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Oct. 22, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:26
The value of the word 'mystical'...
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All right. Good morning, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux. Let's get on with more great questions from freedomain.locals.com.
Here we go. Here we go.
Can you have a reasonable conversation with someone who seriously uses terms like spirit and God?
I appreciate the metaphorical purposes behind some religious stories.
However... I have noticed that there is a growing movement among young conservatives away from reason and towards Christianity.
This appears to me to be a reactionary movement against the woke communism on the left.
Former atheists such as Mike Cernovich, James Lindsay, and even Jordan Peterson come to mind.
After reading about philosophy and empiricism, I find it hard to take people seriously when they use mysticism as a substitute for reason and evidence.
Well, that is a very big and deep question.
There are depths to the human experience that, I won't say that they defy reason, but reason is one method of knowing.
Now, I'm not a mystic, and I hold reason as the highest value, so, you know, I'm not slipping into the supernatural murky end of the spectrum, but I just want to sort of explain, this is what I worked on over the course of my therapy.
I was in therapy for Gosh, I mean, I did a couple of hours, three hours of therapy a week for almost two years, and then I spent another six to eight hours journaling and working on this, and I mean, it was a wild ride. And I'll just tell you about my personal journey.
This is not a philosophical argument.
This is a sort of experiential thing, and then I'll sort of put the argument at the end.
So the experiential thing was that I had been studying philosophy, and For 20 years.
And I knew it fairly well.
And I wasn't living it.
I had it as theory.
I had it as debate. I had it as knowledge.
I did not have it as lived practice.
And what happened was I stopped sleeping.
I stopped sleeping.
I didn't know why.
And I ended up going to therapy because I... And I had tried therapy before, but I just didn't connect and didn't really work or anything like that.
So I didn't know why. And when I went to therapy, my dreams went nuts.
I had characters arise in my dreams that were sort of archetypes.
The bitter old impatient king and the loving mother.
And I had names for all of these characters.
The bitter old... Angry King, the King Lear, I called him Lord Gruul, and I had names for all of these characters.
I had the wildest debates with these characters, and I didn't know really what was going on.
It was this eruptive chaos from my unconscious.
So, the unconscious is generative and creative and impatient and stern and funny and mocking.
And of course, if you think of something like Shakespeare and all the characters he created, or Dickens and all the characters he created, Charles Dickens, I saw a sketch once of Charles Dickens surrounded by all the characters he'd created.
There's hundreds and hundreds of them, and they're all very vivid and so on.
So where does all that come from? It comes from the unconscious.
Mozart's music comes from the Unconscious.
And how do we work with that?
How do we work with the fact that reason, our rational faculties, sit on top of billions of years of evolution?
How do we work with the mind-body dichotomy that reason in the abstract very often does not translate into reason in the practical, in the lived, in the experiential, in the acted upon?
I mean, how do we square the fact that society says it's good to not be in abusive relationships combined with massive hostility to anyone who breaks relations with abusive parents?
How do we square the fact that society says don't use violence to get what you want, but parents and oligarchical apparatus often use violence to get what they want?
How do we As a society that have dedicated ourselves, at least in the West, to a large degree, to reason for thousands of years, how do we deal with the fact that reason is not lived?
It is often, there's lip service to reason, but reason is not lived.
How, and at a personal level, how did I square the fact that I've been studying philosophy For two decades, and yet, I was not living it.
It's more fun to study, but it's better to live.
Studying philosophy gives you a sense of superiority.
Living philosophy gives you a sense, a deep sense of humility.
And so if philosophy is a vanity project, which to some degree it was to me, and I liked being able to put things together.
I liked being able to understand the world.
I liked being able to understand abstractions.
I liked being able to understand politics and the economy and human relations and so on from a philosophical standpoint.
I really enjoyed that. It was great and had value.
Don't get me wrong. It had value.
But I wasn't living it.
It wasn't credible enough to me to put into action, or there's these great lines in T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland, you know, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, between the idea and the action lies the shadow.
Between the conception and the practice, between the idea and the deed lies the shadow.
What is the shadow? What is the shadow?
Nobody gets too mad at you if you only think things.
They get mad at you if you act upon them.
And they get even more mad at you if you inspire others to act upon them.
The ideas themselves are rarely attacked until they start to change things in the world.
And I think we all get a deep kind of instinct about that.
That philosophy is tolerated as long as it's merely manipulating abstractions that don't change anyone's behavior in the real world, at least in detectable, traceable ways.
So when ideas do become manifest, they become dangerous.
If ideas about integrity and virtue actually start to manifest in behavior, then they anger the corrupt and the exploiters.
And when you harm the interests of the corrupt and the exploiters, what do they do?
Well, they harm you back.
I mean, they fight back, obviously, right?
So... To dabble in abstractions, to hold abstractions as mental Lego playthings that do provide clarity and do provide value and do provide understanding.
Between that and actually living your values is the shadow.
It's the desert.
It's the canyon, the chasm, the void.
Atheists say, I don't believe in God, and therefore religious morality is false, but we want to be good.
Okay, so then, you know, according to that theory, they are like people who have said, we're in a desert, and the morality promised by religion is actually a mirage, right?
It's a mirage. It's not real.
However, we still need to drink.
As human beings, we still want to be good.
So religion, we're desperately thirsty.
Religion and its liquid is a mirage.
Our thirst remains desperate.
I come along with bottle after bottle of chilled, clear, tasty water called UPB. Desperately thirsty, religious water is a mirage.
Here comes Steph the philosopher with actual water we can drink.
Now, if somebody who was desperately thirsty had given up chasing mirages and you came to them with water, what would you expect?
You would expect them to grab the water from you with enormous gratitude and drink deep and greedily.
I mean, that's what you would expect, right?
If somebody says, I'm absolutely starving, I'm faint with hunger, and my favorite food is mac and cheese, the way my mama used to make it, and you say, wow, you know, I happen to have a heated bowl of your mother's mac and cheese right here.
What would you expect them to do?
They were faint with hunger, desperately needed to eat, and you had their favorite food right there with you, what would you expect them to do?
You would expect them to grab a spoon, And dig in and be very grateful for what you had provided to them free of charm.
So when people behave in incomprehensible manners, if people behave in ways that reason would never predict, what do we do?
What can we do?
What makes any sense at all?
People say, I'm dying of thirst.
I'm desperate for water. You give them water.
They pretend that you're not there.
Someone says, I'm half starved.
This is my favorite food.
You bring them their favorite food.
And they continue to complain about how hungry they are while ignoring the food before them.
When my mother used physical violence to get her way, and then I used physical violence in self-defense, she was shocked and appalled at my use of force.
And I get, you know, I understand it's manipulative and that, but it's really quite baffling.
How do we explain the world that does the opposite of what any rational prediction would anticipate, would expect?
It's a big question. It's a big question.
And again, putting myself in this category, you know, I'm not saying I'm self-evaluative, which doesn't, well, and self-critical, but that doesn't mean self-attack, right?
Self-attack is a way of bypassing rational criticism by putting yourself in a fight-or-flight state.
You can't reason when you're running from a grizzly, and if the grizzly is self-attack, it's a way of avoiding reasoning.
Then you end up managing the self-attack rather than calmly and clearly thinking through your problems.
My therapist was not a rationalist, was not an empiricist.
I don't want to characterize her beliefs because she was pretty good at not transmitting, but in general I think she was mystical on the mystical side, on the Jungian side, on the unconscious and spirit side.
And that was, according to rational philosophy, that should not have helped.
However, it did.
A rationalist goes to a quasi-mystic for advice on life.
And the quasi-mystic is right.
And that wasn't easy either.
Because what my therapist did was to help me to take what was going on in my unconscious very, very seriously.
Your unconscious is in full revolt.
And the funny thing is, too, is that empiricism, which is the foundation of reason, right?
That reason arises from the predictable stability of matter and energy.
So what processes the senses?
It's not reason. It's not the neofrontal cortex.
It's not the highest seat of reasoning.
What processes The senses is the unconscious.
It's the body. So reason is built from the evidence of the senses and therefore reason is a product of the unconscious, of the autonomous nervous system.
Reason in the mind is a product of the empiricism of the body.
Now, the body cannot Lie.
It's a very interesting thing.
The body cannot lie.
Can you open your eyes and not see?
Physically? No. I mean, assuming your eyes are working, right?
Can you open your eyes and not see? No.
You open your eyes, you see. If your hearing works and there's a sound in the vicinity, can you not hear it?
Well, you can tune it out after a while, but if there's a sudden loud noise, you're going to hear it, right?
You're going to be startled. Assuming, again, assuming everything's in working order, can somebody tickle you and you feel nothing?
No. The body cannot lie.
And if the body does lie, the body is broken.
There's something wrong, right?
If you open your eyes and you can't see, there's something wrong with your eyes.
If there's a loud sound that you can't hear, you've got a problem with your ears and so on, right?
I know someone who has a particular ailment and she can't feel her feet.
So that's how they know there's something wrong.
So the body cannot lie.
The body cannot falsify.
You can't look at the color red and see green, again, unless there's something wrong with your eyes.
You look at the color red and you see red and you, you know, you question this, you can bring the reddest thing you know And show it to people, and they'll all say that's right.
So, if truth is a virtue, where do we look for it first?
Do we look for it in reason?
We do not. If truth is a virtue, we look for it in the flesh, in the body, which cannot lie.
Thou shalt not bear false witness never applies to the senses.
It applies to consciousness.
So reason comes from the body which cannot lie.
Reason can lie.
Reason can lie. Because my inspirations in philosophy were people who lived their philosophy.
Yet I was not living my philosophy.
I wouldn't say my philosophy. People who lived philosophy were my, like, it wasn't like academics who merely talked about it.
They weren't my heroes. It was the people who actually lived philosophy who were my heroes.
So I had said to my unconscious, living philosophy is what philosophy is.
And I would actually openly mock and scorn people who only talked about philosophy and never lived it.
I remember, I think it was in some objectivist article, maybe Ayn Rand or something was talking about, in the middle of the 60s, the sort of mystical crisis and the Vietnam War and so on, the American philosophical organization got together and had a big debate about whether nouns existed in reality.
And I laughed and mocked at that, people who only talked about it and didn't do it.
So I said, my unconscious gave me...
See, it's interesting because my unconscious didn't just give me the tools for reason, like the predictability of matter and energy and stability.
My unconscious also gave me a love of philosophy.
It's important, right?
I mean, you've probably had something where you've had a flip, a switch flipped on somewhere in your mind, and you just love something, right?
When I first saw computers, I was like, wow, got to understand these things, right?
When I first picked up a tennis racket, I loved the game.
When I first heard particular kinds of music, it was like, ah, you know, and some of this musical stuff has sustained itself for decade after decade with me.
Now, I didn't choose to love philosophy.
I wasn't reasoned into loving philosophy.
I started reading philosophy, and my whole being was like a geyser of happiness and excitement.
And I did it, of course, you know, whatever you do for, particularly for thousands of hours without getting paid.
is probably something that's kind of important to you and it's not like a like so people play thousands of hours of video games but video games are designed to be addictive and consuming and they tweak and they use psychologists to make sure it's as addictive as possible and so on so that's a little bit more like an addictive drug but philosophy is not designed to be at least the way that I read it it wasn't designed to be Addictive and exciting and fun, and it wasn't sold with women in bikinis and macho guys in the jungle with AK-47s chomping on cigars.
It wasn't like an action movie.
It wasn't put forward that kind of way.
So when I say, oh, I'm a philosopher.
I'm a philosopher. What does that mean?
It means that my body...
gave me empiricism, and my unconscious gave me great pleasure in the presence of philosophy.
Do you see what I mean? I mean, yes, there's free will, of course, but free will doesn't operate independent of incentives, otherwise communism would be efficient, right?
Well, I mean, at least in terms of how hard people work, you'd still get the price problem.
I am a philosopher.
Okay, what is the I? Well, I am not responsible for the operations of my senses.
That's evolution. And the operations of my senses and the fact that they work for me gave me empiricism.
But, of course, it's not like the evidence of the senses leads everyone to empiricism because there are many people whose senses work who end up not only non-empirical but anti-empirical.
they choose some other realm as the definition of truth rather than the
realm of the senses. But it was, and it wasn't just that I gained joy in the
presence of philosophy, or philosophy provoked joy in my unconscious.
It was a particular kind of philosophy, sort of the...
I wasn't interested in the Kantian stuff, I found it quite repulsive, but it was the Aristotelian stuff, the objectivist stuff, the Lockean stuff, the stuff that validated the evidence of the senses and of reason.
So, I am a philosopher.
My body gave me empiricism.
My unconscious gave me joy in the presence of reason and empiricism.
You understand? There is a certain amount of free will in life, but life also is to some degree being yanked along by what is happening underneath your reason.
I mean, did I choose to be a philosopher?
It's a big question, right? I've made tons of choices, for sure, and I'm not going to deny that.
This is not determinism.
I've made tons of choices in the realm of philosophy, but did I choose to be a philosopher?
Well, When I grew up with the madness of mysticism around me, and not just in my family, which of course it was there, but, you know, in the culture as a whole, the 70s were gross and mystical and all this kind of stuff and all of that.
My mom had sort of a procession of German hippies coming through the place, and yeah, they were all...
Mystical and spiritual and psychic helmets to defend you against malevolent forces.
There was a lot of mysticism there.
And of course I was looking for a way to survive that, a way to avoid that.
So I saw the hell of mysticism.
My body built for me the basis of empiricism.
I didn't choose either of those two things.
And in the presence of rational empiricism in philosophical terms, I felt immense joy, relief and eagerness.
I did not build that immense joy, relief and eagerness myself.
That happened to me.
And the only way that I would have ended up rejecting that is if I had a streak of masochism and said, oh, well, reason and evidence give me, rational evidentiary philosophy gives me great joy and relief and eagerness and excitement, so I'm going to never touch it again.
That would be kind of incomprehensible to me.
Now, I know I've just talked about people who say they want something and then do the opposite, but I'm not talking about that.
That would be kind of incomprehensible, wouldn't it?
Rational empiricism gives me great joy to study and read about, so I'm never going to touch it again.
It's kind of like, I'm sure you've gone through this in your life, they call this, Michael Corleone calls this the thunderbolt.
You know, you just get hit with this thunderbolt and then that person becomes your life, right?
I'm sure you've had it where you just meet someone and you just think about them all the time and you're really drawn to them and all you want to do is spend time with them.
Is that a choice? Of course you can choose what to do with all of that, but is it a choice to have those impulses?
And so once you have those kinds of deep impulses, which arise from the unconscious and the body for the most part, You can choose what to do with it, but whatever you choose to do with it, you're not choosing whether you have something to do.
So if you're really, really drawn to person X, Y, Z, you can act on it, you can fight it, but whatever you do is in reaction to that great thirst and desire for that person.
And that great thirst and desire for that person, yes, it's conditioned by your prior...
Beliefs and thoughts and habits and so on.
But it is something you have to manage.
There's stuff that erupts from the mind that you have to manage.
I mean, we've heard these stories.
It tends to be a bit more on the female side.
And whether we agree or not, with the right or wrong or good or bad of it, it is nonetheless the case that a woman can wake up after a relationship of 20 years one day and look at her husband and feel no love.
It can happen. It can happen.
I don't think it's random. But so the woman, let's say that for whatever reason, good or bad, right or wrong, she wakes up after marriage of 20 years.
Maybe the kids are older.
Maybe they're in their sort of mid-teens, whatever.
She wakes up and she feels no love.
She looks at the man and she just feels kind of contempt or indifference or boredom or eye-rolling and she just doesn't love him.
Now, she could say, well, I've got to talk myself back into it.
I've got to figure this out. I've got to find out what I'm going to do.
I'm going to stay or leave.
She thinks so. She can choose what to do with what's happened to her.
And that's where the choice is, but she didn't choose that it happens to her in that moment.
Now, you can say, ah, yes, but the accumulated choices are, absolutely, I get all of that.
I get all of that. Why did I revolt against my life of theory but not practice?
Of studying and talking about and debating and arguing morality and truth and virtue without actually living it in my life?
Well, in part, I revolted against my life because of all of the prior theories that I had put forward.
Let's use a devilish analogy because I think it's kind of appropriate.
The devil, in a sense, and this is a complete reversal, but it's what popped into my mind, so I'm going to roll with it.
Again, you see, I'm just rolling with what pops into my mind.
So the devil said to me, hey man, you know, you should really get into this philosophy stuff.
You know, it's fun.
It's going to make you, you know, there's a little bit of vanity aspect to it.
You know, you're pretty good at it.
Got a good instinct for it and all of that.
And it's important and it's good and it's virtuous and all that.
You should really get into this philosophy stuff, man.
And the devil was like, do all of that, right?
And let me dabble for 20 years.
And then the devil said, yeah...
Yeah, now it's time to collect.
And my collection is do or die.
You have to do it. You have to do it.
Like you have to actually live it now.
And not only do you just have to live it, but you're going to have to spread it.
You're going to have to promulgate it.
You talked about virtue.
Now you actually have to live virtue.
And then you actually have to practice.
You have to preach virtue.
Not just from theory to practice to preaching.
And... What could I say against that when you've studied particular values for 20 years?
And then your unconscious says, we have to live them.
What are you going to do? Are you going to reject the values?
No. That would be humiliating and cowardly, because you can't prove them wrong.
I couldn't disprove my values.
And I also couldn't disprove the value of living those values, of actually making decisions in my practical, empirical, real life about those values.
I couldn't just say, well, you know, there's this stuff that...
Empiricism isn't for action.
I mean, empiricism is that you measure the value of something By action.
Deeds not words.
If there's an injection that's going to save you from an illness, but the needle doesn't penetrate your skin and it doesn't get into your bloodstream, you're not cured.
Right? Because it's the action that matters.
And if empiricism is the validator of truth, If I say I'm holding a coconut and I'm holding a banana, empiricism would check which fruit I'm holding and tell me whether I'm right or wrong.
If empiricism is the measure of truth, What does it mean if you're not living empiricism?
You're living a lie. If you say that the validation of theory is practice, but you're not actually practicing your own theories, then you're living a lie.
The entire basis of everything that I thought in the realm of philosophy was predicated on proof in action.
Proof in action.
It's like this old sales executive who would yell at his sales team, what are you in the office for?
When you're in the office, I know you're not on site with your clients selling our products.
Don't be here. I don't even care if you go to a coffee shop because at least then I can imagine you're doing something to sell, but don't be here because here you're not on site selling.
It was the kind of stuff you had to sell on site.
If you're going to be into sales, don't be in the office.
Go sell stuff. That's the measure.
Now, this, although blindingly obvious in hindsight, of course, It had not crossed my mind.
It wasn't like I had this idea, oh, I should really live these values rather than just study and read and write and talk and debate, and I should really live these values.
And living these values, of course, I mean, sorry, I know that that's kind of abstract.
What does that mean? It means making decisions in my relationships based on philosophy.
Right just means that's my argument, not am I right?
What does living your values mean?
It means, okay, I have reason and evidence of the highest values, and reason and integrity of the highest virtues, so what should my relationship be with those who oppose what I define as the good?
What should my relationship be with those who oppose what I define as the good?
Well, philosophy is pretty easy.
If you define your values as virtuous, then people who oppose your values oppose virtue, which means they're corrupt or immoral, or both.
And if you say that you have virtues, but you also support and enable those who are immoral, you are living not only without integrity, but with the opposite of integrity.
Without integrity just means you don't have any values you judge yourself by, but if you're living the opposite of your values, that's corruption.
Now, of course, I said to myself over the years, I mean, I knew that there were problems in the relationship, but I said to myself over the years, I'm doing good, I'm, you know, it'll take time, but I'm making the case, and, you know, people will change over time, and they'll get better, they'll listen, they'll this, that, and the other.
I mean, I remember debating with my mother about a wide variety of things, and, you know, I said, ah, she'll, okay.
Okay, you're an empiricist.
It's been 20 years. How's that going?
I mean, if you have a salesman who says, I'm just about to close a sale and they've never sold anything for 20 years, at what point do you say you're not a good salesman?
Because that's back to empiricism, right?
Am I succeeding in improving those around me?
Well, if you need 20 years of evidence, you're not a very good empiricist, right?
I mean, if you had a friend who had started a business 20 years ago and felt he was about to make money very soon, but hadn't quite got around to it, and you were like a really good businessman and had given lots of advice over the years, but he just couldn't make it work, he'd be a bad businessman. Like, you wouldn't need 21 years for that.
20 years is enough. We're not immortal, and therefore we don't have forever to make decisions based upon empirical evidence.
I know this is a long answer, but I feel like it's really, really important.
Eventually, the unconscious gets impatient with falsehood.
Because, remember, truth originates from the unconscious, as the unconscious and the body process the sense data which gives you empiricism and reason.
So, the faculties within you that provide you the truth get frustrated after a while with falsehood.
Now, that's one way of putting it, which is to sort of put me as the whipping boy and the inconstant mere mouther of platitudes who just didn't want to live it.
That's one possibility.
The other possibility goes a little something like this, which is, look, here's what you need to understand.
It's very dangerous to go from theory to practice.
It's very dangerous. And it's dangerous to your personal relationships to start living philosophy.
And if, of course, by this time, by the time I stopped sleeping and so on, I had already now, by this point, figured out that I was a really good communicator, that I had great written skills, that I had a good sense of humor, and that I could really make a difference.
And I'd learned that, of course, in theater school, in university.
I went to three different universities.
I had learned this in the business world, giving presentations at conferences and closing deals and all of that.
So I knew at this point I made some coin and I had a sense of how skilled I could be in the communication of ideas.
And so I now had enough empirical evidence to say, look, you can live independent of people because you've made some money, you know how skilled you are, and therefore you could be fantastic in the spread of philosophy.
So it could be like, oh, stop being a hypocrite and live your values.
That could be one thing, and maybe there's this, you know, usually more than one thing.
But another thing could be the empirical evidence is that you should live your values, and you should preach philosophy.
That's the empirical evidence.
Look, if you can sell...
Millions of dollars worth of software a year, build and sell millions of dollars worth of software a year, then you can sell philosophy.
You can preach.
If you have some financial independence and some competence in that area or region, then you can survive without these historical relationships.
So, more like it's time.
And My unconscious didn't sort of get up to me and say, I mean, it didn't grab my hand because that's not what the unconscious does.
It didn't sort of grab my hand and just write, hey man, you gotta go do this, you know, live your values, dump anti-moral relationships, go and preach.
The unconscious doesn't do that.
I mean, it turned off my sleep because there was a tension between theory and practice.
There was a tension and an opposite.
And the turning off the sleep was the hope, right?
That I could live my values and I could preach, so to speak.
And it would work and it would help the world.
And it was essential. So after dabbling in philosophy, for a long period of time, philosophy came to collect.
Say, okay, you've dabbled.
Your understanding of the economy helped you succeed in business.
Your understanding of human nature helped you succeed as a manager.
But you're not genuinely living your values, and now you can.
Maybe you couldn't when you certainly couldn't when you were 10 or 20 or...
You know, under the thumb of professors and, oh, okay, fine, you know, we'll let you dabble.
You can dabble for a while, but now it's due.
Now it's due. But it didn't tell me that because I had to realize that myself.
And because my unconscious doesn't give me orders and doesn't tell me what to do, I don't give people orders and tell them what to do.
I had to learn that for myself.
And it was a tough and painful process.
It was a tough and painful process to go from theory to practice and from practice to preaching.
TPP. It's my TPP report.
Theory to practice to preaching.
And it's dangerous.
I mean, we all know this, right?
It's dangerous to go. Theory, not so bad.
Practice bad personally.
Preaching, bad socially.
Very little danger to think things only.
Danger at a personal level to practice things in your own life.
Danger at a societal level to preach things in public.
So when you say they use mysticism as a substitute for reason and evidence, and they talk about the spirit and the collective unconscious and the mystical terms and so on, I don't agree with the mystical terms because the mystical terms are an answer.
The soul, the spirit, the collective unconscious, God.
These are answers and I don't know the answer.
I don't know.
And I'm a pretty introspective guy, but I don't know.
I mean, I have theories, obviously, that I had this independence and I had proven my skills and it was time for me to start living my values.
In other words, there's only a certain amount of time you can study stuff before you become impatient to do, right?
I mean, if you spend 20 years practicing your golf swing, aren't you at some point supposed to play a game of golf?
You know, don't you get kind of like, God, like if people knew you had been practicing your golf swing for 20 years, shouldn't you go play some golf?
So I've been studying philosophy and it was time to go live it.
And I had passed the test of my unconscious, so to speak, so I had stuck with it, and I had used it to gain independence and value and some money, and it was time to actually go and start doing it.
What is it, the heart?
Is it Pascal?
The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.
Now, I don't believe in that, because you can understand the reasons, but I didn't reason myself into the life that I have.
Certainly not directly.
I had to be pushed and cajoled, and my, you know, I have a friend, the guy who actually first introduced me to objectivism, And he said, well, but I know myself perfectly.
And I was like, what?
No, that can't be right.
How could you know yourself perfectly?
How would it be even remotely possible to know yourself perfectly?
Or to even know what yourself is?
To even know what yourself is?
My thoughts unroll from a generative state.
There was a show I did a couple weeks ago where somebody asked a question that was so tough, no answer sprang to mind.
And I kind of just let my brain do its thing.
And then, and then...
What happened? The answer came to me.
And you can see it on the video.
Ah! Inspiration, right?
Did I earn that? Yeah, you can say I kind of trained myself in this and that and the other, but the reason I trained myself was because those inspirations happened.
I think Freddie Mercury coming up with the song Crazy Little Thing Called Love while sitting in a bath in Munich, I think he was.
The eruption from the unconscious.
The dance between the theory and the practice.
It's complex. I don't have the answers.
To say I have the answers is to say that the answers are smaller than me.
That I'm the big circle and the little circle inside is the answers and that's not humble and that would be a lie for me to say.
Sometimes I have the answers, but a lot of times the answers have me.
Sometimes I am in charge and I lead the answers and they follow me or they follow me like ducklings follow a duck.
And sometimes I'm like the tail of a kite, just hanging on as the answers rip through me.
I mean, that's just my honest experience.
Sometimes I reason things through.
Sometimes there's this wild inspiration that gives me goosebumps where a kind of seizure provides the answers.
And then I, you know, validate them through reason and all of that.
And of course, right? I mean, we know the story of the guy who figured out the nature of the carbon atom by having a dream of a snake eating its own tail.
Okay, so his unconscious gave him a dream of a snake eating his own tail, eating his own tail, and that's how he figured out the structure of the carbon atom.
I think it was a carbon atom. All right.
I mean, the famous story, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, the story of Sir Isaac Newton, an apple falls on his head, and he gets the whole theory of gravity.
That's a wow!
That's a wow! That's the answer that has you.
And then, of course, you go validate it, and you make sure it's accurate, and you get all that stuff right.
But yeah, my objectivist friend, oh, I know myself perfectly.
I'm like, what? How is that even remotely possible?
And he has not gone on to a life of great achievement.
But I guess he feels that he knows himself perfectly.
So, when somebody seriously uses the terms like spirit and God, I mean, I would say unconscious, I am not alone in here.
I mean, you know, and nobody is, right?
I mean, this is one of the reasons why the role plays in my call-in shows are so important, that people, like, instantly flip into other personalities, other characters.
I can flip into being them.
Even a little girl who's eight years old, I can model that, or whatever.
I can question the parents, and they become their parents, and so we're not alone in here.
And we are not the authors of our own impulses.
And again, you can say, yes, in the long run, for sure, the fact that Freddie Mercury had been practicing music for decades is one of the reasons why he was able to come up with this kind of song.
Yep. Great. You know, as the sort of story, the 10,000 hours thing goes or whatever, like if the Beatles played Hamburg for two years doing many hours of shows a day and that gave them a facility with music that helped them write and get all of that.
But there were lots of bands who did that who didn't end up with that.
Lots of people work very hard at stuff and don't end up with that kind of semi-divine inspirational stuff.
I don't have a big chart at the beginning of call-in shows of everything that I want to achieve and do.
I couldn't possibly, because all I have is a paragraph, and then I spend an hour and a half listening to someone's life.
How could I possibly plot and plan everything out?
I have some ideas, but a lot of it is inspiration.
The questions are inspiration.
And sometimes, an hour later, I'm like, oh, that's why I asked that question.
Okay, am I going to say that's totally plotted and planned and the result of my free will and virtue and dedication?
No. I mean, yes, I've had lots of practice, but, you know, it wasn't like I was terrible at the beginning either.
So when people use mystical terms for the source of knowledge and inspiration and so on, it's like, yeah, I don't like mystical terms because they're an answer to something we don't have an answer to, which is where does all this stuff come from?
Where do dreams that can be incredibly helpful and instructive, where do dreams come from?
Where do dreams come from?
I had dreams about deplatforming a quarter century ago.
Sometimes our unconscious knows the future that our conscious self denies because it would make the present unbearable to accept it.
It's a really complex dance and real power comes in letting everyone in your mind have a seat at the table and not giving them labels and not giving them conclusions.
I live in a state of suspended judgment with regards to my own capacities and my own inhabitants.
I don't know everyone who's down there.
I don't know everything I can do.
I don't know every impulse that I have.
I don't know the answers to questions.
I just find them fascinating.
And it feels like, not I have the answers, but when you ask such great questions, it feels like I'm the first person to hear the answers.
Where they come from, I don't know.
I don't know where this specific story and answer came from.
I had a couple of thoughts on reading the question, but it wasn't all of this.
Where does all of this go? Well, you know, but he's trained before, and he knows before, and he's done answers before.
But the reason why I beg for questions like an addict begs for his drug is that I get to experience some great answers first, and then you get to experience what I hope for you are great answers afterwards.
Where do these answers come from?
Well, the just me?
I don't know that I can say that.
It's not the me that reasons in the abstract.
The unconscious is more about the future.
Reason and evidence is more about the past.
And you can use reason and evidence to predict the future, but all the principles are based upon the past.
Empiricism by its very definition builds knowledge based upon past sense data, prior sense data.
And again, you can use it to learn things about the future and so on, but the generative aspect of coming up with new things is incomprehensible.
The generative aspect of the human mind, of the unconscious, is incomprehensible.
Incomprehensible. Where does everything I say come from?
Some of it I know, much of it I don't.
And I am the first to hear these answers that come from place X in my mind, heart, body, senses, nervous system.
It feels almost like a waking dream to answer some of these questions.
I mean, be honest, I'm just telling you my direct experience.
I don't like to say mystical, because that's to say there's a source that's out there that has no definition.
It's like, well, just say you don't know.
I don't know. When I do a role play, I don't know what's going to be said next.
But I enjoy being the first witness to the generation of great answers.
And that's what it feels like.
That the questions drop into me, And the answers come out.
And I manage and I direct and there's a certain amount of, you know, but I'm at best the conductor of a wild orchestra.
At best, who sometimes listens and sometimes doesn't.
And when they don't, it's usually for the best.
Where is the source of what I say?
What is the source of your nightly dreams?
I don't know. We may never know.
Because even the knowing will change what happens.
What is the source of your inspiration?
What is the source of your deepest desires?
Why is it that some people can watch someone play tennis and just say, oh, that's interesting, and other people watch someone play tennis and become a professional tennis player?
You hear all these stories of somebody who's like, oh, you know, I never really thought about dance.
My mom took me to a dance show and I was like, that's what I want to do with the rest of my life.
Okay, where does that come from? Nobody knows.
How many people go to see plays and how many people go to see plays and then end up with a lifelong desire to be a professional actor?
And it's not, well, because they have the ability, because there's lots of people who want to be actors who never end up making it, or aren't even that good, right?
Why was I so fascinated by people like Marlon Brando and Freddie Mercury and other people who, mostly in the arts, just had a certain kind of passion and excellence and were really at the top of their field?
Well, because deep down, prior to any evidence, I had some kind of belief or some kind of instinct that I could be the top of my field.
And the most important field, top of the most important field there is.
Philosophy, reason, evidence, virtue, all that kind of good stuff.
How did I know what I could do before I could do it?
That's not empiricism.
Potential is not empiricism.
I don't know what it is, and I don't know why I felt I could.
I don't know why when article publishing and podcasting first came out, I was all over it.
I didn't know how big or how powerful this could become.
But I was really excited by it, so part of me kind of knew.
You know, after I'd been dating my wife for a couple of weeks, I just looked at her climbing a hill when we were hiking, and I'm like, this is it.
And that feeling has never wavered for over 20 years, and will never waver until the day one of us is in a dirt box.
And even then, it'll probably grow like the remnants of my hair sometime after death.
I know. Where do these spontaneous answers come from?
Where does my ambition come from?
Where does my excitement about my potential, which is not empirical, where does that come from?
Well, I don't know.
And some people prefer to use God or mysticism or soul or the world spirit or, you know, I don't know.
And I'm not sure that it matters that I do know.
I'm not sure it matters that I do know.
And for people to say, I don't know how I know, I don't know, I don't know how I know which questions to ask next in a call-in show.
I don't know how I get questions and know what to say.
Say, ah, yes, well, practice and history and It's like, yes, but why would I have that practice, that history and experience unless I could do it to a large degree to begin with?
You know, some singer says, you know, where does my great voice come from?
It's like, well, there's these physical folds in your voice and blah, blah, blah.
You know, you know, right?
Where does this great song I wrote come from?
And every artist will tell you the same thing.
Don't know. I mean, this is all the way back to Socrates.
Socrates goes to the poets who have great and deep knowledge of human nature and says, tell me the source of your knowledge.
And what do they say? I don't know.
He said, I don't know. It's kind of like an epilepsy that produces these works of genius.
Every artist will tell you the same thing.
I don't know. Inspiration hits, and you write it down.
And if inspiration doesn't hit, you've got nothing, which is why artists, you know, they have a bunch of albums that are okay, and then they have a couple albums that are fantastic, and then they're mostly done.
As far as creativity goes.
And I'm stretching this out long past its due date, right?
Because I think I first started writing really well in my early 20s.
Now I'm in my mid to late 50s.
So that's decade after decade.
And it's not writing out of habit.
And it's not airport novels like the Stephen King stuff.
It's quite quality.
And I think also I'm gaining in quality.
I'm certainly aiming to gain in quality.
Gaining in quality means relaxing any inhibitions I have about having peaked, right?
Because that's the kind of thing if you start to really limit yourself.
Oh, this is as far as I can go.
Then you start to tense up and you can't.
So I've just had to sort of consciously let the ceiling off my potential and say, I don't know how good I can be.
I'm always going to aim to be better, to be clearer, to be more engaging, to tell you something new.
To tell you something new after close to 20 years of doing this, to tell you something new is so important to me.
Because I then learn something new, which means that I'm not doing the same old, same old.
You know, the people who just give the same speeches over and over again, like the Harry Brown stuff, it's like, I couldn't do it.
And no disrespect to Harry Brown.
He's a great guy, but not for me.
I can't play the greatest hits.
I've got to do jazz. I've got to do improv.
I've got to do Rock in Rio.
So, people have a word for truths that they cannot map the origins of.
Truths they cannot map the origins of.
They have words for it.
Inspiration. Talent.
God. Mysticism.
Past lives, right?
They have many, many, many words for truth which turns out to be valid for which they do not know the source.
I sat down and said, I'm not getting back up until I figure out ethics.
That's where UPB came from.
I remember the goosebumps that I got when I realized that rape, theft, assault and murder could never be universally preferable behavior.
But that wasn't a sort of, how do you reason that out?
An idea that didn't exist before can't come just from empiricism.
It has to be some magic, some flavor, some X factor that mixes with your experience to create something new.
Every painter who paints something has a painting that didn't exist before.
Where does it come from? Where does the spontaneous generation and creativity of the human mind, which can then be validated, right?
Snake eating its own tail turns out to be the valid representation, metaphorically, of the carbon atom.
When we know things for which we have no empiricism, when we understand things for which there's no explanation, What do we call that?
I don't know. I don't have an answer.
I'm willing to suspend myself in the, I don't have an answer and I'm not sure it really matters.
The important thing is not the origin of the truth.
The important thing is the validation and promulgation of the truth.
It doesn't matter where UPB comes from.
It matters that I write and communicate it as well as I can.
It doesn't matter how I know which questions to ask in a call-in show or how to formulate responses to livestream questions.
It doesn't matter how I know that.
What matters is how accurate I am and how well I communicate it and how much it helps people.
It doesn't matter how I know which question to ask next.
In a call-in show, it matters how helpful the call-in shows are to people.
And yet, we circle back and say, well, I'm a rational guy, I'm an empirical guy, I have to know where the source of this inspiration comes from.
Where does this inspiration come from?
But we call it inspiration because we don't know the source and we can't prove the source.
Because it's not empirical.
And it doesn't come from sense data.
It's generative. Your dreams at night do not come from sense data and they are not empirical because they include in them fantastical unknown elements and people you've never met.
Do they have a certain rationale to them?
Yes. Are they rational? Nope.
That's how you know their dreams.
Are they empirical? Nope.
They don't rely on the evidence of the senses.
Ah, but they rely on the prior evidence of the senses.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, right?
This is the question that's fascinated me since I first read, gosh, the original novel of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the guy was saying, well, we can't really create anything new.
You know, we can put a horn on a horse and call it a unicorn.
We can put wings on a horse and call it a pegasus.
But both the wings, the horn, and the horse, we just assembly.
Can we come up with anything new?
Yes. Yes, we can.
Yes, we can. And I think it's because I have a good faculty for...
A good ability.
I have good rational faculty.
Sorry, I'm jumbling a little up.
And why did it jumble there and not anywhere else?
I don't know, and it doesn't really matter.
Usually, things get jumbled when I'm trying to will something where I should be relaxing and channeling something.
So... Because I don't just do reason.
I don't just do arguments.
I don't just do syllogisms.
But I do self-knowledge.
I do history. I do some economics, of course.
And I do poetry.
I've done plays. I act.
In my audiobooks in particular, I write novels.
And so the sort of scope of this generative capacity, a lot of people who are really into reason are very rigid with their unconscious and don't fight any kind of creativity because they view it as destabilizing and anti-empirical.
A lot of people who really are creative and generative and so on cast aside reason in order to Further harvest the wild fruit of their creativity, I'm really balancing in the both worlds, in the generative creativity and strict rational evaluation and empirical evaluation of premises and arguments.
So I've got really deep feet in both camps, so to speak.
And I think that's kind of unusual for somebody to be a good artist and a good philosopher.
It's not unprecedented, but it's kind of unusual.
So, I think when people talk about mysticism and God and the soul, they're saying, stuff's pouring out of me and I don't know where it comes from.
And I need to label where it comes from.
And one of the most powerful things you can do is stand in the face of a lack of knowledge and say, I don't know.
I don't know. And then people feel that somehow it's not valid if they don't know the source.
Which, you know, I understand, right?
I mean, if you don't know where the water came from, maybe you don't want to drink it, right?
I get that. I find it very powerful and helpful and creative to stand in the fact of the matter that I don't know.
I don't know. I won't label it.
I can say inspiration.
It's a close word.
But I don't know where it all comes from.
I know that I have an intellectual and moral responsibility to validate what comes.
But I don't know where it comes from.
And so I think it is perfectly reasonable to have a conversation about sort of mystical elements or Things in the mind for which we have no explanation for their source and say, yeah, I mean you can call it mysticism, but mysticism is a metaphysical answer that is not validated.
It's not valid. Say there's another dimension wherein things pour into my mind or I had a past life and that doesn't answer anything.
It's not true, it's not valid, it's not provable, it's not syllogistic, it's not empirical.
And if we can...
Stand in the face of a lack of knowledge that's incredibly productive and say, what matters is the productivity, not knowing the source, because I can't know the source.
How could I possibly know where the ideas that I don't know where they come from come from?
I mean, it's almost tautological, right?
The idea is I don't know where they come from.
I need to know where they come from. But how would I get the answer as to where they come from if it's not empirical?
In other words, how would I get the answer as to where inspiration comes from?
Well, it would have to be inspiration, but I wouldn't know where that inspiration comes from, so forget it.
I'm just not going down that rabbit hole in this infinite turtles all the way down nonsense.
No. I'm just going to use the gold that generates to buy people's freedom.
Thank you, everyone. Freedomain.com slash donate if you find these conversations helpful.
I really look forward to hearing what you say.
If you could support what I do, I would hugely, hugely appreciate it.
As I dare say, so will the future.
All right. Lots of love, everyone.
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