The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Critical Role of Moral Prejudice ｜ 11⧸17⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.760 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.740 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:35.720 I can already see some people who are complaining about the thumbnail.

00:00:39.540 I'm sorry that is doing psychic violence to you guys.

00:00:42.320 I told the thumbnail guy,

00:00:44.000 give me something that conveys a lot of degeneracy

00:00:46.660 that we're going to have to be talking against.

00:00:49.240 And he definitely delivered here.

00:00:51.220 So sorry if you saw the thumbnail there and got a little shocked.

00:00:55.680 It certainly conveyed what I asked,

00:00:58.340 though I didn't think I understood quite the ramifications.

00:01:01.380 What he's going to put on there.

00:01:02.340 But anyway, the point is today,

00:01:04.580 I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the critical role of moral prejudice.

00:01:10.760 You see, recently on Twitter, we had this guy, Peter Singer.

00:01:16.440 You've probably heard of him.

00:01:18.380 Maybe not.

00:01:19.360 He's a bioethicist, which should always send you running for the hills.

00:01:23.200 Anytime someone is labeled as an ethicist,

00:01:25.740 you should just immediately recognize they're probably the worst human being that's ever existed.

00:01:30.460 Watch out for anyone with the title ethicist.

00:01:32.440 But he also works as a professor over at Princeton, I believe.

00:01:39.500 And he's an Australian philosopher, I think, originally from Australia.

00:01:44.440 And he's known for a number of radical positions.

00:01:48.860 One of them is famously that he was for emphasize, basically.

00:01:54.180 He said you get rid of children well into a couple of years because really, they're not really human beings.

00:01:59.880 They don't really have feelings or souls or or anything like that.

00:02:03.420 They don't have any real, you know, viability because they can't take care of themselves.

00:02:09.360 They don't have any moral agency yet.

00:02:11.640 So you can probably just get rid of them.

00:02:13.500 So he's famous for those kind of takes.

00:02:16.260 And more recently, he came out on Twitter advertising this article, this journal article that is normalizing the idea of zoophilia.

00:02:25.560 And, well, that's pretty much exactly what you would expect.

00:02:29.480 The romantic love of animals.

00:02:32.060 It's obviously quite horrible.

00:02:34.300 And he wanted to present this as a carefully considered and thoughtful piece inside this journal.

00:02:41.640 There's this journal of difficult ideas, you know, that that he's promoting, that he's always looking to push the boundaries of ethics, those kind of things.

00:02:50.820 And so I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about why it's so important to have moral boundaries, why it's so critical to have moral prejudices that exist before we have a philosophical interrogation of things.

00:03:06.440 It's something that we like to think in kind of our modern age is that everything is up for debate.

00:03:11.520 Everything can be rationally deconstructed or defended marketplace of ideas, resolves all of this stuff through rational interrogation of all of the issues.

00:03:22.120 But I kind of want to make the case today that that's not the best way to understand the world, that actually that's a very dangerous way to understand how people interact with morality, how your society should be ordered.

00:03:34.940 And there's really no better way to kind of demonstrate that than to walk through some of the ideas that are built into the things that people like Peter Singer are exploring or trying to normalize that kind of thing.

00:03:49.140 Now, he might himself not be for this normalization.

00:03:52.440 He might just have wanted to be an edgy boy by by kind of tweeting out this paper and saying that this is kind of kind of a reasonable defense of this idea.

00:04:03.120 But that's not the point.

00:04:04.640 You really need to focus on the process and how the process breaks down these moral barriers, because something we want to understand about moral barriers is that they are placed there for a reason.

00:04:17.120 And they're placed well ahead of the actual danger.

00:04:21.260 There's a reason that we order our society the way that we do.

00:04:24.820 And it's because the slippery slope is not some logical fallacy.

00:04:28.960 It's not some weird thing that conservative Christians thought up in the 1980s.

00:04:33.820 It's a very real and observable phenomenon.

00:04:36.060 I think anyone who looks at the way our moral order has disintegrated before our eyes over the last few decades, they can start to see that linkage.

00:04:46.180 And that's one of the problems that I think many even conservatives have is they often adopt the liberalism of 20 or 30 years ago, not understanding that that liberalism led them to the place that they're at today.

00:04:57.440 So they're conservative by today's standards, but those standards are way more radical than they would have been just a decade or two ago.

00:05:06.620 And so they end up in the scenario where they're just defending the current policy position or the policy position of 30 years ago from the policy position of today.

00:05:15.060 But they don't understand how these different things are connected to each other.

00:05:18.600 And so today I wanted to dive a little bit into how they are connected.

00:05:22.780 Now I'm going to show you a little bit of the journal article that he's talking about, though I promise we're not going to spend a ton of time on it because honestly, my whole point here is really that we don't need to.

00:05:35.080 I'm going to explain more as to why that is here in a second, but I do want to go ahead and talk a little bit about this for a moment.

00:05:43.580 So when we look, someone said, I'm not going to fed posting or fed post or and you can't make me.

00:05:49.820 I appreciate your restraint, man. I really do. It's a it's an it's an honorable thing that you're able to restrain yourself that way.

00:05:55.760 All right. So let's let's take a look here. Obviously, he's leading this paper.

00:06:01.920 The person who wrote it is doing so synonymously, probably wise as to not put their name on the record for something.

00:06:08.360 Oh, so horrifically objectionable. But but anyway, they're making this case here.

00:06:15.240 And the whole the name of the article is Zoufili is morally permissible.

00:06:19.640 This is going to be the case here from the beginning.

00:06:22.220 Now, again, I don't want to I don't want to go through this whole thing because my whole case is going to be we don't need a rational argument for this.

00:06:30.100 This is I'm going to make a rational argument.

00:06:33.420 I understand the irony here, but I'm going to make a rational argument as to why no rational argument is required to have the prohibition against, you know, touching animals in a romantic way.

00:06:44.540 So let's go ahead and take a look here at the beginning of what he's going to say.

00:06:49.000 Sex with animals is a powerful social taboo that exposes its practitioners to the utmost indignation and stigma.

00:06:56.820 Yes. Yes, it does. As it should.

00:06:58.640 But taboo is the correct word here. We need to understand the power of the taboo.

00:07:04.420 The power of the taboo is that it is untouchable, that it is unassailable, that it is something that you do not go near.

00:07:12.560 You don't even suggest that this might be an option.

00:07:16.480 And that's really powerful that there's a visceral gut reaction, a disgust mechanism reaction is what most people would see this as.

00:07:25.780 And if you if you're familiar with the work of Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind, this is something that conservatives in particular are in possession of, is this disgust, is moral disgust.

00:07:37.200 And so when when you look at something that is heavily taboo, you have you almost have a literally physical reaction to what is being suggested or approach this kind of thing.

00:07:48.940 And this is really critical because this is what protects us from the excesses of our own rationality.

00:07:56.800 Now, look, rationality, I'm not making an argument against rationality.

00:08:00.020 Rationality is incredibly valuable.

00:08:02.240 It has very important uses.

00:08:04.660 We use it every day.

00:08:05.800 Obviously, I run a YouTube channel where I exercise it on a pretty regular basis.

00:08:10.600 I'm somebody who's been somebody who spends a lot of time talking about political theory, philosophy, rational cases and understanding for things.

00:08:17.900 However, it is not the be all and end all.

00:08:21.140 It is not the only way in which we interact with society.

00:08:25.840 In fact, we are far less rational than we would like to believe.

00:08:29.960 Again, that is that is kind of the conclusion that Jonathan Haidt comes to in The Righteous Mind when he's talking about the way that we kind of arrive at our moral opinions.

00:08:38.520 We really end up inheriting these opinions.

00:08:42.880 We have these opinions on kind of a chord level.

00:08:47.080 And then we go back.

00:08:48.460 He gives our rationality of the the metaphor of the writer on the elephant.

00:08:55.000 He says our our rationality is a writer on the elephant.

00:08:58.300 The elephant goes where it wants.

00:08:59.600 But the writer pretends later on that they kind of steered it that direction.

00:09:03.700 And he gives our moral rationale kind of the same agency.

00:09:09.300 You know, we have a proclivity for a certain type of morality, for a certain moral understanding of the world.

00:09:14.400 When we interact with certain moral objects or things inside the world, we approach them a certain way.

00:09:22.320 And then we kind of go back and post hoc rationalize the way that we interact with them or the way that we responded to them.

00:09:30.760 And so I think it's it's for most of us, we think of today ourselves as highly rational people.

00:09:36.660 We're very advanced.

00:09:38.080 Maybe you think of yourself as progressive.

00:09:39.940 Maybe not if you're on my channel, but a lot of people think that they are.

00:09:43.560 And so, you know, we think of ourselves as very advanced people, far more advanced than those that came before us.

00:09:50.360 And because of that, we assume that our moral attitudes have also kind of evolved and advanced along with it, that it's based on this rationality that we're not subject to the animal pressures or the, you know, the religious dogmas or the things that came before us, but that we've kind of settled all of this out.

00:10:08.380 But that's not really the case.

00:10:10.220 And I'm going to, again, take a look at this this paper just just for a second so we can understand kind of the danger of this idea.

00:10:18.480 So if you look in here, you know, there's there's all these nice citations, of course, you know, we want to make this look incredibly academic, even though it's a work of horrific and disgusting degeneracy.

00:10:31.100 But I want to just show you the headlines here.

00:10:34.340 It's the ones that you're going to assume.

00:10:35.660 So the key principles that this person is addressing when they look at the ethical issue, the first thing they do is they couch this this prohibition against this act, this morally reprehensible act, as something that is a superstitious or is traditional.

00:10:53.640 It's from a heavy social stigma, which came before that these different, you know, these different cultures had.

00:11:01.360 But then they do that.

00:11:02.220 This is the twist.

00:11:02.920 And you'll see this all the time when we when we see people talking about this and trying to rationalize kind of terrible behavior.

00:11:10.380 They'll say, but not all cultures, but not all cultures had.

00:11:14.720 Right.

00:11:15.200 Not all cultures had this thing.

00:11:16.660 And they'll they'll point to some obscure reference or they'll they'll kind of cherry pick certain historical things to make it look like there is some, you know, some level of acceptance that that's good or normal.

00:11:30.700 And so they'll try to under undermine any traditional argument by saying, but well, somewhere there was a place where this this wasn't a tradition.

00:11:38.400 And so therefore, it's fine.

00:11:40.420 Not really thinking about the fact that traditions are rooted in particular cultures.

00:11:45.260 And so it's not enough to just look at a tradition in a moment and say, oh, well, for a moment, they allowed this or this was OK.

00:11:54.800 They you're not putting it in any kind of context.

00:11:57.360 And so there's there's a wide amount of things that you're probably not accepting from that tradition, but you're just picking out of that tradition one moment and saying this is the way we should understand an issue.

00:12:08.720 And that's always dangerous.

00:12:10.160 That's why it's always dangerous to simply take a set of moral reasoning or a set of moral traditions, pull them out of the context in which they arrived in and then plug them into your current situation.

00:12:23.620 This is a mistake that people make all the time.

00:12:26.440 They do it a lot with with things like the Bible, Christianity.

00:12:29.360 They do it a lot with philosophy.

00:12:31.760 They do with all kinds of things.

00:12:32.860 They're just ripping things out of their context.

00:12:34.940 Give me the McNuggets.

00:12:36.100 You know, give me give me the bite sized pieces, the things that I can put one, two, three on an index card or, you know, regurgitate out so I can sound intelligent at a party.

00:12:46.420 And that I'll just kind of project that onto my current situation.

00:12:51.200 And that will explain kind of my rationale for what I'm doing here.

00:12:55.300 So what does this author use to kind of justify?

00:13:01.840 Well, two things they talk about.

00:13:03.180 First, they talk about harm, right?

00:13:05.140 Whether or not it harms the animal.

00:13:07.260 Now, a definition of harm, of course, is finicky because the animal doesn't have that kind of agency, which we'll get to in a second.

00:13:17.680 And so, you know, the things that cause it physical harm, it may not know, of course, because it doesn't have that level of cognitive agency to figure out, like, what's happening to it.

00:13:28.960 But that's not really the point.

00:13:31.460 I'm not here to debunk this argument.

00:13:33.640 My point is that assuming that harm is the only is one of the only two principles involved is a failing.

00:13:40.540 It's a complete failing of the human to understand the wider context of what they're doing.

00:13:46.120 The question of whether or not I am harming somebody is not sufficient to answer the moral question.

00:13:53.120 Unfortunately, in our current very liberal progressive society, this is one of them, right?

00:13:58.520 This is one of the two.

00:13:59.580 And here's the other one.

00:14:00.600 I won't leave you hanging.

00:14:01.560 The other one is, as you can imagine, the issue of consent.

00:14:06.600 And literally, it's in the animal consent.

00:14:09.420 And the reason that these two are so dangerous as this is kind of the one to punch of the ultimate kind of liberal paradigm is harm and consent.

00:14:21.680 Does it cause harm?

00:14:22.680 And does it does the individual actors involve?

00:14:26.540 Are they able to give consent?

00:14:27.820 And the answer is, if both of those are yes, then those people should be able to engage in whatever they want, or those animals and people should be able to engage in whatever they want.

00:14:39.800 That's the argument, right?

00:14:41.000 Is, like, as long as those are available, then it's morally permissible.

00:14:47.960 And that's a disaster.

00:14:49.320 Now, you might think to yourself, well, how could he make the argument that an animal could consent?

00:14:55.320 Like, that it's an animal.

00:14:56.880 Like, pretty much by definition that that's going to be beyond it.

00:15:00.900 It does not have the cognitive ability to grant that to a human being.

00:15:04.680 But, of course, that's the beauty of this one to punch of kind of moral relativism is harm and consent can really be redefined into anything.

00:15:16.100 Because, again, they're not tied to a tradition.

00:15:20.280 They're not built into a context.

00:15:22.900 They're pulled out.

00:15:24.080 They're completely disassociated from any real evaluatory rubric.

00:15:30.460 And instead, they are just putty in the hands of the people who want to go ahead and manipulate them, which is why they're so dangerous.

00:15:39.100 And this is why I have made a, you know, I guess I could say at this point a famous meme of tapping the sign.

00:15:48.140 It's not rocket science, right?

00:15:50.060 Because if you, if these are your only two standards for ethical behavior, then you can redefine things like harm and consent down to justify pretty much everything.

00:16:02.280 And we're watching that happen right now where people are taking harm and consent and saying, but when can, you know, teenagers or children, you know, figure these things out?

00:16:13.120 When can they engage in this?

00:16:14.540 When do they have the rational agency to do this?

00:16:18.140 And they make more and more excuses as to why you're able to devolve these things down over time.

00:16:24.860 And that's incredibly dangerous because, you know, one of the people on the thumbnail is Jeffrey Epstein.

00:16:28.920 And one of the reasons for that is, you know, if you can make the argument that, you know, the young women involved in Epstein's predation were actually rational actors capable of consent.

00:16:40.940 And if you can say, well, what if this person, you know, is getting paid, you know, at the end of the day, then, then, you know, there's no real harm because they're trading, you know, something now, maybe some pain or humiliation or unpleasant experience now for some kind of profit or benefit later.

00:16:59.780 And that, you know, that people do that all the time, you know, construction worker does that with his body, you know, that kind of thing.

00:17:06.300 And so why shouldn't they be able to do that?

00:17:07.880 In fact, Richard Hanania made this argument also on Twitter, basically, is like, well, if these, you know, these people, if Epstein's clients or Epstein's girls were consenting and they were trading the harm for a benefit later, then really isn't that why is this so objectual?

00:17:26.400 I don't get it.

00:17:26.980 Right.

00:17:27.740 And that's what's really important.

00:17:30.560 We need to understand the danger of deconstruction, that we are fallen creatures.

00:17:37.180 And when you understand this about humans, we understand, let me get this paper off the screen.

00:17:41.780 I'm sorry.

00:17:42.120 I don't want to keep subjecting you to any more of that.

00:17:45.940 So, so as humans, we are fallen creatures and fallen creatures like us are going to look for any and every rationale as to why we should be able to do what we want.

00:17:58.340 I mean, just think back to the Garden of Eden, right?

00:18:00.360 Very simple standard.

00:18:02.520 Just don't eat from this one tree.

00:18:03.780 You can have anything else, anything else you want, but just this one tree.

00:18:07.920 There's just one tree you can't eat from.

00:18:10.840 And, you know, and what's the first thing that happens?

00:18:15.320 We're attacked through intellect.

00:18:18.180 But did God really say, right?

00:18:20.860 Is that really what he meant?

00:18:22.560 Can't we deconstruct that standard a little bit?

00:18:25.280 I mean, isn't there isn't there some wiggle room there?

00:18:28.840 Isn't some argumentation as to why we can do what we want and we don't have to stick to kind of this understanding that's been set before us?

00:18:39.120 I mean, you're literally in communion with almighty God.

00:18:41.420 The standard can't be more clear.

00:18:44.780 Its source can't be more clear.

00:18:46.640 And yet somehow we're still able to say to ourselves or we're still able to listen to a serpent tell us, you know, maybe that's not really the case.

00:18:54.940 And we need to understand that about ourselves as human beings.

00:18:58.160 Purely rational actions don't exist, but even if they did, that doesn't make them good.

00:19:05.220 That's not really a justification.

00:19:06.480 It's not really the best way to understand kind of the moral framework in which we live and the way that we should run our society.

00:19:13.380 We should interact with each other, those kind of things.

00:19:15.800 And so that's why I'm here today to make the case against a purely rational morality because intellect has its limits.

00:19:24.500 Again, it's very valuable.

00:19:26.600 We use it every day.

00:19:27.540 I'm not here.

00:19:28.120 Are you against rationality?

00:19:29.800 A lot of people, you say one thing, say, you know, you can't be rational about this one thing.

00:19:35.000 And people are like, oh, well, if you can't be rational about this, then you're just attacking all rationality.

00:19:40.200 It's like, no, it doesn't have to be a totalizing system.

00:19:42.880 Again, that's something that rationality likes to do.

00:19:44.900 It wants to be total.

00:19:46.780 That's why we have this drive to constantly create these grand unifying systems.

00:19:51.660 We don't want nuance.

00:19:52.780 We don't want the ability for things to kind of be fluid.

00:19:56.320 We want to lock them down and control every aspect of nature and morality and everything else so that we can kind of generate the world that we want.

00:20:05.420 We want this perfect total control so everything is under our grasp.

00:20:09.060 But that's not the way the world actually works.

00:20:11.880 We're not actually capable of doing that.

00:20:14.240 Rationality is not capable of grasping everything in the world.

00:20:18.280 That's why I'm not a materialist.

00:20:19.820 That's why you shouldn't be a materialist.

00:20:21.440 And so it's really important to think about where the limits are.

00:20:25.580 And I think that people like Peter Singer kind of draw nice, bright lines for us as to like why we shouldn't go certain places, where we shouldn't be, why rationality is kind of insufficient as a justification for everything that we want to do.

00:20:40.600 So let's think about moral prejudices for a second.

00:20:45.020 Okay, what is a moral prejudice?

00:20:46.640 Now, first, we need to think about the fact, of course, that the very scary word prejudice is attached to it.

00:20:52.700 And we know that you don't want to be prejudiced, guys.

00:20:56.340 One thing, if there's one thing that's just the worst thing in the world, it's to have a prejudice, right?

00:21:00.920 And you can't ever be prejudiced towards it.

00:21:04.700 But actually, that's not how the world works.

00:21:06.640 Actually, you're prejudiced all the time.

00:21:08.420 You have particular assumptions that you make about the world, about everything you interact with, not just people, but whether or not a chair looks like it's going to be stable, whether or not a neighborhood looks like it's going to be safe, whether or not a piece of meat you're about to eat looks like it might get you sick.

00:21:28.360 I mean, you have prejudices all the time.

00:21:31.180 And those prejudices are incredibly important.

00:21:33.320 Many people would call them heuristics, right?

00:21:35.520 They're ways of looking at the world and quickly answering questions without having to rationally evaluate everything that you're looking at.

00:21:44.360 You might like to think of yourself as a rational person, but you cannot possibly rationally process every decision you need to make, every interaction you need to have all the time.

00:21:54.500 You just can't do it.

00:21:55.300 You don't have the capacity.

00:21:56.420 It's not a real thing.

00:21:57.340 And so instead you have these prejudices, you have these, you know, these inbuilt responses to things.

00:22:05.380 And there's many ways you come by them.

00:22:08.580 Many of them are biological.

00:22:10.420 You know, when you smell human refuse, you physically walk away from it. 0.98

00:22:16.180 You get ill.

00:22:17.560 You don't like it.

00:22:18.680 You have a visceral reaction.

00:22:20.960 You know, some people, if they hear someone puke, right, like they have that reaction.

00:22:26.960 Those reactions are there for a reason, right?

00:22:29.260 You have those reactions because they're biological.

00:22:32.500 Your body is telling you something.

00:22:34.260 Your genetic memory going back many, many, many centuries or far beyond that is telling you this is not something I want to be around.

00:22:43.320 This is something I probably shouldn't like just leave on the floor in my house, right?

00:22:47.320 Like I need to, something compels me on a very fundamental level to remove this from my area or to remove myself from this area because I feel like this is not a good thing.

00:23:00.580 And I can't, maybe I can't explain every reason why, but I just know that this is not something that I need to be around.

00:23:07.480 This is very normal.

00:23:08.820 And we don't just have this with biological, you know, preferences.

00:23:12.720 We don't just have this with staying away from refuse or, you know, worrying about the dark or these kind of things.

00:23:19.060 We also have this with morality.

00:23:21.840 We have a very, again, that disgust mechanism that I talked about.

00:23:26.360 And we worked really hard.

00:23:27.940 We've worked very hard in our culture to devolve and disassemble most of our disgust mechanisms.

00:23:35.580 We worked to desensitize people to all kinds of things inside our society in an attempt to normalize all kinds of behavior.

00:23:44.320 And that's what's happening here in this article.

00:23:47.200 The Zophilia article, it's trying to normalize things in the same way we've normalized a lot of other stuff.

00:23:52.640 We give them a cuter name.

00:23:53.960 You notice they're not using the normal name for something like this, which is reality.

00:23:58.020 They're using a new name that might sound a little less harsh.

00:24:02.580 You see the same thing like with maps, right?

00:24:06.300 That this is something where they're trying to rebrand those who might be predatory to children under something that would be less offensive or sound less hostile or less dangerous because they know that there's already like a revulsion attached to this thing and they want to avoid it.

00:24:20.920 And this is how the normalization process for so many things in our society has worked.

00:24:25.060 You come up with a new name.

00:24:26.600 First, you give it something clinical so that you can kind of disentangle it from the moral.

00:24:31.900 Try to make it sound scientific.

00:24:33.800 Try to make it sound like something that could be diagnosed.

00:24:37.480 And then once it's been drawn out of the realm of the moral into the realm of the clinical and you've kind of demystified the taboo, then once you've demystified that taboo and you've taken kind of that core mystical social pressure away, then you can start normalizing, right?

00:24:53.940 You can start saying, well, there's treatment for this or maybe it's not so bad.

00:24:57.900 Maybe there are pieces of this we could better understand.

00:25:00.540 And before you know it, this thing has moved from something that's untouchable that no one would have ever interacted with, that no one would have ever considered.

00:25:08.040 And it moves into a place of normalization, acceptance, and eventually celebration.

00:25:14.480 There's a reason that trans kids have become the soul of our nation, according to Joe Biden, right? 0.99

00:25:19.960 It didn't take very long.

00:25:21.180 That's because that slippery slope was already very well greased by previous movements who had gotten rid of these moral taboos, who'd gotten rid of these moral prejudices.

00:25:30.360 By removing them, they made sure that there wasn't a lot of other resistance.

00:25:34.120 And again, this is why some things might not seem so bad at the beginning, but still need to have a moral hedge put around them.

00:25:41.180 I'd say, well, but really, is that a problem?

00:25:43.520 Is that really going to lead to something else?

00:25:45.420 I mean, can't we just allow this thing and then that'll be fine?

00:25:48.500 And the answer has to be no, right?

00:25:50.660 There have to be things that are not up for debate.

00:25:52.600 They're not up for a question.

00:25:53.880 Not because maybe the thing you're even staring at is that bad in and of itself,

00:25:58.600 but because the 10 things behind it are really bad.

00:26:02.480 And if you let this first thing go through, the next 10 things will be much, much worse.

00:26:07.720 Again, we like to think that we are in control, that we are modern people with the ability to rationally decide where to draw that line.

00:26:17.920 But we are not.

00:26:18.700 And again, if you need any evidence, just look at the way we have slid down that slope in the last few decades.

00:26:24.280 It's very clear that many of the things we were warned about that people and the religious right people in the 1980s who are mocked relentlessly through movies and TV shows and songs and all this stuff are saying,

00:26:36.460 hey, this stuff's going to happen.

00:26:37.520 This is going to follow.

00:26:38.660 And in fact, not only were they, they were wrong, but only they were only wrong because they did not sufficiently understand how bad things would get.

00:26:46.880 They were right about things getting bad.

00:26:48.320 They just undersold, as wild as their assumptions looked back in the 1980s, they vastly undersold the way that things would progress.

00:26:59.380 And so that those moral prejudices that didn't seem so important back in the 80s or really the 60s or before that,

00:27:07.560 the 60s is really the real 50s, 60s or the real watershed moment, actually.

00:27:12.460 But the things that were discarded in those times didn't seem important.

00:27:17.300 They didn't seem critical.

00:27:18.820 They seemed like you could go ahead and get rid of them.

00:27:21.520 I mean, really, how bad could it be?

00:27:23.460 But once they were gone, the next step and the next step and the next step were easier.

00:27:27.880 And again, this is not a logical fallacy.

00:27:31.720 This is just an observable fact.

00:27:33.320 This is just pattern recognition.

00:27:35.120 And we've had a real war on pattern recognition for a long time here.

00:27:39.380 Just don't notice.

00:27:40.560 Don't notice what comes next.

00:27:42.460 Don't notice what happens after this.

00:27:44.620 Don't notice how these things are connected.

00:27:46.740 Just, you know, if we can isolate one thing at a time and we can rationally deconstruct one thing at a time

00:27:53.220 and we can demystify and remove the taboo and get rid of the prejudice about one thing at a time,

00:27:59.160 then the people won't notice the linkage between each one of these things.

00:28:02.540 And that has been a critical part of the leftist project.

00:28:05.060 It continues to be a critical part of the leftist project.

00:28:07.000 And let's be honest, guys, this has been a critical part of the conservative project.

00:28:11.400 When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?

00:28:15.380 When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

00:28:20.220 When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

00:28:22.900 When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

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00:28:38.900 Instacart.

00:28:39.740 Groceries that over-deliver.

00:28:42.300 It really has.

00:28:43.460 I mean, if you look at the conservative project, there are a lot of things that conservatives have been willing to disassemble,

00:28:50.520 especially when it comes to the use of things like free market economics.

00:28:54.420 When we said, well, we don't really have to protect the family, right?

00:28:57.540 People just make choices on their own.

00:28:59.340 We don't have to protect the economic ability of a man to provide for his entire family because really, at the end of the day,

00:29:05.940 won't people be happier if everyone goes to work and they get more cheap Chinese stuff, right?

00:29:11.360 And that, over time, has been something that the conservative movement has kind of paid their wages for.

00:29:18.040 Because guess what?

00:29:19.140 You know, guess who votes conservative?

00:29:20.680 It's married people with kids. 0.53

00:29:22.140 And guess what people aren't doing anymore?

00:29:24.460 Getting married or having kids.

00:29:25.980 Why?

00:29:26.180 Well, because a lot of the policies that conservatives, in theory, pushed ended up disincentivizing families,

00:29:33.580 ended up destroying critical core protections.

00:29:36.600 A lot of the things that the conservatives now celebrate about times like the 50s and 60s

00:29:41.920 were themselves dismantling of prior moral prejudices and traditions,

00:29:46.020 which protected against the kind of situation that they're in now.

00:29:49.920 So the left has been doing this, but the right has also been complicit in many ways.

00:29:55.020 With what has been going on.

00:29:58.280 So, if not rationality, where do we get this stuff, right?

00:30:03.080 So, a lot of people since the Enlightenment have wanted the human being to kind of be this disconnected,

00:30:12.480 autonomous individual making rational decisions.

00:30:15.320 They would just a priori, just before anything else, they would choose kind of where things would be

00:30:20.280 and what they would be, they would consent to, you know, social contracts.

00:30:24.240 Or my favorite is John Rawls and his original position.

00:30:27.960 He's kind of the modern version of the liberal, you know, ideal where the person goes into what's called the veil of ignorance.

00:30:37.420 And they, you know, they don't know who they're going to be in a society.

00:30:40.120 They don't know what position they're going to hold, what families they're going to be in.

00:30:43.940 And then from there, they can just make the rational decision about how the society should be run.

00:30:48.900 But, of course, the critical thing is that a human is never this.

00:30:52.720 You are never this purely rational being.

00:30:55.380 You are never this purely, you know, disconnected, rootless, autonomous individual capable of then rationally making decisions.

00:31:05.100 You only have rationality in the context of the society where you're born.

00:31:10.660 You only make these decisions based on an understanding that is imparted to you through the world that you're involved in.

00:31:17.700 Some people are going to call that postmodern.

00:31:20.060 Sure.

00:31:21.160 It's also true.

00:31:22.620 This is how we understand the world around us.

00:31:25.200 And that's critical when it comes to understanding the role that moral prejudices play.

00:31:30.440 Moral prejudices are handed down to you through tradition.

00:31:35.720 And tradition is usually a long set of encoded lessons that your ancestors learned at great cost.

00:31:44.380 And a lot of people tend to, you know, treat religion as if or tradition, though they are often the same thing.

00:31:52.220 They're not just the same thing, but religion and tradition are certainly hand in hand in this.

00:31:57.440 They are moving this direction together because they are encoding lessons that have been learned at great cost.

00:32:08.760 And a lot of people, you know, discard these things because they say, well, it's not making a rational case.

00:32:14.020 It's not laying things out.

00:32:14.960 Well, one of the things that you're kind of understanding when you embrace a tradition is that you actually are incapable of rationally arriving at every necessary understanding of the world.

00:32:27.640 I've used this example before, but I'll use it again because I think it's very instructive.

00:32:31.700 You know, I was a teacher and I've worked, you know, teaching children.

00:32:36.480 And when you teach a child, you know, you have to every parent knows this for sure.

00:32:43.640 When you're when we're teaching a child, you have to teach them low resolution versions of things that aren't strictly true, but that they need to understand so that later on they could understand a higher resolution versions of the same thing.

00:32:58.200 So, for instance, really, your child needs to understand, say, that your country is something to be proud of.

00:33:07.600 So America is good is something you might treat, teach a child young so they can properly function.

00:33:14.040 And that's a low resolution version of something.

00:33:17.940 America is more complicated.

00:33:19.200 It's not just good.

00:33:20.160 It's done bad things.

00:33:21.280 It's done good things.

00:33:22.300 It's unnecessary things.

00:33:23.660 It's made mistakes.

00:33:24.740 It's got some things about it that are failures, some things that are successes.

00:33:28.200 But for us to have a cohesive society and for society to work together and for that child to live well in the society, they need to believe that there's something positive in particular about their nation.

00:33:39.900 And so America good is a low resolution version of things that they need to do.

00:33:45.240 They need to love their country.

00:33:46.360 Now, later on, as they get older, ideally, if things are working properly, they get a higher resolution version of this where, like, America is complex, but overall still important.

00:33:56.780 And it's still something that they need to be a part of and care about.

00:34:00.240 But you can't get to that high resolution version until you've gone through the low resolution version.

00:34:04.920 Same thing with, like, the concept of God.

00:34:07.460 You know, something that you need early on because it's true and it helps you to understand the world around you.

00:34:13.520 But most people are taught a very low resolution version of that before later on, hopefully, again, unfortunately, other people don't make this journey.

00:34:22.140 But eventually learning that there's a far more complex reality that is connected to the thing that they learned previously.

00:34:28.140 This is true of tradition, too.

00:34:30.700 However, you can never actually fully understand the importance of the tradition.

00:34:34.460 See, G.K. Chesterton called tradition the democracy of the dead.

00:34:39.620 And what he's saying there is that the people that came before you sacrificed in real and meaningful ways so that you could have the life that you have now.

00:34:48.240 And that you're dependent on them just because they're not around at any given moment doesn't mean that you are not dependent on the many, many generations that came before you.

00:34:59.400 They built the society you live in.

00:35:01.520 They built the culture you live in.

00:35:03.020 They built the wealth you have.

00:35:04.240 They built the, you know, the medical systems.

00:35:06.580 They built the moral systems.

00:35:08.280 They built the world around you and made it run.

00:35:11.580 And so they have a very real input into the way you live your life, even though they're dead because their influence is so extreme on the way you exist now, the way you understand the world.

00:35:21.420 And as one person, we cannot grasp, even if we're incredibly smart, very rational, hyper rational, we cannot understand every bit of wisdom that was encoded by, you know, thousands or millions of people into this tradition and transferred to us in ways that we can understand it.

00:35:42.520 Because tradition often takes very complex things and boils them down into ways that we can understand them and we can implement them in our real life.

00:35:52.480 And again, no matter how intelligent you think you are, no matter how learned you might be, you will never truly understand everything involved in a tradition.

00:36:02.560 If you're really smart, you may be able to grasp a piece of it, a part of it.

00:36:07.100 You might be able to expand on that and do important things with it.

00:36:11.580 But you, as an individual, are never outside of your tradition.

00:36:15.740 You are never separated from it entirely.

00:36:18.340 You are never free from its influence.

00:36:20.940 You are never objective in the sense most people be.

00:36:23.980 There is truth, but that truth is always in the context of a tradition.

00:36:29.620 And that is really critical to understand.

00:36:31.480 So, you might say, Oren, okay, so there's a tradition.

00:36:36.840 I get it.

00:36:37.240 And that should inform my moral prejudices, my approaches to things.

00:36:41.280 But things change over time.

00:36:42.760 Things get better, right?

00:36:44.120 We don't want to just be stuck in tradition for all time.

00:36:46.620 What if a tradition tells us to do something that worked at one moment and then it doesn't work at another moment because the world changes?

00:36:52.860 And then, like, we all die out because we got stuck on tradition.

00:36:56.060 Well, that's actually a really good question.

00:36:58.380 That's a really good point.

00:36:59.340 You know, hypothetical person who's asking me these things.

00:37:02.560 And the answer to that is, you're right.

00:37:04.780 We do need to update traditions.

00:37:07.300 Traditions are not just static things.

00:37:10.300 What makes a tradition valuable is not that it's written down somewhere.

00:37:14.020 Writing it down somewhere might help to transmit it.

00:37:16.480 But there are a lot of people who have made the case, and I think they're right.

00:37:20.280 Oswald Spengler is one of them, who I'm quite a fan of, that have said that once you have to write these things down to transmit them, they've already lost some of their power.

00:37:30.920 Joseph de Maestro also said this, that when you have to transfer these things academically instead of through your lived experience of, you know, father to son, mother to daughter, you know, grandmother to grandchild.

00:37:46.900 So when you're no longer passing these things down through actual lived action and you have to only pass them down academically, they've actually lost something.

00:37:55.640 So while we might think, oh, well, traditions are things you write down in books.

00:37:59.480 Actually, they're not.

00:38:00.640 What makes them powerful is that they aren't written down in books.

00:38:02.880 They might get written down in books.

00:38:04.160 They might reinforce them or help them to spread somewhere at some point.

00:38:07.520 But it's the lived experience that really matters.

00:38:10.420 It's the embodiment that makes tradition more true than what we write down.

00:38:16.920 And that's really critical.

00:38:18.020 Tradition is more true than the things we write down about tradition because it's actually lived out.

00:38:23.280 It's actually experienced.

00:38:24.480 It's road tested.

00:38:26.400 Okay.

00:38:26.780 Again, as somebody who works a lot in the world of the mind, somebody who talks a lot about theory and philosophy and all these things, I can tell you that the number one failure and the temptation of people,

00:38:40.060 including even me, who knows this is a bad thing, the number one failure and temptation of the academic, of the scholar, of the person who's in the life of the mind, is to disassociate ideology and theory from practical action and to think that ideology and theory can completely dictate that action.

00:38:58.460 That is a failure.

00:39:00.160 That is, if you have done that, if you know, there's a reason to give it the ivory tower imagery, right?

00:39:05.360 Because it's so far and aloof above that it doesn't actually make contact with the world.

00:39:11.700 The theories don't really play out.

00:39:13.100 And we all know this, right?

00:39:14.140 We've all seen this.

00:39:15.220 We're all familiar with these academic theories that don't play out in real life.

00:39:19.380 And this is why our society is such a mess right now, because we are this incredibly rational, ideology-driven society that is very removed from the practical, from the things that really make day-to-day life happen, right?

00:39:33.800 And so that temptation is always there to kind of separate ideology and theory away from what is grounded.

00:39:45.100 But that's the beautiful thing about real tradition, is it's hyper-grounded, because it is lived out.

00:39:51.680 It is carried from one generation to the next in the most direct way possible.

00:39:56.280 And that means that traditions are alive.

00:39:58.940 They are changing.

00:40:00.520 They are alterable.

00:40:02.020 However, the key for traditions to be altered is, again, that lived experience.

00:40:08.180 For something to alter a tradition, it has to work over and over again.

00:40:13.820 You don't just radically change your tradition inside a few years, the way that you snap-change something in science, if you need to.

00:40:23.220 There's a very slow method that this usually happens when it comes to traditions.

00:40:29.780 And the most important thing is its viability.

00:40:32.960 It has to interact with the real world in such a valuable way over multiple iterations, multiple generations, that it then gets adopted in, slowly but surely, into the tradition.

00:40:49.360 So tradition doesn't mean things never change.

00:40:52.660 It doesn't mean things are never re-evaluated.

00:40:54.820 It doesn't mean no progress is made.

00:40:57.160 And so when I say that you need to base your understanding of morality on traditions and moral prejudices, I'm not saying that you can't evaluate things.

00:41:06.600 I'm not saying that you can't think about things.

00:41:08.680 I'm not saying that things can't be advanced, that things can't progress.

00:41:13.700 You know, terrible usage of the word bearer, but the one that was at hand.

00:41:18.600 It's about understanding that there are these eternal truths that are only achieved through being.

00:41:26.240 They can't be nailed down in our rationality.

00:41:29.880 They can't be put down in a math problem or explained on a spreadsheet.

00:41:34.700 They can't even be put down in texts of moral philosophy sometimes.

00:41:38.680 They have to be lived.

00:41:40.420 They have to be real.

00:41:41.640 And they have to survive multiple iterations in the real world before they can kind of prove their mettle.

00:41:47.820 And we are only one person in a great chain.

00:41:52.000 And we cannot understand every piece of that chain.

00:41:54.900 We cannot grasp every part of it.

00:41:56.660 And so when we look to what we should do, when we look at how we should interact with a moral issue, when we look at the way that we should consider something, we need to put it in that context and understand, yes, we still make decisions.

00:42:12.000 We are still an individual.

00:42:13.180 We do have rational faculties.

00:42:14.960 We are evaluating things.

00:42:16.560 All of those things are true.

00:42:18.000 I'm not saying abandon all that stuff.

00:42:19.860 But we need to put it inside the context of the tradition and humble ourselves and say, actually, that stuff is important.

00:42:27.440 And we are connected to it whether we like it or not.

00:42:30.780 And the people who came before us had wisdom.

00:42:34.640 We are not just because we happen to be the most recent human.

00:42:38.560 C.S. Lewis called this chronological snobbery.

00:42:41.000 The idea that you just happen to be alive at the current moment and therefore you're the most intelligent thing.

00:42:45.740 And all ideas that came before you are somehow lesser.

00:42:48.260 That is not the case.

00:42:50.580 There are often the people who came before us are wiser than we are today.

00:42:54.340 And so that doesn't mean never change.

00:42:56.440 It doesn't mean never evaluate.

00:42:57.740 It doesn't mean never test or try things out.

00:42:59.580 It doesn't mean never make any kind of forward motion with your culture.

00:43:06.280 It just means that these things are slower and they're more organic and they're closer to the ground.

00:43:14.600 And they're less involved in heady ideological exploration and more involved in grounded, lived understanding. 0.97

00:43:25.740 And when we do that, we're far less likely to write stupid things like zoophilia is okay. 0.89

00:43:31.160 Because we have these moral prejudices that have been passed down from a powerful tradition with the wisdom of many, many, many generations of ancestors. 0.91

00:43:44.000 And the reason that those things have been venerated in pretty much every culture is because they're real and they work and they're true.

00:43:52.220 And we should, as people who want to succeed, want to live good lives, want to honor kind of the things that we've been given, we should look at those traditions.

00:44:00.740 And we should put those before necessarily our own desires that we are rationalizing through our current understanding of the world.

00:44:10.920 Just remembering that we are not always the most intelligent people.

00:44:14.040 We are not always the most rational people.

00:44:17.080 And that we should maybe take a moment to think about all the people who came before us.

00:44:21.440 And the reason that the things that they understood have traveled to us to the gate.

00:44:26.060 All right, guys.

00:44:26.600 So just wanted to talk about that a little bit.

00:44:29.600 But let's go ahead and head over to our questions of the people.

00:44:34.920 Mint 20 for $5.

00:44:36.320 The left thrives on dialectics.

00:44:39.300 If you're debating something against them, you're already in the process of losing.

00:44:42.300 Yes.

00:44:42.980 So this is critical.

00:44:46.420 This is so important.

00:44:47.980 This is, I don't know.

00:44:49.280 I might try to write much more on this.

00:44:52.700 But I've done videos on this.

00:44:55.300 I did the Prudentialist and I believe it was the Prudentialist and I read Nick Land's point about this, which is critical.

00:45:03.840 Every disagreement is an opportunity to rule.

00:45:06.180 Politics, dialectics are inherently left-wing.

00:45:09.480 They move you to the left.

00:45:11.300 This is very difficult for conservatives because they want to participate in the political process.

00:45:17.360 However, that is why they are always losing because the political process is inherently left-wing.

00:45:22.000 I know that a lot of people are like, what does that even mean?

00:45:26.120 What are we supposed to do?

00:45:27.360 Please go back and watch the episode.

00:45:28.560 I don't have time to recap that whole hour's worth of work.

00:45:32.620 But the point is that, yes, I've said this before, Mint, and you're absolutely right.

00:45:36.940 To debate many issues is to lose them.

00:45:40.320 If you want an example, just look like, can men become women?

00:45:43.440 When they couldn't, when there was not a debate, that was a right-wing position, a right-wing truth, an axiom on which society was based, and there was no political power for the left there.

00:45:53.320 Now that that has become an issue that they can debate, that is up for debate, the left has unlocked all kinds of political energy and all kinds of political power by tearing apart that thing that was wanted bedrock, bedrock foundation of tradition and understanding of the world around us.

00:46:09.880 That's how the left works.

00:46:11.580 You need to understand this.

00:46:12.820 It's not just, it's not just that, you know, wrong or evil.

00:46:17.020 It's that there's a real mechanical problem that the right does not grapple with.

00:46:22.560 And that, uh, creeper weirdo here for $2.

00:46:25.840 I'm not febristing or in you can't make me. 0.73

00:46:27.780 I, again, I appreciate your discipline, man.

00:46:29.660 Well done.

00:46:31.500 Uh, skeptical panda here for $5 thesis for today.

00:46:35.040 The only way to win is not to play their game.

00:46:36.980 I tend to agree.

00:46:37.720 It's clear that the debate with leftist snakes is a waste of time.

00:46:40.700 Yeah.

00:46:41.040 And, and to be clear, guys, again, this does not mean that there are no rational discussions.

00:46:45.540 That does not mean that rationality just goes up the window, but you need to understand that it is one tool.

00:46:52.540 This is something I respect about Chris Rufo.

00:46:54.360 Chris and I, uh, you know, disagree on some things tactically, but in general, Chris understands this in a way that no other conservative activist does.

00:47:01.940 And they'll say this directly.

00:47:02.940 They'll say, if you look at the history of the last, you know, couple decades of American politics, and you think the message is that rational debate wins politics, then we exist in alternate universe.

00:47:16.680 Because that is just observably not true.

00:47:19.160 And if that's the case, then even if you might like to think of yourself as a rational person, or you want to think of the right as the people who care about facts before your feelings or whatever, that's nice, but it's a losing strategy.

00:47:30.820 And so if you want to win, you need to adopt a winning strategy.

00:47:34.020 And that means, uh, actually looking at what's happening.

00:47:37.060 That means not engaging in every bit of bait that the left throws in front of you and thinking that if you could just wrestle them to the ground with, uh, with, you know, facts that you're going to win because that's not actually outward.

00:47:49.160 Creeper weirdo for $2, which reminds me of, uh, Dubai for some reason.

00:47:55.760 I'm not sure why, but thank you, sir.

00:47:58.200 Uh, mint 20 here for $10.

00:48:00.080 In most cases, uh, reason is just the defense lawyer for what you're, uh, you already want to do.

00:48:06.600 Uh, firm moral boundaries are needed because one, uh, reason, uh, because one can reason themselves into or out of anything.

00:48:13.980 And yeah, I generally agree, right?

00:48:15.720 Again, that doesn't mean that reason isn't entirely detached from reality.

00:48:19.160 Or that there aren't reasonable cases made for a moral truth or that moral truth is indeterminable.

00:48:25.080 This is not a, this is not an argument for moral relativity, but what it is, is an admission that humans are not the hyper rational agents that we want to pretend that they are, uh, that they are governed by things other than their rationality.

00:48:37.600 That even if you could arrive at all the, all the rational arguments that you want, which you can't, uh, that it would still be insufficient for most of society because it's not going to get there.

00:48:47.460 And that instead you need firm moral boundaries because people will do things like, you know, try to normalize zoophilia if you don't.

00:48:56.980 Mint 20 here following up again.

00:48:58.660 Thank you very much.

00:48:59.500 The slippery slope remains the undefeated champion of the 21st century.

00:49:02.360 Yes.

00:49:03.040 One of my favorite things to tweet for a reason because it is true.

00:49:07.120 Uh, Florida Henry here for $10.

00:49:09.880 I just came to the conclusion.

00:49:11.740 If you rewind to 1980s and give Republicans a hundred percent economic control, you'd be in the exact same spot today with corporations pushing this insanity.

00:49:19.560 Yes.

00:49:20.620 That is a very important realization.

00:49:22.600 Uh, sorry guys, but, uh, the, the, the economic policies of the right have consequences.

00:49:28.860 Now this doesn't mean that, uh, you know, you need to implement communism or something, but it does mean that you need to understand.

00:49:36.260 Uh, that there are things more important than individual economic, uh, progress.

00:49:42.220 I'm going to be talking about this a lot here.

00:49:45.240 Um, Nick land has a lot to say on the inevitability of capital and capital escape and what it means for societies.

00:49:52.240 I'm going to be delving deeper into that, um, here in the next few weeks.

00:49:56.960 Uh, so you, you can look for that.

00:49:58.920 Uh, but I think you're right, Florida Henry, that, uh, that, uh, you know, the Republican party has taken many actions, uh,

00:50:06.260 that have disassembled, uh, the family just as well as the democratic party has.

00:50:12.260 And, uh, until it realizes that, uh, things will only get worse.

00:50:17.480 Uh, paladin YYZ for $41.

00:50:20.580 Thank you very much, man.

00:50:21.420 Very generous.

00:50:22.020 I appreciate that.

00:50:22.980 Awesome show.

00:50:23.600 Orin actually turned this, uh, the Savichas down to nine.

00:50:26.920 Your thoughts on the headbanger community can do to squash the events of the total stake, rock harder, ride freer.

00:50:33.880 Yeah.

00:50:34.220 So obviously for people who can't tell from my wall art, uh, I'm a fan of, uh, of metal.

00:50:40.880 Um, and, uh, particularly I enjoy the band Sabotage, which is not, uh, not as well known by many, but actually you've all heard Sabotage before, whether you realize it or not.

00:50:50.540 Uh, because they became the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and you've probably heard, uh, their rendition of Carol of the Bells.

00:50:56.440 Uh, it's, I think it's called Sarajevo.

00:50:58.520 Uh, but, um, but they, uh, were, were a very good, uh, kind of proto-thrash metal band before that.

00:51:05.440 Uh, but I'm a big fan.

00:51:06.520 Uh, I don't know if they, if the heavy metal community, uh, will be making any, uh, any advances against the total state.

00:51:13.140 But I certainly enjoy the music, at least, especially when I'm lifting, uh, it's excellent music to lift weights, too.

00:51:19.740 Uh, let's see here.

00:51:21.480 Uh, Homerus Lupercal, Warmaster of Evergreen Terrace for $4.99.

00:51:26.380 Man, I'm glad that I am familiar with Warhammer, so I can actually read that.

00:51:31.080 This is why, uh, this is why religion is so fundamental to the state.

00:51:35.780 Religion comes with hard moral boundaries because divine edict usually is not debatable.

00:51:40.260 Yeah, and I think if you're, you know, if you want to, if you want to understand this, uh, I'm actually rereading, uh, Gaetano Masca and the Ruling Elite.

00:51:48.280 There's a chapter, uh, that I'm working through now where he talks about, uh, about, uh, the political, uh, I can't remember the name of it all of a sudden.

00:51:59.500 Uh, but anyway, he talks about the necessity of kind of religion to have, uh, that effect with, with the state political formula.

00:52:06.980 I don't know why my, my brain completely, uh, blanked out there.

00:52:10.100 Uh, but also I think really, a really good important book for this is, uh, is The Ancient City by Kalange.

00:52:16.120 And, uh, that, that book is really good because it, it talks about how critical religion was to every part of the founding of Greek and Roman, uh, society.

00:52:26.960 How we, it's hard for us to even understand the level of religiosity that we wove itself through every action because it's the same way we weave our understanding of rationality of everything, uh, which doesn't make us more rational people, ironically.

00:52:42.240 But the, but the point is they did it the same way, but with religion and how critical it was to every foundation.

00:52:47.940 And, and those things were not debatable because like you said, uh, Homer, they were, they were foundational to everything.

00:52:55.900 They, for the understanding of morality, for the understanding of society, they made sure that society perpetuated itself in critical ways.

00:53:02.440 And so if you want to understand that, I think that book is a really excellent read.

00:53:06.380 I highly suggest it.

00:53:08.060 Oh, we've got one more that came in here.

00:53:10.640 Uh, Joshua BB for 999.

00:53:13.440 Thank you very much.

00:53:14.440 The purpose of life for humans is to procreate and make the world better, or at least not worse.

00:53:19.340 Anything that goes against that is, uh, is bad.

00:53:21.880 All moral decisions can be determined through this lens.

00:53:24.860 Well, that's nice and all, but, uh, so you, you've kind of, um, you kind of created a problem for yourself

00:53:32.120 because make the world better or not worse.

00:53:34.040 Okay.

00:53:34.180 Well, what does that mean?

00:53:35.240 Right.

00:53:36.000 Uh, that, that sounds nice, but you, you have to contextualize that, uh, and contextualize

00:53:41.640 that you actually need a tradition.

00:53:43.140 You need a, you need a particular people, particular society, because the things that are good for

00:53:48.300 people are not universal.

00:53:49.980 Uh, the things that are good for people aren't even universal inside a society.

00:53:53.340 Uh, some people can handle their liquor.

00:53:55.320 Some can't.

00:53:56.160 Some people were made to have large families.

00:53:58.580 Some aren't some people, you know, there's a general, uh,

00:54:02.120 you know, tillos towards like what the good human is, but that has to be contextualized.

00:54:06.580 I think again, in the society, in, in the culture, it has to be specific.

00:54:11.060 You can't just say, well, everybody should just do what makes the world better.

00:54:14.340 That's a, that's kind of the, the, the Reddit atheist thing.

00:54:17.200 Like just be kind, man. 1.00

00:54:18.140 Just don't be a jerk. 0.99

00:54:19.980 You know, that, that's not a real morality. 1.00

00:54:21.640 It never ends up doing well.

00:54:23.860 Uh, uh, CB here, uh, for $10.

00:54:26.760 Thank you very much.

00:54:27.400 What are you reading right now?

00:54:28.880 Uh, so like I just said, I'm rereading, uh, the rule of the ruling class by Katana Mosca.

00:54:33.840 I'm a rereader guys.

00:54:35.180 Um, I, you know, especially with these really complicated books.

00:54:38.280 I mean, I start taking notes.

00:54:39.660 I make videos about this stuff.

00:54:41.600 I understand it a decent amount, but there's so much, there's so much layered in these

00:54:45.220 really complex books that I find when I go back over and over again, it's, it's really

00:54:49.840 important.

00:54:50.280 And so I just reread that or I'm rereading that.

00:54:53.060 I just reread the problem of pain by CS Lewis.

00:54:55.300 Uh, which I think is really great book.

00:54:58.000 Uh, I just reread, I'm rereading, uh, out of the, uh, or sorry, palindra, uh, which is

00:55:03.000 the first book in his, um, or no out of the silent planet, the one I'm reading palindra

00:55:07.480 is the second, uh, uh, book in that series, uh, uh, out of the silent planet is the first

00:55:12.320 book in his, uh, sci-fi series.

00:55:14.120 And so, uh, those are the things that I am reading right now.

00:55:17.660 All right, guys.

00:55:18.500 Well, I think I got through all of your questions.

00:55:20.520 Thank you so much for coming by.

00:55:22.400 Hopefully we have dispelled all of the terrible beliefs of Peter Singer and none of you will

00:55:26.880 ever give them any credence.

00:55:28.960 Uh, so I, I appreciate that.

00:55:31.220 Of course, if this is your first time coming by the channel, please make sure you go ahead

00:55:35.100 and subscribe.

00:55:36.300 And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you can go ahead and subscribe

00:55:39.400 to the Ormack Empire show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:55:42.680 Make sure you do that guys do that guys.

00:55:45.040 I know, you know, I, I'm mowing the lawn, I'm working out, I'm cleaning up around the house.

00:55:48.900 Those things I love to have, you know, podcasts and things on and, uh, you know, if it's on

00:55:53.500 YouTube, I know sometimes like you got to deal with the screen and everything.

00:55:56.160 I mean, I'm mostly just talking.

00:55:57.580 So check it, check out that podcast.

00:55:59.260 I'm sure you'll appreciate it.

00:56:00.660 Thank you for coming by guys.

00:56:02.040 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 17, 2023

The Critical Role of Moral Prejudice ｜ 11⧸17⧸23

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