Leo D.M.J. Aurini - December 15, 2013


Political Theory and the Hierarchy of Truth

Topics
relative truth in marketing
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Harrison Bergeron Ted Turner Radishmag Rothbard Godhead Peter Alan
Heroism, and its Absence in Modern Culture Mel Gibson's Advice on Writing

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

142.02

Word count

3,425

Sentence count

287

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the problem with religion, and why we should get rid of the God part of it, and just keep the parts we like. Why not just throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We live in an age of materialistic philosophy.
00:00:07.000 Now, materialism is fine all on its own.
00:00:10.000 The problem is, it forgot where it came from.
00:00:13.000 It assumes a complete understanding of the nature of reality and our existence here on the earth.
00:00:20.000 But when you start to scratch the surface of materialism, you discover a paradox.
00:00:26.000 This is a paradox that religions have tried to encapsulate throughout the eras.
00:00:33.000 Taoism, that which can be written down as not the true Tao.
00:00:37.000 Christianity, if you want to save your life, give up your life. 0.95
00:00:42.000 And if you try and hold on to your life, you will lose it.
00:00:45.000 This is a contradiction that we find not just in philosophy, not just in our own lives,
00:00:51.000 but in the very foundational premises of the scientific method of mathematics itself,
00:00:57.000 that goes to undermine this materialism.
00:01:01.000 But this materialistic philosophy sees these explanations of its limitations
00:01:07.000 and assumes them to be nonsense because they don't fit into the materialistic worldview.
00:01:13.000 Now, this, of course, has very dire and very extreme political implications.
00:01:18.000 But before we can get to that, we need to discuss the hierarchy of truth.
00:01:23.000 Truth comes in three basic levels.
00:01:27.000 The absolute truth, the objective truth, and the relative truth.
00:01:34.000 The relative truth is the easiest one for us to understand.
00:01:37.000 And, of course, materialism makes fun of it more than it should.
00:01:41.000 The relative truth is what's true for you, how things make you feel, your preferences, your tastes,
00:01:48.000 the reality of the moment, how you respond to things.
00:01:51.000 That's the relative truth.
00:01:54.000 And the problem is that if you descend to the level of relative truth,
00:01:59.000 you become a response to your environment.
00:02:02.000 You become nothing more than an object.
00:02:05.000 You are objectified by not having any higher truth inside of you.
00:02:10.000 The next level is objective truth.
00:02:14.000 Now, this is where we find materialism.
00:02:16.000 This is the scientific method.
00:02:18.000 This is two plus two equals four.
00:02:20.000 These are facts and figures.
00:02:22.000 The world that we can see and measure out there.
00:02:25.000 These are laws.
00:02:26.000 These are things written down in books.
00:02:28.000 This is the objective truth.
00:02:30.000 And, unfortunately, this is where most people stop nowadays.
00:02:34.000 We have a lot of stuff clinging on to the objective truth, but not going any higher.
00:02:41.000 The absolute truth is the reality underlying everything else.
00:02:47.000 And you can't discover it using the methods of objective truth.
00:02:51.000 It is the reason behind mathematics that mathematics can't discover.
00:02:56.000 It's the firmament that is necessary for anything else to exist.
00:03:02.000 And it is a moral decision, a leap of faith, to believe in the absolute truth.
00:03:09.000 The problem is, the reason that you need to make this leap of faith is because if you don't, it doesn't matter how strongly you believe in the objective truth, eventually it crumbles into the relative truth.
00:03:22.000 And you become nothing more than an object.
00:03:26.000 This is the fundamental debate going on in politics for the past 300 years, and we are seeing the long-term effects of it.
00:03:37.000 But it would help if I actually started putting the wheels on the road.
00:03:40.000 Let's bring this down.
00:03:41.000 Let's bring this into everyday human experiences.
00:03:45.000 And, in fact, the best place to start is the video that started this whole train of thought in my head.
00:03:52.000 It's a TED talk called Atheism 2.0 by Alain de Botton, assuming he uses the original pronunciation of his name.
00:04:00.000 It might be Alan.
00:04:01.000 And I'll link to it below.
00:04:03.000 There's actually quite a bit of interesting stuff in there.
00:04:06.000 But I'm going to focus on one aspect.
00:04:09.000 So in Atheism 2.0, de Botton argues that, yes, we've all figured out that there isn't a God. 0.73
00:04:17.000 We've all figured out it's silly. Obviously it's not true.
00:04:20.000 But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:04:24.000 He argues that there is quite a bit of stuff in religion that atheists would like to have.
00:04:31.000 For instance, the wedding ceremonies, the sense of community, the moral teachings.
00:04:37.000 This is all good stuff.
00:04:39.000 Why don't we get rid of the God part and just keep whatever parts we like? 0.62
00:04:44.000 Why don't we pick and choose which parts of the religion we like and keep those?
00:04:54.000 Is seeing the flaw in this sort of reasoning.
00:04:57.000 Now, regardless of the truth of religion, the vast majority of religions have been around for quite some time.
00:05:07.000 And the social prescriptions that they lay down create a coherent and stable society.
00:05:15.000 Your mileage may vary. Some are more stable than others. Some are more stifling than others.
00:05:21.000 But the simple fact of the matter is that all of these tenets, all of these bits in the holy book that sound like nonsense upon first reading, if you don't actually study some theology and the context into which you're supposed to be interpreting all this stuff, it might seem like nonsense upon first view.
00:05:38.000 But this is all part of a memeplex. All of these parts are there for a reason.
00:05:45.000 And the reason doesn't quite make sense at first glance.
00:05:50.000 And it's the Godhead, the absolute truth.
00:05:54.000 You follow all these religious rules not because they give you a stable society, but because God said so.
00:06:01.000 And so now, what happens when we approach it saying that we just want a stable society?
00:06:08.000 We're going to pick and choose which parts of the religion that we follow.
00:06:13.000 So, at the beginning, you take a couple of the silly rules that don't seem to make much sense and you toss those out, but you keep the rest.
00:06:22.000 You keep the important parts. You got most of the religion left, don't you? 0.94
00:06:26.000 Until one more rule becomes a little bit inconvenient.
00:06:29.000 So, okay, we're done with that one.
00:06:32.000 And then another rule. And another rule.
00:06:35.000 Until, eventually, you try to have this objective religion, this objective truth of these delineated moral rules you will follow.
00:06:45.000 But one by one, they had to be written out, or modified, or bit by bit, this coherent system of moral rules.
00:06:58.000 Because it has no higher reason for existing. There's no God anymore in this religion.
00:07:02.000 One by one, they disappear, and you're down to relative truth.
00:07:07.000 Quite frankly, look at the social degeneration of the past 50 years in our civilization.
00:07:13.000 So, the hippies, the baby boomers, summer of 1969, they take all of that unnecessary wood in civilization, all those fences that didn't seem to quite make sense. 0.90
00:07:25.000 They tore them all down, had a big bonfire, danced around it, prayed to Satan, and had the best summer that ever existed.
00:07:34.000 But this generation, these baby boomers, were raised in a system with all of these rules. 0.98
00:07:40.000 We still had a pretty strong sense of religion.
00:07:43.000 And so they were raised respecting all these rules.
00:07:46.000 It's a knee-jerk.
00:07:47.000 You know, the same way that every kid in North America was taught to line up before coming in from elementary school.
00:07:54.000 Forming cues, forming lines, that's just something we're trained in.
00:07:58.000 We don't need somebody ordering us to form a line.
00:08:01.000 We don't need a banner telling us to line up this way.
00:08:07.000 We automatically form lines.
00:08:09.000 And so the baby boomers, even though they threw out all this morality, they said there was no reason for believing in it, they kept believing in it. 0.99
00:08:17.000 So the hippie girls, oh, they slept around a little bit. 1.00
00:08:20.000 They had two or three partners.
00:08:22.000 But eventually they settled down and got married.
00:08:27.000 They might have rejected the god, but they still had all the rules.
00:08:32.000 But then one by one by one, each of these social norms got cast aside.
00:08:39.000 One social norm at a time, society degenerated into the present moral morass, where none of us know what to do.
00:08:50.000 We no longer have any rules for what we're supposed to do about anything.
00:08:55.000 And it's up to each one of us to try and reinvent what it means to be a decent person.
00:09:01.000 Because we've gotten rid of the objective truth.
00:09:03.000 We're in relative truth.
00:09:05.000 Do whatever makes you feel good.
00:09:10.000 And it's not just in morality that this comes into play, okay?
00:09:15.000 So the religious example is pretty obvious.
00:09:18.000 But, you know, let's look at what happens in the business world when you lose the absolute truth and you start worshipping the objective truth.
00:09:30.000 In the business world, the three levels of truth would correspond to the following.
00:09:35.000 The absolute truth is why is the company there in the first place.
00:09:42.000 What is the purpose of this company? 0.97
00:09:44.000 And the purpose of any company ultimately boils down to we are going to make the best god damn widget at the best god damn price that we can. 0.96
00:09:54.000 That is the company's absolute truth. 0.94
00:09:57.000 That's its higher purpose for existing.
00:10:01.000 Its objective truth is profit.
00:10:05.000 Are we making more money this quarter than we made last quarter?
00:10:09.000 Because a company needs to earn profit for it to continue to exist.
00:10:15.000 And down at the level of relative truth, that is where we get the day-to-day operations.
00:10:22.000 What is the culture of this company?
00:10:24.000 What's the organization of the human resources department?
00:10:27.000 What's the attitude?
00:10:29.000 What's the morale?
00:10:30.000 The team building?
00:10:31.000 Etc.
00:10:32.000 That's the relative truth.
00:10:34.000 And you need all three.
00:10:36.000 All three levels are fundamental to this company succeeding.
00:10:41.000 But the absolute truth is the most important.
00:10:44.000 Remember, if you want to live life, give it up.
00:10:49.000 Then you can live life.
00:10:50.000 But if you try to hold on to life, you are going to be so terrified of dying that you never actually live.
00:10:57.000 But that terror drags you down into the relative truth.
00:11:02.000 And it's no different for a company.
00:11:06.000 Nowadays, we don't have absolute truth anymore.
00:11:10.000 Now, we try and have the absolute truth.
00:11:13.000 We have the company mission statement.
00:11:15.000 But that's just some words.
00:11:17.000 That's just a plaque put on a wall somewhere.
00:11:21.000 And you know what?
00:11:22.000 A majority vote with the shareholders can change that.
00:11:26.000 Nobody actually worries about that.
00:11:29.000 The point of the company...
00:11:30.000 We're all good Austrians, aren't we?
00:11:32.000 The point of the company is to make money.
00:11:34.000 The objective truth.
00:11:35.000 That's all we have.
00:11:36.000 We have some pretty words and, you know, that acknowledgement that, yeah, humans have the spiritual aspect to us.
00:11:42.000 We need something bigger than...
00:11:44.000 And so we'll make up a slogan, a motto, and yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:48.000 At the end of the day, are we making money?
00:11:50.000 That's all that matters.
00:11:52.000 And so you take this company, founded by an idealist.
00:11:57.000 Somebody with an idea to make money, but to also do it in a socially positive way.
00:12:02.000 So they create this company.
00:12:05.000 But they get older, they hire more people, it expands.
00:12:10.000 Now we're only focused on the objective truth.
00:12:14.000 And this motto.
00:12:17.000 What does it mean to make the best widget at the best price?
00:12:21.000 Well, what if we lowered the quality of the widget, but we also lowered the quality of the price?
00:12:26.000 What if we could get a greater market share by doing that?
00:12:29.000 What if we hired a huge marketing department to make sure that people wanted our product more than others?
00:12:36.000 See, now we're going from the profit motive down to the relative truth in marketing.
00:12:42.000 Because if you market a product properly, if I hand you, for example, two cans of cola, one's name brand, one's no name brand, just looking at the labels, people are going to say that the name brand product tastes better.
00:13:00.000 That's how effective marketing is.
00:13:02.000 Even us, even people that don't watch TV, even people that try and avoid this stuff, the name brand on it is going to make it seem higher quality.
00:13:14.000 We're down to relative truth now.
00:13:17.000 So this company that was once about making the best product and contributing to civilization is now trying to measure market trends.
00:13:25.000 It's trying to understand what the relative truth is of the consumer base and target them.
00:13:30.000 So if this means completely sacrificing quality in the widget, they will do that because that is the logic of objective truth quickly tunneling down into relative.
00:13:42.000 The marketing tunnels down into relative truth and then the company organization.
00:13:47.000 So here we're talking about company morale, about the HR department, about team building exercises.
00:13:54.000 In the company that remembers why it's there, if they get a genius working for them, who's a bit of a grumpy person, they're going to use leadership.
00:14:05.000 Leadership up here, the absolute truth, they're going to pull that into being a functioning organization.
00:14:12.000 But now that we're down here to relative truth, we no longer have anything pulling us upward.
00:14:17.000 There's no reason to take this genius and integrate him into the company.
00:14:22.000 Instead, what we're going to do now is say, you know what, you're making other people look bad.
00:14:28.000 You're causing tensions in the workplace.
00:14:31.000 We're now going to be looking at how people are feeling, and that's all.
00:14:36.000 This is where we get workplace harassment suits. 1.00
00:14:39.000 This is where we get the Peter principle.
00:14:42.000 And this is where we get just the general decline of corporations in this economy.
00:14:47.000 They no longer care if you're doing a good job.
00:14:50.000 Because we've slid an out of objective truth at this point.
00:14:53.000 Nobody cares if they're making a good product anymore.
00:14:56.000 They just care if the workforce is happy and that there's nobody complaining.
00:15:02.000 And finally, let's look at how this destroys our modern political systems.
00:15:14.000 Specifically, let's look at libertarianism.
00:15:17.000 Because I know, listen, everybody here, we like the idea of limited government, responsible government, lower taxes, more free market.
00:15:24.000 These are all great things.
00:15:26.000 This is how a properly run country works.
00:15:29.000 In fact, the best example of a libertarian country is a monarchy.
00:15:37.000 And the second best is an aristocracy.
00:15:41.000 This is something that the latest issue of Radishmag covered.
00:15:44.000 It gave essentially showing that whenever you look very closely at libertarians, you wind up scratching the surface and seeing a bit of red.
00:15:55.000 You see some communist values coming out with a lot of these libertarian thinkers.
00:16:00.000 Even, even Rothbard, you can find it in there.
00:16:07.000 So he gives you the examples of how all of this happens.
00:16:12.000 I'm going to explain why it happens.
00:16:18.000 So with libertarianism, to do it quickly, libertarianism, you take a document, you write down a bunch of principles on it, and you call it sacred.
00:16:29.000 You call it magic.
00:16:31.000 You call it magic.
00:16:32.000 You take this document, which is something written in objective reality, and subject to the legalism of objective reality, and you call that the absolute truth.
00:16:43.000 Unfortunately, it doesn't make it the absolute truth.
00:16:46.000 If this, if this, if this Bill of Rights, if this Constitution is the highest authority, your authority exists in the objective world, and is subject to the legalism, the flaws, and the degradation that the objective world is always subject to.
00:17:08.000 So you take this Declaration of Human Rights, this bill that you wrote, and you've got these enumerated values on it.
00:17:15.000 Freedom of speech, association, you know, being able to start your own business, whatever.
00:17:23.000 So you've got this document, you start your country, and everything seems to be going pretty well at first.
00:17:30.000 But then, then something funny happens.
00:17:33.000 You take this document, which embraces equality, and you start to get inequality.
00:17:40.000 People are born different.
00:17:43.000 Some are smarter, some are luckier, some are harder working.
00:17:48.000 And the people that are smarter, luckier, and harder working, they wind up amassing most of the wealth out of their cohort.
00:17:57.000 It's not a big deal, first generation.
00:17:59.000 You know, they're the boss, but everybody has a decent home.
00:18:02.000 Then the second generation comes along.
00:18:05.000 Their kids inherit their genes, their propensity to being able to make money.
00:18:10.000 And their kids, then, have an extra bonus.
00:18:13.000 They have it in an unequal starting place.
00:18:17.000 Some people are born poor, others are born rich.
00:18:20.000 And you do this through three or four or five generations, and you start to have some pretty substantial differences
00:18:27.000 between those born into privilege and those born into poverty.
00:18:31.000 And this document that was supposed to make everybody equal, to start to give everybody a chance in this civilization,
00:18:40.000 doesn't really seem to make much sense anymore.
00:18:42.000 What good is freedom of speech if nobody listens to you?
00:18:47.000 Ted Turner owns most of the media, so how does his freedom of speech compare to my freedom of speech?
00:18:57.000 We can enumerate them one by one, but I think you get the point.
00:19:00.000 Eventually, this document that was supposed to make all men are created equal winds up reinforcing inequality.
00:19:08.000 And so, we change it a little bit.
00:19:12.000 Suddenly, it's not just the federal government's job to provide a military and build highways.
00:19:17.000 We, you know what, we need public schooling.
00:19:20.000 We need a safety net.
00:19:22.000 We need Obamacare. 1.00
00:19:24.000 Bit by bit by bit, this inequality flows into relative truth once again.
00:19:32.000 The objective truth is that this document that makes everybody equal makes everybody unequal.
00:19:38.000 And so, if this document is going to make everybody equal, we need to start changing what equal is.
00:19:43.000 And so, even if you became a millionaire through the sweat of your own brow, we still need to drag you down.
00:19:50.000 Harrison Bergeron.
00:19:52.000 And the problem is that what are we supposed to say exactly?
00:20:01.000 Like, let's say we're trying to hold the objective truth.
00:20:03.000 So, you have these robber barons as a direct product of all of these objective freedoms that you gave everybody.
00:20:13.000 What's the problem?
00:20:14.000 What's the problem with them being a robber baron?
00:20:17.000 You know, this is a free country.
00:20:19.000 And these poor people that have no other choices freely signed up to work for the robber baron.
00:20:26.000 And the robber baron is freely doing the most he can with his money.
00:20:31.000 What's the problem?
00:20:33.000 That's his pursuit of happiness, isn't it?
00:20:35.000 He's not violating anybody else's human rights.
00:20:38.000 What are you going to criticize him for?
00:20:40.000 What did he do wrong?
00:20:42.000 Nothing.
00:20:44.000 As long as you're staying in objective truth.
00:20:47.000 When the absolute truth is that a country exists to better the human soul.
00:20:57.000 To better the human individual.
00:20:59.000 And this does not mean...
00:21:00.000 See, the communists, again, they're all the way down to relative truth.
00:21:03.000 They just want everybody to eat the exact same sandwich.
00:21:06.000 And that is happiness.
00:21:09.000 The neo-reactionary wants people to be better.
00:21:16.000 To improve themselves.
00:21:18.000 And so in that world, in that world where we still have an absolute truth that isn't written down on a piece of paper, but that people make the moral decision to have faith in.
00:21:28.000 In that world, you point to the extreme wealthy, you point to the Goldman Sachs, the ones getting the massive bailouts and the golden parachutes, and you say that you, sir, have been derelict in your duty as a leader of civilization.
00:21:45.000 Let's not forget the seventh principle of leadership.
00:21:49.000 Develop leadership tendencies in your subordinates.
00:21:53.000 Being a leader is not the boss.
00:21:56.000 Being a leader is to nurture those under you.
00:22:00.000 But the libertarian is existing in this materialist age with an objective truth.
00:22:11.000 And the higher mystery, the higher paradox, how is it that you can both rule and serve at the same time?
00:22:22.000 That's a paradox in objective truth.
00:22:24.000 It only makes sense at the level of absolute truth.
00:22:31.000 And so this is the problem, folks.
00:22:34.000 In our materialist age, where we think we have everything explained, everything crumbles down into schizophrenia and madness and feelings.
00:22:47.000 And that is the world where it suddenly becomes rational to starve seven million people to death because they are slightly inconvenient.
00:22:57.000 There is no absolute truth that we're pinning all of this on.
00:23:02.000 There is no higher purpose to the whole system that we're pinning it on.
00:23:07.000 So when you look at the welfare queen or you look at the scam artist banker, these are products of an objective truth crumbling into relative truth.
00:23:22.000 You take materialism and you look close enough.
00:23:25.000 You study the foundational particles of physics.
00:23:29.000 You study the foundations of mathematics.
00:23:34.000 And you start to notice that there's nothing there.
00:23:37.000 There's nothing that fits into the objective truth box.
00:23:42.000 And that's when you make the decision.
00:23:47.000 You become a postmodernist or you become a neo-reactionary.
00:23:55.000 You choose Marxism and evil or you choose hierarchy and righteousness.
00:24:05.000 Marini out, my brothers.