https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ueqmUFcMT40
So, something came up recently and I wanted to address it directly. I’m probably not even going to have this video edited because no time. Got to get this one out. This dustup around Sam Harris and his statements on trigonometry would start at about the 35 minute mark in that video and I’ll try to link that here, here, somewhere, around here. Just in case you want to engage with it. What happened here is interesting because it sort of points to some of the issues I’ve been talking about, in particular in my Frames and Perspective video, which I think are very important to cover. So I want to cover this quickly because it’s a good example of exactly what I was talking about in terms of framing and what you’re putting first on the postmodern power narrative. Now what I’m going to argue is that what you see here in that video, starting at the 35 minute mark, is a demonstration of the difference between preferring knowledge as your primary value to preferring politics as your primary value to preferring a better set of values, maybe centered around persons. So the statement that Sam Harris makes, which by the way is not taken out of context, there is no valid context for this statement, but he says and I quote, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. In any other context, the fact that you would not care that there were corpses of children in somebody’s basement is abhorrent to me. And I know I’ve been saying this not on YouTube for quite some time, but I think one of the problems with Sam Harris, and you know, I mean, I have a video on my critique of Sam Harris. One of the problems Sam Harris is that he’s not capable of being a moral agent in the world, not capable, it’s not an option to him, because he doesn’t have an ethic, it doesn’t exist. So I’m going to seemingly contradict that, but not really, you’ll see what I mean. If there is a plane crash and 300 people die, I still care about the corpses of children in the basement. I don’t not care about the corpses of children in the basement, irrespective of what else is going on in the world. That’s an important distinction. Now that’s just me, I’m not saying that Sam Harris has to adopt that attitude, but I am making a judgment call on this. A hard judgment call. Because I’m a hard no on not caring about dead children stacked in a basement, or piled in a basement, or sitting in a basement, or whatever. I’m still a hard no on that, irrespective of all other facts in the world. This is tied up in my ethics. So if you need to know what kind of person I am, that’s a good indicator of what kind of person I am. I care if there’s dead children in someone’s basement, especially if it’s somebody that we can identify as maybe somebody we need to pay attention to, and maybe take action against, or for for that matter. Then he goes on to do some dishonest framing. He basically ignores a bunch of facts, a bunch of information. You can say Trump is bad and Trump did bad things, which he provides no evidence for, by the way. Very interesting point. He provides no evidence for his statements. He just claims that Trump is bad without backing it up. Likely because he can’t back it up. Likely because it isn’t actually true, whatever he believes. And I don’t know what he believes, because he won’t state it, which is a clever trick. He’s ignoring that Joe Biden said, Joe Biden said, and you should always believe people when they say things, right? Don’t take their agency away from them and assume they didn’t mean what they said. Assume they meant what they said and give them the chance to clarify and correct. Joe Biden said he withheld a billion dollars from Ukraine on the condition that they replace a prosecutor who happened to be investigating a company that his son was a board member of or an advisor to or something that was paying him. And that action in and of itself, according to actual law, is illegal. It’s also unethical and immoral. And so that’s pretty bad. And I don’t think Trump did anything that bad. He certainly doesn’t seem to have broken any laws. They keep looking into this and not finding anything, for example. That’s a good hint. They didn’t look into this Joe Biden thing, even though like it was on the news. They showed the tape. You can watch him saying he did this and you can hear officials say, well, yeah, and the president at the time, who was Barack Obama, warned Joe that this was probably a bad idea and his legal advisors told him not to do it because it’s illegal. So he did a bad thing and he knew he was doing a bad thing and he did it anyway. And now you want to claim that that’s not that that’s not bad or it’s OK because Trump is worse again without any evidence. And then what he does is he makes a bunch of nebulous claims about, you know, Trump this and Trump that. And then he interesting. And this is very telling to me and it should be very telling to you, I think. Trump University is worse than anything in Hunter Biden’s laptop. He said that. Anything that is insane. But again, I believe Sam Harris, that he is an unethical agent, an immoral actor. I believe that that is true. But the interesting thing is, why is something about Trump University worse? Well, I think it’s actually pretty clear to Sam Harris. The highest institution is the university. Why? Because it supports its highest value. His highest value is knowledge, knowledge. That’s what that’s his God. That’s the thing he worships. That’s the thing that is at the top of his pyramid. And that’s why he doesn’t care about political corruption, but he cares about knowledge. And the other interesting thing is, and I had somebody try to defend Sam Harris and say, well, look, part of Sam Harris’s point is that Hunter Biden is not Joe Biden. And so you can’t compare the acts of Hunter Biden to the acts of Trump, who was president. OK, however, even in a materialist frame, and Sam Harris is very much materialist, right? Material first, material moves the world, right? That’s wrong. The relationship of of Joe Biden to Hunter, wait for it, Biden. So he gave that boy his name is the same. Although I would argue much greater than the relationship between Donald Trump and Trump University, which he gave his name to, but he did not birth. He did not run. He just sold his name to a bunch of people who wanted to run a business. OK, now in quantity in materialistic land where quantity rules over quality. He’s still wrong. Like Sam Harris’s point is wrong. It’s incorrect. It’s illogical, it’s irrational, and it’s unreasonable. All of those things. It makes no sense because it’s nonsensical. So that’s interesting. But his own materialist frame doesn’t support his point. Aristotelian logic denies his point entirely. And if you make a quality argument, the quality of assigning your name to a business, and in this case selling it, right, which is a rather sort of low, you know, fair enough, like it’s a low thing to do. Like I’m just going to sell my name to the highest bidder or something. And I don’t know if he did that, but it doesn’t really matter. We can assume the worst. It doesn’t matter. is different from raising your child that has your name. You bore that child. You raised that child. Things that child does, you have some culpability for. It’s not 100 percent. Maybe it’s not 50 percent, but it’s not zero. And you can make the same argument. Well, Trump’s culpability for Trump University is not zero. But I would argue he had much less involvement in Trump University than Joe Biden had in Hunter Biden’s upbringing and moral, moral and ethical stand. I don’t think that’s controversial. So from a quality perspective, these two things are vastly unequal already. And I mean vastly unequal. So we’re strong on that front. And now the really interesting thing happens here. So what happens is Sam Harris admits that there was a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Trump. He comes right out and says it. And the interesting thing is, I believe his name is Constantine Kissin. He interrupts. He’s one of the hosts of this trigonometry show. He interrupts and says, hold on, I want to stop you on that. Sam Harris very interestingly assumes which part of his statement that Constantine wants to interrupt on and says, are you interrupting about the dead children in the basement? Or the dead kids in the basement, right? And here’s that’s already interesting. Here’s the interesting part. He says no. He says F the kids in the basement. I’m interested in democracy. That’s a direct quote, by the way. F the kids in the basement. I’m interested in democracy. So he doesn’t care about the kids in the basement. Yeah, I’m having a hard time. Sorry. He doesn’t care about Sam’s framework of Trump University either. Neither of these are his value. Neither of them. His highest value is politics. I care about democracy. And so you can see the battle between three different frames, but two rather admittedly. One frame is the frame of knowledge, Trump University being the worst possible thing that you could do is denigrate the high holy church of the university that keeps the high holy thing of knowledge at the center of the universe. Might as well have said that, Sam. And this other frame. Oh, I don’t care about the kids in the basement. I don’t care about Trump University. But my goodness, you have denigrated the high holy politics. You have you have smeared the name of democracy and the principle of democracy. How dare you, sir. That’s where I take issue with you. Not with the kids in the basement. This is shocking to me. I mean, it’s absolutely shocking. But you can see what’s going on here. And in my previous video on frames in perspective, I pointed this out. These three narratives that are outlined, which weirdly, I already did the video on because I’ve seen these frames that are common frames. Politics is the highest thing. There’s an economics is the highest thing. They didn’t cover that one. But there’s a knowledge is the highest thing. So these frames are a postmodern power narrative. Power comes down from above. And therefore, the highest value is the power. Politics is the power. So politics needs to be pure, needs to be purified. Democracy can’t be trampled on because that’s where the power comes from, is politics. It’s a postmodern power narrative. It’s not anything else. It’s not anything else. It’s just a postmodern power narrative of politics at the top of the triangle. And Sam Harris’s, no, no, no, knowledge. And of course, I already exemplified this. The knowledge that Sam Harris picks and chooses and which knowledge he leaves out is very interesting. Sam, how did you choose which knowledge to judge Biden on? Because I gave you the fact that you’re wrong. You’re wrong. You’re leaving out a very important thing that is both a political corruption and a corruption of knowledge. In that case, Joe Biden withholding a billion dollars from Ukraine unless an investigation, unless a prosecutor was fired, right? Thus killing an investigation. So both of those are wrong in that one statement, in that one video. It’s a video. You don’t take my word for it. And I believe Joe Biden when he says he did something wrong, bad, evil, immoral. I believe him. I believe everybody that says that. I don’t believe they’re not agents in the world. I give them the benefit of the doubt that what they’re saying is true. Right? And the opportunity to correct themselves, which they don’t seem to want to do. So you can see this postmodern power from above narrative playing out. Now a more religious interpretation might be, let’s worry about the persons first and foremost as the highest value. You know, the dead bodies. Or perhaps let’s worry about the potential because children are potential. That’s what they are. Let’s worry about that instead. And let’s forget about the rest entirely. Right? What’s important? What’s important is other people. Okay. What’s not important? What people know? It’s not important. I don’t care about knowledge that much. I’m not saying it has no role, but I’m saying it has no importance because it doesn’t. The kindest people I have met are not the smartest people I have met. And the smartest people I have met on average have not been the kindest people. And in fact, overwhelmingly not kind, overwhelmingly not nice. Not all of them, but most of them and most of the people who aren’t knowledgeable or have a high IQ or whatever you want to measure there have been much nicer on average. Not all of them. So that’s an interesting asymmetry maybe worth paying attention to. Right? And maybe the politics is something that’s temporary and it’s the here and now and it will change. And so maybe we don’t worry about that. But maybe we do worry about dead children. My goodness. Maybe that’s what we should worry about. That’s what I worry about. You can see Sam Harris doesn’t care about Constantine’s frame at all. He doesn’t care about the political frame. And then he does his little dance where he switches frames and gets bad faith examples because he’s good at that. And you know, look, I mean, great. You’ve got a skill of switching frames and coming up on the fly with bad faith examples. And look, I have some respect for that skill. It just doesn’t impress me because I can do it. So whatever. And then he disproves the whole concept of conspiracy. No, conspiracies don’t exist because here’s an example where conspiracies don’t exist. That’s nonsense. It’s doublespeak. It’s bad logic. And he gets caught in the bad logic again and dances around it. And this is his trick. This is his game. This is what he does best. Fair enough. Like, again, that’s his skill. Glad that you have a skill. At least one of them. Everybody should have a skill. That’s great. Not impressed. I don’t think it’s a good skill. And I think that when you’re not able to be a moral agent in the world, and Sam Harris believes in determination. So apparently he was never a moral agent in the world because he was predetermined, predestined or whatever to be this way, to make a statement that Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared. Wow. Wow. A new low for humanity. A new low. And caring is important. What we pay attention to is important. Where where and what we attend to. Where are we attending from? Are we attending from a place of love and caring? Are we attending from a place of selfishness and want or desire? Does that make desire bad? No. But does that make wanting bad? No. But where are you doing that from? Where are you caring about the world from? Because that’s going to inform what you care about. As Sam Harris has demonstrated to us, as Constantine demonstrated to us, we don’t care about dead children in a basement. We don’t care about dead children in a basement. We care about knowledge or the denigration of it. We care about democracy or the sacredness of it. That’s what they care about. That’s what’s important to them. That’s not the most important thing to me. In fact, those things aren’t important at all to me. At all. What’s important are principles, patterns. Those are important. What you know changes. What you can know changes. Knowledge itself seems to change over time. And science is very good at adjusting to that change to some extent. Not the scientific establishment as implemented, but the idea of science, the scientific method, going back and testing things over and over again. We have a replication crisis in science. Why? Because some things change. And we don’t like that idea, but they do. And that’s why you should care about the patterns. You should care about navigating the patterns properly with a proper orientation in the world. Because otherwise you won’t care. You’ll find yourself in a situation where you won’t care about Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I don’t ever want to be like that. I don’t ever want to be that person. And I hope I never become that person or a person that’s capable of becoming that person for that matter if we want to talk about patterns. And I hope that no one else becomes that person either, whether by the result of listening to Sam Harrison. Again, I have a critique on him and this is the sort of thing I was worried about. And here we are, guys. Weird that it was that quick in coming. But how the mighty have fallen. Immoral agent in the world confirmed as far as I’m concerned. And that’s just my personal opinion. I don’t know how you defend any of this. By Sam or by Constantine. I have no idea. But I’m glad that you’re here watching my videos and I’m glad that you’re experiencing this breakdown so that you can maybe add a little flavor, a little nuance and understand why this might be a problem and what the actual problem is. Because a lot of people get caught up in the emotion and the outrage and they don’t break down what is it about what Sam said that’s bothersome? What is it about the framing that he’s giving that’s a problem? Where is it that he’s gone off the rails? And I hope I’ve given you some small sense of that, where he went off the rails and why this might be bothering you and why it’s important to realize that some people are worshiping at the cult of knowledge. Some people are worshiping at the cult of politics. Some people are worshiping at the cult of economics, per my framing and perspective video. And these are all postmodern narrative frames. Power from above, postmodernist thinking. And maybe there’s a better way out there to think about the world. Maybe it’s a better way to deal with the world so we end up caring about people having dead children in their basement, which I care very much about. And I want to thank you for getting through this video. I know I had a hard time getting through this video and I apologize for that. I hope it wasn’t too disruptive. But I want to thank you that you’ve given me in this video your time and attention.