Freedomain Radio Podcast 6
Hi, this is the second of my impromptu podcasts. I guess these are a little different than the ones where I read a pre-prepared article, but what I'm aiming to do here is to talk about issues that are coming up in my email conversations with people and, of course, my own thoughts, to try and figure out how we can move this agenda of freedom and non-violence forward in the world. One of the things that I've been having an interesting conversation with somebody online, whose first name is John. The question that he has is basically, What do you do with people who, either through cultural bias or just their own irrationality, don't accept any arguments for individuality? Certain Oriental or Asian cultures believe that the group is everything, and the individual is nothing, and so on. What do you do with that?
My reply to him was to say, this is quoting from an email I sent to him,
Without a doubt, those who are irrational cannot be reasoned with. And that is fine! They can be irrational all they want, they just cannot claim to be rational as well. I can choose to believe in horoscopes but I can't call that belief scientific. And his response to that is,
But you seem to define anyone that will not accept our moral axioms as ‘irrational.' Unfortunately, I suspect that is the vast majority of the human race. If the vast majority are not able to be convinced by your argument, it doesn't matter how ‘right' it is. It still fails its objective, which is to change the direction of human history towards freedom.
Now this is an objection that I have heard and frankly been enormously irritated by for many, many years.
And the argument is something like this:
Somebody puts forward a theoretical or logical framework to prove that the only valid morality is the morality of nonviolence or prove a moral argument or some sort of conceptual framework that is abstract. Syllogistically based, philosophically based. And the reply that we always get back… (laughs) “Always.” Mostly… Let's just say “always.” I think one or two people in my life have not given me this argument back). Which is, I put forward a tightly reasoned and, I think, fairly well-thought-out framework for approaching the question of morality, and people come back and say, “Yeah, yeah yeah, well, that's all well and good. That's a nice, interesting, logical framework, but,” basically, “so what? The fact is we can talk all we want and we don't change one single government regulation, we don't change one single state law. We've been talking and talking and talking for the last 50, 80, 100 years, 150 years, if you count classical liberalism, and the government keeps growing, blah blah blah. It doesn't matter what the theory is. What really matters is that we find a way to convince people.”
Frankly, I think that this is a terrible, ludicrous, and almost contemptible position. I'll tell you why. I don't want to sound overly harsh, because there is this idea that if we are all working in the same direction, then we should all be helping each other. I frankly don't care about any of that stuff, to be perfectly honest. You know, the important thing is, is it true? Is what we're arguing for true? Is freedom morally valid? Is capitalism, i.e. the free market, a valid proposition? Is it true? We are trying to establish something that is a fact, not an opinion, right?
So when this guy, John, says, “You seem to define anyone who will not accept our moral axioms as irrational, and therefore that's the vast majority of the human race, and blah blah blah,” he's basically taking something that I take great issue with, which is the argument from effect. So John is saying, “Well, look. No matter how logical you are, the vast majority of human beings are irrational. Therefore, it doesn't matter how rational you are, we need to find a way to convince people who are irrational.” And then when I say, “Well, you can't convince people who are irrational. All you can do is simply say, ‘Look, you're irrational. And, by the way, by being irrational, you can't claim any moral validity to your pronouncements. '” Then he says, “Well, yeah, OK, fine. That's theoretical. But still, people won't believe us.” And that, to me, seems completely ridiculous and puts us in an impossible situation.
The impossible situation is we should only be trying to convince people if we are right, not just because we like the idea of freedom, or that's how we were raised, or we read Atlas Shrugged and had an epiphany. None of that means anything.
The only way that you can logically or validly try and change somebody else's mind is if you're in fact correct! If I try and convince you that 2 + 2 = 4, if you reject, you know, the numbers don't exist, logic doesn't follow, A is not A, whatever, then all I do is say, “Well, look, you're just being irrational,” and you cease the conversation. There's nothing you can say to people who are irrational. Those two are enormously different situations.
If we take as our position that freedom is just nice, or inefficient, or better or whatever, but not true, not morally valid, not logically provable, then we are absolutely wrong in trying to change people to our way of thinking.
If I'm a scientist and I come up with a theory, I don't try and convince people because I like my theory, or it's kind of efficient, or it's sort of better than what they believe, or it will benefit them to believe it. I try and convince people of my theory because it is true, because it is logical, because it is well-argued, because it is empirically verifiable, and it is reproducible, and it predicts the future. Not because I like it, but because it is true.
For anybody that's been following my Lew Rockwell articles, my basic argument is that because we have failed or been unwilling to address this central issue of logical morality, that is why we have failed so incredibly badly for the past couple of generations. We have failed as a movement in ways that hard to imagine other movements that have failed as badly as we have. We've been arguing, let's just say, von Mises wrote his first works in the 1920s, this proving the validity of government intervention, predicting the failure of communism and socialism, predicting the wild oscillations that come about from government intervention in a free market. It wasn't long after that that Hayek and von Mises wrote about the causes of the Great Depression and the economic circumstances that the government pursued that prolonged it in all about. This stuff's all been proven for generations already. And nobody listens to us. We've had absolutely no effect in injecting ourselves and to the general public debate. I've reasoned it out, and I think that there's lots of empirical proof. My strong belief as to why we have failed is that the world does not run on efficiency. The world runs on right and wrong. The world runs on morality. The world does not run on economic efficiency. The world does not run on arguments from consistency. The world does not run on the fact that the free market is going to give you better income and blah, blah blah, blah blah. The world runs on what is considered right and what is considered wrong. If the people believe that the government programs are morally right, they will support them no matter what the evidence. If the people believe that the free market is morally wrong, or at best amoral, then they will reject its unfettered expansion. They will reject the free market.
This is all very well understood by our enemies. The Iraq War was sold on the basis of morality:
“Saddam Hussein is a bad guy,” “He participated in 9/11,” “He's got weapons of mass destruction,” “He gassed his own people,” “He lied to the UN,” “He fails to follow resolutions,” “He kicked out the weapons inspectors.” These are all moral arguments: “He's a bad guy.” They are not arguments from efficiency: “The price of oil will go down if we invade Iraq.” Nobody cares about that. And nobody cares that the price of oil is going to go down in a free market. They don't care that they're going to make more money and we know that, because we've been arguing those positions for generations and they've got us precisely nowhere. And the last thing I'll say about the argument from practicality, that people believe things that are practical, or change their mind based on practical considerations… Well, let's have a look at the question of religion. What we'll do is, we'll take Islam, although this could equally be applied to flavors of Christianity and Zoroastrianism and Rastafarianism and all the other gobbledygook that clogs up people's brains. But let's just have a look at Islam, because it's a foreign religion, to most of us of course. So it's a little easier to view it objectively. So this gentleman says that people need to be convinced by something that is practical. That we need to find ways to convince people that the free market is more practical and will benefit them, and that's how we're going to win. That forget about arguing from morality and logical frameworks, or anything like that. Forget about abstract or obtuse arguments, just go for the gut, and get them where they live, and tell them they'll make more money or whatever. If we look at something like Islam, can anybody sit there and point out to me or to anybody else what is practical about Islam or Christianity?
If I sat you down and I said, “Look, I've got this great thing that I want to convince people of.” And let's say that this was a completely atheistic society, right? Nobody believes in any religion. I sat you down and I said, “This is my approach. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell people that some incomprehensible, unknowable being with no physical dimension and omnipotence created and runs the world secretly. And there's saints and gods and devils. And then I'm going to call it monotheistic, and then I'm going to break the god into Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Trinity in one. And I'm going to have an immaculate conception (laughs) and I'm going to have miracles and loaves to fishes. And I'm going to ask that people in the 21st century organize their moral beliefs and their modes of living based on the writings of half-starved monks who were hallucinating 2500 years ago that have written in ancient Aramaic and had it translated umpteen times and mistranslated umpteen more times, and that's what I'm going to convince the world of.” ‘There's nothing more impractical than the idea of religion.' Would you seriously look me in the eye and say, “Yeah, that makes sense, because people respond to what is practical”? (laughs) , let alone things like nationalism and the draft and war and so on. But let's just talk about religion. There's nothing more impractical than the idea of religion. And furthermore I would just say that the moral teachings of the religion that I am proposing are things like: No sex before marriage. You've got to baptize your children. You can't masturbate; every natural impulse that your body has, you have to fight. You have to go sit in a box with another guy and tell him everything that you've done wrong. You have to donate money; you have to donate time. You have to dress up on Sundays. You have to give a tithe.
All of these things are wildly impractical. But people believe them and they follow them. And why?
Because they believe it's moral . I'm going to move on to another little bit of his email here, which I think is also very instructive. And I certainly don't blame him for having these opinions. They're so common that to blame him would be foolish. But they are, I think, very instructive.
His particular argument then goes on. He had a Malaysian friend who said, “Well, the group is everything and the individual is nothing,” and blah blah blah. So I said to him, “Your friend from Malaysia has to answer the following. Does the group actually exist? If so, where? Can it be touched? If the group does not exist, then nothing exists but individuals. Therefore, any morality predicated on the existence of a group is false.”
And he replied, “You are missing my point. The Malaysian guy's, and in truth most people's, moral axioms do not require that ‘the group' exist, just as the physical object ‘moral law' does not need to exist for the abstract concept to be valid. He can arbitrarily choose any group and say it validates his axioms. The Chinese have been ingraining that into their people for thousands of years. They are quite good at it. The point of an argument is not to prove yourself right to yourself, but to another person. If the other person will not accept your proof for any reason, it doesn't matter how irrational he is or how wrong. What is important is that he is unconvinced. It is for this reason that I do not believe arguing from any basis will ever work on the large scale. Not by itself, anyway. We must use the argument from self-interest. It is not enough to convince people that the current system is wrong and another right. You must also offer them a real, solid, existing alternative. If the right system is just theoretical, you will likely get the classic father-in-law response, ‘That's just the way things are.' Henry Ford and the other auto industry pioneers did not argue that ‘horseless carriages' were more efficient or moral or whatever than horses. They built effective, cheap transportation devices, and people converted. Ditto with airplanes and electric lights and computers etc. ‘If you build it, they will come. '” So that's his particular approach to how it is that you change somebody's mind about the argument from morality. Not to pick on him, but these are just ideas to discuss. The first thing that I'd like to talk about is his quote which says, “The point of an argument is not to prove yourself right to yourself or to another person, but in relation to reality.” If I say that an object falls at an accelerating rate of 9.8 meters per second per second, which is one of the basic laws of gravity, then the point of that is not to prove it to myself, or to prove it to another person, or my dog, or God, or anything. The purpose of that is to validate that against the empirical facts of reality and the logical requirement for consistency. So it's absolutely irrelevant whether somebody else accepts the truth of an argument or not. Absolutely irrelevant.
If I say that rocks fall, and somebody else doesn't believe that rocks fall, they still fall! ] I may have never heard of the concept of gravity. If I jump off a cliff, I think I know where I'm going to end up. The idea that we can argue for self-interest is complete nonsense. No one's self-interest is particularly served by volunteering for an army or being drafted into an army, or paying 50% of taxes to increase the national debt to cripple the economy for their children, or to follow religious tenets that cause complete neurosis within the personality, or any of these things. Self-interest is absolutely not at the basis of most human decisions, or if it is, then the self-interest is entirely concerned around morality.
If you get someone to believe something is right, they have no defense, none whatsoever, against you enforcing that against them. They may fight, they may groan, they may grumble; however, they will always, always end up folding.
Think about it in your own life. What you consider to be “the Good” is what you will automatically end up doing. Sooner or later, whether you fuss or fight or whatever, because what is right or wrong is the greatest lever in the history of the world. And that's what you get! Everybody can see that the free market is efficient. But they also say that the poor will starve, the old will die, the sick will ail into oblivion, and so on. It's always moral arguments that you hear. The idea that the free market is more efficient in the way that the car was more efficient than horses, therefore we convince people of its efficiency, and they will change their minds, ignores, for me, the basic fact of social reality.
First of all, we have been making that argument for the past couple of generations, and it has completely, utterly, and totally failed. And that's something we've got to stare at in the face and try to figure out why. If you keep doing the same thing, you will continue to get the same results.
We have absolutely proved beyond a shadow of doubt, both theoretically, empirically, predictably, however you want to put it, it we have absolutely and completely proven that the free market is more efficient. That socialism, fascism and communism produce economic disasters and a loss of individual freedoms.
Everybody knows the fact that there's a huge national debt, that a government in the US passes about 100,000 regulations every year. All of these things completely incontrovertible. Everybody knows all of that.
But we still haven't budged a single regulation or even slowed down the growth of the government. So, arguing from efficiency and self-interest doesn't work. It hasn't worked. It's been tried. I think we've given it 80 or so years, which is not a bad lab to figure out what the best approach is. And it's completely and utterly failed. So let's not talk any more about how we can just prove to people that things are more efficient and they'll change their minds. The basic fact of social interaction, and the reason why people are so resistant to the idea of changing their moral beliefs, is that if you change moral beliefs fundamentally and stop putting them into practice — and I say this from both a logical understanding of the matter and some fairly intense personal experience, which I can sort of dip into here if it's of interest to anybody — the reason that it's going to change logically is that one of the basic moralities of the world, as everybody knows, is “Family is good and they must stick together,” “Family this, [family that],” “Oh, you love him like a brother,” or “Sisters should stick together,” “Your mom didn't mean it when she said something bad,” “Your dad didn't know it,” or whatever, “They did the best they could,” or blah blah blah. And I hear this not only from people that I've talked to about with family, but also of course my wife, who practices psychology, use this all the time for patients. People who have the most horrendously acting parents will still find any excuse to forgive them and to continue because, “Oh gosh, don't you know that family is good… And of course the government is good.” If you start to change your ethics, and I'll talk about this briefly, my personal experience that I've been a libertarian in theory, or objectivist in theory probably a little over two decades. I'm 39 years old. I guess it was around five or six years ago, for a number of reasons which I can either never get into or get into another time, I began to really live my beliefs. I began to no longer accept it when people would say, “Well, freedom isn't that important. The free market doesn't matter. Non-violence,” basically, “who cares? I'm willing to use violence to help the poor.” And even after I proved to them that it didn't help the poor, or, at least, it helped only the worst poor in the short run, they continued to have their beliefs. So basically I said, “If you continue to advocate everything that I find morally repugnant, then we have a bit of a problem. We have a real problem in our relationship.”
So I was perfectly willing to be out-argued. I was perfectly willing to accept any logical evidence to the contrary, but what I was no longer willing to do was to just say, “Okay, well, potato, po-tah-to. Let's agree to disagree. You have your opinion, I have mine, everyone's entitled to their opinion.” Because it's not true. Everybody is emphatically not entitled to their opinion, because there is such a thing as objective truth, morality, and reality.
I'm not entitled to an opinion that rocks fall upwards. I mean, I can have it, but I'm absolutely wrong. So what happened was that my business associates — I was in business with my brother and another gentleman — that completely fell apart. I stopped seeing my family. I stopped seeing my extended family. I broke up with my then girlfriend whom I had been seeing about seven years and living with for two. Most of my friendships in the period since have fallen away, and the only consolation that I have is a magnificent and unbelievable relationship with my beautiful, beautiful wife. And that more than makes up for all of the nonsense that I got rid of before.
Now I'm a pretty diplomatic fellow. I don't raise my voice really, I don't yell at people. I can be emphatic, but I'm always open to being contradicted. I'm just trying to find the truth. The truth is out there in empirical reality and logic. So anybody gives me evidence to the contrary or a better logical argument or points out a flaw in my argument, I'm all ears! I absolutely will listen and enjoy it. And I love talking about this stuff. I do get impatient with people who don't know how to think who claim that they do, but I'm also patient with that because it wasn't like it took me two days to figure out how to think. If you're going to say to a Catholic, “There's no such thing as God,” and you are going to convince that person. And also that it's immoral to believe in God, and I know that I haven't proven that argument but let's just say, for the sake, that it's true, then what is that Catholic going to have to do? If they say, “Well, you know what, Catholicism is morally wrong, and to believe in things just because I'm told them and bullied into believing them and frightened with things like Hell is not a good approach. And in fact, those who did bully me and continue to bully me into believing something that is not true, based on the threat of Hell and social ostracism, are also not good people because you should not bully people into believing stuff,” what's that Catholic guy going to do? Well, he's going to have to stop attending church. Right? He's going to have to sit his children down and say, “So sorry. Daddy made a slight error and there is no God. And by the way, Catholicism, which I told you to believe in, and which everybody around you tells you is the only decent way to be and the only moral existence, is completely false. Everyone I told you is good is bad. Everything I told you is right is wrong. Everything I told you was moral is in fact immoral.”
And what are his children going to do? Well, his children are friends with other religious children! So what are they going to do? Are they going to say, “Well, you know what, my daddy now says that God does not exist, and that the Church is bad and corrupt, and everything that we thought was right is wrong” and blah blah blah? Well of course then they're not going to be able to play with those other children anymore. In fact, there's going to be not just social ostracism but unbelievable levels of hostility. Because whenever you point out the truth to people, they tend to get very upset if they feel threatened by it, which, because most people believe false things, they do.
And then how is that Catholic who now sees the truth then going to deal with his parents? Is he going to say to his mom and dad, “Listen, you put me in Sunday school, you told me this was right and wrong, you threatened me with Hell…” What is he going to say? Is he going to convince his parents that yes, there is no God, and that the Church is wrong, and that fealty to religion is a corrupting influence and so on?
And let's say that the people at his work are also religious. Is he going to say, “Well, I've changed my mind”? When they say, “How did you enjoy the sermon on Sunday?” is he going to say, “Well, I don't go anymore because I've come to understand that there is no such thing as God and that the Church is a corrupt social institution that harms children and destroys independent thought” and so on? He may refrain from saying any of that, and then he's put in the uncomfortable position of either pretending that he went to church or evading any kinds of questions about all of this. I'm simply saying all of this because when you ask people to change their ethical position, you are asking them to give up their friends, their family, their community, the respect of their children, possibly their marriage. Let's not even talk about what happens to this Catholic guy when he decides that there is no God and tells his wife (not to be gender specific, it could be the other way around). “Honey, not only have I taught the children that what is right is actually wrong, but you have also participated in this corruption.” And then she has the problem of her parents, and her church community, and her friends, and her extended family, and everything.
People are so incredibly enmeshed and embedded in moral viewpoints that getting them out of those moral viewpoints is almost completely impossible.
The same thing that has happened to me has also happened to my wife. She now no longer sees her sister. She no longer sees her mother and father. She no longer has any contact with her extended family. And with one exception with whom she does not talk about ideas of any kind, all of her friends have rejected her. Why? Because she's curious about the truth and she's not willing to take rote answers. So the fact of the matter is that everybody is completely embedded in a moral viewpoint and a social community. If you attempt to change their minds, you will face incredible opposition, hostility, ostracism, because you are asking them to give up everything that they consider to be of value: friends, family, community. And you're also saying that if they have children, that they have done enormous harm to their children. So the idea that we can just sell people a better car misses the central fact of human life, which is that people relate to each other on the basis of what they consider to be “the Good.” They don't have to be philosophers. They don't have to be abstract thinkers. They don't have to be intellectuals. They just, in their gut, get that what they consider to be the community is “the Good.” And if you question it, you are absolutely thrown out into the snowbank and the whole community will just drive right by.
So the last thing that I'd like to mention here is a question that I was just chatting about with my wife. The question is this: Why are people so contemptuous of, disdainful of the argument from morality? Well, of course this is something that I've already talked about, that they're enmeshed in this social murk or social swamp, and they can't fight their way free without enormous personal cost. The kind of personal cost that makes divorce pale into non-trauma.
And I think that the reason why people like John have such a problem with a rational, empirical argument is that most people, of course, don't think. It's not because they're dumb, it's just because they're actively taught to never think. And so when I propose an axiomatic series of logical statements that are not that difficult to understand, right? I mean the idea that if you have a moral rule, it should be consistent to everyone, it does not require that you have an advanced degree in astrophysics to process it, right?
But the reason that they get hostile towards this and jump into this jittery and skittish world of “Yeah, but what if people don't believe us?” and blah blah blah, is because, I think, that what we call ‘identity,' what we call ‘having a self,' what we call ‘having a soul,' is to me, entirely dependent upon the capacity to think for yourself . I mean, if all you do is parrot what everybody else believes, and of course if all they've done is parrot what has always been believed, it's not entirely clear to me how you could actually be said to have an identity, a being, a self. Saying what other people believe is nonsense. It's not saying anything that's true. It's not saying anything that's original. It's not you processing your own experiences and your own empiricism and your own logic. It's just repeating yourself. To say that believing what other people believe gives you an identity is like saying that a photocopier is exactly the same as an artist.
I think what happens when people are faced with an original argument that doesn't smell or taste like anything that they've talked about or seen before, then what is required for them is to think and evaluate and understand that new argument. Now, in order to do that, they have to be able to think and evaluate on their own, and of course, they can't! I can't sail a boat, but I'm not threatened by that because that's not a central part of my identity. But since I think it's true that to be able to think and evaluate on your own is what we call ‘having an identity,' if somebody is faced with a new argument, what it does is it pokes around in that very empty, scary and dangerous place within them that knows that they don't have an identity. That they don't have a soul. That they don't have what I would call a personality. That they're simply a big bucket which has been filled for a variety of reasons with other people's opinions. So maybe they have a problem with authority, so they're drawn towards libertarianism. Or maybe their father was a union leader, so they're left-wing. Or who knows? Maybe they saw a film about unions when they were a kid and, “Oh, I sympathize with the poor.” But it's all just nonsense. It's all just a random grab bag of experience and emotional expressions and history and prejudice. It's not actually being able to think. And most people can't think, they just manipulate symbols like, you know, “Socialism helps the poor” and “Dog-eat-dog capitalism” and “rugged individualism.” These are just symbols that people just manipulate. They mean nothing. Because they can't think about them in any kind of rational or consistent manner. So when somebody like John, and certainly if I'm wrong I apologize to whoever this person is in advance, but I don't think I'm wrong. When John is faced with an argument, he doesn't know how to respond to it. And not knowing how to respond to it is exactly the same as realizing that he does not have an identity, that he does not have a self, that he does not have a personality, that all he does is parrot what everybody else says. And that is terrifying, to stare into that kind of void of identity.
To stare into that kind of emptiness and that kind of conformity, and to realize that by claiming to be somebody who thinks, you've been a hypocrite your whole life. ‘Cause it's fine to not think, but you've got to be honest about not thinking, like if I don't know how to sail a boat, I should be honest about it. To stare into that kind of void and to realize that if you accept that you can't think and don't have an identity, and start taking steps towards learning how to think and developing an identity, that your entire social circle will fall away from you and you will be rejected and scorned and ostracized for the rest of your life, well, not too pleasant a prospect. The only consolation is the truth, and that your remaining relationships will be rich in a way that you can't imagine right now. But I really think that's a particular problem. When you take the argument from morality and consistency that you will face. He wanted to know what my particular argument was for morality, so I sent it to him. And he said, “I loved it. Too bad few will ever read it the whole way through and fewer still will agree.” He said, “Loved it. But it's too bad nobody will believe it.” Which to me is completely irrelevant. I'm not saying, “Do you like my poem?” I'm saying “Are these arguments true?” And saying, “Loved it, but nobody agrees” is not exactly a response. I mean, if Einstein sends me the theory of relativity and I'm supposed to be a physicist, and he says, “Is this valid?” I can say “Well, this logical step is incorrect,” or “This is inconsistent,” or “This contradicts this experimental data,” fantastic! But if he says “Oh, I love this theory of relativity, I just don't know how many people are going to agree with it,” I would probably write him back and say, “Thanks for nothing. You're not giving me anything useful. Your particular opinion of the piece is irrelevant. The question is, Is it true or is it false?”
All right, I guess that's what came out of that email from me, and out of conversations with my wife, who of course I would absolutely love to thank for reviewing these (laughs) podcasts. I certainly hope that they're enjoyable to you, the listener. I think that having stewed on these topics for many, many years, I guess I've synthesized a few things that I believe are true, and I believe there's strong proof for. So I hope that they're helpful. Certainly the last thing that I will say is that if you're looking at taking this argument from morality, and you're looking at, examining, and poking around in the infrastructure of ethics, which underpins and runs all of society like certain basic physical laws underpin and run all of material reality, just be aware what you're going to get into. As soon as you start bringing up logical and moral consistencies with people, as soon as you start to actually live in a way that conforms with objective morality, you absolutely will face the kind of condemnation, indifference, scorn, contempt, derision, everything that you can imagine.
Because, to take a metaphorical view — and as you probably know, I'm an atheist — there are some very powerful devils that are embedded in the hearts and minds of people. They are not going to give up without a fight. The false morals of this world which so many people profit from are not going to be relinquished without a fight.
So if you're going to get into it and start mixing it up at this level, I absolutely encourage you to do it. It is an incredible way to spend your life. It is a powerful and exciting way that is incredibly satisfying. But you really do have to have a strong stomach. You need to decompress and you need to recognize the depth and power of the ideas that you are facing down.
It's actually a lot more of an exorcism than it is an argument. So I hope that this is motivating. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.
