• 2 days ago
Proverbs 27:17

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another."

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Transcript
00:00Well, good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. This is Dan Mullany from Free
00:03Domain, and we are talking about Bible verses this morning, Proverbs 27, 17.
00:10As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. As iron sharpens iron, so one person
00:19sharpens another. So, we cannot think in isolation. We do not have thoughts in
00:29isolation. There's a hive mind, there's a borg mind, there's a collective mind,
00:34and if you doubt this, of course, you simply have to look at the number of words that you
00:40yourself have invented, or the number of concepts that you yourself have invented,
00:44and most of us will come up with a few over the course of our lives, but for the most part,
00:48we inherit everything from everyone else. So, we cannot think on our own. We cannot communicate on
00:57our own. Imagine if you, as most people do, I know my daughter did, try and come up with your
01:00own language, you realize sort of this Esperanto thing, right? If you try to come up with your own
01:06language, you'll quickly realize that nobody's particularly interested, and it's kind of a
01:10futile project, and you're not going to get anybody else to learn your language, and it's
01:14a ridiculously complicated thing to do. One of the reasons that I have studiously avoided
01:22becoming an expert in a language other than my own is I have a deep appreciation for the
01:29complexity and nuance of English, and I think I'm fairly good at wielding it, and then realizing how
01:34long it's going to take to be able to think in another language and get all of the complexity
01:38and nuance in that other language. It's like trying to consider climbing Mount Everest using
01:45only your teeth and neck to climb. So, they say as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
01:55There is a kind of half-autistic individualism in a lot of Ayn Rand's novels, or in Ayn Rand's
02:00novels as a whole, where somebody has a fairly effortless capacity to think that is independent
02:07of language and others, and that's admirable, and it is a kind of isolated purification
02:18based upon a bit of an echo chamber. So, all thoughts seem pure and perfect until exposed
02:27to the skepticism and criticism of others, and that is a big challenge, and it's easy to feel right
02:36if you are only thinking for yourself, but when you take your ideas out into the marketplace of
02:43the world, and other people's corrosive, and by corrosive I don't mean necessarily bad, I mean they
02:51use acid to clean as well, right, and you need some pretty strong stuff to get barnacles off a boat,
02:56but when you take your ideas out into the marketplace of the world, well, then you find out
03:02what they're made of, right? Are they able to be pared down to their sinews? So, my novel Just
03:10Poor had an original ending, which I actually published at freedomain.locals.com, but my
03:16original, my novel had an original ending that blew into galactic chunks, and then upon meeting
03:23and working with an editor, it improved. I rewrite, I rewrote the whole second half, and it got much
03:30better. The same thing happened when I was working with a professional writer in a writing class I
03:35took many years ago, which was focused on the god of atheists, so things improved, right? It got
03:41better. I was very much into abstracts, and she said, you know, ground it in the senses, you know,
03:46a woman with a red backpack walking across the university quad can help center things in the
03:52reader's more sensual imagination, and you know, really, really good advice with regards to that.
03:58I've always remembered how powerful it seems when a writer, and Shakespeare does this, you know,
04:05list off the wildflowers, you know. There was thyme, there was rosemary, you know, and you get
04:10wildflowers have both a visual and an auditory sense memory to them for people, so it's a great
04:19way to bring people's senses alive, and bringing people's senses alive in fiction, in written
04:25fiction, is even more powerful in many ways than in film, because in film you dictate the contents
04:31of the imagination, so in a novel, if you say she was beautiful, then you can evoke the concept of
04:43beauty that is individual to each person's mind, but if in a movie you cast a beautiful woman,
04:49then you are dictating to the mind what form that beauty takes, so it is much more individualistic to
04:58consume fiction that's written than it is to follow someone's movie making. You are a participant in
05:08the imagination in a work of written fiction, you are a passive consumer of the visuals in
05:16a movie or a television show, so for instance in my novel The Present, there's a character
05:23named Arlo who's quite good looking, and I give a few hints of how he looks, but everyone would
05:27have their own perception of how he looks based upon their own preferences and histories,
05:31and of course since I describe Arlo's character in quite a bit of detail,
05:36it will also evoke someone who reminds you of Arlo, and it will infuse those looks, so
05:42everyone who's read my book has their own vision of Arlo, but if I made the movie,
05:46I would be imposing my vision of Arlo on everyone, and they would not be able to escape it.
05:51So, I mean, if you pictured Arlo because he reminds you of a guy with a mole on his chin,
05:58and you pictured him with a mole on his chin, and I cast a guy with no mole on his chin,
06:02I would be dictating, right? So we cannot think on our own, we cannot get to the truth
06:09on our own. We need to debate, we need to participate, or to put it another way,
06:17self-reflection is masturbation which produces no children, but if you engage in intellectual
06:26discourse, social intercourse, then you can produce the baby called the truth.
06:33So, then the question arises, why? Why are we like this? Why are we like this? And it's a big
06:44old question, right? It's a big old question. Why are we like this? So the answer, I think,
06:51is tied into the violent nature of our origin story, right? Why do we need others to get to
06:59the truth? Why haven't we evolved a mechanism to get to the truth on our own? It's because
07:07there's a battle, and of course we all know this battle, that you have social mythologies,
07:13social falsehoods. Now we can say that they're necessary and essential social falsehoods,
07:19we can sort of get into that in a second, but we do have social falsehoods that you and I
07:23have a certain amount of skepticism about, and having skepticism about
07:27those social falsehoods can be very, very dangerous, right? If you are part of a tribe
07:35that believes in a volcano god, and then as a budding geologist you no longer believe in the
07:40volcano god, expressing skepticism about the volcano god is very dangerous. You will be set
07:50upon by the priests and the warlords who profit from the volcano god, or the belief in the volcano
07:56god, they will set upon you and destroy you. Now, we can look at this as a singular act of
08:02injustice, of course, and say, well, these terrible warriors and witch doctors and warlocks,
08:09they are just mean, they're terrible authoritarians who just want to kill anyone who interferes with
08:14their free money or free resources. And I get that, and you know, there certainly is some
08:19truth to that. But if we look at the problem of endless war, we have a real challenge,
08:29and the challenge is, of course, if people are willing to die and kill for an illusion,
08:39if people are willing to kill and die for an illusion, the illusion of the volcano god,
08:43if people are willing to kill and die for an illusion, then the illusion becomes an absolutely
08:50essential component of tribal survival. And, of course, we can see this happening all over the
08:56world. This is a very contemporaneous thing, sadly. But let's say there's tribe reason and
09:03tribe volcano. They live in the same geographical area. There's tribe reason and tribe volcano.
09:11Tribe reason has rejected the volcano god, and tribe reason is in hot pursuit of science and
09:18truth. Now, in tribe volcano god, tribe volcano, they believe that if you die in battle in the
09:27service of the volcano god, you get to live in a paradise after death. Valhalla, heaven, whatever,
09:37you get to live in paradise after death. But you have to die in the service of the volcano god in
09:45battle or something like that. So then you have a cohesiveness and a willingness to fight to the
09:51death. That's on team volcano, tribe volcano. Now, in tribe reason, they don't believe any of that
09:59stuff. They believe rationally that there is no volcano god and that there is no Valhalla
10:06glorious afterlife, which you inhabit for eternity if you die in the service of the volcano
10:11god. They are immortal, and they do not have a way to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a
10:19collective. Now, let's say that team reason builds all of these wonderful farms and irrigation
10:28systems and so on, and they have a lot of value because they're following reason. Well, then what
10:35happens is team volcano god, well, the witch doctors of the volcano god cult say to their
10:48warriors or to their males, they say the volcano god has informed us that there are heretics and
10:57unbelievers one valley over, and those heretics and unbelievers are blaspheming the wonderful
11:05name of the volcano god, and we need to stop them from doing that. And, you know, by the by,
11:12we'll end up taking their stuff. And maybe the women of the reason tribe, the women of tribe
11:18reason, maybe they've discovered things like soap. So maybe they're slightly more attractive
11:25than the hags in team volcano god, right? So, I mean, there's a lot of different motives going on.
11:32Now, what happens is, if the priests or the high priests or the witch doctors or whoever
11:39of the volcano gods say to the males, the volcano god has instructed you to pursue a righteous
11:46battle against the unbelievers in the next valley, and by the way, we'll get to take their stuff,
11:52well, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to say in general, yes, we will go and do
11:57this. And it is going to be a glorious battle for the righteous sake of the volcano god. And then
12:05what happens over on team reason? Well, in team reason, they will not have the same cohesiveness.
12:13Now they will have better technology and all of that, but they will not have the same
12:16cohesiveness or desire for self sacrifice. So that's a challenge. In other words, how necessary
12:25for tribal survival are belief in things that are not true? How necessary for tribal survival
12:32are the belief in things that are not true? Well, it seems quite necessary, if not downright
12:40essential. Can, in a time, as was pretty much all of human evolution, in a time of
12:49mass tribal conflict, who will tend to win? Those who believe in collective ideas that are false,
13:01but provide infinite reward, or those who are skeptical or don't believe in collective ideals
13:07that provide infinite reward, and are rational in the empirical and material sense? I mean,
13:16I think it's fairly clear to understand that, especially for the women, women tend to be a
13:22little bit more susceptible to some of these mystical or superstitious ideas and think of
13:29psychic powers and intuition and astrology and things like that. And I think that's because,
13:36in general, the more rational tend to be taken over by the more irrational. And women need to
13:43survive in that environment, and therefore they would adopt the more irrational beliefs in order
13:47to survive, if they were taken as prizes of war, as was grimly the case in most of our corrupt
13:56history. Now, there is an Aristotelian meaning in these things, in that if you end up going the
14:02Halley-Bopp comet thing, where the cult members cut off their own balls to join a comet that was
14:06floating overhead, you can go too far. You can go too far. And then you end up sort of
14:14self-destructive, right? Or one of the reasons that the Aztecs were conquered by a relatively
14:22small number of Spanish conquistadors is because the neighboring tribes were preyed upon by these
14:29dictatorial Aztecs to the degree that they wanted to aid and help the conquerors overthrow the
14:35Aztecs. So you can create too much resentment among the conquered peoples to the point where
14:40they'll collaborate with outsiders to overthrow the local regime. So this is a great tension,
14:50because violence has been the greatest single force in shaping human evolution, as it is in all
15:00creatures, prior to us really having the capacity to manifest reason in social life in any
15:07consistent way, which is still kind of hanging by a thread, but there's more now than there was
15:13before. Certainly, this is the greatest time for the spread of reason in human history. Because
15:18of this amazing technology, we have to have these conversations. So does reason win over violence?
15:26Well, no, of course, right? This is the old statement from a general in the ancient world
15:33who said, why are you quoting laws to men with swords? And of course, violence works
15:40in terms of obedience, because our primary goal is not reason, but survival. And if reasoning
15:47ends our survival and the reproduction of our genes, almost everyone, with very few exceptions,
15:54sorry, that's a bit redundant, will submit to violence in order to survive and to reproduce.
16:01Or to put it another way, of course, as usual, those who refuse to submit to violence and were
16:08killed did not get to reproduce, or their heirs were also killed, or their heirs were socially
16:13disgraced to the point where the bloodline did not exactly flourish. So it's interesting to me
16:20that the comment is iron sharpens iron, iron, of course, being a sort of foundational mechanism
16:26of the weapons of war, right? Steel and iron and so on, right? The Iron Age and so on.
16:34So as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. Now, this, of course, is not just verbal
16:41or rational, but is also martial. In order to become a good swordfighter, you need to practice
16:47swordfighting. You need to practice any martial skill that involves another person, which generally
16:53most skills do, you know, punching yourself, you need to, if you want to be a good boxer,
16:57you've got to spar, right? You've got to train to become a better. And of course, even if you
17:02want to become a good violinist, which is neither martial nor necessarily collectivist, you may not
17:06be in an orchestra, you need a good teacher to teach you violin. So we improve relative to each
17:15other. We cannot get to the truth individually, that we need to be questioned and cross-examined.
17:21And this, of course, was the great quest of Socrates, which was to say to everyone who said,
17:26oh, I know what justice and truth and reason and virtuous, I know what all these things are.
17:30And he's like, oh, okay, let me ask you some questions, right? And he'd ask questions and
17:34quickly unravel their pretensions of knowledge and expose them as people who did not, they
17:42fundamentally lied, right? Because they claimed to be in possession of a knowledge that they did
17:46not possess. But the question, and this is, I think, why people reacted so strongly to
17:54Socrates, and we can sort of see this happening in the West, is that, okay, if we don't believe
17:59in things that are false, and we only believe in things that are true, then we don't have a culture.
18:04Right? Because culture is generally belief in things that are not true. You know, we x tribe
18:11are the best or whatever, right? Well, it's not necessarily objectively true, but it is, you know,
18:16that there is a volcano god that gives you paradise if you die in his service. These things are not
18:21true, but they work. Right? Things that are not true, but work. That is the great paradox,
18:31which is evolution and violence versus facts, reason, and evidence. In tribe reason,
18:38do they have a culture of rationality? Or does anyone who claims to be rational,
18:44is anyone who claims to be rational part of their tribe? If the truth can be transferred
18:51from the mind of one to the mind of another, then all who claim to be in the tribe of truth
18:56are interchangeable, in a sense, with anyone else who accepts the tenets of reason and evidence.
19:03I mean, obviously, there's no gender or ethnic discouragements to anyone in this conversation.
19:10I'll talk with anyone, and I've talked with just about every race and ethnicity, and of course,
19:15I've talked to men and women and so on. There's no barrier to that. If you're willing to speak
19:21rationally and be curious, you are absolutely welcome. Because reason is an objective
19:28conversation. Philosophy is an objective conversation or a goal, a conversation with
19:32the goal of objectivity. It is not a tribe. And therefore, all who accept reason can join
19:42tribe philosophy. So, we do want to sharpen each other's wits, but we also have to recognize
19:51that certainly, while there remains sort of central oligarchies, political oligarchies,
19:59that an emphasis on reason can weaken the tribe relative to those who are passionately
20:10and devotedly deranged or believe false things that give them unity, purpose, and
20:19a kind of ferocious will. So, let me give you a more sort of vivid example that's a bit more
20:26personal to us. It's all very abstract, right? So, you've got Bob and Doug, and you're the boss,
20:31right? And what you do is you say to Bob and Doug, if you do a great job this month, if you work
20:4216 hours a day this month, I will give you $10,000. I will give you a bonus of $10,000.
20:51Now, Bob knows that the boss doesn't have $10,000, that he's actually in debt, that he's broke. This
20:59is sort of a desperate ploy to get extra work out of people, maybe with the hope or goal of saving
21:03the company or whatever, right? But Bob knows that the $10,000 is not going to materialize.
21:10But Doug believes that the $10,000 will materialize, and therefore, he's willing to work
21:17super hard for that money. He'll put in his 16 hours, he'll nights, weekends, whatever, right?
21:23So, who is more productive? The man who accepts the truth, or the man who believes in the falsehood?
21:32Challenge, right? Now, you could, of course, say that, well, in the long term, though, Doug is
21:37going to realize that the boss is as light to him, he's going to be mad, he's going to quit. I get
21:42all of that, but let me just talk in the short run. You are going to see that Doug, who believes
21:48in the $10,000, is going to be much harder working than Bob, who does not, right? So,
21:55that's life in the world of war and tribalism that characterizes our origins. When reason
22:03examines culture, culture falls apart. The gods of the tribe disappear, and people are viewed as
22:13interchangeable. Everyone who shows competence in mathematics is a, quote, mathematician.
22:21Everyone who shows competence in reasoning and debate is a philosopher. It is not a lineage,
22:30it is not an aristocracy, it is not a mystery religion, it is not a PhD. It is based upon
22:38competence and execution, or as Aristotle says, we are what we repeatedly do. So, we certainly
22:45do want to sharpen each other's thoughts, but sharpening each other's thoughts has the great
22:52danger of removing a lot of the myths necessary for the survival of our culture. And, of course,
23:01in the West, the two massive shocks of the First and Second World War were so catastrophic
23:11to society. It's staggering. I mean, the rough estimates, $10 million dead in the First World
23:18War, $50 million dead in the Second World War, was so shockingly catastrophic that
23:26believing in the mythos of the noble military and the good war and so on, it was so destructive to
23:37that mythos. And, of course, the men who most believed in those myths were generally the first
23:44to die. You can see, of course, all of the young men in the fall of 1914 who were desperate to go
23:53to war and terrified that the war might end before Christmas, because they thought that war
23:59involved skill and a small number of people, since wars throughout most of human history involved
24:05skill and a small number of people. I mean, relative to the general population, or at least
24:10relative to the young men's proportion of the general population. And skill was essential. I
24:18mean, Napoleon was the best general throughout history by almost any metric. He had superb skill
24:25as a tactician, as a war leader. So, those who believed in the myth of the noble war,
24:34of the skill-based war, of all of that, and, of course, the First World War turned into
24:40sitting in a bunker waiting for somebody 20 miles away to push a button and blow you up,
24:44or running into machine gun fire, or mustard gas, or other forms of chemical warfare and
24:51lice and illnesses raging through the trenches that you couldn't really do much about.
24:57So, it was not a skills-based war. And so, those who most believed in what could be called the
25:07necessary myths of collectivist survival in a world of conflict were the first to go,
25:13and those who were skeptical of those myths survived in, maybe we can even say, a slightly
25:22higher degree. And this is back to an old George Bernard Shaw play called Arms and the Man,
25:28where there's a mercenary who is very sensible about war and doesn't believe in any of the
25:33collectivist myths about the noblest oblige or the virtues of war. He's just like, well,
25:40it's a dirty business. I get paid and I try to do a good job and stay alive. And he has no
25:47illusions. And, of course, you can also see this in just about every, particularly First World War
25:53movies. In just about every First World War movie, there is a sort of apple-cheeked, fresh-faced,
25:58peach-fuzzed, enthusiastic young man who believes in the cause and is just absolutely destroyed
26:08as a result. He rushes into machine-gun fire while his more skeptical and cynical
26:13colleagues hold back. So, it's also Gallipoli, I think, if I remember rightly.
26:17Just try to stay alive, and to buy into the mythos of the noble heroic war is to die in the
26:26most gruesome ways. But then, of course, when you, as a society, lose the young men who absorb and
26:36accept the mythos of the war, you also lose your warrior class and your protectors. And then your
26:44society is fairly ripe for the pickings for those. Team Reason versus Team Volcano, your society is
26:52fairly open to the pickings of those who do believe in necessary mythos for aggression,
26:59survival, and so on. There was a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, and this is used
27:07sometimes in memes. The young German men in World War I, who are so excited and enthusiastic
27:16about the war, they're jumping up and down and cheering and hugging each other and spilling
27:21virtual tears of joy at being able to go to war. And then it cuts to a guy, a hollow-faced guy,
27:29you know, he's alone, his friends are all dead, and he's in the back of an army vehicle moving
27:34through a moonscape of destroyed Europe. And that's the difference. You've also, I'm sure,
27:42seen the pictures of, I think it's an Italian fellow, you know, his face at the beginning of
27:46the war and his face after four years of war. And he's turned from, again, a fresh-faced young man
27:51into a thousand-yard stare, vacant face of existential horror. And this, of course, was
27:59the big issue with Shellshock, right? Shellshock, which is that human beings are really designed for
28:05the fight-or-flight mechanism to last really only minutes, maybe an hour or two, but not years and
28:09years and years, and it really wrecks the brain, the personality. So, yeah, iron sharpens iron.
28:18And what's powerful about this is that it refers both, in my view, to the intellectual,
28:25or you could say spiritual, pursuit of truth and virtue. But truth is objective. But the survival
28:32of warring tribes, the survival of each individual warring tribe, relies upon
28:38collectivist falsehoods that motivate people in the same way that the worker who expects
28:44the $10,000 that will never in fact come works far harder and is willing to sacrifice far more
28:49than the person who says, the boss doesn't have 10 grand, we're never getting it. Or he certainly
28:54doesn't have the 20 grand, right? Which would be required for both people, both workers.
29:00So, iron sharpens iron. Well, intellectually, this means that being in pursuit of truth
29:06is a good thing, but it comes with a danger. Iron sharpens iron refers to
29:11the intellectual pursuit of truth and it also refers to the warriors learning their martial
29:19arts in service of a collective belief which, though false, through force of arms, wins.
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29:41It's a friday. It's a friday. I will talk to you tonight. Bye.