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Sept. 26, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:57
When Loving the World Drives You Mad!
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Alright. Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Time for a walkie-talkie.
Walk and talk, as the man from GLAAD takes to the woods.
Alright. Questions for freedomain.locals.com.
I hope that you will check out that absolutely fantastic resource, freedomain.locals.com.
Alright. Now, First question, I really appreciate your philosophical definition of love.
My philosophical definition of love is it is our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous.
But find that I'm left with a blank space in my brain trying to describe so many relationships now.
I know people who choose to not strive towards virtue.
I know people who choose to not strive toward virtue, but for whom I still have affection.
I can't, quote, love them, but I wish them well, and are rooting for them to choose better and be happy.
I agree with you about how profoundly language matters, and this is something I'm stuck on.
Is there a Greek word to describe this?
Arapé? Maybe. I only know that because my wife is Greek.
So, affection, love, all the various bounds of what we are drawn to.
And of course, for men and for women, there is sexual desire for physical markers of fertility that are not associated with virtues.
We also will often feel warmth, just sort of evolutionarily speaking, we will often feel warmth and positivity towards people who are in the position Of giving us gifts or advantage.
So the king is in many ways defined as the man who can give gifts and punishment, who can bribe and punish.
That's sort of one of the definitions of power, the ability to bribe or punish.
And since throughout human evolution, of course, so much of What we benefited from was on the whim of unstable others, and being in the good graces of those in charge was pretty important.
So, we will feel positively inclined towards that.
This is the grandmother who might leave us a million dollars, right?
We will feel positively inclined We'll feel positivity towards her in anticipation of the million dollars because of the good we could do with it and so on, right?
Or maybe just the fact that we need the million dollars or something.
So, in general, there's lots of different shades of feeling and, I mean, the biggest and most important and key of these is the affection we have towards our children who are not in a state of virtue, right? I love babies and toddlers, and they, of course, are not in a state of virtue.
But they give us a positive emotional experience through cuteness, through laughter, through their own obviously fairly biologically programmed affections.
But even just to say the fact that their affections are biologically programmed doesn't mean that the affections are unreal.
I mean, dogs have...
A sort of herd instinct, a pack instinct that is biologically programmed, but if you abuse a dog, the dog will not like you very much.
So, even though there are biologically programmed attachment mechanisms, the virtue of vice of your behavior is still not completely irrelevant to the situation.
So, the affection that we feel towards children...
Is as a result of, I mean, particularly our own children, right?
Towards their cuteness, their attachment, their laughter, the happiness they generate within us.
And of course, if you love virtue, then you love that, you must love that which furthers virtue, right?
If you love health, you must love that which furthers health.
If you love knowledge, you must value that which furthers knowledge.
So, when it comes to children...
The best way for us to inculcate virtue in our children is through our affections.
Because when you are affectionate towards a child, that child then loves you or is attached or bonded to you.
And therefore, when you encourage the child to act in a virtuous manner, you'll have credibility with the child.
Right, credibility is 95% of parenting.
Because where you don't have credibility, you either need to apologize and improve your
virtues, which of course if you had the capacity to do so, you probably wouldn't lose credibility
in the first place.
But if you don't have credibility with your children, then you need to use bribes, threats, force, escalation,
you name it, to get them to obey you.
If you don't have credibility, all you have left is force and obedience.
So that's not good. So, if we love virtue, then we love that which furthers the cause of virtue, and that which furthers the cause of virtue the most in this world, It's credibility with children, and credibility with children is achieved through their affection towards you, and their affection towards you is achieved through your own virtues.
Right? So, you understand, being virtuous around children is the best way to inculcate virtue in children.
But children don't judge your virtue initially, right?
They judge your affection.
They judge your consistency, right?
I mean, I think we've all heard of these sort of parents who...
are incredibly moody towards their children, right?
They are happy one moment, unhappy the next moment, positive, then negative, friendly, then hostile, and that doesn't show the kind of consistency that's going to breed any particular kind of consistent affection on the part of the children.
And, you know, one of the things that virtue aims for is consistency, right?
Excellence is in many ways defined by Quality plus consistency is excellent.
I mean, when my daughter was younger, I think like most kids, we'd play mini-golf and she'd just whack it randomly, hoping for a really cool shot.
And I must confess that while I found it amusing to begin with, after a while I began to find it annoying.
You know, like the people who...
Don't really know what a truly funny joke is and then just make a thousand jokes a minute in the hopes that one will land, which is not skilled at all.
Quantity and quality are not the same thing at all.
In fact, excellence is really defined as consistently high quality, which means not doing a whole bunch of stuff that's not high quality over time, right?
Like the guy who dates a bunch of women.
It's not good with women, in that sense, right?
Not quality. It's not dating quality women, right?
So, if you have consistency with your children, then they will respect you, you'll have credibility, and then when you say, here's how you should live, they will tend to be very positive about that and towards you.
So the best way to get your children to listen to your moral qualities is through consistent affection when they're younger.
Said consistent affection then becomes positive towards them.
They appreciate and enjoy your company and your presence.
And as a result, they will listen to you when you tell them how to live, right?
I mean, this is blindingly obvious, right?
It's in the same way that you don't listen to a fat guy about how to lose weight.
You don't listen to a chain smoker about how to quit smoking and so on, right?
You don't listen to a divorced guy about how to maintain a happy marriage and so on, right?
So you just need to have credibility and therefore you need to be modeling consistency and virtue and through that modeling You gain credibility with your children, and then when you tell them how to live, they're much more likely to listen.
One of the great frustrations of amoral or immoral parents is they want their children to listen, but they have not earned credibility with their children.
But because they're entitled people, entitled is when you think you deserve something you have not earned.
That famous line from, at least for me it was a famous line, From the movie Bull Durham, I think it was, Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner, back when he had real hair.
And some woman's getting married, and another woman, and she says, I just wanted to be able to wear white.
And she's like, oh honey, everyone deserves to wear white on their wedding day.
And it's like, nope, the virgins do.
But this idea that everyone deserves it...
It creates a situation of narcissistic entitlement and exploitation and hostility that is really toxic and brutal.
Should we try the wind? Let's hope the wind is not too bad.
Let's get out into the blinding sunshine.
So, yeah, there's love which doesn't involve virtue.
There's love, or you could say affection, that creates virtue.
There's a kind of affection that actually creates virtue, and that is particularly affection towards children.
Children are born bonded to you, but you can wreck that bond through inconstancy, hostility, aggression, violence, intimidation, neglect.
you can wreck that bond completely, right?
So, there's lots of different kinds of affection in this world.
Thanks for watching!
But basically, to me, there's two major categories.
There's love, which is a recognition of existing virtues, and then there's love, which is necessary to generate virtues.
There's love, which is recognition of existing virtues, which would be some guy who's, you know, a man or woman, sort of brave and Honorable and honest and morally courageous and all that kind of good stuff.
And then, there is the affection that generates virtue, which is in particular the affections that you would have for your children, which will generate virtue in them over time.
Right? So there's love of actuality, or love of that which is manifested, and then there is love...
Of that which is able to be manifested or more likely to be manifested through that love.
So, if you're a personal trainer, you probably have some respect for somebody who's really, really fit, right?
Because you know how hard it is and work and dedication they need to put into it.
So you have some real respect for somebody who's really fit.
Now, if you're a personal trainer, or, you know, I think just in general, you will also have respect for someone who is, you know, 300 pounds, but shows up to the gym, cuts back on their eating, is really dedicated to losing that weight.
And so there's this sort of myth that...
In gyms, there's this sort of scorn and hostility and negative affect towards people who are overweight who come to the gym.
And there's a scorn and men and women are sort of frightened to go because there's this hostility towards them.
And there is a little bit...
I mean, when I used to go to external gyms, there was a certain amount of eye-rolling stuff...
In January, right?
Because you knew that everyone had signed up because of New Year's resolutions.
They were just going to get fit, work out, and exercise.
But lo and behold, as it turns out, they came, you know, often maxed for a couple of weeks and then didn't, right?
And you just had to wait for this clog to pass by, right?
So you could get access to the machines and the weights.
And you just knew maybe a little bit before summer there'd be another influx as people who want their bikini bodies But you know, that's some bright...
I don't know that this old phone is really the best thing for these videos because I'm kind of looking like the last 20 minutes of Oppenheimer right now.
Oh well, we'll get in the shade, see how it goes.
So, yeah, the love of actuality, love of manifestation, and love of potentiality.
The love of the potentiality is what, or affection towards the potentiality is what is most likely to manifest that potentiality.
So, a personal trainer who has genuine respect for the fat guy who's really struggling to lose weight, well, that respect and that positivity and that encouragement of his potential to be slenderer It's what is most likely to bring about his capacity to be slender.
In the same way that loving your children is the best way for them to end up manifesting virtue.
So, I mean, it's not just the existence of virtue that we should respect and treasure.
It is the manufacturing of virtue, and those who manufacture and spread virtue, of course they need to be virtuous themselves to have credibility, but those who manufacture and spread virtue should be subject to greater affection than those who merely manifest virtue.
The reason being that virtue was kind of tricky and complicated, and to put it mildly, virtue was kind of tricky and complicated, and Those who are able to manifest virtue in others, encourage other people to be virtuous and manifest virtue in others, should be greatly respected because they themselves have had someone teach them virtue, or they figured it out for themselves, which of course is much more rare.
It's a lot easier to read a diet book than to figure out an even better diet than anything that came before.
Trust me, I know this one with regards to UPB. So...
When someone is able to, in a sense, create or transmit or transfer virtue to others, they should be held in even higher esteem than those who merely manifest.
The teachers who can bring knowledge to thousands or millions of students should, I think, be held with greater esteem than those who receive the teaching and manifest the teaching, right?
So the guy who's really good at encouraging others to be fit Should be held in higher esteem than those who are merely fit upon recipients of that knowledge, as recipients of that knowledge.
So I hope that sort of helps with regards to affection, that we also, we don't just love the manifestation of virtue in others.
We can also love the potential for virtue in others.
I mean, to take a sort of silly example, I mean, this shouldn't be too surprising because it's kind of the basis of the show as a whole, that this is going to be without a shred of self, without a shred of humility, just so you know, so sort of brace yourself for something which goes against the grain or against the type, but...
False modesty is just a form of hypocrisy and falsehood, and I try to bear...
I try to avoid bearing false witness wherever I can.
So I love the potential for virtue in my listeners, just as I loved the potential for virtue in
myself, and it was through that love of the potential for virtue in myself that I ended
up studying virtue and ethics and doing a philosophy show.
I love the potential for peaceful parenting that is in the hearts, minds, and souls of you, the fine and wise listeners.
And this is nothing, you know, I think too shocking or unusual, because I also loved the potential for peaceful parenting in myself, which is why I developed the Process, Ideas, Arguments, and Methodology.
So, it is my love for your potential virtue that manifests this show and then has manifested...
We did the calculation on the show the other day that 12 or more million children are not being hit and obviously circumcised and so on as a result of this show.
So that's pretty good.
So I had to love that number, 12 million, or whatever it is.
It's probably higher, but I like to be reasonable and more conservative in my estimates.
So I had to love...
The potential for 12 million children to not get hit in order to do this show.
I had to love my own potential for virtue to even be excited about studying philosophy in the first place, if this makes sense.
So, loving the potential for virtue in someone Is essential to them becoming virtuous.
Because motivation comes first from feeling and then from virtue.
Motivation comes first from feeling and only then or later or after from virtue.
Which is why people who just focus on rational arguments tend not to do very well in the long term and in the long run.
Let's see, where are we heading in here?
I think this is a path.
Let us delve in to see.
Yes, it is a path.
It is a consummation with nature devoutly to be wished.
I've got Shakespeare on the brain because going through Hamlet with Izzy.
So, yeah, you can love people's potential, but you love their potential only insofar as their potential is being manifested.
So, if some guy says, I want to lose weight, you're a trainer or a dietician or a nutritionist, and someone says, gee, I really want to lose weight, then you are enthusiastic and you encourage them and you get involved in that plan and process, only insofar as they, however haltingly and inconsistently, actually lose weight.
That's the thing, right?
So you love their potential only to the degree with which their potential is being manifested.
If somebody has spent 20 years complaining about being overweight but won't lose any weight, then you can't love their potential because their potential is not manifesting.
And a lot of times people will try to dominate you by drawing you into their drama, drawing you into...
There, I wanna, wanna, wanna, I'm lonely, I want a girlfriend, I'm lonely, I'm fat, I want to lose weight, I want to quit these drugs, I want to quit drinking, I want to, all these things that people just want to do, and they do kind of hoover you up into getting into their drama, and they lure you into substituting your will for their achievements, right?
I just really want to quit drinking.
Hey, man, I can help you. I can be your sponsor.
I can help you quit drinking, all these kinds of wonderful good things.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? And they end up not quitting drinking, but you get involved in all this drama about them potentially quitting drinking and blah, blah, blah, all sorts of nonsense about that.
And it's really an unconscious...
way of maintaining alcoholism within the world, right?
To sort of have this, I want to quit drinking.
Oh, won't you help me quit drinking?
Then they don't quit drinking. And what they've done is distract you from people who will actually quit drinking.
And because they feel helpless over their own addiction, They end up trying to replicate, unusually successfully, they end up replicating their own helplessness about their addiction with your helplessness about their addiction.
The helplessness spreads, and it's a way that the addiction maintains itself, is to draw people into trying to cure it, which has no intention of being cured, but it distracts people from actually helping people who could be cured, right?
So, a lot of being an educator...
Is not wasting time on people who won't learn.
Like the trolls, right? The people who draw you in and say, oh, I just want to learn.
I just want to get better. But then they don't practice.
They don't learn. They don't get better.
And every indifferent student you teach is a piano teacher who's not going to become a pianist and has no interest in it, really.
It's just kind of going through the motions or has some vanity thing about being good at piano.
Well, they're taking you away from people who actually will.
Learn piano, become good at piano, and so on.
So it's a way for ignorance, paralysis, and helplessness to spread to draw you into trying to help people who have no foundational intention of being helped, right?
It's a paralytic.
So, yeah, I would say love people for their manifestations of virtue.
Fantastic. And I love people for their potential for virtue.
And, you know, we're all getting better.
We're all learning more. So I love my own potential for virtue as I can manifest it further and further and greater and greater as time goes along.
Hopefully, that's the plan.
That's the goal. That's the idea.
So, yeah, you love people reasonably, I think.
You love people for...
The virtues they have, you love people for the virtues they manifest as long as they continue to manifest it, you love yourself for the virtues you possess, and you love yourself for the virtues you can manifest over time.
So loving the actual, loving the potential, it's great, right?
And somebody who's a skilled engineer, you would respect his skill.
Somebody who wants to become a really skilled engineer and works really hard to do so, you would respect the grind, and so on, right?
So, all right, hope that helps.
Is there a philosophical basis for the modern phenomenon being called out for?
Mansplaining. Mansplaining.
Right. Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my.
So, mansplaining is a phenomenon, or is a psyop, psychological operation, that is invented in order...
To cover up the vast and ghastly ignorance that many women have on most topics.
And look, there's stuff that women understand about that I'm not particularly great on, but the concept of mansplaining has been invented so that women's absolutely appalling lack of knowledge on most topics It's covered up, so that it's not exposed.
Because if women's absolutely appalling lack of knowledge on many topics is exposed, then men won't listen to women as much when it comes to social issues.
And, of course, sort of modern wokeism and cancel culture is, to some degree, of female nature, metastasized by the power of the state and the media.
So, I looked up a couple of headlines, just to sort of back this up.
I've done sort of this stuff before.
Um... You can look for these articles if you want.
Here's one. Men score higher on financial knowledge than women.
But why? This is one of the reasons why women's credit scores are lower than men's.
Women get into more debt. Girl math, right?
Well, if I just pay the minimum, it's really cheap.
That sort of stuff. Here's another one.
Men score somewhat higher than women on the science knowledge scale overall.
Here's another one. Women living in the world's most advanced democracies and under the most progressive gender equality regimes still know less about politics than men.
Indeed. An unmistakable gender gap in political knowledge seems to be a global phenomenon, according to a ten-nation study of media systems and the national political knowledge funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, or ESRC. So, yeah. Women are...
By male standards, there's tons of exceptions, blah, blah, blah, right?
But women are appallingly ignorant about a wide variety of political and socioeconomic and economic realities.
And so mansplaining is to make men self-conscious about trying to educate women on essential topics that women vote on that women really don't know much about.
And women... Not immune, of course, from the scourge of vanity.
Women don't like to have their ignorance exposed, right?
Because there's kind of two views of the world, right?
In terms of helping others.
One is, maybe a little bit more male, one view of the world goes something like this.
In order to help others...
You need to really study, really learn, really understand the world and science and nature and human nature and human motivation.
And you need to really, really bring a massive amount of knowledge and expertise and excellence in order to help people.
Plus, you have to really listen to what people, where they are, what they need, what they want, what will work best for them.
So helping other people is a lot of work.
It's a lot of work.
And you wouldn't want to ever, ever underestimate how much work it is to actually help people.
Let's see. Are the bees still here?
Or should I turn back?
I think they're still here.
I will in fact turn back.
Turn back! All right, all right.
I'm leaving your honey alone, honey.
I'm leaving your honey alone.
Bow to the power of the jab.
All right. So...
Where the heck does this one go?
I don't remember. Let's find out.
Once more, the last footage of The Last Philosopher.
No, I know that one. All right. So, women as a whole want to help others.
And again, there's two ways to actually help others.
One is to study and learn, become excellent in sort of very deep, complicated, and complex topics and apply that knowledge and upset people, right?
So, if somebody's upset about being fat, learning how to really help them lose weight in a consistent, manageable, and sustainable fashion requires a lot of deep knowledge and expertise.
And apparently, a Michaela Peterson great love of endless beef.
I think that's the gig, right?
So, that's how to help people.
Now, that's...
Well, frankly, that's a lot of work.
It's pretty hard to do.
That's a lot of work. And, you know, it's not a super amount of fun to learn a lot about how to help people, so there's another option.
I'll let you guess which gender tends to go towards which direction, but yeah, there is another option when it comes to, you know, somebody who's really upset about being fat.
Again, the one option, learn a lot about weight and Calories and metabolism and nutrition and human motivation and childhood trauma a lot of which has to do with why people are overweight and really learn about the person and you know develop a lot of expertise and a lot of women a lot of men do that maybe a little bit more men than women now so when someone comes to you says I'm really really frustrated that I'm fat I mean, even knowing who the experts are and who to point someone towards in the complex field of weight and nutrition and exercise and all that, it's complicated, right?
Who do you even say who the person should listen to?
You have to have expertise even to do that or experience, right?
So that's one option, right?
Somebody's upset about being overweight, gain a lot of knowledge, maybe you can help them, right?
Now, the other option is to say,''Oh, you don't look fat.
No, you're fine.'' No, don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
And that way, you can make someone feel better without having to learn a damn thing.
Now, are you actually helping them?
No. No, in fact, you're probably making things worse for them.
But if your goal is to feel better about helping people rather than actually helping people, then you don't need to study jack shit, frankly.
All you need to do is talk them out of whatever bad feelings they're having and then think that you've helped that person.
So, if there are women out there, you know, like everyone's like, well, I'm a taxpayer and I fund the welfare state, therefore I'm helping the poor and I'm a good person.
And then if I come along and say the welfare state is based on coercion and doesn't help the poor, in fact, it makes the poor worse off and so on, that person's going to get annoyed.
Right? Because I'm taking away their fake virtue.
People don't like you when you take away their fake virtue, their fake knowledge, and so on.
So, yeah, mansplaining is a way of protecting, a lot of times, protecting women's desire to feel like they're helping others when all they're doing is trying to make themselves feel better rather than actually help the other person.
So, you know, when you take that away, people get upset.
All right. I've been thinking a lot lately...
Says this listener, about how much I should love people.
I don't mean people I know.
I treat people I meet as well as I can the first time.
I meet them and then treat them either as well as they treat me or as well as I have to treat them for utilitarian reasons, whichever is better.
But my question pertains to humanity, the abstract.
I'm coming to terms with the fact that I do not love people, says this listener.
Hesitant to say I hate people, but that's kind of the thought.
I've been trying to devote my life to caring for others and helping to make the world better for people, but I'm starting to think pretty seriously about abandoning ship before it sinks, which means abandoning the people I casually interact with, the children whose lives I'm improving, and in a sense abandoning my efforts to improve the world to just save myself.
How do I know when it's time to release everyone else to their Possibly horrific fate, including all these young people who are not responsible for what's coming to them.
My heart breaks for these young people, even while my view of the adults around them hardens in me that they deserve what's coming to them.
Leftists deserve the dictatorship they're building for themselves, and American conservatives deserve to lose because they just won't understand the origins of totalitarianism and child abuse and their own efforts in hubris.
When do you abandon ship?
Well, I mean, you're talking to a guy who jumped ship a couple of years ago, three years ago or something like that, maybe a little more.
So yeah, you're talking to a guy who jumped ship.
I mean, it's hard to avoid, I think, what's the basic reality of the modern world is that we serve to be a highly digitally detailed So, everything in the past is kind of faded.
There's frescoes.
There's old paintings.
And it all seems kind of surreal and otherworldly.
And even old movies, you know, kind of grainy and blotchy and all of that.
But now, we have, you know, 4K, 60 frames a second, high-definition details about everything that's going wrong.
And, you know, I do believe that that's going to serve as an inoculation against the future.
So, as a whole, I help people who want to help themselves.
But I don't interfere with people who are angry against being helping, against anyone who wants to help them.
And I sort of have, it used to be three strikes and you're out.
Then it was two strikes and you're out.
For now, mostly, it's one strike and you're out.
So I'll try and help people. But if they turn on me or betray me, I'm too old for second chances.
You can give second chances when you're 20.
When you're approaching 60, it's a bad idea to be giving people second and third chances, in my view.
I just don't have the time.
Of course, I'm aware of all the opportunity costs.
The opportunity costs are the key thing to think about in life.
Because the opportunity costs is all the people you're not helping because you're helping somebody.
Who is, you know, in a sense sent by Satan to distract you from helping people who can be helped, right?
Every doctor in a triage situation, right?
So, the triage situation is you've got a room full of people severely injured.
Some people are going to die no matter what you do.
Some people will not die immediately.
And there are other people who will die immediately if you do nothing, right?
So you deal with the last group of people that you can do good with.
And if you don't do that good, they're doomed.
And there are other people who can wait, right?
So if you're not triaging in your life, you're serving immorality, right?
You're serving corruption, decadence, and decay.
So be really cautious with your energies.
I'm very aware that time that I spend or think about helping people who won't fundamentally end up being helped is all this time I'm spending not helping people who can be helped.
So triage is really, really important.
Who's worth your time? Who's worth your efforts?
The world as it stands is unrecoverable by mere abstractions, in my view.
I can't prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, but after I sort of did my presentation on the death of reason and after the de-platforming and so on, it's like, okay, so people are just going to have to learn by experience.
They won't learn from... This is everyone.
You learn from reason, you learn from experience, or you die.
An addict either talks himself out of being addicted or finds some way to reason himself out of it or willpower his way out of it or finds some way out of the addiction or hits rock bottom or dies.
That's the three things.
You talk yourself out of it, reality brutes you out of it, or you die.
That's it. I don't think we're in the...
Purely abstract phase of social recovery, which is not to say that there's not lots of great things you can do in society and help people and this, that and the other, but as far as the larger social mechanics go, it looks like we're just going to have to watch them play out.
So, don't take it personally when other people don't want to be saved.
It's not your failure. You didn't do something wrong.
You didn't put it the wrong way out.
You know, if somebody wants to be saved, there's almost nothing that will stop them.
If somebody doesn't want to be saved, there's absolutely nothing that will stop them down that path or that process.
So, don't take it personally.
I mean, you know, you put out the best you can and try and help people, I think as most reasonable people do.
And if people are open to being helped, fantastic.
Maybe there's a possibility, but don't give them much possibility, because most people...
I mean, you know what it's like.
Most people who lose weight, they lose 10 pounds, and then that's it, right?
Right, nobody... I said, was there something Jerry Seinfeld said many years ago?
What, when he was 38 years old, he'd get 18 years old or something?
But he was like, yeah, nobody ever loses weight.
Just nonsense, right?
Nobody ever really loses weight.
Maybe people who have sort of bariatric or stomach stapling surgery, maybe they do or whatever, but...
Yeah, most people, they just lose 10 pounds and then put on 15 or whatever.
It's just kind of a yo-yo, boring, bouncy thing.
Yeah, so love?
Well, there is no such thing as humanity in the abstract, right?
There's no such thing as humanity in the abstract.
You deal with individuals. Everybody does.
Everybody deals with individuals.
So I don't really tend to have, you know, abstractions or concepts can't have morality.
Anymore than the theory of gravity has gravity, right?
It's just a mnemonic description, a language-based description of that which is.
So, concepts can't have virtue.
You can't love or hate a concept and the collective or the group or whatever.
You can't ascribe or have moral judgments of an abstraction.
And because you can't have moral judgments of an abstraction, you can neither love nor hate an abstraction.
You know, there's a line in Hamlet where we should treat each man according to their just desserts.
And what's it? Is it Hamlet who says, God forbid, if we treated everyone according to their just desserts, nobody would escape whipping.
So, yeah, focus on the individuals.
That's the only place that love can show up.
All right, let's do one more.
That's quite a long one.
Imagine you're creating a family motto for your coat of arms.
What would it be?
That's an interesting question.
So, my first sort of thoughts are reason, virtue, and prudence.
Reason, virtue, and prudence.
Those who encourage you to leap the bounds of caution and take on all fights regardless of your possibility of winning have a murderous impulse behind them.
Of course, I face a lot of this and have over the course of my career, oh, you've got to take on this topic, you've got to take on that topic, you've got to do this, you've got to do that, and no sense of caution, no sense of it's better to stay.
In the lands of the relatively free to continue your work.
But yeah, so prudence is something that is really, really important in life.
I think you want to have courage, and I think I've shown some courage in taking on some really difficult topics, but you also have to have prudence of knowing when you can and can't win against those topics.
Hey, I left your bee nest alone.
Sorry, just have to...
We've got some soldier bee, thinks I'm a bear, about to take their honey.
Whoa! He's back.
And he's back. Should we just have a little trot?
Yes, let us have a little trot to show him.
The non-aggression principle will apply to the bee, our bee friends as well.
My daughter has a bit of a habit of tickling my hairs on the back of my arm and stuff.
And so I turned around and pretended to snarl at a fly in a coffee shop yesterday because I thought it was my sister.
It's kind of funny. She's broken me.
So, yeah, prudence is really important.
Prudence is really important. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day and all of that.
So, yeah, where you have a chance of winning, I think you should take on the fight.
Where you don't have a chance of winning, I mean, this is all sort of my thought about, you know, people with really sordid pasts who take on powerful interests.
It's like, well, it's just a Simon the Boxer thing of, like, continuing their self-destructive ways.
Maybe you switch addiction for...
Poking at powerful interests.
Who knows, right? I'm not thinking of anyone in particular, of course, but...
So, I think prudence.
Yeah, prudence is important.
Prudence is important. If you go down in a giant gout of SJW flames, then you just really serve as a warning to everyone else.
I mean, I think to some degree, showing how good life is on the other side of deplatforming, that it's good.
I prefer this life to what I had.
I prefer this work to what I was doing.
Before I was very much, not enslaved, but before I was very much in thrall to improving the world.
And now I'm interested in improving philosophy rather than using philosophy to improve the world.
If I improve philosophy, That's a longer-term benefit to the world than trying to improve the world in the short term and in the moment.
So hopefully, you know, because of course a lot of people, they saw me vanish from the public square, and they're like, oh man, is that guy still alive?
He's not doing anything.
Man, his influence has completely crashed.
I get all of that. I understand all of that.
And what they're saying is that if they had my level of fame, and it was taken away, or given away to some degree, if they had my level of fame, and it was taken away, that they themselves would be miserable.
And I'm sort of here to say, no.
It can be a great benefit, and I'm enormously grateful to the history of the show as a whole and everything that has played out to give me this lovely conversation as it stands at the moment with you glorious, wonderful, delightful, awakening wonders. That's not a very good invitation.
I'll work on it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
All right. Thanks everyone so much, freedomain.com slash donate.
Don't forget to check out The Truth About the Wild West, which is great.
Some people are saying it's giving them story of your enslavement vibes, which I appreciate.
You can help out the show, freedomman.com slash books.
Check out my free books. Can't recommend them highly enough.
They are magnificent, and you should really check out my fiction.
It's some of my strongest stuff.
I believe you can check out The God of Atheists, Revolutions, The Present, The Future, almost all kinds of great books.
They're free for the taking.
So have yourselves a wonderful day.
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