0:00 - Introduction to Universal Morality
5:41 - Politicians as Modern Witch Doctors
9:15 - The Nature of Pathological Liars
13:04 - Confinement vs. Ostracism
14:41 - Strategies for Handling Dysfunctional Behavior
In this episode, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain tackles a thought-provoking question from a listener, Robert, regarding the concept of universal morality and how to engage with individuals, specifically politicians, who seem to reject this moral standard. Stefan elaborates on the troubling nature of political figures who claim to uphold a universal moral standard while their actions often reveal a deeper power-seeking agenda. He draws an analogy to predators in nature, underscoring that just as tigers may mimic the harmlessness of grass, so too do politicians masquerade their self-interests under the guise of serving the "common good."
Stefan critiques the historical reliance on authority figures, likening politicians to ancient witch doctors who claim to interpret the desires of higher powers while manipulating the populace for their own gain. This discussion leads Stefan to reflect on deeply ingrained memories, including a childhood poem about an invisible friend, which serves as an illustration of how imaginary constructs can be exploited to justify self-serving behavior. He juxtaposes this idea against the backdrop of societal narratives like the common good, positing that such constructs are often replete with propaganda that obscures genuine moral reasoning.
The dialogue progresses into an exploration of how individuals, particularly those engaging in violent or deceitful behavior, may be managed in a community setting. Stefan outlines the limitations of reasoning with such individuals, highlighting how manipulative behaviors can lead to temporary compliance without lasting change. He posits that any attempt to reason with a pathological liar or violent person often results in a farce, as their behaviors remain unchecked once external pressure subsides. Instead, Stefan discusses potential strategies for addressing dysfunctional individuals: ostracism, confinement, or acceptance of their behavior as a part of community life.
Ostracism is presented as a method for dealing with toxic individuals, yet Stefan cautions against the dangers that can follow this approach, noting that banished individuals may harbor resentments that can lead to retaliation. Confinement emerges as another option, albeit one fraught with ethical dilemmas. Stefan also addresses the grim option of death as a historical recourse to eliminate danger within a community. He emphasizes the necessity of establishing boundaries while recognizing that individuals displaying destructive behaviors often operate outside the realm of moral negotiation and reason.
As the episode draws to a close, Stefan reflects on personal experiences with aggressive or dishonest behavior, suggesting that meaningful engagement requires setting clear expectations of accountability. He stresses the futility of attempting to engage with those who do not adhere to social agreements, arguing that true engagement in the "game of life" hinges on shared principles of reason and respect. This episode challenges listeners to think critically about morality, authority, and the boundaries necessary for maintaining healthy communities, driving home the importance of self-defense, personal integrity, and the survival of moral standards in a complex world.
[0:00] All right. Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. A great question from Facebook, from Robert. You've talked about universal morality. Is there anything to be done, or is there any way to work with people whose morality is screwed? For example, politicians who believe might makes right, and that the state has the authority to do whatever it wants to its citizens for the greater good. That's a great question. How do you work with people who reject moral standards? Well, see, I mean, politicians, it's funny because they don't reject moral standards. What they do is they claim universal morality as a cloak for their power addiction, right? That is the really, really tragic thing is that they mimic morality, right? I mean, predators mimic the opposite, right? So grass cannot hurt an antelope. In fact, grass is a source of food for an antelope. A tiger has stripes so that it looks like grass, right? So a predator will mimic that which is harmless or beneficial to you in order to get close enough to prey on you. And everyone talks about the common good, but the common good is the new superstitious god of the ancient witch doctors. So the ancient witch doctors would say that the tribal gods.
[1:20] Have needs and preferences and morals and goals and desires and plans, but you as a non-witch doctor have no access to them so you're just going to have to trust me who is the witch doctor to tell you what the tribal gods want you to do and if you don't believe that then you're a blasphemer who must be ostracized tortured killed whatever right you must be punished so of course you invent an imaginary perfect entity that has no voice presence or or will of its own. And then you claim to speak for that, those tribal gods or that tribal god, you claim to speak for that tribal god. And then you say, I am simply informing you what the all perfect tribal god wants you to do. Don't shoot the messenger and we'll shoot anyone who doubts this. And it's funny, you know, if you look back on your life, you'll think of all of these hundreds of different memories that you have for reasons that you can't explain, right? So they just stick like little burrs in your brain. They just stick to your head. So I have the memory of a poem I read when I was a.
[2:32] About a kid's invisible friend. And the line was something like the invisible friend's name was Bob or something like that.
[2:41] And if you have candy to give me, if you have a candy bar to give me, give me two, one for me, one for my friend Bob, but I will have to eat it because his teeth are rather new, right? So I have an invisible friend named Bob. If you're going to give me me a candy bar, make sure you give it to Bob as well. So you have to give me two, one for me and one for my invisible friend. So I could double the resources because I can claim to have an invisible friend. But it turns out that I will eat the candy bar because my Bob's friend's teeth are rather new. And that stuck in my head. I must have read that when I was, I don't know, five years old. I had a big Oxford book of poetry or something like that. Something about a cow's tail and the the universe as a whole and i remember i drew a little fish on the front page anyway so that stuck in my head i remember this line like more than half a century later and because that was telling me something essential and important about the world in the same way that pleasure island and you know there are two absolutely terrifying cartoons i saw when i was a kid absolutely terrifying cartoons.
[3:48] One was the quasi-pedophile ring in Pinocchio, and the other was the psychotic mental torture land known as Alice in Wonderland. Absolutely terrifying, terrifying stories. But I remember this one, right? So here's a kid saying, I get twice the resources from my.
[4:13] I'll have to eat the extra candy bar because my friend's teeth are rather new. So it's just making up characteristics that mean he consumes the resources, not you, right? And not his friend.
[4:23] So the common good, it's just a new tribal god. But the common good demands that, hey, don't shoot the messenger. I simply speak for the common good, right? And of course, even if there was such a thing as the common good, the common good is just manufactured, right? The common good is just it. Like the common, you can say the common will or whatever, right? But who knows what the common will is? When the common will is generated by propaganda, who knows what the common good is? People are just repeating back all the propaganda slogans they got in childhood, that they got in university, that they got from the media, and so on, right? I mean, a lot of people were pretty keen on the Nuremberg Code, right? You know, no forced medical experiments, full consent, informed consent, full knowledge of the data data sharing like all of the stuff and then it was like covid came along and people like nope well so you can see the same thing with kamala harris right that that she was the most unpopular vp and now after you know a couple of weeks of propaganda she's the greatest human being who since the guy who walked on water and so you said well the consensus is it's like no it's just people aren't taught how to think and they're propagandized from here to eternity so there's no i mean the common good is just whatever the propagandized program people to me to repeat right Right. So.
[5:41] So, I mean, I can't really talk that much about politicians. Politicians, the new priesthood, right? So the new witch doctor. And I'm not talking about the honorable priests of the Christian tradition or anything like that who did huge amounts of good in the world as a whole, ending slavery and so on. But I am talking about the witch doctors, right?
[6:00] The superstitious, manipulative witch doctors, right? So politicians are just the new witch doctors. They're just liars of the invisible deity called democracy that force you to do what they want and they say while claiming it's not self-interested i mean tons of studies have been done like and and brian caplan who was on this show many years ago wrote a book called the myth of the rational voter and tons of studies have been done that say that what politicians do have almost nothing to do with what the people say they want i mean people have wanted controls over various things or lack of control over various things for whatever an hour man it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter what you want they'll do what they, they'll do what they want regardless of you know it's the old you know you're quote consulted and then it turns out that you know people just do whatever they want to do anyway but their consultation means that you can't object you know that's the sort of story like the consultation well hey man you got to vote it's like well you got to vote in general for people who are already bought and paid for we all sort of know know this kind of stuff as a whole so to break this example sample out into something probably a little bit more digestible and a palate able, palate able, palatable. What I would say is imagine that there is a village with a violent guy, right, a violent guy. So what do you do?
[7:20] Well, I don't remember the word, but the Inuit have a name for this kind of guy, the kind of guy who fakes an injury so he doesn't have to go out. Tries to seduce all the wives of the village, and they would just put him on an ice floe and push him away, right? So you've got a violent guy in a small village, a guy who wants to reason, uses coercion, you get what he wants, manipulation, lies, whatever. So what do you do? Well, you have a couple of options.
[7:48] And the first option is you reason with him and you say, this is bad, you've got to change what you're doing. And I included lying under violence because maybe he deforts everyone or whatever it is, right? Takes pay for work that he never does and then pretends like he never did it. Like real pathological liars, right? I don't know if you've ever dealt with someone like that. It's wild, man. It is a wild situation of absolute unreality, right? I was reading this thing on Twitter this morning about some guy saying, oh yeah, we had a roommate who was a pathological liar once and he didn't make his rent, he couldn't make his rent, but he said, no, no, no, I just got a job at the cinema up the street, So I'll be able to make rent very shortly with my first paycheck. And because he'd lied a lot, this guy's roommate said, well, we don't believe you. So if we go up to the cinema and we ask them, do you work there? They're going to say yes. And it's like, absolutely. So he goes up. They find out that the guy doesn't work there. The guy just continues lying. Doesn't face them. There's no conscience. All they can do is lie. I mean, that's a seriously broken person and highly dangerous because you see this a little bit more on the left than on the right. The right certainly have their bugaboos, but the left just lies.
[8:57] And they don't care, right? Like this Trump told people to drink bleach during COVID. It's like, no, he's talking about ultraviolet light therapy, which was actually invented in the 1940s. It's fairly big in Russia and other places and is still used in some American hospitals. It actually seems to be, what am I, no doctor, but it seems to have some validity.
[9:15] But it wasn't like drinking bleach or, you know, ivermectin is the only horse you warm up. Like, it's just like, just like. lie. And the state is a great way to turn lies into gold. I've got Dire Straits album, Love of a Gold, Private Investigations, the great song, Industrial Disease, great song. Anyway, so if you get a lot of resources for lying, then all you do is adapt to that. You're just a predator who lies. You get resources and there's no particular conscience. You don't care how it affects other people because you've just adapted to this methodology of getting resources. sources. So what do you do? People who are violent, pathological liars, and so on, right? Well, a pathological lying also appears to be kind of a brain injury. I remember seeing a documentary once about a guy who was a pathological liar, invented all of this naval history that he was an admiral or something like that. It turns out that he dove into a pool early on in his Navy career, had a terrible brain injury, and then afterwards became a pathological liar. Whether the damage is physical or emotional.
[10:16] Of brain damage, it seems that brain damage leads to this kind of lying. So what do you do with people like that? Well, I mean, you really only have three options, which is you try to reason them into behaving better, which is kind of like therapy or intervention. Somebody tried to reason them into behaving better. Well, there's four options, right? You reason them into behaving better. You ostracize them. You confine them, or you live with the behavior. Now, the problem is if you try to reason with a pathological liar or a violent guy, well, they're pretty good at pretending to do things. I mean, the pathological liar, you can reason with him, and you might even get tears of contrition, and then they'll just go back to the way they were before, right? Because how do you reason with a liar? Well, the liar will pretend to reason, and then will forget about it immediately. How do you reason with a violent person? Well, a violent person will submit to, quote, reason if you have more power. So if the whole town gets together, the whole village gets together and says, You've got to stop this. And then he'd be like, yeah, yeah, you're right. I'm so sorry, blah, blah, blah, right? But then he'll just go back to the way he was before once the pressure is removed.
[11:20] It's kind of like holding up a five-pound weight. The five-pound weight will stay up as long as you hold it up. And then when you don't hold it up, it'll just go back down again, right? So if you apply sufficient pressure to the liar or the violent guy, then they'll conform and they might even burst into tears and they might pretend massive amounts of remorse and then they'll just return back to the way they were. You know, it's the old thing that the bad guy has the gun, he's going to shoot the good guy, and then the good guy gets the gun, and the bad guy's like, hey, let's reason about this. Like, the guy hasn't discovered the sweet joys of reason, he just doesn't have the gun anymore, he lost control of the gun, so now he's all about being rational. But you know, if the bad guy gets the gun back, he can just shoot the good guy. It's simply a matter of a power transfer. The transfer of power creates both the, quote, reason and the resentment. So you can browbeat someone into being more rational with public humiliation or interventions or something like that, and they will surrender to that greater power.
[12:16] And then they will be, quote, rational, but you're just creating resentment, and the blowback is going to be pretty horrible. And the behavior kind of goes underground. Even if you find some way to keep that person more, quote, rational for a long period of time, they'll just start spreading rumors. They'll just go into crowded places when they're ill, and they'll just find some other way to mess up the community because they're just that dysfunctional and corrupted. So ostracism is the other option, right? So ostracism is, you know, if you continue this behavior, you won't be part of the community. and that might get them to pretend to be better people and so on. Of course, if you believe that the person has a soul that can be reformed, then that's going to be pretty tempting for you. But borderline sociopathy, psychopathy, and so on, I mean, nobody knows how to fix them. I mean, nobody knows. And there's not some big healthy person in there like a soul that you can reach in contact with prayer and goodwill.
[13:05] You can't talk the lion into becoming a lamb. It just doesn't work that way. So ostracism is one way you do it. So that's just this meme on the internet where, you know, my favorite story about some, what was it, Idaho or something is that some guy gets kicked out of a bar and 27 years later.
[13:23] Get out of here, Gary. Nothing's changed, kind of thing, right? You ostracize. Get the person out of your life or out of the community's life. And maybe that works, but the problem with ostracism is they go out into the wilderness and they plot their revenge, and they might team up with some other group to plot their revenge. So it's dangerous, right? Confinement or death or whatever, right? But confinement is the other option where you simply remove them from society while keeping them under your control, right? The problem with banishing is that people can come back with, you know, they can poison in the water supply, they can come back and they can kill the livestock. They can do all kinds, and they can ally with the brigands and horse thieves of the woods to come and cripple the community because now they have this burning rage and can't be satisfied, and it'll escalate forever and ever. Amen. So, confinement means that they're ostracized for the community, but they can't go and get external allies. That's another option. Death, of course, was an option in the past. There'd be a duel, shoot out, or something like that, sort of High Noon style. So, with regards to that, I mean, this is just for me. I think there's good data to back it up, but I'm not going to say this is true in every circumstance. It's pretty hard to find things that are true in every circumstance except mortality. So for me, if somebody displays really aggressive, messed up, dysfunctional behavior, I will tell them that this is not acceptable, this is wrong.
[14:41] And I'll give them 24 hours. And if in 24 hours they catch themselves and apologize, then I will listen to that. If they don't, then I have nothing more to say. You can't win against people. I mean, can you win a tennis game against someone who doesn't play by the rules, who allows themselves five serves? Can you win in pickleball if someone doesn't respect the kitchen? You can't. You can't.
[15:07] You can't win in a chess game with someone who is willing to treat every pawn as a queen. You can't win. You can't possibly win. because and not can you not win but it's not even a game anymore like there's no game right reason is the game of life reason voluntarism negotiation is the game of life and people aren't willing to play by those rules there is no game there's no winning there's no victory there is self-defense, ostracism and survival that's it so I hope that helps and this is as true of people's personal life as I think is as I think it is in the larger societal context but free domain dot com slash donate really appreciate these questions keep them coming bye.
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