@@zeXr0andNeGi you say that , but there is something there, creeping. Everyone requires something. Ya'll just super creepy about that tribute, whatever it may be.
@@TheBackyardChemist Maybe if they were in the library more often they could’ve learned how to prevent a pandemic! I can’t talk shit though. I’m American and 50% of our citizens don’t even believe in viruses, germs, chemistry, or freedom. “If I want to give someone Covid shouldn’t that be MY CHOICE!” Is the most used line I hear. Yet these same people also say “well for the good of the country we should segregate by race and forcibly remove “others” and relocate them to the wilderness” you know “for freedom”. That’s the only “logical” answer and if you don’t want to live in a fascist dictatorship, where fat slovenly “men” with man tits and no muscle tone can call you lazy while you work a 10 hour day and they play games all day you’re “too emotional”. Imagine Michael Moore lecturing you on fitness, health, character and “freedom” as he waddles around a PC playing Warhammer for 4 days straight. Then imagine that guy, who has no job or friends, or skills, or character says that he can collect welfare because “the government owes him something because he’s white”. Then imagine that EXACT SAME guy and 100 guys just like him say that YOU are the lazy emotional one for working a 10 hour day because “the games he plays rather than work engages his mind” and that the black guy who you work for, that works even harder for the past 5 decades should be segregated because “he doesn’t do enough to justify equality”. Then imagine him, and all of his flock sobbing openly because you won’t agree with them that they’re the real “patriots/alphas” for being lazy hedonistic Communists who REFUSE to be individual and demand the credit of a collective hive mind such that he can never exist as his own person, just a collection of mainstream nonsense. Also imagine this guy saying that the government should “endorse arranged marriages” because women are too shallow and emotional and they shouldn’t get a say on the matter. No fat chicks though, and they better not expect him to work, and they better be prepared to clean his messy house, make him his favorite foods (pizza rolls, man and cheese, chicken nuggets, and all the other foods slobs adore) and climb atop his 5’10 350 lbs frame every night. You know to fight Communism.
8:16 I'll translate, "The abuse I commit isn't abuse because I said so & liked it, but when the people I abused tell on me, that hurts my feelings." This line is proof of his damage & evidence toward his crimes.
I was a boy. They were two girls. Can I make it any more obvious? I am the ULTlMATE L0VER on this platform. Don't enter my ch*nnel if you are not above a certain age, dear es
"If someone wants you to pay loads of money to join their 'philosophical movement', you should run into the opposite direction.............. huge thank to our patreons for your support." Oh Wisecrack, how could you have missed this chance of comedic gold =(
The difference is Wisecrack is not a philosophical movement. They are not pushing any ideology on us. I bet you 10 cents that Nexium POS never told his followers to go read a book!
"I discovered at a very young age that if i talk long enough, i could make anything right or wrong. So either i'm god or truth is relative. In either case, Booyah." - Jeff Winger.
So if Jeff Winger don‘t belive in death he can live forever? Can he fly if he don’t belive in gravity? There is objective truth even if we can‘t always recognize it. But we can approche it. Some ideas like Einsteins theory is more true than Newtons theory, and Newton is more closer to the truth than Aristoteles, and Aristoteles theory is more closer than no theory. And if he talks long enough to disprove objective truth, he either just changes the definition of a word or he becomes entangled in logical contradictions.
"People who only have their own interests at heart should run the country, because when they're in the most powerful position in the state they'll... really think about what's best for others!" "Abuse is made up - it doesn't exist. so please stop saying I'm abusing you, because THAT's abuse!!!" This guy has some incredible double-think power
Typical sociopath thinking. If everyone just looked out for themselves the world would be a simpler place, selfishness is a virtue. If what I'm doing is stressing you out that's your problem, how dare you blame me for what's going on in your own head.
@@Torus2112 isnt that selfish of you why do i need to be concerned about your feeling things i cannit control people like you and in this video are little baby children who havent expirienced a thing in the real world and couldnt build a lego set much less and philosophy that can guide a society to greatness
i'd like to see him react to/discuss the accuracy of the shinto roots of "sex magic" as portrayed (loosely) in Hybrid × Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia see if we can get him to blush
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” Μηκέθ᾽ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον. ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, X, 16
Fun fact This cult leader went to my college We often joke that he is one of our most famous alumni Oh and our schools logo is “why not change the world”. Seems like he did his best to live up to that
That's true, actions aren't philosophy. But whats being said in this video about it is near meaningless. I agree that I don't want these things to happen to people. But vastly over simplifying things by just calling them bad without a reasoning why they are bad or illogical doesnt really help anything. In fact, it just might make it worse since you leave a gap of information that someone like a cult leader could exploit.
Depends on what you call philosophy. At it's most basic philosophy just means 'A way to think" of which gaslighting bullying and the use of these rhetorical tricks to gain personal power is definitely a philosophy, it's just one founded on dishonesty manipulation and a careless will to twist any word to mean what they want it to to get what they want. Philosophical terrorists you might say.
I gotta say I was skeptical of you michael because I saw you like a replacement for Jared, but I got to admit this video made me see how awesome you can be with a new format and made me realize I was wrong. Thank you very much, this was an amazing video! Much love to you and all the crew
May be a bit late but, I’ve been following this channel for a while now, I’m philosophy “student”, love this format, keep doing this, Michael and everyone else
Speaking of, as a philosopher, calling out people who are called "philosophers" without ever actually talking about actual philosophical theory, can you please analyse Ben Shapiro next? Really pisses me off to hear people call him "the cool kids' philosopher"
@@laneythelame he's not, he's a political commentator, lawyer, and author. That's not really a high bar to achieve( maybe the lawyer one is, but then again there are lots of lawyers who don't make a ton.) he's like Rush Limbaugh( who's a radio personality and author in the same vein). All they do for a living is tell conservative republicans what they wanna hear. Which is mostly that foreigners suck, America is great/nothing needs to change, and there are too many taxes. Though the most I've ever seen of Ben Shapiro is his awful review of infinity war movie and a little bit of where he talks about the songs the Rap song WAP and John Lennon's Imagine, all of which are terrible and kinda funny in how terrible they are cause they completely miss the point of the works.
They're still philosophers, they're just not new ideas. You don't have to have a fundamentally new idea to be a philosopher or no one would be considered a philosopher. Calling these people 'non philosophers' is pointless gatekeeping, beat them at their own game, out think them to defeat them, don't just try to define them out of the category you're trying to defend. Let them in and fucking crush them.
Love the format of this video, feels a bit more honest being able to see your reactions and everything, while still bringing the same amount of quality research. Also you wrote a book! Nice!
Although I'm not an Ayn Rand fan, that comment is of course hyperbolic. There's something to learn from Objectivism. Just don't treat it like the word of God (or any philosophy, or religion for that matter).
@@MicahBuzanANIMATION There’s obviously stuff to learn from Objectivism simply because of Rand’s cultural significance, but treating it on the same level as other ethical theories is in my opinion at least suspect. Rand has been largely ignored by academic philosophers and doesn’t in my opinion warrant the same degree of study as other ethicists. I’m not trying to be explicitly normative or anything here, this is just my two cents.
So glad for this new style of breakdown. Honestly, cult like behavior is spreading on the internet like wildfire and we need something to drown out the nonsense being peddled out there. For every q-anon, we need a response. Not because we’re competing in some marketplace of ideas, but a lie attains the semblance of truth when it is not questioned.
@@JohnMoseley Tarsiers and Marmosets have non-opposable thumbs. New world monkeys and Apes have opposable thumbs. There are other primates that have semi-opposable thumbs.
I feel like the genuine "smartest man alive" wouldn't call himself that. Most people are either an expert in one field or a generalist in many, but no one lacks blind spots. A smart person would recognize this and anyone making claims to being the most intelligent person is likely a victim of the Dunning Kruger effect.
There is only one objective truth. That is what makes it objective. There are in fact three types of truth; objective (that which you cannot change), subjective (that which only you believe), and inter-subjective (a subjective truth shared by the many e.g. money, religion, nationalism, etc.).
"According to the University that gave me a PhD and the people who published my book, I am too [a philosopher]." Weird flex, but OK. No, but seriously, holly poo bro! I expected the team at Wisecrack to be, at best, some sort of team of people with a bachelor's degree in English and a minor on philosophy, which to be fair, that would already be far more than what we deserve, but we get to be spoiled by people with doctorates?! I say, that's pretty neat 👍
It's really a connotation thing. One man's cult is another's church, political movement, or sometimes fandom. "Cult" is a broad term that is used to describe things such as new religious movements, or really any social group that deviates from societal norms with novel beliefs, as well as manipulative organizations centered around worshipping a single figurehead. And there's a lot of crossover in that Venn diagram.
"cult" is a very broad word and all religions started from being cults. So yes, cults are bad but are also ok if they are big and old enough to be called a religion. P.S. For me The Church of the Flying Spaghetty Monster is the best cult/religion.
@@pdzombie1906 IDK but I think there should be a movie about someone joining cults just to learn their evil secrets and then destroy them from the inside.. I would watch that
@@purerasslin91 you're being a little bit too broad. cults can be religious and religions can be like cults, but they aren't the same thing. A cult usually seeks to separate you from people. The leaders and followers follow you closely and define everything you do. A religion doesn't separate you from loved ones, and it doesn't control you beyond some doctrine rules of do's and don'ts. cults have do's and don'ts too, but there's usually some kind of threat of punishment if you dont comply, typically the worst someone in religion is typically gonna do is be unhappy with you. cults shut people out who question the group. Cults want to control, religion wants followers
After the part at the end about running in the opposite direction when someone asks you to "give them lots of money to join their philosophical movement", I was half expecting him to immediately follow it up with "so here's our Patreon, please consider joining" 😂
"Raniere is peddling in exactly the type of bullshit that postmodernism has been criticized for by those who, frankly, didn't read the books." I see some shade on Peterson here.
The frase “there is no objective truth” certainly does not sound like “be humble and accept the limitations of your human psyche”. You phrased it as “there is no universal truth that transcends human cultures” but If there is no truth transcending human cultures , then that statement itself is false (because it won't be true regardless of culture). Is it true that the actions of Keith Raniere were morally condemnable? Should everyone in the world condemn them? If so, then the statement that there is no truth that transcends human culture is false. But If there is no truth that transcends human cultures, then moral condemnation of Raniere (or any act for that matter) is impossible. Derrida might have not been a moral nihilist, but his philosophy certainly provided fodder for that idea.
It's perfectly possible to condemn Rainier. The absence of super-cultural/absolute truth does not really mean all that much in practical, everyday human life, simply because humans do not really exist without culture - just as, of course, culture does not exist outside of humans (or "people", more generally). If anything, it is the search for a universal moral truth outside of culture that is a red herring. The point is to acknowledge that every moral judgement, and every observation is made within the context of a preexisting cultural context which colors and shapes that judgement or observation, and that's not really something humans can escape, because "culture" is how humans make sense of the world. The very act of observing and sensing the world is, in and of itself, an act of culture. Thinking is cultural. Acting is cultural. Humans are cultural beings, we cannot stop creating it, or rather, doing it. So, in essense, humans lack the ability to transcend ourselves (because we are culture). This really isn't as shocking or as scary as some make it out to be. Ideally it makes us aware that we need to stop and consider our action more carefully and be more open to look into the perspectives of other groups, because neither them nor us come into this world with a privileged, universal view of things. It doesn't mean that nothing matters and everything is permitted, it just highlights the fact that we don't have some kind of transcendent umpire that can call time out and step into to recite the cosmic rules. Humans make the play rules in human play pens, after all, and we ought to consider these rules very wisely, respect different perspectives on them (but that doesn't inherently mean approve of them), and have some humility given that these perspectives, however learned and clever-appearing, are ultimately just another product of human experience. So, in the end, it's not that humans can't judge Raniere, in fact, it's that ONLY humans can't judge Raniere. Because who else would?
@@nakenmil I don't think you can claim what your first paragraph says rationally without embracing moral relativism. Perhaps I should have made my point better. I concede, that you and I can both judge Rainieri. And so can everyone in the world. But such judgements would not transcend our culture. And judging him would simply be a mental process which is a result of either evolution of our culture, but completely irrelevant, since it would be a mere bodily function, like yawning. We can also judge Muritania’s stoning of male homosexuals as horrible and amoral, but then it would not be wrong for them, because their culture accepts it. And our judgement would not be a universal moral truth. If we can confidently judge what they do as wrong, then it is because such judgement is a universal thing, independent of our culture. As for the “transcendent umpire” line, I wasn’t trying to prove that there is a God. There are plenty of atheists/agnostics that believe that objective morals are true without recurring to god. In any case your argument that somehow this “cultural relativism” shows that there is no God is a non-sequitur. Even if your point was true (and I don't believe it is), it would only show that there is no moral God. Deists would be perfectly comfortable in accepting that there is a non-interventionist, non moral creator of the universe. It is true that we are limited by our sensory experience in a sense. But if such limitations are so crippling as we are led to believe, then we could not trust our moral judgement, not to mention our perception of reality. Are you really sure that you are reading a youtube comment? Are you sure you are a person and not a brain in a vat? Am I real or are you just having a discussion with yourself? Ultimately I think the point is trivial, we have to trust some (I would say most) of our senses, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to live.
Your examples of cultures kinda hinges on a really old-fashioned idea of culture as these neat little boxes that are more or less isolated from each other, distinct, and internally homogenous. Of course, in reality, cultures don't work like that. Again, "culture" is just what people do, say, and think, and so there is an endless amount of intermixing and constant looking and moving to and fro between different, for lack of a better term, cultural currents ("culture" in itself doesn't exist of of course, it's just a term some humans made up to try to understand the world around themselves and themselves better. It's a tool for mapping our experiences, as is morality. This is important to keep in mind with all discussions like these.) For example, in the case of stoning, appeal to moral relativism (as a worldview as opposed to a methodological approach, more on that later), ignores that in this case there are multiple different parties involved, some with different views than others, different interests, and different amount of power to bring to bear. All of this is important to take into account. So again, my question is, can other groups of people judge a group of people who they think is doing something wrong? Well, obviously, who else would? But can they claim some kind of universal basis for their judgment? No. That may be upsetting, I understand, but it doesn't have to be. It's just acknowledging that at some point in your life, you have to make a moral evaluation and stand by it. You could be wrong. You could fuck up. You could be entirely unable to ever find out whether you are wrong or right. This isn't a flaw of postmodernism or relativism, it's just how the world works. Take human rights, for example. Are those universal? No, of course not, we literally just made them up a few decades ago. But they're popular, and they're useful, and they seem pretty robust, so why not? Anyways, this brings me to moral relativism, or rather cultural relativism can be divided into two for our purposes: - Absolute moral relativism: since no one can claim access to a privileged moral absolute truth, it is pointless to cast judgments across moral systems, so no such attempt should ever be made. (This is a bit nonsensical for reasons given above, ie. mora systems are rarely isolated, and they are rarely unanimously agreed upon even by its adherents) - Methodological relativism: since no one can claim access to a privileged moral absolute truth, it seems like it's a good practical approach to attempt to understand other moral systems as best we can from the perspectives of its adherents before casting judgement on them, so that we achieve a more holistic understanding of it. However, judgement is still entirely possible. Once we have a certain level of understanding of them, just as we might judge our own moral systems. The latter is what my fellow anthropologists generally hold to. Because, ultimately, we have to live in a lived world, not some kind of philosophical abstract construct. Philosophical schemae are clean and consistent. Real life is dirty, complicated, and contradictory.
Here I went thinking "What philosophies would a cult like this even be based around, it's just a bunch of ego-driven, unsubstantiated- Oh, hi there Ayn Rand!"
This new format is actually really cool! There are a lot of public thinkers out there, and it would be helpful to examine each of their underlying philosophies in this way.
I love wisecrack and I'm always around, so I'm gonna say it as someone who wants to see the channel grow: The format is interesting, but it really looks like the person speaking already has a formed opinion and is just pretend they don't. Which... OK, is nice for us that already have this point of view, but I think would fail to capture anyone else to rethink the mess they're in.
While this was generally a good analysis of Raniere and his “philosophy”, it seems to miss the main question of the story. “How is it that so many intelligent people were so taken in?” Saying that they weren’t educated enough does not solve the problem. NXIUM targeted smart and successful people. Similarly, as anyone who has been in a philosophy department can attest, they can be just as cult like as NXIUM or anything else. How many professors amass hordes of acolytes from among their students? Still a decent enough video though.
cults pray on people's feelings. the part of people that seeks to socialize and to have other like-minded individuals follow them. He points out that the guy says a bunch of non-descript agreeable things. that's usually the first step of cults and then They start controlling all aspects of their follower's lives, and then they slowly control more and more, and then he threatens punishment if the rules aren't followed. It's a long con basically. It's not like academia at all because academia doesn't really care as long as you pay them. I mean I dont think any teacher wants one to fail, but they don't legally have to stop you from falling. The only thing they have in common is a person talking in front of a room of people. I'm not sure I agree with the connotation you're implying there. :/
While this was cool and interesting, I did think there was a bit too little of the cult leaders actual philosophy and too much mockery, even if the cult leader 'deserves' it. I'd rather a cool and collected deconstruction and critique that lets me get more of a grasp of what the person talks about, so I can better understand how it's misleading, dangerous, etc. And, of course, throw in some humor and mockery now-and-then, just tone down the frequency of it a little. That's my 2 cents. I liked it and would like to see more :)
It's not philosophy, it's the veneer of deep knowledge and the impression of exclusivity or special mission that set people up for psychological tricks of the "master." No philosophy required. The marks were wealthy and fame adjacent. I remember hearing about this super expensive club for empowering women. Ugh then but you can't help but wonder if you're missing out. That's the trick to hook the mark: appeal to some form of greed.
I’m not trying to grill you since it’s kind of y’all’s style, but this is a bit overedited. Most reaction videos are more natural and free-flowing. It’s not bad, I did enjoy it, but just trying to offer some constructive criticism.
One of my favorite Wisecrack videos of 2020. I'd love to see more of this in the future. Which I get is tough since most modern pop culture doesn't have a defined philosophy like NXIUM did, so a lot of it is extrapolation on your part. Still, I'd dig it if only to see more philosophy stuff. Right now my only Philosophy fix comes from Philosophy Tube, a great channel that I highly recommend everyone watch, including Wisecrack content creators. Peace!
Love the new format, it's great watching you expertise come out on the fly. It really shows how extensive your knowledge and education is and how much you love philosophy. Defs keep it up!
