This is Jay Dyer from Jay's Analysis. You're listening to Esoteric Hollywood. Esoteric Hollywood is where I deconstruct the biggest films in an unparalleled way, from the classics of the silver screen to today's blockbusters. Learned to watch film with new eyes. As we enter Esoteric Hollywood, Welcome, you're listening to Jay's analysis. And I want to do some reflections on the debate and discussion with Adam Kokesh, which was a lot of fun. I appreciate Kokash being willing to.
Do that. I thought that was actually, you know, he didn't really have to.
Do that, and he's a pretty big name guy, so you know, he's basically sending traffic my way, just from a practical standpoint, So I appreciate that, and it was a lot of fun, and I don't think there's no hostility or anything like that. We had a good conversation afterwards, so hopefully we can, you know, continue to have an open discussion on these topics, and I'm thinking I would like to eventually get at them on the podcast to discuss his experiences in war and his principle of non aggression,
which actually I do agree with. I just think that it needs to be filled out in a broader philosophical worldview setting that it doesn't function on its own, but the statement itself that we shouldn't provoke or aggress others for the sake of stability and progress and flourishing.
I totally agree with.
A couple ideas that I also had that I think will be illustrative and instructive that I didn't actually get to in the debate. It didn't get to bring up was that there's interesting discussions even from various types of
libertarians such as Hans Harmenhaupa. And this was actually a point that Tim Kelly made where he points out that in the book Democracy that God Has That Failed, basically overall government spending under monarchies was limited and it averaged around three to nine percent of GDP, whereas government spending under the Masonic republics of our day with the state's bite, hovers around thirty five to fifty percent of GDP on average, So that that's a big difference in I understand the
ABS position, you know, is not interested in any state, But the problem is that the long march towards what we're supposed to believe is the stateless society, the coming possible, hopeful stateless society one day is a long march of revolutions, right, and Adam admitted this when he was talking about the phases of history. And that's sort of sort of a slicing up of history that both the Libertarians and the
Anglo Saxon liberal tradition and the Marxist share. Is this idea that you can cut out these phases of history like the Dark Ages and things like this, and that's not really how history. I mean, I'm not opposed to those kinds of classifications across the board, because you know, we speak of the Enlightenment, which is a phase in the history of the West where ideas shift and change.
I'm not opposed to that totally speaking. But at the same time, it's also can be used just as a kind of rhetorical device that doesn't really have much meaning, like, oh, everyone in the Dark Ages was superstitious and domb and that's not actually true. When you go and read them, many of them are much more capable philosophers than the average intellectual today that inhabits academia or something like this,
you would learn. I'm a big critic of Aquinas, for example, but you'd learn a lot more from the feet of Aquinas than you would.
Professor Richard J.
Darwin at the local university, who's just got one mythology to try to teach you. That tryes to encapsulate all reality under one unified vision of materialism. For example, So other points and notes I had ambiguity on nature. We talk a lot about nature. I don't have a problem talking about nature. But for me, obviously, as you know,
nature is confined within a specific worldview. So when Paul says, for example, in Romans One, that nature itself testifies to the existence of God, he's speaking from the advantage point of a person who believes in creation. You know, Paul talks about x neulo creation more than once in his epistles. So for him, reality is a created reality, and it has its beginning, its middle period, and its terminus or final state telos in God. And that's of course our
Orthodox vision of creation and the process of history. So when Paul uses the term nature, it's nature understood in that perspective with that vantage point. Right, when a person with a reductionistic materialist view uses the term nature, they mean something totally different. So we have a lot of these ambiguities, oftentimes in appealing to ambiguous terms like law, freedom, nature, et cetera, et cetera, that are really conditioned and interpreted
by our worldview as a whole. And this is the point that I continually try to stress, and what we're going to see in.
This talk is.
When we look at a couple essays, I guess, I guess one of them is kind of famous by the famous semiutitian in Berto Echo, whom I've referenced many times and whose books I've read many I've read many of his book Excuse Me of Fucoast, Pendulum and Name of the Rose, and even some of his philosophical and literary works as probably the foremost Semiutitian. Before I think he's died, I don't know that the Mandela effect hitting me where
he didn't die and I thought he did. I don't know, but maybe I thought I saw on Drudge Report that Echo died a year or two ago.
I don't know.
But regardless of whether he did or didn't, he is an interesting thinker, and I guess you could say he represents maybe the modern progressive liberal academic. He's a good candidate for that role, and he's going to critique fascism. And this is the essay that we're going to look
at that Daniel Spaulding sent to me. That's illustrative, and so what we're going to do after I finished discussing Adam's position in the debate and some of the points that I didn't ever get to in my notes reflections on the debate, we're going to dissect echoes essay, and we're going to use the apologetic methodology that I'm hoping to instill in people out there to give them the skills to do what I'm doing, as well as to hopefully better understand where I'm coming from, so that they
can implement these kinds of ideas in their own life. Because I think they're beneficial, I think they're healthy. I think that they will help you to flourish, at least intellectually in this life and then hopefully into the life beyond this life. So that's what we're going to look at, probably in the second half of the talk. I don't know how much of the I don't really have it planned out time wise, how much you know what's going to take care of what, But in terms of looking
at the debate and then looking at echoes essay. But a couple other points that I did want to touch on briefly is that I got a couple of hit pieces written on me this week, one from this Jason Calavito character that Chris at Hoasbusters has had on the show, and Calveto is in the I guess you could say the Snopes Shechrmer nexus of pathological skepticism, as the Colins Brothers called it, which that was a good way to put it. And this is just really the naive scientism
slash empiricism perspective. And I've done countless critiques of naive empiricism.
It's very easy to refute. It's been refuted many times.
Of course, the people in those positions don't really get it and don't have the motivation, I don't think to want to question their presubpositions of native scientism and naive empiricism because it would obviously fall apart very quick, you know, the whole house of cards comes down. And really this is characteristic of all modernity. So there's a lot of scare tactics, straw men, false statements in.
His hit piece.
And since he sent a whopping four people my way, four hits from his hit piece. I'm not even going to spend that much time on it. I mean, just at my website, I'm getting over one hundred thousand views a month, and I don't think four hits from Jason Calvito's kind of do too much damage.
But that's okay.
There's a his article was more of a hip piece than any kind of actual argumentation. I will give him credit that he does seem to have listened to some of my talks, and so that I appreciate that he says that there's nothing worth listening to in my talks, which is interesting that he went to the trouble to
write a hip piece, given I'm not that interesting. So thank you for all the liberal gatekeepers who are out there to protect everybody nobly in their actions, the noble protectors of the common men, right who You're you're stupid enough to fall for listening to my podcast, but you're smart enough to figure out if you listen to Jason calveto his argumentation, which is actually hit piece that's going
to prove me wrong. So nothing but loaded questions, nothing but bandwagon fallacy, nothing but begging the question and nothing but special pleading straw men, appeals to emotion at homonyms. That's basically the entirety of his piece, So not even really worth dealing with. But of course, all of these positions that are really emotional based, reactionary positions, and that
would be liberalism, leftism, progressivism, anarchism. In my view, they have an appearance of logic and coherence, but when you really boil it down to the brass tacks, you're really just appealing to these empty broad categories such as freedom, democracy, rights, quality, egalitarianism, and so Jason Calvito actually got trolled, and the humorous, humorless left is quite easy to troll because he actually believed that I think Trump is God emperor.
He says that in this article, which of course that was a joke.
Okay, that's he wasn't deft enough to figure out that that's a meme.
That was used to troll the left right.
I don't I don't know anybody that actually believes Trump is a god emperor.
This is a joke.
This is from Dune, Okay, Frank Kerbert's novels Dune, David Lynch movie Dune, God Emperor of Dune it's a joke, man lighting up.
So I went by the way.
Jason Calvito lost his argument with Chris Kendall at Hoaxbusters because it got down to the point in their debate where Calvito had to argue that DNA produces absolutely magical new information and that this is how you get the rise of new species from one organism to the next. And of course there's absolutely no evidence or proof that DNA produces new information. Actually, it only codes the information
existing already within the DNA. So Chris nailed Calavito on that point, and Calvito had absolutely no response, and if I recall, he at that point left the discussion because he talked himself into circles. So, I mean, come on, seriously, naive scientism and evolutionary Darwinism. I mean, these people, I don't think they've ever taken a philosophy classes or logic class. They've had maybe pop psychology and a few maybe biologic classes,
maybe maybe, and that's about it. But don't ever expect any kind of upper level analytical philosophy class, any kind of understanding of continental philosophy, any understanding of math theory or metallogic. No don't ever expect that out of these people. So the problem that we want to hinge the argument against, well, this would extend to all modern liberal positions, and that
would include Calavito and koquesh Is Nominalism. Nominalism is the medieval philosophical idea that came as a response to medieval Augustinianism or Platonism or neoplatonism. Noominalism says that there are no metaphysical ideas or categories. There are only humanly constructed symbols, signs, or what are called tokens. So a token similar sign is a purely social construct. It's purely made up from the human creative, pragmatic, it's solely based I guess on
use right functional. So when we talk about things like truth, or when we talk about any metaphysical categories like ethics of right and wrong or whatever, these are all constructs, right, They're relative. This is what nominalism ultimately has to devolve into, because nominalism again starts from the position of rejecting any of these objective, logical, ontological, ethical, metaphysical, and even mathematical categories. Now you say, why do they do this, Well, they
do this. Number one because they're wrong and they're stupid. But number two, because they have an agenda I believe ultimately, which was to attack.
The existing power structures.
And so I don't really care about what Akham's personal motivations are. You know, if he wanted to I don't know, he wanted to be with some check or something or Abalard the other famous anomalists.
I don't you know, he wanted to be.
With some check and maybe the existing power structures, rules, or the papacy or something like this was in the way.
It doesn't really matter.
If you want to really dive deep into that, you can read Haiko Oberman's book on Luther, Harvest of Medieval Theology, where he discussed is the influence of nominalism on Luther in A. Gabriel by all in these other characters be I eal and again, that's Haiko Oberman's excellent book. I read that probably twelve years ago. Very technical theological, philosophical book, but very illustrative, very enlightening to see the rise of the present Reformation coming out of the nominalist tradition. So
this is what nominalism says. It says that you don't really the human mind is confined to its sense data. And because it's confined to it, since data, it can't pretend. It's a pretense to speak of eternal verities, or to speak of metaphysical categories, to speak of objective properties of knowledge, right, because it's always confined to the finite. So anything that we might speak of as spiritual metaphysical eventually gets smushed into the here and the now and the immediate now.
Maybe many of the early nominalists did not have that intention. They did not have the intention of smushing all of man's knowledge or belief in objective properties into.
The here and the now.
But this is eventually what happens, and this is what is not debatable. This is known. This is where you get empiricism. Empiricism rises from medieval nominalism, and empiricism is just nominalism right. Empiricism says we.
Only know.
What we can derive from sense impressions and sense data. And this is why for a presubsitionalist such as myself or anyone else who has followed this train of thought, Hume is very useful. David Hume is very good, not insofar as he's the great of a philosopher, but rather he is the illustrative philosopher for the empiricists because he took it to its consistent conclusions. You see, Hume is consistent,
and that's why he's worthy of note. And he admits that the end result of this empiricism is total skepticism. So you don't really know, you don't really have access to objective truths, you don't really know that the future will be like the past. You don't have any rational logical basis for induction. It's something that you assume and use pragmatically, but you can't justify it. It's unjustifiable because it's by its very nature not provable on empirical grounds.
So empiricism can't stand the test of empiricism. And this is the ultimately the question that hum Is is putting out there to his fellow Enlightenment skeptics and empiricists.
And he's saying, let's not fool.
Ourselves here, right and be dishonest and assume that we have objective truth.
We don't. It's not possible.
So really all we have is pragmatic truth, right, positivism. Yet how often do we hear the rationalist, scientistic empiricist Michael Schrmer, Dawkins, Nildigrasse, Tyson, Jason Calvito. No, no, no, on arguing and behaving and operating as if they have objective reason, logic and metaphysical truths, as they consistently deny and denounce metaphysical truths. And this is of course the
great pologetic point that we're making here. Now most of these guys don't know this because again, well number one, they don't care to know it. It would under mine all of their thought and philosophy, pseudo philosophy, their sophistry really and they actually are of the descendants of the sophists. But they also didn't ever learn any of this stuff. So there's a dual problem here. It's not one of the others, not just ignorance. It's also probably in many
cases bad will. If you're Richard Dawkins, do you want to admit you've been wronging for all these years?
Of course not.
So there's a career political motivation obviously in many of these cases. And so let's come back to Cocash, because we can actually group Cocush and Jason Calvito's again, as we said, empiricism and skepticism under one banner here, when we've gotten rid of in our worldview or philosophy of the world, the possibility of anything like metaphysical categories, truths, objective principles and so forth, what we've actually done is severely limited ourselves.
Now you may think that they.
Argue, of course, that this severe limitation is good, and it's just the fact of how things are. It is just how it is, and like it or not, you're just confined to your immediate sense datum. The question then becomes, Okay, if that's true, then let's be consistent with that, And the argument, the presubpositional argument, the transcendental argument here is that no one is consistent with that because it's absurd
and it's a reductio ad absurdum. So in logic, one of the arguments that you can make, and it's actually, I believe a very strong argument.
Is a reducty argument.
If you reduce the opponent's position to absurdity, then it's obviously not a defensible rational logical position. And anytime you're engaging in debate, you're assuming logic, you're assuming rationality and reason. Otherwise no point in debating. You go home right, drop the mic turn off the mike from get off the stage. If you don't come to the table at least the
professing belief in logic, then you don't have an argument. Right, argument presumes logic, but with a calaveto or with a co cash, we don't have any desire to question empiricism or the bounds of supposed skepticism.
Rather, we just have this assumption that it's so.
I would argue that it's not so, and I can prove that it's not so because it's a reduct Yet it reduces to absurdity. The first argument against empiricism would be that the as we said, the position itself cannot be verified empirically. Now, if you're going to argue that all human knowledge comes through sense data an empirical experience, then to be consistent, you're going to also have to include the maxims and presubsisitions of empiricism itself under that claim.
You see, so we need empirical verification for the truth of empiricism because it's starting off of the universal claim. And remember Adam had no problem with universal claims. He admitted this several times in the debate. Liberals themselves are always touting these moral platitudes and all this universal claims of morals and ethics. Then they turn around and espouse total cultural epistemic moral relativism. So they're they're total fools from the outset. When it comes to logic, we're saying,
excuse me, uh. When Adam argued for a person ory self, we are told that that there's some inherent dignity in this because of the development of consciousness and reason and mind. But the problem, as we see from that evolutionary position of man, is that there's no reason to believe that there's some inherent value to consciousness or mind. And as many of the present day Darwinists are now discovering, there's no argument for consciousness or mind on their on their presuppositions,
and it's it's so stupid. It should be obvious that if you confine everything to materialism, that there's obviously no place for a mind because it's by definition not material or the soul or the self, right, the self is not. At what point can you tell me which collection of molecules is the self?
Right?
Well, you can't, obviously, and that none of them can, and they all admit that. And so since you can't, then the self is alusory because the self is really just an arbitrary collection grouping. Remember Adam had a problem with arbitrary collective groupings. Well, the self is an arbitrary collective groupings of a grouping of this group of molecules, this group of atoms, supposedly right, this section of the gray matter. Perhaps, well, no, I see, perhaps under this microscope,
many chunks of gray matter. But you have not shown me that that equals a self exactly exactly, And we really need a person, the conception of a person, a soul, right in order to make sense of this idea of a morally responsible agent operating with a will. And we always hear from the libertarian perspective of the anarchic perspective of responsibility, moral responsibility, ethics, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, this all assumes individually acting agents.
But again, as many of the Darwinists have noted in their mechanistic view of the universe, if the universe is one giant machine of determined materialistic process, then the arising of consciousness in evolutionary process is also just another aspect of the determined machine. And so your belief in free will is really just illusory. It's a phantasm, just like the angels and the demons in God right according to your view. So this again reduces to a reductio, reduces
to absurdity. If everything is in flux, how is it that we can claim to have access or knowledge of objective metaphysical principle and logic that are not in flux. This is another problem, and this is ultimately this was a problem for Plato as well, because Plato had a dialectical view of the body and the soul, the soul existing or subsisting, perhaps with its connection to the abstract, unchanging, eternal verities of the forms, yet at the same time
being imprisoned in the body subject to perpetual flux. So you have a dialectical tension between two realms, one realm of perpetual flux, another realm of stasis and permanence and unchangeability. And the problem, of course is that never the twain shall meet. And this is a dialectical tension in the history of all Western philosophy. You could argue as well in for Eastern philosophy we reject all dialectics.
But of course all modern.
Philosophies, especially in the West, are built on dialectics. Be it libertarianism, be it anarchism, be it Marxism. They are all classed and start from the presupposition of dialectics. This goes back to Plato, goes back to Aristotle, to Platinus, who all argued that the starting point of philosophy is that multiplicity equals tension and division, or excuse me, multiplicity
or distinction implies tension or opposition. And this is why we have so many problems in society, in man's own life, and so forth and so on, because we believe that the fall is what brought about dialectical tensions as a result of the movement of the will. Okay, it's not a metaphysical problem of differences or distinctions that are Man's problem, but the movement of the will away from the good that is man's problem.
So two different views there.
Whereas so we locate Man's problem as ethical in a matter of the heart, the Greeks and the rest of the tradition of the West locates Man's problem in the externals of metaphysics, politics, and then ultimately with Marx and so forth, class, gender right, identity, politics right, So all of Man's problems are located in the external sphere. Right, this is where we get behaviorism, the perfecting of man through external stimuli.
No no, no, no no.
Man's problems begin, as Paul and the Book of James say, internal, with the desires and lusts of passions of the heart, right the corruption that resulted as from the fall, and man no longer having control of his passions. So man needs a renovation of his heart. And this is why we believe that Christian theology preaches this repentance, this change of heart, which is a lifetime thing, a continual process through life of moving away from rebellion, dialectical tensions and
towards God. So dialectics and dialectical tensions actually is a manifestation of blaming God for man's own moral vices and fall. In other words, when we say that man's problem is the fact that there's these differences out there in the world, and there's these there's your nation over there, and your race and your gender over there, and then I've got mine over here. And the problem that we all have
is that we're different. And if we can just battle and smash and war against each other until we all have one giant small is board, melting pot or something. Then we'll finally have peace when we destroy all the differences or when we say God, it's your fault because you created these distinctions, and distinctions cause division and opposition. Well, no, actually, in our theology, we believe in a balance between the one and the many. In God, there is a perfect
ultimacy between the one and the many. There's no divergence or imbalance. There's no premissy to unity in God over against the.
Triad of God.
Right, so it's not like the Father has more being or the oneness of God has more being over against the Son and the Spirit. No, the Son is just as much God as the Father, we say. And so our view is that the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity, is the source, foundation and basis for our belief that there is harmony of both with unity and with multiplicity. The one and the many are never out of balance, and they're not intention And by tension I mean te and s I owing in tension, not intention.
So there's no dialectical tensions in oppositions.
This has been argued many times by many many Orthodox theologians for many centuries. So this is not something that I derived from some new philosopher somewhere or something like that. It wasn't from some Protestant philosopher. No, this goes back to orthodox philosophers and theologians. So it goes back to Maximus Maximus a confessor arguing dialectics with.
Uh Pirris the Monothelite. So all of this plays out.
In our worldviews, whether we know it or not, is really the point here with.
With the modern revolutionary.
Okay, let's just I'm going to class all these people under the modern revolutionary, and the modern revolutionary for me will include the progressive libertarian, the right libertarian, the American neo conservative, the American conservative, the anarcho capitalists, the anarcho syndicalists, the anarcho liberal, the anarcho feminist, the Marxist, the socialist, the communist, the modern fascist. All of these I'm going to group under the category of the modern revolutionary because
they all share the modern revolutionaries presuppositions. They're all birthed from that source, whether they know it or not. Interestingly, anarchism itself is a tradition. Many of the anarchists are apparently unaware of this, believe that they as a magical mathematical unit in a within a vacuum, came to anarchism through their supposed reasoning powers, when in fact they actually were propagandized by reading it on various online forums, YouTube videos,
and books. So they, whether they know it or not, receive their information through a tradition. And some traditions are even you could argue anti traditions. I believe that one writer, Charles Upton talks about he has some term for it, like a dark not dark tradition, but I forget his term anyway. Point being, you could even argue that that some of these anti traditions are just really themselves a tradition.
Right.
It's kind of like the Baptist Church was grounded in opposing tradition, and then over time the Baptist Church develops its own traditions, right with you singing the hymns just as I am at the beginning of the church, and then you have the offering, and so they develop their own traditions when they're birded out of the.
Desire to have no traditions.
So quite absurd really, And so we heard a lot about the right to freedom of movement, and as I was pointing out where does the anarcho person derive these rights? And he says, well, from logic, and then also talks about nature. And I appreciate Adam admitting that nature seems to show us predators and pray. So nature is not always the best source of argumentation for a position natural rights, so to speak.
So I'll give kudos to Adam for realizing that.
So Adam wants to appeal to eternal verities, Thank good job. Yes, absolutely, of course, how do we have access to eternal verities when we're the product of millions of years of evolution?
We will never know.
But we're just going to assume that that's the case, and we're going to assume that this consciousness that we have is a self, some special identity we could look at, perhaps Descartes Daycartes says, well, how do I know that I exist?
Well, if I.
Doubt my own existence, I must assume my existence in doubting my existence, which is interesting a kind of transcendent argument. However, it's actually not that great of an argument because the argument doesn't actually prove the existence of a person or a self.
It only appears, at least to prove the existence of thought.
You see so leaping from a phenomena of thought to saying that O, therefore I am a person. You see, that only follows with a larger context in worldview, where you believe in and assume the existence of a self. So and I believe many philosophers have actually pointed that out. You know, I think therefore I am is not a non sequitor. It's a non sequitur. I think therefore thought happened.
Right.
You might can argue that that would be a better argument that I think therefore I am. You see, the I there is intended to denote a self or a person, and when we've just tried to boil down all of our starting points. And this is why descartes methodology, right, was this presuppositional attempt to get rid of all presuppositions, which is impossible. And this is the folly of Descartes. While at the same time being somewhat insightful, you can't
ultimately get rid of all presubpositions. This is what Descartes shows us. Even in his heroic quest to theoretically divest himself of all presuppositions, he still has many presubpositions. And by the way, I actually critique this in my undergrad days because.
There's a lot of actually, there's a lot.
More things that Descartes is assuming here that people haven't noticed.
Maybe somehow, I don't know, but.
You can't boil all of your presubositions down to I think, therefore I am because you're assuming language, for one, right, You're assuming subjects and predicates and sentences. So this brings along with it the assumption of linguistics. You're assuming that language operates within time and space. You're assuming that subjects and predicates have reference to things in an external world, even within your attempt right at boiling things down to
no presubpositions. So it's absolutely impossible, and that's why the presubpositional is rejects Classical foundationalism. Classical foundationalism is the idea that within philosophy you can just in terms of we'll say epistemology, Well you can just start with self evident maxims, right, the principle of non contradiction.
Well, that's just a self evident maxim and you can't question that.
Well, the whole of modernity is based on the idea, supposedly that we're going to question everything.
Okay, Well, let's question everything.
Now, what we find then is that in this long process from Descartes and anomalis on and questioning everything, they don't actually honestly do that. They rather turn their supposed questionings into a political or religious agenda slash motivation to remove the existing power structures and hierarchies. That's actually what was going on. And this is where, of course, we get revolutionary thought and revolutionary movements out of these philosophical ideas.
And is everyone who's listened to Jay's analysis for any period of time knows revolutionary thought and movements are the tools of foreign powers and bankers and so forth and so on. Right, they're the tools of foreign states. And if you don't understand that or know that, then you're naive. So when you believe that you've come to a special position of autonomy and individualism, you've really actually just been propagandized by fought from a few hundred years ago. Now
that does that mean that you got everything wrong? Nope, Nope, nope, because that's not how humans and worldviews work. It's not an all or nothing thing. But if you haven't questioned anarchism and empiricism and these kinds of things, then I would.
Venture to say that you have a lot wrong. And this is what hopefully.
The deconstructions and dissections and transcendent arguments and I'm presenting here will convey that's at least my goal in the debates that we're having.
And so forth. So we heard all kinds of things like what it is to be rational? Right? This is special pleading, and.
This is appeals to popularity, as if there's this popular notion of what it is to be rational that everyone shares, which they don't.
Now does that mean that I deny common reason? I do not.
Uh, but I don't think that there's such a thing that we can appeal to in a public sphere, especially not in our day.
That that we that is just quote rational.
So Richard Dawkins believes he's rational, right, but he also believes that everything is subject to evolutionary flux. So I would say Richard Dawkins is irrational, right. So there's no there's not really a prima fascia publicly accessible rationality that that that's in the public sphere of debate. Okay, Now, I'm not saying that human nature doesn't possess reason.
It does.
But you can also the great human nature through various means, toxic culture, whatever, brainwashing, bad bad.
Education, and so forth, to.
Have a programmed populace, and so reason in many of these cases, quote unquote is really just a propaganda tool.
Right.
In other words, in our day we think of reason, I would say a lot of people, especially in internet discourse, quote reason is identified with Dawkins, It's identified with scientism, it's identified with these kinds of things which are all the tools of statism.
And I think that that can that alone, I think shows that.
You know, when you're talking about reason, we have to be clear exactly what we're talking about. Now when I talk about reason, I believe that there's objective logic.
Right.
We should look at fallacies and syllogisms. We should understand what a straw man is. We should understand what no true scot stsman is as a fallacy, we should understand what two quoke way is. We should understand an appeal to emotion. We should understand either or fallacy, genetic fallacy. Right, we should understand all of those in the drama pen in the process of debate.
Most people don't do that. They don't know the fallacies.
I mean, just knowing the basic fallacies informal fallacies is a great step towards.
Your own mental health.
Actually, now what I do in my philosophy though, is and then what I think what you would get in a lot To be fair to a lot of people out there, they would probably agree and say, well, yeah, I'm talking about like the internet so called philosophers, but they're going to say or even in college classes, you should learn these things. I mean, I learned this in my first year of college in a literary class. Beliter or my English professor passed out the lists of informal fallacies, so.
When I was like, I don't know, twenty twenty one. So these are good things to learn.
But as you advance, and as you progress in these kinds of topics, especially in philosophy, you'll encounter really interesting questions for more advanced students, more technical students, which I totally support, which I've investigated and put a lot of time into in my education. And one of those which none of these so called Internet philosophers know anything about or I've ever looked into, is the question of metallogic.
Right now, we're getting way, of course, but metaal loogic points us in the direction of the kind of argumentation that I'm talking about, transcendental arguments, And how do I know that? Well, meta logic is the question of how is it that logic operates as a logical process, right, How does it operate in the world of flux and
change that we're talking about. We know that it does because you know, the mathematical you know, formulas that we use to build an airplane or to build a bridge ten years ago are the same ones that we're going
to use to build a bridge today. They might get more complex, they might get more advanced, we might discover new materials, but the mathematical principles behind building these things or computers or whatever, they don't change, right, These theorems, these algorithms, they don't become the opposite of themselves tomorrow. I mean, this is should be obvious, right, I mean, the law of non contradiction doesn't turn into the opposite
of itself tomorrow. Maybe in terms of multiverse other worlds, right, which, by the way, there's ways you can refute multiverse and all that kind of stuff philosophically speaking, which that I've delved into on Hoostbusters.
On many occasions. How you can actually show that those.
Supposed scientific views, which they are, are a nonsense. But you would do it through kind of transcendent augmentation like I'm doing here, because they would lead to absurdities.
Anyway, we saw with Adams.
Talk that progress is objective, it's universal, it's not what you believe is progress is going to be conditioned by your value judgments, which are conditioned by your worldview.
Right, Well, you consider to be good, we considered to be bad.
So if you, as I said, are a proponent of scientism and reductionistic materialism and global warming and depopulation, then you believe it's good to basically kill off most of the planet, right you would say that's progress, Well, is it?
Right? So there's nothing.
Inherent in the word of progress with this just bantering about throwing out the slogan of progress that actually tells
us what is progressive. If you're a shaman in some tribe somewhere and you trip a bunch of ayahuasca or something, and you almost go crazy and kill yourself, but you got like to the limits of perception or something, right like that was in your view a good right because you went through the shamanica or initiatory process, and yeah, you might have almost died and lost your mind, but you came back and you survived the process, and you think you have an enlightenment, and so.
For you that was a good right, that was that was progress for you individually.
And then most of these people, of course, believe that everybody in a society then should be taking ayahuasca perfectly in line with the CIA's and culture of plans.
And so is that progress or is that regress? Right?
I mean, if we're all living in huts, you know, like archaic revival primitivism or something like this, and we're sitting around tripping ayahuasca, rolling around on our own shit or something, is that progress?
Well, some people would say it is progress. I don't believe it is.
But you can't just say progress as if it's somehow inherently clear as to what this is. Progress doesn't work or function outside of some context of a belief system or worldview. And so that was a lot of the
stuff that we heard in the debate. We had Adam sort of arbitrarily consigning certain things to the category of eternal verities and other things to eternal progress or in to never any flux but we never heard any clear and consistent pattern or benchmark or judgment measure of judgment as to how we know which things are with right logic and reason, he says are in the eternal verities category, traditions and morals are in the evolutionary flux category. Well,
on what basis do you know which is which? We're never going to get that from an empirical perspective. I think at one point he said something like, we test it and see what works. Well, again, what works is dependent on your presubsitions. Right, if my empire where I'm the god emperor and I smash all the people that I don't like, works for me, then I'm going to interpret that as a working. So what quote unquote works
is a very ambiguous subjective notion. We can't just apply this abstract category something quote working as if we know exactly what that means. Every anarcho libertarian, whether right libertarian or left libertarian, I argue once nominalism when it comes to the category of the state.
Right, the state is not real, it does not exist. It's a fiction.
However, when it comes to other arbitrary groupings that they'll prefer, such as their own private voluntary incorporation status and its quote rights and legal categories. Suddenly they're essentialists and Platonists. Hence the parable that I told at the beginning of the debate. So I see this as a very arbitrary contradiction here, that we're the metaphysical groupings and categories where I voluntarily created corporation, and where I have laws that
I will then extend into posterity, such as inheritance. That my inheritance, the people who inherit my wealth, they get this somehow magically as a right when they're so. In other words, if I say that my children are entitled to what I pass on to them, that's a collective legal category that I'm assuming, and you're saying, no, it's not.
Oh, yes it is. I'm assuming that my family.
Has some collective legality status by which my children right are going to get my stuff.
And you say, oh, well, it's voluntary. Oh is it not? Always?
Sometimes children inherit stuff and it wasn't voluntarily their decision to inherit it. Sometimes bad things are inherited, right, Well, how do we parcel this out in the supposed anarcho setting when we again, when we've been told that groupings are fictions. Law is a fiction unless it was voluntarily contracted. Well, I mean this is just retarded. I mean, come on, no, they're not. Humans have the ability to enact things that are binding on other people, and that does not always
require voluntary submission on the part of other persons. And I would say that fathers and families and children.
Show that to be the case.
Now, modern political and ideological systems, as we said, we're arguing against the revolutionary here, the modern revolutionary in all of its forms, they prefer solving man's ills, as we said, through the imposition or the lack of imposition of some external structure.
Man's problems are.
The result of class, the result of race, the result of economic disparities, the result of the state, the result of hierarchies. And while many of these things are problematic, there's no doubt. Are they really the source and the solution to manzils?
I don't believe so.
And again that's because man's ills begin with his own internal vices. And this is why we see that libertarianism in our the modern revolutionary positions, all of them have
their own version of faith, hope, and love. Interestingly, we have all these Christian categories, these biblical categories that are used by the left, by the modern revolutionary, but they've all been divorced from any transcendent theological status, and so they have absolutely no binding force or meaning or purpose because the whole universe is meaningless and purposelessness apart from
everybody's subjective whims. So if your political economic theory has to argue, quote, well, we've never really seen the real implementation of blank, then you have a religious faith in an idealized position that will maybe eschatologically imminentize one day, we don't know. But of course this is out of a chord with all human nature and history as we've seen it so far, which requires some sort of social
cohesion based on social norms and laws. Right, even the most tribal societies out there in the middle of nowhere still have families.
Right, still takes a man and a woman, mommy and a daddy, and then a couple other people.
Again, unless you live a completely hermetic existence, which is possible people do that. There are some guys out there out in the woods doing that. But again, most of these people who want the anarchism, the anarchical position are on the internet, arguing all day.
They're not out there doing this.
So another point that none of this stuff ever comes to realize is that we have protections, even if they're voluntary, for a reason. We have borders and walls for a reason, and that's because you can't have everybody, the whole other half of the planet, other chunk of the planet, with billions supposedly of the rest of the planet, just coming into your culture and your nation. And you say, well, the state is a fiction, it has no right to erect borders. Okay, that's all well and good for the
fantasy world. But in our world we need borders. Okay, go down to El Paso and look at Juarez, and if you want to, if.
You would literally rather live in Juarez.
Where the cartels rule and it's all shacks, be my guest, right, Or if you would rather live in El Paso where you have running water and electricity.
Yeah.
I mean even the mainstream open border news outlets like AP and Reuters, they report on Juarez and El Paso this way. And I've been there, so I can speak from experience, my direct personal.
Empirical experience. I went there and I took photos, and.
You can stand on the one hand, at the Moca shop where you get your smoothie, you're sipping your smoothie and you have running water in a clean restroom, and you look over the wall and you see just endless shanty shacks and people being run by private cartels, private cartels, okay, where there's no state. Arguably, I mean, I guess you could argue this's like some local what's the Hispanic word for hethe right, who works for the cartel or something.
So there's your private government right there. And we always hear.
About the state, the state of the state, the state, but the anarcho capitalists don't often mention that the state that we exist under is a corporate state, that is, a private monopoly state, which is the result of their centuries of market god that they worship. In other words, the libertarian market god is precisely what gives birth to the monopolistic, capitally capital god which runs the society of
the West that we now live under. So they're arguing for the beta position, right, liberty beta seventeen seventy six, seventeen eighty nine is what gives birth to nineteen eighty four.
Now you say that's stupid. I don't believe that.
Well, Quigley says that form one we saw that. Quigley says that the libertarian market positions of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century that came to dominate were the banker's plot. How many times have I been saying this, but our anarco libertarian friends do not want to give this up. On what basis we can ask these libertarians? Do you then impose the non aggression principle upon me? And so what we actually see is that all world
views have this implicit desire to export themselves. Right, Adam is out there debating, trying to convince people of his view. Well, that's not very relativistic, right, in other words, And to be fair to Adam, he believes his position is objectively true. But I would say that I agree with you, Adam, and the belief and objective truth. It's just I don't think we can have it on the basis that you argue for it. How can we have objective truths and at the same time be moral relativists.
And I do get the.
Sense that Madam, that Adam is a moral relativist because you know, things like homosexuality are not wrong in themselves.
They're only quote wrong in some case of.
It being done on someone's private property when it wasn't desire or something like that.
But they're not objectively wrong. Right.
So I can bang and screw dead horse carcasses all day long, I can commit necrophilia. I can actually have sex with dead bodies all day long, as long as they do it on my private property and it doesn't hurt somebody.
Right.
Yeah, Well, see, doesn't something seem wrong about this, right? I mean, doesn't something inherently don't? We want to say, Yeah, I don't really think that having sex with dead babies is good. There's something wrong with this, right, But on the anarcho moral relatives position, there's nothing wrong with it inherently.
A couple more points.
I guess Adam speaks English.
English is a linguistic tradition.
So when Adam makes all these arguments, tries to convince others of his position, which he believes is subject to Well, on the one hand, it's relativistic because everything is under perpetual evolution. At the same time, he's using a linguistic tradition, English to convey all of his ideas, which is strictly speaking, not in his view, not objective metaphysically objective. Right, everything is subject to evolution in terms of such traditions in
Adam's view. Okay, well, then how are the words that you're using able to convey eternal verities?
Exactly? Now?
In my view, I believe that tradition and traditions actually can convey eternal truths and are not completely subject to evolution. So that I think, I mean, and I've got a whole bunch more notes, but we've talked for like an hour just to sort of recapping the debate, and you know, it boils down to utilizing universal claims and principles with no real way to make sense of how there are
universe claims some principles. All right, we're just going to say that there are these eternal verities and we back them up by he says, testing it. Yeah, well, there's not really a way that we just test by trial and error. By the way, there's no been no trial and error test of his position yet, so we don't actually know if that position is true on its own grounds. Right, If everything that's an eternal verity is known, he said, by testing it and see if it works pragmatism, right.
I don't think we can get.
A coherent defense of where his anarchic society has been enacted. Maybe he does have an argument somewhere where this was done somewhere I don't know, but I think you would have to go in the direction of maybe Chris's arguments of.
Like Indian tribes or Native American.
Tribes or something like this would maybe be the closest approximation. But to me, it looks to me like they're all organized hierarchically with tribal chieftains.
So I don't know how we're going to get that.
But we have talked for an hour here. This has been the first hour you've been listening to Jay's analysis. This is my analysis of revolutionary thought and against the revolutionary moderns. And in the second part we're going to do an in depth critique of Umberto Echo's relatively famous essay uru fascism. That is how revolutionary moderns must ultimately argue against all meaning, because meaning, an objective truth is fascism. And this is going to be Echo's point, and this
is a good point. Yes, we want to hold the left to their own presubositions, hold them to accountable, that they're accountable to their own claims and statements, and if they're going to be consistent, we want them to go the full way. We want them to ultimately say, as Wittgenstein and many of the revolutionary monitors will say, words are meaningless games and constructs.
And guess what. Once you've said.
Words are meaningless games and constructs, you have completely destroyed your own position. You can no longer argue and debate, and so actually you've contradicted yourself at the most fundamental level. So you've lost the debate. And we're going to show that in presubsitional fashion with Umberto Eco's famous essay. If you like what you're hearing and you want to hear the second half of the talk, subscribe at Jason Alsi's for four and a five a month or for sixty
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There is PayPal options for inside the US and outside the US, and please get the book from me to help support the author, not through Amazon. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for hour two.