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Dec. 29, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:35
The Truth About Albert Camus!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Some great questions from Facebook.
Can bipolar be fixed with personal agency and responsibility?
Now, I, of course, no doctor, I ain't no doctor with degree, no psychologist, no psychiatrist, just amateur nonsense opinion, but I don't think that the biochemical basis of some mental illnesses have really been strictly determined.
So I would look at, and I did a whole show on mental illness, theories of mental illness in the past.
You can find it at fdrpodcast.com.
But in general, what I would say is that our brain is there to process reason, facts, reality, and the empirical evidence of our senses.
And the world is objective and predictable and rational, like the material world is objective, empirical, predictable, rational, consistent, and therefore we are aligned with the purpose of our brains Exactly and specifically to the degree that our brains follow the principles of material reality.
Do we accept the evidence of our senses?
Do we accept the need for reason?
Do we accept empiricism?
Are we willing to overthrow theory in the face of actual evidence?
Are we willing to be corrected by the facts of reality and the strictness of reason?
If that is the case, we have the greatest capacity for mental health, right?
The body has particular purposes and if we follow that which is best for the body, that which is the body is designed for, we are most likely to have physical health.
Of course there can be bad luck exceptions and it's the same thing with the mind.
The purpose of the mind is to process and extract principles from the sense data that comes into us from objective empirical universal rational predictable and consistent reality so we found our beliefs on reason we accept the evidence of the senses and we discipline our minds to follow the strictness because we have imagination which is a good thing we can deny immediate empirical reason in fact we do it every night in our dreams so
We have the capacity for imagination, which is wonderful.
Animals, in a sense, don't really have much option to not follow their instincts, but we do.
And that's great.
Imagination is a wonderful thing.
Imagination should be tempered by rational and objective principles as a whole.
So, whatever is going on in people's minds that is dysfunctional, we have to look and say, okay, if something is called a mental illness, what is mental health?
It's always a big problem.
What is mental health?
It can't just be conformity to society as the old saying goes.
It is not a mark of mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
So what is mental health?
Mental health is having principles within our mind which is part of reality.
Our brain is part of reality.
It is having principles in our mind that follow the reality that gave us birth and sustains our existence.
So principles within the mind that follow The objectivity, rationality, and universality of the properties of matter and energy, allowing our foundational beliefs, in a sense, to be a shadow cast by the statue called absolute reality.
That is our best chance for mental health, in my humble opinion.
All right.
Where is Bitcoin headed to?
Five years?
Ten years?
Well, I've said this from the very beginning.
It's Bitcoin or bust.
We either get Bitcoin or we end up with creepy totalitarian social credit CBDCs.
CBDCs, sorry.
I had a little...
A little aneurysm there, but good.
We're back from the dyslexia.
So we either get Bitcoin, which is a private and universalized and decentralized currency, or we end up with the government in control of everything we buy and therefore we will enter into a totalitarian phase.
I remember reading once that somebody theorized that the government in 1984 lasted for 9,000 years.
Would not seem to me.
So, to me, it's like Bitcoin either wins or humanity loses.
That's really all there is to it, which is one of the reasons I've been talking about it so fervently and positively and essentially and with great necessity for lo these many years.
So, I obviously can't tell you in any detail where Bitcoin is heading to, but if Bitcoin doesn't win, humanity loses probably forever.
So, all right.
You are not qualified to homeschool your kids.
Yeah, this is something that went on Exa recently.
You're not qualified to homeschool your kids.
There is this funny thing where the new sort of modern gatekeepers are the people layered in the Scrabble bag acronym of supposed credentialism, right?
So this is, well, if you don't have a PhD in Climate science you can't talk about.
So this is all just gatekeeping, right?
All it is is saying, well, I have not been taught how to determine truth from falsehood, right from wrong, good from evil, facts from fantasy, information from disinformation or malinformation, both, by the way, Soviet terms invented by the NKVD to crush dissidents and questions of the virtues of communism.
But credentialism is The new mystery religion, right?
I talked about with regards to science.
Credentialism is the new mystery religion.
So in a mystery religion, you have to submit your questions to the priest, they go into closed areas, have bizarre rituals you're never allowed to figure out, and come back with an answer that you're not allowed to question.
And it is terrible.
It is really beyond terrible.
It is a new, white-suited, horn-rimmed glasses, pocket protector cult of infallible priests whose methodologies you can never question, right?
So, for instance, with regards to global warming, there's all of this modeling stuff, right?
That they model the temperature in a hundred years.
Of course, if the government cared about the future, we wouldn't have a national debt, so the idea that they care about the future is obviously laughable.
It's just a basic intelligence test.
So, everyone understands that Imagine a business case scenario, right?
Like I've done this, you present a business case to investors and they'll give you a hundred million dollars, right?
They'll give you a hundred million dollars if your business case shows a profit in 50 years.
No, let's say a hundred years, because the climate stuff goes out a hundred years, right?
So this is just, again, it's just a basic intelligence test, right?
So if you go to a bunch of businessmen and you say, I'll give you a hundred million dollars, but you need to give me a completely unverifiable business case wherein you make a profit, this business makes a profit in a hundred years.
When, you know, everyone's dead and all of that, right?
Now, if you have hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world, I mean millions of entrepreneurs around the world, let's just say hundreds of thousands.
You have hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world and you put it out there that you will give an entrepreneur a hundred billion dollars with no oversight, no need to make any short-term profits, no need for any of their predictions to come true in the short run.
But you'll give them a hundred million dollars if they come up with a business model that shows significant profit a hundred years in the future.
This whole process has been going on for decades, since really the 1970s.
None of anybody's predictions have come true yet, right?
None of anybody's predictions have come true.
But if you think that out of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, there isn't a single one who would come up with a model that predicted profit a hundred years in the future in order to get a hundred million dollars in the here and now, I'd like to introduce you to a species of bull biped called human beings because clearly you haven't met any of us yet.
It's corrupt beyond words.
It's ridiculous beyond words.
And anybody who would believe it, it's incomprehensible.
It's like they've never met a human being.
Like they've never met... Like they're the writers for Emily in Paris or Megalopolis.
Like you've never met a human being in your life.
So...
That's all.
So with, you know, this kind of stuff, I mean, it's like the projections that the government puts out for various things.
You know, if you were good at projecting economic facts, you would go and make a billion billion dollars in the stock market.
You wouldn't be mucking away in some fluorescent Excel sheet government corner office Putting politically crafted fantasies together in the guise of economic projections, right?
You would actually, if you knew where the economy was going, the last place you'd be looking for is the government.
That's pretty funny.
It's like somebody who says, well, I know exactly who's going to win the Super Bowl, and I have for the last 50 or 40 years or 30 years, however long the term's been used.
Somebody who says, yeah, I know exactly who's going to win the Super Bowl, man.
It's like, well, why are you working in a little corner office putting it out on a block?
Why don't you go and bet on the Super Bowl legally and make a zillion dollars?
I don't know.
It's just kind of funny.
So this idea that you're not qualified to homeschool your kids.
So who is?
Who is qualified to school your kids?
Who is qualified?
I've got to watch for my camera here.
So who... Two, I guess.
So, who is qualified to homeschool your kids?
Politically motivated bureaucrats a thousand miles away who don't even know your child and are responding to the endless demands of the teachers' unions?
You know, like, forever and ever, just a little example, forever and ever, amen.
Everyone has known that the best way to remove the sartorian existentialist horror of school is to allow kids to sleep in, right?
Just let them sleep in.
If they need more sleep, let them sleep in.
And then they won't be exhausted and irritated and distracted, right?
How much of ADHD, or what's called ADHD, is just lack of sleep?
Because teenagers need a huge amount of sleep, especially boys.
So forever, the recommendation has been to start school later.
But they can't.
Do you know why?
Do you know why?
At least the reason they get.
You know, we have contracts with our school drivers, the bus drivers.
The bus drivers.
The bus drivers.
Hard to think of a more incompetent group of people whose job is somewhat more essential for the economy than bus drivers.
We're late.
We got lost.
We dropped your kid off too early.
We dropped your kid off too late.
We're sick.
We're unavailable.
We don't have any discipline.
We can't control the kids.
Anyway.
So, yeah.
So, who is competent to school your children?
Strangers with a political agenda who are very easily taken over by special interest groups to promote bizarre, toxic, anti-human ideologies?
Who is?
Compared to what?
So you're not qualified to homeschool your kids.
Like, okay, so you don't have the requisite scrabble bag of acronyms after your name, but what you do have is a deep knowledge of your child's preferences and personality and a deep love, affection, and care for your child.
So it's saying that Anonymous strangers a thousand miles away are better at understanding and raising your kid than you, the loving parent.
And you also understand your kid at a deep psychological level.
Right?
Because your kid is birthed from you and your wife, you and your husband.
Which means that since almost every aspect of personality is influenced by genetics, you understand and know your kid pretty well.
I think the wasp is trying to mate with my camera.
Fascinating.
You just keep doing that and don't give me another hole.
So the idea that some anonymous stranger in a government bureaucracy is better at raising your kid, because that's what educating your kid is raising your kid, right?
So an anonymous stranger with a bag full of highly politically corrupted credentials is better at raising your kid than you who have a deep and visceral understanding of your kid because your kid is like you and your kid is like the woman or the man that you love and so on.
Because of all of that, you're just not qualified.
What a bizarre thing it is to say to a parent, you are not qualified to raise your own child.
But politically motivated strangers following the demands of greedy public sector unions, well that's that's the ticket man.
That's what you need to do.
How on earth did we ever evolve as a species with parents raising their own children?
It's incomprehensible.
That's just so bizarre to me.
I mean who's good at raising your kid?
And education, you know, education is conversation for the most part.
Like, I don't know how people homeschool as a whole, but education is conversation.
You sit there, you drive and you say, oh, there's a for sale sign for a business.
Let's talk about how a business gets bought and sold.
That's interesting.
I find that interesting.
My daughter does too.
The leaves are falling.
Let's talk about the cycle of the seasons and the earth.
Like, you just have conversations.
And that's how knowledge gets transferred, right?
That's how knowledge was transferred for almost all of human history.
Did a pretty good job, I would say.
I mean, we did get to the top of the old food chain and we do have the biggest brains in the known universe.
So, not too terrible.
No.
So, all that is natural is opposed, right?
That is the modern world.
All that is natural is opposed.
Ideology is a humiliation ritual by which you oppose everything that is natural.
Everything that is natural is opposed.
And that's just, it's a gaslighting humiliation ritual.
So that which is common sense, that which is natural, that which we evolve with, all of it has to be opposed.
And if you've ever been in an abusive relationship, you know that one of the demands of the abuser is one of the ways in which you get ground down and abused is you have to deny the evidence of your senses.
You have to deny common sense.
You have to deny that which is obvious.
Like they literally hold up a red ball and this is 1984 right?
How many fingers am I holding up?
It's just whatever the party says.
So one of the humiliation rituals is you must deny the evidence of your senses.
And you must deny all that is natural.
So if you accept that which is natural, and you promote that which is natural, then you lose power over people, right?
It's kind of bright.
So you lose power over people when you allow them to accept the evidence of their senses and build their knowledge up from then, because then they Then they have a methodology of knowledge that doesn't require outside authority, right?
And the whole purpose of what I do in philosophy is to give you a methodology for determining truth from falsehood, right from wrong, which does not rely on an external authority in the same way that Bitcoin is a way of storing and transmitting value and information without relying on an external authority.
I mean, I am a voluntarist, which is no rulers, right?
Because when you have rulers, you don't have any rules.
If someone can just arbitrarily change the rules of chess, there are no rules of chess.
There's only the whim of the ruler.
So you either get rules or you have rulers.
You can't... the antonyms.
Rulers and rules are the exact opposite.
And it's the same thing with credentialism.
That you have to submit that which is obvious and clear to you.
Because some stranger is waving a piece of paper that says, I'm right and you're wrong.
That's just completely bizarre to me.
Like, why on earth would I listen to someone who thinks they're right?
You know, who thinks they're right because they jumped through a bunch of hoops and followed a bunch of rules in a completely corrupt organization like a university.
It's just completely bizarre to me.
It's like somebody saying to me, well, you see, murder is moral because I have this doctorate.
And it's like, I really, I don't care about your doctorate.
You're just like, it's just speaking nonsense.
All right.
Rand or Mises?
I would say that I've read more Rand than Mises.
I really love the Mises explosion or detonation of the price calculation problem and so on, which is great.
But there, you know, Rand is more of a philosopher and Mises, of course, is an economist, so I don't think it's an either-or.
Steph, have you ever read The Myth of Sisyphus?
Just wondering what your thoughts are of Albert Camus's philosophy.
So, Albert Camus was born to a mother who was both deaf and illiterate, right?
So a deaf mother can't talk to you in general, right?
Because they just make those sort of odd sounds, right?
His father was killed in the First World War.
I don't think he ever knew him.
And his mother was deaf and illiterate.
So that's going to have a huge effect.
I remember dating a girl when I was a young man.
And she had a very vivid imagination and had very, very great difficulty really focusing on other people.
But the imagination was fantastic, right?
And it turns out for the first six or seven years of her life, her parents didn't notice that her vision was atrociously bad.
So she really couldn't see anything.
So she went and retreated to the world of the mind, which sort of makes sense.
And let's see here just sort of quickly.
When Albert Camus was a young man, He married a woman named Simone Yee.
She had an addiction to morphine.
Because she apparently had menstrual cramps and turned to morphine.
So he wanted her to beat her addiction, so he married her, and then it turned out that he found out that his wife, oddly named he, his wife was having sex with her doctor, I assume, in return for the morphine, and so he divorced her.
So, I mean, everybody makes mistakes.
Getting married to a rampant drug addict who's sleeping with her doctor with the assumed to get a hold of the drug.
That's pretty, pretty bad.
I mean, it's sort of a male fantasy that my love can fix a pretty woman with a massive dysfunction.
So, he joined the Communist Party.
So, he was a totalitarian asshole.
Now, of course, he's like, well, no, no, no.
I'm a libertarian socialist.
I'm an anarcho-syndicalist and so on.
It's like, no, don't care.
Don't care.
Look, here's the thing when it comes to philosophers.
Oh, my God.
Philosophy is really bounded by don't try to be too fucking clever.
Just don't, don't try to be too clever.
Don't try to be too clever.
Right?
So let me tell you what I mean.
So if you're a physicist and you come up with A brand of physics that denies people the ability to catch a ball that's thrown at them?
Then you're an over-complicating asshole.
Right?
You are asking people to deny their actual abilities and the reality of their life in exchange for your view of physics.
Right?
Now, and I'm not talking about, like, okay, it's kind of weird that you gain mass as you approach the speed of light, but that's all, that's not people's... If you can't explain how people can throw and catch a ball, your physics is bullshit.
It's just yapping.
It's just noise.
It's distracting, destructive noise.
If you can't explain to people how they can catch a ball and base your physics on that, I don't care what you have to say about anything else.
So, people and all moral systems around the world oppose rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
And fraud, you have to pretend.
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Everybody teaches that to their kids.
Don't hit, don't steal.
All systems around the world recognize property rights.
You say, ah, but communism doesn't.
It's like, well, communism does.
It only says that the government should control all the property.
So the people in the government have all the property rights.
Right?
So, rape, theft, assault, murder, property rights.
Every moral system, what we teach.
So, if your ethical system can't explain that, it's masturbatory, ookie-cookie, embarrassing, pathetic, irrelevant, stupid, weird, twisted, horrifying, destructive bullshit.
If you can't explain that, if you can't explain the opposition to rape, theft, assault, murder, and concomitant property rights, I don't care what you have to say.
I don't care what you have to say about anything else, right?
Because if your theory of physics says human beings can't catch balls, right?
You know, it's the old joke about, it's kind of a joke, right?
How physicists say that bees can't fly.
So that's kind of a joke, right?
Because bees can fly.
Physicists say they can't, but they can.
So, I can't tell you, like, I have a visceral, bone marrow, acidic tongue loathing for philosophers who come up with, like, suicide is man's only fundamental question.
It is the absurdity of life.
Right?
Okay, but most people don't find life absurd, and most people don't want to kill themselves.
Okay.
Uh, if I was raised by an illiterate deaf mother, my father got blown up in a war, I married a woman with a drug addiction who then cheated on me with her doctor to get the drugs.
Probably.
Um, yeah, I could understand that you'd be kinda depressed, but don't confuse your fucked up choices.
For human beings' general reality, right?
I don't try and base physics on my nightly dreams, and I don't try and tell people that whatever difficulties I've had in my life is somehow the human condition.
You know, it is the human condition.
It is something like that, right?
Uh, sorry, I lost a page here.
Uh, what else?
Uh, Camus could not keep it in his pants.
And it was a Spanish-born actress, Maria Cáceres.
One of his, let's see here, oh yeah, he married some other woman, I think.
And his wife, I think it was his wife, she had a mental breakdown after he had all these affairs.
...and needed hospitalization in the early 1950s, and Redia Camus, who felt guilty, withdrew from public life and was slightly depressed for some time.
Yeah.
I'm screwing so many bimbos, or, I guess, Dubovia, but that's a different matter.
But I banged so many women that my wife had a mental breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
Yeah, I think I feel slightly depressed.
So, the absurdity of life and the fact that it inevitably ends in death is his big thing.
Well, your life is absurd.
Mine isn't.
Of course, he was anti-Christian.
It's almost inevitable.
He wrote, there is only really one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.
Suicide.
Yeah, yeah, Emo Prince.
I get it, man.
You're really all kind of the Crow Dark and it's just suicide.
Yeah, suicide.
Uh, Camus follows Sartre's definition of the absurd.
That which is meaningless.
Thus man's existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification.
I don't know.
Don't drive women insane and put them in asylums because you can't keep it in your pants.
Don't marry drug addicts and don't be a communist.
You know, these things are okay, you know, reasonable.
So all I want from philosophers and thinkers as a whole is just, you know, start with the nature of reality.
What is real?
Start with the nature of knowledge.
What is true?
Move to the nature of morality.
What is moral?
What is right?
And then, you know, talk about social organization in consistency with these three things.
It's really, it's not that complicated.
I mean, it's not that easy to do.
I mean, this is what I did almost 20 years ago with my Introduction to Philosophy series.
You should really check it out.
It's a 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series.
I go through that whole process, but yeah.
Don't go against humanity's lived and general experience.
Don't try and be weird and clever and suicide!
It's like the number of people who want to kill themselves is quite low.
So the fact that you're feeling suicidal because you're a rampaging asshole who sleeps around and drives his wife to madness and so on, right?
And the fact that you support communism and violence, right?
So the fact that you're an asshole and you have no self-control, you have to self-control if your average coke-addicted rabbit or Sigmund Freud, two sides of the same coin.
So just because you're an asshole who has no self-control and tragically was raised by a deaf mother who couldn't really communicate with you and you have a sort of sad and tragic life of suffering pain as a child which I sympathize with and then inflicting endless pain on people as an adult and you can't say anything that's sensible and useful to the average person Why would I have any respect for any of that?
It's just a bunch of bafflegab, polysyllabic, French existentialist, depressed noise.
Why would I listen to philosophy from a man who probably cheated on his garden gnome?
It's like, my gosh.
I mean, most of the French intellectuals, a lot of them signed a, hey, let's legalize child sexual assault.
That's all repulsive and vile beyond words.
There's a bunch of pillagers and abusers and vile, vile human beings.
Why would I listen to any of them?
I mean, it's like a diet book by a fat guy.
I mean, it's all just ridiculous.
Why would you bother examining the morality of somebody who lived a life like that?
I mean, it's beyond...
Repulsive and vile.
But it's just a sort of subsonic call out to all the other depressed weirdos to get together and pretend they're being deep when all they're doing is exploiting everything but the pulse and some of the things that don't even have a pulse.
It's like Foucault.
Like Foucault, the absolute monster, just vile, vile human being on every conceivable level.
I'm not even going to talk about the crimes that he committed because it's absolutely monstrous beyond words.
But that's, of course, the world, right?
Like, you have these pseudo-moralists who justify every atrocity known to man, and God and Satan in particular, and they're lionized and taught, and here I am.
In the woods.
All right.
Have yourself a wonderful day.
Thank you for these great questions.
Lots of love from up here.
I'll talk to you soon, my friends.
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