Leo D.M.J. Aurini - March 04, 2013


Gresham's Law： Moral Behaviour in an Immoral World


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

134.84288

Word Count

1,858

Sentence Count

152

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary

Take the high road or the low road when it comes to dealing with people you care deeply about. In this episode, we'll talk about how to deal with messy breakups and mud-slinging by your partner and how to handle it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Gresham's law is a rule of economics that states that the bad will chase out the good.
00:00:12.760 And it's targeting currency in particular.
00:00:17.000 Imagine that you have a gold-based currency, and you have all these gold coins floating around,
00:00:22.780 and then somebody starts drilling out the centers of the gold coins and replacing them with tungsten,
00:00:27.500 which has almost the identical molecular weight.
00:00:31.920 Well, anybody that has real gold coins is going to start hoarding them,
00:00:36.880 and the only gold coins spent in the marketplace are going to be full of tungsten.
00:00:41.920 The bad will have shoved out the good.
00:00:47.680 And so it's fascinating how many other spheres this applies to, particularly with moral behavior.
00:00:54.700 And the example I'm going to use, go figure, comes from Hollywood.
00:01:00.600 Mud slinging.
00:01:01.900 These Hollywood relationships that dissolve, and you just get both partners slinging mud at each other.
00:01:10.700 The most recent example, the one on everybody's mind, at least the one I've heard about,
00:01:15.240 is Chris Brown and Rihanna.
00:01:18.320 So, you know, Chris Brown supposedly beat the shit out of Rihanna.
00:01:21.180 Rihanna supposedly gave him herpes, and it's this big kerfuffle all over the media.
00:01:28.040 And we've all been there ourselves.
00:01:30.160 We've all been to high school.
00:01:31.820 We've all had a messy breakup at one time of our life or another.
00:01:37.040 And the thing about a messy breakup is that, or really any breakup,
00:01:43.040 is you have so much information about the other person.
00:01:46.660 You have so many little details you know about them.
00:01:49.620 Little personal quirks or fetishes.
00:01:52.500 And you have naked pictures of them you could post all over the place.
00:01:56.320 That it quickly turns into a mess.
00:01:58.440 There's going to be mud slinging.
00:02:04.560 And more often than not, it's not even going to be your ex that's slinging all the mud at you.
00:02:12.120 It's going to be her little circle of friends.
00:02:15.840 Her gossip girls.
00:02:16.720 You know, these people that just out of this bloody-minded schadenfreude want to see people suffer.
00:02:26.180 So they spread all these nasty rumors, these exaggerations, these half-truths, so on and so forth.
00:02:32.540 And so you're stuck in this situation now where you're being attacked.
00:02:38.300 They're saying all this nasty stuff about you.
00:02:40.280 And are you going to start spreading rumors about, well, you know, she did this and then she did that and this other thing.
00:02:48.260 You know, are you going to start slinging mud back at her?
00:02:50.020 Are you going to stoop down to that level and just start hurting her?
00:02:55.080 And so you get into this big contest of Rochambeau.
00:02:58.300 You're kicking each other in the knees.
00:03:00.360 You both look like idiots.
00:03:02.740 Or you take the high road and it seems like nobody's on your side.
00:03:07.320 Everybody's spreading these rumors about you.
00:03:08.980 Everybody's saying that you're a dirtbag and you're an asshole and so on and so forth.
00:03:19.780 Moral behavior.
00:03:21.700 The bad chases out the good.
00:03:27.660 But does it?
00:03:32.180 Let's take another Hollywood example.
00:03:35.040 One that's a little bit less familiar because he chose to take the high road.
00:03:42.160 Mel Gibson.
00:03:44.260 Now, Mel Gibson, and you can take the Charlie Sheen is another example.
00:03:51.000 They're not perfect people.
00:03:53.000 But they're not apologizing for everything they've done.
00:03:56.560 But they're not slinging mud either.
00:03:58.540 And so Mel Gibson got into this big situation where he left a really angry voicemail on his ex's answering machine.
00:04:09.860 And his ex decided to send it to the paparazzi.
00:04:13.920 And so we've all heard Mel Gibson flipping out and yelling.
00:04:18.760 And what did Mel Gibson do?
00:04:22.460 Dude ignored it.
00:04:23.520 And so now, you get Chris Brown and Rihanna.
00:04:30.060 They show up in an event.
00:04:32.320 They're a punchline.
00:04:35.120 Mel Gibson.
00:04:36.820 Anybody that hates Mel Gibson hates him because of that Jesus movie.
00:04:40.280 And if you hate him for that Jesus movie, go watch Apocalypto.
00:04:47.160 Guy's got millions of dollars.
00:04:48.600 He's making the movies he wants to make.
00:04:50.200 And they're damn good movies.
00:04:51.860 You watch Apocalypto, you'll love him as much as you did back in Mad Max 2.
00:04:59.980 You can see, here's the thing.
00:05:03.940 Now, and...
00:05:06.040 Half the people won't know what I'm talking about, by the way.
00:05:08.620 Half the people are, they're tactical all the time.
00:05:14.680 All they think about is tactics.
00:05:16.620 I'm about to explain why you should take the high road.
00:05:20.220 And these people, it's all tactical for them.
00:05:23.620 They think, well, you know, in this situation, it makes sense to take the high road.
00:05:29.120 But in other situations, I'll take the low road and mudsling them.
00:05:33.800 And that way I'll be more popular.
00:05:35.760 They wind up just objectifying themselves.
00:05:42.120 Where, like, they're just this product of common consensus on what they are.
00:05:48.840 They're not a person, you know?
00:05:50.700 They're not an ensouled being, not in their own mind.
00:05:54.060 They are a product of what other people think of them.
00:05:57.020 You know, they're a perfect modern narcissist.
00:06:00.100 Everything is tactics.
00:06:01.140 Everything is manipulation.
00:06:02.080 There's no true friendship.
00:06:04.040 There's no true love.
00:06:05.000 There's just status.
00:06:10.440 I'm not making this video for them because they've never listened in the first place.
00:06:13.280 See, the reason you take the high road when you're in one of these ugly, mudslinging situations
00:06:25.040 isn't because of tactics.
00:06:29.440 It's because it's the right thing to do.
00:06:32.120 There's, all mess-ups are great.
00:06:34.120 All break-ups are messy.
00:06:36.380 You know, there's always going to be hurt feeling.
00:06:38.360 There's always going to be little personal quirks.
00:06:40.400 You know, nobody's, nobody's perfect.
00:06:42.760 But you don't, you don't go mudslinging because you're a human being.
00:06:46.640 And they're, they're a human being.
00:06:49.360 Even if they're your ex.
00:06:50.560 Even if you're angry at them.
00:06:52.940 You don't go spreading naked pictures of them or nasty rumors about them because they're a human being.
00:06:59.900 And so are you.
00:07:01.220 You should bloody act like one.
00:07:03.020 And here's where we get back to Gresham's Law.
00:07:08.840 You see, these two currencies, the pure gold and the gold with the core of tungsten, are not indistinguishable.
00:07:24.820 You can tell the differences between these two things.
00:07:27.140 Some people can.
00:07:29.000 The people that always take the low road cannot tell the differences between tungsten and gold.
00:07:34.240 But do you want to be their friends?
00:07:38.720 Do you, this little circle of gossip girls around your ex that want, they want to watch their friend and you kick one another in the knees until you're both bleeding.
00:07:53.600 For fun.
00:07:56.280 For tell-alls.
00:07:57.700 Because it's schadenfreude.
00:07:58.600 Because they have nothing going on in their own lives.
00:08:00.260 So they just want to see other people suffer.
00:08:03.840 They can't tell the difference between tungsten and gold.
00:08:05.960 Do you want them as friends?
00:08:08.940 Whereas when you take the high road, yeah, for the short term you take some abuse.
00:08:12.540 You get, you know, shit on a little bit.
00:08:14.620 But in the long run, the people that you actually want as friends recognize that.
00:08:20.440 You become like Mel Gibson, where, once again, he's being judged on the quality of his movies.
00:08:29.700 Whereas Chris Brown and Rihanna, hell, I don't even know what they do.
00:08:33.380 Singers or something like that?
00:08:35.560 They're Chris Brown and Rihanna.
00:08:36.960 The walking joke.
00:08:38.060 The walking joke.
00:08:44.620 And the guys that can't tell the difference between the high road and the low road, the guys that see it as a tactical question, they become Tiger Woods.
00:08:56.560 Tiger Woods, who got famous, he's a little bit beta, but now he's famous, cheats on his wife.
00:09:01.880 His wife physically assaults him, and he apologizes.
00:09:08.020 This, uh, what race is he?
00:09:09.940 The, uh, Kaplanation, Kaplanation man, who decides to apologize, try and be tactical, to do the right thing in this situation to win points, went from being the most famous golfer who ever lived to nothing.
00:09:25.700 He's not going to be handing out awards.
00:09:28.120 He, ten years from now, nobody's going to know who he is, because he applied it tactically.
00:09:32.840 If, instead, he'd taken the high road, if he said, this is a personal matter, this is none of your goddamn business, yeah, go read the police reports, go post those all over the internet, I don't care.
00:09:44.740 I've got my own life that I'm living.
00:09:48.000 He would have been fine ten years down the road.
00:09:51.140 Instead, he tacticked himself out of the war.
00:09:55.140 Now I'm talking about mudslinging in this video, but really I'm, I'm talking about morality in general.
00:10:08.640 That, so often it seems like, like cheaters and liars and manipulators and mudslingers, like they have the advantage over good people.
00:10:20.180 You know, you go and take the test honestly, well, a bunch of people are cheating on the test.
00:10:28.860 You, uh, you own your car outright.
00:10:33.960 And then there's some douchebag that has a brand new car leased, way more than he can afford.
00:10:40.700 And yeah, yeah, the dumb girls, the idiots, the, uh, the, the materialist degenerates, yeah, they're impressed with that stuff.
00:10:52.940 They're impressed with the liar, the scam artist, the guy that lies on his bank loan, the guy that buys a house that he can't afford.
00:10:58.800 They're all impressed with that.
00:11:00.180 Do you think you're fooling Aaron Clary?
00:11:06.500 You think Aaron Clary doesn't know that your brand new BMW is leased?
00:11:10.540 You think he doesn't know that your horse, horse farm, your horse riding ranch,
00:11:15.260 think he doesn't know that that's a loss every single year?
00:11:19.280 You think he doesn't know that, that this rich guy with his big cookie cutter mansion and his brand new cars,
00:11:27.000 Aaron Clary knows that that guy's insolvent.
00:11:28.820 Whereas the guy driving the older car takes care of his stuff, and, you know, maybe not as much flesh.
00:11:34.800 Doesn't seem like he's getting ahead.
00:11:37.560 He's solvent.
00:11:38.620 He's taking the high road.
00:11:40.300 He's choosing the moral behavior.
00:11:42.780 Economically, socially, you name it.
00:11:47.460 The person that walks the high road, yeah, in the short term, the idiots are going to think that you're, you're, you're the bad guy.
00:11:55.860 You're the loser.
00:11:57.400 You're whatever.
00:11:58.500 But, you know what, over the long term, the people you actually want as friends will notice when you take the high road.
00:12:07.860 Because, at the end of the day, who are you trying to impress?
00:12:14.680 Men and women of decent character and of internal worth?
00:12:19.220 Or are you trying to impress the gossip girls with their schadenfreude, their rumors, and their empty, empty lives?
00:12:29.000 Final word on this video, an addendum, if you will.
00:12:38.200 The reason I'm thinking so much about this particular topic tonight is because I happen to be going through one of these mudslinging situations.
00:12:51.980 Now, ironically, everybody actually involved in the situation is far less, it's messy, they're always messy, right?
00:13:01.940 But, the people actually involved are far less angry and vitriolic than the gossip girls are.
00:13:09.800 The gossip girls are just there, slinging mud.
00:13:13.260 And, and it's not that interesting of a situation.
00:13:16.780 It's just another personal bullshit drama that I have no interest in spreading or spreading hate or anything like that.
00:13:25.860 But, people involved know what's going on, and so, any comments referencing this situation, I am going to delete on the comment thread.
00:13:35.440 Because, it's not really relevant to the thrust of this video.
00:13:43.220 Anyway, folks, love you all.
00:13:46.280 Irini out.