Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 28, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

27:06

CAN SCIENCE BE SAVED? An Open Letter to Bret Weinstein

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi, everybody. This is Sven Molnou from Freedom Man, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world with three quarters of a billion views and downloads.
	Something that Brett Weinstein said in a show of his recently, I really do urge you to check out his YouTube channel while it's still running.
	He's doing amazing work on COVID.
	And he was talking about the corruption in science that I think a lot of people are seeing coming out of the coronavirus coverage, the sort of suppression of alternate treatments, the suppression of a lab leak hypothesis, the silencing of dissent and the belief put out by Dr. Fauci that an attack upon him, the silencing of dissent and the belief put out by Dr. Fauci that an attack upon him, a criticism of his arguments and ideas, facts, data and conclusions is how an attack on science has turned science into a kind of a
	a descent is a heretic kind of medieval hyper Hyper-theological cult.
	And I wanted to sort of explain, because he was like, ah, it seemed kind of odd.
	How do we fix it? What's the problem?
	And he's an evolutionary son, a very smart guy, with quite the whirlpool of hair, but he's not a moral philosopher, foundationally.
	Of course, he cares about morality, I'm sure, but he's not a moral philosopher.
	So, this is just an open comment.
	I'm sure that you'll get a chance to see this at some point, Brett.
	So, with all due respect and friendliness, the problem is...
	The problem is not science, the problem is not the universities, the problem is not the institutions, the problem is not the governing bodies, the problem is not the media, or any of these things that people tend to point at when they talk about the crisis of credibility within science, which is also, of course, the reproducibility issue in science, that significant numbers, more than half, 60, 70, up to 80% of peer-reviewed and published scientific articles and conclusions, if they're put into the replication process, Matrix, right?
	If somebody tries to replicate the findings, they can't do it.
	And replication is one of the key foundational aspects of science.
	If you can't replicate it, well, it's not that it's not science.
	It's just not a valid conjecture or hypothesis.
	And the fact that it's past peer review, a peer review is not magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on things to make them true, any more than saying the word science.
	It makes things magically true.
	Everybody wants these magic spells to gain to the truth.
	Which is kind of a grinding epistemological challenge.
	How do you know what is real?
	How do you know what is true?
	How do you know what is good? These are the foundational elements of philosophy.
	Metaphysics, the study of what is real.
	Epistemology, the study of what is true.
	And moral philosophy, the study of what is good or right or moral or virtuous and so on.
	So... Everybody wants to jump over the beginning of things and start arguing mid-stream.
	So the beginning of things, if you look at science in the modern context, Science in the modern context has turned into a theocratic cult for exactly the same reason that many religions, when they're tied to the state, when they gain their funding from the state, when they gain their protection from the state, also turn into heretic-hunting theocratic cults, right?
	So if you look sort of in the Middle Ages and so on, there was a deal between the kings and the priests in the West, in Europe and so on, which was that the kings said to the priests...
	You can have a monopoly on religion, but in return, you must train the people that the king is sanctioned and is a representative of God, right?
	So they got a monopoly on religion in return for giving the king a monopoly on the legitimate use of force as a state sovereign reflection of God.
	And this is Martin Luther's, the original, not the later, Martin Luther's famous dictum, at least for me it was famous when I studied it, which is when you say, which is it in the Bible?
	Is it an eye for an eye or is it turned the other cheek?
	And Martin Luther said it is an eye for an eye when the king or the prince is mediating disputes among his subjects or when he is applying the full force of law against one of his subjects.
	Then it is an eye for an eye.
	It is turned the other cheek when you are wronged by the prince, when you are wronged by the king, by the ruler of the state, then it is turned the other cheek, forgive your enemies, and so on.
	When it's power down or power imposing judgments horizontally among the population, then it's an eye for an eye.
	If you are done wrong by somebody in charge, then it is turned the other cheek.
	And that formulation was foundational to certainly the Protestant Reformation.
	And of course, each Protestant schism, each Protestant denomination was trying to gain a hold of the power of the state in order to impose its religious views on others.
	And as a result, there were hundreds of years of religious warfare and, you know, millions and millions of bodies.
	And then what happened, of course, was they said, well, we can't survive like this.
	We have to have a separation of church and state, and we can't have compelled belief because it's simply too violent.
	Because if the Anabaptists gain control of the state, the extremists among the Anabaptists are going to use it to attack the Calvinists, the Lutherans, the Swingalians, and so on, right?
	Whereas the other people who Anabaptists believed in adult baptism and the other denominations sometimes when they would come across the Anabaptists, particularly when the other denominations had the power of the state, They would drown the Anabaptists, killing them, basically saying, how do you like your adult baptism now?
	And the violence was extraordinary.
	There was a famous traveler in medieval Germany who said that he scarcely could go from one end of Germany to the other without seeing a tree with at least one heretic hanging from it, and it was a very difficult and challenging time.
	So the problem here was not the religiosity.
	The problem was the power of the state.
	So whenever you have major thought institutions, and the church of course is a thought institution, whenever you have major thought institutions that unite with the power of the state, I think we're good to go.
	Philosophy is supposed to sharpen itself by finding competing explanations for the question of morality in the is-ought dichotomy, that there's no morality in the way that there is laws of physics, so how do we get it?
	The religious answer, of course, is that we get it from God, and that is a province of theology.
	The philosophical answer can't be the same as the religious answer, otherwise it would simply be theology, not philosophy.
	So that's a great challenge for philosophers to try and meet the challenge of morality.
	I've done it myself in a book called Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	You can get it for free at freedomain.com forward slash books.
	More power to theology, more power to religion, more power to philosophy, more power to science.
	Wonderful discipline. Great discipline.
	However, however, however.
	To compare science when it is voluntarily funded, either because it produces goods and services useful to a free market population.
	In other words, it breaks the old saying that science is simply engineering that doesn't work.
	It's actually got some real truth in it in the modern world.
	So if science is funded by, it produces Gorilla Glass, and science produces microwave ovens, and science produces jetpacks, and people want those things, and so that's how science gets funded.
	In other words, science bends its will to satisfying or creating and then satisfying needs and preferences within a free market environment.
	Wonderful. No coercion, no compulsion involved in any way, shape, or form, right?
	If somebody builds a better mousetrap and you want to get rid of your mice and you go give them 20 bucks for their better mousetrap, no violence has occurred.
	It is a win-win situation.
	It is a win-win situation.
	This is a foundational aspect of free market interactions, right?
	If I have a dollar and you have a pencil and we freely exchange those two items, we are both better off.
	This is praxeologically or by definition we're both better off, assuming it's voluntary.
	Because I clearly want the pencil more than I want my dollar, because I'm willing to trade my dollar for your pencil.
	You clearly want my dollar more than you want your pencil, and so we are both better off now.
	This doesn't mean the pencil won't break, we might have regrets, whatever, but in the moment of exchange, the exchange only occurs because each party believes he or she will be better off as a result of that exchange.
	It's a beauty and virtue of the free market itself.
	The question then becomes, when the state starts to take taxpayer money by force, by force, by threat of imprisonment, by threat of fines, and if the fines aren't paid, subsequent imprisonment.
	So when the state points guns at people to get tax money and then turns that tax money over to the scientists, that moment of threat and transfer That is where the moral code of decent people is broken.
	That is where the morality of mankind is cracked and shattered.
	Now, what happens after that?
	It's what everyone wants to focus on.
	Well, boy, how do we reform science?
	How do we make science have more integrity?
	How do we solve the replication issue?
	How do we solve the problem of bullying within scientism?
	How do we solve the problem of corruption in the peer review process through science?
	Everybody wants to jump over that initial thing, which is, no, no, no, no.
	It fundamentally matters how it's funded.
	That's what matters most of all.
	That's what matters most of all.
	So what it's like, it's like saying, okay, How do we make sure that slaves are treated well?
	How do we make sure they're not beaten, they're not hobbled, they're not chased down?
	How do we make sure that slaves are happy, well taken care of, and productive, and this and that and the other, without pointing out the most fundamental issue of slavery, which is that the slaves are captured and kidnapped and bought and sold and controlled and contained by By force, slavery is a government program.
	Yet, of course, it's the citizens who must forever pay for what the government does.
	It's like the residential schools issue here in Canada.
	Somehow, Canadians as a whole are to blame for what the government paid the church to do.
	And the government funding is specifically what people don't want.
	That's specifically what people don't want.
	If a guy says, I've got a girlfriend, where is she?
	She's locked in my van, then you know for sure she doesn't want to be there, because if she wanted to be there, you wouldn't need to lock her in the van.
	Violence is the distinct shadow cast by what people desperately do not want, which is why it has to be forced.
	Some people don't want to fund violence.
	Damn gain-of-function research.
	They don't want to fund gain-of-function research for viruses.
	They don't! Which is why the government has to take their money by force and then give it over to the scientists.
	Because, you know, without the government, who is going to fund gain-of-function research?
	Well, no one. Of course not.
	Because the cost-benefit calculation...
	Oh, well, you know, we might end up better in the next pandemic if we have gain-of-function research.
	Yes, but what about the possibility of creating the next pandemic...
	By spilling the gain-of-function research into, say, Wuhan, well, that's, of course, trading a potential low-risk scenario for a potential high-risk scenario.
	I mean, China has already, from its laboratories, spilled viruses that have caused the deaths of countless people.
	Just go and ask Russia where it hit the most.
	So, everybody wants to jump over how modern science is funded, for the most part.
	Modern science is funded by coercion.
	It is funded through violence.
	Now, trying to make things better while ignoring the foundational moral aspect of modern science, which is funded by violence, you will never solve the problem.
	And once you sort of open, you know, crustily open your third eye and look at the moral universe of...
	Where we are and how things are paid for and how things run.
	It's enormously clear.
	Of course you can't violently steal from the current population and through national debts and deficits violently steal from future generations.
	Of course it doesn't matter what happens to the money after it's stolen.
	And of course if you have an entire scientific establishment That is beholden to the violent power of the state in order to gain its resources, of course it's going to become corrupt.
	Of course it is going to become corrupt.
	It's like saying, well, you know, for my girlfriends, I'm dependent upon a steady flow of kidnapped women through human traffickers.
	And then saying, well, you know, it's weird that my girlfriends don't really seem to like me and I seem to have to apply increasing coercion to keep them around.
	It's like, well, because the girls are kidnapped and enslaved to begin with, it doesn't really matter what happens after that.
	That's the point. That's the purpose.
	That's what we have to look at.
	It's the root cause of the funding of the sciences.
	And people say, ah, yes, well, how would the sciences be funded without taxation?
	To which any sane... Moral, reasonably, remotely, decently moral human being, once you're aware of this issue, right, once you understand this, people say, well, how on earth would science be funded without taxpayer money?
	And once I explain this to you, you will shake off the propaganda, you will shake off the matrix.
	It is exactly the same as saying, well, how will the cotton be picked without slaves?
	How will the fruits and vegetables be picked without slavery?
	How would roads be built without unjustly coerced prison labour?
	If we don't force women to marry men, how on earth could families be formed?
	It doesn't matter. We do the right thing.
	We don't scare ourselves into conformity with immorality for fear of imaginary consequences.
	Then there's no progress whatsoever because everything that is founded on violence has taken a particular shape in society.
	Why was there no industrial revolution in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds?
	Because they were societies built on slavery and if you invest all your money into slavery, into labor, forced labor, Guess what?
	You don't invest in labor-saving devices.
	That would devalue your investment into your slaves so that you get no industrial revolution, no progress.
	I mean, the Romans knew all about the steam engine, but all of the rich people invested in labor and forced labor, so they didn't want labor-saving devices.
	So any more than you would invest both in rotary phones and cell phones at the same time, you just wouldn't do it, whereas one would devalue the other.
	So everything that exists, particularly that which is based upon force, based on violence, takes a particular shape.
	And it becomes, of course, the longer it lasts, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine society not in that shape.
	It was impossible for many people to imagine how society could possibly work.
	Without slavery, slavery had been a permanent and universal feature of human society.
	The Muslim slave trade was over 20 times larger than the transatlantic slave trade and lasted for many centuries longer.
	All societies took slaves.
	All societies kept slaves.
	And it was impossible to imagine.
	What production of resources, how cotton, fruits, vegetables could be picked, how the seeds could be sown, how birds could be chased away, how parasites could be dealt with without slavery.
	Oh, you want to get rid of slavery?
	Everyone's going to starve to death!
	Of course, when you solve a foundational moral problem in society, you have no idea what the future looks like, and therefore trying to guess it is a fool's game.
	It's a way of trying to paralyze you into somehow approving the present because you fear how things are going to look in the future.
	I mean, good Lord. Can you imagine if you went back in time?
	Imagine this. Just picture this.
	Go with me for a moment on this hilarious journey of tragedy.
	So imagine that you go back in time to when abolitionism was starting, the end of slave trade was starting, the end of slavery was starting.
	And people said, oh yeah, well, who's going to pick?
	Who's going to pick cotton?
	Who's going to sow the seeds?
	You can't have agriculture without slavery.
	We'll all starve to death. And you would have sat in front of them and said, guys, bear with me for a sec.
	Just go with me for a second here.
	Here's what I think is going to happen.
	When we get rid of slavery within a very short amount of time, giant mechanical...
	Kind of like robots, half an acre wide, will plow back and forth, and robots, kind of half swords, half plows, will seamlessly, you know, both sow the seeds, they will pick the cotton, they will pick the crops, they will do all of this.
	And, oh, no, no, I gotta, hang on, they're gonna be powered, you'll say.
	They're gonna be powered by, oh, crushed, Dinosaur juice from 200 million years ago.
	Well, people would look at you and say, well, you're insane.
	But this, of course, is exactly how it played out.
	You can't... Like when you solve a foundational moral problem in society...
	It doesn't matter what happens afterwards because you solve the moral problem.
	What happens afterwards will be better because voluntary transactions are always infinitely morally superior to gun to the head, win, lose, coercive transactions.
	So how will science be funded?
	It will be funded by providing valuable services to the free market.
	It will also be funded by philanthropy and charity and benefactors and so on, right?
	Just as it was in the past.
	So I don't care.
	But here's what is so important.
	It's the foundational aspect of this.
	If you've ever worked in a large organization, and I've worked in a lot, and I've managed a lot, I've co-founded a company and grew it to a fairly decent size, there are very difficult troublemakers within that organization.
	People who bully, people who undermine, sociopaths, psychopaths, borderline personality disorder, narcissists, you know, just people who are messed up and difficult and dangerous to work with.
	And it's a small percentage of the population.
	It's really only a couple of percent of the population.
	But boy, oh boy, can they cause a lot of trouble.
	I once started to work at a company and one of my employees swore at me in a meeting.
	And you can't have that if you're a boss, you can't let.
	But my boss didn't want me to fire him because they've both been in the military and they had some buddy-buddy stuff going on.
	So I had to work pretty hard to make sure I got that guy out of the organization because he was also bullying his employees.
	The guy who swore at me, who was bullying his employees, It made the woman cry who was in charge of the quality testing of the software.
	I just couldn't sustain it, so I eventually had to just provoke him in a meeting to the point where he swore at everyone when the board was there and then kind of got my way.
	Dealing with these difficult people is a real challenge.
	Now, having that level of escalation and abuse occur within an organization is really inefficient.
	When you have people threaten and bully and undermine and cause problems in this kind of manner, it's extraordinarily inefficient because everybody's reacting to that, bouncing off that, and resources get misallocated because of bullying and threats and all of this kind of stuff.
	So it's very inefficient.
	Now, if you are shielded Behind the big hellish fiery wall of government coerced resources, then you basically have free reign to the sociopaths.
	In the environment, you give them total free right because nobody wants to confront them.
	They end up gravitating towards positions of power.
	They sit at the heads of various regulatory agencies and regulatory bodies.
	And the first thing they do is try and gain control over funding mechanisms in science and in other places.
	And that way they can really start to pull these giant levers of bullying and a lot of people will fall in line.
	Now, if you are in the free market, let's say company A and company B, company A lets these Nasty people gain more and more resources, which they use to self-aggrandize their own power and pursue their megalomaniacal and narcissistic ends of control and bullying.
	It's very inefficient. It's very inefficient.
	Whereas company B deals with these people, either reforms them or gets them out of the organization, and thus is more customer-focused, less internal dissent, less internal bullying, fewer internal problems, and a more efficient allocation of resources.
	So company A will slowly lose market ground to company B. And in fact, it might be quite fast.
	So, in the free market, Companies that allow bullies to gain control of resources get quite quickly punished because the bullies are putting those resources into their pet kingdoms and projects rather than applying them to the best customer use scenarios and situations, right? Rather than being customer focused, their ambition and vanity and ego focus, which destroys resources in the company, makes it less efficient.
	So the free market regularly punishes organizations and That allow bullying and narcissistic aggression and emotional terrorism to flourish in the organization.
	However, once the money is behind the firewall of government coercion, there are no free market mechanisms by which the inefficiency of organizational bullying You can't achieve any punishment of these things.
	They simply flourish and grow, which is why these people tend to float more towards government agencies and regulatory bodies and regulatory organizations and so on, in charge of licenses and so on.
	Once the money passes through the power of the state and then ends up beyond the free market, beyond the punishment of inefficiency, Then bullying can flourish without market control, without market undermining that.
	What's going to happen, of course, is if a company begins to lose ground because it has bullying, let's say they have some guy, it's some technology company, and the head of R&D is some bully who isn't customer-focused but is simply building his own empire within the organization, they're going to say, well, how come all our competitors are coming up with these cool new products and our company is not?
	And they go to the head of R&D and they do a 360 review, they talk to people in R&D, What's your experience?
	How are things going? And of course, a lot of people are quitting.
	Why are you quitting? This boss is too difficult to work with.
	A lot of people who are staying are saying, well, you know, I come up with ideas.
	This guy yells at me, shoots me down.
	It's not a creative place to be or anything like that.
	So relatively quickly, they will find out that there's a bully in the organization that is really inhibiting The creation of new products, the creative people are just leaving or kind of squelched and just hitting maintenance mode while looking for new work.
	And so very quickly they'll say, okay, we've got to get this guy out of the organization because he's causing us to lose market share rapidly because we don't have the innovation that we need to compete.
	So that's what happens in free market scenarios because you're being punished by the marketplace for bullying in your organization.
	But... There's no punishment from the marketplace in government-funded agencies and institutions, which is why this kind of bullying, this kind of manipulation, this kind of control, this kind of danger, these kinds of threats continually flow, because once the money has passed through, once the money has been extracted from the population by force and passes through to whatever organization, it could be science, it could be anything, then the consumer no longer has any choice.
	You've funded it whether you like it or not.
	I mean, How good would your local restaurant be if they got a hundred bucks from everyone in the neighborhood every week, whether they ate there or not?
	Would the quality of the food decline, with the quality of the service decline?
	Of course, of course it would, because they don't have to compete with everything else you could spend your money on.
	You understand, right? So it's really, really important.
	You have to look at these things like, what if the choice is removed?
	How good would you be as an employee if you knew for sure you couldn't get fired and you'd always get a raise?
	Well, then, of course, you're talking about public sector employees who now, with Juneteenth, what, have 44 days plus a couple of weeks vacation?
	I mean, they basically work, if you can call it that, like two-thirds of the year and earn significantly higher than private sector people and, of course, can't be fired in general.
	So, yeah, what would the quality of the local restaurant be if they got $50 or $100 from everyone in the neighborhood?
	Every week, no matter what. But they wouldn't be competing, they wouldn't need to provide any quality, and it would be such a lucrative source of income That the bullies would immediately move in and try and take it over.
	So the idea that you can reform slavery, the idea that you could reform coercive institutionalized marriage, forcing women to get married to a particular man, the idea that you can say, okay, well, once the money's been stolen by force, how can we make it good on the other side?
	But you can't. You can't.
	The only thing that limits the growth of bullying in an organization Is the punishment for inefficiency that comes from the free market.
	That's the only thing. Because let's say you create some big centralized organization that's going to punish bullying in organizations.
	Well, all the bullies are going to go to that organization that punishes bullying and use it to bully everyone else.
	Like only the free, only!
	There's nothing else, no other option.
	Only the free market. Only the free market can control bullying.
	And the escalation and inevitable corruption that occurs when choice is removed, particularly from economic interactions.
	So Brett, you know, great show.
	Love what you do. But you're just going to have to see this one straight on.
	That you point guns at people to fund X, Y, and Z. Then you can no longer make X, Y, or Z better, efficient, nicer, productive, positive.
	It doesn't matter. Once you kidnap the girl, you either set her free, or she's going to hate you forever.

▲