All Episodes
Previous Next
May 30, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:07
LANGUAGE IS FOR LYING
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
So, one thing you see in the media, of course, is this constant, let's you and him fight.
And I think it's really important to understand just the two major reasons that language was developed.
So the two major reasons that language was developed was one, To instill loyalty in an ideal, not in people.
And two, to work as a substitute for physical strength and martial excellence.
This is why we have language.
We have language to obscure and provoke, not to clarify and reveal.
And so, when I take language, as philosophers should, and use it to clarify and reveal, I am attempting to wrestle, in a sense, a weapon from an enemy.
So, it's really not hard to be clear in terms of language.
It's not hard to tell the truth, and most of what I say is, in many ways, Ridiculously obvious.
I mean, wouldn't you say that?
If it's wrong to hit adults, then it should be wrong to hit children.
That When you blame people for their failings, you are accepting that both you and they have self-ownership and free will and that morality exists.
That rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior because to try and make, say, and by any of those in the category, universally preferable behavior, it erases the categories, therefore can't be valid.
I mean, things are They're pretty obvious, right?
Pretty easy.
That you cannot have opposite moral requirements for the same species, right?
You can't say that all non-red-headed people must refrain from murder, but all red-headed people must murder, right?
That would be crazy, right?
So, looking for consistency and universality in morality, which is what is always claimed with morality, Well, it's all blindingly obvious, so then the question is, if it's all blindingly obvious, and can be explained, as I have, I've explained morality to my daughter when she was three, four, and five years old, and, you know, she's smarter than your average bear, but not to the point where she can process things at four that adults can't possibly process.
So, it's sort of the great mystery of philosophy, right?
Which is, what philosophers say, or what philosophers should say.
is blindingly obvious, and I can't tell you the bottomless wells of acidic contempt I have in my heart for philosophers who have all of these weird, brain-twisting, polysyllabic explanations of things that don't exist and don't matter.
Oh, you see, but the word spirit doth take a particular nation or state by its shorts and move it forward according to the polynomial preferences of an abstract realm called the new amenal.
Yeah, great.
Can humanity get anything that can help you?
I don't know, parent children?
Because that's where morality starts, right?
Morality starts with the parent-child relationship.
So, can philosophers do anything that serves parents?
Anything?
Anything at all?
No, but you see, what's really important is the question of whether we live as a brain in a tank controlled by a demon for unknown purposes, for unknown causes, in unknown ways.
Using unknown methodologies, and that's the most important thing.
Yeah, okay.
Can you imagine?
Imagine as a kid taking one of these ridiculous philosophical mumbo-jumbo word salads.
And saying, well, it's true, Mama, that I did steal from your purse, but really, what is truth and reality anyway?
And do I even have free will?
And maybe it's all predetermined, and maybe we're all just brains in a tank controlled by a demon.
You fail a test, right, at school, and you say, yes, but you see, in an alternate realm, according to the world spirit, it's entirely possible I did pass that test, so you can't fail me, really.
They laugh at you, just as I and any sane person laughs at these supposed philosophers who served the powers that be by obfuscating every polysyllable known to man to the point where human beings can't think their way out of a paper bag!
Or, to put it another way, only those philosophers that pulled all of this polysyllabic obscuring nonsense were the ones chosen to represent philosophy, you see.
And this, of course, makes philosophy so difficult I mean, there are so many famously obscure philosophers with contradictory passages all over the place.
This makes philosophy so impossible that it becomes worse than useless for the general population.
And philosophers should serve the general population.
I mean, shouldn't we?
Isn't that why we don't toil with labor for our daily bread?
Is we provide a valuable service for moral clarity to the general population?
That's why I have always focused on, you know, I don't take grants, I don't take subsidies, I don't take cash offerings that could conceivably obscure the clarity of my purpose, even when they've been offered, and they have been, because I want to face with utility the general population, you, dear listener, and provide value to you.
Because if I'm not providing value to you, I'm Providing value to those who have their boots on your neck, which I will not do.
So, yeah, purpose of language is to have you loyal, not to an individual, but to a principle.
To a country, to democracy, to the king, to whatever.
Like, whatever outlives the individual, which another individual can step into and inhabit, right?
I'm loyal to the crown, because the crown never ages.
The crown can be moved from one head to another.
And language was invented to bypass the natural problem that violent bullies have when they rule others, which is that the violent bullies get older and weaker and the others they bully get taller and stronger.
And if might makes right, those who impose might will be cast out or slaughtered in their old age, right?
Throughout most of human history, the Alpha Hominid gets old and then they're too old to defend their power and they get attacked back.
And so, language is there to create an abstract and an ideal, so that the aging of the individual in a power structure does not directly weaken that power structure.
Or, to put it another way, the power structure is based on eternal language, not on failing and fading muscles.
So, that's the purpose.
One purpose of language is that.
Now, the other purpose of language, of course, is to act as a substitute for muscle and martial prowess.
So if there's a weak guy, right, let's take our eponymous Bob and Doug.
Bob and Doug are two big, ferocious, powerful warriors, and they are oppressing, let's say, let's give him a name, Socrates, right?
So Bob and Doug, big, powerful, meaty, manly, powerful warriors, you know, six foot three, 240 pounds of pure muscle, and they've had massive amounts of experience in fighting.
And they are both oppressing Socrates.
Or, let's say they're not even oppressing Socrates, but they're getting all the cool chicks.
And so Socrates wants to eliminate one or both of them.
So what does he do?
Well, he can't fight them.
He can't fight them.
So what does he do?
Well, he gets them to fight each other.
And then, maybe he just offs the wounded one.
So, he starts spreading rumors.
He starts fighting with language.
He starts using language As a way of hijacking the muscles he does not possess in order to attack both people who are oppressing him.
Right?
So either Bob or Doug or both end up instigating fights against each other.
pushing at each other and shoving at each other and then there's a duel right and you know back in the day the duel was just like punching or throwing rocks or smacking each other with implements sticks or whatever then one would probably get killed and one would get wounded now the wounded guy is not particularly attractive and he might not get better he might die from infection and so on so you see socrates then can use language to Destroy, let's just say, 1.5 warriors.
And so language was invented as a substitute, as a form of possession, possessing others, of hijacking their fight-or-flight mechanism so that they will act as a remote control proxy for your own lack of strength and martial courage and martial skill.
So Socrates can get Bob and Doug to fight each other And then Socrates can either off the weakened one or let the weakened one die of natural causes after the fight.
You know, he's got a broken leg, it doesn't heal properly, he gets weak, he gets feverish, he gets an infection.
Or, you know, he just has a limp and can't fight and can't hunt and loses his status or stature thereby.
Because you see this happening all the time.
It's the physically weak who set us against each other so that they can rule the remains
of our strength. This of course, you combine these two then you get war, right? You combine
loyalty to an ideals rather than an individual because loyalty is based on love. You love your
country whereas surrendering to an individual is based on fear.
And love does not engender hatred, but fear does.
If somebody frightens you often enough, you will get angry and you will want to harm that person.
I mean, you've seen this a million times on the internet, jump scares followed by somebody getting punched.
So, if you can get someone to love an abstraction, which the individual inhabiting that abstraction, like the king and the country, The king is dead.
Long live the king.
The king is dead.
Long live the king.
You see, the king is the language-based continuation of the subjugating person.
I mean, I remember being fascinated by that statement as a little kid.
The king is dead.
Long live the king.
Because I just heard it in abstract.
It's like, that's a paradox.
What the heck does that mean?
The king is dead.
Long live the king.
And it wasn't until I saw it enacted out, you know, some old king died and they held up the young king, Mustafa style, and the king is dead, long live the king.
Pretty fascinating.
So, language, which gets you to love the abstraction called the country or the king, language allows for love to thwart a desire for revenge.
Whereas if it's just an individual who bullies you and subjugates you, right, you think of that, that balled up Fist of the great Crispin Glover acting in Back to the Future, that great balled up fist where Biff finally gets punched, right?
Biff who oppresses, is it Marty?
I can't remember.
The elder McFly.
I wouldn't hurt a McFly.
So you get that balled up fist and that punch which then changes his life, right?
So if you physically bully someone they will desire vengeance against you and you will get old and they will generally get taller and stronger and more cunning and have allies and so on so eventually, you know, Macbeth style you're just gonna get probably killed in your sleep.
Somebody's gonna drop a rock on your head when you're 65 and can't particularly fight.
But, if instead of fearing the fists of the individual, you love the abstraction called the kingship or kinghood or the crown, right?
I mean, that's the name of the series on the Royal Family, it's called The Crown.
It's not individuals, it's The Crown.
So, if you love the abstraction rather than fear the individual, you're much less likely to rebel.
Which is why the revolution happened in America because they did not respect the king and they didn't like King George.
He was just a guy who was taking stuff away from them.
So, let's see if he can, right?
So, language is developed for two purposes that Philosophers, good philosophers, honest philosophers, useful philosophers, philosophers who care about truth and virtue and the people, right?
So I'm giving the people powerful truths rather than lying to them to subjugate them to those with boots on their neck.
So I'm trying to take language and use it Not to justify abstractions, but to say, what have I always said?
I mean, my very first video was on concept formation, and my argument was that, I've always said this, right?
The concept is imperfectly derived from the instance.
So, the tree matters.
The definition of the tree is a shadow cast by the tree.
It's a slave to the tree.
The instance matters.
The concept must accurately reflect the instance.
There are no concepts that can contradict the nature of any instance.
You can't say, of these 99 trees in this little forest, 98 of them are trees and one is the opposite of a tree.
That's a rank contradiction, obviously, right?
Of these 99 trees in this little forest, you can't rationally say that...
98 of these trees are trees, and one of these trees is the opposite of a tree.
I mean, that would be the actions of a crazy person, right?
I mean, if you're out in the woods and say, oh, lovely trees.
And some guy says, well, yeah, except for this tree, this is the opposite of a tree.
This is the total, it's a polar opposite of the tree.
It has all the opposite properties of a tree.
It's like, well, then why are you calling it a tree?
It looks exactly the same as the others.
I mean, maybe it's a cake tree.
I don't know, right?
He says, no, no, no.
It is physically identical to all the other trees, but it is the opposite of a tree.
Like that would be the actions of a crazy person.
You take slow steps back from that person and leave him alone in the woods with the feminists and the bears.
Sorry, reference to current meme to future generations of scholars.
But that's what philosophers do.
Right?
They say that of all the people in this country everyone is a person, the king is a person, but he is imbued with a divine essence that give him completely opposite moral rules.
You can't print currency.
He can print currency.
You can't start wars.
He can start wars.
He can throw you in prison.
You can't throw him in prison.
So he's completely, he's, he's, he's a human being just like you.
He's not a space alien.
He's not a king made out of cake.
I got to stop with these cake things.
I'm getting hungry.
I haven't had any breakfast yet.
It's after 11.
So this is what the philosophers do.
Well, not really philosophers, just propagandists for power.
They say, oh yeah, he's of these 99 trees in the forest, all the trees except this one who has the opposite properties of a tree.
They say, well of all the people in the kingdom, everyone's a person except for the king who has the opposite moral properties and requirements and commandments of a person.
Now in order to obscure this obvious insanity, and it is obvious insanity, they have to create all of these complications.
And of course it comes out of childhood where parents say, you must not use force to get what you want.
I want you to obey.
So I'm going to use force.
That obvious contradiction is why people believe all of this nonsense about Kings and royal power and all of this crazy, genuinely crazy stuff, right?
So when you see, and you can see this all over in the media, various isms and phobias and like people's being sat against each other.
This is all propagated by people who are physically weak, who are using language as a substitute for the muscles they don't possess, the martial courage and martial ability that they don't possess.
They want us to fight each other so they can rule the remains.
And they want the strongest people to fight each other so that they can rule over the weakest, because they're weak themselves.
It's more true of propagandists as a whole, but yeah, it's just important.
So when I take philosophy and use it to clarify and prove, I'm taking a weapon designed to enslave and using it to liberate.
Which is fundamentally confusing to people, as are not you guys, right?
It's fundamentally confusing to people as a whole and makes them quite hostile and angry, for reasons we can all, I think, understand and appreciate.
So yeah, look at this, you see this all over the place on social media, all over the place.
So, those who hate a group, And can't fight that group and can't prove their case and can't win against them in any open disagreement, whether it's martial or debate or whatever.
So those who hate a group...
And wish to reduce their numbers.
Don't fight them openly if they can't win.
If they can win, they will, but when they can't, they won't.
And what they do is they simply say that men are toxic and women are horrible and you should have nothing to do with each other, and that way they reduce the birth rate.
And, well, that's sort of preventive war, right?
Because in war, you kill the adults.
And in propaganda, you prevent them from being born.
And there's a kind of murderousness to both, in my view, in terms of long-term effects.
So, yeah, that's just the way things roll.
So, I'm aware that I am attempting to wrestle an allegorical form of combat from those who invented it and who use language to control rather than to inform.
to lie and destroy, rather than inform and create.
So, it's tough.
It's a tough situation, and this is why, you know, particularly I've done this great 22-part History of Philosophers series you can get at freedomain.locals.com, but it's a wrestle and a half, and that's why there's such volatility around what it is that I do.
So, I hope that helps.
I hope you have a wonderful day.
Thank you, of course, for all of your support of the show.
FreedomAid.com slash donate to help out the show.
It's the last day or two where you can get all of the peaceful parenting goodies including the AI just for supporting me at FreedomAid.com slash donate.
Hope you have a wonderful day.
Thank you so much for listening and for allowing this conversation to continue.
Lots of love from up here.
I'll talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection