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Nov. 18, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:31
The Science of VIRTUE! Listener Question
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All right.
Great questions from X. What are some of the important epistemological and other lessons we learned from the successes and failures of the postmodern age?
So the question of hallucination, I guess, has been looming fairly strongly in philosophical discourse, obviously coming out of the issues with AIs, right?
So AIs, if you make them not hallucinate at all, then they're not creative at all.
If you make them hallucinate too much, then they become less useful.
So it's kind of a Aristotelian mean.
So postmodernism is that there's no such thing as objective truth.
There is only vengeful morality.
That's postmodernism.
There's no such thing as objective truth.
There is only absolute and vengeful morality, morality as a tool of punishment.
Superstition is related to making morals absolute and unquestionable while making reality subjective and open to endless interpretation.
There's no such thing as objective reality.
There is only punitive morality.
So if you have some real primitive tribe, they don't believe in objective reality.
They use peyote.
Everything's the dream of the catfish or whatever nonsense you've got going on.
But if you disobey the witch doctor or the tribal leader, then you are put to death, right?
So that's an important thing to understand that postmodernism is a return to primitivism.
It is where there is no possibility of truly understanding objective reality.
There is only the infliction of punitive morality.
So the typical example, which would make the most sense for most people, is there's no such thing as truth, but racists must be deplatformed.
There's no such thing as reality, but sexists must be destroyed.
And it has to do, of course, that once you let go of objective morality, then you let go of rationality and universality and the desire for reciprocity, the need for reciprocity.
In other words, the sort of the turnabout is fair play kind of question.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander and so on, right?
So this is a typical thing where racism is bad, white privilege is real.
Racism is bad, white fragility is real.
So this is just madly contradictory, right?
Madly contradictory.
I mean, it is literally saying that racism is the worst thing, and it is then used to justify horribly racist statements, right?
So the postmodern goal is to eliminate the need for rational consistency with regards to ethical statements, because there's no such thing as objective truth, objective reason.
And what that means is that you can say any old absolute grab bag of Marxist race or class baiting or gender baiting claptrap, and you cannot be brought up short because of inconsistency.
Postmodernism is absolutely essential for propaganda because propaganda, how do we oppose propaganda?
We oppose propaganda through consistent morality, the requirement that moral statements go through some sort of process of being evaluated in the Socratic sense, right?
Justice, truth, virtue, integrity, that these all be subjected to the Socratic method in order to root out inconsistencies and contradictions and to make sure that we arrive at a universal standard of virtue.
Well, that's all denied.
If you want to use punitive, tribalistic, anti-rational morality to reward your friends and punish your enemies, you must remove morality from the realm of reason and evidence.
Once you have removed morality from the realm of reason and evidence, then you can use it as a weapon, because then you are no longer brought up short by accusations of hypocrisy.
Like I'm doing this on X, right?
So on X, if somebody talks about white supremacy, white patriarchy, white fragility, whatever it is, right?
Then, you know, the simple question is: show me which other race or ethnicity you have criticized for being supremacist or fragile or nationalistic or anything like that.
And if it's only white people that you have attacked or accused of any of this, then you're just a bigot, right?
You're just a racist because you only criticize white people for characteristics that are, you know, you can argue, yeah, they're negative, right?
I think racial supremacy is a horrible idea and evil because it requires government force and it requires that one race violently rule over another.
It's horrendous.
But white people generally aren't arguing for that, at least haven't for a long time.
But there are certainly other races who believe that they are the best and they are the supreme and they are the greatest and whatever it is, right?
So if you are only criticizing white people for that, then you're just a racist, right?
So to have a requirement of rational consistency in your ethics means that propaganda can't work, right?
And so in order to have propaganda win, you have to uncouple and separate morality from rationality.
And you have to denigrate rationality in order to create a one-sided, vengeful pseudo-morality that is used to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
So basically, in the way this works in the West, is that if you have any criticisms of any group that votes for the left, right?
Women, often visible minorities, gays, and so on, and Muslims.
So if you have any criticism of any group that votes for the left, well, then you have these negative labels attached.
You're sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, racist, whatever, right?
And then you're just attacked and punished to make sure that nobody criticizes the people who vote for the left.
And then that means that the people who vote for the left can be assured of being shielded from any criticism.
And then if you do criticize the left, then you will have one of these negative labels attached to you and they will try to destroy your income and your, well, sometimes your freedom, sometimes your life, right?
So postmodernism is the act of shifting absolutism from empiricism, science, reason, and evidence, and philosophy towards vengeful pseudo-morality used to, again, punish enemies and reward friends.
That's the program.
So the way that you do this is you say reality is subjective.
Reality is subjective.
And then through that process, you charge up emotional energy.
Because, I mean, emotions are subjective to a large degree, right?
I'm not talking physical pain, but, you know, it's not quite, there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, like as Hamlet says.
If you say reality is subjective, then nobody can oppose your feelings by saying that's not true because you feel it.
And because you feel it, it becomes true.
And there's nothing to compare your feelings to with regards to objective, empirical, rational reality, right?
There's nothing that you can compare your feelings to and find your feelings to be invalid.
So what this has done is this has diminished, or if not in many places, erased, eradicated, our capacity to think in terms of reason and evidence, rationality, and objectivity.
And it has cast us into a solipsistic sea of self-regard, where the only thing that matters is our feelings, and we have no capacity or even responsibility to compare our feelings to anything empirical or rational.
Right?
So, I mean, the typical example would be racism is bad, okay?
Racism is bad.
Or what is racism?
That's having a negative view of another race.
Okay, well, doesn't white fragility, white patriarchy, white nationalism, white supremacy, if you're only applying it to whites, then isn't that, by definition, racist?
Well, no, but you see, that would be to say that you have to take rational standards and apply them to your beliefs.
But you can't weaponize moral beliefs that are subject to the demands and strictures of the Socratic method and of reason and evidence.
You can't weaponize them.
And if you can't weaponize morality, then you lose a foundational tool of dominance, attack, subjugation, and again, sorry to repeat myself so often, punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends.
Now, if you look at sort of the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s, the 1950s was still running on the momentum of earlier rationality.
But, and this is partly a psyop and partly just the cynicism that came out of the First and Second World Wars.
But if you look at things in America, you saw, along with the dissolution of reason and evidence, right, the dialing up of the hallucinations, right?
Hallucinations become real.
Obviously, an AI cannot itself detect the difference between what is real and what is a hallucination.
Otherwise, it wouldn't do it, right?
Because you'd say, don't do hallucinations.
But when reality becomes subjective or is perceived or is processed as subjective, then instincts, feelings, emotions, hormones sometimes become all-powerful.
They are no longer restrained by rationality.
Now, when thoughts, feelings, instincts, emotions, and hormones are no longer restrained by rationality, then you get an explosion of creativity.
I've talked about this with regards to my own novels.
Don't want to make this about me, but it's if you sort of followed this conversation.
This is the tension that I have in my own novels, which is the characters want to do their own thing, but I want them to pursue or illustrate some sort of moral purpose, they need to serve the moral purpose of the story.
And I'm certainly willing, of course, to change things.
As I mentioned in a call-in show, sorry if this is spoilers, if you haven't read dissolution yet, but when I have a redemption arc that I'm hoping for with a particular character, it doesn't really, it's not really a spoiler, I wouldn't mention much character, but I have a redemption arc in that I hope a character is going to end up well, and then that character just does not end up well.
I'm certainly willing to have that be that have that happen, but I can't have an evil character not have problems and I can't have a good character lose.
That's like Apple, like in movies you're allowed to show them, people using Apple products as long as they're not the bad guys.
So if I were to be purely creative, then I would take my hand off the rudder, so to speak, and I would let, you know, hey, man, sometimes the evil guys flourish in this world and sometimes the good guys die like dogs, like that poem I wrote when I was a teenager.
Two men in the wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
Wolves don't taste virtue or vice in any particular way.
So the more creative you are, the less rational your story is.
And you started to see lots of really creative stuff.
And this is particularly true in the realm of music, where you saw really creative stuff coming out.
It also happened in the realm of a theater.
And I remember my professor, I remember his name, Dr. Barry Ulshan at Glendon, College of York University back, lordy, 30 plus years ago.
Dr. Barry Ulshan was handing out these, because he knew I was interested in theater and so on, because I was always cast as the lead in these plays.
But he was handing out these books.
And one of the books that he handed out was a sort of naked theater experiment that was going on.
In hindsight, it could be argued that that was not the most appropriate thing.
I remember he referred to my writing as Stefanesk.
He said, it's going to be tough to come up with a name for your style of writing, Stefanesk.
And I remember also we were supposed to have read Billy Bud, which I found really brutal to get through, and I hadn't finished it.
But we're supposed to have this discussion.
Nobody had anything to say.
And he's like, has anyone here actually read?
How many people here have actually finished the story?
And I think only about 20% of people put their hands up and he just got up and left the room.
And rightly so, like, no, no complaints about that.
But in terms of the creativity that was going on with the collapse of reason and evidence as a standard, you get a lot of creativity.
And then you get a lot of chaos.
So you get this massive, like Vesuvius-like eruption of creativity because rational restraints have been removed.
And of course, if you look at creativity entirely bound in and controlled by rational restraints, you would look at something like The Fountainhead or in particular, Atlas Schrut.
Or if you look at the first sort of 60 pages of Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, you'll see, of course, that it is very creative, has dreams and visions and fantasies and memories of a child and the horse and blah, blah, blah.
But it is pretty chaotic because he was dictating the book at that point.
For me, a more tightly controlled book, like Almost, which is a traditional story, was there was a lot of fair amount of creativity in it.
I particularly enjoyed and found quite vivid the scene called The Battle of the Gardens.
But some creativity, but very much constrained into the arc of a traditional story.
The God of Atheists was much more chaotic, lists and sort of postmodernist stuff.
And the present is a sort of standard book.
And the future was more creative, because, of course, I had a lot of options given that I was writing about a completely fictional world of the future.
So you'll get a lot of creativity.
And it's like taking drugs.
You'll get a lot of creativity, but it comes at the expense of sustainability of that creativity.
And that is a sort of foundational challenge that you let go of reason and evidence like you do every night and your dreams are very creative.
But if you stayed in the dreams, you'd go mad, right?
And this is why a lot of people who use drugs end up with a lot of creativity, but it tends to be unsustainable.
And you kind of look at Freddie Mercury's songwriting.
I don't think Brian May did drugs, but I think Freddie Mercury was quite into drugs.
I think cocaine in particular.
A lot of creativity.
But, you know, you go from, it's a long fall from Bohemian Rhapsody and Somebody to Love to Delilah, right?
There's a pretty love song to his cats.
It's a pretty long fall from grace, as far as all of that stuff goes.
So what happened was there was a wild amount of creativity in the dark and early Middle Ages.
And you can see this from some of the art and so on.
And very sort of florid creativity.
Of course, most of it has been lost.
Then the age of reason comes along and you start to get real perspective in art.
And you have to be anatomically correct, right?
You can't just paint stuff, right?
You're sort of famous, if a finger is lifted, then one muscle shows up in the forearm.
And you can see Michelangelo has actually carved that kind of stuff into his carvings.
And you've got painters who dissected cadavers in order to figure out and find out how the human body worked so that they could be more accurate in what they painted.
So Angres and Caravaggio and so on.
And then you sort of contrast all of that.
And it had something to do with the rise of photography, but it wasn't just that.
The dedication to empirical and universal objectivity and rationality, that carries over from a previous generation because that's how people are raised.
But the creativity can come very quickly in the next generation.
There's a leapfrog.
So the creativity erupts from the people who let go of reason and evidence.
And then through that creativity, they dissolve other people's focus on reason and evidence.
Art was supposed to mean something.
And then, of course, the postmodern artists, all the way from the nonsense data from the 1920s through the anti-rationalists of the 30s, and then the non-representational artists of the 40s.
And then, of course, the crazy stuff that came out of Andy Warhol, where, you know, a soup can is a worthy subject of a painting.
And that guy was a real creep, by the way.
Like, it's just an absolute creep.
So, and then after there's too much chaos and madness in art, people have to, the pendulum kind of swings and the sort of auto-correction of the collective unconscious begins to try and return more to sort of reason and evidence, like it's gone too far, right?
So from an epistemological standpoint, sort of study of the nature of knowledge, the goal of weaponizing morality requires detaching the human mind from reason and evidence, which does kick up a huge amount of creativity.
And then the creativity then spreads itself through art.
The sort of dissolution from reason and evidence spreads itself through art.
And then reality dissolves in the mind of the general consciousness because everything has become subjective.
And a lot of this has to do with masculine and feminine perspectives.
The fact that so many objective, rational men got wiped out in Europe in the First and Second World Wars had a lot to do with how subversive and anti-real, anti-rational art began to flourish and spread.
The sort of common sense builders and maintainers of the empire and the scientists and the rationalists and so on, they all got wiped out.
And as they got wiped out, then the subjectivists and the relativists who tended to survive wars because they tend to focus more on subjective feelings such as fear and cowardice rather than objective obligations like duty and responsibility and fighting for king and country and all that kind of stuff.
So those people get wiped out.
I mean, wars are a fantastic way for the subversives to wipe out the objective people because the objective people take their sort of responsibilities and their culture and their country and their king and their duties and their obligations very seriously.
And so it's a great way for physically weak subversives to wipe out the stronger alphas is to engage them in a war, knowing that the physically weak are less likely to be sent to the front to fight and are more likely to work in propaganda and supply chain management and all the other sort of stuff where a stronger mind and a weaker body are more important.
So war is not a war against a foreign enemy.
War is a war against the strong, superior, physically, and mentally objective in your society.
The war is against the strong, not against the enemy.
The enemy is a proxy by which the local weaklings destroy the strong.
And of course, we see this happen repeatedly over the course of history and certainly over the course of the 20th century.
The war that was waged against objective reason and the competent and the dutiful and the rational was endless.
Hundreds and hundreds of millions of the more responsible are destroyed.
Because the more responsible act from a sense of honor and universal ethics and the stiff upper lip of the British, right?
The idea that it's okay to have feelings.
It's not too bad to have feelings, but you must master your feelings and you cannot run your life according to your feelings and you have to subjugate or sublimate your feelings to rational objectives and so on, right?
The border between sort of reason and emotion.
And it is the most dutiful and the most objective who get fed into the furnace of war by the weaker and more subjective.
And the weaker and more subjective, you know, almost all wars start on lies, right?
And so the truthful and the honorable are not very good at lying, bad at lying.
They don't want to lie.
It's dishonorable and wrong and a sort of element of weakness.
And so it is the weak who start the wars, the weak and the liars and the subjective, who start the wars, and then they feed into the furnace of war the strong, the rational and the objective.
So, because if you're strong and rational and objective, like I still have trouble with this as a whole, like I realize I'm putting myself into some pretty elevated company here, but I remember, and I still have trouble with this, with the sort of basic reality of saying to someone, but it's false, right?
This is the fine hoax, right?
The fine people hoax and all of the other hoaxes that sort of coalesce and they float around.
Trump, and of course, we're talking about the Gulf War, the Second Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
That people, like, it's not true.
And it's so weird to me that people can just not care if things are true or not.
Honestly, I find this like it's like a foreign species to me.
It is completely unfathomable to me to not care whether something is true or not.
Like, like the fine people hoax, right?
Oh, Trump called the Nazis fine people, blah, blah, blah.
It's not true.
And people don't care.
And they don't care.
And that's because they're told to hate someone and their hatred is moral.
And the only thing that matters is that the moral is good.
You're taught to hate someone.
Hatred of Trump is the good.
And you don't need to check with anything real because the only thing that matters is the quote virtue of your legitimized and socially approved hatred.
That's the only thing that matters.
Facts don't matter.
Only feelings which are malleable and easily programmed, right?
You can't program facts, right?
You can't, there's no propaganda that says two and two make five.
I mean, there's torture, I guess, in the O'Brien scene with Winston Smith at the end of 1984, but that's an attack upon rational consciousness, right?
That the truth and facts and empirical reality are what the party says it is.
If the party says two and two make five and four, simultaneously you must believe it.
And that is the 19th century consciousness struggling against 20th century totalitarianism.
And of course, it's a humiliation ritual to force someone to lie, to force people to say things.
I mean, endless examples of this throughout the modern world, that you're just forced to say things that are just blatantly not true.
But if you don't say them, then you'll get fucked up, right?
People will just fuck you up in some horrible manner, get you fired, life destroyed, you know, your wife will leave you, whatever, right?
People would just fuck you up, attack you, and harm you, and you might be thrown in jail, right?
And so the humiliation ritual, that is how the weak overpower the strong, is they disconnect morality from rational examination.
You cannot rationally examine reality, and therefore you cannot rationally examine morals.
If reality is beyond reason, how dare you bring reason to my morals?
And therefore, you get full and free play to do whatever you want with morals.
And you don't at all have to worry about being rationally examined for inconsistencies and anti-logic, right?
I mean, bigotry and hiring is really bad, so we're not going to hire whites.
It's like, that's like, it's so obvious, but they don't care because just it's become about power.
You turn by disconnecting the human mind from objective reality, you turn morality into a tool of power because it no longer has to be consistent.
It no longer has to be objective.
It can no longer be questioned according to rational standards.
To turn morality into a tool of power, which is, you know, I mean, in more extremist religions, if you don't repeat the catechisms, if you don't affirm, right, then you're a heretic and you have to be burnt at the stake or punished or something like that.
So all of that is really powerful in society, right?
And one of the things that made morality more objective was people focusing on objective reality, right?
So with the sort of scientific revolution starting from Francis Bacon onwards in the early 16th century, then you have all of this focus to sort of subjugate the human mind and the human impulses to reason and evidence and objectivity in science.
In superstition or in extreme religiosity, any conflict between the idea and reality, you must rule in favor of the concept, right?
So there is a God.
Where do we find him in reality?
Well, we can't find him in reality, and God is a self-contradictory entity, all-powerful, all-knowing.
We've gone over that a million times before.
But so since the idea exists in the mind, but cannot be validated in reality, then it is the mind that wins.
It is the idea in the mind that wins against the rules of reason and reality, and reason and empiricism.
So starting in the 16th century, this came out of the productivity gains of the Quattracento, as they call it, the 14th century.
The productivity gains bringing science to bear on matters of agriculture produced such staggering gains in crop productivity that the science of agriculture was so powerful that it gave credence to the scientific method.
The scientific method came out of the unbelievable like 10, 15, 20 times, times, not percent, times gains in productivity from the agricultural revolution.
And so when you have that kind of immense productivity gain, you have to say, okay, well, the methodology that produced this is really great.
And the methodology that produced this was empirical testing and the scientific method in an instinctual way pursued by people who had a kind of green thumb on some theory, of course, and all of that.
And advances in sort of chemistry, manure, agricultural sciences, winter crops, turnips, blah, blah, blah, crop rotation, all that kind of stuff.
So from the immense productivity gains of the 14th century in agriculture, which didn't always, of course, of course, occur in the same place at the same time.
Sorry, that's kind of obvious to say.
But then people were like, wow, science is really cool.
Like, I'm literally alive because of science.
My children are living because of science.
So let's see if we can codify what the farmers are doing.
And that's where a lot of the scientific method came out of, or at least one of the reasons why it spread, is that once you have a proof, like, holy crap, we have 10 times the food production that we used to have by following reason and evidence.
So let's try and codify reason and evidence and see what other good things it can bring us.
And that's where the scientific method comes from.
And once people saw the immense productivity gains of the scientific method and then of the free market and so on, then the scientific method and the free market are both based upon universality.
One is the universality of empiricism and that in any conflict between ideas and tangible reality, tangible reality wins.
So the subjugation of the mind to universal principles produced massive productivity gains and advancements in the scientific realm.
You know, they figured out the heliocentric, sun-centered model of the solar system and just, I mean, so many, the scientific explosion that came out of the Baconian Methodists almost without end, or certainly so far.
And once universalism in the scientific sense was recognized as so incredibly valuable and productive, then universalism in a moral sense became important.
And universalism in a moral sense eliminates slavery because slavery is having two moral categories, those who own themselves and those who own others.
And you cannot own yourself and be owned by others at the same time.
It's like saying, you and I both own this car at the same time.
You and I can both drive this car in different directions at the same time.
You and I, because if I own the car, I can drive the car in the direction that I like and want.
If I don't own the car, I can't even get into it legally, right?
Unless somebody gives him permission.
But to say a man owns himself and is also owned by others means that he can self-direct his action at the same time as somebody else can direct his action, which is, again, like saying that you and I can both own the same car and drive in different directions at the same time.
It's an empirical and rational impossibility, self-contradiction.
And so when we accepted the universal principles of matter and energy, this gave us massive productivity.
Improvements in agriculture led to the scientific method.
The scientific method led to the value of universality.
The value of universality leads to universal human rights, the end of slavery, and that leads to the universal goal of property rights and the non-aggression principle, which was the foundation of the modern free market, all of which was very cool and is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
But then, of course, those who are good at universality flourish, and those who are bad at universality don't flourish.
I mean, they do flourish, but only as a shadow cast by those who are good at universality.
So the objective, which is largely the male, flourish, and the subjective, which is largely the female or matriarchal societies, do worse.
And then you get a counterattack.
And the counterattack is we're going to break down rational standards, which is going to unleash creativity, which is going to have everyone humming anti-rational songs and everyone enjoying anti-rational art.
And we're going to have naked people on stage to turn everyone on.
And that way, we will spread anti-rationality that way.
And then we're going to gain control of the government.
And then we're going to only fund anti-rational art.
And, you know, we need to launder a lot of money through art.
So we're going to buy a bunch of crap and have it valued and give it to charity and make our tax receipts that way.
And so there's a counterattack.
And that counterattack usually takes down the civilization as a whole, a civilization based on reason, universality, and a meritocracy, right?
A meritocracy is when people win according to objective rules.
The objective rules, like take something as simple as the objective rule of a hundred-meter race, right?
So everyone starts at the same place, they run as fast as they can, and it's objective.
Who crosses the finish line first, right?
So that's a meritocracy.
But a meritocracy doesn't benefit losers.
Losers want subjectivity and manipulation.
Losers want to whine and complain and say, well, I never got a chance to train, so I should be able to start 10 meters further ahead than the other guy, and so on, right?
And you can see these memes, like the white guy who has the clear path and then the black woman who's got to jump over barbed wire and the swinging axes and all this kind of stuff.
It's not fair, right?
So the society as the West is really founded upon a meritocracy cannot, the people who are bad, right?
Like if you're born poor and you become wealthy, then you tend to be conservative.
If you're born wealthy and end up poor, you tend to be a socialist or communist at the regression to the mean stuff.
And so the counterattack that comes out of society is losers.
And those who lose when there's a meritocracy, they then want to put their thumb on the scale and change things, right?
If the person who wins the 100-meter race gets $10,000, then people who are going to, they know they're going to lose the game means they want to change the rules and they want to make things subjective.
And when morality became closer to being objective, then it passed from the tools of the sophists, the propagandists, and the manipulators.
It passed out of their hands to the philosophers.
And this is why people hate UPB so much is that UPB takes away your ability to manipulate morality to gain resources by making morality absolute in its whims, to make morality absolute and it doesn't matter.
In fact, it's a feature, not a bug, when morality is anti-rational, because you can will it to benefit friends and punish enemies, and you're not restrained by any requirement for reversal, universality, or what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Or you're not, your moral rage, your moral destructiveness, your moral mob mentality is not subject to any restrictions of the requirements for rationality.
But then society starts to lose its mind, and it then gets overtaken.
The more superstitious societies, the more subjectivist and relativistic societies get taken over by the more rational and objective societies.
So, yeah, that's my sort of sprint through postmodernism.
In a nutshell, for more on this, you could look at my novel from 20 plus years ago called The God of Atheists, where I talk quite a bit about postmodernism.
And I think bring it to life in a pretty funny and engaging fashion.
You can get that at freedomain.com slash books.
So again, if you find these kinds of conversations, these kinds of insights helpful and useful, and I guarantee you you can't get them anywhere else, certainly not in as compact a formula, I really, really would appreciate your support at freedomain.com slash donate.
All right.
Lots of love, my friends.
I will talk to you soon.
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