Left Wing Hedonism: TYT & CosmicSkeptic on "Pleasure".

guys let me let me start this way before
i ask anna a question i'm going to ask you guys a question okay and i want you to think about it what's the point of life we can't help but desire certain things as part it's kind of as stephen once described it an axiomatic part of our nature we have no choice but to desire our pleasure we have no choice but to have other people's pleasure as a derivative of that and therefore have a sense of morality now that might not be philosophically groundable but if it's not grounded in me then it's not grounded in god either no seriously um once i give you the answer i think that a lot of you will say well yeah obvious it's obvious and what do you think is the point of life i think and i think logically it is inescapable but the point of life is to get the most out of life the most enjoyment out of life now i don't know why nobody ever tells you that and even if you were saying a jig of course i was saying get most enjoyment out of life of course that's the right answer what else would we do oh and it doesn't nothing else even makes sense um okay but then the next layer to that is how how do you get the most enjoyment out of life one of the most interesting things about the psychology of free will to me is that it's impossible to not kind of live with that illusion that you do have free will i mean i can fully rationalize the idea that free will is ultimately an illusion but it still feels like i have it interestingly i think that if you ask someone who believes in free will probably needs to be an atheist for this to be reliably the case but if you ask them what they think brings them meaning life you know what is it that infuses their life with meaning they'll probably say something like well i like pursuing pleasures you know the pursuit of happiness is one of the things detailed in the declaration of independence for a reason because it's seen as one of the most important ways in which a human being can find meaning and purpose in life and the anti-free will argument doesn't remove that it further entrenches it but anna do you see people doing this do you see people going oh you know what i figured out my life i figured out what makes me the most happy for example i'll give you my example in a second of what makes me the most happy and i figured it out in the short term and the long term and i know that that's my objective and that's why i've been leading my life uh with that in mind to get the most out of it i i haven't seen too many people do that so but maybe i'm being ridiculous maybe everybody's doing that and they're like jake we're all so happy and we all know that what are you stupid i'm tempted to just upload this video with those first few minutes and no further commentary no further reflection for myself it has to be said with many of these discussions the people engaged in them are so stupid and so insincere that the facts are quite immaterial are quite irrelevant to the ensuing debate it's shocking to me it's scary to me that hundreds of thousands of people are taking this kid cosmic skeptic and putting him on a pedestal and treating him as a real philosopher treating him as a real leader in both the vegan movement and the atheist skeptic anti-religious movement when he in a self-serving way fabricates the facts his arguments rely on when he makes these claims about things he hasn't even looked up in wikipedia now my first university group was in political science it seems to me the best known factoid in the history of the united states of america is that the memorable phrase life liberty and the pursuit of happiness was a very slight propagandistic rewording of life liberty property that the philosophy set down by john locke but not only john locke really many authors of that time was life liberty property and inasmuch as you want to pin this on thomas jefferson dare we forget that property for him in his philosophy included the ownership of slaves and if we're talking about this reckless self-serving self-centered hedonistic view of the world that life is just about pleasure it's just about enjoyment is just about utility maximization the ownership of slaves doesn't that put all of those things in a very different really meaningfully different frame of reference what if all of a sudden you don't have to do your own laundry you don't have to fold your own clothes you don't even have to go out and find someone to date and buy them coffee and take them out to dinner in order to have sex actually all of your material and emotional needs can be satisfied by owning someone not even paying them a salary and if they defy you with your slightest whim whether that be doing your laundry or making love to you you can have them beaten you can have them chained you can have them punished and thomas jefferson wasn't a moderate supporter of slavery i don't know why it is the cosmic skeptic in one video after another is invoking the name of thomas jefferson as this you know great intellectual luminary who's a positive inspiration to him there have been books written and recently dealing with the extent to which thomas jefferson he did have his own philosophy nobody talks about it nobody quotes it nobody wants to talk about it thomas jefferson was a philosopher it's a terrible philosophy it's a mind-blowingly racist philosophy he was more racist than other people in his own time he was more more pro-slavery than other people in his own time it wasn't even popular in his own time let alone today the philosophy of thomas jefferson here's this here's this kid who's being embraced as a leader of the vegan movement this atheist skeptic secularist anti-religious movement and nobody seems to have a problem with him premising his claims again and again of the moral authority of thomas jefferson and where he doesn't even stop to look this stuff up on wikipedia to establish really really simple facts like the relationship between jefferson's doctrine of the pursuit of happiness and john locke and the fact that really this was just another way of saying uh property at a time when the fundamental function of government was seen to be the defense of property rights and when property rights included owning slaves you should be confident in who you are you should be confident in your preferences and your hobbies and not really care about anyone who has anything negative to say about it about it yeah but everybody says that nobody actually does it i do it okay well that's awesome a very large part of what middle-aged men do with philosophy is seek to justify the decisions they already have made in their lives and to come up with a rationale for the decisions that they are yet to make in the future jank wieger of tyt certainly is one such middle-aged man this kind of self-justification is remarkable to me because it doesn't even make sense as a description of the world as it already is as it already functions let alone as a kind of analysis that would lead to a better life for some kind of improvement whether on the most intimate scale of just one two three people on the larger scale of society as a whole i don't think we can understand why people choose to major in philosophy to spend thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars and sacrifice years of their life to the study of a subject that for most people can never lead to any kind of employment instead of say getting a degree in dentistry getting a degree in nursing getting a degree as an x-ray technician or not getting a degree at all devoting their life to cocaine and skiing i'm canadian cocaine and skiing go hand in hand in this country i am aware of the laughably self-serving dogmatic doctrinaire series of no true scotsman fallacies that will ensue whereby they claim that everyone in the world no matter how seemingly self-sacrificing their behavior is no matter how blatantly it is that they are suffering in order to do humanitarian work or they are suffering in order to engage in research or to read a book that is in no way entertaining or gratifying them whether the example be of the tiniest form of self-sacrifice or the most granules they will forcibly interpret this as being for that person's pleasure being for that person's enjoyment or claiming that for example a muslim who decides to cut off part of his own penis in this terrible circumcision ritual invented by my own religion judaism by the way um that someone who engages this they are in fact doing this for their own pleasure that people who choose to remain virgins until marriage or take up vows as a monk and remain virgins until the day they die as a monk as a nun or what have you that all of this is for their own pleasure never stopping to realize that they have taken this step into a non-falsifiable dogmatic self-justifying religious worldview a view that can neither be described as philosophy nor as science i'm very well aware of what all of these arguments are but the question i want to ask you in this video is simply why why bother to argue this way why take the tremendously rich diversity of human experience that we have in front of our eyes and force it into this analysis whereby all human motivations are reduced to pleasure what is it that motivates these men to look at the world and say everything i see around me is just as shallow as i am myself we can't help but desire certain things as part it's kind of as stephen once described it an axiomatic part of our nature that we have no choice but to desire our pleasure in case you think that conversation jank wieger had about hedonism proceeds to some more profound introspection he asks his co-host anna kasparian what she thinks of this philosophy of life he's adopted and she proceeds to tell us how she's proud that she had a nose job that she's proud she had plastic surgery to change the shape of her face because she thinks that she looks great and that when people on the internet say that she's ugly or shallow or made a bad decision in getting a nose job that just doesn't affect her at all because she knows she looks great and she's enjoying her life like i think i look really damn good right like the nose job doesn't like bringing up my nose job makes me realize i spent money on something that worked the enjoyment of life becomes philosophically an excuse for many other things but the most fundamental excuse it is most invisible to these people who've cultivated this excuse-making mentality in themselves is that what they're doing is making an excuse for their own shallowness they're projecting it onto the world and they're insisting that when they look at other people all they're seeing are automatons who are powerlessly pursuing their own pleasure that what they're seeing is a world populated by people just as shallow as they think they are themselves you know what the tragedy of it is i don't even believe that they're that shallow i don't believe that jank weaker has lived his life in the way that he describes i don't believe that cosmic skeptic right now is living his life for such shallow reasons i think all these people have profound concerns ethical concerns political concerns philosophers i think they have all kinds of motivations to make the world a better place and to become better people themselves but ironically in a very public discourse that begins with criticizing and repudiating mainstream religions like christianity judaism and islam what they've ended up doing is propounding one of the only philosophies in the world that i can sincerely say is worse than christianity judaism or islam i can honestly say this particular type of left-wing self-indulgent hedonism is worse than living your life with the vagus notion of doing the right thing just because it's the right thing to do a notion that people have managed to derive from terrible books like those written by muhammad like those written by ancient prophets of judaism like ezekiel in the final analysis the conclusion that there is some reason to live other than pleasure is going to beat the argument that life is about pleasure that life is just about self-indulgence that life is just about your own self-centered happiness each and every single time no matter how mind-blowingly stupid that philosophy or religion may be