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July 7, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:20
The Truth About Mysticism
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Alright, so it's pro tip and also blowing your mind time.
So I put out a statement the other day, it was a very short video, like 20 seconds or whatever, saying that mysticism is a gateway to mental illness.
And I was really struck by something that somebody said the other day about how one of the reasons that...
The church used to punish witches as witches and astrology and Ouija boards and so on tends to exploit a particular weakness in the female mindset that leads to mental illness.
So I was talking about mysticism. Now of course everyone knows that I grew up with a very mystical mother and she did go crazy.
And so if I put out a very short video saying mysticism is a gateway to mental illness, if you disagree with me, Perfectly fine, of course.
This is a debate forum.
This is, you know, great. Help me out as a brother.
See, I look for love when it comes to debates.
I look for love of truth. And if somebody is a listener to me and I've made an error, I would expect them to reach out in affection and positivity and love.
They don't have to, but I'm just saying in terms of getting people to listen to you, I think it's kind of important to do that.
And so if I've made a mistake, then you should...
You know, try to reach out in some sort of positive way to...
And that doesn't mean you can't be harsh.
It doesn't mean you can't be, you know, aggressive or anything like that.
But you can really sense when people are motivated by love when they want to help you.
So if I say mysticism is a gateway to mental illness and you think I'm completely and totally wrong, then to help me, and of course not just to help me, but to help all the people who've Listened to that, I think you should, you know, reach out in curiosity and love of truth and all of that.
And not in this sort of modern thing.
It's like this modern thing where people are kind of just bitchy and manipulative and negative.
And I know that doesn't sound like me reaching out with love, but I am actually reaching out with love in this instance because I really want people to know how they come across so that debates can...
So if I say mysticism is a gateway to mental illness, then this upsets you, and being upset is totally legit and valid.
You've got to trust your gut and your disgust impulse, and maybe I'm totally wrong.
Well, the first thing, of course, that people should do, since it's a very brief statement, if it upsets you, first you should know why it upsets you, and again, your upset may be perfectly valid.
I mean, if somebody said, you know, theft is great, that would be upsetting to me, right?
That would be a negative. So being upset is totally fine.
You've got to figure out why you're upset.
Now, the first thing when you're responding to someone who's made a very short and pithy statement is to ask for definitions, because how do you even know you're disagreeing?
How do you even know that you're disagreeing with someone unless they define their terms?
I mean, to take a silly example, somebody might define communism as free trade.
I mean, you know, you know what they mean.
And since it's a very short statement and mysticism is a very complex word, the first thing is say, oh, that's interesting.
Can you tell me what your definition of mysticism is?
Now, if my definition of mysticism is anything that is not rigidly empirical...
And logical, that's my definition of empiricism.
So if I were to say, which I'm not, and that's not my definition of mysticism, if I were to say everything that is not rigidly logical or perfectly logical and empirical is mysticism, and therefore everything which is not perfectly logical and empirical is a gateway to mental illness, well... Again, it just takes a moment's thought, and this is what happens so often in the world when you're a thinker, is that other people react and don't put a moment's thought into it.
So, for instance, if you thought that was my...
Opinion, then you have to be critical of yourself before you dump on others.
If you want to be taken seriously, like if you want people to engage with you as a serious thinker, then you have to, have to, have to be critical of your own ideas.
So let's say you thought, or somebody thought, ah, let's make it personal.
Let's say that you thought, well, Steph means that everything that isn't logical and empirical is a gateway to mental illness, okay?
Well, Steph does dream analyses.
I wonder how that fits into, what does that mean about being relentlessly logical and empirical?
Are dreams logical? They are not.
Are dreams empirical? Well, by definition, they're not, because they're occurring in your mind, and laws of identity and physics and all of that are broken on a regular basis.
So the fact that I do dream analysis means that I take the subjective, the personal, the irrational, and the anti-empirical with great seriousness.
So it can't mean that, right?
What about the fact that I write poetry and plays and novels?
What about that? Are they relentlessly logical and empirical?
Well, no. A novel is a work of fiction.
It's not the whole point.
If it was non-fiction, it would be a documentary.
It would not be. A novel.
What about a poem? Is a poem relentlessly empirical?
It is not. It is a compressed dream state designed to communicate an emotional truth that stimulates thought.
So when I say mysticism, I mean, I've talked about it before, and that's not the perfect requirement for you.
You're going to have to go listen to 5,000 podcasts.
But if you don't know what my definition of mysticism is, and there's no way that you can know what my definition is of a complex term when I use it in passing, And by in passing I mean in a very short presentation.
So there's no way you can know what my definition of mysticism is.
Now if you don't, this is the thing, if you don't know what someone's definition is, then by definition you're arguing a straw man.
If you don't know what my definition of mysticism is, then whatever you're reacting to is a straw man.
And the reason why you want to ask for people's definitions Is to avoid wasting everyone's time with an emotional overreaction to a straw man.
Right? That's childish.
That's immature.
And you want your ideas to come across.
You want to be taken seriously.
You want people to respond to you in a positive way.
I think. I hope.
So, it's really important to ask for people's definitions.
And, you know, again, you can probably find instances where I haven't done that.
Yes, I'm not perfect and all that.
But, you know, this is what I try to remind myself of.
So somebody says, I've always thought Steph's arguments in this area are weak, such as the assumption of atheist as categorically correct, when I understand it to be of the same quality as climate change science.
The mainstream encourages it, so that would be likely, right?
I never wanted to take this up with him because I did not feel like it was an important part of the entire platform.
Like, he mostly offers extremely positive, powerful information.
I do not feel like Steph coming over to thinking astrology is legitimate would improve his platform necessarily, but I responded to this provocation.
I do not have a platform for my own, so there is no opportunity to invite Steph to a formal debate on the subject.
Any such thing, I would make sure I had all my ducks in a row first, rechecking and specifically sourcing many points.
This may take a few weeks.
So, and somebody says, why do people never want to get under the live stream and ask a question?
And so I replied, weak is...
He said, I always thought Steph's arguments in this area are weak.
Now, weak is a term of sophistry, a weak argument.
See, weak attempts to implant powerlessness into the mind of the reader and thus associate a negative term with the argument.
Right? This is a basic...
It's like hate speech, right?
You take a pejorative...
And you attach it to a person or an argument and then you're attempting to correlate a disgust response or a contempt response to the debate or to the argument or to the arguer.
It's just like attaching something that smells foul To someone so that they're unpopular.
I mean, it's a wretched and rather bas-sympathetic trick.
It's a weak argument.
Well, weak is not an argument, ironically.
And it's funny, you know, and this is why I really encourage people to do philosophy rather than just listen to or read about philosophy.
Do philosophy. And do philosophy with the smartest, most assertive person you can find.
Because that way you find out if you're any good.
It's all very well and good to think that you are an excellent ninja warrior because you've read a bunch of books on martial arts.
But if you really think that you are a very good ninja warrior, you should go out and do some actual sparring.
Because you don't know if you're any good unless you put it to the test.
And so it's funny, you know, people have listened to me, and he's listened to me for a long time, talks about a lot of my arguments, and yet he thinks that the word weak is an argument.
Steph's arguments in this area are weak, but the moment somebody says an argument is weak or debunked without providing proof, you know, all of this sort of nonsense.
Steph's arguments are underdeveloped.
Steph's arguments are immature. Steph's arguments are weak.
Whatever, right? I mean, it just means you haven't learned anything.
Like, it's literally possible to listen to me for thousands of hours and learn very little.
It really is. Now, and I remember when I used to play soccer as a teenager on Sunday afternoons, and it was just like, we didn't do any drills, we didn't do any, right?
We just played. And we played for, I don't know, hundreds of hours, right?
And there was another team that got a coach and they did drills and they did practices and they did all the stuff that's not as much fun as just kicking the ball around and running around.
They did all the stuff that's not fun.
And then we played them and they completely beat us because we were hobbyists and they were semi-pros.
They did all the hard work.
And so the fact that we were playing soccer a bunch without any strategy, without any drills, without any research, without any plan, any goal.
And there's nothing wrong with it. You can go play soccer.
That's fine. I mean, I wouldn't have gone if it was a bunch of drills.
I already had enough stricture in my life having two or three jobs as a teenager.
I just wanted to go and be out in the sunshine and kick the ball around.
Right? So if you've been in that kind of situation where you've been doing something from a no improvement, no practice hobbyist thing and other people have been doing the difficult and hard work of genuinely improving, I mean, I would say that we barely improved over the course of playing soccer.
Which is, again, no problem.
I don't regret it.
I mean, it's fine, because the purpose was to go out, have fun, and kick the ball around, get some exercise, get some sunshine, do something physical.
And so we achieved what we wanted to achieve, but what we wanted to achieve was not actually improving.
You know, if there's one thing that I would try to get across to you in these kinds of shows, the one thing is Be skeptical of yourself.
It doesn't mean be hostile.
You're skeptical of yourself because you have the capacity for improvement.
It's a great act of self-love to be self-skeptical.
Self-skeptical is saying I can do better.
And I'm always saying this.
I'm always saying this in my shows to myself, in general.
The reason I keep doing call-in shows is I'm like, I can do better than the last time.
I can do better. I can do better in my arguments for free will.
I can do better. And I'm trying in this show to bring you something new, to do better than I've done before.
It's really, really important to me.
Now, of course, self-skepticism is often associated with self, like hostility to the self or self-criticism in a negative or self-abuse or something like that.
But self-abuse is when you say you can't do any better.
Self-skepticism is like, I think you can do better.
I think you can do better.
Now, the particular path that I've chosen is to do better in a spontaneous manner.
In the moment manner.
To not write everything out ahead of time, usually.
You know, I remember reading about how Queen spent three weeks on the guitar dubs for Killer Queen.
Fantastic for them. Fantastic for them.
I prefer the live versions, but whatever, right?
That's not my particular level of obsessive attention to detail.
I want to be fluid in the moment.
I think that's the best way to communicate philosophy because it shows that philosophy is not something you need to painstakingly rehearse for two weeks before you do it, but you could do it in the moment because philosophy is there for the moment.
It's there for in your life when you're thinking, when you're facing a challenge, when that moment comes, as they generally come on a fairly regular basis, Where your integrity and your virtue is tested and you need to be fluid and thinking in the moment.
Philosophy needs to be available to you in the moment.
In the moment. So, I am constantly trying to improve, constantly trying to do better.
I mean, I took on just last night, no, the night before, sorry, Wednesday night live, I took on the task of, I am going to try to explain the 50s to the 80s.
30 years in 20 minutes.
Now, that's quite a big task to take on, and I wanted to give it a try.
But you can listen to this show and not become skeptical of yourself.
Because when you're not skeptical of yourself, you waste everyone else's time, and then they don't want to talk to you about important things.
Because they've got to battle back all the projection and straw man and nonsense.
Life is short.
I'm closer to the end than the beginning.
My days are measured.
The grains of sand and the hourglass are beginning to resolve themselves into individuals rather than this big bucket.
So I don't want to waste time with people who are projecting.
I don't want to do philosophy and a journey of self-discovery at the same time.
It won't work. So this person is upset and angry at me for talking about mysticism in this way.
But they've invented their own term, they've invented their own arguments, and they say that they know how to debate, but they say something that is not a valid argument.
So anyway, he did reply to this.
Let me see here. Hey, Steph, I would say this post itself.
The definition of mysticism is related to mental health in this manner.
Do you have a more thorough argument for this?
Do you have any data on this? Do you think this is a fair request?
I do not have the exact post, but I believe one of your points is to understand another's argument.
You must be able to argue on their behalf.
Can you do this with mysticism?
On the point of Darwinism and atheism, that would require me to do research that would take time.
Perhaps after this research would be a good point to press on with a live stream question.
Another point I recall is that species do not tend to jump from one species to another.
If someone keeps breeding fish, even strange fish, they do not become a different species
like a turtle.
Do you have a more thorough argument for this?
Do you have any data on this?
And so, can you argue for mysticism?
Now, see, to me, again, being able to steelman somebody else's argument is a good way of understanding whether you're projecting or not.
But if the first thing he does is insult my argument and insult me, and it is, look, I mean, be fair, right?
Saying that I have a weak argument is an insult, right?
Now, saying I've made a mistake, that's not an insult, right?
Saying, well, Steph has misinterpreted this, or he's got this data wrong, or here's a counter-date, that's not an insult.
But just saying an argument is weak, that's kind of insulting, right?
So if you kind of follow up an insult by saying, well, I want you to steel man my position, it's like, why would I? If you think steel manning somebody else's position is really good, then you should do it first.
Right? Do you see what I'm saying?
Is somebody arguing in good faith?
Are they defensive? Are they triggered?
Or are they in genuine pursuit of the truth and wish to enroll you in the journey towards accuracy?
Because this is a manipulation.
This is saying, well, I've insulted you, now I want you to argue my position.
And again, people just, look, I want you guys to get involved in productive debates, and this is just not how to go about it.
So that having been said, let me sort of address the content, because, you know, it's a good and interesting question.
So to me, and I think this is a fairly good definition, it's not a dictionary definition, but again, I'm a philosopher, not a linguist.
Okay, so a definition of mysticism.
Mysticism is...
Taking a subjective experience and making it empirically true with neither coherence nor obligation.
Mysticism is when you take a subjective experience, make it objectively true with neither coherence nor obligation.
So let me sort of explain what I mean by that.
So if you just have a feeling of oneness with the universe, and then you say, we are one with the universe, like it goes from a subjective experience of oceanic oneness, what Freud talked about, sort of the maternal feeling of union with the mother and so on.
So you take a subjective experience, like a feeling of oneness with the universe, and you make it objectively true with neither coherence nor obligation.
So, what I mean by that is, it's just a feeling, it's translated into a fact, and it gives you no requirement for coherence or obligation.
So, for example, I watched Sound of Freedom, a recommended movie, and in it, the man, I believe, this is from an interview that I've heard about rather than the movie itself, he feels, he has an experience that God says, Here's what you have to do.
Well, in fact, the one guy, he's called Vampire or something like that, and he was sleeping with a prostitute.
Turned out the prostitute was underage.
He was going to kill himself, and God said, go save children.
Go save children. So he had a subjective experience or an experience that only occurred in his own mind, which is God says, and by that I mean like you wouldn't pick it up on a video recorder, God says, go save the children from sex trafficking.
That to me is not mysticism because it comes with coherence and obligation.
The coherence is you don't both save children and damn them So there's some coherence there.
And there's an obligation, which is now he has to risk his life saving children.
So that to me is not mysticism because it's translating into a worldview or a philosophy of the world that has coherence and obligation.
Coherence simply means it can't just contradict itself all over the place and so on, right?
So mysticism is when you take a subjective experience, reframe it as true, and it has no requirement for coherence, and there's no obligation.
And by obligation I simply mean, what in your behavior changes?
What in your behavior changes as a result of your recasting of a subjective experience to objective fact?
What changes? If it's not coherent, has no requirement for coherence, and it has no obligation to it, then it is a dangerous form of self-indulgence to believe that your inner states are true with no limitation of your projection of your inner states on the universe, no limitation for the requirement for coherence or obligation.
Then it's lazy.
And I'm not talking about any of this in here.
I'm just talking about the mystics in general and how I talk about it.
So, of course, I've talked about this before, but every now and then, when you're dating as a young man, you run into women who are mystics.
And, you know, they believe that the universe will provide them things because they want it.
They believe that all they have to do is picture things and those things will happen.
They usually have a smattering of vague psychic abilities and so on, right?
Now, if you genuinely believe...
So, how do you know it's self-indulgent and therefore dangerous and eroding your sense of reality?
Let's say you genuinely believe that you're psychic.
You have the ability to read people's minds, to see into the future, to know the unknowable, and so on, right?
Well, let's say that you woke up tomorrow with that ability.
You could read people's minds, you could know the unknowable, and so on, right?
You could see without being present.
Well, I mean, The burden and possibilities of such a gift would be truly astonishing.
It would be truly incredible, right?
It would be incredible. So what you would do, I don't know.
I mean, you could do any number of things.
Almost anything, right? You could set up a...
You could become a private investigator and you could solve crimes.
And you could make the world a safer and better place.
You could go and find missing children, right?
You could...
Decide to go and once you can prove psychic abilities you would change the entire universe because the entire world of physics would be upended and therefore you would be spearheading an investigation into an entirely new kind of reality hitherto unguessed, unseen, unknown which would radically reshape people's relationships to what they perceive of as real.
You'd be giving an enormous gift to the world.
Who knows what else could be achieved?
Who knows what else could be achieved with the new physics that you would be able to prove?
The Amazing Randy has had for many decades now, I think, a million dollar prize.
If you can prove psychic abilities, you could take that million dollars and you could donate it to charity.
There's so much that you could do.
You could teach other people how to harness their gift and the world could become a wildly better place.
So if you believe you have psychic abilities, your world and our world as a whole would change beyond recognition.
It would be more powerful than space aliens coming down and announcing themselves on the lawn.
So that is coherence and consequences.
If you believe you have psychic abilities...
And here's the thing.
You would only need to have a slightly...
It wouldn't need to be 100%, obviously, right?
It would be psychic abilities there.
You know, my powers don't work that way or whatever.
But you'd only need to be slightly better than random in order to prove your psychic abilities, right?
So, the amount of good that you could do in the world...
You could reveal false flags and stop wars.
You could trace Bitcoin to ransomware scumbags.
You could do so much with your psychic abilities.
So if you genuinely believed you had psychic abilities, your world would change enormously and you would either radically revolutionize the entire planet and Everyone's consciousness and our sense of physics and reality, you would either do that or you would find out that you don't have psychic abilities and you'd have to let go of that little, or that rather grandiose piece of vanity.
Right? So you would do the tests and all of that.
You would then have to let go and you'd have to return to reality.
Of course, nobody has psychic abilities.
I mean, we know this from an evolutionary standpoint.
If it was possible to read minds, the evolutionary advantage in terms of hunting and combat and so on would be so enormous that the mind readers would have taken over humanity hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Like the moment anybody developed the ability to communicate without any medium known to us now, like without having a Call out or do hand signals or smoke signals.
The moment that anybody communicated, you'd win all the battles.
I mean, so we know.
There's no such thing as psychic abilities.
It's all lies and nonsense and vanity.
However, if you genuinely believe you do have psychic abilities and you don't work as hard as you can to work them for the benefit of humanity, Then you're just a complete a-hole as a whole, right?
Because you would have this incredible gift and you would do nothing to help the world with it.
You would only shuffle it out to try and gaslight potential dates into how special you are.
I mean, with great ability comes great responsibility.
I have a great ability for philosophy, and therefore I have, you know, sometimes very heavy responsibility to use it for the betterment of the world as best I can.
I can't even tell you what my life would be like if I had not taken every opportunity I could to share philosophy with the world.
I mean, my life would be horrible.
To know that you have this kind of ability, and yet to use it for I'm special, parlatrix, would be horrendous beyond words.
So to me, somebody who has a non-empirical, non-rational source of knowledge, such as the Ten Commandments, that's not mystical.
Because there's coherence.
The commandments don't contradict each other rampantly.
And there are consequences.
You have to follow the Ten Commandments.
So, I prefer empirical sources of truth, but I prefer of actionable truth, of consequential truth.
Truth which has no consequences.
It may be true, but it's unimportant.
So, in order of hierarchy as a philosopher, I prefer, and for good reasons, rational and empirical sources of knowledge, knowledge that has coherence and consequences.
Now, second best is non-empirical, non-rational sources of knowledge that have coherence and consequences.
By coherence, I mean they don't rampantly contradict each other, and there's some good morals in there, some UPB-compliant ethics, like thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder, and so on, because those have coherence and they have consequences.
The third worst, right?
Best reason and evidence.
Second, coherence and consequences.
Third is the people who have mystical beliefs.
They have beliefs that are non-empirical, non-rational, and they have no coherence and no consequences.
That's the gateway to mental health.
I didn't say mental illness, sorry.
I didn't say that's the gateway to evil.
The gateway to evil is people who have rules that are contradictory and And are actionable, right?
So a thief is evil because he has a belief system that he should not respect other people's property rights, but other people have to respect his property rights, because you don't steal something if it's just going to get stolen from you.
So that's contradictory, and it's consequential in that he acts upon it.
So I said it was a gateway to mental illness, not to evil.
Because the reason it's a gateway to mental illness is one way that you could really harm someone would be to remove from their consciousness all signs of a negative path.
Right? So if you wanted to make somebody ill, you would feed them food that was clogging their arteries and just wrecking their health.
But they didn't gain any weight.
It didn't show up on any scans.
It didn't show up on any blood work.
Because then you just, the widow make it, right?
The aorta would just tear or get clogged and they would just die, right?
So if you were to put someone into a state of ill health, the best way you would do that would be to remove all of the markers or the signs That their health was being compromised.
Because then they would be lean, they would maybe even have muscles, they would have great blood work, they would have all the indicators of good health, but there was a secret thing ravaging their body and so on.
So they wouldn't take any preventive action, they wouldn't change their behavior, because all of the signs of ill health would be removed, right?
That would be a very effective way to harm someone and really kill them.
In the same way, if you wanted to have a doctor who harmed his patients, You would tell that person he was a great doctor.
You would pass him with flying colors.
You would give him all the awards known to man.
While he was, in fact, a terrible, incompetent, dangerous doctor, you would just give him all the accolades and make sure patients went to him and make him immune from being sued.
Then he would do a lot of damage to people, right?
So a mystic is someone who claims to have knowledge that requires no coherence and has no consequences.
There's no obligation. Which means they're special.
They're wonderful. They're important.
They are of value with no requirement for coherence or obligation.
No obligation on their part. I mean, can you imagine if someone, you were dating a woman and she said, I can cure cancer by touching someone.
Oh my gosh, my uncle has cancer.
I want you to touch him so that his cancer is cured.
And she says, no.
No. And of course, every single person I've ever heard who's claimed to have psychic abilities, I mean, it's very easy, you just need a deck of cards, you know, whatever, right?
Oh, you have psychic abilities.
Okay, I'm looking at what card it is.
And you don't have to get it perfect, but you have to get better than random.
Right? It's like a 10-minute test to see if somebody has psychic abilities.
Right? But if a woman genuinely believes she touches a man, cures the cancer, your uncle has cancer, but she won't go and touch him, I mean, you understand how horrible that would be.
How horrible that would be.
And of course, if there were people out there who believed that someone could touch cancer and get rid of it, then would they take treatments?
Would they, right? No, they wouldn't.
Just get someone to touch. Right, so she's doing a lot of damage.
Holding out the hope that touching people can cure cancer will get some people to not get their cancer dealt with or treated because they'll just go looking for people who can cure with a touch.
And also, what kind of person?
If they say, I can cure cancer with a touch, and you say, my beloved uncle has cancer, please come and help him, and she says no, what kind of monster would she be?
So she's getting a feeling of specialness and value.
It could be heat, and certainly it is heat sometimes.
Warlocks, I guess, right?
So she's getting...
A whole sense of importance and specialness and vanity with no coherence, and the coherence is what keeps us sane.
The need to make things fit together, the need to smooth out the jagged edges of inconsistencies, the need to assemble ideas into a coherent framework that hang together, that's part of what keeps us sane.
Why? Because the universe, the universe is a coherent framework that hangs together.
It is consistent. It is empirical.
It is logical. And mental health is our relationship to reality.
If our mental health or if our perceptions are defined relative to vainglorious whims that make us feel special with no requirement for coherence and no requirement for obligation, if you claim that something is true but have no requirement for coherence and you never have to act upon it, you will drive yourself crazy.
Like whipping a horse off a cliff.
You will drive yourself mad.
I mean, if you look, I mean, I don't put Christianity in this context because the need for Christianity to be consistent, that's the entire basis of scholasticism and theology and like huge amounts of debates about whether Adam and Eve had a belly button and so on, right? So this need to make it coherent and cohesive.
You know, I have a good friend on FDR who sends me videos and articles and arguments about the cohesive nature of Christianity, and this has been going on for over 2,000 years to make it cohesive and, of course, to act upon it.
To act upon it.
And, you see, the woke stuff is a form of mysticism in this way, in that the woke stuff does not have to be coherent.
Right? Does not have to be coherent.
I mean, you can be racist against everyone except whites.
It's a completely self-contradictory statement, right?
But that doesn't matter. In terms of actionability, most people, it's called virtue signaling, right?
It's called virtue signaling. It's the old thing about, I think we should take care of the homeless.
Oh, do you have a spare room?
Maybe we can put one up. Oh, no, that's different, right?
Because then you have to actually, you don't just say it, you have to act on it.
And, of course, if you want data, I can give you data.
The leftism is the most detached from reality.
It's the most virtue signaling. It's the least coherent, least actionable, or least beliefs that people want to act upon.
We should help the poor.
Well, okay, you should give away.
Your possessions to help the poor, right?
Like Ben and Jerry's were saying, oh, let's remember on this July 4th that America's built on stolen land, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, you all own a bunch of stores.
You should give up that land to natives.
You should give up those stores to natives.
Hand them over if you believe it's stolen.
But it's not about that.
It's not actionable. People don't want to act on it in that kind of way.
It's a form of mysticism, which is a form of saying, I'm good, but neither coherence nor consequences.
With neither a rational construct nor any obligation.
Right? If a man says, you know, women are hard done by in the workplace, okay, we'll give up your job for the woman.
That would be actionable.
You see, it's action that limits madness.
It's actions that limit madness.
Because when you have beliefs without consequences...
that you don't have to act on personally those beliefs will detach you from reality which is why we don't buy diet books from fat guys, right?
So mysticism is the projection of an internal state onto the universe as if it's true with neither coherence nor consequences with neither a rational framework nor obligation to act Which is why I always put the empirical test...
I knew it was always going to be this way, right?
Which is why I always put the empirical test on the women I met who claim to be psychic.
I'm psychic. Oh, let me get a deck of cards.
I'd love to see this. It doesn't work that way, right?
This is always the thing, right? It doesn't work that way.
No, it just doesn't work, right? So it's a belief that you're special...
With a certain knowledge that you're not.
That's a huge contradiction and contradictions lead to madness.
And the way that you limit contradictions is you work for coherence, which means you attempt to iron out contradictions.
If you say gases expand and contract when heated, that's a contradiction.
You've got to figure it out and work it out because madness is contradictions, right?
Opposing things simultaneously.
So a woman who says she's a psychic and then you say, let me get a deck of cards.
Fantastic. We can go get that million dollars from the amazing Randy in Las Vegas and then we can do wonderful things, travel the world, give to charity or whatever, right?
So she says, I'm psychic.
So she says, it's true that I'm psychic.
And of course, I wouldn't believe things just for the sake of vanity and feeling and looking special, but I know for certain.
And then you say, well, fantastic.
Let me see, right?
If someone says something is true, asking for validation is a mark of respect.
And then, of course, you always hear, well, it doesn't work that way.
I can't control it.
It's random. Blah, blah, blah.
Okay. Well, if it's random and you can't control it, how do you know that it's true?
Because there is a certain amount of coincidences that simply accumulate in everyone's life, right?
In everyone's life, there is an accumulation of coincidences.
There's some dreams that come true and we always forget the dreams that don't come true.
You think of someone and then they call and we never think about all the millions of times
we think of people, but they don't call.
You get all of this, right?
You know, we think something bad has happened to someone and, you know, that once or twice
in our life when it turns out something bad has happened to someone, we grab onto that
and we say, ah, I had a premonition that something bad was happening to that person and it turned
out it's true, it was a bad thing and we forget about it again.
The millions of times we've had premonitions that things are going to happen positively
or negatively and none of it comes true.
We forget about all of that. So you understand, there's no strictness, right?
And so, if you feel you have the truth, but you studiously avoid any test of that truth, then you know that you don't have the truth, right?
You know, like, so this is the contradiction, right?
Is that you say, I'm psychic, somebody asks for proof, and you steadfastly avoid proving anything, right?
Because you know. You know you're not psychic.
I mean, you know that. That's why people don't go and pick up the amazing Randy's million dollars.
It's kind of what that money is for, right?
Plus, there's no physics that would explain it or anything like that.
So, yeah.
The wages of sin is death.
And the wages of vanity is mental illness.
Right? So, if I just said to myself, you know, I'm just the greatest, I'm the best, I'm Muhammad Ali of philosophy, whatever, I'm just...
Super at it and just fantastic at it.
But I never wrote or debated or did anything with it.
And then people said, oh, and I said to people, I'm the best philosopher.
And they'd say, oh, well, tell me something wise.
I'd say, no, it doesn't work that way.
I'm the best mathematician in the world.
Oh, can you solve this math problem?
No, it doesn't work that way. No, it kind of does.
That's how you know. That's how you know whether you're the best.
Mathematician in the world. If somebody thinks they're healthy when they are in fact very sick, that's not good for them and it's not good for them to participate in that lie.
It's not healthy. It will kill them or make them more sick, to put it as mildly as possible.
So, if what you believe is a delusion that is never tested by the need for logical coherence, or empirical action then you are guarding the delusion knowing it's a delusion but believing in it anyway that's a contradiction that severely harms your mental health and also last thing I'll say here also what it does is if you believe you have value because you're psychic while knowing that you're not psychic really deep down because you avoid any test if you believe you have value Or you believe you have community because you have this oneness or you project childlike capacities onto your ridiculous pets.
If you believe you have value, then you stop trying to gain value, which means you end up far less valuable.
That's the problem of vanity.
If you think you're wonderful and you're not, then you cease trying to become wonderful and therefore you remain unappealing.
If I think I'm at peak health, I've exercised as much as I can.
Any more exercise, I'm going to injure myself.
If I think, oh, I'm peak health, then I will stop exercising.
Now, if I think that when I'm pear-shaped and my bones are brittle and I haven't exercised in years, then it is the delusion of value that leads people to dislike you.
Because especially if you ask or if you demand as condition of being with you that other people participate in your delusions, then you drive away good people and the only people around you will be other people also spiraling into mental illness.
So here's the part that might blow your mind.
I'm going full apologetics on this.
Bear with me. Let me make a case here.
The argument that God wants us to believe things anti-empirical and anti-rational is false.
Utterly, completely and totally false.
God created a perfectly rational universe and gave us perfectly accurate senses through which to process that perfectly rational universe and God gave us a thirst and instinct for universality and consistency second only to our sex drive and our sex drive only exists so that we can produce more of that stuff.
I don't know if you can hear the storm in the background, but it's giving some good drama to what I'm saying.
Let me reiterate. God created a perfectly rational universe, gave us perfectly rational senses, a thirst for reason, empiricism, and universality within our minds.
In fact, we can only survive in God's perfectly rational universe by being rational ourselves and empirical.
That God, after giving us all of this rationality, empiricism, universality, conceptual ability, and thirst for reason, would then completely 180 the whole equation and say, no, no, no, you've got to be mystical to approach God.
What? That makes absolutely no sense.
It's literally like going to Picasso and saying, well, you can't, you know, you shouldn't.
Picasso never wanted you to look at the paintings.
He only wanted you to feel and lick them.
It's taste and touch that Picasso was really saying.
No, no. Picasso worked in a visual medium.
He painted things in order for you to look at them.
He hung them in galleries, well lit, so you could see.
No, no, no, no. That's not what Picasso really wanted, man.
Shakespeare didn't want you to watch his plays or read his poetry.
No, no, no. What Shakespeare really wanted you to do was to lick the paper and taste the texture.
It's like, well, no, no, he wrote in a medium designed for the stage and designed to be read, and the idea that that's not what he wanted.
I mean, do you understand, right?
God gave us a rational universe, rational senses, a thirst for empiricism, reason, and universality, and then saying, ah, yes, but to approach God, we must be mystical!
Mystical! Mystical! In other words, those with the greatest capacity for reason must turn the furthest away from God.
My argument would be that's kind of satanic to say that mysticism is how we approach God.
We assume that God followed his own values when he created the universe.
He wouldn't create the universe as a torture chamber, now would he?
Because he's infinitely good. So God followed his own values when he created the universe.
God created a perfectly rational universe.
Consistent, universal, iron laws of matter and energy and the relations thereof.
God created the whole thing perfectly rationally.
God didn't give us senses that completely make mistakes and hallucinate and can't process reality and recoil from the truth.
No! Perfectly rational universe, perfectly rational senses, and a thirst for truth and reason and universality.
I mean, how do we define evil as wildly opposing moral views?
The murderer values his own life, wishes to destroy somebody else's.
The thief violates other people's property rights but wishes to keep his own.
The rapist is after his own evil pleasures to the horror of his victim, who cannot pursue her pleasures.
So evil is contradiction.
Mysticism is contradiction.
So the idea that we approach God through mysticism is completely incomprehensible.
Does God want human beings to cast aside all the rules of his creation and all the evidence of the senses he created in them and all of the thirst for reason and universality that he implanted in people?
Does he want to reverse all of that in order to behold his glory?
The God of sanity does not want you to go mad to appreciate him.
The God of reality does not want you to become a mystic in order to appreciate his works.
His works are rational, empirical, universal, objective, factual.
He gave you reality and a perfect mechanism to achieve it.
Five senses, intuition, your gut, your thirst for reason, your thirst for consistency.
Absolute senses that give you a perfect window to an absolute universe.
Empirical senses that allow you to fully and deeply appreciate and explore an empirical and objective universe.
No, but it's mysticism.
That's how you get to God. No, that's how you get to laziness and craziness, which are two sides of the same coin.
Did God ask Adam and Eve to accept him on faith?
No, he walked with them.
Did God give Moses a vision of the moral laws?
No. Stone tablets written right there.
Did Jesus ask people to accept his divinity on faith?
He did not. He performed miracles, empirical evidence for divinity.
Empirical evidence for divinity.
Given that the Age of Miracles appears to be a little bit in the rear view, we can only know God by understanding the rationality of the universe.
Mysticism is an affront to God's creation.
Anti-rationality is anti-divine.
Anti-empiricism is a kind of blasphemy to the mind of God and his creations Which are all rational, empirical and universal.
The sin of pride, the sin of vanity, the lust for truth without the effort to attain it and maintain it.
These are all sins.
Projecting your inner state onto God's creation and thinking that your subjective experience somehow mirrors His divine and perfect truth is a blasphemy.
To the rational universe, the rational faculties and the empirical senses you've been graced and placed within.
This is the moral philosopher talking.
The idea that morality cannot be rational is a blasphemy in my mind.
The idea that God would create a subjective, wind-based universe, which, in a way, he does every night when you dream.
That's a subjective, wind-based universe.
And he gives us the perfect ability, those of us who are sane, to differentiate the dreams of the night with the reality of the waking.
Perfect facts! And people take the nightly dreams, project them onto God's rational universe, and think that they're getting closer and closer to oneness, with the universe, with each other, with God.
Nope. They're going in the opposite direction.
The idea that the most important aspect of a rational universe is morality.
And that morality would be the only anti-rational aspect of a rational universe when it is its most important element is mad.
It's like saying we've had a perfect designer of a rocket ship, the best, most competent engineer and physicist in the universe.
He's the best. And he has designed every square millimeter, every square inch of that rocket has been designed with the greatest care and precision and accuracy and perfection.
Now the entire purpose of the rocket is to get to the heavens.
Pretty subtle analogy, right?
The entire purpose of the rocket is to get to the heavens.
And the method of propulsion, you see, of the rocket ship is the rocket itself.
Now the designer who desperately wants to get people safely to the heavens has designed this entire rocket ship, every square inch, every dial, every button, every square pane of glass.
He's designed it all perfectly to get you to the heavens.
It's a wonderful rocket ship.
However, interestingly enough, the actual rockets are pointed the wrong way.
They drive you down into the ground.
You understand? By definition, he couldn't be the best engineer if you reversed the rockets and had them drive you into the ground rather than into the sky.
Not a good engineer.
Kind of missed the point of the spec, which is to go up, not down.
In the same way, the idea to me, this is when I sat down to work out UPP. In my living room and I said I'm not going to get back up.
I don't care how much I have to pee.
I don't care if I pee myself. I'm not going to get back up till I solve this.
The idea that morality couldn't be rational was a blasphemy to the entirety of the universe that I live in.
The universe God created rational, universal, objective, empirical.
Your senses Rational objective, universal empirical.
Errors exist in the mind, not in the senses.
And God gave us that reminder every single night.
Every single night he designed us to have dreams to remind us that we can make mistakes because dreams are mistakes relative to the objectivity of the universe, of our waking world.
Dreams are fantastical, enjoyable, and sometimes instructive errors like fiction.
God labeled every day a documentary and every night a work of fantasy.
Every day, we live in reality.
Every night, we live in delusion.
And yet people take these delusions, project them onto the universe that God has created, and think they're doing something other than besmirching his creation.
Not just the universe, but your senses, your mind.
God so designed us That we are instructed on error every single night.
We are reminded that we can make up anything we want and believe it.
Dreams work because we believe them.
Every night, God has so designed our minds that we are reminded of our capacity for fantastical and highly credible errors.
Every single night we are instructed on our credulity, our capacity to believe utter falsehoods.
Every night we are trained on the unreal and every day we wake up to the real.
So the idea that the central purpose of God's creation is the moral journey, moral definitions, and that God would put infinitely more work into making the universe rational Then making morality rational is saying that the best designer of rockets puts the rockets the wrong way.
Drives you into the ground, not up into the heavens.
Then he's not the best. But God has to be the best.
Therefore, if God created a rational universe, gave us a thirst and capacity for rationality, an instinct for rationality.
We have an instinct for rationality.
Just look at babies and how they work with the world.
Even the animals have an instinct for objectivity and empiricism and universality.
When the ball goes missing, the dog doesn't imagine it vanished from reality.
God created a rational universe, gave us rational senses, a thirst for reason, instructed us on delusion every single night.
Instructs us, the present is, every single night.
The purpose of God's creation is morality.
God's creation is rational.
God would be sadistic.
To make morality anti-rational, irrational, non-empirical.
The purpose of reality is to train us on morality.
Say it with me brothers.
Say it with me sisters. The purpose of reality is to train us on morality.
Reality is rational and objective and morality is rational and objective.
God did not put the rockets the wrong way round.
So when I sat down to work out UPP, it was with a certain knowledge, not necessarily with this perspective, but with a certain knowledge that morality could not be irrational, could not be subjective.
perhaps this was a leftover from my Christian upbringing, perhaps it was
the finger of God swirling lazily in the bucket of my brain but it was a certainty in me
nonetheless.
Mysticism says that subjectivity is truth.
Subjectivity is reality.
It says that subjectivity is objectivity, which is a rank contradiction.
Rank contradictions lead to mental illness, which is why the push in the culture these days to believe things that are diametrically opposed is so strong.
They're literally trying to drive people crazy because crazy people are easier to rule.
I told you. Blow your mind a little.
I'm aware of what I said in the past.
I'm not blanking out on that. This was a statement and an argument for those who are inclined towards mysticism.
It is a blasphemy to the rationality of the universe and it will drive you crazy.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
I appreciate the question, and I hope that you will help out the show empirically, testably, right?
This is why I tell people Live Philosophy and also donate to the show.
That's an empirical test to see if you've learned really much.
So, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Appreciate your time. Lots of love.
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