All Episodes
Previous Next
June 5, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:18:36
Jordan Peterson Debate Analysis Part 2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right.
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux, from inside your brain, your conscience, as we rummage around, trying to make us all better people.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Thank you, C. Marsh.
I appreciate your tip.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
It's the best way to do it.
All right.
Hey, Steph, I was wondering if you had any suggestions for books slash stories from my six-year-old daughter.
She loves The Emperor Has No Clothes that you suggested in a previous show.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Well, I would just take some fairy tales, the Grimm's fairy tales, read through them.
Don't sanitize them too much.
She's six, not four.
And just say, well, what could this mean, right?
What could this mean?
Why would all of the mothers be stepmothers?
In Grimm's fairy tales, why would they be stepmothers?
And what does that mean, right?
So there's two answers really to that.
Number one is that a lot of kids can't process that their moms are really mean, so they imagine that the good-loving mom was taken out, yoinked out, and replaced with the evil stepmother.
That's number one.
And number two is that stepmothers are kind of dangerous, right?
So non-biologically related.
Adults in a household with children are generally assholes.
They're generally predatory for reasons of obvious evolutionary and familial fitness reasons.
So it's not good.
It's not good.
All right.
Hey, Steph, Elon Musk and Donald Trump need you to make one more political analysis podcast to help wrestle government spending.
Yes, I just did a little two-second video today.
Everyone's like, Steph, you've got to be on politics, man.
So politics was great 10 years ago, 15 years ago, even 8 years ago.
There was hope.
There was hope that people would be able to have the tough conversations with those around.
It's not about podcasting.
It was never about, of course, whether I could change things or other people in an individual sense could change things.
It was about...
Because it doesn't come down to a podcast.
It comes down to each individual person putting their values and beliefs on the line.
Now, as it turns out, people didn't really want to do that.
Because to have integrity, apparently, is to be in a cult!
Right?
To be in a cult.
And people misunderstood the against me argument and all the other things that I put forward over the course of my show.
And basically, if you don't, and not you in particular, but if people don't have integrity with regards to their moral beliefs, the only thing that's left is political escalation, to put it as nicely as humanly possible.
That's all that's left.
You either have integrity, you're willing to put your relationships on the line for the cause of the non-aggression principle.
In other words, don't have people in your life who want you thrown in jail and tortured and raped for disagreeing with them, which is what politics is all about, is that if you don't do what I want, you go to jail.
So don't have people in your life who want you confined, abused, and possibly raped, incarcerated, because you disagree with them politically.
right?
No, libertarians, you can disagree with libertarians politically, as long as it's like, This DRO or that DRO should handle things that's, you know, voluntary as anarchists.
But statists are bloodthirsty.
Statists are bloodthirsty, and statists go to the gun.
Go to the gun.
Got a problem?
Go to the gun.
That's all they do.
That's all they do.
So I put out the call for integrity, and everyone says, it's a cult!
He just wants you to disassociate from people who just happen to disagree with you.
Oh, my God.
What can you say?
You know, in totalitarian takeovers, it's all the people in glasses who get killed.
I talked about that in my documentary on Poland, which you should definitely look at.
So I put forward the call that people should have genuine integrity with regards to their political beliefs.
And most people did not want to do that.
And what that meant to me was, it's mostly all talk, right?
It's mostly all talk.
And also that they felt it was too late in the game to give up friends and family because they might need them in the post-apocalyptic warlord scenario that could be coming down the pipe, right?
Okay, so if people say, well, I don't want to give up friends and family for the sake of my morals because I'm going to need them in the post-apocalyptic zombie apocalypse, okay.
Then don't complain if I'm off politics because people don't believe in it anyway.
So I just wanted to mention that.
I thought you said love.
I should love.
Ex-porn star Nala Ray apparently is speaking at TPUSA.
Turning Point USA.
Because it's a big tent.
No, it's okay.
She's reformed.
She only licks her ladle when making pancakes these days.
Oh, my God.
So, porn stars are welcome.
Ex-porn stars, I suppose, are welcome.
I haven't quite received my invite yet.
But perhaps if I become an ex-born star, I'll be welcome.
Oh.
Show your vajayjay so that orbiting satellites can view it like the Grand Canyon.
No problem.
Talk about IQ.
Well, that's beyond fail.
Sorry, I went on a brutal hike today with my daughter.
Up and down the Bruce, up and down the Assyrian Empire.
So I'm afraid my lungs have collapsed.
Turning Point USA.
Ah, dear, dear.
That's pretty wild, man.
That's pretty wild.
And, uh, you might want to follow Milo on Glenn Greenwald.
he really is something.
And it's probably worthwhile Seems to be true.
I don't know.
But it's definitely worth following to see who's welcome.
Who's welcome in the small government movement?
*laughter*
Oh, it's so liberating, man.
Oh, I love them.
I love them for all the freedom that they provide to people like me.
Are you going back to Twitter?
No, it doesn't exist anymore.
Oh, my gosh.
Hi, Steph.
There is a lot of talk about women not having children today, and a gloomy forecast for those women when they reach advanced stages of their lives to include vulnerability and financial devastation.
Oh, you mean lives.
Please!
Spell check.
Don't make me puzzle it out.
It's not an escape room, bro.
They reach advanced stages of their lives to include vulnerability and financial devastation, but women have children with men.
Doesn't this mean that men are also not having children, and what will be the fallout for men as well?
Men can survive childlessness a lot better than women.
Because men generally build in the world, and so we don't need to build people quite as much.
And so, this is the most, I'm not saying for you, I'm just, in general, the most absolutely mind-numbingly boring thing is when you say something about women, and you say, well, what about men?
uh, You have a tumor on your left kidney.
Yeah, well, what about my right kidney?
It's like, well, we're kind of talking about your left kidney.
What about my right kidney?
What's the story with my right kidney?
Let's focus on my right kidney.
It's like, well, right?
So, feminism plus statism is just way too much power.
Women have an enormous amount of power.
They're the gatekeepers of sex.
They're the gatekeepers of marriage.
They're the gatekeepers of children.
And in sort of the traditional sense, given that, you know, sexual desire led to marriage and children, And they get all these resources from men.
Men are constitutionally and biologically programmed to throw resources at women like buckets of water on an everlasting fire.
And so women have an enormous amount of power just in the determination of who gets to reproduce, who gets to date, who gets to marry.
And you throw that in with the state power.
The state then bends to the will of the women.
The women wish to escape consequences, which means the consequences all land like a ton of bricks on the gonads of the men.
Go on strike.
The other strike is men going on strike, and men are going on strike in relationships, and men are going on strike, at least white men, in marriage.
I mean, I've said for 20 years, right, the statism leads to collapse, and people have decided I'm wrong.
All right.
How can I approach a girl and feel I have value and or actually have value?
My approaches lately are basically begging for her to like me when I believe I have nothing to offer, at least nothing that she would appreciate.
It seems to me that all Gen Z girls care about is Instagram likes.
I can be clever and flirty, but I come across as low value, including due to my fundamental beliefs.
I believe I cannot compete with the sexual market value of a 20-something girl.
Any suggestions?
Well, stop being a fraud.
Stop approaching people that...
That you don't believe you're worthy of.
I mean, you don't see me applying for jobs as a neurosurgeon because I'm not worthy of it, right?
You don't see me saying, well, you know, everybody has to donate $1,000.
What, Ross Ulbricht, did he just get 30 plus million dollars in Bitcoin?
Freedomain.com slash donate.
But, yeah, stop being a fraud.
If you feel that the girl is too good for you, don't approach her.
Because that's fraudulent, right?
Because you're asking her to think better of you than you do of yourself.
Nobody is going to praise you when you are down on yourself except somebody who wants to rip you off, con you, or exploit you.
So if you approach a woman and you're down on yourself, she doesn't know you from Adam.
She doesn't know who you are.
She doesn't know what your value or your worth is.
So if you believe...
And that's what you prefer.
You prefer women to reject you, which is why you approach them like, well, I guess you don't really want to go out on a date with someone like me, huh?
Huh, women, they're so cold, they just reject me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've approached probably 100-plus girls this year in very high-risk settings.
It's probably what I'm most proud of.
I couldn't even bring myself to say hi to a girl last year, says someone.
That may be a little bit undifferentiated, right?
Like, if you don't have a reason to choose a woman, she's just going to be insulted.
Hey, you with the boobs and the pulse.
But I get together and make a family, right?
A woman likes to feel that you've chosen her.
So just talking to everyone, maybe a little bit, maybe a smidge undifferentiated.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to find.
Oh, sorry.
Okay, so I've got the Jordan Peterson thing queued up because there's some very interesting arguments there.
If you have questions, issues, comments, I'm totally happy to hear those.
Or I can do the Jordan Peterson stuff.
I did it more for exposure therapy.
All right.
All right.
But don't you actually want to get a date at some point rather than just do exposure therapy?
I could be wrong, but I think the purpose is to get a date, to get married, whatever, right?
So just something to think about.
Yeah, I have a tough time explaining why people pursue negative interactions.
Oh, you got dates too?
Okay, do you have a girlfriend?
The whole point is to get married and have kids, right?
So you get dates, but are you upgrading, right?
My son gets mad at me if I bring up a possible girlfriend.
LOL?
I don't think that's funny.
No girlfriend, yeah?
Okay.
Well, then you've got to read people better and differentiate people better.
So nobody wants to be in a giant collective called females as a whole who I ask out.
It's got to be a bit more individual.
At least a woman of quality is not going to want you just going down the line.
Hey, want to go out?
So, yeah, it's a tough thing to explain to people why they, like, let's say you grew up with a really, I don't know, A nagging mother, and then you end up with a nagging girlfriend.
You say, well, how do you explain that?
Why?
I mean, it's negative.
I didn't like my mother nagging me.
Why do I end up with a naggy girlfriend or wife?
Why do I end up with a wife who nags, right?
Or you grew up with an emotionally distant father, and you end up with a husband who's emotionally distant.
You say, well, why?
Why would I do this?
I don't like it.
I said, yeah, but you prefer it.
And the analogy that I would use is, let's say you move to some foreign country, far away from your native.
Land.
And let's say your native land is, I don't know, America, whatever, right?
And you move to some Panama or something like that.
And then you end up, you're going to gravitate towards an expat community, right?
You're going to gravitate towards Americans who speak English.
Americans who speak English.
And you're going to hang around them because it's a language you're familiar with.
And it's the same thing with dysfunction.
You move someplace, you end up just hanging out with the people whose language you're familiar with, which is called dysfunction.
If you come out of the pickup artist tradition, you feel obligated to approach every okay-looking woman and kick yourself when you don't, even if all the interactions are unpleasant.
I don't believe you.
I don't.
Like, I don't believe you.
I mean, the pickup artist tradition has got a wide variety.
And is the pickup artist tradition, is it designed to get you laid, or is it designed to get you a wife?
If it's designed to get you laid, then it's just animalistic lust, right?
So it's kind of pathetic, right?
Oh, I'm lighter in an ounce and a half of semen.
Enlightenment!
Raise that.
All right.
So, the questions are not flying fast and furious, which is totally fine, of course.
So, I'm going to throw in the Jordan Peterson stuff.
I will keep half an eye out on the questions, of course.
All right.
Okay, morality and purpose cannot be found within science.
I see your question, Jay.
So, we'll get to that.
Morality and purpose cannot be found within science.
Fine young man in the blue shirt.
What is up, Mr. Canada?
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing great.
What's your name?
Brian, I think it's interesting that you say that.
All right.
that morality and purpose can't be found in ties.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
Purpose, I actually grant you, because purpose is subjective.
Right?
Unless you want to boil it down to the purpose of life is just to procreate, right?
Okay, so he's not going to say that the purpose of life is that.
I'm going to speed this up just a smidge, but the purpose of life, yes, it's not just to Okay.
Sure, whatever.
Morality is actually something that we do see.
We actually have examples of Neanderthals and older individuals found in the tribe.
Okay, so Jordan Peterson says you can't get morality out of science.
And this guy says, well, It is like, that actually serves Jordan Peterson's point completely perfectly.
So I'm not really sure.
It's just a listening thing.
If he says morality can't come out of science, and then you talk about a vastly pre-scientific system of morality or situation of morality, then...
That's just saying stuff.
So most people have a bunch of talking points, and we had this in.
I did a telegram chat earlier today.
Most people have a bunch of talking points, and they just try and jam those talking points into whatever it is that you're saying.
And this guy has a talking point, like, hey, man, Neanderthals have morality.
And it's like, but that's not relevant to Jordan Peterson's point.
So it's just coming up and saying stuff that you've memorized as if you're actually contributing to the conversation.
missing an arm, missing teeth, still alive, somehow in his 40s, 50s, right?
Typically, you're a Neanderthal.
You can't eat, you can't hunt, you die, right?
But we know the members of his hyperteam care of him.
Okay, so this is to say that morality is taking care of others.
Absolutely false.
Absolutely false.
I mean, there are plenty of species in nature that take care of others.
I think of the amount of effort that birds have to do to It's crazy, right?
So the idea that, well, you know, some animals take care of each other and therefore that's morality is to say that all genetic energy-focused preferences are the same as morality.
Come on!
I mean, The father lion play fights with his baby lions, right?
With the lion cubs.
To teach them how to hunt.
Is that morality?
He's doing beneficial things, expending energy in order to benefit his cubs, right?
So, yes, that is not morality, right?
So, the idea that there were nice people in the past.
Let's just theorize for a second here.
Why would Neanderthals, why would they want to take care of those who are older and somewhat disabled?
Well, a couple of reasons.
Number one, they're available to take care of the offspring, as grandparents do.
Female fertility tends to fade out when there's going to be more benefit to the offspring from the woman.
Investing in her grandchildren rather than trying to give birth to more live kids.
So investment in the offspring.
They may have a whole bunch of wisdom that is of value to teach the next generation.
So somebody's got to teach the next generation the tribal habits of here's the food we gather, here's how we store it, here's how we process it, here's how we cook, here's how we hunt.
Someone's got to transfer this knowledge.
And for older people to transfer the knowledge who aren't hunting but who had experience hunting is a very useful thing.
Also, you will encourage people to have more children if those children will take care of the elderly, which helps the tribe grow.
So there's very practical, evolutionary, biological, genetic reasons as to why you'd want to take care of those who are wounded or disabled.
Nothing wrong with it.
It's great.
And of course, if they're wounded and disabled, they don't have as many.
Calorie requirements, because they're not out there hunting and doing all of this physical labor.
So, they're telling the stories, right?
Telling the tribal stories so that there's cohesion within the tribe if there's an attack.
All of these things.
So, the idea that this is somehow abstract morality and virtue and so on.
Nope, it's just evolutionary and genetic efficiency.
So, we know that at some level, early in our evolutionary history, we actually developed altruism.
Altruism is doing things for others at no benefit or negative or at loss to yourself.
Altruism is helping others at no benefit or at a loss to yourself.
Now, why is that morality?
It can't be universalized.
The concept of sacrifice cannot be universalized.
If I say, well, it's moral for me to give you $100.
It's moral for me to give you $100, and I don't even like you or your cause, right?
So I'm sacrificing myself and my money to give you $100.
Well, it's asymmetrical, right?
Because if it's moral to give $100 to add a negative for you and we dislike each other, then I should give you $100, you should give me the $100, I give you the $100, you give me the $100, and it can't be universalized.
It's asymmetrical.
Asymmetrical morals are always a prequel or a manifestation of exploitation.
Right?
There's just people telling you, well, you have to give stuff to me even if you don't like me, because that's virtue.
It's just a way of getting things for free.
So, yeah, it's not virtue.
We have examples of chimpanzees who actually have a basic understanding of fairness, right?
If you give a chimpanzee two grapes, right, and his buddy gets three, right?
He actually freaks out, right?
But you give both chimps three grapes, and they're good.
We have examples of parrots.
Except for the greedy chimps.
Right.
So, I don't know, how is that morality?
That if you do things that are unequal, chimpanzees get angry.
And again, Jordan Peterson is saying you cannot get an ought from an is.
You cannot get morality out of science.
And then for Brian here to say, ah, yes, but chimpanzees, and he was going to come up with something to do with parrots, and these aren't morals.
These are just instincts that are beneficial to the tribe.
Sharing equally produces less conflict.
the chimps don't tear each other apart for inequality, right?
I mean, if you've ever Ugh.
They want four graves.
They want four graves.
You know, those do exist, right?
But we have similar examples where we do animal tests, right?
And so the greedy chimps, right?
So this is Jordan Peterson's point, is that, yes, you can say that there are these tendencies, but there are also the, quote, sociopathic Neanderthals or greedy chimps or whatever, the people who just want more and more and more, which means it's not a universal instinct.
So morality is intrinsic.
So it precedes science?
So he's saying morality is intrinsic, which means it can't be morals.
It's just an That's like saying, you know what, man, chimps can catch a ball you throw, therefore chimps are physicists.
It's like, no, you've got to understand the abstractions, not just manifest the behaviors.
Actually, a better way to define it would be that social animals, which we are, require some level of morality.
Into what?
I'm not disagreeing.
Why do we require some level of morality?
And why is that morality just about, quote, taking care of or giving resources to others?
Why?
Why do we need that?
Human societies, all human societies, past, present, and hopefully not in the distant future, all societies run on asymmetrical false morality and predatory coercive exploitation.
All!
All of them!
No exceptions!
No exceptions.
So, is it moral?
To carve off a certain group of individuals and say, well, you guys can initiate the use of force at will, but everyone else has to be peaceful.
That is how societies work.
Well, you see, we need a certain level of ethics in society because we're social animals.
It's like, okay, then why the living fuck are American children, to take one example out of many, why are American children born over a million dollars in debt?
Because we need a whole system of morality.
Why is it that the government can just declare a war, take your money, use it to provoke people overseas, and then you have to deal with the blowback and you have to be drafted to deal with the war?
How is that moral?
You know, you work for 50 years, and then the government prints 40% of the money over the last couple of years and inflates away 20 of your 50 years.
They've just enslaved you for 50 years.
They've just put you in a fluorescent fucking cubicle jail with Janet from HR breathing down your neck for all your social media posts from when you were a teenager.
They just put you in fluorescent jail for 20 fucking years.
But we need this morality to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway.
Because it's the only way that social groups can actually survive, right?
That's my point with regards to science.
Thank you very much.
It's the only way, so apparently, so societies need morality because it's the only way for social groups to survive.
Okay, Genghis Khan was one of the most successful genetically, right?
Power, political power genetically, was one of the most successful human beings to have ever lived.
Where were his morals?
His genes have survived and flourished.
He's still on the Mongolian currency, for God's sakes.
There's statues all over the place.
Of Genghis Khan.
So this is all just like a fat, hyper-feminine, nice, absolutely zero understanding of history.
Absolutely.
I mean, the Aztecs in South America, Central America, the Aztecs were unbelievably brutal.
They tortured children for their cry and he's happy God.
Cannibals, right?
The Maori.
In New Zealand, cannibals and rapists, right?
What are they talking about?
Morals are needed for human survival.
It's like, genetically, human survival is driven historically, not morally, but historically is driven on violence and rape.
In a state of nature, right?
So, yeah, it's all just very abstract and has no actual practical understanding of history.
Very much.
Precisely the point that you just made, that science has to exist within a moral framework that isn't in itself scientific.
How is it not scientific?
Well, because it's not derived from the scientific process, as you just indicated.
It's not derived from the scientific process.
This is the fact that we are social animals and we need that to exist as a group, right?
Okay, so Jordan Peterson's point is flawless.
You know, I've got my criticism of him when it comes to religion and atheism, but his point here is flawless.
And the fact that Brian, the man they call Brian, that he doesn't get it is kind of incomprehensible to me.
You know, morality is supposed to include free speech.
And how is free speech doing these days?
Well, it's being utterly fucking decimated.
I mean, the British police are arresting a thousand people a month for social media posts.
Holy crap.
Absolutely mad.
We are social animals and we need that to exist as a group.
So the fact that you need something to exist as a group doesn't mean that there's such a thing as morality.
Needing for something to exist as a group.
And how is that morality if it's local?
So you've got group A, you've got group B. They believe different things.
Group A believes they're superior to Group B. Group B believes that they're superior to Group A. Yeah, Islam, I mean, go look at how Islam spread, right?
I mean, the idea that it's all just morals and virtue and being nice to people and binding up people's broken arms and bringing them food although they've lost an eye.
I mean, I don't even, like, how can you be this completely blind to everything that's going on in history and around you?
Like, that's just amazing to me.
But this is privilege, right?
People who grew up in the suburbs who just, oh, everything's so peaceful and nice and lovely.
And it's like, what we have and what we're losing is utterly out of the norm.
It is way off the bell curve of human history.
The relative peace, the high-trust society, the relative peace that I grew up with in society.
Absolutely outside the norm.
And then people are like, well, but we need to be nice to each other and we need altruism.
It's like, bro, understand the incredible outlier that you happen to be living in.
The unbelievable outlier that you happen to be living in is not human history at all.
You pointed to the morality of Neanderthals, to the morality of chimpanzees.
They didn't derive that from science.
They don't need to.
That's not how that works.
That's my point.
They don't need to.
That's not how that works.
That's exactly what...
And he said, well, you don't need to.
That's how it works.
And so these people are in complete agreement and pretending to disagree.
Science explains it.
Knowledge science doesn't explain morality.
It doesn't explain how social animals would need to be But we see it, though.
Yeah, but explaining the evolution of morality and explaining morality itself aren't the same thing.
Oh, because you're asking why does this happen?
Yes, that's more accurate.
Because we're social animals.
Yeah, but there's more to it than that.
Is it?
Sure, sure, for example.
So we're moral animals that have a sense of the future?
Sure.
Okay, that makes us unique.
Okay, so a sense of the future.
So this is very common among atheists, is to blend and to smudge and to merge what human beings do with what animals do, right?
Which is what this guy did.
Human beings, Neanderthals, which are not specifically Homo sapiens, and chimpanzees.
So he's saying, well, we're kind of like animals plus a little.
We're animals, you know, we're on the same continuum as animals, and we're not.
We're absolutely not in any way close to animals.
Animals can't do one billionth of one percent of what human beings can do.
So we're not just animals plus.
We're not just beasts of the field and forest, but...
with a little bit of shine.
We're not just a car with a new coat of paint, and we're not just a cake with a little extra icing, right?
So this idea that morality grows out of in-group genetic preference is to say that human beings are specifically tribal, and they Again, if you look at the indigenous population of North America, they were doing the most appalling stuff, scalping each other, raping each other, enslaving each other.
The Cherokee were almost genocided at one point.
So, yeah, he's saying that that's what?
That's the good?
I don't know.
It's strange.
No, actually, there are other animals that can predict the future.
So he's saying that human beings have the capacity to predict the future, right?
So they can say, well, I want to send a spaceship past Saturn.
So I've got to predict the position and the right payload and the angle and the speed and the propulsion and the acceleration, right?
And he's saying, well, but birds build nests before they have eggs.
Like, it's not the same.
It's not the same at all.
No, tigers.
Actually, there was a tiger at the SF Zoo that killed somebody.
Hunting animals?
No, no, no, no.
Kids threw shit at the tiger.
The tiger actually plotted its escape, and it found the kids.
I'm not saying that animals can't think.
Yeah, my brother and I, we poured some sand or dust down a wasp's nest, and it was like two hours later, I got stung by a wasp.
Which had never happened before.
So clearly they saw me and they chased me down and I got stung.
And I remember rolling around.
I was about six or so.
I remember rolling around in my flat, you know, like holding my arm because it was so painful.
I'd never been stung by a wasp before.
And it was like right after we poured some sand down the wasp's nest that they came and found me and sung me.
So that's exactly the same as putting a...
Voted out by the majority.
Thank you, man.
Good man.
Science can prove that reciprocal altruism can benefit a gene pool.
That doesn't prove morality because reciprocal altruism occurs in a wide variety of creatures.
Hey, Frank Peterson.
How are you doing?
My name's Luke.
Nice to meet you.
Good to see you, Luke.
So your claim that morality and purpose can only be found in science is a little shaky because I think that your claim— So is he missing things completely?
But then this is somebody, again, they're just setting up their talking points, right?
So your claim that morality and purpose can only be found in science I mean, it's right there on the title, not that this guy can see it, but Mr. Manbun.
All right.
It's a little shaky because I think that your claim is really being framed to be morality and purpose can only be found in religion.
Is that how you're kind of framing it?
I would say that the domain of religion is the domain of morality and purpose, yes.
Exactly.
And also that science is actually structured, at least in part, technically, to eliminate such considerations from its purview a priori.
That's why we define science as value-free.
But that has to be wrong because scientists have to prioritize their attention.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Directed about apologetics about the Bible, specifically in this type of facet with morality, evolution and such, and going back and forth with that.
So, in the Bible, it talks a lot about slavery, right?
Yes.
Yes.
So, in that, it teaches you how to take care of a slave.
Rather than saying slavery's wrong, I think it should say that.
No, it says that in the story of Moses.
It says slavery is incorrect.
Well, that's why Moses leads his people away from slavery.
No, it doesn't say that slavery is incorrect.
It says that the enslavement of Moses and his people is incorrect and they should be free, but not on an abstract level.
That human beings should not be subject to the coercive control of rulers, because then the Bible would be an anarchic document.
But why does the Bible predicate and tell people exactly how to take care of a slave?
Isn't that immoral?
Wouldn't you say that culturally we've evolved as a species, as he said earlier about empathy?
Yeah, I would say that the reason we evolved, so to speak, away from slavery was because the West was founded on Judeo-Christian morality and the presumption that every person was made in the image of God.
And so slavery itself became immoral, and that was established by Protestants.
Well, no.
I think that slavery – well, sorry, let's – it's not – because Christianity had been around for, you know, 15, 16, 17, 1800 years, depending on sort of how you count the sort of slavery thing.
Christianity had been around for a long time, and it was – slavery was the end result of other things, in particular improvements in parenting.
But – The idea that Christianity alone is responsible for the end of slavery is saying, well, why was there a 1700- or 1800-year lag?
Which is not inconsiderable when you're saying, this causes this.
It's like, yeah, but 1800 years later, it's got to be something else.
In other words, the further that people got away from Jesus, the more they valued the teachings of the Bible.
That doesn't really make sense.
Convinced the UK government for 200 years to go to war on slavery.
And what do you say that this is about the cultural evolution of humans in general rather than just Christianity?
No, I think it's the flowering of the ideas that were embedded in the biblical texts across long spans of time.
I feel like this is just humans editing based on the cultural evolution.
Well, but it is certainly true that the Bible tells people how to take care of their slaves.
And taking care of them is not saying, free them, right?
How just.
Just?
Yeah, just humans.
Well, humans.
Well, based on culture and history, right?
We get better.
They did do it based on culture and history, but culture and history have their foundations too.
Well, yeah, but we're talking about slavery.
So many people bolstered it based on the Bible.
Based on the Bible.
They looked at it and they justified it in the United States in the Deep South.
They justified slavery based on the Bible.
Yeah, but the main thrust of Protestant thought in particular was stringently against slavery and it was about the only movement in the history of the human race that had an anti-slavery direction.
Which was driven by humans and their understanding of morality.
Well, it depends.
It's the same with women's suffrage.
Humans drove slavery, too.
Yes, exactly.
So there's no argument there.
If slavery and anti-slavery were both driven by humans, what does your claim that they were driven by humans have to do with it?
Evolving morality based on the culture within the society that they live in.
Okay, fine.
So with women's suffrage as well, it's a very similar topic in the Bible.
There are denominations in Christianity, such as Pentecostal movement, which do bolster women to be pastors, right?
Which I think that's a great thing to do.
But most like to disregard women.
Where do you think the idea that human beings were sufficiently equal to all vote and not be slaves came from?
Humans.
Yeah, but so did the idea of slavery.
So did the idea of God.
Fine, but what's your point?
Like, you're not making an argument.
You're just saying all thoughts come from humans, regardless of the thoughts.
Now, that's actually a very good, again, Dr. Peterson, a very smart fellow and a good debater, no doubt.
So, that is very true.
And the question of where the end of slavery came from, Again, there's lots of different arguments.
One that I would make would be that the end of slavery came out of the Black Death, right?
So the Black Death wiped out a third, sometimes even a half of the general population.
And so the serfs, the slaves had a much better bargaining position and the lords and the landowners had to make pretty significant concessions in order to get people to work from them.
some of those concessions involve freedom.
So then what happened was when you...
So you had a shortage of workers, you give more concessions to workers, you start to erase serfdom, which was a prequel to the erasure of slavery.
And, I mean, slavery is worse than serfdom, but serfdom had to go first, because it was more tied to the Western era.
So what they did was you had the Black Death.
The Black Death restricted the number of workers.
Therefore, the landowners had to give many more concessions to the workers.
They had to give them more freedom, more ownership, more property rights, more liberties, and so on.
And then they very quickly found out that the more freedoms their workers had, the more productivity their land produced.
Now, that's a very powerful thing.
It's a very powerful thing.
So there then became a race between lords within a country and countries within the international framework to say, who can we liberate the most to become the most productive?
So, for instance, if you've got Lord John and Lord Ralph, right?
Lord John and Lord Ralph.
Now, Lord John gives his workers a whole bunch of freedoms, and then they produce 50% more as a result of that, right?
And maybe he taxes half of that or whatever.
But they're still producing 25% more.
So because Lord John, I think it was Lord John, sorry.
Because the Lord who gives his serfs more freedom ends up with more wealth so he can buy out the other guys.
And this is how that kind of freedom spreads.
So then the other guy is like, holy crap.
Also, he might lose workers to go over to the freer.
Demons, the freer lands, right?
And so he's then got to offer more concessions, more freedoms, and then it becomes an upward spiral.
And then what happens is you end up with so much land productivity, and I wrote about this in my novel, Just Poor.
You should get it at justpoornovel.com.
But I wrote about all of this, about you had 10, 15, sometimes even 20 times The crop productivity with winter crops, with turnips, with, you know, there's a whole turnip townsend, like there was whole books written and all of this kind of stuff about how to increase agricultural yields, but all of that had to do with property rights and trading rights and market rights and freedom.
So when you start to get a significant excess of crops being produced, you end up with an urban proletariat, right?
There's not, you don't need that many workers on the land.
And so you kick people off the land.
This is called the enclosure movement.
And then they end up in the city, and they're a great pool of labor for the beginning and the foundations of the Industrial Revolution.
You can't have an Industrial Revolution unless you have excess food productivity in the countryside, because there's just not enough for the city dwellers to live on, right?
Cities all survive on excess crops from the country.
There was a war between those who gave their workers more freedom, whether it was urban or rural.
There was a war between those who gave their workers more freedom and those who gave their workers less freedom or kept their freedom limited.
And this was not just within particular countries where the most liberal lords ended up with the greatest productivity, the greatest wealth.
They could buy out the other people.
They could bribe the king more.
They could move up in the hierarchy because they were wealthier.
And then this also occurred between countries, so that the more productive countries, and in particular I'm thinking of England and, let's say, the Netherlands, right?
It was very productive.
And the Netherlands was actually the birth of the stock market, which is the defining characteristic of a free market.
And so the countries that liberated their serfs and their workers, such as England, ended up with immense amounts of power.
Not just in terms of economic productivity, but once you give people their liberties, they become incredibly creative and productive, right?
So you had the invention of all sorts of, you know, ships and weaponry, navigation systems, transportation systems, the train, and I think it was 1825 that the train first was really the steam engine, because there's intellectual property rights, there is the ability to buy and sell, there's a stock market, so you can get the investment.
Economically liberated countries win the race of colonialism.
So, of course, we just want to keep that going until people are free from all political violations of persons of property.
So that is a start, right?
Is that a perfect explanation?
It really depends on whether you say, well, it was the Black Death or whatever it was, right?
And it could be any number of things, but the Black Death was certainly a pivotal and seminal event in European history to the point where, when we know from the very facts of the matter that massive concessions were wrung from the Lords by the workers on there.
On their fields, on their lands, and as a result of that, productivity went through the roof and people got kicked off their land and went to the cities.
That for sure we know.
There's all the dominoes, right?
So it's not that the Black Death cost it because the Black Death hit other people, but the Black Death plus offering more liberty to the serfs and the workers and so on.
And so it's not just, well, Christianity just happened to win this.
And, I mean, another argument would be that why did it come out of the Protestant countries?
Well, the Protestant countries, by allowing the most educated to have children, right?
So, remember, in Catholic countries, a lot of the most educated and the highest IQ people are priests, and the priests can't have kids, at least not officially.
I mean, I know there was a lot of stuff on the wayside.
So, the countries that became more Protestant had higher IQ people have children, IQ is 80% genetic by late teens and I think goes up even further after that.
You have more and more intelligent people over generations.
And so that is another aspect of things as well.
In other words, freedom for priests to get married and have children, which occurred in Protestant countries and not in Catholic countries in general, that level of freedom was positive for the Intellects of the people over generations, right?
You've got smarter and smarter people.
So did it come specifically out of Christianity?
Because as Dr. Peterson says, it's the Protestants.
Well, why was it the Protestants?
Well, the greater the abstraction, usually the higher IQ that is required not to understand it, but to discover it, right?
So the greater the abstraction, the higher the IQ is required to discover it.
So look at physics, look at UPB to pat myself on the back a little bit.
And so, not to explain it, and not to understand it, but to discover it, to figure it out.
So, if we're going to say, well, it came out of the Protestant tradition, well, the Protestant tradition was not the, quote, Christian tradition, in many ways.
It was a rebellion against what was going on in the Church, or the Catholic Church at the time, which was the sale of indulgences was one of the big issues that Martin Luther had, which is that the Catholic priest was selling for gold.
Reduction of your time in limbo for the sins you committed on earth, right?
So you didn't go straight to heaven.
You went to limbo.
You might be there for 100,000 years, but if you give the priest 20 gold pieces, he'll knock 10,000 years off that.
And then they began to sell the indulgences, not just about past deeds, but about future deeds.
You say, oh, I'm going to go have a dirty weekend with my mistress.
Here's five gold pieces, and I'm already forgiven.
and I can go and have fun without a conscience and all that kind of stuff, right?
So it became the sale of imaginary release from Limbo and imaginary So one of the things that they were rebelling against was that level of corruption.
So if it comes out of the Protestant nations, it's because the Protestant nations allowed the smartest people to have the most kids.
It's the same thing in the Jewish community.
The rabbis tend to be the smartest, and statistically we've seen that they have the most kids, and that is a very, very big possibility.
and also the Protestant Reformation, you know, 15th century and so on.
a couple of hundred years later when you've had, you know, eight to nine generations of smart people getting smarter, well, they can grasp the abstractions of the universal value of human life, which was what was used as the underpinnings to the end of slavery.
So anyway, I just want to point out that, and again, I'm not saying you get all of that across in this kind of debate, but...
It's driven on our experiences.
Define higher.
Which is what is best for all people.
Is it driven by conscience?
It could be.
Which conscious is also something that has evolved over time, and I think that's something that does evolve within morality and empathy.
Okay, I don't understand the point that you're making.
My point is that God influenced slavery.
People looked at the Bible and went, this is moral, because God says it, just like women's suffrage, and just like homosexuality.
All human societies were slave-only.
So you can't blame that on the Bible.
If humanity...
This is the one test of the Bible, right?
If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, there should have been things in the Bible that were completely incomprehensible to the current society, to the society of the time.
If I say, hey man, I've got a pipeline to omniscience, then you can ask the Bilbo Baggins question.
You put your hands in your pocket and say, play some pocket pool.
And so you ask the Bilbo Baggins question, what has it got in its pockets?
So you put your hand in it.
If I say, hey, I got a pipeline to omniscience, then the way that you would test that, of course, is you would say, you would ask me something I couldn't know, right?
What have I got in my pocket?
Now, if I answered that, okay, and I kept answering, right, then you'd say, well, you couldn't possibly have that knowledge, therefore, it is established that you have a pipeline to the divine, right?
However, if I claim to have a pipeline to the divine, apparently this is my right arm, Because it's right, it's correct.
Pipeline to the divine.
But I never tell you anything or write anything down that I couldn't have known at the time.
Right?
I mean, if you're going to write the Bible with reference to the omniscience of God, then if someone in ancient Roman times had written down E equals MC squared, we'd be like, whoa.
Well, God knows E equals MC squared because God designed the whole architecture, right?
So God completely knows E equals MC squared.
So if someone in the Bible had written that down or the inverse square law or, I don't know, the price of Apple stock, June 27th, 1997, That would be like, well, they couldn't possibly have known that at the time.
There's no way they could have known that.
So clearly, there's a pipeline to the divine.
So if in general, slavery was accepted, but it was kind of understood that to be good, you had to treat your slaves reasonably well, then you would expect that in the Bible.
The fact that some people fled slavery is not a condemnation of slavery.
At all, right?
So it's like saying, well, some people escape unjust prisons, therefore all prisons are unjust.
It's like, no, no, people escaping a gulag is different.
That would be good, I suppose, if they're innocent victims of totalitarianism versus people who escape who are put justly in prison because they're serial axe murderers.
they go and escape and start chopping up the population Robert De Niro style, then that's bad, right?
So saying people escape a prison doesn't mean that all prisons are immoral, which they would be in an anarchic, Oh, wait, address that first.
All human societies were slavers, so you can't blame that on the Bible.
Well, you can say it bolstered it.
Well, not if you look at the broad sweep of history, because it was the...
Ah, the broad sweep of history.
Well, no, if the Bible bauls to slavery, that's If God is all-good and all-knowing and all-moral, then God should have condemned slavery because slavery is evil.
Not on the Bible.
Well, you can say it bolstered it.
Well, not if you look at the broad sweep of history because it was the Protestant Christians in the UK.
Based on their interpretation of the Bible.
It was the Protestant Christians in the UK.
Which involves over time.
Let's pause there.
Yes, and that's really rude to just not let Dr. Peterson make his case, right?
He's got to make his case.
And it's not the worst case in the world.
It just doesn't explain why it took more than a millennia and a half.
All right.
So the first thing I would like to say is I would like to engage in this discussion in a symbiotic manner.
I would not like to engage where there is one clear winner and one clear loser.
Emotions are activated and ultimately comes about ego.
So I'm just saying I'm really trying to understand your position and I would just like you to really try to understand my position.
Deal.
Okay, sounds good.
With that, if you're saying that morality and purpose cannot come from science, So, I mean, what bothers me, of course, is that science is a methodology for understanding and predicting the nature and behavior of matter and energy, right?
It's an objective, rational, empirical discipline for understanding the behavior of matter and energy.
So, when people say morality and purpose can't come from science, I get that.
I get that.
What I would like to have a discussion about is, can morality and purpose come from philosophy?
Right?
So science is a physical subset of philosophy as a whole.
It uses reason and evidence in the pursuit, again, of understanding and predictability of the behavior of matter and energy.
So saying morality doesn't come from science is a category error, because science is not there for the production of morality.
Philosophy is the all-discipline, science is a sub-discipline, and the central purpose of philosophy is not science, but morality, because that's the one aspect of philosophy that is not shared by anything else.
So, saying that morality, which is a discipline of philosophy and not of science, saying that morality doesn't come from science is like saying bread doesn't come from physics.
Physics is not supposed to produce bread.
Physics is supposed to be the analysis of the behavior and interactions of matter and energy.
So, it's a category error.
And it bothers me, of course, fundamentally, and this comes out of a lot of Richard Dawkins stuff, that people want to, atheists in particular, want to create a new deity called science.
And they say, well, morality comes from Evolution, which is scientific, and morality comes from biology, which is scientific, and therefore we can get morality from science.
It's like, what the hell is wrong with philosophy as a source of morality?
Right?
I mean, philosophy, as I've proven with UPB, philosophy can produce, it's the only thing that can produce rational and consistent ethics.
It's the only thing.
Philosophy is the only discipline that can produce rational and consistent ethics, not religion, not science, no other, not language analysis, not history.
No other discipline can produce universal morality other than philosophy.
Science cannot do it.
Because science is a description of what is, not what ought to be.
You can't get the is from the or.
That's a way of defining it, yes.
That's a way of defining it.
Ooh, come on, man.
Right, that's good.
So I would say that with regard to the first claim, say, atheists don't understand what they're rejecting.
Because I would say, by definition, God is the unity upon which moral claims are based.
God is the unity upon which moral claims are based.
Because I'm all about the base, about the base, no worries.
What does that even mean?
God is the unity upon which moral claims are based.
No, God commands morality.
So the answer to morality from religion is we know what's good because God is all good and God commands this.
It's an argument from authority and it's fundamentally buttressed by punishment and reward by hell and heaven, respectively.
It's an argument from authority.
God is incomprehensible, all good.
You have to do what he says.
And if you do what he says, you go to heaven.
If you don't do what he says, you go to hell.
So it's an argument of authority and an argument from brutal consequence.
That's not an argument.
That's an appeal to authority followed by a threat of infinite torture or eternal orgasm of heaven, right?
So, moral claims are based.
No.
And, of course, the problem with religious morality is many problems.
It's not rational.
It's not empirical.
It's not provable.
It's relatively subjective because Every god and every denomination and each individual within that denomination has different views of what's moral.
It tends to amplify personality to the universal and the eternal, which produces a kind of narcissism and megalomania.
Because if you believe that your particular instincts are at one with God's will, then you can't be contradicted and you can't show any particular self-restraint or self-criticism because you are united with God's will.
God is universal, perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-moral, all-good.
If you've self-identified a unity between your preferences and God's preferences, you know, it's like the old thing that both sides on the war or the sport are praying for God to give them victory, right?
That's number one.
It tends to be subjective.
And the subjectivity is not identified as subjectivity.
Subjectivity is wound into universal perfect objectivity in that the subjective preferences are united with universal divinity, which means they're no longer perceived as subjective, nor even objective in a human sense, but universal and perfect in the sense of God.
So that's very dangerous, number one.
And number two is that if God is the source of all morality, And the alternatives are not God and science.
The alternatives are theology and philosophy.
God and science, science is the new God, wherein atheists try to extract their religion.
I dare say cult, a bit of an abused term.
So the problem is that if God is the source of all morality, then you can eliminate morality by no longer believing in God.
That's a big problem.
You cannot eliminate morality by ceasing to believe in UPB any more than you can eliminate theories of gravity by refusing to believe in them.
You're still subject to it.
Of course, people can say, I don't accept UPB.
UPB is false.
UPB is wrong.
Then they have to prove it.
They can't.
UPB is beyond dispute.
People have been hacking at it for 17, 18 years.
I've had endless debates about it.
It's true.
It's true, it's valid, it's factual.
I mean, there may be details in which you can explain it better and so on, but stealing can never be universally preferable behavior because stealing means everybody should want to steal and be stolen from.
Everybody should prefer stealing.
But if people want to be stolen from, it's no longer stealing.
The category collapses.
It's a self-detonating argument.
It cannot be universalized.
The same thing with rape, assault, and murder.
Excuse me.
You can disbelieve in UPB in the same way that you can disbelieve that 2 and 2 make 4. But if somebody says to you, I reject 2 and 2 makes 4, I think 2 and 2 make 5 or the color blue or a dragon, right?
Then you would say, not that they're wrong, but that they're crazy.
If somebody were to say to you, the earth is shaped like a banana and a dodecahedron and my armpit at the same time, you wouldn't take that person seriously.
They would have no place in a rational discussion.
So people can reject UPB, but only by saying that two and two make blue.
Or that it's true that all men are mortal.
It's true that Socrates is a man, but it's not true that Socrates is mortal.
Right.
You wouldn't, like, it's like, well, no, if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.
It's a basic syllogism, right?
We're talking deductive.
UPB is not inductive reasoning.
It's not probability.
It's not odds.
UPB is 100%.
It's deductive logic.
It's not inductive.
It's not odds are.
So people who reject clear deductive reasoning are never taken seriously at all.
Right?
All birds can fly.
A pigeon is a bird.
Therefore, a bird can fly.
A pigeon can fly.
Right?
I mean, whatever.
I mean, you could say, I don't know, emus and ostriches and so on, right?
So, if people reject clear, deductive, syllogistical reasoning, nobody takes them seriously.
If somebody were to say, well, it's true that I owe you $1,000, but I don't owe you $1,000.
People say, what?
You just contradict?
And that's the sign of a broken brain, and nobody takes anybody seriously.
So it's true that people can reject UPB, but only by casting themselves out of any rational discussion.
If somebody were to say, I believe that gases both expand and contract when heated.
Say, well, no, no, come on.
It's got to be one or the other.
It can't be both, right?
If somebody at the equator says north is both this way and the opposite of this way, we would say, I don't know what's wrong with your brain, but this is not right.
So people can reject UPB once it's widely accepted and so on, and logically true.
People can reject UPB, but nobody would take them seriously.
they'd be completely ejected from rational discussions.
You'd just be like people would just roll their eyes and say, well, you have some emotional problem or some mental problem or some brain problem, so you can't...
Like, have you seen that guy?
He's on YouTube, and he asks the most blindingly obvious questions.
Like, in what country is the Panama Canal?
Japan.
Yes.
He says a yes at the end of it, with a face of despair.
A face of despair.
So, philosophy can prove secular ethics through UPB.
So God is the unity upon which moral claims are based?
That's a definition.
Okay, if there is a God, what is the purpose of life?
Well, in the Christian tradition, the purpose of life is to engage in voluntary, upward, self-sacrifice, so that the kingdom of heaven can be established on earth.
So you're trying to make it to heaven and avoid hell?
Yes, that's a good way of thinking about it.
What is the purpose of heaven?
You understand?
So here's the deal.
At minimum, it's the opposite of endless suffering.
How about that?
Okay.
And so should we...
I don't think that that question is relevant to the concept of heaven, because happiness is the end goal of human activity as a whole, or at least self-satisfaction.
And so it's like saying, if you're trying to get home, what's the purpose of trying to get home when you're home?
The purpose of trying to get home when you're home is no longer valid.
It's been shed like the skin of a snake, because you try to get home, you work to get home, you're traveling to get home, you get home.
So what's the purpose of getting home when you're home?
Well, there is no purpose of getting home when you're home, and there is no purpose to heaven, because it's already infinite pleasure.
Do not try to achieve infinite suffering on planet Earth, and if we can achieve infinite suffering on planet Earth without God, avoiding it, if we can do that without God, then does that defeat your claim?
If we can avoid infinite suffering on earth without God, can these people not just argue from first principles and define their terms?
Yeah, except that you circumvented my initial definition, because I said that by definition God was the unified source of morality.
Wait, the unified source of morality or the unified basis for morality?
Ah, source and basis are not the same thing.
Basis is a foundation.
Source is a passive, like the source of a river is a passive entrance.
All right.
If we engage in a moral exercise.
When you're talking about morality, though, when you really reverse engineer it and you get it down to its root, you're a psychologist, it really seems like it just has to deal with motivation.
People are saying there is a God.
It's more specific than that.
Well, so let me ask you this.
So if there is a God and there is a moral code and it doesn't come at your benefit, are you going to follow it?
Wait, what?
Sorry, I lost this thing there.
Is a God, and there is a moral code, and it doesn't come at your benefit, are you going to follow it?
And there is a God.
It's more specific than that.
Well, so let me ask you this.
So if there is a God, and there is a moral code, and it doesn't come at your benefit, are you going to follow it?
Well, of course, because the benefit is your soul.
So your, for the atheist, means you as an individual mortal being.
Your, for the Christian, is your soul.
And the purpose of your soul, if it's massive suffering to get to heaven, then that's just like, A little bit of dental drilling to save your teeth, right?
So, are you going to follow it?
Well, for the Christian, yes, because it gets me to heaven.
freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show, by the way.
I haven't even really been keeping track of donations, but I don't think they're flowing in, and I'm working fairly hard here.
It depends on how you define your benefit.
If it's going to come at your expense, would you still follow it?
If God came down and said, here is my moral code, and you should follow it, but even if you follow it, you are still going to end up in hell.
Are you going to follow it?
Okay, so these are theoreticals that just don't make any sense at all.
Here's my moral code.
So God says, would you still follow it?
If God came down and said, here is my moral code and you should follow it, but even if you follow it, you are still going to end up in hell.
No, because God can't do that because to punish people for following virtue would be immoral and God can't do that by definition.
Are you going to follow it?
Well, that was the question that was put to Job and to Christ, right?
Because they were required...
They were required to withstand trials that would break anyone and maintain their upward orientation regardless.
And they did that with the motivation of believing that this omnipotent, all-loving God would somehow turn it into a benefit.
So they still did it solely for their benefit.
Hang on, hang on.
Let's define benefit.
Like, if I did something for your sister, would that be to your benefit?
Like, how are you defining your benefit?
Do you mean one of your whims gratified now?
Or do you mean you and everyone you love and know over some reasonable span of time?
So when you're talking about whims, I think you're talking about something that's more dopamine.
When you're talking about morality, you're talking about something that's more serotonin and more ultimately satisfying.
So now we're into biochemistry.
Excellent.
Instead of being programmed by the Ten Commanders, it's now programmed by dopamine and serotonin.
Okay.
Well, you and I agree on a lot.
I mean, when it comes to talking about how men should be masculine and things of that nature, you and I are 100% in agreement.
We just don't agree on the justification that God is the only thing that provides morality.
It's not a justification.
It's a definition.
What's the difference then?
Between a definition and a justification.
I mean, it's ultimately psychologically the same thing.
Well, we have to define what we're talking about before we can just debate.
Okay, well, so here's my position.
So, God being the basis of morality is not a definition.
It's just putting a bunch of words together and thinking you've achieved some syllogism or some argument.
I'm actually a non-theist.
I'm not an atheist.
I believe the human condition is one of uncertainty.
And what that means is that I don't believe that you can conclude there is a God with certainty, and I don't believe that you can conclude that there is a God in the same position.
Now, with that, I don't care.
I still wake up every day, and I have motivation to be a moral person.
Define moral.
Moral, what I ought to do.
Okay, what I ought to do.
That's not it.
How do you come to that conclusion?
Ultimately, it comes down to what not just benefits me, but what benefits the entire planet, what benefits the entire system.
Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
No, you cannot say that morality is that which benefits everyone, because there are evil people who are harmed by your moral actions.
Right?
I mean, if you want to free a hostage from a kidnapper, then you are harming the kidnapper.
And you are benefiting the hostage.
So there's three people, right?
You benefit because you're doing a moral thing.
You've released the hostage, so she's benefited.
But the hostage taker, the kidnapper, is negatively affected.
Maybe you kill him.
Maybe you wound him.
Maybe he goes to jail.
Or maybe he just runs away and doesn't get the blackmail or whatever he was trying to get.
So the idea is, oh, I can just benefit the whole world.
It's going to benefit the whole world.
Oh, my gosh.
I think that your entire moral perspective comes from linear thinking, and when you look at the reality of the universe, it's actually more so holistic.
So when you look at how Aristotle defined God when he said that there had to be an unmoved move or an uncaused cause, he was defining God from a linear perspective, and you do the same with morality, and you do the same with purpose, I reject that.
How does my definition of morality hypothetically differ from yours?
Because you're saying that there's something that exists in a vacuum, that it exists in and of itself.
And nothing in the universe exists in a vacuum.
Nothing exists in and of itself.
It's a whole systems-based morality.
Well, nothing exists in a vacuum is, by definition, a vacuum is without substances within it.
So, yes, nothing exists in a vacuum and bricks do not exist within clouds.
Ah.
So.
Yeah, I don't.
It's a systems-based reality.
Is there a hierarchical structure?
Is there a hierarchical structure?
Are some things more important than others?
I think some things lead to more benefits than others.
By your own definition, some things are more important than others.
Yes.
Pause there.
You've been voted on.
All right, so I got to stop here because it just, like, it hurts my brain to, this is like Freddie Mercury or...
Frank Sinatra.
Ah, there's a couple of strangers in there when you'd hear sounds that were atonal from the orchestra.
I can only take this for a certain amount because, my God, just crazy.
All right.
So, appreciate that.
Let's go back solo here.
We will get to a couple of last questions from you guys.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Three bucks, a dollar, and a two dollars.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Okay, let's get to your questions.
Hi, Steph.
This is Jay with three bucks.
I'm 40 and have a problem of throwing myself into regiments, then rebelling against them.
My relationships have been with teammates in various pursuits.
Art, dance, sports, chasing girls.
I rebelled against that too and married a woman who I could not satisfy.
I viewed the marriage as a challenge to satisfy a partner and become a good husband.
The marriage was unhappy and is now over.
No kids or alimony.
What's up with me?
Given the information that you've provided, I have no idea how to answer that question.
However, you can go to freedomaine.com slash call and we can have a good old meaty chat about it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how to answer that.
Why do atheists care about morals or ethics?
They just enforce tribal rule.
A chimp can shit and I can chimp.
I'm a chimp.
It's pretty funny.
Epicurus says, I was raised peacefully and default to politeness in conflict.
However, I feel that a massive disadvantage compared to more brutalized children when jockeying for dominance with other men.
And this subservience results in much less interest from women.
Men who are more eager to resort to violence attract women on a primal level that I don't.
Any thoughts?
Well, men who initiate the use of force are primitive, and they attract primitive women.
And if you want to be with a primitive woman, you're out of luck.
If you want to be with a sophisticated, intelligent, moral woman, they are not drawn to violent men or aggressive men in that way.
Assertive, yes.
Aggressive, no.
All right.
All right.
UPP is disproved when those willing to enact it are out-reproduced asymptotically.
No, UPP is not disproved.
No.
UPP can only be disproved by finding logical contradictions within the arguments and formulations, which they aren't.
There aren't.
Steph clearly hasn't talked to Zuma women in the aggregate.
Yes.
Yes, I have not talked to superwoman women in the aggregate.
What a wonderful thing you're providing to the world.
All right.
I really wish we could use Steph's brainpower on the issue, but he's overly idealistic and out of touch with the current dating climate.
His methods worked for decades, but we need new tactics now.
Yeah, apparently I don't know anybody who's I just, I don't know anybody.
I don't have friends who've got kids.
I don't have any contact with young people.
I just, I don't talk to people in calling shows who are in their 20s.
I just don't have a clue.
Oh my gosh, that's funny.
That's very funny.
We should watch A Fresh and Fit with Steph or Get Him On.
Oh, fresh and fit, isn't it?
Just mostly, I don't know, trashy people as a whole.
I could be wrong, but...
There are young men who are idiots.
And the beautiful thing is that there are obvious idiots now.
In the past they were much more camouflaged.
So now there are obvious idiots and you can step over them to get to the quality women.
No, there aren't any quality women.
It's like, no, there are quality women.
Absolutely are quality women.
You're just not around you.
And that's not my issue.
Steph, glad to hear you again.
I've been fasting for you since you got YouTube banned.
Okay.
All right.
Any other questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems?
Happy to hear whatever is on your minds.
And I do appreciate your support at freedomain.com slash donate.
That's freedomain.com slash donate.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
Thank you, Matt.
Thank you, Dorbans, as always.
A great pleasure.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Let's check out something here.
And if there are no more questions, I will close off for the night.
I really do appreciate you guys dropping by.
It's great to be able to explain the world to everyone.
And it doesn't particularly hurt that it helps me explain to myself.
All right.
Going once.
Going twice.
Thank you, Jay.
I appreciate that.
Thank you, Steph, for your amazing books.
I've been thinking about the present a lot recently.
Fantastic show, Steph.
Donated a day or so directly.
Your work is valued greatly.
Thank you very much.
The Jordan Peterson video seemed like a speed dating session from hell.
That's pretty funny.
All right.
If you're listening to this later, of course, please help out the show.
The show!
And get on PILD.net.
I don't know what PILD.net is.
So I appreciate that.
Have yourselves a glorious evening, everyone.
What did we get to?
32 minutes and 45 seconds out of 1.28.43.
It would be fun to do one of these, one on 20, 1v20.
Well, maybe before I'm dead.
We'll see if I get back out of the wilderness.
Ah, you know what?
I love exploring the wilderness.
I just did that today on the Bruce Trail.
Yes, pay for what you consume.
If you are consuming my material and you find value in it, it's responsible to donate.
There's no ads, right?
There's no ads, so I've saved you.
Years of your life with no ads, and it is the responsible thing to do, to donate.
And I really, really appreciate that.
Have yourselves an absolutely glorious night, my friends.
We'll talk to you Friday night.
▲
Export Selection