https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=O8WFLw8T9y4
Hello there! Today I wanted to do a video on three things that I think are interlinked and are very important. They’re terms I use all the time. Materialism, individualism, and objectivism. I don’t mean the Ayn Randian objectivism but maybe it’s the same thing. So let’s dive in! These three words for me are important because they describe rather succinctly what people are trapped in. How people are unable to see the world, we’ll say, in a way that benefits them the best. Why they’re coming up with these oversimplified models. Now I don’t want to make any claims as to how they’re related other than they seem to be, which was causal. I’m not really sure. I’m not sure it matters. It might be if you step in any of these three holes the other two holes will follow or something. So first let’s jump into materialism. Now materialism can get rather extreme. It can get to the point where people believe that material itself is like the most important thing or the only thing available for us to put in reality. But there aren’t a super huge number of people like that. I mean they’re certainly out there. But what I mean by materialism is that primarily they think the mode of the world is determined by or can be manipulated by manipulating material. And so they don’t necessarily deny that there are things like thoughts and ideas and E equals MC squared, right? They can put those things in reality and say well they’re real phenomenologically or something, right? Sort of invoking that materialism again. But they seem to think that the material things are what primarily matters or primarily moves the world, right? So rather than believing, for example, that maybe your thoughts affect your actions, they would believe that well your actions are mostly the result of either the things that you were exposed to in the past or they’re the result of the way in which the world forces you to interact, right? And they often talk like this. If you listen carefully enough you’ll sort of hear it. And so that’s what I mean by materialism, right? They’re just a primary thing that moves the world are things. If we set up the things right then the people will behave correctly, right? They won’t be able to rebel or they won’t rebel because they won’t know how or something. And so you hear these, if you listen carefully, you hear these constructions all the time. So the second thing I want to address is this individualism. Now individualism is a problem for me because what ends up happening, for better or for worse, whether people intended or not, is when people are engaging in this individualism they are separating themselves from everything else. So individualism seems to reliably degrade into this concept that you are detached from the rest of the world, you’re able to hold a stance, an objective stance, that’s why we’re gonna get into objectivism next, on the world and that you are not engaged and participating in the world. And I don’t think there are individuals, I think there are persons and persons are connected to other persons and to nature, right? And that’s actually really important. When you believe that there is a condition where that is not true you misapprehend the world because you were born, you had little to no choice about it, right? Be fair to Sam Harris, but that automatically connected to your parents like inexorably or the lack of parenting too, right? You were already connected to those things and we don’t, at least not too many of us, do everything on our own. In fact I would argue nobody can do everything on their own because you need a relationship with nature, right, to eat for example. So when we’re, when people are engaged in this individualism it tends to degrade to I can do everything on my own, I’m not engaged with nature, I’m not engaged with other people, I’m you know, I’m not a person that’s connected to other persons, I’m just an individual and therefore. And you see this a lot, a lot of arguments boil down to that, like the, well I don’t need anybody else, right? Meanwhile they’ve got their iPhone and they’re, you know, ordering food delivered to their door, you know, and then they go into this theoretical world where, well theoretically I can grow all my own food and theoretically I choose this to be efficient but that’s not true, it’s not the case. And you know, you have to dig quite deep to sort of get people to understand, no, you’re misapprehending the world, right, that there was stuff built before you, right, and you’re, all of which you’re using. Like technology is the legacy that you inherit from the past, right, not that it couldn’t be reinvented but you don’t have to and therefore you inherited it, right. So people don’t take that into account and you know, that enables this last piece that I want to talk about, which is this objectivism. And again, I’m not going to invoke Ayn Rand’s objectivism, her incomplete philosophy is interesting, I’m a big fan, but it has its limitations and probably suffers from all three of these to some extent. So objectivism is the stance that there is a world of view that you personally as an individual can inhabit that enables you to judge materiality or to judge the world. Now the problem with this is that that doesn’t exist. Again, we’re connected, we’re inexorably connected to our past because we were born into something, right, we were born from something, we’re inexorably connected to each other, we’re inexorably connected to nature, right, and we’re connected to ourselves because to Peterson’s point we don’t know ourselves. And so when we try to be objective in the sense that most people mean, I know there are multiple ways people use the word, what they mean is they’re removing themselves from the world, from the picture, and they are standing outside looking at the picture from a position that is authoritative. Now there’s something to be said from detaching yourself or at least your emotional state from a situation, but I don’t think that’s an objective worldview, I don’t think an objective worldview would be useful even if we had it, and I don’t think we have the option to have it. I think we can fool ourselves into thinking that when we’re being dispassionate or unemotional about something that we’re therefore being objective. Now to the extent that that’s possible to be, you know, emotionally, you don’t have to be unattached really, I think that’s probably a misnomer, emotionally unengaged but aware because you should be aware of your emotions because if you’re not aware of them they’re definitely moving you in ways you don’t understand. There’s a lot to be said for that, right, so in that respect I like that idea, but I don’t think it’s possible to take an objective view, that would technically be a God’s-eye view, right, that would be an all-knowing, all- judging sort of a view, and I think that’s unavoidable, I think it’s something that people avoid in their heads, they’re not quite understanding that an objective worldview basically means that you are able to judge things independent of yourself and because you are in the picture, right, because you’re a player in the world, you can’t do that, you know, it’s just not an option that’s available and I think these three things again are related, you know, very heavily because we get the idea that as an individual, right, if we were an individual an objective worldview would be possible and the things we would be judging would be, you know, primarily material because we can get intersubjective agreement, in other words you can get more than one subject to agree to it, but that’s not the same as objectivity, for example, so if you say, well, you know, objectively there is a tree, you know, at this location, I don’t, it’s not an objective tree, the tree is not, it doesn’t object to being called a tree, right, but it does object to empty space, right, it does object in some way to nature because it’s using resources to grow, but it’s not apart from its environment, right, trees have leaves, they sway in the wind, they take up sunlight and, you know, they use stuff from the air and they emit stuff into the air, right, they’ve got roots, right, they’re not, you can’t remove a tree from that and still have a tree that would die, so there isn’t a state in which it’s not connected, but because of this individualist worldview we believe that that’s a state that we can inhabit, that we can sort of stand apart, stand outside and judge all of these material things that you all agree to, and then what we’re really doing is, at that point, we’re sort of invoking this idea that, well, I have a viewpoint and I’m an individual and because I’m being objective you should agree with me, and the reason why you’re not agreeing is due to an emotional state or due to a lack of control on your part, and obviously I disagree, I think this is super dangerous, I don’t like that formulation, I see a lot of people acting this way though, like a lot of people are enacting this sort of a problem, and so that, for me, is where the trouble comes in, right, the trouble comes in in that, oh, well, there’s a way in which these people have a set of beliefs in their head that enable them to look at the world as primarily material, be apart from it as an individual, and take a position that I would argue can’t exist, where they are able to make judgments, right, and to understand things uniquely to themselves, right, they’re not understanding them in a way that involves other people, right, it’s just them and the world as it is, the material as it is, and when you listen to people carefully enough, I think you’ll hear this all over the place, which is not to say that it’s necessarily, you know, overused or a bad thing, but it is dangerous, and I think it’s dangerous because it leads to this way of thinking where you’re self-justifying all of your thoughts and your feelings and your actions in the moment, and that’s bad because maybe they’re not justified, maybe you shouldn’t be doing that, and so that’s the problem with materialism, individualism, and objectivism as I see it. I think once you conceive of things this way, you’ll hear it more in the way people are talking, right, in their base assumptions, and I do think also, you know, Jonathan Pichot often, at least for a while, was asking people where are they standing when they make these proclamations, right, from which point are you judging, and I would say they believe they’re judging from objective worldview, right, from objectivism. They believe they’re objective, disassociated agents, individuals in a material world, and that because it’s a material world and it has intersubjective agreement, we can make proclamations about it as individuals, and of course because it’s objective, we’ll all see the same thing because we’re all looking at it from the same perspective, the objective worldview. Of course this doesn’t work, and that’s where I think the problem comes in, so it’s good to ask where are people standing when they’re making these judgments, or maybe better yet, where you’re starting, because there’s always that pesky middle-out thinking, which I have a video on, right, and then also because you’re connected to the world, the thing you need to pay attention to is what are my connections costing me, right, what trade-offs, another video, am I making for the things that I have, right, because we are connected and we need to take that seriously, and I think materialism, individualism, and objectivism lead us astray down the path of disconnectedness or perhaps a loss of intimacy, and of course I talked about intimacy with Andrew at the Bank’s lovely conversation, and so I think that this is tied into that whole process, and I hope to be speaking more on this in the future, and if you like this sort of stuff, let me know in the comments below, like, subscribe, tell your friends, share with everybody if you find this useful, and as always, I just wanted to thank you for your time and attention.