Chapters
0:00:00 Introduction
0:07:51 The Problem of Poverty
0:10:14 Ambiguity in Charity
0:10:27 Challenges with the Aged
0:13:24 Facing Ambiguity Everywhere
0:15:03 Dealing with Ambiguity Through Brutal Absolutism
0:18:20 Religion’s Absolutist Solution to Ambiguity
0:22:23 Ambiguity in Public Education
0:29:33 Increasing Ambiguity in Poverty
0:35:06 Recognizing Ambiguity and Seeking Solutions
0:39:06 Questioning the Use of Violence
0:41:45 Uncovering Hypocrisy and Ambiguity in Culture
0:43:40 The Power of Ambivalence in Society
In this episode, we delved into the intricate concept of ambivalence, particularly in relation to poverty and the MECO system. I discussed how poverty exists within a larger circle of dysfunction, showcasing the complex interplay between choices and circumstances leading to poverty. I used the analogy of rehabilitation for accident victims to illustrate the ambiguity surrounding poverty and individual choices.
Furthermore, I explored how societal attitudes towards poverty can be ambivalent due to the difficulty in distinguishing between those who are involuntarily poor and those who make decisions to remain in poverty. The discussion then expanded to include the impact of welfare programs and charity, highlighting the unintended consequences of incentivizing certain behaviors through aid.
The conversation shifted towards addressing ambiguity in various aspects of life, such as aging, education, and parenting. I emphasized the challenge of navigating truth versus cultural acceptance, particularly in the context of public education and societal transitions. The episode touched on the discomfort individuals face when confronting ambiguity, especially in decision-making and moral complexities.
Moreover, I questioned the widespread use of violence as a solution despite society’s moral stance against it. This contradiction led to a critical examination of societal norms, hypocrisy, and manipulation, urging listeners to confront the uncomfortable truths and complexities within the culture.
Ultimately, the episode underscored the importance of recognizing and addressing ambiguity, delving into the deeper layers of societal constructs, individual choices, and the underlying motivations driving human behavior. The exploration of ambivalence and its implications for personal growth and societal change offered a thought-provoking journey through the complexities of human existence.
complexity, ambivalence, poverty, MECO system, individual choices, circumstances, societal ambiguity, welfare programs, charity, societal norms, discomfort, decision-making, contradictions, violence, uncomfortable truths, culture, growth
[0:00] Hi everybody, it’s Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Man Radio, but of course you know that.
My lovely, talented, brilliant, and sexy donators.
I’m sorry this has taken a little bit of time to get to Ambivalence Part 2.
I’ve just, I’ve been really torn about this podcast. Oh!
He made another ambivalence joke, didn’t he? Well, let us keep moving on from that roadkill humor and talk a little bit more about this question of ambivalence, which for me is heavily enmeshed in or a source of this question of the MECO system.
[0:38] So let’s go into a little bit more detail. I touched on this briefly about something like ambivalence with the poor and how statism helps us nuke that ambivalence.
It sells us relief from ambivalence and complexity by giving us violence as the solution to the problem of the poor. poor.
So to go into things in a little bit more detail, when we look at somebody who’s poor, or we look at the poor as a category, as I mentioned last time, we can clearly see that almost everyone who ends up poor comes from a problematic or dysfunctional household.
But not everyone from a problematic or dysfunctional household ends up poor, or unless they’re philosophers.
But what we can say is that poverty exists as a small or smaller circle within a larger circle called dysfunction.
[1:33] And maybe there’s a little bit of overlap and so on. And we’re not talking about sort of the mental illness thing, but just in terms of the habits that people learn or generate when they come from dysfunctional households tends to contribute to a lack of income.
Now, of course, some people who come come from dysfunctional households, end up enormously rich, though not necessarily happy or stable in their relationships and so on. The Klaus von Bülow stuff.
So here, because we have a larger circle of dysfunction, which largely or mostly overlaps a smaller circle called poverty, we have an ambiguous relationship or an ambivalent relationship to the question of poverty.
So, for instance, we don’t know to what degree somebody’s choices have contributed to their experience or their categorization, objectively, of being poor.
So to analogize this to some degree, let’s say that thousands and thousands of people a month get injured in accidents.
[2:43] Now, some of those people who get injured in accidents pursue physical rehabilitation and learn to walk again and get out of their wheelchairs.
Other people do not pursue rehabilitation, even though they could, and they would end up being able to walk and be out of their wheelchairs if they pursued rehabilitation.
And other people do not pursue rehabilitation because their injuries are so great that they it would do them no good, or that seems to be the evidence.
Other people, of course, pursue rehabilitation, and it does not work for them, right? So, there’s injuries.
There’s four categories, right? People who pursue rehabilitation and it works, they end up walking.
People who, if they had pursued rehabilitation, would have ended up walking, but they don’t.
People who do not pursue rehabilitation because it won’t end up with them walking, and people who pursue rehabilitation but don’t end up being able to walk.
[3:43] Now, 20 years after these accidents, it is actually impossible to tell the people apart who are still in wheelchairs.
I mean, maybe there’s some people who, no matter if they’d taken all the rehabilitation in the world, they never would have gotten out of the wheelchair because maybe their spines were severed or their legs were cut off or something like that.
So they’re in a wheelchair.
God hates amputees and won’t regrow them on prayer. So we know for sure that those people would not ever have ended up not being in a wheelchair. chair.
But the people who tried or who could have benefited from rehab but chose not to pursue it because they didn’t feel like it, they wanted to go drinking, it was kind of painful, they just didn’t feel like it, those people are indistinguishable 20 years later from the people, who simply could not have benefited from rehab.
You know, their legs have atrophied, their ligaments have contracted, and no amount of rehab is going to help them now, right?
Functionally or practically, no amount of rehab is going to help them now.
So the problem that we have with poverty is that fundamentally we cannot tell this group apart, right?
So the people who simply rehab won’t help, those are people who have sort of mental illnesses and schizophrenia or something and they just roam the streets and you can’t, unless you’re going to cage them up or whatever, right? You can’t help them not be poor.
[5:11] And those people at rehab won’t help or won’t work, right?
[5:16] However, it certainly does seem to be possible, to say the least, that you can produce somebody, that somebody can turn themselves into somebody who’s unable to be helped simply by avoiding help for long enough, right?
Now, it’s the old thing that by the time you get terminal lung cancer, quitting smoking doesn’t help.
So this is a real challenge when it comes to examining the nature and the question of poverty.
That the, quote, fake poor, or the poor who are their own, like the writers of their own destiny, the poor who made themselves poor through their choices, with all the sympathy for having been injured by dysfunctional families in the beginning, the poor who made or kept themselves poor through their own choices, who had an alternative, that all remains trapped or ensconced in some alternate universe where the what-if-what-if could play out, right?
There is is no control group called my life if i’d made different decisions i mean there’s a theory and so on so because we can’t distinguish the people who were in wheelchairs all right we got let’s say we got a thousand people in wheelchairs and 200 of them are there um because they could have taken rehab but they decided not to they took the easy route they avoided it whatever right well we’ll because those 200 are now completely medically indistinguishable from those who were there involuntarily, had no chance for rehab, and so on, we have ambivalence towards the poor because we just can’t tell.
[6:43] And, of course, if arms are being given out, A-L-M-S, are being given out to the poor, then clearly more arms or more consistent arms or charity is going to be handed out to those who are poor involuntarily.
[7:01] So, to the people who wish to remain poor because charity is being given out, those people are going to increase, as we well know, right?
If you subsidize the poor, you buy, shockingly, lots more poor people.
So, those people who could make it out of poverty may not make it out of poverty or may choose not to make it out of poverty.
And this is the sort of the argument that’s in, I can’t remember the book, Charles Murray book that I reviewed on FDR some time back.
Those people, they have a strong incentive to camouflage themselves as the deserving poor, right?
The undeserving poor, the people who pour through their own choices, bad mistakes, and so on. They have a desire to portray themselves as the deserving poor. poor.
[7:52] And so we have this ambivalence in that we really want to help the poor, but we don’t want to encourage the bad decisions that helping the poor tends to engender, right?
It’s really complex, it’s really messy. But poof, you get the welfare state.
[8:07] And you get this, you know, amazing, horrible, ghastly, monstrous, violent and destructive solution to this problem of the poor.
Poor. We don’t actually have to think about the poor.
We don’t have to deal with the problems of the poor. We don’t have to worry about the ambivalence of the poor who manipulate poverty in order to avoid the just rewards of their own bad decisions.
So we’ve just wiped all of this clean. And the same thing, of course, and I won’t go into this in more detail, right, but we can see this with just about everything that the government touches.
It touches because it gives us, or it does more than touch. It grabs by the throat because it is able to give us relief from ambivalence.
In the same way, we can see that people who end up with health problems because they eat too much and they end up overweight, those people…
[9:00] We have ambivalence towards, right? I mean, if everybody who ends up overweight gets free diet coaching and all their insulin will be paid for if they develop diabetes and so on, it’s the same problem that we have with cigarette smokers, right?
That people who end up developing illness because they have made bad choices and smoked cigarettes or they haven’t exercised or they’ve eaten badly or whatever, those people we have an ambivalent relationship with compared to people who get struck ill out of the blue, right?
Those people who have decided to save money by not getting insurance or by not eating well and exercising or whatever.
Those people we have an ambivalent relationship with.
Nobody likes to see anybody who is sick suffer, but a lot of people make decisions that will end up in a pretty straight line with them getting sick in one form or another or to one degree or another.
So all of these problems or challenges result in a a fairly significant degree of ambiguity.
And that, of course, is the great challenge of charity, right?
It’s finding a way that we can help people without provoking the very things that we’re trying to help them to solve or we’re trying to help prevent.
[10:14] Losing ground. That’s the Charles Murray book. He goes into a great example of what happens if you try to pay people to stop smoking, right?
You end up with more smokers.
So that’s the kind of stuff that we have a problem with in terms of ambiguity as a culture, as a society.
[10:28] And let’s take a look at another example that, in many ways, is closer to our hearts than even the poor, unless our aged relatives tend to be poor. And that is the aged, right? The old.
[10:43] Particularly in a time when society is in a decline, as we can see with the expansion of state power and the problems that we have in terms of belief in ethics and the increased insanity of Christian cults, particularly in the US and so on, we have inherited a world that in many ways is declining.
Whining, and this gives us a great degree of ambiguity with regards to the aged, right?
So, when people get old, they need a lot of resources from those around them.
In other words, they need a lot of resources from the young, medically and in other ways as well, and in terms of income, or if they get too old to work.
And by the time that people’s mistakes have become become irrevocable, they are almost inevitably drawn to play upon our guilt and sympathy.
And it is hard, if you are a caring human being at all, it’s hard to avoid the reality of feeling guilt and sympathy for people, right?
Even if they have brought their disasters upon themselves, it’s hard to avoid the feelings of guilt and sympathy for them.
[12:05] I can certainly say that even for my own mother, who brought, I mean, she obviously was one of these people born in the war and so on, and brought a lot of the disasters of her life on herself.
But nonetheless, still brought a lot of the disasters of her life upon herself, that even though she caused me to suffer more than just about any other human being, I still feel a certain amount of sympathy for the life that she has ended up with, which is what I would scarcely call a life at all.
And in the same way, the people who are old, and we will face this within our lifetimes, of that I have no doubt, but the people who are old at the moment, who are the baby boomers and so on, did precious little to avoid the fate that they will end up facing, which is the increased need to prey upon the young because they have not fought the power of government but instead were bought off through government, right? So they’re going to face this fate.
But at the same time, little old ladies living on cat food is not anybody’s idea of a pleasant spectacle, unless you’re just a mad sadist, which you’re not listening to this, right?
[13:24] So these are just some of the challenges that we face in terms of ambiguity.
We can see the same thing.
Sorry, not to labor the point, but I just want to sort of make the issue.
We face this with our own parents personally, right?
When they get old and they no longer have power over us, or when we get away from them, they suddenly turn to different kinds of power mongers, right? right?
They start to use, and this actually, this occurs often in our teens, right?
But they start to use less violence or physical control and they start to use more guilt and manipulation.
And we can see the same thing in people who, you know, irresponsibly indulge in things like sex and, you know, maybe they get pregnant and so on.
And we have great sympathy for the kid, obviously, and we have some sympathy for the single mom.
Let’s say she gets pregnant with a the guy who doesn’t stick around but the problem is that the more sympathy we have for this kind of stuff the more we will fund and fuel it and create it as an optional lifestyle that people will then pursue voluntarily which they wouldn’t have done otherwise i mean that statistically is pretty easy to see being borne out in the inevitable progressions to the demise of the welfare state, Historically, there was a movement called Spenumland that went through exactly the same thing in England, 18th century, I think.
[14:41] So, this ambivalence we have is really, really a tough thing to work with.
And the government, of course, will whip up a tasty little bloody souffle that we can eat to deal with the problems of this, to deal with the problems of ambiguity.
It doesn’t actually solve the problems of ambiguity, of course.
It just masks them with absolutism, right?
[15:03] And we, of course, can see this in the my country, right or wrong people, right? The love it or leave it people.
It tends to be idiots that are drawn towards brutal solutions to the problem of ambiguity, right? right?
Like the parents who snarl, you know, do as I say, not as I do.
And the my country, right or wrong people and the support our troops no matter what they do people and, you know, people who just look for simple, brutal, moral answers to complex and challenging questions, right?
Why should you do it? Because I pay the bills around here, Sonny.
And when you live under my house, you live by my rules and blah, blah, blah, right? Right.
These are all very sad and pitiful attempts to bypass or deal with the problem of ambiguity through brutal absolutism.
And really, brutal absolutism is the only way that you can really effectively deal with the problem of ambiguity, other than reasoning through it and going through all of the challenges that that entails.
[16:02] Now, once we begin to understand the pervasive nature of ambiguity, which for a lot of people, of course, sits very firmly around the question of children, right?
How to discipline children. We want children to do things that are, we want children to obey us, and we want children to do things that are sort of, quote, good for them, and so on.
But most people won’t deal with the ambiguity that they feel, both the love for their children and the anger that they feel towards their children when they disobey.
They will just either suppress that anger and become wildly permissive, thus harming the children, or they surrender to that anger and become abusive and controlling.
Or, as is more common, as certainly was the case in my family, they veer between those two extremes, which is wildly unpleasant and confusing for the child.
[16:53] So once you start to look at this question or this problem of ambiguity, it becomes almost impossible not to see it just about everywhere you look.
And this, of course, is the great temptation of violence in the world.
And by violence, I also mean like breaking a kid down through verbal abuse and, you know, that kind of stuff, all the stuff that supernanny ends up having to deal with in these crazy-ass dysfunctional households, right? Right.
But that, of course, is is one of the great, great draws of religion as well.
Right. As I mentioned before, that in the world of in the universe called religion.
[17:32] You have this situation where ambiguity is dismissed through the will of God. Right.
Because the Bible is one of these perfect funhouse mirrors, kaleidoscopic end of the dragon kind of scenarios where you can find whatever it is that you’re looking for.
[17:50] In terms of allowing you to have your moral absolutes. And so you deal with the problem of ambiguity in the realm of the Bible just by creating this world, or I guess picking and choosing this world, wherein you can just find the absolutist answers to moral problems.
You don’t have to deal with any complexities. complexities, you barely have to deal with any doubts, and so on.
[18:21] You just have to look it up in the Bible, and that is the answer to all the moral complexities and ambiguities that you could possibly have.
You get to wish them all away.
You know, it’s just, just look it up, right?
Or just ask the priest, or, you know, just go for the, you know, ask the Pope, or whatever.
[18:40] So, power is in many ways the opposite of ambiguity, in the way that religion is the opposite of science, and the state is the opposite of virtue, or the opposite of what would be called society, and parental authority is the opposite of coaching or instruction.
Now, there’s another, I think, aspect to the question of ambiguity that’s what we’re talking about here as well.
Everywhere where you can see significant expansions in state power, you can see people’s discomfort with ambiguity.
[19:21] So, for instance, if we look at the realm of public education, we can see that the question of how children should be educated Educated is an enormously complex and ambiguous situation.
How should children be educated?
[19:41] And the reason that this is an enormously complex and ambivalent situation to look at is because when we look at the education of children, we have the conflict between truth and culture.
So, what I mean by that is, it is true that rationalism, empiricism, individualism, and so on is true.
However, the problem becomes, and we can see all of this very often or regularly and repetitively played out in the free domain radio boards and the conversations.
I see this in my inbox all the time, where people say, well, you bald bastard.
I’ve now listened to free domain radio for six months, and I get it. I’m an atheist.
I’m a rationalist. I’m down with the UPB and DROs and a voluntary society and so on.
And now I’m completely alienated from my society, right?
I live in Birmingham, Alabama, or some damn place, where education in the truth means alienation from those around you, because there’s such a staggering degree of illusion and falsehood in society.
[21:10] And this, of course, is the primary ambivalence here, is in the realm of parents.
Now, parents, as we know, tell an enormous amount of untruths to their children, right?
While at the same time saying to their children, you should really value a little thing we call honesty, right?
Or, as we know from the sort of RTR experience, those who’ve gone through it, parents tell us to tell the truth, and they also say that they’re interested in what we think and feel.
But the reality is that when we say what we think and feel and our parents find it inconvenient, they get angry at us and basically punish us through threats of withdrawal or fogging or whatever defenses they come up with.
So parents have a real challenge when it comes to education and think particularly about.
Terms of science, right? I don’t think it’s any particular accident that public education arose pretty much solidly throughout the Western world fairly shortly after the theory of evolution came cooking along.
If I remember rightly, theory of evolution was the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s was.
[22:23] The inculcation of public schools, the creation of public schools throughout most of the Western them well.
And of course, this had a lot to do with the fact or you could say the reality or the problem or the challenge, which was simply this.
Parents want their children to succeed socially and know the truth intellectually.
And parents feel deeply anxious and ambivalent when those two things do not coincide.
So I’ll just, you get it, I’ll just touch on it very very briefly, because I’m sure you understand it.
So, parents want their children to know the truth about the world.
I mean, if a parent, sorry, if a teacher starts teaching that north is south, 2 plus 2 is 5, east is west, up is down, black is white, America is called Scandinavia, and so on, the parents would be rightly upset, and would pull their kids, right?
Because they’d say, well, we want our kids to know the truth, not things that are not true. Right?
[23:29] Unfortunately, the problem then arises that when there is a sea change in human knowledge, and the theory of evolution was one of the biggest, when there is a sea change in human knowledge, what happens is the parents are then ambivalent.
They want their children to know the truth, but the truth that their children will end up knowing is directly against the parents’ interest and comfort and so on. It’s like, why would I pay for my children to be taught that, which is offensive to me, right?
So, there then ends up being this enormous ambivalence on the part of the parents, and they get very angry, and they get very upset, and they get very tense.
So they say, well, I don’t want to pay the teachers to teach my kid evolution, but at the same time, evolution seems to be sort of true.
Right. So what are they going to do? They also don’t know which way things are going to go socially, right? I mean, for the future.
All right, so I’m some kid in 1860, I’m some parent in 1860, and evolution is coming out, and a sort of new scientific understanding is coming out.
I don’t know which way society’s going to go.
If society ends up going the rational route, and I teach my kid about religion, my kid is going to be…
[24:54] Mocked and is going to be out of step and is, you know, I’m going to have to apologize to my kid later on and retrain him and eat all of that, right?
And I’m going to have to, and I’m going to be paying for my kid to learn stuff that is going to be socially disadvantageous, i.e.
To learn religious concepts when it turns out that society is going to head in this non-religious or anti-religious direction, right?
So that’s one possibility. Of course, the other possibility is in some ways even worse, which is, let’s say, that as a parent in 1860, I make the gamble that society is going to go the religious direction, right? right?
Sorry, it’s going to go the rational direction. No, it’s going to go the religious.
Sorry, I make the bet that society is going to go the religious direction.
[25:53] And so I train my kid on religion. Turns out that science wins the day he’s out of step.
If I go the opposite and I assume that science is going to win, so I train my kid on science. Turns out that religion wins.
Then my kid is out of step and he’s going to be rejected by his peers and so on, right?
And even more fundamentally for the parents, the ambiguity is not just around these sort of, quote, rational calculus of how to most successfully position my kid to succeed socially.
That’s not the primary thing that I’m talking about here. Here, the primary thing that I’m talking about here is more of a challenge, right?
Which is that parents don’t…
[26:40] Parents like to believe, and they certainly tell their children, and I’m sure they tell themselves as well, that they are teaching their children that which is true, right? right?
They don’t say to their kids, well, what I’m doing, you see, is I’m teaching you that which is socially advantageous, right?
Because then there is no possibility that they will be able to resist problems that their children may have in terms of peer pressure, right?
Because if the parents are revealed as just pretending that things are true in order to make things more socially convenient, then they lose a pretty core authority with their children and a pretty, inflated but still compelling view of their own motives and their own desire for the truth and adherence to the truth right I mean, no parent no Muslim parent says to their kids well I’m sending you to religious schools to the imam or whatever because I mean it’s not true but none of it’s true but, you have to get along in the Muslim world so you gotta pretend that it’s true.
[27:50] As we pretend that it’s true so that we can get along and get ahead in a Muslim world.
Right? I mean, parents just wouldn’t say that because they’d have no authority with their children.
They’d be revealed as conformist cowards and so on. So parents say, by God, what we’re going to teach you is true.
It is true. It is true. It is true.
[28:12] And then when what is comfortable socially is no longer what is accepted intellectually as true, or there’s a risk or a danger that it could go either way, parents.
This is all sort of revealed to, in, among, between, throughout the parents, and they get very anxious.
So then, when someone comes along and says, hey, you don’t have to worry about any of this shit, because we’re going to put public schools and everyone’s going to learn the same goddamn thing from top to bottom, back to front, across the whole country, right?
We’re going to have a standardized curriculum. curriculum well then of course all the problems that the parents are facing truth versus cultural acceptance go away right they now know hey i can send my kids to a public school and they’re not going to teach evolution and therefore i am going to be sure that i my kids are going to learn stuff which is not going to end up ostracizing them during a time of transition now of course i don’t have any proof of this, and I’m not sure that any such thing could even be considered to exist. But.
[29:24] It’s true. It seems like a compelling thesis, and I’m certainly open or interested in ways in which we could figure out whether this is true or not.
[29:34] But it’s worth, I think, looking at from this standpoint, just on a mildly related note, I would also say that when it comes to transition points like this as well, it certainly could be the case that as poverty becomes clearly more and more voluntary, that people’s ambiguity tends to increase with regards to poverty, right?
In other words, when most of the poor are poor involuntarily, then there’s less ambiguity.
When more poor become voluntarily poor, there’s more ambiguity.
And so it’s interesting to note, and there’s lots of other reasons for this, but it’s just interesting to note by the by that the welfare state, modern welfare state, Johnson’s Great Society programs were put in place at a time when poverty was decreasing by about a percentage point a year, which meant that those who remained in poverty were less likely to be those who had no chance to get out of poverty, right?
Because when fewer and fewer people become poor, then it seems likely that those who remain poor are remaining so out of choice.
[30:51] So again, ambiguity began to increase and we ended up with a very large government program.
So it’s just a way of looking at this. Again, I’m not going to say this is the sole reason.
I think particularly in the case of public schools, though, I think it’s quite an interesting phenomenon to think about, right, the degree to which the government imposes programs to relieve people of deep ambiguity that they feel with regards to particular situations, that it is selling them a relief from complexity rather than a solution to a problem, relief from contradictory feelings.
Now, the interesting thing, of course, is that you could then naturally ask the question and say, well, when we think of the my country, right or wrong people, we think of them as, you know, frankly, kind of stupid, right?
You know, there aren’t very many, say, professors of political science who are very big on the proposition, my country, right or wrong.
Those people tend not to be very big that way.
They would tend to look upon that as a fairly primitive form or approach to the question of government or patriotism.
[32:02] Say, and this may be part of the reason why democracy is always considered to devolve into this kind of nonsense, but you could very easily say, look, most people are pretty stupid, right? Or at least, let’s just say average.
And the ability to process ambiguity requires a fair amount of intelligence.
So what you’re basically saying is if everyone has a PhD in physics, then society will run really well.
And I can certainly understand that as a thesis. I have obviously some problems with it because we don’t know if an inability to process ambiguity is itself subject to the law of ambiguity, right?
And what I mean by that is that we don’t know, whether or not people who can’t process ambiguity are doing so because they’re stupid or they’re stupid because they refuse to process ambiguity and take the easy route out of imagining or or making up absolutes, right?
In other words, sorry to put it one more way, it’s a complex thought, at least that it’s for me.
Maybe it’s clear for you, but let’s say that it’s as complex as for you as it is for me.
So we don’t know if somebody’s poor because they’ve made bad choices or because they had no other choice.
In the same way, we don’t know if somebody ends up not being able to process ambiguity because they avoid the discomfort of processing ambiguity and take Take refuge in simplistic absolutes like state, flag, government, God, family equals good, all that kind of stuff.
[33:31] Know if they have the process to get to the ability to process ambiguity to take the easy way out or whether they genuinely do not have the ability to process ambiguity so even the question of the ability to process ambiguity is subject to the law of ambiguity which is which we’re ambiguous about it right ambivalent about it better way of putting it ambiguous is uncertain ambivalent is opposing warring thoughts or feelings i would say though that i do believe believe very strongly that anybody who has the emotional ability, even if we say it’s only the emotional ability, anybody who has the emotional ability to recognize a problem has some responsibility for working or trying to solve it.
And of course, I’ve said this a million times in listener conversations, right?
Which is that if parents know what to avoid, then they’re responsible for that knowledge, right?
If somebody dances through a landmine against all conceivable odds, he can’t then say, I have no idea where the mines are, right?
[34:35] And if parents consistently defend against the truth that the child says, and only against the truth that the child says, then there’s a part of the parent that recognizes that something different is occurring when the child tells the truth, right?
In other words, when the child is not attacked for conforming to the parents’ wishes, but then is attacked for telling the truth which the parent finds uncomfortable, then the parent clearly is able to recognize the truth to some degree, right? I mean, that’s just, that’s a logical absolute.
[35:06] Say that i don’t understand mandarin and i stare blankly at someone until somebody says can i give you a million dollars and then i say yes then clearly i understand mandarin right my former supposed incomprehension non-withstanding so if we understand that and then we understand that, increased ambiguity creates a demand for a brutal or violent or coercive or authoritarian or a hierarchical solution, then we can understand that the people who are clamoring for the solution, recognize that ambiguity is a problem and desire a solution, right?
Does that mean that they’re too stupid to process ambiguity?
Well, of course not. It means that they’re certainly intelligent enough to process ambiguity.
They’re just choosing to process it in a way that results in destructive Destructive anti-solutions.
[36:05] So, in this way, I think that we can very usefully examine these sort of questions and issues and problems with regards to ambiguity.
I hear about the squash court, I guess you’re wondering. It’s not gunfire.
But, yeah, we can process the questions or the problems of ambiguity in this way, and I think quite productively as well.
Well and then of course we can come up with some ways that will approach a real solution, and of course one of the things that occurs when we like as part of this conversation that i’ve been fairly aware of from the beginning is when we say for instance when we say that that violence is not a solution, then a whole series of questions arises, right?
Which is why this conversation tends to be so volatile for people, and why it doesn’t take very long to get to family questions or issues with regards to philosophy.
And I’ve been very conscious of this from the very beginning, so hopefully I haven’t fucked it up too much, but it goes sort of something like this.
If we say that violence is not the solution to problems.
[37:30] And somebody accepts that, then two questions, which are just the first of many questions, arise.
The first question is, if violence is not the solution to problems, then why Why do we try to solve problems through violence?
[37:54] It’s a pretty important question, right? And this is the anxiety that people face when they look upon a voluntary society, anarchism, a stateless society, you know, whatever it is you want to call it, the non-aggression principle, right?
If violence is not an acceptable solution to problems, and of course this is what we’re taught if we try belting another kid in the sandbox, we teach this principle to three-year-olds, two-year-olds, that violence is not an acceptable solution to problems, not a moral solution to problems.
So, if we teach it to two and three and four-year-olds, and if everybody generally accepts that violence is not a solution to problems, then why do we use violence to solve problems?
Why do we use the state? Why do we use the welfare state? Why do we use Medicare, Medicaid, old-age pensions, foreign policy, aid to dictatorships, war, prisons, right? right?
That is a very queasy, inducing question. It makes people feel physically sick when they really get it.
If violence, let me just want some sort of be repetitive, but hey, why stop now?
[39:07] If violence is not a valid solution to problems, then why do we use violence to solve problems as a society?
[39:16] That is a very tough question to ask, right? Because the answer is long and and complicated, and involved, and highly, highly uncomfortable, right?
That’s the first question that comes up.
Now, the second question that comes up makes people feel even more dizzy and queasy, and is another sort of squeeze from the bottom of the toothpaste tube propelling them out of the matrix, right?
[39:41] If violence is not the solution to problems, then why do we use violence to solve problems? That’s the first question.
The second question, which is even more unsettling to people is, and why, oh why, oh why, does everyone pretend that we don’t?
[39:59] Awful these questions are for people what relationship it gives them to their culture, how awful a set of questions these really are if violence is not a solution why do we use violence and why does everyone pretend that we don’t but in those two questions which which really arise from a true understanding of the proposition the non-aggression principle.
[40:25] In those two questions lies the entire heart of the challenge that we face as thinkers, as philosophers, as voluntarists or anarchists or whatever.
And if we could find a way to painlessly answer those questions, well, we’d be living man gods and I’d be even happier.
But I don’t think there is an easy way to answer these questions, right? There is no easy or fun way to answer these questions, because they lead into a realm of horrible ambiguity.
And the foundational ambiguity is, why do we live the opposite of our values and lie to ourselves about what we’re doing?
Why do we say violence is bad and then use violence and say that we don’t?
I mean, talk about a completely horrible and fucked up and ambiguous situation, right?
Why do we say violence is bad and then use violence and then claim that we don’t?
Or don’t even bring up the question of the fact that we do, or the reality that we do.
And when you start to get into those questions, as we all know, I mean, the shite really hits the fan, right?
[41:28] Then we begin to face really enormous and wild-ass challenges in terms of understanding ourselves, our culture, our society, our families, our religions, our governments, our public education, the whole messed-up and ambivalent matrix that we live in, right?
[41:46] We begin to feel the ambivalence, which is foundationally what I talk about in Untruth, and that’s why I talked about it in Untruth first, right?
[41:57] That kind of runs along the fault line of saying that violence is bad, so we’re going to use violence and pretend that we don’t.
[42:06] That is a wild, messed up, entirely contradictory situation that we have within our lives, within our society, within our culture, right?
That is some messed up stuff, right?
[42:20] And being able to process that ambiguity, that everybody knows that violence is being used, and everybody says that violence is bad, but nobody will talk about violence.
I mean, the hypocrisy, the manipulation, the control, the cynicism, the fact that we are told that violence is required because everyone is bad, except the government.
But of course, if everyone is bad, then why are we told that violence is bad?
We shouldn’t care if we’re all evil, right?
We shouldn’t care that violence is bad if we’re all evil.
So all of the messed up complexity that goes along in what is called culture all of these screwed up hypocritical manipulative bullshit that flies under the guise of culture all of that stuff is uncovered when you just get the basics of anarchism right and people they don’t like that right because it’s a hard road it’s a hard road to look at the the filthy lies of your society.
It’s very hard for people to do that and to realize that those who were supposed to be their caregivers were lying to them and manipulating them based on their own, the child’s desire for virtue and truth and honor and goodness and dignity, that our parents fear, desire, and surrender to the lust and evil of power while claiming lives of pure virtue and goodness.
[43:40] And through this ambivalence, right, that’s why I say everyone gets a seat at the table, right when everyone gets at the seat of the table in terms of the meco system and i’ll talk about this in part three of ambivalence in terms of how ambivalence fuels the the meco system because the meco system is the avoidance of the reality of ambivalence of the lies that were told and the cross motivations of those who tell us the lies and why they do so and the type of lies they tell that when we really understand the ambiguity that goes on in our society And the ambivalence that is at the heart of everything that we’re taught, we really begin to feel that for ourselves, and we end up in a very interesting and powerful and positive, or at least potentially positive place.
[44:27] But it’s a hard road, as we can see. So I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening.
And as always, I will talk to you soon. I’ll post part three of this, which will be about ambivalence and its role relative to the MECO system.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
Thank you so much for your donations. I always look forward to more.
It really does help with the advertising and I will talk to you soon.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
