0:07 - Introduction to Philosophy
0:15 - Love and Virtue in Parenting
4:36 - Individualism vs. Collectivism
9:21 - Rational Calculations of Safety
15:59 - Greed and Jealousy Explored
18:35 - The Nature of Excess
20:39 - Resolving Trust and Abandonment Issues
22:15 - Choosing Between Warring Sides
24:00 - Meaning in Signs and Symbols
26:46 - The Atheist Argument Against Suicide
30:22 - Wealth and Spirituality
31:38 - Traditions vs. Modernity
34:45 - Inner Dialogue and Human Nature
37:21 - The Value of Virginity
39:48 - Convincing Others to Live in Reality
40:43 - Unchosen Obligations and Validity
In this episode, I delve deeply into the nature of love, virtue, and moral distinctions, stimulating a rich conversation centered on the philosophical inquiry of human emotions and relationships. I tackle an intriguing question raised by a listener concerning the seemingly involuntary response of love to virtue, specifically in the context of parenthood and the bond between humans and animals. I clarify that while animals can exhibit attachment, they do not engage in moral reasoning or possess virtues as humans do. This distinction is crucial, as it shapes our understanding of love as something that is fundamentally different from mere biological instinct.
As I reflect on my own experiences as a father, I emphasize the joy and deep bond that come from nurturing a child, despite the fact that infants are not capable of demonstrating moral virtues. The attachment I feel is natural and instinctual, echoing the patterns of attachment found in the animal kingdom, which while beautiful, does not equate to the moral love we cultivate for others who can demonstrate virtues. I argue that genuine admiration for someone's virtues develops as they grow and embody characteristics that are praiseworthy.
The conversation shifts toward the critical philosophical debate between individualism and collectivism. I explore the idea that society often judges individuals not just based on character but also on immutable characteristics, and I advocate for a perspective that emphasizes individual merit and action. Here, I draw on the metaphor of a zebra evading a lion to elucidate our instinctual judgments about safety and danger, stressing the importance of reasoned assessments in our daily interactions with others where appearances can both mislead and inform our decisions.
I tackle various other pressing inquiries, including the moral obligations associated with parenting and the ethical implications of providing advantages to one's own children. The dialogue extends to the complexities of social hierarchies and the critique of individuals who create systems that reward their own interests without accountability. I approach sensitive topics such as trust and abandonment issues, underscoring the necessity of taking risks in close relationships, highlighting that while childhood experiences shape our attachments, adulthood allows for a more nuanced engagement with trust.
Engaging in broader philosophical themes, I assert that a moral duty exists to fight against evil and pursue virtue, and examine the role of individual initiative in achieving both personal and societal well-being. Throughout the discourse, I provide a framework to analyze emotional landscapes—be it jealousy or greed—demonstrating how these feelings, when not taken to excess, can be useful catalysts for personal growth and societal improvement.
Additionally, I explore the profound implications of societal constructs such as traditions versus modernity and invite listeners to contemplate the ramifications of these choices in terms of cultural progress versus regress. Ultimately, I encourage an introspective look at our values, urging listeners to consider how they can best engage with both the traditional systems that shaped us and the new paradigms we encounter.
This episode serves not merely as a philosophical discussion but as a call to take personal responsibility, both in our inner lives and our interactions with others. The myriad topics covered invite further reflection and dialogue, providing insights that resonate with our everyday experiences and dilemmas. Through these philosophical explorations, I aim to inspire a deeper understanding of love, virtue, morality, and the importance of individual agency in shaping a life well-lived.
[0:00] Good afternoon, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. Please help spread philosophy, the greatest thing in the world, at freedomain.com/donate.
[0:08] Questions from people on X. Hi, Stef. I've been wondering, if love is an involuntary
[0:12] response to virtue, can, how can a parent love an infant?
[0:15] Can't animals display virtues, at least in a rudimentary fashion, as much as babies? Thanks.
[0:21] Well, no, animals cannot be virtuous, because virtue is when we compare proposed actions to ideal standards and then choose the ideal standards. The ideal standard called, you know, telling the truth, being peaceful, morally courageous, and so on, right?
[0:38] And so animals don't have the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, and therefore they don't have moral free will in the way that we would understand it. Animals are programmed by dopamine, and they're programmed by instinct, and so on. So birds are programmed to feed their babies, but they don't love their babies and they don't love each other. There's just an attachment that is genetically and biologically programmed into them, which is not to say that the affection of animals is bad, right? I mean, my daughter and my family as a whole, we've had a whole series of ducks over the years and the ducklings are super cute and they follow you everywhere around, and it's really nice. I don't, of course, imagine that they love me for my virtues. They would follow around anyone who fed them. It's not, I mean, you've seen ducklings, I don't know if you've seen these studies where they, the ducklings will imprint upon an orange balloon and will follow that around if it's the first large thing that they see when they emerge from their eggs. So, no, animals are not virtuous, and babies are not virtuous. Now, of course, I was there for the present. I was present for the birth of my daughter and she treasured her and had massive affection for her as a baby. You know, we're programmed that way and I was so overjoyed to be a father and it's wonderful. It's a beautiful bonding thing.
[2:02] But I did not love her virtues when she was a baby, of course, because she did not display any particular virtues when she was a baby. I mean, she was great fun. She giggled, she laughed.
[2:12] I guess early on she started feeding me back when I would sort of feed her so that was cool, But no, I mean, she was not morally courageous. She did not stand with great integrity against the steadfast evils of the world. So, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's not her job. She's a baby. She's a toddler. I have grown to enormously admire her moral courage and steadfastness and honesty and virtues as a whole, as she has grown. And that's a beautiful thing to see. But, no, we have to differentiate love in an adult human sense from attachment to offspring, which is shared by the animals, right? If something is moral, and if animals can't be moral, as I've sort of shown, animals can't be moral.
[3:02] And love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous, what we love about another is their virtues, then by definition we cannot love our babies for their virtues since they don't possess any. Now they're super cute and we feel enormously bonded with them and we would move heaven and earth and perhaps even die for them but that attachment, beautiful as it is, is shared with all of the animals and therefore cannot be part of adult human love. Love in the context that we use it for people has to mean something different than programmed animal attachment.
[3:43] Now, of course, I'm not trying to say anything about like, well, your love for your children is therefore less than your love for your partner. And so I'm not trying to say anything like that. The attachment that we feel towards our babies and our toddlers is a beautiful, deep, wonderful, powerful experience, but it is not philosophical, moral love and we have to differentiate love in the adult human context from that which is shared with animals and attachment to offspring is shared with animals and if love is our involuntary response to virtue we of course have colossal, powerful, deep, oceanic attachments to our babies and our toddlers and we instruct them in virtue and we grow to replace the attachment, sort of the programmed attachment we have with a genuine respect for their moral qualities and their moral character as they age. So I hope that makes sense.
[4:36] All right, somebody asks, I believe that individualism versus collectivism is the issue beneath all issues and that adopting a content of character mindset rather than a judge by immutable characteristics mindset is the only peaceful and prosperous path forward to humanity. Most people are decent, and if we separated the world by decent people versus assholes, there would be a lot less incentive to be assholes. Thoughts? Not quite sure what the question is here.
[5:05] So, we are pattern-recognizing machines, I mean animals as a whole, and we have developed it to a fine art. So, we are pattern-recognizing machines. And so we do have to judge people by patterns. And of course, none of those patterns necessarily apply to any specific individual, but those patterns as a whole are still things we need to judge by. So, for instance, if there's some young thug who is walking behind us, or maybe it's a group of young thugs walking behind us and they're, you know, dressed in sort of semi-prison garb, and, you know, they are swearing at everyone who passes by and so on, well, we're going to feel nervous. And if we look back, instead of seeing young thugs of any race, it doesn't really matter the race, right? But they're sort of dressed in menacing manners and obviously love this negative culture. Whereas if we look back and there's an elderly Asian gentleman walking his chihuahua.
[6:17] We're going to probably feel that that's not quite, that the potential dangers of these two situations are not equal. And we understand that and we know that. Now, of course, it could be the case that the young thugs are perfectly lovely young gentlemen. Maybe they're just coming back from shooting a video or they're researching roles for their theater play or something like that. And it could be that the elderly Asian gentleman is, in fact, a mass-murdering serial killer psychopath. So, these are all things that are possible, for sure. But we still have to take the odds as they are. And this is just a cost-benefit thing. If we misjudge the danger of people following us, well...
[6:59] Very bad things could result, right? We could lose our wallet, we could lose our health, if we get stabbed, we could lose our lives. It's very dangerous. So it's sort of like if a zebra sees a lion, it could be that the lion is not dangerous at all because the lion has recently fed or had sex or is lazy or tired or doesn't feel like hunting or something like that, right? And so, the zebra generally makes a calculation.
[7:31] Now, of course, if the lion doesn't feel like hunting, the zebra saves a certain amount of calories by not moving away. But if the lion does feel like hunting, and the lion might pretend to be asleep, or lazy, or moving slowly, or something like that, in order to lure the zebra closer, but, in general, the zebra has to make that decision. If the zebra guesses wrong, then the zebra might die. And that's it. That's it for the zebra. I mean, if you've ever been at home at night and you hear a thump or a noise or something, right? I mean, 99 times out of 100, 999 times out of 1,000, And it's nothing, right? It's just a, you know, the wind blew it, a shutter closed or something like that, or the house is settling or a bird flew into a window. I don't know, whatever, right? Could be any number of things.
[8:31] But you go and check anyway, right? Even though 999 times out of a thousand, it's nothing. But what's the cost benefit, right? So if you don't go and check, it's probably going to be kind of tough to get back to sleep. You feel uneasy or whatever it is. And of course, if you're wrong and you think it's nothing, but it is an intruder, then you could get killed, right? Or a bunch of your stuff could be stolen or something like that, right? In which case, you've got to do all of the hundredth of hours to replace the stuff that was stolen, assuming it was expensive. You fill out a police report, deal with insurance stuff. Like, it's a mess, right? So, it's just a cost-benefit. Okay, it's going to take me 10 minutes to go and check the house, and then I can go back to sleep, right? As opposed to, well, maybe I'll get some bad sleep, and maybe I'll wake up to a burgled house, or maybe I won't wake up at all if I get killed.
[9:21] So, we have to do these calculations. Now, of course, the entirety of modern media is about telling you that all of the rational calculations you have about safety and danger are completely wrong.
[9:36] It's completely wrong. And the media is at war with your instincts of rational calculation. So that is to allow you to be further and better preyed on. All right. Does philosophy come more naturally to honest people who are naturally attuned to the truth? Does philosophy come more naturally to honest people who are naturally attuned to the truth? I don't know. I don't know what it means to be naturally attuned to the truth. All human beings survive by attuning themselves to the truth. So, human beings, on the whole, survive through reason and evidence, but our leaders, our slave masters, the ruling class, survive by lying to us and forcing us to lie to ourselves and to each other. So, humanity, on the whole, survives through reason and evidence, but elites and the power illustrious, and those who rule over us survive by forcing lies. All right. Is it moral for a man to give his son a leg up, a good home with a loving mother, a virtuous example, a free college education, help with a home or business, or is that unfair to another child from a poor and broken home?
[10:53] I don't understand this. What does that mean? Is it moral for a man to give his son a leg up? So is it moral to love and care for your children and to use your resources to help them succeed I'm not quite sure I understand that.
[11:12] Is it moral? I'm sorry, I'm trying to figure out what the even potential reasoning is behind this. So, if you choose a woman to have children with, who's young, attractive, and healthy.
[11:27] Is that an unfair advantage if you choose an old, ugly, and sick woman to have your children with? If you show up to work and continue to get paid, is that unfair to the people who are drunk and lazy and don't show up to work who get fired? I don't quite understand that. If you go and see a doctor, is that unfair to someone else who might want to have seen the doctor at the same time. If you take care of your own health, is that unfair to the people who don't exercise and don't eat well and get fat, lazy, and soft? If you study for an exam and do well, is that unfair to the people who don't study for the exam and do poorly? I genuinely, I don't know what the living unholy hell you're talking about. If you're virtuous, is that unfair to the corrupt and the evil? If you are industrious, is that unfair to the lazy? If you are... Yeah, I don't understand. I don't understand how you could do anything. If I'm really good at philosophy, is that unfair to the people who are trying to do philosophy shows and fail? I don't know what that means.
[12:47] I don't know what that means. I think if you have good principles of living, it's probably a good thing as a whole to share and spread those good principles of living for both reasons of virtue and reasons of practicality. But I don't know what that means. All right. Can UPB define truth? It's the interpretation that could be used to everyone. Can UPB define truth? Yes. Yes, it can. So, UPB is a methodology of truth that includes science and math and so on, universally preferable behavior. However, in its most important application, it is the methodology for determining good from evil, moral from immoral. All right. Do we have a moral duty to fight evil and pursue virtue? Yes. Yes, we do. I mean, most of the goods, most of the good things that we have in our life are the result of people who sacrificed life, happiness, sanity, physical integrity, property, you name it, security, in order to fight evildoers and hand us some general principles of morality that we still enjoy. So, if you inherit 10 million Do you have a duty to attempt to...
[14:10] At least not destroy that good fortune. To do whatever is necessary to maintain that good fortune, you know, obviously spend some of it. I mean, there's no point if you don't. But if your family has worked for 10 generations to save up $10 million and hand it to you, do you have a duty to not blow it all on hookers and cocaine? Well, yeah, you kind of do. And so we've been handed wealth in the West in terms of relative freedoms compared to the rest of the world. And of course, it's our moral duty to fight evil and pursue virtue. All right. Are humans LLMs with an extra mechanism on top? No, LLMs don't create, which is why you have to stuff them with 10 billion pages of mostly left-wing garbage. No, humans are not LLMs. Large language models, no. Because we can create and AIs cannot. All right. Where does philosophy end and religion begin. So, religion begins when you accept that things are true in the absence or opposition to reason and evidence. So, that's where it is. What is more destructive, greed or jealousy? Yeah, so, in general, what we call negative emotions are emotions that don't fall into do the Aristotelian mean?
[15:31] So, if you're not courageous enough, you're a coward. If you're over-courageous, you're foolhardy, right? Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. I have definitely been guilty of the latter sin of excessive courage, which becomes a vice. So, if you look at something like greed, greed is not a negative emotion. I'm greedy for love, I'm greedy for truth. I'm greedy for reason and evidence.
[15:58] I'm greedy to do good in the world.
[16:00] Greed just simply means that you want a lot of something. And there's nothing wrong with greed. And there's nothing wrong with jealousy. I was jealous of happier families when I grew up. And jealousy is simply the thirst to be in possession of what someone else has. Or the thirst to match your status with someone else. Now, if I was not at all jealous of happy families, that would be a very strange thing, right? To be raised in a very unhappy family and to not be jealous at all or admire the good fortune and wish it had been mine of people who had good families, well, that would be kind of crazy, right? It would be like starving to death and not being at all jealous of the people who had more than enough to eat. or at least enough to eat, right?
[16:49] So, jealousy has two ways of resolving itself. Either you pull yourself up, or you drag other people down. And on the right, in general, the goal is to pull yourself up, or to encourage others to pull themselves up. On the left, the goal is, in general, to drag other people down. So, if you come from a miserable family, then your goal is to destroy families as a whole, Whereas if you're on the left, on the right in general, it is, let me figure out what principles made that other family happy and see if I can work to reproduce them. A deficiency of greed is a deficiency of a vital ambition and focus and goals and energy and so on. You're kind of ignorant. An excess of greed, right? So if you're greedy, let's say for money, that's fine. That can make you work hard. That can make you save. It can make you invest because you're greedy for money, that's fine. If you're too greedy for money, then you cut corners, you become corrupt, you steal, you lie, you cheat to get money, and that's bad.
[17:54] Neither greed nor jealousy is destructive in and of themselves, but it's the excess of these things that causes them destructive. It's like saying, what is more destructive, carbs or protein? It's like, well, depending on what you're doing, depending on what your dietary requirements are, maybe even depending on your ethnicity, they're not bad. They're not bad. It's the wrong thing. Even sugar is not bad for you in moderation, right? Small amount of sugar is fine as a whole. But, you know, if you have a steady diet of mostly sugar, that's bad. What is more destructive? Starving to death or eating to death? Well, something in the middle is the good, right?
[18:35] All right. I guess, yeah, it's an interesting question. So why would things go to an excess?
[18:42] So a deficiency in virtue can lead to a love of virtue, as in a deficiency of a happy household when I was growing up has led me to want to create a happy household as an adult, which I've succeeded in doing. Of course, not alone, but that's sort of my goal, and I've achieved that. So then why would you want to destroy families? I think it really just comes down to hatred. Right it really comes down to hatred if someone else has something that you want that you're desperate to achieve if you don't think you can achieve it you'll just want to destroy them right so if there's a guy in your tribe who's really attractive let's say he's he's got abs and whatever it is then then you should get abs or whatever it is right to become attractive if for some reason it's impossible or you believe that it's impossible then rather than try and emulate his attractiveness, you will try to destroy him to lower the bar for what is considered attractive. And of course, you can see this playing out with the fat positivity movement, that women who become so obese that they really have almost no chance of being attractive and slender in that way. They wish to erase the slender girls. They feel rage at the slender girls. And so on. It's the same thing with men who don't think that they can make any money, in particular hate the rich because they know that the women want the rich. It's just a form of sexual competition, right?
[20:11] If standard X is considered attractive, then you should try to achieve standard X. If you don't believe that you can achieve standard X, then in a tragic Darwinian fashion, your best hope is to attack, undermine, and destroy anyone who is standard X. And then when they're all gone, the standard has to be recalculated closer to something that you could achieve. All right.
[20:36] Why, Stefan? Why? Technically not a question, more of a letter.
[20:40] What is the most reliable way to resolve trust and abandonment issues, personally or interpersonally? Oh, I can tell you this from personal experience. So, I won't get into the whole story. But the way that you resolve trust and abandonment issues is you throw yourself into a connection with someone. And if it works out, great, you're solved. If it doesn't work out, then you survive. And then you're not afraid of it anymore. See, when you're a child, if your parents are not close to you, if they don't commit to you, when you're a child, then you risk death, right? Because if your parents don't care about you, you might not get food, you might not get protection, a whole bunch of really bad things can happen. And so, you can't survive trust issues, abandonment issues. You can't risk them, right? As an adult, you'll survive. If you're betrayed, if affection is withdrawn, you'll survive. So, when you're a kid, you can't risk parental affection being withdrawn, so you just do whatever you have to do to get their approval. As a teenager, this to some degree reverses, but you can't survive your parents loss of commitment or affection or investment as a kid because you can't survive on your own.
[21:52] And so, you just have to conform to whatever they want, which erases yourself and gives you trust issues down the road. But as an adult, you can throw yourself wholeheartedly into a emotional commitment or attachment. And if the person then rejects you, you'll survive. And then you're not afraid of it anymore. So, you just have to throw yourself in. All right.
[22:16] How do you, from a moral standpoint, pick between two warring sides when you find each side doing immoral things daily? Oh, if you're talking left and right? I mean, I'm not on the right wing technically because anarcho-capitalism and all, but in general, I have more sympathy for the right than the left because it's a more mature model of the world because people on the right have more diversity of thought. People on the right can negotiate ambivalence. People on the right can model the mindset of people on the left and people on the left really can't do any of those things. It's a very immature mindset. that, you know, it's one thing that you'll notice in life as you get older, sorry to give you the crusty old guy argument, but one thing you'll notice in life is that one of the most useful things that I've learned in life is to figure out where people's mental and emotional development have stopped.
[23:05] Because people grow until they hit severe trauma, and then they stop growing. All they can do is manage their response to that trauma. And so, you know, some guy who starts drinking heavily when he's 16 isn't going to grow anymore. Because growth is when we overcome obstacles and deal with pain and trauma and learn how to manage ambivalence and so on. But addiction in particular erases all of that. So you don't grow anymore. So somebody becomes a severe alcoholic when they're 16, when they're 46, it's still going to have the mindset of a 16-year-old. That's why the potheads tend to be so immature. And all addicts have their emotional development frozen in time at some particular point. And the left have their emotional development stopped very early on. And again, I can have great sympathy for all of that, but that is the way that it is. All right.
[24:01] Does AI dream? Nope. How do signs and symbols acquire meaning and what is meaning?
[24:06] So, meaning is when there are universals embedded in concepts. So, meaning, you can say meaning is complex, or you can just say meaning is another word for definition. So, what is a tree? Well, we have a concept of a tree that allows us to point at a variety of trees and identify them as trees. So, the word tree has meaning, which is that it describes the characteristics, or its definition describes the characteristics of that mature trees. So, signs and symbols acquire meaning when they universalize sense data according to the laws of physics and biology. The laws of physics and biology are universal, and certainly the laws of physics are universal, absolute, and objective, and rational. And so, when our language correctly identifies the essence of the things that it describes, then it gains meaning. Meaning is when you can take a word and apply it to a new situation and know what's being talked about. What is the best attitude to take towards the unanswerable questions? Well, I mean, sorry to be pedantic, perhaps, but by definition, if it's unanswerable, it's not a question.
[25:15] Like if I were to say, what is the what? Is that a question? What is the what? Well, it's not a question because there's no meaning. There's no meaning. So they're not questions if they're unanswerable. All right, somebody says, the structure that is UPB, oh, this is what I thought the earlier guy was talking about. The structure that is UPB is not only relevant to morality, because self-detonating arguments are errors, not only in the domain of morality, but in all domains. For example, math is based on axioms, but these axioms must be UPB. Have you thought what else UPB is capable of? I certainly have.
[25:43] Philosophy is the all-discipline, which validates metaphysics and epistemology, study of knowledge, sorry, study of nature of reality and study of knowledge. How do we know what is true and false? So philosophy is a universal discipline. The scientific method is a sub-discipline of, philosophy as a whole, because philosophy validates the senses, validates reason and evidence, and has a universal objective and logical requirement for truth and proof. So philosophy is the all-discipline, which is why, because I love dipping my toes in a variety of disciplines, philosophy is the thing for me. So yes, UPB is uber-discipline to determine truth from falsehood, it's just especially valid in the realm of morality. So, UPB is both a methodology and a set of conclusions. In the same way, we say science. Science is a methodology, the scientific method, and it is specific conclusions, a scientific experiment, and so on,
[26:44] right? So, I hope that makes sense.
[26:46] What is the atheist argument against suicide?
[26:50] So, suicide is a monstrous moral crime because of the harm it does to others. I mean, look, if you, for some reason, I don't really agree with this as a whole, but let's just say for some reason, you don't want to live. And you've got connection with people, right? You've got friends, family, colleagues, wife, kids, whatever, right? And let's say that for some reason, you don't want to live. Well, then you should make it completely believable that it was an accidental death, right you should because you don't want people kicking themselves self-attacking miserable you know christopher hitchin style because he missed a call from his mother who killed herself just miserable stuff right so if you care about people and for whatever reason you don't want to live anymore maybe it's some incurable ailment that nobody else knows about and it's causing constant pain there's no cure whatever i don't know i don't know right then do do the decent thing and make it so that it's a believable accident.
[27:54] I mean, we've all heard these stories of these complete psychos who like blow their heads off. I've heard these stories directly from listeners. People who like suck a shotgun and blow their heads against the wall in the home where their kids are coming home. I mean, that's about as evil a thing as you can imagine, right? The amount of trauma and harm and destruction that causes other people is, you can't really overestimate it. So with regards to suicide, I mean, I couldn't tell someone else what is bearable or unbearable in life. I could certainly encourage them to say this too shall pass, and in general, things get better, and if you don't like your life, try working for the good and waiting for a while, and it will almost certainly improve.
[28:42] But the argument against suicide is it's usually a failure. What if there is a permanent solution to a temporary problem? But that's not necessarily the case. I can certainly understand, you know, if someone's in their deathbed and they can't get better and they're in agonizing pain and no cure and it's just going to get worse, I can understand wanting to your hiatus make with a bare bodkin. I can understand that. I mean, think of the worst pain you've ever been in. If that was only going to increase and get worse, then taking the quiet morphine.
[29:15] Exit would be understandable. So, I'm not one to say, well, you have to continue even in agonizing pain, even at the point of draining your family's finances and, you know, destroying your kids' opportunity to own houses because they're pouring more and more useless medicine into your dying body. I can understand people wanting to kill themselves. And in that situation, then that would be something you would discuss with your family and your doctor and all that kind of stuff. But you know the people who you know in a florid and dramatic manner paint the walls, with their brains and their kids come home and find them that's just about as psycho and evil a thing as i can conceive of and absolutely wrong morally you can destroy your own property, right morally i could take this little recording device i could smash it on the ground and nobody would put me in jail i bought it i paid for it it's mine i can destroy it it's the same thing is true with your life. But the moral argument is the amount of harm it does to those around you.
[30:15] It's beyond calculation, and it is an unbelievably selfish, abusive, and destructive act to kill yourself when people care about you. All right.
[30:23] Are wealth and prosperity inherently wrong? It seems that many people who identify as religious believe you cannot be both wealthy and genuinely spiritual at the same time. No, wealth and prosperity are fine. I mean, everything that we have that is worth having is the result of an excess, right? I mean, you could theoretically live on a bare minimum of food. I mean, people survive in concentration camps, right? Somehow. But you could survive, you can survive on a bare minimum of food, everything over and above that is gravy, so to speak. It's wealth, right? So I could survive without philosophy. I could survive without recording this show, but it gives me pleasure. I think it does some good for the world. So I do it.
[31:06] And the reason I'm doing it and able to do it is I don't have to pull beetroots for my lunch. I'm not just surviving on a bare minimum. So everything that is worthwhile in life arises from an excess. And wealth and prosperity inherently wrong? No. Wealth in a free market, right? I'm not talking about predatory wealth. Wealth in a free market arises out of providing voluntary value to those who are never forced to consume your products and services.
[31:35] Now, political power, that's a whole other matter. All right.
[31:38] How does one analyze keeping traditions versus testing accepting modernity? Can one go back to traditions abandoned if modernity experiments fail or prove to be a detriment and tradition was the quote right choice all along?
[31:50] So, government taxation and redistribution of resources creates an endless social experimental phase where ideologues can capture the incentives and disincentives of a general population, tinker with it to their crazy, psycho, sociopathic heart's content, and then face no negative consequences for getting things wrong. So the modernity is just the massive amount of lab rat social experiments inflicted on us by power-hungry politicians who face no negative consequences for getting things wrong. So, let's say in a free society, some company would work to protect people from criminals, right? That would be a free society. Some company would work to protect people from criminals. Now, let's say that...
[32:42] Company decided to start paying single mothers more than they could really reasonably get from their husbands. Now, would that cause some marriages or some relationships to break up? For sure, it would, right? Now, of course, as we know, the children of single mothers are prone to a wide variety of significant dysfunctions and promiscuity, drug abuse, addiction, violence, criminality, and so on, right?
[33:07] So if that company, which was there to protect people from criminality, pursued a policy that increased criminality, they would lose twice. Number one, they would lose on having to pay all the single mothers to get rid of the father, so to speak. And number two, then when the criminals began to emerge from this social experiment, they would lose again because they'd have to pay out a lot to protect people from the criminals that their own policies have bread. So they would be very careful about doing that because in a free society, if you run some sort of corporation or some sort of LLC, well, your personal property is not immune from lawsuits, right? The corporations are legal fictions that governments have created in order to buy the allegiance of the wealthy by removing from the wealthy personal liability for bad decisions, right? And in the past, in America, say 19th century, if your bank went bust as a bank owner, you lost your house. Now you can just shut down your corporation, keep all of the filthy lucre and ride off into the sunset. So it's really bad. The people who would be providing protection in a free society would not tinker and experiment with things without really knowing the results or having good reason to believe that the results would be better.
[34:21] And they would not just say, hey, let's just create a welfare state because, you know, the government can just create the welfare state and no individual politician suffers personally when this experiment goes badly. So it's really bad. Modernity is just a bunch of lab rat experiments run by sociopaths who face no negative consequences for their bad decisions. It's the worst possible system that you could come up with.
[34:45] Right, what percentage of people have an inner dialogue? And is that an argument against all humans being the creation of God's image? I apologize if you've mentioned the statistics for inner dialogue, but it deludes me at this time. 30-40% of people don't seem to have an inner dialogue. I don't know if it's broken down by gender or ethnicity or whatever it is, but that's a general situation. Well, of course, one of the big problems that has occurred in the West. Christianity has given great benefits to the West. It's a universal moral system, which makes it quite distinct from most other moral or religious systems. But the big problem, of course, is because Christianity believes that all human beings have a soul created in the image of God, then all human beings are capable of what every other human being can do. And imagine if the Christian belief was that everyone had a glorious singing voice provided to them by God that just needed the right training. What would happen is the Christians would go around the world gathering together all of these choirs and putting everyone in and training them like crazy and the result would be an appalling mess of atonal terrible music.
[35:57] Because in order to be a great singer you have to be born with a great singing voice. Now training helps, and all of that. I've taken a lot of training in singing when I was in theater school, and I don't have a great singing voice. I like to sing, but I don't have a great singing voice at all, right? So, if you believed that there was operatic, beautiful, Pavarotti, Ben Hetman-style musical ability and capacity in every human being, then you'd go around the world trying to create all of these choirs, and it wouldn't work because the physical limitations wouldn't occur, or whatever, some limitations. Some people, even if they have great singing voices, some people are tone-deaf and can't tell the difference between notes. Even if they have great singing voices, they still can't sing. Well, it's a really wild combination of things that is needed to make a great singer. Also, it's nice to be able to perform a little too.
[36:49] So, of course, this is called The White Man's Burden, 18th, 19th century. Christians ran all over the planet trying to turn all of the world into Europe.
[36:59] And how well did that work? Well, they were doing all of this based on the idea that all human beings have a soul implanted by God, and therefore all human beings can be turned into Europeans or have European civilization, and so on.
[37:16] And this is a very, very tough belief to give up this hyper-egalitarianism.
[37:22] It's a very, very tough belief to give up. So, all right. Should the value of virginity be held equal between both men and women? No, no, no, no. Because a woman can go out and have sex in about 20 minutes very easily, in general, right? Most women. Men cannot do that. Men, I mean, maybe there's like, I don't know, one in a zillion men who's, you know, uber-chat, flawless face card, tons of money, whatever, rock stars and so on. But that's only because they generally have other things that they've either been given or have earned. So women can go have sex very easily, and men have to work very hard to have sex.
[38:06] So it's sort of like saying, should the assets of two men be held an equal esteem if one of them inherited $10 million and the other one has made $100,000 from scratch, has saved $100,000 from starting with nothing. Well, no, we would say we would have more admiration for the assets of the man who'd earned $100,000 from scratch rather than somebody who just happened to inherit $10 million.
[38:38] And so the degree of work that is needed is important in our evaluation. And women inherit, just by virtue of being women, and being young and being fertile and all of that, women inherit the capacity for near-infinite sexual achievements with very little effort.
[38:59] And so, I do believe that men should not be promiscuous, so I'm not trying to defend male promiscuity, but in terms of struggle and effort, you know, there's this, I've been making fun of this off and on for years, you know, the secret, the universe just provides you stuff. And it's always like, in general, it's just attractive women, sometimes attractive men, but in general, it's just attractive women saying, you know, all I do is ask the universe for things and they get provided, right? There was this semi-crazy woman on Joe Rogan not too long ago, I just saw a clip, and she's talking about, you know, the government has proof of interdimensional beings. She's quite pretty. And women saying crazy stuff is a form of pretty advertising because men put up with their crazy stuff because they're pretty, right? So it's a form for women to be like mystical and for women to be like, oh, I'm really into tarot and astrology.
[39:44] All they're doing is just saying, I'm so pretty that men don't call me out on my nonsense.
[39:49] So, all right. How do you go about convincing a person to live in accord with reality after they've gone too long living a lie? Why would you want to? Why would you want to try? I mean, it's triage, right? I mean, every ounce of energy you put into saving someone who can't be saved is an ounce of energy you're withdrawing from someone who can be saved.
[40:11] It's just triage, right? Triage is three groups, right? If you're a doctor, three groups of people. People who are going to survive even without immediate intervention, people who are going to die even with immediate attention, and people you can save with immediate attention and you focus on the latter. The former can be dealt with later, the latter you can't help, but the people who are going to die without immediate intervention, that's who you focus on. So, why on earth would you want to spend all of your time focusing on someone where the odds of salvation or bringing them to reason are virtually zero, when you could actually focus on people who you can help?
[40:43] Are unchosen obligations valid? No. No. So, of course, when I say you have a moral obligation to, say earlier, saying, you know, promote virtue and try to thwart evil. You can't be put in jail for failing to do that. Nobody can initiate the use of force against you for failing to do that. So there are obligations that are aesthetically preferable actions, which means you can't enforce them with violence. But if you're asking about, is there such a thing as a social contract that you're born into that you can go to jail for not upholding? No.
[41:15] What is the point of knowing if you can't do anything with it or about it. I mean, how do you know? You don't know ahead of time. What? I mean, I studied philosophy for 20 years before I became a podcaster. You just study stuff because it's enjoyable and important. It helps your life and you don't know what the future is going to be. I studied computer programming for like 10, 15 years before I became a professional programmer. All right. Let's see here. I think I will stop here. Let me just see. A little bit more to go. How much more do we have to go? Yeah, I think I'll stop here. And I appreciate these questions and we will get to the rest of them later. And of course, freedomain.com to help out the show. Gratefully, humbly and deeply appreciated. Have yourself a wonderful afternoon, my friends. Thanks for the questions. Bye.
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