plato85

I highly recommend the Kenneth Clark's BBC documentary series 'Civilisation' which depicts European Civilisation though the ages. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264234/ Also 'The Ascent of Man' is a similar documentary series. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069733/

Be real. Choosing to be an optimist, choosing your emotions is curious US trait which irritates the rest of us :-p

Psychobabble. The glass is both half full and half empty. It's pointless reading anything which word someone uses. Optimism doesn't mean you're happy. Pessimism doesn't mean you're unhappy. Optimists are more likely to be disappointed. Pessimists are more likely to me pleasantly surprised.

George Orwell - “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." I am learning that most of the disagreements people have come down to definitions and word associations. Words have different meanings to different people. You will find this regularly occurring in debates on this forum. Molyneux has described peoples outlooks as being built up of words like a fairy-tale, so when we try to reason with an irrational outlook words have no impact, or our arguments may even drive them further into irrationality because the words we use are associated with evil and we confirm their biases. We've been debating 'arguing with irrationality'. Another way of putting 'irrationality' may be the sub-conscious mind. When we tip-toe around 'triggering' people, we're not talking about their rational thoughts, we're talking about emotion. We may find that in an irrational person they lack consciousness, or maybe they have a strong subconsciousness? If we're arguing with irrational people I suppose we have to make emotional arguments? What George Orwell was describing by the word 'Newspeak' is also known to us philosophers as 'deconstructionism'. Deconstructionists try to break down the meanings of words to give a new meanings and associations. This can be done though 'priming'. Priming is a psychological tool to make people associate something with something else. Pavlov's dog associates a bell with food. We associate coleacola with cord like cold and refreshing. I am noticing this happening more and more. Words like 'morality' used to mean someone's whole set of values and virtues that they live by. Now it means someones sense of right and wrong in conduct with other people. A much diminished definition. Evil used to mean not virtuous, now it means some kind of supernatural spirit. Fascist used to mean someone who supported Mussolini. Now Nazis are fascists. People associate Hitler with far-right even though his policies were socialist. Churchill fought off national socialism, and he was right wing and conservative. By today's standards Churchill is far right and therefore if he were around today he might be associated with 'fascism'. People associate immigration policy Nazism and genocide, even though before WWII every country other than the Wiemar republic had strong borders. No one can determine what the alt-right is, the mainstream media have an agenda control the word 'alt-right' to mean a neo-nazis movement, but the alt-right think they're a libertarian movement. Etc... My question is how do keep track of these changing definitions, and how do we talk to people with those porn-modern definitions and word associations? How to we combat newspeak/ deconstructionism?

I'm interested in exploring the ideas and arguments.

Yeah it's as clear as mud. But how can anyone answer the question should Libertarians support the alt right unless they know what it means. Part of the problem is a smear campaign. Various forces are trying to hijack the movement, or hijack the narrative.

How do we live the good life in a wicked world? This is an ancient conversation that continues. The dilemma is can we live a good life if we stay connected to evil communities, or should we leave? From what I've noticed in history, it's usually the craziest people who leave to start their own communes. I think Epicurus did it. The Anabaptists did it. The 1960s counterculture did it. This was Dagney Taggart's Dilemma in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Stefan Molyneux talks about not letting the evil people into his life. Where do you find the good people to replace the evil people?

I just got access to THE BRONZE FILES! and by chance the first FILE I picked addresses this discussion. It's called 'Libertopia Speech Rehersal: Take 1' The general premise is that the best way to influence people who are closed to reason is to live the good life, lead by example, and everyone will want to come to our side. His arguments are Freudian, he argues that most peoples outlook are built up of words like-tales and that can't be penetrated by words. The subconsciousness that needs to be penetrated with reality. He describes living the good life similar to Rand. He lives his life by his own standard and doesn't let people with standards he deeply disagrees with into his life, and he doesn't let them get him down.

People are either more liberal minded or more conservative minded, and there are liberal minded and conservative minded people on both sides of politics just as there is idealism on both sides of politics. Conservative minded people are more idealistic and collective, liberal minded people are more independent. In the old days the division between the left and the right was more simple, the left and the right both had a Christian outlook. The conservatives were more and idealistic Christians, and they tried to push their 'modernist' lifestyle onto everyone. They wanted everyone to fit into the perfect mold of a stoic christian nuclear family. The Left tried to reign in the government and churches influence. That was the main difference between left and right in politics. Then in the 1930s FDR came along and offered 'The New Deal' which completely changed politics. The new deal was a trade off of liberal and authoritarian values. The trade off was a bigger state in return for civil rights. The 'Social Liberals' lifted the prohibition, fought for new rights for workers, women, and coloured. From the time of FDR, 'social liberals' (as opposed to 'classical liberals' / libertarians) fought for equal rights under the law. That's what 'equality' used to mean. Since then, the conservatives and the 'classical liberals' have been grouped together as right wing, but this always was is a division. Because most liberal minded people were voting with the left, conservatives minded people dominated the right. By the end of the 1980s FDRs 'social liberal' agenda for equal rights was pretty close to complete, but no one announced that the agenda was complete. Everyone had equal rights under the law. Because this agenda was complete, and the left had the status quo, the left became idealistic and conservative. They told everyone that what they were really after was 'equality,' but they changed the meaning of the word equality from equal rights, to something else, but at the time most people didn't realise it, and the rusted on liberal minded voters continued voting with the left. 'Equality' is their brand of social engineering. It's about changing the way people think and deconstructing a way of life. Rather that equal rights they're trying to make men and women the same.... This of course is authoritarian. It started more subtly and became really obvious over the last 8 years. So recently liberal minded people started flocking to the right. It has changed the balance of liberals/conservatives in the right-wing, but it has also given more power to the 'classical conservatives'. The left are no longer for rights or freedoms, they are fighting for a bigger state and for social engineering. The left are the status quo, and they are becoming more and more authoritarian. The left are now THE conservatives. Anyone with 'classical conservative' ideas is now radical. The meanings of all our political language have changed so much since the 1930s that it's hard to even talk about the changes in our political/philosophic outlooks without constantly re-defining what you mean.

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged - excellent novel which philosophically argues out the social problems. Easy to read but very long. I couldn't recommend it enough. Carol Quigley - Tragedy and Hope is an INTENSE world history, covering about 150years up to the 1960s. It's a real hard slog though. 1300pages of fine print. It took me nearly a year. He goes into the philosohic outlook of each country and how it relates to their past. Adam Curtis - Watch all of his documentaries. Start with Century of the Self. It's about how Freuds ideas are used to control society. Another excellent video is An Evening with John Taylor Gatto. He goes into the education system. He goes into theories about whether we're being dumbed down deliberately.

Thanks Xcalyba. This guy is switched on.

Pffft. How many stupid people do you see in good jobs? They're all around us. And anyway IQ only measures some of your intelligence. It doesn't count conscientiousness for instance. If your answers at school are ambiguous, perhaps the questions don't interest you. Not being interested in school is normal for everyone and not a sign of intelligence. Being a student is a an abstract existence, things will seem very different when you're in the real world.

I find Myers-Briggs personalities the best way to understand how different people think. You can do a personality test at 16personalities.com amongst other places. A Myers Briggs Personality is made up of 4 different scales they are Extroversion vs Introversion (E vs I) - Whether you feel energised by other people's company iNtuitive Vs Sensing (N vs S) - Whether you think more in terms of ideas and concepts or you think more in terms of detail. Sensing people notice far more than intuitive people. Intuitive people notice the ideas and patterns. Truth Vs Feeling (T vs F) - Whether you think more about the Truth or more about people's Feelings - People who think more about feelings understand people better and are usually better at influencing and keeping in touch with people. People who are more interested in the truth are more logical and better at things like engineering. Judging Vs Perceiving (J vs P) - People who are Judging are organised and they get things done. People who are Perceiving are messy but adaptable to different situations. I am an ENTP. I have a theory that in a philosophy forum we'll find a lot of Ns and Ts.

I'm in the North West.

It's not a racial movement, that's the narrative the left push. The alt-right is a reaction to political correctness. It is a collection of people who refuse to be politically correct and often actively deliberately stir up political correctness to get over reactions to show how ridiculous PC is.

Deep stuff Livefree. Calling Dr F! I was brought up with political discussions at the dinner table where I learnt that political discussion was the most interesting discussion and battle of wits. I thought this was interesting and normal, while other families were talking about their days and the monotonous things they do. I've continued that love of discussing ideas, but my ideas have come a long way from the PC ideas of my Mum and Brother and now I have a very strange relationship with them. I don't know how else to relate to them other than the discussion of politics and ideas, that's how we grew up. I guess if I could figure out how to switch on someones rationality I could have a normal relationship with my Mum.

We're talking hypothetically and generally. I think anyone's friends and family would think they've gone mad if they changed religion. If what brings people together is common values then changing religion is like publicly declaring you don't share the values with all the people you used to. We used to say that the family was the basic unit of the state. Christianity organises everyone into families, and families into communities. Those communities preach charity and look after the poor. Christianity is the alternate to the welfare state. It's curious that you call Christianity an Aryan religion, I thought of it as a Jewish one.

Given how irrational the population is, given the secular ideologies they drift to, I wonder how necessary religion actually is. Since we tore religion down, morals haven't been anchored to anything except fashion.

There's a few different ideas of love in Western philosophy. Romantic love - This fairy tale idea of love at first sight. In the old days it was used as an excuse for shot gun weddings. It's an ideal pushed by Hollywood as an excuse to justify a culture of casual sex. Bourgeois love - This was the old worlds Bourgeoisie ideal of matching based on wealth and power. Western love - "This assumes that personailities are dynamic and flexible things formed largely by experiences in the past. Love and marriage between such personalities are, like everything in the Western outlook, diverse, imperfect, adjustible, creative, cooperative, and changeable. The Western idea assumes that a couple comes together for many reasons (sex, loneliness, common interests, similar background, economic and social cooperation, reciprocal admiration of character traits, and other reasons). It futher assumes that their whole relationship will be a slow process of getting to know each other and mutual adjustment - a process that may never end. The need for constant adjustment shows the Western recognition that nothing, even love is final or perfect. This is also shown by recognition that love and marriage are never total and all-absorbing, that each partner remains an idependent personality with the right to an independent life. (This is found throughout the Western tradiction and goes back to the Christian belief that each person is a separate soul with its own, ultimate separate, fate)." - Quigley (Tragedy and Hope)

Seriously? Part of the problem is we shirk from thinking for ourselves, we trust experts as if they have all the answers, and we don't trust our own intuition. It sounds like your instinct is that you shouldn't be taking them. I wonder if they're depressed because their outlook is irrational, or they're irrational because they're drugged? You would enjoy a 3 part documentary by Adam Curtis called 'The Trap'. It's on youtube.

Thanks Boss. I've never heard of it but it sounds fascinating.

There is a spectrum in Myers-Briggs Intuitive Vs Sensing. On one end of the spectrum is someone who thinks in terms of details, at the other end of the spectrum is someone who thinks in terms of ideas. If you don't remember details, you probably understand and remember the overarching concepts better than most people. It's a shame school teaches us that remembering detail is more important.

This is a good time for an example. I recently lost a friend of mine to the dark side. Let's call him Milhouse - He's part Asperger, part infantile. One one level he understands the world extremely well, and on another level he's easily swayed. He always was conservative and his friends were too. Last time I saw him he was 2 months into a teaching degree and he was suddenly far left and completely irrational. I wanted to know how he came to his new views. He told me because he's a teacher and so he has to understand people as someone who has to teach. I asked him what he means and what they're teaching him. He said teaching is about empathy and if he's going to teach people to get along with each other he has to teach them empathy. I told him his job as a teacher was to teach people to think with their head not their emotion, and if you can train up rational people they'll co-operate better than people that think emotionally. From there he insisted that he was a teacher (2months!) and that my views don't count... from there it descended as I met all his arguments with reason until he was just hurling abuse at me. It's as if he's suddenly just switched off part of his brain. Defeatists here are saying these people are beyond reach and they don't have a rational brain (Stefan included), but If someone's whole world view can be turned upside down after 2 months of a teaching degree, I wonder how easy it is to turn him back? I know he is intelligent and he can be rational, but he's infantile and easily swayed. Maybe he was just parroting my rational arguments back?

I was raised without religion so I don't really understand but I want to. Do Christians really believe Jesus was the son of God? Are Atheists/agnostics prevalent in the church? Are they open about it? Do Atheists ever join the church? Being an atheist raised in a PC atheistic family I can see the value of being part of a society. And I see the value in established values rather than progressive values. I think my family would disown me and my friends would think I've gone mad if I converted. Has anyone seen this happen?

I'm new to Freedomain radio, and I see > 3600 podcasts, and I wonder where to start. Is there any way to listen to the most important and avoid the less important episodes?