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Jan. 19, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:09
606 Coincidence

Humility in the face of randomness

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
It's the 19th of January, 2007.
Hope you're doing well. And I'd like to talk this morning, coincidentally enough, about happenstance.
About ye olde coincidence.
And this ties into, for me at least, 601, 602, what I'd like to give to the world, which is a kind of humility.
And there's really nothing like coincidence.
To really help engender or grow in us a sense of humility.
So, before I learned about philosophy and truth and reality...
Before I was 16 or so, I really didn't exist in a sort of fundamental way.
I was just bouncing off reactionary events within my circumstances, environment, the people around me.
I had no clear opinions about anything that were rooted on any firm foundations.
I had no differentiation in my own perceptions of the world and my ideas.
I remember just saying, oh, I think what Canada could use.
I remember saying this until about 15 or so.
I can't even remember what context, but it's really stuck with me that I said it.
And I said, what Canada could really use is a healthy dose of socialism.
And what did I mean by that?
I meant nothing. I meant nothing.
I had no idea what socialism meant.
I mean, other than it was a vaguely positive helping people kind of thing, you know.
Because of all the propaganda I'd received, undifferentiated.
And I was just... It is like being a mirror.
It's like being somebody trapped in a mirror, looking out, and it's two-dimensional, and you're just reacting to everything that's around you.
So, as an identity, as a human being who could think, process things in reality, have opinions, have discussions, have debates, To be alive intellectually and spiritually, really, when you put the whole thing together,
the emotions, the mind, the thought, feelings, intuition, all of the alchemy of the human mind, put it all together for me, it sort of equals, there's not a whole lot better word than spirituality, though there's no spirit involved.
But what I do find To be fascinating for me is thinking back to that primordial soup of a pseudo-personality that I had prior to discovering philosophy, because I was not somebody who could invent the wheel that way.
I certainly know Ayn Rand, and all hats off to the Great High Priestess of Rationality, I was certainly not somebody who was going to sit there and look at the world and say, ha, I'm going to reorganize it within my own mind and start from first principles.
That took a long time for me.
So, when you think about, or when I think about just the enormous number of coincidences that resulted in the great things in my life, the great things in my life,
Philosophy, in no particular order, sort of philosophy, art, my wife, my wife in particular, philosophy, art, and love, and my wife are the great things in my life.
And when you look at the coincidences that had to occur in order for those things to come into my life, I didn't invent them from scratch.
I was into computers.
I really like computers.
Did I earn that?
No. It was the first time I started farting around with a computer.
I had a great time. And I really enjoyed it.
And that was what I did.
And Saturdays I'd go to the computer lab and learn how to program and learn how they worked and all that kind of stuff.
And because I was into computers, I met a good friend who was also into computers.
And he bought the Atari 400 and then I bought the Atari 800.
And we learned computers together and all that kind of stuff.
And it was all great. And this guy happened to be into the band Rush, and I never have particularly loved.
I like Red Barcella.
I think the only song of theirs that I really like.
The vocals are just a bit...
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I like me a high voice.
I can handle Sting.
I can even handle John Anderson with some relish.
But there's something about Geddy Lee.
You know, good singer and all. I've seen them live twice.
But there's just something not quite right about that band.
There's a certain kind of passion or something that's missing.
Or maybe it's a bit too precise.
There's something about a band that's never really warmed to.
So... This guy happened to like the band Rush, and the drummer, Neil Peart of the band Rush, is an objectivist, or at least was in the 80s.
And so my friend read...
Atler shrugged, read The Fountainhead, and he said that I should read them.
And I was a pretty depressed youth, of course, at this time, and sort of 15 or 16.
And I was very much into Pink Floyd, not into Rush.
And of course, he didn't like Pink Floyd, because he was certainly a more positive and peppier person than I was in those days, which, you know, wasn't hugely hard.
And so that happened, right?
And What of that did I earn?
Like through hard, mental, grueling sweat.
What of that did I earn?
Well, I just happen to like computers.
I didn't sort of say to myself, well, you don't like them, but you should train yourself to learn to like them because they'll be a good career for you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No. When I first started reading The Fountainhead, I responded, yay, as the flower to the sunlight, immediately.
That was an emotional aha that occurred.
Did I earn that? No, that was just lying in wait.
That was the seed that was waiting for the rain.
Sometimes it feels like I was watching David Attenborough's The Life of Plants.
Secret Life of Plants. Well worth watching.
I know it sounds dull as watching a turnip dry, but it's really, really great.
Actually, I got it for Christina because she loves plants, right?
I mean, she loves flowers. She's a girly girl.
And... I sat down to watch it with her because I love watching things that she loves watching.
Actually, I love watching her loving things that she's watching.
And I ended up just being fascinated and really enjoying it.
It's very, very interesting.
And in it, they found this seed that had survived in Japan from a shrine that was buried 2,000 years ago.
The seed had survived 2,000 years, couldn't flower it again.
And sometimes it feels like The species has been dead that long, you know, since ancient Greece.
And that the seed still lives, you know, even within us, within our unconscious, just waiting for the right combination of things to spring it to life.
And it doesn't even stretch.
It's just, boing! I mean, been in bed for 2,000 years pretending to be dead, and it's like, oh, wait!
I think that I can move now.
Boing! You come up like a...
A small Russian gymnast lady.
So those kinds of coincidences, as far as art goes, I always sort of had a feeling that I could write and tried it for many years.
I finally had a breakthrough when I was in theater school and wrote what I thought was a good play and then produced it in Toronto.
Excuse me. And...
That has been a source of great pleasure for me.
Great frustration, of course, because I've only had one book published and it hasn't exactly caused a good third of the Amazon to be cut down.
But it has trained me, being an artist has trained me in the uniting of the thought of the mind and the heart.
Ayn Rand stuff, for me, a little bit too much mind, not quite enough heart.
Most writing is way too much heart and far too emotionally macabre, especially modern writing, to really appeal to me.
But it did train me because there's nothing harder, for me at least, than being a philosopher who wants to write novels.
I mean, who wants to write poetry or fiction.
Oh, it's grueling. Because just writing fiction, you sit down and sort of, I mean, you have to do this technical, but you just kind of work it, right?
But when you want to put a new philosophy across in a fictionalized manner, oh my lord, is it hard.
And it's real. You've got this tightrope.
You've got to walk between being didactic and being pedantic and being entertaining and being true to life and being emotionally passionate in a way that serves the philosophical backbone.
Oh, it's just grueling.
So there was great training in that, and that kept me in touch with what a lot of philosophers lose, which is kept me in touch with my passions, with my instincts, with my emotions, with my heart.
So regardless of the fact that it didn't get me a teaching position in creative writing at the University of all that, it was a wonderful, wonderful exercise to go through.
In order to be able to sort of round out or complete my personality.
And theatre school, although it did not launch my career as an hector, it certainly did break through the British upbringing of standoffishness towards the physical.
British actors are sort of famously cerebral, and it doesn't mean they're any better or worse.
The American actors, North American actors, are more of the Stanislavski kind of emotional memory approach, and they sort of dig into the emotions, but the British actors are much more cerebral, which is why British actors, in my view, do an incredibly better job at Shakespeare than American actors do.
But... Theater school broke all of that, and I won't even get into all of that sort of stuff, but there was a lot of bodywork there, which was just freaky to me and was emotional to me, but did get me out of this standoffishness that a lot of intellectual people have towards their own physicality, and it gave me a great deal of respect for the body.
Because when I was surprised by the emotions that came out during bodywork, I recognized that there was another brain in there with me, which a lot of intellectuals don't remember.
I think the human mind, the spirit of man, is sort of like that dinosaur that has a brain at the end of its tail.
I mean, we have our cerebral frontal cortex stuff, and we have all our analytical engines, and we have all of our processing that goes on up there.
But deep down in the body, and perhaps in the chain of evolution, rest death with us, still our other mind, our instincts, our gut.
And... Not having access to that, I think, makes for a lot of heavy lifting in life and makes, if you don't learn to surrender control to your instincts while maintaining your rationality, which is no easy feat, and I don't think it's hard in general.
I just think it's hard because of how we're raised.
I think that it's natural for us.
Otherwise, it's just that we're raised to split these things off.
The mind-body dichotomy is famous throughout Western history and is very, very strongly inflicted upon religious children, but also on the children of intellectuals.
Who look at the body as sort of a wheelchair, a device to move the brain around, which must be fed and watered and maintained, unfortunately, but is of little use other than as a carrying pod for the brain.
You know, if you could replace it with a saline tank in South America with a couple of electrical impulses, you'd be happy.
Which, of course, is not the case.
The body is the source of as many joys and instincts and knowledge as the mind is.
And, of course, I know it's all occurring in the brain.
I'm not saying that the liver is cognizant, but that's just the way that...
I mean, if you forget about the body, then mortality, I think, comes as a bit of a shock.
And that engenders nothing but procrastination, defensiveness, and the desire to dominate.
So, anyway, let's not get into all of that.
But coincidence is that I happen to have these seeds germinating within me, and I happened to be born into a culture where these books were available, and I happened to like computers, which got me in touch with someone who liked Rush, Ayn Rand, which set me on the path of learning about philosophy.
And that's quite a lot of coincidence, really.
When you think about it, if I had not been friends with a couple who came up with the idea of playing volleyball and I had not decided to go and play volleyball, then I never would have met the love of my life, my darling wife. And I don't know.
I mean, it would be a very different kind of conversation.
I don't think I would be having this conversation.
With you, because I would be, I don't know if I would have ended up podcasting or not.
I doubt I would have got, well, I probably would have got that job.
I might have ended up podcasting, but it would not be as rich.
It would not be as passionate.
It would not focus on the family.
It would be political, and there would be fewer of them, and they would be more cerebral, and I would not, I don't think, really have made that connection down to the roots of the family in the absence of my wife's wisdom and counsel.
Coffee break. If I went out into computers, I wouldn't know how to podcast.
I mean, I know you could learn, but it probably would not have been something that I ended up doing, and so on.
So... And of course, if I hadn't made a decent amount of money in my life, then I could not have borne the startup costs of getting this server and the board and all of the stuff going and paying for the hosting and all that kind of stuff.
Anyway, there's just a million things that had to sort of come together for me to podcast.
And there, of course, are about a million more things that had to come together for you to hear and be interested in and be receptive to and enjoy these podcasts.
So, a million things brought me together to do it.
A million things brought you together to listen.
And that's...
What is that?
A thousand billion?
A trillion? A trillion.
A million times a million? A trillion?
These are all down to only about three decimal places.
But let's just say there's a lot of coincidence, right?
Now, what people tend to do...
With coincidence is the false self uses coincidence to extract vanity.
Now that's scientific if ever I've said anything scientific, but what I mean by that is...
Well, let's just say I was doing my manly business this morning and flipping through a magazine, and there was a picture of a woman lying back with a smug, self-satisfied expression on her face, and she had these glorious tresses, her hair sort of laid out across a pillow, and it was an ad for shampoo or whatever, right?
And I'm always sort of reminded of something that Dave Barry said.
Dave Barry is a very funny writer if you get a chance to read him.
He's really good.
He's one of the few Laugh Out Loud writers.
He and PJ O'Rourke can really have that happen for me.
And... And he said that, hey, you know what the difference is between you and the people in the ads?
It's not the shampoo. The difference is they were born with great hair.
And that's kind of fundamental, right?
And this smug, self-satisfied expression on the woman's face, I'm oh so beautiful and look at my hair, isn't it glorious, is really quite astounding when you think about it because she was just born with that hair.
And yeah, they can put chemicals on it and make it look glossier and so on, but, you know, they can put chemicals on my mangy moonscape as well, and I'm not going to end up in any hair ads.
If there's a Viagra for foreheads, though...
Huh, let me look for some sponsorship there.
So, what's happened, and I'm just taking this from an ad, and it resonated with me, maybe, I'm not saying I know anything about the woman in the ad, but...
The kind of smugness that certain people have, and whether it's because of their height or their physical attractiveness or their intelligence or their wealth or whatever, right?
It's all inherited.
It's all inherited.
And it doesn't mean I don't believe there's willpower and virtue and all these kinds of things, but I just think it's important to be humble about this kind of stuff.
The... The kind of personality that pretty people have is different from the personality that ugly people have.
Pretty people can get away with being coy and superior and flirty and haughty and so on.
You try that when you look like two miles a bad road and it really doesn't come across very well.
When I was teaching in a daycare for a couple of years, there was a very cute, sort of very, very physically cute girl who at the age of four had all of these coy mannerisms and people would just go ooh and ah and so on and I tried to sort of work her out of that kind of stuff a little bit.
But, of course, I just bewildered her because it's like, I'm sorry if it doesn't work.
If my key opens every hotel room in the hotel but one, I'm not going to fuss about that one.
I'll just go to some other hotel room, which is why it's so difficult to coach attractive people, right?
Because they just don't, you know...
This idea that you're going to confront some shallow girl who's pretty or whatever and she's going to suddenly achieve depth, it's like, oh, okay, so my key doesn't work in this hotel room, but there's about a million others that it will, so I'll just go to one of those.
That's why people who have a lot of advantages, natural advantages, inherited advantages, generally are not very coachable.
And you can see this, you know, that a lot of people on the board have had some significant disadvantages and challenges in their life.
And high minds born to low places, it really is where, it is that leverage that moves humanity forward.
So, you know, we haven't had a lot of people who are like, you know, I'm a runway model, and I've inherited $10 million.
The guy who showed up from Montreal, Michael, I think his name was.
Enjoyed the intellectual debate, but couldn't handle the emotional stuff, right?
And he just thought everybody was whiny.
Well, he was born into a very privileged family.
He's a very good-looking fellow. I saw his picture on Skype.
And he's very intelligent, of course, a very erudite British accent, which goes somewhere.
And so, of course, he's not going to have any sympathy for people who've struggled, because he can't recognize struggle, as I've talked about before, because that's a blow to vanity.
And that's why, for me, humility is important.
And to understand humility, you need to understand coincidence.
And coincidence also helps to avoid the flip side of vanity, which is shame.
The flip side of vanity is shame.
And a lot of people that are on the boards, I'm going to name them now alphabetically, a lot of people on the boards, I can tell I consent that there is humiliation in their life.
And the humiliation is a high mind born in a low place.
A high mind born in a low place.
And we take it personally. And that's the great danger, right?
So if we were 6'4", bushy-haired, cranky-jawed, washboard-stomach-prone, and so on, and had been born with great wealth, then we would be high and mighty on ourselves that way, and we would resist psychological explanations for things, and we would resist the idea of coincidence because that would hurt our vanity.
On the other hand, those of us with high minds born to low places, we have trouble sometimes with avoiding the shame of our origins, right?
Nobody in my adult life, other than a few close friends, knows that I came from a physically, emotionally, and mentally abusive, psychotic, single-parent, mother-institutionalized, lived on my own since I was 15 kind of family.
Nobody. I don't talk about my family with anybody.
Now, that's partly shame, but...
Sorry, I shouldn't say that.
It's not exactly shame.
It's not wanting to be judged according to those circumstances and not wanting to be set into a different category.
But there certainly is some shame.
It's hard for me, even after these many, many years, to not take where I was born, which of course is a complete coincidence, to not take where I was born personally.
Because I was friends with, and this guy I knew who got me into Ayn Rand came from a very pleasant, nice...
His father was a professor, his mother would stay at home, they had a nice house, everybody was pleasant.
And, you know, it's hard not to take it personally when you're born into low places or with...
Not a handsome face or short or something.
It's hard. Because it's very hard to peel our ego away from its attachment to coincidence.
And it's not just that we do it ourselves.
It's that other people do it to us as well.
So if you're short or you're ugly, you get a certain reaction from people that inhibits your freedom.
So... This coincidence thing is a very, very important thing to understand.
We have no responsibility for where we're born.
We have no, you know, if you're beaten or humiliated or born into some trailer park or whatever, you've got nothing to do with that.
That's just coincidence. And the difference between that and being born in a manner is accident.
Well, I mean, there's no possibility of me having been born anywhere else.
If I'd been born anywhere else, I wouldn't be me, right?
I've got to be my parents' genes combined.
So... It's just what happened.
And this is another reason why I'm so horribly against or so energetically against religion.
Because religion is the ultimate dismissal of coincidence.
Religion is the ultimate vainglorious rejection of coincidence.
Because religious people Take it as virtuous that they are who they are in their beliefs.
So a Christian will say, I have been saved, I am virtuous, I am going to heaven because I believe in Jesus Christ.
As if believing in Jesus Christ is just something that you will.
You don't have to be able to read.
You don't have to speak English.
You don't have to have access to the books.
You don't have to be raised as a Christian.
You don't have to be in an environment where you are praised and where there is a ready-made community that is going to help you along.
You don't have to live in an economy where being Christian is positive and gets you ahead.
None of those things count.
It's just a matter of will. You know, Iglucock in the Arctic who's never heard of Jesus, he just hasn't willed it, you see.
So people preen themselves that I'm saved and I'm a Christian, and that Christ is the way, and I'm sorry, but we have the truth, as the woman says, this evil witch says in Jesus' camp.
This is the truth. We are saved.
I love Jesus. Well, I wonder how this woman would have done in terms of being saved if she'd been born under the Taliban.
However much I dislike her, I would not wish that upon her, although it would be a wonderful lesson for her to spend a week in 1990s Afghanistan to understand that she shouldn't so much crow about her own virtue, about being saved by Jesus.
Because if you are living as a woman under the Taliban, you don't get to read, you don't get to be educated, and if you even mention the word Jesus, you get stoned to death.
The bar's a little higher for other people, you know?
This is where a large part of my sympathy for the trapped, imprisoned, and crazed herd in Iraq come from.
I could be that.
You could be that.
And if I'd been raised in Iraq, I would never have had any access to Ayn Rand, or to Aristotle, or to Locke, or to Spinoza.
Or to any of the other great philosophers.
My education would have been entirely different.
I would not be able to defoo.
And, I mean, for those who heard Podcast 300, Christina and the Priest, you all know that I can argue the other side of the coin pretty well.
Well, maybe that would have taken over.
Maybe I would have been an imam.
I mean, I've got some verbal skill, I'm passionate, so maybe I would have been an imam.
A crazy, tooth-rotting cleric.
So, I just happened to be born in North America, and boy, you want high minds in low places, there ain't no place in the West that's lower than even the highest place in a Muslim theocracy.
So, it's just, you know, am I grateful?
Yes, except that there's no one to be grateful to.
It's just coincidence. But I would rather be born into my crazy, ugly, vicious, vile, evil family in the West than be born a Saudi prince.
A million times over, I would choose this life.
So, yeah, there's some stuff that I do that is willed, right?
But it's not that big relative to everything else, right?
Sometimes I will take on a podcast topic that I'm nervous about.
Sometimes I will confront somebody in a way that's not natural or easy for me.
And, yeah, I'll claim some goody-two-shoes stuff over that.
Idiot. I hate these people who, you know, when you're driving and I'm going the speed limit, right?
And I'm coming up to the turnoff to the highway that takes me down to my office.
These mofos in a van, they pull off to the right, and I can see that like 10 car lanes ahead of me, the lane is ending.
They think there's another lane, so they just pull around to the right.
And then I have to slow down so that they don't hit the median so that they can get back in.
I have to adjust my driving habits and patterns, which is not always safe.
It's a little slippery up here, because they want to peel around the right.
And I don't know.
I just... I can't quite understand.
I guess it's chronic anger that these people have, right?
Like they get angry at me and then they get angry at the guy ahead of them.
Then they're angry at the traffic light.
But it really is a dangerous business to be doing.
You know, they're not doing the safe stuff, you see, like podcasting.
It's very different. Actually, I think podcasting improves my driving, right?
Because I have to really pay a lot of attention.
So... Anyway, so this thing about coincidence is very, very important.
This is why it's important to have some empathy for the irrational people around you and to give them lots of chances.
It doesn't mean that you can't get angry at them if they continue to claim virtue even after you've proven them incorrect, and if you've proven them compromised in a virtuous manner.
It's not like you can ever get angry, but I think that humility is very important, and humility is completely lacking in the religious world.
Humility is... The Muslims say, well, we're good Muslims and we're raised to believe in Muhammad, so we're going to paradise.
Whereas the Christians and the Jews and we spit on them, they are going to hell and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, who raised you?
Well, my Muslim parents.
Huh. Who raised the Jewish guy?
His Jewish parents. Huh.
Don't you think that might have had a bit of a frickin' effect on what you ended up believing in?
So, you happen to be born to Muslim parents, and now Muslim is great, you get to go to heaven, everyone else gets to go to hell.
They weren't born to Muslim parents, an old glukak in the Arctic, who's never heard of any of these crazy religions, going to hell.
And what was his chance?
Could he have just invented Christ on his own?
Well, of course, if he had invented Christ on his own, that'd be a pretty good argument for a god, right?
But they never do, right?
Nobody invents Christ who's not exposed to Christ, which is why you know that the only religion is the oral tradition.
There's no God, it's just people being told stuff and frankly frightened or bullied in passive-aggressive and oh-so-smiley ways.
So coincidence is just very important to understand.
Very important to understand.
And if you really do understand coincidence, then you get real pride, which is doing what you can to help the world with the talents that you have received.
There's real pride in that.
There's real empathy in the sufferings of others, once you understand humility.
There's real contempt and anger towards those who are completely blind to coincidence and who claim all the virtues in the world for having to be born Where they were born and happen to be taught whatever they were taught, that suddenly becomes all the virtue in the world.
And the people who don't believe that are evil and wrong, then, of course, it's just laziness, right?
It's just people saying, oh, what social circumstance am I in?
Where am I born? What's positive?
What's productive? What's safe?
What's praised? Hey, that's good, right?
That's good. And anyone who doesn't believe that, anyone who...
The fact that I believe in Christ when everyone claps me on the back and I get to go to church and be a hero...
It's exactly the same as if people who get stoned to death for believing in Christ in the Muslim world, you know, their virtue and my virtue are pretty much identical.
The fact that I get praised for it and they get killed for it is completely immaterial.
I'm just an all-good, all-knowing, all-wise Christian loveguard and staring at myself and preening at myself and thinking how wonderful I am.
And this coincidence aspect is never, ever discussed because coincidence in religion reveals a subjectivity in the circumstance, right?
Oh, I just happened to be born Christian.
Then your religion isn't any better than anyone else's.
It's just what you're used to. It's just what you're used to.
It's like saying English is better than French.
I speak English because I was raised English in an English household.
I'm in English school. It doesn't mean that I... French, those people who speak the French, they're going to hell.
Those people who speak the English are going to heaven.
And that's all just mad nonsense.
But that's what just about everyone does in this world.
And it's just important to understand it and to forgive yourself for your history and not to take too much vanity in the accidents of your experience.
Thank you so much for the donation last night.
I look forward to your donation. Thank you for listening.
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