In this episode, I talk about the role of moral prejudice in shaping our understanding of the world, and why it's so important to have a critical examination of our moral prejudices before we have a philosophical interrogation of them. I also talk about Peter Singer's recent article that normalizes the idea of zoophilia.
00:02:34.300And he wanted to present this as a carefully considered and thoughtful piece inside this journal.
00:02:41.640There'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.
00:02:50.820And 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.
00:03:06.440It's something that we like to think in kind of our modern age is that everything is up for debate.
00:03:11.520Everything can be rationally deconstructed or defended marketplace of ideas, resolves all of this stuff through rational interrogation of all of the issues.
00:03:22.120But 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.
00:03:34.940And 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.
00:03:49.140Now, he might himself not be for this normalization.
00:03:52.440He 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.
00:04:04.640You 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.
00:04:17.120And they're placed well ahead of the actual danger.
00:04:21.260There's a reason that we order our society the way that we do.
00:04:24.820And it's because the slippery slope is not some logical fallacy.
00:04:28.960It's not some weird thing that conservative Christians thought up in the 1980s.
00:04:33.820It's a very real and observable phenomenon.
00:04:36.060I 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.
00:04:46.180And 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.
00:04:57.440So 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.
00:05:06.620And 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.
00:05:15.060But they don't understand how these different things are connected to each other.
00:05:18.600And so today I wanted to dive a little bit into how they are connected.
00:05:22.780Now 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.
00:05:35.080I'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.
00:05:43.580So when we look, someone said, I'm not going to fed posting or fed post or and you can't make me.
00:05:49.820I 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.
00:05:55.760All right. So let's let's take a look here. Obviously, he's leading this paper.
00:06:01.920The person who wrote it is doing so synonymously, probably wise as to not put their name on the record for something.
00:06:08.360Oh, so horrifically objectionable. But but anyway, they're making this case here.
00:06:15.240And the whole the name of the article is Zoufili is morally permissible.
00:06:19.640This is going to be the case here from the beginning.
00:06:22.220Now, 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.
00:06:30.100This is I'm going to make a rational argument.
00:06:33.420I 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.
00:06:44.540So let's go ahead and take a look here at the beginning of what he's going to say.
00:06:49.000Sex with animals is a powerful social taboo that exposes its practitioners to the utmost indignation and stigma.
00:06:58.640But taboo is the correct word here. We need to understand the power of the taboo.
00:07:04.420The power of the taboo is that it is untouchable, that it is unassailable, that it is something that you do not go near.
00:07:12.560You don't even suggest that this might be an option.
00:07:16.480And that's really powerful that there's a visceral gut reaction, a disgust mechanism reaction is what most people would see this as.
00:07:25.780And 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.
00:07:37.200And 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.
00:07:48.940And this is really critical because this is what protects us from the excesses of our own rationality.
00:07:56.800Now, look, rationality, I'm not making an argument against rationality.
00:08:05.800Obviously, I run a YouTube channel where I exercise it on a pretty regular basis.
00:08:10.600I'm somebody who's been somebody who spends a lot of time talking about political theory, philosophy, rational cases and understanding for things.
00:08:17.900However, it is not the be all and end all.
00:08:21.140It is not the only way in which we interact with society.
00:08:25.840In fact, we are far less rational than we would like to believe.
00:08:29.960Again, 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.
00:08:38.520We really end up inheriting these opinions.
00:08:42.880We have these opinions on kind of a chord level.
00:09:38.080Maybe you think of yourself as progressive.
00:09:39.940Maybe not if you're on my channel, but a lot of people think that they are.
00:09:43.560And so, you know, we think of ourselves as very advanced people, far more advanced than those that came before us.
00:09:50.360And 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.
00:10:10.220And 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.
00:10:18.480So 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.
00:10:31.100But I want to just show you the headlines here.
00:10:34.340It's the ones that you're going to assume.
00:10:35.660So 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.
00:10:53.640It's from a heavy social stigma, which came before that these different, you know, these different cultures had.
00:11:16.660And 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.
00:11:30.700And 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.
00:11:40.420Not really thinking about the fact that traditions are rooted in particular cultures.
00:11:45.260And 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.
00:11:54.800They you're not putting it in any kind of context.
00:11:57.360And 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.
00:12:10.160That'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.
00:12:23.620This is a mistake that people make all the time.
00:12:26.440They do it a lot with with things like the Bible, Christianity.
00:12:36.100You 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.
00:12:46.420And that I'll just kind of project that onto my current situation.
00:12:51.200And that will explain kind of my rationale for what I'm doing here.
00:12:55.300So what does this author use to kind of justify?
00:13:07.260Now, 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.
00:13:17.680And 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.
00:14:01.560The other one is, as you can imagine, the issue of consent.
00:14:06.600And literally, it's in the animal consent.
00:14:09.420And 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.
00:14:27.820And 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.
00:14:56.880Like, pretty much by definition that that's going to be beyond it.
00:15:00.900It does not have the cognitive ability to grant that to a human being.
00:15:04.680But, 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.
00:15:16.100Because, again, they're not tied to a tradition.
00:15:50.060Because 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.
00:16:02.280And 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?
00:16:14.540When do they have the rational agency to do this?
00:16:18.140And they make more and more excuses as to why you're able to devolve these things down over time.
00:16:24.860And that's incredibly dangerous because, you know, one of the people on the thumbnail is Jeffrey Epstein.
00:16:28.920And 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.
00:16:40.940And 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.
00:16:59.780And 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.
00:17:06.300And so why shouldn't they be able to do that?
00:17:07.880In 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?
00:17:42.120I don't want to keep subjecting you to any more of that.
00:17:45.940So, 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.
00:17:58.340I mean, just think back to the Garden of Eden, right?
00:18:22.560Can't we deconstruct that standard a little bit?
00:18:25.280I mean, isn't there isn't there some wiggle room there?
00:18:28.840Isn'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?
00:18:39.120I mean, you're literally in communion with almighty God.
00:18:46.640And 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.
00:18:54.940And we need to understand that about ourselves as human beings.
00:18:58.160Purely rational actions don't exist, but even if they did, that doesn't make them good.
00:19:52.780We don't want the ability for things to kind of be fluid.
00:19:56.320We 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.
00:20:05.420We want this perfect total control so everything is under our grasp.
00:20:09.060But that's not the way the world actually works.
00:20:11.880We're not actually capable of doing that.
00:20:14.240Rationality is not capable of grasping everything in the world.
00:20:19.820That's why you shouldn't be a materialist.
00:20:21.440And so it's really important to think about where the limits are.
00:20:25.580And 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.
00:20:40.600So let's think about moral prejudices for a second.
00:20:46.640Now, first, we need to think about the fact, of course, that the very scary word prejudice is attached to it.
00:20:52.700And we know that you don't want to be prejudiced, guys.
00:20:56.340One thing, if there's one thing that's just the worst thing in the world, it's to have a prejudice, right?
00:21:00.920And you can't ever be prejudiced towards it.
00:21:04.700But actually, that's not how the world works.
00:21:06.640Actually, you're prejudiced all the time.
00:21:08.420You 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.
00:21:28.360I mean, you have prejudices all the time.
00:21:31.180And those prejudices are incredibly important.
00:21:33.320Many people would call them heuristics, right?
00:21:35.520They're ways of looking at the world and quickly answering questions without having to rationally evaluate everything that you're looking at.
00:21:44.360You 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.
00:22:34.260Your genetic memory going back many, many, many centuries or far beyond that is telling you this is not something I want to be around.
00:22:43.320This is something I probably shouldn't like just leave on the floor in my house, right?
00:22:47.320Like 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.
00:23:00.580And 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.
00:23:53.960You notice they're not using the normal name for something like this, which is reality.
00:23:58.020They're using a new name that might sound a little less harsh.
00:24:02.580You see the same thing like with maps, right?
00:24:06.300That 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.
00:24:20.920And this is how the normalization process for so many things in our society has worked.
00:24:33.800Try to make it sound like something that could be diagnosed.
00:24:37.480And 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?
00:24:53.940You can start saying, well, there's treatment for this or maybe it's not so bad.
00:24:57.900Maybe there are pieces of this we could better understand.
00:25:00.540And 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.
00:25:08.040And it moves into a place of normalization, acceptance, and eventually celebration.
00:25:14.480There's a reason that trans kids have become the soul of our nation, according to Joe Biden, right?
00:25:21.180That'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.
00:25:30.360By removing them, they made sure that there wasn't a lot of other resistance.
00:25:34.120And 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.
00:25:41.180I'd say, well, but really, is that a problem?
00:25:43.520Is that really going to lead to something else?
00:25:45.420I mean, can't we just allow this thing and then that'll be fine?
00:26:18.700And again, if you need any evidence, just look at the way we have slid down that slope in the last few decades.
00:26:24.280It'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,
00:26:38.660And 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.
00:26:46.880They were right about things getting bad.
00:26:48.320They just undersold, as wild as their assumptions looked back in the 1980s, they vastly undersold the way that things would progress.
00:26:59.380And so that those moral prejudices that didn't seem so important back in the 80s or really the 60s or before that,
00:27:07.560the 60s is really the real 50s, 60s or the real watershed moment, actually.
00:27:12.460But the things that were discarded in those times didn't seem important.
00:32:14.960Well, 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.
00:32:27.640I've used this example before, but I'll use it again because I think it's very instructive.
00:32:31.700You know, I was a teacher and I've worked, you know, teaching children.
00:32:36.480And when you teach a child, you know, you have to every parent knows this for sure.
00:32:43.640When 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.
00:32:58.200So, for instance, really, your child needs to understand, say, that your country is something to be proud of.
00:33:07.600So America is good is something you might treat, teach a child young so they can properly function.
00:33:14.040And that's a low resolution version of something.
00:33:24.740It's got some things about it that are failures, some things that are successes.
00:33:28.200But 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.
00:33:39.900And so America good is a low resolution version of things that they need to do.
00:33:46.360Now, 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.
00:33:56.780And it's still something that they need to be a part of and care about.
00:34:00.240But you can't get to that high resolution version until you've gone through the low resolution version.
00:34:04.920Same thing with, like, the concept of God.
00:34:07.460You know, something that you need early on because it's true and it helps you to understand the world around you.
00:34:13.520But most people are taught a very low resolution version of that before later on, hopefully, again, unfortunately, other people don't make this journey.
00:34:22.140But eventually learning that there's a far more complex reality that is connected to the thing that they learned previously.
00:34:30.700However, you can never actually fully understand the importance of the tradition.
00:34:34.460See, G.K. Chesterton called tradition the democracy of the dead.
00:34:39.620And 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.
00:34:48.240And 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.
00:35:08.280They built the world around you and made it run.
00:35:11.580And 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.
00:35:21.420And 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.
00:35:42.520Because 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.
00:35:52.480And 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.
00:36:02.560If you're really smart, you may be able to grasp a piece of it, a part of it.
00:36:07.100You might be able to expand on that and do important things with it.
00:36:11.580But you, as an individual, are never outside of your tradition.
00:36:15.740You are never separated from it entirely.
00:36:18.340You are never free from its influence.
00:36:20.940You are never objective in the sense most people be.
00:36:23.980There is truth, but that truth is always in the context of a tradition.
00:36:29.620And that is really critical to understand.
00:36:31.480So, you might say, Oren, okay, so there's a tradition.
00:36:44.120We don't want to just be stuck in tradition for all time.
00:36:46.620What 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?
00:36:52.860And then, like, we all die out because we got stuck on tradition.
00:36:56.060Well, that's actually a really good question.
00:37:07.300Traditions are not just static things.
00:37:10.300What makes a tradition valuable is not that it's written down somewhere.
00:37:14.020Writing it down somewhere might help to transmit it.
00:37:16.480But there are a lot of people who have made the case, and I think they're right.
00:37:20.280Oswald 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.
00:37:30.920Joseph 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.
00:37:46.900So 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.
00:37:55.640So while we might think, oh, well, traditions are things you write down in books.
00:38:26.780Again, 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,
00:38:40.060including 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.
00:39:15.220We're all familiar with these academic theories that don't play out in real life.
00:39:19.380And 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?
00:39:33.800And so that temptation is always there to kind of separate ideology and theory away from what is grounded.
00:39:45.100But that's the beautiful thing about real tradition, is it's hyper-grounded, because it is lived out.
00:39:51.680It is carried from one generation to the next in the most direct way possible.
00:39:56.280And that means that traditions are alive.
00:40:02.020However, the key for traditions to be altered is, again, that lived experience.
00:40:08.180For something to alter a tradition, it has to work over and over again.
00:40:13.820You don't just radically change your tradition inside a few years, the way that you snap-change something in science, if you need to.
00:40:23.220There's a very slow method that this usually happens when it comes to traditions.
00:40:29.780And the most important thing is its viability.
00:40:32.960It 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.
00:40:49.360So tradition doesn't mean things never change.
00:40:52.660It doesn't mean things are never re-evaluated.
00:40:57.160And 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.
00:41:06.600I'm not saying that you can't think about things.
00:41:08.680I'm not saying that things can't be advanced, that things can't progress.
00:41:13.700You know, terrible usage of the word bearer, but the one that was at hand.
00:41:18.600It's about understanding that there are these eternal truths that are only achieved through being.
00:41:26.240They can't be nailed down in our rationality.
00:41:29.880They can't be put down in a math problem or explained on a spreadsheet.
00:41:34.700They can't even be put down in texts of moral philosophy sometimes.
00:41:56.660And 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.
00:42:57.740It doesn't mean never test or try things out.
00:42:59.580It doesn't mean never make any kind of forward motion with your culture.
00:43:06.280It just means that these things are slower and they're more organic and they're closer to the ground.
00:43:14.600And they're less involved in heady ideological exploration and more involved in grounded, lived understanding.
00:43:25.740And when we do that, we're far less likely to write stupid things like zoophilia is okay.
00:43:31.160Because we have these moral prejudices that have been passed down from a powerful tradition with the wisdom of many, many, many generations of ancestors.
00:43:44.000And 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.
00:43:52.220And 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.
00:44:00.740And we should put those before necessarily our own desires that we are rationalizing through our current understanding of the world.
00:44:10.920Just remembering that we are not always the most intelligent people.
00:44:14.040We are not always the most rational people.
00:44:17.080And that we should maybe take a moment to think about all the people who came before us.
00:44:21.440And the reason that the things that they understood have traveled to us to the gate.
00:45:28.560I don't have time to recap that whole hour's worth of work.
00:45:32.620But the point is that, yes, I've said this before, Mint, and you're absolutely right.
00:45:36.940To debate many issues is to lose them.
00:45:40.320If you want an example, just look like, can men become women?
00:45:43.440When 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.
00:45:53.320Now 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.
00:46:41.040And, and to be clear, guys, again, this does not mean that there are no rational discussions.
00:46:45.540That does not mean that rationality just goes up the window, but you need to understand that it is one tool.
00:46:52.540This is something I respect about Chris Rufo.
00:46:54.360Chris 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.
00:47:02.940They'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.
00:47:16.680Because that is just observably not true.
00:47:19.160And 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.
00:47:30.820And so if you want to win, you need to adopt a winning strategy.
00:47:34.020And that means, uh, actually looking at what's happening.
00:47:37.060That 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.
00:47:49.160Creeper weirdo for $2, which reminds me of, uh, Dubai for some reason.
00:48:15.720Again, that doesn't mean that reason isn't entirely detached from reality.
00:48:19.160Or that there aren't reasonable cases made for a moral truth or that moral truth is indeterminable.
00:48:25.080This 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.
00:48:37.600That 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.
00:48:47.460And that instead you need firm moral boundaries because people will do things like, you know, try to normalize zoophilia if you don't.
00:49:11.740If 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.
00:50:34.220So obviously for people who can't tell from my wall art, uh, I'm a fan of, uh, of metal.
00:50:40.880Um, 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.
00:50:50.540Uh, because they became the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and you've probably heard, uh, their rendition of Carol of the Bells.
00:50:56.440Uh, it's, I think it's called Sarajevo.
00:50:58.520Uh, but, um, but they, uh, were, were a very good, uh, kind of proto-thrash metal band before that.
00:51:21.480Uh, Homerus Lupercal, Warmaster of Evergreen Terrace for $4.99.
00:51:26.380Man, I'm glad that I am familiar with Warhammer, so I can actually read that.
00:51:31.080This is why, uh, this is why religion is so fundamental to the state.
00:51:35.780Religion comes with hard moral boundaries because divine edict usually is not debatable.
00:51:40.260Yeah, 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.
00:51:48.280There'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.
00:51:59.500Uh, but anyway, he talks about the necessity of kind of religion to have, uh, that effect with, with the state political formula.
00:52:06.980I don't know why my, my brain completely, uh, blanked out there.
00:52:10.100Uh, but also I think really, a really good important book for this is, uh, is The Ancient City by Kalange.
00:52:16.120And, 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.
00:52:26.960How 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.
00:52:42.240But the, but the point is they did it the same way, but with religion and how critical it was to every foundation.
00:52:47.940And, and those things were not debatable because like you said, uh, Homer, they were, they were foundational to everything.
00:52:55.900They, for the understanding of morality, for the understanding of society, they made sure that society perpetuated itself in critical ways.
00:53:02.440And so if you want to understand that, I think that book is a really excellent read.