#125 – Modern-Day Religious Fanaticism

Ft. Naval and Farb.

Here is a short conversation I had with Naval Ravikant and Farbood Nivi on Airchat about modern-day religious fanaticism. The YouTube version runs 2 minutes and 35 seconds long. The full transcript of the conversation is below.

You can also join the conversation on Airchat.

Transcript

Naval: I lost my cool today because I ran into a person who is advocating in California heavily, a person of power who is advocating for banning open source AI. Of course they don’t call it that, they just call it regulation, but they want to regulate the flops and they want a regulatory committee to decide what’s allowed to be legal and what’s not. It’s complete madness.

These people are weaponizing government to stop the free access of mathematics. And of course they’re AI doomers. And I just could not have the discussion, I finally lost it.

I just said, I don’t want to have this conversation and I left because they are such do-gooders. And I realized that it’s do-gooders who think the world is going to end and they’re uniquely positioned to save it. These people are the real menace.

They just enjoy this feeling of feeling so good and so moral and so right by telling us how to live our lives and fix us and save us from ourselves. But they’re actually the problem.

Farb: It’s often rooted in a deep sense of guilt that drives this sort of moralizing behavior, and it’s a sad attempt at relieving one’s sense of guilt by trying to impose a morality on others.

Naval: The worst part is that it comes with a sense of moral righteousness. They genuinely believe that they’re saving the world, and they’re saving the poor, and they’re saving the ignorant, and that they know better. They really just look down on you.

They’re very smug about the whole thing. It’s the exact same instinct that you see in a religious fanatic. It is religious fanaticism just reborn over and over again.

It is the religious instinct in humans that keeps coming back. And by religion, I don’t mean spirituality. I mean organized religion, the kind that controls you, the kind that gave religion a bad name in the first place.

Arjun: The other day I tweeted out that nowadays whenever I hear quote-unquote experts say anything it automatically sounds like religious fanatics say in my mind.

This is why I find C.S. Lewis was so on point when he said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

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