May 17, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:45
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| Time | Text |
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| I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Is this true? | |
| Like, you know, we have this, I'll sort of give you a more sort of current example. | |
| And I did an interview with Dr. Kevin Beaver many years ago on this as well, worth checking out. | |
| People can check out my show at fdrpodcasts.com. | |
| Even all of the Formerly prominent videos are still resurrected and in various places across the web. | |
| But the idea that, well, the crime comes from poverty, right? | |
| That if you're poor, boy, you just need your crust of bread. | |
| Crime comes from poverty and so on. | |
| Statistically, it's just not true. | |
| It's just not true. | |
| Generally, there's a lot of crime and that makes neighborhoods poor because stores don't. | |
| Want to be there and people with means move out because they don't want to deal with the crime. | |
| And so just these kinds of causalities. | |
| The idea that a socialized medicine is essential for maintaining people's health. | |
| No, no, not really. | |
| People who have less access to, quote, free government healthcare often have healthier outcomes than people who have, quote, free access to government healthcare, which tends to be a conveyor belt of profitable pills for pharma rather than lifestyle changes for your actual health. | |
| So there's a lot of, I mean, we could sort of go on and on, but there's a lot of delusions in society that are constantly reinforced. | |
| And, you know, you just have to look at the truly scramble-cooked brains of the CNN-addicted boomers to see the effects that this has on people where you really can't reason with them at all because they just have these train tracks burned into their brain. | |
| Anything which challenges the train tracks or tries to jump the train tracks is considered to be... | |
| An attack upon reality, almost, and just can't be abided. | |
| And, you know, this weird gaslighting amnesia that's happened post-COVID, where, you know, a lot of people turned kind of evil over the whole COVID thing, or at least revealed their evil tendencies in that sort of Milgram experiment style. | |
| And it's all gone. | |
| It's all kind of vanished. | |
| And everyone, nobody circles back and nobody says, you know, what did we do that was wrong? | |
| Or how did things get so kind of crazy for this ailment? | |
| There's a lot of shared delusions, and people who come along and tell the truth, you know, the one thing that's not accurate is the kid is celebrated and the truth is revealed. | |
| That's not really how it works in the world, but that's why it's a fairy tale and not a documentary. | |
| On page 5, you say, Truth is a necessary prerequisite for intimacy. | |
| Most times in life, we do not even know that we are lying. | |
| We do not know that we are failing to process reality, both inner and outer, correctly because we are addicted to mythology or making up stories which drug us with the illusion of truth rather than humbly pursuing truth in reality. | |
| How can we determine if we are engaged in self-deception? | |
| It's a big epistemological question. | |
| So, I mean, what is truth? | |
| Well, truth is when the contents of our mind match facts in reality. | |
| So, the world is a sphere if we believe it's banana-shaped. | |
| The contents of our mind do not match that which is in reality. | |
| If I say it's raining outside and it's sunny outside, my statements do not match what is in empirical reality. | |
| So, empirical reality, what we get through the evidence of the senses, and we have a bunch of senses. | |
| It's more than just the five. | |
| We also have balance and hunger and instincts in our second gut, our second brain. | |
| Which actually has a whole bunch of neurons down in our sort of gut region. | |
| So we have more than five senses. | |
| We have sort of reason, evidence, science. | |
| So what you want to do is you want to, for the most part, it's a very difficult process because we are to some degree the sum of our beliefs. | |
| And when we challenge our beliefs, we're challenging our very identity. | |
| We're challenging all of our relationships. | |
| We are challenging our sense of morality. | |
| And we are challenging authority, which for most of human history had a very bad outcome indeed. | |
| So, what you want to do is, for me, it's just blank slate. | |
| It's just blank slate. | |
| Okay, let's pretend I know nothing. | |
| Pretend I'm just newly hatched, newly born, beamed in from some other planet. | |
| How would I build things which are true from nothing? | |
| And, of course, Descartes did this with regards to reality, and Kant did this with regards to ethics. | |
| Socrates did this with regards to knowledge as a whole. | |
| Like, let's pretend I know nothing and see what I can build that has some sort of substance or... | |
| And I have a whole 19-part Introduction to Philosophy series. | |
| Again, fdrpodcast.com. | |
| People can check that out. | |
| I've got Essential Philosophy, which deals with simulation theory and free will and morals and so on. | |
| So just start with a blank slate. | |
| Okay, well, what is truth? | |
| Well, truth, the big question in philosophy, there's this famous, somebody famously asked a philosophy professor, how's your wife? | |
| And he said, well, compared to what? | |
| And that's... | |
| Compared to what? | |
| Well, truth compared to falsehood. | |
| So true has to have something to do with objective reality outside our minds. | |
| Because, you know, there's this weird thing where people say, my truth, like that can be validated or verified or something like that. | |
| Truth is, in a philosophical sense, truth is the relationship between the contents of our minds that we believe to be true and the actual facts of empirical reality. | |
| And so you have to start assuming that everything you've been told is a lie and everything you believe is false and just say, okay, if I have to build things up from nothing, what is true? | |
| Well, of course, Descartes famously said, well, I think therefore I am, which is the only thing I know is that I am thinking. | |
| And I think he kind of went on a weird brain controlled by a demon, like brain in a vat, hooked up to electrodes controlled by a demon. | |
| It went kind of weird that way, but you start with nothing, and we only have to start with nothing because we're lied to so much. | |
| Like, in the future, when philosophy is taught to children from an early age onwards, we won't have to do all of this, right? | |
| We won't have to unlearn all of the bad teachings we've been given, but lying to people is so profitable that it's like the ultimate human crop is delusion. | |
| At the moment, we have to kind of undo a bunch of stuff and say, okay, let's assume that I know nothing. | |
| Okay, what is true? | |
| And so we study the principles of objective reality, which is reason and evidence, right? | |
| Reason is the art of non-contradictory identification of information. | |
| Evidence is the consistency of the behavior of matter and energy. | |
| And so we say, okay, well, if I have self-contradictory beliefs, they can't be true, because truth is relative to reality, and reality is not contradictory. | |
| An elephant doesn't turn into an airplane, does not turn into a cloud, and there's no such thing as a square circle, and two and two never make five. | |
| There's a pleasing kind of rationality and objectivity to reality as a whole. | |
| That is a beautiful thing. | |
| It's a beautiful thing that we live in a sane universe, because it gives us the opportunity. | |
| To not be mad, to actually be sane. | |
| So you build your knowledge base up with reference to reason and evidence. | |
| This is a sort of scientific method rather than saying, is the world run by sort of ghosts and goblins and demons and spirits and so on? |
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