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[Music] double standards and hypocrisy that's the topic of the day this is a powerful and sneaky self-deception mechanism which i have touched upon in my three-part series called self-deception part one part two part three i briefly mentioned double standards and now we're going to go into some depth on it here basically the way it works like this the less conscious one is the lower one's stage of ego development is the more selfish one is the more biased one is the more double standards one holds the more of a hypocrite one is so there's a deep connection between hypocrisy and consciousness or stages of ego development for more on stages of ego development go check out my three-part series called the nine stages of ego development where i explain the susan cook greuter model very powerful model for ego development which basically shows you all the stages that you'll be going through along this self-actualization journey it gives you a really great roadmap so that you know what to expect but one of the things that i like to do is just i like to look at the features of highly developed minds what does that entail and also the features of less developed selfish minds and what that looks like and so double standards is one of these features which is why religious fundamentalists are some of the biggest hypocrites of all time have you noticed this this is not an accident have you ever wondered like why are the most moral people the people who who cloak themselves in morality and speak the most fervently about morality why are they some of the biggest hypocrites the hypocrisy of religious fundamentalists is legendary to a comical degree why is that well we'll be explaining that basically it all has to do with your level of development but see the hypocrisy of religion that's the easy case all of us pretty much know about that although actually half the world basically doesn't half the world are religious fundamentalists pretty much that's their level of development and um they're complete hypocrites and they hold many many double standards and it's really those people who make religion look so bad and so unpalatable to those who are a little bit more developed who are let's say a spoiler dynamic stage orange and above who are more rational scientifically minded more skeptical to those people basically the lower half of mankind makes religion look like uh like some sort of farce which it is in the way that they practice it but then the mistake that is made is like well then you get the idea that all religion is like that and all spirituality is like that and of course that's not the case and we've talked about that elsewhere so basically double standards are selfishness itself what does it mean to be selfish it's to have double standards it's to have one set of standards that you apply to yourself and your tribe and then a totally different set of standards that you apply to others the ego mind always wants to make exceptions and excuses for itself as part of its self bias i've talked a lot about bias and self bias go check out my episodes on bias understanding bias and i have another one called self bias we'll be covering a lot of that similar material here but from a different perspective so this episode will dovetail with those two these are very important episodes really what we're talking about here is bias when we're talking about double standards in order to develop yourself to high levels you must make a commitment to truth and to intellectual honesty which means you have to hold yourself to the same standards as you hold others you have to hold your tribe and your group to the same standards that you hold other tribes and other groups and you have to hold your your own group and yourself to the same standards as you do your opponents and your enemies that's critical a lot of people don't understand this here's the definition of hypocrisy from the dictionary quote the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards and a feigning to be what one is not end quote so what i want you to see about morality is that morality and all notions of fairness and equality are commonly weaponized for the purposes of survival to get a leg up on others in society that's a lot of what morality is doing and this is a corruption and a misuse of morality so if you want to practice true morality then you have to get rid of all your double standards and all your biases and that's a lot harder to do than most of us realize most of us don't even understand how many double standards we hold these double standards are so sneaky and subtle sometimes they're kind of crude and gross but a lot of times they're subtle you probably know the gross ones you've probably encountered those but what you haven't understood yet is how many subtle double standards you hold i want to point some of these out to you so let's go through a list of examples of double standards this will be a large list some of these are going to be obvious some of these are going to be more subtle a warning as i'm going through this beware of your own biases because the trick with pointing out a double standard is that a lot of times people are so deeply entrenched in their double standards and biases that they don't even want to admit that this is a bias or double standard that they have and then the mind goes into making rationalizations and excuses so as i point some of these out to you beware be mindful that you may get triggered and that your defense mechanisms may get set off so your job is to not get triggered as i talk about these and to not accuse me of bias for talking about your biases let's see that's another common defense mechanism as soon as i bring up a double standard the mind automatically goes into a sort of an attack mode a defense mode counter attack mode maybe you might say it can start to do all sorts of what about isms and justifications rationalizations stuff like that so just be aware of all that so here's a long list i've been thinking about this list for for months compiling this list in no particular order so here we go example number one is psychedelics are dangerous and harmful that's what society tells us but then what about alcohol what about tobacco alcohol is actually one of the most deadly drugs there is and most people don't even consider alcohol to be a drug what kind of double standard is this alcohol is way more socially dangerous and damaging than psychedelics and yet the way that psychedelics are treated and demonized and alcohol doesn't have any spiritual real you know spiritual applications whereas i mean it's mostly just for entertainment and partying and letting loose but psychedelics can be used for partying and entertainment but then they also have incredible profound spiritual applications and yet they're demonized more than alcohol so that's one double standard we find in our current society another one related to psychedelics is the way that many spiritual teachers actually uh hold and talk about psychedelics and this has been really disappointing to me because you would expect spiritual teachers and gurus you know to be more conscious and aware more developed and therefore to have less biases and less double standards but you'd be shocked at how many double standards these gurus hold for example a guru can can talk with a straight face about how psychedelics do not produce genuine enlightenment or genuine permanent awakenings and and yet when you apply that same standard to their own workshops retreats books videos do those produce permanent awakenings and enlightenments no of course not see how come if if you go to a 10 day vipassana retreat and you do that you don't go complaining to your guru like i haven't had my permanent awakening your guru what will your guru tell you your girl will say well that's because it takes years and decades of these apostate retreats to have your you know your radical awakenings so be patient and keep doing it and that's what students do and they do it for 10 20 years and they still don't awaken and yet they keep doing it but if you go to a guru and talk about a psychedelic and then the girls say oh well yeah you took it once and what did it do for you did it make you enlightened did it make you all spiritual and wise well maybe it didn't in this one trip but you know one session of meditation one meditation retreat is also not going to do much for you so you got to be comparing apples to apples here you see this is a gross double standard if you took as many psychedelics as many hours as you meditated as your buddhist for example guru suggests that you meditate you know like for 10 years let's say one hour a day every day for 10 years that would be a typical regimen that your buddhist guru might suggest for you maybe even longer if you did psychedelics for that long [Laughter] uh where would you be with your spiritual development see but the guru doesn't think of it that way the guru says like oh well you take your psychedelic once yeah but if you meditate for an hour once what is meditating for an hour once is gonna do anything for you of course moving on we have some scientific ones i like to criticize science and point out the double standards of science there's some really gross double standards within science and see this is tricky because uh it's easy to see the double standards in religion a lot of times it's a lot harder to admit them within science although they exist almost as much for example science criticizes religion for all of its contradictions and getting things wrong and making mistakes you know factual errors in the bible and so forth and yet have you noticed that no amount of scientific mistakes of which there are thousands the history of science has riddled with thousands of mistakes that scientists have made but yet why is it that not a single uh that not none of these mistakes ever are capable of invalidating the scientific method because he if if an atheist or a skeptic or rationalist or a scientist finds one single contradiction in the bible then they say well to hell with the bible it can't be true that's the standard that they hold religion to but if you hold science to that same standard then you should throw out all of science given how many mistakes science has made how can you ever be so naive as to trust scientific conclusions and yet you do and yet no matter how many mistakes science makes you still trust in science why is that admit that gross double standard to yourself here's another one from science science demands proof for everything and yet where is the proof that everything true in the universe can be found using the scientific method has that ever been proven of course not then why do you assume that that's true why do you take that as a given why do you take that as scientific we've talked a lot about these scientific issues in a lot more depth in my series three-part series called deconstructing the myth of science part one part two part three so if you're interested in more detail about that because i won't go into it here go check out that series i've talked about science a lot here's another one from science science criticized religion when religion is defended on utilitarian grounds and yet when you corner a scientist on this issue of truth whether science is really true or not the scientists when backed into this corner will justify science and defense science based on utilitarian grounds so what does this mean this means you know like if you're arguing with a religious person and you know you back him into a corner with your arguments uh eventually the religious person might say well yeah you know maybe religion isn't all you know technically true and accurate maybe it's not really objective but the impact it has on my life you know it makes me a moral person it makes me a better person all these positive impacts that it has on my life you know like it's it's practical religion isn't just theory it's you know it's practical it's the way that i interact with people the way i take care of my children the way i think about my enemies and how i regard them it's all this kind of stuff and that's practical that that makes me feel good that improves my the quality of my life therefore we shouldn't throw out religion see that's the kind of argument that a religious person would make when backed into a corner now as an atheist or a scientific person you'd say well but but what about the truth of the matter you know like who cares whether it's practical or whether it's useful to you just because it makes you feel good doesn't mean that it's true and so you're kind of shifting the goal posts here when backed into a corner because really the issue was about the truth of whether you know whether god exists we want that like we want to know if that's true we don't care how you feel about how it makes you feel or if it makes you a better person we want to know if that's actually true well when you're arguing with a scientist the same exact situation arises but the scientists take a blind eye to it because you take an atheist or a scientist and then you start to question them about the truth of science and you can question them deeply enough to eventually to the point where you back them into a corner and they will be forced to admit that well leo no but you know science technically speaking science doesn't say anything about what's actually true science is just purely utilitarian pragmatic the reason science is valuable is because it can land a man on the moon and because it can build a computer not because it's true in any metaphysical sense so even if science is not metaphysically true it's still the best thing we've got because it's so useful for making our lives more comfortable essentially that's your defense of science you see but when you do this you're employing the exact same defense as a religious person and you're skirting this issue of truth because you can't really defend that issue of truth if questioned deeply enough but see when a scientific person or an atheist does this that's considered okay it's considered okay to justify signs on utilitarian grounds but it's never going to be acceptable to justify religion on utilitarian grounds that's a gross double standard become aware of that the next one is that science criticizes religion for appeals to authority and yet most of science hinges on appeals to authority when you argue with scientifically minded people and atheists and so forth most of these arguments devolve into appeals to authority they make appeals to authority you know einstein said this and quantum mechanics says that and my physics professor said this and this you know big name professor and intellectual said that these are all appeals to authority and yet these appeals to authority are considered okay whereas the religious appeals to authority are not considered okay another one is signs criticize religion for being circular but all the fundamental properties of science are also circular so for example a scientist might criticize religious person for saying something like well i believe in the bible because the bible is the word of god and how do i know that the bible is the word of god because the bible says so well that's circular reasoning but if you take a look at all the fundamental properties of science you know what is energy what is matter what is mass what is velocity what is distance what is time all of these are circularly interdefined in terms of themselves science does not give you any kind of ground for any of these fundamental properties it doesn't tell you what anything is it doesn't tell you what energy is what matter is what time is what distance is what um you know what charge is none of these are properly defined or grounded anything it's just an endless circle you know energy is defined in terms of mass and acceleration and distance and time and then time is defined in terms of distances and velocities and then you know energy is going to be defined in terms of something else and it's all defined it's just pointers pointing around to pointers it's a game of telephone and yet that's perfectly acceptable within science it's just excused away another one science ridicules the notion of god on the grounds that it's a magical thing that cannot be explained and has no cause and yet the universe as a whole or the big bang is exactly in that same position so somehow it's okay for a scientist to say that the entire universe came out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever 14 billion years ago somehow that's okay but to say that the entire universe came from god that's not okay it's pretty ridiculous another one scientists talk about being rational and objective like that's their ideal you know treat everything objectively and yet these scientists themselves don't behave objectively in their own life for example according to science there's no reason why there's anything wrong with your daughter being raped according to science because according to science there's no moral judgment between pain versus not pain between suffering and happiness science doesn't make any claims about these things there's no scientific proof or reason for why suffering is wrong or bad and yet when this scientist behaves and goes about living his life he's completely consumed by survival and the avoidance of suffering and pain and he doesn't treat these things as equivalent to pleasure and other things he treats them as bad and wrong and evil and his whole emotional system reacts in that way which is a complete double standard so how are you being objective for example as a scientist why do you value your life above the lives of poor hungry children in africa now if you were a true scientist if you were truly rational objective you would not value your life any higher than theirs but you do because actually you're very biased you're scared you're run by fear and survival you have sexual cravings and all these sorts of things you know as a scientist why would you want to have sex with a hot woman versus you know a fat ugly woman as a scientist if you're a male scientist it shouldn't matter to you if you were truly scientific but you're not see and in your mind you create this separation between well i'm doing my science when i'm in the laboratory then when i walk out of the laboratory i'm just a normal human yeah uh but you see your humanity and your science can't be so cleanly separated as you would like it to be how about the double standard of positivism positivism says that the only things that should be admissible within science are strictly empirical truths no metaphysical mumbo jumbo no philosophy no abstractions just strict objective facts that's what's true but then what is the status of positivism itself of that position positive positivism itself the position that only strictly empirical truths should be admissible within science that itself is not a strictly empirical truth how do you know that's true that's not an objective fact you find out in the world that's something that's an abstraction it's a philosophical scheme that you have invented see so you make an exception for your philosophical schemes and your metaphysics but you denounce all other metaphysical and epistemic schemes how come see that's a double standard how about with rationality rationalists love to talk about facts over feelings yet these very so-called rational people they get very emotional and triggered by irrationality by religious fundamentalism by new age people look at some of these debates on youtube by so-called rationalist people with religious people they get very very triggered they get very emotional they act in very irrational ways and yet they claim to be rational and to be holding facts over feelings when in fact their entire rationality is grounded in feelings not facts how about with skeptics skeptics like to take the attitude that everything should be doubted but if everything should be doubted what about your skepticism why don't we doubt that except most skeptics aren't really serious they hold a double standard and so they excuse their own skepticism from their skepticism and therefore they never end up doubting their skepticism and then they get stuck in this kind of shallow false skepticism which i've talked about in my episode called false versus true skepticism how about this one with terrorism there's a lot of double standards when it comes to terrorism first of all the way that label is used a lot of times especially like white americans will only use the word terrorist for a brown muslim or a foreigner they won't apply that label to a white person who commits a terrorist attack like a domestic terrorist they don't consider those people true terrorists see that's a double standard because really terrorism just means somebody executing a violent attack towards some sort of political agenda that's really all terrorism is it has nothing to do with your race or your religion but people hold a lot of double standards about that another one you know double standard when it comes to terrorism is people get very outraged when a few thousand people die in a terrorist attack you know oh my god we have to spend trillions of dollars and decades chasing down these terrorists and preventing this from ever happening again but then when a few thousand people every year die from lack of health care nobody raises an eyebrow over this this is a gross double standard and this is in fact the biggest problem with the way that america especially treats terrorism is you know um we get so outraged and emotional over terrorist attacks and then we let thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people die from lack of resources invested into education into drug rehabilitation into proper prisons and prison reform into health care and other sorts of safety nets people die from poverty and disease and all this stuff could could have easily been fixed you know if we took the couple of trillion dollars that we invested into the war in iraq and afghanistan and we threw that into education health care poverty drug rehab clinics improvement of prisons rehabilitation centers and so forth we could have saved like probably a million lives over a period of 10 20 years but we were so emotionally triggered by 911 which was only like 3 000 deaths or so you know regrettable of course horrific of course but just from covid in the last couple of years we've lost like what hundreds of thousands a million people from just from covid and that could have easily been prevented if we just invested a little bit more money into disease prevention pandemic prevention you know the government had a whole center set up uh whole programs for you know very rapid um you know contract tracing and vaccine develop all this kind of stuff and then this was defunded and it doesn't cost a lot you know just for like 10 billion dollars is all it costs to properly have you know preventative pandemic um preparedness and yet we're so distracted chasing terrorists because of 3 000 people who died on 9 11 that we completely take our eye off of what's really important if what's really important is human suffering and death we want to save lives and improve people's lives then our resources should be allocated towards totally different areas than chasing down terrorists uh and then the whole notion of what is a terrorist is also very relative there's a lot of double standards there you know one person's terrorist as they say is another person's freedom fighter also americans for example never consider their own military attacks as acts of terrorism so when drone strike kills some civilian casualties in the middle east to the middle easterners that can look like a terrorist act it's really indistinguishable from a terrorist act i mean what's the difference between a suicide bomber walking into a cafe and blowing up uh you know 20 people versus a drone strike blowing up you know the wrong building and blowing up the you know a family of 20 innocent civilians and of course there are differences there there's a different difference of intention and so forth but ultimately to the people who are getting killed there's not that much of a difference you know even if even if you blow up a civilian building with good intentions with a drone strike even if your intentions were good um you're still basically committing an act of terror on those people you're terrorizing people with those drones and the civilian casualty rates on drones have been reported to be as high as 90 percent i mean that's insane if you think about it uh who knows what the true number is really you're never going to know because it's too embarrassing for the pentagon or the military to release those numbers i mean they probably know or maybe even they don't know because to them if they actually knew it would probably be so horrific that they couldn't even live with them so they couldn't sleep with you know at night if they knew those numbers so maybe even they don't know i don't know who really knows what the numbers are but it's been estimated to be as bad as 90 civilian casualties from drone strikes that's pretty awful so who are the real terrorists here see americans never apply the label terrorism to themselves that's a gross double standard if we were truly honest intellectually we would call some of our own terrorists but we don't because it's too politically incorrect here's another double standard people love to criticize leaders and politicians for their sexual indiscretions and scandals but what about your sexual indiscretions and scandals what about the sexual manipulations that you engage in people just completely excuse those it's like when a politician loves sex that's somehow awful and despicable and immoral and yet we all love sex we all manipulate to get sex how about the double standard of post-modernism this is called the performative contradiction so post-modernism insists that all value systems are relative and therefore none should be privileged over any other you know one culture is no better than another culture one set of values is no better than other set of values and yet then post-modernism likes to impose itself as sort of the the pinnacle of all value systems and then it tries to impose relative relativity onto everybody else which is the performative contradiction that's a double standard because see if if postmodernism was truly consistent then it would allow other cultures and peoples who do not believe in postmodernism their own worldview that is not postmodernist but that's not usually what postmodernists um that's not usually how they behave usually post-modernism comes with the sort of uh a normative expectation that everyone's going to adopt post-modernism and agree with the truth of post-modernism but the whole point of post-modernism is that not everybody's going to agree with the truth of post-modernism because people have their own truths that's basically what post-modernism says so if i have my own truth then why can't my truth negate post-modernism the c-post monitors like that another example is well really it's a whole class of examples honestly there's no better source of examples for double standards than right wing media fox news oan breitbart uh youtubers like ben shapiro stephen crowder you know like turning points usa charlie kirk the whole maga movement uh jordan peterson all of this this this right-wing media is just filled just it's rife with so many double standards i mean it's it's comical and it's amazing that these guys don't see their own double standards because they really believe when they're criticizing the left or so forth they really believe that you know they're being intellectually honest they're really not the right wing is objectively guilty of more bias than hypocrisy than the left that now be careful here that doesn't mean that the left is free of double standards the left certainly has double standards progressives have double standards i'll be pointing some of those out to you as we keep going but just if you're honest if you inspect the whole field on both sides if you're honest you'll see that there's objectively more double standards and hypocrisy on the right and that's one of the reasons why i've claimed in the past and i continue to claim that the right on the whole is less psychologically developed less morally developed less spiritually developed than the left now when right-wingers hear that of course they accuse me of being biased and me having double standards but um it just is what it is i don't know how else to convince you of this i mean i can give you a lot of examples of of right-wing double standards there's so many of them for example with jordan peterson jordan peterson complains about the dangers of marxism and communism he holds this is one of the greatest dangers right now in modern times is you know the left spiral dynamic stage green going overboard and then going you know and committing the atrocities of communism all over again that's like one of his greatest fears and he talks about that a lot and yet the reality over the last few years with the maga movement is that nationalists neo-nazis and ultra right wingers were nearly able to pull off a coup of the united states government and trump and all of his allies and supporters of which jordan peters peterson is basically one of them he said he would vote for trump over hillary given that given that uh and everything we we know about the coup that the trump administration has you know tried to pull off like that would have been the an interruption in democracy the united states has had 250 years pretty much you know of a steady continuation of democracy that would be the first interruption in 200 years of democracy that's the guy that jordan peterson would vote for and i don't know i don't know if he would vote for him again knowing everything he knows now would he vote for him again i'm sort of tempted to say he probably would he would find some excuses for why you know behind his evil or something but but considering considering this all of the complaining that jordan peterson does about marxism and communism when the true honest threat is the coup that actually happened right you could come up with fantasies about how uh college kids are gonna become socialists and gonna turn into the us into some sort of soviet um uh style government you know a decade from now you can have fantasies about that kind of danger and maybe there's a small chance of that but the reality the real danger is that the right wing in this country having run amok with the maga movement who peterson would have voted for um and trump himself tried to stage a coup and are still in the process of undermining vote counting uh undermining the integrity of of elections getting people to doubt in the integrity this is directly corroding democracy if anything is going to destroy american government realistically it's not going to be some group of college kid marxists or trans people these people have no power but the ultra right wing with you know led by trump and steve bannon and the demagoguery that comes from that that is a realistic danger that could truly end democracy and yet nothing from jordan peterson on this now sure he'll he'll admit that you know trump isn't so great and trump has his problems he'll admit that but no no no it's not that trump has problems that's not the issue here the issue here is that he executed a [ __ ] coup and almost ended 200 years of democracy that's not like a little thing if jordan peterson was truly honest with himself about his double standards he would realize that the standard he places on the left for the dangers of the left versus what he places on the right are completely dishonest and completely out of balance skewed by his perspective on reality meaning that he would have to change his perspective on reality in order to correct that balance which is exactly what he will not do of course fox news is a great source of double standards just gross ridiculous double standards compare fox news's coverage for example of obama when he was in office you know they were complaining that obama was dividing the country and being racial he was racializing the politics in this country i mean compared to what trump did why aren't they complaining about trump dividing the country racializing the country the amount of racial attacks on jewish people on black people on asian americans skyrocketed under trump the amount of uh neo-nazi activity has skyrocketed under trump these are well-documented objective facts reported by the fbi other government agencies none of this happened under obama if you were intellectually honest you would actually admit that trump is the one who's dividing the country and who's being racial they also criticized obama for being undignified for wearing a tan suit for putting mustard on his burger i mean compared to trump obama is a [ __ ] saint in terms of dignity morality family values i mean it's absurd trump is like a serial cheater gotten divorced three times remarried three times has children out of wedlock all those kinds of stuff obama is a family man loyal family man no signs of cheating sex scandals see if fox news was truly honest and fair and balanced and didn't have double standards then they would be criticizing trump over the stuff not obama the tan suit fiasco is particularly amusing because actually there's a video of ronald reagan wearing a tan suit and ronald reagan you know fox news people love ronald reagan he's like their hero so why didn't they criticize ronald reagan for his tan suit but they criticized obama for wearing a tan suit as if obama was the first president to wear a [ __ ] tan suit see just ridiculous double standards and this is why fox news can't be taken seriously uh conservatives on states rights issues also gross double standard so when it's an issue like abortion you know they want to throw that to states rights you know oh well states should have the rights to decide for themselves uh but then a lot of conservatives when the idea comes up like if we ban abortion i mean like if we if we over overturn roe v v wade and then we propose um you know a law that will ban abortion at the federal level a lot of conservatives will be for that so they throw away states rights as soon as it's convenient for them because they just want to ban abortion everywhere so they don't really care about states rights they just use that as an excuse gross double standard and then um you know uh there are a lot of other issues when it comes to states rights where conservatives would object for example if we talk about legalizing all drugs conservatives would usually be against that and then you know a progressive might say well how about we do states rights every state whichever states wants you know let's say california wants to legalize heroin why can't they do that you know states rights a conservative would say no they don't have that right no maybe a few conservatives would would go so you know libertarian might say well yeah they do have that right but most conservatives would not go that far they would not say that california has the right to legalize heroin or psychedelics or whatever but you believed in states rights why should heroin be banned at the federal level why should we be banned at the federal level why should psychedelics be banned at the federal level if you truly believe in states rights and there's a lot of other issues like that which you know conservatives like to say they like states rights but actually if their agenda is passed at a federal level the they'll take it and they'll love it and they won't raise any issue about states rights in the end what you want is you want your laws passed across the whole country you don't really care about states rights you only care about it when you can use it as a weapon to you know prevent the other side's laws from being passed at the federal level another one that conservatives are guilty of is the double standard of complaining about welfare queens but then if a conservative loses his job he gets unemployment and then he's going to complain about his inadequate unemployment check and why is my unemployment check so low but see when a conservative is getting an unemployment check he doesn't consider himself a welfare queen but like when a black person is getting it or a non-conservative is getting it then all of a sudden they're welfare queens and they're leeching off the government but conservatives have no problem leeching off the government when it benefits them they're not principled about this at all consider you know conservative business owners will readily apply for subsidies and tax breaks to leech off the government to them corporate welfare is totally fine and yet they complain about welfare queens um also conservatives love to criticize government handouts but then they take them when they're in need famously ayn rand the libertarian founder of libertarianism basically iron rand um you know she was very very critical of of government handouts and then later in her life she got government subsidies and support when she couldn't afford to pay for herself in her retirement see double standard how about um conservatives on protesting conservatives love to criticize protesters like they love to criticize for example you know the colin kaepernick nfl players who are kneeling peacefully so when a football player kneels peacefully to protest you know whatever racial injustice that's you know that's very disrespectful that disrespects the country the flag the nfl and all those sorts of stuff so they're not allowed to do that okay but then when those people protest outside the football stadium on the streets they're also not allowed to do that they're not allowed to you know conservatives will criticize people uh protesting racial justice on the streets that's also bad and then when something like blm you know stages a riot somewhere and actually does violence or destroys property well that's outrageous too that's also not allowed so so how are you allowed to protest you're not allowed to protest violently you're not allowed to process in the streets you're not allowed to protest peacefully by taking a knee on the on the football stadium so in essence you're not allowed to protest but the constitution guarantees u.s citizens the right to protest gross double standard and then of course when conservatives are protesting when they're staging some sort of rally like unite the right rally charlottesville rally you know some sort of kkk rally or whatever that's okay they get permits for those and then they get upset when they're denied their permits so really they're just for protesting when it's their side and against protesting when it's not their side that's the double standard how about um on fracking uh uh i read a news story some years ago about um like a wealthy republican advocate for fracking he was like a business owner and he was advocating for the safety of fracking and fracking is good and all that kind of stuff but then when fracking when some company came to do fracking in his small town that he lived in in his backyard basically he filed a lawsuit against them and went through this whole big court trial uh to stop them from from fracking in his backyard see it's this kind of double standard that we're talking about how about with religion like um most religious fundamentalists take their holy book and their scriptures on faith as true everything in the quran is true everything in the bible is true and so on but if you're going to take your holy book on on faith why don't you take other holy books on faith and afford them the same credence and benefit of the doubt that you afford the bible so a christian will take the bible on faith but then the quran not why and you know vice versa a muslim will take the quran on faith but perhaps not the bible or not some buddhist text or some hindu text why not obvious gross double standard here's another example you criticize aggressive moves by other countries against your country but you don't criticize the aggressive moves of your country this is a classic one classic double standards that come especially with nationalism if you're a nationalist then you're going to be very guilty of this you're going to see the aggressions of your country as just defensive maneuvers and then you're going to see the aggressions of other countries as evil aggressive you know they're evil aggressors another one is people are outraged when other countries interfere with their country's election system and undermine their democracy but not when your country does the same to other countries so when americans are undermining democracy all around the world in russia in the middle east and in latin america no one cares that's all fine but then when when russia is undermining and meddling in our elections here now we're all outraged about it how about when it comes to wars you know like russia invading ukraine that's an evil war of aggression the us invading iraq well we're liberators and we're defending the world from terrorists preposterous double standard and that ruins america's credibility around the world see if the us did not evade iraq then now when putin invaded ukraine we would have a lot more moral standing and credibility but we don't we sacrificed that by invading iraq how about this double standard nationalists and evangelicals are outraged when muslims want sharia law which is just basically they want a theocracy under the banner of islam but yet these same nationalists you know like american nationalists and evangelicals they basically want their own version of theocracy christian law gross double standard how about this one the constitution is sacred and we should do everything in the constitution right a lot of conservatives will say that we got to conserve the constitution at all costs okay but the constitution considered black people to not even be fully human do you agree with that is that what you want to conserve so what is it should we be conserving the constitution or should we be modifying and evolving the constitution see it's a gross double standard because what conservatives do is they cherry pick the constitution for whatever things they like and the things they don't like or that don't serve them they just ignore those i call that cherry picking it's a very sneaky self-deception mechanism and in general that happens with uh all religious people who try to follow moral prescriptions from any holy book like from the bible or from the quran or whatever what they do is they cherry pig there's a lot of moral prescriptions in all these books that they completely ignore and then other ones that they fixate on and this turns into quite legendary degrees of hypocrisy how about this example if a radical islamist kills five people then westerners want to blame all muslims for that and all muslims have to answer to that and all muslims now must denounce violence you hear this on tv it's like why won't all muslims denounce this radical islamists who killed five people they're not doing it yeah but when a radical you know christian domestic terrorist shoots 20 people in a church crickets why aren't there calls for all good christians to come and to denounce this radical christian who killed 20 people in a church why is it that muslims have to answer for all violence by muslims but christians don't have to answer to all the violence done by christians for example you know when george w bush decided to invade iraq back in the 2000s i remember very vividly he said you know god told him basically he was talking to god and god basically convinced him that this was a good move a good decision so in essence the iraq war was started by a christian george w bush and his administration was you know full of christians so you could call it a christian war but why don't we call it a christian war and why don't all christians have to answer for the horrors and evils and blunders of iraq a lot of christian nationalists in america want odes to office to be taken on the bible but then they're outraged when muslims take odes on the quran in the u.s christians love to complain about leftist politicians and their sex scandals like bill clinton and so forth and the lack of the lack of family values but then when a right-wing politician comes along who's a serial cheater like trump or newt gingrich they just turn a blind eye to that i mean of all the presidents we've had trump was the worst on family values objectively the worst on family values of probably any president in the last 100 years and yet he has the most evangelical support in america i mean it's it's preposterous the degrees of double standard that are happening here uh you know conservatives also believe that killing a zygote is evil but killing a grown animal for sport that's good conservatives will you know support the blue support police until the police come after you and you know your politicians and the fbi comes after trump for for uh for running off with a bunch of classified documents then all of a sudden you know now we have to defund the fbi it's ridiculous conservatives got into a whole huge um uh you know had a whole conniption about hillary clinton and her classified emails stored on her private server but the degree of violation of classified information that trump is guilty of now is way worse than anything hillary clinton was guilty of i mean it's preposterous trump doesn't give a [ __ ] about protecting classified documents i mean if you were intellectually honest you would admit this complaints from the right wing about censorship you know the right wing loves to talk about freedom of speech and all that but the reality is that a lot of right wings politicians and conservatives they pass legislation they ban books from classrooms um the right wing has been guilty of censorship in this country you know for since the very beginning censorship of pornography censorship of of profanity censorship of certain kinds of books censorship of um socialist ideology you know the mccarthy era that what was that that was right-wing censorship so this idea that the right wing doesn't engage in censorship it's preposterous there's double standards around homosexuality and homophobia uh a lot of people who object to homosexuality the most who are the most vocal you know against it a lot of them are actually homosexual closeted homosexuals there's actually been science scientific studies that that correlate the like the degree to which you are anti-homosexual is actually correlated with um arousal towards photographs of naked men there's a correlation there i mean it's not a perfect one-to-one but there is some correlation there how about the double standard of uh application of laws when it comes to punishing criminals so a lot of times conservatives want like maximum punishments for criminals but then when they themselves commit a crime then all of a sudden they want you know they come up with excuses and they want lacks lacks punishments so you want criminals punished but as soon as you become a criminal now you don't want criminals punished you want exceptions for yourself how about uh american nationalism as a whole is a ridiculous double standard where it's like this is our land you immigrants go home go back to your country and meanwhile the native americans are sitting there thinking wait a minute this was our land you're the immigrants why don't you go back to europe now i've been [ __ ] on conservatives for a long time now it's time to [ __ ] a little bit on progressives the progressives have also double standards one really ridiculous one that i've noticed lately is with defunding the police this is such a stupid progressive idea this idea of defunding the police horrible horrible idea horrible slogan horrible politics horrible optics all of it is awful but what what just struck me as the height of hypocrisy is on january 6th progressive commentators they were outraged at the lack of police presence around the us capitol and they were screaming you know where are the police why weren't there more police was there some sort of secret plot to you know remove the police the police weren't properly trained they weren't properly prepared they were incompetent all this kind of stuff well how can the police be properly prepared and trained and how can there be sufficient numbers of them if you if you want to defund them all this is preposterous also i've noticed some progressives some like extreme progressives like with this trump fbi raid stuff that's been happening lately um the conservatives have been saying yeah let's defund the fbi which is a [ __ ] stupid idea and then the progressives have some progressives have been like yeah why don't we yeah i mean we agree uh finally there's something we agree on the progressives want to defund the fbi because you know the fbi has been used historically against black people and socialists and so forth um so yeah the progressives want to defund fbi and the conservatives mega movement wants to defund fbi so between the two of us let's come together and defund the fbi this is this is so [ __ ] stupid um do you understand what this country would devolve into without the fbi the fbi are those who chase down your drug dealers um and i don't mean weed i mean like dangerous drug dealers um you're cyber criminals you're scammers your white collar criminals cyber crime pedophilia fbi has a whole pedophile division you want to defund the fbi that basically means you're pro pedophilia that's how stupid that is the fbi serves a very important function but anyways um that's a double standard for you there um and then you know if you did defund the fbi and then your child was you know sexually molested by an adult you would be outraged by this but then of course that's the double standard because hey you wanted to defund the fbi well who else is going to police that [ __ ] for you someone has to police it it's not going to police itself you know that requires a lot of money to police that moving on though let's move on to communism you know in communism there was gross double standards you know especially like in the soviet era i'm talking about like party leaders in the soviet union basically professed this sort of like morality of equality you know all of us are comrades we're all equal we're almost on the same field we're all going to earn about the same amount of money and so forth but actually secretly all these communists took bribes to get better material goodies for themselves and to hold on to exclusive positions of power within the communist party and so actually even though under communism it's supposed to be like a flat hierarchy right that was the point of communism remove the hierarchy all of us are going to be equal we're all going to earn roughly the same amount of money no one's going to be some elite lording over us but then in practice what happened is that the communist party itself became a very strict hierarchy and the way you ascend that hierarchy is through bribes and other sorts of shady deals and the higher your position the hierarchy the better apartment you would get the better car you would get the better food you would get and all that sorts of stuff so in essence communism just even though in in theory it was supposed to remove the hierarchical structures of oppression of capitalism in practice it removed them all and then it recreated them all under the guise of communism and this is exactly what is the case right now in china too china pretends to be communist but in practice they're actually more capitalist and they're extremely hierarchical and if you wanna you know have any political power in china you're gonna have to climb that hierarchy even more so than you have to do in america it's actually harder it's harder to be a politician in china than it is in america because in america it's actually an open system basically anybody can run for office in china you can only run for office if the right communist um party leaders approve of you and they're going to want bribes and all that kind of stuff how about this one this double standard a few nations in the world are allowed to have nuclear weapons like the uk the us china russia a few others that i'm forgetting who but um france and so forth but then everybody else is not allowed to what kind of ridiculous double standard is that why can't iran have nuclear weapons i mean shouldn't every country have the right to defend itself where's the justice in that how about this double standard people love to count the deaths of communism over the last 100 years you know communism has killed 100 million people they say okay but what about the deaths under capitalism how many how many people has capitalism killed in the last hundred years nobody counts that that would be a very interesting number to count also nobody really likes to count how many lives have been uplifted by communism for example take a look at um even russia but especially china take a look at china and you know if you consider china to be communist which is really um silly to consider them that but you know right-wingers will consider china to be communists so if you're a right-winger and you consider a child to be communist take a look at how communism under china in the last 50 years has improved their um their wealth their prosperity of the average chinese person it's made life in china so much better but see that's not counted towards communism because you know the capitalists love to count how capitalism has improved the lives of so many people as if capitalism is the only system that can improve people's lives if you're going to count the improvements under capitalism also you should be fair and count the improvements under communism too communism actually improved the lives of russians over the last hundred years enormously russia was basically like a medieval state a hundred years ago under soviet communism it went through rapid industrialization rapid development now of course there was enormous problems i'm not denying those but you should also be fair about its successes because see you would admit you'd have to admit that there are enormous problems under capitalism too but just because there's enormous problems doesn't mean capitalism isn't viable or that it shouldn't exist or that it's bad there's good size there's bad sides you gotta you know weigh apples to apples here how about when the us places missile silos in europe pointed at russia that's considered okay and non-aggressive the us is just defending itself nato is just defending itself but if russia placed nuclear missile silos in mexico there would be complete outrage on american tv there's no way america would settle for that how about this one the alternative media loves to criticize mainstream media for its bias and for tearing the country apart but the reality is that alternative media is more biased and tears the country apart even more or at least as much as mainstream media all these youtubers these progressive youtubers conservative youtubers and podcasters and so forth um they're tearing the country apart and they're way more biased than cnn or msnbc they're way less professional they're way less accurate if you compare the inaccuracies on cnn to the inaccuracies that you see from alternative media on youtube you're going to get way more inaccuracies on alternative media simply because they don't have the same budgets they don't have enough fact checkers and personnel to staff these small little media outlets so there's going to be more errors and they can't afford to have a whole team of journalists now does that mean cnn is never inaccurate no it's it's got inaccuracies does that mean cnn isn't biased no it's got its biases but you got to compare apples to apples here you can't just ignore all the bias that's happening in alternative media it's pretty bad especially if you take into account twitter facebook tick tock the amount of bias on these platforms i mean these platforms are like the bottom of the barrel when it comes to bias you couldn't get more bias than that and in general what happens with with this double standard when it comes to politics is that there's a criticism of the out groups politicians the ones who are not on your side your opponents you criticize them to hell as being corrupt but then those who are part of your tribe the politicians that represent your tribe you ignore all of their corruptions so all of trump's supporters ignore the corruptions of trump they're so blind to it it's as though trump isn't corrupt in their mind i mean it's preposterous but also uh the left wing does this too certainly left-wing politicians can be corrupt and as a left-winger you can notice yourself kind of like turning a blind eye to some of the minor corruptions of your own politicians notice that all right let's start to move away from politics we kind of got wrapped up in that because i mean honestly there's religion and politics are like the two biggest examples or categories of double standards it's so obvious there let's move on to some more subtle ones like for example when you are negotiating the price of something like let's say you're you're buying a house well when you're buying a house you're trying to negotiate the price down you want the lowest price but if you were the seller in that situation if you were selling the house then you would you would try to argue the price up and you would make all sorts of stories and excuses for why you know well you know in this market i should get more i should get or i should have to pay less you know whatever you're gonna whenever you're negotiating for the price you're always negotiating in your own favor with a gross double standard also in business you know corporations and ceos love to argue that unions are unfair they give you know unfair power excessive power um and they get in the way of you know honest negotiations between employees and the corporation this is preposterous a preposterous double standard because the reality is that the leverage that a corporation or ceo has over his employees is like you know it's like a thousand to one leverage so a union is just equalizing that and even then in most cases corporations and ceos will still have more leverage even over a powerful union how about with circumcision female circumcision is considered obscene and horrific and evil whereas male circumcision is desirable what's the difference another category where there's an enormous amount of double standards is just between races especially between blacks and whites and it's in favor of whites obviously to the disadvantage of blacks there are so many examples here many of them are so obvious i won't even mention them but when it comes to all sorts of forms of discrimination when buying a house when selling a house i recently read an article in the news that said that a black couple listed their house on the market at one price and then they did something where then they sort of pretended that they were white instead of black and then the valuation of their house like went up by a couple hundred thousand just because when they first started it looked like they were black and then and then later it looked like they were white i mean ridiculous double standards like this um so of course you know racism itself is basically um double standard incarnate um this also applies to different cultures you know treating one culture as above other cultures is sort of western chauvinism thinking that western culture is the best culture this kind of stuff but of course you know like the chinese are guilty of this too you know basically every culture thinks it's the best the chinese think their culture is the best indians think their culture is the best russians think their culture is the best and japanese think theirs is the best and this is preposterous of course and um there is no such thing as the best culture even though also there are many you know there are many features to culture some cultures have better features than other cultures you have to like compare them at sort of a fine-grained level i'm not saying they're all equally good but the treat one culture is above the others it's a gross double standard there's also speaking of culture there's a lot of arbitrariness within cultural norms and etiquette so just the etiquette of the west versus japan versus china there's a lot of like arbitrariness to that and there's a lot of double standards just like you know how do you hold a fork how do you talk to your boss or employee how do you hold a door open for somebody or shouldn't you you know how do you eat your food do you you know chew with your mouth open or close like a lot of like arbitrary standards like this a lot of double standards when it comes to that uh there's a lot of double standards that women have towards men especially when it comes to sexuality and dating for example you know fat men love to complain about women being fat but then they ignore the fact that all their friends are fat and they're fat um men love to complain about how easy it is for women to get sex but they don't take into account many of the problems that women have in getting sex and dating so there's gross double standards there especially a problem within the in-cell communities within the ncl community there's so many ridiculous double standards that these in-cells have towards women and their expectations about sex and about how they look it's just it's it's so toxic and ridiculous uh within pickup there's a lot of double standards you know for example here's one it's like in in pickup there's a there's a sort of a common attitude that you know all girls are disloyal [ __ ] and cheaters um but then when you're talking to a girl and she doesn't end up sleeping with you you know she's actually not easy she's actually you know she's not loose she's not a [ __ ] she's actually you know loyal she has a boyfriend or something the pickup guy will get upset and say oh that [ __ ] why didn't she sleep with me well which is it are women disloyal [ __ ] and [ __ ] and they're all loose and easy or are they actually uh you know loyal and but then why are you complaining that she didn't sleep with you if she's a disloyal [ __ ] then how come she didn't sleep with you so easily how come she was loyal to her boyfriend see but the pickup ideology discounts that because it doesn't care about the truth of the matter it doesn't care about being objective it just cares about validating its own you know self-serving beliefs and for pickup guys they need to create a story in their mind that all women are disloyal [ __ ] because in reality the pickup guy is there to sleep with hundreds of women so he has to justify to himself that he's cheating on all these women every night and lying to them and so forth and being disloyal to them he has to justify that the only way he can justify that is by saying that well women are doing the same thing or are even worse so therefore i'm allowed to do it because if you realize that women are actually very loyal you would feel horrible about cheating on them and being disloyal to them and also most pick up guys take this attitude that you know well if if a girl cheats on me that's wrong and evil but if i sleep around with a bunch of girls that's okay ridiculous ridiculously self-serving i got a few more scientific ones for you for example science says that we can't accept god without proof and yet science accepts the existence of an external objective world without any proof science also accepts the existence of other conscious beings without any proof science also will not accept the paranormal without proof but science readily accepts logic without proof where's the proof that logic is absolutely true science complains about the dangers of religion and mysticism but science completely ignores the dangers of science and materialism how come religion and science are so dangerous but nuclear weapons well that's not science's fault or genetic engineering that's not science's fault or heavy metals in our water supply and leaded gasoline and pollution that's not science's fault well whose fault is that compare the amount of people that have been killed by science and compare the amount of people have been killed by religion you'll be in for a very rude awakening and yet that does not in any way detract the value of science or the legitimacy of science in the mind of a scientist because they create all sorts of excuses but when a religious person creates excuses or a mystic creates excuses for the dangers of religion and mysticism well those are not accepted those are unacceptable excuses that's called [ __ ] but when a scientist does it it's not called [ __ ] and in general we've talked about this before but just to touch on it lightly there's a lot of double standards when it comes to the way that you're using the labels of logical and rational so basically what people do is that their pet theories and beliefs no matter whether they're true or not or rational or not those are called rational and logical and those with other people's who you disagree with they're called illogical and irrational not because they actually are but simply because that's how you use those labels in a very double standard way another double standard that i see commonly especially given my position is people love to accuse anything they disagree with anything that's kind of like non-mainstream any kind of ideology or worldview that's a little bit off the beaten path and talks about non-material things they always call that oh that's a cult but they never apply that same label to for example fields of science or academia or what's going on in universities they don't call that a cult they don't call mainstream delusions occult they don't call materialism a cult why not if you were honest you would so the label cult is is weaponized in this way here's an interesting double standard that i noticed when i was young that always just puzzled me a lot of these double standards are actually easier to notice when you're young when your mind hasn't yet been programmed with them when you're first interacting with society because once you've been deeply ingrained in society and brainwashed with it you start to become just um like a fish and water and you you can't see the double standards anymore but like for example what always puzzled me is the death of celebrities when a celebrity dies there's all this mourning and people come out and they're they're so thankful to the celebrity how amazing the celebrity was and all this how you know oh my god it's so sad we lost this amazing celebrity this actor this musician whatever but then on the news every day you read people dying getting stabbed shot killed run over by cars all this sort of stuff you know children elderly whatever and nobody gives a [ __ ] about these people they're not mourned nobody cries over them nobody tells them how beautiful or important they were how much they were loved but what's the difference what's the difference between kobe bryant dying and some random nobody dying which happens every there's no [ __ ] difference if you were truly objective about it it's just that you have an emotional attachment to kobe bryant but why should that dictate how sad or how heartbroken we should feel why i mean honestly why do you feel more heartbroken for the death of kobe bryant than you do for any other person in the world like it makes no sense at all if you were truly objective about it uh here's a case cutting in line have you ever stood in line and had somebody cut in front of you and then how that makes you pissed off right and yet what about when you try to do that yourself there's a long line to the club and then you sneak in front i've done that um it's very interesting to observe when i do that sometimes i do cut in line like vegas club lines can can be awful sometimes i have ways of cutting through vegas club lines um sometimes i would even bribe my way through i can pay the bouncer slip them 20 or i have i have other means that i've you know sneaky sneaky ways of cutting through lines because some of these lines are awful um i don't do it all the time just occasionally but i noticed myself doing this and also i noticed myself like usually i don't do that that's actually something i started doing just recently um my whole life i would i basically never do it i was very like integris in the sense that i would refuse to cut in line because i don't like people cutting in line in front of me but actually as part of my development i've sort of been like exploring my shadow side my evil side a little bit so you know i allow myself little evil maneuvers like this now and then just to kind of test myself because i know that i'm going to let this go right i'm going through this as part of like getting the immaturity out of my system burning through my karma basically um so i've been practicing that and just seeing kind of like how it [ __ ] with my mind because i do break integrity when i cut in line i do break integrity when i bribe somebody even though vegas nightclubs like bouncers there are like bright i mean it's it's like standard practice to bribe bouncers basically at vegas nightclubs um it happens like hundreds of times every night uh but still interesting to observe that interesting to observe what it does to your psyche how you feel about your own self whether you feel guilty about it or not see most people who cut in line or pay a bribe they don't even think about it they don't even think about what they're doing and how this is hurting their development or another related point to this is trying to get special treatment i know a lot of a lot of people try to get special treatment like they get they try to like haggle their way to some sort of special discount you know they go to a store maybe they're they're doing something like they're buying something and you know they try to get a better deal here they try to go freebie there this kind of stuff special treatment i call this um but really when you're trying to get special treatment you're you're creating double standards and this is something that i've developed a habit of not doing there are situations in which i could get special treatment if i kind of like skillfully my new maneuver myself you know with with my speech craft skills and so forth so to speak but um but i tend not to want to do it because i don't i don't want special treatment but a lot of people they i notice that they try to get special treatment in fact they have developed a habit of expecting special treatment and they see nothing wrong with this they don't they don't see how this hurts them in their development and in their consciousness so i'm pointing that out to you just in case you're one of those people uh there's a whole set of double standards that come with being rich and being upper class a lot of upper class people sort of just expect certain doors to be open to them and they're very entitled in certain ways for example upper class people will expect to be able to lobby government and they're totally fine with having disproportional influence on the government you know our government system in america our democracy is fundamentally predicated upon the idea of one person one vote everyone should have equal power in electing somebody basically but then millionaires and billionaires you know they have no qualms about donating a billion dollars here or million dollars there or exerting various kinds of pressure to basically essentially what they're doing is they're buying votes they're not literally buying votes but basically it's the equivalent of buying votes such that a person with a billion dollars who donates that billion dollars towards some sort of lobbying firm basically that company that person has the equivalent power of enacting their legislation or their agenda or having their favorite politician elected they're increasing their power by like a thousand-fold so in essence they're having a thousand votes or a million votes more than the average person which is corrupting our entire system and um this is a gross double standard because i'm sure if you ask one of these rich people do you believe in one person one vote they would say yes but then in fact behind the scenes they're lobbying they're donating all this kind of stuff and they don't hold it in their mind as corrupting the voting system and in general you know the rich tend to feel entitled and justified to their upper class status and wealth and therefore they support the status quo and the capitalist system because they're at the top of it so of course they're benefiting so to them it seems like everything is great but here's a double standard is that if they happen to be born in a slightly different position slightly different part of the country slightly different part of the world slightly lower in the in the hierarchy um then they would be stuck in poverty and then they would curse the system and this this is a this is a profound double standard that almost all rich and upper class people hold and they've held this um since the dawn of civilization because when you're rich it does not serve you to see the double standard that is resulting in your wealth and power and there almost always is a double standard that is responsible for that even though you tell yourself otherwise how about with the new age and alternative medicine fields in these fields there's a lot of double standards for example you might go to some new age healer like with some sort of pain in your stomach or something you go to this you know reiki healer the reiki ladies you know she moves her hands around your stomach and then if you're feeling better the next day then she's gonna take credit for it and she's going to say oh well it was it was the spirit of reiki that healed you but if you're not feeling better she's not going to take credit for not fixing you she's not going to say to yourself oh well the spirit of reiki didn't work on you she's gonna find some excuse to say well that's because you know you did something wrong you weren't receptive enough to the energy you need to have more faith your faith wasn't strong enough i've noticed this kind of logic and these kind of double standards with alternative medicine healers and new agers reiki people they're so full of [ __ ] they're so full of [ __ ] basically when it happens to work they take credit for it and if it doesn't work they don't even acknowledge that it didn't work they turned a blind eye to it same thing with shaktipat i've had shaktipat done it's so preposterous you go to these shaktipot people and they they promise you that they can awaken you they can awaken your kundalini they can enlighten you through their you know through an energy transmission then you know you're skeptical of it but you say okay fine do it on me let's just practice and see you know what the hell let's take a gamble you do it a few times um if it works they're going to take credit for it and they're going to use you as an example of one of their you know one of their testimonials one of their good clients and they're going to count that towards how effective they are at their shaktipat but when it doesn't work what do they do well they blame you of course they say oh you're not ripe enough you're just not spiritually ripe enough yet you're not ready you're resisting it there's something within you that's holding you back you're not open enough or like you know you're one of those people you know we all have different karma and you just have more karma therefore for you it's going to take longer so just keep coming longer they take no responsibility for the fact that um that it's not working not because of the client but because you know their their shakti pot fantasies aren't as reliable as they think they are another one from science you know errors in religion prove that religion is [ __ ] but errors in science are just evidence that science is real and honest and willing to correct itself it's such a ridiculous double standard how about science is attitude towards psychedelics like a scientist will say oh well leo all the insights you get from psychedelics are just hallucinations okay fine but if we adopt that standard then all the insights of science are generated through neurotransmitters through serotonin a psychedelic is basically a neurotransmitter so therefore if all psychedelics are just a hallucination then all of science is also hallucination are you willing to bite that bullet no a general double standard goes like this is that you know humans are very tribal and we want to say that our tribe is right and the other tribe is wrong and our tribe has good intentions whereas the other side the other tribe has bad intentions so this ascribing of intentionality is done in a selfish and a biased way such that like you know conservatives thinks that think that progressives have bad intentions and progressives think that conservatives have bad intentions well what is the actual truth well the truth is that everybody has good intentions see my episode about that everyone has good intentions but they're at different levels of consciousness they have different corruptions from the ego mind and so forth different levels of self-esteem through this your good intentions get corrupted and turned into what looks like bad intentions but this is a double standard that is commonly seen another one is complaining about the evils of capitalism on the one hand but then when it comes to how you earn your own money using capitalism that gets ignored that's okay because you need that to live yeah well everybody within capitalism needs what they're doing in order to survive that's capitalism for you the reality and this is why communism failed the reality is that if you eliminate capitalism what's going to happen is that and then you enact socialism or communism is socialism and communism most the people are so underdeveloped that they are going to resort to all the same exploitative tactics that existed under capitalism except now it's going to be under the umbrella of socialist and communist ideology which is exactly what you see in modern china and also you saw it in soviet um soviet communist russia and you see it basically in any socialist country cuba and elsewhere you the the it turns out the structures of capitalism are so uh profoundly important to survival that you can't eliminate them now i'm not saying that we shouldn't try to you know find some sort of post-capitalist solution we should but this sort of naive idea that socialists and communists have that oh if we could just get rid of capitalism and then enact socialism everything's gonna be great it's like no you don't understand how deep of a problem this is um just because you eliminate capitalism in name and in theory doesn't mean that you'll be able to eliminate it in practice for example in north korea where supposedly they have eliminated capitalism because it's a communist state um in reality the only way that country functions uh you know there'd be so much there'd be so many people dying of hunger in that country if there didn't exist capitalist black markets so when it comes to like buying your groceries in north korea you know you can kind of go to a normal store and try to get some food and stuff but it's not enough it's not enough for you to survive so in practice the north koreans are resorted to having secret black markets where they trade goods you know it could be food could be just household items and stuff like that just the basic necessities of life they have to trade that outside of their sort of like standard store system government run system because the government system run system is not providing them sufficient resources for basic living so um they're forced to do this black market trading stuff and basically they have to do it as a market capitalism style and the government what's even what's even more perverse is that the north korean government knows about all these black markets it's not like these black markets are like inaccessible to the police and so forth no the police themselves are engaged in these black markets because the police couldn't function without the black markets so everybody knows about the black markets but it's sort of like a you know it's like an open secret everybody knows about it and the government doesn't even bother cracking down on them because they know that if they did it would [ __ ] collapse the whole system so the communist system depends on the capitalist black markets and that's exactly how communism has always been and how it would be if if it was enacted today uh how about this double standard people love to complain when spiritual teachers charge money for their teachings it's like oh well leo you are so spiritual you don't need money you're god you don't need money why are you charging me for a course but then when it comes to how you behave in your life how you pay your bills you know i got to pay my bills but the question is how do you pay your bills you have no problem you know if you work at starbucks you have no problem charging your customers money and if a customer came into your starbucks and said well why aren't you uh giving me free coffee you would you would never i mean you would laugh them out of the store of course i'm charging you for coffee of course i'm charging you for being here you know like for example um why do you expect your boss to pay you a salary why aren't you working for free at starbucks you expect a salary why but leo you're so spiritual you shouldn't need a salary but i'm also material i still when i go to the store i have to pay the money like when i go to starbucks to get a coffee which i don't but if i did um i would have to give them cash right i couldn't say that i couldn't go to a starbucks and say oh you know i'm leo i'm the spiritual guy therefore give me a free a coffee they would laugh me out of the store therefore i need money i can't do that with you know the electric company my cable company that provides me internet you know like um they're not going to accept my spiritual teachings as payment they need cash and therefore be careful with your double standards when it comes to spiritual teachers spiritual teachers need to eat too just like everybody else gotta pay our mortgage and gotta pay the electric bill gotta go shopping gotta you know health care bills to pay all that [ __ ] you don't escape that by being spiritual i wish it worked that way but it doesn't um how about complaining about big oil companies and the evils of pollution and oil but then you use those companies and their oil for your road trips to get to work to drive to the club you fuel up at the chevron station at the exxon mobil station at the shell station these are the same companies that you are you know railing against for being evil and yet you need these companies to get about your life how about this one this one has always struck me as such a crazy preposterous double standard it's considered completely unacceptable to show sex in a children's cartoon this would be perceived almost equivalent to pedophilia and yet showing murder to children in a cartoon is considered not only acceptable but a legitimate form of fun and entertainment why is it okay to show murder but not okay to show sex we have our priorities backwards also for example parents are outraged when children make stupid mistakes in their youth and yet those parents made the same stupid mistakes in their youth so what are you outraged about you know when your daughter sneaks off to go making out with some boy from middle school as the parent you might get pissed off but then you did the same [ __ ] when you were in middle school or like when your daughter smokes some weed in middle school you get pissed off as the parent but then you did the same [ __ ] and probably even worse when you were in middle school also parents love to scold their children for cursing you know they don't want their children to curse say [ __ ] and so on and yet parents themselves curse more than children how about most people believe that stealing is wrong and yet for example if a store clerks makes a checkout mistake in your favor which is essentially you stealing something from the store that you turn a blind eye to that that's acceptable that's not wrong because you know they made the mistake how about this one butchering a cow is okay but butchering a human is evil why this double standard beating a horse is okay but beating an employee is wrong why another scientific one you know deepak chopra um he's ridiculous because he doesn't understand quantum mechanics and he's just using it to justify some sort of woo ideas and yet how about the fact that the fathers of quantum mechanics like niels bohr and schrodinger einstein others they were all into mysticism how do you square that go check out my episode called quantum mechanics deconstructs materialism part 2 where i read you quotes of all these fathers of quantum mechanics and their passion for mysticism how about this double standard something like as much as 50 of all scientific studies these days fail to get replicated and validated that means they're done once the result is published and then 10 years later somebody does the study again and then they fail to replicate the results which means that the original result was basically bad science so even though we know that something like up to 50 of scientific studies failed replication yet we still demand scientific studies as proof before we accept a thing why it's basically a coin flip whether the scientific study that you're citing as proof is going to actually prove the thing you think it proves it's pretty bad odds it's a coin flip why even do the studies at that point another general double standard that i see is application of spiritual logic misapplication of spiritual logic in a sort of a double standard way like um well i already sort of gave you one example with you know expecting spiritual teachers not to charge money but there's a lot of examples of this like for example you might say something like well you know i know that god exists because i've had some awakenings let's say and so since god exists um you know i don't have to i don't have to worry about doing my taxes because god will take care of it for me like this kind of logic um there's a lot of like weird ways in which you can apply spiritual logic sort of like unevenly like you expect god to do this thing for you but not that thing and um this gets you into all sorts of all sorts of problems and trouble so be very careful with how you're applying spiritual logic and a lot of times when you're when you're you know talking with some other spiritual person there's conflations of relative and absolute truths that can happen and you can use relative and absolute critiques in sort of selective ways i've talked about this in the past um as one of the traps of of this spiritual work is conflating the relative and the absolute so what would be an example of this like maybe your girlfriend comes to you and you know she's crying because something bad happened at work and then you tell her something like well but you know you know baby um um you know that's it's all just you know work it's just an illusion your boss he yeah your boss is an [ __ ] but that's just it's just an illusion in this case you're kind of speaking from the absolute point of view right and technically what you're saying is true so you're not saying anything wrong there the problem is that you're you're having a double standard in how you apply this because you see then when something happens to you and you come crying to her you know you'd be very upset if she used that same logic back on you for example let's say um [Music] let's say your neighbor ran over your dog and your dog died and then you would come crying to her about how you know my neighbor's an [ __ ] he ran over my dog and then she would tell you like oh baby don't worry your dog was just an illusion see if she told you that that would also be true but you would be pissed off about it and in your own mind you don't think of your dog as an illusion it's much easier to think of your girlfriend's boss who you've never met who's just some sort of nuisance that she's telling you about it's much easier to think of him as as just an illusion than it is to think of your you know your beloved dog is an illusion so you have to be very careful about you know casting things as illusions or dismissing things as illusions because even you know everything is an illusion in the end but if you're gonna go that route well then you have to apply that logic equally you can't just cherry pick things and say well that thing is an illusion and that thing's an illusion because i don't want to deal with it but then the things that you know are close to me well those things aren't illusions so be careful about that another common double standard i see is accusations of grifting and criticizing people for making money now of course sometimes you can make a legit criticism of somebody who's a grifter but a lot of times look everybody has to make money somehow i don't care who you are you have to make money a lot of times i'll see like progressive youtubers criticizing some conservatives for being grifters and making money but then these same progressive youtubers they have sponsors they run advertisements they pitch you stuff too they have to make money so be careful about accusing someone of being a grifter just because they make money we all have to make money uh generally speaking within argumentation and debate a lot of double standards get employed anytime you're arguing and debating with somebody just watch out whether you're debating science religion atheism theism left or right wing politics philosophy whatever it is just watch really carefully how the other side uses double standards and you use double standards too you have to hold yourself accountable to that um a lot of double standards happen with cherry-picking data lying with data facts and statistics you can always cherry pick the data to basically fit your own narrative you have to be very careful against doing that reductionism can be used in a double standard way where you can reduce an issue that you don't really care about you can take a reductionistic approach to it but then an issue that you do care about you don't think of reductionistically um what would be an example of this for example you you can take a very reductionistic approach towards sex you can say well what's the big deal why is sex so important it doesn't matter like for example let's say let's say you cheat you're a guy you cheat on your girlfriend right and then um your girlfriend comes she's angry at you and she says you [ __ ] you [ __ ] cheated on me blah blah blah blah and then you you take a reductionistic approach and you say well but baby you know what is sex really all it is is it's just like it's like just a vagina and a and a dick and it's just like it's this it's just like a physical emotion it's just material like there's nothing spiritual about it doesn't matter baby it's just like it's just like a physical it's like a physical act it doesn't matter it's just like an animalistic act it doesn't it doesn't mean anything see like this like you reduce it in order to justify it but then but you see but you see how that's a double standard because if it was just such a physical act it didn't mean anything then why did you end up cheating if it was so unimportant then surely it would have been easy for you not to cheat so obviously it's not so unimportant to you it's very important to you you're just you just cast it and frame it as unimportant when it serves you to do so so this sort of form of reductionism is um i'll give you an example of a reduction as of a reductionist double standard that i caught myself on uh when kobe bryant died on the forum people were like mourning for him and i i made a mistake uh i fell into this trap where um i reduce i'm like i'm like what's the big deal of mourning kobe bryant's death because after all all he did was just like shoot balls into baskets this is so reductionistic basically i boiled down all of kobe bryant to a guy shooting balls into a basket and it's like well what's the big deal about that there's nothing special about that right but then see if i'm gonna reduce kobe bryant to just a guy who throws balls into baskets i mean that's technically true but like i have to do that now with everything right it's like well what am i then you know if i if i take that approach to me what am i i'm just a guy who sits and yaps his mouth right like what makes me so special i'm just the guy who yaps his mouth um or you know what makes what makes anyone special like basically you can reduce the specialness of anybody with this kind of reductionistic take and just like boil it down you know like well what's a scientist a scientist is like what is albert einstein well albert einstein was just a guy who sat around thinking all day and scribbling stuff on a piece of paper like you could reduce albert einstein you're just a guy who made some scratch chicken scratches on a piece of paper or um you can reduce down you know a brilliant scientist who you know types on a keyboard you can just say well all he did his whole life was just punch punch plastic keys but you see um how unfair that would be i mean you can do that if you want to do that we have to do that across the board don't just do it with things that you're trying to criticize or argue against here's another very general double standard pattern which is selectively pointing out the hypocrisy of your enemies or your out group while excusing your in-group so it's like you know if i'm progressive i'm going to point out the hypocrisy of all of the right-wingers but none of the hypocrisy of the left-wingers like that also an example of a pattern of double standard is also like straw manning arguments because see what you're doing when you're straw manning someone's argument is you're taking their weakest argument and pitting it against your strongest argument but if you're going to straw me on somebody you should also then straw man your own position as well like if you're going to straw man um theism you also have to now align that with a straw man of atheism too if you're going to straw man christianity you also have to straw man science and usually that's exactly what is not happening when straw manning is happening because the whole point of a straw man is to compare apples to oranges to compare the strongest of your you know position to the weakest of some other position uh here's another example complaining when somebody is late but then creating excuses for when you're late here's one complaining when somebody is doing a bad job at their work but then letting yourself slide and do bad work at your job so for example you go to the airport and let's say the cashier there the flight attendant or whatever they're not doing their job they're and you're upset about that but then when you're at work you also slack off and do don't do a good job but you don't criticize yourself for that and you don't get angry at that you don't get outraged over that same way that you would do when you're at the airport and you're waiting in line or something like that uh here's another very general one complaining when somebody makes a mistake just in general criticizing people for making mistakes mistakes but then you make mistakes all the time in your life and you don't beat yourself over the head for that you don't get outraged when you make a mistake we all make mistakes how about this double standard criticizing and judging others for their ignorance or lack of knowledge but at one point in your life you were also ignorant and also lacked knowledge and you wouldn't like being criticized and judged for that you would want some respect and some understanding and some compassion and finally we've come to the last double standard this is the mother of all double standards which is this all double standards basically boil down to this one you criticize complain and get outraged when others behave selfishly but you behave selfishly all the time and you're okay with that so essentially this is the demonization of survival the double standard is that you demonize the survival functions of other people and organizations but not your own and not your own organization or tribe that's what it all boils down to this is the crux of selfishness selfishness is literally bias inequality unfairness hypocrisy that's what selfishness is that's its function the function of selfishness is to skew reality in your favor selfishness is the unequal application of standards in order to benefit your own survival selfishness and survival pressures the mind to tailor moral principles to its own advantage this is the weaponization of morality this is the weaponization of ideology it's a biasing of morality and ideology in service of survival at the cost of truth now we've discussed a lot of societal double standards we might say they're culturally um these double standards that we've been talking about a lot of them are just like baked into our culture and while it's important to be aware of some of those that's not really the most important lessons from this episode the most important lesson is i want you to notice your own double standards the double standards within your own mind that you create never mind what culture and society creates what does your own mind create what kind of excuses are you creating so here's an example of a societal double standard society our culture western culture generally considers that men who sleep around with women are cool chads and women who sleep around with men are [ __ ] now this is unfair and you can argue about how to correct this and all that but in the end that's not important here's an example of one that's a lot more important here's a double standard that your own mind creates your own mind can create the double standard of like capitalism is evil and bad you hate capitalism but in your own life the way that you're earning money as soon as you get an opportunity to make a quick but buck exploiting other people you jump and seize on it without thinking about it twice and yet still in your mind you believe capitalism is evil this is a double standard that your own mind created this is really what the problem is this is what you got to work on because you're not going to fix society's double standards they are what they are culture changes at its own rate it's not really in your control what you can control is the double standards that your own mind holds and how those are applied for example when you're doing philosophy when you're debating when you're arguing with people this is where it really matters now the topic of double standards is easily misused and weaponized the danger here is that now that i've taught you about double standards you're like ah okay leo i see double standards and now you go around and you go um complaining about all the double standards that exist within society that's not the point of this episode that's not what i'm trying to teach you i'm not trying to make you into a whiner or a victim this can be badly misused and weaponized for example if you want you could use this information to go out there and start to complain about something like you know in school you might complain like well why don't we teach both sides of the evolution creationism debate in schools it's such a double standard that for example we only teach evolution but not creationism we don't have equal time to both this would be a weaponization of this topic or for example with climate change you might say well it's a double standard that people are talking about climate change then we're not hearing the opposite side of climate change so let's hear more about how climate change is fake that's a mistake and that's a weaponization of double standards for example white people who cry about white genocide and reverse racism this is a this is a misuse of double standard there is no white genocide and reverse racism is not the same thing as racism conservatives sometimes like to cry about you know why if there's a gay pride parade why isn't there a straight pride parade that's a double standard leo no you're misusing this lesson of double standard look what you have to understand is that not everything is equal i'm not trying to teach you some naive notion of equality here sometimes things deserve to be treated differently not everything is the same not everything deserves equal treatment so this is not as simple as it seems you have to really ask yourself in this case where there's a double standard where i you know i suspect there's a double standard is it a genuine double standard or not or are these two things actually different and deserve to be treated differently for example when it comes to many of the double standards between men and women a lot of these actually are not strictly speaking double standards they're legitimate in the sense that men and women are different they have different mindsets different needs different weaknesses and strengths and psychologies and therefore it is different for example there is a difference between a man walking around topless shirtless on the street at the beach whatever versus a woman there is a difference it's not the same thing so be careful not to fall into this simplistic trap like oh well men can go topless why can't women go topless there's good reasons why women can't go topless because men are sexually attracted to female breasts in a very different way than women are attracted to male breasts that's different that's an important difference a man easily gets sexually aroused by female breasts a woman not the same looking at a guy's chest i mean she can get a little bit turned on but like not nearly the same thing as what happens when a guy is looking that's an important difference so that's not strictly speaking a double standard you know there's cries for example about affirmative action you know conservatives love to cry about affirmative action or you know how wrong reparations are um this is a misuse of this notion of double standard again this is a weaponization there's actually validity to affirmative action and reparations this is not simply a double standard for example people like to cry about oh leo you're criticizing the right wing so much more than the left wing that's a double standard no because what you have to consider is maybe actually the right wing deserves more criticism than the left see you can't just assume that they're equal maybe they are but maybe they aren't that's an empirical question that's not something you could just take a priority as a given it's possible that the right wing deserves more criticism it's possible that they're less developed at least at this point in time maybe in the future that'll change um you know men love to complain about double standards with women like they'll say oh women have it so easy to have sex but again you're not seeing the asymmetry some dating and sexuality for men and women are is very asymmetrical for a woman the challenge of dating is not getting laid yes she can get laid easily but that doesn't serve her reproductive needs her reproductive needs are not to get laid her reproductive needs are to find a guy who's going to stick around and not run away not pump and dump her and that is a challenge for many women a serious challenge it might be even a bigger challenge than it is for you in cells to get late so um be careful saying that there's a double standard between how easy it is for women to get laid and for men to get laid there's there's there's many asymmetrical trade-offs that women pay for being women you have to honestly take a look at that what i see people get really confused about is when they're trying to compare two asymmetrical things like the sexuality of a man versus a woman they're so bad at handling asymmetry because they just usually people can can be fairly decent and intellectually honest about um adjudicating a situation where two things are sort of like two equal sides of the coin they can kind of be unbiased and a little bit objective in that sense although even there they can screw that up easily but where they really struggle is when they're trying to judge or adjudicate an asymmetrical situation like for example left wing versus right wing because most people assume that left wing and right wing are just two polar opposites and equal things and they try to adjudicate it that way but that's not how it is left and right are asymmetrical and people get so confused by that same thing with you know dating when it comes to men and women they get really confused by that as well trick tripped up by that so you have to be very careful and watch for your justifications and rationalizations of your double standards another misuse of double standards would be starting to debate about who's the bigger victim of double standards you might be tempted to say well okay so leo taught me about this concept double standards now let me go out there and you know write blog posts and shoot videos and podcasts about how big of a victim my tribe is and i am because i'm part of this you know group um for the double standards you know double standards against gay people against black people against asian people against women against whatever and then you you turn that into an identity this victim identity and you start to debate people about how big of a victim you know who's the bigger victim are black people the bigger victim or are asian people the bigger victim or jews the bigger victim or are trans people the bigger victim this is a mistake that's not what i'm trying to teach you you're going to waste a lot of your mental energy doing this and you're not going to develop yourself in doing this we're not primarily interested in the double standards that other people are doing to us we are mostly interested in the double standards that our own mind is doing to the world you are guilty of double standards i don't care how big of a victim you are you're guilty of doing it so as part of developing yourself what we're interested in is eliminating double standards within you and that does not mean treating everything equally men and women should not be treated equally for example you might say oh well leo you know men get drafted you know men have to sign up for the draft if there's a war men get drafted but women don't and that's unfair that's a double standard that's not a double standard that's how it should be there's good reasons for that now maybe we can tweak some things here and there but just understand that it's not the same thing to draft men as is to draft women and there's legitimate reasons for that and this this apply you can extrapolate this issue to many other situations not just with men and women but just across the board in life right so be careful not to call things double standards when there's a legitimate difference between them and they need to be treated differently so this requires intelligence on your part now you might be wondering ultimately like leo why are you harping on these double standards why is it so important and here's why it's actually very important it's more important than almost anybody realizes here's why because god love and truth is lack of bias so my mission here is to guide you towards the highest realizations of god love and truth that's what i teach i can't do that if you develop a habit of hypocrisy and holding and arguing with these kind of gross double standards that most people hold and being as biased as you are this issue of hypocrisy is much deeper than most people realize here's what i want you to understand take this away from this episode that you are literally too biased to realize god and to understand what reality is the deepest levels if you want to really understand god the obstacle to that is all of your biases and your double standards your mind is so corrupted by bias and double standards that you actually don't have and you don't have a clear enough perception to be able to cognize god because god is the total absence of bias in order to see god clearly you have to cleanse your mind of all your biases and so that's ultimately what the point of this whole episode is it's actually much more significant than you would think this episode you might have thought that oh this is this is about leo criticizing conservatives or leo you know talking about some problems within society no this was not i'm not talking about problems i don't care about who has easier sex or who's more oppressed black people or trans i don't give a [ __ ] about that it doesn't matter that's all [ __ ] i mean it does matter of course i do care about that on a certain you know human relative level it matters but in the larger context of what we're doing here it doesn't matter at all what we really care about is purifying your mind of your own biases so that you can access the deepest wisdom and the highest insights that's what we care about that's why i talk about bias so much go see my episodes see my episode called understanding bias see my episode about called self bias see my other episode called understanding relativism part one i'm gonna have a part two and a part three coming up in the future very important episodes it's this which is preventing you from accessing god not just you but the majority of mankind 99 of mankind is so biased they will never understand god and this includes scientists and academics and progressives you're not appreciating how how problematic bias is this is not a small thing that this bias problem is it goes to the very metaphysics of of reality low conscious people have blatant double standards now you understand this and you're starting to get a sense of why that is because selfishness is bias and god is selflessness so if you want to access god you have to become selfless which means you have to give up all your biases and this is why nobody accesses god very frequently because they don't want to give up all their biases they're too attached to them the fundamental problem is that people don't care about truth they don't see what they're missing by giving up truth they sacrifice truth as soon as as it's intellectually convenient for their survival for example the bible says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven but that's a very inconvenient truth therefore what most christians do is they pursue wealth and they cherry-pick the bible for you know those um moral prescriptions which are convenient for them and then the ones that are not convenient they ignore those for example jordan peterson he knows that the bible says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of an eel than this for rich man to get into heaven and yet he's raking in millions of dollars doing what he's doing now i am not i'm not naive enough to think that jordan peterson is doing what he's doing simply for the money but still like um you know if i was talking to jordan peterson i would really press him on this i would say you know you're you speak about the bible a lot you talk about all sorts of bible stories and various kinds of prescriptions moral prescriptions from the bible and what you should do and what you shouldn't do but what about this one from the bible you know if you truly believe in the bible and you think it's so important you think it's it's the cornerstone of all of western civilization um how can you ignore this this most um uh crucial passage that it's easier for for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rich man to get into heaven so i would ask him i mean you're a rich man you have millions of dollars so are you going to get into heaven how come and then i would ask him how come when you're you know when you're talking against marxism and communism and socialism and progressivism and all this sort of stuff how come um and you know you quote the bible a lot as you do that and you talk about bible stories how come you never bring up this this problem with capitalism you know isn't it shouldn't you like re really be troubled by capitalism because capitalism encourages people to become wealthier and wealthier doesn't that mean that they're not going to be getting into heaven and isn't the whole point of what you're teaching to help people get into heaven how do you square that isn't that a double standard that you hold see you might think that this is just some sort of like debate point or some sort of like minor equivalent but it's not a minor quibble like literally what i'm saying is that jordan peterson is unable to realize god because of the double standards he holds in his mind that's how serious this is and most likely he will die not realizing god himself as god because of the double standards he holds and the money he earns for holding those double standards because he earns a lot of money for holding those double standards and look i don't i don't begrudge him any of that um i have nothing against money if he wants to make millions of dollars that's fine i don't have a problem making millions of dollars myself right and i can do that you might say well leo aren't you rich too though um i'm i'm pretty wealthy i'm i'm not as wealthy as jordan peterson i don't rake in that kind of money but i'm i'm not i'm not doing bad for myself um however here's the difference the difference is that i'm i'm i'm very aware of my biases i've cleansed my mind of enough by like you don't have to be perfect at this i'm not claiming to have cleansed all of my biases i've cleansed enough of my bias to the point where i realize that i'm god right so i've already achieved that so whether i earn money now or not it's irrelevant at this point although still i would say that i still have more growth to do and i still notice that my desire to chase for success and fame and money i have to hold myself back from that i could do more of what jordan peterson like is doing like i could go on hundreds of podcasts i could orchestrate that um i could do a bunch of interviews i could get my name out there i could start taking very uh kind of like controversial um hot button political positions just you know to get more viral exposure i could reduce my video duration you know from like three hour long videos to 10 minute long videos i could do that i could restructure all my content to make millions more dollars and if i do that that will [ __ ] my development i will also ultimately have to sell myself out um i could appeal to a lot more people by playing up to their biases i would have a lot more money and by doing that i would prevent myself from accessing the deepest aspects of of spirituality that i still have yet more work to do to access so i'm very cognizant of that and i've sacrificed a lot of money what most people don't realize is how many millions i've sacrificed um to get to where i'm at right now in my consciousness like literally i've put my business on i've crippled my own business in order to become more conscious of god i had to do that so there's a lot of wisdom in this saying i don't know was it jesus who said this that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven there's a lot of truth to that now that's not an absolute statement that doesn't mean that a rich man can't become enlightened it's possible but there's also it also presents some serious challenges there's a good reason he said that because the chasing of mon it's not really the money itself that's the problem it's everything you're doing to procure the money and secure the money and then the money becomes an addiction you want to chase more of it it becomes a never-ending cycle and then you end up chasing money your whole life and you get so busy doing that that you have no time to actually meditate to do psychedelics to contemplate to reflect on your self biases which is exactly jordan peterson's problem like if jordan peterson wants to realize he's god he has to stop what he's doing for a couple of years and just like sit down and [ __ ] contemplate and do psychedelics do meditation do all that stuff read books and then he can do that but but to do that he he'd have to surrender probably 10 million dollars is he going to do that i don't know that's hard that's very hard to do because you know it's tempting i if somebody handed me a suitcase with 10 million dollars and said hey look for the next three years don't meditate and don't do any spiritual work here's 10 million dollars i would be tempted you know that's that's good money i mean like i can live off that for the rest of my life i'd be tempted to do that now hopefully i would i would say no but you know i don't even know luckily i don't have that problem uh so fundamentally you have to understand that your mind does not want fairness it doesn't like fairness you think you like fairness you actually don't if you got an actual taste of fairness you probably cry what you really want is you want things skewed in your favor notice that you only complain with things are skewed against you when things are skewed towards you you don't complain about that that itself is a major double standard that you hold most people hold people without double standards are quite rare you should notice this people with high intellectual integrity these these are rare people mostly what you find out there in the intellect in the intellectual uh space on youtube on social media on mainstream tv all this kind of stuff these so-called intellectuals and thinkers and speakers um they're deeply deeply biased finding a human being who is truly unbiased is so rare it's such a gift if you find such a person it's such a gift if you find such a teacher such a mentor such a friend such a lover such a parent so rare so rare this is so precious and people don't appreciate it i hope this episode convinces you to appreciate this more to look for these kinds of people and when you find them to to befriend them and to make the best use of them it requires so much consciousness and commitment to truth and enormous levels of self-reflection and integrity and lots of admitting your own biases to let go of all your double standards so what i suggest to you if you really want to develop yourself and reach the highest potential that you have as a human being is and within spirituality especially is i want you to commit to this project over the next few decades of your life to eliminate as many of your double standards from your mind as possible understanding that the payoff at the end of all that will that will be that you'll be able to um to reach levels of truth and awakening that are superhuman that no other human has reached because they haven't gone through this process and understanding that there is a serious cost to lack of intellectual integrity which is that you have a divided mind all these double standards these are boundaries that you're drawing within your own mind and you have to reinforce these boundaries these boundaries are fragmenting and dividing your mind and god is unity god is a united mind and in the end everything you're working towards in this spiritual work is the unification of a divided mind all of the bad intellectual habits that you picked up from society from media from culture from friends from family and others from school from business from the pursuit of sex and money and fame all of these have divided your mind fragmented your mind and now the rest of your life if you're interested in actualizing yourself is a process of stitching your mind back together again unifying all the fragments until eventually you reach absolute unity which is god that's what i suggest you attempt you'd have to be pretty wise to see the importance of doing this most people won't see the importance of it because it doesn't give you an immediate you know easy quick return on investment it's a long term process it's only going to pay off years later if you wish to do this then start looking for and systematically weeding out all of your double standards catch yourself in the very act of committing a double standard holding a double standard arguing from a double standard catch yourself in the act this is going to require introspection i have an older episode called developing introspection go watch that it'll help you to do this now you might say but leo what about your double standards in hypocrisy aren't you guilty of double standards i i've seen some of your episodes and it seems like you've been guilty of this stuff in the past and certainly i am guilty of holding double standards and i am guilty of hypocrisy for sure you'll find some of that in my work my work is not spotless i'm doing the best i can with what i got and i got i got some ego mine i got corruptions i got bad habits that i picked up in my youth and so forth um and all of this is really just a part of the topic of self-deception and remember in my self-deception series at the end of that in part three i very much deliberately stressed that i am not immune to self-deception i do the best i can i'm better than most people but i'm not immune to it and in the end that's all you can do is you can you know you can strive to do your best i can give you a whole list of examples of of my own hypocrisies and how i caught myself in double standards for example i've caught myself in double standards and hypocrisy when it comes to leftist politics and progressivism definitely part of that is there my mind got infected with that as i was you know learning progressive politics it's hard to avoid that because there's so much so many so much bias within all the progressive media sources um i've caught myself holding double standards when it comes to doing philosophy having certain biases against certain philosophies and towards other ones arguing about a philosophy you know for for my my favorite philosophy and against some other philosophy and using double standards in my arguments i've done that in the past not so much on camera but like i mean in the past when i was like studying philosophy back in university also um when it comes to science atheism skepticism again i'm not talking about what i do on camera i'm talking about stuff that i did in the past when i was you know back in university and and so forth you know really thinking deeply about science atheism skepticism going through that phase of my life you know i had i had a lot of double standards there that i had to catch which ultimately allowed me to deconstruct science atheism and skepticism because those are built on double standards i had to deconstruct all those you have to understand that you might think oh leo is so unscientific and anti-scientific and anti-atheist and anti-skeptic and all that no i was the biggest most scientific most rational um atheistic and skeptical person uh before i you know did a lot of work to deconstruct all that i jailbroke my mind from science i had to do that to reach higher levels of consciousness i had a lot of double standards i had to correct there and i had to identify which allowed me to do that which i help you to do like in my deconstructing the myth of science part 1 2 3 series a lot of that is just pointing out the double standards of science and then deconstructing those we did a little bit of that even here today um when i got into pickup again this is a long time ago before i even begin actually.org i got into pickup and i noticed that some of the attitudes towards women and sex that i adopted there uh were also hypocritical and i had double standards there i had to correct those maybe i still have i i do still have maybe a little bit of lingering hypocrisy there that i'm going to correct going forward some bias there um but uh it used to be a lot worse i corrected uh plenty of that in doing this work with actualize.org um i notice and catch myself sometimes when i'm moderating on the forum giving out warning points to people for bad behavior i sometimes notice myself giving out warning points to somebody and then i realize wait a minute last week i just did the same thing myself and here i am giving out warning points shouldn't i be giving warning points to myself i notice that i'm very cognizant of that and then i use that to try to correct my behavior in the future to make myself more integrated more consistent um again i'm not i'm not perfect at that i still make mistakes in that respect um it's a it's an evolutionary process uh i've caught myself in double double standards when it comes to criticizing other people's selfishness a lot of times i'll judge somebody for being selfish and i realize but wait a minute i'm [ __ ] selfish too also um i've caught myself criticizing other people for being hypocrites but then i noticed wait a minute i'm hypocritical too that's sort of a meta hypocrisy is criticizing hypocrites for being hypocrites even though you're a hypocrite paradox of hypocrisy um i noticed myself having double standards and criticisms of public intellectuals and spiritual teachers i'm very careful about that these days and i'm going to eliminate all that going forward i noticed double standards in terms of my criticism of ignorant people and of the lower stages of spiral dynamics so a lot of times i can tend to kind of like look down and be dismissive of the lower stages and then i have to remind myself wait a minute but i had to go through those lower stages too i had to go through a blue stage i had to go through an orange stage i had to go through a green stage and you know who am i to criticize these stages when i had to go through that myself a lot of times i criticized people for selling out for being grifters for chasing after money for you know various kinds of shady marketing tactics but i went through a phase of that too before i started actualizing i went through a phase of that myself so who am i to criticize um so i can be hypocritical on that point um sometimes i have a double standard in that i'm you know i take a sort of shot and freuda or uh sort of a glee and seeing the cancellation of other people but then when i think about it like well would i be happy if i got cancelled so i'm very careful about cancellations um i'm very careful not to call for the cancellation of people generally speaking although some some scoundrels do deserve it um but like i'm very careful about that because i want to make sure that i don't have a double standard when it comes to cancellation um other double standards sometimes i've noticed that my criticisms of vegans have had double standards within them and bias something i'm going to eliminate i notice when it comes to environmentalism like theoretically i'm very pro-environmentalist but then when it comes to actually my own personal life i noticed that i'm not as green as i could be like i could reduce my carbon footprint more um and i've been kind of neglectful in that respect because i've just been focusing on other more important things and in that sense i have double standards that i'm kind of a hypocrite you know i love to criticize big oil companies but then i still fuel up my car and so forth so in that sense i'm guilty um yeah so just and more examples along these lines for example in relationships i noticed double standards for example i might expect a girlfriend of mine to accommodate my needs and think of her as being selfish when she's not doing that but then i might not be as accommodating to her needs and yet i don't think of myself as selfish for doing that so relationships is sort of a category that um i haven't talked about yet but it's actually very important like if you want to have smooth relationships you have to be very careful that you don't hold a lot of bias or double standards with respect to your spouse girlfriend boyfriend or family members because that's going to create a imbalance and then it's going to create unnecessary drama intentions and battle and it's going to corrupt your relationships so that's sort of a it's actually a very important topic that i sort of like didn't mention until now so make sure you realize the importance of double standards in relationships so in conclusion be vigilant when you're making justifications and rationalizations introspective for double standards you'll often be shocked at how often you have a sneaky double standard lurking in there the general principle is this whatever bar you set for yourself you have to cl or i mean whatever bar you set for some other person to clear you have to be able to clear that bar too for example if if you don't want other people cursing you have to be able to clear that bar yourself if you don't want other people um like if you're gonna criticize people for sexual scandals you have to have your own sexual cravings under control if you're gonna be um you know expecting and demanding other people to be on time you have to be on time if you demand and expect other people to put out stellar work exceptional work flawless work with no mistakes you have to be able to do it too and if you can't then you have to ease up and lower your bar for others if you want others to be non-partisan you have to be nonpartisan if you want others to be non-biased you have to be non-biased if you want others to be selfless you have to be selfless if you want others to not be dramatic and emotional you have to have your emotions under control see this is intellectual honesty the cultivation of intellectual honesty is something that really isn't taught in school but it's so important so important this is one of the things that's destroying our culture and our politics right now is that there's so little intellectual honesty with many of the actors who are talking about politics and culture and this means that it's impossible to have a genuine dialogue instead what we have is just people barking at each other and demonizing each other it's tribal warfare the culture wars uh here's a tip for you make a distinction in your mind of bad faith actors bad faith actors or people who have no intellectual integrity and who do not care about integrity or truth these would be people like sean hannity tucker carlson uh ben shapiro these are bad faith actors alex jones now i mean i mentioned some of the very obvious cases of people on the on the right you can also find maybe some bad faith actors on people on the left um but in general you should not listen to people who are bad faith actors you should not communicate with them you should not try to debate with them stop debating with bad faith actors it's a complete waste of your time only engage in dialogue with people who have a relatively high level of intellectual integrity this will save you a lot of hassle and just spinning your wheels intellectually spinning your wheels that's that's mostly what the public intellectual discourse is that we see whether it's about politics or god or religion or science most of it is just intellectual spinning of the wheels so be very careful that like you don't waste decades and yeah years and decades of your life just intellectually spinning your wheels getting nowhere it's very easy to get caught in these sorts of traps certain youtube channels you can subscribe to certain podcasts you listen to the people you listen to all they're doing is just intellectually spinning their wheels they're not actually making progress intellectually towards anything they're not actually developing their mind they're not ever going to reach awakening ever they're not ever going to understand what god is or spirituality is or what truth is or what sign they're never going to understand what religion is what healthy politics is they're never going to understand these things because they're just intellectually spitting their wheels mentally masturbating going over the same [ __ ] over and over and over again just debating it endlessly if you're going to be investing in intellectual development make sure that you're getting some payoff for it that there's progress and evolution in your mind every year your mind should be evolving to new stages and levels of development so to wrap this up here's a homework assignment for you if you want to take this seriously the homework assignment is to start catching yourself in these double standards especially when you're criticizing judging or complaining about others that's when you catch yourself the most and to help along with this i have two questions for you right this write these down this is your homework assignment number one what are all the ways in which i am a hypocrite make a long list number two what are all of my double standards make a list add these to your commonplace book if you don't know what a commonplace book is go check out my episode called how to keep a commonplace book very practical one there add this to your commonplace book and keep adding to this list so brainstorm some stuff right now to get this list started but then you're not going to be able to brainstorm all of them just sitting on your couch you have to actually in the act while you're online leaving comments criticizing arguing complaining debating with people as you're complaining and debating with your family members your spouse your girlfriend your boyfriend your friends whatever your co-workers as you're doing all that catch yourself in the double standards and then add them to the list and keep growing it keep growing the list of all the ways in which you're hypocrite and then you're gonna have to surrender all those and as you do that your mind will purify the divisions in your mind will heal and you will be able to gain access to higher states of consciousness and deeper insights into the nature of reality in god ultimately i hope you can see the important role of becoming more principled just more principled period the role this plays towards your overall development and towards that end go make sure you watch my video called my episode um [Music] what is integrity and i'm going to have a follow-up episode to that called how to develop integrity that's yet to be released all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me if you like this episode and come check out actualize.org you can find my blog there i post a lot of stuff on the blog you can find the book list you can find the life purpose course i'll be releasing new courses in the future sign up to my newsletter for that support me if you would on patreon i appreciate that helps along with the channel helps me from selling out uh you know over filling my stuff with sponsors and all that garbage sign up to the forum have some discussions there actually the forum is a great great place for you to if you spend a lot of time on the forum you'll notice a lot of your double standards get exposed there so that's really good all right in the future i'm going to have an episode about justification and rationalization which is going to dovetail with this episode very nicely that's going to be an important one so make sure you stay tuned for that you