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Dec. 3, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:51
How to Fight Bias!
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Hello, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
This is Stéphane Molyneux from Free Domain, the domain of freedom.
Freedom is the main thing.
Free domain, formerly radio, now TCPIP.
And I hope you're doing well.
Had a great question from a listener.
Do humans even have the ability to think and philosophize with absolutely zero anthropomorphic bias.
The more I discuss philosophy with AI, the more of my own anthropomorphic bias I find in my own arguments.
This can serve to invalidate or, at the very least, undermine much of our philosophical ideas.
So it's a great question to do with bias, of course.
How do we know if we are reasoning in good faith, or how do we know if we're biased?
Now, of course, the easy answer is, hey, just try and figure out whether you've committed a logical fallacy, right?
But, you know, we can't spend our entire lives examining everything we've said, or will say or do say, running it through some sort of perfect rational checker.
I mean, obviously, we strive for reason and we like to be corrected with regards to reason, but there's a bunch of stuff that you can do ahead of time that is going to be very helpful on figuring out your biases and other people's biases.
So I had a call the other day.
I did sort of a spot live stream and had a call with a young man.
He was 29, no job, no girlfriend, lived in his parents' basement, like, you know, really a bit of a sad situation.
And I said to him, are you willing to criticize your own parents?
And he said, no.
And that's fine, right?
I mean, obviously, it's all free will.
It's all a choice.
You don't have to do any of that if you don't really want to.
I'm not going to impose that.
You know, if somebody's overweight and you say, are you willing to diet and exercise?
And they say, no, then it's like, okay, well, then you're going to have to live with being overweight if you don't want to take, right?
If you refuse a treatment, you continue usually with the ailment, which is fine.
But obviously, it wasn't that young man who would be harmed in the long run by criticizing his parents.
It was his parents who would be harmed in the short run and maybe the long run, who knows, by being criticized, right?
So when a man is Bob, let's use Bob.
When Bob is examining his own ideas, what is true?
How do I know that what I believe or advocate for is true?
So there's a couple of things that I go through when I'm trying to evaluate what I know.
The first, of course, is, have I experienced it directly or have I just been told this?
That's a pretty important question, right?
Have I been told this or have I directly experienced this?
Now, of course, history, to a large degree, is what you're told.
I mean, there are eyewitness events and eyewitness testimonies and so on.
We can't go back and directly experience history.
So it is told, but, you know, there may be videos, there may be, you know, some contemporaneous events from people who don't have a dog in the fight, so to speak, who don't have a bias, or at least much of a bias.
So there's stuff that we can get from history.
I'm not sort of radical subjectivist or relativist or nihilist that way.
But all history has gone through the machinery of power.
So history is portrayed in a way that serves power, right?
So everyone who says, oh, well, without the government, there's no way we could resolve disputes and it would be a war of all against all and so on.
Nature red and tooth and claw.
Well, I mean, why is that allowed to be taught?
Well, because it serves people in power.
It serves the government.
It serves politicians, serves the powers that be.
And so most of what, and certainly through government schools and government-protected and sponsored universities, the reality, of course, is that everything that you are taught is allowed to be taught.
And we've seen how brutally, even in a relatively free expression environment like the internet, we've seen how brutally information that goes against the needs and preferences of those in power can be suppressed.
There's arrests, there's lawfare, there's deplatforming, de-banking, right?
You know, all of this, right?
So we've seen how brutally information that goes against the needs and preferences of those in power is suppressed.
And therefore, by definition, everything that remains is needed.
If you've ever seen someone make a dress, then they cut away the fabric that's not part of the pattern.
So everything they discard is not needed for the dress.
Everything they keep is needed for the dress.
If you've seen people, bakers, right, they make these pies, and then they'll trim around the outside of the pie to take off the excess crust.
Maybe they'll nibble on it, maybe they'll throw it away.
But everything that is not needed for the pie is discarded.
Therefore, everything that has remained, everything that remains is needed for the pie.
So that's a basic reality of the world.
So that which is allowed to be taught is helpful to those in power.
And everything that is inconvenient to those in power is suppressed, destroyed, removed, censored, and so on.
So what is the perspective of those in power for the information that I have received?
What is the perspective of those in power towards the information that I have received?
So it's sort of a well-known trope or kind of cliché that groups on the left are fiercely protected by those politicians.
It doesn't really happen.
So on the right, people are universalists.
So they don't tend to favor their own group.
On the left, people tend to be relativists, and they do favor their own group, their own groups, right?
So all the groups that are reliable voting blocs or sources for the left are protected.
And that is to say that the narrative around those people are always going to be promoted as positive.
Immigrants, you know, who vote for the left, always hardworking and hard done by and so on.
And all of the people who are not voting for the left, in general, like white males, those people are, you know, racists and bigots and Nazis.
They protect their own and they attack those who vote against them.
So because politics is sort of all-powerful, everything is so colored by politics because politicians and the government are so powerful that you have to ask, what is the perspective of what I think I know?
What is the perspective on that information by those in power?
Are they for it or are they against it?
Now that's sort of important, right?
So you'll see lots of movies, of course, coming out from Hollywood about Nazis and Nazism and so on.
And not about the evils of communism, because they tend to be a pro-socialist and communist and they tend to be anti.
They're pro-international socialism and they're anti-national socialism.
So, what is the perspective or preference of those in power?
And power doesn't just mean political power.
It could also be in control of the sort of major organs of propaganda dissemination.
I mean, if you read Pravda, which the Soviet newspaper meant truth, if you read Pravda, right, under the communist regime, you don't expect it to be objective because it's run and controlled by those in power.
So, it's going to tell you how great socialism is, how evil capitalism is, how great the workers are, how evil bourgeois landowners, and particularly the petit bourgeois are, and so on, the capital, evil capitalists.
So, you don't expect it to be.
It's advertising, right?
I mean, if you're evaluating whether Coca-Cola is a good thing and you watch a bunch of ads about Coca-Cola, you know that the ads are paid for to promote Coca-Cola as a fun, fizzy drink that makes people's clothes fly off and get abs, even though it's sugar water.
So, if you're talking to an advertising company that gets 90% of its revenues from Coca-Cola, it's not going to be neutral about Coca-Cola.
It's kind of bought and paid for.
If a particular institution is paid, controlled, protected, or shielded from significant competition by the state, well, then, of course, they're not going to be neutral.
They're going to be pro-socialist because they're a socialist entity, and they're going to be anti-capitalist because they don't want to be subject to the strictures of the free market.
It's kind of inevitable, right?
So, what is the source?
Is it compromised?
Is it controlled?
Who's paying the bills?
If you see an advertisement for a particular politician and it's sponsored by that politician, then you know it's not going to be objective.
It's going to be, you know, pro that politician, right?
And it's going to be an advertisement, right?
People who want dates don't put their ugliest pictures on Hinge or Bumble or Many Fish or whatever they're using.
Now, if, I mean, as the old saying goes, it's very hard to get a man to believe something or accept something when his paycheck requires that he neither believe nor accept it.
So, is it compromised by power?
Is it compromised by a paycheck?
Is it compromised by protection, right?
If you're being protected from the free market, are you going to be objective about the free market?
If you feel or believe you wouldn't survive in the free market, then you're going to be hostile to the free market.
If you get particular benefits, you know, like tenure and four months off of the summer, and every fifth or fourth year, you can go have a nice sabbatical someplace sunny and write a book that no one's going to read.
You only have to work 10, 15 hours a week, and you get paid $200,000 a year, like a university professor, right?
That's not free market wages, right?
And so, yeah, of course, you're going to be not objective about these things.
In fact, it's really hard to accept that anyone has access to the truth if they are compromised, right?
The CEO of a particular company, we accept and we understand that the CEO of any particular company is not going to be objective when reporting on or writing about that company, right?
I mean, we financial writers who hold stakes in particular companies, let's say they have a bunch of shares in Apple and they're writing about Apple's product launch.
Usually, sort of professional ethics would dictate or require that they have to say, oh, by the way, I have a lot of stock in Apple, all that kind of stuff, right?
So, is the person paid?
Does the person benefit from a powerful institution?
Are they shielded from competition?
Do they have job security?
You know, a lot of people in government positions get 30 to 50% more salary and benefits or more, and plus job security.
And so are they going to be able to write or talk about or objectively, right?
People in the educational system who are paid and protected by the state, right?
So but they're going to be interested in privatizing the educational system.
Well, probably not, right?
I mean, they may make noises that way, but they won't do it.
So that's the more obvious stuff.
Now, the less obvious stuff is what is the person's social environment?
So let's say that somebody is married to a woman who's like a super liberal, I mean, or super conservative, whatever.
Somebody's married to a woman who's a super liberal.
And most marriages, in most marriages, the women have a pretty significant say or sway, or sometimes even sort of dictate or dominate the social interactions, right?
They keep the social stuff alive.
And it's a good thing, but women tend to do that kind of stuff, keep the social life humming and so on.
And it's these sort of memes like your wife says, please don't get into politics at dinner.
Please don't get into politics at dinner, right?
Because she's taking the pulse of the social environment.
And if you start talking about politics at dinner, let's say you're going to dinner with a bunch of liberals and you're a conservative, then, you know, your wife is going to be like, please don't bring that.
Please don't bring that stuff up, right?
So what is your social environment?
Is your social environment dictating what you can or cannot talk about or discuss?
Well, for most people, yes.
Will you lose your job?
And so the job, the economic one is important, but sometimes even more important is, well, my boomer parents are super liberals, so I can't talk about any negative stuff.
I can't have opinions that go against the social or economic grain that I'm in, right?
Because if I do have those opinions, then I will lose my social life.
My wife might divorce me.
My kids are going to a super liberal college, right?
I mean, with Victor Davis Hansen, some of his kids married Hispanics, and there's some immediate family member for Charles Murray, who's an ethnic non-white and so on.
So can they be objective about immigration?
Maybe, maybe, but it's challenging.
But it's challenging with regards to their social life.
So these are all really important and challenging questions.
So most obvious political power, direct economic benefit, shielding and protection from free market and stuff like that.
That's pretty important.
Secondarily is the social life.
What are the consequences of coming out as a pro-Trump when you got a bunch of liberal hysterics around?
Or, you know, could be vice versa.
What if you were pro-Biden, a pro-Kamala Harris, and you had a bunch of sort of MAGA folks?
So can you be objective and honest about that kind of stuff?
So it's bribery and punishments, right?
Sticks and carrots, right?
So are you going to benefit from your perspective or are you going to be punished or viewed negatively for your perspective?
That's going to have a significant effect.
Now, another one that's interesting is: are you physically competent?
Are you physically competent?
So let's take an example of an old woman who desperately needs her kids to take care of her.
The old woman is pro-Trump, but her kids are pro-Democrat.
And she's just really dependent upon the kids taking care of her.
Can she be objective and honest about her political beliefs?
Let's say, to sort of reverse it, let's say that the old woman is a staunch liberal and she's very wealthy and one of her kids is pro-Trump and the old woman considers Trump the antichrist, right?
Trump is sort of the big measure of objectivity.
So her son is pro-Trump.
She herself is fanatically pro-liberal and she's got a lot of money.
Is he free to talk about his political arguments or perspectives if he's concerned that she's going to write him out of the will?
And maybe she openly says that.
Like, I'm not going to give a penny to any pro-MAGA, pro-Trump fascist, whatever, right?
I'd rather set fire to the money in the living room than give it to any kids who are pro-evil orange man Bad Trump, right?
So can he be honest?
Another thing, of course, is that has he built up an audience?
In other words, his sort of pay and income is not coming from necessarily the government directly, but has he built up an audience, audience capture, right?
Has he built up an audience that pays his bills, that only pays his bills because he has a particular argument or perspective?
So let's say he gets, I don't know, 10 grand a month from his audience because he's super liberal.
Can he reverse that at all?
Can he say, you know what?
I've looked into X, Y, and Z, and I've realized that Trump or the Conservatives have a point about this, that, and the other, right?
That's another thing.
It's pretty tough to reverse.
You've got to cross that desert, right?
It's funny because the left seems to welcome converts a lot more than the right does because the right is more suspicious of manipulation.
Baby, I've changed.
Because the left is female-coded, right?
So that's another issue you have to think about.
Of course, another issue you have to think about is guilt, is a bad conscience.
So, I mean, a typical example would be I am making the arguments against spanking and somebody has spent many, many years hitting their children.
Can that person be objective?
They cannot.
Because if it turns out that they're wrong, are they willing to publicly reverse their position?
I can think of very few instances in my life, and almost none in my public life where I have debated someone and that person has lost the debate.
And after losing the debate, they say, you make a great point.
I've actually moved over to your position and I have forsworn my former position and you're in the right.
And right?
That hasn't happened.
The other thing, too, is, has the person been a dickward?
Also important.
So I think about the people who have, I'm thinking sort of rationality rules was one of them or other people who have been publicly contemptuous and scornful of me.
John Balfour is another professor who has been sort of very publicly scornful of me.
And then he calls in after I got through his hysterical ad hominems.
We had a pretty productive conversation about UPB.
And he seemed to accept a few things about UPB in the moment, but of course, you have to wait, right?
You have to wait for quite some time to find out if somebody's actually changed their mind, or if that person is simply sort of stunned in the moment, and that's happened quite a bit, or someone's stunned at the moment, and they're like, Yeah, I can't argue against that.
But then their ex post facto self-justifications kick in, and they end up going back to their former position.
And just exactly what happened to John Balfour, that he sort of went back to taking these snarky smarmy shots at me and all of that kind of stuff, right?
And it's like, okay, well, so does the person have a bad conscience?
So if, and this is why it's almost impossible to debate in good faith with people who've been, you know, petty, vicious, and insulting to you in public.
Because it takes an enormously big-hearted person with a great degree and commitment to integrity, great degree of, and commitment to integrity.
If you've publicly called someone a fool, an idiot, and a moron, then how do you walk that back?
How?
Like, that's why people who come on punchy don't change their mind.
You can't get any objective information about someone.
If they've called you, you know, an absolute moron, an opposer, and a sophist, like whatever nonsense people say, right?
They can't admit that they're wrong.
To publicly apologize and retract is so rare, it's ridiculous.
I mean, I tell you this from great personal experience.
I'm 10 to 15 to 20 years ahead of the curve in general, which is kind of annoying.
It's really no benefit, right?
But I'm sort of five, sorry, 10, 15, 20 years ahead of the curve.
And how many people do you see who slagged me?
How many people do you see turning around, coming back and saying, oh, you know, I really thought you were crazy.
I thought you were bad.
I thought you were wrong.
Blah, And I'm sorry.
And you've made really good points.
And I shouldn't have blah, Like all that kind of stuff, right?
Well, people don't do it.
They don't do it.
They don't do it.
So you can't get any objectivity from people who've been insulting and petty and so on, right?
Now, another way in which people's subjectivity is proven is: does their perspective give them the view that they're a good person?
I mean, this is particularly true with sort of the refugees and so on, like they're just looking for a better life.
I'm a good person, people say, with regards to this topic.
They say, I'm a good person because I support the right of the downtrodden to come to the West and seek a better life and, you know, all of this sort of stuff that people talk about.
So they believe, deeply believe, that they are good people for wanting that.
And that if you question or oppose that, you are a bad person.
So if people say, well, I'm happy to pay the government to feed hungry children.
Let's just take that typical example from the left, right?
So they say, I'm really happy.
I'm thrilled that the government is taking my tax money and using it to feed the hungry, to give health care to the sick, to house the homeless and clothe the shivering and naked and blah, blah, blah, right?
Yeah, I'm happy.
I have compassion.
I care.
I don't want people to be sick.
I don't want children to starve.
I don't want people to be cold.
I don't want any of this terrible stuff to happen.
I'm a good person because I want the government to do this and I'm happy that the government does this.
I have more than enough.
And if the government takes a bunch of my income and uses it to, you know, help and house and heal and feed, then that's a good thing.
I'm a good person.
You know, the sort of typical example.
I like the children of poor people to be educated.
So I'm super happy to pay for the government to have public schools.
It's better for society.
It's good for society.
I don't want a bunch of uneducated people running around, blah, blah, blah.
So if the person genuinely believes that he's his perspective, or often her perspective, makes her a good person, and their moral ego and identity is wrapped up in this perspective is the good, nice perspective.
And anyone who opposes this good, nice perspective is a bad, mean, selfish person who wants the poor children to starve and the sick to die in the streets and the homeless to shiver over subway grates in sub-zero temperatures, like all of the sort of stuff.
Like, well, then you can't get anything objective because the ego has now been bound and wrapped up into the virtue of the position.
And personally, it's very rare.
I mean, I guess Dr. Thomas Sowell talks about having started out as a Marxist and becoming a free market guy over time.
And of course, I've talked about I started off as a socialist and so on.
But it was not heavily invested, nor was it a fundamentally public position.
I wasn't, I mean, I was a socialist when I was like 12.
I suppose it was about 15 when I became a capitalist.
So I didn't have a sort of big career out of it.
Obviously, I had no career out of it.
I didn't have the sort of big, big positions or anything like that, public positions.
So the way that I view people as a whole is there are so many forces that keep people boxed into an ideological position that it's barely worth debating with anybody because all people do is get upset and offended.
In other words, we're social animals and the price of social life is conformity for the most part, right?
The price of social life is conformity.
So why would people want to repeat stuff that's false?
Because that's the price of having a social life.
That's the price of having a tribe.
A tribe is people bound together by their delusions masquerading as truth and virtue, right?
Their delusions and conformity masquerading as truth and virtue.
And that's the price.
Now, we can only survive with the support, or at least how we evolved, is we can only survive with the support of others.
And the price of that support from others is almost inevitably believing things that are false.
That is just the way it goes, man.
It's the way it pleases, man.
Do it please, man.
But people don't like to know this about themselves.
People don't like to think, gee, if I think that there's anything positive that Donald Trump did, then my friends will all call me a MAGA Nazi and dump me.
And then I've got to go and try and figure out how to make friends with these MAGA people.
And I disagree with other things.
So people don't want to say, I don't have beliefs.
I give up my integrity in return for social capital, right?
Social reciprocity, for social goodness, for having someplace to go Friday, Saturday night, for having people who call me up and ask me how I'm doing and maybe bring me some chicken soup if I'm sick.
I give up my integrity, my honor, my free will, and my virtue for the sake of social approval.
And social approval sounds like some, you know, I mean, it takes Ayn Rand to think that social approval is in general a bad thing.
It's just a survival thing, right?
We could not always take care of our own children.
We could not guard ourselves at night.
We could not provide everything that we needed in order to survive.
And so therefore, we had to have people who approved of us.
And if people disapproved of us, we could not survive.
So we had to surrender our free will and our autonomy and so on in order to survive.
And that's how we lived.
That's how we got to where we are.
I mean, we have these giant complex brains, of course.
And the giant complex brains are social constructs.
We need each other in order to maintain the size of our brains.
Or to put it another way, our brains are both primed for truth and for delusion.
They're primed for truth in order to survive in the world, and they are primed for delusion in order to survive within society.
So people don't have beliefs.
They have conformities and subjugations masquerading as independence, integrity, and virtue.
And that's really all that's going.
You're not talking to people who've thought things through.
You're not talking to people who've got reason and evidence.
You're talking to people who have two perspectives.
Hello?
I'm just home soon.
Do you need anything from out here?
I'm very happy to go get a Tim's for you, Dev.
Oh, there's no single serve here, is there?
Oh, a Tim's.
I mean, it'll be a few extra minutes, but I'm happy to go get it.
You're welcome.
Do you want anything else from Tim's?
Okay, I will get Tim's.
You sure you don't want a donut or anything?
For later?
Tomorrow?
No, I'll get a fresh one tomorrow.
Okay.
All right.
I love you.
Bye.
So, with regards to objectivity, if you want to achieve objectivity, you have to be willing to surrender everything.
You have to be willing.
It doesn't mean you have to, but you have to be willing to do it.
You have to be willing to surrender money, fame, audience.
You have to be willing to surrender relationships.
You have to be willing to surrender family.
You have to be willing to surrender your ego.
You have to be willing to surrender your credibility with people because, you know, once you have a big reversal of position, people can always say, oh, just like you were certain of things before, but you're not certain of them now, right?
Oh, you were certain of this before.
Now you've changed your mind.
Why should I believe you want anything, right?
So people will do that in order to herd you back.
And people's fear of that is what herds them back into this sort of conformity and so on.
So you have to be willing to burn things down, to let everyone and everything go in order to get to the truth.
Sorry, one thing I started on and then I drifted away from was physical competency.
So I look for people who exercise.
And you don't have to be some big bulky guy.
Lord knows I'm not.
But you do have to have physical competence.
I look for people who've done physical labor.
I look for people who have played sports, particularly social sports, particularly social and competitive sports.
I look for all of those people.
And I certainly do look for physical strength.
It's an old meme, but a true one, that if you are physically weak, you are primed for consensus.
You're not primed for independent thought.
So it is these things that I look for with the recognition that very few people are willing to burn down their entire social sphere and their, you know, harm their educational, economic, political, perhaps, and career opportunities.
That very few people are willing to do that or willing to risk that, I suppose.
And I'm not even complaining about that.
I'm not saying, oh, it's terrible and everybody should, you know, burn down all of their social relationships in order to get to the truth.
I don't know.
That's sort of like saying that every cell in your body should mutate at once.
It's like, no, I don't.
I don't necessarily think that that's a great thing if everybody just burnt down all their social.
Well, of course, if everyone did it, then everyone's social arrangements would reform almost instantly because people would get to the truth and they would then be able to enjoy and enhance that truth within their personal relationships.
But people as a whole just conform and they bork, they comply.
They line up like a bunch of Roman soldiers, right?
I'm not complaining about that.
I'm simply pointing it out as a fact.
And it stings their vanity when people think that they're good and they think.
When they're not good and they don't think, they just comply and conform and praise themselves as virtuous.
People's egos really, really can't handle the presence of actual virtue.
You know, it's like the sort of small-town pompous know-it-all when somebody really knowledgeable comes along.
They get touchy, they get annoyed, right?
So all of that sort of bundled together tells you that very, very few people are going to be willing to pursue the truth no matter what.
And because of that rarity, now you can find each other more through the internet than before, but because of that rarity, most people don't like coming in contact with those actually in pursuit of the truth because their own unthinking conformity masquerading as independence and truth, their own unthinking conformity is revealed by the presence of actual thought.
The sort of salieri thing, right?
The people who think they can almost always automatically resent those who actually can.
The people who praise themselves are humbled and therefore angered by people who, through their actual humility, do real good in the world.
The sophists are annoyed by the philosophers.
That's sort of natural.
And of course, the point is to plant the seeds of people getting along and doing well and thinking clearly and being rational to plant those seeds, particularly in family and social life, which is why I focus on the family, not just on sort of abstract philosophy, so that there can be a group or a community of people who can begin to truly create the first social group.
Conformity and self-subjugation is not a good social group.
It's not a final productive social group.
And it's certainly not honest or honorable.
So through this conversation, through what we're doing here, the truth has finally been arrived at in terms of ethics in particular.
So people can actually have a social life that is bound up with actual truth, reason, reality, objectivity, and virtue.
So we can have a human community of deep individualism and rationality for the first time really in human history.
And that's a wonderful thing.
It's a new world.
It's a new world.
So, those are sort of my thoughts on objectivity and the barriers to it.
If you have thoughts, you disagree, of course, yeah, please feel free to feel free to spark up my thought with opposition.
And I really appreciate that kind of pushback.
And freedomay.com/slash the nate to help out the show.
Lots of love from up here, my friends.
I'll talk to you soon.
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