Episode #027 - Transcript

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

So, as we get more and more into this period of philosophy that we’re in, as we get more and more into the period when we actually have concrete things to read by all of these various philosophers, it’s very difficult for this show to not start feeling very personal for me. See, previously we’ve had very little to go on. We’ve had fragments to read that experts commentated on, or we’ve had some translation of a translation that makes reading many parts of the work very difficult. But now we’re starting to have entire bodies of work that not only give us more stuff to talk about with each individual person, but a lot of these things are ideas that have directly influenced me.

Thomas Hobbes and this Leviathan is a beautiful work with all sorts of messages woven in through it. And one of these messages that stuck with me when I first read it, and it’s endured with me over the years, is what Hobbes says about the nature of fear. This is something that I think a lot of people can relate to. So, I first read the Leviathan when I was 16 years old, and without going too much into it, because of situations that I found myself in throughout my life, I looked at the world as being a much more hostile place than it actually was. At 16 years old, I was a scared kid, and my behavior certainly reflected it. I remember I would do ridiculous things, things looking back on it I can’t believe I ever did. I would be sitting in a coffee shop, and I would be completely hypervigilant.

I’d be looking at everybody that came in through the door, and I’d look for bulges coming out of their jacket to see if maybe they have, like, a gun inside of there. And they came into this Starbucks at this time to ruthlessly gun down everybody that was enjoying their coffee. I mean, I would be scared of things like flying. I was terrified of flying for a long time. I had these visions whenever I was in a plane that the captain and all the stewardesses and crew were just doing a conga line up in the cockpit and not paying attention to where the plane was going. And it was just going to fly directly into the side of a mountain. I was scared that some hydraulic system was going to fail on the tail of the plane or that somebody was going to hijack it.

Now, bottom line, there was no real, substantive reason to fear any of this stuff. And I always found some way—no matter what situation I found myself in—I found some way to look at people and find out how they were going to try to hurt me. This fear pervaded every single other aspect of my life. And the worst part about it all is that I fully recognized it at the time. I remember explicitly thinking, because I had just finished reading the Enchiridion by Epictetus right before I read Thomas Hobbes—and with Epictetus’ time spent as a slave very early in his life and how that time as a slave flavored a lot of his philosophy—I remember acknowledging that it was absolutely pointless to worry about any of this stuff, and I feel enslaved to it. I mean, how stupid am I for worrying about this stuff? How stupid am I for allowing this fear to enslave me every day?

But no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop. These patterns of thought of being scared of everything all the time were so deeply ingrained in my mind that merely being conscious of how pointless it all was really didn’t do anything. I’m sure people have experienced this too. Now, this episode is not titled “Confessions of a Previously Neurotic Person.” This fear is obviously much more extreme than most people face. But the patterns of thought are not entirely different. And I think everybody listening to this has some irrational fear that Thomas Hobbes can give you some insight on.

Being so young and having these irrational fears and feeling enslaved to them, I had this feeling like I was needlessly putting myself in Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature that we talked about last time. I felt like I was creating an artificial state of nature. And I think when you recognize that you have an irrational fear, yet despite recognizing it you still can’t stop it, it’s very easy to get frustrated with it. What I started to do quite naïvely is I started to just hate fear in general. All fear was bad. Now, at the time I defined fear or anxiety—I saw the two as very similar—as some anticipation of some negative future outcome and all the distress that’s caused by that. What I decided I was going to do—up until the time that I read Thomas Hobbes—was to try to eliminate fear completely out of my brain. Fear was the enemy. It was pointless in modern society to me. My goal was to try to be like the Dalai Lama, try to be the most Zen Buddhist monk on planet earth.

But I learned a huge lesson by reading the Leviathan. One of the main recurring concepts that Hobbes brings up throughout the Leviathan is all the different ways that fear motivates and affects us. Now, let’s think about it in the most obvious and physical sense. When you’re stranded out in the woods and you’re trying to survive out there, when you’re in the state of nature, what motivates you to not just sit around on a tree stump all day? What motivates you to go out and try to find some berries to eat? What motivates you to take your shoelaces and lasso a deer and eat for that night? Hobbes lays out multiple things that can all be distilled down to self-preservation, not the least of which is a fear of scarcity, or a fear for your own survival.

Now, that same fear, that same exact fear that saves your life in many of the situations where you might be killed in the state of nature or you might get months of preparation stolen from you in the state of nature, that’s the same fear that eventually washes over you like a tidal wave in the state of nature. That same fear completely takes over your life and is so devastating and terrible that you would rather forfeit much of your freedom to a sovereign leader just to be able to escape it. See, fear, to Thomas Hobbes, is a little bit like NyQuil. If you’re about to go to bed and you’re experiencing some cold symptoms and you want to get rid of them, you can take a capful of NyQuil before bedtime, and you’re going to sleep pretty well. If you drink the entire bottle of NyQuil, you’re probably not going to wake up in the morning. But is NyQuil intrinsically bad because it can cause you harm? Well, no, of course not. And just like NyQuil, fear shouldn’t be seen as something intrinsically bad either.

Now, this was lifechanging for me when I first thought about it. I mean, think about it. Fear really does help us in small doses. I mean, just imagine yourself walking around the world with complete impunity, zero fear about anything bad ever happening to you. You’d probably look like Mr. Magoo. You wouldn’t be scared about any cars hitting you, not scared about intruding on other people’s personal space and them getting mad at you. You wouldn’t want to be completely fearless, but you also wouldn’t want to walk around terrified of everything, terrified of anything that even has a miniscule chance of coming to fruition. And do you really have any control over those things anyway? You shouldn’t feel stupid. You shouldn’t beat yourself up for having irrational fears or for not being able to stop that mental state of fear in its entirety. In fact, in many ways, fear is what’s gotten you this far to begin with. We should be proud of some fear. And if you think about it, it really is a good thing that you’re a forward-thinking person on some level.

This gave me a tremendous amount of acceptance. When I first started viewing my irrational fear as not a part of my brain that was short-circuiting but a useful portion of my brain that was working overtime, Thomas Hobbes not only changed the way I saw fear, but he changed the way I saw almost every other mental state because the same exact logic can apply to it. For example, whenever you talk to other people, you probably have certain objectives in that conversation. You don’t want to offend the person. You don’t want to say something mean to them about something they’re insecure about. You probably want to say something that’s at least remotely interesting to the person. But look, this self-censorship is just another example of something that can be useful to us in small doses but, when it’s taken to an extreme, can be detrimental.

When we apply it to Hobbes’ idea of fear, Hobbes would say that you certainly don’t want to speak with impunity or not censor yourself at all. If you do that, you’re going to say a lot of stupid stuff. People are going to get mad at you for not thinking before you speak. But if you take that censorship too far to the other extreme, then you’re stuck in kind of an analysis paralysis, as they say. You start stumbling over your words. You never really convey the points that you want to. Well, this same dynamic applies to most activities that we could find ourselves doing. And while the point of moderation in all things is obviously nowhere near revolutionary, the idea of understanding that these relics of our evolutionary past are not intrinsically bad is actually very useful. Hobbes would advise that we shouldn’t artificially create a state of nature in our lives when none exists. After all, we signed the social contract; it's counterintuitive.

This is the insight that really helped me get past a lot of my irrational fears, and they all came to a head on a single day in my life. I will never forget this moment because it is the moment that everything came together for me with Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan. I’d just been reading it for a week before this. And this was the moment that it all came together for me. I was sitting in a Subway—not a subway like a transit station—a Subway restaurant, you know, the place where angry people make you sandwiches with the triangle-shaped cheese on them. I was sitting in this restaurant, and I was completely paranoid and neurotic.

And here's what you do when you’re paranoid and neurotic and 16-years old is, you position yourself with your back to the wall so that you can see everything that was going on in the restaurant. I remember I did this. I wanted to see the front door before they saw me. And I remember it was raining outside. It was pouring rain. There was lightning and thunder and wind blowing all over the place. At least, that’s how my brain remembers it. And I remember, this guy walks in, and he’s soaking wet. Here’s what you do when you’re a needlessly paranoid person is, you start to apply meaning to things that really have no significance at all.

I remember, I looked at this guy’s shoes and noticed that they were really dirty. And back then, I had this rule of thumb, like, that there is a direct relationship between how dirty your shoes are and how mentally insane you are. And I remember thinking, oh man, wow, who’s this guy? And I look at his pants. There are rips all over them. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt that’s drenched with rain, and there’s rips and stains all over it. And the thing that I notice above everything else is that he’s holding this wooden handle, and it’s tucked up on the inside of his forearm up into his long-sleeved shirt. And he’s gripping it really tight, white-knuckling it. And I remember thinking instantly—the first place that my brain went to was back to an experience that I had that forged this terribly inaccurate view of the world that I was living in at the time. And this is going to be relevant to Thomas Hobbes and why he thinks that Francis Bacon’s scientific method is wrong.

But anyway, I remember thinking back to a living situation that I was in. There was this guy that was special forces in the military, and he had this thing called a Ka-Bar. And it had a handle that looked very similar to what this guy was holding. I mean, basically, what a Ka-Bar is, is it’s like a fixed-blade knife. It can be, like, six to eight inches long. It’s used in the jungle to cut through thickly wooded terrain or also to disembowel people. It serves a nice second function there. And there was this time where I woke up in the middle of the night, and this person that had the Ka-Bar was sitting in my room watching me sleep. So, I see this guy come in with a wooden handle that looks very similar to that, and instantly my brain goes to the worst place. I’m thinking this guy—I see the dirty shoes; I see the wooden handle. This is not going to be good for the inhabitants of this subway.

He walks up to the counter, and he starts ordering a sandwich. The lady asks him what kind of bread he wants. He says, “Honey Oat.” Now, this is another example of why I thought he was crazy. The difference between sane people and insane people is that sane people get Honey Oat once and then never get it again. Insane people continue to get it. That’s a very clear distinction I used to make. So, this guy gets Chicken Bacon Ranch as his sub, but he omits the bacon. Again, this man has to be crazy. He omits the greatest part. Why would you omit the best part of the sub? This man is obviously mentally unstable.

And at this point, I’m looking at his shoes. My eyes are darting around the restaurant just trying to look for an out. I’m trying to look for some sort of opening where I can bob and weave and get out of the restaurant out the front door. Because I look to the back, and the entrance is obstructed. There’s no way to get out the back door for some reason. They blocked it. Then I start to think that this guy facilitated all of this. Like, he came in hours before and set up the back entrance to be blocked so that nobody could get out. He could go on a murderous rampage. So, at this point I’m scared. I’m terrified. I’m sweating. I’m thinking these are the last moments I’m going to live on planet earth.

And the lady slides his sandwich over to the vegetable department, and she asks him what he wants. And he says, “Extra, extra pickles.” He said, “Extra, extra pickles.” That’s how he orders his pickles, like he’s four-years old! And at this point, I’m looking at him, and there has never been a time in my life I’ve been more certain a man was psycho, you know, about to snap. Then I see him tighten his grip on the wooden handle. And I’m thinking, this is how he does it. This is his whole thing. He asks the Subway for way more pickles than it could ever possibly provide for him, and then he kills them because they can’t. This is his thing, and I’m going to be fodder for his psycho amusement.

The lady empties the entire plastic bin of pickles onto his sandwich. It looks like a mountain range of pickles. And he asks her if she can go in the back and find more, like she has some infinite supply of pickles in the back. But she does because she’s a hard worker, somebody that’s innocent. And they get to the sauces. And this guy, I swear to God, this guy asks for five different sauces. He asks for both types of mayonnaise. He asks for the light mayonnaise and the regular mayonnaise, sweet onion, chipotle. It was the most disgusting sandwich I have ever seen in my life. It looked like soup. And the lady folds it over and cuts it in half. It’s leaking everywhere.

They get up to the cash register. And she says, “It’s going to be $7.30.” And I’m sitting there just shaking. And he just kind of takes the money out of his pocket. And he says, “Okay, I don’t have $7.30; I have $7. But I’ll tell you what I do have. This is—I swear to God—this is a brand-new battery just out of the pack. I just bought it. This is worth at least $0.50. You got to let me have this sandwich.” This lady looks at him like he’s completely insane. And I’m like, here it is. This is the moment. You know, for the last 10 minutes I’ve been sitting here sweating, convinced I’m going to die. I’ve been in a state of constant anxiety like I was in the state of nature. And the lady looks at him and says, “You know what, just go ahead and take your sandwich.” And the guy takes it. And to my surprise, he just starts walking towards the front door. And he gets towards the front, and at the very end, he pops out the wooden handle. And it’s an umbrella. And he opens it up, and he just walks out. And he goes on his way.

This entire time I’ve been scared of him holding some fixed-blade knife like he’s a ninja. And, yes, in my defense, he did hold his umbrella in quite a weird way. But my experiences horrendously shaded the way I saw that entire situation. I mean, I can go back and think of a dozen ways that judgments arrived at by me based on my individual history led me to have a completely inaccurate account of what was actually going on. Not only was this an example of me not appreciating and taking advantage of the social contract I signed at birth that Thomas Hobbes wrote about, not only was this me creating a completely artificial state of nature, but this is an excellent example of a terribly distorted map of the world proving that it is incapable of perceiving reality accurately because that lens will always be shaded and driven by experience.

This inability to perceive reality accurately is the biggest distinction between the scientific approaches of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. And it’s also the justification for why Hobbes feels his is superior. Let’s talk about them.

Part of Francis Bacon’s idea of how to arrive at scientific progress had to do with conducting experiments using our own human experience, our sense organs. Thomas Hobbes didn’t feel the same way for reasons that are going to be very familiar to us. You know, I remember when I used to live next door to those Mormon people who came over, and they tried to convert me on a regular basis. A question that they asked me one time was, “If you were on trial for murder—if you were wrongly convicted for murder—what is the one type of evidence that you would want on your side more than anything else?” And I said, “Video evidence?” And they said, “No, eyewitness testimony. That’s the most valuable kind of evidence. Don’t you know that?” And I said, “No, that’s the worst kind of evidence, I thought.”

Human experience is very shaky. Multiple people can all experience the same event and have very different accounts of what actually took place. We see it all the time. Not only do biases that we hold prevent us from seeing reality, but we’re gathering evidence through flawed senses to begin with. These things that make eye-witness testimony unreliable are what Francis Bacon would call the idols of the mind. Thomas Hobbes would call them the reason why we need a better way to arrive at knowledge. And what Hobbes says in the Leviathan is that our method should be more centered around language than it should be around human experience.

He says, “For though the nature of that which we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our own different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker.” To understand where he’s coming from, let’s talk about the Leviathan for a second.

Thomas Hobbes is in a sort of scientific coalition with Francis Bacon. That is the context of Thomas Hobbes. Both he and Bacon represent this shift from the humanistic way of thinking that sparked the Renaissance into a more scientific approach to knowledge. Hobbes lived as a contemporary of people like Galileo, people that are seen as the fathers of the Scientific Revolution. And because of this, he has a tremendous amount of reverence for the process used to arrive at scientific and mathematical proofs. He says, “In Geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow upon mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call Definitions; and place them at the beginning of their reckoning.”

Let’s go back to the very beginning when mathematics as we would know it didn’t exist. Humans needed to look at the world and arrive at first principles about stuff: fundamental concepts that can be obviously agreed upon that we can then base further progress on. For example, some guy somewhere initially recognized that 1 rock added to 1 rock gives you 2 rocks. 2 rocks and 2 rocks equal 4 rocks, you know? He discovered things like, you can add rocks or take away rocks. Those are two ways that you can relate rocks to each other. Then you can look at this triangle-shaped thing over here and see that this side is 3 rocks long; this side is 4 rocks long. So, because this angle right here is 90 degrees, this side has to be 5 rocks long, you know?

From these sorts of first principles, we can extrapolate from them, and we can arrive at more complicated concepts like the triangle. But those more complicated concepts are reliable, and we know this because they are soundly based on first principles. Hobbes admired this way of reasoning so much that he lays out his Leviathan in a very similar way. The entire Leviathan, which is multiple books long—the first book has about 15 chapters, if that gives you an idea. And for the entire length of the thing, he’s walking us down this path of reason based on the principles that he’s already laid out in previous chapters.

For instance, the first chapter of the Leviathan is centered around explaining the most basic of concepts: how and why we sense things, and then how those senses form thoughts and ideas. Then from there he goes on to say that through reason we arrive at the stage where we use speech as a means to convey these ideas to other people and to be able to progress, because we can now record them for future thoughts to be based on. He says, “The Use and End of Reason, is not the finding of the sum, and truth of one, or a few consequences, remote from the first definitions, and settled signification of names; but to begin at these; and proceed from one consequence to another. For there can be no certainty in the last Conclusion, without a certainty of all those Affirmations and Negations, on which it was grounded, and inferred.”

Alright, so, the Leviathan is a philosophical work, structured not unlike something a scientist or a mathematician would make. And by using this way of reasoning and by being so scientifically minded in the first place, Hobbes produces a really unique body of work. He eventually says that everything in the entire universe is made of physical matter, no exceptions. Each and every thing has dimensions. And if we talk about a substance that doesn’t have dimensions, then it doesn’t exist at all. But this raises a very obvious question for people in Hobbes’ day. How can he explain things that we know that they exist, but we don’t perceive dimensions of any sort, like thoughts?

Well, Hobbes’ explanation is that these things do, in fact, exist in a physical form. But who said that just because something exists in a physical form that our senses need to necessarily be able to see it? Humans are a purely physical being as well. We are machines. We’re machines made of bones, skin, flesh, and blood, just like all the other animals in the world. And what we should take from this is that we have components. And like components in a machine, they’re not perfect. No matter how much arguing or discourse happens to try to arrive at the truth, we still are fighting a losing battle if we’re trying to arrive at knowledge through our senses. They are flawed elements of a machine.

From this he reasons, and he arrives at what he thinks is a much better way of arriving at what we would call science. “Reason is…attained by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to Assertions made by Connection of one of them to another; and so to Syllogisms, which are Connections of one Assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and what that is, is what men call science.”

Hobbes describes science as the knowledge of all the consequences of words. See, Hobbes saw the same problems with human experience that Francis Bacon did. But he thought they weren’t idols of the mind that could be controlled. He thought that our knowledge should be based on things that were much more secure and trustworthy. What Hobbes is talking about is what we talked about in the Francis Bacon episode. When I say “microphone,” a completely different image of “microphone” comes up in the head of everybody listing. There’s no clear picture of a microphone that everybody thinks about.

But if we were trying to arrive at scientific principles about the microphone that I’m talking about, how can we ever accurately do that unless if we have a word or a super-specific way to describe this particular microphone. Sure, we have adjectives. I mean, I can say a black, studio microphone with a pop filter on it. I mean, I can even say the brand name and the model number of it. But it still wouldn’t be nearly trustworthy enough. Hobbes thinks that as a society we need to sit down and define exactly what everything is. A good way to think about it is that Hobbes wants us to walk around and make the entire world one of those Ikea sample rooms where you can look at any particular piece from the room, and it has a serial number attached to it.

But maybe I’m not describing the significance of this to you. I mean, you may be saying, “Okay, well, all this is great if you’re a scientist, but how does this have anything to do with me and my everyday life?” Well, this problem of different words conjuring up different images in people’s heads is actually a huge problem that can easily lead to a misunderstanding in your personal life. Like, if you’re a guy driving around on the golf course at the country club and, all of a sudden, your wife calls you and asks you, “Where are you?” and then you say, “I’m at the club,” well, she could easily start freaking out here. “At the club? Are you dancing with other women at the club? Are you doing drugs?” “No, I didn’t say in da club. I said, at the club, the country club! I’m at the golf course right now.”

That’s a good example of these sorts of misunderstandings based on language. They might only be temporary inconveniences in our personal lives, but when it comes to arriving at scientific first principles, when it comes to arriving at what Thomas Hobbes or Francis Bacon concerned themselves with—when we’re basing all of our future knowledge on it, you can see how what’s at stake drastically changes how accepting people might be about human experience and how reliable it is.

Thomas Hobbes sees quite correctly that these fundamental problems involving language naturally lead to fundamental disagreements about things. And these sorts of fundamental disagreements naturally go to civil war or wars against other nations. These disagreements—Hobbes thinks they do nothing but needlessly divide humans from each other, and they only serve to challenge the preservation of peace that we aim for with the social contract. So, they directly undermine the social contract. So, these misunderstandings that we have are not just things that might get you in trouble with your wife for a couple hours. They are huge obstacles when trying to maintain that peace provided by the social contract.

Hobbes thinks that his method of arriving at knowledge prevents civil wars. It prevents fundamental disagreements. And it’s really the only responsible way to move forward as a society.