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April 24, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:58
The Demonology of 'Nefarious'
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So I went to go and see the movie Nefarious, and I really, really would strongly recommend it, just for the ideas and the arguments and the back and forth and the moral questions.
And I don't know.
I might do another show...
Where I go into some of my criticisms of the film, but I don't want to give anything away.
I would just say, really go and see it and think about it and talk about it.
It's some great scenery-chewing performance by Edward, the demon guy.
And the sort of yuppie scum guy is also very good, but I would really, really recommend it.
It did get me thinking about this question of...
Why are there such common conceptions and perceptions and portrayals of demons versus angels the whole world over?
Now, of course, one argument would be that there are demons and there are angels, and we get a sense of that and so on.
We can call that the Cernovich argument, I suppose.
But... The philosopher has the challenge of explaining the ubiquity of universal phenomenon without reference to the supernatural.
The supernatural is a bit of a short-circuit explanation, so the question, like, what's going on in society at the moment as a whole is just this kind of sadism.
A sadism is when you force someone to bend to your will and take great pleasure in it.
And forcing someone to bend to your will and taking pleasure in the suffering that that bending of the will involves is what you take pleasure in.
You take pleasure in crushing and controlling and manipulating and exploiting and taking from, and in an extreme case, of course, murdering people.
So why do we have this conception of angels versus devils?
And without reference to theology, I wanted to make a case here that hopefully will make some sense.
There are two ways to get resources and to survive.
One is by dealing with reality, and the other is by exploiting people.
So if you are a hunter, a gatherer, if you are a farmer and so on, then you are dealing with reality and you are gaining your resources from interacting with objective reality.
Now, of course, if you think of being a hunter, what you're doing is you are going out to try and get the big game, the deer or whatever it is that you're going to hunt.
And to do that effectively, you need to cooperate with other people.
You need to work well together.
You need to be a good team.
You need to have empathy towards each other.
You need to like each other ideally and so on.
So to hunt effectively is, in general, a team effort.
This can be the case with others.
Fishing as well, old man of the sea, nonwithstanding.
And hunter-gathering, yes, the gathering aspect of things, yeah, it's very helpful.
I mean, if you have a friend and he's like, oh, I went out that way and I got all the roots and berries or whatever it is, then you don't go there.
You don't waste your time. So even though it's more solitary, it's a bit more participative.
So we'll just broadly categorize this as the farmer.
It's a cooperative enterprise where you gain your sustenance out of dealing with manipulating and gaining resources out of objective material reality with the cooperation of other people around you.
So that is the farmer.
Now the fighter, on the other hand, So the warlord, sort of the Genghis Khan thing, what you do is you roll through a particular region where some particular wealth has been generated through interaction with reality, and you enslave people, you take their staff, you rape their women, and so on, and that's the violent way of spreading your genes, of gaining resources.
And, you know, the general pendulum of history that occurs is you get too many fighters, and they kill off all the farmers, and then the fighters all starve to death because there's nothing left to steal, and then they try to move on to some new region, and then they leave that old region, like they've pillaged it all, like Sopranos-style.
And then they sort of let it lie fallow for a while for the hope to be brought back up, for the farms to be reestablished, for the hunters to get their thing going and all of that.
And so a certain amount of peace tends to move people more towards being the farmers rather than the fighters.
But then, of course, when the farmers have generated enough wealth and peace and stability, then they're ripe for the pickings again, and the fighters and the warlords, they come swarming back, and they pillage the whole thing, plague a locust time again, rape, pillage, kill, enslave, and so on.
And that's the general pendulum, and we're in the downside of one of those pendulums at the moment.
So, why would there be this sense of the demon who takes pleasure in other people's suffering?
Because this is the angel and the devil in human nature.
You either take pleasure in people's success, or you take pleasure in people's suffering.
Taking pleasure in people's success is the farmer, the hunter, the gatherer, and so on.
Because you're all cooperating to get resources from objective reality.
So you take pleasure in each other's success.
If you're out in a hunting party, and you throw the spear but you miss the deer, but your friend throws the spear and he hits the deer, you're very happy that your friend hit the deer.
Of course you'd prefer it if you did, but you're very happy that he did, because if neither of you hit the deer, nobody gets any food.
So you are very happy If your friend does well.
If you're good friends with your neighbors, right?
You have a little farm, they have a little farm, right?
And you're good friends with your neighbors and you help each other out, then if something happens to your crops, but his crops are okay, Then you're actually happy that his crops are okay because he will share with you in the same way that if his crops were toasted for some reason and your crops were okay, you'd share with him. So his success, right, you lose your crops, he keeps his crops, and assuming it was just some accident.
You're happy for him because his success is your success, and your success is his success.
It's win-win. Because it's cooperative.
So... For the warlord, for the fighters though, for the exploiters and the pillagers, it's win-lose.
Right? You have something I want.
I will take it from you.
You will lose that thing. There's no cooperation.
I win, you lose. Now, if you're in a win-lose environment, you would evolve to take pleasure in somebody else's frustration, upset, suffering, and pain.
Because when they're in pain, that means that you have won, that you have gained the resources, you have enslaved that person.
If you're going to steal and rape his wife and then sell her into sexual slavery, he's going to go through a lot of suffering because he loves his wife.
You need to take pleasure in his pain because that's your motivation.
You have to win by him losing.
You can't both win.
You have to win by him losing and therefore him losing, which causes pain, is something that gives pleasure to you and this is the root of sadism.
Sadism is an emotional apparatus that trains you To effectively exploit people in a win-lose situation.
Because you also, you empathize with the person to the point where you feel their pain, but you take pleasure in their pain because either they're going to feel the pain or you're going to feel the pain.
And because it's a win-lose situation, evolutionarily speaking, you would infinitely rather that they suffer the pain than you suffer the pain.
Because it's win-lose.
And if you ain't winning, you're losing.
In cooperative facing reality, Hunter-gatherer, farmer stuff, you're all dealing with the same issues.
You're all kind of on the same team.
You will help that person raise their barn.
You will help, you know, for women, you will help each other raise each other's kids and so on.
It's cooperative because you're dealing with reality.
I think of a pride of lions, right?
The lion that actually, like they're all circling around some baby zebra.
Now the lion that actually clamps down on the jugular and kills the zebra...
It's not that that lion wins and all the other lions lose, right?
They all win if the zebra is brought down because they all get to eat, assuming there's enough for everyone.
So when you're dealing with objective reality, you need teamwork, you need support, you need empathy, and you need to be there for the team.
You need to not have just I win, you lose kind of ego stuff, right?
Whereas if you're a pillager, if you are a rapist and a thief and a murderer and so on, then you have a very different emotional apparatus, which is if the other person is suffering, you're winning.
And if they're not suffering, you're the one who's suffering and you're losing probably and going to die.
And of course, our emotional apparatus tends to very strongly guide us towards what allows us to survive and flourish and away from that, which causes us to be destroyed.
So, the angel is the cooperative nature of those of us who deal with objective universal reality.
The devil is an analogy for the sadism that is embedded in win-lose attacks, not even negotiations, or it could be negotiations, win-lose.
Now, of course...
The purpose of exploiting others is to gain their resources against their will because you don't have anything to trade other than maybe you'll let them live.
So you get resources from other people.
It's against their will. They don't want to share them with you.
And there's no reciprocity, right?
If you have the neighbor, you're out of food, he'll share some food with you.
You do the same with him. That's reciprocity.
If you have a neighbor who you know for sure would never ever share his food with you, you're less likely to share your food with him.
So the warlord or the fighter is the win-lose guy.
So the emotional apparatus that leads you towards that is called sadism and has a demonic aspect to it.
And these survival strategies of cooperative production versus predatory theft, I mean, we can go both ways.
And, of course, a lot of times it has gone both ways all throughout human history.
Now, of course, as a predator, as a pillager, as a warlord, you would much rather...
People come to deliver their goods to you voluntarily or at least not fight when you send your agents around to get those goods.
You would much rather that they do that of their own accord rather than you have to go out and fight and maybe people will die and so on.
And so what you'll do, the more abstract you can make your pillaging, the more effective your pillaging will be, the cheaper it will be for you, the less dangerous it will be for you and so on.
So... What you'll do is you will focus much more on, if you're a good warlord, if you're a good exploiter or pillager, what you'll do is you'll focus a lot more on ideology than you will on brute force.
Because the ideology has people feel, oh, no, I'm going to give you these goods because social contract.
I'm going to give you these goods because you are appointed by the divine.
I'm going to give you these goods because I'm a patriot.
I'm going to give you these goods because I'm a good person, whatever.
So you'll focus much more On abstractions than you will on sword to the throat kind of stuff, right?
I mean, you've maybe heard the argument that, you know, primitive governments are just pillagers and warlords who decided not to move on but to set up camp and harvest souls, in a sense, locally.
So... What we see is that demons are abstract entities, and by that I mean sort of immaterial, and they don't show up on photos or whatever usually.
So they're abstract entities that possess and displace the original personality.
And what I mean by that is that the best exploiters invent ideologies that have you deliver your goods to them in exchange for the feeling of being virtuous or being good or protecting people or whatever it is, right?
So they'll give you a false sense of virtue if you give them your very real goods and resources.
And because virtue is dangerous, getting a false sense of virtue is getting the high of being virtuous without the danger of being virtuous, because if you're virtuous, you interfere with the interests of evil people, and evil people usually make pretty short shrift of people like that.
They'll usually take them out one way or another fairly quickly and efficiently.
So it's actually very dangerous to be good.
But if you can give people the sense of virtue in return for them delivering goods to you, then...
That's a really, really great deal for both parties, not for the future, of course, in the long run, but for both parties in the immediate, in the short-term moment.
You give them the drug of self-righteousness, they give you the goods that they have earned or maybe even taken from others.
Who knows, right? So, the more abstract the pillaging, the more abstract the warlord's justifications, the more dangerous the warlord is.
And so, to me, you take that principle, which we kind of all understand instinctively, and you keep abstracting that to the point where the most abstract is the most dangerous, right?
The most abstract justifications for resource transferring under threat.
well, first of all you have to obscure the threat, which means you turn it into a virtue
to hand over your goods, and therefore it's not a threat.
So you obscure, I mean the threat is still there, but you obscure that. And so I would argue
that demon and demonic possession is an analogy for the ideology that justifies and simplifies
and makes far less risky the exploitation of others, the resource transfer from others.
And And so demons are abstract, they possess you, and you have to invite them in, right?
You have to want that false virtue.
In order to invite in the ideological mindset that numbs you to the pain of being exploited, right?
That's one thing ideology does, is it numbs you to the pain of being exploited so that you don't fight back.
I mean, the people who are exploiting you, they don't want you to fight back, obviously, right?
So they want you to And so they'll give you this kind of unholy bargain, which is they'll give you the pride of false virtue in return for you covering up the coercion of their exploitation.
So you have to invite them in.
You have to invite them in, like vampires.
So you have to invite them in, and this is part of the movie, which you'll sort of see.
And then what do they offer you?
They offer you the whole world and everything in it, right?
So what do they offer you? They offer you material.
They offer you material gain.
They don't offer you virtue.
They don't offer you peace of mind.
They don't offer you pride in the actual performance of moral actions and so on.
They offer you just the world and everything in it.
And what they do is very similar to a drug dealer, right?
So if you have a really terrible childhood, you have a lot of psychological pain and upset and anger and self-contempt and all of that.
They're very, very uncomfortable, very unpleasant.
Now, to my way of thinking, the way that you solve that is you very clearly delineate that you are the victim of evil and you are a survivor of...
A malevolent attack that went on for many years in your formative years, that you drew this very, very sort of clear, fiery trench line between you and the evildoers and say, yeah, I was born into a kind of hell run by evil people and I managed to escape or borrow my way out and, you know, don't look back, pillar assault kind of stuff.
It's a moral issue and the fact that psychology in general issues morality is to me one of the worst aspects of the modern mindset.
So, the drug dealer will come along and say, well, I can give you the fruits of virtue through a drug, right?
So you can feel great, and you can feel good, and you can feel high, and you can feel happy, and you don't have to deal with all of this painful stuff.
You don't have to stand up against evildoers.
You don't have to recognize the immorality of your upbringing and so on.
I'm just going to give you the fruits of virtue, but you don't have to be virtuous, right?
So giving you the effect without the cause.
Giving you the high without the work.
It's like those machines that they use.
I don't know if they still do these to sell on late night TV that you clamp these electrodes to your belly and it does sit-ups while you watch TV for you.
It's just kind of silly stuff like that.
I don't know if that stuff ever worked. I doubt it.
I remember seeing those and just kind of laughing like, God's sakes, just do some sit-ups.
Do you want to electrocute yourself?
How lazy are you? Do you rather electrocute yourself than do some bloody sit-ups?
It's crazy. So in the same way as a drug dealer offers you the chance to bypass dealing with the evils and the pains of your childhood and gives you the high as if you have dealt with those things just through a drug, And which is actually protecting the malevolence of those who harmed you as a child if that's what happened.
Helping the evildoers bury the bodies in your own heart, so to speak, draping you in opioids rather than opening you up to self-knowledge and moral clarity.
Very much serving the immoral people, right?
Covering up the symptoms is very much serving the immoral people.
So that's what happens on the drug dealer side.
In this sort of demonic side, what they do is they say that you don't have to be good, which puts you at risk.
You can feel good by gaining the approval of bad people, right?
Don't worry about virtue.
Don't worry about objective morality.
What you need to be is approved of by people and if the people who've been through bad childhoods know the most about evil and yet they are to some degree the most susceptible to rejection.
So, you know, bad forces, bad ideologies, bad actors in society threaten those who have been through bad childhoods with ostracism which puts them back to the loneliness and isolation of their abused childhood because society doesn't reach through that fiery wall and provide any particular comfort or sustenance to abused children.
So they say, oh, well, come with us.
Don't examine evil.
Don't point out the obvious immoralities within society.
Don't poke or provoke us, the evildoers.
And what we'll do is we will lead you over here and give you money and approval and then...
You'll feel better.
You'll feel good. You've had enough fighting.
You've had enough unhappiness.
Just come over here. We'll give you a career.
We'll give you money. We'll give you comfort.
We'll give you pleasure and so on.
And you won't... The unspoken thing is...
And you'll be serving us.
You'll be covering up the crimes of your childhood.
And you will be no longer fighting against immorality or promoting virtue.
So that kind of temptation is quite common.
If you grew up under the control of evil people, you know a lot about evil, which means that you are a threat to the evildoers of the world because you understand the whole game, the whole system.
And so what they will do is they will threaten to continue the abuse of your childhood forever and you'll never get out of it if you identify evil and speak about it clearly.
And they will attempt to bribe you with approval, which of course you've been looking for as a kid if you, one of the ways that cruel parents harm children is to withhold approval.
And so you want approval and they will give you approval.
Just give up all of the fruits of the knowledge of good and evil that you got by being raised by evildoers.
Give all of that up. Come with us.
We'll approve of everything.
We'll give you money. We'll give you peace.
Just give up the fight. I understand.
It's tempting. And I think that if you look at that particular pattern of sadism as an emotional adaptation strategy to win-lose predatory interactions, and making things more abstract makes predation far more effective and far more powerful, And therefore, the most dangerous demons are the ones that are invisible that you have to invite in, which is ideology.
And ideology is convincing people with a great knowledge of evil to work for evil rather than against it.
And it's very, very powerful.
So I hope that this makes some sense.
I'm not going to give up much on the movie.
It's absolutely worth watching.
And maybe what we'll do is we'll, if you've watched the movie, let me know.
And we can do a sort of show where everybody talks about their thoughts about the movie, because they certainly have some thoughts, but I don't want to give away any spoilers.
But Yeah, absolutely. Go and watch Nefarious.
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