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June 30, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:51
Propaganda vs Free Will
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Alright, so the question of nature versus nurture, free will versus moral responsibility, came up in the last live stream, and I recognize it's scattered over a couple of dozen places over the course of the show, so I'll synthesize my thoughts here.
Happy to get your feedback. On what I'm arguing for.
So, of course, you have to take into account the information that people have or don't have when it comes to evaluating their moral choices.
The analogy I've used before, of course, is you don't blame a doctor in the 17th century for failing to prescribe an antibiotic for an infection because antibiotics didn't exist.
So he's not aware of it, he's not capable of getting it, it's not present in his environment, and therefore you cannot blame him For not doing that.
Now, when it comes to moral responsibility and environment, there are a couple of considerations.
First of all, as I repeatedly point out in my novel, The Future, the first standard that you apply to a person, let's call her Sally, right?
So the first moral standard that you apply to Sally...
Is Sally's own moral standards, in particular those she applies to others, and in particular, particular those she applies to her own children.
So if Sally says, don't steal, then Sally should not steal.
Can Sally be judged for stealing?
Well, sure, because if she says to her kids, don't steal, stealing is wrong, and so on.
If she says to her children, don't grab, don't hit, don't take, then she is responsible for In her life for not hitting or taking or grabbing.
If she says to her children, tell the truth, then she's responsible for telling the truth.
She's judged by the moral standards that she applies to herself.
In the same way, though, there is a lot of propaganda to completely shred and reverse personal morals to institutional ethics.
So, personal morals don't take.
Institutional morals, using state coercion to transfer resources, is not only morally acceptable, it's morally good.
So, for individuals, you don't take.
For larger institutions, you do take.
And so on, right? So, you say to your kids, don't lie, but then when they're saying things that embarrass you, you tell them to be polite and diplomatic and thoughtful and hold their tongue and say things that they don't mean.
Oh, grandmother, that's so wonderful, whatever, I'm so happy to see you.
So, when it comes to morals, people are responsible for the morals they inflict on others, particularly on children.
And they are also far less responsible, though, in following the subtle threads up the propaganda tree to the mass of institutions that raise them.
One of the great dangers, of course, of letting children be raised by the state is they bond with the state.
Most children from the ages of 4 or 5 to 17 or 18 spend much more time in the arms of the state than in the arms of their parents.
And so institutional ethics, having one ethic to rule all people, regardless of uniform or costume or position in society or claims to the opposite, having one moral rule.
For all people is the foundation of UPB. Of course, massive amounts of propaganda are expended to exclude or reverse morality when it comes to particularly political hierarchies and institutions.
It's just like gravity.
It's just like physics.
It's not something that you question and so on, right?
We don't imagine flying unaided to get from one place to another unless someone were to show us Being flying unaided.
Very few people are able to rigorously apply single principles in all situations.
And we're built to do that, we're born to do that, which is why so much propaganda has to be expended to prevent us from doing that.
But drawing those straight lines from personal ethics to universal ethics to institutional ethics to political ethics to, you know, just having one moral rule Regardless of political position or tradition or experience and so on, having one moral rule is very hard for most people to be able to achieve.
And so then, the question is, how responsible are people for that which they really can't easily conceive of, and for which they would be very punished?
I mean, we can all imagine being a student in a government school, and the teacher says, don't use force to get what you want.
And lo and behold, some kid puts up his hand and says, but you forced my parents to pay your salary through property taxes.
You can imagine what would happen.
Oh, no, no, this is a social contract.
It's like, well, no, there's no contract that I've signed or my parents have signed, right?
What do you mean? And so you can't tell us...
You can't tell us that we shouldn't use force to get what we want when you use force to get what you want.
Your summer's off and a fairly easy work schedule and job security and free pensions and health care at the expense of others.
This doesn't happen in school.
It's incomprehensible for it to happen in school, even if a child thought it through some particular genius or exposure to libertarian thought.
The child would almost certainly never say it.
That would be punished almost beyond imagination.
You wouldn't want that thought, truth, that glimmer of reality spreading among the young, right?
So we don't blame children, of course, for not saying these kinds of things, for not figuring these kinds of things out and saying them.
We don't blame children.
Adults in the same way for failing to recognize what almost nobody recognizes.
I mean, this is a fair statement, isn't it?
Can we blame adults for failing to recognize what almost no adult recognizes?
Well... I don't think we can.
If we were space aliens observing human beings with no, like with a prime directive, with no intention of intervening, we would look at human beings and we'd say, well, very few of them have a universal moral rule.
It probably is not More than one person in a hundred thousand who has a conception of the universality of a moral rule and everybody is propagandized to the opposite, to say that that which is forbidden to citizens, that which is forbidden to children is not just permitted
but encouraged for others, particularly in the political hierarchies and so on, almost
nobody sees it, almost nobody understands it, almost nobody gets it, and people are
enormously propagandized to the opposite.
So they say, ah, well what is their moral responsibility?
Well that's the wrong question.
That's the wrong, this is why I pushed back so hard the other night.
So the wrong question is saying, how morally responsible are people for failing to apply
moral law universally?
How responsible are people for doing that?
Well, that's the wrong question.
It's a passive question.
It's a judgment question.
It's a distancing question.
It's a paralysis question.
Because, let's say that you have...
A giant repository of life-saving pills, right?
A giant repository of life-saving pills, right?
And people are taught that your pills are bad and you're a bad person for having the pills and so on.
You shouldn't take those pills and all that.
Even though your pills, while painful, are curative.
And if you were a doctor with...
Even if you're not a doctor, you have these pills, right?
Let's say you're a doctor, a pharmacist or whatever, someone with credibility.
And you were to say, how responsible are people for not taking these pills?
That would be the wrong question.
The right question is, what efforts are you taking to make the pills more palatable, to proving the value of the pills, to taking the pills yourself, to raising your credibility with people?
Because I think it's fair to accept that we cannot judge people harshly for knowledge they do not possess.
But the people who do possess that knowledge Of the universal moral law.
The people who do possess that knowledge should be judged more harshly for failing to spread it than those who have failed to receive it.
Do you see what I'm saying?
This is why the question is frustrating to hear.
People want to judge, right?
Want to judge others, right?
You've got a big sack of life-saving pills.
People aren't taking them.
How responsible are people for not taking them?
That's the wrong question. The right question is, how can I get people to take these pills?
Can't force them. Don't want to lie to them.
Can't bully them. Don't want to bully them.
How can I encourage people to take these pills?
Rather than judging people for whether they take the pills or not, you should be judging yourself, if you have the pills, for how well you're working, how effectively you're working to get the pills into the hands, bellies, and blood of the general population, right?
So in the initial question that came up where people were like, I'm so mad at women because the women vote for a government and this, that, and the other, right?
Okay. I'm so mad at women and you judge women and so on.
And I came in reminding everyone that women are propagandized and in some ways even more so than men.
And people then, oh, so you're saying women don't have any moral responsibility.
They don't have any moral agency.
No. My point is, that I have some great medicine and My judgment is not whether people take the medicine or not.
My judgment is on myself at how effective I am at interesting people in the medicine, at showing people how good the medicine is for me, at showing people how good the medicine is for my family and my friends and my community and all of that, right?
That's what I'm interested in.
Not judging people from a great distance, like you're locked in an attic and can't go out and mingle among the people.
It's like judging people.
Oh, so many people are so anti-rational.
Okay, well, that's true.
They've been propagandized.
It's not natural to us.
What's most natural to us is universals, and reversing them is a lot of propaganda, a lot of violence, a lot of power, right?
A lot of destruction of integrity.
You say, oh, people are so anti-rational.
All right. What are you doing to bring reason to them?
Rather than judging them for what you have, but they lack, why don't you judge yourself positively or negatively for your willingness to go out and tell them about reason, and tell them about the moral law, the universality of ethics.
So rather than sitting back and judging others, You should judge yourself for your effectiveness, or lack thereof, of going out and spreading the word.
Oh, people, they don't understand philosophy.
They're against philosophy. I'm going to judge them for that.
Okay. You can do that, of course, right?
But... When you bring reason to people, you create free will in them.
People don't have the capacity to choose that which they believe to be impossible.
Choosing something that is impossible is one of the definitions of insanity, right?
I choose to believe that I'm Napoleon.
Well, Napoleon has been dead for centuries, so that's not possible, and that's kind of crazy, right?
I choose to believe I can walk on water.
I choose to believe I can float through the air.
I choose to believe I can jump off a building and fly.
I mean, that's crazy, right?
This is a mark of insanity.
And so, rather than judging people for how sane or not sane they are, why don't you go and help them?
If you're an expert lifeguard and somebody's drowning in a pool, right where you are, instead of judging...
Them for whether they can swim or not, how about you go in and rescue them?
The judgment aspect is very passive.
So if you are upset with women being on the left or women voting for bigger government and so on, then what rescues all of us really is love.
Love of wisdom, love of truth, love of virtue, love of another...
So, instead of judging women in this way, my plea was to start to understand where they're coming from and why they have these particular perceptions.
If you have a great product but people aren't buying it, you have to look in the mirror.
I mean, you can, of course, just rail against people and get mad at them and condemn them and so on, and I guess maybe that gives you a certain amount of useless aristocratic satisfaction, but wouldn't it be better as a whole?
Rather than if you've got a great product and people aren't buying it, wouldn't it be better for you to figure out what their barriers are, what you can do better, how you can communicate better, how you can get better marketing, like whatever it takes.
Judgment is a very often detachment.
A judgment very often is a form of, I don't want to quite say cowardice, although I think there's elements of that, but I wouldn't want to condemn it, of course, until it's fully understood.
So if I'm making a good case here, and then you still prefer to condemn rather than encourage, Then that may be considered cowardly, but I won't say that at the beginning because I'm just putting forth this perspective.
And I think it's fair to say that in my life this is what I've modeled.
Of course, never perfectly.
I get all of that.
You can find exceptions. But in general, my approach has been the world is not rational.
The world is anti-rational.
And so what I will do is work as hard as I can to bring reason to as many people as possible in as positive and enjoyable and engaging and challenging a way.
And exciting, hopefully, a way as possible.
Rather than condemn the world for being irrational, I will work to bring reason to the world, right?
There's lots of people complaining about the fires.
There's very few carrying water, right, to put it out.
And so, do you expect women, if they are attacked by men, to give up the state and embrace the love of men?
No, that's not going to happen.
You will have to woo women away from the state.
Now, how do you woo women away from the state?
Well, you Become good boyfriends, good husbands, good fathers to their children.
You bring love and reason and empathy and compassion and curiosity and affection and honor to their world.
Or I guess alternatively you could just scream at them from the sidelines that they're evil socialists wrecking the world.
Well, you understand that's just going to If you know a woman who's in an abusive relationship and you scream abuse at her, You're not drawing her out of that abusive relationship.
You're probably driving her further into the arms of her abuser.
You understand? It's just not productive.
It's not productive. I mean, I guess it's emotionally satisfying in the short run, but like all addictions, emotionally satisfying in the short run usually leads to massive disaster in the long run, right?
Which is, you know, that's not what you want.
It's not what you want. So, the wrong question is, how responsible are people?
How much free will do they have?
What moral responsibility do they have?
And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, whatever moral responsibility they have, it needs to be increased.
And how are you going to increase it?
Are you going to increase it by judging them according to standards they do not understand?
And attacking them with standards that are incomprehensible?
No. That's not going to spread reason.
That's not going to spread virtue.
You want to, I think, model virtue as best you can.
You want to model reasonableness as best you can.
And you want to model compassion and strictness, right?
The compassion is, yeah, there are things that you don't know.
And if everyone around you has said everything, everyone around you has said the same things for all time, I think we can forgive people for believing those things are true and accepting them in the way that we accept gravity and so on.
But at the same time, we can work to give them new information and new knowledge that will expand their choices to make the moral law consistent so that their choices can be made where we have broken down What they perceive of as reality and we have created options that hitherto did not exist.
The option of, say, applying the moral law universally.
So, the question of, well, Steph, aren't you, by saying that people are very susceptible to propaganda, aren't you making them victims and aren't you taking away their free will and their moral responsibility and so on?
I recognize that people have been lied into error, which they do not perceive as error, but as virtue.
Now, if someone comes to you and starts yelling at you that you should overcome gravity and that you're an idiot and a slave and a sheeple for obeying gravity, you would think that person is crazy.
Of course you would, right? I would.
And you would want to stay away from that person as much as you possibly could.
It's dangerous, right? You understand.
Now... If you go yelling at people that they're hypocrites or socialists or slaves or sheeple or whatever according to standards they don't understand, you may be emotionally satisfying your own resentment, but you won't actually be changing the world for the better at all.
In fact, you'll be discrediting your philosophical viewpoints considerably.
And that would be kind of tragic.
It would be very tragic to drive people away from virtue, to drive people away from the truth, because you're angry.
And listen, I understand that you're angry.
I understand the frustration.
When you've been working in philosophy for four decades and publicly battling and locking horns with an increasingly censorious and aggressive and dangerous world, I get it.
I understand it. You don't have to explain it to me of all people.
I understand it. I really do.
And I sympathize with it.
I really do. And if you can't overcome your resentment, then you need to take a break from the world of philosophy.
Because if philosophy is leading you to resentment and frustration and anger and condemning half the planet or 90% of the planet, then philosophy is taking your soul, it's taking your compassion, it's taking your humanity.
And that's not good. That's not going to help you or anyone else in the long run.
Remember the sort of devilish aspect of our nature, or if you prefer, the devil himself, will always, will always, always, always tempt you To alienate others through vanity.
And the vanity is, well, I understand these things, and I found my way out of the matrix, and I know the moral law, and I accept the truth, and everyone who doesn't is an idiot.
Well, look, you were lucky in a way.
You were lucky in a way.
When I first got rational philosophy, when I first was exposed to rational philosophy, I responded very positively.
Did I earn that through virtue and integrity?
I did not. I just happened to react very positively.
Now, when I tried to share, I mean, I knew that I wasn't going to be much of an evangelist for rational philosophy when I'd been in it for a couple of months.
But, you know, I handed the books and tried to explain the ideas, handed the books out to other people and so on, and tried to explain the ideas, and...
The other people in my life did not respond positively to reason and evidence.
They in fact responded with great negativity and hostility to said reason and evidence.
Now, I had a very positive reaction to reason and evidence and they had a very hostile reaction to reason and evidence.
What is the cause of that?
Is it virtue? It is not.
It is not, because I became virtuous over many years because I loved reason and evidence, because I loved rational philosophy.
I'm just going to say philosophy, right?
Because the only kind is rational and empirical philosophy.
So I responded positively, and therefore I put years of work into philosophy and slowly began to drag virtue out of the sort of shack.
It shattered, bombed-out remnants of my childhood and youth.
My friends reacted With hostility.
Friends and family reacted with hostility.
My mother, of course, was very hostile towards philosophers.
That got me thinking originally, particularly Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand just became your mother.
She just replaced me. Well, you could have read Ayn Rand.
So... Did I earn my positive response?
And look, if you're honest, when you first listened to me or you listened to other people or read whoever that got you interested in the free market and reason and evidence and empiricism and so on, when you read these people, you had a positive response to it.
Did you earn that positive response?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
Like, there's some people who just, the moment they start tickling the ivories on a piano, they just absolutely love it.
And they sort of work night and day to figure it out, right?
That's that Brian Adams song, right?
Got my first real six-string at the five and dime.
Played it till my fingers bled.
It was the summer of 69. Right, he just played it till his fingers bled.
Eric Wolfson from the Alan Parsons Project just loved piano and...
Figured out piano and played piano and just loved it and became a great piano player because he loved piano the moment he was exposed to it.
Whereas other people play piano and they don't really like it that much.
They don't enjoy it. They find it kind of frustrating.
And so they don't really end up being pianists.
Usually. Right? So, when you were exposed to reason and evidence, I bet you didn't feel rage, I bet you didn't feel contempt, I bet you didn't, you know, look up on the internet how best to discredit whoever was espousing reason and evidence, right, you probably had a very positive response to it.
It may have even felt, as it did for me, like an oasis in a desert that you were about to die of thirst in.
A lifesaver, a salvation mindset.
So you reacted positively.
Other people react negatively and with hostility and rage, sometimes.
Murderousness, sometimes.
I don't know all the differences, all the reasons why.
We can sort of theorize, but it's not particularly important why it happens.
We simply know that it happens.
So you reacted positively, as did I, and most other people will react with negativity, hostility, frustration, maybe even rage.
It could even be violence.
Did you earn your warmth towards philosophy when you first heard it?
Did I? Nope.
I mean, I think I had some instinct towards ethics because even though I was abused as a child, I did not become an abuser of others.
But for whatever reason, and I don't know exactly why, could have something to do with early childhood experiences, could be something just X factor, could be something genetic, I don't know, I have no idea.
But that's still a fact.
You reacted positively, I reacted positively, most people react with negativity and hostility.
Facts. So humility is to say, look man, I was lucky.
I was exposed to a whole bunch of good and bad belief systems.
I happen to instinctually and deeply emotionally gravitate towards the good belief systems rather than the bad belief systems.
I'm lucky that way.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky that the devil didn't have such a hold on my heart that he turned me against philosophy instinctively the moment that I'd heard it and didn't cause me to condemn it or attack it or hate it, right?
So, you're lucky.
You're lucky. You're like somebody who just happens to be born immune to a particular illness, railing at all those who get sick.
Saying, well, you idiots, why did you get sick?
And, you know, well, have some humility, I would argue.
I mean, this seems to be sort of the theme of the week, and I hope it makes some kind of sense.
But yeah, I would say have some humility.
Have some humility and recognize that if you've been given the gift of a positive reaction to philosophy, then I think your job is to try and awaken in others a positive reaction to philosophy as best you can, right?
And judging them only, right?
And look, of course we all judge, and I'm not saying that's a terrible thing at all, right?
I mean, philosophy is a lot about judgment, but if all you do is judge and rail against people, then You are almost literally like a guy who inherits 10 million dollars railing at people who are poor for just being lazy.
You happen to have inherited a positive reaction to philosophy, and that is not granted to many people.
You understand why.
Society needs philosophers to progress, but philosophy destabilizes society, and too much destabilization can cause some pretty ugly things.
So you have been blessed with a positive reaction to philosophy, whereas most people...
are cursed with a negative reaction to philosophy, and you should be grateful for that.
I know I am. My life would be hell, really, if I had been cursed with a negative response to philosophy.
And we understand why, evolutionarily speaking, this might be the case.
Society needs philosophers in order to progress, but if too many people are into philosophy at the same time, society gets immensely destabilized, and some very terrible things can occur in the short run.
So... You happen to be part of the, in a sense, you know, how evolution works, even if you just want to talk about it at a micro level, evolution works because there's sort of some random genes that work their way in and society tests, oh sorry, and evolution or nature tests them for do they help the animal survive and reproduce and so on.
And so, you know, we're kind of like a little bit of the random genes in society to try and help it evolve.
And a lot of people who are anti-norm, right?
Anti-social norms or anti-reality norms, a lot of them are crazy.
Trust me. I was raised by one, right?
I know. So a lot of the people who are in this...
Random mutation stuff.
They're crazy. We happen to be super sane rather than crazy, which is wonderful.
I would not want to be somebody who was in the world of the normie in the world of the matrix.
I wouldn't want to be someone like that.
But I would prefer being that to being crazy.
So I happen to be somebody who goes against social norms out of sanity rather than out of craziness.
And that's very, very, very unusual.
And I just happen to be lucky that way.
And so do you.
And the purpose, of course, I think, of having this kind of luck is to try and reproduce our good fortune through arguments and debates and evidence and presentations to other people.
I mean, to take a silly analogy, if you happen to have a blood that cured people of a deadly illness, wouldn't you want to give blood?
I mean, not all of it.
You've got to live, but, you know, wouldn't you realize?
Like, if you could save a thousand people by donating a pint of blood, wouldn't you do it whenever it was medically safe to do that?
I would think so.
I mean, I'd hope so. So you happen to be born with a positive mutation, which is A happy reaction to reason and evidence.
Very rare. And railing against other people who did not have your good fortune is ungrateful for that good fortune.
And what we have been fortunate to be blessed with by whatever brings these things about We should try and share these blessings as much as possible.
And railing against people, which again, I understand.
I'm not condemning you for condemning people.
I have my own judgments and I can get hostile and I can get frustrated.
So I'm not saying that I'm sort of floating in a Zen position with my legs crossed, you know, four foot off the summit of Mount Everest or anything.
I'm just down here in the trenches just trying to pass along some battle-scarred wisdom.
Some survival tips, survival skills.
You're lucky. I'm lucky.
And part of our luck is the people who came before us who were also lucky in that they responded positively to reason and evidence.
The reason we have beautiful music in the world is there's some people who react very positively to music, to musical instruments, right?
I mean, Freddie Mercury was saying that music is his entire life and that that's all.
It's all he's interested in.
And if he couldn't do that, he didn't know what he'd be, like a stripper or something, probably, right?
So you're lucky, I'm lucky, and the purpose is to share our good fortune with the unfortunate.
It's to share our good fortune and to help other people be lucky, right?
So some people are born with a natural bent and natural gifts towards slenderness and muscle accumulation, right?
And of course, you know, even people with a fairly good genetic gift towards muscularity can't often add more than five pounds of muscle a year without supplements or whatever, right?
So some people are born really lean naturally and with a genetic capacity to build muscle, right?
Now, do they just rail at everyone else who can't build muscle the same way they can?
I think that would be unfair and ungrateful for the gifts that they have if that's what they want in their life.
But what they can do is they can inspire other people to become more healthy.
They can recognize their own good fortune.
Hey, I'm just kind of naturally lean.
I kind of naturally accumulate muscle.
And then I remember, I would think it was on my honeymoon.
I was playing volleyball on the beach with my wife and there were these girls there and they had great figures.
And I remember them saying, oh, we don't even work out.
Like, man, when we work out, it's truly insane.
This is just the way I'm built, right?
And I think it was true.
They weren't particularly muscular, but yeah, again, really nice figures.
So, yeah, you're lucky, I'm lucky, and society's lucky to have us, even if it doesn't recognize it at the time, or, you know, it's quite hostile and oppositional to us at the time.
And yes, the masses are dangerous, and they can be anti-rational, and they can be very explosive, and they're easily tricked and programmed and manipulated, and I get all of that.
And we're not. And we're very lucky for that.
It's not just virtue, right?
Because you can't really be virtuous until you're philosophical, and so you can't claim that you got into philosophy because you were virtuous.
That's putting, that's reversing cause and effect, right?
You get into philosophy and then you become virtuous.
And so you're very interested in philosophy, can't be virtuous foundationally to begin with.
It's just a compatibility, it's an interest, it's a simpatico situation, it's a synchronicity thing, whatever you want to call it.
It just fits with us, and we fit with it, and then we can bring that to others.
But rather than railing against, I don't know, women for voting on the left or whatever, recognize your good fortune and work as hard as you can, humbly and positively and passionately and sometimes...
Very assertively if you have to be, but work to spread your good fortune so that other people have a choice where you had a very positive instinct that propelled you down the path.
Other people have a choice and you are creating free will in the dissemination of philosophy.
So I hope that helps. Of course, there's a lot to take in and I'm happy to hear your arguments for and against what it is that I'm saying, but that certainly wanted to put it all in one place.
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