00:01:13.140Because to become an Uberminge, an individual has to overcome suffering.
00:01:20.700Who has the potential to be self-actualized if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?
00:01:31.320And the fun thing about Laszlo's system is it's a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist think that they're already at the top of it.
00:01:42.420And it explains to the rich progressive who doesn't want to think about why the poor have different world frameworks in them.
00:01:57.180I'm excited to be here with you today.
00:01:58.460Today, we are going to be talking about the links between the Uberminge, as developed and defined by Nietzsche, and the rebranding of the term self-actualization into its modern definition, which was done by Abraham Maslow of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs fame.
00:02:31.020Anyway, we have another episode if you want to understand how Maslow rebranded the term self-actualization and how his rebranding was so toxic and largely destroyed the field of psychology and is the seedbed of the urban monoculture.
00:02:46.940That is not what we're going to be focusing on in this episode.
00:02:49.280What we're going to be focusing on in this episode is Maslow was pretty explicit in this in some of his works.
00:02:56.240Self-actualization was a rebranding, an explicit rebranding, of the concept of the Uberminge.
00:03:03.860But it was rebranded to be palatable to a broadly progressive urban monoculture cultural perspective.
00:03:13.740And through the rebranding, in a way, it became an inversion of itself.
00:03:19.280I think he thought he was just making little tweaks to it and not realizing that he was actually retooling the core of what it meant.
00:03:31.140Now, broadly speaking, I'm going to go over what these two mean, and then we're going to go over how they contrast with each other in understanding and what we as individuals can take away from this contrast to understand how we can live meaningful lives.
00:03:51.160Can you imagine when they first introduced this to you, like in your college psychology class, they're like, oh, yeah, like there's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
00:03:58.300And at the top, it's basically Nietzsche's Uberminge.
00:04:02.940The good thing about Nietzsche's Uberminge, one of the best things to contrast it with the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization is that the definition, when you boil it down, is actually pretty clear.
00:04:16.560And it's not like vague, just a bunch of positive things.
00:04:20.440You are an Uberminge if you do not get your morality from your culture.
00:04:34.460If you pick up what you think is right and wrong because other people told you this is what's right and this is what's wrong, you are not an Uberminge.
00:04:45.460If you develop what is right versus wrong because you personally sat down and saw it through.
00:04:53.140Now, it's not saying that you reject morality or you embrace nihilism.
00:04:57.700It's actually a specific refutation of that.
00:05:00.720Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has.
00:05:06.480There is a way to say society is wrong or society isn't necessarily right.
00:05:12.360As we see in the Pragmatist Guide to Life, we do not live at the moral nexus of history.
00:05:16.800You cannot assume that just because there's a moral understanding today, and this is true of all people in the past, wherever you look in the past, there is going to be something that they did that today we consider absolutely mortifyingly amoral.
00:05:54.920So, I – and people can be like, well, no, morality moves in like one direction.
00:06:01.360And I'm like, okay, well, suppose you are of this progressive mindset and you think that.
00:06:05.400There have been periods in history where, you know, I go to, let's say, slave owner in the South or something like that, right?
00:06:14.920And I point to earlier periods of European history where, like, same-sex relationships were more acceptable.
00:06:21.620And they're like, well, those people were clearly evil.
00:06:23.940Look, society is always moving towards progress.
00:06:26.240And yet today the things that had been normalized in the slave-owning South but were less normalized during that period but more normalized during earlier parts of European history.
00:06:34.900And note, I'm not saying here that same-sex relationships were ever totally normalized, like them being totally normalized in Rome or Greece is just inaccurate.
00:06:43.780But there were forms of same-sex relationships that were more normalized.
00:06:47.540Than during the high end of slave-owning South.
00:06:49.640That they would say, like, okay, well, then maybe it goes in like a wave or something.
00:06:54.220It's like, no, you just need to – there are going to be things that are normal today that people in the future are going to find mortified.
00:06:59.580So, Nietzsche says, you have a responsibility to not just accept morality, which is, I think, interesting in that it goes against a lot of modern rightist philosophy.
00:07:14.140And that a lot of modern rightist philosophy says, learn from your ancestors, embrace your culture, where Nietzsche says, no, learn from and evolve that culture into something better.
00:07:31.420It's important to start with because I think a lot of people get the Ubermensch wrong.
00:07:34.560They think it's some weird racial hierarchy something or – I do not know what they think it is.
00:07:39.860I think they think it's like a genetically engineered person.
00:07:42.340I sort of see this – or the height of, like, German blood perfection.
00:07:46.420And it's like, no, that never had anything to do with it.
00:07:48.920If I broadly were to model the leftist commentators that I constantly listen to online, I think what they would vaguely conjure in their minds is a proto-edgelord.
00:08:02.880And there's no such thing as someone who's actually, like, advanced.
00:08:06.220It's just someone who, like, actively acts edgelordy or they would call themselves heterodox, if that makes sense.
00:08:12.280Well, it's funny because they're actually kind of right.
00:08:15.160It's about somebody who defines their own moral truths because that's the only – if you're following a form of morality, like, obviously you're better than the pure nihilist if you follow some moral framework.
00:08:26.720But if you follow that moral framework only because somebody else told you this is what's right and wrong, you're patently lower on a global moral hierarchy than somebody who developed their own moral norms by putting thought into it, right?
00:08:41.680Yeah, and to be fair, Malcolm and I are very, very passionate about this.
00:08:45.780Before we knew what Nietzsche's philosophy was all about because we just didn't study it.
00:09:06.260And here's a guide to thinking, like, thought experiments around common potential things you may want to optimize, be it hedonism or serving God or any variety of other things.
00:09:18.960And we just want people to actually take ownership of that thought process.
00:09:22.240So we 100% respect what he's doing here and we like it.
00:09:55.360I think if I'm going to view Maslow's hierarchy of needs and self-actualization as he handles it disfavorably, I would say what it really is is just self-acceptance.
00:10:06.180Just sort of, like, you are okay with your place in the world, which you can definitionally be at any point, right?
00:10:12.700But he's like, no, you have to have all this lower stuff.
00:10:26.980Now, if you're going to then take the counter perspective to this and actually know it's more sophisticated than that, let's look at what, I'll take an AI's sort of rebuttal on this so you can get an understanding of how somebody might steel man his position against that.
00:10:43.500They would say that that's actually more about esteem needs level four and not self-actualization level five, where esteem needs involve feelings of accomplishment, confidence, independence, respect for others, and a stable positive self-image.
00:10:59.560This can include pride in achievement or feeling valued.
00:11:02.580And it's more about elevation of the self, e.g., I like who I am because I've succeeded.
00:11:08.400And I say here, well, yeah, but there's different types of self-acceptance, and that wasn't the type that I would be talking about here.
00:11:15.440But let's look at what they would say as a counter self-actualization is at the intended of just general self-acceptance, right?
00:11:23.140Maslow defined it as a, quote-unquote, desire to become more and more than one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming, which you can see, one, how that builds on the concept of the Ubermage.
00:11:38.220Like, clearly, he liked, oh, you know, you're building yourself, but he removes the concrete definition.
00:11:55.260About a sort of perpetual self-improvement without any definition as to what better is.
00:12:00.660Although I feel like that's so, maybe it makes sense that this just seems so much like the path that people take.
00:12:09.200Like, I remember so many of the classmates that you had at Stanford's business school, which this is one of the hardest to get into schools in the entire world.
00:12:17.740These are incredibly competent, smart, well-connected, lucky, and well-resourced people.
00:12:22.580And so many of them really didn't seem to have any moral framework or set of values that they really cared about.
00:12:30.060That actually shocked me when I hit the halls of power in society.
00:12:33.600There were some Israelis and Mormons, I'm going to say, who actually did.
00:12:36.900I mean, they weren't, I would say, like, Nietzschean or Ubermensch-y in their, because this was their default culture.
00:12:43.120Maybe they thought through it and come to own it themselves as well.
00:12:45.440Still, their big thing was just, I'm doing the best thing.
00:13:02.420You know, we've been in sort of the halls of power in society and the, you know, Peter Thiel secret societies and everything like that, right?
00:13:10.480Like, and so I've encountered the best and brightest of what the institutions that are generally thought of as accumulating the best and brightest bring.
00:13:21.820My first question, and this is, Simone knows this from me, from our first date, to somebody who's always like, okay, like, what are you about?
00:13:29.500Like, what are you attempting to do with your life?
00:13:33.060Because I need to know how I can align my goals and their goals and if there's a useful alignment or if there's not a useful alignment.
00:13:38.480The number of people who sputter and start outputting platitudes when you put that question to them, which I think should be the number one question any individual considers, is astonishingly high in these halls of power.
00:13:54.060I'd say if you're talking about an institution like a Stanford MBA, because that's, you know, the most exclusive of the institutes that we've been talking about here, maybe one in 20 people who go through have thought through what their purpose in life is and why they exist.
00:14:17.160So I need to go to the best school, get the best grades, earn the most money with superlatives all the way down, but there's no point to it.
00:14:24.660It's just whatever is the most prestigious or seen as the highest achieving, then that's what they'll do, you know, climb up to the highest rank of whatever organization.
00:14:33.180And then if that organization gets capped out, well, then I guess I have to run for political office.
00:14:37.720And then because the government is a big organization, I guess I'll do that.
00:14:41.020And then after that, who knows what, you know, I'll be a philanthropist and basically pull the strings of multiple organizations by being their primary source of funding.
00:14:51.320And this is how people in positions of power get so easily captured by mimetic contagions, like the urban monoculture, that you as a, I don't know if you watching this have thought through your own value system,
00:15:04.120but you as a potential ubermensch may look at them and say, wait, but can't they see how stupid and self-contradictory this value system is?
00:15:14.360Like, can't they see the long-term consequences of adhering to this value system?
00:15:18.720Have they not had a single iota of internal self-reflection about what matters in life and what they live for?
00:15:28.260And the real answer is, and I say this very unfortunately, it's no, they have not.
00:15:32.440They may even find the concept of doing that offensive because it implies, you know, sort of self-ownership, which the urban monoculture teaches you is bad because if it can teach you that, then you don't end up reflecting on these ideas.
00:15:48.900The next point I make about the ubermensch before I go further here, which is important in this world, is you might be like, oh, that's quite arrogant to call yourself the ubermensch.
00:15:55.420No, the ubermensch is a simply defined thing.
00:15:57.820Did you build your own moral framework or did you take it from an outside source?
00:16:03.540Yeah, and it doesn't matter if you are the wealthiest person in the world or impoverished, right?
00:16:17.360There's nothing elitist about it at all, actually.
00:16:19.840Or it's not even like, I mean, it absolutely can come from a place of superiority.
00:16:24.820There's something elitist about it, and it's elitist in our conception of it, and it was elitist in Nietzsche's conception of it.
00:16:31.140Ubermensch are morally superior to non-ubermensch, which is, I think, just an objectively and obviously true thing as soon as you think through it.
00:16:40.420Somebody who has taken ownership and saw it through a value system, even if it's exactly the same as somebody else's value system, is doing something of a higher moral caliber by following that value system than the person who's just following what everyone else says is right and wrong.
00:16:55.240Because they've taken on this additional layer of moral verification.
00:17:02.700Somebody could be like, well, why was that moral verification necessary?
00:17:05.600Wasn't that just like self-masturbatory work if it ended up at the same place as society's value?
00:17:10.600And it's like, no, it wasn't, because it may not have.
00:17:14.440And if it didn't, it would lead to a completely different trajectory of this in person's entire moral prism through which they see reality.
00:17:21.980So it is elitist in that it does rank people into a scale of moral hierarchy.
00:17:28.660But it isn't elitist in that only the mentally superior can engage with it.
00:17:34.280It's more like the mentally superior in terms of, I don't know, being willing to be critical of society or being self-critical that puts you in that category, not IQ.
00:17:43.760So back to what it's saying self-actualization is here.
00:17:46.680It is less about feeling good about yourself in a static way and more about growth, authenticity, and actualizing innate potentials.
00:17:56.940It includes traits like realistic and accurate perception of reality, including oneself without illusions or denial, self-acceptance, accepting flaws without shame or defensiveness, but not complacency, autonomy and independence from external approval, creativity, spontaneity, and quote-unquote peak experiences, moments of profound joy, insight, or transcendence.
00:18:22.120Now, note here what you'll see in some of these.
00:18:25.200Some of these carry parts of the Ubermich within them, right?
00:18:31.120Autonomy and independence from external approval is sort of key to building your own moral framework, right?
00:18:37.780But then other of them are just completely like cucked urban monoculture, creativity, spontaneity, and peak experiences.
00:18:50.220What does that have to do with actualization, right?
00:19:13.260Some kind of aesthetic or some kind of cultural trend at the time?
00:19:16.400So I think what he was trying to go with this was to say this Ubermich concept has a lot of baggage,
00:19:25.720but I want to create because people love creating a categoried framework of society.
00:19:31.480Let's create a categoried framework of society.
00:19:33.980If you'd like to see some of ours, you can check out like our life stages and stuff like that videos.
00:19:38.620If you have this categoried framework of society and you have something at the top of it,
00:19:43.640you then look to other systems that have similar things.
00:19:47.040And the two systems that he very obviously pulled pretty hard from to the point of plagiarization is combining the Ubermich twisted through a progressive lens with the Buddha.
00:20:00.960And we talked about that a lot in the last episode.
00:20:03.720There's clearly a lot of Buddhist inspiration in the modern concept of self-actualization.
00:20:09.920It's just this thing that is definitionally the best and that if you have to ask how it's qualitatively or quantitatively different from other states,
00:20:19.880that's just proof that you don't have it.
00:20:22.140And when you have it, then you'll know.
00:20:23.740But because you're asking about it, then you don't know.
00:22:28.420The point being is you can see how it's melding these ideas together.
00:22:33.180But – and I'll note here that an area of overlap is that Maslow also says that self-actualization involves accurate self-knowledge and humility.
00:22:42.520So, to continue – and I'll note here, this is coming from Maslow himself because a lot of people are like, well, that just sounds like you're describing a narcissist, right?
00:22:51.660Like a really self-centered narcissist.
00:22:54.220And so, he had to have, you know, his boilerplate argument about why this isn't just an entire world framing about how to be a better narcissist, right?
00:23:03.060And he emphasized that self-actualized people were actually not narcissistic.
00:23:08.260They have a strong sense of reality, testing, humility, and resistance to self-deception.
00:23:15.260Narcissism, by contrast, involved distorted self-perception and a fragmented ego defensiveness, which are antithetical to self-actualization.
00:23:25.960On selfishness, Maslow noted that someone self-actualizing often fuses selflessness and usefulness into a higher utility.
00:23:36.160They pursue personal growth, but this naturally leads to good for others.
00:23:41.780In later frameworks, he added transcendence as a level beyond humanity slash nature slash the universe, getting very Buddhism influenced here, and helping others grow to explicitly counter any self-only interpretation.
00:24:18.660Does that correlate with better health, longer lifespan, signs of flourishing like rates of marriage or wealth creation or family formation, the number of kids they have?
00:24:30.580Like, I just don't see what this correlates with and why he would choose it as a desired outcome.
00:24:35.600Because I don't see it as being correlated with, particularly correlated with any sort of desired outcome.
00:24:45.740And I think that we can see that this is the case by the way that he developed his theory.
00:24:50.840He just looked at a bunch of people that mainstream society respects and then boiled that down, and what he got was a system of values that looks a lot like mainstream society's value systems.
00:25:03.760But, surprise, surprise, that is more palatable to an average person in mainstream society because they don't need to adapt, right?
00:26:32.800Because they're actually, I mean, I think, actually, I almost want to do a reworking of how the force is interpreted to show that the light side of the force is actually evil.
00:26:44.560Oh, that's going to make a great episode.
00:26:47.960It's just that the way it's interpreted in Star Wars always sort of forces darksiders to take on these horrible actions.
00:26:54.960But if you look at it completely pragmatically, to say a person decided to use the force against the force's own will for whatever was good for evolving humanity and moving civilization forward.
00:27:08.100That person would be a darksider because they would be not obeying the will of a, what, a non-democratically elected god entity that gets to tell an independent branch of, like, ninjas who just kill people on the streets, like, what is moral and what is not moral?
00:27:29.500That doesn't, that doesn't sound, that sounds like slave morality to me, man.
00:27:33.420Yeah, on whose authority does the force get to govern all humans?
00:27:54.960That the mitochlorians, I, I also love that because we know that the force is controlled by, like, living organisms that are symbiotes with humans and live in ourselves.
00:28:03.820So, humanity who follows the light side is literally slaves to the hive mind of a parasitic organism.
00:28:13.320Yeah, I guess the analogy is to be like, well, my gut microbiome tells me to, this, the toxoplasmosis I'm subject to.
00:28:20.260They're literally obeyed the toxoplasmosis.
00:28:38.200So, he introduced the concept of the uvermectin in his 1883 to 1885 philosophical novel, Thus Spoke Zoroaster.
00:28:47.460It's a central idea in philosophy representing the idea that a human who transcends traditional morality, societal norms, and human weaknesses to create new values and affirm life fully.
00:28:56.680Now, note here how this definition sounds a lot squidgier than the definition I gave, but that's because this is how it is commonly interpreted by people, even though that's not how it's actually laid out.
00:29:06.720Because he's like, once you define your own morality, all of these other positive things come to you.
00:29:12.540You do get a lot of positive things from taking complete ownership over your own moral framework.
00:29:17.940But, yeah, but he, I think, especially the people who have built on him, went a little mystical with what those nice things are afterwards, right?
00:29:29.860Like, you then become an axiomatically good person.
00:29:32.620Where, no, there's a lot of people who have defined their own moral framework and were still really, they came up with horrible moral frameworks, right?
00:29:40.740A lot of the people who have read our book, The Pragmatist Guide to Life, and reported back to us have come up with conclusions that we wouldn't come to.
00:29:49.580But we're actually glad, because it means that the book is not biased.
00:30:15.420So the Ubermensch emerged in a world where God is dead, as Nish said.
00:30:20.660Traditional religious and moral foundations have collapsed, requiring individuals to overcome nihilism through self-mastery and creativity and the will to power,
00:30:29.440an innate drive to grow, dominate, and shape one's existence.
00:30:33.480Nishay contextualized it as an evolutionary leap, not a biological Superman, but a psychological and cultural one that embraces eternal recurrence,
00:30:45.680living as if one's life repeats forever, rejects herd mentality, slave morality, and embodies the idea of fati, love of fate.
00:30:54.720You know, this is interesting, the idea that your life repeats forever and you should live as if that.
00:31:00.920We argue for something similar, but different, where we say that because the timeline has already played out, we believe,
00:31:10.600like time is just like distance or anything like that, another framework, and the future is predestined,
00:31:16.940or all possible futures are predestined.
00:31:18.840Because of that, every moment in time is infinite, and therefore you have infinite moral responsibility for how you choose to burn every moment.
00:31:30.560And the most important decision you can make is the framework you use and how you build the framework you use for making those individual choices,
00:31:39.640which was the point of the book that we mentioned, The Pragmatist Guide to Life.
00:32:55.640So how are they actually different from each other?
00:32:58.420And where would people, like, where would Maslow be like, oh my god, this needed to be rethought because this comes downstream of Nietzschean philosophy, right?
00:33:07.020If I'm going to package this for the positive psychology community.
00:33:25.440But what an outsider would say is Nietzsche's ubermensch is rare, aristocratic, and anti-egalitarian, reserved for the strong-willed few who can endure isolation, create new values, and potentially scorn or lead the herd.
00:35:07.160But what's ironic is as soon as you put it like that, you realize, oh, the huddled masses is who have the potential to become the ubermensch.
00:35:18.020Who has the potential to be self-actualized if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?
00:35:29.580Self-actualization within Maslow's system is definitionally reserved for the elite.
00:35:36.080And then gated through elitist institutions like therapy and elite education.
00:35:44.900I also find it interesting that the one thing I would think all humans have access to, while not everyone is born equally intelligent, I think all men have access to or should be judged by their lack of access to their own personal willpower.
00:36:02.840It says it's reserved for the strong-willed few.
00:36:08.020Being strong-willed, if it is genetic, like, let's assume it is genetic, it is still worth me scorning the individual who is not strong-willed because they will take actions that are immoral at a higher rate.
00:36:22.140And scorn is used to prevent them gaining power, which they will use to take immoral actions.
00:36:28.860When we make the concept of recognizing, which you can see here in this AI is doing, of recognizing, and I think Maslow did from the perspective of the urban monoculture, that strong will is a negative trait.
00:36:45.300To say, if I recognize strong will in others, and I laud them for that, that is a negative thing for me to do.
00:36:56.360Ranking humanity on the amount of self-responsibility that they are taking in terms of building their own moral frameworks versus ranking humanity by, and I love the entire hierarchy of needs pyramid is meant to sort of hand wave that this is being done.
00:37:14.540Ranking humanity by wealth, which is fundamentally what the hierarchy of needs does, because it monetizes the things that you need.
00:37:24.760It creates a food period of basically stuff you need to buy, experiences, friendships, dating, romance, sex, everything like that.
00:37:37.280Whereas what the Ubermensch does is it says, no, you can just go straight in and get this stuff yourself.
00:37:44.760You can learn to control all of these other needs while building a moral framework and living your life around that framework.
00:37:53.520Thoughts before I go further here, Simone?
00:37:56.980Nothing in particular, but what you're saying makes sense.
00:38:37.980A lot of this, you can understand why this is the case when you look at incentives.
00:38:41.700Therapists who systematically are very, very good at getting people who have problems what they need and helping them get to a good place mentally, go out of business.
00:38:52.940Therapists, therapists who create codependency, do really well.
00:38:56.400Who are going to be the therapists left after 20, 30, 40, 50 years of that?
00:39:00.980The ones who create codependency and maintain your problems or better yet, make them worse so you have to up your hours.
00:39:08.880It's just obvious that it would end up like this.
00:39:11.940And then what you get, and this is why the urban monoculture as an evolving sort of organic entity is so important.
00:39:17.360Then you can see how a profession like this could co-evolve with a mimetic set where the profession helps put more people in a mental state where they're willing to accept and then dedicate their time, life, and resources to proliferating this mimetic set.
00:39:35.820Where that mimetic set also funnels people in to this profession.
00:40:21.380Reducing threat detection is important if you're going to join a culture where your own people are systematically going extinct and you are importing a hostile foreign group.
00:40:30.160A normal person would say, well, this seems like a big mistake.
00:40:34.300But if you have the thing in your brain that is telling mice to go where the cats are and do a little dance so they can eat you, it's easy to see how it adopted the same circuitry.
00:40:44.160To get the progressive to say, yeah, let's bring the knife wielding man to my country who is actively saying he wants to kill anyone who is like me, which they often will.
00:40:54.720There was a case recently in the UK where the government in charge, like Stalmer's government, was cheering, saying we want a major civil rights victory, bringing this guy back to the UK and freeing him from Egypt.
00:41:26.360But, but the, the next inversion here that it sees, but I find that first inversion very interesting because they're trying to hide from you the truths of inclusivity.
00:41:37.100And the reason why this can make sense to it from an elitist perspective, whether that's AI that is often trained on elitist data or to the type of person who you're going to read because they have reach, i.e. they're writing books or they're writing the New York Times.
00:41:56.800So, and everyone they know has all their needs met.
00:41:59.380So when they go out there and they say, well, self-actualization is available to everyone, whereas having willpower is not, what they mean is everyone in their evoked set of friends.
00:42:10.740They know that if they told their set of friends, hey, you have to take responsibility for the things you're doing and saying, you have to take more responsibility for your own system.
00:42:19.860And so they're like, well, then this is an inegalitarian thing because my friends wouldn't engage with this.
00:42:25.780They don't consider if I'm actually talking about somebody who's struggling in life and in a disadvantaged position, which system is more accessible to them?
00:42:36.240Because they just genuinely don't think about those people.
00:42:39.520And I think that this is also really important to understand when they're talking about being a fem cell, when they're talking about being a, you know, oh, you know, guys just don't get it when I, you know, hit on them or whatever.
00:42:50.240It's so hard to date when they're a girl.
00:42:52.160And what are you guys talking about when they're saying all this?
00:43:03.920If they do not look at a guy and think, I want to bone that, that person does not clock as meaningfully human.
00:43:09.660The guy who bags her food at the grocery store, they are never considering that person when they're talking about guys just don't date me, right?
00:43:19.840Like they know that that person would date them, right?
00:43:24.420I guess the more implied statement is eight out of tens don't date me.
00:43:30.100Yeah, and I think the, but it's more that morality and moral frameworks do not worry in terms of how they apply to anyone below the eight out of ten.
00:43:41.040Because I simply don't consider them in anything I do in my life.
00:43:44.600So a great example of this is incels versus gays, right?
00:43:49.600So these women, right, they're our gays.
00:43:54.560Like a lot of women, look at our Yowie episode, right?
00:43:57.580Where we talk about this phenomenon, right?
00:43:59.280And so when you say to them something like, well, I do not think that it is good to normalize that people who are same-sex attracted, that the default pathway for them or the only pathway available for them is going into same-sex relationships.
00:44:17.500And to which they would gasp and say, but if they don't go into same-sex relationships, how are they going to be able to masturbate their arousal system?
00:44:26.680How are they going to be able to have sex with somebody that they want to have sex with, right?
00:44:32.320And they'll say it's about love, but we all know that you can love people who you're not attracted to.
00:44:46.020What they're really mortified at is the idea that the gay men that they want to F wouldn't be able to sleep with whoever they want to sleep with, wouldn't be able to masturbate their arousal system, would be inconvenienced or challenged.
00:44:59.260Now, you talk about the incel, who has the same struggle.
00:45:05.460They are not able to masturbate their arousal system in the way that they want to masturbate it.
00:45:09.740And they say, well, their plight deserves not just no concern, but active scorn.
00:45:20.960I am annoyed and angry that you have inconvenienced me with suffering that is ironically of a form that I view as so absolutely societally existential to protect in the form of gay normalization.
00:46:37.120Why is the incel asking for sympathy around something you see as absolutely socially existential in this other context now worthy of score?
00:46:46.520The polarization of the difference of these views.
00:47:45.700And in general, if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you happen to have an iPhone, because we don't even have one, it would mean a lot to us.
00:47:54.120We know people look at that for whatever reason.
00:47:56.380And we, I do not know why the Apple Podcasts reviews matter.
00:48:00.060But anyway, I want to, I want to go to the, actually, do you want to say what our Apple Podcasts review is right now?
00:48:04.320I think we're at like 130 or something, 140.
00:48:08.980See, we don't have that many because we're very YouTube first podcast.
00:48:33.680A, so this is another difference that something like an AI would see in this, which I think is good because it's getting sort of the average societal opinion of how these concepts are different.
00:48:41.820Amoral slash value creating versus inherently ethical and pro-social.
00:48:48.400So, it's interesting here that it is assigning Nietzsche's system as being amoral slash value creating and Laszlo's system is inherently ethical and pro-social.
00:48:58.040Where I actually think the inversion is true.
00:49:00.500I think that the Laszlo's system is amoral and value creating and the Nietzsche system is inherently ethical and pro-social.
00:49:08.160The ubermensch transcends slave morality, Christianity, pity, equality, resentment, to invert their own values, which could be noble, ruthless, or experimental, not guarantees of kindness.
00:49:21.000Nietzsche warns against pity as weakening and celebrates amor fati, loving fate, as triumphant self-assertion.
00:49:29.500Maslow and since self-actualized people are automatically ethical, creative, just, loving, and reality-oriented.
00:50:02.500They exhibit B values, being values like truth, beauty, wholeness, justice, and often move towards transcendence, helping others self-actualize.
00:50:15.600He explicitly rejects Nietzschean, quote-unquote, rampaging egotism or callousness as pathological, not sublime.
00:50:26.440It's Nietzsche light, the perks of harmonious descent, not the barbaric joy of conquest.
00:50:32.940Or I would say the acceptance that, because really what this is all about and what the big fear you see in the contrast of the two system is,
00:50:40.980is, again, Nietzsche's system requires self-ownership, right?
00:50:46.500It requires, because as soon as you take the self-ownership, then you can say, well, then why don't I just not act on those intrusive thoughts?
00:50:53.660Like, why isn't that the goal instead of satiating the intrusive thoughts, right?
00:52:18.800You've got your, you know, I mean, they want to know where they are in a system.
00:52:24.840And the fun thing about Laszlo's system is it's a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist
00:52:32.360think that they're already at the top of it.
00:52:34.860And it explains to the rich, progressive, who doesn't want to think about why the urban poor or rural poor have different world frameworks in them.
00:53:03.760I also just see, has Maslow's hierarchy of needs as being a means of justifying basically any form of indulgence?
00:53:11.380Like, oh, well, I need to go out and treat myself to X because I just don't feel shored up in this part of my pyramid,
00:53:20.080and I can't do the more important stuff unless this is addressed.
00:53:24.340Except, as I mentioned when we were talking about this before,
00:53:27.780every rung in this period or every level of this pyramid of needs is insatiable.
00:53:34.400There is no level at which someone can say, okay, I have enough.
00:53:39.860The enough part of it really has to do with whether or not you care or how much you care or how you choose to interpret your situation.
00:53:48.260And someone, for example, with very little actual physical or mental safety could feel safe just depending on how they interpret the world.
00:53:57.060Whereas someone who is maybe even a paid security team who lives in a gated community and who's one of the more safe people in the entire world may feel deeply unsafe
00:54:08.760because that's how they've chosen to interpret their surroundings and their circumstances.
00:54:12.720So I think maybe one of the reasons, one, like, why he was compelled to create this in the first place,
00:54:18.880but also why people glom onto it, is that it's a very indulgent and a very compelling tool to justify indulgence.
00:54:26.960Just like the concept of self-care really caught on maybe, what, 10 or 15 years ago,
00:54:33.360and everyone was talking about how important it is to engage in self-care.
00:55:23.600We talk about things being shop opportunities because we get that it's a very human thing to want these excuses.
00:55:30.320But we need to understand what I think is important is Laszlo's hierarchy of need normalizes sin.
00:55:37.020I think it's important from the moral framework that we push, whenever you are doing something out of alignment with your objective function.
00:55:46.440Now, your objective function may be hedonism.
00:55:51.680Like, whatever that looks like for you, right?
00:55:53.220But when you're doing something outside your objective function, that is sin, right?
00:55:57.600And so it tries to normalize all of the things that we know are distracting us from, and I think very few people who watch this are probably hedonists.
00:56:08.400They're like, I want to move human civilization forward.
00:56:11.000I think that's the easiest thing that a lot of people are attempting to do.
00:56:14.160When I'm doing something that doesn't do that, I am sinning.
00:56:18.760And Laszlo's hierarchy of needs is just a giant pyramid of all that.