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April 27, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:34
735 We are not born small...

The size of our souls is the depth of our opposition

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 5 o'clock on the 20-late-ish of April 2007.
And I thought it would be worthwhile dipping into some fairly deep philosophical mojo.
Because I've done some podcasts recently on the importance of philosophy and the importance of this conversation that we're having with regards to philosophy.
And it's very hard for us to see that.
When we're in doing our sort of daily life kind of thing, it's really hard to see the grandeur of what we're doing.
And grandeur is something that is not...
It's not really encouraged in the modern world.
In fact, grandeur, and this is partly because we live in a petty, false self planet, but also because the grandeur that was accepted as valuable in the 20th century was the sort of leafy Rosenstahl, or whatever her name is, the woman who did the Nuremberg Rally films, It's that kind of grandeur.
It's the fascist grandeur.
It's the world epoch-spanning Marxist self-annihilation catastrophe of the classes kind of grandeur.
And people kind of freaked out in the 20th century with regards to grandeur.
And Grandio very, very quickly became an enemy.
And people found that it sort of became like if the only way that you can socialize is to snort cocaine off the bald Brazilian beavers of prostitutes, then at some point in your life you're going to have a problem socializing it.
You're going to get too old and you're going to get too sick.
So, if you have a very unstable personality, you have to stay away from temptation, because what happens when you get a hold of temptation, or rather, to be more accurate, when temptation gets a hold of you, is you just go haywire.
You can't have a drink, right, if you're an alcoholic.
You can't have a drink, because one drink leads to five drinks, leads to ten drinks, leads to Tijuana, tattoos, and hepatitis.
So, you can't have a drink when you are an alcoholic.
Now, the 21st century, and in many ways the second half of the 20th century, was humanity sort of shrinking back in absolute horror and terror with regards to the events of the first half of the 20th century.
And this, of course, did not serve the causes of freedom in any way, shape, or form.
In fact, it served quite the opposite of the forces of freedom, namely the forces of statism.
But it sort of very quickly became apparent to people, at least in the way that they thought of it, that human beings are full of savagely, sickly, horribly evil impulses of genocide and torture and murder, and 10,000 men died per foot of advance along the Somme, which was then taken back, and Vimy Ridge, and all the stuff that happened in the First World War.
It was perceived that a lid had come off the hellish, evil soul of humanity.
And this is what happens, you see, when you think big.
This is what happens when you think big.
Because in the late medieval, early Renaissance Enlightenment period, thinking big was good.
Thinking big was great.
Everybody wanted to think big.
Thinking big without vanity, without narcissism, without, say, genocide was considered a good thing.
People wrote, Alexander Pope and all of the other Enlightenment poets wrote this amazing work.
Shakespeare didn't think small.
Shakespeare didn't set his plays in his kitchen sink dramas, right?
He thought big.
He did gods. He did kings.
He did wars. He did, you know, big personalities.
To be large, to be grand was very much the hallmark of the Enlightenment.
And of course, the nice thing about it was it came...
In opposition to the endless genocides of religious warfare that was going on in the late medieval period, especially after Luther, as we talked about in the digital Gutenberg podcast, after the unwashed masses got their grubby little hands on the original text of the Bible, everybody went, hey, this isn't what I was told, and everyone says, well, that's not what you're saying, and they all fall to each other's throats in the way that we can see them doing in Iraq at the moment.
It's the same thing we were doing a couple hundred years ago.
We just forget.
We always forget. So it was good to be big.
It was good to be big. Adam Smith didn't write the wealth of my street, right?
He didn't write the wealth of my little corner of England or the wealth of my cat's collection of furballs.
He wrote, no, the wealth of nations, not just of a little particular corner of things.
And the Declaration of Independence.
All men are created equal, endowed by the Creator, blah, blah, blah.
This was big thinking.
This was universal thinking.
This was broad, grand thinking.
Platonic Forms is not exactly saying, my cat has catness based on its fur and is local to me as it rubs it up against my leg.
Plato was, the forms are the essence of reality, of reality, supersensual reality.
Hegel didn't think small.
Hegel wrote a philosophy which regarded the unfolding of the world spirit and the manifestation of nations' destinies.
Which sadly led to a lot of genocides, but he was not thinking small at the time.
And basically from the sort of 17th century onward, people thought big.
They thought big, they thought grand, they thought for the future, they thought in terms of humanity.
And now, and now, and now, and now, we're just not thinking.
Allowed to think big.
Got to think small. Think small.
Think globally. Act locally.
If you want to save the planet, change your light bulbs.
It's all about the little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little things.
Don't you worry your pretty little head about the big things.
We've got all those sorted out.
Democracy is good, you know, it's a mess, but it's good.
We don't really deal with universal values.
We don't really think about the future, grand visions.
We just do the little things, little things.
You're not allowed to have big thoughts.
That's what post-modernism is all about.
You're not allowed to have. Big thoughts.
The only big thoughts you can have are thoughts about how large the smallness of everything is.
And I'll do postmodernism when I go a little more full-time.
But you're not allowed to have big thoughts in the modern world.
And since I have been cursed and or blessed with big thoughts my whole life, I can tell you that speaking big thoughts to people blows their mind.
Blows their minds. You're not allowed to be big.
You're not allowed to be big.
Everybody is frightened. It's like, well, the last time we were big, 250 million people got killed, so let's not be big anymore.
Ooh, let's not be big. Let's just be little.
Let's hide. When we were big, we unleashed the demons.
So now, let us be small and hope that the demons, if they're around, won't notice us.
Let us be as mammals at the feet of the dinosaurs and dart and hide and burrow and scurry and be small.
But sadly, my friends, being small will not save us.
Being small will not save us.
Because the one thing that isn't small is power.
Power of parents, power of priests, power of politicians, power of army, policemen, power of intellectuals.
That, my friends, is growing.
And we must be larger than power if we are to tame that power.
We must be large enough to embrace and contain and eventually crash like a boa constrictor power.
We must be larger than the government.
We must be larger than God.
We must be deeper than history.
We must be more precise than logic.
We must aim...
Very, very large if we are to wrap our arms around this bloated beast of power that squats across the modern world and shrink it.
And shrink it. We can't drain it.
We can't drill little holes in the bottom.
We've got to embrace it and crush it in our embrace.
And that means we've got to be big.
A longtime listener posted on the boards today, on the board, He said, you know, I can't stop listening to, I think it's 729, where I talk about the size of what it is that we're trying to do.
He said, I can't stop listening to it.
First, you know, check the auto-repeat on your MP3 player.
But if that is fine and it's intentional, then...
Or perhaps I've just done so many that you think they're new all the time.
But I think I know why you can't stop listening to it.
Because I do not encourage people to be big.
I do not... Even provoke people to be big.
I demand that people be big if they wish to be philosophers.
You can't be small if you want to be a philosopher.
Now, the problem is that we associate science with narcissism.
We associate being big with pushing other people out of the way.
We associate inhaling To a larger size to be pushing everybody else away because that's narcissism.
I get bigger at your expense.
I get bigger by eclipsing you.
I don't grow myself fundamentally and effectively what I do is I shrink you.
That's the approach of the narcissist.
And such is not our approach, my friends.
Such is not our approach, my friends.
I do not seek to be large at the expense of anybody who is listening.
In fact, I would find myself peculiarly and nauseatingly revolted should I feel that I had increased the grandeur of my spirit and soul at the expense of anybody who was listening to this.
I want us to grow big together!
I want us to aim high to be big because certainly human beings can be big.
Certainly human beings can be big.
And a lot of the disasters of the 20th century were human beings being big and terribly the wrong way.
So human beings can be big and why not you or I? Why not?
What was carved on our foreheads that says, cannot grow?
What was carved on our foreheads that says, stay small, stay little, don't move, don't attract attention, don't offend, don't upset people, don't contradict, don't confront.
I don't believe that that's carved on my goddamn DNA. And I don't believe it's carved on your DNA either.
I think that's just frightened people boxing us in to keep us small.
And I've had it with that.
I've had it with that.
There is nothing written in our DNA that says we cannot speak the truth because people will be upset.
So they get upset. So what?
So what? Want to go to your grave?
I don't. I don't want to go to my grave saying to myself, well, I didn't ruffle too many feathers.
People liked me.
They didn't know me, really. And I didn't certainly reveal my true self to them.
I didn't even know what it was.
But I got along. I sort of...
I passed through life like a javelin into a still pond with barely a ripple.
That is my legacy.
That about 18 minutes after I died, people say...
Oh yeah, that guy. And they think back on me, and without the aid of photographs, they can barely remember my face.
And without the aid of letters and emails, they can barely remember my words.
That's not what I want for me.
That's certainly not what I want for you.
There is nothing written into anything within us, deep within us, that says we must be small.
There is only the scar tissue on the outside, and that we can get rid of.
That we can outgrow. Basically, you say, fuck the scar tissue, I'm growing beyond it.
You keep growing, you absorb it in you, and it doesn't matter anymore.
You engulf it the way that we need to engulf the state and God, priests, parents.
Oh, parents. We need to be larger than our parents.
And what makes us large?
Well, of course, values, logic, philosophy.
That's how we connect to that which is the largest.
How does a physicist become large enough to travel in his mind with accuracy to a black hole orbiting Betelgeuse?
Well, with logic and science.
That's how we become large.
And that's exactly why in the humanities nobody's allowed to talk about logic and science.
In any fundamental values kind of way.
If you connect values to logic and science, my God, you become big.
Bigger than anyone in the room.
Bigger than the world.
Bigger than the universe. And certainly bigger than mankind.
So I'm not bigger than mankind.
Philosophy is bigger than mankind.
And the degree to which we participate in it, accurately and humbly and with joy, we become large.
We grow. We bestride the world like colossi when we connect with philosophy.
And it's horrible to think of.
It's horrible to think of.
That we lived low these many decades.
My brothers and sisters, we lived low these many decades among all of these people who were our teachers and our masters.
And those who inflicted their wisdom, wisdom upon us.
We lived for many, many years among these people who told us and taught us what was right.
And not only did they never tell us that we could be big, not only did they never tell us that we could be powerful, they attacked us whenever the notion crossed our mind.
It's not that people never told us that we could be large.
I could forgive that. I could forgive the world for not telling me that I could be large.
I could forgive the world for that.
And then I would be much less motivated to change it.
I could forgive the world for not telling me that I could be large because maybe nobody thought of it.
Maybe nobody knew it. Maybe it never crossed anybody's mind.
Didn't cross my mother's mind to teach me elvish because she never read Lord of the Rings.
I don't hate her for that.
Why would I?
There's so many other good reasons.
No, it's not that nobody ever told me that I could be big, powerful, grand.
And...
That's not what I dislike the world for.
It's that... Everybody knew that I could be, just as they knew that you could be.
And it threatened them, and that's why they attacked us.
And that's why they ground us down into this fine, pasty, empty mist of minutiae and trivia and nothingness, perpetual emptiness.
It is what is inflicted upon children these days.
There are children I know that you can't have a conversation with.
There are adults, oh god, so many adults I know, that you just can't have a conversation with about anything.
And that's most people.
And they know that they are large, and they know that you are large.
This is not the province of you or I. This is the birthright of mankind.
This is the birthright of everyone to be large and powerful and grand and beautiful.
Our souls should be, as the song says, landscape paintings in the sky.
We should be grand.
We should be deep. We should be powerful.
We should be wise.
We should be brave. We are all these things naturally.
We are all of these things naturally.
I am not attempting to invent But to recover the spirit of man.
to disinhibit our grandeur, not to inflate the false self.
It is that depth, power, wisdom is recognized power, wisdom is recognized only in the modern world and the opposition.
Only in the opposition.
How do we know what human beings are naturally?
We know what human beings are naturally by seeing what is opposed.
Are human beings naturally braver?
Of course! That's why any act of independence has to be crushed and attacked when you're a child.
Naturally we are that way.
A human being's naturally collectivist?
Of course not! Of course not!
We're mildly tribal, but we're not naturally enslaved to the collective by nature.
That is not our nature.
Because if it was our nature, we would need no propaganda.
Whatsoever. To become that way.
We would not need to have dunce caps put on our heads or when I was a kid to be caned for disobeying stupid rules.
Or when you were a kid, perhaps you got rulered on the back of the hand or perhaps you merely got humiliated and sent to the back of the class.
Or perhaps you had to write out senseless lines.
Or perhaps you had to, as one of my listeners wrote, stand half crouched in a corner for half an hour when you are seven or eight years old until your muscles scream.
But whatever happened, your natural self was utterly violated, opposed, crushed, diminished, humiliated, as, of course, we have talked about before.
However, But the important thing to know is why.
Why were you ground into such a little pile of obedient and empty dust?
Why? Why would people do that to you?
Why would they try to make you small?
Why?
The answer is clear.
People must try to make you small because, my friend, you are not small.
No.
The degree of opposition is the degree of recognition.
The degree of opposition is the degree of recognition.
The degree to which we are forced to be small is exactly and proportionately the degree to which we are not innately small.
The degree of opposition is the degree of recognition.
How much medical or anorexic intervention is required to prevent a child from going through puberty?
It's an enormous amount of work and labor and effort.
You've got to dope the kid, you've got to starve the kid in order to prevent puberty.
If somebody wishes to prevent puberty in their child and dopes them and drugs them and starves them, it cannot be said that they do not know about puberty.
They know about puberty, and we know that they know about puberty because they are trying to oppose and prevent puberty, right?
Why is it that we're herded into the pews, and why is it that we sit through these endless, completely boring family dinners?
And why is it that we were herded into the stupid little robot rows of public schools and just forced to be so tiny?
Tiny. Relative to what?
Well, they have to invent all of these concepts that don't exist that make you feel small relative to those concepts.
The human concepts are larger than the universe because we wrap around and define what is the universe and we know the edge of it and go beyond it to say that it is not the universe.
So if the concepts are within you, then you are grand and great and beautiful and powerful.
If you own the concepts.
Ah, but, my friends, if the concepts own you, you are infinitesimal.
You are teeny-diny.
You cease to exist.
I mean, relative to the state, we don't exist.
What is our personal power relative to a couple of hundred ICBMs?
What is our personal power relative to the power of war and taxation?
The slaughter, murder, imprisonment and welfare.
And roads. What is our power relative?
It doesn't exist. Because that's a concept that owns us.
That's a concept that we're taught dominates us, exists independently of us.
That is how we are made small, is concepts are invented that are external to us that we cannot evaluate.
Reason about that we must simply compare ourselves to and vanish and vanish and vanish.
Were your parents fallible human beings who communicated with humor about their limitations and encourage you to think for yourself?
Of course not. Of course not.
Of course not. We are building that.
We are building that. We cannot visit that.
We are planning that. We have blueprints.
we do not have a city.
No, your parents paraded their power as infinitely greater than yours.
That to be a parent was to be correct.
That to be a parent was to be virtuous.
And you could not be a parent!
You could not be a parent when you were a child.
So you had no access to that.
Just as you and I have no access to government power, fuck the vote.
It's an illusion. Three rapists and a woman get to vote who gets raped?
Huh.
That seems fair and logical and virtuous.
What about your priests?
Ha ha ha.
Where's your power and identity relative to God's?
God is simply invented to make people vanish.
God is like the invisibility cloak.
God is a concept that is invented to make people vanish.
To make them feel utterly insignificant and worthless.
Why? So that you can control them.
That's why we have armies.
That's why we have the country and the flag!
Or Gaia.
It's to make you feel insignificant.
It's to drown you.
In abstractions, it's to cause you to wink out of existence.
Relative to these big heady bullshit concepts.
But here's the different approach.
Here's the approach that we've been working on here.
Here's the different approach.
No concepts exist outside of your mind.
No concepts exist outside of your mind.
The government does not exist outside of anybody's mind.
The government is but a concept, a country.
I'm not talking about the trees and the rocks and the people.
I'm talking about the concept.
does not exist except in people's minds.
Your parents, your family, the virtue of those things does not exist except as an idea in people's minds.
God Himself does not exist except as a concept in people's minds.
Now, if I walked up to you and said, you are smaller than the dream I had last night.
You are smaller than my idea of blue.
What sense would that make to you?
What possible sense could that make to you?
It's like saying, is a tree taller than the color blue?
Wait a...
It's a null comparison.
It doesn't mean anything.
No concept, and I said this from the very beginning, but I want to personalize it now.
Thank you.
No concept exists except within the minds of men.
Of men. Saying that you are smaller than the government or that you are smaller than your country...
It's exactly the same as saying you are smaller than the idea of the color blue in a couple of different people's heads.
it means nothing it means nothing saying that you are smaller than God is like saying that you are smaller than my memory of my vacation it means nothing It does not compute.
It does not compute at all.
And here's the deepest layer, at least that I've been able to get to.
The proposition that you are smaller than God or your country or your parents is itself nothing more than an idea in somebody's head.
Thank you.
It is not a statement of truth.
If you and I stand next to the Eiffel Tower and I say, you're smaller than the Eiffel Tower, that's a testable hypothesis that I'm putting forward and so on.
But if I say, you are smaller than God, I'm putting forward a perfectly meaningless statement.
When I'm saying you are smaller than God, I'm saying that you are smaller than the idea that you are smaller than God, which is completely and totally beyond meaningless.
I hope I'm not doing a bad job of explaining this.
It's so important! There is nothing larger, deeper, more powerful, more rich, more wonderful, more beautiful than your sovereign soul and mind.
And heart, let's throw the instincts in as well.
There is nothing larger than your judgment.
When I say nothing, I don't mean reality.
Reality is larger than all of our judgments.
There is no concept larger than your judgment.
Reality is larger than your judgment.
It's larger than my judgment. If I judge the traffic ahead as clear, I close my eyes and start driving forward and it turns out that I'm wrong, reality wins.
We don't get to make these things up.
But when somebody puts forward a proposition, There is nothing in their mind that is larger than your judgment.
Nothing in their mind that is larger than your judgment.
And every concept that they appeal to is in their mind, not in reality.
If we're standing next to the Eiffel Tower and I say, you're smaller than the Eiffel Tower, you say, yeah, I think so, I'm looking up.
If I say, you are smaller than the idea of a tower, Then you have every right to say, that makes no sense.
That is a complete non sequitur.
It's a null comparison.
It's turtles eating turtles all the way around.
It's like saying, I'm older than the number two.
Actually, the number two could have a history, conceptually.
You can put this together.
Don't work me so hard Everything that everyone communicates to you is an idea in their head it.
Thank you.
Do you see? An idea in their head.
All they're using is mere language.
You can only compare yourself to reality.
You cannot compare yourself, your size, to concepts.
You can only compare your concepts to reality.
and you can only validate your concepts through logic.
And that's what I mean when I say that you can never be smaller than the idea in somebody else's head.
And just about everything that people talk about is an idea just in their head.
I'll give you some examples.
Country. God.
Parent. A parent does exist in reality, but once you become an adult, it just happened to give birth to you a number of years ago.
And there's certainly no virtue.
A parent is just a biological relationship.
Which has no value or virtue in and of itself, whatsoever.
You have a biological relationship to a tumor as well.
It doesn't make it virtuous. Law.
Law is just an idea.
Law is just...
I don't mean physical laws.
Human laws are just an idea in people's heads.
It's just a thought. It's just a concept.
Obey the law.
It means obey me.
Obey the ideas that I'm putting forward.
Somebody says, you know, there's this old phrase, it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Well, no. Law is at very best nothing more than a good idea.
Universally preferable behavior, morality is a little different, but I'm talking human law in the way that it's talked about now.
Human law does not exist. It's just an idea in somebody's head.
You must vote!
Voting is just an idea in somebody's head.
It's just a thought. It's magical thinking at that.
No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
Nobody says, would you like to vote or would you like to keep your money?
Let's see how long the state lasts.
if that proposition is ever put forward.
This is so hard to understand...
At least it was for me. Maybe you're sailing along saying, dude, pretty redundant, man.
I got it.
This is such a hard thing to understand that we live in a social construct that is almost invariably in direct and total opposition to reality.
Teacher doesn't exist.
Thank you.
Thank you.
There's a person who's telling you something.
You can listen or you cannot. And they may have taught you if you wish to learn.
But a teacher, she is the teacher.
Like you walk into a classroom when you're, I don't know, you go to grade 9, you get a whole new set of teachers.
For me, it was grade 10. Grade 10, you get a whole new set of teachers.
You walk into the room.
Somebody says, that's the teacher at the front.
You can say, no, she's not.
And I can say, no, she's the teacher.
No, she's not the teacher.
She hasn't taught me anything.
Now, if she has great things to say and I wish to learn, then she can teach me for sure.
But when I walk into a room and somebody's standing there with chalk in their hand and horn-rimmed glasses and Flowered print dresses.
And somebody says, I've never met this person before.
Somebody says, oh, that's the teacher.
Well, no, they're not the teacher.
It's just a person. That's a politician.
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