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Oct. 11, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:34
A Theory of Evil
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Alrighty, righty.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
And I had a couple of minutes in between various tasks.
I just finished the recording of René Descartes on my History of Philosophers series that I hope you will check out.
You can get that at freedomain.com.
And I had a thought.
I guess more of a perspective or an argument.
I was going to do it anyway.
And I like the fun and excitement of doing it live, baby, live.
So, it's a theory of evil, I suppose you could say.
Not just because I did dip my toe into the toxic sludge known as Netflix's Jeffrey Dahmer show.
But let's have a look at a possibility...
of what's driving evildoers.
Now, let's look at, I mean, I think what we could all say is pretty much the worst evildoer, which is a baby, a baby killer.
That's pretty wretched as far as evil goes.
So, this is from just a couple of hours ago.
Nurse Lucy Letby poisoned babies with insulin, trial told.
A poisoner was at work at a hospital where there was a significant rise in the number of healthy babies dying, a court has heard.
Lucy Letby has been accused of murdering five baby boys and two girls and attempting to murder ten other babies at Countess of Chester Hospital.
Nick Johnson, KC, prosecuting, said that she was a, quote, constant malevolent presence in the hospital's neonatal unit.
and Miss Letby, 32, of Hereford, denies 22 charges at Manchester Crown Court.
Jurors heard Miss Letby is alleged to have tried to kill one child three times while another died as a result of being injected with air.
Gosh, that's a novel I read.
Peter Benchley's novel, The Deep.
Air in the lungs is life.
Air in the blood is death.
Family members of some of the babies concerned in the case were among those present in the court as Mr.
Johnson opened the prosecution.
He said the Chester Institution was a, quote, busy general hospital like so many others in the UK. However, he said that, quote, unlike many other hospitals within the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, a poisoner.
Prior to January 2015, the statistics for the mortality of babies in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester were comparable to other like units.
However, over the next 18 months or so, there was a significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses.
He said the increases were noticed by hospital consultants who were concerned that quote, babies who were dying had deteriorated unexpectedly.
Medics also noted that babies who had collapsed, quote, did not respond to appropriate and timely resuscitation, and that others collapsed dramatically, but then, equally dramatically, recovered.
Having searched for a cause which they were unable to find, the consultants noticed that the inexplicable collapse and deaths did have one common denominator, the presence of Of one of the neonatal nurses and that nurse was Lucy Letby.
Mr. Johnson told the court that as medics could not account for the collapses and deaths, police were called in and conducted a painstaking review.
That review suggests in the period between mid-2015 and the middle of 2016, somebody in the neonatal unit poisoned two children with insulin.
The prosecution say the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence you will hear is that somebody poisoned these babies deliberately with insulin.
So you can read for more on this.
I won't go into all of the details.
Now, the trial may last up to six months.
So we don't know.
Innocent until proven guilty.
But let's go from this to a theoretical.
A theoretical child murderer.
I mean, that's about as bad, I think, as things could be, is a child murderer.
A baby murderer, in this case.
So what could possibly be happening?
Well, to have a potential answer for that, I think, is also to have you, or at least to help you, understand what it is that I've been up to, lo, these many years. Now, a philosopher is a promoter of virtue and an opposer of evil.
A doctor is there to promote health and oppose disease.
And some doctors are there more in the promotion of health business and some doctors are there more in the prevention of disease or curing of disease.
Well, there's a prevention of disease and there's a curing of disease.
So for me, I have been very much, at least in my plans and thoughts, in the forefront of The promotion of virtue and the curing of disease.
So what could possibly drive?
Again, we're not talking about this woman in particular, but there certainly have been other women and men who've been accused and convicted of these kinds of crimes.
So we'll just make up somebody call her Sally, right?
So why would Sally have murderous impulses towards babies?
Now, I would argue that the primary motivation of Sally is not the murder of the babies.
The primary motivation of Sally would not be the murder of the babies.
The primary motivation of Sally would be harm to the parents, right?
Because the baby who's murdered is then beyond suffering.
And we know that if there's a sadistic impulse in Sally's mind, that Killing a baby would end the suffering for that baby or end the life of that baby and therefore tautologically almost end the suffering.
But that the suffering of the parents would go on and on and on.
So in this kind of sadistic mindset, again, we're just talking about some theoretical construct here because I don't know if this woman's guilty or not.
So Sally, the baby murderer, Is targeting the parents.
Is targeting the parents.
The amount of rage that Sally would have towards the parents or towards society or parents as a whole is almost beyond comprehension.
So why would Sally have this level of rage towards society, towards parents as a whole?
I don't know, obviously, the theoretical construct, but let me put forward a conjecture.
A possible scenario that could fit.
So let's say, as I'm sure is certainly the case, that Sally was brutalized as a child.
Now, I don't know if you've ever known people who were brutalized as children.
But my God, it's an appalling situation.
I've known women who were trafficked by their fathers in the most appalling manner that you can conceive of and probably even more appalling than you and I as healthy people could consider.
I've known boys Who were beaten to the point of potential brain injury by fathers.
I knew a boy who was so angry towards his mother that in his teenage years he would throw her up against the wall and threaten her with his fist drawn back.
I have known, I don't really know these people as much anymore, but certainly over the course of my life I have run into people, and look, I've always been the kind of person that people talk to.
I'm not sure exactly why that is, but I can tell you for sure that it is.
And you probably know, maybe you are one of these people, but you probably know people like this, if not being one of them, where for some reason you have an extra ear on your forehead and people just talk to you.
I think it's because that statement, nothing human is alien to me, which I read when I was quite young, had a fairly big impact on me.
Which is, I mean, geez, I just did a call-in show.
I haven't released it yet to the general public, and I may not, in fact, do so.
But I did a call-in show where a fellow was confessing that the children of his brothers, or the children that his brother thought were his, were, in fact, fathered by the caller. I mean, that's pretty appalling, right?
But I'm always intensely curious to try to get to root causes, like what could cause something like that to even occur or even be considered as a possibility in the world.
And I think that level of curiosity and that level of openness to listening, I'm not a very big reactive person, like, how dare you?
I don't generally do a lot of that.
I mean, over the years, of course, I've heard some pretty appalling things.
In these call-in shows, and...
I try, and I don't have to try too hard, but I want to get to the root cause of immorality and the root cause of this kind of dysfunction.
And to do that, I need to remain curious.
And I've always had that.
And I've always been one of these people that, you know, I'm at a party and people just open up.
You know, like the jaws of life, like the shark of the jaws of life, just open up.
And it's not like I'm out there trying to fish and pull these things out of people, but they just come, and they always have.
And I have been told an awful lot of things over the course of my life, and of course some of them you know because there are call-in shows or live streams, and some you don't know because it was before I did any of this sort of stuff or calls that I have never released and things like that.
So I've been told a lot.
So I have a fairly unique view on the genesis of immorality.
So I'm going to sort of synthesize that.
And this does sort of think, help explain why I've been doing what I've been doing for the past 16 years.
Maybe give you a perspective on the general purpose of the show and why I focus so much on child abuse, childhood dysfunction, and so on.
So, you know, because we're doing a live stream, I can ask y'all some questions.
So, if you're in the chat, if you could do me a favor, hit me with a Y if you were significantly harmed as a child by, you know, someone close to you.
It could be parents or something like that.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thank you. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, a fair number of you have been harmed as a child.
Now, Hit me with another Y. No, actually, just in case people are coming in late.
Hit me with an N if nobody as a child listened to or protected you when you were being harmed.
Hit me with an N if nobody, N for nobody, as a child.
This is a negative, right? Okay, so one person was helped and the rest of you were not, right?
Okay. Oh, sorry.
Somebody says, I thought it was a yes.
My abusers were encouraged, actually.
Okay, so this is, I mean, look, massive sympathies, deep, deep sorrows for what you endured, and it's awful.
Not just that you were harmed, but that you were not offered any security, any safety.
Nobody stood up for you, right?
And I remember I wrote about this in a poem probably 35 years ago.
What is your view of society if you're deeply harmed as a child and people collude with your abusers?
What does your view of society turn into?
This is where a lot of hatred and hostility and nihilism and, I believe, aggression, if not downright criminality, comes from.
Why do people attack society?
Because society either attacked them or enabled or covered up or ignored them being attacked.
Now, it's one thing if you're in some farm in the middle of nowhere, but most of us who were harmed as children grew up in a society with dozens if not hundreds of people around us over the course of our childhoods who have some care and custody over us.
Who have some emotional or moral or legal commitment to protecting us who didn't protect us.
So you grow up with a very odd view of society.
Because, you know, when you're a kid, in general, people say they love you or they care about you or they want to protect you or they want what's best for you and Even if that's not explicit, or even if they say the opposite, they still keep you at home and have power over you and provide you with food and healthcare and shelter and so on,
right? And society as a whole says, boy, how much we love our children, our children of the future, we care about the children.
So it's a very strange situation.
Where you have a society and individual members within that society who claim to just love you and want to protect you and, you know, I would do anything for my children.
You hear that, I would do anything for my children.
And you have extended family, you have gatherings and barbecues and parties and picnics and everyone's around and how you're doing and, you know, everyone's having fun.
And yes, there are significant proportions of children in that environment who are being Desperately harmed.
Desperately harmed. So what is your view of society when you grow up, as you grow up?
Because you can't ever lose that first impression.
The poem, sorry, I forgot to mention or finish that, the poem that I wrote 35 years ago, maybe 40, Was something like this.
It's one thing to be brought down by a lion in a lonely jungle.
It's another thing to be stalked, attacked, and half-eaten when standing in line with people reading newspapers waiting for a bus.
As you imagine, you're a kid on a street.
There's a bunch of people reading newspapers.
Dozen people, twenty people, all lined up waiting for the bus.
And as a kid, you're being stalked by a lion that takes you down and half chews you to death with everyone around you reading their newspapers.
And what do they do? Do they see you?
Do they hear you? Are you a ghost?
Are you invisible? No! The only way that you know that these people know that you are there and being attacked is they raise their newspapers just a little bit to keep the blood from spattering on their hats.
Or on their hair.
They raise their newspapers just a little bit to catch the blood that may be spraying off you as you're chews half to death by the lion.
So they know you're there. They know that you're being attacked.
They're shielding themselves from your blood.
But they don't say anything.
They don't do anything.
They don't protect you. I think the real anger towards society comes not just from those who are victimized.
Being victimized is not enough.
Again, my conjecture, my hypothetical.
Being harmed is not enough.
Being harmed and being ignored is not enough.
Being harmed, being ignored, and having people enable your abusers is not enough.
Because all that behavior is predatory, but without the one final ingredient that I think is absolutely necessary for true rage to be inflicted upon society.
For true rage to be inflicted upon society, a child need be abused, ignored, people explicitly or implicitly complicit with the abusers.
And the most important and final ingredient, the one that really pulls the pin off the grenade, so to speak, is the society must be relentlessly hypocritical about all of this.
I think it's the hypocrisy that drives the rage the most.
Because hypocrisy indicates that the person knows what is good, proclaims what is good, but not in order to be good, but as a form of camouflage for the immorality.
Somebody who preaches one thing but does the exact opposite is particularly enraging because that is a peculiarly human form of corruption.
The animal who is a predator, the lion, does not praise vegetarianism.
The lion is, hey, I'm a dangerous guy.
I'm going to chew your leg off and burp and sleep.
There's no hypocrisy in mere animal predation.
They just do what they do.
The shark is not going to bite your leg while lecturing you on the common good.
Or the virtue of human shark families or the need to sacrifice yourself for the sake of others.
The shark is just going to take an opportunity and chomp on your leg if he or she can.
Now, it's a peculiarly human attribute to proclaim morality while doing the opposite, to have that particular form of camouflage.
And that's an opposite.
So that's a knowledge of virtue that is used for the pursuit of corruption or evil.
A knowledge, a deep knowledge of virtue.
A torturer has a deep knowledge of human physiology because he needs to know what hurts most for people.
I think it's the hypocrisy that generates the real anger because that's a peculiarly human form of moral wounding, which is why humans get targeted, not animals.
And of course, when there is...
This is an old Socratic argument.
Aristotle had this view too, but Socrates really formulated it, that evil is simply a form of ignorance.
That the thief is simply ignorant of the virtue and value and self-preservation of property rights.
So once you teach the thief about the value and virtues of property rights, then the thief will no longer steal.
It's simply a lack of knowledge.
In the same way we wouldn't say to a 15th century physician, boy, he was terrible because he didn't once use an MRI. He didn't have the knowledge.
He didn't have the information.
Didn't have the capacity. If people claim, oh, family is everything, I do anything for my kids, love my kids, kids are everything in society, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then treat their children terribly, then their immorality is not a species of ignorance.
It's not a form of ignorance at all.
Because they know exactly what the good is.
How do we know that? Because that's all they're talking about.
The good, the virtue, the right, right.
Well, we need these wonderful government schools to educate our children because all we care about is the education of our children and educating children is how we have a civilized society and we need to share our values and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So we care about the kids and care about education.
You know, arguably, it's mostly for indoctrination as it has been from the Prussian school onwards.
You can read John Taylor Gatto for more on that.
So if someone does you wrong and they genuinely don't know what the right thing to do is, then it's simply a matter of instructing them.
So if you have some Japanese fellow comes over and does something that would be appropriate in his culture but is offensive in your culture, or more likely it would be the other way around, but some Japanese fellow comes over and does something.
He wishes to show you respect and be polite and civilized and all that, but he does something that That is offensive in your culture.
Well, he's not trying to be offensive.
He's trying to be respectful, but he simply lacks the information.
And you say, ah, well, lifting the middle finger is considered an insult, not a greeting.
And then he'd be like, oh, I'm so sorry.
He will bow. He will never raise his middle finger to you again, and he will instead shake your hand or whatever it is, right?
So there, he has a goal called being respectful and polite and civilized.
And he thinks he's in pursuit of that goal, but when you correct him, he's ashamed, even though he was acting from ignorance, not malice.
And he reforms his behavior to the better.
So there, a, quote, lack of politeness is directly related to a lack of knowledge.
And when instructed on politeness, the behavior changes to conform with the new knowledge.
Now, if somebody mistreats you while spouting...
Moral and pious platitudes, then instructing them on morality will not change their behavior, right?
I mean, if you have some half-crazy Japanese guy who extends his middle finger to you saying this is a polite greeting in Japan, I'm sure it's not, but let's say it is, right?
This is a polite—and then you say, actually, it's not.
And he's like, winks and says, yeah, I know, I just like trolling people.
Well, he's not going to change his behavior because he's not ignorant of the fact that what he's doing is offensive.
He's enjoying it. So people who proclaim virtue while performing evil are not susceptible to or amenable to correction through instruction.
Because they already know what the good is to make sacrifices to your children, to do what's best for your children, to care for your children, to everything for the children.
They already know all of that.
And so telling them that you should really do more for your children, they said, well, that's what I just said.
I want to do everything for my children. I want what's best for my children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So they already know what the good is, what the right is.
And so if they act in opposition to that, there doesn't seem to be any particular form of moral instruction that can change their behavior.
Because their behavior does not come from an ignorance of morality.
But rather, morality is deployed by them as a form of camouflage to throw people off the scent in order to get away with continued immorality, right?
So, you know, people who are escaping from prison or trying to escape bloodhounds or whatever, they go into water and they will wade upstream or downstream because, like, a bloodhound's nose is like a thousand times more sensitive than a human being's nose.
And so they do.
To throw people off the scent, they will change their direction in fast-flowing water that eliminates their scent.
Or the trail. So, if the immoralities performed in particular in this example against children are not the result of a lack of knowledge, then those immoralities cannot be fixed or cured or ameliorated or reversed or stopped by knowledge.
So, in our theoretical example, if this woman Sally is poisoning the babies and she knows, like, if she genuinely thinks that what she's doing is good and right and healthy, If somebody does not make the note that the baby is allergic to X, and then Sally gives the baby X, and the baby has the strong allergic reaction, that's a mistake.
A desperately dangerous mistake, perhaps, but it's not malicious, not malevolent, assuming that these were all in errors, right?
Now, if the nurse who determined that the baby was allergic to X is aware of that, is aware it's not on the chart, and then instructs Sally to give the baby X, then the malevolence would not be Sally's, but rather the original nurse who hid the information and then commanded her to do something the original nurse knew was dangerous.
But in our sort of theoretical example, if the nurse is Applying drugs repeatedly to babies or giving them medications or some sort of substance that repeatedly is harming them and she's aware of this and she knows this and she continues to do it.
Then going up to her and saying, you know, it's really important for nurses to make sure that children stay healthy and to give them appropriate medicines that enhance their health.
Well, she already knows that.
She's doing the opposite, even though she already knows what the right thing is to do.
And she will, of course, say, well, of course, nurses should try and do the very best to keep the babies healthy and happy and flourishing and thriving and all that sort of nonsense.
Right? Well, she probably wouldn't say and all that sort of nonsense, but that's what she's probably thinking.
So it's not a lack of knowledge.
It's just... Hypocrisy, that she proclaims the virtues and values of keeping babies healthy and then does the opposite, to cause them harm or possibly death.
So she, and of course by being in a, quote, helping profession, I mean it genuinely is a helping profession to be a nurse, but for her it's a, quote, helping profession because she's in the profession to gain access to babies to do them harm in our theoretical example.
So why? Why?
Our society as a whole Remains, in a much more sophisticated way, to some degree, a child-sacrifice society, as is almost always the case throughout human history, that the children are sacrificed for the pleasures, hedonism, and sometimes cruelty of the adults.
I mean, we can think of this South American god that was supposed to flourish on the tears of children.
The children would be tortured to produce tears before being killed and sacrificed sometimes by the thousands to this god.
That's an extreme, of course, form of child sacrifice.
But you know, national debts, crumbling families, bad education systems and so on, these are all a form of child sacrifice because it's for the hedonism and pleasure and sometimes cruelty of the adults that the children's needs, preferences and requirements are sacrificed.
While society at the same time proclaims that all it ever does is care about the happiness future and lives and well-being and moral instruction and education of the children.
Of course, it never asks the children what they want.
It never tries to wrap its instructions based upon what is good for the children.
Warren Farrell, who's been on this show a couple of times, is very good at writing about this, how the educational system has slanted towards that which benefits girls at the expense of that which benefits boys.
While at the same time, you know, talking about how wonderful children are and blah, blah, blah, right?
How necessary it is to provide them quality instruction, right?
So if somebody is raised in a situation where children are harmed by a hypocritical pretense of virtue, if our theoretical woman Sally was brutalized as a child by a group of people who proclaimed How wonderful children were and how important it is to make every sacrifice to ensure the health, happiness, well-being and good education and moral instruction of children.
But this is all they cover.
Then she would have internalized that morality is camouflage for evil.
That proclamations of virtue are camouflage for malicious actions.
That morality is like the stripes on the back of a tiger.
It's there to camouflage it to get it close enough to its prey that it can close the distance without the prey getting away.
And if it was her own parents that harmed her, she would have great rage towards her parents.
And she would have great rage towards all the other parents or adults in her life who...
Permitted, or perhaps even colluded, or as one listener says, encouraged the abuse, despite proclaiming how much they love the children and care for the children and family as everything.
Great rage towards parents.
Great rage towards hypocrisy and a genuine belief that virtue is a camouflage for evil doing.
The purpose of virtue is to serve as a camouflage for doing evil.
So, great rage towards parents.
Well, if she kills the babies, our theoretical Sally, if she kills the babies, then she's causing great suffering to the parents because she's really angry at parents.
And, of course, she would use her position as a nurse, a theoretical woman, she would use her position as a nurse to pretend to care for babies while harming them because people pretended to care for her while harming her.
So the purpose of what I have been doing with these many conversations I've had with people, some of whom have done some fairly egregious things, and certainly many of those who've suffered some horrible things as children, I think that it only takes one counter-example to break repetition compulsion.
It only takes...
Listen, I was able to forge...
A great family life out of a very dysfunctional upbringing where just about everybody around me was from dysfunctional, broken, wrecked, nasty, screaming, abusive, or addicted families.
I had one counterexample.
One family that seemed to me to be pretty healthy and pretty functional.
It just takes one.
It just takes one.
Example. One counterexample.
So, of course, everybody says, oh, child abuse is terrible and we should protect children, we should listen to people, we should listen to children, and so on, right?
But, boy, if you've been in a situation where you've been abused as a child and you try to tell anyone about it as an adult, whether they were in the vicinity when you were a child or not, well, everybody gets really uncomfortable and tries to distance themselves from you.
They wish for you to remain isolated and entrenched in In the ice prison of having to manage and wrangle this abuse without any social contact, without any sympathy, without any care, without any empathy or any soft shoulder to rest your head.
Oh, child abuse is terrible.
Should we have sympathy for the victims of child abuse?
Absolutely. Okay, here's someone who's telling you about their child abuse.
Oh, I don't like that. Oh, that makes me kind of uncomfortable.
Not very comfortable with that.
Oh, please don't.
Please don't tell me that. I don't want to know.
Oh, it could be because it triggers their own memories of child abuse, if that's what occurred to them.
It could be because they themselves were cruel towards younger siblings.
50% of sibling relationships are classified as abusive, even in our modern standards.
It could be because they don't want their delusions about the virtues of society punctured by a lot of people talking about how they were abused as children and no one shows them any sympathy, either as children or as adults, but instead is deeply uncomfortable with any conversations about this and wishes it all to go away and for them to shut the hell up and carry their trauma without anybody reaching down to help them with the load.
It just takes one person to have sympathy to break the pattern.
And bleed the venom and diminish the rage.
Isn't this true? I'm sure you can think of people, if you've had this good fortune in your life, to have at least one person who's given you sympathy for the suffering you've experienced.
It just takes one person.
Because then you have a duality where formerly you had a unity.
I mean, to take a silly example, we all think we're subject to gravity.
If you met one person, You've widened your choices.
There's now a fork in the road where before there was simply a train track.
Humanity is cruelty under the pretense of virtue.
That you claim that empathy and listening to people who suffer is a virtue, but boy, if anyone comes to you and tells you that they suffered as particularly as a child, you shun them.
That people proclaim their love for children while exploiting them through the national debt.
That we say, well, we want to teach children how to think, not what to think, but then the moment the child thinks originally in a way that is socially unacceptable, we harm that child.
We really care about educating children, but if children, particularly boys, are not happy, if they're bored and restless and stultified, well, we'll drug them rather than fix the system of education so that it appeals to boys and further enhances their considerable capacity to learn.
So I think that in these...
Public displays, which have gone out to many millions of people by this point.
Public displays of genuine sympathy and empathy and curiosity and a willingness to hold and accept and listen to the suffering that people have gone through.
We as a community, it's not just me who does this, right?
But we as a community have created choice where before there were only absolutes.
I'm sorry you suffered.
It was wrong. It means that there's A crack of the wall, a glitch of the matrix, a break in the conditioning.
And that leads people away from a pretty black-pilled destination.
It leads people back.
That there is somebody else who understands and who sympathizes and who actually lives the values that society only proclaims.
Who actually lives the values that society only proclaims.
And since society in general only proclaims virtues in order to violate them under the table, under the cover, that virtue is a camouflage for violence.
If you have somebody who actually lives virtue and sympathy and empathy, as opposed to merely talking about it in order to do the opposite, boom, you've broken the train track that leads down to a very dark place.
I say this having flirted with that train track in my youth myself.
Sympathy diffuses aggression.
Empathy undermines violence.
And I did really want to pass this idea along before the tragedy of brain-moving forgetfulness, as it often does.
Oh, I've got this great idea.
I should really talk about it and get it down.
And I want to, and I mean to, And I don't.
And then two days later, I'm like, oh yeah, that wasn't that great.
So I just wanted to get this down.
I want to hear what you think about it and let me know in the chat.
And don't forget, if you have a call-in request, if you want to talk about anything that's on your mind, call in, C-A-L-L-I-N, call in at freedomain.com.
I would really, really appreciate hearing from you and love to chat with you.
freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show, freedomain.locals.com for a great community.
Thanks everyone so much. Lots of love from up here.
Happy Thanksgiving Day! To my Canadian friends, and what is it?
Happy Columbus Day to my American friends, and happy Monday to everyone else.
Lots of love from up here. Take care, guys.
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