# Philosophies of Pleasure and of Character | Prof. Massimo Pigliucci

An episode of [Vedanta Talks - Swami Sarvapriyananda](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247628265), 22 Dec 2025, 1 h 49 min.

Audio: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/73e9dbc8-9696-407d-9c7c-ec1240e1d16e/stream.mp3

Professor Massimo Pigliucci, K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy, The City College of New York. Professor Massimo Pigliucci is an American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education. His recent work has focused on stoicism. ► To support the Vedanta Society of New York: http://www.vedantany.org/donate Vedanta NY Archives: / vedantanewyorkarchives Web: http://vedantany.org Soundcloud: / vedantany iTunes Podcast: http://bit.ly/vedanta-talks-itunes Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5IrDmqX... Facebook: / vedantany ABOUT VEDANTA Vedanta is one of the world’s most ancient religious philosophies and one of its broadest. Based on the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of India, Vedanta affirms the oneness of existence, the divinity of the soul, and the harmony of religions. ABOUT US Vedanta Society of New York is affiliated with the Ramakrishna Order of India. In fact, this is the Order's first Center started by Swami Vivekananda, in 1894. It was a historic event, for the seed of the world-wide Ramakrishna Movement was sown here in New York over a century ago. Swami Sarvapriyananda is the present Resident Minister and Spiritual Leader of the Vedanta Society of New York.

## Transcript

[0:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Good morning, everybody, and welcome.
[0:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We welcome today the return of Professor Masimou Piliuchi, the K.D.
[0:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Erani Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York.
[0:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He's back by popular demand.
[0:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Raised in Rome Italy, it professed that Pellucci received a doctorate in genetics from the University of Ferrara, holds a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
[1:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Here's a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which recognized
[1:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: to studies of gene-environment interactions and his educational efforts to counter widespread pseudo-scientific beliefs.
[1:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 1997, he was awarded the prestigious Dobzanski Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution.
[1:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Pelucia has written regularly for skeptical inquirer on topics such as climate change denial and intelligent design.
[1:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As the philosopher, he's interested in the structure and foundations of evolutionary theory.
[1:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The relationship between science and philosophy and the relationship between science and religion.
[1:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He's written, wait for it, for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, been interviewed by PBS, the BBC, NBC News, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, the Atlantic,
[2:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: the economist, Forbes, and scientific American, and made a guess against appearance on the Colbert Report.
[2:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He's published over 170 technical papers in science and philosophy, and is the author or editor of 16 books, including the best selling how to be a stoic, using ancient philosophy to live a modern life.
[2:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This past January, another book beyond stoicism, a guide to the good life with stoics, skeptics, Epicurians, and other ancient philosophers was published, that was just in January.
[2:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He produces a podcast called Stoic Meditations and his writings and musings can be found at massymolpulucy.org.
[3:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Today, the subject of his talk
[3:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: philosophies of pleasure and philosophies of character.
[3:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Part one.
[3:12] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Welcome.
[3:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Thank you so much.
[3:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That was a very kind introduction.
[3:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: bit too long, but it's my fault.
[3:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I guess it's my fault.
[3:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So what I wanted to talk to you today and next time is a really broad panorama, a broad exploration of
[3:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: ancient Greco-Roman philosophies we talked in the past last the first time I was here we talked about stoicism which is the one that I tend to practice and I tend to start you know spend most of my time on but in fact the Greco-Roman philosophical world was much broader than stoicism and it connects even more so than stoicism we have other wisdom traditions throughout the Eurasian continent and so that's what I want to talk about today and next time kind of give you a really broad overview
[4:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why?
[4:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, because I've been to some ideas there, they're still useful for us today.
[4:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is not just about history.
[4:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's not just about a particular area of the world.
[4:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's about the fact that the kinds of things that these people were talking about and thinking about 2020-500 years ago are in large part still with us today.
[4:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If not, they're specific answers, they're specific suggestions.
[4:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Certainly, the kinds of questions that they were asking, the kind of issues that they were considering.
[4:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a general idea.
[4:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, let me start really broadly with the thing.
[4:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is a broad map of the major so called wisdom traditions, some of the major, they're not all there.
[4:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Of the Eurasian continent.
[4:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We're not going to talk about Africa.
[4:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm not going to talk about Mesoamerica, though.
[5:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Of course, we could expand further our discussion to those areas, but Eurasia is big enough as it is.
[5:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we're going to stick with that.
[5:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we're talking about China and eventually a little bit on Japan, India, what we today called the Middle East and the ancient Romans called Asia, and of course the Mediterranean world.
[5:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, during a period of several centuries, roughly from about 800 BCE to 200 BCE, that part of the world went through a series of transformations of changes that it sometimes referred to as the Axial Age.
[5:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Axial means value in Greek, so the age of value.
[5:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The age when people started realizing that there were things that had valued that were not the obvious kind of things.
[5:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It was not just about food and shelter and security and stuff like that, but there were other things.
[5:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What we would today call spiritual issues or philosophically broadly speaking issues.
[6:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is the first time that something like that happens as far as we know in the course of human history.
[6:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And it happened about simultaneously, as you can see from that diagram,
[6:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: throughout the Eurasian continent.
[6:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And we're talking about the archaic period in Greece, the origin of Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China,
[6:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and, you know, the Vedic religions are said in India and in the Middle East, of course, the Jewish tradition, the Abrahamic traditions, which eventually came right later, much later after the actual age to Christianity and then Islam.
[6:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, pretty much all of the major philosophical and religious traditions,
[6:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: of that area of the world to start it out about the same time.
[6:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, when I say about the same time, it's actually a fairly broad period, right, 800 to 200, it's about 60, 600 years.
[6:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's not like it happened simultaneously or not in the age of Facebook here, and you know, it's not like things happen simultaneously.
[7:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But that's a remarkably short period of time.
[7:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then we can talk about it, maybe at some point.
[7:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: in the Q&A of why that happened and that particular time, there are different hypotheses, different theories.
[7:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But as far as I'm concerned, this is just to provide you with the really broad background to what I'm going to tell you for the rest of this talk.
[7:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So now we're going to zoom in into the Greco-Roman traditions, which is really originally the Greek tradition.
[7:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It becomes Greco-Roman later on, at the end of the axial period.
[7:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's mostly Greek tradition.
[7:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Excuse me, philosophers that we recognize as such in the West and Tradition.
[7:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: appeared about the end of the 7th century at the beginning of the 6th century, B.C.
[7:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The very first one is a tale is on the latest and two of his students, an axiomander, and an axiomanus.
[7:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And those are contemporaries of Pythagoras.
[7:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Then everything else happens afterwards.
[7:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Then you get the big tree, Plato, Socrates, an early star role, and then you get the elinistic philosophies, like a peculiarism, stories, et cetera.
[8:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But he basically start all starts with around the end of the 7th century.
[8:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: label Homer, right?
[8:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So Homer, it's not a philosopher, he's a poet, of course.
[8:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The reason he's there is because it marks the transition.
[8:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: between the age of poetry and the age of philosophy in ancient Greek Greece.
[8:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Up to the eight century BCE, give or take.
[8:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The major explanations I was going on in the world were mythical explanations, were poetic explanations.
[8:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The Iliad and the Odyssey are considered early textbooks in
[8:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: what we would today call model philosophy.
[8:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They teach ethics, but they teach a very different kind of ethics.
[8:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: than what developed during the axial age.
[8:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so in some sense, the axial age, the beginning of philosophy, is kind of a response or an alternative to the age of heroes, right?
[9:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we get, we replace Achilles and Odysseus and all that sort of stuff with people like Patagoras and then Plato and so on.
[9:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it was an important transition between a more poetic, mythological,
[9:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: approach the things and what we would today call a more religious or philosophical approach.
[9:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay, and this is the area that we're talking about at the time as I said was mostly Greece.
[9:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This map refers to 550 BCE, so it's the middle of the 6th century BCE.
[9:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It was all Greece.
[9:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, the room existed, but it was the tiny little dot in the middle of Italy.
[9:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It wasn't yet.
[9:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Most of the colors that you see there are those were Greek colonies.
[9:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay, now all of this to get you into what we really really talking about today, which is an approach that my friends and co-authors, Greg Lopez and Merit Cones have developed in a book that came out a few months ago, January of this year called Beyond Stoysen.
[10:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: which is an exploration of the whole cracker-room and philosophical landscape.
[10:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And now, typically, the way this is done is just chronologically, right?
[10:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You start with telets, because it was the first philosopher then you go to Pythagoras, then you go to Socrates, and so on and forth.
[10:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it doesn't make a lot of sense to do it philosophologically, because then you don't understand why these things are going on and how they are interconnected.
[10:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you just go chronologically, it's just
[10:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: one thing after another, but we know rhyme or reason.
[10:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What we instead trying to do is to put some rhyme or reason into these all things, and we thought, okay, really what's going on at that time in Greece can be boiled down to three major approaches.
[11:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What we call the three ports, because we use a navigating metaphor.
[11:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's why you see a ship there.
[11:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a Greek ship.
[11:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, the metaphor we use is, okay, we'll navigate to different ports and then explore the lands that are characterized by the characterizes for each port, and there are three of these ports, pleasure, character or virtue, and doubt.
[11:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Today, I'll talk about pleasure and character.
[11:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then next time, we'll talk about doubt.
[11:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and something else that we called here be dragons.
[11:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In ancient maps, when people didn't know what was going on in a certain area of the world, they would label it here be dragons, meaning this is treacherous territory.
[11:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is, we don't know what's going on there and you go there, you are in your own pedal.
[11:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There is a fourth group of philosophies that we talk about in the book that doesn't fit into any of the other three ports, and it is a little treacherous.
[12:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a little complex, it's a little dangerous kind of thing.
[12:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So next time we're going to talk about those two ports, the port of doubt, which basically it's about skepticism, and the dragons, I'll introduce you to three or four dragons of ancient Greek philosophy, metaphorical dragons, not actual things.
[12:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Let me start before we get to the first port.
[12:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Let me start by introducing two fundamental concepts here, from Greek philosophy, talos, and udomoinea.
[12:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Talos means meaning, means purpose or end or what you do things for.
[12:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you have a particular goal, then that goal is your talos.
[12:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's where you want to end up.
[12:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Udomoinea is the ancient Greek word for what
[12:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: or more precisely a life worth living because the word happiness, you know, it means different things to different people.
[13:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What really that meant was the kind of life that you get to the end of it, you look back and you said, yeah, that was not a waste of time.
[13:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay, that's what you the Moinia actually in fact means.
[13:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so we're looking at questions
[13:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Do we want to become rich and famous?
[13:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Do we want to experience pleasure?
[13:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Do we want to live in a serene manner?
[13:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Do we want to become a good person?
[13:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: These are some of the possible answers you can give to what constitutes a Judaemonic life, right?
[13:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For the Greeks, the tell us of a human life, is Yudamuynia.
[13:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yudamuynia is what it's called.
[13:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're in intrinsic good.
[13:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it is a good for which it doesn't make any sense so I ask why you want it.
[13:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, if there are some goods that are not intrinsic, like money, if I ask you, well, why do you want money?
[14:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can probably give me an answer that doesn't reduce to, well, I just like money.
[14:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't very few people, psychopaths, perhaps, sociopaths.
[14:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But very few people like money for the sake of money.
[14:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You like money because money can afford you a nice lifestyle, a good house, a good
[14:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You know, travel, you know, etc.
[14:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: etc.
[14:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Then if I ask you, well, why do you want a nice house?
[14:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can say, well, because I want shelter, because I want to grow a family and etc., right?
[14:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, all of these, every time you can give me a because to the question, why, that means that that good is not intrinsic.
[14:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's not a final good.
[14:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's instrumental good, it is an instrument that you're going to use to get something else, right?
[14:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But when it comes to Udomonia or to happiness, I'd startle size, it makes no sense to ask yourself, why do I want to be happy?
[14:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You want to be that's what people do they want to be happy or they want to lay a life worth living it's very difficult to articulate a further answer while I want to lay a life worth living because because what?
[15:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: because I don't want to waste my life, but that's a century the same answer.
[15:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's what we're talking about.
[15:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The tell us, for the Greeks, the tell us of a human life is a life worth living.
[15:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then we need to explore basically, what does that mean?
[15:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What is a life worth living?
[15:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And as we point out in the book, there are a number of answers that the Greeks came up with.
[15:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And we're going to explore each one of the big answers.
[15:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then at the end of the next time, we're going to try to figure out, so who was right if anybody was one of these answers better than the others in the answers.
[15:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not exactly.
[15:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, first part, pleasure.
[15:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Pleasure is about, so a philosophies of Pleasure are usually referred to as hedonistic philosophies, right?
[16:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Edo, Edo means Pleasure in Greek.
[16:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And there are two important schools of hedonistic philosophy in ancient Greece.
[16:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: One are where the Cedar Nakes, so named after the city of Serene in North, current Libya, Northern Libya.
[16:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And the reason for that is because the guy that funded the school was a guy named Aristopus from Cyrene, or Aristopus of Cyrene, and so they were referred to as Cyrenex.
[16:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You probably never heard of the Cyrenex today.
[16:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They disappeared very quickly, which is interesting because you would think that he don'tistic school would actually be one of the things that people resonate most easily with, right?
[16:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, everybody wants pleasure.
[16:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And yeah, it's interesting to me that one of the very first in the N6 schools just went under within a couple of generations.
[16:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The second big N6 school is the Epicureans.
[16:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a school established by Epicureans of Samus.
[17:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Samus is a small island in the extreme Western, sorry, Eastern part of the agency in front of what today is Turkey, Western Turkey.
[17:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But the agoras was also from Samus, and Aristarchus was from Samus.
[17:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, these little island cave actually burst through at least three major philosophers and scientists during that period, which is kind of amazing.
[17:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Alright, let's take a closer look at these two hedonistic philosophies.
[17:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is a quote from Aristipos himself.
[17:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He says, I possess
[17:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Lays who was a Kurdism, prostitute, but I am not possessed by her.
[17:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Since the best thing is to possess pleasures without being their slave, not to be devoid of pleasures.
[17:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So in other words, yes, it's about pleasure, but you retain control over the pleasures, not the other way around.
[17:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you find yourself in the hands of your pleasures, then that's not good.
[18:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That pleasure is probably going to control you and possibly destroy you or make your life miserable.
[18:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So these were smart hedonists.
[18:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: These were the kind of hedonists that make a point of moderation, using moderation, controlling their own pleasures.
[18:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But a way Aristopus had a long life-long relationship with lies, who was a very famous and beautiful cortisan.
[18:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They were essentially married, I say essentially because they were not really married, but they were together for their entire life.
[18:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, Sereneseism was the original sex drugs and rock and roll.
[18:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: for us if you're alive.
[18:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can see from that little table, we got on the top, the topline says physical pleasures and mental pleasures, those are the two major kinds of pleasures that you can have, and then on the side you have pleasures in the past.
[18:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the
[18:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Pleasure that you derive from remembering certain things, right?
[18:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, for instance, yesterday with my wife, we had a very pleasant day up on the Hudson Valley visiting France.
[19:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a memory, right?
[19:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, the day itself was pleasant, but the memory of that day is also pleasant, right?
[19:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a pleasure in itself.
[19:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There is, of course, present pleasures in the middle.
[19:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then there are future pleasures, the anticipation of a pleasure, right?
[19:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I am anticipating the pleasure, for instance, tonight of going and having dinner with a friend of mine.
[19:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It hasn't happened yet.
[19:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: When it will happen, it will be a current pleasure or a present pleasure, but right now I have the present the pleasure of anticipating that, right?
[19:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not for the Syrians.
[19:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The Syrians said, forget about mental pleasures, why forget about mental pleasures because they're much less strong than physical pleasures, okay?
[19:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So physical pleasure is something that you can really sink your teeth in, so to speak.
[19:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Mental pleasure, and it's a little bit more remote.
[19:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a little bit more, some I say sophisticated, but the serenades would say not quite as exciting as the physical pleasure.
[20:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, remember, these guys went after recordings, so that's what we're talking about.
[20:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They also said, forget about pleasures from the past and pleasures in anticipation of the future.
[20:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The only pleasure that really qualifies as a pleasure for the serenades is physical pleasure here and now.
[20:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so for the serenice, a good life just is that it's one physical pleasure after another.
[20:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you can get them, and if you can't get them, that's what you should try to do.
[20:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You should try to work toward getting more and more pleasure.
[20:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Of course, again, in moderation because you want to control your pleasure, it's not the other way around.
[20:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's a very simple, very straightforward sort of hedonistic approach to life, right?
[20:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, the Syrian ex also valued other things, for instance, friendship.
[20:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Friendship is clearly not a physical pleasure.
[20:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a mental pleasure.
[20:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's not like they completely excluded other stuff.
[20:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it was less important.
[20:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And most interestingly, from their perspective, the reason you want friends is because you can get pleasure out of your friends.
[21:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What your friends get out of it, it's their business.
[21:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not yours, right?
[21:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because you cannot experience their pleasure.
[21:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can only experience your own.
[21:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So from my perspective, I'm not in perspective, it's a little bit of an egotistic approach to life, right?
[21:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it's not like they didn't like their friends, or they didn't care about their friends.
[21:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's just that they said, whatever pleasure as my friend gets out of getting together with me, it's his business, not mine.
[21:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: My business is my pleasure to get together with that person, right?
[21:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Presumably the pleasure is reciprocal, but I am focused on the bet that concerns me, not the bet that concerns the other person.
[21:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So you should live in the here and now, for the serenades, the bottom line was that, again, the expansive pleasure is only possible right here, right now, physical pleasures are much stronger than mental pleasures, so you should give him precedence.
[22:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, that doesn't mean you shouldn't engage in mental pleasures, but, you know, eating a gelato is much more pleasurable than thinking about eating a gelato, okay, that kind of thing.
[22:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Also, they ask interesting questions from a philosophical perspective, like, you know, why should I be concerned about the future?
[22:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: My own future.
[22:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because I'm not living in the future.
[22:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm living now.
[22:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't even know in fact, if my future itself will have the same priorities and make the same choices that I make.
[22:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Modern philosophers kind of tend to think the other way around a lot of modern philosophers, especially U.T.
[22:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: time philosophers, tend to think about the fact that tend to argue that we have duties or our future selves, that we should be acting right now because as a duty toward, you know, myself 20 years down the road or 30 years down the road.
[22:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But for these certain nights, this was nonsense.
[22:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's like, I don't know what that guy is going to like.
[22:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So suppose that I would say for instance, I shouldn't be drinking and eating a lot because that's going to cause my older self to be suffering from health problems.
[23:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, maybe he's going to like the idea that I actually spent 20 years eating and drinking all the time because I enjoyed it and he doesn't care about the fact that he's going to have health problems.
[23:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I am not him, not yet.
[23:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I am no idea what he's going to think.
[23:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: in the future, therefore, I cannot be concerned with it.
[23:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And again, this may sound egotistic, perhaps it is.
[23:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it's an interesting point.
[23:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Do you have a duty toward your future self?
[23:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why exactly do you have a duty toward your future self?
[23:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And how do you know what your future self wants to like?
[23:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's going to, essentially, are simply projecting yourself into the future.
[23:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: All right, you cannot imagine, you cannot truly imagine, or know what you will want 20 or 30 years on the road.
[23:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you don't believe me, just think of it this way.
[23:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Imagine doing the same, using the same approach when you were a kid, right?
[24:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You were 10 years old, and you were studying and asking yourself, well, I should behave in a way that my 40-year-old is going to prove.
[24:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, no idea what your 40-year-old is going to prove.
[24:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: because you're 10-year-old.
[24:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You have no idea of most things in life.
[24:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's an interesting point.
[24:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm not saying that I agree with it, but it's something to think about.
[24:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So to recap, Siren Aix philosophy is about these two things.
[24:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Physical pleasures in the here now, plus self-control.
[24:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Let's not forget the self-control part.
[24:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Otherwise it becomes destructive.
[24:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is what life worth living is for a Siren Aix.
[24:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's the first.
[24:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Philosophy in the first port, in the port of pleasure.
[24:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The second philosophy in the port of pleasure is a peculiarism, a peculiarism is much more sophisticated.
[24:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's also kind of hedonism, but much more sophisticated, as you'll see in a minute.
[24:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and showing off a picture is a misenchanted replaced serenacism almost immediately and unlike serenacism, a picture is lasted for centuries and if at even today we still use the word epicurian, although we tend to misuse it, we tend to think about epicurianism as you know gourmet food and wine, which is not what the ancient epicurians did, but we still use the word, we don't use the word serenake, when you probably never heard somebody's like
[25:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But you might have heard somebody say, oh, that's very a peculiar end of you.
[25:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[25:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, let me start here with what I think is one of the most interesting contributions of the a peculiar philosophy, and that is what they call the tetrafarmacos, which is Greek for the fourfold remedy.
[25:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Pharmacosis is the root of the world pharmacy, right?
[25:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's literally meant as a cure for life.
[25:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is from a papyrus that was discovered at a Collinium near Pompeii a few years ago.
[25:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The author is an Epicurian Roman Epicurian named Phil Demons.
[26:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And he says, don't fear God.
[26:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Don't worry about death.
[26:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What is good is easy to get.
[26:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And what is terrible is easy to endure.
[26:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's the fourfold remedy.
[26:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now why would they say that?
[26:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why not fear God?
[26:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Were they it is?
[26:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: No, they they were not it they the Europeans do have a reputation these days for being it is they were not they they did believe in the existence of God's but they thought that God's are up there thinking and doing whatever God's thing can do and they are not concerned with us they don't give a damn about us They're doing their lofty things you know thinking about themselves thinking or whatever it is
[26:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, it doesn't make any sense for us to be worried about, you know, oh, is God going to approve of this or not going to approve of this or that sort of stuff like that?
[26:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: God, it's there, but it doesn't care.
[26:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, number one, don't fear, God.
[26:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Don't be worried about things that you shouldn't be worried about.
[26:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Don't worry about death.
[26:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why not?
[26:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We all worry about death.
[26:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Most of us at least worry about death.
[27:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But for the Europeans, if you hear his famously said death, where death is, you are not, and where you are, death is not.
[27:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Meaning that death is by definition the seizing of consciousness, and so you cannot experience it.
[27:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can experience the process of dying, so maybe you should be worried about that, but not death itself.
[27:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Once you're dead, you're dead, done.
[27:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There's nothing to experience there.
[27:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So why are you worried about something that you cannot possibly experience?
[27:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That interesting argument also to reinforce that point.
[27:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's called the symmetry argument.
[27:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They say, look, look, you and Bing stand to be worried about non-existing for an eternity after death.
[27:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But very few people are worried about the fact that they do not exist for an eternity before birth.
[27:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So if you're not worried about that, why are you worried about these other ones?
[27:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's their essential, the same thing.
[27:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The only difference is that you know that you're going to be dead, but you didn't know that you were about to be born.
[27:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But otherwise, the situation is entirely symmetrical,
[28:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: third one.
[28:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What is good is easy to get.
[28:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'll elaborate on this in a minute, but basically the appearance said that you know everything that really should want.
[28:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's actually rather easy to get.
[28:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's really not problematic.
[28:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We should want basic things in life, food, shelter, stuff like that, friendship, relationships, other people, that sort of stuff.
[28:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And the most circumstances, there are exceptions, of course.
[28:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But the most circumstances, those things are rather easy to do.
[28:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're not cost much, neither in terms, in terms of effort, no, in terms of money.
[28:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What is terrible is easy to endure.
[28:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They thought that if you're in terrible pain, for instance, there's only two things that can possibly happen.
[28:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Either the pain itself is not actually that terrible, so you can endure, or it's going to kill you.
[28:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In which case, back to number two, right?
[28:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't need to worry about that.
[29:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There's something to be said about that.
[29:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are even modern psychologists.
[29:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Some modern psychologists, cognitive behavioral psychologists, do tend to agree that a lot of our
[29:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is, obviously, there are physical ailments, right?
[29:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can get sick and all that's very stuff.
[29:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But what makes it really unindurable often is the fact that the way we think about this stuff, not the stuff itself.
[29:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The stuff itself is like, yeah, most times it's indurable.
[29:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And if not, you're probably not going to survive it anyway.
[29:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So they're because we're definitely not the sex drugs and rock and roll of ancient philosophy, as I said, those were the ceramics.
[29:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In fact, the highest possible pleasure for an epicurem was lack of pain, a condition that they refer to as aponia.
[29:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It literally means no pain.
[29:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: All right.
[29:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the only thing that we're afraid of is was pain.
[29:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Experiencing both mental and physical not just physical in fact mostly the mostly the mental problem because the physical one as I said You can either endure it or it's gonna kill you, but it's the men these were basically communities communes Many of them survived for centuries They were scattered throughout Europe and
[30:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And you can still see them today in a different form.
[30:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Christopher, many Christian monasteries were actually built on top of European communes.
[30:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the immigrants had an interesting classification of desires.
[30:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They basically thought that there are the desires, human desires, can be either natural or unnatural, the top row.
[30:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then they could be either necessarily
[30:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So natural necessary desires are the only ones according to the begins you should really concern yourself with.
[30:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those are the easy ones to satisfy.
[30:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those are things like shelter, food, clothes, friendship, conversation, stuff like that.
[31:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Then there are necessary but unnatural desires.
[31:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: These are essentially the same thing as the first group, but thanks here.
[31:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: not just food, but gourmet food, not just water, but fancy wine, you know, that's sort of stuff.
[31:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So those are natural in the sense that we're still talking about food and shelter and all that sort of stuff, but they are unnecessary because
[31:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: because, sorry, unnatural, because you don't actually need them to live.
[31:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't need gourmet food, you just need food.
[31:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't need a villa, you just need shelter and so on and so forth, right?
[31:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So if you trouble yourself with the unnatural necessary desires, you're just asking for trouble.
[31:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You're asking for things that you don't, that you don't actually need.
[31:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now let's go back down on that side,
[31:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: to the unnecessary and unnatural desires.
[31:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those are things like fame, wealth, and so on and so forth.
[31:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those are unnatural, you don't need them, and they're a mini nature, it doesn't require them.
[32:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There is no pay off for those, and they are unnecessary.
[32:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're absolutely not required for your happiness.
[32:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those are the ones that cause the most trouble.
[32:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: People that go after things like fame and wealth,
[32:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: are the ones that cause themselves and others, a lot of trouble.
[32:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then finally, of course, you can see that there is a group of natural unnecessary desires.
[32:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's empty.
[32:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because if it's natural, it has to be necessary.
[32:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It can't be unnecessary.
[32:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It cannot be such a thing as unnecessary desire that it's also natural.
[32:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's the classification.
[32:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, why did they do this?
[32:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because that's why you zoom in immediately into the first category, natural and necessary.
[32:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And essentially, the right there, you got a recipe for a good, a peculiar life, just go after those things ignore the other ones, and you're going to be fine.
[32:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, all in all, therefore, the computing approach to the good life is a little bit more complicated than the CERN eggs.
[33:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They look at simple pleasures, especially mental ones.
[33:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So both physical and mental, but actually the mental ones have a much more important in than in these ceramics.
[33:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You add to that things like memories and expectations, so they recognize that anticipation of future pleasures and remembrance of past pleasures is are in themselves pleasures, and so they need to be cultivated.
[33:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Epicureus famously, when he was dying, he was dying of some kind of stomach ailment and he was very painful apparently.
[33:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But he was physically painful.
[33:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But he was riding to a friend and he said, you know, this is one of the happiest day of my life because I keep going over in my mind to the wonderful conversations and the great time we have together.
[33:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I'm having pleasure.
[33:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm the arriving pleasure from those memories.
[33:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that pleasure kind of overrides my current situation in terms of
[34:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: physical pain.
[34:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then virtue, meaning self-control, especially.
[34:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, this is like the CERNAics, the Epicurean said, you know, all of this in moderation.
[34:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't go to excesses otherwise, because you're self-troubled.
[34:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The result of these things is a life without pain, upon you, and that in turn leads to ataraxia, tranquility.
[34:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the goal of an impeaker in life is a suede in life and a suede in life is based on lack of pain, especially mental pain.
[34:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: All right, that was the first port for the pleasure.
[34:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The second port in the last one we're going to take a look at today.
[34:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is the port of character or sometimes referred to as the port of virtue.
[34:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a pretty busy one, so I'll go a little faster on these things and you know,
[34:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: scape over a bunch of things.
[34:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you want the details, then you just might have to get the book.
[34:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The four major schools of virtuatics are Aristotelianism, Platonism, stoicism, which is represented there by epictitas and cynicism, which is represented by Eparquiat, one of the few women that you find among the major philosophers of ancient Greece.
[35:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I'm going to give you a little bit of a quick
[35:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: a little bit of a cartoonish version or a simplified version of each one of these.
[35:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Let's start with Aristotle, who famously says, one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day.
[35:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so two one day or a short time does not make a men blessed and happy.
[35:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Happiness is not an in-the-moment thing.
[35:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: As in, I'm happy to see you.
[35:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, I may be happy to see me, to see you, but that's not what happiness is.
[35:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Happiness is long term.
[35:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you experience happiness only one day or a few days in your life, you're not happy.
[35:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's not really what Aristotle at least meant by happy.
[35:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Famously Aristotle was into classifying things.
[35:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you read his books, he gives lots of tables and classifications about all sorts of stuff.
[36:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is his classification of the virtues.
[36:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We're not going to read through all of them.
[36:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The point is that E thought that virtue is a middle.
[36:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a mean.
[36:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a golden mean between two extremes.
[36:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For instance, let's take the first one, right?
[36:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Courage.
[36:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: is to be courageous, is somewhere intermediate between a deficiency when you are a coward, right?
[36:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And an excess when you're a rush.
[36:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, rushing into battle, for instance, or toward danger, just for the hell of it, without thinking what you're doing, it's not being courageous, it's being stupid, okay.
[36:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Courage is somewhere in between those two extremes, and so it's not the same goes for all the other ones.
[36:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's not a thought that really virtue requires some kind of wisdom, the wisdom of
[37:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And it's not that easy.
[37:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are no universal rules about this.
[37:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because, for instance, there are situations where what is a golden mean for another person, may not be the most old golden mean for me.
[37:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For instance, if we were talking about diet and calories, that's a statue of a famous wrestler in the form of capability, myelo of croton, croton is in southern Italy.
[37:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: what was a good diet for Milo was not a good diet for me.
[37:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If I ate as many calories as Milo, I would balloon to an extreme.
[37:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And vice versa, if Milo ate my, my no calories that I do, it would die very likely before his next match.
[37:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it depends.
[37:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the, so it's not just that the golden mean is, that the virtuous is a mean between extremes, but it, it may also depend on the specific circumstances.
[37:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What may be counting as courage for me, may not be counting as courage for you, and vice versa.
[38:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more complicated.
[38:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, Aristotle thought that there are fundamentally four kinds of people when it comes to virtue.
[38:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The extremes are easy to understand.
[38:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are people who are just virtuous, period.
[38:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're always with the right thing.
[38:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't know how many of those people you actually know.
[38:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't know many.
[38:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: presumably they're out there but it's it's right very rare.
[38:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: At the opposite extreme there are vicious people pretty much always can be reliably counted on doing the bad the bad thing.
[38:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I know a lot of those people not necessarily personally but you just open the newspapers and you find a good number of those I'll leave you to your imagination to fill in the blanks but I think that we all know some of those people.
[38:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The interesting part is the two in between, so to the left there is what Aristotle called an anocratic person, anocratic means the one who makes effort.
[39:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Hopefully, we are, if we're not virtues, we're at least anocratic.
[39:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For instance, let me give you an example of anocratic approach, or an patriotism.
[39:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't like going to the gym, but I do it anyway.
[39:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[39:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because it's the right thing to do.
[39:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's good for my health.
[39:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I'm behaving as anocratic person there.
[39:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I am saying to myself, you know, so the virtuous person would actually enjoy going to the gym.
[39:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Would actually say, yeah, time to go to the gym.
[39:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I never done that in my life.
[39:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I never enjoyed that in my life.
[39:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But I do it on a regular basis, so I count as anocratic person.
[39:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The problem is, most of us, at least some of the times, are not in credit.
[39:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We are acratic.
[39:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Acrase accrase means weakness of the will.
[39:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So to use the same example, this would be like me saying, I really should go to the gym.
[40:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: On the other hand,
[40:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I read a stay on the couch and watch TV and eat potato chips because that's more pleasurable, right?
[40:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That would be anocratic person.
[40:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I know that I should be doing something.
[40:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I know what the right thing to do is.
[40:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I just can't bring myself to do it because it takes effort.
[40:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I don't want to make the effort.
[40:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: According to where he started, the major problem in the humanity has is accratia.
[40:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We all have one point or another.
[40:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We all suffer from a crazier.
[40:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We can accept the will.
[40:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we need to work on the will.
[40:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How do we work on the will?
[40:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The same way in which you get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice, right?
[40:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So again, to stick with the same example, how did I, you know, I was probably originally a critic about going to the gym.
[40:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: When I finally decided to do it,
[40:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That gets a go.
[40:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How did I do it?
[40:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I just force myself the first few times.
[40:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I said, oh, yeah, I got to do it.
[40:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then the more you do it, the more you practice, the more you repeat that kind of behavior, mindfully repeat that kind of behavior.
[41:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right, so it's a cognitive behavioral approach to things, just starting as in modern cognitive behavioral therapy.
[41:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You tell yourself what the right thing to do is, and then you try to implement that as a behavior.
[41:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The more you do it, the easier it becomes.
[41:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Sure enough, now I don't think twice about going to the gym.
[41:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I just got up and go, I still don't enjoy it.
[41:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I haven't gotten that, that good.
[41:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it is the reason I brought up the kind of goal,
[41:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You learn how to play an instrument largely by practicing, mindfully practicing.
[41:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I have a neighbor who practices something like a flute, probably, or sounds like a flute.
[41:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Every day, couple of hours, every afternoon.
[41:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So points for being persistent.
[42:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But he's obviously now mindful because in five years, I've lived in that apartment.
[42:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He has not improved a single ayoda.
[42:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He's at the same exact level as it was five minutes, five years ago.
[42:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why?
[42:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because he's probably, I don't know him personally.
[42:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But I mean, imagine that he's not being mindful.
[42:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is, he just does the exercise, you know, like that.
[42:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And no, you have to force yourself to do it by paying attention, challenging yourself, ratcheting things up, little by little, you know, you need a guidance probably.
[42:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This guy doesn't probably have a teacher.
[42:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's how you do it.
[42:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Of course, most people don't get the kind of the hell, but most people can learn to play an instrument, and it's the same with virtue.
[42:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The goal is to become a truly virtuous person in Aristotle's way of looking at things.
[42:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But at the very least, most of us, we know that we're not going to get there, but at the very least, we can get good enough to play the instrument, right?
[42:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Let's do that, that's the idea.
[43:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So here's the sketch, the final sketch for Aristotelianism.
[43:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Virtues, you practice the virtues, there's 12 of them, according to Aristotle, plus what the Greeks called externals.
[43:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There is things like health, wealth, reputation.
[43:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those do contribute to a good life, according to Aristotle.
[43:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And of course, something I haven't talked about in this context, but we do go into it in the book, a proper political system.
[43:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I just thought that unless you live in a good society, you're going to have a really difficult time having a happy life.
[43:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Happy life.
[43:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Happiness doesn't depend only on you and your own efforts.
[43:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It depends in part on the environment in which you live.
[43:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Mostly in the society in which you grow up.
[43:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and that's another thing that I'm sure you guys are thinking about specifics of the current situation.
[43:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Let's move to stoicism.
[43:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm not going to stay long to on stoicism because we talked about it last time, much more detail.
[44:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is a pictetus who says that the operations of the will are in our power, not in our power, are the body, the parts of the body, property, parents, siblings, children, country, friends.
[44:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In other words, we don't control crap.
[44:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We only control our own efforts and our own decisions, essentially, our own judgments.
[44:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Everything else, it just comes our way and we just need to deal with it.
[44:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a far more...
[44:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In a sense, limited meaning less encompassing philosophy than our isateronism, but it's also a little bit more realistic because we really can't too much about all these other stuff.
[44:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so the stoics will teach you to just focus on the things that you actually can't do.
[44:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those things that actually are under your control.
[44:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The stoics taught us that we should live according to nature.
[44:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And what is nature for us, we are social primates.
[44:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and we are intelligent animals.
[44:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Just like those things over there, those are bonobos, those are the closest relative to get over the chimpanzees that we have, everyone who's trying to be speaking and you can see, they live in groups, they're social, and they think that's stuff.
[45:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't know what that guy's thinking about, but thinking.
[45:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So in other words,
[45:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because this is when nature gave us the ability to live socially and to think about you to solve our problems by reason, by where a reason.
[45:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is according to the story, it's a good human life.
[45:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a life where you use your reasoning abilities to solve problems, and it's a life in which you live pro socially.
[45:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You live by being helpful to other people.
[45:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: A Pethiros as a Santa minute ago divides things in general into two broad categories, up to us, not up to us.
[45:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The things are up to us, include our judgments, our decisions to act or not to act, which is just as important.
[45:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And the values we endorse or reject.
[46:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Everything else is not up to us.
[46:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Our health, our wealth, our reputation, our relationships, not that.
[46:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you are tempted to say, about hold on a minute, there are things that I can do about those other issues, for instance, my relationship with my wife.
[46:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Of course it's up to me, right?
[46:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I came behaving certain ways.
[46:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I can talk to her in certain ways.
[46:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, but those are all judgments.
[46:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: values, decisions to act or not to act, that's how I influence those other things.
[46:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But the thing itself, the relationship itself is not up to me because it is up to another person.
[46:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's, you know, I can be as helpful and talkative and, you know, and all that sort of stuff is I want.
[46:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But if the other person is not interested, it's not interested period and the story, right?
[46:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I control that left part, I don't control.
[46:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Another way to think about it is I control my efforts but not the outcomes of those efforts.
[47:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm in charge of what I do, but I'm not in charge of what happens as a result of what I do.
[47:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Which I think it's a fairly helpful way of looking at things because it immediately focuses your attention where it matters on your agency, on the kind of stuff that you can actually do.
[47:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, to recap these brief overview of Stoicism, again, there are virtues.
[47:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This is, remember, this is the port of character.
[47:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: with virtues simply a character trait, right?
[47:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Virtues are character traits.
[47:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Virtues like being courageous or being generous at certain these are character traits, which are dispositions, behavioral dispositions.
[47:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We, if you say that somebody is generous, what he means is that most of the times on the most circumstances, that person behaves generously.
[47:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's what he means, right?
[47:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the emphasis on, in all four, of these philosophies is on virtue,
[47:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In this particular case, I wrote of the stoics, they only recognize four major virtues.
[48:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those who see them up there with them courage, justice, and temperance.
[48:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then they have the second category, which I call indifference.
[48:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: These are things like what I thought I will call externals, things like health, wealth, and reputation.
[48:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The difference between Aristotle and the stoics is that Aristotle thought those things are necessary in order to live a happy life.
[48:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They are your demonic life.
[48:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you do not have a little bit of, if you're not healthy,
[48:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: you don't have a little bit of money, you don't have a good reputation, you don't have good looks, you're screwed, according to our study.
[48:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: As far as the stoics are concerned, it doesn't matter, because all those things are indifference, meaning literally they do not make a difference to your character, which is the thing that they think matters.
[48:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, of course, they have value.
[48:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You know, the Seneca, one of the stoics says, you know, I'm not stupid.
[48:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I prefer to be healthy
[48:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I prefer to have money rather than being poor, but those things are not what determines my life.
[49:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What determines my life is how I handle poverty or wealth.
[49:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How I handle being sick or being healthy.
[49:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is what determines how I do in my life.
[49:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Third, the cynics.
[49:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So this is a park here.
[49:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Paintering somebody, so she decided to be a philosopher.
[49:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And this was not a popular choice for women, especially aristocratic women.
[49:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: She was from a well-to-do family.
[49:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so somebody told her, what the hell did you decide to be a philosopher?
[49:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That was a silly decision.
[49:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And her response was, do you suppose that I had been ill advised about myself if instead of wasting further time upon the room, I spent it in education?
[49:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: so there.
[49:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now the synics were famous for, so the synic literally means dog-like.
[49:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They lived like dogs.
[49:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay, Sinoz is dog in Greek.
[50:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And they were proud of it.
[50:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They lived in the streets.
[50:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That one on the left side there is a diogenesis of Sinope, one of the most famous of the cynics, who was living in a barrel, basically.
[50:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that scene represents a famous encounter between Alexander de Great, the guy on the right.
[50:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And diogenesis, a diogenesis of so famous, despite the fact that he owned nothing, he had no family, he had no property, nothing.
[50:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: No money, but it was very famous, so Alexander came and paid homage to Diogenes and Alexander this mountain is is beautiful horse and said I am Alexander the great I am honored to meet Diogenes.
[50:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What can I do for you?
[50:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, here's the rich guy rich and powerful guy who thinks that of course the scenic wants something Right and the agonies you can see raises his hand and says what you could get out of the sun
[50:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: because you're blocking my son.
[51:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's all he needed, it didn't need anything else.
[51:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the Sineclife style is for very few people.
[51:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are not many Sinex today that I know of, because it involves essentially extreme poverty, you know, going around begging essentially, because your only point in life is to practice the virtues.
[51:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: All right, the cynics where they valued liberty, freedom, among above all.
[51:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And in fact, they distinguish three kinds of freedom.
[51:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Elyoutaria, which is freedom from restrictions imposed by society, as I said, they lived in the streets, they did everything in the streets, they ate in the streets, they defecated in the streets, they clearly not what society expects you to do.
[51:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So Elyoutaria, they celebrated self-sufficiency, out of chaos, they didn't need anybody or anything, they didn't even Alexander the Great, and Paraisia was the most important
[52:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: When the audience says to Alexander, you know, get out of the sun, easily challenging the most powerful men in the world.
[52:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[52:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's freedom of speech.
[52:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, you might think about current situations and developments in that context.
[52:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So for this, the recap for this index is very simple.
[52:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's all about virtue that's it.
[52:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Nothing else matters.
[52:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In fact, other things get in the way.
[52:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Notice the difference between Aristotle, the stoics, and the synics when it comes to external things like health, wealth, et cetera.
[52:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For Aristotle, those are needed, they're necessary.
[52:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you don't have them, you have a crappy life.
[52:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For the stories, they're indifferent, meaning that, sure, if you have them that fine, but you're not going to have a good life, you can have a good life even without them.
[52:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: for the cynics they literally get in the way of it and that's why they got rid of them.
[52:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's why they had no.
[53:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So they think of the cynics essentially as eating around monks.
[53:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: pretty much.
[53:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a good way, a good model, think about the syncs.
[53:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Played-o.
[53:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, it's the last one.
[53:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So now, Played-o, I can up possibly summarise Platonic philosophy in five minutes.
[53:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In fact, we don't even try in the book.
[53:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We devote an entire chapter in Played-o, and we only focus on one aspect of Played-o's philosophy.
[53:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Plato wrote literally about everything that we're still discussing 2004-200 years later.
[53:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So much so that influential 20th century philosopher Whitehead said that an argument can be made that all of Western philosophy is about a series of footnotes to Plato.
[53:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: that it's a slight exaggeration.
[53:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a little bit more than a series of footnotes, but the point is, Plato really did write about everything.
[53:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There is no top, if you read, and one of the things that it's amazing about Plato is that I think is the only Greco-Roman author that may be one or two more, but I think it's the only one.
[54:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: From home we have everything he has written.
[54:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Everything survived.
[54:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Aristotle, we lost half of his stuff.
[54:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The stoics, we lost 95% 99% of their stuff.
[54:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But in the case of Plato, we have everything.
[54:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Everything he wrote down, it's come to, and that's because he was so famous that they made a bunch of copies, right?
[54:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Everybody kept making copies of it, and so that's why we have so much by him.
[54:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So he says over here, in one of his letters,
[54:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: letter 7.
[54:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until through some divine dispensation, those rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.
[54:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, this is so
[54:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: relevant to current events that it's not even funny.
[55:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, what he says, of course, when he says philosophers, no did he says true philosophers, really philosophers?
[55:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It doesn't mean an academic like myself.
[55:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Philosopher here is not an academic person, even though, of course, if he founded the academy.
[55:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: school was called the Academy, which is where the more academic comes from, right?
[55:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But that's not what he's talking about.
[55:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He's not talking about somebody who just writes technical papers and publishes in journals that, you know, five people in the world are going to read.
[55:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Philosopher here just means level of wisdom.
[55:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: the literal etymological meaning of the term.
[55:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So he's basically saying, we're not going to have a respite from our problems until we finally figure out that we need to have wise individuals govern our societies.
[55:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Or until politicians, he says, for the grace of God, somehow become wise.
[55:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Good luck with that.
[56:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, very, very briefly, in the Republic, which is one of the major books by Plato, he actually explores these topics in detail, the structure of a society, how a society should work.
[56:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's the ideal society, the collipolis, the ideal society according to Plato.
[56:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not necessarily a model that we would want to follow, but it's an interesting, it's interesting that he actually even asked the question.
[56:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why, what kind of society would work?
[56:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and wouldn't work.
[56:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In his mind, society works as a society, of course, that is in the hands, you know, that is headed by philosophers, as I said, by wise people, right?
[56:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not necessarily one philosopher, that's Marcus Aurelis over there who was a stoic, not a pletorist.
[56:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But, you know, wise individuals, and then a society in which everybody else simply does what they're doing.
[56:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That little quote that you probably can't read at the bottom just says that that in a good society people are allowed to do What they're best in doing Right are you a good teacher then teach are you a good, you know Player of you know musical instruments then play music instruments and songs for you good bricklayer Then lay bricks that sort of stuff right everybody should be allowed to do what they're good because otherwise it's a waste of talent
[57:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So waste of resources, it's a waste of human resources as we will call them today.
[57:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's kind of ironic that the word human resources now, it's used in a completely different fashion.
[57:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, interestingly, and controversially, Plato also thought that, you know, the saying that what goes for society is goes for individuals.
[57:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is, a balanced society, a good society is one where wisdom and other characteristics are balanced with each other, so that everything works in harmony.
[57:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The same goes for a human soul.
[57:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: A human soul is a balance, it's a good internal balance.
[57:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: A human soul has three parts, according to Plato.
[58:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The rational part that is in charge of logical thinking, the spirited part which is in charge of emotions and the repetitive part which is in charge of physical desires.
[58:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now of course,
[58:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: At the time, the three parts correspond to the brain, the heart, and the stomach.
[58:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We know now that all three parts are actually in fact in the brain.
[58:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It all comes from here.
[58:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it doesn't matter.
[58:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The details don't matter.
[58:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The point is, a good human life, a huge amount of life, is the result of a balance, internal balance.
[58:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: in the same way in which a good human society it's a result of an external balance.
[58:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the human mind, the human soul is a microcosm of the microcosm that is society.
[58:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You may disagree with the details I certainly do, but I find the general idea very appealing, this notion of internal balance, both for a societal and individual level.
[58:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Plato also wrote famously about the different kinds
[59:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And in order to them, that way, in his mind, the best type of government is an aristocracy.
[59:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, that may strike us as a little bit bizarre, because we tend to think of aristocrats as wealthy people who inherit their wealth.
[59:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But aristos just means the best, in Greek.
[59:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[59:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's government by the best.
[59:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, the best here are defined not as the richest, but as the wisest.
[59:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, yeah, if you put it that way, I do want wise people to govern us.
[59:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Many years ago, if you remember, when Bush II was elected, John Stewart made a comment on the daily show about the fact that, you know, since I don't understand all these people that say that they're going to vote for Bush as opposed to Gore, because they can see themselves going out and having a beer with the sky.
[59:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's like, I don't want a president that I go out and get a beer.
[59:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I want a president actually knows what they're doing.
[1:00:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Who is smarter and wiser than I am.
[1:00:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's what I want as a president.
[1:00:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not somebody who was out for a beer.
[1:00:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I got my friends to go out for a beer, right?
[1:00:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's not.
[1:00:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So there is something to be said for an aristocratic government in that specific sense that that Plato means.
[1:00:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The second best choice is a democracy.
[1:00:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: government by the brave, the example in ancient Greece was Sparta.
[1:00:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So these are tough people who are not as wise as the aristocrats, but they have the heart in the right place and they actually know how to get things done.
[1:00:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The third government type of government is an oligarchy, that is what people with money.
[1:00:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a government controlled by people with money.
[1:00:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: essentially what we have in the United States right now.
[1:00:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's an oligarchy.
[1:00:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, for Plato, who was an optimist, that's a third level of the third best government, because presumably if you're smart enough to make it all that money, you're smart.
[1:01:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And therefore you can figure things out.
[1:01:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We know now that that was a false premise.
[1:01:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We have very good examples of how one can make a lot of money and being a complete idiot.
[1:01:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: no specific reference to anybody that might be in the news at the moment.
[1:01:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Notice that the next to the worst kind of government is the democracy.
[1:01:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That might surprise the hell out of us, right?
[1:01:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But remember, at the time, a democracy was simply a straightforward majority rule.
[1:01:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: by a short by a vote of a few people in favor as opposed, you know, against the ones that were against.
[1:01:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So for Plato, Plato had seen democracy as essentially mob rule.
[1:01:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: a straightforward majority with no protections for minorities, with no constitution, nothing like that.
[1:02:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's interesting to imagine what he might have said, had he had an example of a democracy that was actually based on a constitution and protection of rights.
[1:02:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: As it turns out, there was such a place at the time, but he didn't know it.
[1:02:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That was ancient rum.
[1:02:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Republican Rome is actually, we tend to think of ancient Athens as the democracy, but in fact, the modern democratic system is much closer to the ancient Roman model, pre-empire, of course, before the empire.
[1:02:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: To the Roman republic, then it is to ancient Athens.
[1:02:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So what Plato was reacting against there was, so democracy understood as little immob rule.
[1:02:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And once you have immob rule,
[1:02:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: you degenerate into a tyranny.
[1:02:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Some populist politician comes up, convinces the majority of the people, even a bear majority of the people, that he knows what he's doing, and from that point on, we have a tyranny.
[1:03:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, any possible reference to current events is entirely coincidental or not.
[1:03:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's what it is.
[1:03:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't have time to go into how Aristotle modified this scheme, but Aristotle also talked about the different kinds of government, and he actually had some interestingly different ideas from his mentor, from Plato.
[1:03:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And ideas that actually even more relevant to what we're experiencing today.
[1:03:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So according to Plato, therefore, how do you get to you, the Moiniam?
[1:03:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, you still need the virtues, for of them, as in the case of the stoics and the synics.
[1:03:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You do need externals, some externals, although they're not as important as Aristotle that, and again, you need the proper political system, because if you don't have that, both Aristotle and although Aristotle and Plato disagree on what the proper political system, the best political system was, nevertheless, if you don't have it, you're in deep trouble.
[1:04:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's it.
[1:04:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Done for today.
[1:04:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'll see you in a few weeks for a part two.
[1:04:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Thank you.
[1:04:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Hopefully we have a little bit of time for Q&A.
[1:04:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah.
[1:04:23] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Thank you so much.
[1:04:25] \[SPEAKER_02\]: So I'm a little bit fusser.
[1:04:27] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Piglierochi.
[1:04:28] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Did I get that right?
[1:04:29] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Close enough.
[1:04:30] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Okay.
[1:04:31] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Yeah.
[1:04:31] \[SPEAKER_02\]: My name is Prem Krishnamurthy.
[1:04:33] \[SPEAKER_02\]: I have, it's a question, but I don't think I'll have time for all of them.
[1:04:37] \[SPEAKER_02\]: This was fantastic.
[1:04:40] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Better than all of my intro philosophy classes I took in college.
[1:04:44] \[SPEAKER_02\]: First question is very easy.
[1:04:45] \[SPEAKER_02\]: How do we, your book?
[1:04:47] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Oh, everywhere they sell, what's it called?
[1:04:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Beyond Stoicism, that's the American version.
[1:04:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's really not a good title, but authors have no control over the title as it turns out, over the cover for their matter.
[1:05:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, though I like the cover.
[1:05:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The UK version, it's actually more appropriate title.
[1:05:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's called Live Like A Philosopher.
[1:05:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How to Live Like A Philosopher.
[1:05:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But in the United States, it's Beyond Stores.
[1:05:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can find the name bookstore on online.
[1:05:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Great.
[1:05:14] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Well, I'll be in London, so I'll get it.
[1:05:16] \[SPEAKER_02\]: So let me ask two related questions.
[1:05:19] \[SPEAKER_02\]: One is, you said several times when talking about eras tippus that, I'm sorry, I'm trying to find this quickly in my notes, give me one moment.
[1:05:31] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Yeah.
[1:05:32] \[SPEAKER_02\]: I think it was something about happiness, I'll try to get it from my head and not for turn notes.
[1:05:41] \[SPEAKER_02\]: So the first part of it is you said a couple of times everybody wants to be happy.
[1:05:47] \[SPEAKER_02\]: And so the first question is I wanted to ask, how do you think about, and maybe these philosophers would have thought about people who actually, they not want to be happy.
[1:05:56] \[SPEAKER_02\]: People who want to self-confident, they don't want to be happy.
[1:05:58] \[SPEAKER_02\]: their own traumatic histories or other young people for whom happiness is actually suspect and who find that not existing or non-happiness might be what they want to be.
[1:06:12] \[SPEAKER_02\]: So related question is when you're talking about when you're talking about
[1:06:20] \[SPEAKER_02\]: I believe Aristotle with theocratic and of the spectrum and vicious people.
[1:06:27] \[SPEAKER_02\]: So you spoke about theocratic side is, you know, people what they should be doing, but they don't do it, and you need to have practice.
[1:06:36] \[SPEAKER_02\]: that, which makes a lot of sense.
[1:06:38] \[SPEAKER_02\]: But how do does thisocratic end of the spectrum think about people who hurt others in an inadvertent way, not on the vicious end of the spectrum?
[1:06:49] \[SPEAKER_02\]: But let's say take in historical examples, example, many Germans during 1930s, 1940s, who perhaps knew that something was wrong.
[1:07:01] \[SPEAKER_02\]: did not do something.
[1:07:03] \[SPEAKER_02\]: And so I'm curious about that sense of harm to others, but that is unintentional in quotes.
[1:07:11] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Right.
[1:07:12] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Thank you.
[1:07:12] \[SPEAKER_02\]: Let's start with the second one.
[1:07:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So.
[1:07:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I think that the example you just brought up, somebody living in an autocratic system, you kind of know or suspect that there are things that the system is doing in your name that are not exactly the kind of things that you should want to have done and yet you do nothing.
[1:07:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That is another example of a crazier.
[1:07:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's weakness of the will, right?
[1:07:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because it's situation where it's not that you don't know or you don't suspect.
[1:07:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's that you don't take it seriously enough to actually act on it.
[1:07:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, there are, of course, also cases presumably of true ignorance.
[1:07:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are situations where we just don't know what's best, either for us or for other people, in which case the answer there is study.
[1:08:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's think about more, inform yourself and things like that.
[1:08:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But I think the example you just brought up,
[1:08:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: which may apply to a number of contemporary societies.
[1:08:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, it's like, oh, well, I know that's not right.
[1:08:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's not right, that's not right, but I'm not doing anything.
[1:08:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: All right, I have other things to do.
[1:08:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't have time, you know, that's a real stuff.
[1:08:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That sounds to me like the guy who knows that he should go to the gym, but prefers to watch TV and eat potato chips.
[1:08:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it is a perfect example of a crusher.
[1:08:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's a little bit more.
[1:08:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: impactful kind of a creation because it impacts not just the individual, you know, if I don't go to a gym and impacts me, not other people, but if I don't object to an autocratic government that may potentially affect potential millions of people.
[1:08:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So of course, it's also to be fair.
[1:08:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's also far more difficult to know what to do in the second case and in the first term.
[1:08:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right.
[1:08:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So if it's a matter of
[1:08:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: My personal health.
[1:09:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: All right.
[1:09:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It doesn't take a rocket scientist to speak, to figure out that.
[1:09:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, you really should go to gym.
[1:09:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You really should not eat potato chips and so on and so forth.
[1:09:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's not difficult to figure out.
[1:09:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: On the other hand, figuring out what sort of effective counter actions one can put in place against an autocratic garment.
[1:09:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's not easy.
[1:09:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There's lots of things that one can do, but they're not necessarily effective, or at least not immediately effective, right?
[1:09:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that could be a whole different conversation, you know, so if you...
[1:09:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I know it's very common to sort of blame the Germans for Hitler and blame the Italians from Mussolini for that matter.
[1:09:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And to some extent, that blame is well placed.
[1:09:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, after all, both Mussolini and Etre did win elections early on in their career.
[1:09:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, you know, there were people who favored that approach.
[1:09:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But once the shooting started,
[1:09:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: it's hard to imagine exactly what if I had lived in that at that time, you know, what exactly would have done, you know, going to the streets in complaint, but I probably would have gotten shot as a result.
[1:10:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that's a high bar to me.
[1:10:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, which is, of course, why one would argue you had to act early.
[1:10:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not once the things are already at that level, but yet to act early, but the problem we've acting early is that you don't know whether where things are going, right?
[1:10:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, I can imagine, I've read quite a bit about the history of fascism in Italy, for instance, just simply because I'm from there.
[1:10:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I'm interested in the history of my own country.
[1:10:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And for several years, it was difficult to tell what this old thing was going.
[1:10:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It was like, yeah, sure, anybody could have told you that Mussolini had some autocratic tendencies.
[1:10:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But you know, one thing is have a tendency.
[1:10:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So long as there is a parliament in session and there are laws and all that sort of stuff is like, yeah, okay, well, the tendencies are going to be checked, right?
[1:11:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The system has checks and balances and stuff like that.
[1:11:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then all of a sudden, Mussolini did these all parliament.
[1:11:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And there were no checks and balances anymore, right?
[1:11:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So you need to act before it gets things get to that point, but it's hard to tell if things are actually, you know, if you're overreacting.
[1:11:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you're saying, oh, this is just, you know, something that it will, it's a shock to the system, but the system will absorb it.
[1:11:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This has happened multiple times in the history of,
[1:11:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: humanity in multiple places.
[1:11:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The other obvious place that lots of people actually bring up today is the end of the Roman Republic.
[1:11:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So for a long time, even really smart people like Cicero thought that
[1:11:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay, yeah, this Drudeau Caesar guy is an a little bit of a dangerous kind of guy.
[1:11:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He's got autocratic tendencies, but you know, the Republic has survived 4, 450 years, and we have checks and balances, and you know, we'll survive.
[1:12:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: No, as it turns out, you know, Jews is a really did destroy the republic.
[1:12:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's hard to tell, to be fair, it's hard to tell.
[1:12:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But I do think that that kind of non-involment of non-social political involvement is another case of accration.
[1:12:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, to your first question, so what about people who engage in self-hime, for instance, things like that?
[1:12:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, for most of the Greco-Rumans, those people
[1:12:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay, their brain is just, their mind is just not functioning properly.
[1:12:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're talking about, whenever they're talking, anything that I said today was about your normal range of behavior, I know that these days the word normal is suspect, but normal just means within the norm, right, within the general distribution of human behavior.
[1:12:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We know that there are some human behaviors that are outside the norm, typically we call
[1:13:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the analogy, again, a good analogy is with the physical counterpart, right, with medicine, for instance, right.
[1:13:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For me to say that everybody wants to be happy is essentially the same from a Greco-Roman perspective as saying everybody wants to be healthy.
[1:13:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's true, most people, right?
[1:13:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, are there exceptions?
[1:13:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Are there people actually enjoy being so sure?
[1:13:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But we think of those people as weird.
[1:13:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Those people, if there's something there, that it's not going right.
[1:13:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The normal meaning natural state for a human being is you want to be healthy.
[1:13:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: you want to be in a healthy body, in a healthy mind.
[1:13:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you don't, that in itself might suggest that there is something not quite right with you, with your mind.
[1:13:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That doesn't imply that we should do anything about it.
[1:14:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: People have a right to within certain limits to do what they want, especially if it's about their own health.
[1:14:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you don't care, for instance, about your health, you don't want to go to the gym, you don't want to go to the doctor, you prefer to put it to chips.
[1:14:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You put it to chips, you're ordering yourself, you're not earning other people.
[1:14:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But I can still say, that's not good for you.
[1:14:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And we know what that means.
[1:14:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It means, another way to put it is that ethics in general, especially virtue ethics, which is everything we talked about today.
[1:14:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's about what sometimes philosophers refer to as conditional impedatives.
[1:14:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: When I say you should go to the gym, you ought to go to the gym and you ought to eat healthy and all that sort of stuff.
[1:14:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't mean that as a commandment as if it were coming from God.
[1:14:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The implication there is, if you want to be a healthy person and feel good and live long, then you are to do these things.
[1:15:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's a conditional imperative.
[1:15:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's an if-then, right?
[1:15:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now you can say, but I don't care, all right?
[1:15:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Then go ahead and do whatever damage you want to your body, but I can still say meaningfully that's unhealthy, and we all understand what that means.
[1:15:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Even though the person might say, well, I don't care about being unhealthy.
[1:15:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm okay with that.
[1:15:29] \[SPEAKER_06\]: Yeah.
[1:15:32] \[SPEAKER_06\]: This is a little bit like to...
[1:15:34] \[SPEAKER_06\]: Hi, everyone.
[1:15:35] \[SPEAKER_06\]: I'm piled.
[1:15:36] \[SPEAKER_06\]: This is to kind of like pick you back a little bit on what you're saying a bit around the ports of pleasure.
[1:15:41] \[SPEAKER_06\]: So like the two, the two thoughts of schools around that, I found it interesting that in both, there was this idea of self-control as being part of that.
[1:15:53] \[SPEAKER_06\]: And then I think about things like addiction, right?
[1:15:56] \[SPEAKER_06\]: So if you're going like heavy into pleasure, yet in both of those, and pleasure was defined differently,
[1:16:03] \[SPEAKER_06\]: some other concepts that you went over.
[1:16:06] \[SPEAKER_06\]: But both heavily around both of those schools of thought or ports were very much saying, OK, well, they're self-control.
[1:16:13] \[SPEAKER_06\]: But how did within the philosophy how did people handle ideas around addiction?
[1:16:19] \[SPEAKER_06\]: Like, where does that, and that make fall into the sick person?
[1:16:22] \[SPEAKER_06\]: And so on, but I don't know.
[1:16:24] \[SPEAKER_06\]: So I'm just asking if you
[1:16:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: can speak a little bit about that in terms of the ports of pleasure and how how that was looked upon or how self-control came in like what does that look like yeah that's a very good question so obviously the engines did not have the engine governments did not have a concept of addiction that's a modern understanding of things and I think it's an accurate understanding of
[1:16:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: However, to some extent, they kind of treated everyone as an addict, meaning that, for instance, a big data says, whenever somebody does something wrong, it's not because they want to do wrong, it's because they can't help it.
[1:17:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Their mind is not working well.
[1:17:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: At some level, we don't know
[1:17:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So he uses, for instance, an interesting analogy at one point, one of his students says, so what about this guy, he's a teeth and these other guys, he's a murder, shouldn't we get read of them?
[1:17:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So at the time, they didn't go much for the subtle things, right?
[1:17:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You just go read up people.
[1:17:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And if he did, it says, no, they're like a blind man or a death man.
[1:17:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They lost their fundamental ability to tell right from wrong.
[1:17:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so you don't kill them, you don't get rid of them, you help them.
[1:17:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In a sense, they're sick.
[1:17:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're meaning in the sense of they're not functioning normally as a human should-right function, right?
[1:18:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So in a sense, Epititas was treating everybody who was making bad decisions as in a sense being sick and therefore in need of help as opposed to condemnation.
[1:18:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: in need of, you know, of support instead of punishment, you know, that's right.
[1:18:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, that is also very clear.
[1:18:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It says, you know, the first thing you do with a blind man, if you see a blind man walking down the street, you realize that it may be hurting people, because he bumping into people.
[1:18:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: because he doesn't see them.
[1:18:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The first thing you want to do is to make sure he doesn't hurt people.
[1:18:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So this is not a free pass for people to just cause harm to other people.
[1:18:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You try to make sure that they don't.
[1:18:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But once you've done that, once you have eliminated the possibility of harm to others, then you don't go on and say, oh, you're an evil person, I'm gonna get rid of you.
[1:18:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You're gonna say, what can I do here to make things better?
[1:18:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: what can I, how can I be helpful, right?
[1:19:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So in modern terms, I think going back to a crazier and addiction.
[1:19:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So in modern terms, I think what we would recognize is that there is a spectrum, there is a continuum of possibilities, right?
[1:19:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So there are, and one
[1:19:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: addicts of some sort, right?
[1:19:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So they do certain they engage in certain self-destructive behaviors because they're really literally is something not not right For whatever reason, it could be genetic it could be early environment it could be all sorts of stuff, right?
[1:19:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We don't we don't need to get into into that Those people are in a sense sick and they are in you know, you need of help
[1:19:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And under is the majority of the rest of us who just make a mixed decision, some decisions are good and some decisions are not good.
[1:19:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And there it's about education.
[1:19:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There it's about being more mindful, more reflective about things.
[1:20:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You educate yourself, you ask other people to get a better understanding of what a good social, healthy behavior is, and you try to implement that's why education is important.
[1:20:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Education in the broad sense, not education is in the sense of just formal schooling.
[1:20:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: about education, especially in terms of moral education, which starts in the family, but continues in society at large.
[1:20:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's why you need moral education.
[1:20:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's why, because we live in a society and it's complicated.
[1:20:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are lots of, you know, we all capable
[1:20:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: both according to the Greco-Rumans and according actually to modern moral psychologists, well basically, you know, capable of basic moral decision making.
[1:20:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We come as social animals, we kind of come in with in the life with a certain number of instinctual reactions.
[1:20:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There are certain behaviors that we are instinctively feel are not good or good, right?
[1:21:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't need to teach them to a child that the child knows.
[1:21:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But a lot of what makes modern society is not that simple, right?
[1:21:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's not, oh, well, that guy stole something from somebody that's clearly bad.
[1:21:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's more complicated, right?
[1:21:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's about issues varying from environmental pollution to abortion to
[1:21:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You know, should we intervene politically or not in this situation, or that's it, those are really complex issues that our instincts do not prepare us for, because we didn't evolve under those conditions, right?
[1:21:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We have, for most of you in evolution, we were small groups, small bands of people that were mostly ready to each other.
[1:21:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so, moral problems were rather easy to figure out.
[1:21:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It wasn't that difficult.
[1:22:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But now, we live in societies with literally tens or hundreds of millions of people.
[1:22:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're interconnected globally.
[1:22:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now we have the kind of situation where your instincts are not enough.
[1:22:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Your gut feeling is not enough.
[1:22:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You need to really seriously think about it, talk to other people, learn.
[1:22:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But we can all do it.
[1:22:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it is within the character, you know, the abilities of a normal human being to do it.
[1:22:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then you, yes.
[1:22:35] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Thank you very much.
[1:22:36] \[SPEAKER_05\]: It was a wonderful presentation.
[1:22:38] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Thank you.
[1:22:39] \[SPEAKER_05\]: I appreciate it a lot from your body of work.
[1:22:41] \[SPEAKER_05\]: And thank you again for taking us through some of these things today.
[1:22:44] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Some referring to one slide where we spoke about the Golden Mean.
[1:22:48] \[SPEAKER_05\]: And this is something I've observed in various societies and various organizations.
[1:22:55] \[SPEAKER_05\]: And I was wondering from your whole.
[1:22:57] \[SPEAKER_05\]: body of work and philosophy, how would you suggest something as a solution to this?
[1:23:04] \[SPEAKER_05\]: The context being, you know, Charles McCowsky always said that the problem with the world is that the intelligent are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
[1:23:14] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Yep.
[1:23:15] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Now, to put my question precisely and crisply, how do we get the virtues to be more courageous?
[1:23:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, that's a question of course that people have been struggling with for at least two and a half millennia, right?
[1:23:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Here's the problem.
[1:23:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't think necessarily is that the virtues don't have courage for one thing because courage is a virtue.
[1:23:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so if you're really virtuous, then presumably you're also courageous, right?
[1:23:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The problem is there are so few people who are virtuous.
[1:23:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The problem is that so few of us are actually wise.
[1:23:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: One way to look at it is that there's been a constant decoupling over the last at least three millennia and that decoupling has accelerated in recent centuries between knowledge and wisdom.
[1:24:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, in terms of knowledge, we have made a lot of progress, even in the last 50 years or 100 years.
[1:24:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We've technologically, scientifically, you know, we know a lot more about how the world works.
[1:24:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And as Francis Bacon back in the 16th century set, knowledge is power, which means that
[1:24:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not only we know more, but we have a lot more power to act on things, right?
[1:24:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, we live in, let's not forget that although the general discourse is not focused recently, has not been focused recently on nuclear weapons, we still have the technical ability to destroy this planet in a few seconds, many times over.
[1:25:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: No human society has ever had that kind of power before 1944, right?
[1:25:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we have a lot of knowledge, we have a lot of power.
[1:25:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: What has not gone up, or if it has, it has gone up far more slowly, it's wisdom.
[1:25:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I actually do think that we have improved in that department, but not as much.
[1:25:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I do believe that we made moral progress.
[1:25:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In certain areas and I can give you examples like the perhaps two of the big ones are women right Which are almost worldwide at this point?
[1:25:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean there are still a few places a lot Yeah, a certain number of places in the world where women's done have a lot of rights But brotherly speaking historically certainly over the last century century and a half women's rights.
[1:25:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I've improved significantly
[1:25:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And perhaps even more obvious slavery, in most societies in the world at this point, it is simply unacceptable and unthinkable to have slaves, which, on the other hand, was perfectly normal for most of the history you meant.
[1:26:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I mean, it's fashionable these days to blame everything on Western society, but certainly Western society does have its own, it's false, but let's not forget, slavery is a universal phenomenon.
[1:26:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: you find it in ancient India, in China, in Japan, everywhere.
[1:26:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Africa, in Mesoamerica, everywhere.
[1:26:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why?
[1:26:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But because it's cheap, right?
[1:26:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Once you subjugate people, you get them to work for you, for free.
[1:26:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, it's a pretty logical thing to do if you think about it.
[1:26:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not doing it requires a certain moral understanding.
[1:26:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It requires these understanding that, well, these are human beings just like myself.
[1:26:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I wouldn't want it to be done to me or to my family.
[1:26:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So why should I impose it on somebody else?
[1:27:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's sophisticated kind of thinking.
[1:27:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So I think we have made some progress.
[1:27:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I could mention a few other things where I think we have made moral progress.
[1:27:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But there are far, few in-between, and the progress is very slow compared to our technological and scientific progress.
[1:27:22] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so the problem that I think we're facing right now we've been facing for at least, at least since the 40s, is that now we have the technology that is modern enough to destroy the entire human race.
[1:27:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And we don't have the wisdom not to do it.
[1:27:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that is the big problem.
[1:27:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How do we, we don't need more knowledge?
[1:27:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We need more wisdom, right?
[1:27:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How do we get it?
[1:27:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's an interesting question, right?
[1:27:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that is, I mean, it's possible.
[1:27:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: One of the things that you do understand very clearly, at least it's very clear to me when you study history is that
[1:28:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: for instance, what was going on and why this was a bad idea, which means that it's possible.
[1:28:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If one person can get it, then it means that unless that person is a superhuman, that means that other people could get it, but they don't.
[1:28:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that becomes the question, why is it that a few people get it and a lot of people don't?
[1:28:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[1:28:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah.
[1:28:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So for instance, when I was writing a book a few years ago on character, the character quest, I did some research about the Peloponnesian War, which was this war that raged for decades between Sparta and Atons, and eventually ended up not only in the destruction of Atons, essentially,
[1:28:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: but in the destruction of Greek civilization, because even the winners, the Spartans, were so weakened that the Macedonians, Alexander, came down and just took over everything, right?
[1:29:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that was as arguably the Polyponision War was the end of Greek civilization, ancient Greek civilization.
[1:29:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, if you read the history of the Peloponnesian War by Tacitides, it was a historian, and you look at the comments he makes, because unlike modern historians, it wasn't about just facts.
[1:29:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He was doing a running commentary.
[1:29:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You would say, oh, this is the fact, and this is what he means.
[1:29:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And it's very clear that he got it.
[1:29:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He understood many years before the end of the Peloponnesian War.
[1:29:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He understood that this was bad for grace.
[1:29:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Not just for Athens, it was bad for grazing generally.
[1:29:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He says, you know, these people don't get it.
[1:29:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's going that way.
[1:29:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Socrates understood it.
[1:29:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Socrates did, you know, some of the platonic dialogues, you have Socrates making comments about the Polyponnesian War and how this was going to be a disaster before it ended.
[1:30:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So some people got it.
[1:30:02] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You go back a little bit later on, the history of the Roman Republic, Cicero understood what was going on, perfectly.
[1:30:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, but most people didn't.
[1:30:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And sure enough, we've got what we've got.
[1:30:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that, to me, is the really puzzling question.
[1:30:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I don't think I have an answer.
[1:30:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why is it that so few people get it?
[1:30:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And how do, and more importantly, how do we get more people to get it?
[1:30:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I'm not sure.
[1:30:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, I could say,
[1:30:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: platitudes.
[1:30:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I could say, well, more education.
[1:30:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Sure, fine.
[1:30:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But again, by education, one shouldn't mean necessarily formal education, you know, the kind of stuff that you teach in high school or college, because the city is doing a good college.
[1:30:57] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and needed to do so.
[1:30:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They were educated in a broad sense of the term.
[1:31:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They understood what was going on because they read wisely.
[1:31:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They talked to people and they thought and reflected on what was going on.
[1:31:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that is the question.
[1:31:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: How do we teach people to open their eyes and not sleepwalk through life?
[1:31:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I'm using that particular metaphor for a reason.
[1:31:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: One of the pre-socritex philosophers, it applies to the clitoris of Ephesus, the guy that said that we never stepped in the same river twice, that kind of guy.
[1:31:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He be rated his fellow Ephesians, the citizens of Ephesus.
[1:31:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And he kept saying, you guys are sleepwalking for life.
[1:31:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You just don't get it.
[1:31:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't get what's going on here.
[1:31:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: and therefore you're not acting.
[1:31:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You're just sleepwalking.
[1:31:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then you're gonna die one of these days and you just did not get it.
[1:31:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So people are being aware of these tendons your people to sleepwalk at least for two and a half millennia.
[1:32:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we know what the problem is.
[1:32:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We know that it's possible to solve it because some people,
[1:32:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: scattered throughout history and geography have gotten it.
[1:32:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the only question is, how do we raise those numbers?
[1:32:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We don't need just one or two sockets or other clusters.
[1:32:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We need lots of people like that.
[1:32:27] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Right, so just one thought on that, thank you for the answer, and I agree with most of what you've said.
[1:32:35] \[SPEAKER_05\]: One thought on that from my own investigations is that apparently the influences that a person has before they turn five or six years old, place a big role in them responding to things the way they do.
[1:32:56] \[SPEAKER_05\]: When they are children around that age, I think it might give a point to how to create more of the people who get it.
[1:33:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, I think you're right.
[1:33:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Certainly it has to do with very early influences in life.
[1:33:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We know that you can change people's minds almost at any age.
[1:33:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it becomes more and more difficult to do so, and most people are just close to just not receptive.
[1:33:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And you can hammer all you want, but if somebody is not receptive, they're not receptive.
[1:33:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They need to make the first steps.
[1:33:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We know now from the development of human developmental psychology that the human brain pretty much stops forming in one's early 20s, right.
[1:33:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's read the latest.
[1:33:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You can do anything.
[1:33:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, plus serious, right.
[1:33:51] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because after that, it's like, again, people do change their mind, but it's very rare.
[1:33:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So at the very least, you need to act before that.
[1:33:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, again,
[1:34:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'm a scientist.
[1:34:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I love the fact that modern developmental psychologists actually can put data and knowledge in front of these things.
[1:34:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But for a long time, the Jesuits for instance, one of the Christian orders that was mostly into education, more into education, they have always have this saying that give me a child of seven and I'll give you a man of fourteen.
[1:34:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Absolutely.
[1:34:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So what they meant was, that's the pliable edge, that's the age where, so too early, so very early development is important, but it's mostly important in terms of developing empathy and sort of emotional reactions and things like that.
[1:34:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Human children don't really engage in high-level abstract thinking until the age of six or seven, or it depends, it varies, but that age.
[1:34:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's what used to be called the age of reason, right?
[1:35:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: At that point, you better come in and start doing what the Jesuits said you should be doing.
[1:35:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But we don't.
[1:35:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You know, we postpone, you know, for instance, teaching philosophy or clinical thinking to college, it's too late.
[1:35:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: By that time, the only people that I can reach are students who are already ready to go, and they are, you know, they are... Yeah, they're open to the expense, they want to do it, fine.
[1:35:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So every class, I mean, you know, because you've been several of my courses, every semester, my classes typically have 25 to 30 students.
[1:35:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If I get four or five that I can, that I feel like I can reach, I can see that a success.
[1:35:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a small minority, the rest, it's up to them, you know, I can't do anything
[1:36:04] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that's why Cicero thought, for instance, that early education is crucial.
[1:36:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But we just don't know, and they were aware of the problem.
[1:36:16] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Cicero writes in one of these books about, he says, you know, if people are naturally virtuous,
[1:36:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If virtue is a thing that comes now to you, why is it so many people are vicious?
[1:36:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why is it so many people just don't act?
[1:36:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right.
[1:36:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Any given answer?
[1:36:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He said it's society's fault.
[1:36:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We corrupt people immediately as soon as they're born.
[1:36:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We start doing the wrong things.
[1:36:43] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In modern terms, what we would say is that human beings have a natural, pro-social instinct, because we're social animals, as I was shown before.
[1:36:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we have it.
[1:36:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And then we hammer it down as soon as we come into the world because our parents act in a way that it's actually
[1:37:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: our peers don't help, society at large doesn't help because they immediately bring us in a direction that is contrary to where we should go.
[1:37:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We're merely told that to be successful means to make a lot of money and have power and influence people.
[1:37:22] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Louis commonwealth.
[1:37:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, and instead it's the opposite, right?
[1:37:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Real success should be to be a well-adjusted human being
[1:37:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: but we're not all that, as children.
[1:37:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so it's no surprise that then things go down immediately and it's very hard to pick them up.
[1:37:42] \[SPEAKER_01\]: Thank you.
[1:37:42] \[SPEAKER_05\]: Thank you very much.
[1:37:43] \[SPEAKER_05\]: I'd like to ask you a question or comment.
[1:37:46] \[SPEAKER_01\]: Thank you for taking the question.
[1:37:48] \[SPEAKER_01\]: Just like quickly, how do we select, in this particular case, there is a select view of the wise people supposedly,
[1:37:57] \[SPEAKER_01\]: will make these decisions right and influence the society as large.
[1:38:04] \[SPEAKER_01\]: Who selects, who is wise?
[1:38:07] \[SPEAKER_01\]: And also, how do we know that the wise person is making the decisions are actually wisdom based on wisdom?
[1:38:17] \[SPEAKER_01\]: How do we know that their vote levels, it's not based on or actually being influenced by personal policies?
[1:38:28] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah, those are excellent questions.
[1:38:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, let's start with the second one.
[1:38:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So how do we know that somebody's acting wisely?
[1:38:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Plato would say that to act wisely requires a certain skill.
[1:38:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so you treat it as any other skill.
[1:38:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you go to your doctor, for instance, how do you know that she knows medicine?
[1:38:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't.
[1:38:54] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'll let you or yourself a doctor.
[1:38:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't.
[1:38:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You just trust her.
[1:38:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[1:38:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, there are some safeguards, right?
[1:39:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's why you're going to an a doctor's office, and you see diplomas on the wall.
[1:39:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: She started at Columbia University.
[1:39:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Okay.
[1:39:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, that sounds good enough.
[1:39:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You know that there is a board of, you know, the people that make decisions about giving licenses to doctor and can revoke them if the doctor, et cetera, et cetera.
[1:39:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it's essentially
[1:39:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right, that's always the case with experts.
[1:39:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Unless you are an expert, it's not just doctors or wise people.
[1:39:30] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Mechanic, I don't know anything about cars, so if I need to fix my car, I go to a mechanic.
[1:39:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I trusted the mechanic, knows what he's doing.
[1:39:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, of course, you look also the results, right?
[1:39:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you bring a car to a mechanic and the mechanic doesn't fix it, then you might have start having doubts about whether he's a really a good mechanic.
[1:39:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But even in that case, all you do is to go to another mechanic.
[1:39:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So the answer to that question, I think, is trust.
[1:39:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So you really need to figure out who we can trust.
[1:39:59] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And there are, I mean, there is a whole philosophy and psychology of trust.
[1:40:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: There's people who've been thinking about this stuff.
[1:40:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't need to know to have the know-how, the specific technical know-how, to figure out whether I can trust somebody.
[1:40:17] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For instance, the case of mechanic, as I just said, I look at the results.
[1:40:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't need to be a mechanic.
[1:40:25] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I just need to say, hey, this is the third time that I bring the car to this guy.
[1:40:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And every time he brings it back to me, and it's not working, right?
[1:40:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Or he breaks down again.
[1:40:35] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that you know that you can't trust him.
[1:40:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Even though you still don't know anything about mechanics, car mechanics.
[1:40:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So we confuse,
[1:40:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Trust the basis for trust with knowledge.
[1:40:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: The basis for trust is different from technical knowledge.
[1:40:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It is a type of knowledge, but it's different.
[1:40:55] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And we should focus on developing skills in the people about trust.
[1:41:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Can you recognize whether you can trust somebody or not?
[1:41:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And on the web basis, you trust people.
[1:41:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, on the basis of their behavior, not just what they say, but what they do, on the basis of their record, on the basis of what other people who are experts say,
[1:41:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[1:41:19] \[SPEAKER_03\]: For instance, you know, most medical doctors agree that vaccines work.
[1:41:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Some don't.
[1:41:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[1:41:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: They're always exceptions.
[1:41:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, if you pick enough of a large group of people, there will always be somebody who says, I don't think so.
[1:41:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right?
[1:41:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, I still trust vaccines.
[1:41:36] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Why?
[1:41:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Because the majority of the doctors seems to agree that those are things that work.
[1:41:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Now, does that mean that the majority is always right?
[1:41:44] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Of course not, but it's my best bet.
[1:41:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If I bet the other way, I'm at risk my life.
[1:41:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I have a higher chance of risking my life.
[1:41:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So there are things you can do to see whether you can trust somebody or not.
[1:41:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And those things do not imply personal technical knowledge, which is impossible.
[1:42:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We cannot become experts on everything.
[1:42:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: If you really want to do your research as people use to say you're in the pandemic, you know, I'm doing my research.
[1:42:12] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Like, on what basis are you doing your research?
[1:42:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Are you a doctor, are you a biologist, are you a epidemiologist?
[1:42:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: No, then what the hell are you doing?
[1:42:20] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You don't, you can't do your own research for most things because it would take multiple lifetimes to become an expert on everything.
[1:42:29] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So there is, that's the answer to your second question.
[1:42:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Your first question was, I forgot,
[1:42:37] \[SPEAKER_03\]: like who's wise.
[1:42:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Ah, yeah.
[1:42:41] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right.
[1:42:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah.
[1:42:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's a big question, because so Plato would say not democratically, because they're because they're like, you know, people are now wise.
[1:42:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right.
[1:42:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Yeah.
[1:42:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's why he likes the, he says that the best system of government is an aristocracy, where the people who make decisions are the people who actually know.
[1:43:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: you know that the people who are wise and therefore know that doesn't that's not going to fly for most modern society well i don't know actually about most modern societies because i checked the recent and the number of democracies in the world is actually only about 20 percent of countries how truly democratic countries even when you expand the definition of democracy to kind of board the line cases it doesn't get higher than 50 percent so so most countries in the world are actually not democratic even today
[1:43:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But within a democracy, it's hard to make that argument that you are well, you should trust the wise people, right?
[1:43:40] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that is the fundamental conundrum of a democracy.
[1:43:45] \[SPEAKER_03\]: This was understood again all the way back to ancient Rome, which was the first democratic republic, and certainly was understood by the founding fathers of the American republic.
[1:43:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: that if you do not have educated citizens, you will not make wise choices.
[1:44:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's why education is so crucial, right?
[1:44:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that's why certain people that you're going mentioned, abolish things like the Department of Education.
[1:44:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, it couldn't possibly be more naked than that, right?
[1:44:26] \[SPEAKER_03\]: When you have an entire party, if it says one of our first priorities is to abolish the Department of Education, you've got to wonder, what why are they doing this, what's going on here, right?
[1:44:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So that's the problem, that so I'm in favor, for instance, I'm in favor of free speech at a pretty extreme level.
[1:44:46] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, I think that there are very few types of speech that should be curtailed in any way.
[1:44:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In that sense, a classical liberal.
[1:44:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I'll ask John Stuart Mill who wrote only Bertie where he makes this pretty radical argument especially for the time, but even today that the only cure for bad speeches is good speech.
[1:45:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Fine, but Mill didn't live in the time of social media.
[1:45:11] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It did not live in the time of AI-generated but
[1:45:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So, he lived in a time where people really could be educated, where there was in hope at least, that you could get enough people in society to be educated so that they would be able to distinguish, you know, sense from nonsense and make the right decision.
[1:45:32] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And so that when he says, you know, the light of truth is the best way to exterminate false
[1:45:39] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Well, that makes the biggest assumption that people are able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and we don't live in that kind of society.
[1:45:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Clearly.
[1:45:48] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, no matter what you think politically, we just don't live in that kind of society.
[1:45:52] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We have, I don't know, 50% of Americans will believe in astrology.
[1:46:00] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Right there, that's a standing, it's a standing percentage.
[1:46:05] \[SPEAKER_03\]: like one out of two Americans believe in a strategy, something that has been debunked for at least 500 years.
[1:46:10] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So it's problematic.
[1:46:13] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And that it's readily simple compared to the kind of political lies that we are exposed to in a regular basis.
[1:46:21] \[SPEAKER_03\]: So
[1:46:23] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't know what the answer is.
[1:46:24] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Again, I think I temperamentally, I am sympathetic to Mill.
[1:46:31] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I really would love to live in a society where, you know what, you just fight falsehood with truth and let the best men win, right?
[1:46:42] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But I don't believe deep down that that's the kind of society we're in.
[1:46:47] \[SPEAKER_03\]: We just now, you know, but what are you going to do?
[1:46:50] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I mean, Plato's answer was you like to people for their own benefits.
[1:46:56] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You treat them like children, right?
[1:46:58] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He's the guy that talked about the noble lie.
[1:47:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: He says, look, most people just don't get it.
[1:47:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And what are you going to do?
[1:47:06] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You have to lie for their own benefits.
[1:47:07] \[SPEAKER_03\]: Isn't it?
[1:47:08] \[SPEAKER_03\]: You know, the republic is often considered sort of a fastest depicting a fastest state.
[1:47:14] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But it's not.
[1:47:15] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It certainly is a auto, sorry.
[1:47:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: aristocratic state, that's for sure, I mean, Plato himself says so, explicitly, it's not a fastest state because in a fastest state, the autocrat, the leader, lies to the people in order to exploit and manipulate the people.
[1:47:33] \[SPEAKER_03\]: In Plato's Republic, the philosophers lie to the people for their own good.
[1:47:38] \[SPEAKER_03\]: It's like a doctor who lies to a child and says, don't worry, the injection will not, you won't feel anything, right?
[1:47:49] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And yet it does feel it, but it's too late to complain about it, and it was for his own good.
[1:47:53] \[SPEAKER_03\]: But we live in a society where we are repelled by the whole notion of lying to people for their own benefits.
[1:48:01] \[SPEAKER_03\]: And I understand that.
[1:48:03] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I sympathize with that, right?
[1:48:09] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I don't know, we go mill on the one side and play it on the other side to simplify things to oversimplify things a little bit.
[1:48:18] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I think that I am temperamentally in favor of mill's model, but deep down I think it's not going to work.
[1:48:27] \[SPEAKER_03\]: I am not temperamentally in favor of Plato's model, but I think he has a point, and so I don't know what to do.
[1:48:34] \[SPEAKER_03\]: That's why I'm here and not of there being a politician.
[1:48:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: it's up again on April 27th, yes, that is part two and thank you so much.
[1:48:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I think everyone had a wonderful time.
[1:48:50] \[SPEAKER_04\]: Thank you.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.