0:03 - Introduction to Proverbs 27:17
1:47 - The Collective Mind
6:02 - The Role of Debate
7:05 - The Origins of Violence
12:20 - Belief and Survival
16:00 - The Nature of Truth
19:37 - The Philosophy of Reason
22:47 - The Cost of Rationality
29:26 - Conclusion: Iron Sharpens Iron
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain discusses the profound implications of the Bible verse Proverbs 27:17, which states, "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." This exploration delves into the idea that individual thought does not exist in a vacuum; rather, we are all products of a collective hive mind that influences our beliefs, language, and creativity. Molyneux emphasizes the futility of attempting to invent language or concepts in isolation, illustrating this point with personal anecdotes and reflections on the complexity of language acquisition. He asserts that our thoughts and communications are deeply rooted in the contributions of others, which underscores the importance of discourse and collaboration in achieving true understanding.
Molyneux critiques the notion of extreme individualism often found in works by figures like Ayn Rand, arguing that such perspectives can lead to an echo chamber where ideas appear flawless until they are subjected to external scrutiny. He encourages engaging with differing viewpoints to refine one's understanding and enhance intellectual growth. The dialogue promotes the essentiality of debate and communal discussion as a means to challenge our concepts and beliefs, ultimately paving the way toward discovering deeper truths.
As the lecture progresses, Molyneux draws parallels between intellectual engagement and martial training, illustrating how skills are honed through interaction. He reflects on experiences from his writing journey, highlighting the value of feedback and collaboration with editors, which dramatically improved his work. He also contrasts the immersive nature of reading fiction with that of consuming film, arguing that novels allow readers to engage individually with their imagination, while films impose a singular vision, limiting individual interpretation.
A significant portion of the discussion centers around the sociocultural dimensions of belief and skepticism. Molyneux explores how false beliefs can sustain tribal cohesion and survival, even as they may not align with objective truths. He illustrates this dynamic through hypothetical scenarios involving tribes that adhere to distinct mythologies, such as the belief in a volcano god. The conflict between 'Team Reason'—a group dedicated to empirical understanding—and 'Team Volcano'—a group united by shared myths—serves as a metaphor for real-world tensions between rationality and belief.
The conversation navigates through historical instances where collective beliefs have driven societies into conflict, emphasizing the dangers posed by blind adherence to unfounded mythologies, and how such beliefs can shape warfare and social structures. Molyneux warns that the biases and social narratives we embrace can often lead to collective violence and tragedy, drawing on vivid historical examples such as World War I and II, where belief in noble causes often resulted in catastrophic loss.
Ultimately, Molyneux presents the paradox of needing both rational discourse to uncover truth and societal myths to promote cohesion and survival. He poses critical questions about how belief systems can serve or hinder the collective, suggesting that while reason is essential, it may also inadvertently dismantle the very narratives that protect tribal identity in a dangerous world. The conclusion reinforces the duality of human existence—our quest for truth and understanding is at odds with the collective constructs that have historically provided us with identity and purpose.
Through this intricate examination of human thought, language, and social constructs, Molyneux highlights the nuanced relationship between individual growth and communal interaction, advocating for a balanced approach to truth-seeking that respects the complexities of human nature and culture.
[0:00] Well, good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:03] And we are talking about Bible verses this morning, Proverbs 27, 17. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. So we cannot think in isolation. isolation, we do not have thoughts in isolation. There's a hive mind, there's a Borg mind, there's a collective mind, and if you doubt this, of course, you simply have to look at the number of words that you yourself have invented, or the number of concepts that you yourself have invented, and most of us will come up with a few over the course of our lives, but for the most part, we inherit everything from everyone else.
[0:52] So we cannot think on our own. We cannot communicate on our own. Imagine if you, as most people do, I know my daughter did, try and come up with your own language, you realize sort of this Esperanto thing, right? If you try to come up with your own language, you'll quickly realize that nobody's particularly interested, and it's kind of a futile project, and you're not going to get anybody else to learn your language, and it's a ridiculously complicated thing to do. One of the reasons that I have studiously avoided becoming an expert in a language other than my own is I have a deep appreciation for the complexity and nuance of English, and I think I'm fairly good at wielding it, and then realizing how long it's going to take to be able to think in another language and get all of the complexity and nuance in that other language. It's just a, it's like trying to consider climbing Mount Everest using only your teeth and neck to climb.
[1:48] So they say as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. There is a kind of half autistic individualism in a lot of Ayn Rand's novels or in Ayn Rand's novels as a whole, where somebody has a fairly effortless capacity to think that is independent of language and others. And that's admirable, and it is a kind of isolated...
[2:17] Purification based upon a bit of an echo chamber. So all thoughts seem pure and perfect until exposed to the skepticism and criticism of others. And that is a big challenge. And it's easy to feel right if you are only thinking for yourself. But when you take your ideas out into the marketplace of the world, and other people's corrosive, and by corrosive I don't mean necessarily bad, I mean they use acid to clean as well, right? And you need some pretty strong stuff to get barnacles off a boat. But when you take your ideas out into the marketplace of the world.
[3:00] Well, then you find out what they're made of, right? Are they able to be pared down to their sinews? So my novel Just Poor had an original ending, which I actually published at freedomain.locals.com. But my original, my novel had an original ending that blew into galactic chunks. And then upon meeting and working with an editor, it improved. I rewrote, I rewrote the whole second half and it got much better. Same thing happened when I was working with a professional writer in a writing class I took many years ago, which was focused on the God of Atheists, things improved, right? It got better. I was very much into abstracts, and she said, you know, grounded in the senses, you know, a woman with a red backpack walking across the university quad can help center things in the reader's more sensual imagination, and, you know, really, really good advice with regards to that. I've always remembered, how powerful it seems when a writer, and Shakespeare does this, you know, list off the wildflowers, you know, there was time, there was rosemary, you know, and you get wildflowers have both a visual and.
[4:13] Auditory sense memory to them for people. So, it's a great way to bring people's senses alive. And bringing people's senses alive in fiction, in written fiction, is even more powerful in many ways than in film, because in film you dictate the contents of the imagination. So, in a novel, if you say she was beautiful, then you can evoke the concept of beauty that is individual to each person's mind. But if in a movie you cast a beautiful woman, then you are dictating to the mind what form that beauty takes.
[4:54] So it is much more individualistic to consume fiction that's written than it is to follow someone's movie making. You are a participant in the imagination in a work of written fiction. You are a passive consumer of the visuals in a movie or a television show. So, for instance, in my novel The Present, there's a character named Arlo who's quite good looking. I don't give a few hints of how he looks, but everyone would have their own perception of how he looks based upon their own preferences and histories. And of course, since I describe Arlo's character in quite a bit of detail, it will also evoke someone who reminds you of Arlo, and it will infuse those looks. So everyone who's read my book has their own vision of Arlo, but if I made the movie, I would be imposing my vision of Arlo on everyone, and they would not be able to escape it.
[5:51] So, I mean, if you pictured Arlo because he reminded did you have a guy with a mole on his chin? And you pictured him with a mole on his chin, and I cast a guy with no mole on his chin, I would be dictating, right?
[6:03] So we cannot think on our own. We cannot get to the truth on our own. We need to debate. We need to participate. Or to put it another way.
[6:17] Self-reflection is masturbation, which produces no children. But if you engage in intellectual discourse, social intercourse, then you can produce the baby called the truth. So then the question arises, why? Why? Why are we like this? Why are we like this? And it's a big old question, right? It's a big old question. Why are we like this? So, the answer, I think, is tied into the violent nature of our origin story. Why do we need others to get to the truth? Why haven't we evolved a mechanism to get to the truth on our own?
[7:06] It's because there's a battle, and of course we all know this battle, that you have social mythologies, social falsehoods. Now, we can say that they're necessary and essential, social falsehoods. We can sort of get into that in a second, but we do have social falsehoods that you and I have a certain amount of skepticism about, and having skepticism about.
[7:27] Those social falsehoods can be very, very dangerous, right? If you are part of a tribe that believes in a volcano god, and then as a budding geologist, you no longer believe in the Volcano God, expressing skepticism about the Volcano God is very dangerous. You will be set upon by the priests and the warlords who profit from the Volcano God, or the belief in the Volcano God, they will set upon you and destroy you.
[8:00] We can look at this as a singular act of injustice, of course, and say, well, these terrible, warriors and witch doctors and warlocks, they are just mean, terrible authoritarians who just want to kill anyone who interferes with their free money or free resources. And I get that. And, you know, there certainly is some truth to that. But if we look at the problem of endless war, we have a real challenge. And the challenge is, of course, if people are willing to die and kill for an illusion, right, if people are willing to kill and die for an illusion, the illusion of the volcano god, if people are willing to kill and die for an illusion, then the illusion becomes an absolutely essential component of tribal survival. And of course, we can see this happening all over the world, this is a very contemporaneous thing, sadly. But let's say there's tribe reason and tribe volcano, right? They live in the same geographical area. There's tribe reason and tribe volcano. Tribe reason has rejected the volcano god, and tribe reason is in hot pursuit of science and truth.
[9:20] Now, in Tribe Volcano God, Tribe Volcano, they believe that if you die in battle in the service of the Volcano God, you get to live in paradise after death. Valhalla, heaven, whatever, right? You get to live in paradise after death.
[9:39] But you have to die in the service of the Volcano God in battle or something like that. So then you have a cohesiveness and a willingness to fight to the death that's on team volcano right tribe volcano now in tribe reason they don't believe any of that stuff they believe rationally that there is no volcano god and that there is no valhalla glorious afterlife which you inhabit for eternity if you die in the service of the volcano god they are mortal and they do not have a way to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a collective. Now, let's say that Team Reason builds all of these wonderful farms and irrigation systems and so on, and they have a lot of value because they're following Reason. Well, then what happens is Team Volcano God, well, the witch doctors of the volcano god cult say to their warriors or to their males, they say the volcano god.
[10:53] Has informed us that there are heretics and unbelievers one valley over, and those heretics and unbelievers are blaspheming the wonderful name of the volcano god, and we need to stop them from doing that. And, you know, by the by, we'll end up taking their stuff. Maybe the women of the reason tribe, the women of tribe reason, maybe they've discovered things like soap. So maybe they're slightly more attractive than the hags in team volcano god, right? So, I mean, there's a lot of different motives going on. Now, what happens is, if the priests or the high priests or the witch doctors or whoever of the volcano gods say to the males, the volcano God has instructed you to pursue a righteous battle against the unbelievers in the next valley, and by the way, we'll get to take their stuff, well, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to say, in general, yes, we will go and do this, and it is going to be a glorious battle for the righteous sake of the volcano God. And then, what happens over on Team Reason? Well, in team reason, they will not have the same cohesiveness. Now, they will have better technology and all of that, but they will not have the same cohesiveness or desire for self-sacrifice.
[12:21] So, that's a challenge. In other words, how necessary for tribal survival are belief in things that are not true? How necessary for tribal survival are the belief in things that are not true? Well, it seems quite necessary, if not downright essential. Can, in a time, as was pretty much all of human evolution, in a time of mass tribal conflict, who will tend to win, those who believe in collective ideas that are false but provide infinite reward, or those who are skeptical or don't believe in collective ideals that provide infinite reward and are rational in the empirical and material sense.
[13:15] I mean, I think it's fairly clear to understand that, especially for the women, right, women tend to be a little bit more susceptible to some of these mystical or superstitious ideas. Think of, you know, psychic powers and intuition and astrology and things like that. And I think, I think that's because, in general, the more rational tend to be taken over by the more irrational. And women need to survive in that environment and therefore they would adopt the more irrational beliefs in order to survive, right? If they were taken as prizes of war, as was grimly the case in most of our corrupt history.
[13:57] Now, there is an Aristotelian meaning in these things in that if you end up going the highly bop comet thing where the cult members cut off their own balls to join a comet that was floating overhead, you can go too far. You can go too far. So, and then you end up sort of self-destructive, right? Or, you know, one of the reasons that the Aztecs were, conquered by a relatively small number of Spanish conquistadors is because the neighboring tribes were preyed upon by these dictatorial Aztecs to the degree that they wanted to aid and help the conquerors overthrow the Aztecs. So you can create too much resentment among the conquered peoples to the point where they'll collaborate with outsiders to overthrow the local regime.
[14:47] So this is a great tension because violence has been the greatest single force in shaping human evolution, as it is in all creatures, you know, prior to us really having the capacity to manifest reason in social life in any consistent way, which is still kind of hanging by a thread, but there's more now than there was before. Certainly, this is the greatest time for the spread of reason in human history. Because of this amazing technology, we have to have these conversations. So, does reason win over violence?
[15:26] No, of course, right, this is the old statement from a general in the ancient world who said, why are you quoting laws to men with swords?
[15:38] And of course, violence works in terms of obedience, because our primary goal is not reason, but survival. And if reasoning ends our survival and the reproduction of our genes, you know, almost everyone, with very few exceptions, right, sorry, that's a bit redundant, will submit to violence in order to survive and to reproduce.
[16:01] Or to put it another way, of course, as usual, those who refused to submit to violence and were killed did not get to reproduce, or their heirs were also killed, or their heirs were socially disgraced to the point where the bloodline did not exactly flourish. So it's interesting to me that the comment is iron sharpens iron. Iron, of course, being a sort of foundational mechanism of the weapons of war, right?
[16:30] Steel and iron and so on, right? Iron age and so on. So, as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. Now, this, of course, is not just verbal or rational, but is also martial. In order to become a good sword fighter, you need to practice sword fighting. You need to practice any martial skill that involves another person, which generally most skills do, you know, punching yourself, you need to, if you want to be a good boxer, you've got to spar, right? You've got to train to become a better. And of course, even if you want to become a good violinist, which is neither martial nor necessarily collectivist, you may not be in an orchestra, you need a good teacher to teach you violin.
[17:12] We improve relative to each other. We cannot get to the truth individually, that we need to be questioned and cross-examined. And this, of course, was the great quest of Socrates, which was to say to everyone who said, oh, I know what justice and truth and reason and virtue is, I know what all these things are. And he's like, oh, okay, let me ask you some questions, right? And he'd ask questions and quickly unravel their pretensions of knowledge and expose them as people who did not, they fundamentally lied, right? Because they claimed to be in possession of a knowledge that they did not possess. But the question, and this is, I think, why people reacted so strongly, to Socrates, and we can sort of see this happening in the West, is that, okay, if we don't believe in things that are false, and we only believe in things that are true, then we don't have a culture. I guess culture is generally belief in things that are not true you know we ex-tribe are the best or whatever right well it's not necessarily objectively true but it is you know that there is a volcano god that gives you paradise if you die in his service these things are not true, but they work right things that are not true but work.
[18:27] Is the great paradox, which is evolution and violence versus facts, reason, and evidence. In tribe reason, do they have a culture of rationality, or does anyone who claims to be rational, is anyone who claims to be rational part of their tribe? If the truth can be transferred from the mind of one to the mind of another, then all who claim to be in the tribe of truth are interchangeable, in a sense, with anyone else who accepts the tenets of reason and evidence. I mean, obviously, there's no gender or ethnic discouragements to anyone in this conversation. I'll talk with anyone, and I've talked with just about every race and ethnicity, and of course, I've talked to men and women and so on. There's no barrier to that. If you're willing to speak rationally and be curious, you are absolutely welcome. Because reason is an objective conversation. Philosophy is an objective conversation or a goal. A conversation with a goal of objectivity. It is not a tribe.
[19:37] And therefore, all who accept reason can join tribe philosophy.
[19:44] So, we do want to sharpen each other's wits, but we also have to recognize that, certainly while there remains sort of central oligarchies, political oligarchies, that an emphasis on reason can weaken the tribe relative to those who are passionately and devotedly deranged or they believe false things.
[20:16] Give them unity, purpose, and a kind of ferocious will. So, let me give you a more sort of vivid example that's a bit more personal to us, it's all very abstract, right? So, you've got Bob and Doug, and you're the boss, right? And what you do is you say to Bob and Doug, if you do a great job this month, if you work 16 hours a day this month, I will give you $10,000. I will give you a bonus of $10,000.
[20:51] Now, Bob knows that the boss doesn't have $10,000, that he's actually in debt, that he's broke. This is sort of a desperate ploy to get extra work out of people, maybe with the hope or goal of saving the company or whatever, right? But Bob knows that the $10,000 is not going to materialize. But Doug believes that the $10,000 will materialize, and therefore he's willing to work super hard for that money. He'll put in his 16 hours, he'll nights, weekends, whatever, right? So who is more productive? The man who accepts the truth, or the man who believes in the falsehood? Hmm, challenge, right? Now, you could, of course, say that, well, in the long term, though, So Doug is going to realize that the boss is as light to him. He's going to be mad. He's going to quit. I get all of that. But let me just talk in the short run. You are going to see that Doug, who believes in the 10K, is going to be much harder working than Bob, who does not.
[21:55] That's life in the world of war and tribalism that characterize our origins. When reason examines culture, culture falls apart. The gods of the tribe disappear, and people are viewed as interchangeable. Everyone who shows competence in mathematics is a, quote, mathematician. Everyone who shows competence in reasoning and debate is a philosopher. It is not a lineage, it is not an aristocracy, it is not a mystery religion, it is not a PhD. It is based upon competence and execution. Or as Aristotle says, we are what we repeatedly do. So we certainly do want to sharpen each other's thoughts.
[22:48] But sharpening each other's thoughts has the great danger of removing a lot of the myths necessary for the survival of our culture. And of course, in the West, the two massive shocks of the First and Second World War were so catastrophic to society.
[23:13] It's staggering. I mean, the rough estimates, you know, 10 million dead in the First World War, 50 million dead in the Second World War, was so shockingly catastrophic that believing in the mythos of, you know, the noble military and the good war and so on, it was so destructive to that mythos. And of course, the men who most believed in those myths were generally the first to die, right? You can see, of course, I mean, all of the young men in the fall of 1914 who were, you know, desperate to go to war and terrified that the war might end before Christmas because, they thought that war involved skill and a small number of people, since wars throughout most of human history involved skill and a small number of people. I mean relative to the general population or at least relative to the young men's proportion of the general population.
[24:17] Was essential. I mean, Napoleon was the best general throughout history by almost any metric. He had superb skill as a tactician, as a war leader. So those who believed in the myth of the noble war, of the skill-based war, of all of that, and of course the First World War turned into, you know, sitting in a bunker waiting for somebody 20 miles away to push a button and blow you up or running into machine gun fire or mustard gas or other forms of chemical warfare and lice and illnesses raging through the trenches that you couldn't really do much about. So it was not a skills-based war.
[25:02] And so those who most believed in what could be called the necessary myths of collectivist survival in a world of conflict were the first to go. And those who are skeptical of those myths survived in, maybe we can even say, a slightly higher degree. And this is back to an old George Bernard Shaw play called Arms and the Man, where there's a mercenary who is very sensible about war and doesn't believe in any of the collectivist myths about the noblism, the noblesse oblige, or the virtues of war. He's just like well you know it's a dirty business I get paid and I try to do a good job and stay alive and you know he has no no illusions and of course you can also see this in in just about every particularly first world war movies in just about every first world war movie there is a sort of apple-cheeked fresh-faced peach fuzzed enthusiastic young man who believes in the cause and is just absolutely destroyed as a result, right? Rushes into machine gun fire where his more skeptical and cynical colleagues hold back. So it's also Gallipoli, I think, if I remember rightly.
[26:16] Just try to stay alive and don't, to buy into the mythos of the noble heroic war is to die in the most gruesome ways, right? But then, of course, when you, as a society, lose the young men who absorb and accept the mythos of the war, you also lose your warrior class and your protectors. And then your society is fairly ripe for the pickings for those, right? Team Reason versus Team Volcano. Your society is fairly open to the pickings of those who do believe in necessary mythos for aggression, survival, and so on. And there was a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, and this is used sometimes in memes. The young German men in World War I, who were so excited and enthusiastic.
[27:16] War, they're jumping up and down and cheering and hugging each other and, you know, spilling virtual tears of joy at being able to go to war. And then it cuts to, you know, a guy, hollow-faced guy. You know, he's alone, his friends are all dead, and he's in the back of a army vehicle moving through a moonscape of destroyed Europe. And that's the difference. You've also, I'm sure, seen the pictures of, I think it's an Italian fellow, you know, his face at the beginning of the war and his face after four years of war. And he's turned from, again, a fresh-faced young man into a thousand-yard stare.
[27:54] Vacant face of existential horror. And this, of course, was the big issue with shell shock, right? Shell shock, which is that human beings are really designed for the fight-or-flight mechanism to last really only minutes, maybe an hour or two, but not years and years and years. And it really wrecks the brain or the personality.
[28:15] So yeah iron sharpens iron and what's powerful about this is that it refers both in my view to the intellectual or you could say spiritual pursuit of truth and virtue but truth is objective but the survival of warring tribes that's the survival of each individual warring tribe relies upon collectivist falsehoods that motivate people in the same way that the worker who expects the $10,000 that will never in fact come works far harder, and is willing to sacrifice far more than the person who says, the boss doesn't have 10 grand, we're never getting it. Or he certainly doesn't have the 20 grand, right? Which would be required for both people, both workers. So iron sharpens iron. Well, intellectually, this means that being in pursuit of truth is a good thing, but it comes with a danger. Iron sharpens iron refers to the intellectual pursuit of truth, and it also refers to the warriors learning their martial arts in service of a collective belief, which, though false, through force of arms, wins.
[29:27] This is all solved by peaceful parenting, freedomain.com slash donate. To help out the show, I really would appreciate it. Thank you so much for your support and continued attention, freedomain.com slash Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful day. It's a Friday. It's a Friday. I will talk to you tonight. Bye.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
