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Answers to Locals questions:

"How would you define cerebral, and how is cerebral different from intellectual?"

"How do you arbitrate? I would, for example, consider it humiliating and depressing to marry a statist. But if I take the same attitude with every relationship, I will have no relationships! How do you navigate making friends, coworkers, dates, and FOO relationships with people when the norm is irrational and immoral?"

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Transcript
00:00 Good morning everybody, hope you're doing well. It's Der Stefanovic and it's
00:06 Sunday February the 4th, just a little bit before the 11 o'clock show. I wanted
00:10 to do a little bit of voice warm-up and also answer some questions. So here
00:18 they are from freedomain.locals.com. How would you define cerebral and how is
00:22 cerebral different from intellectual? The question is how would you define
00:27 cerebral and how is cerebral different from intellectual? So this is interesting.
00:32 So when I was a younger man, a young man, I would play a game like I did a lot of
00:38 manual labor and I'd need something to intellectualize, something to occupy my
00:45 mind. So what I would do is I would say well here are two words that are that
00:49 seem like synonyms, why are there two different words? I mean it was an
00:54 interesting game for me to sort of slice and dice language and figure out why
00:58 there are two different words. So initially I was like who cares this is a
01:02 ridiculous question it's so unimportant but then I thought okay well this is
01:05 actually similar to the game I used to play when I was younger about taking two
01:10 different words and figuring out, two similar words and figuring out why we
01:17 had to have two different words. So there is cerebral and there is intellectual. So
01:21 cerebral of course refers to actions of the brain and it generally tends to be I
01:27 think refers more to platonic stuff that's within the brain, imagination and
01:33 reflections, ruminations, memories, insights and so on so it goes on within
01:37 the brain. Intellectual tends to be interacting with other people's brains
01:43 so intellectual reads books on a philosophy and psychology and history
01:48 and so on. So cerebral I think has to do with self-reflection, interacting with
01:51 your own brain and intellectual usually has to do with interacting with other
01:56 people's brains for better or for worse. So that would I think I think that's why
02:00 there are. So okay see here how do you arbitrate? asks someone. I would for
02:05 example consider it humiliating and depressing to marry a statist but if I
02:09 take the same attitude with every relationship I will have no
02:12 relationships. How do you navigate making friends, co-workers, dates and foo
02:16 relationships with people who when the norm is irrational and immoral? Well is
02:21 that the norm? Is that the norm? Irrational and immoral? I don't think so.
02:25 I don't think so. If you find everyone around you irrational and immoral well
02:29 you just might need to change your social circle up a little bit. There are
02:33 plenty of decent people out in the world. Now most people of course because
02:37 university preferable behavior, the rational proof of secular ethics, it's
02:41 kind of a new thing right because it's kind of a new thing. Most people aren't
02:44 moral because they have a sort of deep understanding of objective rational
02:49 ethics or anything like that but that doesn't mean that it's impossible for
02:53 them to be moral. So let's sort of take an example. This is a silly
02:59 example but just use it to illustrate a point. So let's say that if there is an
03:03 ancient culture that says if you don't commune with the Sun God you're likely
03:08 to be sad because you are not communing with the Sun God. And they say
03:13 go commune with the Sun God, make it a daily practice and your life will be
03:17 better and happier. Okay so communing with the Sun God I assume means
03:23 kneeling in in the sunshine or spreading your arms wide in the sunshine or
03:27 something like that. So this belief, commune with the Sun God, it will
03:32 cure your unhappiness, it'll make you happier and healthier, the Sun God
03:36 bestows his blessings when you expose yourself to the Sun. Well of
03:39 course that gives you vitamin D and all these other kinds of things and
03:43 there's lots of good. I mean I sort of read articles, I don't know whether
03:46 it's true or not of course, but I've read articles about how we've been kind of
03:50 scared away from the Sun whereas a healthy amount of Sun exposure is
03:54 actually quite good for us. And isn't there SAD, seasonal affective disorder,
03:58 when people who get sad, if they don't get any Sun exposure over the winter
04:02 months and so on. So if we were to go to this culture would we say oh this
04:09 culture is crazy, they don't have any sense of medicine or health, they don't
04:12 have any discipline. But they have evolved over time to notice that if you
04:17 spend time, I mean they call it commuting with the Sun God, whatever they call it,
04:21 if you spend time out in sunshine that's good.
04:27 Now they've noticed this, they've made it a superstition, but I mean this is the
04:32 question between progressivism and conservatism, which is the
04:38 progressives would say, the secularists would say, well there is
04:45 no such thing as a Sun God, so there's no such thing as commuting with the Sun God
04:49 and therefore to go outside to commune with the Sun God is ridiculous because
04:56 the Sun God is not conferring his infinite immortal blessing upon you
05:02 and therefore going outside to commune with the Sun God is ridiculous so don't
05:08 do it. And then they end up depressed. So that's the big challenge,
05:13 so beliefs over a long period of time tend to have evolved for some kind of
05:16 purpose. I mean there must be productivity particularly in widespread
05:20 beliefs otherwise they wouldn't be widespread, must be something, must be
05:23 something. So that's the big question with morality is that morality has
05:30 evolved over tens of thousands of years and the general don't murder, don't steal,
05:39 don't rape, you know, I mean certainly in many many cultures that has evolved
05:45 as kind of a norm and many cultures it hasn't for various reasons but
05:48 certainly in the West that's been the norm for a very long time. So is it
05:55 possible to say, let's say you're surrounded by people who believe in
05:59 communing with the Sun God, is it possible to say these are irrational
06:03 people who are very superstitious and have no idea about health?
06:06 They have no scientific backing for communing with the Sun God and
06:11 therefore I won't learn anything from them, I'll have nothing to do with them
06:15 and I won't follow their silly practices. Okay well then you stay in, you don't get
06:20 your vitamin D, you don't get your sunshine, you don't get your fresh air, at
06:24 least based upon like a daily ritual or whatever right? You know there are people
06:28 who meditate and maybe they believe some pretty mystical things like you're
06:32 communing with some larger spirit, you're you know I don't know astral travel at
06:37 the extremes and so on but those who do meditate are often happier and calmer
06:45 and so on right? So I mean this is a phrase that I learned pretty early on
06:51 and don't throw the baby out with the bathwater right? Which is well the
06:54 bathwater is used, you got a baby in the bathtub and you don't throw the baby out
06:59 with the bathwater and so you don't throw the wisdom out with the irrational
07:04 beliefs right? You don't throw the wisdom out with the irrational beliefs. You
07:10 don't get rid of something until and unless you know how it evolved, why it
07:16 evolved, why it spread, why it's prevalent right? I mentioned this before but
07:20 there's sort of two examples. One is just a general principle which says if you
07:25 find a small piece of fencing in the middle of a field and you say well this
07:30 fence doesn't connect to anything it must just be some weird leftover and you
07:34 just tear it out without trying to figure out why it was there, looking into
07:37 the history, what's the purpose of it, why you know maybe there's some crazy bull
07:40 in that field that you need a fence to hide behind and it doesn't need to be
07:45 wide because it's just to protect you from the bull's charge or you know
07:48 whatever you could maybe it's to mark up a spot of buried treasure. It could be
07:52 could be any number of things right? Maybe it's a marker for where somebody
07:57 died very sentimental and it could be it could be any number of things right?
08:01 Maybe it was the last piece of fencing that a guy's beloved grandfather was
08:06 working on and it was left up there as testament before he died he was working
08:10 on this piece of fence. So there could be until you know why the little piece of
08:14 fencing is out there in the field you don't just rip it up you gotta know
08:18 what it meant. Whereas the progressive thing is well this this fence makes no
08:22 sense and right now of course if you don't care about this guy's grandfather
08:26 or you bought the land or something it may be it makes sense to you know it
08:29 might say you're not gonna have a bull in that field yeah but you need to know
08:32 what it was there for and the other I remember sort of very vividly was it was
08:36 some Microsoft manager at Microsoft talking about managing the code in Word
08:42 this is sort of I don't know 30 years ago whatever right and he said you know
08:47 there's some scrap of code you can't figure out what it's for it doesn't
08:49 really seem to make any sense and you're like well we gotta you gotta clean up
08:53 the code we're gonna pull the code and then you find out that the code is to
08:59 store the file in memory if it's being written to a floppy disk and someone
09:04 pulls out the floppy disk halfway through right and so until you know what
09:10 the purpose of the code is right now now you would repurpose it for a USB drive I
09:15 see you might mean there still are floppy disks you can actually get floppy
09:18 disks that go in through the USB port or whatever right I guess to access your
09:22 old floppy disks but the question is you don't toast it until you know what it's
09:28 for and you don't assume irrationality of effect just because there's
09:38 irrationality of explanation right hear me out on this really really important
09:42 you don't assume irrationality of effect if there is irrationality in
09:50 explanation so if you have some healers who are trained to I don't know pull
09:57 bits of whatever bad stuff got into someone's skin or it's a wound or
10:02 something and pull out an arrowhead you've got healers and the healers say
10:05 that I must purify my hands with soap in homage to the God that we worship right
10:14 I must I must I must purify my hands with soap so that I don't don't transfer
10:18 my sins to the other person right and why would something evolve in that kind
10:25 of way well because throughout most of our history our intellect would be
10:29 considered akin to a child's now when I was a kid I was told to brush my teeth
10:33 because if I didn't dancing sugar fairies would roam around my tooth
10:37 cracking my enamel away whatever stuff I was I was told about because children
10:43 remember things in sort of storyish format and they can't and so what
10:48 happened was some guy just happened to wash his hands and everyone noticed that
10:51 the infections went down if he washed his hands before dealing with somebody's
10:56 wound and people notice the infection in infections went down now they couldn't
11:00 explain this even though germ theory until the 19th century so you can
11:02 explain this but they knew that the practice had to continue even though
11:06 they couldn't understand the practice right you follow they knew that the
11:10 practice that hand-washing had to continue even though they had no way of
11:13 understanding the biological mechanics of the hand-washing and so they had to
11:20 translate it into something that could be explained and enforced and so they
11:26 would say well clearly the God we worship values washing your hands and
11:33 confers the blessing of non-infection on the wounded if you wash your hands so
11:39 it's a blessing it's a sequence to the God it is my all this kind of stuff
11:43 right and this way the practice while not understood in obviously reason the
11:50 practice and impossible to understand a reason you can't see germs right need
11:53 the microscope and all so the practice which is beneficial continues because it
11:59 has pragmatic positive outcomes even though the explanation is not rational
12:06 right there is no local tribal God who confers the blessings of non-infection
12:12 on the bodies of those who wash their hands right you just wash your hands you
12:17 get rid of your own germs and then especially if you wash your hands
12:20 afterwards right it's just obviously you know it's better right so what you're
12:24 doing if you feel that you're surrounded by people who don't have a rational
12:28 beliefs what you're doing is you are mistaking the explanation for the
12:35 wisdom you're mistaking the explanation for the wisdom so of course again the
12:41 sort of modern secularists a lot of atheists and so on they they come
12:44 forward and they say well you know there's no such thing as a God that
12:48 confers the blessing of non-infection because of the silly ritual so we don't
12:51 need to do this ritual anymore right rather than say well why is there this
12:56 ritual or you know if they really are I guess secular rational scientific
13:01 atheists or whatever they would say well okay this practice has been around for a
13:06 long time and we really should try and figure this out let's try not washing
13:11 like we can try an experiment let's try not washing our hands and then washing
13:15 our hands and then they would very quickly see that the people who didn't
13:18 wash their hands infected their patients much more or the patients and we've said
13:23 that the patients of those who didn't wash their hands got far greater
13:28 infection now then they would be resentful because they can't explain it
13:32 I mean let's say this is sort of pre germ theory they can't explain it but it
13:36 seems to work so then they get into a battle with the religious people right
13:39 the superstitious people who believe in the local God and the superstitious
13:44 people would see aha you see this is proof that our God conferred a blessing
13:47 on the ritual of hand purification and the atheists would say well that's crazy
13:52 then it's not but so but they can't explain it and it challenges their
13:57 worldview people get into all these kinds of battles all the time now of
14:01 course let's say that you prefer quote reasonable person to an unreasonable
14:07 person you prefer a materialist to somebody who's superstitious right and
14:13 let's say that you are in this tribe and you get accidentally shot with an arrow
14:18 and you have a pretty bad wound and do you want to be treated by the healer who
14:24 has the irrational belief in hand purification at least in the reason for
14:30 the hand purification right do you want to be treated by the healer who washes
14:35 his hands because he believes in the superstitious purification ritual or do
14:41 you want to be treated by the healer who doesn't wash his hands because he scorns
14:46 all manner of superstition haha you see what I'm saying do you want people who've
14:52 abandoned positive outcomes based on irrational thinking or do you want
14:58 people who abandon those positive outcomes because those positive outcomes
15:02 are based on irrational thinking right if you go to say a religious therapist
15:09 and the religious therapist says that what you need to do is to pray for
15:13 guidance and surrender yourself to a higher power now of course I made this
15:20 whole argument in against the gods that to to pray let's say just from the
15:28 secular standpoint right to pray to a God is to commune with your unconscious
15:34 you're sort of perceived and received instincts and wisdom from four billion
15:38 years of evolution to surrender yourself to a higher power to surrender yourself
15:41 to your instincts to you know all of the challenging dreams where our
15:45 unconscious is trying to warn us and protect us and help us and guide us and
15:48 so on right and let's say that when you commune with your unconscious or you
15:52 commune with the higher power that you get good advice and good results and
15:56 good instincts and you make better decisions and so on right or you have an
16:01 atheist a therapist who doesn't tell you to do that and says that you you you
16:06 need to overcome your own internal bigotries and right whatever like they
16:11 just basically puts you through a struggle session or something like that
16:15 right okay so who's who's better for you the right action for the wrong reason or
16:21 the wrong action through rejection of the wrong reason right so this is I
16:26 think pretty pretty foundational to your life so in general and then of course if
16:31 you're looking for people who are purely rational from the ground up and and
16:34 perfectly understand UPB and enact it in all circumstances well I mean that ain't
16:39 even me if that's any consolation I came up with the theory right that ain't even
16:43 me so or if you do if you say okay well I want people who are good and
16:50 given that UPB is still in its infancy I mean in some of the history of
16:54 philosophy terms you want people who are good and committed to virtue and
17:00 committed to universalism and are willing to make sacrifices for their
17:06 virtues and values well that in general is as Christians right I mean that
17:13 certainly shouldn't say right like that's some sort of proof but that's
17:15 certainly been my experience right so I mean this is the whole question of the
17:20 vaccine and the question of a sort of wide variety of other things in modern
17:24 culture where the Christians we can say made the right decisions for reasons
17:35 that you know wouldn't pass a hundred percent rational and empirical
17:38 philosophical muster whereas all of the people who were devoted to quote reason
17:42 and evidence and science and so on made the wrong decisions in many ways right
17:46 or certainly didn't have good foundations for making the decisions
17:49 that they made if you have the purity test you will be isolated whereas if you
17:55 have the good people for whatever reason right there are no the other I think
18:04 looking for people who are good for all the right reasons is like needle needle
18:11 in a haystack it's also a mirror in the bathroom please talk free needle in a
18:18 haystack right so you want to look for good people and accept the wisdom that
18:23 they have but if you're gonna throw everyone out because they don't have
18:27 fully fleshed rational and empirical reasons for their beliefs you're gonna
18:32 be isolated and it's also vain right in my view it's vain because everyone who
18:40 has high standards automatically I mean axiomatically assumes that they pass
18:44 those standards right everybody who has high standards like having high
18:49 standards is a form of vanity display right so having high stand and at least
18:53 I'm not saying don't have high standards I'm just saying that some high standards
18:56 can be a form of vanity display right I mean everybody's seen these sort of memes
19:01 of you know the woman he's like I got two kids by two different dads but I
19:05 need a guy who's you know six six six six at all six-pack six-figure income
19:09 you've got to take care of my kids got up 200 grand in the bank gotta have a
19:12 house with four to five bedrooms go all this right so having those kinds of
19:17 hand high standards is a vanity display so having these super high standards is
19:22 a form of feeling superior I'm not perfectly rational my gosh I wouldn't
19:30 even know what that would mean I mean I certainly you know I strive towards
19:33 reason I used to I strive towards empiricism I strive towards self
19:38 knowledge but you know I mean people are very complex I'm very complex you're
19:42 very complex life is changing circumstances are altering and and
19:46 society is doing its various upgrades and downgrades and the economy is this
19:52 and Cove it was that and what we learned about people through that process was
19:56 there right so I mean this thing's constantly changing it's like like
20:00 parenting right I mean parenting someone who's in their mid-teens is very
20:04 different from parenting someone who's 10 or 5 so and you know you age and
20:09 parents get sick and there's lots of things that that happen that are a real
20:13 challenge and life is a constant kaleidoscope of new information and new
20:19 circumstances and and accumulated wisdom and both the gathering of new wisdom and
20:25 the casting off of wisdom that's no longer relevant due to aging and also
20:31 the casting off of wisdom that you thought was wisdom that turns out to be
20:33 unwise I mean we're kind of in a constant flux so I don't even know what
20:37 perfectly rational would even mean but certainly I strive for it and aim for it
20:41 and and all of that and I've certainly aged out and I think reasoned out of
20:46 some of the punchiness that I had when I was younger which I don't regret or
20:49 anything but for me the acceptance and I was I was more punchy when I was younger
20:56 because I thought people would just listen to reason and if they didn't it
21:00 would be annoying but now I sort of accept that people don't listen so much
21:05 to reason and I have to be an empiricist right so there's no point getting mad at
21:10 people for things that they don't do as a whole I mean you can but it's
21:15 empirical empirical information very interesting so it's sort of I adjust as
21:18 I as I go forward so if you're saying well everyone around me has to be
21:24 perfectly rational I'm not saying that's what you're saying but you're saying
21:26 well there are all these people who don't believe all these don't believe
21:29 these super rational things and so on and yeah I accept that and again I would
21:33 be one of them from time to time and maybe even more from time to time but if
21:37 you're saying no one's up to scratch you're saying that you are superior
21:44 nobody meets my lofty standards nobody passes the high bar of my faction and so
21:50 you can have that splendid isolation of being the only perfect person in the
21:56 known universe but I wouldn't take that approach myself because we are social
22:02 beings right we're social beings we need a community in general tends to be
22:06 healthy you need people to watch our backs and help keep us rational because
22:09 in isolation we generally go crazy like in isolation we generally go crazy
22:13 because we we have offloaded our reality processing I mean it's why we have such
22:18 a vivid inner life as we've offloaded some portion of our reality processing
22:23 to those around us and in the same way we have eyes in the front of our head
22:28 because we don't generally hunt solo right I mean if you're hunting and any
22:34 kind of pack animal the fear is that as you focus on the guy ahead of you
22:38 they're gonna gang up behind you right and I maybe there are people who there
22:44 of course there are tribes I'm sure that hunt solo but I think a lot of it is is
22:47 a group hunter-gatherers hunters gatherers anyway and so we've been able
22:53 to focus so much and this is generally true of predator species right we've
22:57 been able to focus so much on what's ahead of us because we've had people
23:01 watching what's behind us right back to back back to back they faced each other
23:05 drew their swords and shot each other there was some nonsense poem when I was
23:09 a kid sorry total tangent but and and we've been able to be so introspective
23:13 which has been great for our creativity imagination because we've offloaded some
23:19 of our reality processing to other people and so alone we tend to fall into
23:23 ourselves and and become solipsistic and self-referential and we lose our
23:28 capacity to relate to others and we to some degree lose our capacity to process
23:32 reality we are not isolated reality processes processors we are social
23:37 reality processors and certainly when it comes to reading I mean even reading
23:42 books is a form of that though it's not quite as good as conversation so if you
23:47 say well I'm the most rational and I'm super great that way then you will have
23:54 a lofty standard which will exclude others but excluding others will harm
23:58 your capacity to be rational because they can't I mean people who care about
24:02 you who think deeply who will give you feedback and so on so they tend to not
24:06 work at all I'm a rock I'm an island no man is an island I am involved in all
24:12 mankind I mean there's some real truth in there but we are social animals that
24:16 we know right so the life of splendid isolation tends to be a form of reality
24:21 decay because you don't have other people like I mean you can go hunting on
24:24 your own and then eventually some wolf is gonna take you down from behind
24:28 because you can't see that way so I hope that helps and I really really
24:32 appreciate these great great questions it's a wonderful way for me to start my
24:35 day and I guess I'll see you soon when it comes to the 11 o'clock show all
24:41 right lots of love from up here freedom and comm slash donate to help out the
24:44 show I'd really appreciate that and I'll talk to you soon bye