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April 15, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:18
Why People Choose Evil!
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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
So the question has been sort of floating around since the last live stream and I just saw it posted and I wanted to take a swing or a stab at it.
And the question goes something like this.
If you came from a bad background...
And you got to a better place, right?
You became a good father, a good husband, a productive member of society.
And someone else in your immediate environment, a sibling or someone, or your parents for that matter, didn't.
Like just, it went bad, it got worse and so on.
And the question is, why, why, why?
Why? Now there are really only three answers.
The first answer is pure determinism that Your genes, the environment, the dominoes that fell upon you that moved you to where you are and you're just another domino, that there's no virtue, there's no vice, there's simply atoms moving in a void.
And that's all we get.
That's one answer. The second answer is that you made better choices because of some Mystery meat soup that was served up to you by empirical reality.
You happen to have exposure to something better.
You saw a movie, you read a book, you had heard a podcast.
That tickled your brain because of some predisposition that is an X factor and that set you on the path.
To something better and you're, let's say you had a sister and she just wasn't exposed to those things or she was exposed to those things but they didn't happen to tickle that special center in the brain that helped propel her to a better path and therefore she ended up in a worse place.
Pure determinism.
Semi-determinism.
And then the third one is...
Free will.
Choice. Choice.
You saw something better, and you grasped that it was better.
You pursued that which is better, and let's say your sister saw that same thing that was better, understood that it was better, and chose not to pursue it.
Those of us who come from bad backgrounds, who tunnel up through that magma layer on top of that particular underhell, know that when you're born into a dysfunctional, you're never born into a dysfunctional family, you're born into a whole dysfunctional class, a whole layer. You're not born into a trailer.
You're born into a trailer park.
When you have dysfunctional parents or parent, no one around is functional.
No one. Because functional people don't want to be around dangerous, crazy, impossible to manage, chaotic dysfunctional people.
So dysfunction is like a moat.
It keeps all of the functional people away.
So when you're born into a dysfunctional class, then leaving that dysfunctional
class is very isolating.
Because the people you were born with, they're dysfunctional.
And particularly the older generation who've already messed up and for the most part it's unrecoverable.
Once you've been a bad parent, you can't undo that.
You can't really fix it.
I guess you could take some responsibility and give some comfort to your kids down the road, but you can't.
It's not undoable.
It's not fixable. So, you're born into that dysfunctional class.
You tunnel up and out.
And you're alone for a while, crossing the desert, you know, hoping that that shining city on the horizon is not a mirage that's leading you to your death, but rather the rare village of people who've survived and flourished.
How much do you have in common with functional people when you've tunneled out of a dysfunctional class?
Well, hopefully more than you have with a dysfunctional class, but that journey, that tunneling, that crossing the desert, it changes you, it strengthens you.
And the people who've been born in a functional household is wonderful.
That's what we want, right?
But they don't have quite the same view of things.
So we are tribal animals.
We need horizontal peer relationships.
We need a group. We need a clan.
We need whatever, right? We need a tribe.
So if you're peeling up and out, I know I'm mixing my analogies here, but if you're peeling up and out and crossing the desert, You can, of course, arrive at a place that's functional.
The people born into functional relationships, you can get along with them, but they're not going to have quite as much in common.
Other people who've tunneled out across the desert, they have the same or similar experiences, so you can have companionship with them in a very productive way.
But it's a hard crossing, and you get pretty isolated in the process, and there's time when that isolation feels like it's not going to end, which is kind of existentially awful for we as dogs, not cats, social species.
So, when people see something better, when they see that there's a way out, they see that there's a place of functionality they could possibly get to, when people see that, They have a choice.
They have a choice. We have an instinct for something that's better, I believe, otherwise we never could have gotten out of the trees and out of the caves and into the skyscrapers.
We have an instinct for something better because what is better is just universal.
It's just universal. It's just having a moral law that you apply universally that you don't use to reward your friends and punish your enemies and manipulate your way out of situations and attack others and so on, right?
Like, you know, a thief is a terrible person because he steals someone else's property, but if someone were to steal that stolen property for him, he'd be outraged, appalled, upset, and go on a vengeance spree.
So he's got really hypocritical views on property, right?
Property for me, but not for thee.
The same thing with parents who hit their children saying, don't hit people.
You know, it's just, when you just relax into a universal moral law, well, it's the same effect on the moral landscape that the rise of objectivity in physics and universal physical laws and properties had on the scientific realm, sort of post-Bacon onwards, right, sort of 16th century onwards.
It made the modern world.
It made the material paradise that we currently live in, at least for now.
So, When people see something better in this dysfunctional class, or they have that instinct for something better, and everybody's exposed to something better.
When I was a kid, growing up, on TV, there were these great families.
I mean, everybody knows the names of these shows who was like a 60s or 70s kid, you know, like the Eight is Enough shows, Family Ties, Lever to Beaver for the Younger set, My Three Sons.
There was Full House.
There was just endless numbers of shows, which people loved, with parents being gentle and reasonable and explaining things and never using violence and never screaming and never calling names.
So everybody through the media has been exposed to hundreds if not thousands of hours of examples and, in a sense, programming for peaceful parenting.
So almost nobody with a television set can claim that they just don't have any idea and so on, right?
So, the people from the dysfunctional class who are exposed to things better, see something better, have the instinct for something better, which almost everybody has, they have that choice.
See, when you're born to this mess, you're born to this hell, The demons around you don't want you to grow any feathered wings.
They don't want you to get a halo.
They don't want you to rise up and above their station.
They don't want you to tunnel out of this hell because they say this hell is the world and if you tunnel out Then what they accept as metaphysically true, that mankind is messed up and everything in their life is everybody else's fault and all the mess that goes with this stuff, they believe that that stuff is true.
If you defy that, if you break out of that, if you get to a better place, then their assumptions about what is true about life and human nature have proven to be false.
And what they believe or what they accept is conformity to reality turns out to be cowardice to elevation.
What they consider to be a wise adaptation to the nature of things and people turns out to be a cowardly cowering in the hellscape of dysfunction.
They don't want that revealed to them, so they want to keep you down.
They don't want you getting out.
And we have, of course, all of us, we have conformity to the past or integrity to ideals.
Everybody has that. Everybody wants to get along with the people that grew up with.
Everybody wants to stay in the same place we originated from because breaking out of our quote tribe or our community or this dysfunctional class breaking out of that was Absolutely impossible for like 99.99% of human history.
So we're not designed to break out, to get out, to get to a better place.
I mean, maybe you could leave your group when you were, you know, 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, 500 years ago.
Maybe you could leave your group and where would you go?
You'd go to some other place which basically had the same values or the same dysfunctions.
You couldn't get out. Now we have the possibility of getting out.
The jailbreak from dysfunction is available to us.
The pick of the lock, the Getting out of the cage is available for us for the first time in human history.
We're not particularly adapted to that, although we have always had a yearning for consistency and universality.
I mean, we have an instinct for universality.
All animals do. It's the only way that you can hunt and hide from predators and build your burrows is by accepting the objectivity of reality.
So we're always universalizing.
Human beings do it with regards to morals, which other animals, other creatures don't or can't.
So they don't want you to get out.
And this conformity with the past versus integrity to ideals, that's the pivot.
That is the worlds that we're hung between virtue and familiarity.
Conformity and integrity.
This is the oldest fight between ethics and history.
Some people make that choice To stay in conformity with dysfunction.
They make that choice to stay in conformity with dysfunction.
Some people make that choice to pursue moral universality, functionality, and integrity And they know that the cost is going to be high.
This is why so many people choose not to do it.
We know that the cost is going to be very high.
If you stay in dysfunction, you will have companions for the rest of your life.
There will always be somebody at the dinner table.
There will always be somebody on your birthday bringing in candles on a cake.
There will always be people at Christmas.
You will always have that companionship if you stay in the dysfunction.
And I say with great sympathy and great empathy and great understanding, that's very tempting.
Because dysfunctional people say, if you are alone, then you're a loser.
And they do that so that you'll stay with them.
The people who are willing to break out, of course, are attacked and slandered by the people who are Choosing to stay in the mire, in the dysfunctional class, in the hellscape of subjectivism and manipulation known as this kind of dysfunctional mess.
Of course, right? Anybody who shows a higher path, a better path, a more virtuous path is going to be attacked by people who rejected that path.
Of course, right? So people are saying and really asking me, and I appreciate that trust and I always do my very best to handle this with as much sensitivity and Accuracy is possible.
So I appreciate the vulnerability of asking me this, but the stakes really couldn't be higher than the answer to this question.
So I really sort of thought this through and walked around and organized my thoughts.
Why do some people choose to stay in dysfunction?
Why do some people choose to get out?
First of all, understand that there are great rewards to staying in dysfunction.
Familiarity, community, and if you grew up as a child in dysfunction, you develop particular skills for managing dysfunction.
That's the only power that you have.
You don't have any power because nobody listens to you or respects you or reasons whether you don't have any power or authority in the relationships.
But you do have power to Or some sense of control.
You can't control your life, but you can manage crazy people.
You can manage destructive stimuli that's coming in through your senses.
So your only sense of authority or power or competence or efficacy is to manage dysfunction.
And so nobody likes to feel helpless.
And you only feel like you have any control when you're around uncontrollable people.
I know it's kind of a paradox, but...
And so people are drawn towards control.
They're drawn towards feeling a sense of efficacy and competence in their environment.
And if the efficacy and competence that you've developed as a child in a dysfunctional environment is managing dysfunctional people, managing, surviving, finding some way to have control over your feelings, not the environment.
You can't control the environment, but your feelings around it.
So they're drawn towards continuing that sense of efficacy.
It's very disorienting when you grow up managing dysfunctional people, being around functional people.
You feel like your wheels are spinning in the air.
You feel like you don't have any control because people don't need to be managed.
It's wild. Everybody gets this fork in the road.
And I know this sounds theoretical, but I have talked to a lot, I mean, thousands of people over the course of my show, but even when I was younger in private conversations, I did confront the people who did me wrong as a child and as a teenager and as a youth, and I gave them advice.
My feedback, I gave them this view, and I saw.
I mean, I know this is not an argument, you understand.
I'm just telling you my direct personal experience with a couple people.
My very deep, deep experience.
And again, combining it with my sort of knowledge of the virtues and evils of self-knowledge, or self-denial of knowledge, and thousands of conversations I've had with people over the course of doing Free Domain for the past 17 years.
Everybody has this choice.
Why do some people choose to stay in this dysfunctional environment?
Why do some people choose to get out?
This question both cannot be answered and must not be answered.
It cannot be answered and it must not be answered.
So why can't it be answered?
I know it sounds almost like censorship, you must not answer this, but no, I'll tell you why.
Hang in there. So first of all, you can't answer it because if people stay in a sort of messed up and dysfunctional environment and you ask them, why did you stay in this messed up and dysfunctional environment?
They won't tell you. They won't tell you.
First of all, they'll deny that it's dysfunctional.
And secondly, even if you point out that it's dysfunctional, they'll say, well, I stayed to help people.
And even if you point out that they can't help people, they'll just make up more and more and more lies.
Because to stay in a dysfunctional environment when there's a possibility of a better environment, you have to lie to yourself.
And of course, if you're willing to lie to yourself, lying to others becomes a breeze.
The first break with integrity is always with, well, always inflicted from outside.
But as an adult, you lie to yourself and then you lie to others.
So because people say it's not dysfunctional or I'm here to help or they're getting better or I have hope or whatever nonsense they're saying to stay in that environment when, you know, the true answer is I didn't want to take the journey.
I went with what was Sick and familiar as opposed to what was healthy and foreign.
I chose to stay in the landscape I can navigate.
I chose to stay in the place where I have the illusion of control rather than tunnel up, burrow out, claw my way through the magma ceiling of the dysfunctional classes, cross that desert.
I chose to stay here because it's more familiar and it's easier for me in the short run.
I mean, they might say that, but they never will say that, because if you have that level of honesty with yourself, you can't stay in the dysfunctional environment.
So the fact that they've stayed in the dysfunctional environment means they're lying to themselves, therefore they're going to lie to you, therefore asking them.
Why they made their bad decisions.
They will say, no, you abandoned this family.
You rejected those people who loved you.
You got involved in some crazy belief systems and you're the bad person.
I'm the loyal son, daughter, whatever, right?
And I'm there and I'm caring and I'm in there and I'm trying to help.
They'll make you the bad guy and them the good guy.
So you can't answer this question.
Number one. Number two, you must not answer this question.
And number two, you must not answer this question, comes out of number one.
Because you'll never get the truth, any answer you have to a question that you can't get the truth for will be a lie.
But if I were to say to you, how many air molecules Did you breathe in?
How many atoms of oxygen did you breathe in 10 breaths ago?
You can't answer it.
You can't answer it at all.
So any answer you come up with is false.
A billion, a zillion, a dillion quill, a quintillion, a Googleplex.
Any answer to an unanswerable question is a lie.
By definition. The question can't be answered.
Whatever answer you come up with is false.
There's not even an accidental accuracy.
Because you can't measure it, so you'll never know whether it's accurate or not.
Even if you did somehow write down the actual number of oxygen atoms you breathed in 10 breaths ago, You could never verify it because you don't have the accurate reading of the number of atoms you breathed in 10 breaths ago.
You don't have that. So you can't ever know that something is true.
So when a question is unanswerable, you must have the discipline to stop seeking the answer and to not pretend you ever have an answer.
Because if you tunnel back in time and saying, well, what were the various dominoes?
What were the various happenstance?
I happened to be exposed to this.
It was raining that day, so I took shelter in the library.
I happened to see this book.
This book changed my life. My sister didn't go to the library, didn't see that book.
When I gave her the book to read, she was mad at me and she didn't read.
Like, no.
Don't do it. Don't do it.
Because it is A reduction or elimination of free will.
To look at the dominoes that made you better.
Because if it was dominoes that made you better, you're not better.
You're not a more virtuous person.
You didn't make better choices. You just happen to be exposed to it.
Look, I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that if you came from a dysfunctional environment and you found better ideas, you found better arguments, you invented a better way of life, you clawed your way out, of course you went back to try and help.
Of course you reached back to try and help.
Of course you tried to give people...
Videos, podcasts, books, ideas, arguments.
Of course you tried to help people.
Of course you did. So, whatever you were exposed to, which had no credibility behind it because it wasn't a family member who cares about you, who was trying to bring you to the light, whatever you were exposed to that helped you become a better person, you then turned around and exposed either your family or other dysfunctional people.
Of course, you don't get into a lifeboat and leave other people behind.
You reach back in general and try and help them and then they bite at you and they curse you and they try and sink your lifeboat so that you return into the water.
So whatever you were exposed to that helped you become a better person, you turned around and exposed those you care about to the same information with the infinitely better situation for them that someone they claim to love, someone they claim to care about, who certainly cares about them, is bringing that information.
It wasn't just some random book on a library shelf.
It wasn't just some random podcast or video on the internet.
You are bringing them this information with all the credibility of being a family member who cares about them.
So they had a far better chance of accepting and absorbing this information than just randomly finding it somewhere.
So whatever you found, you know, when I first found philosophy, I tried to bring it to everyone around me.
Of course they did. When I first started reading books on self-knowledge and psychology and so on,
of course I tried to bring it to everyone around me.
They chose to reject it.
They chose to go with what was familiar.
There is no empirical cause and effect in the realm of free will.
Because by definition, if it is empirical cause and effect, it's not free will.
The causality between, say, smoking cigarettes and getting lung cancer or emphysema or whatever is very well established.
The epidemiology is very clear.
You can choose to smoke or not.
Please don't. You can choose to smoke or not, but you can't choose the effects of smoking on your body.
The choices in the smoking or not The choice is not in how it affects your body.
How it affects your body is dominoes.
That's matter. That's cells and carcinogens and so on, replication.
If you're going to try and find some cause and effect in the realm of someone's choices, you are eliminating the very concept of choice.
Ah, but we can't just put some X factor on things and call it an answer.
Of course we can. Of course we can.
Because free will, by its very definition, cannot be explained by those, in particular by those who reject it.
If I don't speak Japanese and I watch a movie with no subtitles in Japanese, I don't know what's being said.
I don't speak the language.
So asking me what is being said in a movie where the actors are speaking a language I do not understand, I'm not going to be able to answer it.
People who reject free will can't tell you anything about free will.
Now you can say, of course, well...
The reason that I chose a better life is because I looked down the tunnel of time and I said to myself, well, I want to end up with a better marriage and I want to be...
So I focus on the long-term effects and maybe your siblings, they focus on the short-term effects of conformity and familiarity and a sense of...
Control over a chaotic environment rather than feeling a lack of control over a more peaceful environment So you can say well I looked at the long-term effects and and they just looked at the the short-term effects Doesn't answer anything First of all, everybody looks at the long-term effects everybody Everybody looks at the long-term effects of their actions I mean, if your sibling finished school, then they clearly said, well, I'm going to study rather than go out and have fun.
And if they went to university, they say, well, I'm going to defer income and I'm going to do X, Y, and Z for a couple of years in order to end up with a better blah, blah, blah.
If they ever exercise, they'll do something less pleasant in the moment to get a better outcome later.
If they've ever dieted.
We all do this. We all look at the long-term consequences of things.
So carving out something and saying, well, they just chose not to look at the long-term consequences of this thing doesn't answer anything.
Because everybody, over the course of their entire waking day and even in your dreams, you're looking at the long-term consequences of things.
So that answers nothing at all.
I know it's uncomfortable because we as human beings, we want to look for explanations.
But the moment we find a, quote, explanation for people who choose badly, for people who choose wrong, The moment we find a quote explanation, we can't confirm it because people who choose badly lie to themselves and therefore will lie to you so you'll never get an honest answer as to why they chose badly.
It will always be manipulation, prevarication, obfuscation, chaos and nonsense.
It will always be misdirection.
So you can't get the answer.
Therefore you can't verify the answer.
And if there was an answer, it wouldn't be a choice.
Somebody falls from a building, and if they jumped, you won't know exactly why they jumped, because they'll be dead, right?
If they're pushed, then you have an answer.
They fell off the building because they were pushed.
But you understand, they no longer have made the choice to jump off the building because they were pushed.
So, if you go back and say, well, they fell because they were pushed, okay, well, yes, you have an answer as to why they fell.
But that answer has eliminated their free will.
And sure, if you're pushed off a building, you didn't choose to fall.
You can't get this answer.
It is part of the dysfunction to keep looking for the answer.
It is part of you being unable to leave the rat's nest of dysfunction you were born in to continue to circle back and try and find the answers!
There are no answers there.
You're in the realm of causeless choice.
There are no answers. You say, why did people choose this?
If you were to answer that, which you'll never be able to do, if you were to answer that, it's no longer a choice for them.
You haven't answered anything. Free will must be embraced and accepted.
As an X factor. And we can try and provide as much information.
I'm making an argument here.
I'm trying to make the case.
That circling back and trying to dig up the disinterred the bodies of people who didn't make choices will never tell you the truth is a fool's quest.
It's a way of trying to maintain ties to people and have hope for people.
The moment you try...
To find a cause for someone's choice.
You've taken away their choice and replaced it with what?
Please, swallow this one whole.
The moment you look back at someone and you're trying to find a cause for their choice.
First of all, you've taken away their choice.
They were pushed, they didn't choose.
And you have taken their choice away and what have you replaced it with?
The worst thing in the world.
You've taken away their choice.
And you've replaced it with an excuse.
An excuse. An excuse destroys free will.
It temporarily calms the conscience by beating it back with the dominoes of empiricism.
The conscience is saying, you chose badly and you continue to choose badly and I'm going to make you uncomfortable until you choose better.
You claim universality but you're a hypocrite and I'm going to make you uncomfortable by giving you the emotional feedback on that hypocrisy until you Return to universality and you stop making exceptions for yourself.
Exceptions to universals are excuses for bad behavior.
So people feel discomfort because of the conscience that universalizes everything or, to be more accurate, takes the claims of universality very seriously.
So people get their discomfort from the conscience.
And what do they do? They blame other people.
And when you blame other people, you're making them the dominoes that caused your behavior.
You're stripping yourself of free will and you're giving yourself an excuse.
Blaming other people is excusing yourself.
You replace other people's free will.
You replace it with excuses. That's not the worst thing in the world.
The worst thing in the world is everything you excuse in others, you give yourself permission to do.
Everything you excuse in others, you give yourself permission to do.
You have, hopefully, a sense of universality in your morality.
A commitment to a belief in universality.
Non-aggression principle, property rights, and so on.
If you're going to say that some people are exempt from moral choice because of dominoes, because of some external factor that just pushed them off the building, then you are saying that there are breaks in universality called outside causes that strip away free will and take away people's responsibility for their own actions.
That means that this is how the claw follows you.
This is how the claw follows you.
This is how the hyenas track you across the desert.
Dysfunctional people always create exceptions to their own universal rules.
Don't scream at me! Well, you're screaming at me.
Well, you made me, right? You're responsible for your own actions.
Well, why are you so upset? Well, you made me upset.
So, I'm responsible for my own actions.
You're not. If you scream at me, it's because I made you scream at me.
If I scream at you, it's because I'm a bad person and I'm responsible for my own act.
Like you understand, it's all just manipulation.
Create universals, break universals, toss them around, manipulate everyone.
Claim universality, create exceptions for yourself always.
That's a choice. So when you say that there's a cause for someone's choices, you're saying that they're exempt from the moral laws.
They're exempt from the requirements for universality that is the essence of philosophical and moral reasoning, scientific reasoning by the by.
It's so wild to me that people take all the products and benefits of the universality and the scientific reasoning, including this entire conversation and the technology used to record and deliver it.
They take all these benefits from The universality of science.
And then they won't apply that same universality and morality.
Again, I understand why, I sympathize, but it's a pretty wild thing.
Causality for others is licentiousness for yourself.
When you remove others from the requirement to practice universality when universality is claimed, you are also giving yourself the out.
You're also giving yourself the excuses.
You understand? They want you to come back and sniff around the roots of their choices for causality, for dominoes, for determinism.
Why? So that their hypocrisy can then infect you.
You can't ascribe to others without ascribing to yourself.
You can't say, well, everyone else is a mammal, but I am both a reptile and a silicon-based Alpha Centauri rock creature.
There's a new title for the show.
Whatever you ascribe to others, you accept for yourself.
That's universality.
This is my whole argument. Universality is universality.
If you say, well, my parents...
They did bad things because of their own childhood.
You're just giving yourself permission to do bad things because of your childhood.
This is how the rot follows you.
The temptation to go back and sniff for causes, which is to ascribe excuses, which is to recoil from the moral judgment of your elders, which again, I completely understand throughout almost all the human history.
Taking the universal morals of your elders and applying them back would get you ostracized or killed.
So we have a great fear and anxiety of taking the moral universal commandments of those in authority and applying them back to authority because it was rank suicide for most of human history.
So again, I completely sympathize and I understand that.
But then the honesty should be applied to that.
Don't lie to yourself and say, well, there's these weird dominoes and causality and effects and they had a bad...
Just don't lie to yourself and say...
I'm too scared. It's too dangerous.
It's too risky.
It triggers me too much to try and give true universal free will to those in authority.
I understand that.
That's honest.
And it may in fact be entirely the right thing.
Because when people are moral hypocrites, exposing them makes them violent.
So it may be entirely a wise and right and good decision.
The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
Discretion is the better part of valor.
So it may be entirely the right thing.
Just be honest with yourself. And don't say, well, you know, I just really want to understand my parents or I really want to understand why this person made a bad choice while I made it.
I just really want to. No, you don't want to understand because it can't be understood.
You'll never get the truth from the person.
You'll never be able to verify it.
It is in the X factor of free will.
Yes, no, but I want to understand these things, but you can't.
That's the whole point of free will. You want to give them excuses, which is to say, you want to serve their need for excuses.
Your parents, of course they want to give you excuses if they treated you badly.
Of course they want you to give them excuses.
That way their conscience doesn't trouble them as much.
I completely understand that.
I sympathize with that.
I won't do it, but I sympathize with it.
And it's a way of drawing you back and saying, well, I don't have any particular virtues or values or health or good advice or wisdom or I can't really give anything to you, but I can make you believe that I hold in my heart an answer and you can come and keep digging and performing endless archaeology in search of the answer that I have value in that which I withhold, which I do not in fact possess.
There is no answer as to people's choices.
That's the whole point behind a choice.
Well, if they'd focus on this or they didn't, you will never know.
It can't be answered. So this is a way that they keep you coming back.
It's the orbit. There's a black hole at the center called, I have an answer.
I have an answer as to why you did better and I did worse.
There's an answer. There is no answer.
I know that's tough.
Philosophy looks for answers.
Yes. And the answer to this one is there's no answer.
It's a way to pretend that dysfunctional people have value to you.
It's a way for them to... I have an answer!
I have an answer! It's like some horrible aunt who keeps you floating around because she promises you a million dollars.
She finally dies and the bank account is empty.
Whoops! It's like...
And we just have to live with that...
Discomfort, in a sense, of just 100% moral responsibility.
Think of infinity. Think of a thousand, a billion percent moral responsibility.
You still won't get there. And neither will I. It's a consolation, but yeah, everybody's responsible.
100%. Why did they do badly?
Well, they chose to do badly.
Why did you do well? You chose to do well.
Well, that's not an answer.
Yes, it is. That is the answer.
There is no other answer.
Nothing. But there's got to be some reason why they chose to do badly.
No, because if there's a reason, it wasn't a choice.
If somebody's locked in a jail cell, you say, well, why don't they go walk in the park?
It's because they're locked in a jail cell.
They don't have the choice to walk in the park.
Why does somebody stay in a jail cell that's open and they could walk out at any time?
They choose to stay there. But no, but why did they choose to stay there?
No. That's it.
They choose to stay there. That's it.
Because the moment you start searching for this causality, you're stripping people of free will and actually doing them and you harm.
Dominoes for them is dominoes for you.
Why did my mother hit me?
She chose to. But why did she choose to?
There's no answer to that. The whole point of choice is It's not causal.
The whole point of choices is not dominoes.
The whole point of free will is it's not determinism.
And I will not give anyone in my life the disrespect of stripping them of free will.
Why? Because if I strip them of free will, I strip myself of free will.
My daughter can't afford for me to give excuses to the people around me in the past.
Because if I give excuses to them, I give excuses to myself.
If I say, well, my mother did badly because of her bad childhood, then I'm giving myself permission to do badly because of my bad childhood.
Sorry. I mean, it's funny, you know.
I'll just close off on this.
This is why maybe the people in charge of whatever don't want you to have kids.
Life is pretty simple when you have kids, right?
It's pretty simple. It's pretty easy.
Whatever's best for your kids.
That's the thing. Whatever's best for your kids.
That's the thing. That's all there is.
Whatever's best for your kids. Boom.
Done. Done.
How should I? What should I? No.
Whatever's best for my kids. If I give excuses to people who act badly, I'm giving myself permission to act badly.
If I explain away other people's bad choices with dominoes, I'm saying there are dominoes that can make me act badly.
It's totally outside of my control.
Sorry, that's just not going to happen.
Whatever is best for my daughter, that is what I do.
And it is, I mean, it's philosophically consistent, all of that, right?
So there's logic and reasoning and all the philosophy behind it.
I stand by that.
But why do I pursue this?
Why am I so relentless and rigid?
Why am I so rigid in this formulation?
Because this formulation is exactly what protects my daughter, and it's exactly what's going to protect your children, the next generation.
If you don't give excuses to others, you have no excuse for yourself.
If there's no causality that strips you of free will and makes you act badly, and by the way, you can't act badly if it's causal, a person who's pushed off a building did not commit suicide.
They were murdered. Right?
It's a way, when you say that there's causality behind other people's choices, A, it's no longer a choice, and B, there's no moral content to it.
And if there's no moral content to other people's actions, you strip yourself of moral content, which means you can't act better.
I'm here to preserve your 150 million percent free will and moral responsibility.
And that's a universal.
And of course people are uncomfortable if they've acted badly and you say you were 100 percent responsible.
Of course they want to make excuses.
I get that. Addicts want drugs.
It doesn't mean you give it to them.
Bad people want excuses.
But giving them excuses makes you worse.
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