WORST. ADVICE. EVER. Alain de Botton's "The School of Life".

now let's think why are we not all
turned on by the same person it's because we all had different backgrounds it's because if you're a heterosexual male we had very different mothers so what is this claim based on what possible evidence could support it or disprove it in other words is it acceptable for orlando bottom to just make this kind of thing up off the top of his head and for the audience to accept it as if it's some kind of proven scientific fact no this is falsifiable and it is demonstrably false brothers raised by the same mother can and do find different women attractive even twin brothers so you can test this scientifically if the type of woman you're attracted to were determined by who your mother was there's a pretty simple experiment you could undertake hey guess what i come from a big family lots you in the audience will too it's it's not that hard to test this hypothesis within your own family or your friends and neighbors family any family that has a couple of different brothers raised by the same mother you would be able to challenge and then discard this thesis a little bit trickier for people to be honest themselves about is that the very same man can find different women attractive at different times of his life right and he still has the same mother it's the same person you can have a phase of your life when you're younger when you're into one thing you can have a phase in your life that only lasts a few months where you're attracted to a certain type of person and that might be a little bit more difficult for us to be honest with ourselves about but again even if you just have a few friends over a few decades you should be able to recognize this and of course scientifically this could be pinned down this could be measured this could be falsified right finally if you scale it up isn't it a demonstrable fact that what people find attractive goes through fads decade by decade i mean the images on screen are different beauty icons from different decades as time goes by is your thesis that everybody had a different mother when one body type was in vogue rather than another i mean whether it's one hairstyle or you know how skinny or how curvy the women are featured in cinema even in pornography these things go through fads and fashion so come on and finally does he care that this claim is totally irrelevant to his thesis made in the video as a whole it's sexy precisely because it's private because it's a miniature utopia that you're creating part-time philosopher full-time youtuber alain de bottom promises us something serious profound philosophical about the problems of human sexuality and he utterly fails to deliver what he does do in this video is give you a series of profoundly incoherent generalizations each of which is totally incompatible with the others each of which doesn't in any way support the hypothesis presented by the others in just a moment we're going to get to the mean hypothesis he advances in the first episode but what a notion what a notion we've just been presented with that when we're attracted to somebody when we're attracted to one person rather than another it has to do with privacy it has to do with the yearning to create a utopia it's sexy precisely because it's private because it's a miniature utopia that you're creating well that that could be a thesis but then within just a few moments he offers a totally bizarre and incoherent um philosophical appraisal of bdsm and the use of sexual violence within loving relationships people will hit each other scratch each other's backs call each other names pull each other's hair what's going on there trust weirdly it's trust it takes a lot of trust within a loving relationship to allow one person to hit another violence sexual games all of these things they're not signs of depravity they're precisely signs of our more aggressive impulses being accepted within a social arena do you think he came to this conclusion on the basis of any kind of scientific evidence do you think he came to this conclusion after even interviewing just 10 experienced bdsm dominatrixes about what their clients are after what they enjoy what motivates them do you think he had any open-mindedness to the possibility that his thesis his philosophy was wrong that it was falsifiable that even to use the most disparaging terms that he's introduced here even to use the word depraved this is a sort of depravity are you gonna claim that for zero percent of people who are into bdsm this really is about violence this really is about denigrating or humiliating someone else or being denigrated or humiliated oneself are you going to claim that in 100 of cases the people who dedicate their time and money to this kink are acting out your fantasy and not their own what a philosophy ellen de bolton in this way i feel that not just this one video on sexuality but all of his videos including those about politics really are a kind of strange game of him taking his own dreams and presenting them as something self-evidently and scientistically real what i want to talk to you about tonight is how to have a better sex life i want to hold him to this promise he opens the video this is the beginning of the video we've gone back to now by suggesting to you that he's going to tell you how to solve your problems he's going to talk about how to improve your sex life by thinking about sex in the right way and even though we think that we think a lot about sex we perhaps don't think about it enough or not in the right ways um i want to start by asking uh what makes something sexy as it well before we're looking at the problems that sex gives us let's consider what makes something sexy why are certain moments situations positions especially sexy i think it has to do with loneliness i know what you're thinking it can't possibly be that he's suggesting the reason why you find one person attractive and not another is loneliness it can't possibly be as he he didn't justify this to people but even situations it can't possibly be that the reason why some people think it's very sexy to make love in the backseat of a car whereas other people would prefer a bedroom or other people would prefer to be outdoors in the middle of a forest or middle of a desert or something it can't possibly be that the difference subjectively as to why some people find one thing sexy and not another is explained by loneliness it can't possibly be that the major thesis of this video that he's advancing again with the promise that he's going to help you solve your sexual problems is this stupid well hear this short clip from later in the video it is it is precisely that stupid now let's think why are we not all turned on by the same person i want to ask why some people turn us on that is the problem he is pretending to address that is the problem that he's promising if solved will help you think about your own sex life better and solve your problems in your marriage or in your single life in the ensuing lecture this claim is never proven it is never substantiated in any way and just ask yourself how could this not be a stupid or pointless thesis if you do that thing that 90 of the population does on a daily basis and take out your cell phone and scroll through images of beautiful people some people do it on instagram some people do it here on youtube doesn't matter if you do that for a minute do you feel that the explanation for why you find some of those images sexy and not others some of those people sexy and others do you think that the explanation possibly could be loneliness a very different example if you turned on your radio and you changed the dial between different radio stations where all you hear is a human voice and then sooner or later you hear one voice and you think that's sexy that person's voice is sexy not the other voice on the other radio station do you think you can explain that difference in your own subjective judgment through a land of botons philosophy of loneliness it's not just that this is false it's unfalsifiable it's impossible to prove it's so incoherent we can't even reason through it to come to a conclusion as to how it possibly could be true sex symbolically cleanses us another person accepts us the whole of us and that is a miraculously exciting thing it's exciting we call it it's a turn-on it's sexy but it's deeper than that it's psychologically enriching it makes us feel fully human what he's doing here is stating a completely irrelevant fantasy he has about human nature as if it were a demonstrable scientific fact and he just fundamentally doesn't seem to care that each one of these philosophical expostulations fails to support prove or demonstrate any of the others and none of them connect in any meaningful way to his original thesis i want to ask why some people turn us on he already answered that question remember the video opens with him claiming that the answer to this question is loneliness what is a sexy person now evolutionary biologists have got an answer to this question they tell us that a sexy person is a healthy person the problem with an evolutionary biological analysis of life is not that it's wrong it's right sure it's right problem is it's very boring it's very boring okay so what if this is the case that doesn't really explain the richness of why certain people turn us on does he or does he not care that this is irrelevant to his thesis now i actually share his apprehension here that what evolutionary biology tells us is of incredibly limited value if you take this phrase and just state it negatively all you're really claiming is that you would not find someone attractive if they were unhealthy right that's really all it means to say that you're attracted to a healthy person but as you know you can scroll through hundreds or thousands of images of attractive people on a dating app on your cell phone in a magazine in a movie theater doesn't make any difference and the question of why you would find one healthy person attractive rather than another again one voice on the radio attractive with another that is not answered in any meaningful sense just by establishing this limit that you wouldn't find someone attractive if they were unhealthy i'd make an even further claim that this has zero explanatory value for human sexuality think in your mind's eye about somebody you fell in love with at some point your life could be a love you've lost could be the person you're married to now doesn't matter do you believe the claim that if you had met them when they were receiving treatment for cancer you wouldn't have fallen in love with them at all you wouldn't have found them sexy at all it's actually routine people do fall in love when they're receiving treatment for cancer they do while they're undergoing chemotherapy people who have terrible diseases fall in love with other people with terrible diseases in the hospital all the time now maybe that's a little bit strange maybe it's a little bit perverse maybe it's a little bit perplexing maybe it flies in the face of this seemingly reasonable assumption that you would prefer or exclusively be attracted to healthy people i've met people with terrible chronic diseases co-workers know people have some kind of you know meaningful interaction with it and i really feel attracted to them and you know what i i'd like to think it's despite the fact that they're sick but maybe in a really profound sense sickness and health is actually irrelevant to the question of whether or not you're attracted someone or beyond that whether or not you fall in love with them whether or not there's someone you want to have children with the fundamental problem with what ellen de bolton says about health here a concept as simple as health is the same as the problem we encountered before with what he says about bdsm within loving relationships people will hit each other scratch each other's backs call each other names pull each other's hair what's going on there it's not based on any kind of empirical experience it's not even based on interviewing five or ten dominatrixes being willing to listen to empirical evidence of some kind because what you'll find is that the empirical evidence in this province of human research is internally self-contradictory mystifying and baffling people do not become fascinated with and gratified by sexual violence for one simple reason that justifies your ideology or philosophy you're going to find it's for all kinds of bizarre internally self-contradictory and perverse reasons it's going to frustrate whatever your agenda is whatever the ideology is you're trying to justify with reference to bdsm skinny people do not fall in love with get married to and have children with fat people for one simple reason that justifies your ideology not even if your ideology is this kind of evolutionary determinism some people idealize and are especially attracted to fat people some people would prefer to be with a slender partner but they happen to fall in love with this fat person but human nature in this province is not something you can in this way make abstract a priori prescriptive statements about to then pin to and justify your personal fantasies and when we say this woman is a turn-on we're turned on not just by signs of her health but by a whole person we live in a culture where we're often very suspicious of the body of the surface we hear that phrase she only liked me for my body he only liked me for the outside of me and that's taken as an insult i want to argue that a lot of us is present in the physical envelope and when we say this woman is a turn-on we're turned on not just by signs of her health but by a whole person don't dismiss the notion of sexiness as merely a superficial category it's a very deep one part of me just feels like saying really bro really when people on the internet feel attracted to angie verona it's not her body it's the whole person really when tens of thousands of people watch her singing and masturbate to the view of her singing in revealing clothing that's just because of the quality of her voice or her emotional interpretation of the song or or the whole person in this profound i in a sense this part of his hypothesis angers me more than most because when i was a much younger much more naive man in a sense i wanted to believe this [Music] [Music] i lived a very bookish very intellectual existence for many years of my life and it's not that i assumed everyone else on earth would live that way i would share my values but i assumed that the tiny minority of women who found me attractive would be attracted to me for those intellectual reasons because they valued that about me and with one experience after another i had to come to the crushing realization that very close to zero women who found me attractive had any interest in my intellect whatsoever that in fact for most of them you know my involvement with things intellectual history politics the study of languages it was like an unwanted encumbrance and primarily or entirely they were interested in me because of physical sexual attraction that was something that startled me and astonished me and disappointed me again and again and again and i didn't find it flattering and i still don't and i had the experience again and again of talking to women even this month talking to women where they're they're talking to me and it's like look this is who i am whether i'm sending them a link to an article i've written or a youtube video recorded this is the research i'm doing these are my goals and aspirations in life this is what my life is all about so what is it you you want to get involved with here like why are you talking why are you trying to sleep with me and yes some of those conversations happen face to face and some of them are by email or what have you and yes there's part of me still that's jejune or that wants to be jejune in that when women approach me i want to imagine that it's because of those other characteristics that it's because of the whole person in some profound sense and no you have to grow up you have to accept that most people most of the time are responding to one another the same way those millions of men are responding to angie verona the fact that those men are watching the video of her singing despite her singing voice not because of it despite the music not because of it that they enjoy photographs of her and video clips of her despite her personality and not because of it the vast majority of beauty icons whether they be actresses singers or what have you their personality their intellect it's only an encumbrance it's something unpleasant and a turn off to be ignored because most these people are idiots who have absolutely no sick level of sophistication or so-called division we're talking about i think it is useful not just to talk about human nature in general but to talk about one's own nature because that's the little piece of human nature we know best no matter how incongruously it may contrast to human nature in general as it surrounds us i have a video on this channel i think it's one of the best videos i ever recorded that's actually about open relationships how to yeah nissian's name is in the title but it's not really about an scn and this is just a negative example contrasted to what i'm saying there about human sexuality and when i watched that video back i'm aware i'm partly talking to people as they are and i'm partly talking to people as they should be one of the things i say in that video again and again is you can't possibly be this shallow you can't possibly fall in love with someone have a relationship with someone or get married to someone just because they have a pretty face or just because of their body you can't possibly cheat on your wife with someone because the person you're cheating with just has a pretty face or just hasn't attracted everybody i'm i'm warning in a sense the audience to say don't be that shallow this is only going to lead to your own heartbreak your own downfall like a nissi and you're going to ruin your life if you live this way as opposed to recognizing the whole person that we're funny as opposed to living in the way that ellen de bottle is claiming implicitly we all do live but of course the tragedy implicit in that video in explicit in this one is that yes people really can be that shallow and even people who have a choice can choose to be that shallow they may prefer it there may be something liberating in just relating to another human being as one monkey to another monkey with the same mindless physicality that is so taboo in our culture that to indulge in that unencumbers us with the layers of sophistication we're supposed to have acquired through education civilization religion or what have you that on some level some people might want to just shed all of that and appreciate a beautiful person for just being beautiful that they might want to forget about their own shallowness and forget about the other person showing us and have the only kind of intimate relationship they're capable of so yes yes talking about my own human nature and i think probably this is true of a great many people in my audience the kind of person watching my videos i can say dogmatically don't live this way don't live this unexamined life don't be this shallow you can't possibly be the show you can't be shallow enough for this kind of relationship to work for you and i know at the same time the tragedy of human nature is that not only can people be that shallow they may actively prefer it it's because if you're a heterosexual male we had very different mothers and according to who our mothers were we might get a stronger or weaker impulse to to take one of these uh ladies out on a date [Music] so yes i'm just including this clip to make clear his claim really is that stupid that the difference between finding one famous movie actress attractive and another is who your mother was so many of you could imagine a scientific test to determine this right now you could have different brothers born and raised in the same family and have them scroll through a bunch of pictures of famous movie actresses and choose between them and it could not possibly be that their preference is explained by who their mother was what the hell is this claim based on what possible evidence could support it or disprove it and does he or does he not care that this is totally irrelevant to his thesis why do some of us have too little sex part of the problem is that the person we have sex with generally is someone we're trying to do an awful lot of other things with it's so stupid i'm sorry okay okay uh this person is going to be this person called my wife or husband and i'm going to do everything with them i'm going to put out the bin bags with them i'm going to raise the children with them i'm going to have sex with them i'm going to do the accounts with them and i'm going to plan the interior decoration of our home problem is that sex gets very squashed among all these different priorities this is the part of the video where he finally shifts into the mode of giving you advice that could help you in your marriage or long-term relationship something that was promised at the beginning and we haven't really seen much evidence for and again part of the problem is evidence so if your wife gained 150 pounds since you got married are you going to tell me that the problem with the relationship the problem why you don't find them attractive anymore is that you do too many things together that you do your taxes together you don't do things separately oh yes he thinks this profound insight of his has prescriptive value just listen uh this is the park hyatt in tokyo it's gonna cost you about 400 a night a hotel separates out the functions and reminds you yet again of who that person was before they became so confused with other things he's never willing to consider the possibility that his hypothesis his fantasy could be wrong for some people could be wrong for the majority of people or could actually be 180 degrees wrong it could be completely utterly wrong all the time for everyone if you don't feel attracted to your wife what percentage of people if they instead go and stay in a hotel for a few days what percentage of people say wow that solved the problem in the relationship now suddenly they do feel attracted and you say what what percentage do you think the people who are struggling with obesity would find that that's the solution to problems do you think the people struggling with alcoholism or drug addiction or the prolex problems that plague you know relationships around the world what about people for whom trust has broken down how about it's gambling you feel betrayed because your husband or wife took all the money and lost it gambling what if it's just betrayal generally you feel this is someone you now despise whereas before you trusted them and loved them now you feel like enemies you have anger you have conflict between you there are so many conceivable reasons why sex within a relationship would be awful and could not possibly be improved by staying in a hotel these claims he's making are falsifiable if you just think them through in fact they're unbelievably implausible and again even if we were convinced by his argument without any evidence each and every one of these arguments fails to support his original hypothesis it's not to think about too much sex they've been aware of the power of sex and they've got us to try and do various things not to think too much about sex and when we think about these people we think oh my goodness how repressed they were dressing the head to toe in gear you know getting too turned on by the sight of an ankle this seems ridiculous we think in the modern world that we are liberated right and that we don't need to worry too much about the physical and about the erotic and about sex because it doesn't really matter what you're looking at you can be thinking about you know microbiology or the fate of human beings you're not going to be distracted by certain visual images these things are not going to put you off they're not going to you're not going to change your priorities just because there's somebody sunbathing semi-naked next to you grow up now my thing my analysis is yes we will very many of us very sensible people get very very very affected by these sort of things now i'm not necessarily recommending this but i'm thinking let's think about the power of sex sometimes to draw us away from things that are very important let's not let sex be used as a distraction from very necessary internal processes let's sometimes admit that a certain amount of censorship and repression is not just for the victorians it's not just for the religious it's for all of us if we're trying to have a good life part of that good life will involve some censorship some repression so that was the final argument presented in the video that was the longest clip i've used the only reason i used it was so that you wouldn't feel i was only letting the guy get half a sentence out at a time that is the final point he makes in the video he then just has some kind of closing jokes with the audience it doesn't in any way support the claims made earlier we never get to answer the question of why what distinguishes the people were attracted from from the people were not attracted from would have anything to do with loneliness and he again makes claims that are phrased in such a way that they don't seem to require empirical evidence testing or even clear definitions what if he's right that people are distracted by seeing one another in bikinis in swimwear what if he's right that it's a problem what would be a reasonable conclusion to come to maybe at the university library people should not be allowed to wear bikinis maybe there should be a dress code at the library is that his point or is he actually saying women should not be allowed to wear bikinis at the beach and was this the point of his video was all of the other joking all the other philosophizing about bdsm and how to improve your marriage by staying in a hotel room so you're not thinking about doing the taxes and cleaning the dishes and you can revive the sex in your relationship such a stupid hypothesis and you know never pausing to examine the opposite claim the claim that no if you really love someone if you're really attracted to someone you'll still want to have sex them when you do the dishes together you'll still want to have sex with them when you do your taxes together you'll still want to have sex with them whether you're in a room closet or in the bathroom you don't need to rent a fancy hotel room that won't increase or decrease your sex drive because you actually find yourself each other attractive you're actually in love you actually have great sex and maybe your sexual relationship could even thrive or do better based on the fact that you face and overcome meaningful challenges together in your life whether those have to do with doing the taxes or all the other raising children your careers studying things at school maybe you know dealing with adversity and sharing ambitions and all the stress and the distractions that go into that maybe that's a powerfully positive thing for human sexual relationships as opposed to this notion that sex is something you do on vacation in a hotel room because when you're at home doing dishes together and worrying about the taxes you hate each other and find each other unattractive like maybe that's a really flawed world view that leads to really terrible advice bad implications no no no no don't think about that the final conclusion of this lecture inexplicably is the suggestion that orthodox muslims are kind of sort of right to some extent that's never pinned down that actually seeing women in bikinis at the beach is uh just an abominable distraction from your important inner life your inner life that's so important to you that you can't ignore the sight of beautiful women ultimately when looking at the philosophy of alain de bhutan all we're looking at are his attempts to take his fantasies and put them forward in the world as if they were self-evident scientific facts talk boss featuring words that kill my slang is editorial explicit material briefcase show lava stereo flow filming donna realty set the black people free is this cute right now should i just take this off [Music] it's so yellow