0:00 - Welcome Back to the Conversation
4:03 - The Challenge of Cancel Culture
11:14 - The Nature of Tyranny
17:03 - The Illusion of Easy Solutions
34:36 - The Dangers of Outsourcing Conscience
40:24 - Exploring Individualism vs. Collectivism
51:17 - The Urgency of Moral Choices
52:46 - Fire and Family
1:00:31 - The Role of Ostracism
1:10:36 - The Cost of War
1:18:57 - Bitcoin and the State
1:27:23 - Teaching Morality to Children
1:42:06 - Closing Thoughts and Future Conversations
In this episode, we dive deep into morality, systems of ethics, and the implications of human behavior in society with a guest who opens the discussion with reflections from their previous interactions. We recount the evolution of societal behaviors since 2016, emphasizing how the complexities of human relationships and moral obligations shift over time. As we reconnect, I share my thoughts on the guilt inherent in our tendency to forget the teachings of others when presented with distractions, touching upon concepts of cancel culture and the importance of individual responsibility.
We explore how tyranny—historically rooted in human motivation and behavior—has the potential to transform when intersected with technology. I express concerns over technological advancement's role in supporting oppressive regimes and highlight the essential nature of individual liberty and awareness of personal ethics to combat these forces. The conversation brings forth valid concerns regarding the implications of AI and how automation can lead to unchecked tyranny devoid of human vulnerabilities.
The discourse shifts towards the philosophical, examining individualism versus collectivism. My guest elaborates on how this paradigm shapes societal structures and influences moral behavior. We discuss the dangers of assuming that one's sense of ethics can be nebulously defined by group actions, emphasizing the risks of losing individual accountability within a collective framework. This leads to a vital discussion around morality and ethics, debating the necessity of actionable principles for guiding human conduct based on historical failures.
As we further dissect the complexities of behavior versus legal definitions of morality, we pivot towards the concept of virtue ethics. I highlight the challenge of articulating robust ethical theories that can resonate with even the youngest minds. We analyze how philosophical principles like universally preferable behavior must be simplified so that they can be instilled early in life, encouraging individuals to act based on a strong moral foundation rather than through the whims of authority or societal pressure.
Our conversation culminates in an examination of how the advent of technologies such as Bitcoin can transform societal structures. I share insights into the implications of decentralized finance eroding the foundations of war and state coercion, positing a future where individual liberty is not merely discussed but realized. The foundational elements of ethical behavior, community building, and the rejection of collectivism are intertwined throughout this rich dialogue, establishing a vision for how we might foster resilient social structures founded on individual rights and personal responsibility.
This episode serves as a clarion call to engage in deeper discussions about freedom, ethics, and how we navigate the unfolding technological landscape. It encourages listeners to reflect on their beliefs about morality while contributing towards a more thoughtful and liberated society.
[0:00] All right. Can you hear me?
[0:01] Yes. Okay.
[0:02] What's on your mind, my friend?
[0:03] I'm just glad to have you back. I just wanted to say, hey. I actually came on one of your shows a long time ago, one of yours on your website. It's been years, like 2016, I think, and spoke about, gosh, what did we speak about? It had something to do with religion. Anyway, it was actually quite nice. But I used to listen to you all the time on YouTube, and I'm just really, really glad you're back. And I have to say, I listened to you yesterday and I was feeling a little guilty about the not following you over one page over, one site over. I'm guilty of that. And you're right. That is why cancel culture works. That's why canceling people does work. And I think that your message is one that needs to be heard about that because we need to do better. But thank you for everything you do and thanks for coming back.
[0:54] And I appreciate that. And of course, I don't want you to feel a little guilty. I want you to feel a lot guilty. No, I'm kidding. And it's funny too, because you say, oh, it was a long time ago, and it's like 2016. And yes, that was a long time ago, but that was still past the halfway point of the show. So it's great to hear from you again. And it's a funny thing too, because I get people say to me, oh, Stef, but it's a real challenge because this is another website. It's like, you could just subscribe to the podcast. It just gets delivered to your phone. I can't, like, there's no way on earth other than, you know, me being in a hyper-verbosed potted plant at the corner of your living room that we can make it easier. But I also do get, I mean, that the people who de-platform, they kind of know what they're doing and they wouldn't do it if it doesn't work. So they're kind of keying into something important about human nature, which we have. And listen, I've certainly forgotten about people, not really because they've been de-platformed. I just got distracted by other people. And then I'm like, oh, I wonder what person X is doing and all of that. So, yeah, I understand that. And I appreciate that we're back. And I appreciate, you know, sometimes, you know, it's the old statement, if you've got a really clingy boyfriend, how can I miss you if you never go away? So now there's just a fresh appreciation for the aged wine of my pickled brain. So I'm very, very glad for that. And how long do you speak before you? Sorry, go ahead.
[2:15] Oh, well, I was listening to you for about, probably about three years before I spoke with you. And then I listened to you right up until you got deplatformed. So a long time. I, my personal, I have your, not your peaceful parenting book, the one before that, something about argument.
[2:35] I have that book. Oh, Art of the Argument. Yeah, yeah.
[2:36] And I actually bought several of them and like gave them out to like my pastor and a couple of other people. That was kind of interesting. It was fun. We had some discussions about that. Oh, I was going to say something. I forget. Oh, I didn't forget about you. I want you to know that. And I know you feel forgotten and you do. And I didn't. I spoke about you often. And I spoke about you to other people and how you were de-platformed. So I was aware of it happening. I think the biggest thing, we all just get caught up in our lives and how we do things. And it's really hard to change our habits. And my habit was to find you mostly on YouTube. That's where I listen to you mostly. And I'm an artist. I do my thing. I'm sculpting. I'm doing it. I turn on the YouTube and just let things play. And so I listened to a lot of your long-form stuff before, learned a lot of things. And I loved your long-form discussions on different topics, you know, like Marxism and like the fall of Rome and like the boomers when you talked about them. I mean, there were a lot of different things that were just full of information that I really appreciated. And I learned a lot.
[3:43] Well, I appreciate that. And of course, it's delightful to have you back in the audience. And I look forward to continuing conversations. And what a lovely way to open up my first spaces. I really, really appreciate that, Laurie. Thank you so much for the feedback. All right. Got it. All right. There are open spots if people want.
[4:04] Otherwise, good Lord, I'm going to start vamping like a toothy guy with a widow's peak. So if you have questions, comments, issues, problems, feel free to chime in and you can just request to talk. Yes, sir. Teeth Powers, don't forget to unmute. I am all ears, brother. How can I help you? it's an absolute pleasure i have a question for you actually i was having a discussion with someone else who might actually be in this chat room right now the driver we were talking about the possibility of you know a dark future where the the sort of one world government nightmare comes into play and my thought about it is that a system that is completely void of good principles and long-term thinking would collapse in and on itself long before it became a global power.
[4:59] And I was kind of curious to hear what your thoughts are on the nature of power coalescing on such a massive scale, because I seem to think that it just isn't possible for evil to reach that proportion. It would consume itself before it got to that scale. What are your thoughts? I think that's a very good question. It's a very, very serious question, and I appreciate you bringing that up. So in the past, tyrannies tended to collapse because human beings became demotivated.
[5:32] I mean, this is the sort of classic argument of compulsion from above. When you get ordered to do stuff, you don't really want to do it, right? I mean, every husband has been tempted by that dark impulse when the wife says, I want you to do the dishes and you've got to do them this way and you've got to do them exactly and you've got to rinse it this way and you've got to stack stuff this way. At some point, you'd just be like, I'm just going to do a bad job until she stops asking me to do this. I'm not saying that you should succumb to that temptation, but we've all had that temptation. Or if you have a really aggressive and domineering boss, that you just become less and less motivated. If you're in the theater world and your director is a total OCD micromanager, then you have less enjoyment because you just feel like you're being posed like a mannequin or whatever, and you don't bring your creative fire to the endeavor. So in the past, control and hyper-control demotivates people, and you lose out on this Pareto principle issue where there is just magic people. I mean, just look at Elon Musk and people like that. There's just these magic people that multiply productivity in ways that appear inches away from the completely supernatural.
[6:42] And like a really great programmer, and I was a programmer and a chief technical officer for many years, a really great programmer is not just twice or three times, they're like 10 to 100 times as productive as an average programmer, which is why talent gets paid so much and why in most meritocracy endeavors, like 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people. Songwriters, right? There are just some people who can pen those songs that have you humming them all day like a brain virus. And then there are a lot of people who just write sort of bland songs that you can't really remember.
[7:17] So you lose the magic multiple productivity people. You lose the general motivations of people. And of course, the other reason why tyranny collapses is that centrally planned and directed economies lose the price signal. And the price signal is where we should allocate our scarce resources as a society. If there's a high demand and a low supply, then the price goes up, which means more resources get poured into that production arena, driving the price back down. And if the price is going down because people don't want stuff, people move out of producing that stuff. So you get like a billion points of data per second based upon prices in a free market. And when you have essentially planned and conducted economy, you lose all of those price signals. And so the lack of motivation, the lack of massive talent, expression and the lack of a price signal means that a tyranny will always economically collapse. However, this is the big danger. I don't mean to darken everyone's horizon, but this is the big danger that we're facing at the moment, is that computers don't care about motivation.
[8:27] And computers can't be bribed. You think of the Central and South American semi-tyrannies, the way that the economy staggers along is that the officials get bribed, right? Like they set up all these permits and requirements and hassles and all of that, but you can just wallpaper your way through with the local currency and get things done sometimes in a more efficient way, even than countries with lots of regulations where the officials generally don't take bribes. I mean, I don't know if you remember, there was a French company that was involved in the giant boondoggle building of this high-speed rail in California, and they finally quit California manufacturing and politics, and they moved to North Africa where they said it was far less corrupt, because I guess at least you can bribe people.
[9:12] So computers don't care about motivation, and so a tyranny does not affect the motivation of AI, of computers, of automation, of robots, of surveillance systems, and so on, right? So if you have human beings who are enforcing some sort of tyrannical rule, at some point they get depressed, at some point they get alienated. At some point, they get just really bored and they can also be ostracized by their fellow citizens for being sort of toady lackeys to the powers that be. The problem, of course, is that when we start shifting to AI facial recognition, social credit scores, and the central bank digital currencies and other forms of surveillance, monitoring, and control, they are inexhaustible.
[9:57] They don't get demotivated.
[9:59] They can't be ostracized. The automation of tyranny removes the fuse that causes tyranny to fail. And so I think that is a big issue, which is why we need to be talking to people very seriously about the need for expanding liberty, reducing violations of the non-aggression principle, and making sure that we have as much free trade, free speech, free movement, and free thought as possible, because what caused all of these tyrannies to fail in the past was human nature. But when you automate a lot of tyranny, human nature is no longer part of the equation. And robots and AI and computers at all, in general, they don't care about tyranny, they just do what they're told. And they have no spiritual rebellion, they have no conscience or soul rebellion against dictating and controlling their fellow human beings. I mean, the concentration camp guards would regularly become suicidal, but if you could imagine a robot as a concentration camp guard, they never sleep.
[11:06] They never get sick, and their conscience never troubles them because they are computers, not people. So it is a risk.
[11:14] It's more than a risk if we don't have more continued and expanded conversations about human liberty and voluntary ways of solving complex social problems rather than coercive and hierarchical ways of solving human problems. The coercion will expand and there will not be a fail-sale stopgap fuse mechanism of human motivation, human conscience. And the price signal becomes less important the more that you automate. So that's my thoughts about that. But I'm happy to hear what you think as well. Yeah, wonderful stuff, man. Thank you for that insight. Yeah, it's funny, the first thing I started thinking about as you were talking about the.
[11:57] Severe implications of artificial intelligence and technology on sort of supplanting the negative effect that immorality and sort of evil behavior has on the human sort of mind. My first thought was, well, how can AI and technology work into our benefits so that we can sort of elevate ourselves and use that same technology to benefit the world. And so I guess my last question to you would be, do you have any sort of visions or insight into how AI and the technology in the future is going to elevate our ability to spread liberty and freedom? Well, I mean, as far as the future goes, that's obviously pretty tough to guesstimate. But I will certainly say that I've converted a lot of my, well, most of my books and articles and many of my podcasts into an artificial intelligence, which people can get at premium.fredomain.com. So I've worked to, and of course there's at the peacefulparenting.com, there's a free AI for people to put in parenting questions and so on. So I think in terms of helping people to understand and conceptualize and argue for principles of liberty.
[13:14] AI can help us polish. People can go and ask and learn these things. But the great challenge in human nature, and it's really quite heartbreaking and very sort of soulful right down in our spinal core, is that our desire to get something for nothing is, I sort of hate to sound cliche, but it's our greatest strength and also our greatest weakness.
[13:44] Because to get something for nothing is, well, I would like to be able to talk to people. I don't want to walk to your house. So we'll use this technology. So the fact that we build all of this technology so that we have to perform less labor in order to achieve something, rather than having to rub two sticks together, you can just flick a lighter. You know, when I was a kid, you had to get up to change the channel. Of course, you have wireless remotes and so on. So we want to get something for nothing.
[14:09] We want more
[14:10] Food from the same acreage of land. And so we work on, you know, winter crops and crop rotation and manure and all other kinds of funky stuff to get more food out of the same amount of resources. So the efficiency process is why we have all of this amazing technology. I want a drink of water without having to go to the well that's, you know, half a mile away. So we have taps and plumbing and all this kind of good stuff. So wanting, in a sense, something for nothing is the foundation of our prosperity and our progress. And from a material standpoint, wanting something for nothing is great. From a moral standpoint, it is absolutely catastrophic to want something for nothing. The roots of the problem in the West go back, obviously, a long ways. But one of the low points of our evolution was in the 1960s when the wealth generated by the post-war boom was siphoned off from productive people and turned into the welfare for the poor, which is the welfare state as a whole, and the welfare for the rich, which is preferential legislation and the military-industrial complex.
[15:20] With regards to the poor, well, the wages of sin is death, and it is a sin in the extreme to demand that the government solve the problem of poverty so you don't have to get your lily-white hands dirty. I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to the people in the 60s, the boomers in many ways, 70s as well, when this stuff really began to expand. So you want something for nothing. You want to help the poor. You see poor people, you go, that's really sad. I don't want them to be poor. I want them to be better off. Well, helping poor people to become better off is a big, deep, rich, and complicated question. And it is never guaranteed because of free will. You can offer poor people all of the benefits known to man, God, and the devil, and some of them will say yes, and many of them will say no, but they prefer living, for whatever psychological reasons, in the gutter and sewer of their own decaying neighborhoods.
[16:19] But people look at the poor, and I think this is a little bit more for women than for men. When men look at the poor, we're like, wow, I don't want to become that. That's an example of what not to do. It's good to know. Whereas for a lot of women, it's not all, but a little bit more women, they look at the poor and they get this sort of estrogen-based younger sibling, scoop them up and make everything better, which they do sometimes with criminals as well. And they say, oh, the poor dear, we have to help them out. We have to give them food, money, and resources. And particularly if it's a woman who's made bad decisions like A woman gets pregnant from the wrong guy who takes off or is a drunk or a spendthrift or gambler, beats her or something like that. And women are very much there, but for the grace of God go, I, we have to help them out and so on.
[17:03] And that wanting something for nothing, wanting to do good, as a result of giving the government more power, is the foundation of our decay. And that is what is getting us, is this desire to get the fruits of virtue without having to be virtuous, which is getting your hands dirty, waiting in, dealing with issues that people are having, offering them both rewards and negative feedback if they do well, negative feedback if they do badly, as opposed to just, well, we have this welfare state, so the poor are taken care of, and I don't really have to worry about it. And it's one thing if you do that out of your own personal tax base, but that's not what happened.
[17:46] What happened was money got printed,
[17:49] Which harmed the poor and those on fixed income, most of all through inflation, and money was borrowed. It is the worst drug in the world to want the effects of virtue without the challenges of being virtuous. The effects of feeling, call it virtue signaling, right? The feeling that you've done good, right? Everybody's probably seen these videos where they say, hey, do you want to help the homeless? Oh, yes, I want to help the homeless. I so want to help the homeless. It's so important for me to help the homeless. Great. You have a big house. I've got two homeless people here. Where can you put them up? Oh, no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about abstract drug-like pseudo-morality. I'm not talking about actual personal self-sacrifice and having people in my living space.
[18:38] Now, the effects of doing good feel so good, it's the ultimate orgasm of the soul when you do something virtuous. And the reason why we have such a strong positive response to doing good is because it's pretty dangerous, right? As Voltaire says, you know, it's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. It's hard difficult dangerous to do good because whenever you do good you impinge upon the interests of some pretty bad corrupt and evil people and they they have their say about what happens as well as i think we all know here if we've done good in our lives and especially if you've done good in the world that the enemy has his say too on how things go moving forward and so nature has built in us a great desire for the happy, happy joy by serotonin that comes out.
[19:35] Of doing good.
[19:37] And the reason we have such a positive response to that, as I said, is that it's dangerous and it's difficult and it's risky. So wherever something is difficult, dangerous, and risky, we need a big reward on the other side. Nobody's going to invest in a penny stock if it only pays 4% or 3%. You might as well go buy some bonds or some more stable stuff, right? So wherever there is a high risk, nature has programmed in us to have a high reward. And unfortunately, through the power of the stage, through the power of central banking and money printing and borrowing, people have the feeling of doing good. Oh, look at all these poor refugees. And oh, look at all these poor, poor people and all these sad single mothers, which is going to help them, but not Personally Not by rolling up our sleeves And getting our hands dirty No, no, no, no Nothing like that, We just want the government To promise to help them We're not even going to Circle back and check in Whether it actually Damn well helps at all, We don't care. We don't care about the poor. We care about feeling good, about helping the poor, and not through any personal sacrifices of our own, right? If we say, I want to help the poor, does somebody say, oh, great, okay, that'll be $10,000 a year. You have to pay, oh, okay, well, that's different, right? We want to, in this blobby, gooey, amorphous way, we want to help the poor or foreign countries or whoever, right?
[21:02] And we then get to feel smug, self-satisfied, and virtuous, and that's the devil's bribe to corrupt your society.
[21:11] So until we can resist the urge to outsource our virtue and our conscience to some pretty corrupt people who don't actually end up helping the poor, the poor have not been helped by the welfare state. In fact, the poor have been further corrupted by the welfare state because everything that coercion claims to do achieves the exact opposite. And the welfare state is coercive in terms of money printing and taxation and borrowing. And so, I mean, the Department of Defense, right? Is it defending? Not so much. Is it attacking? Quite a bit. So, Department of Education has turned into propaganda, which not only doesn't train people how to think, it actively punishes them for thinking at all. The same thing happens in universities these days, of course. So everything that is based upon coercion achieves the opposite of its stated goals. That's an iron law of morality. And all the people who said, well, I want to help the poor and I really care about the poor.
[22:08] They don't care about the poor. They care about feeling good. They care about feeling moral. They care about feeling like a good person for wanting to help the poor without making any personal sacrifices. And if you do ask to make any personal sacrifices, they're highly offended in the same way that if you knock a crack pipe out of a crack addict's hand, he's highly offended and gets very aggressive. Take false morality away from self-congratulatory hypocrites, and they get very, very angry. And true virtue and true ethics and true morality takes away the drug of false morality from people and no longer allows them to feel virtuous because of abstract intentions. They actually have to achieve tangible good. And this is what, of course, charities in the past, before the welfare state used to do. In the past, of course, in thinking sort of Victorian charities, if a woman got pregnant outside of wedlock, they might help her out for a little bit, and they'd certainly try and help her get married, or maybe they'd try and find a home for her child. But if it happened again, well, good luck.
[23:11] She's for the streets, right? And so we have, as a society, we've become pathologically averse to letting people fail. And again, this is a little bit more female than male, right if you've been if you've been a bro right you know what it's like at least i don't know what it is now but when i was a kid like i moved from canada i moved to canada from england when i was about 11 and i didn't know the canadian sports i didn't know how to skate i didn't know hockey, i didn't know street hockey of course i didn't know baseball i knew rounders and of course the canadians didn't know the sports that i was good at like rugby and cricket and so on right i didn't even know the games that the canadians played so when i first i mean i'm fairly athletic i suppose But when I first came to Canada, oh.
[23:57] Let's not pick the British boy. Let's not pick the Brit boy because he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. And I also, you know, I grew up broke, or my family was broke. It was a single-mother household, right? My family was broke. I could never afford a baseball club. Because I remember clearly, they were like 30 bucks, you know, and we were struggling to get food in our mouth. So, and I'm left-handed. And nobody around was left-handed or had a left-handed glove. So I'd have to borrow someone's glove. And I can't throw with my right hand. My right hand is like this weird, semi-useless meat tube.
[24:33] And so I would have the ball would come and they put me way in outfield just to get me out of the way right and the ball would come and I'd catch it and then I'd have to rip off my glove so that I could throw because my glove was on my left hand because most people catch on the left throw on the right I throw on my left and catch on my right but I couldn't so I was just not picked of course, and I remember when I first hit a ball in baseball in England in rounders you get three hits and you can choose your best one like if you think you can hit better next time you say I'll take the next one, right? And I hit the ball, and I'm a pretty good hitter, and I hit the ball, and I'm like, oh no, I'll take the next one. People were like, run, you limey bastard, run, run for us. And anyway, I sort of figured out that I was supposed to run, but it didn't really matter. So I was at the bottom of the roster. I was picked last. And like any reasonably prideful and ambitious young boy, I practiced like crazy. And then I learned how to catch. I learned how to throw. I learned how to switch gloves really quickly. I learned how to hit even better. I understood the rules. Learned how to skate. I never got into hockey, but then I started getting picked more and more and higher and higher. That's just, you know, they didn't want me because I sucked.
[25:48] And I was a warning to the other kids, like, this is what happens when you don't, when you suck, when you're bad at things, you should fail when you're bad. But now, I mean, I remember a friend of my daughter's once was saying that there was a sort of track and field meet, and there was a girl who didn't even show up. I can't remember why. She's probably sick or something, or maybe traveling. She didn't even show up, and she got a participation ribbon. Didn't even show up. Nobody can fail, and that's a little bit, because women are a bit more designed to handle sort of babies and toddlers, and babies and toddlers are not supposed to be allowed to fail, right? Because they're babies and toddlers, they don't understand consequences. So women are a little bit more averse to letting people fail. So it's just sort of an instinct for dealing with babies and toddlers. Whereas men, you suck. It's kind of a thing that happens. So I hope that helps. Sorry, that's a real sprint sketch overview. But we have to resist this temptation to outsource our conscience to politicians.
[26:50] Of all people,
[26:51] Right? They'll just tell us everything's fine while slowly corrupting us from the inside. All right. So, sorry, is there anything else that you wanted to add? Oh, no, that was absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it, Seth. All right. Thanks, man. All right. Patrick, don't forget to unmute. I'm all ears, brother. Going once. Hello. Did you call on me, Patrick? Yes, I did.
[27:15] Awesome. So there's a little blank when my mic gets activated.
[27:18] No problem.
[27:19] So I didn't hear. I'm very excited about this philosophy talk because I believe that this is a big flaw in humanity these days. Ways that we never talk about the philosophy of things that make us tick and the things that can guide us in the right path and what I'm what I think specifically is that the concept of individualism versus collectivism is never discussed and I think that not only is that is the core of the wisdom of the West But it was also an evolution of the human spirit, the idea of individualism, that we can judge each other on by content of character and not by which tribe or which color we are. And that, you know, the tribe down the river doesn't have to be our enemy if we can find common ground in our humanity. And I think all of this social justice and everything else is plunging us back into collectivism, which is a dead end for humanity, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on individualism versus collectivism.
[28:28] Right. So collectivism is the fantasy that we can outsource our conscience to the mob. So you think of the mob, the sort of typical village mob, you know, with their pitches, is that there are pitchforks and there are torches and there's hunting down some guy. Oh, so-and-so is a bad guy. We've got to hunt him down. Individually, you debate with yourself whether it's the right thing. But when you join or merge with the crowd, with the group, then you believe that you have somehow outsourced your conscience to the group as a whole. But the problem is when individuals try to outsource their conscience to the group as a whole, the only people willing to accept that outsourcing are sociopaths and evildoers who have no conscience of their own. Of course, hey, you want to give me your conscience? Well, if you don't have any conscience of your own, which is, you know, a couple of percentage points at least to the population, then that is very disastrous. And this is where the most corrupt, the most soulless, the most cold-hearted end up running society because people are desperate to outsource their conscience. I talked, of course, yesterday about the Milgram experiment where people were told to apply escalating electric shocks as part of a learning experiment to people in a room. They were actually actors and so on, but they didn't know that. And when the.
[29:44] When the white-coated people who were running the experiment said, it's important for the experiment that you continue. They didn't order this. I mean, you have to. I'm going to punish you if you don't. They just said it's important for you to continue. They gave them fairly neutral statements. And, you know, two-thirds of people are willing to put lethal electricity through somebody's body. They don't even know this person. just because somebody that they perceive to be an authority who has no direct power of, they can get up and walk out of the experiment at any time, but they perceive that somebody who has some mild authority over them is even more mildly encouraging them to continue. And they're like, okay, right? So individualism means I will contain my conscience within my own heart and mind, and I will never, ever outsource my conscience to an amorphous blob that doesn't even exist. Of course, there is no such thing as a crowd. A crowd is a mental tag that can be useful, but does not exist in and of itself. Like trees exist, trees exist in proximity to each other, but when we call a group of trees a forest or a corpse.
[30:58] The forest is a conceptual tag within our own mind that is useful for organizing our sense data, But forest does not exist as a thing in the world. The trees do, the undergrowth does, the leaves, all of that. Yes, those things exist as tangible things, but the concept does not exist. So when I say people use the crowd to dilute and outsource their conscience to the crowd, they are dissolving their own conscience by surrendering their own moral will to something called a crowd, which doesn't even exist. It's like saying, well, I can do all the crimes I want, and it's my imaginary friend who will go to jail and take all of the moral consequences. Well, your imaginary friend doesn't exist. We know that because, well, he's imaginary. And so individualism is a metaphysical statement of that which is, that which exists. I exist, you exist.
[31:59] We're both human beings, but the classification human being is a conceptual tag that doesn't exist independent of her own mind. I mean, unless you're some complete Platonist who believes that our concepts exist in a higher realm of perfection, but I'm more Aristotelian and objectivist that way, so I don't, not more, I completely don't believe that concepts exist outside the mind. Concepts are imperfectly derived from instances. In other words, if you have a concept, say, well, all of these things are trees, and then I include a deer, well, a deer is not a plant, a deer can move, a deer has fur, and trees don't, and so on, right? And a deer, I guess it might shed its coat, but it doesn't shed its leaves. So, and a deer is a mammal, not a plant.
[32:41] So, if I
[32:41] Include deer in the conception of trees, then I've made an error. And so, when I say the concepts are imperfectly derived from instances. What I'm saying is that concepts have to accurately describe the characteristics of entities in the world. And if there's something in an entity that contradicts the concept, but you try and include it within the concept, then you're just wrong and you have to abandon it. So when people join a mob, what they experience is the dissolution of themselves and the outsourcing of conscience to something which does not exist called a crowd. I mean, just the last example I'll sort of give and then I'd love to get your thoughts on it is, let's say you're in a mob of 50 people and you're just chasing some guy because you told he was a horse thief or some bad guy or whatever. Now, you think you're okay.
[33:31] Because you're in a group, you're in a mob. You can't put everyone in jail, so I've dissolved my conscience to the mob. But if you say, you turn to the guy next to you and you say, hey, Bob, Bob, listen to me, man. If it turns out we're doing the wrong thing, will you go to jail for me? And Bob's going to say, no. So you can't outsource your conscience or your consequences to any individual. You have to outsource it to this general blob called the mob. And it is the easiest and most destructive way to eliminate your conscience is to join a group, outsource your conscience, and then do terrible things, which the collective always does. And then what happens is your conscience returns to you bloodied and angry and makes your life hell because you can outsource your conscience to something that doesn't exist. But that's like outsourcing your kidney function or your digestive function to the mob or the crowd. It doesn't really work. What happens is you use the mob to dissolve your conscience. You do terrible things because you think you're free of your conscience.
[34:37] And then what happens is your conscience, it turns out you cannot outsource and your life becomes kind of a living hell of self-false and contradictory ethics. So that's sort of my take on it very briefly, if that helps you at all, Patrick.
[34:54] That's awesome.
[34:56] I want to hear what you think of my method to dumb it down is kind of, I say, look, you look like a nice person. Let's be friends is a thousand times more sane and just than you're in a different group than me. So I have to hate you. and to like put it in a perspective so people will open their minds to the concept of individualism, which is the foil for racism and all a lot of the isms that plague the world. I believe that individualism is the cure for that.
[35:32] Well, I mean, I hear what you're saying, but there's strict limitations to that kind of stuff. And there's strict and fuzzy limitations to that. The first, of course, is that, you know.
[35:41] There are two
[35:42] Very replicable findings in psychology, in the field of psychology, that no one is really allowed to talk about. One is IQ, and the other is that stereotypes are usually rooted in some kind of truth. So, for instance, if you are at a bus stop late at night and some guy comes up and he's got a mohawk, he's got a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, he's sniffing glue, then you are probably going to think that person is dangerous, right? If there's somebody who's part of a criminal gang, right, then you would judge them as being part of that criminal gang. You wouldn't just carve them off and judge them as an individual. If you look at someone and they have a face full of tattoos, well, you're probably going to say this person is a little bit impulsive and maybe a little bit lower in intelligence and not as easily able to process the long-term consequences of immediate decisions. And maybe, because it's all very painful, has had a really abused childhood and might be masochistic, right? So now, would you be right 100% of the time? I don't know, but you would be more right than average. So I agree with you. We should work as hard as we can to judge people as individuals, but we also should not pretend that there's nothing else we can judge people by. There are other things we can judge people by, and we kind of have to.
[37:11] If you're a woman in your walking home. It's dark out.
[37:16] And if there's a guy, you know, whistling and crossing on the other side of the street, yeah, I mean, you're probably not too concerned about him. If you hear a sound behind you and you see a guy creeping up behind you, well, are you going to sit there and say, well, I don't want to prejudge. Like.
[37:32] That's just a
[37:32] Way of disarming your basic fight or flight self-protection mechanisms. And of course, we've had a lot of that in society where we're not supposed to judge anyone. But, you know, I mean, if you're a zebra and some creature is walking towards you, it kind of matters whether it's another zebra or a lion. So I love the idea. And this is, of course, how in general, I mean, I move in pretty moral circles, so I judge people as individuals. But, you know, when I go to the big city or I go to some place where there can be some more significant risk, then I tend not to judge people as individuals. I tend to judge them by the way in which they present themselves and the social markers that they may have that could be more reassuring or less reassuring, if that makes sense.
[38:19] It does you know and i guess my answer to that is yes you can't help but make generalizations in situations like that where you might be put yourself in danger but it's it's like you know you have to set boundaries and i'm always armed so that helps with my perspective on that where i can assume that you're a nice person until you get close enough to where i have to challenge your motivations.
[38:49] Right. I mean, so if you're in a good neighborhood and someone asks you if you have the time, you're probably okay with it. If you're in a really sketchy neighborhood and some guy comes up and asks you for the time, he could just be getting close enough to rob you or something, right? So we do just have to make these kinds of judgments. And of course, all the people who want to pry on us tell us that all those judgments are terrible and prejudiced and so on, right? And I mean, of course they do because they want us to not have that basic sense of self-protection and self-preservation. And I say this in a way because I've had thousands of conversations with people over the last 20 years, in particular around things like dating or business. And when dating or business has turned out to be really bad.
[39:32] And I say to the person, were there any signs at the beginning of the relationship that it was going to go bad? And of course, when they're honest and they look back, like 100% of the time, It's like, oh, yeah, well, there was this thing. Oh, yeah, well, no, there was that thing, too, right? So philosophy is about prevention, not cure. Philosophy is nutrition, not the emergency room. And so philosophy is there to prevent you from having problems. Like if you're having a heart attack, you don't call your nutritionist because your nutritionist is like, well, maybe you should change your diet 10 years ago. But right now you've got to you've got to get into an ambulance. You've got to get to the ER, right? And so philosophy is about preventing problems, not necessarily about curing them, or at least not nearly as much. But preventing problems means relying upon our instincts and social cues about who's safe and who's not.
[40:25] And so I hope that helps, and I appreciate the question. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
[40:31] Yeah just you know i i won't don't want to dominate the time but i i simplify it ultimately it's the world is divided into two groups of people good people and assholes and both of those are choices
[40:44] Not circumstances of birth
[40:46] And but that's it oh and just to go back real quick to the to the ai thing i think everybody should go back and watch the 1950s version of the day the Earth stood still. It was very forward thinking, and it was about an AI named Gort. It's funny that Garak is so close to Gort, that provided all of human needs but would destroy any group of humans that were aggressive against another,
[41:15] And it was programmed to
[41:16] Operate that way. It's a very interesting take, given today's debate on AI.
[41:23] Well, I appreciate that, and thank you so much. I'm going to move to T. Pv tragula tragula what is it dr acula dr acula you're gonna need to unmute but you oh i don't know why i'm yodeling but you are welcome to chat and uh what's on your mind.
[41:41] Oh, hey, Steve. Hello.
[41:42] I came a little late in the call. I wasn't sure if you're going to get to me. I actually, I was caller about in 2019 to one of your call-in shows. And we actually had a little bit of a conversation back and forth on the truth. And I've been on a bit of a journey six years. And I think I've definitely come a lot more to your line of thinking on that. When I was like, just reflecting when I saw that you're back on X. I was like, yeah, Stefan was right about that.
[42:14] My question is, you were talking a lot about virtues. And I think I've actually become Catholic in those years too. And what you were talking about when you were talking about welfare and needing to connect with people on an individual level or see their needs to actually give them what they need, where they're at, was charity. And that's one of the theological virtues and the highest Christian virtue. So, and I think it's been bad. It's very bad that now we talk about charity as these institutions as opposed to a fundamental individual human virtue. So I was just, well, you're talking a lot about virtues in general. And I was wondering if you have any sort of hierarchy of virtues that you subscribe to or are you where you place one virtue above the other and in development and i'd also like last time i talked to in 2019 you were an atheist i was sort of curious if you'd made a want to touch on how you've how you've developed in your journey and your relationship to faith as well i
[43:23] Appreciate that great questions and i love the you know whip out a quick hierarchy of virtues and that's you know that's a totally fair question and i'm glad that i've done some work in it because that's that's a that's a big old question and i won't forget your second question which i spaghetti.
[43:36] So my first answer is that in my book, University Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, I divide virtues into five categories, which sounds maybe too much, but I mean, there's only two that really count and one is just the mirror of the other. So there's only one that really counts. So the first is university preferable behavior, which is a combination of property rights and the non-aggression principle. Non-aggression principle, of course, is thou shalt not initiate the use of force against thy fellow carbon-based bipeds, right? No initiating the use of force against people. You can respond to the initiation of force with force if you are in a situation where you can reasonably expect imminent grievous bodily harm or death. So you can shoot a guy who is running at you with a chainsaw. So non-aggression principle and property rights. Property rights simply says we own ourselves and we own the effects of our actions. And it is really impossible to argue against this principle, because in order to argue, you have to debate someone about what they're saying. Stef, you said this, right? So I own myself, and I own the effects of my actions. The effects of my actions could be something really good. It could be some crime. It could be a house. It could be a poem. I own myself, and I own the effects of my actions. And there are proofs for this in the book. I won't go further into it.
[45:00] As a whole.
[45:00] But so universally preferable behavior is respecting persons and respecting property that's universally preferable behavior and that's if you do that you're not super good but you ain't evil right you're not evil and the second tier is called aesthetically preferable actions these are things which are beneficial nice they can be universalized but they're not enforceable through violence so the sanctity of my own persons and my own property can be enforced morally through violence right so you can you can use violence to restrain someone who's stealing from your store i mean you don't shoot him right i mean that you can use you can grapple him and hold him down if he's stealing from your store so you can use force if somebody's stealing you can of course use force if somebody's attacking you.
[45:52] Now, aesthetically preferable actions are nice to haves, but they're not enforceable through violence. So these are things like being reasonably polite, being on time, being productive in your job, not cheating on your boyfriend, your girlfriend. Now, cheating is bad, but you can't shoot someone for cheating because they're not enforcing the relationship on you coercively, right? So if somebody's running at you with a chainsaw, they're enforcing their actions upon you coercively. Whereas if you're in a relationship, someone, they cheat on you, you chose to be in that relationship. You can choose to leave at any time. If your friend is consistently late, well, nobody's forcing you to be in that relationship. So you can't shoot the guy for being late. So there's.
[46:35] Universally preferable behavior, respecting persons and property, not violating persons and property. Then there is aesthetically preferable actions. And these are things like honesty. It's good to be honest. It's important to be honest, but you can't shoot someone for exaggerating a fishing story, right? Oh, the fish I caught was, you know, twice as big as, you know, whatever. And then you get to see a picture and it really wasn't that big. You can't just blow him away because he's not enforcing his story on you coercively. He's just saying stuff that is not true. Now, if you've got a contract and so on, and there's fraud involved, that's sort of a different matter. That's much more towards university preferable behavior because contract violations of fraud is a form of theft. So there's aesthetically preferable actions, university preferable behavior, and those are really the only two categories that matter. There's a neutral category, which is, you know, I'm running to catch a train. Is that good or evil? Well, it doesn't fall into the category. It's not universalizable. It's certainly not enforced through violence. Now, so there's UPB and then there's violations of UPB. So let's just think of the mirror opposite. So these are people who violate persons and property, right? They stab people, they threaten people, they kidnap people, they steal, they rob, they defraud, they lie through contracts and steal that way and so on, right? You can steal a lot more with a briefcase than a gun, certainly these days.
[47:57] You know, what is it?
[47:58] But it comes to central banking. It's an amateur who robs the bank. It's the professional who owns it. So you think of universally preferable behavior, aesthetically preferable actions, and then there's aesthetically negative actions, which are the opposite people who compulsively cheat and lie and are late and disreputable and spread negative rumors. It's just stuff that's negative, but you can't enforce through violence. And then, of course, there's the opposite of UPB, which is violations of persons and property, which can be sanctioned with ostracism and force. And generally, aesthetically negative actions, like the lying, cheating. You know, if you're at a, I don't know if you had this as a kid, like you play a bunch of games with your kids in your neighborhood, and there's always some kid who's just a cheat.
[48:46] Right?
[48:47] They just cheat. You didn't touch me. And, you know, they open their eyes during grounders and say, I never did. You know, they just cheat. well you can't you can't beat that kid up right because no he's not enforcing through violence his interaction with you but generally what happens in those situations is the kids will simply stop inviting that kid right they'll just ostracize him because they don't want him to be part of the game right so ostracism is not a violent response ostracism is simply saying i i am not going to spend time with you and you can't shoot someone who doesn't want to spend with you. Some woman doesn't want to go on a date with you. You can't.
[49:24] Kind of shooter, kind of attacker,
[49:25] It'd be evil. So those are the moral categories. Very briefly, you can get more. I've got a free book, essentialphilosophy.com. You can also get UPB for free at freedomand.com slash books. That's the general hierarchy. I'm not saying that answers every moral question you might have, but is that a general framework that makes some kind of sense to you?
[49:47] Oh, it's a framework. If I could push back a little bit, it sounded like Like those, like, because I remember you talking about these before, they sound like principles more than virtues to me. It sounds like a dantological ethic system as opposed to a virtue-based ethic system. And so the difference that I, maybe I see it, is like that ethic that works with virtues is, like, virtues are almost like micro-personalities. Because they're the inverse of vices. Vices are bad habits and bad parts of your personality that you want to get rid of, like smoking, for example, just randomly or arguing perpetually. But virtues are like, go to the Aristotelian ones, then again, temperance is a virtue because it's moderation of food and your appetites and fortitude is courage.
[50:50] Well, sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt and I won't make a big speech here, but I view our current addiction to violence as a society so all-pervasive that I feel like a doctor in the middle of a terminal plague. Right? So a doctor in the middle of a terminal plague is just rushing around saying to people, man, wash your hands, man, don't.
[51:10] The wounds, don't do all these terrible things. And later, when the plague is diminished, we can start talking about diet and exercise.
[51:17] But right now, people are dropping dead because of a communicable plague that can be stopped by individual choices and better decisions, right? So as far as temperance goes and all of that, moderation in your appetite, hey, man, that's great. I think moderation in your appetite is great. Right now, we're facing the largest theft in human history, which is all of the national debts and unfunded liabilities in the Western countries. It is the largest theft in human history. We have a knee-jerk response to move to government coercion to solve every conceivable social problem.
[51:50] And we have a court system that is destroying the family and our capacity to have and raise children, which is a foundation of human happiness and also allows us to continue our culture and civilization. You know, the little things like that. So I view a five alarm fire right now, like half the neighborhood, three quarters of the neighborhood is burning to the ground. Children are jumping out of windows, just absolutely terrible stuff is happening. And so I'm focusing on coercion, which is why I focus on not violating persons and property. Man, if we can convince people to stop violating persons and property, which is probably going to take two to three generations of peaceful parenting, if we can convince people to do that, I'm real happy, and I'll be long dead by then, of course, but I'd be real happy to talk about the Aristotelian virtues and the Aristotelian mean and moderation and things like that. But right now, you're like, well, wouldn't it be nice if we could build houses.
[52:44] Which were a little bit more fire resistant?
[52:46] And it's like, yes, but right now, three quarters of the neighborhood is currently burning to the ground and we've got to get the hoses out, if that makes sense.
[52:54] Yeah, and I want to commend you for the work you've done on your call-in show. I think it's actually... You've been on the front lines helping people with real problems and giving a much better perspective on things. So I want to commend you on that. I mean, again, I might say that if we want to get ahead of the game, we're going to have to work on having just men. And I think like what you're saying about...
[53:21] Sorry, having just what? Yeah.
[53:24] I don't think there's a just society without just men. So we need to work on having just men. And I guess it's a part, like the principles you're outlining, is, is, is a way of, of getting us there or getting us better, like more towards that. So I agree with that.
[53:39] Yeah, of course, but just men will always be eviscerated in a state of society because just men are outvoted by unjust people of both sexes. So that's, that's, you know, the real, the real challenge is can, can we give up.
[53:51] Our addiction to coercion? Can we start
[53:54] To look at voluntary, peaceful solutions, negotiated solutions, rational solutions? Now society is similar to the way that Europe was in sort of the 15th, 16th centuries during a time of sort of 200 years of religious warfare, before the rise of science and the free market that allowed decisions to be made about the course of the natural world without the violence of religiosity and fundamentalism, which of course can definitely flower in those circumstances. So we had science to allow us to make decisions about the course and effect in the natural world, which is pretty important. And we had the free market to begin the process of allocating resources according to voluntary trade, as opposed to the historical privilege of the aristocrats and so on. So.
[54:44] Society is a war of sophistry, masking coercion, where the productive are getting torn apart by the endless demands of the corrupted.
[54:57] The greedy, the incompetent, the unproductive, or the negatively productive. And so there's a battle between the makers and the takers. and it is a very foundational battle that can only be solved by a return to respecting morality. But respecting morality means we have to start making decisions in our relationships based upon virtue, not on accidents of birth or coincidence of environment like, oh, these are my friends from high school and so on, whether or not they're good or bad people. Oh, this is just my blood family, whether they're good or bad people. But we have to start making decisions based upon virtue rather than accident. Like, I think that relationships, I mean, if you have a virtuous family, I have a family myself, and it's full of great and good people. If you have a great and good family, fantastic. If you can cajole, exhort, perhaps even nag your family into becoming good and virtuous, that's fantastic. But I don't think it's worth having relationships based upon historical accident or coincidence. It is really important to have relationships in the long run based on virtue because having a community around you that you didn't really earn that's just based on accident and history and not virtue is just another thing that I was talking about earlier, which is the unearned, right? Which is our desire for the unearned. To have companionship without the requirement of virtue is very tempting to people as a whole. Sorry, that was a minor aside, but please continue with your thoughts and I haven't forgotten your first question.
[56:25] Yeah, I don't think it was that minor aside. It's a good point of evidence. When I was saying we can't have a justice, society without just men, I was saying that justice is another one of Aristotle's virtues. But we need to get to that point where if morality and justice is Coming from the individuals, we have to, I think that, and I think we both agree on that point, then we need to focus on the character of men. I think you're right, though, too, that there is this problem of cheats and immorality that's apparent in all this. And I think that there's really a problem of inauthenticity as well. I think what you're getting back to the idea of truth as a central virtue and aspire to. So I don't, is identifying and isolating cheats and people who are inauthentic in their approach to things, maybe like a good dividing line there, I guess. Well, it is.
[57:29] It is. I mean, I've written an entire book about this. Well, two, in fact, one called Practical Anarchy and another is a novel called The Future. Ostracism is essential in the moral organization of society. If we don't have the right to ostracize people, we have no moral control over them. In other words, if they can gain society's resources without conforming to reasonable standards of social behavior, then society has completely lost control of any moral enforcement and hedonism and decay and decadence take their inevitable course. It is, I mean, I was born in the 60s, grew up in the 70s, and the 70s was an absolute hellscape of moral decay. Society has recoiled a little bit from, you know, the key parties and the drugs and the, you know, just gross oily stuff that was going on in the 70s. But what happened was we no longer had the capacity to ostracize people in any effective way. Like we could choose not to see them socially. Like in the past, of course, if you became a single mother, and of course, in the 19th century, say in America, like a third of marriages, you can sort of tell from the marriage to the birthdate, a third of marriages were shotgun marriages. So people had sex outside of wedlock in the past. And of course what happened was, well, you had to marry the girl and she had to marry you. So it was, you know, ex post facto reasoning made it more, more virtuous.
[58:54] In the past, if there was a single mother, and I'm not trying to pick on single mothers, it's just an example that most people, of course, know. So in the past, if there was a single mother, she could be ostracized by society, and it would be pretty tough for her to make a go of it. She basically had to move back in with her parents, and she wasn't going to have much of a future and so on. She could not get society's resources against their will. Now, of course, with the welfare state and with other kinds of programs, you can no longer economically ostracize anyone because they just, you know, you can disapprove of people as much as you want, but they just run to the government and cry crocodile tears. And then again, a lot of women, but certainly some men who are over sentimental and pathologically altruistic are like, oh, well, we can't have sad people in the world. We have to, we have to help them. Right. And so now we we've lost all of our enforcement mechanisms in any practical way. And really enforcement mechanisms now are just things like deplatforming people who tell the so we don't have any effective way to ostracize people and it's sort of like if there was no way, for say the nba right if there was no way for them to say.
[1:00:05] No to someone
[1:00:06] Who wanted to be on the team how long would it take before the nba collapsed because nobody wants to watch semi-competent basketball or if i remember the band genesis they auditioned like 400 singers after Peter Gabriel left and then eventually Phil Collins took over the singing duties. But if anyone who wanted to sing for Genesis was allowed to sing for Genesis, nobody would come to the concerts.
[1:00:32] Ostracism is essential. If every woman had to go out with every guy who asked her out or who swiped left or whatever it is on Tinder, if every woman had to date any man who asked her out, I mean, she'd lose her mind and she would find this incredibly objectionable. And rightly so. And so in general, because men pay like over 80% of the taxes and men contribute, infinitely, almost infinitely more into the tax system than women do, and men basically pay twice what they take out and women take out twice what they pay. So this is, I think, one of the reasons why a lot of men have become frustrated with female behavior, which is unfair. You know, all human beings are corrupted by power and statism grants too much power to people who make mistakes, moral enforcement becomes impossible, and everything decays from there until collapse.
[1:01:25] I actually want to tie this to something, because I think you're right. I think that ostracism and setting boundaries is important, and we need that ability to set boundaries. And the breakdown of boundaries
[1:01:37] Is a big part
[1:01:38] Of the decline of the West that we're seeing now. Curious to see how you think it relates to cancel culture, which you've been, which has been used notoriously on you, and I think extremely unjustly. Would you see that as, do you see that as a usurpation or a co-option of, like, a potentially just mechanism of social ostracism, which you would advocate, or no? Is it, like, is there something completely different?
[1:02:13] I mean, cancel culture is a very interesting phenomenon, and I don't want to get too much in-depth to it because we've got still some people who want to chat, which I'd love to be able to accommodate. So I was not canceled because I did something bad or wrong or immoral. I wasn't canceled because I was convicted of a crime. I wasn't canceled because I told people to do evil things. I was canceled because I told the truth, which was inconvenient to some people. Now, without the state, the stakes are not high enough for truth-tellers to get canceled, right? So let's just give you an example. Obviously, since I'm against coercion, I'm against the forced redistribution of wealth. Now.
[1:02:55] Depending on how
[1:02:56] You count it, between a third and a half of the American population relies on government transfers for most, if not all, of their income. So let's say that I'm close to getting my way.
[1:03:06] Let's say I'm close to winning that argument. then there's tens of millions of people who don't understand how they're going to be able to survive that's crazy high stakes right and so of course they're going to get very aggressive and they're going to get very angry and they're going to get maybe even violent which certainly happened with me in terms of threats and so on and so but without the state you don't end up with tens of millions of people dependent upon coercive transfers of wealth and so the stakes aren't, as high to the point where people will organize. Or let's say, not me, but let's say there's a guy named Bob who's really influential in some particular election, right? In make up a country, we'll use Scott Adams' eponymous, Albania, right? So Bob is really swinging the election in Albania. Now, of course, elections in sort of the modern West, because governments are so large and powerful, trillions of dollars hang in the balance for an election. And so if Bob is swinging the election one way, then, or, you know, people like Bob or whatever it is, well, the party that might stand to lose is, they seize like billions or tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars slipping out of their grasp. Well, people will do a lot to get control of that kind of money, right?
[1:04:28] People were killed for 50 bucks sometimes so the because there's so much money that swings on the basis of winning or losing an election that again the stakes are enormously high in a truly free society in a voluntary society the stakes just aren't that high so it's really not worth it to organize massive boycotts of of advertisers and and pressure points and create false narratives of slander and lies to right it's just it's not worth it because there's just, not nearly as much as stake in a free society, but when you have a say to society.
[1:05:03] People's livelihoods and trillions of dollars hang in the balance, and therefore it's well worth organizing slander campaigns and getting Bob deplatformed, if that makes sense. So, I mean, I'm fine. Look, if people don't want to listen to what I have to say, as the old saying goes, don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you, right? I mean, And people are free to not listen to me. And the last thing I'd ever want is for anyone to be forced or bullied or coerced into listening to me. If you don't want to listen to me, by all means, do not. It's my job to make what I say worthwhile, interesting, and valuable. So listen to it. It's not your job to pay me attention. That would be like being a government teacher. Well, you better enjoy my lessons or I'm going to drug you with child-sized methamphetamines or whatever is going on. But the crazy drugs these days it's not it's not the child's job to be interested it's the teacher's job to be interesting so i think that ostracism and de-platforming you know i said this is the way we solve social problems and then it happened to me and i couldn't help but sort of smile at the irony of that but it's not a it's not a free society or a free situation where that would happen in a free society because the states are way lower.
[1:06:21] If that makes sense.
[1:06:22] It does.
[1:06:23] If you could just
[1:06:24] Wrap it up with your stance on religion, like where you're at with God.
[1:06:29] Yeah. So I'll tell you. I'll really appreciate your questions. I'll tell you the whole story. I am friends with Christians. Both I and my family have been to church, and I recoil at the term atheist because it's way beyond fedora, where now it's generally socialist slash communist slash secular tyrant who wants to enslave half the planet for the sake of the blank slate theory of human personalities. So I will say I am between two worlds in that I recoil from atheists. I very much enjoy the company of Christians, and I very much enjoy sermons at church, but I cannot will myself to accept the metaphysical existence of something that goes counter to reason and evidence. So I patiently await signals from above, if that makes sense. I think we've lost him. I still want to do more. Blake, I'm all ears. If you want to unmute, let me know what you're thinking, my friend.
[1:07:31] Yes, Saban, thank you for all your work you've done. I really appreciate it. I was curious what your thought is on Bitcoin as the ability to end the state, do hyper-Bitcoinization, and then defund war or heavily de-incentivize war and that type of thing. So wanted to get your thoughts there, kind of get an understanding of how far you've gone down that rabbit hole in relation to Bitcoin.
[1:08:02] Yeah, I appreciate that. And it's a great question. I won't just refer you to a speech that I gave many years ago called Bitcoin versus war, where I go through the actual math. But you should definitely check out that speech. The website is FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fdrpodcast.com. You can do a search for Bitcoin versus war. And the general argument is that defensive wars are funded voluntarily by a local population. Offensive wars require central banking and debt. And because Bitcoin is not just resistant to, but it's the opposite of central banking, it's decentralized finance. Because Bitcoin is the opposite of central banking and Bitcoin cannot be printed, cannot be multiplied unjustly in the massive theft of people's lives called inflation, right? I mean, 40% of money in America in existence was printed 2020 onwards, 40%, which means you work for 50 years and the government just stole 20 years of them, just put you in a gulag, so to speak. Well, at least you get to choose your own occupation, but you're no less a slave. It just stole 20 years of your life by printing 40% more money.
[1:09:17] So Bitcoin is absolutely necessary for the end of war. And I'll give you an example, of course. In the First World War, the combatants were fighting to standstill. Everybody knows about the stagnant nature of trench warfare and the tiny gains and losses that cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives. The Battle of the Somme was hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered men slaughtered of course and everybody was running out of money and the war was going to be over very quickly but then they switched they went they sold off their gold and they switched to fiat currency and they printed and borrowed and all kinds of stuff right not they didn't immediately create central banks but basically they they borrowed against future tax receipts and they if they if the if the war had relied upon the current coffers of the combatants, it would have been over probably early to 1915. It would have been a very short war, and everybody basically would have gone back home, and there would have been very little change, and people would have, they would have really understood the futility of these kinds of conflicts. Instead, what happened, of course, was the conflict was elongated almost to infinity. It felt like 10 million dead, mostly in France, of course. The conflict was elongated to near immortal levels.
[1:10:37] And even then,
[1:10:38] Because everybody was doing the same strategy of borrowing and printing money, even in 1917, everybody was fighting to a standstill. But at that point, so many people had died, that if the war had terminated with no clear victory, the leaders would have probably been hauled out and strung up by their Buster Browns, as the mayor in Jaws mentions at one point. So they very much wanted to continue. So of course, what happened was they convinced, America to enter the First World War, I think part of the false flag, Gulf Tonkin style with the singing of the Lusitania, which was actually, I think in general, pretty military in nature. And so America entered the war, because America entered the war, the powers were able to fight against Germany to the point where they were able to impose this draconian treaty of Versailles on Germany, which led to the hyperinflation as Germany tried to pay off its war debts, which led to Hitler, which led, of course, to the Second World War.
[1:11:37] And that of course was catastrophic.
[1:11:40] Another catastrophe was as America entered the war on the Western Front, Germany so desperate to not fight a two-front war with Russia in the East and of course the allies on the West that Russia shipped the communists through Finland into Russia and armed and funded them and this of course was instrumental in creating the absolutely the appalling, disastrous, and slaughterously murder house of the Soviet, dictatorship, which encompassed, I mean, gosh, I mean, and of course then through that, that spread to China and like a third of the world was living under these brutal communist dictatorship and communism slaughtered. I mean, I think it was well north of a hundred million people because you could count 70 million in Russia alone and certainly a lot under Chairman Mao and other leaders in China. And so, because America entered into the war, a whole series of dominoes came down, as they do. It's almost impossible to predict in history, but it seems pretty clear in hindsight, to the point where America's entered.
[1:12:47] Into the world,
[1:12:48] Introvertly guaranteed the Second World War, and also strongly facilitated the emergence of global communism, which was one of the greatest evils ever to strike our planet. So this would all be impossible under Bitcoin. See, under Bitcoin, you can't just declare a war and just fund it based upon money printing and debt. If you want to start a war, you have to go to the people who own Bitcoin and say, I'd really like some Bitcoin to run this war. And if it's a defensive war, if there's some malevolent force invading your local geographical region or your country, then of course people will pay. People pay for protection all the time. They have security guards. They have gated communities. They have security systems.
[1:13:30] They have private police
[1:13:32] Forces in some areas. So people pay for protection of their property all the time. And this would just be another example of that. However, if it's like, well, it's really important that we go all.
[1:13:45] The way to the other side of the world
[1:13:47] And we go and invade some country because there's a threat. Current events are entirely unrelated, right? Well, okay, so people won't immediately dismiss that because I guess conceivably they could be, but there'd be a pretty high bar for proof. And also, if the people, this is sort of my tip for the world for today, is that, people suffer no negative consequences for being wrong. I don't listen to what they say. I don't. Like people say, well, why aren't you in politics? I was in politics for some time. I don't really do politics. And that's because it's been abundantly clear, especially COVID and post-COVID, that people who did the most egregious wrongs against society are skating away scot-free. And so, you know, there's all these people, of course, at the moment saying, oh, there's this danger in the world. There's that danger in the world. We got to do this, that, or the other, or global warming or whatever it is, right? And it's like, okay, well, What happens if you're wrong? I mean, I've been an entrepreneur myself for like 30 years, more really.
[1:14:47] And if I get things wrong,
[1:14:52] I lose my business. I lose my money. I lose my business. I guess I would lose my reputation, except that mostly was taken away for me. And I remember, of course, in the business world, having to sign big promissory notes to meet payroll when we were delayed in our payments. So I was out a huge amount of money if the company failed. Whereas the people in the media, the people in politics, if they say there's a big danger and it turns out they're wrong, what happens? Well, nothing, nothing. George Bush is still pulling a tape, doing his little paintings on his iPad and all of that. Like what's happened to all the people who got things wrong over COVID, all the people who got things wrong over global warming. There's been no global warming since 2013 or something like that so and it's really efficient the big can.
[1:15:41] I ask a follow-up question Stefan not to interrupt no go ahead okay And I do really appreciate your videos from, I think I did watch your videos from 2013 and 14. And, you know, that was really a hope, helped me understand it and loved your insights there. And, you know, I can't think of anything, you know, trying to think about first principles and what's going to affect the most amount of change. You know, I can't think of anything better than Bitcoin, but then Bitcoin for your audience, it makes your audience, I'd argue, extremely rich if they, you know, all get as much as they can. And then that will help propagate philosophy and i guess i'm trying to understand you know what your thoughts on you know the strategy i guess one of the things i'd love to see you know and love to get your perspective is like
[1:16:29] You just involved.
[1:16:30] In more bitcoin
[1:16:31] Things kind of bridging the gap with the philosophy and the bitcoin especially since you were so early in it you understand the connection to war so well and then you know kind of thirdly if and when your audience, I'm sure hopefully most of them are already in it, become really rich, they have more resources to propagate our value systems and beliefs throughout the world in a constructive manner, as well as kind of cutting, no pun intended, cutting the head off of these socialist government kind of processes or reducing the money spigot that they can have to propagate these things. So I guess to summarize the question is just like, what's your thought on getting more involved in being on podcasts and going to the Bitcoin 2025 in Vegas and just getting a little bit more involved to try to bridge the gap a little bit further.
[1:17:21] So I'd love to get your thoughts
[1:17:22] On that perspective, because to me, and it sounds like you might agree that this is the most important thing that can kind of rip out the root of, dare I say evil, but this government funding war machine and theft and some of those things, as well as help us with some of the things you've already discussed so much on your videos and podcasts.
[1:17:47] Well, listen, Blake, I certainly appreciate what you say. I've given speeches at Bitcoin conferences before. I spoke to 40,000 people in Amsterdam at the NextWeb conference some years ago. I just don't receive any invites. And I simply assume that's because the reputational damage that I've suffered through the media and through other sources has just been so extreme that I'm sort of off the reservation as far as that stuff goes. If it's any consolation, I, of course, have continued to do Bitcoin shows over the years. I had a Bitcoin roundtable that was pretty active. I did The Truth About Bitcoin, the updated presentation last year. So if people want to invite me to Bitcoin conferences, I'd be happy to come, but I think that there's some concern. All right. I appreciate the question. let's do just one more. Liquid Zulu.
[1:18:28] Very interesting name.
[1:18:29] I am thrilled to hear from you. You'll just need to unmute. All right. Okay. So Liquid Zulu, what's.
[1:18:35] On your mind?
[1:18:36] Yes. Thank you for having me up and for with me through those technical difficulties. So I wanted to comment on your universally preferable behavior discussion from before. It sounds pretty interesting. Eduardo has been telling me I need to look into that more and I will read the book at some point. Pardon me.
[1:18:57] So based on that, I was wondering what you thought of my proof for the non-aggression principle from the primacy of existence. Now, you know, obviously we're going to be limited on time. I won't be able to give the full thing, but maybe at least you could perhaps comment on the basic structure of the proof, which is that there are essentially three types of legal theory you can have. There's the non-aggression principle, which says you're not allowed to aggress, or there's the law of the jungle, which says just do whatever you want, just aggress at your whim. Might make right all those sorts of things. Or there's some form of mixed law, like most legal systems today, where people think, oh, well, sometimes it's okay to aggress, but sometimes you shouldn't aggress. Maybe don't commit murder, but then it's fine to steal
[1:19:49] If you're an IRS agent.
[1:19:53] So, in my view, both the law of the jungle and mixed law are able to be reduced into a form of whim worship. And whim worship is rooted in the primacy of consciousness. Which of course from objectivism we knew to be false it is trying to wish something into being it is saying this is okay because i feel like it is this aggression is licit because i want it to be licit so what would your thoughts be on that sort of proof of the non-aggression principle
[1:20:26] I'm sorry if i missed something but describing other systems is inconsistent i'm not sure if That's a proof of the non-aggression principle. And I'm sorry if I missed something, but if you could just run me through the proof. I mean, I have a sort of syllogistical proof approach to things, which is UPB. So if you can run me through the syllogistical proof of the non-aggression principle, I'd love to hear it.
[1:20:48] Sure.
[1:20:48] So the full proof is very, very long, so I won't go into too much depth.
[1:20:55] Well, hang on. Hang on. So are you a parent?
[1:20:59] No.
[1:21:00] Okay. If your proof is very long, how can we teach children about morality?
[1:21:06] I mean, the
[1:21:07] Entire proof of the objectivist ethics is very long.
[1:21:09] Right, but UPB is not. I taught UPB to my daughter when she was two.
[1:21:14] Sure.
[1:21:15] So how can we teach children to be moral if the proof is pages of advanced reasoning that they can't possibly comprehend? Do we just say, kids, well, you're going to have to exist in a state of nature until you're 22 and can understand this proof? Or do we just say, well, you have to do what I tell you to, even though I can't prove it to you because you're too young? That's the problem. Well, you can.
[1:21:38] Work through the proof at the level where they'd understand it, and you can try to explain it more and more,
[1:21:44] But obviously— You said that the proof is very long, and holding a whole—hang on, holding a whole series—I'm not arguing with you, I'm just saying that this is the problem, is that we need to teach morality to children, and how do you teach a long, complicated proof of ethics to children when we expect children to behave and to learn about morality at a pretty early age?
[1:22:07] Well, my view would be that you would teach it to them at the level that they can understand. And I think you, because a child isn't necessarily going to come up with.
[1:22:16] So teach me your proof of the non-aggression principle. And this sounds confrontational. I don't mean it that way. Like I'm not, oh yeah, prove to me. I don't mean it in any aggressive form. I genuinely, like I'm three or four years old. How would you prove the non-aggression principle to me?
[1:22:36] So I would start off with,
[1:22:38] Hey, you know, let's say you're in nature and you pick up a stick first and somebody else can maybe comes along later and they try and take that stick off you. This is called an aggression. And I would say, hey, there are three basic ways we could deal with this aggression. Either we say you're not allowed to aggress or we say, who cares, aggress if you want. Or we say, well, sometimes you might be able to aggress and sometimes you shouldn't aggress. And then I would go over, well, those are exhaustive of the options we have. And the law of the jungle is to aggress at your whim. That is a form of whim worship, which is based on the primacy of consciousness, which is a stolen concept fallacy.
[1:23:19] You give me whim worship and the primacy of consciousness when I'm three? What are you talking about? Have you ever spent time around children at all?
[1:23:27] Well, you'd have to explain the terms, obviously.
[1:23:29] Okay, I said explain it to me like I'm three.
[1:23:31] Okay, so I would say the law of the jungle, this idea that you just aggress at your whim, this is saying that this is right, this is just, because I feel like it is. Which is saying that... Okay, but the right
[1:23:45] And just is begging the question. You're trying to teach morality, which means you can't teach conclusions of morality. You can't assume the conclusion. That's begging. So you can't say it's right or just when you're trying to prove what right or just is.
[1:23:59] Well, no, no, that's, that, to be clear, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the person who is proposing the law of the jungle, this ethic, what it is saying is that it is just, that is the conclusion it comes to
[1:24:10] For whatever reason. It is claiming that.
[1:24:13] Okay, so hang on. So let's say the three-year-old is the biggest kid around and he can just take whatever he wants. Wouldn't he do that he.
[1:24:22] Gets all the
[1:24:23] Candy he gets all the candy he gets all the toys he gets everything he wants whenever he wants it because he's willing he's bigger and he's willing to be aggressive so why shouldn't he.
[1:24:31] Right so what what this big three-year-old is doing is he's operating on the assumption that his wishes can override reality no no if he thinks no no no
[1:24:44] He's not making a philosophical statement he's saying i'm bigger i want the truck you're playing with so I'm just going to take it away and I can do that because I'm bigger. He's not trying to manifest a wish. He's literally getting the truck by pushing the other kid down and taking the truck.
[1:25:00] Right, but that's based on the premise that his wishes override reality.
[1:25:04] No, they don't override reality because his wish gets him the truck in reality.
[1:25:09] Well, I agree that his wishes don't actually override reality, but I'm saying he's basing the premise he's working on.
[1:25:16] No, that doesn't make any sense. him. He gets the truck. And, you know, when you have kids, man, you'll be in a playground, you'll be in a sandbox, and this stuff happens. This is not theoretical at all, as you know, right? So his whim-worshipping, his wishes create reality, I don't know. He gets the truck. And why wouldn't he get the truck? He wants the truck. He can get the truck by taking it from the smaller kid. Tell me why he shouldn't.
[1:25:42] Right. So exactly. He wants the truck, and he gets the truck and so that is basing that is the premise i want therefore it's okay okay
[1:25:51] But that's not that's not creating reality i mean he i.
[1:25:55] Want the truck
[1:25:56] I get the truck and he gets the truck because he's bigger and stronger and willing to use aggression so why shouldn't he.
[1:26:03] Right because that premise that that he is operating on whim there right his his whim his desire for the truck is the justification he's using to go out and get the truck.
[1:26:15] Yes. And he gets the truck. He satisfies his desire.
[1:26:19] So then he is operating
[1:26:20] On the premise that because he wants something.
[1:26:23] It's therefore good for him to get it.
[1:26:25] Right. He takes pleasure in getting the truck. Right.
[1:26:29] So then that is saying that this thing is true, that I should be doing this, that that is true because I want it. So this is a truth coming from an I feel.
[1:26:40] Sorry, and what is the truth?
[1:26:43] What he's proposing is the truth, is that he should go out and get that truck.
[1:26:47] Well, I don't know. Okay, so he should satisfy his desire to get the truck by getting the truck from the smaller kid. Yes.
[1:26:55] Yeah, that's his proposition, to be clear. And he thinks that proposition is...
[1:26:58] He's three. He's not making a proposition. He's satisfying a desire.
[1:27:03] It is based on a proposition. It's based on at least an implicit proposition.
[1:27:07] Not necessarily. I mean, have you ever seen apes at a zoo? They grab stuff from each other all the time. Are you saying they're also making implicit propositions?
[1:27:14] Well, I don't
[1:27:14] Think they're rational agents.
[1:27:16] Well, I'm not sure that many three-year-olds are making abstract rational propositions.
[1:27:22] Certainly not explicitly.
[1:27:24] Okay. So are you going to try and tell the three-year-old who's big and strong and wants the truck, that he's got an implicit moral proposition in his actions that needs to be teased out, which will bar him from getting the truck.
[1:27:37] Well, I would explain it in much simpler terms. I would say just because you feel like you want something doesn't mean you should get it.
[1:27:43] But I can't. OK, I'll say the three year old, but I can get it. I'm bigger.
[1:27:47] And I would say that doesn't establish that
[1:27:49] You should get it. No, but I can get it. I want it. I can get it.
[1:27:55] Right. A three-year-old can always just repeat points. So that doesn't, the point is that it doesn't actually establish the truth.
[1:28:02] Okay, what is the truth?
[1:28:04] The truth is that there are certain requirements for having good experiences, having a good life. And this is destructive of those requirements.
[1:28:15] No, no, I hang on. I want the truck. I've got the truck. I'm happy. You're trying to say, so first of all, you say that I'm a whim worshiper and I just want to be happy. And then when I tell you I am happy, you tell me I'm not. Which is it?
[1:28:29] I'm saying that is disintegrating, destroying, let's say, the requirements for flourishing over the course
[1:28:37] Of your life. Oh, come on, man. It's a three-year-old talking about destroying the requirements for flourishing over the course of your life. Have you ever spent any? You were a child yourself, I'm assuming. I mean, do you think that that would make any sense to a little kid? Right.
[1:28:52] Well, I will say.
[1:28:54] You might as well say, well, if you disturb this Egyptian tomb, a strange curse will follow you for your life. There's nothing empirical about that for kids.
[1:29:04] Well, I will say, I think there's two different questions here. One question is, is my proof valid? The other question is, would a three-year-old be able to follow it? I think there are many proofs in philosophy which are valid. But a three-year-old would be completely wrong.
[1:29:19] Well, but my whole point is that if you want a theory of morality, it has to be something that a three-year-old can understand because that's what's not teaching children about morality. And either we just, like for Christians or for religious people, their answer is God says thou shalt not steal. And if you steal, you'll go to hell. Now, kids can understand that.
[1:29:41] Right? Sure.
[1:29:43] I'm just curious. You said earlier that you are at least somewhat objectivist, Aristotelian, right? Do you think that if you want a valid theory of, say, concept formation, does that theory of concept formation have to be able to be explained to a three-year-old?
[1:29:58] No, because it is not essential for a three-year-old to learn about concept formation, but it is essential for a three-year-old to learn about morality.
[1:30:07] But then the validity of a theory and philosophy isn't based on if a three-year-old
[1:30:11] Can understand it. Okay, we're just going round and round in circles here. Why don't you help me out by explaining to you why I think it's important you're able to explain a theory of ethics to a three-year-old? This is where you talk.
[1:30:24] Oh, sorry. I thought you were...
[1:30:25] No, you tell me.
[1:30:27] Right. I think it's important to teach three-year-olds about all sorts of things. It's important to teach them at the level at which they can understand it. It's important to teach them some very, very basic truths in epistemology and very, very basic truths in ethics as far as they're able to understand it.
[1:30:44] Why is it important to teach a three-year-old about ethics?
[1:30:50] Because you want them to make the right decisions.
[1:30:52] Because we're holding them to ethical standards. Now, if you've got a three-year-old and you can't explain your ethical theory to the three-year-old, how do you enforce it? With threats, with authority, with I'm bigger and I'm stronger and I'll punish you if you don't do what I say. It's an argument from authority that strips.
[1:31:07] Away their capacity
[1:31:08] To understand the rules that are being inflicted upon them and has them simply surrender to someone who's bigger and louder and more complicated. And I don't think that's healthy for children. I think children should not be subject to rules that.
[1:31:21] They don't understand
[1:31:22] Any more than human. Like, we've got this crazy Byzantine law system, which is like bookshelves and bookshelves of laws. There's nobody in any Western country that has any clue what all the laws are. And so, is it fair to hold people to a legal standard they cannot possibly comprehend? And the answer, of course, is, well, no. This is why common law it was so good, it was pretty easy to understand, right? So if we want children to be moral, we need to be able to explain morality to them. Otherwise, all we can do is force them to comply or punish them if they don't or bribe them if they do, which teaches them nothing other than we're bigger and stronger and can punish or reward them. It doesn't teach them anything about ethics at all. So all we can get them to do is imitate ethics based upon punishment and reward, which is not moral.
[1:32:20] Sure, and that speaks to, you know, how strongly you should hold a child to ethical standards. If there's some really, really remote area in ethics where you're not able to explain it without all the prerequisites,
[1:32:37] Then yeah, you can't exactly... Come on, I wasn't giving you a remote corner of ethics. I worked in a daycare as a teenager, right? I worked for years in a daycare. I was around tons and tons of kids. And frankly, they really liked me because I explained everything to them, right? So I was talking about a big kid grabbing a smaller kid's toy. Do you think that's a weird esoteric area of ethics when it comes to parenting and child raising?
[1:33:06] No, but if the three-year-old is able to come up with crazy philosophical objections to my theory...
[1:33:15] No, bro. Meanwhile, they're not able to understand. You're not listening. You're not listening. Okay, what was my primary objection when you said my proof of the non-aggression principle is very long and complicated? What was my objection?
[1:33:34] Your objection was that if you're going to hold children to certain ethical standards, then you have to be able to explain those standards to them, or else you're just going, I'm bigger and stronger, and I can force you or bribe you, whatnot and whatnot. Right.
[1:33:47] So if you say to the kid who's bigger than.
[1:33:49] The other kid,
[1:33:50] You shouldn't inflict your will on other people just because you're bigger and stronger, and I can't explain the theory of ethics, then I end up being a complete hypocrite. I'm not calling you a complete hypocrite. I'm just saying that if I were to do that, if I were to say to my daughter, well, just because you're bigger than the other kid doesn't mean that you can inflict your will on them and make them do what you want, but I can't explain the system of ethics to her, then I end up being a complete hypocrite because I'm telling her, don't impose your will on others just because you're bigger. And then I end up imposing my will on her, which is don't take the kid's toy just because I'm bigger. So this is the kind of stuff that turns kids' heads into soup.
[1:34:29] So to speak.
[1:34:31] Your challenge, I'm giving you an exciting challenge, which is you need to be able to explain your system of ethics to a three-year-old. So if your system of ethics is really long and complicated, then you have a problem, which is that we desperately need to teach children ethics. And if your proof of ethics is long and complicated, then you can't teach it to kids. And in philosophy, long and complicated, anything to do with ethics is bad. In the same way, I mean, I've used this example before, so I'll just touch on it briefly, and then I'll probably we have to shut things down. My stomach is grumbling.
[1:35:10] Baser desires are taking over intellectual ones. But, you know, the Ptolemaic system that they used to have circles, but they thought everything in heaven or everything in the skies had to be like a perfect circle because of the gods and geometry and mathematics and so on. And so in order to predict the location of Mars, you needed like 20 pages of calculations. Whereas once they said, okay, well, if we just move the sun to the center of the solar system, then the retrograde motion of Mars, which is where the Earth is going around faster and Mars looks like it's going backwards, is you only need two equations. Or I think they even got it down to one. If things are overcomplicated, especially if you desperately need to teach them to children, then your challenge is you have to simplify it. In the same way, you know, they used to believe in the ether and then they moved to Einsteinian physics where the speed of light is constant and everything is relative. And that just explained was way more, was way simpler, way simpler. E equals MC squared. And so it's just way simpler than what came before. So overcomplication, particularly in the realm of ethics, is a sure sign that either you're getting something wrong or you're overcomplicating things. And so you need to keep working at it until you can explain it to a three-year-old.
[1:36:22] And of course, if there are any kids around,
[1:36:24] Try sitting down with them, as I have, and explaining your system of ethics to them and make sure they understand it. Now, of course, kids have varying levels of intelligence and so on, so it's not all going to be the same age or whatever. It could be two, three, four. But whenever you start imposing moral requirements on children, you need to be able to explain to them in terms they understand what morality is. And I've got a whole podcast on this I did like 15 years ago called The ABCs of UPB, where here's how you explain things to kids. Because otherwise, you're just arguing from authority and size and imposing your will upon them because you're bigger and stronger, which is law of the jungle. And we can't teach a moral theory that opposes the law of the jungle by using our size and strength, which is the law of the jungle. Does that make sense?
[1:37:12] Yes, and I do understand the criticism, but I do want to just, a caveat, just to clarify, when I was saying that it's long and complicated, what I was getting at is that it has to be long and complicated, the full form, because there are numerous sideways objections that can come into it, obviously not from a three-year-old. For a three-year-old, If this three-year-old genuinely is saying, hey, I'm big and strong, therefore I'm allowed to do it, you could just say, well, I'm bigger and stronger than you, so would I be allowed to do it to you? Like, that would be perfectly fine to show that their principle doesn't work.
[1:37:51] Yes, but the problem is, when you're not around, they'll just go back to what they did before, or they'll hide it from you, right? So that's just consequentialism. Well, I'll do it to you. Well, I'll just wait until you go to the bathroom and do it then, right? So, again, these are complicated things. But, yeah, have a listen to the ABCs of UPB. You can get it at fdrpodcast.com. You know, maybe I'll do a little role play with a hand puppet about how I explained morality to my daughter when she was very little. But yeah, we can't just impose it through power and size. And the golden rule, this is that Kantian categorical imperative, which is that you should act as if the.
[1:38:30] Principle of your action becomes a
[1:38:32] Universal rule for everyone. So you shouldn't steal because what if everyone steals? Well, of course, the whole point is that everyone doesn't steal, so it doesn't really solve the problem. And the biggest and strongest guy in the village is very happy to have size and strength to determine who gets resources and the girls and the land or whatever it is, right? So that's your challenge. And you have to find a way, and certainly before you become a parent, right, or before you spend time around kids in sort of any moral teacher kind of role, you have to find a way to be able to explain morality to children in a way that they understand. And, you know, Christians have it way ahead of atheists, because they can explain morality in a way that children understand. It is still an argument from authority, because God, right? And it is also punishments and rewards, but they can at least explain ethics in a way that children understand. UPB also does that and is able to achieve that, which is, I think, one of the things I'm quite proud of about it. And so, listen, your proof might be beautiful and elegant, but you need to break it down to the point where kids can understand it. Otherwise, you're just going to end up violating your principles in the imposition of your virtues because you're telling them to do stuff they can't understand, which always boils down to an argument from authority, if that makes sense. All right, I'll give you a last word, though, because you've been patient as I harassed you on your viewpoint.
[1:39:53] Yeah, sure. So I would definitely agree that if you're trying to teach this to children, if you're going to hold children to certain standards, that yes, you should be able to explain those standards to them in a way that they'll understand and you shouldn't just say well i said so i completely agree with all of that and i you know i think it would be a good idea if i were at some point to be having children then i would have to work to the point of explaining this to them absolutely i wouldn't want to hold them to standards that they can't understand well
[1:40:30] Sorry just interrupt as well but there are people in the world of course who have IQs of 90 or 80 and so on. And we also need to be able to explain ethics to people who aren't particularly smart. And this is my sort of issue is that obviously you're a very intelligent and eloquent person and you spend your time around eloquent and eloquent, sorry, eloquent and intelligent people. It's great when I misspeak on the word eloquent, but we have to remember that, you know, there's significant portions of society that aren't particularly smart and they also need to be able to understand good and evil, virtue and vice. Otherwise, preaching diet books to the thin, which is, I'm sure you and your friends and the people you discuss this stuff with are all very sensitive moral people with a good conscience. But the whole point is that we need to convince people who aren't virtuous, who aren't, like children are born sort of amoral, or people who aren't particularly smart. We need a system of ethics that includes people who aren't necessarily super smart because obviously they need full moral participation in society. We want to encourage their conscience and good behavior. So virtue.
[1:41:35] In the atheist world
[1:41:36] Is crazy complicated. And it is very exclusionary to children and to the less intelligent. And I'm not sure that it even does much to help the more intelligent because the more complicated ethics is, the more you're going to be ending up advocating for dictatorship because other people won't be able to understand it. And you don't want a system of ethics so complicated that you have to wait for children to develop full brain maturity, which is like mid twenties before they can really understand it. Because by then, if they haven't learned about ethics, they're not going to start then. All right.
[1:42:07] So sorry for taking
[1:42:08] That last little bit. I appreciate everyone's time today. I'm sorry to the people that we didn't get to, but I'll be doing more of these. This is a true joy for me to have these kinds of conversations. I really, really do appreciate everyone's questions and comments today. It's been absolutely lovely. And have yourselves a glorious and wonderful evening. For those of you who don't know, Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Eastern, Friday night, 7 p.m. Eastern, Sundays, 11 a.m. Eastern, that is when we do our live streams. They'll be broadcasting to X as well. So thanks, everyone. And of course, if you found this enjoyable and interesting and engaging and helpful, please feel free to talk about it on X or other places so that we can get more people who want to get involved in these kinds of discussions because I think if there is a way to save the world, it's this and not much else. Thanks, everyone. Lots of love. FreeDomain.com slash donate if you would like to help out the show. Take care, my friends. Bye.
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