https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lchWriufJD8
So people will say to me, as was said in the introduction, that I have courage. And that’s not right. That’s not true. That’s not the case. I have my fears in order. I am dead serious about that. So when my government, such as it is, decided in 2016 that they could introduce a piece of legislation that was unparalleled in the history of western democracies derived from the common law tradition and that they could require me to use a form of language that I regarded as the neologisms of detestable… What would you say? Detestable ideologues? I thought, no, I don’t think so, guys. I’m a lot more afraid of losing my tongue than I am of a you. And so that’s a matter of having your fears in order. Now, people always lie because they’re afraid… People lie for two reasons. They lie because they want to avoid taking a responsibility for something that is their responsibility and perhaps encountering the requisite punishment. Children often lie for that reason. Or they lie to gain something that they don’t truly deserve. A lie is a form of avoidance. And so you can understand that people lie because they’re afraid. They fail to tell the truth because they’re afraid. So fear plays into it in that front. But what do you lose if you tell… What do you lose if you lie? What do you lose if you lie? What should you be afraid of losing if you lie? Well, the answer to that depends on how profound your conception… It depends on the profundity of your conception of freedom of speech. And this is a place, by the way, that conservatives fail dreadfully, just so you know. Free speech is not a right among other rights. It’s the predicate of all rights. It’s also the predicate of a functioning psyche. I mean this… I don’t mean this politically. I mean it technically. It’s the predicate of a functioning psyche. And it’s the predicate of a society that can maintain its integrity and its adaptive flexibility simultaneously. And to say that is no different than saying that thought is the bedrock of adaptation. Now, if I can speak freely, I can express my thoughts. And so then you might think, erroneously, that the reason I have free speech is so that I have the freedom to express my thoughts. And that’s also not why I have freedom of speech, even though that’s a corollary. I have freedom of speech so that I can think. Now, the reason that works, that is a technical definition and a truth, is because… It’s twofold. One is you think in words. You think by internalizing dialogue. Most people can’t think. They think by talking. You think by putting forward your viewpoint and then having it opposed by someone else. And then you might say, well, why should you put up with the opposition? And the answer is, well, what if you’re stupid and wrong? Well, and the right response to that is, well, I am stupid and wrong. Please correct me. And because the alternative to being corrected in that way is to be a good person. The alternative to being corrected in that way is death. Really. So here’s how it works biologically. This makes human beings unique, by the way. So, animals are much the same generation to generation. And if an animal acts out of conceptualization and the conceptualization fails dramatically, then the animal dies. And that’s the end of the conceptualization. And human beings determined at some point in the past to take a slightly alternative route. Or a radically alternative route. The part of our brain that we use to generate abstract thought is not a part of the brain that generates abstract factual representations of the world. It’s also not the case that you have freedom of speech so that you can discuss your facts about things in the world. That isn’t how it works. The way it works instead is that you use your capacity for abstraction to produce abstracted variants of yourself. They’re abstracted variants of the next iteration of you. You might put it that way. And then you test the validity of that abstracted representation of you by subjecting it to the criticisms that are analogous to the opposition that that would meet in the real world. So the reason that you call someone out on their stupidity is so they don’t run headlong into a brick wall. And that’s why you discipline your children. It’s like, you have to stop thinking that way. Well, why? Because you’ll act that way. Well, so what? I like to act that way. It makes me happy. So that would be the hedonistic response. Well, if you act that way, the world will object. Perhaps the natural world, perhaps the social world. And you will fail. And that will be desperately miserable. And that will be much worse than the small pain that you’re going to have to undergo if you just sacrifice your stupidity now. And so, really, the progressives might say, You have no right to hurt someone’s feelings. And the answer is, well, you should hurt their feelings if the alternative is to let them die. And that’s what you do. That is exactly what you do. If you interfere with people’s ability to think. Not only do you let them die, you doom them to death. Because their stupid ideas don’t die, and then they do. The purpose of thinking is to let your stupid thoughts die instead of you. Now, There is a certain amount of pain associated with that. Because you might have put a fair bit of effort into whatever self-serving tyranny currently possesses you. And it might be very difficult for you to allow that to collapse into smoking runes and build something out of the ashes. But that still might be easier on you than undergoing the absolute cataclysm of acting out your foolishness in the real world and having yourself burn up totally in consequence. And so, of course, there’s sacrificial pain in free speech mediated error. We’re all in love with our own self-serving tyrannical, self-serving tyrannical misapprehensions. Well, it’s absolutely the case. I just did a seminar on Exodus, which I released some of it so far on YouTube, with about nine different thinkers. And one of the things that happens in the Exodus story is that Moses calls on the Pharaoh, under God’s direction, to abandon his tyrannical presuppositions. Moses, or the Pharaoh, being a tyrant, doesn’t abandon his tyrannical predispositions, predilections. Instead, he doubles down, which is what all tyrants do, and which is what most of us do when we’re confronted with error. All that means is that things go from bad to worse, right? The plagues get more and more severe as the tyrant gets more and more intransigent until the last sacrifice is the death of the future itself. And it’s the death of the future itself that you bring about when you interfere with people’s ability to destroy the stupidity that would doom them to hell. And that’s what you do when you interfere with free speech. It’s not a mere matter of, well, you know, people can’t just say what they want. As if freedom of speech is some hedonistic whim that we’re all allowed to shoot off our mouths merely to gratify our own, what would you say, again, hedonistic desires. It’s not surprising that bloody left-wingers think that way, because they are perfectly willing to gratify their hedonistic desires at everyone else’s expense at any moment in their entire lives. And so… The fact that they’ll extend precisely the same logic to the hypothetical hedonism of free speech is absolutely in keeping with the mode of being that they’ve adopted in the most radical possible manner. But that doesn’t mean it’s correct. It just means they don’t understand the relationship between freedom of speech and thought and adaptation itself. This isn’t some theory, by the way. It’s no more a theory than it is to say that it’s a theory that thought is useful. You try things out by thinking. And you have to do that with great difficulty. You want clashes of avatars so that the best survive, right? You want that for your children. You want to put up some resistance against their foolishness so that they modify themselves at the least possible cost. You do the same thing with your wife or your husband if you have any sense at all. In your marriage, you communicate honestly, painful and terrible as that is, so that each of you can discover what’s lacking about you, and that’s plenty. So it’s not going to be a pleasant interaction. It’s going to be something that burns off the dead wood. You might be mostly dead wood, so you’re going to object to that.