May 17, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:34
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| On page 117, you say, the first thing that you need to do in order to begin the process of destroying a child's mind is you set up categories, empty categories, which are moral absolutes. | |
| Can you explain what you mean by this? | |
| Do I say what those empty categories are? | |
| I'm sorry to ask you to sort of flail around in the book for a moment. | |
| Empty categories that are moral absolutes. | |
| I think I know what it is, but go ahead. | |
| I know it's not exactly in the kindergarten book, but trust me. | |
| Well, don't trust me. | |
| Let me reason it out and see if you believe me. | |
| This is how it works. | |
| You, with great reverence, as a corrupting teacher or parent or person with authority, you get, with great reverence, you vividly describe and are enormously passionate about things which the child cannot see. | |
| You go on to say, you speak with enormous reverence and passion about things which the child cannot see, and the child, of course, is baffled. | |
| You familiar with this section? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, I understand that. | |
| I understand that. | |
| So, we are supposed to love virtue, and virtue is supposed to be empirical, right? | |
| I mean, if somebody says, I'm a good person, well, compared to what? | |
| And what's the evidence, right? | |
| Because anybody can say, Anything, right? | |
| It's that old New Yorker cartoon from many years ago where dogs typing says, you know, the great thing about the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. | |
| So, I mean, there's sort of a catfishing thing and, you know, those big drum rolls when the woman steps back with a slender face to the camera to reveal this bulbous Jabba the Hutt sort of frame. | |
| Boom! | |
| So, we must love virtue, and virtue must be empirical. | |
| Now, if you're going to create categories of things that you're supposed to love that don't exist in the real world, then you are taking people's passionate attachments and putting them to manipulatable objects. | |
| So, one example would be, love your country, right? | |
| Love your country, okay? | |
| Well, the country is a concept. | |
| The country does not exist in reality. | |
| And I know people have a tough time because they'll say, well, look, there are borders, there are walls, there's different colors on the map. | |
| I get all of that, but it still doesn't exist. | |
| There was a sort of very bad plane landed a couple of years ago in Canada, and people just wandered off the plane and into Canada. | |
| You know, they didn't have to, I mean, obviously they would be rounded up and they'd end up going through customs, but they just walked off the tarmac into Canada or the 7 million. | |
| People under Biden who came sort of pouring into the country as if there was no border, right? | |
| So they said, well, so people can just walk across the line on the map, and it's not a Grand Canyon. | |
| It's not a fiery pit. | |
| It's not, you know, a 500-foot-tall wall. | |
| It's just a line on a map, and you can just walk across it. | |
| This is not to say that, you know, countries don't exist conceptually. | |
| They certainly do, and the laws certainly change, or at least they used to from one country to another. | |
| So when you take If children's desire for love and attachment and you then jam it into a concept, then you are taking away the empiricism and value of loving virtue. | |
| So if you say, well, I should love my country. | |
| Okay. | |
| Let's say, love America. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, what is it that you love? | |
| Do you love the geography? | |
| That's kind of odd, isn't it? | |
| I mean, there's nice geography in America, but there's also not so nice geography in America. | |
| Do you love the leaders? | |
| That's really dicey. | |
| And historically, that doesn't end too well when people get over-attached to the value and imaginary virtues of the leaders. | |
| Do you love the values your country represents? | |
| Okay, but then why not just love those values? | |
| So if you say, well, America has a First Amendment, so we love freedom of speech. | |
| Freedom of speech is a core value for me and one of the greatest values in the known universe because without freedom of speech, people can't really think. | |
| And the denial of thinking is the denial of humanity. | |
| And the only people who want to deny your capacity to think are people who want you to not be critical of their lies. | |
| So you say, okay, so wouldn't you just love freedom of speech? | |
| Rather than, because there are lots of people in America who really dislike freedom of speech and want it gone. | |
| So, rather than having a proxy, just love the virtues and values themselves. | |
| And the same thing can happen with gods. | |
| The same thing can happen with races. | |
| The same thing can happen with classes. | |
| The same thing can, where you are just taking children's Affection and attachment, and rather than connecting them to the actual practical virtues manifested by an individual, you're plugging them into empty concepts that almost always turn out to be serving the needs of those in power. | |
| Right? | |
| So, we saw this happen under COVID. | |
| Well, you're supposed to love science. | |
| Trust the science. | |
| And it's like, but science is specifically founded on a lack of trust. | |
| It is, I mean, this is, All scientific thinking is founded upon skepticism of experts, right? | |
| And this is, I think, that was an old quote by a scientist. | |
| And so science is not to be trusted. | |
| Otherwise, there wouldn't be a peer review process, however crappy it is often. | |
| You wouldn't need to be able to reproduce the experiments. | |
| You wouldn't share your data so that other people could re-evaluate and re-interpret and make sure you came to the right conclusions. | |
| So, trust the science is one of the greatest oxymorons in human history, because you're taking, like, who should we trust? | |
| We should trust people who have exhibited the empirical characteristics of trustworthiness, right? | |
| They've acted in a consistent, self-critical manner. | |
| They release their sources. | |
| They accept criticisms. | |
| They entertain alternate hypotheses. | |
| They can steelman the opposing arguments and all of that, right? | |
| Trust the science. | |
| Well, the science is an empty concept. | |
| There are some scientists who are trustworthy. | |
| Very few these days, in my opinion, because science has just become another government program. | |
| So, you don't trust the science. | |
| That's an empty concept. |
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