just kind of vanished from the scene for a long, long, long, long time.
I mean, the de-platforming is not new.
De-platforming is not new at all.
And it's, you know, ostracism is one of the powerful ways that provoking ostracism from others is a powerful way of controlling the human herd.
So the Me Too movement is if the woman asks out the producer, Even that could be suspect because maybe she's only doing it because he has so much power.
But if the woman asks out the producer, then that's not considered an abuse of power.
But because the producer is asking out the actress and he can control her career, he can cast her in a movie, he can get her blacklisted so that nobody will work with her, so he can destroy her entire career and aspirations and potentially you know millions or tens of millions of dollars in earnings and fame and financial security and he can just destroy that with a snap of his fingers so to speak.
So if you look at the patriarchy right the typical way that things are talked about that you know the man convinces his wife to stay home to not get educated to have kids and then he has complete financial control over her and so If he's mean to her, she's really helpless and she needs a lot of support because he's got all the power.
And so we judge him more harshly because he has so much power, just as we judge the producers more harshly or the bosses more harshly if they ask out subordinates and so on.
And most companies have explicit rules against dating subordinates.
And of course, you can get into some significant legal trouble if you abuse that power.
At least you're found to have been abusing that power in various mechanisms.
So if we say, like if people say, That, yes, I accept that where there's more power there should be higher moral standards.
Now, that's not a proof of it, but you don't need to prove something to someone that they already accept, if that makes sense.
I mean, I think it's good to have a proof, but there's very few people in the world who would say stealing is great.
I mean, just about everyone would say, yes, stealing is wrong.
Murder is wrong.
Rape is wrong.
Assault is wrong.
I mean, that's...
Where people get messed up is when you say, okay, if these things are wrong, are they wrong universally?
And if they're wrong universally, Then what's the status of taxation?
That's where they get messed up.
But in general, there's the UPB route, which is you prove things from the ground up, which is very helpful.
But conversationally, it's not a way of proving to someone beyond the shadow of a doubt, but it's showing them, this is basic Socratic method, right?
It's showing them the consequences of their own beliefs.
The greater the power disparity, now this is the basic syllogism, right?
The greater the power disparity, the higher the moral obligation on the part of the more powerful.
Okay?
Everybody accepts that, for the most part, right?
And the second is, there is no greater power disparity than that between parent and child.
Right?
That's the second, right?
And then the conclusion, or the third, is, therefore, parents have the highest Moral standards or parents are subject to the highest moral standards or requirements.
So the greater the power disparity, the higher the moral requirements.
There's no greater power disparity than that between parent and child.
Therefore, parents are subject to the highest moral standards.
And even if you say, okay, well, there could be an even higher one, which is, I don't know, an unjust totalitarian dictatorship and the victims in its gulag and so on.
Okay, right, fine, fine.
But, okay, it's still higher than the average, right?
And then you say, okay, well, then how is it possible that parents are allowed to hit children, but they're not allowed to hit other adults?
Because that's certainly having lower moral standards.
So how is it possible that parents are allowed to authorize unnecessary mutilation of male penises, but they can't ever do that to an adult, right?
So, I mean, that's just a way of beginning to dismantle the Smug, unfortunately stupid certainty.
Doesn't mean the people who have that certainty are stupid, they're just propagandized, but it is a stupid certainty that people have.
You say, okay, and this is what Socrates did, right?
Oh, you claim that this is true.
You claim that theft is wrong.
Okay, what is the status of taxation?
You claim that the more power people have, the higher the moral standards should be.
Well, why do parents get to hit kids then?
These are just Basic statements that produce exactly the same hostility now that was produced in the days of Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or you name it, right?
And so that's, I think, the best.
It's a Judo move, right?
It's like, oh, you already believe this, so you believe it as a universal, so let's see if it actually applies universally.
And if it doesn't apply universally, you either have to reject Things which violate the universality such as taxation or spanking, circumcision.
Or you have to say it's no longer universal.
But people don't want to say that their morals are not universal.
Even the people who say all morality is subjective say, okay, is that a subjective statement or is that an objective statement?
Because you're making a judgment about morals which is a moral statement in and of itself.
They don't like that.
They don't like that.
Everybody wants to say everything's subjective except for what I say.
Which, you know, is the fundamental corruption that power builds on.
That's the end of the speech.
I sometimes trail off and people are like, I don't know, is he done?
Is he taking a breath?
Did he pass out?
Is he hyperventilating?
Well, that's hypocrisy, right?
Well, it's not hypocrisy until it's pointed out, I would say.
They're ignoring consequences of their own actions.
They say they don't want to take the universality out of their morals and they speak these high ideals and then they don't live up to them.
Well, that's why people dislike philosophers.
Philosophers have the magical power to summon demons in the hearts of humanity.
Because it's not hypocrisy until you know something better.
As I say, you're not a bad doctor if in the 19th century you didn't know about the existence of antibiotics, because they didn't exist, right?
So failing to prescribe antibiotics for an infection didn't make you a bad doctor in the 19th century.
Now, once you have antibiotics and you know that they work and you know their efficacy, then now you're a bad doctor.
So you create bad doctors by inventing antibiotics, right?
So to speak.
And so when we spread moral knowledge, we create immorality.
In what was before a state of nature, we give people a moral choice, but before they were simply propagandized robots.
And some people, like the people listening to this, you probably love the fact that you now have choice, where before you were only a robot.
We've given you, or philosophy has given you and me, the capacity to understand things and make choices that we didn't previously have, particularly in the moral realm, which is really the only realm that counts in philosophy.
So we're out there summoning, like we just look like we're going to parks and just summoning demons, you know, for fun.
We're just making people feel evil from a blind state of nature.
And that's, you know, they don't want that.
They kind of like the state of nature.
Well, they don't have to feel bad.
Now, deep down, right, it happens anyway, but that's why people fight so hard against philosophy, because they feel, and to some degree they're right, it's making them immoral by pointing out things that formerly they didn't even think of.
Yeah, thanks for that.
You are very welcome.
Man, it's good to do some philosophy.
Oh, we do love it so much.
We do love it so much.
I've got another few minutes if anybody else wants to make a comment or question.
Yep, I've got a question.
You were talking about concepts at the beginning.
You were saying that concepts have a purpose.
So, like, if you find some weird thing, you ask yourself, okay, what's the purpose of it?
But if all concepts have a purpose, then how do we take the man-made out of the natural?
Because purposes are man-made.
Like, I give a purpose to a table because I'm a human and I have a purpose for the table.
So if we're saying, like, the concept of a table Has embedded with it the purpose of the table, then we can't really take the concept out of the man-made, right?
Do you really mean purpose in that sense or do you mean more like the function of concepts?
How do they function and what's their function for humans?
Does that make sense?
I think you've got a fantastic question in there.
And the fact that I've not grasped it yet is not your fault, I think.
I think your question is, and tell me if I'm wrong, of course.
I think your question is, it's a great question.
I'm going to answer it whether it's not or not, but maybe later.
Your question is, what is the value of separating the man-made from the natural?
What is the purpose of that?
Not quite.
I definitely see the value in doing that, for sure.
Because the value for that, just for those who don't know, would be, in particular, property rights.
Because if you come across a log cabin, you assume that somebody built it and somebody owns it.
If you come across wilderness, then it's usually unowned.
Again, assuming that you're kind of early on in the growth of a country.
And so differentiating between that which is owned and that which is not owned, between that which has been created and that which is natural, allows you to utilize resources without threatening somebody else's property, right?
So it's one of the reasons why it's important to differentiate.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, absolutely.
I definitely agree with that.
Oh, one other, sorry, because I was talking about how we differentiated between nature as man-made and nature as simply forming through natural forces.
helps us to say that something is formed through natural forces allows us to truly universalize physical laws in a way that if God creates and controls everything, we don't get to do.
Sorry, go ahead.
Right.
So that was kind of at the end of your speech.
And I'm also referring to the start of your speech when you were saying that concepts have a purpose.
So do you mean by purpose that concepts have a function for humans?
Like we use concepts to predict things or, Or do you mean that the meaning of a concept has part of it a purpose?
I wouldn't say that there's no purpose built into mental functioning.
There must be a purpose.
to concepts as a whole.
And we wouldn't have evolved those concepts if the concepts did not serve our survival.
And to take an obvious example, right, so the hyena, if he doesn't know the difference between a lion and a zebra, between something that's alive and something that's dead, between something that's edible and something that's not, won't survive.
So the purpose of concept formation is to allow for more complex organisms to gain access to resources more reliably, more easily, and so on, right?
Like the paramecium just got to wait till some food drifts its way and then it just absorbs it, can't really hunt and packs or anything like that.
But once you get sense concepts...
In other words, that's a zebra, not a lion, then you get the opportunity to gain access to resources by hunting something which you can kill rather than which is likely to kill you.
And so the purpose to sense concepts is to enhance the survivability of the organism and then the purpose of True abstractions, like the universals, the sort of third tier, right?
The second tier of concepts, third tier of sense data, is to truly universalize.
And then that gives you access to a universal truth rather than an empirical truth.
So the empirical truth for the lion is, that's a zebra, not another lion, so I'm going to hunt the zebra.
It's true.
It's true.
It is a zebra, not another lion.
But it doesn't really have a concept of truth.
It's largely stimulus response.
The concept of truth comes in I mean, if you ask a lion, is it true that that's a zebra, not a lion, it'll just eat you.
Say, oh, you're closer than the zebra, I'll eat you instead.
But the concept of truth is in the universals.
That's where, because truth is a universal.
When you say something is two and two is four, it's everywhere, all over the time, all throughout history, all throughout time.
And of course, evolution is true all throughout the history of organisms and really it relies on physical and biological laws that transcend even the existence of creatures.
So truth is in the third category, which is universals.
That definitely clarifies it.
So you're talking about the function of concepts.
I only brought this up because I was concerned that some people might say, If all concepts have this embedded purpose, it means that morality has a purpose, and so morality is socially constructed because it depends on what we want to do with it.
And, you know, somebody could make an argument like that, that morality is subjective because it depends on the purpose we have for it.
But it seems what you're talking more about is the function of concepts.
And it's not like the function is part of the concept, it's just the function of the concept, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and we're trying to wrestle.
So the purpose of universals is to pretend to be universals, right?
So stealing is wrong.
It's pretended to be a universal while allowing for exceptions for those in power, right?
So the purpose of morality in general was the morality was developed to serve the rulers and now we're trying to get it to serve the people.
Right?
We're trying to wrestle control of a weapon designed to secure the power of the rulers and get it.
But because they claim it's universal and we're saying, okay, well, if it's actually universal, then you shouldn't be our rulers, right?
If the rulers survive by stealing from the people while saying that stealing is universally wrong, that's a contradiction.
It's not a contradiction they like or they like to have pointed out.
Like counterfeiting is wrong.
Well, what does the Fed do?
It just prints money or really just creates it in a bank account somewhere by typing it into a web browser or something.
And so if counterfeiting is wrong, then the Fed shouldn't counterfeit, right?
This goes back to an argument I made many years ago.
It's not an argument, it's a fact that the governments, when trying to define what terrorism was in the UN, they could never do it because they could never create a definition of terrorism that didn't include pretty much all their foreign policy.
It didn't include all their subterfuges.
They could never come up with a definition of terrorism that excluded state actors whenever they didn't put out a specific exclusion for state actors.
But the moment you define terrorism with a specific exclusion for state actors, you're admitting that state actors are terrorists, right?
If you say, well, stealing is wrong, except for taxation, then you're saying that taxation is stealing.
Because you say, as soon as you have an asterisk, except for, then you're saying it's part of that category, but we're creating a specific exclusion from it, right?
Like, it's kind of funny to me how, what is it, Rockstar Games make Cyberpunk 2077, and people are like, oh my God, that's terrible.
They rushed the development.
It's so buggy and now they're getting sued by their investors because they're legally liable for a rushed process that produced a botched product according to the accusations, but somehow people think that the COVID vaccine is totally fine because video games matter, but apparently RNA reprogramming doesn't.
All right.
I'm afraid I have another call.
Don't forget to check your inbox.
I'm going to release my first trigger warning call in 15 years.
Please, please listen to it.
It's long.
It's dark as hell.
But it's really powerful, and there's really great light at the end of the tunnel.
So I hope that you will check that out.
I'm going to put that out later today.
And thanks, everyone, for dropping by today.
It's a great, great opportunity to have a chat about these topics, which is kind of the heart-minded soul of what I love so much about philosophy.
So thanks for all of your support, of course.
Have yourselves a wonderful day.
I hope you had a great Christmas and I will talk to you guys soon.
Bye.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy and And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
To help out the show, to give me the resources that I need to bring more and better philosophy to an increasingly desperate world.
So thank you so much for your support, my friends.
▲
Export Selection