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Sept. 1, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:45
Dealing with Irrational People!
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All right, hey everybody, Sam Molyneux from Freedomain.
A great question from Facebook from Robert.
You've talked about universal morality.
Is there anything to be done or is there any way to work with people whose morality is screwed?
For example, politicians who believe might makes right and that the state has the authority to do whatever it wants to its citizens for the greater good.
That's a great question.
How do you work with people who reject moral standards?
Well, see, I mean, politicians, it's funny because they don't reject moral standards.
What they do is they claim universal morality as a cloak for their power addiction, right?
That is the really Really tragic thing is that they mimic morality.
I mean, predators mimic the opposite, right?
So grass cannot hurt an antelope.
In fact, grass is a source of food for an antelope.
A tiger has stripes so that it looks like grass, right?
So a predator will mimic that which is harmless or beneficial to you in order to get close enough to prey on you.
And everyone talks about the common good, but the common good is The new superstitious god of the ancient witch doctors, right?
So, the ancient witch doctors would say that the tribal gods You have needs and preferences and morals and goals and desires and plans, but you, as a non-witch doctor, have no access to them, so you're just gonna have to trust me, who is the witch doctor, to tell you what the tribal gods want you to do, and if you don't believe that, then you're a blasphemer who must be ostracized, tortured, killed, whatever, right?
You must be punished.
So, of course, you invent an imaginary perfect entity that has no voice, presence, or will of its own, and then you claim to speak for that, those tribal gods, or that tribal god, you claim to speak for that tribal god, and then you say, I am simply informing you what the all-perfect tribal god wants you to do, don't shoot the messenger, and we'll shoot anyone who doubts this.
And it's funny, you know, if you look back on your life, you'll think of all of these hundreds of different memories that you have for reasons that you can't explain, right?
So they just stick like little burrs in your brain, right?
They just stick to your head.
So I have the memory of a poem I read when I was a kid about a kid's invisible friend.
And the line was something like, the invisible friend's name was Bob or something like that.
And if you have candy to give me, if you have a candy bar to give me, give me two.
One for me, one for my friend Bob.
But I will have to eat it because his teeth are rather new.
Right, so I have an invisible friend named Bob.
If you're going to give me a candy bar, make sure you give it to Bob as well.
So you have to give me two, one for me and one for my invisible friend.
So I could double the resources because I can claim to have an invisible friend.
But it turns out that I will eat the candy bar because my Bob's friend's teeth are rather new.
And that stuck in my head.
I must have read that when I was, I don't know, five years old at a big Oxford big book of poetry or something like that.
Something about a cow's tail and the universe as a whole.
And I remember I drew a little fish on the front page.
Anyway, so that stuck in my head.
I remember this line, like, More than half a century later.
And because that was telling me something essential and important about the world in the same way that Pleasure Island and, you know, there are two absolutely terrifying cartoons I saw when I was a kid.
Absolutely terrifying cartoons.
One was the quasi-pedophile ring in Pinocchio and the other was The psychotic mental torture land known as Alice in Wonderland.
Absolutely terrifying, terrifying stories.
But I remember this one, right?
So here's a kid saying, I get twice the resources from my invisible friend, but I'll have to eat the extra candy bar because my friend's teeth are rather new.
So it's just making up characteristics that mean he consumes the resources, not you, right?
And not his friend.
So the common good, it's just a new tribal god.
The common good demands that, hey, don't shoot the messenger.
I simply speak for the common good, right?
And of course, even if there was such a thing as the common good, the common good is just manufactured, right?
The common good is just it.
Like the common, you can say the common will or whatever, right?
But who knows what the common will is?
When the common will is generated by propaganda, who knows what the common good is?
People are just repeating back all the propaganda slogans they got in childhood, that they got in university, that they got from the media and so on, right?
I mean, a lot of people were pretty keen on the Nuremberg Code, right?
You know, no forced medical experiments, full consent, informed consent, full knowledge of the data, data sharing, like all of the stuff.
And then it was like COVID came along and people like, nope.
So you can see the same thing with Kamala Harris, right?
That she was the most unpopular VP.
And now after, you know, a couple of weeks of propaganda, she's the greatest human being since the guy who walked on water.
And so you said, well, the consensus is, it's like, no, it's just people aren't taught how to think and they're propagandized from here to eternity.
I mean, the common good is just whatever the propagandists program people to repeat, right?
So, I mean, I can't really talk that much about politicians.
Politicians, the new priesthood, right?
So, the new witchdoctor.
And I'm not talking about the honorable priests of the Christian tradition or anything like that, who did huge amounts of good in the world as a whole, ending slavery and so on.
But I am talking about the witchdoctors, right?
The superstitious manipulative witch doctors, right?
So politicians are just the new witch doctors.
They're just liars of the invisible deity called democracy that force you to do what they want and they say while claiming it's not self-interested.
I mean, tons of studies have been done.
And Brian Kaplan, who was on the show many years ago, Wrote a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter.
And tons of studies have been done that say that what politicians do have almost nothing to do with what the people say they want.
I mean, people have wanted controls over various things, or lack of control over various things.
For an hour, man, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what you want.
They'll do what they...
They'll do what they want, regardless of, you know, it's the old, you know, you're quote consulted.
And then it turns out that, you know, people just do whatever they want to do anyway.
But their consultation means that you can't object.
You know, that's the sort of story like the consultation.
Well, Hey man, you got to vote.
It's like, well, you got to vote in general for people who are already bought and paid for.
We all sort of know, know this kind of stuff as a whole.
So to break this example out into something probably a little bit more digestible.
And a palatable, palatable, palatable.
What I would say is imagine that there is a village with a violent guy, right?
A violent guy.
So what do you do?
Well, I don't remember the word, but the Inuit have a name for this kind of guy, the kind of guy who fakes an injury so he doesn't have to go hunting, stays home and tries to seduce all the wives of the village.
And they would just put him on a, put him on an ice floe and push him away, right?
You've got a violent guy in a small village.
A guy who won't listen to reason, uses coercion to get what he wants.
Manipulation, lies, whatever, right?
So what do you do?
Well, you have a couple of options.
And the first option is you reason with him and you say, this is bad.
You've got to change what you're doing.
And as I included lying under violence, because maybe he defaults everyone or whatever it is, right?
Takes pay for work that he never does and then pretends like he never did it.
Like real pathological liars, right?
I don't know if you've ever dealt with someone like that.
It's wild, man.
It is a wild situation.
Absolute unreality, right?
I was reading this thing on Twitter this morning about some guy saying, oh yeah, we had a roommate who was a pathological liar once, and he didn't make his rent, he couldn't make his rent, but he said, no, no, no, I just got a job at the cinema up the street, so I'll be able to make rent very shortly with my first paycheck, and, because he'd lied a lot, This guy's roommate said, but we don't believe you.
So if we go up to the, if we go up to the cinema, are we going to, and we ask them, do you work there?
They're going to say yes.
And it's like, absolutely.
So it goes up.
They find out that the guy doesn't work there.
The guy just continues lying.
Doesn't face them.
Right.
There's just no conscience.
All they can do is lie.
I mean, that's a seriously broken person.
And, and highly dangerous because you, you see this a little bit more on the left and on the right, the right certainly have their bucket booze, but the left just lies like that.
They don't care, right?
Like this, this, Trump told people to drink bleach during COVID.
It's like, no, he's talking about ultraviolet light therapy, which was actually invented in the 1940s, is fairly big in Russia and other places, and is still used in some American hospitals.
It's actually seems to be, what am I?
I'm no doctor, but it seems to have some validity.
But it wasn't like drinking bleach or, you know, hyperactin is only hoarse, you worm.
Like it's, they just like, just like, and the state is a great way to turn lies into gold.
I've got Dire Straits album, Love Over Gold, Private Investigations, The Great Song, Industrial Disease, Great Song.
Anyway, so, if you have, if you get a lot of resources for lying, then all you do is adapt to that.
You're just a predator who lies.
You get resources, and there's no particular conscience.
You don't care how it affects other people, because you've just adapted to this methodology of getting resources.
So, what do you do?
People who are violent, pathological liars, and so on, right?
Well, A pathological lying also appears to be kind of a brain injury.
I remember seeing a documentary once about a guy who was a pathological liar, invented all of this naval history that he was an admiral or something like that.
It turns out that he dove into a pool early on in his Navy career, had a terrible brain injury, and then afterwards became a pathological liar.
Yeah.
Whether the damage is physical or emotional doesn't ultimately matter, but there is a brain damage.
Seems a brain damage.
Leads to this kind of lying.
So, what do you do with people like that?
Well, I mean, you really only have three options, which is, you try to reason them into behaving better, which is kind of like therapy or interventions or whatever, you try to reason them into behaving better.
Well, there's four options, right?
You reason them into behaving better, you ostracize them, you confine them, or you live with the behavior.
Now, the problem is, if you try to reason with a pathological liar or a violent guy, well, they're pretty good at pretending to do things.
I mean, the pathological liar, you can reason with him, and you might even get tears of contrition, and then they'll just go back to the way they were before, right?
Because how do you reason with a liar?
Well, the liar will pretend to reason, and then we'll forget about it immediately.
How do you reason with a violent person?
A violent person will submit to, quote, reason if you have more power.
So if the whole town gets together, a whole village gets together and says, you gotta stop this, and then it'd be like, yeah, yeah, you're right, I'm so sorry, blah, blah, blah, right?
But then it'll just go back to the way it was before once the pressure is removed.
It's kind of like holding up a five-pound weight.
The five-pound weight will stay up as long as you hold it up, and then when you don't hold it up, it'll just go back down again, right?
So if you apply sufficient pressure to the Lyre are the violent guys and they'll conform and they might even burst into tears and they might pretend massive amounts of resourceful remorse and then they'll just return back to the way they were.
You know, it's the old thing that the bad guy has the gun, he's gonna shoot the good guy, and then the good guy gets the gun.
And the bad guy's like, hey, let's reason about this.
Like, the guy hasn't discovered the sweet joys of reason, he just doesn't have the gun anymore.
He lost control of the gun.
So now he's all about being rational.
But you know, if the bad guy gets the gun back, he can just shoot the good guy.
It's simply a matter of a power transfer.
The transfer of power.
Creates both the quote reason and the resentment.
So you can, you can browbeat someone into being more rational with public humiliation or interventions or something like that.
And they will surrender to that greater power of yours or the community.
And then they will be quote rational, but you're just creating resentment and the blowback is going to be pretty horrible.
So.
And the behavior kind of goes underground, even if you find some way to keep that person more, quote, rational for a long period of time, they'll just start spreading rumors, they'll just go into crowded places when they're ill, and they'll just find some other way to mess up the community because they're just that dysfunctional and corrupt.
So ostracism is the other option, right?
So ostracism is, you know, if you continue this behavior, you won't be part of the community.
And that might get them to pretend to be better people and so on.
Of course, if you believe that the person has a soul that can be reformed, Then that's going to be pretty tempting for you.
But borderline sociopathy, psychopathy, and so on.
I mean, nobody knows how to fix them.
I mean, nobody knows.
And there's not some big healthy person in there, like a soul, that you can reach in contact with prayer and goodwill.
You can't talk the lion into becoming the lamb.
It just doesn't work that way.
So ostracism is one way you do it.
There's this meme on the internet where, you know, my favorite story about some boys of Idaho or something is that some guy gets kicked out of a bar and 27 years later opens the door to the bar and they say, get out of here, Gary.
Nothing's changed.
Kind of thing, right?
You ostracize.
Get the person out of your life.
Or out of the community's life.
And maybe that works, but the problem with ostracism is they go out into the wilderness and they plot their revenge, and they might team up with some other group to plot their revenge, so it's dangerous, right?
Confinement, or death, or whatever, right?
But confinement is the other option where you simply remove them from the society while keeping them under your control.
The problem with banishing is that people can come back with, they can poison the water supply, they can come back and they can kill the livestock, they can do all kinds, and they can ally with the brigands and horse thieves of the woods to come and cripple the community because now they have this burning rage and can't be satisfied and it'll escalate forever and ever, amen?
So confinement means that they're ostracized for the community but they can't go and get external allies.
That's another option.
Death, of course, was an option in the past.
There'd be a dual shootout or something like that, sort of High Noon style.
So, with regards to that, once... I mean, this is just for me.
I think there's good data to back it up, but I'm not going to say this is true in every circumstance.
It's pretty hard to find things that are true in every circumstance except mortality.
So, for me, if somebody displays really aggressive, messed-up dysfunctional behavior, I will tell them that this is Not acceptable, this is wrong.
And if they- and I'll give them 24 hours.
And if in 24 hours they catch themselves and apologize, then I will, um, I will listen to that.
Uh, if they don't, then I have nothing more to- You- you can't win.
Against people- I mean, can you win a- can you win a tennis game against someone who doesn't play by the rules, who allows themselves five serves and- right?
Can you win in pickleball if someone doesn't respect the kitchen?
I- where you can't- you can't volley.
You can't.
You can't.
You can't win in a chess game with someone who is willing to treat every pawn as queen, right?
You can't win.
Can't possibly win.
Because not only can you not win, but it's not even a game anymore.
There's no game, right?
Reason is the game of life.
Reason, voluntarism, negotiation is the game of life.
And people aren't willing to play by those rules.
There is no game.
There's no winning.
There's no victory.
There is self-defense, ostracism, and survival.
That's it.
So I hope that helps.
And this is as true of people's personal life as I think it is in the larger societal context.
But freedomain.com slash donate.
Really appreciate these questions.
Keep them coming!
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