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71 Culture: How to Enslave a Human Soul
Summary:
Summary here.
Transcript:
Good morning everybody, hope you’re doing well. It is Stef, it is 8:38 in the morning on January the 27th, 2006. Thank you for the kind words about the podcast of two days ago. I actually did do one yesterday, but it’s on homosexuality, marriage, and abortion. The reason that I didn’t post it was that I wanted my wife to have a quick go over it before I start talking about the rational disposal of the woman’s womb; I thought it might be nice if a female of the estrogenical persuasion were to have a look at it and let me know if I was talking out of my mouth or of some other orifice, so I will post that soon. It is in response to a question by a young libertarian – always my favorite people in the world, of course, the young, who are facing this future with minds far less cluttered by the rational compromises necessary to survive in this sort of asylum we call the modern world, so I always do my best to answer their questions as quickly as possible.
My friend Francois sent me a funny e-mail this morning. I guess he liked the podcast that I did two days ago on how to control the human soul, so he mocked up a picture of Einstein at a blackboard renouncing communism, I thought was very funny. I would forgive Einstein for quite a lot, actually, I would forgive Einstein for a lot of the terrible errors that he made – the science behind the creation of the atomic bomb, the recommendation to FDR that the atomic bomb be created, the socialism, the silly talk about God. I would have forgiven Einstein for quite a lot if he had just not named his theory “the theory of relativity.”
Of all the things, that was the thing that really bugs me the most, because it allows idiots who are not too well-read or interested in pursuing matters to any kind of depth, it allows those people to say, “Well Einstein said everything’s relative,” and of course they apply this to morality, and that, of course, has nothing to do with the truth. Einstein’s theory is more absolutist than Newtonian physics, because Einstein’s theory says that the speed of light is a pure constant. In Newtonian physics, of course, everything was considered to be fixed in position, and you could sort of measure movement relative to a fixed standard, I think pre-Einstein it was called the ether, some sort of ethereal substance that everything was supposed to move within and that’s where you measured speed and so on.
And then Einstein said, “well if there’s no ether, or if the speed of light is constant, there’s no ether, then you can measure everything in terms of movement relative to each other, and that’s the only fixed point that you have.” I don’t see how that has anything to do with moral relativity whatsoever, but I wish it’d been called something other. If it had been called the theory of absolutism, then I would’ve been much more happy, because you would have to waste time explaining physics, at least my limited knowledge of physics, to those who grab a label and think they have a philosophy.
I was talking of course about how to control a human soul a few days ago, and I'd like to sort of finish that one off. It might take both the drive in and the drive back from work. I worked from home yesterday so I had no commute. Formerly, where I was not particularly enthralled with my commute, I now can while away the time spinning logical theories, which is a much better way of spending time than listening to audio books on economics and philosophy.
So I wanted to talk about culture this morning, because culture is a very important aspect of social control, and something which it’s important to get a handle on, I think, if you want to understand why the philosophies of rationalism, mysticism, rationalism, collectivism and all the other ugly –isms that so dominate the modern world – and the world of history – why are they so entrenched? Like all really good systems of exploitation, there is a stick and there is a carrot. The stick, of course as we talked about a couple days ago, is that parental “love” is, of course, entirely withdrawn if you don’t believe in these invisible ghosts, and goblins, and made up apples, and all of these higher realms, and countries, and so on. (This, of course, relates back to something I did six or seven weeks ago on sports). If you don’t believe any of these things, you’re socially ostracized, you’re punished in ways that almost no child could survive.
No child that I could conceive of could survive that level of ostracism, because the terror of abandonment for children is just biologically hard-wired into our nervous systems, and we can’t really do anything about it. The only way you avoid the fear of abandonment as a child is you become sociopathic in nature, or you sort of switch off your empathy valve, and then you become sort of a criminal, because you’ve given up so much trying to listen to or care for other people’s opinions because they’re so harsh and horrible that you end up caring nothing for anybody’s opinions. So you become a criminal, at which point, of course, the existing power structures don’t have any problems with you, because they can just toss you in jail. They don’t worry too much about those people. But everybody else, we collapse and we crawl and we obey.
I put myself thoroughly in this camp. I went to boarding school, I was in Cub Scouts. I was never an altar boy, fortunately, but I went to church, and I didn’t make my pipsqueak little stand at the age of six when I was shipped off to school. That was simply because you can’t. It’s absolutely impossible to take any kind of moral stance against your parents when you’re a child. You simply don’t have any power. There is no greater power imbalance in nature, in any kind of human relation, than between the between a parent and a child, and as we know, power tends to corrupt. So you obey, and you give up your identity, and you give up your self, and you give up your reason, and you give up your integrity in order for survival, in order for mere survival.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the family, and I certainly would not approve of anything like collective raising of children, but these are simply the facts of nature that we’re working with, the facts of nature and of social control that we’re working with. It’s not an accident that everybody’s crazy. It’s not an accident that everyone’s irrational, and it’s not an accident that everybody faces any discussion of any real truth with panic, hostility, and fear – except for we few, we happy few, who are in the midst of this conversation. So that’s sort of the stick, as I’ve talked about.
Now the carrot is twofold. The one is that once you are told if you don’t eat the invisible apple that you’re bad, and if you do see and eat and go along with everyone, then you’re good, that’s the immediate stick. But how do they make that stick stick, so to speak? What they have to do is convince you that the invisible entities that you’re supposed to believe in and worship and so on give you stature. Whenever you have a lie, you want to go to the opposite extreme. The big lie is always believed a lot more than the little lie, and that’s, of course, not my originality, I think it was Orwell or even someone before him [transcriber’s note: it is attributed to Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Nazi regime]. People will believe a big lie that is the complete opposite, rather than a small lie that is anywhere close to the truth.
So the big lie in terms of culture is that obedience to petty people wielding invisible absolutes is stature, is self-esteem, is identity. When, of course, obedience to irrational people is the complete opposite of identity and stature and self-esteem. At the very best, you’re going to end up with the slow rot of neuroses. Your personal relationships are going to be completely impossible and destructive, because you have no self, no capacity to negotiate based on rationality and objective truth. You have no self-esteem because you’ve given up your mind. You have no integrity because obedience is obviously slavery to whim, and you can’t have integrity when you’re following the whims of somebody else as if they were absolutes.
So the idea behind culture is the exact opposite of the truth. Once they have gotten you so frightened of personal destruction that you have been willing to stop miming this invisible-apple-eating contest, then the next thing they have to do is to substitute something within your shuttered psyche, to substitute something that is going to shore up and foster your false self. That’s twofold: one, is that your desire for virtue – which if you have a lot of it they really want to make sure they keep a handle on and keep controlled and destroyed your desire for virtue. And two: once you grow older, you’re going to get the suspicion. So the desire for virtue is how you get it as a kid – “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he sees when you’re awake” – this is not particularly good for children, of course, because it’s such a slavery to whim. Of course, deep down we all know that we’re obeying the priest, or our parents, or whoever, simply because they have power and are willing to use it to our enormous detriment. So they have to make sure that as we get older, this power relationship remains obscured to us.
It’s not enough to destroy the true self if you want power over someone. It’s not enough to destroy the true self. The appeal to virtue, which is the argument that’s made to children – all arguments essentially rest on the argument from morality – but the appeal to virtue that’s made to a child, to obey these invisible absolutes, is still an appeal to the true self. This is the short term thing, this is how you begin to turn around the ship around of the truth self and turn it into a false, mealy-mouth, neurotic, obedient self – a false self.
So the first thing you do is you say, “there’s this invisible apple, you’ve got to eat it, and if you can’t see it you’re a bad boy, blah blah blah.” But you’re still appealing to virtue there, still appealing to the true self. We’re all born with a natural and true self, which is healthy and wonderful and great, and this corruption of the process that occurs starts with an appeal to that true self, because there is no false selse yet in the human psyche when this process begins. You have to appeal to the true self to get the kid to give up the senses and give up integrity and give up rationality, and then you have to start constructing a false self. The manifestation of this false self in the world is what we commonly call culture. The title for this podcast, I think, is going to be something like: “Culture: There’s a reason why it’s both the name for social beliefs and a growth of bacteria”: it’s a very similar kind of phenomenon.
So the true self is corrupted by its desire for virtue into obedience to insanity or mental corruption, and then, the sad little prize that is given to the shattered self, is the erection of this false self, which we call culture. The reason that I talk about culture in this manner is that culture is the exact opposite of what is real and what is true. Always. Always, always, always, always, always, always – did I mention always? I think I did. There’s no such thing as a culture that says “gravity exists.” “Gravity exists” is not a part of culture. “The sky is blue” is not a part of culture. That’s a part of fact. You could say it’s a part of science, but there’s no culture which says, “Our sky is blue.” There’s no culture which says, “We have two eyes and two hands.” There’s no culture which has anything to do with facts. Culture is, by definition, a self-aggrandizing falsehood that is inflicted on children as a “reward” or substitute for the destruction of their true self through mysticism or collectivism.
So the one thing that you can be certain of with culture is that it’s a lie. There’s just no question about that. To sort of give some examples – I’m sure you could figure all this stuff out for yourself pretty quickly, but I’ll just indulge myself in a couple of examples. Every culture thinks they’re the best. “The Turks are the best,” “the Armenians are the best,” “the Uzbekistanis are the best,” “the Norsemen were the best.” Every culture thinks that we're the best, and, of course, they’re not. That much is pretty obvious. But once you can get somebody to place their identity in a collective falsehood, like “we’re the best,” then you’ve kind of got them for life. There’s no way back to your true self when your false self is completely erected on falsehoods and lies. Those lies are then the sad substitute, and your original self-esteem has now become this collective frenzy of wide-eyed and passionate obedience to the power structures in place.
This is pretty obvious with many cultures. I know a little bit more about the Greek culture, just through my wife and her family. In the Greek culture, it’s kind of funny. They say, “We gave the world logic – Logos – and democracy” and so on, and the hilarious thing about that is, of course, Socrates would be utterly appalled at the idea that people 2500 years after his death would be using him as a prop for their self-esteem. Socrates had no respect for culture at all, and so the idea that Socrates is used as a prop for culture is hilarious.
It’s very similar to the fact that I found – and this is gonna sound a little vain, so I apologize in advance – but when I was taking a class on Aristotle in university, I wrote a paper voluntarily, just sort of sat down and wrote it to work the ideas out (I guess I was around 22 at the time). I wrote a paper to critique Socrates’ theory of identity, and I handed it into my professor, who sat down and was relatively pleasant and gave it a critique and so on, and sort of looked at me weirdly and said, “Well, what’s your background?” So I said, “Oh, I just came here from theater school.” And she sort of gave me a second take, and then there were just sort of a few last comments, and then she just sort of turned me loose.
I just thought that was kind of funny. Here’s somebody who studies Aristotle, and obviously has a high respect for logic, and yet when somebody who is intelligent and interested in logic, and creative shows up in her class, she takes almost no interest. This is similar to another professor of intellectual history I had who was a big fan of Socrates, but whenever I would ask him questions, got kind of hostile. It’s kind of funny; to me, it’s a comedy. It’s a horrible comedy, of course, because it’s all based on violence at the root (90% of the funding in Canada comes from the government for universities). It’s just kind of funny that these people wear this robe of admiration for independent thought, and then when faced with it themselves, become hostile, and frightened, and angry – basically threaten to mark you down and stuff like that. I just find that stuff sort of funny.
In the intellectual history class, the professor read one of my papers out to a class of about 200 people because he thought it was so good, and I did extra essays for him. He wanted to get Luther’s ideas across in a powerful way, so I played Luther for a class reading from John Osborne’s play about Luther, acting it out, and got everybody all wild up with my “preachin’ style,”. And what did the guy give me? A 78. I aced the final exam, of course, although the final exam was ridiculous. It was something like, “Explain the theories of justice from the Greeks to the present.” It was all stuff which was all in such a wide net that you could mark anybody anyway you wanted. If you’re trying to explain the theory of justice from the ancient Greeks to the present, and you’ve got an hour to handwrite an answer, you’re always going to miss something, and that’s what people got marked down for. This is just one of the petty intellectual bullies that show up so often in university and in high school and junior high school (not so much in primary school, because you’re still so obedient that they can be a lot more pleasant). I find it sort of funny that these people claim to have such a love for independent thinkers, and then the moment they come across one, they go medieval on his brain. So . . . we’ll classify that as a tangent, but I think we’ll keep it, because there’s nothing like a few scraps of personal history to humanize the abstract discussions.
So culture is the substitute for your broken self, and culture is, by definition, anything which is not true, which is described as a self-aggrandizing virtue or pompous self-esteem substitute. And you do see this in just about every culture you examine. Of course if you examine your own culture, all of these falsehoods will be pretty clear to you, that everything that you believe is a lie.
For instance, growing up in the British culture there’s this lust for war, and this hatred,at least when I was growing up, a hatred of colonialism and so on. None of it based on anything that is true. The whole “We defended the world for freedom” is pretty hilarious. England fought National Socialism in order to win, for themselves, domestic socialism. It’s funny, in a terrible kind of way. The idea that “we freed the world,” when tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe were flushed down the sewer of Soviet power is also sad. I can’t find that one funny. Socialism just robs you blind, it doesn’t throw you into a gulag or kill you, so that has a certain level of grim humor to it, but there’s nothing funny about the Soviet Empire, which was just a slaughterhouse. And, of course, the myth of the good leader. “Well, Chamberlain was weak, you see, and he was an appeaser, but then we got Churchill, who was great and strong and saved everybody,” which, of course, is also funny.
We don’t have to get too far into Churchill, but I learned a lot about Churchill because he was a character in one of my novels, so I had to read just about every book on the guy. This is not a mentally healthy individual, and not somebody who had a shred of rationality, and certainly not somebody responsible for winning the war. The war was won by two factors: it was won by the free market in America, and it was won by the crazy idea of Hitler to pull a Napoleon and invade Russia in the winter, as if this was possible.
And, of course, the battle of Britain is a complete falsehood. “We were so overwhelmed, we were better fighters than they were, the British were valiantly defending their island against overwhelming odds.” It’s not true, it’s nonsense. It’s well-documented now that it was nonsense. The forces were about equal, the casualties were about equal. There’s no such thing as “personal valor,” or “having better hand-eye coordination” between countries. When you’re in the sky fighting for your death, pretty much everybody wants to come out alive, and everybody wants to kill the other person as quickly as possible.
The idea that the British were more valiant, and the noble race, and that the French were weak, and the Germans were crazy and homicidal . . . . It’s just such nonsense. The French weren’t weak. What happened with the French? Well, of course, they just had, twenty years before, a war fought on their country that went on for four years and killed ten million people, of which two or three or four were French. Devestated their entire country. Also, they just made a mistake about where the Germans were coming from.
So in a sense, who was worse in terms of sort of rational calculation? Were the British worse for fighting when they didn’t really have to (because Hitler was going to destroy his army anyway), and getting the crap bombed out of them? Or were the French worse because they just surrendered and let the Germans occupy them for a couple of years and then they were free because the Germans self-destructed? Who had the better course? All the people who were bombed into atoms in England during the blitz probably would have rather been French people and be called cowards but be alive. You can look at any of these sorts of falsehoods, and as soon as you start looking at the facts, they’ll all fall apart. So culture is the exact opposite of the truth.
One other example would be in Canada here, we consider ourselves a kind society. We have welfare, we have a social safety net, and we take care of the old and the sick and the poor, and we have universal health care because it’s “a fundamental Canadian value.” This is a lie on just about every level you could take it from. It’s a huge and ugly lie, as all big lies are.
For instance, to look at the sort of thing logically, you would say, “Okay, well if it’s a fundamental Canadian value, then I don’t need to be taxed for it.” This is one of the contradictions that you’ll always find at the heart of things like culture. “These are our fundamental values, but we’re gonna force you to obey them anyway.” Well, if they’re really “my fundamental values,” then I don’t need to be forced to obey them, right? If we really are better, then we don’t need to be told that we’re better, because we just are.
I bet Tom Hanks doesn’t come to your party waving his Oscars and shouting all night that he’s such a fantastic actor, because he just is a great actor. So he doesn’t have to wave it in everybody’s face. If providing free health care for everybody who needed it was a fundamental Canadian value, we wouldn’t need any taxation or legislative coercion in order to have it. It would just be there.
It’s like saying, “My wife, she loves me so much that in order to keep her with me I have to lock her in the basement and shackle her to the wall.” Well, if she loves you, set her free! And if we loved socialized medicine, then we would do it if we were not compelled to, therefore it can’t be of value. The fact that it is coerced means that it’s the exact opposite of a value, it is something that we fear and hate.
So that’s at one level. At another level, of course, it is false that universal health care makes people healthier. What it will do is make money off the cure, not the prevention. Therefore you’re going to have problems with diabetes and obesity and all of this sort of slow-growth, entirely preventable illnesses that occur because people don’t take proper care of themselves. So people generally will get less healthy, or, if they do sort of get longer lives, which does seem to be the case, that it’s got nothing to do with the health care system. I think that is statistically true, that this growth in longevity has nothing to do with the health care system, but more to do with private pharmaceutical companies and better food and sanitation treatment methods and so on. These sorts of lies about Canada being a kind and compassionate society, we are far more coerced than just about any other society.
To call an army brave when it is either bribed or coerced into being an army is also a sad, sad fiction. If you’re drafted and herded into a desert or jungle and you are given a gun and it’s kill or be killed, you really can’t call anybody brave for that. I have a lot of compassion for somebody who’s in that situation, because that’s the worst thing that the government can do to you is to force you to become a murderer. It’s even worse than killing you. You can’t call that person brave, because it’s kill or be killed. The U.S. army is not meeting its recruitment goals (gosh, what a shocker!), and therefore it’s having to increase the amount of money it’s paying people to become soldiers. So if somebody is bribed, they’re not brave.
So the idea that the soldiers are brave and so on is sort of the complete opposite of truth. The fact that you associate someone like a Marine with honor is the exact opposite of truth. Honor is not killing people when somebody points out to you that they really should be killed and you should do it for that person. It would be honorable to not be a paid killer, or a hired killer, but of course honor and integrity and the team and all this and that. Everything you look at in terms of culture is the exact opposite of the truth, because, of course, if it were the truth, it would just be a fact, it would just be science, it would just be logical.
So it’s not culture that helps me plan my route to work. It’s a map, and facts, and fortunately private roads. It’s not culture that makes my marriage great; in fact, it’s a rejection of culture that makes my marriage great, because we can actually be with each other as free and independent and logical and joyful entities, rather than helping sadly prop each other’s social fictions and wondering why we’re discontented and bickering or unhappy. Living a lie is fundamentally horrible, it’s fundamentally a shameful existence, to be a slave to the rapacious and exploitive illusions of other people. [28:34]
The amount of human happiness that is flushed down the toilet because of these sorts of gruesomely inflicted social fictions really can’t be measured. It is a living hell. If you pile up all the souls that have been destroyed throughout history for the sake of obedience to fools, then you really do have a big heap of hell in your mind’s eye, and something which I certainly can’t look at without flinching mentally, because it is just an enormous amount of suffering that is going on.
Even in the absence of war and things like that, you really can’t be happy if you believe things that are false. That’s just the way we are constructed. It does doesn’t matter whether you explore them or don’t explore them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any clue that eating a lot of fat will make you fat: the moment you start eating fat, your body goes, “Well, I guess we’re storing up for the winter,” and away it goes putting on a few subcutaneous layers on you.
Same thing is true with philosophy. It doesn’t matter whether you know or don’t know that something is true or false, your conscience and your reality processing, which autonomous and beyond your control, will nonetheless process it and produce either happiness or unhappiness, depending on the truth or falsehood of what you’re living. We really don’t have any choice about that; all we can do is try and study the science of truth as much as possible and live to the greatest degree of integrity we can with the balance of happiness.
It’s nice to go out and be happy, but I don’t eat three egg whites a day and spend four hours at the gym. I’ll enjoy a piece of chocolate. I’m not perfectly rational all the time, of course, because the goal of life is not rationality but rather happiness. Rationality is the means to an end and to look for heaven is to live in hell.
There’s a famous line, and I can’t remember which Nazi general said it: “Whenever I hear the word culture, I pop off the safety of my revolver” [transcriber’s note: this quote is frequently attributed to Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, though if he said it, he was quoting a Nazi-written play]. The reason why that’s a famous line is because it is true.
As Mao said, “all political power grows out from the barrel of the gun,” which is perfectly true, and “culture is taking off the safety of the revolver” is a perfect line, because when you get people to believe false things, then they are open to manipulation. They have no self, they have no integrity, and, for them, morality is the opposite of the truth.
So morality, instead of being adherence to the truth and universal humanity, becomes obedience to the brutal whims of the power structure in place, the exact opposite of morality. To obey a bully is the exact opposite of being good. In fact, it’s worse than just being irrational yourself. Personal irrationality doesn’t form an army. Personal irrationality doesn’t form a police force or a prison system. Obedience to irrational culture and whims of the rulers do form things like concentration camps and so on. So it’s far worse, it’s the most immoral thing, to obey the irrationality of another, because if you believe that, and if other people believe that, you get the collective brutality, which is the hallmark of most of human history and the causes of the greatest suffering and evil in the world.
Culture is the unlocking or the loosening of the safety on the gun, because once you get people to obey irrational absolutes, then they are ready to use violence. You have uncocked the safety of the gun, of the massive and infernal gun of collective obedience. So that statement is very true, and people laugh at it like, “Oh, he’s just a crazy Nazi,” and of course he was, but that statement resonates, and very few people ask, “Why? Why does it resonate? Why does it seem sort of funny, and why does it make me sort of nervous?” Well, because it’s true.
Of course, everyone thinks it’s an uncultured statement, like he is saying, “If I see ballet, then I wanna shoot them.” That’s not what he’s saying at all, and I bet if he was around today you could ask him and he’d tell you exactly what he meant. That’s the arts, ballet is the arts. Culture is the public funding of ballet, that’s the complete opposite. To paint is to be a painter. To be a member of the cultural industry is to get public subsidies. Culture, again, is always based on violence, always based on falsehood. It’s always the exact opposite of what is truth.
This is why I said two days ago, and stand by it now, and probably will forever more unless somebody can come up with a good explanation that’s different, that culture is the scar tissue that grows over the wound of the soul murder or the slaughtered self that goes on during the invisible apple dinner party. Culture is the scar tissue that grows over that.
They appeal to your true self, because you want to be a good boy or a good girl, and then when you begin to have all of this self-doubt and face this incredible fear that your own mental processes are incompetent and you really can’t make it in reality, or that everyone around you is sort of horrible and murderous and wants to just enslave you, then this catastrophe of the fall or death of the true self or the murder of the true self is sort of saved and hardened into a false self through the application of grandiose fantasies about culture. So then, you sort of go from “There’s this invisible apple and you’re bad boy or girl if you don’t see it, and if you do see it and you eat it then you’re a good girl,” then you sort of get hardened into “Only we, only our group can have this invisible apple, and every other group can’t, and they’re bad, and we are good, because this invisible apple only belongs to us. It is not even part of humanity’s common richness, it is only our group that has this invisible apple, and we’re the best,” and so on.
So this brutalized self that is just shocked and appalled by this process being forced to believe in irrational absolutes is then reconstellated under the guise of culture as a false self that is open to obedience and brutality, and is now fully primed to be a soldier of evil in the world. This doesn’t mean, of course, that everybody becomes a soldier, but it means that if demanded of, scarcely anybody can refuse, and if they do refuse, like Eugene Debs in the twenties in America, it’s because they’re committed to some other crazy absolute and are trying to wrestle power from the existing power structures in order to have it themselves (he was a socialist who was jailed for his opposition to World War I).
So that’s my take on culture. I think that there may be a little bit more about it this afternoon. That’s my approach to it. It really is just scar tissue, and it’s a sad thing, and something which we need to recognize and start to shrug off as part of our mental apparatus. Because there’s no joy without authenticity, there’s no joy without the true self and without accurate and joyful apprehension of reality, and culture is the exact opposite of all of that. All it produces is compliance, obedience, misery, and aggression. So I hope that you have enjoyed this, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
Summary here.
Transcript:
Good morning everybody, hope you’re doing well. It is Stef, it is 8:38 in the morning on January the 27th, 2006. Thank you for the kind words about the podcast of two days ago. I actually did do one yesterday, but it’s on homosexuality, marriage, and abortion. The reason that I didn’t post it was that I wanted my wife to have a quick go over it before I start talking about the rational disposal of the woman’s womb; I thought it might be nice if a female of the estrogenical persuasion were to have a look at it and let me know if I was talking out of my mouth or of some other orifice, so I will post that soon. It is in response to a question by a young libertarian – always my favorite people in the world, of course, the young, who are facing this future with minds far less cluttered by the rational compromises necessary to survive in this sort of asylum we call the modern world, so I always do my best to answer their questions as quickly as possible.
My friend Francois sent me a funny e-mail this morning. I guess he liked the podcast that I did two days ago on how to control the human soul, so he mocked up a picture of Einstein at a blackboard renouncing communism, I thought was very funny. I would forgive Einstein for quite a lot, actually, I would forgive Einstein for a lot of the terrible errors that he made – the science behind the creation of the atomic bomb, the recommendation to FDR that the atomic bomb be created, the socialism, the silly talk about God. I would have forgiven Einstein for quite a lot if he had just not named his theory “the theory of relativity.”
Of all the things, that was the thing that really bugs me the most, because it allows idiots who are not too well-read or interested in pursuing matters to any kind of depth, it allows those people to say, “Well Einstein said everything’s relative,” and of course they apply this to morality, and that, of course, has nothing to do with the truth. Einstein’s theory is more absolutist than Newtonian physics, because Einstein’s theory says that the speed of light is a pure constant. In Newtonian physics, of course, everything was considered to be fixed in position, and you could sort of measure movement relative to a fixed standard, I think pre-Einstein it was called the ether, some sort of ethereal substance that everything was supposed to move within and that’s where you measured speed and so on.
And then Einstein said, “well if there’s no ether, or if the speed of light is constant, there’s no ether, then you can measure everything in terms of movement relative to each other, and that’s the only fixed point that you have.” I don’t see how that has anything to do with moral relativity whatsoever, but I wish it’d been called something other. If it had been called the theory of absolutism, then I would’ve been much more happy, because you would have to waste time explaining physics, at least my limited knowledge of physics, to those who grab a label and think they have a philosophy.
I was talking of course about how to control a human soul a few days ago, and I'd like to sort of finish that one off. It might take both the drive in and the drive back from work. I worked from home yesterday so I had no commute. Formerly, where I was not particularly enthralled with my commute, I now can while away the time spinning logical theories, which is a much better way of spending time than listening to audio books on economics and philosophy.
So I wanted to talk about culture this morning, because culture is a very important aspect of social control, and something which it’s important to get a handle on, I think, if you want to understand why the philosophies of rationalism, mysticism, rationalism, collectivism and all the other ugly –isms that so dominate the modern world – and the world of history – why are they so entrenched? Like all really good systems of exploitation, there is a stick and there is a carrot. The stick, of course as we talked about a couple days ago, is that parental “love” is, of course, entirely withdrawn if you don’t believe in these invisible ghosts, and goblins, and made up apples, and all of these higher realms, and countries, and so on. (This, of course, relates back to something I did six or seven weeks ago on sports). If you don’t believe any of these things, you’re socially ostracized, you’re punished in ways that almost no child could survive.
No child that I could conceive of could survive that level of ostracism, because the terror of abandonment for children is just biologically hard-wired into our nervous systems, and we can’t really do anything about it. The only way you avoid the fear of abandonment as a child is you become sociopathic in nature, or you sort of switch off your empathy valve, and then you become sort of a criminal, because you’ve given up so much trying to listen to or care for other people’s opinions because they’re so harsh and horrible that you end up caring nothing for anybody’s opinions. So you become a criminal, at which point, of course, the existing power structures don’t have any problems with you, because they can just toss you in jail. They don’t worry too much about those people. But everybody else, we collapse and we crawl and we obey.
I put myself thoroughly in this camp. I went to boarding school, I was in Cub Scouts. I was never an altar boy, fortunately, but I went to church, and I didn’t make my pipsqueak little stand at the age of six when I was shipped off to school. That was simply because you can’t. It’s absolutely impossible to take any kind of moral stance against your parents when you’re a child. You simply don’t have any power. There is no greater power imbalance in nature, in any kind of human relation, than between the between a parent and a child, and as we know, power tends to corrupt. So you obey, and you give up your identity, and you give up your self, and you give up your reason, and you give up your integrity in order for survival, in order for mere survival.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the family, and I certainly would not approve of anything like collective raising of children, but these are simply the facts of nature that we’re working with, the facts of nature and of social control that we’re working with. It’s not an accident that everybody’s crazy. It’s not an accident that everyone’s irrational, and it’s not an accident that everybody faces any discussion of any real truth with panic, hostility, and fear – except for we few, we happy few, who are in the midst of this conversation. So that’s sort of the stick, as I’ve talked about.
Now the carrot is twofold. The one is that once you are told if you don’t eat the invisible apple that you’re bad, and if you do see and eat and go along with everyone, then you’re good, that’s the immediate stick. But how do they make that stick stick, so to speak? What they have to do is convince you that the invisible entities that you’re supposed to believe in and worship and so on give you stature. Whenever you have a lie, you want to go to the opposite extreme. The big lie is always believed a lot more than the little lie, and that’s, of course, not my originality, I think it was Orwell or even someone before him [transcriber’s note: it is attributed to Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Nazi regime]. People will believe a big lie that is the complete opposite, rather than a small lie that is anywhere close to the truth.
So the big lie in terms of culture is that obedience to petty people wielding invisible absolutes is stature, is self-esteem, is identity. When, of course, obedience to irrational people is the complete opposite of identity and stature and self-esteem. At the very best, you’re going to end up with the slow rot of neuroses. Your personal relationships are going to be completely impossible and destructive, because you have no self, no capacity to negotiate based on rationality and objective truth. You have no self-esteem because you’ve given up your mind. You have no integrity because obedience is obviously slavery to whim, and you can’t have integrity when you’re following the whims of somebody else as if they were absolutes.
So the idea behind culture is the exact opposite of the truth. Once they have gotten you so frightened of personal destruction that you have been willing to stop miming this invisible-apple-eating contest, then the next thing they have to do is to substitute something within your shuttered psyche, to substitute something that is going to shore up and foster your false self. That’s twofold: one, is that your desire for virtue – which if you have a lot of it they really want to make sure they keep a handle on and keep controlled and destroyed your desire for virtue. And two: once you grow older, you’re going to get the suspicion. So the desire for virtue is how you get it as a kid – “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he sees when you’re awake” – this is not particularly good for children, of course, because it’s such a slavery to whim. Of course, deep down we all know that we’re obeying the priest, or our parents, or whoever, simply because they have power and are willing to use it to our enormous detriment. So they have to make sure that as we get older, this power relationship remains obscured to us.
It’s not enough to destroy the true self if you want power over someone. It’s not enough to destroy the true self. The appeal to virtue, which is the argument that’s made to children – all arguments essentially rest on the argument from morality – but the appeal to virtue that’s made to a child, to obey these invisible absolutes, is still an appeal to the true self. This is the short term thing, this is how you begin to turn around the ship around of the truth self and turn it into a false, mealy-mouth, neurotic, obedient self – a false self.
So the first thing you do is you say, “there’s this invisible apple, you’ve got to eat it, and if you can’t see it you’re a bad boy, blah blah blah.” But you’re still appealing to virtue there, still appealing to the true self. We’re all born with a natural and true self, which is healthy and wonderful and great, and this corruption of the process that occurs starts with an appeal to that true self, because there is no false selse yet in the human psyche when this process begins. You have to appeal to the true self to get the kid to give up the senses and give up integrity and give up rationality, and then you have to start constructing a false self. The manifestation of this false self in the world is what we commonly call culture. The title for this podcast, I think, is going to be something like: “Culture: There’s a reason why it’s both the name for social beliefs and a growth of bacteria”: it’s a very similar kind of phenomenon.
So the true self is corrupted by its desire for virtue into obedience to insanity or mental corruption, and then, the sad little prize that is given to the shattered self, is the erection of this false self, which we call culture. The reason that I talk about culture in this manner is that culture is the exact opposite of what is real and what is true. Always. Always, always, always, always, always, always – did I mention always? I think I did. There’s no such thing as a culture that says “gravity exists.” “Gravity exists” is not a part of culture. “The sky is blue” is not a part of culture. That’s a part of fact. You could say it’s a part of science, but there’s no culture which says, “Our sky is blue.” There’s no culture which says, “We have two eyes and two hands.” There’s no culture which has anything to do with facts. Culture is, by definition, a self-aggrandizing falsehood that is inflicted on children as a “reward” or substitute for the destruction of their true self through mysticism or collectivism.
So the one thing that you can be certain of with culture is that it’s a lie. There’s just no question about that. To sort of give some examples – I’m sure you could figure all this stuff out for yourself pretty quickly, but I’ll just indulge myself in a couple of examples. Every culture thinks they’re the best. “The Turks are the best,” “the Armenians are the best,” “the Uzbekistanis are the best,” “the Norsemen were the best.” Every culture thinks that we're the best, and, of course, they’re not. That much is pretty obvious. But once you can get somebody to place their identity in a collective falsehood, like “we’re the best,” then you’ve kind of got them for life. There’s no way back to your true self when your false self is completely erected on falsehoods and lies. Those lies are then the sad substitute, and your original self-esteem has now become this collective frenzy of wide-eyed and passionate obedience to the power structures in place.
This is pretty obvious with many cultures. I know a little bit more about the Greek culture, just through my wife and her family. In the Greek culture, it’s kind of funny. They say, “We gave the world logic – Logos – and democracy” and so on, and the hilarious thing about that is, of course, Socrates would be utterly appalled at the idea that people 2500 years after his death would be using him as a prop for their self-esteem. Socrates had no respect for culture at all, and so the idea that Socrates is used as a prop for culture is hilarious.
It’s very similar to the fact that I found – and this is gonna sound a little vain, so I apologize in advance – but when I was taking a class on Aristotle in university, I wrote a paper voluntarily, just sort of sat down and wrote it to work the ideas out (I guess I was around 22 at the time). I wrote a paper to critique Socrates’ theory of identity, and I handed it into my professor, who sat down and was relatively pleasant and gave it a critique and so on, and sort of looked at me weirdly and said, “Well, what’s your background?” So I said, “Oh, I just came here from theater school.” And she sort of gave me a second take, and then there were just sort of a few last comments, and then she just sort of turned me loose.
I just thought that was kind of funny. Here’s somebody who studies Aristotle, and obviously has a high respect for logic, and yet when somebody who is intelligent and interested in logic, and creative shows up in her class, she takes almost no interest. This is similar to another professor of intellectual history I had who was a big fan of Socrates, but whenever I would ask him questions, got kind of hostile. It’s kind of funny; to me, it’s a comedy. It’s a horrible comedy, of course, because it’s all based on violence at the root (90% of the funding in Canada comes from the government for universities). It’s just kind of funny that these people wear this robe of admiration for independent thought, and then when faced with it themselves, become hostile, and frightened, and angry – basically threaten to mark you down and stuff like that. I just find that stuff sort of funny.
In the intellectual history class, the professor read one of my papers out to a class of about 200 people because he thought it was so good, and I did extra essays for him. He wanted to get Luther’s ideas across in a powerful way, so I played Luther for a class reading from John Osborne’s play about Luther, acting it out, and got everybody all wild up with my “preachin’ style,”. And what did the guy give me? A 78. I aced the final exam, of course, although the final exam was ridiculous. It was something like, “Explain the theories of justice from the Greeks to the present.” It was all stuff which was all in such a wide net that you could mark anybody anyway you wanted. If you’re trying to explain the theory of justice from the ancient Greeks to the present, and you’ve got an hour to handwrite an answer, you’re always going to miss something, and that’s what people got marked down for. This is just one of the petty intellectual bullies that show up so often in university and in high school and junior high school (not so much in primary school, because you’re still so obedient that they can be a lot more pleasant). I find it sort of funny that these people claim to have such a love for independent thinkers, and then the moment they come across one, they go medieval on his brain. So . . . we’ll classify that as a tangent, but I think we’ll keep it, because there’s nothing like a few scraps of personal history to humanize the abstract discussions.
So culture is the substitute for your broken self, and culture is, by definition, anything which is not true, which is described as a self-aggrandizing virtue or pompous self-esteem substitute. And you do see this in just about every culture you examine. Of course if you examine your own culture, all of these falsehoods will be pretty clear to you, that everything that you believe is a lie.
For instance, growing up in the British culture there’s this lust for war, and this hatred,at least when I was growing up, a hatred of colonialism and so on. None of it based on anything that is true. The whole “We defended the world for freedom” is pretty hilarious. England fought National Socialism in order to win, for themselves, domestic socialism. It’s funny, in a terrible kind of way. The idea that “we freed the world,” when tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe were flushed down the sewer of Soviet power is also sad. I can’t find that one funny. Socialism just robs you blind, it doesn’t throw you into a gulag or kill you, so that has a certain level of grim humor to it, but there’s nothing funny about the Soviet Empire, which was just a slaughterhouse. And, of course, the myth of the good leader. “Well, Chamberlain was weak, you see, and he was an appeaser, but then we got Churchill, who was great and strong and saved everybody,” which, of course, is also funny.
We don’t have to get too far into Churchill, but I learned a lot about Churchill because he was a character in one of my novels, so I had to read just about every book on the guy. This is not a mentally healthy individual, and not somebody who had a shred of rationality, and certainly not somebody responsible for winning the war. The war was won by two factors: it was won by the free market in America, and it was won by the crazy idea of Hitler to pull a Napoleon and invade Russia in the winter, as if this was possible.
And, of course, the battle of Britain is a complete falsehood. “We were so overwhelmed, we were better fighters than they were, the British were valiantly defending their island against overwhelming odds.” It’s not true, it’s nonsense. It’s well-documented now that it was nonsense. The forces were about equal, the casualties were about equal. There’s no such thing as “personal valor,” or “having better hand-eye coordination” between countries. When you’re in the sky fighting for your death, pretty much everybody wants to come out alive, and everybody wants to kill the other person as quickly as possible.
The idea that the British were more valiant, and the noble race, and that the French were weak, and the Germans were crazy and homicidal . . . . It’s just such nonsense. The French weren’t weak. What happened with the French? Well, of course, they just had, twenty years before, a war fought on their country that went on for four years and killed ten million people, of which two or three or four were French. Devestated their entire country. Also, they just made a mistake about where the Germans were coming from.
So in a sense, who was worse in terms of sort of rational calculation? Were the British worse for fighting when they didn’t really have to (because Hitler was going to destroy his army anyway), and getting the crap bombed out of them? Or were the French worse because they just surrendered and let the Germans occupy them for a couple of years and then they were free because the Germans self-destructed? Who had the better course? All the people who were bombed into atoms in England during the blitz probably would have rather been French people and be called cowards but be alive. You can look at any of these sorts of falsehoods, and as soon as you start looking at the facts, they’ll all fall apart. So culture is the exact opposite of the truth.
One other example would be in Canada here, we consider ourselves a kind society. We have welfare, we have a social safety net, and we take care of the old and the sick and the poor, and we have universal health care because it’s “a fundamental Canadian value.” This is a lie on just about every level you could take it from. It’s a huge and ugly lie, as all big lies are.
For instance, to look at the sort of thing logically, you would say, “Okay, well if it’s a fundamental Canadian value, then I don’t need to be taxed for it.” This is one of the contradictions that you’ll always find at the heart of things like culture. “These are our fundamental values, but we’re gonna force you to obey them anyway.” Well, if they’re really “my fundamental values,” then I don’t need to be forced to obey them, right? If we really are better, then we don’t need to be told that we’re better, because we just are.
I bet Tom Hanks doesn’t come to your party waving his Oscars and shouting all night that he’s such a fantastic actor, because he just is a great actor. So he doesn’t have to wave it in everybody’s face. If providing free health care for everybody who needed it was a fundamental Canadian value, we wouldn’t need any taxation or legislative coercion in order to have it. It would just be there.
It’s like saying, “My wife, she loves me so much that in order to keep her with me I have to lock her in the basement and shackle her to the wall.” Well, if she loves you, set her free! And if we loved socialized medicine, then we would do it if we were not compelled to, therefore it can’t be of value. The fact that it is coerced means that it’s the exact opposite of a value, it is something that we fear and hate.
So that’s at one level. At another level, of course, it is false that universal health care makes people healthier. What it will do is make money off the cure, not the prevention. Therefore you’re going to have problems with diabetes and obesity and all of this sort of slow-growth, entirely preventable illnesses that occur because people don’t take proper care of themselves. So people generally will get less healthy, or, if they do sort of get longer lives, which does seem to be the case, that it’s got nothing to do with the health care system. I think that is statistically true, that this growth in longevity has nothing to do with the health care system, but more to do with private pharmaceutical companies and better food and sanitation treatment methods and so on. These sorts of lies about Canada being a kind and compassionate society, we are far more coerced than just about any other society.
To call an army brave when it is either bribed or coerced into being an army is also a sad, sad fiction. If you’re drafted and herded into a desert or jungle and you are given a gun and it’s kill or be killed, you really can’t call anybody brave for that. I have a lot of compassion for somebody who’s in that situation, because that’s the worst thing that the government can do to you is to force you to become a murderer. It’s even worse than killing you. You can’t call that person brave, because it’s kill or be killed. The U.S. army is not meeting its recruitment goals (gosh, what a shocker!), and therefore it’s having to increase the amount of money it’s paying people to become soldiers. So if somebody is bribed, they’re not brave.
So the idea that the soldiers are brave and so on is sort of the complete opposite of truth. The fact that you associate someone like a Marine with honor is the exact opposite of truth. Honor is not killing people when somebody points out to you that they really should be killed and you should do it for that person. It would be honorable to not be a paid killer, or a hired killer, but of course honor and integrity and the team and all this and that. Everything you look at in terms of culture is the exact opposite of the truth, because, of course, if it were the truth, it would just be a fact, it would just be science, it would just be logical.
So it’s not culture that helps me plan my route to work. It’s a map, and facts, and fortunately private roads. It’s not culture that makes my marriage great; in fact, it’s a rejection of culture that makes my marriage great, because we can actually be with each other as free and independent and logical and joyful entities, rather than helping sadly prop each other’s social fictions and wondering why we’re discontented and bickering or unhappy. Living a lie is fundamentally horrible, it’s fundamentally a shameful existence, to be a slave to the rapacious and exploitive illusions of other people. [28:34]
The amount of human happiness that is flushed down the toilet because of these sorts of gruesomely inflicted social fictions really can’t be measured. It is a living hell. If you pile up all the souls that have been destroyed throughout history for the sake of obedience to fools, then you really do have a big heap of hell in your mind’s eye, and something which I certainly can’t look at without flinching mentally, because it is just an enormous amount of suffering that is going on.
Even in the absence of war and things like that, you really can’t be happy if you believe things that are false. That’s just the way we are constructed. It does doesn’t matter whether you explore them or don’t explore them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any clue that eating a lot of fat will make you fat: the moment you start eating fat, your body goes, “Well, I guess we’re storing up for the winter,” and away it goes putting on a few subcutaneous layers on you.
Same thing is true with philosophy. It doesn’t matter whether you know or don’t know that something is true or false, your conscience and your reality processing, which autonomous and beyond your control, will nonetheless process it and produce either happiness or unhappiness, depending on the truth or falsehood of what you’re living. We really don’t have any choice about that; all we can do is try and study the science of truth as much as possible and live to the greatest degree of integrity we can with the balance of happiness.
It’s nice to go out and be happy, but I don’t eat three egg whites a day and spend four hours at the gym. I’ll enjoy a piece of chocolate. I’m not perfectly rational all the time, of course, because the goal of life is not rationality but rather happiness. Rationality is the means to an end and to look for heaven is to live in hell.
There’s a famous line, and I can’t remember which Nazi general said it: “Whenever I hear the word culture, I pop off the safety of my revolver” [transcriber’s note: this quote is frequently attributed to Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, though if he said it, he was quoting a Nazi-written play]. The reason why that’s a famous line is because it is true.
As Mao said, “all political power grows out from the barrel of the gun,” which is perfectly true, and “culture is taking off the safety of the revolver” is a perfect line, because when you get people to believe false things, then they are open to manipulation. They have no self, they have no integrity, and, for them, morality is the opposite of the truth.
So morality, instead of being adherence to the truth and universal humanity, becomes obedience to the brutal whims of the power structure in place, the exact opposite of morality. To obey a bully is the exact opposite of being good. In fact, it’s worse than just being irrational yourself. Personal irrationality doesn’t form an army. Personal irrationality doesn’t form a police force or a prison system. Obedience to irrational culture and whims of the rulers do form things like concentration camps and so on. So it’s far worse, it’s the most immoral thing, to obey the irrationality of another, because if you believe that, and if other people believe that, you get the collective brutality, which is the hallmark of most of human history and the causes of the greatest suffering and evil in the world.
Culture is the unlocking or the loosening of the safety on the gun, because once you get people to obey irrational absolutes, then they are ready to use violence. You have uncocked the safety of the gun, of the massive and infernal gun of collective obedience. So that statement is very true, and people laugh at it like, “Oh, he’s just a crazy Nazi,” and of course he was, but that statement resonates, and very few people ask, “Why? Why does it resonate? Why does it seem sort of funny, and why does it make me sort of nervous?” Well, because it’s true.
Of course, everyone thinks it’s an uncultured statement, like he is saying, “If I see ballet, then I wanna shoot them.” That’s not what he’s saying at all, and I bet if he was around today you could ask him and he’d tell you exactly what he meant. That’s the arts, ballet is the arts. Culture is the public funding of ballet, that’s the complete opposite. To paint is to be a painter. To be a member of the cultural industry is to get public subsidies. Culture, again, is always based on violence, always based on falsehood. It’s always the exact opposite of what is truth.
This is why I said two days ago, and stand by it now, and probably will forever more unless somebody can come up with a good explanation that’s different, that culture is the scar tissue that grows over the wound of the soul murder or the slaughtered self that goes on during the invisible apple dinner party. Culture is the scar tissue that grows over that.
They appeal to your true self, because you want to be a good boy or a good girl, and then when you begin to have all of this self-doubt and face this incredible fear that your own mental processes are incompetent and you really can’t make it in reality, or that everyone around you is sort of horrible and murderous and wants to just enslave you, then this catastrophe of the fall or death of the true self or the murder of the true self is sort of saved and hardened into a false self through the application of grandiose fantasies about culture. So then, you sort of go from “There’s this invisible apple and you’re bad boy or girl if you don’t see it, and if you do see it and you eat it then you’re a good girl,” then you sort of get hardened into “Only we, only our group can have this invisible apple, and every other group can’t, and they’re bad, and we are good, because this invisible apple only belongs to us. It is not even part of humanity’s common richness, it is only our group that has this invisible apple, and we’re the best,” and so on.
So this brutalized self that is just shocked and appalled by this process being forced to believe in irrational absolutes is then reconstellated under the guise of culture as a false self that is open to obedience and brutality, and is now fully primed to be a soldier of evil in the world. This doesn’t mean, of course, that everybody becomes a soldier, but it means that if demanded of, scarcely anybody can refuse, and if they do refuse, like Eugene Debs in the twenties in America, it’s because they’re committed to some other crazy absolute and are trying to wrestle power from the existing power structures in order to have it themselves (he was a socialist who was jailed for his opposition to World War I).
So that’s my take on culture. I think that there may be a little bit more about it this afternoon. That’s my approach to it. It really is just scar tissue, and it’s a sad thing, and something which we need to recognize and start to shrug off as part of our mental apparatus. Because there’s no joy without authenticity, there’s no joy without the true self and without accurate and joyful apprehension of reality, and culture is the exact opposite of all of that. All it produces is compliance, obedience, misery, and aggression. So I hope that you have enjoyed this, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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