Podcast
PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash
Hosted by Martin Hash · EN
Politics & Philosophy by Dr. Martin D. Hash, Esq.
51episodes
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1530 Life Concepts
Jun 1500:02:01Tap to summarizeWhat’s better than talking about your life? 1. People don’t get what they deserve even if they don’t deserve it. 2. Institutions are now run by the people who should be in institutions. 3. You don’t find wisdom, you earn it. 4. You’re lucky to be here. 5. Unawareness is a shield against the vulgarity of life. 6. Depravity is the natural state of all living things. 7. Success is simply a matter of being right most of the time. 8. New generations need new goals. 9. The people who claim to have empathy, don’t. You may get your news somewhere else but take your advice from me, the Wysest Myn in the Wyrld.
Transcribe →1529 Real Empathy
Jun 1300:02:39Tap to summarizeEmpathy is a word fraught with peril: use it at your own risk. Whatever the word’s original definition was supposed to be, with the rise of wokeness, empathy became the same as sympathy except the receiving party gets to decide how much, which gives them control; you may have sympathy for the plight of others but they get to dictate how you must respond. This is not the original understanding of empathy at all; it wasn’t sympathy, it was understanding, but to recognize this, you have to have self-awareness, something the Left isn’t capable of due to mental illness, malevolence, ignorance or stupidity. The real meaning of empathy is: if you empathize with someone, you should be able to understand their point of view, something the Left does not and apparently cannot do towards the Right, though many on the Right understand the motivations & grievances of the Left, and sincerely want to offer solutions. For example, the plight of Gen Z of not being able to be as well off as their parents: most of the Right would truly like to change the forces that caused that to happen. The Right would like to help people with mental illness because they empathize with the pain of the sufferer, but the selfish Left instead wants to validate mental illness. The Right recognizes the perverse incentives that keep Blacks poor and on state assistance. Real empathy is not virtue signaling by claiming altruistic goals but instead acting on them.
Transcribe →1528 Generational Success
Jun 1100:02:17Tap to summarizeContrary to popular belief, Gen Z is doing as good as previous generations, they just have to measure their success by new metrics. They don’t have the same value system as their elders and shouldn’t be held to outdated goals & ideals. Boomers had an abundance of material opportunities so they measured their success in the physical accumulation of things, but by the time Gen Z came along, the gold fields had been picked clean: no houses in the suburbs, no fancy cars, no 401Ks, no jobs, no retirement, no spouses and no children. Even making a career is becoming impossible for a large portion of them. Therefore, Gen Z needs to measure their success differently; for example, abundant entertainment, including videogames; online relationships where you have more choices and don’t have to stay with a bad one; you can work from home; learn without being in a brick & mortar building; a large variety of food; they’re not in the thrall of captured media; they’re not held to religious dogma; they’re not tied down so they can travel, and there’s no judgment on how they want to live their lives. Go ahead Gen Z, take the win!
Transcribe →1527 Right Most of the Time
Jun 900:02:30Tap to summarizeThe problem with claiming to have wisdom is that other people cynically expect it to be 100%. If you get 1 thing wrong in 100 things, people will fixate on the 1. This makes it impossible to expect others to defer to you or respect you for being wise; they’d rather follow their own counsel then think anyone may have better judgment than them. The problem gets worse as the other person’s formal education increases. If they’re a doctor, you better be a physicist, and if they’re a lawyer, they all think no one could possibly be smarter than them. Not just those examples: pick anyone out of a crowd of successful people and every one of them would rather give you advice than take any. In that environment, how can anyone claim wisdom if they’ve ever been wrong before? The functional reality is that a “wise” person is more right than usual; certainly more right than wrong but there’s still lots of room to be wrong. In Vegas, only a 3% house advantage means that, in the end, they always win. “Winning” is an objective measurement of wisdom, no matter the number of missteps. Unfortunately, most people don’t care about the end so much as they appear “right” to others during every step along the way. That’s why wisdom is worthless to anyone but the wise person using their own wisdom to be right most of the time.
Transcribe →1526 Depravity of Man
Jun 700:02:52Tap to summarizePresbyterians, an offshoot of Catholicism, believe in the total depravity of mankind, meaning people are tainted by sin in every aspect of their lives, hearts & souls. This causes them to be slaves to sin, unable to love God, unable to do good, and unable to have faith in Christ. That’s a pretty dismal condemnation of humanity at large, and doesn’t offer much hope. It’s obviously written by someone perceptive enough to recognize that the base motives of people, such as lust, greed, avarice, envy & hate, are more powerful than the counter virtues of chastity, benevolence, generosity & love. Unfortunately, that view of life is not wise enough to think people can rise above those primitive desires without mysticism. Maybe for the dumb, ignorant & uninformed, it’s true; God needs to be included in the indoctrination. Leaving the mass of people to wallow in their depravity is far worse than a formalized religion that scorns, shuns & shames them into compliance with civilized modes of interaction within society. However, some small portion of people, perhaps 10%, have the capacity to see the long-term advantage of not yielding to the temptation of instant gratification from dopamine stimulation. This is commonly known as self-awareness. If self-aware people could be situated into positions of power, where they control the school curriculum, the role models presented by entertainment, and the reinforcement of aspiring values via government, then mysticism wouldn’t have to shoulder the burden, and man wouldn’t be so depraved after all.
Transcribe →1525 Unawareness
Jun 500:02:39Tap to summarizeUnawareness is living your own life without being cognizant of how other people perceive you. People in a coma are certainly unaware; autistic people are unaware, and in general, innocence is a kind of unawareness. The opposite is, of course, self-awareness; more specifically external self-awareness. People with external self-awareness know and care what other people think of them, and make decisions with that knowledge at the forefront. Those without external self-awareness, go through life doing only what they want. They might have internal self-awareness, meaning they understand their own motivations, but they don’t know and can’t understand why others treat them like they do. Liberalism, in the form of libertarianism, purports to live and let live, but that’s not how people are in real life. For whatever reason, often just FOMO, the fear of missing out, many people want everyone to be just like them, with the same ambitions & goals, and anyone who thinks differently is suspect, which turns into resentment, which turns into contempt, finally leading to a feeling of malevolence toward the person operating outside the mold. Zoning boards, charters, and social engineering are examples of this control. Anyone who’s ever lived under the heavy hand of an home owners association has experienced this. HOAs are specifically set up to force everyone living under their auspices to keep their homes in an acceptable range of presentation: color, lawn, ornamentation, even access of family & friends. Unfortunately, unaware people are their easy prey.
Transcribe →1524 May Luck Be With You
Jun 300:03:05Tap to summarizeMost people don’t comprehend, nor even want to know, how much luck controls their lives. Almost everything they do, their entire path is life, is almost certainly luck with a little bit of intent and effort nudging the ball, like in a pinball machine, except less controlled. There’s no other way to explain why some people are undeservedly successful while others are undeserved failures. In the past, when science was mysticism, luck was interpreted as God’s will. Another explanation was karma: that people got what they gave. That concept actually serves as a good catchall because most people can make up reasons in their head to justify anything: “Joe’s cow died because he yelled at his wife yesterday.” Destiny is another commonly held belief: that you have no free agency and all of your actions were assigned to you before you were born. Most of history is one kind of these excuses or the other because who wants to think you are alone, no one cares, and what happens to you is random, as it is for everybody else. However, wishing people luck is an acknowledgment of subconscious understanding. In modern times, children are taught “May the force be with you,” which is a tacit recognition that some force controls your life besides you, wrapped in a secular narrative aimed at children. They are being introduced to and entertained by the idea that most people are pawns and only those with special powers can change the world, and those people are born with it. That means that a regular person is at the mercy of powers he can’t understand and has no control over. They probably don’t recognize it as random chance but that’s what it is. The only alternative is that we all live in a simulation, and all of this is preprogrammed, meaning our lives aren’t real, and neither are we.
Transcribe →1523 Three Ways to Find Wisdom
Jun 100:03:10Tap to summarizeIn the past, the definition of wisdom has been nebulous; Confucius said, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” But other than the quote itself, Confucius didn’t expand any further so throughout history, other people have been offering interpretations of what his words meant. Reflection is mindfulness, another difficult word to define, but it mostly means self-examination. However, studies show that no more than 10% of the population have that ability, though the ones that can could be considered wise. Imitation might fool other people into thinking that you have wisdom but unless you absorb it, you don’t actually have any. Experience can certainly lead to at least specific kinds of wisdom. Albert Einstein said “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it,” but he was smart not wise so his definition is only half right because wisdom requires a lifetime of schooling to acquire, both formal and informal. I offer my own humble definition of wisdom; one that’s both succinct & objective. In fact, it’s actually a measurement, and anything that can be measured is real. Wisdom is the breath & depth of knowledge times the breath & depth of experience times self-awareness. As an example, if you were school-taught knowledgeable in medicine, law, science, business, travel, sports, philosophy, politics & family, and your lived experience in those fields was demonstrably accomplished as designated by licensing, and marriage, and you were high in self-awareness, you’re probably as wise as a human can get.
Transcribe →1522 Loss of Faith in Institutions
May 3000:02:52Tap to summarizeUp until the current generation, Gen-Z, people respected institutions: law, medicine, government, education, entertainment, news. They had reason to because life was continually improving; each successive generation was doing better than the last, and the people in those institutions seemed to have earned their place. Now it seems all institutions are inadequate, incompetent, even counter productive, and people have lost faith in the opinions of "experts." One by one, our institutions have been shown to be corrupted: medicine was dishonored by COVID, the judicial system was disgraced by the lawfare on Trump, education is tainted by usurious student loans & politically-biased faculty, Climate Change put science into disrepute, and business has consolidated into monopoly. Most previously trusted fields, economists for example, fall into the same category as pollsters & hedge fund managers. Then along came affirmative action, followed by DEI; not to mention increasing levels of nepotism. Merit is derided as White Supremacy, which is defined as thinking that conscientiousness, punctuality & integrity are good things. Of course, this is coming from the people who are none of those things, and got their positions of authority through questionable means. Combine that with general social & economic degradation that comes with the fall of empires, and nobody believes in anything anymore. There has been a resurgence of religious fervor, and maybe that can save us and the institutions too, but it seems doubtful.
Transcribe →1521 You Don’t Get What You Deserve
May 2800:02:27Tap to summarizeMerit is the idea that you get what you’ve earned, but that homily only exists within the parameters of an artifice, a game with rules that you played by and won. For the Baby Boom generation, that concept seemed true because so many people appeared to reap the benefits of their meritable actions. Unfortunately, that was an illusion caused by the unprecedented good times times brought on by America’s ascendance after the Second World War. There was plenty of opportunity and anyone willing to pursue it, even at a minimal level like holding a job, buying a house & raising a family, was rewarded in old age just from inflation alone. The rules were unquestioned because there was no reason to do so. However, in abject reality, there are no rules guiding or protecting you, and once the artificial good times ended, opportunity was replaced with nepotism & corruption. Worse, you are discriminated against for the basest of reasons: maybe you’re short, maybe you’re dumb, maybe you’re ugly? All of the people who excel over you in these physical traits will get the advantage of ever decreasing opportunities, no matter what you do; there is no deserving. Great power does not mandate great responsibility; that’s just a social refrain from short, dumb, ugly people who would otherwise always lose if competing with tall, smart, beautiful people who are related to someone important.
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