All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 21, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:29
EVEN MORE ANSWERS TO ‘X’ LISTENER QUESTIONS 8!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show to help out philosophy.
I very much appreciate it.
Don't forget to check out my debate with Dr. John from last night, mid-September.
It was a really, really good debate, and I appreciated him calling in.
I know that he's been bagging on me on X for a couple months, and then he's been saying he's going to call in.
So when I saw his name, I'm like, yes, bring him on.
Let him tear at me.
And that was a really enjoyable debate.
All right.
So these are questions from listeners on X. You can now, of course, subscribe to me on XX.com slash Stefan Molyneux.
And you can just click on subscribe on the header.
All right.
Given that Plato's allegory of the cave still seems to apply to modern people, is there any hope of someday having a civilization rooted in reality?
So Plato's cave is an analogy not of human nature, but of political power.
So why is it that it is so profitable to lie to people?
Well, because if you lie to people and you get them to accept all the vagaries and moral contradictions of massive amounts of political power, then, well, you rule them and they'll obey and shut up and comply and all of that.
So lying to people, planting lies and harvesting subjugation is foundational.
You have to teach the slave that he's not a slave, that slavery is good, that it's fine, and it's loyalty.
And oh, oh, without being a slave, he'll be dead, right?
This is the ultimate argument for power is that, well, power is a problem, but it's better than being dead.
And this goes all the way back to, I mean, goes all the way back to Plato, but Hobbes' idea that in a state of nature, life is nasty, brutish, and short.
And so we band together and agree to subjugate ourselves to political rulers so that we don't get murdered by each other on a continual basis.
So it's better than being dead is sort of the basic argument.
And then you have to lie to people about all kinds of things.
And you'll see this not just with political power, having all coercive power, right?
So when I talk about being against spanking, what do people say?
Well, spanking, yes, we understand is difficult and unpleasant, but what's it better than?
Ooh, quick question.
What's it better than?
Why, yes, it is, in fact, better than being dead.
Because if you don't spank your children, they'll go run in the road and get hit by a semi and die and so on, right?
And Stephen King vividly wrote about this when he was writing about the creation of pet symmetry, that his kid was running towards the road and he barely stopped him in time and all of that.
So yeah, it's, oh, if you don't, you'll die, right?
If you don't subjugate yourself to me, to my ideology, whatever, well, you're just gonna, you're just gonna die.
Or, you know, be grievously wounded.
You know, like if there are two examples of spanking is always like running into the street, right?
Number one, running into the street.
And number two, of course, it is, well, your kid is going to, what are they going to do?
Oh, they're going to pull a pot of boiling water off the stove and, you know, it's going to be terrible and die or be horribly scarred for life.
So you're just lying to people and say, well, without us, you're going to die.
And therefore, subjugation to us is better than dying and so on, right?
So it's the tyranny say, I'm here to protect you.
And you say, well, from what?
Well, from what I'm going to do to you if you don't obey me, seems a little circular to me, but that's the general issue.
All right.
So once we have peaceful parenting, and then that diminishes the need and thirst and acceptance of political power, we can begin to work for a voluntary state of society, a peaceful state of society.
And then we get a free and voluntary society.
And in a free and voluntary society, people don't profit from lying to children.
They actually end up with a stable society by telling the truth to children, and that's what we want.
Somebody asks, if truly sentient and self-aware and self-motivated robots come to be, would you welcome them into the world as fellow beings worthy of respect?
I have had many decades experience as a computer programmer, and computers are not human brains.
And the level of richness and complexity, all the way from the medulla, the hippocampus, the neofrontal cortex, the lizard brain, all the way to the mammal brain, all the way to the post-monkey beta expansion pack called humanity is incredibly rich and complex and deep.
We don't understand it really much at all.
Computers are just a whole series of ones and zeros, right?
Just bites.
Bites and bits, ones and zeros.
And that's not the way that the human mind really works at all.
So I never say never, right?
The future, blah, blah, blah.
And if, you know, if at some point we really do understand the brain, maybe we can find some simulacrum in some sort of reproduction in software and hardware.
But it's hard to conceive that that could ever really come to pass.
But again, a thousand years from now, who knows what's possible.
But if there are robots that have the same functional capacities as human beings, then sure, yeah, they would be fellow beings, and they would be covered by the non-aggression principle.
They would be covered by UPP and all kinds of cool things.
UPP being universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
It's a great book.
You should get it for free at freedomain.com slash books.
This is the argument that I had with Dr. John last night, which is if there are space aliens, and actually I had a thought about this.
I'll sort of mention it at some point, but I'll throw it in here as a bookmark.
So if there are space aliens living on Alpha Centauri that have minds to some degree analogous to human minds, in other words, they've evolved and so on, then would they be covered by morals and ethics?
And yeah, of course, to me, they would.
Right?
Now, all life originates in a state of nature, and all life originates in violence and theft.
I mean, there's predators, there's prey, and animals steal from each other all the time.
And so, I mean, it's not, it's not, it's violence, not murder.
It's getting first, early bird gets the worm, takes it from all the other birds.
And although you can certainly see from the movement of wolves that they respect property rights, to some degree, marking territory and so on is a way of trying to minimize conflict between animals.
But creatures that evolve on some other planet through the process of evolution will, of course, pass through the phase of violence and theft.
Violence drives evolution, theft drives evolution, camouflage, hiding, you name it, property to some degree, or property delineations drive evolution.
Creatures guard their property.
And so all life that is sentient and conscious will have passed through violence and theft and rape or, you know, forced sexual contact.
I mean, we don't accuse, we don't send dolphins to jail for, sorry, I'm sister.
I'm just about to walk into a giant spider web.
And I don't hugely want to.
You know that feeling where you get wrapped in that spider web around your calf and then you just wait for that little prick of a bite and followed by a strange Australian death.
Anyway, that's the fear.
So all creatures will go through violence, rape, theft, and so on to evolve.
And civilization occurs when people come up with moral rules to ban these things.
So all creatures in the universe will have issues with rape, theft, assault, and murder, because that's where we evolve from.
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
So all creatures are going to have to ban rape, theft, assault, and murder if they are sentient and capable of abstract thinking and morality and so on, or moral theories.
And so UPB is a universal phenomenon designed to help delineate the animalistic violence, rape, theft, assault, and murder from a civilization where people can work to ban these things.
So UPB is truly universal in that it is required to restrain the animalistic impulses of all creatures that are attempting to evolve beyond the mere hedonistic and instinct-driven, brutal necessities of the moment.
All right.
Can an atheist, like an ex-Muslim, be a Christian, at least culturally go to church, and even if he can't find any rational way to believe that God exists?
I know it's a strange question.
I don't think it's strange at all.
I don't think it's strange at all.
And I go to church.
I find it very interesting to be in a room, in a large room, and I love the aesthetics and the beauty of a good church.
And it does, of course, remind me of my childhood and the stained glass overlays that drape over the shining faces of the choir boys, of which I was one.
And so I think it's a lovely thing to go to church.
You get to listen to ideas, to arguments, to morals.
You get to lift your head from the trough of day-to-day issues and problems and challenges and look at the larger sphere of life and the more noble and spiritual sphere of life.
And who knows, right?
Who knows?
Maybe something vivid will happen to you that certainly happens to many mystics.
That will give you some powerful experience of the divine.
I mean, I'm ready waiting and open, and I would love to have some proof of the divine.
So far, no good.
All right.
Or no luck.
All right.
So if the purpose, next question, if the purpose of life is, as I think it is, to become a great mate, find a great mate, create a family and raise kids who will be great mates themselves, what does the purpose of life become for people who can't, don't, or choose not to become parents?
Well, obviously I'm going to get into trouble here.
I'm just telling you my sort of personal opinion.
This isn't a sort of syllogistical, rational argument.
Neither it is inductive nor deductive reasoning.
I'll just tell you my experience.
So I don't know that the purpose of life is to become a great mate because the purpose of life is a concept.
And I don't imagine that rabbits ever sit there and think, geez, you know, all I do is dodge predators, munch grass, and try and have as much sex as possible.
Really, what's the point of it all?
I don't think that animals feel that or think that.
They wouldn't have the conceptual ability really to face ennui or some kind of angst or meaninglessness or despair in that existential way.
So if it can be done by animals, it's not the purpose of humanity.
I'm not saying that the purpose of humanity doesn't include what animals do.
I mean, animals eat, human beings have to eat.
Animals reproduce.
Human beings kind of need to reproduce.
Animals sleep and rest, so do human beings.
So there is a circle, an overlapping circle.
But it's two overlapping circles.
Because there are things that animals do that human beings shouldn't do, such as rape, theft, assault, and murder.
There are things that humans do that animals can't do, such as use abstract language, reason, and debate.
And then there are things that both humans and animals do.
So sort of two-cent circles side by side overlapping.
So it's not finding a great mate, having kids, and having them reproduce, because animals do that.
And so that can't be the purpose of humanity.
That having been said, my personal belief or my personal experience, my personal emotional experience, which is, again, not to say it's logical or objective or anything like that, I find people who don't want to have kids, not the people who can't have kids, that's a whole different category.
But the people who don't want to have kids, who could have kids, I just find them weird.
I find them weird.
I find them kind of selfish.
I find them kind of incomprehensible.
I had friends when I was younger.
Married couple, seemed to get along reasonably well.
Just never had any talk of kids.
And that's just weird to me.
Like, have kids, my gosh.
I mean, have kids.
I mean, you're alive.
You get some reasonable pleasure and enjoyment out of life.
So spread that reasonable pleasure and enjoyment out of life to others.
Have kids.
It's a natural thing.
It's a beautiful thing.
It's a wonderful thing.
Yeah, just have kids.
So the purpose of life is to promote virtue and fight evil.
That's the purpose.
Because that's the one thing that human beings can do that only human beings can do.
So the purpose of life as a human must be to do something that's exclusive or specific to humanity, right?
The purpose of a painting is to evoke an emotional response in the person who watches.
And the purpose of a painting is specific to a painting, right?
And the purpose of a painting is not to be a manhole cover.
The purpose of a painting is not to have a pleasing reggae beat to it, right?
Because that would be specific to other things, so engineering or music or something like that.
But the purpose of a painting has to be something specific to a painting.
So, all right.
Would moral standards exist or need to exist in a post-singularity world where anyone can have anything they want built by robotics, AI, and insanely advanced 3D printers?
Yeah, you would need even more morality where goods are more plentiful.
So, for instance, if everybody's broke, do you need a system of morality that says don't overspend?
No.
However, if people are relatively wealthy, they have good lines of credit and access to credit cards and so on.
In other words, they have plenty, then you need even more morality that says do not overspend.
You need a diet when you have an excess of food.
You need dietary requirements.
You don't need dietary requirements if you're in prison and can't choose your meals.
You don't need dietary requirements, or you don't need a sort of specialized diet if you're on a desert island and can only eat fish and coconuts.
So the more access you have, the more morality you need as a whole.
Like we need something called don't overspend because we have a financial system that allows us in an unholy manner allows us to use the future earnings of the unborn as collateral against which to borrow to buy votes in the present.
So you need more morality, the more access that you have.
Somebody says, my question, oh, once we have anything we want, what are moral standards worth?
Well, you won't have anything you want.
Two human beings can't occupy the same space at the same time.
They can certainly try to, which is a lot of fun.
But you can't have anything you want.
So there's still going to be shortages of raw materials.
All raw materials are limited.
Land is limited.
Space is limited.
Houses will be limited because you'll have to have a place to put them.
So there is no such thing as post-scarcity as a whole.
And even if you have everything you want, you still are mortal.
All right.
Let's see here.
Utilitarianism or deontology?
Greatest good or moral principle?
Old debate, but I haven't heard your take.
So this is the idea that is the good that which benefits the most people, the greatest good, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, is that the good?
Or is it moral principle?
Well, the greatest good of the greatest number is mysticism.
You can't know the greatest good of the greatest number because good is subjective.
And good, being subjective, cannot be ever the basis of an objective system of morality.
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Well, all that will happen is that people will tell you what the greatest good is in order to control the process, the distribution of resources.
So you need a central authoritarian agency, a tyranny, really, to gather up all the resources and then distribute them in a way that apparently creates the greatest good for the greatest number.
But then all that will happen is that people will claim that they should get resources because it will create the greatest good.
And they say, well, I want some sort of objective way of the greatest good, but such a thing doesn't exist.
Let's say the prettiest girl in school should go out with the most men, or the most boys, let's say.
No, let's make it adults, right?
Let's make it adults.
So the prettiest girl in a university, well, all the boys, all the men, want to go out with her.
So what's the greatest good of the greatest number?
Well, she should date as many men as possible.
I don't mean sleep with, but date as many men as possible because that's the greatest good of the greatest number.
Is that right, fair, moral, and just?
Nope.
Right.
What if the men lust after her, right?
She's got a great figure.
She's very pretty or whatever.
She's very sexy.
And all the men lust after her.
What is the greatest good of the greatest number?
Well, that's, it would be wrong to say she has to sleep with the men because it will make the most men happy.
No, right?
It would be rape is wrong and she should not sleep with anybody she doesn't want to sleep with.
All right.
So and of course, people will simply change their behavior to gain the greatest good.
So one of the big things was that when there was a relatively small number of single mothers, people said, oh, well, we should have a welfare state to take care of the material needs of the small number of women who have children without fathers to provide for them.
And so it's a small amount of pain to take money away from people who can afford it.
And it's a great amount of happiness to give that money to the single mothers so that they have material comfort, access to healthcare, dental care, housing, food, and so on for their children.
The unhappiness of people paying 10% of their income to the welfare state or 20% or whatever it is, that unhappiness is relatively small, whereas the happiness of the single mothers having food and clothing and shelter and healthcare for their children is very high.
So net happiness increases, right?
Okay.
Well, then, of course, what happens is because you set up this system where you've turned children from a liability, which needs a provider, into an asset, which doesn't need a provider, then women, a lot of women, simply change their behavior so that they have children in order to get money from the welfare state.
And, you know, instance, in the black community, it used to be 20% illegitimacy, right?
20% of black children growing up without fathers.
Now it's 75%.
So that's what happens when you break principle.
People change their behavior.
So if you pay women to have children, then women will have children in order to get paid.
And then you end up with many more problems and dysfunctions and messes.
So, no, it has to be a moral principle.
Anything that occurs in the future is mysticism.
Nobody can predict the future.
So somebody says, well, I know the outcome of, let's say, I know the outcome.
The outcome of the welfare state is going to be really good.
It's going to help out the world, it's going to make everyone better and make the world a better place.
The outcome of the welfare state is super, super good.
Okay.
Well, if you know the outcome of a coercive measure across an entire country of hundreds of millions of people, then you have an ability to predict the future, which means you don't even need the welfare state.
And why do I say that?
Well, if you have certain knowledge of the outcome of massive variables hitting hundreds of millions of people over decades, then you certainly have the ability to pick stocks that are going to succeed because you know the future of hundreds of millions of people based upon a new variable over many, many decades, which means you sure as heck are going to know what the price of apple stock is going to be tomorrow.
And then you can long it or short it and you can make zillions of dollars and then you can give your profits to the women who have kids but no provider, right?
But if you can't figure out the price of apple stock tomorrow, why on earth would I believe you that you know what's going to happen after the war in Iraq, that you're going to know what's going to happen after the welfare state gets implemented, that you know what's going to happen after Common Core gets implemented?
Like you don't.
You don't.
Like people who believe that they can predict the weather in a hundred years based upon their computer models, well, they should.
What they should do, of course, if they weren't full and entirely full of shit, what they should do, since they can predict weather 100 years out, is they should long and short various agricultural products based upon what the weather is going to be like next year or the year after, what the average temperatures are going to be next year or the year after.
Because if you know, if you knew somehow what the temperatures were going to be next year or the year after, you could long and short various agricultural products, soybeans, pork bellies, whatever, and you could make an absolute fortune, and then you could pour all of that absolute fortune into solving climate change.
But this is sort of the skin in the game stuff.
I don't believe anybody can predict the future.
I mean, other than in broad general moral principles.
So if you have an increase in coercion in society, things will generally get worse materially because you're destroying price signals and interfering with the, oh my God, I must walk into that stupid repetition compulsion.
I'm sorry, I almost walked right into that spider web again.
Oh, well, the thin threads of thought shall remain intact.
So, yeah, people, they don't know the future.
You can get broad things as a whole, but you can say if there's a war, then people are going to die in the war and so on.
So, you can get sort of broad general principles, but you cannot predict the future in any specificity.
And if you can predict the future, right, if there's going to be a war, then you can invest in the hideous machinery of mass combat, right?
And, you know, if the government's going to pay for a quote vaccine, then you can invest in those companies.
So, those are people who know, and that's really based on politics more than anything else.
But if people have no downside and they have no history of successful prediction, right?
So, the welfare state, the people who put it in, now that it's revealed as a failure, do they have any downside?
Do they lose any money?
No, not at all.
In fact, they gained political power and resources through that.
So, the people who have no skin in the game, they lose nothing if they're wrong, and they have no history of even short-term successful predictions.
Why would I listen to them about the long term?
Anyway, but they're all just excuses for the expansion of political power.
Okay.
What is truth?
Truth is when the principles in your mind are in accordance with the facts of reality.
Not a question, but elaborate a bit on the left-right rabbit hole.
I'm feeling used.
So, the left is feminine plus the state.
The right is masculine plus the state.
And for more on that, you can check out my premium show on Pink Floyd's The Wall.
I know, sounds like a bit of a stretch, but it's a good stretch.
How do we keep ourselves from hating our enemy more than we love our people?
Yeah, I'm not sure why hate is such a negative thing as a whole.
Hate is just an emotion.
All emotions have their strengths and weaknesses.
Excessive happiness can lead to complacency and naivete.
Excessive anger can lead to destruction.
Excessive hate can lead to violence, right?
But to love virtue is to hate evil, right?
I mean, think of your immune system, right?
You want it to, quote, hate and work to destroy cells or viruses or bacteria that are harmful to you.
And in the same way, I'm not talking physical destruction, but to love virtue is to hate evil.
I mean, if you love health, you cannot equally love illness.
So I don't know that we want to classify any emotion as negative in and of itself.
All right.
What does it mean to feel pain for the loss of someone you never met in person?
Well, I mean, of course, I've been feeling Charlie Kirk's murder all week.
And I did meet him once and was on a panel with him.
And we co-spoke at a conference together in St. Louis.
And yes, so, but of course, I wasn't close to the man.
And I never heard from him directly.
He never sent me anything during my deplatforming or whatever.
But the reason why you feel bad or negative about the murder of someone you never met is, well, first of all, we see it vividly on the screens in front of us.
Because when I grew up, you'd never see that kind of stuff because the networks would not broadcast a direct murder.
But now we get to see it.
And it's appalling.
So we feel like we're there.
And because uncensored, we feel like we're at war.
So it's very strong that way.
And if Charlie Kirk is murdered for his beliefs and you share those beliefs, and what is it, two or three out of ten Democrats are fine with political murder, political violence, let's say.
So political violence is a better way to put it.
But if Charlie Koch was murdered for his beliefs and you share those beliefs to some degree or another, then you are a potential target as well.
So makes sense.
Why are we here?
We are here because of evolution and we have become successful because of the development of rational consciousness.
And the why is to promote the fruits, the fruits of consciousness that are singularly human, which is morality, to promote virtue and to oppose evil.
Divorce and family dissolution is agony that endures until death.
Is it better to have loved and lost or to never have loved and thus be spared the loss?
What's that eurythmic song?
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved it all.
So, yeah, of course.
Of course.
Dig in, love deeply, live vividly, push yourself, work out, climb mountains.
You know, do these things as a way of sort of strengthening your mind and body.
I mean, don't make them fetishes to the point where you only climb mountains and don't fight evil.
But you don't get to live longer by retreating from life.
You just end up with an empty life.
There is happiness in life, which makes life worthwhile.
There is loss in life.
Odds are that I'm going to die before my wife, and then she's going to have to spend some number of years mourning my absence.
Could happen the other way, of course.
And the option is what?
The option is what?
To not love.
It doesn't shield you from dying.
In fact, those who are married, happily married, tend to live longer.
Now, divorce and family dissolution, that's a different matter.
Divorce is when you've either chosen wrong or you've acted badly.
Or both, I suppose, right?
So if you've chosen wrong, let's say you chose somebody who's an unreformable narcissist to get married to and to have children with, then you chose wrong.
And, you know, I certainly have sympathy for choosing wrong.
It's not like everyone I ever chose to date was some sort of perfect moral paragon.
But you chose wrong.
And that's not existential.
That's not life.
That's your choices.
If you chose to marry a narcissist, then that's a bad choice.
That's not existential to life or foundational to human nature or anything like that.
Or let's say that you chose someone where it could have worked out, but rather than sitting down and trying to talk things out, you withdraw, you turn to alcohol, you travel, you have an affair, and so on, like you're unavailable and you avoid the person rather than sitting down and dealing with your issues, because it's easier in the moment to ignore issues than to try to work to solve them.
So if you have chosen wrong, then you'll just have to learn better.
And it's a brutal lesson.
And I'm sorry for that.
And I've had to learn it.
And most of us have to learn it because we're raised pretty badly these days.
But if you have chosen wrong, learn to choose better, figure out why you chose wrong and why everyone in your life allowed you to choose wrong.
That's the really painful part.
Or if you acted badly, figure out why you acted badly, work to resolve it, and learn that lesson.
All right.
Would you have bought a pedophile baby?
I don't believe there's any such thing as a pedophile baby.
Pedophilia is, and I write about this in my book on peaceful parenting at peacefulparenting.com.
But there's no such thing as a pedophile baby.
There is horrible life experiences that make people more likely to become pedophiles, and then there's free will as well.
All right.
How can we know that we all see the same color when we say blue or green?
Because we have a thing called wavelength, right?
And, you know, just empirically, if you say to someone, hand me the red ball, and they hand you the red ball, then you both see red.
I mean, you don't see identically.
Eye sizes are slightly different and so on.
But that's empirically you know, right?
If your wife says, wear the blue shirt, and you come out wearing the blue shirt, then you know that you both see blue.
All right.
And of course, not everyone sees 10% of men are colorblind, right?
So not everyone, right?
If space ends, what is on the other side?
I don't know that space ends, and it doesn't matter to the moral missions that we have in the world.
Why is there something rather than nothing that is a fact of reality that is immovable and inviolate?
It's like saying, why is there a gravity?
Well, of course, if you are religious, you would say, well, God designed matter to attract matter, mass to attract mass, so that human beings could stick on the ground rather than fly into space.
But if you are not religious, it is simply an irreducible, primary fact of nature, that there is something rather than nothing.
How long will it take for me to stop grieving Charlie Kirk's murder?
So lessons repeat until the lessons are learned.
Right?
I mean, this is why people on the third marriage generally tend to do better because they've, you know, on their third marriage, they finally figured out maybe it's them or whatever, maybe it's their choices.
So lessons repeat until the lessons are learned.
And pain is your way, is your body's way of saying learn this lesson, right?
So we've all done this thing where we have walked through confidently through a darkened room and then we've mashed our little toe against the leg of some table or coffee table or something.
And that teaches us to move more cautiously through a room.
And now, you know, we creep forward in a darkened room because we learn our lessons.
If you keep confidently walking through the room and keep bucking your shin or crushing your toe, then the pain will continue until the lesson is learned.
So the right needs to peacefully, voluntarily, through ostracism and through boycotts, need to push back against the violence of the left.
And I think when you have learned the lesson, and it's unfortunate, of course, that on the right, masty platformings weren't enough, but unfortunately it had to escalate to outright murder.
But I think the lesson is somewhat learned.
And of course, in your life, right?
Given that 20 to 30% of people on the left support political violence, then you need to, I mean, confront those people and get them the hell out of your life.
So why would you want people around you who support the murder of you?
Right?
All right.
So universal morality, I'm sorry, does your internal dialogue or actions shape your reality?
Which one is more significant and why?
So your internal dialogue shapes your reality internally.
Your actions shape your reality empirically.
In other words, your internal dialogue shapes your own reality, but your actions shape other people's perceptions of you.
And this actions include talking, right?
So there have been actors who are really depressed who've had to do comedies.
I mean, I think that Jim Carrey seems to be one of them.
And in Long Day's Journey Tonight, Eugene O'Neill writes about his father who had to put on a heroic play or be the lead in a heroic play on the night that his son died.
And so I'm sure that he was a skilled enough professional that the people didn't even know how bad the actor had it.
You know, the laughing clown who's depressed, that kind of stuff.
I'm a comedian because I think nothing is funny.
It's some Tom Hanks movie.
Pretty bad movie.
Anyway, so your internal dialogue shapes your internal reality.
Your actions shape your empirical reality, which is the reality that other people experience.
All right.
Universal morality versus ingroup morality.
If you believe in universal morality still, upon what basis?
Essentialphilosophy.com.
It's a free book.
You should read it.
Why do most philosophers believe in God?
Well, I don't know what most philosophers believe because most philosophers operate, operated, and still do, operate under horrendous levels of violent censorship.
So I don't know.
You know, the UK leads the world in arresting people for memes and online commentary.
So what do people in the UK believe?
I don't know.
Because they face horrendous blowback for posts deemed unacceptable by the regime.
I don't know.
It's like saying, what do people in North Korea believe?
I don't know.
I know what they have to say they believe in order to survive, but I don't know what they really believe because you don't know what people really believe when they're censorship.
And of course, this is true not just in society and politically and in regards to hate speech laws and so on, but this is also true in your relationship, in your relationships, right?
If you have a relationship where there are topics you simply are not allowed to talk about, then you don't really have a relationship.
So I've talked about this, of course, many, many times with people in call-in shows, that I say, well, if you have an issue with your mother, you should talk to her about it.
Oh, I can't, right?
She'll just get really angry and shut me down and storm out.
Or whatever my dad will just yell at me and storm out.
Okay, but then you don't have really a relationship.
And your parents don't really know what you believe because they punish you for speaking the truth.
So throughout most of history, I mean, I can't remember which philosopher it was.
He was in his 80s and burning his material because he was concerned that he might be arrested for what he'd written.
Solchenitsy, of course, had to famously sort of bury the manuscripts for the Gulag archipelago because he was afraid of returning to said Gulag archipelago.
So I don't know what people throughout history believe because for most of history, people are faced to jail, torture, murder, ostracism for saying what they think.
I don't know.
I don't know.
And of course, the philosophers that are taught in university are philosophers that do not harm the power of the universities, right?
Can you imagine me being allowed to teach in university?
It would never happen.
What's your opinion on Sam Harris?
I mean, I liked Sam earlier on.
I thought he wrote some good books and some courageous books.
I think he got Trump Derangement Syndrome pretty horribly, and that's a real test, right?
The real test is when you come across ideas that cause you to recoil.
How do you handle it?
And I think he succumbed to all of that, which I think is a real shame.
Somebody writes, what's the point of it all?
It's not even struggle anymore.
It's all just crap, endless, worthless crap.
Listen, brother, sister, I absolutely understand.
There are times in life where it just feels like it's just one damn thing after another.
Absolutely.
And it's a cheesy story, but a worthwhile one.
You know, the magic ring that makes you happy when you're sad and sad when you're happy.
And on the inside of the ring is the inscription, this too shall pass.
It's going to pass.
It's going to pass.
There are times where things cluster.
So there are times when it rains for a week in a row or two weeks in a row.
And then there are times when it's sunny for a week or in a row or two weeks in a row.
And mostly it's just scattered.
But there are definitely times when things cluster.
And then you feel cursed.
And then you may make mistakes because you feel cursed, which tends to increase chances of negative things happening.
And just recognize, of course, that, you know, if you're playing a board game with two dice, right, there are times when you'll roll three 12s in a row.
You say, oh, that's weird.
It's like, oh, you know, but statistically, it's going to happen.
So just try to pull yourself out of feeling like you're cursed or life is just a whole series of terrible things.
Because then what happens, of course, is if you get fundamentally pessimistic about life, people who are optimistic don't want to spend time with you because you're going to kind of drag them down.
And then you end up with other pessimists around you who then reinforce it.
And then bad things don't are not happening.
Good things are not happening to anyone you know.
And then if good things start to happen to someone, they'll probably break out of the pessimist social circle.
So you have to be careful.
It doesn't become a self-reinforcing paradigm.
All right.
Let's do the last one.
What are your thoughts regarding cancel culture and the differences that exist between how it is implemented by the right versus the left?
So the left implements cancel culture in general by lying about people.
And the right implements cancel culture by telling the truth about people.
And of course, there's flaws on the right and there's virtues on the left and so on.
So I get all of that.
But just in general, I was the victim really of left-wing cancel culture.
And certainly from my experience, they did not tell the truth about me.
And the lies were horrendous and multiplied like rabbits.
But it seems to me that on the right, they accurately post in context what people are saying.
And the cancel culture happens because of what people say that is true.
And they tend to focus more on private cancel culture, boycotts and so on, rather than sort of coordinated cultural attacks that usually end up with massive amounts of institutional pressure.
So I think it's more voluntary and individual.
So I hope that helps.
I will do more soon.
Thank you so much for your support and interest in philosophy.
I love you guys so much for it.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show and subscribe to me on X. And I will talk to you soon.
I will get to the rest of these probably tomorrow.
And again, thank you so much for these great questions.
I really appreciate them.
▲
Export Selection