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April 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:02
733 Why Fight for the Future?
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Ah, my friends, let us sit and let us get comfortable.
And do you know why we must get comfortable?
Because, oh, look, I'm looking up through my moonroof, and there are little, little, little drops of rain, and that means nobody can drive fast, must run through jello, slowly coagulating, can't move.
Oh, these drivers, I swear to God...
It's not the end of the world.
If there's just a little rain, it doesn't mean you can't move.
Well, it's okay. I can get as frustrated as I like about the traffic because I only have just a few more days and then we are done.
So, I had a very interesting post, and again, for the UbiVonTubiTubers, I'm sorry for the discontinuity between the podcast slash videocast, but, uh, eh, I'm fairly random.
But I have a, um, a, uh, A podcast which was 7.31, I think, I know, I lie, 7.29, which was basically about the future.
We should do have this kind of philosophical conversation about the future so we can set people free in the future, and it will be many billions of people that will be free in the future if we have a successful conversation about values and philosophy now, and these conversations are very rare.
They are as common as stars in the bowl of the night sky.
So, I had a very slightly tongue-in-cheek listener post today, and what an incredible feedback mechanism this is, my friends.
I just think that, as I say, the quality of the show is...
The show? The quality of me talking in my car is...
It can only be as high as the quality of the listeners.
The great philosopher Farooq Bulsara said that he can only sing as well as the audience lets him or wants him or accepts him to sing.
And that is something that I think is quite important.
The quality of what we're talking about here is the quality of the conversation is the quality of the listeners.
And I have this amazing feedback mechanism in the Freedom Main Radio board.
And I'm racing neck and neck with the Freedom Main Radio board because there are 700...
This is 733.
I haven't posted two from today.
And there's 729 board members.
So I must race!
Actually, I'm going to lose. I'm going to totally lose.
At least I hope I'm going to lose, because it would not be good if I only got two new listeners a day.
That would not be... Now, if the two was a little squared, that would be excellent.
Then we could take over the planet in about 13 and a half days.
See, it just did that in my head. Didn't even take my shoes off.
And I have to get home in, I guess, half...
40 minutes. 40 minutes.
It's been 10. And I have made it about...
Oh, I can still see my office building.
Somehow I don't think we're going to make it.
But we will survive!
Hey, hey! There's the filler for you, ladies and gentlemen.
All the stuff which future scholars will take out and say...
Bye, bye.
Anyway, so after posting this podcast about the importance of this conversation and the freedom that we will be bestowing upon future generations if we get this conversation about philosophy and values right,
if we are one of the bright spots in the dark night sky of history, Which move the species, the planet, the race, civilization forward, then by the by we will have a great deal to do with freeing the future, which I think would be a very good thing to do.
If we fail in this conversation, then it might be a couple of hundred years or maybe even a thousand years until this conversation starts up again.
That our significant conversation, in my humble opinion, around values was probably around 1600, 1700, and so on.
And since then, we've just been arguing about how big the state should be and whether religion is valuable to individuals or not.
But we haven't been arguing or asking why should we have a state and why should fantasy or falsehoods, Be good for anyone.
So, let me just turn the screen brightness down here.
We've got lots of time. So, a poster posted today an excellent post.
And post his posting, I thought I would post this one.
And what he said was, yeah, why should I care about the stinking future?
Eh, the stinking future, what do we care?
Let them live in the stinking future.
The past people did nothing for us.
Why should I do anything about the future?
And apparently he's Cheech.
So, let me switch my lanes.
So he was asking, basically, of course, why should I care anything about the stinking future when people in the past didn't give much of a rat's ass about my freedom here, and so I'm going to live my life, and I'm going to raise my kids, and I'm going to love my wife, and frankly, fuck the future. Forget about the future.
Let's get on with the past.
And I can totally understand that.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, there's no reason why.
I mean, there are no positive obligations unless you sign a contract or have some children.
There are no positive obligations.
So if you don't want to help the future, you don't have to help the future.
I'm not going to sit there and say, ah, you know, the purpose of freedom is to be enslaved to the whims of those yet to be or to the freedoms of those yet to be.
And that would not make, obviously, much sense at all, so I'm not going to advocate that.
But a listener whose Kung Fu Jiu-Jitsu force is strong, very strong, posted this idea of universally preferable behavior.
And there's some truth in that, of course.
If you feel angry towards people in the past that they did not raise objections...
To the spread of state power, to the spread of the fantasy of religion, to the spread of the fantasy that family has value just because people have sex and have the biological capacity to give birth, that they have value.
If philosophers had not been so cowardly in the past, and I would say barely even philosophers, but more just toadies of power, paid well by those in power to make up stories about the virtue of those in power, whether they are parents or priests or politicians...
If they had done their job, then our job would not be so hard.
In fact, our job might conceivably be easy.
In fact, it might be the case that we would not have to do this job.
I mean, nobody in the West seriously has to oppose slavery anymore because the abolitionists, they did their job.
And so that debate is done.
And I always think that it's nice when a debate is done and people can move on, deal with the basics and move on.
So, to paraphrase the argument, those bastards in the past did nothing for me.
It's difficult to have this conversation with people, to confront people, to talk about ideas, to question their values, to have that old Socratic back and forth.
It's tough to do that.
And so why would I want to do that?
Why would I want to be enslaved towards...
I don't want to be enslaved to freedom even for me, so why would I want to be enslaved for the freedom of those yet to be?
I mean, what kind of sense would that make?
And of course, I completely agree it would make no sense.
But then Jiu-Jitsu Jedi of universally preferable behavior said, well, yes, but if you're angry at all with the people in the past for not doing their job to fight the growth of state power, if you are angry with people in the past who did not do their job to fight state power and the power of false philosophies, then... You are doing something which you disapprove of, right?
You're angry at people in the past who didn't stand up for what was right, which makes your job that much harder.
Then, clearly, you're saying it would have been better if they had done the right thing and so on.
And that's all very true.
And if it's better that they, if it would have been better that they did the right thing, then clearly getting angry at them and then not acting yourself, getting angry at other people for their inaction and then not acting yourself is a logical contradiction.
It doesn't mean anything. It's just a logical contradiction.
And it's just important to know that.
And the way to resolve this contradiction is one of two things.
One of two things. So if you say, well, the sensible policy...
Well, first of all, you can say, it's just my opinion.
There is no good or right way to behave with regards to fighting for the truth.
It's just, you know, I choose not to, other people choose to.
There's no value in either opinion.
No value in either approach or either action.
Well, that's fine. If there's no value in fighting for the truth, there's no problem with that.
But then you can't get angry at the people in the past.
Because when you get angry at the people in the past, you're saying they should have done something differently.
They should have done something differently.
And... If they should have done something differently, then you're saying it would have been a higher value for them to do X, right?
For them to fight the powers that be, for them to be good citizens of the world or to have made your life freer and better and so on.
They should have done that.
And if they should have done that, then obviously you should do that because values are universal, right?
You kind of have We have one set of values for the people in the past, another set of values for the people in the future.
If the people in the past should have done differently to make your life easier, then you should do differently to make the lives of the people in the future easier.
So, if that's the case, then you've got to act to free the world.
And then, if you act to free the world, you are perfectly legitimate in getting angry towards the people who sat on their thumbs and did nothing to act to save the world in the past, leaving you with a steaming hunk of anti-conceptual bullshit which you have to wade through.
So, yes, act, and then you can condemn those who did not act.
I'm perfectly satisfied with that, if my satisfaction means squat to you, or the argument at least.
That's sort of one option. Now the second option is to say, well, if there's no benefit to acting to save the world, then clearly those who did not act to save the world in the past were not doing anything wrong.
Logically, right? If A is better than B, then whoever does A is better than whoever does B. And whoever doesn't do is worse.
This is just logic, right?
I'm not trying to bully you.
I'm just pointing out just the facts, ma'am.
So, you either have to act and then you can retain your anger or you cannot act to save the world but then you can't get angry at anyone in the past who made exactly the same decision.
That you did. And let's also put it this way as well.
What does it take to fight for the future and to fight to save the world?
Not much. Blogs and emails.
Talk to people. Have conversations.
Emotionally, it can be very difficult.
But we're not talking the Spanish Inquisition here.
We're not talking the Dark Ages.
We're not talking Nazi Germany.
We're not talking Russian gulags.
We're not talking Mao's communism.
We're not talking about getting our kneecaps shot off for speaking the truth.
So if people in the past should be condemned for not speaking the truth when it was harder to speak the truth in the past, you had to spend a lot of time.
I mean, what? I'm doing this in my car, for God's sakes, and posting it on the web.
What's it costing me? I don't know.
Five thousand bucks and five thousand hours a year sometimes, it seems like.
But it's nothing. I mean, the cost is nothing relative to the good that is achieved, I think, or at least the conversation that is stimulated, which inevitably is going to lead to the good, to the better things.
So, to condemn people in the past, to condemn someone in the 17th or 18th century or 19th century for not writing books and getting them published and speaking up for the truth and this and that, when all you've got to do is to set up a blog and point people at it and write some thoughts down or email articles around.
I mean, nobody's asking you to become a monk and to give up all of the pleasures of the flesh and Wear itchy robes and droney, chanty, fall asleep and try and stay awake.
And nobody's asking you to give up your life and take a vow of silence.
Vow of silence. Even the word is terrifying.
Even the phrase. No one's asking you for that, brother.
Nobody is demanding that of you, my sister.
What's being asked of is that you have some conversations with people, either online or in person.
That's really all that's required.
You don't have to brave the thumbscrews of Tokamata to do your part to save the world.
So there's no problem if you don't think that even the relatively easy action that we can take in the modern world to spread the conversation with this absolutely amazing technology that we have on our hands, if you feel that it's too much of an effort or it's too fractious or whatever, if you feel that it's too much of an effort or it's I mean, I'm not going to tell you otherwise and what would it matter if I did?
Your motivation is your motivation.
I'm certainly not going to try and corner you and say, oh, you must and this and that.
No, the whole point of this is freedom, but...
You can't get angry at people for not spending a thousand joules of energy to ward off the onslaught of irrational dictatorship if you're not willing to expend ten kilojoules of energy.
It probably is even a higher ratio than a hundred times, but...
If you condemn people for not acting when acting was a thousand or a hundred times harder than what you have to do, then you can't.
You can't condemn them if you're not going to act.
You just can't. I mean, you can, but that's just ridiculous, right?
It's just hypocritical. And I know that this guy is sort of tongue-in-cheek.
I'm just fleshing out the argument.
I know that he was just sort of speaking and saying, there's this argument, what do you think?
think and and this is sort of uh this is sort of what i think it's sort of like i don't know if there's a bridge that raises and lowers somewhere and uh uh if you come across the bridge and it's a howling blizzard and and the bridge is up and you got to get out of your car and winch it down or whatever and there's no problem with it being down then just leave it down for the next person, right?
Because the next person is going to face the same issue.
Or don't get upset at the person ahead of you who left the bridge up.
I mean, it's like the toilet seat, right?
If you never lift the toilet seat, you can't get upset about somebody else.
I'm sorry, if you don't lower the toilet seat, let me just get my genders here.
If you don't lower the toilet seat and you prefer it down, then you can't get mad at people who don't lower it.
They're just doing what you do, right?
I mean, that's universally preferable behavior.
You can get mad, but it's hypocritical, right?
I mean, that approach, not this listener.
All listeners are perfect, but this approach.
And the other sort of argument that I would bring to bear, and Lord knows there probably is more than one, but the other argument that I would bring to bear on this perspective about how we view the future is, well, I mean, obviously it took, like, I don't know, 150 years, or if you count the long view, 3 billion or 2 billion years to get rid of slavery.
You count human beings around for, what, a couple of million years, a couple of hundred thousand years in a sort of Homo sapiens format.
Human 2.0.
Actually, 3.0, I think.
Australopithecus? Neanderthal?
Anyway, I saw my friends' episodes, too.
So, if you just sort of accept that to rid the world of a major evil takes a long time.
Now, we are in an unknown situation in that we have a viral multiplier.
That is just absolutely astounding.
You can get the equivalent of three years of college degrees from Free Domain Radio, just in terms of, let's just say in terms of length, and not quibble about the quality.
You can get three years of education that you can listen to on the go, I've had people who have written to me who say, I work in a factory and I put free-domain radio on under my protective ear gear.
That's amazing! That's absolutely astounding!
That somebody stuck in a manual laborer's job, of which I have worked many, many hours off in my life, so no disrespect intended.
I gold-panned, if you want to talk manual back-breaking dull-ass labor, all you get to do is watch for bears and Indians with guns.
Anyway, we'll talk about that another time.
But this person can listen to 8 hours if he wants a podcast, and this person has, listen to 8 hours of podcasts a day while he's working away.
It's completely unprecedented.
And he pays nothing. He pays nothing.
Imagine if I was selling, I guess it would be about 450 tapes of C90s.
Maybe not that many.
350 to 400 C90 tapes.
Of the podcasts.
Imagine what that would cost.
Well, I mean, there would be the cost of the tapes themselves, which would be, I don't know, a bucket tape, 500 bucks.
The cost of mailing 450 tapes, which would probably be about 100 bucks.
550 bucks.
The labor to create 450 tapes, which would probably be at least a day, even if you had some sort of auto-switcheroo.
And $50, $400.
So at least $1,000 outside of profit just to get 450 tapes of podcasts.
And you've got to remember them.
We'd have to label them.
Oh my God, just don't even get me started.
CDs or whatever. So, a thousand bucks, and then you'd have to make those.
I mean, you wouldn't just make those and then try and sell them, right?
You'd say, hey, I got 400 CDs.
You want them? Right?
I mean, they're not going to work, right?
So, there's just no way you'd have to do lots of live.
You'd have to be full-time. You could not build it the way that I've built it.
So... So it would be at least $2,000, $3,000 for these podcasts in any other medium.
And then there'd be the additional hassle of carting them all around and which one am I on.
And now they all fit on, I don't know, what is their 7 gigs worth of podcasts at the current audio resolution?
It fits on a $250 MP3 player.
And that's astounding.
You get all of this for free.
Or you can throw me a hundred bucks, which I think would be a fairly civilized thing to do.
The honor system is fifty cents a podcast.
Fifty cents a podcast, which I believe is a reasonable, reasonable voluntary price.
And it's funny, of course, those who are this far along anarchism, well, anyway, should get the whole voluntary participation thing fairly down well.
But... This conversation is so astoundingly unprecedented in history, and it is not just this viral reproducibility, but it's also the amazing and instantaneous feedback that I get in terms of emails, in terms of IMs, in terms of board responses.
It's this absolutely astounding biofeedback mechanism, which allows me to...
I don't have to sort of sit there with my hand on the stove for half an hour and then go, hey, that's hot, because my hand's already burned off.
I get this amazing feedback mechanism where I just get instantaneous response.
Literally, I have posted a podcast and gotten a response back like 20 minutes after the podcast length is over.
And that's just fantastic.
That kind of feedback is a significant part of how I guide this conversation and how this conversation grows and flows.
And that's all your beautiful, beautiful participation, you absolutely gorgeous listeners.
So... I don't know what the result is of a conversation of this level of quality and this level of participation and this level of freebie brain rewiring to all and sundry who want it.
I don't know what the effect of this is going to be.
It certainly is going to accelerate significantly.
The changes that are going to occur.
In the mindset. Forget the actions.
Fuck what's going to happen. Doesn't matter.
Can't control that anyway. All we can do is put the best arguments possible forward.
And then we can see what happens out of that.
That's all we can do.
As a doctor, you put your best foot forward in terms of your diagnosis and treatment, and then, to some degree, you just hope for the best.
That's all you can do. So all we do is apply the best diagnosis and treatment that we can, which is analysis and communication, and then we see what happens after that.
And with curiosity, we look at how the world is going to change based on what it is that we're doing.
So I don't know. I don't know how long it's going to take.
Historically, absolutely not in our lifetime.
I mean, I'll live for another, let's say, 50 years.
I plan to live at least to 90.
And I certainly have extended my lifespan by no longer podcasting in the car after Monday.
But this issue, this question of what the future looks like and whether we'll live to see it and so on, I mean, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter at all. So the two other arguments, I told you there was going to be more.
The two other arguments that I would bring to bear on this, one is that this guy says, well, I just want to stay home and spend time with my kids and love my kids and this, that, and the other.
Which, of course, is wonderful.
I mean, that's great. Spend time home and love your kids.
That's great. But, you know, these people in the future of which I speak may not be as unknown to you as you think.
We're not talking about some guy 300 years from now in Bangladesh.
We're talking about something a tad more immediate than that.
So, I don't think that it's...
It's worthwhile or valuable to think of the future as some place that we will never see.
Of course we will see it. We see our kids who will see the future.
Our kids that we see will see their kids who will see the future.
And so the world that you choose to act in to make better or choose to withdraw from and leave to decay is the world that your children are going to inhabit.
It's the world that your children are going to inhabit.
Now, of course, this is nothing particularly revelatory from my standpoint.
I'm sure it's occurred to everyone, but probably not quite as convolutedly and lengthily.
So I'd like to think I could bring something to the conversation.
Your children are going to grow up in this world that we can design.
The world is not designed at the moment.
The world is simply falling over in inertia.
Because no new thoughts are coming forward.
No new thoughts are coming forward.
And no new thoughts, in my view, have been coming forward for hundreds of years.
The last big trinity was separation of church and state, scientific method, and capitalism, which we're talking about the late 18th century, 200 and 250 years ago.
And the ideas were germinating before that.
That's when the ideas found expression in the general milieu.
The ideas are germinating for 100 or 200 years before that.
They just didn't have as much of an opportunity to spread in the way that our viral communication can spread due to this fantastic technology.
Capitalism is a slave to the state, but capitalism will save itself from the state.
And this is how. So it's been, I would say, three, four, five hundred years since the generation of really new, good, wild, valuable, practical ideas in human thought.
You can go back to the pre-Smithian economics, Ricardo and so on for all of that.
Well, I guess I should say, and it is a chilling oversight on my part, that you really can't dismiss what many consider the best single idea that ever happened to anyone, which is the theory of evolution.
And I don't believe that that's the best single idea.
I don't know what the theory of evolution has done for me, relative to, say, capitalism and the scientific method.
The theory of evolution didn't produce podcasts, that was capitalism and science.
So, I just think it was a good idea, but...
I don't know. I mean, I'm sure 8 million biologists are going to write and tell me, oh, you didn't know that your left eye is totally engineered by the descendants of Darwin or something like that, and I certainly look forward to being corrected.
But, yeah, it was a good idea, but I don't know how it changes the price of apples in my world, so...
Forgive me if I don't leap at it with both hands in a way that I do say of my wife.
So... That is the world that we are going to inhabit, that our children are going to inhabit.
It's the world of the future, the world that we either save or let decay.
And at the moment, it's all just decaying.
At the moment, it's just a series of dominoes.
The people who have had thoughts and ideas in the past came up with those thoughts and ideas in the past, and we're now simply just repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating them over and over again.
And sometimes redundantly.
So there's no new ideas in the world.
There haven't been for hundreds and hundreds of years.
I think that we're putting some new ideas forward.
And, I mean, there are, you know, Freud's discovery of the unconscious, which he totally botched by introverting the sexual predation of children into the Oedipal and Electra complex and so on.
So I have to get into all of that, but...
That is the world that they're going to inhabit, and the world is simply going to continue in its entropic fashion, in its decaying domino, domino, domino, repeat, repeat, repeat fashion, until there's a significant and heavily willed intervention from intelligent people like us.
I mean, nothing is going to change unless we change it.
Society is a snowball, it goes down a mountain, it grows to a...
Avalanche, until somebody stops it, right?
And if you stop the snowball early enough, who knows, right?
I think that certainly the snowball is getting pretty fast, and I don't think that we're going to be able to stop it, but after the impact, the rebuilding is something that we can very strongly affect, and I think that, of course, we should.
So, your kids are going to live there, and their kids are going to live there, so why would you want to have kids, right?
If you don't want to make the world a better place.
I mean, the world is not in stasis.
I mean, the world is declining.
I mean, certainly the West. Other areas such as the middle class in India is like, what, 50,000 or 100,000 new people like every day move into the middle class in India.
So there are places in the world that are doing better and better, but in the West where we live, where we are, for the most part, it's significant decline.
Increased militarism, massive state interventions, increased national debts, expansion of state power continually, resurgence and expansion of the Unity of church and state in the United States in particular and growing in England.
I mean, these are all signs of decadence and decay, and we're not the first civilization.
Hopefully, if this conversation works, we'll be the last, but we're not the first civilization to go through this.
The signs are clear, and I don't know if we'll be able to stop it or not.
I doubt it. But we can do an enormous amount to rebuild after the break.
So why would you want to have kids?
If you find speaking the truth difficult enough for you now in this life, how's it going to be for your kids?
This turtles all the way up, I guess, generationally.
How's it going to be for your kids?
You can't speak the truth when the world is...
50% corrupt, just making it up, and every generation it becomes 10% more corrupt, then how are your kids going to be able to speak the truth at 60% corruption?
80%, 90%?
If you can't do it now, who's going to do it in the future, given the way that a rudderless society disintegrates?
It's like a car rolling down a hill.
And it's going like, I don't know, 15 miles an hour.
And it's going to roll off a cliff.
And you're like, ooh, I don't know.
It's going kind of fast for me.
I'm going to wait until later to roll.
But it's going down a hill, right?
If you're not going to open the door and roll out now...
How are you going to do it when the car's going even faster?
And how are you going to do it?
And why would you do it or even bother when the car's going over the cliff?
Or gone over the cliff? Wouldn't help.
Wouldn't sort of mean anything, right?
So that aspect of things, I think, is very, very important.
If you can't do it now, it's not going to get any easier for your kids.
Quite the contrary. It's going to get harder.
So do them a favor.
If not the love for humanity in the abstract, then the love for your children in the reality of your children and the future that they should have.
The future that they should have and the knowledge that in the absence of significant intervention the inertia takes the world down and down and down the slope of decay and dissolution and decadence.
And without strong-willed intervention, nothing's going to happen.
Nothing's going to change. It's all just going to continue and get worse and worse and worse.
So, I hope that that at least helps some aspect of the conversation for you.
I really do appreciate you listening, as always.
And look at that nice, tidy, short podcast, and I will talk to you soon.
Thank you for another nice little donation today.
I certainly appreciate it. Remember, remember, my friends, you get...
The fabulous novel The God of Atheists.
There's also a novel called Almost Set Between World War I and World War II concerning a British and a German family drawn heavily from my own family history, which I think is an excellent, excellent book.
There is Just Poor, the story of...
A brilliant orphaned woman who struggles to achieve some sort of voice in the middle of the agricultural revolution in 18th century England.
There's Revolutions, which is my novel about a Russian anarchist just before the revolution in Russia.
And last but not least, there's a book that Christina and I wrote together called Public Lives, about how the state and mental health and emotional destruction work hand in hand In socialized medicine, it's a fiction story.
So thank you so much for listening.
These are all available for donations.
Give me a shout if I have.
Somebody sent me some cash.
I appreciate it. I'm not going to write you back, and there was no email on it, so if you...
If you want to drop by the board or send me an email or you can even write me again, I'd be more than happy to send you.
I can slip it on CD if you like, but just let me know.
If you've sent me something and when I get stuff through eGold, I don't get any emails, so I can't tell who gave me the money.
So just email me and I'll believe you.
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