Video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/k5byoaiNo81KbSA4gRU
The lecture highlights valuing virtues over material wealth for personal growth and meaningful relationships in modern society, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing virtue over materialism for fulfillment.
Chapters
0:00:00 Introduction to Philosophical Paradoxes
0:13:54 The Excess Wealth Dilemma
0:30:33 Reflections on Physical Appearance vs. Virtue
0:37:37 The Efficiency Debate: Materialism vs. Sociopathy
0:44:09 Materialism vs. Ambition and Dating
0:46:35 Embracing Courageous Honesty in Relationships
In this podcast lecture, we delved into the intriguing concept of beauty, efficiency, and virtue. The speaker explored the idea that beauty can be seen as wasteful luxury when prioritizing efficiency but becomes incredibly valuable when focusing on lovability. An examination of historical architecture revealed a paradox where poorer times produced breathtakingly beautiful buildings, while wealthier periods often resulted in less aesthetically pleasing structures.
There was a reflection on the correlation between economic status and the creation of beauty, with a highlight on how societies tend to prioritize material gains over spiritual virtues in modern times. The speaker emphasized the importance of directing excess resources towards cultivating inner beauty through virtues like integrity, courage, and honesty rather than solely focusing on external appearances or material wealth.
Throughout the lecture, the speaker explored various societal norms and behaviors, such as the emphasis on physical attractiveness, materialism, and the pursuit of short-term gains over long-term fulfillment. The discussion also touched on the significance of family, integrity, and the impact of individual choices on personal growth and relationships.
Ultimately, the underlying message urged listeners to prioritize virtue over materialism, courage over convenience, and honesty over deceit. The speaker emphasized the transformative power of pursuing integrity and moral courage in nurturing not only personal growth but also meaningful relationships and fulfilling lives.
podcast, lecture, beauty, efficiency, virtue, economic status, materialism, integrity, courage, honesty
[0:00] All right, this is Philosophical Paradoxes. This is number six.
Sorry, this is the fourth file.
The fourth in the sequence, but this is number six. Some I've done more than once.
From Chateaubriand, who wrote something like, it's a paraphrase, Beauty is useless if you care for efficiency, but shockingly useful if you care for lovability.
Yes, beauty is a wasteful luxury, but ultimately the only thing people will protect and make pilgrimages to. Two, let's do that again. It's a really, really important one.
Beauty is useless if you care for efficiency, but shockingly useful if you care for lovability.
Yes, beauty is a wasteful luxury, but ultimately the only thing people will protect and make pilgrimages to.
Now, I think that is very, very interesting, of course, to put it mildly.
Now, you know, one of the things, of course I grew up as you know in London I spent time in Dublin I spent time in Johannesburg I spent time in, Scotland Edinburgh and so on and the one thing that you notice I think fairly quickly when you go to these various diverse places is that, there is great beauty in the buildings in some places and great efficiency in the buildings in other places.
[1:28] And, of course, the thing that strikes me, it kind of struck me a little bit at the time, which is the older buildings tended to be, the older and more beautiful buildings tended to be from the poorer economic times.
Right? So some of the most beautiful buildings in England were built 17th century, 16th century, a little bit, and they just poured heart and soul into medieval churches and I'm thinking of the great universities.
It is really inspiring and beautiful buildings.
And yet, when we got greater wealth, we got a fugly environment.
I mean, that's kind of strange, right? When people were broke, they created beauty.
When people were starving, they created beauty. When people were wealthy, they created ugliness.
Isn't that a strange thing? It's almost an economic paradox.
[2:29] Why is it the case that when someone has no money, their house is beautiful.
When someone is a zillionaire, their house is an ugly Soviet-style Kleenex box of grim, eye-wateringly ugly efficiency.
When you have the excess money to create beauty, you create ugliness.
When you have a deficiency in resource you create staggering beauty now i understand, all of the arguments that it's not the same people and i get all of that but just as a culture, when we were broke we had beauty when we are wealthy we have ugliness and again tons of exceptions i get frank lloyd right i get all of that but i've always had and i sort of this This nostalgia brought the world of 18th century England to life for me in my novel Just Poor, which you should totally get.
It's a great, great book. It's free. freedomain.com slash books. But.
[3:30] I was really, I have this nostalgia for some of the beauty of sort of medieval periods and so on.
And I don't just mean the big cities, right?
I mean the hominess, the familiarity, you know, when you, and this is one of the reasons why these medieval games, and Dragon's Dogma, Skyrim, and Dragon Age Inquisitions, and all of these other, gosh, what is there?
I mean, of course, there is Baldur's Gate series, Icewind Dale series, Neverwinter Nights, and there's one other one.
Oh, yeah, Elden Ring. Like, there are all these medieval settings, and people take great comfort in having these medieval settings.
The sort of thatched roof cottages and narrow streets.
And there is a kind of—now, I understand, of course, you know, it's the D&D versus the Monty Python view of the Middle Ages, right?
So, Monty Python looked at the Middle Ages and accurately and rightly said, you know, bring out your dead, there's lots of death.
They said, why is he a king?
Oh, you know, he has a king. Well, how do you know? Well, he hasn't got shit all over him. Like, I get all of that. Oh, there's some lovely filth down here.
[4:45] The peasants who are gathering mud and so on. I get all of that, and that's very real.
But of course the Monty Python guys are secularists and atheists highly educated secularists and atheists and they look at the Middle Ages as a time of filth and disease, and squalor and you'll notice that in Monty Python and the Holy Grail which conditioned an entire generation on how to look at the Middle Ages to be frank right in that movie there's no beauty, now I get it's a comedy right I get all of that.
But the comedy could be juxtaposing the beauty with the ugliness.
[5:24] There's comedy in that as well. So the atheists and the secularists, like Monty Python, look at the Middle Ages and see only ugliness and filth and squalor.
And, you know, of course there was that. But there was also greater beauty in the public buildings.
Again, with the full caveat that, I mean, this is the view from E.M.
Forster's A Room with a View, which is, they're in Italy and they're looking at a church and they say, oh this is beautiful some of the people, they're on a tourist guide to the church oh it's beautiful and so on, and the priest says these buildings are a monument to faith they stand for a higher purpose I'm paraphrasing, they stand for a higher purpose.
[6:16] They're shrines to the glory of God and based upon a belief in higher things, and the sort of hero of the novel his father says no built as a shrine to faith that just means the workers weren't paid properly, Aha! You see? Now, is it true that the workers weren't paid properly? I don't know.
I don't know that anyone's gone through the project details of the building of a great church.
Were the workers paid properly? Right, so this is the priest, of course, who's portrayed as ridiculous.
That's the place where we saw the yellow dog.
The priest is portrayed as ridiculous, and the secular atheist humanists, they are portrayed as wise and loving and passionate and physically beautiful and all of that sort of stuff.
I mean, Julian Sands played the young man, and in his prime he was just about one of the most attractive people on the planet, in my humble opinion.
So that's the two. This is a monument to faith, says the priest.
Well, that's just a cheap, fraudulent way of ripping off the workers, says the atheist.
[7:39] And the atheism is quite vividly alluded to in the text.
That just means the workers weren't paid properly. Religion is a shrine to the beautiful.
Religion is an excuse to underpay the workers, right? So this is the socialist versus the Christian.
This is the religious worldview versus the atheist worldview. worldview and this is the big question of the atheist worldview the atheist worldview creates beauty not in things but in views it does not create beauty it creates views so the atheist worldview which produces science produces the i mean the truly staggering views of the earth rising over the moon, right? Earthrise, it's called.
It creates amazing views of storm clouds from orbit.
It creates amazing views of the details of a fly's eye.
It creates amazing views of the.
[8:42] Peaks of mountains rising up like shark fins through the oceanic clouds of the sky.
It creates amazing views, underwater views.
It creates amazing perspective, amazing views.
And sometimes comedic ones, like you think of the guy with the extreme fisheye lens who attaches it to his nose and then walks in a fun way through a field, can be amusing.
So science creates technology, technology creates views, technology rarely creates beauty. And this is the divide between, I mean, they call it literally the cult of Apple. The cult of Apple.
So, Steve Jobs said things have to not just work well, but look good.
Whereas IBM-style PCs are notoriously clunky, you know, smoker's tooth yellow boxes with turbo switches, you know, sort of back in the day.
[9:37] And Apple costs more, and it's prettier. a beautiful building costs more, but it's beautiful. And of course, I grew up in ugly, ugly, ugly places.
Yeah, no, even my boarding school was an ugly place. The church was pretty.
I remember the occasional corners of beauty that I would find in the world. I just loved them.
And I remember there's a famous view, or at least for me, it was a famous view in Montreal.
I lived in Montreal for four years, going to the National theater school and then finishing my undergraduate at mcgill and there is a place in montreal you can stand below a church and rising up behind the church is a giant vertical ice cube tray glass tower of staggeringly ugly economic efficiency right just you know a high-rise tower of for for businesses, with all of those glass squares on it.
And I remember, of course, looking at that. I'd walk past it on occasion.
I think it was on the way to my bank.
And I would stand below it, and I would look at this towering edifice to capitalism.
[10:53] Looming over this beautiful church.
And I remember also taking refuge in a church.
I mean, I know this sounds a little melodramatic, but I had been in the bush for so long that I just needed to see beauty.
And nature has beauty, but it's pretty rare.
I mean, if you've ever done a long hike through the forest, I mean, the forest is pretty, but it's pretty monotonous, right?
I mean, just to say a few over and over again, when people do hikes to get to sort of mountaintops or hilltops or whatever and look out over the vistas, but even the vistas tend to be a little monotonously the same.
I had to spend so much time in the bush that I just needed to take refuge in some man-made beauty.
I needed to crawl into the womb of some man-made beauty and I took refuge in a church and meditated there for some hours just to give myself respite from the monotony of nature.
[11:49] And there is a certain aesthetic purity I get, I understand, to looking at a city with these beautiful, in a sense, I get the beauty if you look at sort of Hong Kong.
I did a speech overlooking Hong Kong for my documentary, Fight for Freedom.
Get that at freedomain.com slash documentaries.
And I did enjoy and love looking at cities, but living in them is too scant of beauty to nourish the soul.
It's too short. So when you live in the city, you take respite from the city in the beauty of nature.
And I think it's been shown that seeing not straight lines seeing in nature this is good for the soul good for the mind.
[12:37] You take respite from the hard, angular, engineered lines of the city in the swirly, puffy, lovely chaos and unplanned nature of the country.
So atheism, science, materialism, secularism produces wealth, without a doubt.
I mean, produces efficiency, produces lower heating bills.
So then the question is what is all that excess wealth for they had to be excess wealth although of course again back to the the hero of room with a view he would say that the only reason there was excess wealth is the workers weren't paid properly that you ripped poor the poor workers off in order to create the beautiful cathedral so atheism produces wealth i mean not obviously communist I mean, it's atheism, but the secular material mindset produces wealth, because it focuses on efficiency, it cuts costs, it cuts operating expenses, and so on.
[13:41] The buildings where you can't open the windows are more efficient to heat and cool than the buildings where you can open the windows, but people also need fresh air.
Although, you know, how much fresh air there is in the city is kind of debatable.
[13:54] I really I took a smaller office when I first got my own office I took a smaller office that overlooked trees I wanted that to rest my eyes from the hard CRT text I was constantly pounding away as a coder and as a guy who just wrote endless emails and documents and presentations and RFPs and all, so we have all of this excess wealth are we pouring it into beauty?
No we are not pouring our excess wealth into beauty.
If you look at a place like Florida, I mean, this is sort of famously.
[14:31] Doug Copeland talked about this in Generation X.
So Florida is famously an economic powerhouse and Florida is famously monotonous and ugly, right?
It's a strip malls and gas stations and cheap t-shirts and amusement parks and it's sort of famously ugly.
It's efficient there are jobs there's money there's income and what happens to the excess income well the excess income in the past used to be poured into beauty whereas the excess income now, is poured into what it is poured into, consumption you see when a person in the middle ages would go to the church and would pray and be part of the service they're not consuming they're participating, right they're not in a sense they're not watching an auction they're in the auction right.
[15:21] Passive, because the entire point of the Christian service is to convince you of the need to change your thoughts and behavior to save your soul.
It's a very different situation from watching a movie, right?
I mean, obviously watching a movie has elements of propaganda to it and all of that, I understand that, but the purpose of a movie is to distract you from your emotional, in modern movies, to distract you from your emotional defenses in order to program you with a particular world of view right and this of course is all the way back to room with a view where the writer.
[16:03] Populated all of the characters whose worldview he wanted to push he populated those people were all beautiful and wise and curious and smart and and non-conformists and all kinds of wonderful things according to the writer and according to the rebelliousness of the the time but movies are there to lower your emotional defenses by appealing to your vanity or i'd like to be friends with these people or these people are the cool kids or these people are the pretty kids and therefore you want their world view right you you sell the world view through beauty in the same way that attractive people are often at the helm of various fraudulent fraudulent activities, right?
Fraudulent activities could be anything from a pyramid scheme to a woman saying, giving you the hint that maybe she'll date you if you buy her dinner when she has no intention of dating you.
And so that's just fraudulent from that standpoint. And the same thing happens as well with guys who are fit, want to sell you their supplements, you know, and so on, right?
[17:07] So, but in the Christian worldview, the beauty that you have is unrelated to your physical being.
The beauty that you have and the beauty that you're capable of is unrelated to your physical being.
And in fact, the less attractive your physical shell, the more access you have to certain virtues because you won't have the sin of vanity or pride regarding your appearance. appearance.
So beauty is more available to the physically ugly than it is to the physically beautiful.
So this is the interesting reversal, right? The less you focus on your external appearance, the more you focus on your internal qualities.
And I say this, you know, as a guy who was scouted to be a model when I was in my teens and went through a whole modeling program and And then at the end of it, just decided not to pursue that life.
Not just, well, that was not a thing. It just seemed like a very dangerous world. Tempting, of course.
Tempting because there's a lot of positive feedback. You can make some money.
[18:12] But that is not something that I wanted to get into.
I mean, I had the temptation, but it was not a life that I wanted to pursue.
And having talked to some models in the industry over the years, it's a very good thing for me. for a good thing that I did not do that.
So, to participate in the story and to become beautiful, well now, what's happened, of course, the story of becoming beautiful has been turned into mere consumerism, right?
So the story of becoming beautiful now is no longer the perfection and refinement of the morals of your soul.
No, no, no, no. Now what it is to become beautiful is to buy makeup, to buy a gym membership, to polish the virtue of, to polish the muscles and skin of your body to become beautiful.
It is not the participation in a moral narrative that makes you beautiful.
It is the purchasing of consumer goods that makes you desirable.
And that's a very different situation.
[19:19] And of course, physical beauty is not distributed widely.
Mightily of course there's a bell curve to physical beauty some who are ugly no matter what some who are beautiful almost no matter what and some who you know with work in the middle can go go a little bit either way but physical beauty is not evenly distributed which gives people despair if physical beauty is the standard then the fact that some people are just born ugly.
[19:49] Gives them despair and excludes them from the good whereas of course the christian narrative that what matters is the virtue of your soul, which is available to all allows everyone to participate in the moral journey and doesn't create this caste system of physical attractiveness.
[20:07] Some women, of course, the genetics of their fat distribution just tends to enhance the curves of their outfit.
Some guys are born, you know, with great teeth and great jawlines and maybe naturally fat-burning metabolisms and great thick lifelong heads of hair and all that kind of stuff, right? Like the sort of chatty-chat stuff.
And that's just genetic accident and so on. And it means that participation in the good, and the good these days means stimulation of sexual desire, right?
It's mating display. Mating displays is the good these days.
Mating and wealth displays.
Mating displays for women, wealth displays for men, right?
There's the idea that a man over 30, and particularly over 40, is neither ugly nor handsome.
All he is is rich or poor, and that's it.
And that's it. and the current tension over 20-year-old women sleeping with 35-year-old men and it's creepy and it's icky and it's this and it's that.
It is destructive, of course.
It is destructive because if the women want resources from the 35-year-old men, then they will get those resources from the 35-year-old men.
But the 35-year-old men are unlikely to settle down with the women who lack 15 years of experience.
[21:26] Does mean that the 20 year old men can't compete with the resource acquisition of, the 35 year old men so the 20 year old men are left out in the cold and the 20 year old women are unlikely to settle down and start families with the much older men this is where you get, the 304s and the incels right the women who want material wealth princess treatment only only you know they just want to have money money spent on them which is i mean women have a lot of women of course have a fetish for having money spent on them it turns them on right and you can understand of course why it's a man displaying excess resources and so on so women have a fetish for a lot of women have a fetish for having money spent on them but the problem is that it doesn't lead to stable families it leads to sex or to sexual excitement but it doesn't lead to stable stable families.
For that, you need more contemporaries, right, in your level of experience.
And of course, a woman doesn't have to have discernment if she goes for an older man, because he's already proved that he can make resources.
She has to have discernment and encouragement to a younger man so that she can figure out who's going to make resources and how she can help make that happen with her encouragement and skills and abilities and support and so on.
[22:47] So it's kind of a cheat, right? It's cheating both sides of the system.
There's nothing immoral moral about it. It's not evil. It's not the initiation of the use of force.
But something can be not evil and yet corrupt.
Not evil and yet corrupt.
It's aesthetically preferable actions to date someone roughly in your own age range.
That's the only way that society can be stable and grow.
Wide age disparities in dating produce a collapse in birth rate and a bunch of young men with no access to dating, which means that they don't have any particular ambition.
Men have ambition in order to gather resources for their family.
If they don't see any prospects of a family, they will turn to video games, drugs, pornography, like whatever it is, but they won't build any particularly ambitious lives as a whole.
[23:39] So, the beauty of the soul, which Christianity provides to everyone, the beauty of the soul is a story we can all participate in, and the beauty of the soul does not cost money right the beauty of the flesh costs money, the beauty of the flesh costs money the beauty of the soul is free give or take right i mean of course you know maybe you have to pay a tithe maybe you donate maybe of course you have to buy bibles and so on but you know relative to how much money is spent on makeup gym liposuction injection fillers, Brazilian butt lifts, fake boobs, and so on, buckle fat removers and so on.
[24:23] Too much it's not too much and of course a tithe even if it's ten percent of income a tithe is income variant whereas beauty products are not right they're not they're not bought on a sliding scale right they cost the same amount of dollars whether it's half your income or one percent of your income so it's kind of a regressive tax on the poor so you can have economic efficiency and you can have more money, but if you have more money, what do people spend their money on?
That's a sort of foundational question.
We are the wealthiest generation that have ever existed, or maybe the second after the boomers, but we are the wealthiest generation.
I mean, if you look at the hundreds and hundreds of generations of humanity, we're the top one or two or three or whatever, right?
So we are, you know, one-tenth of one percent of the wealthiest people who've have ever lived. And what are we spending our money on?
Are we spending our money on the improvement of our souls? We are not.
Are we spending money on the pursuit of virtue? We are not. I mean, present company accepted, of course. What are we spending our money on?
We're spending our money on inconsequential, passing dopamine feel-good hits that lead nowhere and amount to nothing.
[25:41] That's what we're spending our money on. Not a book on virtue, not the practice of moral courage, but on hair products, tight skirts, and cool shoes for both men and women, right?
Sneakers of the high heels of, sneakers of high heels for men, right? In terms of like utility and.
[26:06] As consumption, as are cars. Cars are the purses for men.
So we are spending our money on consumption and display, not on the elevation of virtue.
[26:18] And people who are morally beautiful have to be banished from the public sphere in the same way that ugly girls don't tend to hang out with beautiful girls because, I mean physically, and again, I don't mean spiritually, right? Right?
Homely girls don't tend to hang out with beautiful girls and kind of want them away because if the ugly girls are hanging out with the beautiful girls, then the men will zero in on the beautiful girls, will ignore the ugly girls, and the ugly girls will look uglier by comparison.
Which is why the overweight girls tend to hang out together and you sort of all understand. And it's the same thing is true for guys too.
The broke guys tend to hang out together.
The wealthy guys tend to hang out together. So you have an even chance at the women in the vicinity and so the internet of course has given us the edification of, beautiful people, morally beautiful people and they have to be banished because that arouses the resentment of the spiritually ugly.
[27:17] So in the middle ages when there was very little excess wealth they spent it on beauty.
Now that we have relative to the middle ages effectively infinite excess wealth we waste it we waste our money We waste our money.
And look, I understand that I'm obviously long past the peak of needing to be physically attractive.
I mean, in terms of like a mating display, I obviously still exercise.
I want my wife to find me attractive and, you know, all of that.
[27:49] On display in public, right? And it wasn't too long ago, that I was with my daughter in a public place and I saw all these guys coming down, like these young men coming down the street and they were, all of them, checking out their hair and adjusting their hair.
Now, I don't want to be like Mr. Old Foggy Critical, oh, I never did that.
No, of course, of course, I checked my hair, I I remember being horrified.
I had been in, I used to go to the summer camp for months at a time.
I'd been at summer camp forever. There were no mirrors around.
And I think I saw somewhere there was a mirror and I saw that I had a cluster of pimples on my forehead.
I was just appalled and horrified. So I get all of that. And I'm not saying, oh, it's the most terrible thing in the world. I've done it and so on.
I remember when I first started losing my hair, I would run my fingers through my hair and then pull it down to one side to cover up the widow's peak.
Okay. Okay, so again, I'm not, oh, how dare these vainglorious youths only care about their appearance. I get all of that.
But the amount of effort that I poured into my physical appearance relative to the amount of effort that I poured into my spiritual or my moral or my philosophical development was relatively small.
I spent more time reading and thinking about philosophy than I did about playing with my hair.
[29:13] Certain amount of you know late stage mouse utopia the beautiful ones focusing on grooming because when you focus on grooming it's passive you focus on grooming that's a passive situation, grooming and passivity go hand in hand because grooming is making yourself attractive, so that someone else takes the initiative and for young men to focus so much on grooming is to broadcast their passivity.
That's not a good thing. I mean, think of the Venus flytrap, right? What does the Venus flytrap pour its energies into?
Well, creating that sweet, sticky substance that attracts the flies so they can close over them.
It's not out there roaming around like a panther hunting. It's not taking initiative.
It's focusing itself into being attractive so that it can trap a fly or whatever it is, right? I assume it's a fly, Venus flytrap and all.
And so, yeah, I mean, of course, I did focus on my appearance to some degree And I'm not saying that's unimportant, but it's got to be kind of in the middle of that bell curve. It's got to be in the Aristotelian mean.
And I just, of course, I couldn't help but notice that there were young, attractive women around.
And the boys were all looking in the mirrors.
[30:26] Dude, I don't know. I'd love to teach a class on masculinity, but I think we'll just stay focused on philosophy.
[30:34] And again, nothing wrong with being attractive. But then of course when you look back later on in life and you say how much time did I spend worrying about how my hair looked and checking it out in the mirror rather than going up and talking to girls and learning how to do that.
I mean a woman does not want to compete with a man for the bathroom mirror.
A woman doesn't want to look and see more beauty products on the man's side of the bathroom sink because that's a broadcaster passivity.
[31:06] Feminine to focus too much on appearance i mean i don't use makeup i don't obviously don't do my hair and i focus on the quality of what i can provide intellectually morally not how i look on camera and and so on right and of course none of it matters right i mean this is the fundamental thing you get older right none of this matters how your hair looked when you were walking down down the street at 2.05 p.m.
On a Wednesday afternoon 27 years ago is completely irrelevant to your life.
Did it hang the right way? Was it a good hair day? Was it a bad hair day?
Is my skin totally clear? Do I have a couple of pimples?
Like, none of that matters. You get older. And again, you know, the perspective of age, and I'm not saying that my perspective at 57 should match a 17-year-old's. Of course not. I get all of that.
But still, you need to hear this perspective if if you're a young man, young woman, what matters is the quality of your soul, not the correct floppiness of your hair.
How about having a good soul life rather than worrying about having a bad hair day?
Good versus pretty. Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter. Of course, this is a perspective as you age that you look back at all the things you were concerned about when you were younger and they're generally retarded.
[32:24] Overconcerned with, like I said, overconcerned with they're generally retarded.
And worry in general tends to be a lack of faith in your ability to handle changing information at a rapid and reasonable pace.
The focus on beauty at the expense of wealth is a continual reminder to society, that the quality of your character matters more, than vanity material displays of high sexual market value, you, whether it's resources for men and prettiness for women and so on.
So the purpose of the church is, and this is back to the day in Montreal, many times I stood below the church that was dwarfed by the glass tower of economic efficiency and soulless ugliness.
I mean, Minecraft Lego monstrosity of glass-sheened invisibility, basically, like, is a human being possessed of the desire for virtue glass buildings are sociopaths, you can't see in, the exterior is kind of blinding, it has a certain attractiveness to it but it's fundamentally soulless it has no individuation or no personality and it exists simply for the sake of efficiency, not beauty.
[33:44] Spending excess resources to promote the virtue of beauty reminds us all that that what matters and carries us through life is not how pretty we are or how much beyond a certain minimum excess wealth we have but how good we are that's what brings self-satisfaction that's what brings love that's what brings attachment like pair bonding is virtue bonding that's the only thing you can't pair bond on looks because looks fade you can't pair bond on money because it It hollows out and often also fades as well.
You can only pair bond on virtue. You can only pair bond on virtue.
And that's because the ducks can pair bond with each other because there's not much difference between ducks.
So the biochemical pair bonding mechanism can work, right?
Swans or whatever mates for life. It's like, oh, it's so sweet.
It's like, no, they're just control C, control V. You know, Claudine.
Research style. whereas there's such a variety of human beings we have villains, we have heroes, we have in-betweeners we have people falling from grace we have people rising from nothing we have people traversing all of the infinite highs and lows of human virtue, there's so much to choose from that we can only pair bond on virtue.
[35:00] That it is the quality of our characters that matters in the long run and not the screwability of our fleshly capsules.
Our meat photocopiers, known as our bodies, are not the fundamental value of who we are.
Everything we share with the apes is anti-human for men and women to pursue.
And, of course, apes have their hunger, their food, their lust, their sex, their mating displays, their butt shaking, all of that kind of stuff.
And it's part of life. I'm not a Platonist in that sense, that we are meat, muscle, and mind.
I get all that. We're meat, muscle, and mind, but to live at the level of meat and muscle is to live with brutal Darwinian efficiency, but no higher virtue pair bonding.
The cathedrals that were beautiful were put there as a shrine to the possibility of lifelong love love of virtue love and respect for the self love of the other through admiration of his or her virtue it was a reminder that.
[36:13] Beyond bare survival it is the quality of our characters that matter, not the excess resources we can consume, that that the view in the mirror of a virtuous person is worth infinitely more than the cool view of the earth rising over the horizon of the lunar landscape.
[36:34] Beauty is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to material things.
I mean, if you look at churches that are built in the 21st century, they're generally ugly boxes.
You look at the churches built in the 15th century, they are ornate detail, glass stained, inspiring and beautiful.
Beautiful. And they call to us, they call to our soul because of what they fundamentally represent.
Pursue virtue, not material gain, because look at all this material excess we have and we poured it into inefficient beauty.
But beauty is not only efficient in terms of love.
Beauty of character, beauty of virtue, beauty of integrity and moral courage is the only path we have to love.
Now, of course, a sociopath would say love is inefficient.
And I'm still trying to figure out the big distinction between scientism and sociopathy. It seems to be kind of the same thing.
[37:38] So a sociopath says, well, I mean, look at children.
Children are expensive. And to me, people who talk about the expense of children, children cost $150,000, $200,000, right?
So it's inefficient. But that's sociopathic in my view. It's an empty calculation of dry economic utility.
[38:03] Or a man who says, if I want to attract a woman, it's more efficient to fake that I'm wealthy than to actually work to become wealthy.
It's more efficient in terms of just attracting a woman to pretend I'm wealthy.
In the same way that a woman might say to attract a man, it's more important for me to be sexy than virtuous.
Because sexiness is a faster way of attracting a man and will attract more men than virtue will.
Virtue is a very inefficient way of attracting someone because they have to get to know you, They have to understand your virtues. They have to appreciate your virtues.
They have to themselves be virtuous, which takes a long time to achieve.
And so you're really trying to, you know, shoot a hoop from the parking lot, right? It's really tough.
Whereas, you know, just push up your boobs and stick out your butt and put a lot of makeup on and go shake your moneymaker at a bar and you'll get lots of male attraction.
It's it's it's efficient to put out merely fleshly mating signals whether it's resources for men or attractiveness for women it's more efficient you get more people attracted to you you get more choice you get more sex in in the short run so yeah it's it's efficient it's if you want to make money often it's more efficient if you have charisma but no particular business skills well, it's way more efficient to run a Ponzi scheme than it is...
[39:32] Build a valuable business and learn how to market and hire and sales and accounting and all of that.
You know, that was one of these tragic stories. These sort of mascara-eyed anime women.
There was some woman who, a girl I guess, she was, she just turned 18, which I guess legally means you can start an OnlyFans.
She started an OnlyFans and made like, I don't know, was it $200,000 in her first month or something like that, right?
[40:00] So that's more efficient. It's like the amaranth thing, right? That's more efficient.
It's more efficient if you're an attractive woman to shake your butt and get stuff.
That's more efficient than becoming a good person, gaining the love of a good man, raising happy and loving children, and being surrounded by a beautiful community as you age, right? Well, that's slow.
And the beauty sacrifice is saying there's nothing more than material gain.
And I remember this. There was some skeevy OnlyFans salesman at some university, and the OnlyFans salesman was saying, you should start an OnlyFans. You're hot.
And the woman said, I don't think my father would approve.
And the skeevy OnlyFans salesman said, said, I bet he'll have no problem with it when you buy him a Lamborghini.
Ooh, to sell your daughter's virtue, or your approval of your daughter's virtue, to sell that for a piece of decaying metal.
Sell your soul for stuff.
[41:08] Means, work mating displays, not virtue.
Pour your energy into being attractive, not virtuous.
Virtuous which means trading the glory of love for the transitory self-betrayal of mere lust and again no problem with lust lust is great but only in the realm of virtue when you have excess resources and you pour them into beauty you are saying that the purpose of the material is to serve the soul not the flesh the purpose of wealth is the pursuit of virtue, not the pursuit of dopamine virtue grows in pleasure and survives and flourishes into old age dopamine and physical attractiveness decay and fall apart middle to late middle age when you still got 30 40 years to go you want a plane that's not going to fall apart mid-flight A looned plane that makes the distances hurt you.
You build the plane quickly, you can take off sooner, of course.
[42:15] You can take off quicker, but the plane falls apart in the middle of the journey, falls apart in the middle of the journey.
So is beauty efficient?
Absolutely. But it's only efficient insofar as we take excess resources and pour them into beauty to remind ourselves and others that virtue is more important than stuff.
Virtue is more important than stuff. And I mean, this was sort of my big question.
I was rolling along in a very comfortable, productive and enjoyable high-tech executive entrepreneurial career and i walked away from that to pursue virtue this is the same thing that when i was deplatformed i said okay this is a reminder in a sense from the universe to work on beauty not just impact and this is why i turned to, reading and writing novels and other things that i think have have beauty so science does have a a certain sociopathy to it in that it focuses only on material gain.
I mean, and it's interesting to me that in the 1960s, which was really one of the most catastrophic turning points in American history, America went to the moon and created myriad unjust laws, the welfare state, and massive debts and catastrophes.
[43:37] Whole world, and on the other side of the world, occluded by the view of the world, were the virtues.
The earth rise over the moon was the eclipse of the virtues that the science program took away.
The science program was, we'd rather have cool views than happy families, because it took tax money to create these views, which meant that fewer children could be created.
Absolutely, you need some material comfort, of course, right?
But where do you put your excess resources?
[44:10] In the pursuit of beauty, I think. This is all the people, I've said this of course, to all the people, get a lot of young men and some young women, it's mostly young men calling me in and saying, well, I'm living at home and that's saving me money. Well, that's materialism.
Well, what matters is the dollars in your bank account. And I said, but it's destroying your ambition.
It's destroying your dating prospects and all the good women are getting snapped up and it's crippling you. I mean, you can say, well, it's efficient from a material standpoint, it's efficient to live at home.
But that's only because you're looking at the short-term material gain of not having to pay rent, not the long-term eternal adolescence and infancy, really, of relying on your parents and driving away potential mates.
[44:54] And saying, well, I need to live at home to save money is saying that I can't make more through my own ambition.
It's crippling. Like saying, I'll get my sense of achievement from video games.
[45:08] Well, it's not real achievement. It's dopamine over virtue.
The virtue being courage to go out and carve your own life.
So yeah, it's efficient to not have children from a short-term economic standpoint.
But of course, when you have children, you just work harder and smarter, and then you have all the joys of family life. And the joys of family life are second to none.
Honestly, the joys of family life are second to none. I would do anything to achieve and maintain the joys of family life.
And that anything meant having moral courage and integrity to the point where I got deplatformed. Well, so what?
The alternative was to lie and misrepresent my commitment to the truth, which would lose the respect of my family.
I don't want to get deplatformed from my own family. If that means being deplatformed from YouTube, fuck YouTube.
[45:58] I also don't want to get deplatformed from my own conscience, and that's much more important than PayPal.
So, I hope that this helps. I hope that this paradox is somewhat unraveled in your mind and in your life.
Please, you know, I'd be on my knees begging you to pursue integrity, virtue, and courage.
Right? I talked to a guy yesterday. He's been in a marriage for 17 years with his wife.
He's called her all kinds of horrible names. And yet he's never told the truth to his own mother about how angry he is at how she neglected him as a child.
So have the courage to speak honestly to those in your life.
[46:35] Don't misrepresent, don't avoid, don't lie, don't avoid, don't minimize.
Just have the courage to speak honestly in your life. Will that give you up some material benefit?
I can guarantee you that it absolutely will.
I can guarantee you that it will give you up some short-term material benefit.
In the same way that if you build skyscrapers, you might save 20% on your heating and cooling bills, but the problem is you end up with a culture that's so ugly nobody wants to bother to defend it, and your civilization ends.
I'm telling you, it's way worth paying the extra heating and cooling bills to create beautiful things so that you have a culture that people want to protect and preserve.
[47:15] So, if you focus only on the flesh, you can't live beyond yourself.
If you focus on your values, you can transfer them to your children.
Your children can transfer them to their children, and they can live forever.
You partake in eternity by having a family.
You partake only in the life of the flesh, which decays and dies as you do, if you focus on materialism. So I hope that helps.
Thank you so much. Freedomain.com slash donate. I'm now going to go get myself ready for the 11 a.m. show.
Appreciate you listening. I appreciate your support.
Freedomain.com slash donate if you'd like to help out this show later.
I'd really appreciate that. Have yourselves an absolutely wonderful day.
Well, I guess I'll talk to you in about 20 minutes.
Have a wonderful time. Stay in touch. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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