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?
00:02:30.000And, unfortunately, this is where most people stop nowadays.
00:02:34.000We have a lot of stuff clinging on to the objective truth, but not going any higher.
00:02:41.000The absolute truth is the reality underlying everything else.
00:02:47.000And you can't discover it using the methods of objective truth.
00:02:51.000It is the reason behind mathematics that mathematics can't discover.
00:02:56.000It's the firmament that is necessary for anything else to exist.
00:03:02.000And it is a moral decision, a leap of faith, to believe in the absolute truth.
00:03:09.000The 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.
00:03:22.000And you become nothing more than an object.
00:03:26.000This is the fundamental debate going on in politics for the past 300 years, and we are seeing the long-term effects of it.
00:03:37.000But it would help if I actually started putting the wheels on the road.
00:04:39.000Why don't we get rid of the God part and just keep whatever parts we like?
00:04:44.000Why don't we pick and choose which parts of the religion we like and keep those?
00:04:54.000Is seeing the flaw in this sort of reasoning.
00:04:57.000Now, regardless of the truth of religion, the vast majority of religions have been around for quite some time.
00:05:07.000And the social prescriptions that they lay down create a coherent and stable society.
00:05:15.000Your mileage may vary. Some are more stable than others. Some are more stifling than others.
00:05:21.000But 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.
00:05:38.000But this is all part of a memeplex. All of these parts are there for a reason.
00:05:45.000And the reason doesn't quite make sense at first glance.
00:05:50.000And it's the Godhead, the absolute truth.
00:05:54.000You follow all these religious rules not because they give you a stable society, but because God said so.
00:06:01.000And so now, what happens when we approach it saying that we just want a stable society?
00:06:08.000We're going to pick and choose which parts of the religion that we follow.
00:06:13.000So, 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.
00:06:22.000You keep the important parts. You got most of the religion left, don't you?
00:06:26.000Until one more rule becomes a little bit inconvenient.
00:06:32.000And then another rule. And another rule.
00:06:35.000Until, eventually, you try to have this objective religion, this objective truth of these delineated moral rules you will follow.
00:06:45.000But one by one, they had to be written out, or modified, or bit by bit, this coherent system of moral rules.
00:06:58.000Because it has no higher reason for existing. There's no God anymore in this religion.
00:07:02.000One by one, they disappear, and you're down to relative truth.
00:07:07.000Quite frankly, look at the social degeneration of the past 50 years in our civilization.
00:07:13.000So, 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.
00:07:25.000They tore them all down, had a big bonfire, danced around it, prayed to Satan, and had the best summer that ever existed.
00:07:34.000But this generation, these baby boomers, were raised in a system with all of these rules.
00:07:40.000We still had a pretty strong sense of religion.
00:07:43.000And so they were raised respecting all these rules.
00:08:09.000And 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.
00:08:17.000So the hippie girls, oh, they slept around a little bit.
00:09:10.000And it's not just in morality that this comes into play, okay?
00:09:15.000So the religious example is pretty obvious.
00:09:18.000But, 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.
00:09:30.000In the business world, the three levels of truth would correspond to the following.
00:09:35.000The absolute truth is why is the company there in the first place.
00:09:44.000And 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.
00:12:17.000What does it mean to make the best widget at the best price?
00:12:21.000Well, what if we lowered the quality of the widget, but we also lowered the quality of the price?
00:12:26.000What if we could get a greater market share by doing that?
00:12:29.000What if we hired a huge marketing department to make sure that people wanted our product more than others?
00:12:36.000See, now we're going from the profit motive down to the relative truth in marketing.
00:12:42.000Because 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.
00:13:02.000Even 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.
00:13:17.000So this company that was once about making the best product and contributing to civilization is now trying to measure market trends.
00:13:25.000It's trying to understand what the relative truth is of the consumer base and target them.
00:13:30.000So 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.
00:13:42.000The marketing tunnels down into relative truth and then the company organization.
00:13:47.000So here we're talking about company morale, about the HR department, about team building exercises.
00:13:54.000In 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.
00:14:05.000Leadership up here, the absolute truth, they're going to pull that into being a functioning organization.
00:14:12.000But now that we're down here to relative truth, we no longer have anything pulling us upward.
00:14:17.000There's no reason to take this genius and integrate him into the company.
00:14:22.000Instead, what we're going to do now is say, you know what, you're making other people look bad.
00:14:28.000You're causing tensions in the workplace.
00:14:31.000We're now going to be looking at how people are feeling, and that's all.
00:14:36.000This is where we get workplace harassment suits.
00:14:39.000This is where we get the Peter principle.
00:14:42.000And this is where we get just the general decline of corporations in this economy.
00:14:47.000They no longer care if you're doing a good job.
00:14:50.000Because we've slid an out of objective truth at this point.
00:14:53.000Nobody cares if they're making a good product anymore.
00:14:56.000They just care if the workforce is happy and that there's nobody complaining.
00:15:02.000And finally, let's look at how this destroys our modern political systems.
00:15:14.000Specifically, let's look at libertarianism.
00:15:17.000Because I know, listen, everybody here, we like the idea of limited government, responsible government, lower taxes, more free market.
00:15:26.000This is how a properly run country works.
00:15:29.000In fact, the best example of a libertarian country is a monarchy.
00:15:37.000And the second best is an aristocracy.
00:15:41.000This is something that the latest issue of Radishmag covered.
00:15:44.000It gave essentially showing that whenever you look very closely at libertarians, you wind up scratching the surface and seeing a bit of red.
00:15:55.000You see some communist values coming out with a lot of these libertarian thinkers.
00:16:00.000Even, even Rothbard, you can find it in there.
00:16:07.000So he gives you the examples of how all of this happens.
00:16:18.000So 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.
00:16:32.000You 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.
00:16:43.000Unfortunately, it doesn't make it the absolute truth.
00:16:46.000If 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.
00:17:08.000So you take this Declaration of Human Rights, this bill that you wrote, and you've got these enumerated values on it.
00:17:15.000Freedom of speech, association, you know, being able to start your own business, whatever.
00:17:23.000So you've got this document, you start your country, and everything seems to be going pretty well at first.
00:17:30.000But then, then something funny happens.
00:17:33.000You take this document, which embraces equality, and you start to get inequality.
00:21:18.000And 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.
00:21:28.000In 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.
00:21:45.000Let's not forget the seventh principle of leadership.
00:21:49.000Develop leadership tendencies in your subordinates.
00:22:34.000In our materialist age, where we think we have everything explained, everything crumbles down into schizophrenia and madness and feelings.
00:22:47.000And that is the world where it suddenly becomes rational to starve seven million people to death because they are slightly inconvenient.
00:22:57.000There is no absolute truth that we're pinning all of this on.
00:23:02.000There is no higher purpose to the whole system that we're pinning it on.
00:23:07.000So 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.
00:23:22.000You take materialism and you look close enough.
00:23:25.000You study the foundational particles of physics.
00:23:29.000You study the foundations of mathematics.
00:23:34.000And you start to notice that there's nothing there.
00:23:37.000There's nothing that fits into the objective truth box.
00:23:42.000And that's when you make the decision.
00:23:47.000You become a postmodernist or you become a neo-reactionary.
00:23:55.000You choose Marxism and evil or you choose hierarchy and righteousness.