Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux
  • 9 months ago
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?"

Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!

Get my new series on the Truth About the French Revolution, access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and more!

See you soon!

https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
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