Episode #044 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, a couple weeks ago we had an episode on belief, and in many ways this episode is a continuation of that episode. And I say that because many of the thought lines that are being explored here were originally talked about on the belief episode, and they’re going to be expanded upon here. So, I guess what I’m saying is, if you haven’t listened to the “Belief” episode yet, do yourself a favor. Go back; listen to it. Absorb it. Let’s be honest, you guys have all heard that episode before, probably multiple times. And if you haven’t, I have nothing to say to you. Leave this podcast right now.

Well, I have nothing to say to you except for this very short episode recap I’m about to give you. The “Belief” episode was kind of like an awareness campaign.  But instead of spreading awareness about some terrible disease like prostate cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or something that affects millions of people a year, the “Belief” episode was talking about—it was sort of an ice bucket challenge for a horrible disease that affects seven-plus billion people a year. Because as long as you’re a human being with senses, intuitions, or an ability to reason that can deceive you, like all of us are, you are living with this condition every day of your life. And the condition that I’m talking about is the problem that arises because of the very flawed human tools that we have at our disposal for acquiring knowledge about anything. For all intents and purposes, certainty is impossible.

And that starts to become a very dangerous recipe when it’s combined with the fact that there are absolutely zero limits to what we can allow ourselves to believe if we’re gullible enough. We can literally believe anything that we want to believe. What I’m saying there is, what you believe has absolutely nothing to do with how true it is, necessarily. Now, every single one of us realizes this, right? We’ve all been children before. We all know what it’s like to believe in things for bad reasons. You don’t got to look too far back to remember a time when you believed something that ended up not being true based on a false pretense.

I believed in a ventriloquist dummy that was evil that was constantly stalking me and was going to come into my room in the middle of the night and kill me. I remember reading these Goosebumps books. It’s like a horror book genre by R.L. Stine when I was a kid. I really thought this evil ventriloquist doll was going to come and choke me out with his wooden hands. I believed that. It’s crazy looking back on it, but now I wonder what I believe in that’s just as unfounded.

Like, many kids believe in Santa Clause. They believe that Santa Clause is always watching them and making a determination as to whether he’s going to give you presents or coal. He has a hard time pulling the trigger on the coal. I think it’s mostly used as an incentive campaign. We’ve all heard the song, right? “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.” Like, for some reason kids aren’t supposed to question why Santa became an omniscient being. It’s like this fat dude that lives at the North—anyway.

And my point is, we’ve all held beliefs in the past for reasons that have nothing to do with how true they are necessarily, whether it’s because we want them to be true or because it would be convenient or nice if they were true. But that doesn’t make them true, okay? So, if that bothers you, as it bothered me believing in my ventriloquist dummy, antagonist, if you want your beliefs to be as close to the truth as possible and not just a collection of fun things that you like to tell yourself, you instantly assume a lifelong responsibility. You need to constantly look at your beliefs through a critical lens. You need to constantly consider every new piece of information that becomes available to you. Because look, if you’re really focused on the truth for the truth’s sake, you can never get lazy in that pursuit. You can never say, “I believe this thing, and no matter what anybody says to me, no matter what evidence is presented to me, I will never, ever not believe this.” You can’t say that.

Now, if you follow this thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at a tagline—at least this is what I did—and you arrive at the fact that every belief is at some level a leap of faith, but not all leaps of faith are created equal. But this isn’t the end of the discussion. No, there’s much, much more to talk about, many questions and conversations to be had. And today I want to address one of the most common follow-up questions to this tagline. In fact, I’ve gotten several emails from you guys about this very question.

And I can’t think of a better way of doing it than by relating it to one of these critical issues being rethought during the Enlightenment period—the practice of slavery. Is it right? Is it wrong? And look, before I begin to tell you the question that’s a follow-up to the “Belief” episode, I just want to make sure one thing is clarified before we move forward. If the “Belief” episode was supposed to spread awareness about this condition that we’re all born into, then this episode is designed to tell you just how much is at stake because of this condition that we’re all in. Try to think about the potential cost of holding lazy beliefs. Because when you hold them for lazy reasons, it quickly goes beyond just putting ourselves in chains, and it can quite literally put other people in chains as well in the case of slavery.

I don’t know why I’m doing all this lead up. Let’s just ask the question! It’s a follow-up to what we’ve been talking about the last few episodes, and it goes like this. So, if certainty is impossible, then why would you ever willingly choose to spend your entire life chasing a ghost, a ghost named certainty, basically? Why spend every second of your life chasing some elusive thing that you’ll never catch when the alternative to it, though it isn’t true, it feels so good to believe? Like, for example, let’s say that I believe in an afterlife. Even if my belief ends up not being true, it sure made me feel a lot happier all these years that I believed it, you know, that I’d never have to stop living, that I’d get to talk to people up in the clouds for trillions of years.

The point that the person asking this question is making is that since truth is so slippery to get ahold of—it’s like a fish you just pulled out of the river—isn’t it better to just believe things not based on how true they are but based on how helpful they are to me personally? This is a very good question. And let’s explore both sides of it a little bit deeper, because I think the person that’s asking it—and this is the way that they feel—although they have good intentions, I think they’re arguing the point on crutches.

So, in order to make their point valid, they kind of need to make doubt out to be a terrible mindset to have. Living in doubt is horrible. Because if they can do that, then they can say, well, you’d have to be a downright masochist to just willingly subject yourself to that kind of torture, doubting things all the time. That’s a torturous existence. When on the other hand, you can just believe one thing, wash your hands, and never look back again, never change it. Isn’t that a better life to live?

And on one hand, we can see where they’re coming from. At least I can. This whole process does seem a little bit neurotic on the surface. If you want your beliefs to be based on truth and to accomplish that you keep honing your beliefs and running around trying to make them the closest facsimile of the truth possible, even if at some point in your life you hold beliefs that happen to be true, you’re never going to know for certain that they’re true. It’s always going to be a leap of faith at some level.

And we can imagine what that looks like if taken to the extreme by looking at somebody that we’ve already talked about on the show before, Pyrrho in ancient Greece. Remember him? He was known as an incredibly radical skeptic, super radical. He’s the Adolf Hitler of skeptics. This guy was famous around town for being so skeptical about everything around him, even the existence of the physical world, that he would just suspend judgment about everything to a ridiculous level. There’s stories that we’ve talked about of him staggering around town like he’s Mr. Magoo. Like, a cart is rolling down the street, and he is so willing to suspend judgment about whether that cart is actually rolling down the road that he just steps out in front of it and his friends have to grab him and pull him back and save his life time and time again. Like, who even stays friends with a guy like that? He’s basically like a toddler in adult clothes walking around. They got to always look after him.

But Pyrrho wasn’t just somebody that would walk out in front of a cart and his friends would have to save him all the time. His skepticism actually had, I don't know, quasi-practical uses as well. We told the story on the Skepticism episode about Pyrrho: he had surgery performed on him, and he didn’t even flinch with the pain. There’s no anesthesia back then. Apparently, the story goes, he didn’t even flinch because he was so unwilling to accept that pain is a bad thing that he’s not going to let that consume him during that moment. Like, that is just—of course it’s not true. But imagine if it was. Imagine this mindset being taken to the extreme in your life. It’s crazy to think about.

But the question that we’re asking today is, why would you ever knowingly embark on a quest that you know you’re never going to finish, especially when the alternative to taking that quest is so awesome? There’s no question that we can be made happier by holding lazy beliefs that paint the world to be the way that we want it to be rather than what it might actually be. I can believe that the holocaust never happened. I can believe that I am correct about everything in the world and that I’m the smartest guy ever. I can believe that when I die I’m going to see my grandfather again. And this time when I talk to him, he’s not going to be cranky all the time because his arthritis is going to be gone. We’re finally going to get to throw the football in the front yard!

Now, I don’t think that many people would doubt that holding these beliefs would make us, at least in a very shallow and short-term sense, happier people than believing in some terrible alternative to them. But there’s a whole other side to this, isn’t there? If false beliefs can make us artificially happy, then can’t they also make us artificially sad or angry? Really, I don’t think I got to convince you guys much of this. Just take any example.

Someone can be rendered completely miserable because they believe that they’re trapped in a job that they can never get out of, some dead-end job, no way of escaping it. People can believe that their relatives died, right? Your friend could tell you that your grandfather died. You could be sad, bawl your eyes out. You could be in mourning for the next three months, completely miserable. And then you could find out your friend was just kidding. It was some elaborate April fool’s joke. Your grandfather was just on vacation. And then you’re fine.

The point is, any one of us could come up with countless examples on either side of how our false beliefs can either make us artificially happy or artificially sad. And the fact is—and this is a very impowering and important point to think about this week—our beliefs don’t just affect us. We live in a world where our own individual beliefs can positively or negatively affect all kinds of things: animals, other humans, even the planet that we live on. That’s huge! What are some examples of what I’m talking about?

Well, like, when it comes to animals, if you go to the grocery store and you think that when you’re buying a piece of meat from there that that piece of meat came from some salt-of-the-earth Midwest farm with rolling green hills, lush grass—the animals are frolicking around happy, and the farmer looks like Old McDonald, smiling all the time—you’re not a bad person for believing that, but you could be holding beliefs that allow for all of the various atrocities that take place in the current factory farming culture. That’s an example of holding beliefs that could be harmful to animals.

When it comes to the planet, I mean, take your pick. You could believe that, yeah, it’s just a little bit of toxic waste dumped in the water supply of an indigenous tribe. No big deal. You could be holding beliefs that do significant damage that you don’t really realize. And when it comes to humans, this might be the most obvious of all. If you believe, for example, that the human species is not just one species of primate that should be treated equally by society but that different races or cultures are more suited for manual labor than others and they were put here by nature to be our indentured servants, well, you could be locking people in chains for centuries, calling them your slaves, forcing them to serve you lemonade all the time, and you’d never think twice about it.

Now, I want to set the stage here for our discussion that’s coming up. We live in a great time. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that everybody listening to this podcast believes that slavery is wrong, okay? They don’t think that enslaving entire groups of people is an okay thing to do. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if somebody did think that slavery was okay, you’d think that they were either, A, a little stupid, B, completely amoral, or C, severely disconnected from modern culture. But it hasn’t always been that way.

And the point that we should all consider, especially as it applies to our own beliefs that we hold in 2014 that might be damaging, is that throughout history it hasn’t always been amoral or stupid people that have been advocates of slavery. Back during the good old days of slavery, you weren’t seen as an evil person for owning slaves just like people in today’s world aren’t seen as evil people for buying meat in the grocery store. Slavery was the norm back then, at least in Europe.

And based on our simple understanding of where humans fit into the natural world, based on where science was at then, there were a lot of respected academics—undeniable geniuses, by the way—the intellectual pillars of their time period that thought that they had some really solid arguments pro slavery. Again, these weren’t evil or stupid people. They looked at the fact that there were these obvious differences between cultures. And they used their own intuition to arrive at lazy beliefs that led them to think that some creative power organized the world in a way where some of these cultures were designed to work for others.

Let’s not try to reduce a couple thousand years of thought into a single paragraph. I want to have a debate this week on the Philosophize This! podcast. I will be your moderator. And the motion today is, slavery is okay. Arguing pro-slavery are a few philosophers that you’re all going to be pretty familiar with if you’ve listened to the show since the beginning. Unquestionably the most brilliant thinkers of their day debating out of a wide range of times from antiquity to the Middle Ages, give it up for the supporters of slavery: Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Now, on the other side of the stage in this great slavery debate that we’re going to have is one man. We haven’t talked about him yet. Well, we’ve mentioned him. But his comments on slavery forever changed the way the world looked at the practice. He’s seen as the biggest competition to Voltaire in the Enlightenment period. The two of them basically rocketed the Enlightenment forward in tandem. And his political thought deeply influenced the French Revolution. His name is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Now, let’s start our discussion today by talking about the arguments for slavery that were so prevalent in Europe for thousands of years. Because it’s understandable, completely understandable, that a lot of people living in modern times might be a little bit confused by this. I mean, sure, you can understand why the average Joe is going to be an advocate of slavery. He’s just going along with whatever the times are. But these guys were geniuses that we’re talking about. Somebody living today might wonder, how could any of these brilliant people, if they were geniuses, look around them and not see this for what it actually was, purposeful exploitation by the powerful?

Well, this is something for us to take into account when we look at the beliefs that we hold in 2014. And consider the fact that even something as unanimously detestable as slavery in today’s world was justified by brilliant people for thousands of years. Alright, so, let’s start with Aristotle. We mentioned his views on slavery very briefly in the “Aristotle Part Two” episode. Aristotle says in his politics, “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient: from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”

So, one day, Aristotle’s walking around ancient Greece in his toga. He looks around him, and he reasons that there seems to be two different kinds of people in this world: slaves and non-slaves. The same way that somebody today might go outside, look around them, and draw conclusions based on what makes sense to them as human beings, Aristotle, being a byproduct of a culture with a very minimal understanding about the natural world, looked around him and thought it was obvious that there were two types of humans in this world. It seemed very clear to him that these slaves were born different than non-slaves like Aristotle. In particular, he thought they were born without the majority of the rational part of their soul. He thought it was very clear based on what he saw that they were essentially just domesticated animals. And slavery wasn’t a bad thing for them at all. Just like a dog needs his master and both benefit from that arrangement, the slave/non-slave relationship was a mutually beneficial one too.

Now, obviously on the non-slave part, you get tons of work done for you. But the slaves, Aristotle thought, needed the non-slaves to manage their lives for them. They could never do it alone with that limited ability to reason that they had. They need someone looking out for them all the time. He continues by saying that it’s very clear to him that they are not completely like animals. Like, they’re obviously higher up than the rest of the animals in the animal kingdom because they have some virtue. They’re just not as high up as non-slaves like him.

Now, if we’re going to take a look at our beliefs and try to understand where we may be mistaken, what do you think that Aristotle saw around him that made him hold these beliefs that ended up being dead wrong? Well, knowing what we know now, he must have been looking at two different human beings that came from two very different educational backgrounds. And that must have made him feel like they were two different species. And we can kind of see what made Aristotle draw this conclusion. I mean, take one person that’s been forced to work their entire life every day and one person that has at least a semblance of an education, and to somebody living back during his time, no matter how smart you were, it may have seemed totally obvious that these are just two different types of human beings. One is designed to work for the other.

Now, an important thing to keep in mind here is that as Aristotle is holding these beliefs about slaves versus non-slaves, he’s probably pretty happy. He probably isn’t feeling very unhappy as he’s being fanned by palm leaves for the rest of his life. But here’s a great example of how a person’s beliefs, that on one hand make them happier, can lead to very real human suffering and injustice on the other hand.

So, the next person to give an argument on the pro-slavery end of the stage in our great slavery debate is Saint Augustine. Now, Augustine has a very unique relationship with the concept of slavery. He never wrote formally or at length about anything in slavery. So, what we have are excerpts from multiple different works where he discusses slavery in brief. And all these excerpts come together to present a pretty clear picture of how he feels about the subject. He said, “It is with justice we believe that the condition of slavery is the result of sin. And this is why we do not find the word ‘slave’ in any part of scripture until righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this name. It is a name, therefore, introduced by sin and not by nature.”

So, Saint Augustine is a Christian, obviously. And the point he’s making here is a big one. He’s making it very clear that he doesn’t think slavery was a part of God’s original plan at all. I mean, he didn’t create all these people on planet earth so that half of them could basically be pack mules for the other half. In fact, Augustine says, you don’t even see the word “slave” in the Bible until Noah starts throwing it around. Then you start seeing it all the time. And what this means to him is that slavery is the advent of sinful man. It’s a product of the fall. It’s not a product of God or nature.

But, Augustine thinks, that doesn’t necessarily make it something we need to actively try to end during our time on this planet. Look, Augustine’s job when living on this planet during the short time that he has is not to abolish sin completely, okay? In fact, on the contrary, sin is a part of God’s plan. To be against sin is to be against God in a certain way. We should be giving people enough rope to eternally hang themselves with, so to speak. After all, what other way are we going to use to be able to separate who gets into heaven and who gets tortured for all of eternity? Shouldn’t we allow sin, and shouldn’t we allow slavery to exist in that same way? Slavery is inevitable in this world in the same way that sin is inevitable as a part of God’s plan.

Now, it should be said before we get all bent out of shape, Augustine is an advocate for slaves in a way that is completely unprecedented before his time period. He’s one of the first thinkers who talks about a master-slave relationship being almost like a father-son. He should be like a loving father figure to his slaves. And at multiple points throughout his life and career he urges the church to make freeing your slaves seen as a virtuous act because the church was the moral authority at the time.

Anyway, but Augustine gives other pro-slavery arguments. He’s obviously defending slavery. In fact, he even gives one that’s incredibly ahead of it’s time. Actually, it’s very similar to a line of thinking that is in the pre-Enlightenment period almost 1,000 years later. It's popular with people like John Locke, and it goes like this: slavery should really be seen as a lesser of two evils. And Augustine asks, let’s think about how slaves are even made in the first place, alright? Some conquering army marches into town. They absorb the women and children into the tribe, and they kill all the men. Well, isn’t it a much less bloody and much better alternative to just enslave all the men, sell them, or force them to work? Slavery is the lesser of two evils. Slavery is actually a benevolent act. At least you’re letting them live in that case.

Now, again, like we did with Aristotle, let’s put ourselves in Augustine’s shoes. We can definitely see how he would think that slavery was just something that we have to live with when we’re on this planet. I mean, if you believe that this universe was created and is maintained by the Christian God—at least the way people are interpreting scripture during his brief lifetime—if you believe that sin is a necessary byproduct of the universe that God created, and it’s God way to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to whose getting into heaven or not, and also that God kind of has a hands-off approach when it comes to managing these sorts of things, then the rest of it really isn’t that crazy.

So, the last debater on the pro-slavery side of the podium was Thomas Aquinas. And on one hand he was sort of an Aristotelian continuation of Augustine. But as you guys well know, Aquinas was filled with novelty when it came to all sorts of subjects. And the slavery discussion was no exception to that. He pointed out that God probably doesn’t endorse slavery himself, but just look at nature. It seems to be implying something. He said, “For men of outstanding intelligence naturally take command, while those who are less intelligent but of more robust physique seem intended by nature to act as servants.”

He's pointing out that, look, all you got to do is look around you and see that we’re living in a world where everybody’s born with different natural gifts. Some people are smart like Thomas Aquinas. Some people have a robust physique. And it seems very clear that these robust fellows were put here on planet earth to do our gardening and serve us crackers constantly. There’s a part of God’s order—there’s a part of nature that implies that there’s some sort of hierarchy out there. He even points to scripture. He points out that some angels are more powerful or more important than other angels. And there’s obviously a hierarchy among the animals. There’s predators and prey and etc. Why is it crazy to think that humans can be subdivided too?

Now, it should be said that Aquinas’ idea of a slave was very different than many people of his time period. He compares them to sons, similar to Augustine. Just like a son belongs to his father and it’s the father’s job to regulate that son and give him restrictions and, look, even hit his son from time to time to keep him in line, a slave is no different. But Aquinas is a really nice guy, and he says that we should be good masters of our slaves and not hit them unless it’s absolutely necessary. He’s the thinking man’s slave owner.

So, again, as we did with the other thinkers, here’s another great example of a categorical genius looking at the world around him, arriving at beliefs that seem to be obvious based on his own intuitions as a human. Oh, I’m a human. I look around me. And it seems intuitive that there’s a hierarchy in nature. Why would humans be exempt from that? We can see where he’s coming from, alright?

So, what did Rousseau have to say in response to all of this? Well, real quickly about Rousseau, Rousseau is most famous for his political philosophy that he lays out in his famous work called The Social Contract. Thomas Hobbes also had the social contract. They were kind of tackling the same issues there. And when he writes this stuff about slavery, he looks at the systems of government around him, and he goes, hey, you know what? I notice a lot of similarities between slaves—the life that they live—and people that are just born into a tyrannical monarch society where they had no say in how they were going to be governed in the first place. And he talks about slavery setting the stage for his political philosophy that was to follow in The Social Contract.

Now, when it comes to a system of government, how do we impose laws upon a population in the first place? Like, let’s say you have a set of laws that are etched in stone; you got them all figured out. How do you enact those laws on a population? Well, Rousseau thinks it happens in one of two ways, always. And it’s not ironic to Rousseau at all that they’re the exact same two ways that people are made into slaves. The first way is by brute force. The second way is by consent. And let’s talk for a second about Rousseau’s reasons for why both of these are trash.

We’ve all seen brute force before, right? Army or bully takes over a geographic proximity. He attaches a chain to your leg, and he calls you his property. He imposes a set of rules upon you, and he maintains it by brute force. He likens this to how it feels to be born into a society ruled by a tyrannical dictator. You had no consent there, and he maintains his rule by brute force.

Now, if you’re arguing for the pro-slavery side of things, you need to make a case that during the Enlightenment period was better known as the right of the strongest. This is basically what a lot of people are arguing if you break it down far enough. The idea is that slavery is okay simply because some group is strong enough to impose it upon another group. They take over that certain geographic proximity, and instead of killing them, well, they’re going to chain their legs and call them their property now. That is morally justifiable because this group was stronger than that group.

So, if that’s morally justifiable, then Rousseau would ask, do we have a moral obligation to just play along with these people simply because they’re stronger than us? Or is something made right or wrong simply because the strongest group or person deemed it to be right? The way to clarify the point that Rousseau’s making here is by looking at it from the other side. If someone’s born and is captured and is taken into slavery and they follow all the rules of their slave master and they be a good little slave, does that make them necessarily a moral person? Or more generally, does just submitting to power make you a moral person?

This probably reminds you of a typical argument that we’ve talked about on this show before. It’s a common one that atheists throw against Christians or any follower of a monotheistic religion. They ask, if the only reason you aren’t murdering your neighbor and stealing stuff at the convenience store and burning buildings down is because you’re scared that God’s going to punish you for it and send you to hell, does that really make you a moral person or just a slave to power? Well, Rousseau would say no. He would say that adhering to brute force is just an act of prudence, not morality. Morality is something much, much different. And ironically, both sides of this modern argument that I just referenced would agree with that.

So, the point that Rousseau’s making here is that something like slavery isn’t justified when it’s done by brute force, because that would imply that morality is determined by whoever the strongest is. And that obviously is very slippery, and the concept of morality would change quite a lot. What Rousseau is aiming to do in this part of The Social Contract is tear apart any sort of justification of slavery that you can think of. So, after rebuking the argument that might makes right, that slavery by brute force is somehow justified, he’s left with the second way someone might become a slave back then, by their own consent.

Now, believe it or not guys—actually, who am I talking to here? I’m not talking to some random person here. I’m talking to you guys, my audience! You guys all know this. Some people back then willingly agreed to being a piece of someone else’s property. They saw it as beneficial to them. And that begs the question, can someone willingly sell themselves into slavery? Rousseau says no, slavery is even wrong in this case. And he argues this by responding to the guy before him that argued the other way around, Mr. Thomas Hobbes—Dr. Thomas Hobbes.

Remember, Thomas Hobbes believed that maintaining order was the ultimate goal of the sovereign and that people could in theory give themselves over to the sovereign, and it doesn’t need to be a bad thing. It doesn’t need to be something that’s morally detestable. It could be a personally beneficial thing to do. Rousseau doesn’t agree with this line of reasoning, to say the least. And he’s responding to Hobbes and his idea that the sovereign supposedly maintains order—and by people giving themselves over, they benefit from that—he’s responding to him when he says this here.

“‘The despot guarantees civic peace in the state,’ you may say. Granted; but what do the people gain if the wars his ambition brings down on them, his insatiable greed, and harassments by his ministers bring them more misery than they’d have suffered from their own dissensions if no monarchy had been established? What do they gain if this peace is one of their miseries? You can live peacefully in a dungeon, but does that make it a good life? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very peacefully while waiting for their turn to be eaten. To say that a man gives himself to someone else, i.e., hands himself over, is to say something absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, simply because the man who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness doesn’t create any right.”

Okay, so what he’s saying here is, brute force is not a legitimate way of determining what rights people have, alright? The only way is by social agreement. Rousseau thinks that for anybody to actually volunteer themselves to forfeit every right that they have would be crazy. He says, if you doubt this on any level, just look at the contract that this guy is signing. So, let me get this straight, you’re giving up your status as a man or a woman, your rights as a human being, and even your duties as a human being, and I give you a slave’s life. What sane person would ever sign that agreement?

Rousseau talks in another section about how any agreement, to ensure that it’s beneficial to both parties in the long term and make sure that nobody’s taking advantage of anybody else, it needs to be signed and readdressed at usual increments by both parties. But if that was the case when it came to this arrangement, what would those meetings look like in the case of a slave? “Okay, well, I own you and with it every right you have to speak your mind about anything that dissatisfies you with this arrangement. So, uh, meeting adjourned.” What kind of agreement is that? What kind of insurance can you have that they’ll do anything that they said they were going to do if they own you completely? Like, if you’re a slave, what kind of request could you ever make of your master? After all, if you’re going into those meetings, how can you be said to be agreeing to anything if you have no choice in the matter?

Then Rousseau brings up what I think is one of the most powerful points in any of his works. Can morality exist without freedom? It’s a very interesting question to think about. Like, if you aren’t free to be making poor decisions, how can you be said to be making good decisions? You didn’t have a choice in the matter. In that same way, when you remove someone’s freedom, then you remove the morality from any action that they do. And this whole subject would prove to be immensely important when it came to his political philosophy that we’ll talk about very soon.

So, the point of this episode was twofold. On one hand, I wanted to provide a barebones foundation for the next episode when we really look into the politics of Rousseau and the French Revolution. And on the other hand, I wanted to emphasize what’s at stake whenever we hold beliefs about something. And look, I get that this stuff isn’t rocket science, you guys. But seriously, look around you. This is something that most people take for granted. Just ask yourself a question right now. Do you honestly think that you know everything? Do you think that you know everything? Kind of a dumb question, but it’s easy to look back at people a hundred years ago and laugh about how stupid they were. We can all do it.

“Ha, look at them thinking there’s nothing wrong with the Treaty of Versailles. How could they ever have possibly thought that way?” “Look at them in the 1400s with their crude medicine and all their superstitions that they believed in.” You could do this with any time period. I mean, just go back to 500 BC; take any citizen from the city of Athens, and put them in front of a TV screen. That guy could watch Nick Jr. all day. He’s never going to stop learning stuff. Dora the Explorer would be a breakthrough in theoretical thought. Her little monkey, Boots, would say something about a mountain; Parmenides would have a stroke, just convulsing on the ground.

Now, I’m not trying to beat a dead horse here. But do you honestly think that you’re exempt from that? Do you think that this generation is some sort of evolutionary end point? Future humans are going to look back and say, “Wow! That’s when they finally got it right, right there, 2014.” Well, I got news for you. We’re all going to be seen as barbarians in the future. Now, obviously not as much as previous generations will. But if you’re perceptive, you can look around you and kind of guess at what the things are that future generations are going to look back on and think that we’re insane for accepting.

Look, this shouldn’t be a defeatist attitude. The fact that by the time you turned 18 you didn’t know everything there is to know about the world—that shouldn’t be something that makes you give up or be depressed. It should be inspiring. You shouldn’t just say, “Well, you can’t know anything for certain anyway, so I’ll just believe whatever makes me the happiest.” No, you aren’t the center of the universe, random guy. You aren’t the only thing that needs to be considered because your beliefs affect a lot more than just you. If they only affected you, that’d be completely different.

On that same note, by all means, if you hold a belief that makes you happy, keep it. I fully endorse that behavior. But understand that there’s a whole other side to that belief. And if you’re going to resign yourself from ever trying again, can you do the rest of us one favor at least? Before you decide to purposefully suspend your critical thinking out of convenience alone, before you decide to put the blinders on for the rest of your life, for the sake of the rest of humanity, can you just take a few days and think about that belief? Do a little bit of research. Find out if it could possibly hurt anyone else around you unfairly. At least do that. And then from there, go on about your life and be happy.

Now, we’ve been talking a lot about our individual beliefs in the last couple episodes: how they affect our lives and the lives of people around us. But the Enlightenment wasn’t just a leap forward in this area. It was an exponential leap forward in many areas of thought: economics, government, etc. And we’re going to start looking into other ones starting next episode. But keep these points in mind as we move forward. And I look forward to seeing each and every one of you next time, the most openminded audience in the history of podcasting.

Talk to you next time.