I ran into some new ‘work’ of Sam Harris, and he managed to tick me off yet again with his arrogant stupidity. The ‘work’ in this case is a short montage of quotes from the above linked full conversation.
The ignorance behind his comments is truly stupefying.
The montage was created by Harris (or his people) from the long conversation linked above, meaning that we can consider it his authentic opinion.
Here is the transcript of the short version.
“These people have to be no longer lionized as somehow exemplars of what you should be when you become wealthy. It should be embarrassing to be a billionaire who is not incredibly generous and obviously positive-sum with respect to the common good, right? The billionaire who’s just trying to maximize the escape plan to New Zealand and otherwise trying to hold on to every dime. That has to be embarrassing among other billionaires. He shouldn’t be able to go to a party in Aspen and be in good standing reputationally if you are that much of an asshole. – Well, it’s the opposite. – It’s the opposite because all this, I mean, we got a bunch of people who read too much Ayn Rand and science fiction and just didn’t get a proper ethical toolkit. Like what Elon did with USAID should be an extinction level event for his reputation.” (emphasis mine)
You can listen to the whole conversation to have more context.
It is full of lies, distortions, smears and insinuations. In this one interview, there are enough lies about both Elon Musk and RFK Jr. for them to sue Harris for defamation.
If I were them, I would do just that. Just to make a point. But this post is not about my dislike of Sam Harris and his proto-communist, hate spewing and preening virtue-signaling; but the dangerous ideas it is resting on.
As I am writing this, the short video got ~1,400, the long conversation close to 700 comments. His audience has a universally uncritical approval of his depressingly primitive message, which is based on the simple fact, that Sam and his readers do not seem to understand anything about money.
The meaning of money
Money can be defined by its functions, such as a medium of exchange, store of value, measure of worth, etc.
It can mean different things to different people, such as freedom, power or security, but its most essential function in every one of these cases is the power of decision making it confers to its holder. This is true on every level of wealth. Every spending decision is a signal to the market. The larger the amount, the more impactful the decision. Whether you are saving, spending or investing money, you are expressing a preference that impact our shared reality.
Land, real estate and stocks are NOT money. Their value is not tangible. If nobody is willing to exchange money for their ownership, they are worth nothing.
Price, value and worth are just signals. They are all subjective and can be extremely volatile.
Many real estate owners in Florida, Vancouver and Toronto are finding this out as we speak.
Elon Musk lost about a third of his “MONEY” this year because he managed to antagonize a good chunk of the population with his politics. (Thanks, to no small extent, to obnoxious ideological bullies like Sam Harris)
The ‘rich’ do not have money, they have things. They have investments, not liquidity.
Elon Musk, when he exercised some stock options in 2021, paid 11 billion dollars in taxes, “the largest single-year tax bill by any American in history”. He had to pace the process, to protect the value of the stock from dropping too much.
The rich get rich because they make good decisions. They get rich because the people they serve are willingly giving them money in exchange for the goods they produce or the services they provide. If they stop making good decisions, their “MONEY” will shrivel to nothing. Just look at the stock value of Blackberry over time:
The scale is logarithmic! At its peak, the valuation of the stock was US$ 83 billion dollars, today it is US$ 2.45 billion.
It is the same company, but now it is worth only about three percent of its value in its glory days. Over eighty billion dollars evaporated. It’s all about decisions and market conditions. Blackberry lost its value because Apple started offering a better product. The same can happen to any company.
Negative sum games and the ‘common good’
I keep wondering what it means to be “obviously positive-sum with respect to the common good.” What is the common good?
If I work day and night, if I spend all my resources for years and eventually discover a cure for cancer, would that qualify? Would that be more of a ‘positive sum’ result than spending the same effort, money and resources on the drug addicts on the street to make them happy by supporting the bad decisions that got them where they are in the first place?
How about directing my efforts on preventing cancer (and autism) by removing from the environment the things that are causing it? If I fix the problems of the world and people shower me with money for doing so, will that somehow become ‘obviously’ negative sum? At what point?
At what point should I stop expanding the industries to spend the income supporting navel-gazing dopeheads like Harris? In what way would be supporting losers and their lifestyles “positive-sum with respect to the common good”?
Everything Elon Musk does is “obviously positive-sum with respect to the common good.” He makes things that make people’s lives better, cheaper, easier. That is the essence of serving the common good. Making government agencies more accountable, less wasteful and less corrupt is a perfect example of doing something that is “obviously positive-sum with respect to the common good.”
We may argue about trade-offs but not about the underlying concept, that making people’s lives easier is a respectable; that creating products that are far superior to the ones they replace, is a service to humanity. Uber displaced the government-controlled taxi medallion system, making urban transit cheaper for us. Is that not part of the ‘common good’? Now Elon Musk is poised to replace that with robotaxis bringing the price of mobility close to that of public transport.
Elon Musk had a choice: he can spend his time, effort and the profit from his other businesses on making truly affordable autonomous transportation possible, or hand over that money to some losers like Sam Harris with his ‘ethical toolkit’ to piss it away on what they consider to be the ‘common good’?
The rich is rich because they are making things to serve us. They can only stay rich if they keep making good decisions on how to serve us best, on how to produce the things that we need and want. The best possible decisions about money will most likely be made by the people who made that money.
Clearly and obviously, it is quite possible to act in a way that is not acting in the interest of the common good. Theft, fraud, extortion and corruption are not good.
We could say that all involuntary exchanges are ‘obviously’ negative-sum with respect to the common good, but I must be saying this only because I read too much Ayn Rand and science fiction and just didn’t get a proper ethical toolkit. (Guilty on both counts)
The ‘ethical toolkit’
…. is another thing we should all wonder about. Seriously, what the hell does it mean? What is an ethical toolkit? Sam Harris never defines what he means by it, but he clearly sees himself not only as someone possessing said toolkit, but someone who is both enabled and entitled to judge others on how they measure up “with respect to the common good.”
He clearly thinks that fighting fraud, corruption and waste (what Elon did with USAID) “should be an extinction level event to his reputation.”
There are makers and takers in this world. Elon Musk is a maker; George Soros is a taker.
RFK Jr. spent his whole life making our world healthier, the environment, our children, our food supply.
Bill Gates is a scavenger capitalist with nary an original idea of his own.
Sam Harris is just an obnoxious relativist, who hates the makers and roots for the takers. The essence of Marxism is the idea that the makers are the bad guys, while the moral high-ground is occupied by the takers.
Listening to the full interview will give you a better understanding of Sam Harris’ ‘ethical toolkit’. A sizeable part of the interview is about his experiences with meditation, spiritualism and a great variety of mind-altering drugs.
He is denigrating, insulting and condemning Elon Musk and RFK Junior, while expressing admiration for the philanthropaths like George Soros and Bill Gates.
We are talking about the George Soros who broke the bank of England and bankrupted Thailand. He never produced anything in his life but misery, and profit for himself from it. His organizations are banned in Russia, Pakistan and Turkey, he is obviously not welcome in Thailand and has been routed out even of the country of his birth, Hungary.
We are talking about the George Soros who is working hard on destroying American democracy by spending millions on financing violent riots and getting radical leftist, soft-on-crime prosecutors elected.
We are talking about the Bill Gates who made a 10x return on his Pharma investment that was selling vaccines to his public-private partnership foundation.
This ‘partnership’ is the essence of the philanthropats’ scam:
Provide seed money to start a non-profit.
Ensure that you are in full control of it.
Buy media space and use your celebrity status to promote it.
Use your contacts and lobbyists to get governments to fund 80%+ of your activities, while taking all the credit for the humanitarian ‘benefits’.
Invest large sums in the companies from whom you will buy the overpriced products that you will use for the ‘humanitarian’ goals, such as sterilizing (black) women without their consent to save the planet from overpopulation.
Use you own non-profit to generate ‘studies’ proving what an amazing success the whole enterprise is.
These are the people, and their ethical toolkit that Sam Harris admires.
The left has a fixation on greed, because they see everything as a zero-sum game.
The idea that any gain must be paired with someone else’s loss is the central idea of Marxist economics. The future Harris advocates is a form of communism, one that we should be shamed into accepting.
In a sane world, the ignorance evidenced in the comments of Sam Harris should be an extinction level event for his reputation as a public intellectual.
In the insane world we are living in, they are just an expression of the zeitgeist.
As a parting gift, let me leave you with a few more pearls of wisdom from the conversation with of Sam Harris :
“… but what we will have to do is change our ethic or our pseudo ethic around the sense that you have to justify your life by fitting into this economic machine. You have to figure out how to do something that someone will pay you for otherwise you have no right to live on some level.”
“…we can’t figure out how to spread the wealth around”
Sam Harris has an estimated net worth of 10-15 million dollars, putting him at the bottom of the one percenters. That is a far cry from being a billionaire, I don’t know where he keeps his money, but I am quite certain that it is not stuffed into his mattress. I am willing to bet that a notable portion of it is invested into income producing assets.
Nobody is stopping him from spreading his wealth around……..
“we would want something like universal basic income something where at a minimum everyone can survive and even flourish as you spread this wealth around because, you know, we’re just morons, which is what we do.”
“… or would you actually like to live in a society where envy and desperation have not, you know, risen to the asymptotically to so as to derange everybody. You’re not surrounded by criminals or would be criminals who are desperate for your stuff. You’re actually surrounded by happy, productive, creative people who are having their hopes and dreams realized, too”
And so you have it. We shouldn’t really care what his is doing with his own life, but we should be alarmed by the ways he wants to ruin ours.
…and a comment for the zeitgeist:
“@HypatiaK
What’s the point of seeking billions? What does it get you that you couldn’t have with, say, a few million? You can only eat three meals a day, wear one outfit of clothes at a time, sleep in one bed, ride in one vehicle. Seeking billions is a form of insanity. Musk’s use of power to end USAID achieved nothing but the death of starving infants. We need a law to put a ceiling on wealth.”
More from Substack
You can learn more about the philanthropaths from the series from MAA:
Anatomy of a Philanthropath: Dreams of Democide & Dictatorship
Part 1: A Mostly Peaceful DepopulationAnatomy of a Philanthropath: Dreams of Democide & Dictatorship
Part 2: Downloadable Digital DictatorshipsAnatomy of a Philanthropath: Dreams of Democide & Dictatorship
Part 3: Yuval Noah Harari: Not the Man We Think He Is?
References
https://youtube.com/shorts/_0GAFtiN4A4?si=y7L-LuBfY9pWiMPU
This Old Experiment With Mice Led to Bleak Predictions for Humanity’s Future
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda (2022 Wakefield-Kennedy-CHD Documentary)
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The dude has been an embarrassment since his Atheism+ days. Brights, anyone?