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April 29, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:34
CULTURE VS PHILOSOPHY!
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Time Text
Oh! Oh!
Oh, my God is telling me we have a rant.
Do you want me to answer questions?
Or hit a rant? R for rant.
Q for questions. R for rant.
Q for questions. Oh, it's a good one.
Oh, yes. I'm afraid the R's have it.
Oh, here it comes.
I can't hold it. I can't hold it.
All right. Here's why I took a hammer to culture.
I'll tell you exactly why I took a hammer to culture.
It's just come to Kramer style.
It just came to me right now. Here's why I took a hammer to culture.
Why I talked about culture being error.
Culture is another word for error. If it's not culture, it's math, it's science, it's facts.
It's truth. It's proven.
It's not culture that two and two make four.
It's not culture that the world is round.
It's not culture that the sun is the center of the universe.
Culture is everything that is wrong.
It's not true. A cultural belief means it's not true.
Because if it was true, it wouldn't be a culture.
A pawn can move forwards one space except at the beginning when it's two and it can only use move diagonal to take.
That's not culture. It's not a cultural thing.
That's the rules of the game. It's the rules of chess.
You're not playing that. You're playing some other game.
Culture can only survive as a store of values.
Not value. Values. Culture can only survive as a store of values if you don't have other cultures come in.
Homogenous cultures can maintain that because the appearance of universality occurs because there's no contradiction.
Nobody coming in and saying, I don't believe it.
Everybody believes it. Everybody believes it.
And so it feels true because there's unanimity in your environment.
Everybody believes it. And of course, when there was less communication, less travel and so on, it was much easier to keep people in that box of culture and pretend that culture was physics, culture was right, culture was truth.
Now, I come along and I look at culture and I see you being torn apart.
Torn apart, shredded and ripped and attacked by skepticism, by secularism, by materialism, by Darwinianism, by utilitarianism and pragmatism and other religions and other cultures and other beliefs.
And they come into this culture, your culture, and they say, well, we believe our culture is absolutely superior and perfect.
And you believe that your culture, you get this multiplicity.
And it shatters. It shatters.
How you destroy a culture is you bring in other cultures and you resist philosophy.
Because philosophy can find what is true and unite people in facts, reason and evidence.
Reality! Reality, not fantasy.
Not the historical inertia of prior era we call culture.
Damn, that's good.
So I see a soft swimmer in the water.
Sharks, piranhas, barracuda all around it.
Nibbling, tearing, biting, shh, the shh.
The swimmer is screaming.
I say, we have to get you out of the water.
We have to build a cage.
If you stay in the water, you're being torn apart.
And Western culture was marked for destruction, as you know.
Individualistic, rationalistic, free market.
It's the most philosophical culture, Western culture in the past, at least until this generation.
The most philosophical culture, which is why it had to go.
So you've got the swimmer in the water being torn apart.
Well, we can't get rid of the sharks.
We can't get rid of the barracuda.
We can't get rid of the piranha. I know piranhas are lake fish sharks.
Well, no, there are freshwater sharks in Nicaragua.
I know that. I don't know why.
I'm not proud of it, but I do.
So I saw it all being torn apart.
And I'm like, we've got to put some balls and spine in these load-bearing walls because they're crumbling.
They're falling down. You've got people setting off charges in the basement of the building and we've got to shore this up.
We've got to build some girders, some structure.
We've got to find what is true and weld people's belief to what is true.
Or to put it another way, because the analogy is coming fast and furious, there are people in a ship being torpedoed by skepticism.
Well, maybe we can patch up the ship.
Nope, okay, we've got to get people off the ship, onto lifeboats, get them to land.
I came in and I saw a culture, and this includes our religion, could not last.
The absolutism of error can only be sustained if other absolutist errors aren't mixed in.
Opposing absolutist errors aren't mixed in.
And this is why people who rule over error, when they get invaded, they're pushing back not just the physical invaders, but the undermining of the myths that serve their power, which we called culture.
So I was like, well, this ship ain't gonna last.
This swimmer's in the water, it's gonna get torn apart.
So I have to Find what is true in culture.
I have to sandblast away the accumulated, cumulus, teeth-rotting candy of falsehood and I've got to get to the core hard skeleton of truth that Western culture is wound in but not defined by.
Wound in by but not defined by.
So I'm like, okay, I've got to establish the nature of reality.
I've got to establish the nature of sense perception.
I've got to establish epistemology, the study of knowledge.
I've got to get to ethics.
I've got to get to politics. We've got to clean it all away, blow it all away, wipe it all away.
All of it. And build from the ground.
This is not my approach.
This is Descartes. This is even Nietzsche if you want to look at it in an extremist way.
Just wipe it clean. Wipe it clean.
Start again. With your kid, you make a painting, you draw a picture of the painting, it gets worse and worse, throw it out, start again.
Start again.
Start again.
Wipe it clean, start again.
Our culture could not last because other cultures had been invited in and the Christian culture
in particular, Christian values, were specifically excluded from schools.
You couldn't talk about it.
Thank you.
Now, leftist cults come in, that's fine.
But the religious foundation in the entire West, got to get rid of that to make room for other cults.
Or break room for cults.
Christianity is not a cult.
So I'm like, okay, the torpedoes, the target, the laser, the shocks in the bathtub...
The vector of attack is to disintegrate culture.
So my job is to ride in there and rescue from culture what is true and transfer people's beliefs from a ship that can't possibly sustain itself, that is sinking, to get them into a lifeboat and get them to the land called truth, called philosophy, reason, evidence. Because when you're on land, you're pretty much immune from the torpedoes.
Torpedoes are a sea-based weapon.
So I'm like, clear it all away, find the essence of the core of truth, okay?
No murder, no theft, no rape, no assault.
That I'm down with. That's got to be what we have to establish.
So I work on the introduction of philosophy, one of the first major works that I did, 19 hours straight of here's how we find out the truth.
I go from there, I go to, you know, the second essay that I published was...
Universally preferable behavior or proving libertarian morality where I laid out the foundations of universally preferable behavior and say, okay, what can we say about virtue that requires no faith at all?
Because faith is saying, I desperately need this to be true.
I'm going to assume the conditions that make it true so that I can survive.
We have to have people not steal.
What do we need to assume to be true so that people won't steal?
Well, there's a God and he's going to punish you and he's going to reward you and thou shalt not steal and boom, boom, boom.
Done, right? Okay, fine.
What if somebody comes along who doesn't believe in God?
Huh? What if somebody comes along who says, oh no, see, my God says, totally fine for us to steal within our own group or tribe or religion or belief system.
Those people outside, don't care about them.
We can tell them any lies we want.
We can steal from them.
We can attack them.
We can undermine them. It doesn't matter.
What are you going to do? What are you going to do?
When someone comes along and says, your values, your virtues, everything that your ancestors slaved and died for, everything that you hold dear, and that you treasure, and that you find necessary for the survival and beautification of your world, spirit, soul, future, and lineage, everything that you believe in and hold dear, what if somebody comes along and says, nah...
I don't buy it, man. I don't buy it.
I just, I can't buy it.
I just, you know, this is my friends when I was, I read about these guys in The God of Atheists.
The skeptics. The cynics.
You know, my friends would say, yeah, you know, it's Christianity.
It's a great story, man. I don't buy it.
I just don't buy it. What do you say to people like that?
Well, you have to buy it because you go to hell.
If you don't, I don't believe in hell.
But you'll get to go to heaven.
I don't believe in that. What do you do?
What do you do? What can you do?
Or somebody says, well, in my particular belief system, there's no such thing as hell.
It's all just an analogy and a metaphor.
What are you going to do? What if you had a system of ethics, virtue, and truth that you didn't have to abandon or give way in the face of skepticism?
That's what UPB is. I can absolutely, completely, and totally prove virtue to you.
It's not cultural. It's not religious.
It doesn't require you to believe in anything that can't be proven at all.
It's absolute, certain, deep, powerful.
It's physics, not preference.
It's causality, not culture.
It's reason, not inertia.
It doesn't require you to believe in anything prior to accepting its outcome.
That's what I've been up to.
That's what I'm all about.
If you have physics, you can prove the behavior properties in nature of matter
People don't need to believe anything that you believe ahead of time.
They don't need to agree with you about a god or a culture or a history or a country or a patriotism or a culture or any of that.
It's inescapable.
And making virtue inescapable because you know it's inescapable in our conscience.
Deep down in our brain, where the facts get processed, no matter what we will or how many lies we tell to each other, the judge, the jury, the executioner is always down there, sharpening his blade, holding out some seed cake, if you get it right.
Judging, cold-eyed, always being watched, always being judged.
That's your unconscious. That's UPP in your brain.
That's the universalization mechanism of your entire thought process.
It's always occurring. Always.
Even in your dreams, and maybe even especially in your dreams.
Is culture, you say, an unreliable mechanism for establishing social norms?
Yes! Yes, it is.
We need philosophy. We need science, facts, reason, and evidence.
Ah, but you can't get an ought from an is!
You just did. Moving on.
Done and dusted. Yeah, some cultures are better than others.
Those cultures that are closest to philosophy.
So why don't we just have a culture called philosophy?
Why don't we just have values called truth, reason, evidence, facts, data?
I mean, my God, man.
Do you know, me, one guy, do you know how much I've been right about?
One day, I will list it all.
But it just goes on and on and on.
Yeah, you can't rely.
See, culture has a soft flank.
Culture has a giant hole in the armor.
Which is, okay, well, if I don't believe it, what are you going to do?
Well, then you need the threats of the state.
You need the threats of hell. You need the bullying and ostracism of the crowd.
You need mob justice. You need aggression and torture and murder and prisons and...
Demons to threaten and bully and bribe people and, oh, just do it!
You're like a parent who can't explain anything, who offers candy or a beating.
No! Culture can't survive skepticism!
Which is why when you want to destroy culture, you bring in skeptics.
Philosophy...
Not only can philosophy survive skepticism, philosophy is skepticism.
Philosophy requires it, it demands it, it needs it.
It's the first question I ask with every show that I'm live streaming.
It's the first question. Comments, issues, questions, problems, criticisms, debates, oppositions, you name it.
People who disagree with me, top of the line, front of the line, debates, absolutely.
Philosophy needs skepticism like life needs sustenance.
Culture can't survive skepticism because it's based upon falseness.
If it wasn't based on falseness, it wouldn't be culture, it would be science, facts, reason, evidence, logic, whatever, right?
Be truth. Culture cannot survive skepticism.
That's why you teach everyone to be skeptical of everything except communism, right?
A culture can't survive skepticism.
Philosophy, not only can it survive skepticism, it's founded on skepticism.
Bring it on, man. Bring on your doubts.
Bring out your dead. Bring on your doubts.
Bring them, bring them, bring everything that you think, every caustic tsunami of bitter acidic skepticism, you just crash into this man, you bring it, you bring that acid, you bring that bile, you bring those stomach juices, you ring them all over the cathedral and statue of philosophy, bring it! I need it.
I want it. I thrive on it.
I eat it.
I grow strong on skepticism.
Because that's the bully that kicks over culture.
Why should I believe it?
Your ancestors did.
Well, I don't care. Why should I believe it?
Because it serves your needs.
I don't think it does. I don't want to have a belief just because it serves my needs.
And there's all these people around me just come in from the Middle East, just come in from Africa, just come in from Russia, wherever.
All these people, they don't believe it.
Why should I? If I lived over there, I'd believe what they believe.
Like when I was five years old, or however the hell old I was, when that kid came over and said, my soccer team is way better than your soccer team.
I'm like, so? If I lift where you lift, I'd like that soccer team, and you'd like my soccer team.
It's just an accident at birth.
It's not truth. I'm born here, I believe this.
Okay, you can believe it, but it doesn't make it true.
Truth is not geographical.
Truth is not what you're indoctrinated with as a kid.
Truth is what survives skepticism.
That's all it is. Check that fire hose, that acidic sandblasting fire hose at every crumbling structure you see.
Truth is what's left standing after the fires of skepticism race through the forests of
history.
And everything that is left standing after the fires of skepticism burn through will
stand forever.
Will stand whether people believe in it or not, whether they like it or not, whether
it pleases them or displeases them, whether they love it or hate it.
Everything that survives the fires of skepticism lasts forever.
You have burned away the temporal, you've burned away the prejudicial, you've burned away the historical, you've burned away the accidental, you've burned away the geographical, and you have uncovered and revealed the solid silver spine Of absolutism and eternity.
You have now hooked your mind into that which is infinite and permanent and valid.
Culture cannot survive.
It cannot survive diversity.
Culture has to get off the sinking ship of history and onto the eternal land and solid structure of philosophy.
Amen. Tell me that ain't worth a tip or two, brothers.
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