Stefan Molyneux
  • 3 months ago
In this episode, I address a listener's inquiry about universal morality and the challenges of engaging with politicians who often undermine this principle. I critique the duality of political figures masking self-interest behind a facade of moral authority, comparing them to predators in nature. The discussion explores the difficulties of managing violent or deceitful individuals within communities, suggesting strategies like ostracism and confinement while recognizing their ethical complexities. I underscore the need for clear boundaries and accountability, asserting that true engagement relies on shared values of reason and respect, prompting listeners to reflect on morality and authority in a complex world.

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Transcript
00:00All right, hey everybody, Sam Molyneux from Freedomain.
00:03A great question from Facebook, from Robert.
00:06You've talked about universal morality. Is there anything to be done, or is there any way to work with people whose morality is screwed?
00:12For example, politicians who believe might makes right, and that the state has the authority to do whatever it wants to its citizens for the greater good.
00:19That's a great question. How do you work with people who reject moral standards?
00:26Well, see, I mean, politicians, it's funny because they don't reject moral standards.
00:30What they do is they claim universal morality as a cloak for their power addiction, right?
00:39That is the really, really tragic thing, is that they mimic morality.
00:44I mean, predators mimic the opposite, right?
00:47So grass cannot hurt an antelope. In fact, grass is a source of food for an antelope.
00:54A tiger has stripes so that it looks like grass, right?
00:58So a predator will mimic that which is harmless or beneficial to you in order to get close enough to prey on you.
01:04And everyone talks about the common good, but the common good is the new superstitious god of the ancient witch doctors, right?
01:13So the ancient witch doctors would say that the tribal gods have needs and preferences and morals and goals and desires and plans,
01:25but you, as a non-witch doctor, have no access to them.
01:30So you're just going to have to trust me, who is the witch doctor, to tell you what the tribal gods want you to do.
01:35And if you don't believe that, then you're a blasphemer who must be ostracized, tortured, killed, whatever, right?
01:43You must be punished.
01:45So, of course, you invent an imaginary perfect entity that has no voice, presence, or will of its own.
01:53And then you claim to speak for that, those tribal gods or that tribal god.
01:59You claim to speak for that tribal god, and then you say, I am simply informing you what the all-perfect tribal god wants you to do.
02:06Don't shoot the messenger, and we'll shoot anyone who doubts this.
02:10And it's funny, you know, if you look back on your life, you'll think of all of these hundreds of different memories that you have for reasons that you can't explain, right?
02:22So they just stick, like little burrs in your brain, right?
02:26They just stick to your head.
02:28So I have the memory of a poem I read when I was a kid about a kid's invisible friend.
02:35And the line was something like, the invisible friend's name was Bob or something like that.
02:42And if you have candy to give me, if you have a candy bar to give me, give me two.
02:49One for me, one for my friend Bob, but I will have to eat it because his teeth are rather new, right?
02:55So I have an invisible friend named Bob.
02:58If you're going to give me a candy bar, make sure you give it to Bob as well.
03:02So you have to give me two, one for me and one for my invisible friend.
03:05So I get double the resources because I can claim to have an invisible friend.
03:08But it turns out that I will eat the candy bar because my Bob's friend's teeth are rather new.
03:14And that stuck in my head. I must have read that when I was, I don't know, five years old.
03:17I had a big Oxford book of poetry or something like that.
03:20Something about a cow's tail and the universe as a whole.
03:25And I remember I drew a little fish on the front page.
03:28Anyway, so that stuck in my head.
03:31I remember this line like more than half a century later.
03:35And because that was telling me something essential and important about the world in the same way that Pleasure Island.
03:42And, you know, there are two absolutely terrifying cartoons I saw when I was a kid.
03:46Absolutely terrifying cartoons.
03:48One was the quasi-pedophile ring in Pinocchio.
03:55And the other was the psychotic mental torture land known as Alice in Wonderland.
04:01Absolutely terrifying, terrifying stories.
04:05But I remember this one, right?
04:07So here's a kid saying, I get twice the resources for my invisible friend.
04:11But I'll have to eat the extra candy bar because my friend's teeth are rather new.
04:17So it's just making up characteristics that mean he consumes the resources, not you, right?
04:21And not his friend.
04:23So the common good, it's just a new tribal god.
04:27But the common good demands that, hey, don't shoot the messenger.
04:30I simply speak for the common good, right?
04:32And of course, even if there was such a thing as the common good, the common good is just manufactured, right?
04:38The common good is just it.
04:40Like the common, you can say the common will or whatever, right?
04:43But who knows what the common will is?
04:45When the common will is generated by propaganda, who knows what the common good is?
04:53People are just repeating back all the propaganda slogans they got in childhood, that they got in university, that they got from the media and so on, right?
05:02I mean, a lot of people were pretty keen on the Nuremberg Code, right?
05:06You know, no forced medical experiments, full consent, informed consent, full knowledge of the data, data sharing, like all of the stuff.
05:13And then it was like COVID came along and people like, nope.
05:16So you can see the same thing with Kamala Harris, right?
05:19That she was the most unpopular VP.
05:21And now after, you know, a couple of weeks of propaganda, she's the greatest human being since the guy who walked on water.
05:29And so you say, well, the consensus is, it's like, no, it's just people aren't taught how to think and they're propagandized from here to eternity.
05:35So there's no, I mean, the common good is just whatever the propagandized program people to repeat, right?
05:42So, I mean, I can't really talk that much about politicians.
05:45Politicians, the new priesthood, right?
05:47So the new witch doctor, and I'm not talking about the honorable priests of the Christian tradition or anything like that, who did huge amounts good in the world as a whole, ending slavery and so on.
05:56But I am talking about the witch doctors, right?
05:59The superstitious manipulative witch doctors, right?
06:03So politicians are just the new witch doctors.
06:05They're just liars of the invisible deity called democracy that force you to do what they want.
06:12And they say while claiming it's not self-interested.
06:15I mean, tons of studies have been done.
06:17And Brian Kaplan, who was on the show many years ago, wrote a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter.
06:23And tons of studies have been done that say that what politicians do have almost nothing to do with what the people say they want.
06:29I mean, people have wanted controls over various things or lack of control over various things.
06:33For an hour or an hour, man, it doesn't matter.
06:35It doesn't matter.
06:36It doesn't matter what you want.
06:37They'll do what they want regardless of, you know.
06:41It's the old, you know, you're quote consulted and then it turns out that, you know, people just do whatever they want to do anyway.
06:48But their consultation means that you can't object.
06:50You know, that's the sort of story like the consultation.
06:53Well, hey, man, you got to vote.
06:54It's like, well, you got to vote in general for people who are already bought and paid for.
06:58We all sort of know this kind of stuff as a whole.
07:01So to break this example out into something probably a little bit more digestible and palatable, what I would say is imagine that there is a village with a violent guy, right?
07:17A violent guy.
07:18So what do you do?
07:20Well, I don't remember the word, but the Inuit have a name for this kind of guy, the kind of guy who fakes an injury so he doesn't have to go hunting, stays home and tries to seduce all the wives of the village and they would just put him on an ice floe and push him away, right?
07:35So you got a violent guy in a small village.
07:39A guy who won't listen to reason, uses coercion to get what he wants, manipulation, lies, whatever, right?
07:43So what do you do?
07:44Well, you have a couple of options.
07:48And the first option is you reason with him and you say, this is bad, you got to change what you're doing.
07:54And I included lying under violence because maybe he defaults everyone or whatever it is, right?
08:00Takes pay for work that he never does and then pretends like he never did it.
08:03Like real pathological liars, right?
08:05I don't know if you've ever dealt with someone like that.
08:07It's wild, man.
08:08It is a wild situation.
08:10Absolute unreality, right?
08:12I was reading this thing on Twitter this morning about some guy saying, oh yeah, we had a roommate who was a pathological liar once.
08:18And he didn't make his rent, he couldn't make his rent, but he said, no, no, no, I just got a job at the cinema up the street.
08:24So I'll be able to make rent very shortly with my first paycheck.
08:27And because he'd lied a lot, this guy's roommate said, well, we don't believe you.
08:31So if we go up to the cinema and we ask them, do you work there?
08:35They're going to say yes.
08:36And it's like, absolutely.
08:37So he goes up, they find out that the guy doesn't work there.
08:39The guy just continues lying, doesn't face them, right?
08:42There's no conscience.
08:43All they can do is lie.
08:45I mean, that's a seriously broken person.
08:47And highly dangerous because you see this a little bit more on the left than on the right.
08:53The right certainly have their about caboose, but the left just lies like that.
08:57They don't care, right?
08:58Like this, this Trump taught people to drink bleach during COVID.
09:02It's like, no, he's talking about ultraviolet light therapy, which was actually invented in the 1940s.
09:08It's fairly big in Russia and other places.
09:10And it's still used in some American hospitals.
09:12It's actually seems to be part of my, I'm no doctor, but it seems to have some validity.
09:16But it wasn't like drinking bleach or, you know, hyperactin is the only horse you want.
09:19Like it's just like, just like, and the state is a great way to turn lies into gold.
09:24I've had Dire Straits album, Love of a Gold, Private Investigations.
09:27The great song.
09:28Industrial disease, great song.
09:30Anyway.
09:31So if you have, if you get a lot of resources for lying, then all you do is adapt to that.
09:37You're just a predator who lies.
09:39You get resources and there's no particular conscience.
09:41You don't care how it affects other people because you just adapted to this methodology of getting resources.
09:47So what do you do?
09:49People who are violent, pathological liars and so on, right?
09:53Well, a pathological lying also appears to be kind of a brain injury.
09:57I remember seeing a documentary once about a guy who was a pathological liar, invented all of this naval history that he was an admiral or something like that.
10:03It turns out that he dove into a pool early on in his Navy career, had a terrible brain injury, and then afterwards became a pathological liar.
10:10Yeah.
10:11Whether the damage is physical or emotional doesn't ultimately matter, but there is a brain damage.
10:17Seems a brain damage leads to this kind of lying.
10:19So what do you do with people like that?
10:22Well, I mean, you really only have three options, which is you try to reason them into behaving better, which is kind of like therapy or intervention.
10:32Somebody tried to reason them into behaving better.
10:34Well, there's four options, right?
10:36You reason them into behaving better, you ostracize them, you confine them, or you live with the behavior.
10:42Now, the problem is if you try to reason with a pathological liar or a violent guy, well, they're pretty good at pretending to do things.
10:51I mean, the pathological liar, you can reason with him, and you might even get tears of contrition, and then they'll just go back to the way they were before, right?
10:57Because how do you reason with a liar?
10:59Well, the liar will pretend to reason, and then will forget about it immediately.
11:02How do you reason with a violent person?
11:04Well, a violent person will submit to, quote, reason if you have more power.
11:10So if the whole town gets together, the whole village gets together and says, you've got to stop this, and then they'll be like, yeah, yeah, you're right, I'm so sorry, blah, blah, blah, right?
11:16But then he'll just go back to the way he was before once the pressure is removed.
11:21It's kind of like holding up a five-pound weight.
11:23The five-pound weight will stay up as long as you hold it up, and then when you don't hold it up, it'll just go back down again, right?
11:29So if you apply sufficient pressure to the liar or the violent guy, then they'll conform, and they might even burst into tears, and they might pretend massive amounts of resource or remorse, and then they'll just return back to the way they were.
11:41You know, it's the old thing that the bad guy has the gun, he's going to shoot the good guy, and then the good guy gets the gun, and the bad guy's like, hey, let's reason about this.
11:48Like, the guy hasn't discovered the sweet joys of reason, he just doesn't have the gun anymore.
11:52He lost control of the gun.
11:53So now he's all about being rational.
11:55But you know, if the bad guy gets the gun back, he can just shoot the good guy.
11:57It's simply a matter of a power transfer.
12:00The transfer of power creates both the, quote, reason and the resentment, right?
12:05So you can browbeat someone into being more rational with public humiliation or interventions or something like that, and they will surrender to that greater power of yours or the community, and then they will be, quote, rational, but you're just creating resentment, and the blowback is going to be pretty horrible.
12:22And the behavior kind of goes underground, even if you find some way to keep that person more, quote, rational for a long period of time, they'll just start spreading rumors, they'll just go into crowded places when they're ill, and they'll just find some other way to mess up the community because they're just that dysfunctional and corrupt.
12:37So ostracism is the other option, right?
12:40So ostracism is, you know, if you continue this behavior, you won't be part of the community.
12:45And that might get them to pretend to be better people and so on.
12:49Of course, if you believe that the person has a soul that can be reformed, then that's going to be pretty tempting for you, but borderline sociopathy, psychopathy, and so on.
12:58I mean, nobody knows how to fix them.
12:59I mean, nobody knows.
13:00And there's not some big healthy person in there like a soul that you can reach in contact with prayer and goodwill.
13:05You can't talk the lion into becoming the lamb.
13:08It just doesn't work that way.
13:10So ostracism is one way you do it.
13:13There's this meme on the internet where, you know, my favorite story about some boys of Idaho or something is that some guy gets kicked out of a bar and 27 years later opens the door to the bar and they say, get out of here, Gary.
13:24Nothing's changed kind of thing, right?
13:26You ostracize.
13:27Get the person out of your life or out of the community's life.
13:30And maybe that works.
13:31But the problem with ostracism is they go out into the wilderness and they plot their revenge and they might team up with some other group to plot their revenge.
13:38So it's dangerous, right?
13:39Confinement or death or whatever, right?
13:42But confinement is the other option where you simply remove them from society while keeping them under your control.
13:47The problem with banishing is that people can come back with, they can poison the water supply.
13:52They can come back and they can kill the livestock.
13:55They can do all kinds and they can ally with the brigands and horse thieves of the woods to come and cripple the community because now they have this burning rage and might not be satisfied and it'll escalate forever and ever.
14:06So confinement means that they're ostracized for the community, but they can't go and get external allies.
14:12That's another option.
14:13Death, of course, was an option in the past.
14:15There'd be a dual shootout or something like that, sort of high noon style.
14:18So with regards to that, once, I mean, this is just for me.
14:23I think there's good data to back it up, but I'm not going to say this is true in every circumstance.
14:27It's pretty hard to find things that are true in every circumstance except mortality.
14:30So for me, if somebody displays really aggressive, messed up, dysfunctional behavior, I will tell them that this is unacceptable.
14:40This is wrong.
14:41And I'll give them 24 hours.
14:43And if in 24 hours they catch themselves and apologize, then I will listen to that.
14:48If they don't, then I have nothing more to say.
14:51You can't win against people.
14:53I mean, can you win a tennis game against someone who doesn't play by the rules, who allows themselves five serves?
14:59Can you win in pickleball if someone doesn't respect the kitchen where you can't folly?
15:06You can't.
15:07You can't.
15:08You can't win in a chess game with someone who is willing to treat every pawn as a queen.
15:13You can't win.
15:15Can't possibly win.
15:17And not only can you not win, but it's not even a game anymore.
15:20There's no game.
15:21Reason is the game of life.
15:23Reason, voluntarism, negotiation is the game of life.
15:25And people aren't willing to play by those rules.
15:28There is no game.
15:29There's no winning.
15:30There's no victory.
15:31There is self-defense, ostracism, and survival.
15:35That's it.
15:36So I hope that helps.
15:37And this is as true of people's personal life as I think it is in the larger societal context.
15:42But freedomain.com.net.
15:44Really appreciate these questions.
15:45Keep them coming.
15:46Bye.