https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OEtRcDNz3t0
You’re certainly, you know, not close to, but in the midst of an argument about free will. Because obviously if you make the hard determinist argument that free will doesn’t exist, and that consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing on itself, then how exactly does… how does culture propagate? How do these memes propagate? How are people choosing sexual selection and natural selection become one and the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection? Well, and also I think the free will argument… I mean, I see why Harris gets tangled up in that, you know, because, well, first of all, deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful. And when we use deterministic models for many things, they really work. So you could say, well, we’re going to use that by default. It’s like, fair enough. We’re going to deviate from that with care. But I don’t see people as driven like clocks winding down. First of all, we don’t wind down in any simple way. We’re dissipative structures. To use… he wrote Schrodinger. What is life? A human being is a dissipative structure. We’re not an entropic structure like a clock running down. We are in some sense, but as living beings, we pull energy in. And so we’re not winding down like a deterministic structure. We’re something other than that. And the way we treat each other is as logos, as far as I can tell. The way I treat myself, if I’m going to be good to myself in the proper sense, is that I’m an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential and casting that potential into a reality for good or for evil. OK, and if I treat myself that way, then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality. And I think if you read Frankel, for example, or Solzhenitsyn, and you see how your bad decisions can warp the structure of reality, then that wakes you up. OK, so there’s that. If you don’t treat yourself like an active agent imbued with logos, then your life doesn’t go well. But more, if you don’t treat other people that way, they do not want to play with you. If we set up societies that aren’t predicated on the idea that people are like that, then the societies become, they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost instantly. So then I would say, well, you’ve got the problem of determinism. It’s like, fair enough, man. How do you reconcile the fact that if you lay out a society at every level of analysis on strict deterministic grounds, it fails? So doesn’t that mean your hypothesis has a flaw? I mean, maybe not. Maybe you can say, no, the facts are independent of the ethical consequences. Right, exactly. This is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being, right? Because Sam would say, well, it’s true regardless of what the effect is. And you would say, well, it’s obviously not true if morals are constructed for a pragmatic reason. And if this pragmatism doesn’t work, if it falls into nothingness. Well, it also depends to some degree on how you’re willing to test your hypothesis. Because I might say, well, if your hypothesis is factually correct, wouldn’t you assume that if people base their behaviors individually and familial and socially on that set of facts, which is basically what Sam claims about facts to begin with, if you base your ethos on those facts, wouldn’t it work? Right. Well, he claims that that’s a test. And I would say, well, then it fails that test. It doesn’t work. We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work. Yes. And I think, well, that’s… I can’t see any way out of those arguments. Yeah, I can’t see there obviously, which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff. And I think that it’s also the reason why people find your work really inspiring. And while the left wants to claim that you are an angry person, they’ll claim similarly that I’m a deeply angry person. I don’t think there’s been quite an angry conversation. I’m pretty sure it has not been. I’m horrified by what the radical left is capable of, but that doesn’t make me angry. Exactly. And I think that it’s demonstrative of why so many people find what you’re doing inspiring, because unlike the radical left, which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology and we’re victims of the system, like Marxism makes the claim that the only way that people suck is the claim that Marxism makes. But the only way to cure people of sucking is by changing the entire system, which will in some magical fashion transform the nature of humanity. Yeah, in the proper direction. Right. Exactly. The claim that you’re making, and I hope that I’m making as well, is that human beings do suck unless they decide to stop sucking. And your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms, is your famous phrase goes. Yeah, well, they might as well start with what’s right in front of them. It’s a lot harder than it looks, because to clean up your room means to accept that it’s actually necessary for you to take that little bit of chaos that’s in front of you, that chaotic potential, and cast it into habitable order. And then you have to develop the right attitude towards that. It’s like, okay, well, I’m going to put my room in order. Well, what do you mean? Order is in relationship to something. Like if your desk is ordered, it means you’ve ordered it because you’re going to work there, and you’re working there on something valuable. And so the order is conceived of in relationship to a T-loss. It’s like, okay, you’re going to order your room. Well, what are you going to do in it? Like, what’s your room for? What’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? You can’t order your room without falling into purpose. And I would say, well, if you’re going to fall into purpose, it’s like, try it out on a local scale first, right? You don’t want to go out there and change the system. It’s like, what the hell do you know? Leave the system alone. See what you can do locally. See if you can put yourself together. See if you can put your immediate environment together. And you’ll find if you’re in a chaotic household, and a chaotic household would be one where no one has any discipline, no one has any aims, and there’s a terrible battle between Cain and Abel going on all the time. Right? So life sucks and everything’s miserable, and we’re cynical, and that’s what wisdom is. It’s like, and there’s no point in trying anything because everything’s meaningless. And who the hell is going to care in a million years? And you’re a fool to move forward in any case. It’s like, there’s your household. Okay. And so now you decide, no, despite all that, I’m going to put my room an order. It’s like, you will have a war on your hands. Because the first thing the people around you who are aiming down will do is think, oh, you really, you think you’re so much better than we are, do you? You really think that, you and your fancy goddamn plans. It’s like, we’re going to put every psychological obstacle we can possibly think of in your way. Because if you succeed, even in something that trivial, you shed a very dim light on our existence. And so we’re going to put, we’re going to do everything we can to take you out. And so this, people think, oh, well, cleaning your room, that’s just a cliche. It’s like, yeah, really, right? Just go ahead and try it. You see how much of a cliche that is. And if you’ve got your room in order, then put your office in order. See, and then you’re going to encounter the, as soon as you do that, you step out into the social world, you’re going to encounter the antipathy between men and women. You’re going to encounter the identity politics in the workplace. You’re going to encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you’re working with people of the opposite sex. You’re going to encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward. It’s like the whole, it’s a microcosm. It really is. And so to take those microcosms seriously, well, that’s what I’m asking people to do. And I’m saying, look, it isn’t only about you being happy. It’s like, yeah, whatever, happy. There’s lots of times in your life you’re not going to be happy. And so that’s not going to work. You want to have something meaningful. That’s the boat that will take you through the storm when you batten down the hatches. But there’s more. It isn’t even that. It isn’t even a meaningful, engaged life will see you through the catastrophes, even though that’s a big deal. That’s a great proposition. And I really believe it’s true because you can say to yourself, yeah, it’s worth it. Right. Right. And great. But there’s the other part of it too, which is, don’t be thinking that your errors aren’t linked to hell because they are. If you look at what happened in the 20th century, the brilliant commentators on the 20th century totalitarian states and all of their atrocities said the same thing over and over. It isn’t top-down evil leader manipulating innocent masses. That’s not it. It’s the moral failings of every single individual, unwilling to say their truth, unwilling to act out what they know to be right, that accumulate and produce the catastrophic state. And so when you’re fussing about with your life, when you’re not manifesting your potential, when you’re falsifying your speech and your actions in the service of short-term expedience, you are working to bring about hell on earth. And that’s true. It’s true literally. And then it’s true, I suspect it’s also true metaphorically. And that’s a real truth, man. When you get the literal and the metaphorical working at the same time, it’s like, that’s real. So it isn’t just that you have to fix up yourself so that you can have a better life. It’s like, who cares about you for a moment? It’s you have to fix up your life because if you don’t, every time you make a mistake that you know to be a mistake, you’re leading the world toward hell. And I believe that. I think it’s true.