Full Transcript
Hey, have you noticed that everybody has gone
crazy over the last couple of decades? Well, I think there's a reason for it and I think
it's fairly straightforward to explain and it's one of those things that once you know
to look for it, you'll see it everywhere. See, the problem is that everybody, including everybody
watching this, has certain rules they follow in their life. Rules that they consider sacred. They
cannot be questioned. They get very emotional if they see somebody breaking them. But those
rules, and I cannot stress this enough, are totally arbitrary. The easiest example of this
is just modesty of dress. What part of your body are you allowed to expose while walking around?
That varies wildly from one culture to the next, from one neighborhood to the next. What you're
allowed to wear to one beach will get you arrested if you wear it to another one. But none of those
rules are based on any kind of logic or reason. It is purely just the customs of that society.
Other examples include things like table manners, what foods you're allowed to eat with your
hands. There was a controversy recently where a politician ate some rice with his hands, and
some people who are very anti-immigration thought that was disgusting, that it was a sign that our
society had been polluted by outsiders because after all, any civilized person would eat their
rice with a fork! But those same critics would have no problem picking up messy chicken wings
and eating those with their fingers. A similar rule is how often you bathe. In some societies,
you shower every day and some you only do it on special occasions. Again, in neither case is it
based on any kind of logic or science or reason. Societies have different rules about whether
or not you smile at strangers. In some places, that's considered weird or creepy. Where I'm from,
it's just polite. Or, how much personal space you grant to strangers when you're standing
in line with them. And a big one in my line of work is what language you're allowed to use,
what words are considered profane or offensive. This contradiction, this paradox that exists in
everybody's brain where I get highly emotional if I see somebody breaking this rule, but I can't
explain with any kind of reason or logic as to why? It just breaks people. It makes them act
insane. Now, you can go a long time without ever having to confront that contradiction as
long as you stay within your own little group where you all have the same rules and nobody is
allowed to question them. But in the modern world, that's not possible. Now, if you're going to live
in a multicultural society, as most of us do, or if you're going to exist on the internet, where
by nature you're going to be encountering other cultures, then part of your education should be
in how to make the distinction between differences that are actually harmful and can actually put
someone in danger versus the differences that simply annoy you because they remind you
that your own rules are totally arbitrary. But almost no one can do that. And so they
try a bunch of different coping mechanisms to handle this contradiction and almost all of
them are maladaptive and bad. But you also see them in the headlines every single day. The first
thing you'll see people do is try to come up with some chain of reason or logic to make it sound
like their arbitrary rules are not arbitrary at all. They may say that the way they eat or the way
they dress it was a rule handed down by their god, in scripture. But the problem is you can very
quickly find somebody that practices the exact same religion but does not adhere to those same
rules of dress. Or they may try to tie some sort of hypothetical physical harm to it. This is
something you've seen on the left over the last couple of decades where they said that certain
language isn't offensive due to their arbitrary rules, but that it is medically harmful somehow,
that I read or heard these words and it triggered a medical response in my body and therefore it is
a form of physical violence. Or, this language you used could inspire some other hateful person to do
a hate crime. Therefore, your words again were a form of physical violence. They can't acknowledge
that it's just an arbitrary rule about language they personally don't like. So, they have to try
to invent some sort of a tangible harm from it. The second thing you'll see them do is simply try
to attack or ostracize the person who has broken the rule. Often by trying to tie it into morality,
that eating this way is not just our habit, it is the morally right way to eat. That if
you eat this certain food with your fingers, then you are a savage. You are uncultured. If you
wear these clothes that expose too much of your body, then you are sexually promiscuous. You're
a ****. And the third, the one that I think is particularly dangerous, is to try to build all of
these different rules into a narrative of decline, that society is falling apart because people are
not following the rules like they used to. I think a great example of this is when you hear old
people talk about how society has fallen apart, they will talk about how women dress these days.
They're wearing skintight leggings and crop tops, implying that sexual morality has just completely
gone out the window. But also, we're in a society where objectively young people are having less
sex than ever before. They're having fewer teenage pregnancies than ever before. So, do you see how
it works? They've conflated something that just offends their personal sensibilities ("I don't
like seeing this much of a woman when she's out in public") with an actual harm to society, which
isn't there. And when you hear somebody talk about a subject like immigration, they will start by
complaining about things like crime. But if you show them that actually the immigrants we have
here commit crimes at a lower rate than native born citizens, they don't change their mind about
immigration. They just shift to something else or they say, "Well, but if somebody comes across the
border and commits a crime, even if the rate is lower, that's still one more crime than would
have been committed if they hadn't come here." But at that point, you're not arguing against
immigration. You're arguing against people. Like you're saying that we shouldn't have more
people because those people might commit crimes. But it doesn't matter, because if you go to any
space where people are collectively complaining about immigration, they will move off of the crime
stuff very quickly and they'll start complaining about how at their local park kids used to gather
and play baseball and now it's "just a bunch of Mexicans playing soccer" or "suddenly there's
taco trucks everywhere!" "They're playing their Mexican music!" Whatever - it's just "different
culture" stuff. And the big one, the one that seems to be the most triggering for these people,
is just cleanliness. They will complain that the foreigners smell bad. And in fact, if they travel
abroad, they will complain that everybody there smells bad, which is a bizarre thing to say.
There literally is no such thing as a society where everyone smells bad. That's just the smell
of that place. It's different. It's bad to you, but it's obviously not bad to them. And people get
really upset when you say this because they will say, "Well, cleanliness is an objective thing
like something can be sanitary or unsanitary. That is scientific." Which is true if you're
talking about something like food preparation or sanitation in terms of like sewage or disposing of
garbage. But in terms of personal bathing habits, no. There's no scientific basis for bathing every
single day. And I actually think this is a point that's worth stopping to discuss for a moment
because aside from crime, personal cleanliness is the one thing I see brought up more often than
anything else when discriminating against another culture. It's saying they are dirty. Like people
will go to France and complain that the French smell bad. But logically, daily bathing has not
been a thing in any time or in any place except for a few countries in the present day. They just
didn't have access to that much fresh water that they could waste so much bathing every single
day. And it *is* wasteful. We buy and throw away a whole lot of products that exist only to repair
the damage to our skin and hair that's caused by bathing every single day in hot water. But if you
encounter somebody who doesn't do it, if they only bathe once a week or they just wash selective
parts of their body when they get too dirty, you don't just think of that person as being
economical with how they use their water. We think of them as a bad person. They are slovenly.
They are lazy. their life has gone off the rails. But here's the thing: If you ran into somebody
who bathed 10 times a day, like every 90 minutes they were in the shower, you would think they
were crazy. You would think they were wasteful. You would think that they had some sort of a
superstition about germs or something because that's "crazy." That why is that any crazier
than bathing daily? This is when the arbitrary nature of our rules becomes the most clear. It's
when you imagine running into somebody with an even stricter standard than you have. The same guy
complaining about the foreigner who eats rice with his fingers? If they went out with their friend
and that friend tried to eat their chicken wings with a knife and fork, they would laugh at them.
Everyone who complains about maintaining standards in society and we should keep our standards high,
the moment they encounter somebody with a higher standard than them, well then that person is just
oppressive or they're fussy. The kind-hearted progressive who has banned certain words from
their own language because they are offensive, the moment they run into a religious person
complaining about profanity, they will laugh at them because that's such a silly superstition to
think that mere words could be unholy or profane. In the internet era and in the social media era,
these conflicts happen millions of times a second. There is no easy way to solve it because these
arbitrary rules are important. They're important for signaling reasons. For example, if I complain
about the language somebody is using, it would be very easy for that person to say, "Well, all
words are permissible. There's no such thing as dirty words!" But profanity serves a purpose in
language. You need certain words to be reserved as profanity. Language that is specifically designed
to be unacceptable in many settings such as work or at a place of worship, but that is okay to
use in more informal circumstances. That's why that language exists. It's to signal to somebody
else, "hey, we're in a more informal setting" or it may be signaling that I'm very upset. "Here's
language that I would normally not use. The fact that you're hearing me use it tells you something
about my mood." There are some cultures where to raise your voice or to get too close to a person
means you're basically ready to physically fight them but in other cultures, it's just a routine
type of interaction. But it is important to know within that culture what that means. If you're
going to effectively communicate with me, you have to know what the thing I'm doing or saying means
in my culture. Does this signal that I'm upset or does it just signal that I'm excited? If you try
to judge my behavior based purely on your culture, then we are never going to connect, because what
I'm doing is not going to make sense to you. In other words, the one thing that everybody wishes
they had will never exist, and that is a universal set of rules that everybody follows. And the
things that people think they want that would accomplish that can't happen. They either want
to completely close off the country so that only people of their culture live here or they want to
impose their rules on everyone else in the world. Even if it was morally right to want those things,
they're not possible. It's never going to happen. But when you see people talking about
how we need to close down the border, we need to start teaching Christianity in schools
again or we need to start teaching basic manners where "basic manners" means "exactly what they
grew up with." When they talk about how the world is falling apart and the savages are taking over,
it's all just different ways of expressing this same anxiety, that "I am being exposed all day,
every day to people from different cultures who demonstrate to me that the rules I think of
as sacred are really just purely arbitrary."