Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Um, welcome everyone. Welcome Rob and oh, welcome David Kelly. Our founder is here with us in the room. Um, thanks for being with us here on Thanksgiving week. Uh, we are going to be talking with our senior fellow Rob Sinski on the topic of was con the first woke philosopher, a theme that Rob has been exploring, uh, in our discussions and in print, I'm going to be recording this Jayla pear is, has joined us as well. I'm going to be recording this. I also wanted to let everybody know. Uh, we have also made our, um, clubhouse chats available on the outlet societies podcast platforms on any of your favorite podcast channels. So check them out there. And, um, Rob, please, uh, introduce the topic for us and tell us why you chose to, uh, pick it for this week's session.
Speaker 1 00:01:06 Well, well, I picked it because I like to leap on any chance that any excuse that I get to talk about big philosophical issues as they come up in the news. And this is one that very much to my surprise actually came up in the news in the last couple of weeks. Uh, they began about two weeks ago. Um, I go on Twitter and if people who know what Twitter is like, no, this is not exactly a normal day. I go on Twitter and everybody's talking about Emmanuel content and thinking what's going on here. And I found out that it was a Thursday that we could go Thursday. Uh, that mark Tiesen at, uh, the Washington post had a column in which he said the, the rut of critical race theory. This thing that everybody's talking about now woke and critical race theory or these sort of words that kind of vaguely go together.
Speaker 1 00:01:53 I'll get to that later, but that critical race theory, this, this hot topic everybody's debating, it really goes back and dates back has its roots in Emmanuel Kant. And of course, as an objectivist, you know, any opportunity to beat up on Emmanuel comp, we're going to take it and more broadly. And, you know, in writing about politics, you get these opportunities occasionally to actually get people. You know, people, politics has to be a bit of a food fight, people arguing over petty and nonessential issues. Like, you know, what, what's the latest GAF Kamala Harris did or something like that. Uh, and, uh, when you have an opportunity to actually bring up a big philosophical issue like this, I like to leap, audit and take advantage of that. So I think it was last Wednesday. Um, I talked about this and our discussion with Steven Hicks, um, and which was great because of, you know, uh, ideal in the thing that I've been doing on it.
Speaker 1 00:02:43 I deal more with the early end of things, the content end of things, but he has a great deal of knowledge and expertise on the later end, the 20th century and where the critical theorists sort of translate, take these content ideas and translate them into the forum currently known as or political correctness or what have you. Uh, but then at the time I talked to Steven, I already had a draft done and it's since been published of an article titled was con the first woke philosopher. And you can find that at, uh, it's discourse, magazine.com, uh, that I had that published. Um, and I think the importance of this, the reason why we want to talk about these big issues is that critical race theory is only one small part of all of this and that if people could understand what concept ideas are, how influential they are and how detrimental they are, how damaging they are.
Speaker 1 00:03:36 Uh, I think we do a lot more good than just opposing, you know, this one little aspect of it, critical race theory. Um, in my piece, I talk about how, you know, conch was a philosopher who was not messing around. Uh, so some of my favorite, uh, I said, my favorite title of a work by Connor is something on the one possible basis of an argument for the existence of God. So it's not like I'm going to argue for the assistance of God. I'm going to talk about the, what the one possible basis for doing that is, or his other famous works. The most influential works are, are probably the, uh, um, prolegomena to any future metaphysics, add his foundations of the metaphysics of morals. So you're starting to see a pattern it's like, this is the one possible kind of argument you can offer.
Speaker 1 00:04:24 This is the way you can create any future theory of metaphysics. This is the groundwork for the foundations of, uh, of, of morality. So this is a guy, like I said, he's not messing her out. He is, his goal was not just to put out his own theories. It was to influence, set the terms for how anybody else could ever present any other kinds of theory. And he was largely successful in doing that. And like I said, in a way that goes way beyond critical race theory, being a small aspect of that. And that's what I think we need to understand and be able to, to spot that influence. Now, the primary influence that I talk about in my, in my piece here on which I think is relevant to critical race theory, and I'm just going to sum it up very briefly. And then we'll, we'll open up the discussion, but it's the idea of the Copernican revolution that he created.
Speaker 1 00:05:18 Now, this is sort of a, a self-aggrandizing name that he gave that Khan himself gave to an idea that he, that he created in philosophy. And I argue with my piece that it's actually the opposite of what Copernicus did, but I guess that this is sort of a self flattering name. You know, he was describing myself as a, a new Copernicus who's totally changing and reversing the whole system of philosophy because, you know, Copernicus Copernicus edge. And he said, well, instead of trying to make the system work with the earth at the center of the universe and everything you're rotating around that let's make the system work with the sun at the center and having the earth revolving around the sun, along with everything else. So he saw himself as a similar, like re conception of the whole nature of the field of philosophy. But what he's specifically trying to do is he was responding to various sort of skeptical arguments against, uh, our ability to gain knowledge specifically, David Hume.
Speaker 1 00:06:12 I mentioned that that caused the original woke philosopher in the sense that, uh, he actually says that, uh, David Hume was the philosopher who woke quote, quote unquote, woke me from my dogmatic slumber on quote. So he described us as having been awakened by Hume. So he's tried to take these skeptical arguments offered by Hume because human was the guy who said, basically, you know, you cannot say with a hundred percent certainty, the sun's going to rise tomorrow. There's no cause and effect, how do you know anything? You really know anything. It very much in this sort of skeptic school philosophy. And it's considered a very dangerous and deleterious, uh, you know, uh, radical, uh, undermining kind of view of the world that, you know, if, if you take this skepticism seriously, how do you preserve any morality or any kind of social system? It'll all be at our key and chaos and we'd be, you know, kill each other in the streets.
Speaker 1 00:07:03 So that was sort of the reaction people had to Hume lock up the kids, right? Uh, cause David Hume was coming down the street. Uh, and so, uh, an answer to that conscious trying to come up with an answer to that, a way of reestablishing order and harmony. But the thing is that he actually would, he actually ended up doing is systematizing concept, um, uh, sorry, narcotics Hume's skepticism and sort of turning it into a whole system and making it look less scary. And the way he did that was his quote unquote Copernican revolution, where he said he made the observer revolve. So this is the Copernicus analogy. But in this case, what he did is he said, well, what if, instead of the idea that reality is producing all of our perceptions, all the things we perceive that reality is producing the sense data.
Speaker 1 00:07:50 And then we have to figure out whether our concepts matched the census data. What if it's our concepts themselves that are producing the census data? And therefore the census data that we've received has to conform to the concepts because it's created by those concepts in the first place and that's his Copernican revolution. And the way he does that is by saying, well, look, we can't really know things as they really are things in themselves, as he calls it, all we can know is things as they affect us through our senses. And then he says, well, but our senses are conditioned by these categories, these mental categories, these conceptions we have in our mind about causality and about, uh, uh, you know, uh, the existence of entities, all these basic concepts that we want to have. These are implanted in the nature of our consciousness and they determine and distort everything.
Speaker 1 00:08:43 You know, everything that we perceive comes through the nature of our consciousness and is shaped by these categories. And therefore he said, therefore, they are what we perceive our sense data has to conform to these categories. It was brought in through these categories. It was shaped by these categories. It was produced by these categories now. So the upside of this is you can say with confidence while everything we see has to, has to be orderly and conform to these conceptions that we have because it was produced by those conceptions. The downside obviously is you've just cut yourself off from reality, because you said are the things that we perceive are not determined by the nature of the thing itself out there. We can't know anything at all in con system about things in themselves, the actual nature of reality, all we can know is the appearances that come in through our sense data.
Speaker 1 00:09:34 Now that's the key Copernican revolution of cons. And you'll notice that it's, it's, it's radically subjective, but he sort of civilized it, it made it seem less threatening because he said it was collectively subjective. So this is everybody is, you know, the, the world that we perceive may be an illusion created by the Asia consciousness, but everybody has the same illusion. Everybody has the same categories. We're all living in the same illusion. So you don't have to lock up the kids anymore. When you see a manual car coming out of the street, it's not considered subversive in the way that Hume system was, because then you can say, well, you know, everybody within society has the shared framework and therefore we, you know, it's, it's, it's universally subjective. Now the problem that you see how we, and this is what I trace out, what I want to discuss more is over time.
Speaker 1 00:10:25 People go to work on that, on that premise, that, that assumption about how this is all universal. So Hagle comes along and thought a generation after Cod in the early 19th century, uh, George Walham freezer Cajigal comes along. Uh, the Germans were the wrecking crew in the 19th century of taking these ideas and working on them. And he says, well, it's not universal. It changes from era to era, and there's a spirit of the age and even a national spirit that influences how you perceive things. And you know, that nationalism, you can kind of get an idea of where that's going. We're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're the Germans are going to end up with that in another century.
Speaker 1 00:11:05 And then Marx came along as a student of Hagle, as one of the young huggy Allianz, uh, influenced by Hagle. And he says, well, actually, no, it's, uh, uh, the way we perceive things, what we see as true and not true is actually determined by our relationship to the means of production and whether you're bourgeois or proletarian. And so he creates a whole system where, who you are your relationship to the power structure of society, determines how you think and what, and what you think about and what your views are. And he actually has this analogy that he says of the base and the superstructure. The base of reality is the relationships of material production, whether you're a bourgeois or proletarian a worker or a capitalist. And then the superstructure is art, literature, philosophy, religion, all the anything having to do with the mind, all of these fields of ideas, they're all just, um, sort of illusions or legitimating ideologies created to represent the real reality, which is where you stand in the power structure of society.
Speaker 1 00:12:10 And that's really, that's the one of the last big launching off points to where we get to wokeness cause wokeness or critical race theory is this idea that your place in the power dynamics of society now, by the time you get to today, it's conceived as race, class, and gender, and more and more increasingly as just race, but your place in the power structures of today, having to do with racial relations that determines everything about reality, determines how you think it determines what you believe to be true. And any idea you disagree with could be dismissed because it's something that comes from a white man and therefore represents the white man's place in the system of white supremacy and any, I just, I agree. I agree that any idea that you like can be, uh, supported, it needs to be promoted because it represents quote unquote marginalized perspectives.
Speaker 1 00:13:02 So it's that Copernican revolution of Cod where everything you think, everything you perceive is determined by who you are, it's determined by your nature becomes a hundred. And what 200 years, roughly 200 years later, it becomes everything you think is determined by what race you are, what race you're in, where whether you're a marginalized person, what your intersection of marginalization is within the power structure of society. So that's the way that Copernican revolution filtered through con's idea of the base of the superstructure. That's how we get to contemporary wokeness, but you can see how that's much wider issue than just what is critical race theory. It's a whole outlook that has had a huge influence over vast areas of philosophy. So that's what we, why we need to understand why constant the base of it. So we can spot other versions of this as we see it.
Speaker 0 00:13:59 Thank you. Uh, rod David, I don't know if you wanted to add a perspective on that. Um, I have some questions and I also know there are different perspectives on can't even kind of within libertarian circles. So I'd love to, at some point get to some of, um, some of the arguments that as, uh, more of an ally of the enlightenment, but David,
Speaker 2 00:14:26 Uh, yeah, thanks. Just a, um, a comment about a general comment about the Copernican revolution and then, uh, a more narrow point of back. Uh, this is both what con what the, the general point is that, um, what Rob is described very, very well, um, in terms of con uh, uh, Copernican revolution in objectivist terms, what he's doing is rejecting what we call the primacy of consciousness. Um, I, I started the primacy of existence. Um, he says, and I'll just, I want to quote something that, that I thought was illuminating and give you an analogy that I find I found helpful medicating how exactly how radical and bizarre his, uh, his view was in his major work, that the critique of pure reason he says quote to it has been suppose that all our knowledge, Les conform to the objects by the organism that's opposition, every effort to establish the validity of consciousness has failed.
Speaker 2 00:15:37 So the experiment I can quoting the experiment, therefore ought to be made, whether we should not succeed better with the problems of metaphysics, by assuming that the objects must conform to our motive. That's the, you know, one key, um, actual point, um, that, uh, you know, reflections of Rob with the point Rob's made, the analogy is, uh, imagine you're driving down a road and, uh, three people are in the car. Once it realist once a skeptic, like you, once an idea of us like it, realist is driving and the way you are, I would drive. He looks at the road, he steers accordingly. The skeptic is worried. Hume says, what if the road made a turn? You didn't see it. I can be sure you're steering the car, right?
Speaker 2 00:16:32 And then the, I, then conjoints your conversation. And he says, is it two? It has been suppose that our steering was performed to the road. It has proved impossible to establish the validity of our steering experiment, therefore ought to be made, whether we should not have more success with the problems of driving. I assuming that the road must perform for steering or our steering, that that is a, you know, very diverse, uh, example of the, uh, uh, the primacy of consciousness, which con, um, I believe was the institutional historical father. Um, just a narrower point also. Um, Rob, you talked about the, um, the constant view that our concepts structure, all of our thought about the world, and that's certainly true, but con also drew a distinction between the sensory and the conceptual level. And even with the senses, you said that our awareness, our sensations are structured into percepts by internal mental forms of space and time. So even at the basic level will cut off. So just, uh, that's a finer point along the same lines, but that's, that's, that's a great set of connections.
Speaker 0 00:18:06 Thanks, David, go ahead, Robin. I want to also just welcome people that have joined us. I see Patrick Dale, of course, Jayla, pear Scott, um, and others to raise your hand. If you have a question, if you agree, if you disagree, we want to hear from you.
Speaker 1 00:18:26 Yeah. So, so one of the thing I want to say is that that content perspective, it may sound very abstract and abstruse and only philosophers know about it, but you have to really, when you start noticing and you start seeing it, and we know what to look for, you see a pop up all sorts of different places. So one example that I like to think point to is there's a couple of years back, you might've seen on the internet. There was this thing going around, where there was a photo of a dress in a window of a shop. And there were two different camps that were bitterly divided. Some people saw it and said, well, that's a black and blue dress. The colors in the, in the, in the dress are black and blue. And other people said, no, it's white and gold. And you think how it's, it seemed insane.
Speaker 1 00:19:06 Like, how could you possibly see this? If, if like me, you looked at the photo and you thought, yeah, that's a black, a blue dress. What's the question. But there were other people who swore blind that no, that's a white and gold dress. And now, you know, there's a solution to the conundrum wishes that normally when you perceive something, your eyes are making adjustments for the ambient light. And so something that's black and blue looks black and blue in a normal light could look a different, you know, if you adjust for assuming that you're seeing a normal light, you would think, oh, that's black and blue, but if your eyes make the adjustment, assuming you're seeing under harsh light, it would look white and gold. So, or there's something like that. It's like your eyes making adjustment for the ambient light and, and, and adjusting the colors to fit.
Speaker 1 00:19:53 And of course, when you see a photo, you don't know what the ambient light is. You don't know how to make that adjustment. And so people can react to it differently. Now that's something that we, from our perspective, can't explain and say, oh, well, it's because the eyes work in a certain way. And actually, you know, the actual answer is that is because our eyes are so good at seeing things in the real world is because they're capable our eyes and our brains are capable of making these adjustments for ambient light in order to see the colors correctly. That may be, that can be thrown off with an artificial photo, but it's only because our eyes are so good at things, seeing real things in the real world. So in reality, if you look into it, it actually shows it reinforces how valid our perception is, but at the time this came out, uh, and there's another example later, a February remembers Laurel versus Yanni.
Speaker 1 00:20:43 It was an audio clip, and some people heard it as saying Laurel and some heard her to saying Yanni, similar kind of optical symbol, similar kind of auditory illusion, and similar explanation. And, you know, so we can look at it and say, well, actually this shows how well our perception works, that it can adjust the colors for the ambient light. And it shows how good we are at seeing things in the real world. But there were a whole bunch of articles coming out saying, well, see, this shows that we can't really know what anything is that our, everything we see is just an illusion created by our senses. And, uh, somebody says w that somebody drew the conclusion. It means we'll all die alone because there can never be possibly be any shared reality between individuals. So that's, you could, and this sort of thing just pops up on its own when people discuss this sort of thing. So you can see how, how widely and deeply this content perspective. And I bet half the people saying that, or 90% of the people saying these things in these articles online would have no idea that they got the idea from Cod, but it shows how wide and influential that idea is.
Speaker 1 00:21:51 Scott.
Speaker 3 00:21:54 Hi there, great conversation. Um, you know, I've come to see, uh, as you know, there, uh, uh, at certain points in history, a dominant altruism gets replaced. We saw it happen with like multi gods in ancient times being replaced with Christianity and now being replaced with Marxism or woke, woke ism. And I think the way you're presenting it, it makes me think that like Hume to some degree, uh, with his skepticism and then even con more so were steps of, you know, moving from less certainty about the old myths and then that leaving a kind of vacuum for these new altruistic myths to come about through after con with Hagle and marks,
Speaker 1 00:22:46 Or really, I mean, for that, and from the, when you talking about from the moral perspective, the big step after con I would say is August comp who created this religion of humanity in which it is the collective good of humanity, the good of others that becomes the, the, the dominant, overwhelming, uh, the, the object for which you must, which U S Federation, which you must sacrifice. So the idea of, I mean, the big shift that comes after con is society takes the place of God in, in the system. And it conscious part of that, this Copernican revolution is relevant to that because in his view, you know, we were all living in a delusion, but it's a collective delusion it's shared by society. And so by the time you get to Hagle and then to compt, it's the idea that society is literally the creator of reality, right?
Speaker 1 00:23:38 That your concept of what's real and what's true, is shaped by the social categories, uh, provided to you by the collective. And therefore society becomes the creator of reality. And then society as a whole, as a co, as a collective becomes the object of sacrifice, which you then hit what you have to appease and to which you have to devote your life. So, yeah, that's the key sort of post content thing is that God gets replaced by society as the creator of the world, as the source of all knowledge and wisdom, and as the ultimate object of veneration and sacrifice. Now what's happened after that though, after sort of the Hagle, uh, comped Aug comm, uh, uh, GWF Hagle period, is that society as a whole gets balkanized, you know, you're not sacrificing for humanity as such, you're sacrificing for the proletariat, or then your sacrifice, you know, the object of veneration becomes its little subgroups within society.
Speaker 1 00:24:41 And it's the, it's the balkanization, you know, the develop the, the division of it into, into warring tribes. And I think that's, I mean, that's really where we're at right now, where, uh, uh, uh, where you have, I mean, if people know the concept of intersectionality, this is the idea that, well, you know, if you're black, you're oppressed in a certain way, if you're homosexual, you're, <inaudible>, they oppressed in a different way, but what if you're black and homosexual, or if you're a woman you're, you're oppressed in a different way, but what if you're black and homosexual and a woman, then you've got a whole different form in which you're oppressed. And so it creates this sort of people call it the Olympics of victimhood, where you try to sort of pile up the number, the largest number of different ways in which you are part of an oppressed marginalized class, and that therefore gives you precedence over everybody else. So it's this society society as the, as the, uh, in place of God. But then society gets broken down into a sort of politic deistic, uh, system where you've got all these different little tribes, uh, fighting against one another. I say, that's the distinctive sort of late 20th century, early 21st century development on it.
Speaker 0 00:25:57 I'm going to invite Jay to speak, but just as a trivia fun fact, I decided to go back and reread Covata's, which, um, Iran described as one of the great novels in the romantic style. And I was surprised, but perhaps shouldn't have been to discover who the book was dedicated to. Can anybody guess, uh, it was dedicated to August. So again, maybe not a surprise because, um, it's an arc narrative perspective towards a more altruistic worldview, the Christian religion as kind of contrast to, uh, to Nero's Rome and Roman empire. But, um, I, yeah, I wouldn't have expected that he was also a contemporary,
Speaker 1 00:26:58 Let me throw out something on that, um, which I find interesting, and I think it probably relates to, cause I, I, I was a little surprised by that because, um, I know that that, uh, I mean, Covata is sort of the basis of the whole book, what we used to call the swords and sandals epic that Hollywood used to do where you did these Roman empire epics, but with Chris UC, with Christian themes, sort of like Ben Hur and, um, and, uh, he, it was sort of the cool Vitus or the godfather of all that. And it's very Christian and theme. So that's why comp surprised me cause comp was very much the idea that I'm going to, he was trying to get rid of Christianity and create sort of a secularized religion with society in place of God. But to square that circle, I recently came across an article.
Speaker 1 00:27:45 It's a philosophic philosophy journal article from the fifties, uh, called altruism comes to America. And the author is trying to trace the arrival of altruism, comps theory of altruism, as, you know, as a moral theory, how it comes to America, how it gets adopted and his big it's, it's a kind of a shallow overview. He doesn't understand the issues in a very deep level, but what I took from it in, and the overall story he tells is that altruism got absorbed by Christianity is in the late 19th century, early, very early 20th century that it comes to America and it comes with this comp test, his own system with it. But as it comes to America, it gets absorbed as sort of brought into a Christian perspective. But, and, and that sort of, there's the state of play circa, you know, early, very early 20th century that altruism got adopted by the Christians and sort of wrapped into the Christian religion, which is totally natural because, you know, Christ on the cross is the ultimate example of altruism.
Speaker 1 00:28:43 But, uh, that would explain how you get somebody like, uh, uh, sink of it who writes Cuevas with her with a Christian theme, but with a dedication to August comped that, you know, he composting is basically perfecting the altruism of the, the moral theory of Christianity, uh, by giving it the name altruism. Uh, but then I think what's happened after that is as we've become a more secular society. And as religious belief has declined, especially among the educated elites of the philosophers altruism has come back to a more secular form. And that's how you get the sort of woke philosophy. It is a more secular it's altruism finding a more secular form in the form of this sort of racial tribalism
Speaker 0 00:29:33 And just the added, uh, kind of irony of being named by Iran as, um, as one of her favorite novels. Uh, I want to welcome you up on stage. Also wanted to recognize, and to Noah, Marty, who's in the room, she's a senior fellow at the Atlas society and I'm CEO of associate dot Atlas.
Speaker 4 00:29:59 Oh, thanks. There's a terrific session, a great overview Rob, and really emphasizing that, that connection to look for it everywhere. And David, I love the, uh, the driving analogy. It makes me, I guess, wonder how anyone can truly believe this. If you've spent your life thinking about it in, in business, and we can park that one in business, I run across it. When you run into terms like, you know, perception is reality and the customer's always right. And these sorts of very shallow, you know, sort of, um, uh, it, it, people can't truly believe it, but more recently we've run into more explicit discussion of, there are no facts. It's kinda, my truth is every bit as good as your truth and that's my story or something. And it never relates to something specific that is in the span of control of the person it's always related to something they don't know anything about. Um, or at least usually it seems to be. So this brings me to two questions. One is the, you know, more concrete examples on the right and left, uh, because both are inflicted with this and then say, how can the, the academy honestly believe this stuff? How can people spend their lives, you know, studying and thinking, not come to grips with the BS involved here. Thanks.
Speaker 1 00:31:38 Well, so one of the answers I'm going to give to that is, uh, you know, Iran also gave us an answer. So I entered, he gave us a great answer to calm, by the way. Uh, she, uh, I'm going to talk about that in a second, but she also gave us an answer to how these ideas spread and has ferals worth to use as don't bother to examine a folly, ask only what it accomplishes. Right? So, uh, the thing that interesting thing is I start wrote this article about con being responsible for wokeness, as some of the pushback I get is from the religious, right. You know, these are people who are opponents of wokeness, but they all love conch because what was his goal? His goal was to limit reason in order to make room for faith. All right. So you had this whole idea in, uh, he set out to, to protect as he put a Godfrey will and the immortality of the soul.
Speaker 1 00:32:25 Uh, and I, it's a complicated way he did that, but he, well actually, let me describe it cause it's, it's important. So you created this sort of the second later part of the, of the critique of pure reason after introducing this revolution is to create something called the <inaudible> of pure reason. Now autonomy's basically, it's just a really fancy way of saying contradictions. And so he comes up with these three issues, God free will and the immortality of the soul. And he says, well, the minute you start thinking about these issues, you get mired down in hopeless contradictions. And if you get mired down and hopeless contradictions, and you can't affirm that you can either affirm them nor deny them without running into contradictions. So therefore, so if, if everything we see in this world of illusions, we see it's, it's, everything's determined by our internal mental categories.
Speaker 1 00:33:15 When you come to something that gets mired in contradictions like that, therefore you must've encountered something that doesn't come from our internal categories. It must come from the real world. So this is sort of his, you know, uh, the early church father to Julian said once, uh, I believe it's because it is absurd. This is about some church doctrine. I believe it because it is absurd. And this is con coming up with a really sophisticated philosophical rationalization for that. So this is the minute you get mired into a bunch of concrete contradictions. That's how, you know, you're in contact with real reality because you're in contact with something that doesn't perform to you to the, to the categories and conceptions that you've been imposing on reality. So therefore you must be in contact with real reality, and that's sort of his case for God free will and the immortality of the soul, because they don't make sense by the categories of ordinary reason.
Speaker 1 00:34:09 Therefore they must be true. And that's why you get these, you know, the re the conservatives who just love can't because what they want is they want that escape hatch from reason they want the thing to say, well, look, reason is limited. It has it reaches these points that it can't explain, and therefore it fails. And therefore we need religion to fill in the gaps. Uh, we're we're we're reason, camp pride and explanation. So that's, I mean, that's one of the reasons for the popularity of this content views is it allows people to get away with a lot of things they couldn't get away with under a strictly quote unquote realist, uh, uh, outlook.
Speaker 0 00:34:49 Thanks, Rob. That's really helpful because that is, has been for me, just in my understanding kind of a, a missing link. And, um, because I do have a lot of conservative friends who, uh, are very pro con and, um, asked me to explain the, uh, the objectivist critique of her. And, um, I I'm getting better at it. Thanks to the two of you, David. And then I also, I have an interesting question that came up in, um, the back channel, which I'm going to ask after David comments. And so I also wanted to not only invite any of you who are in the audience, um, Drai's your hand, if you want to come up on the stage and, uh, discuss that also, if you are someplace noisy, you don't feel comfortable speaking out in public. Um, you can always shoot me your question on the back channel.
Speaker 2 00:35:45 Uh, yeah, just that I want to add something to what Rob said as the explanation for why conch use have survived and been widely embraced. Um, you know, I, I do agree with the point that, uh, uh, Ellsworth to his point, don't ask, don't ask what the, uh, there, it says as what, um, you know, what's for what, what it's doing in practical terms. However, I w I would also like to say as someone who's wrestled with the philosophical questions themselves, um, that the issues of epistemology account was dressing, inherited heart. And, um, I think it's part of range genius that you cut through a lot of, uh, bad assumptions, bad arguments, and, um, pertaining to, um, things like perceptual relativity account was mentioning the way we see colors, et cetera. And, um, so I, there is a, a way in which, uh, philosophers have, you know, without necessarily being dishonest, um, have had tried, have seen in con a way of, uh, solving some really difficult philosophical issues that had the devil philosophers, um, or at least a couple hundred years in some ways going back to put it on air.
Speaker 2 00:37:20 So, um, and that's still the case. It's, it's hard to, hard to factor out the honest from the dishonest, um, embrace the, these ideas, although I will, there's plenty of dishonesty and in particular, um, lots of people like these ideas without understanding them because the primacy of consciousness gives you a huge exemption from responsibility. Uh, and the flight from responsibility is, um, it's all around us now, but it's, it's one of those enduring human, uh, failings across all times. But anyway, there's, uh, I'll back you Jen JAG and the, uh, questions that you want to address now, ex
Speaker 0 00:38:10 Great. Yes. So, um, had a question here for Rob, are you suggesting that wokeness is wrong headed because it's content or is cond wrong headed because his philosophy leads to wokeness?
Speaker 1 00:38:31 Well, I, I, I don't want to put it quite that that woke. This is wrong because it's content. I mean, it's, it's wrong on all these different levels and conscious response, you know, partly B, but I do say that the it's the, what I want to direct people to is that wokeness is wrong, but it's one example of a certain underlying approach to ideas and to philosophy that is much wider than wokeness. So if you can see how wokeness is wrong, it's sort of like a step to seeing how the underlying mentality that makes it possible. The underlying philosophical assumptions that make it possible are also wrong and will allow you to see the fault and a lot of other, and the, the, the wrongness of a lot of other ideas. So it will allow you for example, to understand the, okay, why the woke people are wrong.
Speaker 1 00:39:26 If you understand the content and risks of that, you'll be able to understand the error when you hear it. As I have from the constant argument from religious conservatives saying, oh, well, reason is limited. And we can't really know things. So therefore we need to religion. It allow you to understand how they're using the same outlook and the same ideas to chip away at reason, from a different direction. And more broadly, I want to go to the positive here, because I liked what David said about how these issues are really hard. The, you, you, when you get into philosophy, you get into these very difficult sort of paradoxes and difficult to answer questions and untangling. All of that is very difficult, which is why the emphasis should be on celebrating the fact that there are the people who came along and actually did come up with usable solutions.
Speaker 1 00:40:16 Now, by the way, one of the I'm not having this much time in academia as David has, but one thing I will say, the reason why people are susceptible to the content version of the answer is the occupational hazard of intellectuals in general and philosophers in particular, is they tend to, they have a tendency to love long chains of reasoning, more than they love observing the world, right? So there's an inherent bias towards getting, getting caught up in these long torturous, complicated chains of reasoning and contents full of that. If you read him and being okay with getting caught up in these torturous chains and being led off to conclusions that if you're, you know, if you're standing around looking around you at reality would not make any sense. So one of my little rants that I like to do is I hate the way that philosophers use the word problem. They'll say the problem of induction, the problem of this, the problem of that, and what profit. So, you know, we think about a deduction like, you know, people drawing new conclusions based on the evidence. You know, I like to say the answer as well. I observe, I induced no problem. You know, that the fact that induction that the drawing
Speaker 1 00:41:33 Of new conclusions on the basis of evidence, the fact that it's actually happening in the world is you really just on a common sense level. It's impossible to doubt because we live in a world shaped by so much science and technology. That was the result of people drawing new conclusions based on evidence. So rationally, you would look at it and say, okay, induction must be possible. The only problem here is figuring out how, how do we do it? How does it get done? What are the rules? But the way a lot of philosophers create approached that the problem of induction is the problem is if I can't come up with an arcane theory to explain it, therefore it doesn't exist. Right? So that's us getting decis. I said, this occupational hazard, they're getting so, uh, wrapped up in these arcane theories. And that's, you know, that's how controversial this of like, well, all these previous attempts to come up with theories to explain how we observe the world have failed. Therefore we can't, therefore we're not, we can't observe the world. We're not really in touch with reality. Uh, it's like, I love your analogy of steering by the way, David. So it'd be like saying all previous attempts at steering, uh, to describe steering has failed. Therefore steering is impossible while you're driving down the road. That's sort of the, the mindset. So, uh,
Speaker 2 00:42:50 I started Rob, go ahead.
Speaker 1 00:42:51 No, you go ahead.
Speaker 2 00:42:53 I, I just one, um, one shorter then there's, uh, there's a statement by Bertrand Russell that I love Russell was himself a prime example of, um, the, uh, loving long chains of argument reflected. But in one of his more honest moments, he said, uh, philosophy begins with what no one can doubt and ends up with what no one can believe. Um, that, that to me describes, you know, 90% of those lot board historically anyway, back to you,
Speaker 1 00:43:32 I think it's just the mindset of be seeing rounded and reality. That is the needed answer to that. But go ahead, Jennifer.
Speaker 0 00:43:39 Yes. So in, uh, Atlas society style and our open dialogue, um, and toleration and the encouragement of different points of view, uh, Roger has, um, been conversing back with, back and forth with me on the back channels and has a different take on cons. So with, uh, with that spirit, I'd love to welcome him to, uh, maybe express the question that he was trying to get to before a little better than I could on his,
Speaker 5 00:44:12 Hey Jenna, thank you very much. And I really appreciate opening this, that actually, when, when that, that little paragraph started floating around Twitter, claiming that, uh, you know, con was somehow the Virgin of, of wokeness. I, I, I was really excited because would now start reading some content, uh, and, and it seems like they have, and I, um, I, I will preface this with, I actually believe I am in objectivist. I, I read and read or read her novels. I write about Anne Rand. Um, I won't plug one of my articles just came out on when Erin, but it's very supportive. Um, and I, I just, I don't like how, how God has come into the conversation. Um, the, the current conversation in the context of, of wokeness, I w I'm going to try I'll phrase this I'll phrase the question. Um, I just, I, uh, I guess what would you consider is cons question?
Speaker 5 00:45:21 We can, you said several times the constant answer is isn't efficient or wrong and in some way, um, what would you, what do you think, you know, his, his general, I guess I'm confused about what you think his general question was and, and, and what his general answer is. And, and maybe, and I really try not to put you on the spot here, um, and maybe, um, and maybe talk about what some, some other alternatives would be, and maybe expand some more on, on rans, you know, specific response. Um, it's what it is, because I guess this is a tough question, because it does talk about so many things. I here's my issue. I feel like you've grouped a lot of what Kahn talks about, and you've, you've explained it and then just kind of been like, that's crazy. Right. Great. And that's kind of like what your argument is, like, what are not job. Um, and I, and I just, I, I, maybe we just don't have the space to really dig into all of this. I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to later, but it didn't even, what do you think his question was? What was his answer, you know, as clearly as you can, why, why do you think it's wrong and maybe offer some other alternatives? Um, and I know that's a huge question that I apologize and thank you very, very much for letting me up here. I'll, I'll stop that.
Speaker 1 00:46:33 Oh, that, that is a huge question, but it's actually where I wanted to go. Uh, so I wanted to get back. So I was saying that the important thing is these questions are hard. And so the important thing is to look at the positive answers. And I think the reason, part of the reason for arguing about all this is really because I think that we live in the wake of the enormous influence of the enlightenment and the enlightenment's confidence in reason, uh, as well as confidence in the, in the individual and all of these very good ideas that became popular and popularized in the enlightenment. Uh, they had this enormous beneficial impact on human life. We're still living in the living influence of that in science and technology and politics and all of that. So defending all of that, it's really important. Content is seen as an enlightenment philosopher.
Speaker 1 00:47:25 I think he's, he's sort of the last great enlightenment philosopher because he killed it. Right. But, but he, he presented himself as being a defender of the enlightenment. He wrote a famous essay called what is enlightenment. Um, so he, he viewed himself as, and, and presented himself as being a defender of this tradition. And the question he is trying to ask was the big question or the question he was trying to answer was the big question. All of these enlightenment philosophers were grappling with in one way or another, which is the validity of consciousness. How can we say with confidence that what we perceive and what we think, and the ideas we come up with are true and valid. So the validity of consciousness was the central question everybody was grappling with. And his answer was basically to say, we could say our consciousness is valid as a description of this, this collective delusion, this world of appearances, but not as a description of the, of the, the dig on sitch, the digging sitch, the, the, the thing in itself reality as it really is.
Speaker 1 00:48:29 But he said, don't, you don't have to worry about reality as it really is. Cause we're not, we're not, we, we don't, we're not in contact with that. All we're in contact with us, the world of appearances. So if I come up with a theory that validates our consciousness in the world of appearances, that's good enough that gives us what we need. So that's sort of the, the pro content, the best pit, the best spin you can put on Cod is he was trying to solve this problem of the validity of consciousness by saying, well, you don't need to worry about reality as it really is. We can, we can validate our consciousness for the world of appearances. Now, the argument that gets caught, and this is where woke this comes in, is that it doesn't work. It doesn't, it's not a tenable solution. And like I said, you go through this whole process over 200 years where it gets, it gets broken down to well, there's, it's actually not universal.
Speaker 1 00:49:18 It's the, you know, if you're a German, you see the world differently than if you're somebody, if you're a Russian, uh, or, or, or in some other culture. Uh, and you're, if you see things differently, if you're a proletarian versus if you're a bushwalk capitalist, you see things differently. If you're black or if you're white or you're Asian, and it gets just broken down and balkanized. And I think we have, you know, basically 200 years of evidence to show that constellation solution doesn't work because it leads to the, the, the wokeness. So I guess that's, I'm also saying that woke, this is wrong because, because it shows the, it shows the sort of, uh, ultimate end result of this content approach now. So then the important thing is what is iron rans answer? So that's, I think the important thing is like, Dave, is that these subjects are incredibly hard and complex.
Speaker 1 00:50:11 And so the fact that somebody comes along and actually gives a workable answer is really the most important thing. So I want to talk brief, we call, they have a few minutes left. I want to talk briefly about it. Uh, first of all, she has a great summary of conscious is that we are blind because we have eyes deaf because we have ears and diluted because we have a mind. So saying, you know, if you say that the, the categories with which we perceive things, distort the things we perceive and create this world of illusions, you're you are saying you're deaf because you're blind because you have eyes. Now, her answer, uh, and I, I sort of first got the grasp of this. This is actually integral to why I'm an objectivist. Cause I, the moment at which I sort of grasped and understood and accepted Iran's philosophy was reading the, um, chapter and axiomatic concepts in iron's, uh, instruction to objectivist epistemology, where she sort of gives the deepest explanation.
Speaker 1 00:51:05 And her deepest explanation is this idea. She says the problem with conscious, he assumes that if our consciousness has to process its interaction with reality, if we're cautious has to have any role in, as in mediating our contact with reality, therefore it's inherently distorting and inherently makes that novel, legit valid. She says, well, but would you say that about any other process of human life is everything has to go through a process of cause and effect you, you, so she has a section where it says, would you, would you, would you say that because we have to digest our food, that true nutrition is impossible, right? So the fact that our consciousness has to go through a cause and effect process of interacting with the world and then producing knowledge, the fact that it goes through a process is not distorting. It doesn't make it invalid.
Speaker 1 00:51:58 In fact, it makes it more valid. It, you know, it actually means I, so I think her fundamental answer is not just the primacy of existence versus the primacy of consciousness, but specifically, I would say a causal view of consciousness that consciousness is a set of causal cause and effect relationships between the things we perceive and then the knowledge that we end up with in our mind that, you know, so when I opened my eyes, there's a set of causal relationships from the, you know, the incandescent, the, the, the filament heating up in the incandescent light bulb produces light. That light bounces off the wall. It bounces back into my eye that, you know, it produces photons of a certain frequency and a certain magnitude number of protons that then hit the receptors in my eye and produce chemical reactions. And those chemical reactions turn into, uh, neurological signals that then go to my brain and all along there, that's all governed by cause and effect processes that are because their cost of different processes are reliable and stable and produce an objective relationship between the thing that's happening in the world.
Speaker 1 00:53:09 You know, the, the electricity going through the incandescent, the filament of the incandescent bulb between it. So it creates this cause and effect, relationship between the thing going on in the world and the ultimate awareness of that thing in my mind. And that's all governed by cause and effect. And it's that processing by cause and effect relationships that makes it valid. That shows that because we know these are stable explainable cause and effect relationships. That's how we know that our perceptions are correct. So that's sort of the, my short, the best summary I can present in three to five minutes of what Iran's answer is that she had this idea that yes, knowledge is processed, but everything in human life has to be processed, everything's subject to the law of cause and effect. And so if you accept that, you know, I think implicitly contest the idea that the only way to know the world would be through revelation, right?
Speaker 1 00:54:07 Through sort of a costless, um, you know, knowledge without any means or, or intermediary steps. And by establishing that sort of mystical revelation as his standard, then he says, well, our perception of the world doesn't measure up. So therefore, you know, it it's invalid. Um, and I think that if you throw out that assumption and say, no, there's no reason to accept, to have to think that it would happen by magic. It should happen by a process. It should happen by cause and effect. Then you would see that that cause and effect relation between the thing in the world. And my awareness of it is what is, what makes it valid. That's the way, best thing I could do in this short period of time. We have,
Speaker 2 00:54:51 If I could jump quickly up for those who have a little more time on their hands, uh, this is an issue that I cover in some depth in the first chapter of my book, the evidence in the senses and dresser
Speaker 1 00:55:04 Fred, by the way. And that's part of where I got this.
Speaker 2 00:55:07 Yeah. Thanks, Rob. Um, so, um, just a point of reference, uh, for, for the re
Speaker 0 00:55:15 Thank you, David, and thank you, Rob. I want to thank everyone. Roger J. Scott, uh, who came up and interacted and asked a question. Um, this is very sadly our last clubhouse for this week. Uh, but, uh, not our last activities for the week tomorrow. Um, professor Stephen Hicks is going to be having sessions for in his, uh, course on capitalism. So I encourage you to, um, to join in that. And then also tomorrow I'm going to be interviewing, uh, on our various platforms. Um, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, zoom, LinkedIn, uh, Zarrab Gucci jet power DS, who is the, uh, leader of the libertarian movement in the country, Georgia. And you may ask why Georgia, um, but it's actually become kind of a hot bed of objectivism in, in part thanks to, uh, several volunteers in the country who have been helping to translate our videos and other materials into Georgia.
Speaker 0 00:56:30 So that's going to be an interesting conversation. And then after the holiday break, we're going to be back next week as usual on Tuesday with Rob Sinski. And then, um, Wednesday, I'm going to be interviewing, uh, Jeffrey Tucker. Who's going to be talking about lockdowns and about COVID, uh, restrictions and mandates. Um, and then also another clubhouse on, uh, next Wednesday with, uh, Steven Hicks is capitalism bad for the environment. So, um, check out our events on the Atlas society, web website, uh, the events section, and if there's any overlap, uh, in our audience with people who are also on Instagram, um, make sure to be in that, just following our, you know, our feed there, but, uh, twice a week, we do Instagram takeovers where we answer your questions, including questions on. So I'm grateful to have a bit of study, oh, and, uh, last, but definitely not least, um, today, uh, through socio dot Atlas, uh, and to NELA, Marty is going to be doing a live in an hour with Rodrigo de Monte. He is a Venezuelan human rights activist. So that's in Spanish, but, um, plenty to choose from. Don't get overwhelmed, come back and join us and, uh, appreciate all of you being here.
