0:05 - Introduction to Non-Determinism
2:15 - The Nature of Free Will
9:46 - Emergent Properties Explained
16:18 - Understanding Free Will
19:04 - The Complexity of Simplification
24:05 - Brilliance and Simplicity
36:04 - Control Through Complexity
36:39 - Conclusion and Support
In this episode, I delve into the fascinating topic of emergent properties, particularly focusing on how non-determinism can arise from deterministic subcomponents. I tackle a listener's question on whether I can provide a clear step-by-step example of how atoms and cells, which possess no free will on their own, can contribute to a consciousness that appears to embody free will. I explore this by emphasizing the importance of examining the form of a question before delving into its content, using the act of questioning itself as a demonstration of emergent properties.
I illustrate how the act of formulating a question requires an aggregation of atoms and cells working together in a manner that reflects a level of agency not inherent in the individual components. By dissecting the process, I argue that no single atom can think or express a desire for knowledge, yet together, they exhibit emergent phenomena, such as the ability to process information and exhibit curiosity. I emphasize that the very act of questioning embodies the concept of emergent properties, suggesting that our human experience itself is an example of non-determinism arising from deterministic foundations.
Moving forward, I present a range of examples from nature and technology to further clarify emergent properties. I compare the behavior of living organisms, like trees and birds, with inanimate objects, such as rocks, to highlight how life conveys a form of agency absent in non-life. The contrast between a tree that grows but remains fixed versus a bird that decides to migrate illustrates the spectrum of agency rooted in life and an exploration of meaning and choice. Through the narrative of emergent properties, I touch on how complexity and agency manifest in various forms of existence.
In my discussion, I also touch upon the human inclination towards complexity, critiquing how many seem to equate true intelligence with intricate systems rather than appreciating the comfort and clarity that simplification brings. I explore the role of benevolence in creating simpler solutions that benefit the broader community, positing that the act of simplification is a hallmark of brilliance. Furthermore, I underscore that complexity is sometimes a barrier to understanding and participation, as some individuals choose to obscure their insights behind convoluted explanations, perpetuating a sense of elitism.
Drawing from my own experiences with coding and software development, I illustrate how simplifying code and design leads to greater accessibility and functionality, allowing more users to benefit from technology. I use this discussion to challenge the perception that wisdom lies in the baffling intricacies of any subject and instead, I advocate that the ultimate goal of intelligence should be to distill complicated phenomena into understandable concepts, making knowledge approachable for everyone.
As I conclude, I reflect on the implications of understanding emergent properties for broader philosophical discussions, including free will and determinism. I hint at future explorations of these themes, recognizing the necessity for preserving nuance in philosophical debates. The episode comes full circle by inviting listeners to reconsider their understanding of emergent properties and the significance of their own experiences as demonstrations of this concept in action.
[0:00] All right. Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from freedomain.com.
[0:06] Let's throw in a slash donate as well, freedomain.com slash donate. And these are questions posted from subscribers and donors. And sorry, it took me a little while to get to them, but I have the attention span of a squirrel. So we're on it. All right.
[0:24] So, somebody asks, do you have an example of non-determinism being an emergent property out of deterministic subcomponents? So, do you have an example of non-determinism being an emergent property out of deterministic subcomponents? So, of course, what that means is, can I show step-by-step how mere atoms and cells gain free will, right? No individual atom has free will. No individual cell has free will. My finger doesn't have free will. My ear doesn't have free will, and so on, right? So, can I show step-by-step how there's an emergent property possessed by none of the individual components that exists, right? Well, I mean, so the first thing that I would do if I was in this situation, the first thing that I would do is I would ask myself the following. Can any of your individual atoms think of, formulate, type out, and post the question. So, again, I said this sort of many years ago that one of the major things that I brought to philosophy is to think about the form of the argument before engaging with the content. So, think about the form of the argument before engaging with the content.
[1:51] What is implicit in the form of the argument, right? So, if somebody says to me, UPB is false, rather than arguing whether UPB is true or false, I would say, well, implicit in you telling me that UPB is false is that there's an objective standard of truth and falsehood, and that truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood, which is UPB, right? So, rather than looking at the content, look at the form.
[2:15] So, I would say to this person, and, you know, with all due respect and affection and all of that, I would say, okay, which one of your atoms typed this question? You say, well, individual atoms, the individual atoms that compose me can't think of or type these questions. Ah, okay, so that's good to know. Okay, well, which one of your cells thought of, formulated, asked, typed, and posted this question? And wanted an answer. Which of your atoms, or cells, or appendages, or so on, which one of them.
[2:53] Thought of, wanted an answer, preferred truth to falsehood, formulated the question, typed it out, and posted it in the hopes and preference of getting an answer? Now, of course, anybody who's honest would say, well, my spleen didn't do it, my finger didn't do it, my finger, if the finger didn't send you a message saying, hey man, I really want to figure out this determinism thing. And so, in the very act of having and asking a question, in the very act of having and asking a question, you are demonstrating emergent properties that is nowhere contained within any individual slice of cells or atoms or anything like that, or any organ or appendage. Now, again, we can sort of look at the neurons in the gut and the gut instincts and the gut feelings and all of that, but, That's also shared with animals and so on. We're talking about sort of conceptual questions. So, for me, slow your roll is essential.
[3:58] Because so many questions are actually answered in the formulation and presentation of the question. So, do you have an example, asks the listener, of non-determinism being an emergent property out of deterministic subcomponents? Yeah, that's you. Look in the mirror. Look in the mirror. Think about what you're doing. I don't know why this is hard for people. It seems to be very hard for people. Maybe it just involves a certain kind of humility, or maybe, I'm not saying this is true of this person in particular, because they're a donor and I love them, but maybe it's something to do with dance monkey dance, like I'm going to make you answer a question. Because do you have an example of non-determinism being an emergent property out of deterministic subcomponents? Well, well, your life, your question, your typing, your curiosity, your wanting to know, or maybe wanting me to jump through hoops for you, I don't know, but look in the mirror. You know, if somebody says to me, Stef, do you have absolute proof that a human being exists independent of you? It's like, well, you're asking me. So you must believe that I exist independent of you, right? If I want an answer to a piece of information I don't think I have, I don't ask myself, right? I don't know what, I don't know, the smallest town in Borneo is. I don't know that. Wait, is Borneo even still a country?
[5:24] Madagascar. I don't know what the smallest town in Madagascar is, so I don't introspect, because that's a piece of information I don't have. So, the first thing to do when you have a philosophical question is say to yourself, what is proven by me asking the question, or making the correction, or making the statement. What is proven? And if we look at all of the philosophical questions and implications that are laid to rest in the simple act of asking a question, then I swear on my spine, like 98% of philosophical questions are solved by slowing your roll and looking at what is implicit in asking the question. So, when we're looking at emergent properties, there's so much here, right? Non-determinism being an emergent property after deterministic subcomponents. Well, all life is non-determinism relative to non-life. Boy, that's a lot of negatives, right? All life is free will compared to non-life.
[6:38] So if you plant a tree in your backyard then the tree is going to be where the tree is the tree doesn't have a choice to pick up its skirts and move around I mean it could be ripped out I suppose by some extreme weather condition but the tree is the tree right it is where it is now that's a living thing of course and the tree will grow and extend and you don't know exactly where the branches are going to be but you know there'll be branches you don't know exactly how many leaves it's going to have, but it's going to have leaves. You don't know exactly how far it and its roots are going to extend, but they're going to be roots underneath the tree. So a tree relative to, say, a bird looks pretty determined, pretty deterministic, right? Now, what about a tree relative to a rock?
[7:24] So let's say, and we'll just remove as many variables as we can, right? I mean, you can always come up with edge cases, but let's say that you bury a bag of gold coins, you bury a bag of gold coins 10 feet deep in your backyard. And let's say you're in a totally stable place, no earthquakes. So we just say, right? And people have dug up this kind of pirate treasure stuff, or from the Roman age, people have dug up stuff, right? So let's say that you bury a bag of gold 10 feet deep in your backyard. Now, will that gold choose to move? No, the gold is absolutely passive. It does nothing except be acted on by external forces. It's inert.
[8:09] So, all life is free will relative to non-life. So, if there's a bird in your backyard, let's say it's going to fly south to the winter. I mean, you don't know exactly when. You don't know if it's going to make it, but, you know, it's going to generally do that kind of stuff. So the bird is going to move around in a way that the pot of gold 10 feet under the earth in your backyard is not going to move around. So... If you bury a burnt log from your fireplace 10 feet under the ground, then, well, of course, you're stealing carbon from the plants, but you are taking carbon and you're burying it. The burnt log is not alive. It's dead, right? And it's inert. It's carbon-based in a sense, but it's inert, as opposed to a carbon-based life form, like a squirrel or something like that, which is going to be moving around.
[9:05] So, atoms react, life is proactive, right? Like life has to seek out food, it has to seek out reproduction, it has to avoid predation. Life is proactive, matter is purely reactive. Life is composed of reactive matter, but life is proactive. Or to put it another way, of course, in my usual formulation, or life that is not proactive does not survive.
[9:31] Atoms don't reproduce. Atoms call conservation of energy, right? Energy can, sorry, matter can only be, can never be created or destroyed, only transferred into energy and back, right? So, atoms, right?
[9:46] So, atoms don't reproduce. DNA in cells reproduce.
[9:54] So, in terms of like, give me an example of an emergent property not shared by any individual component, right? Well, your computer, which you use to type this, is composed of atoms. No atoms have the ability to be a computer. But you put enough atoms together they're in the correct configuration and supply them with electricity, and then they have the capacity to be a computer. So everything that you're doing, typing, asking a question, using a computer, post, so that I can read it, no individual atom can do any of that. So everything that you do as a living organism, every question you ask, everything you type, every breath you take, is all an emergent property. Does any individual atom need to breathe? Well, of course not. Do cells require oxygen to function? Yes, they do. So, everything you do is an emergent property, and I'll give you one further, right? And once you understand this emergent property thing, you don't even ask the question. Now, that's not to say that there are no valid questions to be asked regarding emergent properties. I get that. But in this case, given that everything you're doing is based upon emergent properties, so you have to ask yourself.
[11:13] And even a cell can't ask itself this, right? You have to ask yourself, can any individual atom ask this question, type this out? No. But I'm composed of individual atoms, I accept that. Can any single neuron do this? No. But there's a certain aggregation of neurons and neural activity and connections and so on that allow you to ask this question and so on, right? But I'll go one further. I would ask this person, if they were in a call-in show, I would say, which letter contains your argument?
[11:43] Or your question, right? Which letter? Is it the letter D? Like, if you just typed D question mark, would I get your question? Right, what about A? What about P? What about S? What about T? Right, if you just posted one letter, and didn't even include a question mark, let's say no grammar. So, if you just posted one letter, would I get your question? What if you took all of these words and replaced them with one letter, or commas, or semicolons, or or anything like that. Well, none of that. So, even the question is an emergent property because no individual letter or space contains this question, but in aggregate, a question emerges. You should follow no individual letter, right? This is composed of the 26 letters, right? Space, right? A couple of, he's just got one. He's got a hyphen and a question mark, right? So, individual letters and spaces, and of course, even if he left out the spaces, I could puzzle out the question. So, no individual letter contains this question. However, you put the letters together, and you get the emergent property of a question.
[12:55] So, basically, if somebody's saying, give me an example of emergent properties, I would say, your question is an example of an emergent property, because no individual letter contains the question, but arranged in the right way, what emerges is a question. Your life, your consciousness, your being, none of that, your desire for an answer to a question, none of that is contained within any individual cell, or any individual atom in your body. No carbon atom has consciousness or cares about the answering the question of emergent properties. So, an emergent property called self-directed motion.
[13:39] If you've ever been, I mean, we all have for the most part, you've been on a beach, right? And what do kids do on a beach? They want to collect cool shells. Now, once in a while, you will grab for a cool shell, and it turns out to be a crab that scuttles away. So the shells are inert. They don't move. However, a crab, which may look like a shell when partially submerged, is going to get up and move.
[14:08] So, shells don't self-direct their motion, crabs do. And I hope we can say crabs, well, it's instinctual, they're not thinking it through, and I get all of that. But nonetheless, there's sort of a foundational difference. No individual atom within a crab can move. No individual atom within a dead shell can move. However, crabs move, shells don't. So, the question of emergent properties is answered through introspection and honesty with the self. Is my question answered in the content, form, and transmission of my question? Now, I get that this is determinism versus free will, and this is different from life versus non-life, but the question of emergent properties is essential. If we've answered the question of emergent properties, then the question changes.
[15:12] So, if somebody were to ask me, like they were to type to me, using a computer, a keyboard, a monitor, and the internet, they were to type to me, prove that computers exist, I would say, look down at what you're typing on.
[15:26] Answer to the question is embedded in how the question is created and transmitted. Now, once people say emergent properties are totally valid, and they are, you can't be alive, you can't formulate questions, you can't use a computer, right? Anytime you use the capacity of something not embedded in its individual atoms or cells, you are accepting emergent properties, right? Anytime you deploy anything whose properties are not contained in its deterministic components, then you are accepting emergent properties. So, if you say, look, I fully accept the validity of emergent properties, because to deny them would be to deny that I'm alive and have the capacity to ask a question on a computer. So, I fully accept emergent properties.
[16:19] So, talk to me about free will. That's fine. But if somebody is saying, do you have an example of non-determinism being an emergent property out of deterministic sub-components, the form of the question is, show me a characteristic of an aggregation of atoms that differs from the characteristics of each individual component. Now, show me the characteristic of an entity composed of individual things, which has properties not contained within each individual thing. Which is like asking, show me a tree, given that each individual atom within a tree is not a tree.
[17:01] Or, show me a house where each individual atom within the house is not a house. Which is true. If somebody were to say, I'm going to sell you a house and then try to deliver to you a single atom, or a one-inch cube of brick, right? Each brick is composed of, you know, brick-ness, brick matter. And somebody would come and say, here's your house. It's like, oh, just one brick, right? Well, houses are generally composed of bricks, there's exceptions, of course, but houses are generally composed of bricks, but one brick is not a house. I mean, if you were to say to your wife, I bought us a new house, and you come home and you show her a brick, she would say, that's not a house, right? So, the general form of the question is, show me a component, or sorry, show me a characteristic of an entity which is not shared by its individual components. Well, that's everything, right? If somebody says, you can buy this car for $5,000 online, and you send them the $5,000, and then they drop past your house with the steering wheel and say, no, by car, I mean, it's just the steering wheel. You'd say, well, that's not the car. The car is the whole thing. I mean, the steering wheel is important. You can't drive without it.
[18:10] Steering wheel is not the car. It's just a component of the car. It's not the car. So if you'd be upset by somebody taking $5,000 for a quote car, then just giving you a steering wheel, you completely and fully understand the concept of emergent properties.
[18:25] So if somebody says, I fully accept emergent properties as an absolutely, completely and totally valid phenomenon, because I couldn't be alive or ask you a question if I didn't already accept that, but I'm having trouble with free will. I'm having trouble with free will. That's a different question from, give me an example of emergent properties from components, right? So if somebody says, listen, I accept life and consciousness and me asking this question, the computer, the internet, the house, everything around me is an emergent property for the most part, but I'm having trouble with the free, I accept emergent properties, but I have a problem with free will, then that's a different question.
[19:05] Now, regarding the proof of free will, I've got a whole three-part series on that called Free Will Part 1, 2, and 3, which I did many, many years ago. You can find that at fdrpodcast.com. But free will is important, and it's a great question and argument. So, it's funny because, and I'm not saying this is necessarily the case with this person, but determinists as a whole, generally are doing it as a power play. And this is one of the reasons why debating with determinists is so volatile, because they're basically saying, prove to me that free will exists, and most people kind of flounder around, and I understand that I did too for some time. Most people flounder around and can't do it, and then the determinist ends up feeling superior.
[19:51] And it is a little devilish, and it's a little controlling. I'm the motive of this individual, but I've had some significant marrow-deep battle scars in combat with determinists. And so, one of the reasons why determinism is such a volatile subject is it's often put forward as a you-don't-really-know-what-you're-talking-about-humiliation thing. I mean, my general answer is free will is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
[20:20] And, of course, the determinist can't contradict that because he's asked me to prove free will, which means that his proposed action, that I prove free will, has to be judged by an objective standard called validated and honest. So, this is why when somebody says, prove to me free will, I'll say, well, you just did, because you're saying that human beings have the ability, to compare proposed actions to ideal standards because you're asking me to prove something, which means you want me to act in a way that conforms to a universal standard called proof. So you've just accepted free will. And when somebody comes at you from a dominant dance for me monkey standpoint, and you push back saying that if they had really thought, if they'd really thought at all about their question, they wouldn't be asking it. Then they go from a dominance state to a humiliated state. So, if somebody says to me, I don't believe in emergent properties, I'd say, well, do you have this thing called life? Is any of your individual atoms alive? The cells are, right? Any individual atom of yours, is it alive? No. Are you composed of atoms? Yes. Do you have life? Yes. Well, that's your emergent property. All you had to do was think about it for five seconds. Then they go from dominant to humiliated. And that's rough emotionally. I'm not saying it's true with this guy, but just in general. All right.
[21:45] Somebody else wrote, I'm curious. Why do people seem to avoid simplicity or any reductions in complexity? I get tons of requests to add complexity to software at work without any regard for value provided to customers. I find it a fun, interesting, and not overly difficult to simultaneously remove complexity, often deleting large amounts of code, even while adding features and making the program more robust. Well, all the future maintenance programmers should put up a shrine to you, just by the by. All right, he goes on to say, I saw this recently too, with people mocking Musk's Raptor 3 engine, which is a massive simplification of the previous Raptor 2 and 1 designs. I see this as not only practical, but as a thing of beauty, that something so simple can be functional and likely more reliable because of it, yet people don't seem to hate it, yet people seem to hate it, and I don't understand. Well, of course, the purpose of brilliance is to simplify. The purpose of brilliance is to simplify when I first checked out the internet, it was like infinite DOS, you typed.
[22:46] To navigate and there was no graphical user interface. There was no point and click. And I remember the first time a friend of mine showed it to me, the Simon Fraser University, I was out there on business and met up with an old friend of mine. And he showed me the internet. I was like, I felt goosebumps, like absolute goosebumps. It's going to change the whole world. Absolutely, completely, totally. It's going to change the whole world. So yeah, the purpose of brilliance is to simplify, and that's part of our benevolence towards the less brilliant, right? And I say this with all humility, right? I mean, there are computer geniuses who make touch tablets work, and I really appreciate that. I can't do it, but I appreciate their kindness to my lack of competence in this area. So, yay, thanks for them, right? But yeah, the purpose of brilliance is to simplify, and to simplify is an act of benevolence. If people were, you know, like the real propeller heads were comfortable with the infinite DOS of the early internet, where you had to type commands to do everything, well, the internet would have remained hidden and unavailable to the vast majority of people. Once you come up with a website's GUI point-and-click interface, then that's a whole different situation, right? Now it's available and consumable by the average person, or even below average person in terms of intelligence, because brilliant people have made things simple.
[24:06] Simplifying things is an act of deep benevolence.
[24:10] So if there's a medication with 15 ingredients and you put it all together in one pill, you've simplified that rather than saying to people, well, you've got to get these 15 ingredients, mix it up and so on, right? Might get it wrong. So simplifying things is an act of benevolence and generosity and kindness and helpfulness to the planet as a whole. You benefit from it, I benefit from it, and hopefully we add to that which is simplified in the world as a whole. We add to that and do our own acts of benevolence to people in the world. But why do people dislike it? Well, there's this belief that true intelligence lies in complexity, whereas to me, true intelligence lies in simplification.
[24:59] So, for instance, in programming, I mean, there is things called APIs, Application Programming Interfaces or something like that, APIs, and Windows is scattered with them. So when I first wrote my software, I did it for 640 by 480, which was the standard VGA resolution. And then there was SVGA, which was 800 by 600. Now, originally, I had to release two versions of the program, one size for 640 by 480, one size for 800 by 600. And then, and this was pretty tough to do back in the day, because not a lot of documentation, but I managed to figure out okay well I can query Windows to find out what resolution it's running in and then I can dynamically resize the forms when they load up so that they fit the screen better or properly.
[25:44] So Microsoft had, and this was a, what was it, Lotus 1, 2, 3, or something like that. There was, this was a, I sort of vaguely remember this, but it was some sort of brouhaha about one spreadsheet had access to much faster APIs than the other. So that's how it did so well and so on. So APIs simplify things by, you don't have to go into the guts of the programming system. You just ask a little piece of code, hey, what resolution am I running in? Okay, now it tells you, right? And so that simplifies things as a whole. So, yeah, simplification is very important. And, you know, touchscreens and so on are great because you can sit with a tablet on your lap, hopefully with some kind of radiation shield perhaps, but sit with a tablet on your lap and you can just swipe and touch and type and talk and all that kind of stuff. Whereas with a mouse, you kind of need a desk.
[26:37] It's more comfortable and simpler. Mouse is simpler than typing. GUI is simpler than text. And that's what you want to do. So, to simplify is the great task. Now, to people who have trouble with abstractions, they think that the more complicated something is, the smarter people are. And listen, please understand, the end result is simplicity, the complexity that is required to deliver simplicity is huge, right? So, the code and processing required to deliver a touchscreen experience is millions of times more complex than throwing ASCII texts up in a DOS window at 80 by 25, right? So, just understand that. That's really, really important. So, I get that there's complexity that results in simplicity. The amount of philosophy that I had to study to come up with UPB was 20 years. I had to study philosophy for 20 years and grind my brain almost into dust to come up with UPB. So, yeah, you need a lot of complexity to produce simplicity. But simplicity transfers intelligence to the less able.
[27:59] Authenticity transfers intelligence to the less able. So to be a good researcher takes a lot of training and a lot of experience, right? Because I know I've done these truths about it for like 20 years, right? So to be a good researcher takes a lot of training and a lot of experience, fair amount of education, and so on, right? Now you can go to Grok and you can ask for deep search, and you can reproduce most of that in a few seconds. I mean, that's amazing. And that's great. That's wonderful. So now research, now, again, you know, you still got to validate, I get all of that. But research is now available to those without the training history and so on, right?
[28:39] Education and experience and all of that, right? That's really important. When I was doing my graduate school thesis, I had to read an ungodly amount of texts from four major philosophers and others, and do searches for particular terms using the index, which was, you know, not a database index, but of course the index was, in the back, like printed in the back of a book. Oh, I'm looking for the state, or I'm looking for laws, or I'm looking for, you know, does Emmanuel Kant support the concept of human rights? You have to go to search. And then it was sad. After I finished my thesis and handed it in, like a couple of days later, you could finally order, I saw you could order a CD-ROM searchable index, like you could do a general search. And it had, you know, sort of the major text of Western philosophy on it, and it was like 20 bucks. That would have saved me hundreds of hours. But, you know, it is what it is, and there was other value I got from it. So that simplifies that as a whole.
[29:41] So it is the most benevolent thing that smart people can do to the planet as a whole is to simplify things as a whole to people. But people who want to appear smart want things to be complex. And that way they can shield...
[30:00] Them from others, because they claim things as, oh, the causes of the Industrial Revolution are incredibly complex, and, you know, so many factors to get away in your mind, and so on, like, that's complex.
[30:13] And who can criticize them? Who even knows what these factors are, in order to oppose that viewpoint? You'd have to study every one of these factors, and debate every little piece of minutiae, and so on. Whereas if you say, well, the Industrial Revolution resulted from the end of slavery and serfdom, and you can sort of make a case for that very strongly. I mean, were there thousands of other factors? Well, sure, there were thousands of factors with everything, right? But what are the sort of central salient factors that are of use and of value to people as a whole? Well, it is the fact that the Industrial Revolution resulted from raising the cost of labor to the point where labor-saving devices became economically productive, because that's the one thing that had never happened before in human history. And it is literally called capitalism after capital. And capital is what you invest to increase worker productivity. And the reason you do that is because workers are expensive. And serfs and slaves are not expensive. So you don't buy a bunch of slaves and then invest in farm machinery that reduces the value of your slaves, right? You rely on a brute, dumb, manual labor. And by dumb, I don't mean the slaves. I just mean it's not skilled labor. But you have to rely on sort of this brute manual labor stuff because that's what you've invested in.
[31:31] So for people who wish to appear intelligent, they refuse to simplify so that they can be worshipped. It's like they turn intelligence into a kind of mystery religion where things are just so incredibly complicated and you can't possibly puzzle them out and so on. And therefore, you just have to accept what that person says.
[31:49] If you say something as simple as the Industrial Revolution, or something as boiled down as the Industrial Revolution resulted from a free market, for the first time in human history, a free market in labor. Well, then you can debate that. And of course, if you find other places where a free market in labor was robust, but no Industrial Revolution emerged, then you can start to look for other factors. But that's the most foundational one. So that, if you say, what was the cause of World War I? Well, the cause of World War I, as is the cause of all wars, is statism. States get to declare war, states get to force people to fight for them, and states can fund it through counterfeiting, money printing, borrowing, right? So that's the, you say, ah, well, but that's not the cause of World War I. It's like, well, yeah, there were more local factors regarding World War I, but if you have a government, you have war. War is the health of the state, right? So it boils something down really as simply, and the state is the health of war. So, and why do states exist because people believe that they're moral and necessary. So, you have to put all of this stuff to question. And so, it's incredibly complicated versus here are the key factors. If it's incredibly complicated, then history has no utility, right? If it was like an aligning of the planets, 10,000 different complicated factors had to come together to produce the Industrial Revolution.
[33:12] Is sort of a Marxist view in many ways, because Marxism has to complicate things, because if it comes down to particular choices and virtues and willpower, then their scientific or mechanistic or deterministic view of history falls by the wayside, and you get back to the great man theory, which is individuals making courageous choices shape history for the most part, or evil choices, of course as well. So the value of an answer to the Industrial Revolution, which is, we had an Industrial Revolution because there was a free market in labor, and therefore the price of labor rose, there were bidding wars for labor, which meant the capitalists who could pay the workers the most got the workers, but the way that you pay the workers the most is to make them as efficient as possible, right? This is the Henry Ford Model T thing, rather than having one car in the middle and a bunch of people swarming to all add bits to that car. He put the cars on a conveyor belt and each person added their individual thing and he was able to produce massive amounts of greater numbers of cars than the other way, right? So, that's just an innovation, the assembly line. And so, he could raise that he paid his workers double what everyone else paid. So, when you're paying directly for workers and you're in competition with other capitalists, then you must find ways to improve worker productivity because the workers' wages are paid from worker productivity. And if you can find a way to have workers produce twice the goods.
[34:39] With a similar expensive input, then you can pay the workers more, and you can get better and more efficient workers, and you can then sell your products for less, and so then you succeed. But without a free market in labor, serfs tied to the land, slaves, of course, tied to their owners, lash to their owners. So that's the answer. Now, that you can debate and that's useful to the future, which means that if you want your economy to grow.
[35:06] As free market or labor as you can, which is the difference between America where you can fire people and France where you can't fire people really effectively. It's the difference between the public sector and the private sector. The public sector does not work on efficiency because there's no competition. And therefore, there's massive amounts of waste, of course, which we can see coming out of USAID and it will come out of other places as well.
[35:30] So, if you correctly identify the cause of the Industrial Revolution as the free market and labor, then you can say, well, if you want a strong, healthy economy, you need to keep the price of labor as low as possible. That's good. It's helpful. But if you say, well, it's 10,000 incredibly complicated factors, then there's no utility for the future. You're helpless towards the future. So people overcomplicate so that they're in control, so that their narrative and they remain in control. And so, because, you know, I mean, Marxists who talk about all of this incredibly complicated stuff, want to control the future.
[36:04] So they want to keep you out of it by implying that there's a mystery religion called causes of things that it's just too complicated for you to understand, and that way they stay in charge of where the future goes.
[36:14] So, I mean, Marxists advocate for revolution. They don't say, well, it takes 10,000 incredibly complicated things to come together for there to be a Marxist revolution. It's like, no, they work for it for decades, and they focus on it, and they're willing to use violence to achieve it. And so, yeah, they just want to keep you out of the arena so they can remain in charge. So, So hopefully that helps. There is one more question, but I'm going to get to it another time. I'll do it tomorrow because the guy's been waiting, so I appreciate that.
[36:40] So thanks everyone so much. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out Le Chou. I would very much appreciate your help and support. It is a tough economy for philosophers. And if you could help out, if you've been listening for a while and you could convert your consumption of what I do into support for what I do, I would hugely, deeply, and humbly appreciate that. So stay frosty, my friends, and I'll talk to you soon.
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