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July 10, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:14
1105 Motivation and Slavery

Some thoughts on a TED talk by Anthony Robbins http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cpc-t-Uwv1I

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Good evening, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It is Tuesday, the 8th of July, 7pm, 2008.
So, I have watched a couple of these TED Talks.
It's some place out in California that gets right people together to give speeches.
And, of course, I couldn't help but feel a little bit of semi-professional jealousy because it would be wonderful to be able to give a speech at this sort of place, but it's never going to happen, and so I have to recognize the reality of the world that we live in.
And the reason that I ended up there was a fax came through to Christina's line, which was Anthony Robbins giving a talk at the Metro Convention Center, which is a big place up here in Toronto.
And I guess it's July 25th to 28th, so a couple of days.
And it's 700 bucks for general admission.
Executive VIP is $1,300, includes breakfast and lunch.
And so, just out of curiosity, I've never seen an Anthony Robbins speech, but I looked him up and he was given a TED Talk about motivation or something like that.
And it was just fascinating, of course, because as all these things are when you view them through what I think is the unclouded lens of philosophy, it's just amazing to see how these things operate.
In this speech, you know, he says human beings have, you know, X numbers of needs and they will try to get them met a variety of ways.
So we want to have impact on people and so we can either do that through Charity or positive things or we can have an impact on someone by holding a gun to their head and demanding respect if we're in the hood or something like that.
And he makes a joke about...
Al Gore makes a joke.
He's sitting in the audience. And Anthony Robbins comes down and gives him a high five and so on.
And it really is just amazing because there's this fundamental question which more and more time and energy is being devoted to which is, you know, what the hell is wrong with the world?
I look at this In a sense, God-forsaken planet that we live in, where there are islands of joy amidst a generally seething sea of blood and despair and destruction and hopelessness.
And there is this sort of fundamental question, what is wrong with the world?
And, in general, I mean, my approach to this question, or my answer to this question is, what's wrong with the world, almost inevitably, is the solutions to the question of what is wrong with the world.
What is wrong with the world?
Well, what is wrong with the world is that Anthony Robbins will say human beings need to feel meaning and validation, like all the general junk that these kinds of guys talk about.
And that holding a gun to your head will mean that you feel that you have had an impact on someone.
Whereas a politician who covers up the violence he uses to achieve his ends is someone you give a high-five to.
And why is it that people go to people like Anthony Robbins and say, okay, why would somebody spend $1,300 to go and spend a few days as a speck in a crowd of thousands at a seminar like this?
What are they paying for?
What are they paying for? Why does Al Gore give him a high five?
Or he give a high five to Al Gore, who's just another sleazy, fear-mongering politician, right?
With all of his global warming shit, stuff like that.
What are people paying for? Well, they're paying for an avoidance of all the stuff that we have to do.
We who are actually working with first principles philosophy, they're paying to gain the satisfaction of courage without actually having to be brave.
They're paying To gain the illusion of certainty and confidence when all they're getting is a kind of hyper-emotional pumping up and a kind of smug self-satisfaction of their own virtue.
They may as well, in my opinion, be paying to go and see a prostitute and thinking that they're buying love.
Everybody knows that there is something very wrong with the world.
And everybody knows that the answers do not remain satisfying for very long.
I mean, sure, you go to one of these places and you get kind of pumped up.
I mean, he's a high-energy kind of preacher guy.
And I'm sure that you feel that you make some sort of progress in some sort of way.
He has an example of a Muslim and a Jew talking on his stage and coming to some sort of reconciliation.
You hear a lot about this kind of stuff from various people.
And he says now that they're working for peace in the Middle East and they're writing books and this and that.
And of course we can guarantee for sure that peace in the Middle East will not come from these efforts.
Because you simply cannot speak the truth about the basics.
The entire purpose of this is to put the blame on the victims.
Right? To blame the sheep because the farm is run with violence and degradation.
This blame the victim is the essence of any kind of salvation religion, whether it's the Catholic Church or Anthony Robbins or Barack Obama.
What is wrong with the world?
What is wrong with the world is that you lack passion and motivation.
That is what is wrong with the world.
What is wrong with the world is that you are not generous enough, you see.
That you are selfish.
What is wrong with the world is that you get bound up in petty things.
What is wrong with the world is that you get caught up in the past.
What is wrong with the world is that You are not a productive enough slave.
You should be producing 12 gallons of milk a day when you are in fact only producing one or two.
And what I mean when I talk in this kind of way Is that, well, what is wrong with the world is that you're not passionately devoted enough to giving to others, to the world.
Giving back! That's what they always talk about.
That's what he says at the very beginning of this.
I posted this on the board.
Very beginning of this TED talk.
You can look for it on YouTube.
It's great to have a chance to finally give back.
And you're not allowed to talk, of course, if you're one of these guys.
You're not allowed to talk about the basics, which is that there's nothing at all wrong with humanity in the slightest.
Nothing at all wrong with people, in the slightest.
If you are a British sailor in the 17th century, and they haven't figured out that you need your vitamin C to avoid scurvy, then you will, as hundreds of thousands of sailors did, develop symptoms as hundreds of thousands of sailors did, develop symptoms of scurvy.
Your teeth will rot out.
I think your eyeballs fall out.
and then you die. And whoever invented oranges and lemons, say the bells of St.
Clemens, to bring along with the sailors, did more for the British Navy than the guy who invented the cannon.
The British Navy lost more sailors to scurvy than all the wars, I think, that it fought during that time.
And Anthony Robbins is the kind of guy who says, you have scurvy because you lack motivation and generosity.
What is wrong with the British Navy?
What's wrong with the British Navy is that it lacks passion and purpose in life.
Well, I don't believe that anybody...
Fundamentally lacks passion and purpose in life.
I don't believe that there's anything wrong with the individuals.
I don't believe that yammering away at the slaves and high-fiving the slave masters is a particularly noble and productive way.
Well, sorry, I shouldn't say.
That is clearly enormously lucrative for him to be able to do that.
But, and I remember this from, I spent some time, my brother kind of, back when this was still a goal of mine to stay in this relationship, my brother keelhauled me into this landmark forum, which was an outgrowth of Werner Herzest, and I spent a weekend or two And it was interesting.
Again, nothing wrong with it. It's all very interesting.
And I did get some stuff out of it that was useful, but fundamentally and foundationally, it ignores so many of the basics.
You know, it's like being an aerobics instructor to a bunch of people in chains on a slave ship and saying, people, where is your motivation?
Why aren't you dancing with passion?
Well, because we have chains on.
And the chains, of course, are statism and religion and the cult of the family.
The chains are violence.
The chains are propaganda.
The chains are lies, which you are contributing to.
Not you. Anthony Robbins and people like him.
And saying to people that propaganda is the solution for propaganda is ridiculous.
That you need to pump yourself up because you're beaten down.
Put some makeup on those bruises and go out and conquer the world, he says to the beaten wife.
But you simply cannot talk about the basics, which is why are people so messed up?
Why are they so frightened?
Why are they so angry? Why are they so scared?
Why are they so vicious? Why are they so brutal?
Why are they so cold?
Why are they so alienated?
Why are they so volatile? Why are they so reactive?
Why are they so defensive?
Why are people so fucking weird?
Well, these people are intelligent.
I would credit Anthony Robbins with more than a few brain cells.
And, of course, if he were given this problem in terms of, you know, farming, a farmer came to him and said, why are my cows so stunted and I have owned these cows since they were born?
What would be the first question that would pass into his mind, as it would into the mind of anybody with an IQ over about 12?
Why are your cows so stunted and sickly?
Well, what do you feed them when they are growing up?
How do you raise them?
And so, Anthony Robbins looks around the world and says, well, there are lots of problems with the world, and like this Dr.
Phil punks out on the teacher's podcast I did about 18 months ago, he comes to the conclusion that what people lack is knowledge and motivation.
And so he goes and sells very expensive tickets.
I don't know what the price is. Maybe he's only shaving 5%, but I doubt it.
How does he go about solving this problem?
Does he say, look, it doesn't matter what the fuck you and I talk about in this amphitheater.
It doesn't matter how many fucking charts I put up in the wall, and it doesn't matter how passionately my godlike six-foot-tall teeth gleam in the spotlights.
It doesn't matter one little goddamn bit.
What we talk about here, because our children are being mentally mauled by brutal and coercive education.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what we talk about here.
I'm not going to try and teach aerobics to slaves.
I am not going to try and teach passionate oratory to the mute.
To those who have had their tongues torn out.
I am not going to further humiliate you slaves by pretending that you aren't slaves and weren't raised as slaves.
And saying that the upsets and problems in your life are to do with your own thoughts which mysteriously popped into your head.
That's what he says. You know, you always know that some people who just get pissed off no matter what.
Always know that some people are happy no matter what.
It's your thoughts, you see.
It's your thoughts. That make you who you are.
Well, who made your thoughts?
Where did your thoughts come from?
How much of our personality is really ours outside of culture and history?
A very small part outside of what we're taught and the milieu that we float in.
How much of it? How much of us is really ours?
A couple of percentage points?
Maybe five? Maybe ten? Maybe.
Maybe. Who would you be if you'd been born a poor child in Syria?
Same body, same genetics, just different parents, different culture.
I bet you'd be at least 90% different.
At least.
So who we are is forged by where we live.
Doesn't mean that that's all we can ever be, but that's what shapes most of us.
We know that from simply looking at the cultures around the world and seeing how similar everyone is.
And it's true that in some of the freer cultures, you'll go, ooh, Republican or Democrat, or ooh, maybe Nader or Libertarian, but it's all still the same narrow spectrum compared to someone, say, a child born near the top of a mountain in a village in Afghanistan.
So, when he looks at people and he says, well, the world is kind of messed up, does he say, well, the problem, you see, is the ideas that are inflicted upon us when we are children.
He says, no, we have a therapy culture.
We think it's all about the past.
Well, I'm talking about the present and I'm talking about the future.
Well... That, of course, is because he wants to take credit for his own self.
I mean, what is he, nine feet tall?
A very handsome fellow.
And those teeth.
It's like Stonehenge is trying to eat me.
But he wants to avoid talking about the basics.
He wants to take the vanity for himself, for his appearance, which is a huge part of his success.
I mean, it's like some male model, Antonio Sabato Jr.
circa 1992, saying, well, you know, why don't you all become underwear models?
What's the matter with you? Or Brad Pitt saying, geez, don't worry about money.
And women, you know, it's all about confidence is how you get women.
Right. Right?
Because looks, but it has nothing to do with it.
I mean, we might as well get one of the Carnegie Mellon children to tell us about how it is your attitude that determines your wealth.
And my attitude was, be born to a wealthy family.
So can he talk about any of the basic realities that it is our culture that messes us up?
It's the cult of culture that messes us up?
It is the fact that parents do not get to choose?
The schools for their children, can you imagine?
Of course, this is because children don't vote, and parents, unfortunately, want to offload them a lot of times, but can you imagine if the state decreed that adults had to marry whoever the state chose for them out of a local pool?
No. People would go insane.
It's unbelievable. But when a child is 5, I guess from 5 to 18, 12, 13 years of education, is that not more important than a marriage in terms of the formulation of our ideas and our identity?
But that is all compulsory.
That is all compulsory.
The lies that our parents tell us about religion, about statism, about the uses of violence in society, about the virtues of public schools, the heroism of teachers, I mean, is this all shocking to people?
Of course not. I don't know if Anthony Robbins has kids, but I guarantee you they don't go to a public school.
I know for sure that Al Gore's kids don't and Clinton's didn't.
I doubt George Bush's kids did.
In fact, I'm certain that they didn't even without looking it up.
These guys don't send their kids to public schools.
But that's because they don't want the competition, right?
Don't want the slaves working out.
Only the slave masters work out.
The slaves are kept weak. So you can't talk about the fact that culture is gruesomely inflicted upon children and the fruits of violence are the destruction of the minds of children.
And that these people in the audience, you say, these people that you're talking to, you had your minds broken by a sick, evil, and violent culture.
You had your minds broken by a sick, evil, and violent culture.
The violence and propaganda of the state, the emotional violence, abuse and propaganda of the church broke your spirit.
That you were a slave who had the indignity of being enslaved, not by the strong, but by the weak.
You were a slave who had the indignity of being raised by slaves, of being enslaved by other slaves.
What do we call the slave of a slave?
Well, nothing more than a citizen.
Who enslaved you?
Well, it was public school teachers, it was priests, it was your parents, your family, extended family.
These people are not at the pinnacle of power in a political society?
Not even close.
Public school teachers? Good lord.
We were enslaved and broken down by slaves.
And by unconscious slaves.
People who didn't even know they were slaves.
There was a 60 Minutes the other day about why Denmark is so happy.
And the Danes.
And, oh my god, you should have seen how smug these Danes were.
This one guy was sort of smiling and bubbling over with Pompous glee.
Oh, well, you see, but I at the moment I am paid for being a parent.
The state is paying me to stay home and be a father.
I am So well kept.
My slave master is so much better than your slave master.
We look over there at the American slave pen and we say, oh, what a terrible life.
We could not live like these people a month off after having a baby, then straight back to the workforce.
Your slave masters are really bad.
Our slave masters are absolutely wonderful.
They keep us so well tended.
They give us antibiotic shocks.
They give us They give us paid parental leave.
They give us six weeks of vacation a year.
We are very well-kept and pampered slaves.
And these are the slaves who are going to raise their children as slaves.
And then their children are going to grow up anxious and depressed and fearful and broken.
And they're going to go to Anthony Robbins' seminars or whatever the equivalent is in the future.
Son of Robins. I don't know.
And they're going to be told, well, you see, the reason that you are unhappy is because you focus too much on the past.
You don't have a vision bigger than yourself.
You don't understand the basics of your own needs.
You don't understand what it is that your heart desires.
You aren't organized. You aren't focused.
You aren't disciplined. You didn't plan.
You are so easily distracted.
You waste your time on television.
That is why you are unhappy.
Your unhappiness is of your own doing, you see, because you haven't been focused and disciplined enough.
And we have a culture, you see, here that focuses so much on the past, that your unhappiness comes from the past.
Well, of course, people have to hear that.
Right? They have to hear that.
They have to be constantly steered away from the past.
These guys always talk about their hostility to...
Psychology, particularly to the psychology of the unconscious.
Because with the psychology of the unconscious comes freedom, and we'll talk about that in the future.
Got another podcast coming up about that, but...
But these guys simply can't talk to you about the basics.
That you were handed over to a coercive and mentally abusive state school system where your input was not solicited, where you were forced to go or your parents would be sent to jail, or they were forced to pay for you to go, or they would be thrown in jail.
And that you see freedom and choice It's such a value.
America or Canada or Australia or wherever you live is a free country, you see.
It's a free country. Now, unfortunately for you, you did not get to taste any of that freedom until you got older, until you were far past, for most of you.
The possibility of really asking that question.
If it's a free country, why don't I have any goddamn say in my own education even though I am 6 or 10 or 15 or 17?
Why do I have to take all the shit they shovel at me?
Why am I stuck in these fucking rows of veal-fattening pens when I want to be active and I want to think with my hands as well as my mind?
Why do I have to go to these horrible, airless, empty, chalk screeching little rooms and be droned at by people who are bored and uninspired and uninspiring and unintelligent and lazy?
And kind of ignorant and defensive and petty.
Petty! That's the one thing that I remember the most from my educators was their unbelievable littleness.
Pettiness! That's of course what they're chosen for.
They're chosen to be petty and defensive and vaguely threatening and annoyed and immature.
More so, much more so than in the business world.
Now, the business world has its share of petty people, that's just the internet as a whole, but I remember maybe two, no, maybe even one, one, no, two, two teachers who were not petty out of the dozens and dozens and dozens who taught me in the various continents and schools that I went to.
Always vaguely dangerous, always prickly, always so easy to offend, always so vehement and odd, weird, strange people.
These, of course, are the people that we have to give charge of our children to, because otherwise they may learn a little bit something about respect.
I don't remember any respect being given to me in any of the schools that I went to, public or private, in three different continents.
I don't remember any respect being given to me.
I shouldn't say three, two, England and Canada, really.
But this, of course, can't be talked about.
We can't say, well, your minds were broken by your culture.
Who threw you into these violent slave pens?
Or slave pens funded by violence, and that's why you're unhappy.
The reason that you're weak is you have scurvy.
Here's a fucking orange.
There's nothing wrong with you.
Well, we have to give up all this other nonsense as to what's wrong with people.
Well, you see, the devil tempts you, we're born into sin, we don't give enough back to society, we're selfish, we're petty, we're small-minded, we're all this kind of crap.
The idea that there's nothing wrong with humanity other than the prior answers as to what is wrong with humanity apparently requires one extra brain cell at least than more people claim to possess.
Because I don't believe there's anything wrong with humanity at all.
At all. What's wrong with humanity is the human predator called culture.
That's what breaks and wrecks humanity.
This parasitism of lies, of mythology, propaganda.
The velvet glove With the fist.
The golden gun.
The lies about violence and control.
The obscuration of the Involuntary nature of education when we are children.
Involuntary for the parents, involuntary for the children.
You just go.
And you do what they tell you to.
And then people grow up unhappy and unmotivated and then we say, ah, you lack motivation because you lack focus.
No. I lack motivation because I was bullied.
But these guys, that's what they're paid for, right?
They're paid to tell the people with scurvy that they're just not motivated to exercise, and they will pump them up for a little bit, and then they will go back to their lives, and their lives will then begin to decay back into dysthymia and depression and so on, and then they will have to come back for another hit of enthusiasm.
Of the rah-rah. And, you know, we are so calibrated that the enthusiasm of another gets us motivated, usually because when we don't join in the enthusiasm of other people, we get criticized, singled out, and ridiculed.
Try not cheering at a football game.
Hey, what's wrong with you, man?
Cheer up. And, of course, it takes the structure of It takes the coercive structures of the state and the church and the family.
It lets those completely off the hook.
We don't ever need to talk about the root violence of society, the root violence of statism, the root propaganda and evil of religion because we can take these miserable bastards, these slaves, and get them to dance in their chains and forget their chains for five minutes or five days and then have them shuffle right back into their fucking slave pens and start producing more.
This is a form of cheerleading the slaves, right?
To get you to be bigger, more productive, more aggressive, more generous, quote generous, which means produce more for your owners.
And that's what they're paid for.
To distract the slaves from the chains and to, with any luck, motivate the slaves into being More generous.
I mean, if you want to take on the crisis in the Middle East, the violence in the Middle East, which has been going on for thousands of years, it's relatively easy.
It's not easy for it to be solved, but it's very easy to solve it.
There is no God. Right?
There is no God.
And bullshit is his name.
There is no God. There is no such thing as Islam.
There is no such thing as Judaism.
You people are all in a fucking cult.
And you can take these false, fake, crappy identities if you want, and the result is that your children's faces will flower into a shower of blood.
That is the price you pay for your illusions.
If you want to have peace, give up your gods.
Give up your culture and learn reason.
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