 Now that's a pretty inflammatory title, isn't it? You might be scared and think that by saying this I'm announcing that I'm not a libertarian anymore and have mega-minded my way out of it and I'm now peering down my nose at the peasants known as my audience, but it couldn't more so be the opposite. Everything I'm going to say through the course of this video are things that I've been guilty of numerous times in a state of blissful ignorance and some of my most successful videos have been around points that I've made whilst ignorant of the deepest foundations of what I'm actually saying. You may think that because now you know what our priori and our posteriori mean, you've got philosophy nailed down and are well on your way to being able to answer any question about reality that's ever existed. I thought this way and take it from me if you ever start to look outside of this sphere of ours, you'll be immediately humbled. Libertarianism is not a complete philosophy. Again, settle down, this is not an insult and it's simply true. Ask Mises Rothbard or Hopper. I have a whole video showing how libertarianism is a legal theory and not a moral one. It uses axiomatic logic to show what you are or are not permitted to do in a legal sense, not what you should or shouldn't do in a moral sense. Libertarianism shows that you can legally make any economic exchange which does not violate the natural rights of another person, but it doesn't tell you if you should make any sort of exchange. This is why the argument for the legalization of drugs should never ever be conflated as an argument that buying, selling or using drugs is good. All we can say from libertarianism is that if you were to initiate the use of force against somebody trying to do any of that in order to stop them, you are claiming de facto ownership over them which is a performative contradiction as all humans are self-owners. This is the most basic form of what's called argumentation ethics, but where does that leave us? Can we only ever hold a completely apathetic position to drug usage? Are we simply never allowed to say whether or not it's good or bad and have to sit on the fence of every issue other than legal ones? This would only be the case if you wrongly viewed libertarianism as a complete philosophy. And if libertarian legal theory is the only philosophy you've ever seriously read, it's highly likely that you falsely assume this, maybe even only implicitly, and I'll show why that could be the case for you when I get into the presuppositions. There is nothing in libertarian legal theory that says you can't have any opinion on social or cultural issues which do not involve matters of legality, and certainly doesn't say that you should always take the moral position that the fucking left does. It does not even say that freedom is a moral good and it's something that people ought to desire. Goodness and aughts are the realm of morality, so you can make any claim to goodness or aughtness of action as long as it does not contradict the stipulations of the legal theory, you are not contradicting libertarianism. If I say you should not take recreational drugs, I am not saying you cannot, and I'm in no contradiction. I already know how incredibly guilty I am of previously stretching the limits by saying that strictly according to libertarian legal theory, violating the NAP is immoral. The only thing you can say from libertarianism alone is that violating the NAP is justified grounds for retaliation. Nothing about it says whether you should or shouldn't, or if it's good or bad too. The people most ignorant of this are the socially liberal fiscal conservatives, Beltway, Prague caucus, Joe Jorgensen, Pinkhead, I Want Gay Married couples to protect their weed farms and machine guns types. And that used to be me. These are the people who will tell you that if you don't support the current thing being shoved down your neck from the cathedral's propagandist tentacles, that you're not a real libertarian. If I say that casual sex is hedonistic, a vice, and ought not to be committed, they're likely to lash out, call me a statist among many other sorts of names, say something about Nick Fuentes for no good reason, rather than actually try to dispute my moral claim on moral grounds. I can only imagine it's an insecurity borne out of their philosophical ignorance and personal lifestyle, which causes them to lash out and do libertarianism a gruesome injustice by using it to defend a moral claim, which it explicitly says it is not fit to do. So what I want to do is not tell you what conclusions most libertarians get wrong out of philosophical ignorance, but what this ignorance actually pertains to. I will declare what side I am on, but will not give the most extensive reasons why, because I want you to look up what these things are and actually get to know them. What the different sides claim, and what is true. Rather than me just make a claim that few people watching would understand, and fewer people would start arguing in the comments, which wouldn't help anyone. I'll also say what libertarianism itself often presupposes, yet does not get questioned on, and what libertarian individuals are prone to unknowingly presupposing, and I'll make it clear when I'm doing one or the other. I'll start with the area that I'm struggling to reconcile the most internally right now, and give this fiery topic a running start. Nominalism vs Metaphysical Realism If you've only ever read the philosophy of libertarianism, you'll have absolutely no idea what these things are, because my point is entirely true, libertarianism is not a complete philosophy, but it presupposes nominalism. Nominalism is the claim that concepts do not actually exist and are just made up. Does society actually exist, or is it just a name we ascribe to a fictional category? If you think that such a category has to be fictional, you're already presupposing nominalism and don't even know it. In reading medieval philosophy, I've come to realise that nearly everything post-enlightenment presupposes nominalism, and this presupposition never gets challenged, but I have come to take the position of metaphysical realism, that concepts are real. When you think of a dog, you can either think of a specific dog that you have seen before and recall it in your imagination from your memory, or you can think of the concept of dog in general, not a specific one, and know that dogs have particular and real characteristics in order to be a dog, and that the category of dog is a real one beyond just the arrangement of atoms, which have come together to take the physical form of a dog. So where does libertarianism presuppose nominalism? In the area of one of my most viewed videos, intellectual property, and that's where this is my greatest ongoing conflict. Before I made that video, I discussed it with some friends and made the assertion, all property is physical. Technically, with this statement, I assumed materialism, and materialism is not to be conflated with consumerism, which the vast majority of people who say it do. Materialism is the assertion that the only things which exist are physical, that being made of matter. But I believe that if you can conceive of the concept of dog in general, you are using immaterial faculties to conceive of an immaterial part of reality, that this immaterial faculty of yours is the intellect, separate from just the matter of the brain, and instead belongs to the soul. Talking of such things as the soul even existing these days is seen as backward and superstitious, but you cannot read the depths of which scholastic and Platonist philosophy goes into making these claims and still think they're stupid or without real basis. If you dismiss either side of this argument with a hand wave, you are much more than likely nowhere near educated enough on them to be making any sort of judgment. You are building a house on sand if you do not challenge these presuppositions, yet march proudly forward, smugly grinning, and with your head so far up your own arse you don't know which way is up, which is exactly what I did. So if you do not presuppose materialism and nominalism, most of what I said in my intellectual property video is nowhere near as strong as it once seemed. If immaterial and material things exist, and if concepts are real rather than fictional, the question of whether or not these can truly be property is a very different one. This does not change many points I did make in that video though, that ideas are not scarce, and that I cannot be said to own the parts of your senses and mind which perceive and conceive the idea which I created. So I'm not telling you all of this to say I've completely flipped on this issue, but I have to find a way to reconcile all these points. They only didn't need reconciliation before, not because I knew why not, but because I was working on top of many layers of presupposition which I now think are wrong and had no idea that's what I was doing at the time. The most visible presupposition amongst many libertarians rather than libertarianism itself is moral relativism, and this is the one that just really riles me up, because it is normally accompanied by a staggering amount of contradictions which leave me absolutely flabbergasted that the people making them can't see it. I've already said that just because libertarianism does not examine morality, that does not mean you have to think that morality therefore does not exist. Libertarian legal theory doesn't tell you whether or not the moon exists, that doesn't mean you can then say there's no way to know, or in fact doesn't. I've seen a quote online attributed to Mises which says, if a man drinks wine and not water, I cannot say he is acting irrationally. At most I can say that in his place I would not do so, but his pursuit of happiness is his own business, not mine. Now I don't believe this is from human action and I don't know the context in which he said it, but I think it is either morally relativist or leaves the extremely vague happiness of a person as their ultimate end to which they should order their actions, and with the implication that there's no actual guidelines of how you could do that. Morality can be defined as the way things ought to be. So if you're a moral realist like I am, you can say there is a way which humans ought to be, and that their actions are the means towards this end. But you'll find so many people who will clap until their hands are bloody at what Mises said and think there's no way humans ought to behave as long as they're happy, because morality doesn't exist. Say that you don't like the ideas being pushed by LGBT groups though, and lots of them won't waste a second in telling you how it's bad to think that way. If it's bad to think a certain way, you are saying there is a way you ought to think and act. You are a moral realist. Your morals are just whatever is being socially pressured onto you, rather than anything transcendent or ontological. Finding a consistent moral relativist is as hard as finding Hen's teeth. You can find so many libertarians who dodge any moral question from a traditionalist standpoint by just saying morality doesn't exist and it's just a form of control by the man to divide the pros. But if you say anything anti-progressive, prepare to be told how you're such a bad person. Good and bad are moral values. Good or bad according to what? A true moral relativist will say it's only good or bad according to their personal preference. But if that's the case, why the hell should I care? The way things ought to be is not up to you, and if all you can tell me is the way you would like things to be, I do not care. This moral relativism is the result of another presupposition, and what I think is the most grievous crime that the Protestant Reformation started and the Enlightenment continued against philosophy. That is the presupposition that metaphysics doesn't exist. And what is that? Metaphysics is one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with logic, ethics, and epistemology. Metaphysics is the branch which is concerned chiefly with the nature of being, form, and substance, and causation, among others. Within this, it studies what it means to be a human, which Aristotle said is to be a rational animal and dissected what that necessarily means. David Hume invented something called the Problem of Induction, which is to say that when we stand near a fire and feel heat from it, we induce that this particular fire is hot, but if you saw another fire in the distance, you could not induce that that fire must also be hot by necessity. Or that because the sun has always risen in the east and set in the west, we cannot say that it will do so tomorrow. It boggles my mind that people take this seriously. I can only hope that when my listeners hear it, they see it for the stupidity which I always instinctually have and can now actually explain. This is because metaphysics was murdered hundreds of years ago, as it was extensively used in the medieval period to logically support doctrines of the Catholic Church, so the Protestant reformers banned it, rather than have reality threaten their new theologies. Chief among the examples was how Saint Thomas Aquinas used the metaphysical distinction between form and substance to prove how the Eucharist, given at Holy Mass, changed from bread and wine to the real body and blood of Jesus Christ with transubstantiation. That's a mouthful of a word, but we all know what transformation means, and I can explain it using that. I am me, and I have a beard. My substance is me, and my beard is part of my form, my physical appearance. If I shave my beard off, I have transformed myself by creating a change in my form, but I am still me in substance, and cannot change that. Well, transubstantiation is the opposite of that example. Saint Thomas showed that the bread and wine at mass pertains the form, that is physical appearance, of bread and wine, but after they're consecrated, it's entirely possible that through an unseen miracle, they can change their substance, which is transubstantiation. The host continues to look and feel like bread and wine in form to our senses, but are substantially different, the opposite of when I shave and transform. This does not prove that this miracle happens, and it maintains that a thing cannot change its own substance through natural means. This can only be done through divine intervention, and because Christ promised to give his body and blood to us with bread and wine, he truly gives it to us in substance with the form of bread and wine. So what do you do if you're a Calvinist Protestant in 17th century Europe, and don't want people to believe in the doctrine of true physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, because it contradicts your theology? You presuppose that Catholicism is wrong, see that philosophy supports Catholicism and its doctrines, then just say that philosophy is wrong. Ah, it's fucking genius, can we get a round of applause? You just say it's not actually true without providing any proof, and then ban the teaching of metaphysics. Now, a young René Descartes grows up in a Calvinist area of northern France with an incredibly inquisitive and philosophical mind, but in a place where philosophy, and especially that evil, popish metaphysics, is banned. What Descartes did was an incredible feat. He rebuilt philosophy entirely in a part of the world where it simply ceased to exist. The problem is that because of this, he was seriously wrong. He gave absolutely no attention to metaphysics because he couldn't properly get his hands on it, and then decided there's no way to tell if your sensory experience is reflective of reality at all. Metaphysics tells you how reality exists, you are a human, humans have senses, and senses experience reality. Cut off this limb of philosophy, and now nothing can be known to have any true meaning or substance. In a world without metaphysics, we now believe there's no such thing as form and substance, and that nothing has intrinsic meaning. What is a woman? What does it mean to be one? Does a woman have a particular form and a particular substance which dictates their nature? And nah, we say there's no such thing as a woman, anybody can choose to be one. How can you choose to be something that doesn't actually exist? And like I said before, a thing cannot change its own substance through natural means. As a man, you can put on high heels and wear a pink skirt to make your form appear like that of a woman, but you have an immutable substance, and that is of a man. You can never change that. So if you're looking at the state of utter lunacy the world is gripped in now, and the complete disconnect from reality and a spiral into nihilism, depression, and suicide at breakneck speeds, you can thank the Protestants and the Enlightenment, then do yourself a favor and go learn some metaphysics. Reality has meaning, life has meaning, you have meaning, what you do has meaning. We are surrounded by a nihilistic post-metaphysics world which feeds you lies. If you want to know what this meaning is, you have to go back before the great lie began. Libertarian legal theory has been developed after the lie and is not concerned with answering it, so you will never find meaning if that is all you care to read. If you try to substitute the beatific vision as your ultimate end with a hatred of government and taxation, you will forever be a bitter person as your ultimate values will not be in line with ultimate reality. Nominalism, materialism, morality, metaphysics, and meaning. Libertarianism does not tell you anything about these, so go out and learn them rather than remaining ignorant. These are the areas that most libertarians do not understand about philosophy, and that's really bad because they are absolutely foundational. I have to emphasize the word most in there, because there are libertarians around that are fully educated in philosophy, but they are the minority. And I want to give a shout out to objectivists. Objectivism is a complete philosophy and is once steeped in the Aristotelian tradition, with lots of inspiration from Thomas Aquinas. Objectivist epistemology in particular is their strong point, and I love it, they completely get how David Hume ruined empiricism. But where they go wrong is placing their ultimate ends in themselves. Humans are imperfect and finite, they cannot be described as ultimate in any sense. Only the perfect and infinite can truly complete you and grant you ultimate, sublime, everlasting happiness. And that is God. Anyway, fellas, get reading. Libertarianism can only explain a specific slice of reality to you, but you should want to know all of it, at least as much as our natural limit allows. For that, I, of course, recommend Thomas Aquinas, which you can probably tell, but branch out in any way you like. If you really do seek out the truth, I believe you will find the way, the truth and the life. God bless and take it easy.