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Nov. 3, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:40
1197 Aiming at the Headstone

What will people say at your funeral..?

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Good evening everybody, hope you're doing well.
It's October the 31st, 2008 and this is one of these staggeringly beautiful fall days up here in Canada where the weather is mild, the fish are swimming, the chicks are flying And your mom was good looking.
It is beautiful out here.
I was hoping to get out a little bit earlier today.
It's 6 o'clock in the eve.
And it was like 14 or 15 degrees here today.
Which is the Canadian equivalent of living on the surface of the sun for this time of year.
But I was involved in this debate and I, for some bizarre reason, wanted to get...
Oh, I know why! I wanted to get this debate with Qtron Man out today to boost up the video views so that we can get better numbers than last month.
Because I'm all about driving the numbers.
So, I wanted to talk about something that I think would be interesting for us to do, shockingly, as a group and I'll run over it and you can let me know what you think whether this would be something that you would be interested in participating in now I'll just go over the general idea and then my specific application of it and then tell me hopefully you'll tell me if there's something you'd like to be involved in so any great endeavor starts with The end,
right? You want to build a bridge, you have to know that you're going to build a bridge, that the end goal is to have a bridge, a dam, a novel, a happy marriage, whatever it is.
You have to figure out what the final goal of what it is that you're doing is going to be.
And that's not how we live our life.
I mean, it's not even close. To how we live our lives, right?
Because we live our lives one day at a time, often without much of a sense of larger goals, larger purposes, larger pictures, or anything like that.
We live our lives, you know, what's to say?
We live our lives forward, we understand our lives backwards, in a sense, right?
So, the question is then, what are our lives for?
If the purpose of building a bridge is to end up with a bridge, what is the purpose of our lives?
There is an end point of our lives, which I would like to introduce you to, which I've been mulling over for years, off and on.
And the end point of our lives is called a eulogy.
We sprint into a headstone.
Here lies Lestamore, shot to death by a 44.
No less. No more.
We run headlong into a tombstone, and a tombstone has an epitaph, and at our funerals there is a eulogy.
And what I've sort of tried to...
The big sort of breakthrough that happened to me some years ago when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life rather than living it day by day, which is what I was doing for a large part.
It wasn't like I didn't have plans, but they weren't big plans.
They were business plans right now.
Go see a movie, get better sales this quarter, put out a new product.
Fun, nice, not bad things or anything.
But they weren't big plans.
And I think...
Or I have found that it is so enormously helpful to think of the eulogy.
To think of my eulogy, right?
So I'm dead, I'm rotting, I'm in the ground, taking the eternal dirt nap.
At least until the universe recycles and puts me back where I am, but with an afro.
And the question is, What will be said about me when I'm gone, when I'm dead, when I am shuffled off this mortal coil, done, joined the choir invisible?
Which is really podcasts.
What is going to be said about me?
And there's two possibilities, right?
There's nothing you can do to affect what people will say about you.
Which is, it doesn't matter how good I am, it doesn't matter how positive I am, it doesn't matter how noble I am, it doesn't matter how courageous I am, people are going to say what they're going to say, it doesn't matter, right?
I have no control over my eulogy because everything is projection, right?
Ooh, bunny rabbit! No, no, I just had some lasagna, thanks.
And that's a very...
Fundamental question. Can I affect what it is people are going to say about me when I'm done, when all is said and done?
And I am nothing but an old corpse.
Well, if I have an influence over that, then my goal is to attempt to influence people around me to gain The eulogy that I want, right? My goal was to, once I wanted to marry Christina, my goal was to fool her with a thin and brittle veneer of common sense.
My goal was to, I mean, and it's not manipulative because it's all genuine, but my goal was to, I wanted to marry her That was going to make me happy.
I trust the values that she wants in a husband, so I will try to achieve those values.
And they've turned out to be perfectly right and valid and true and have made me much happier.
My goal as a father is to have a child who will want to be with me when I am dying.
To go down that unbelievably intimate Crater, infinite crater into death.
To go down with somebody into death is an astonishingly intimate and emotionally powerful interaction, circumstance, relationship process.
And I want my child to be there because of love, because of happiness, because of all the joy that I have brought to that child's life.
I want people to care that I'm dead.
And I want people to celebrate that I lived.
I mean, this is what I am trying to figure out.
How is it that I'm going to live my life to get what I want in a eulogy?
I do assume that the way in which I interact, the way in which I treat people, is going to have a huge effect, if not the dominant effect, if not the defining or deciding effect, on how people view me.
I'm going to assume that my eulogy is up to me.
Ah, yeah, you know, some people say, good riddance, cosy, right?
Fine, right? Those people, that's fine.
I don't know what I can do about that. But I have an influence on how good people, how honest and noble and courageous and brilliant people are going to view me when I'm dead.
And what are they going to say about me?
If they're honest, right? Of course they are, if they're virtuous.
And aiming at the eulogy is a way of, for me, overcoming The endless temptations to pettiness and smallness in the present.
Because the present always tempts us with pettiness, with smallness, with distraction, right?
With reactionary, with defensiveness, with cowardice, with all the things that I struggle with, that you struggle with, that everybody struggles with.
And it sounds weird, but it works for me to say, will this person...
I care when I'm dead. Will they miss me?
Will they feel sad that I'm no longer in the world?
Do they view me as a lighthouse, as a light that is out, but that hopefully helped other, a thousand points or helped other light shine?
Or if I interact with this person this way or that way, will that affect whether they want to come to my funeral If this person were asked to give my eulogy, what would they say?
And that helps me in terms of keeping people in my life and nourishing the friendships and the beautiful people who are part of this amazing community.
And it also helps me to eject people from my life who I don't want at my funeral.
And so I haven't written it down, and maybe I will, and this is something that I would invite us as a community to think about and participate in.
Thank you.
I would love to have a section of the board or a section of the website or wherever.
I would love to have a place where we could write our eulogies.
What is it that we're aiming to have said about us?
What is the bridge that we want to build in the short time we have?
What impression, what crater do we want to leave on the world?
What impression do we want to leave in people's minds?
That to me is so essential to living a life that we can be truly proud of.
Truly, a truly enriching life for the planet, right?
I mean, there's some things that I've really tried to live by based on this.
Idea of what do I want in my eulogy?
So I'll tell you a couple of these things and you can tell me if I'm hitting them or missing them or what.
But I want people to to feel that I sort of have a ferocious devotion to living richly, to To drinking deep of the cup of life.
To trying to be passionate, to be frightened, to be angry, to be scared, to be courageous.
That I felt and I did not fight my feelings and I did not hide my feelings.
And I expressed my passion, I expressed my love, I expressed my anger, I even expressed my hatred.
And that I ferociously attacked and inhabited life.
Man, there are so many squirrels in this forest among the trees.
It literally feels like the leaves are ganging up on me.
I don't think they are, though.
No, wait, no. No, they're not.
And I want that blistering attack upon life to be very much part of people's memory of me when I'm dead.
You know, he lived.
He lived. That's what I want as part of my eulogy.
And so when I feel hesitant to express what I think or what I feel, I think about that, right?
Will this get me a he lived deeply and richly and passionately on my eulogy?
Or will that subtract from that?
And people will say, well, he was a pretty guarded fellow.
I mean, I never quite knew what he was thinking.
Those are the things I couldn't imagine being said about me.
I couldn't quite imagine what he was thinking and so on, right?
Knowing that there is no time in the future for courage.
There is only time for courage now, right?
So I like the idea that I dove heedlessly into life.
Heedlessly sounds like the wrong word, but I think you know what I mean.
That sort of Randall Patrick McMurphy thing where you just dive in.
So that's one thing that I want, this ferocious engagement with life, this ferocious dance and participation and battle and lovemaking with life itself.
That's one thing that I want to be said at my eulogy.
Vibrant, energetic, positive, creative, spontaneous, and so on.
The other thing that I want, and this is something that Jake said, which I thought was very nice.
He said, you know, he's super comfortable in his own skin.
And I want people to remember that about me as well.
And that's why I work.
To have a good relationship with myself, to applaud and to praise the ecosystem that gives me such incredible bounty and such amazing gifts every day.
This crew that is me is just beyond staggeringly amazing and wonderful and I could not wish for better companions in what it is that I am doing in life because what it is that I'm doing in life is what all of us here within my brain are doing with life and I just have the most amazing,
brave, courageous, concerned, angry, Insightful, brilliant, compassionate crew and having that great relationship with myself where everybody gets a seat at the table within my ecosystem and I praise and love everyone for what they can bring to the table and it's an incredible, wonderful, beautiful crew. I want people to remember that.
And it's not for me.
I mean, I'll be dead. What do I care, right?
But the legacy of possibility is what I want to leave in the world.
Of how a human being can be within his or her own skin.
Of how this ferocious and loving assault on everything that life has to offer and inhabitation of all the possibilities of feeling and thought and intuition and emotion and intellect and All of passion.
I mean, that I want people to remember that as a possibility.
Not for me. I'll be dead, and who cares?
As far as I'm, you know, I won't care.
But I want them to...
Oh, man, it's beautiful out here, let me tell you.
It's like one of these soft, ashen Turner paintings late evening, or early evening.
And a drip. So I want people to remember that, because I want to...
To awaken possibilities within people that were never awakened in me in the past, because growing up in England in the 70s and Canada in the 80s was a small place to be.
It was a petty place to be. It was an empty-headed sitcom land of midgets of the heart and mind.
So I want that size of spirit which we all have.
It's not peculiar to me or to you.
We all have. I want people to feel that yearning that they see someone flying and so they have wings.
That's what I want.
To expand and extend people's possibilities as to what it is to be human and to enjoy and to richly engage with your life and with others.
I want that to be said at my funeral.
Hell, maybe they'll just play this. I don't know.
They want that to be said at my funeral.
I want the things which we're all ambivalent about to be co-joined in a kind of productive synthesis when people remember my life in their minds.
So, obviously, anger and compassion, courage and Conciliation are two things that, you know, is tough.
We want to love people, but some people are ugly and destructive, right?
So being able to navigate that challenging back and forth is so important for me.
It's so important for me to nimbly be able to dance this line between having compassion for people who are hurt and having courage and anger and Firmness in the face of those who are too hurt to be healed, who are destructive, who've become an infection or cancer.
I want people...
I mean, we all love the Leo Biscaglia, dewy-eyed hippie love thing, but at the same time, we want people to stand tall and stand firm with the evil in the world, the evil people in the world.
So, we don't want the Bill O'Reilly angry at everyone thing, and we don't want the hippy-dippy give Gaia a hug and, you know, put your head between its breasts and make motorboat noises.
We don't want that kind of nothing but compassion, and we don't want that nothing but anger, right?
So, that dance, which is partly intellectual, partly instinctual, right?
Self-trust! I want people To remember and say, well, you know, he trusted his instincts and it almost always paid off.
I want people... Because that communicates something of value about the instincts, which are so undervalued by philosophers and so overvalued by the hippy-dippies, right?
So I want people to remember that very much.
Again, it's not for me.
I'll be, you know, worms coming out of my eyes.
But for the future.
Like, I want people to remember or I want people to feel when I'm dead and gone.
I want people to feel that that guy cared about the world.
And what is great about that is not just that he cared about the world, but that he cared about a world that showed no indication for the first 30 years of his life of giving a rat's ass about him.
Other than in a negative and destructive way with the family, right?
And he didn't overcome The hostility and violence that he suffered as a child with this dewy-eyed, universal, pacifistic, rub-your-gandy kind of love, right?
But with a refined, mature judgment that where love was possible, he gave it.
Where love was earned, he gave more.
And where love was spurned, he did not.
Cast his pearls before swine.
Like, I want people to get big-hearted compassion, empathy, and refined and mature judgment and condemnation where appropriate.
I mean, I want people, because otherwise it's one or the other, and we don't get the richness of experience.
We have to sort of lodge yourself in this stereotype of, you know, this dewy-eyed pacifism or this angry renunciation.
I go, live in the woods, right? So, to stay engaged in the world without becoming a slut to the world, right?
To love the world without being cheap and easy.
That's what I want people to remember as well.
So that they can recreate it in themselves.
Because we all have that potential.
We all have that possibility. I hope this doesn't have...
To me this doesn't have anything to do with vanity because it's all about trying to be as generous as possible with the gifts that I can give the world.
And what residue or echo or afterimage I can leave on the world when I'm gone.
Acceptance of self without the requirement of perfection.
Now, I want also to be remembered so much as a thinker, you know, more on the Baconian model than the Randian model, or the Marxist model.
I want to be remembered as somebody who attempted as much as possible to contribute to a fluid and objective methodology for thinking rather than specific conclusions.
That's so fundamental to what it is that I'm trying to do with people.
To not give them answers, to not give them conclusions.
I know that I do. I don't mind that because it's okay to show that the methodology gives you valid conclusions, right?
That's what fucks people up about UPB so much, right?
Well, what's the answer? The answer is a methodology.
Here's some examples, right?
Well, how does this apply to abortion and child protection?
This is the methodology. Now you should think for yourself.
Because if I give you answers for everything...
And that's why I say in the books and in UPB, these are not final answers.
There are no final answers.
There is a methodology. Sorry, when I say there aren't any final answers, I don't mean that rape will turn out to be moral or anything.
I don't mean sort of like that. But it is a methodology, right?
I mean, to me...
Murder is evil is like the world being round.
We don't sit and revisit that issue a whole lot.
It's nice to have the science behind it and the logic behind it, which I think UPB provides.
But we need to move on, right?
And that's why I've been writing these books, is to give us the chance to move on.
That's why I did the Free Will series, to give us the chance to move on.
We're stuck like everybody does in these circular little patterns of ever-spiraling inconsequentiality.
I mean, that's no good. So I want to...
And this is why the show continues, and I think this is why the show continues to be exciting, right?
I mean, I'm so...
I'm so thrilled that the level of intelligence and compassion and depth within the community is only growing.
I mean, that's just such a beautiful thing to see.
I mean, I wish you could see from where I see, right?
Because I sort of have the...
The hub of the wheel spoke view, the top of the mountain view of the community, and I'm sure some of you do, and maybe I'm not the only one up here, but I wish you could see what I see, this incredible starburst of depth and brilliance in the community spreading across the world.
I mean, it is such a staggeringly beautiful thing, I can't tell you what a beautiful thing it is to see.
How absolutely wonderful it is to see how much beauty there is in people in the amazing, brilliant, confused as we all are deep and rich souls that people are opening up To share in this community.
I wish you could see that.
It is like watching a city coming to light after 10,000 years of darkness.
It is just beautiful beyond words.
I'm not bad with the words, but I can't talk about that in a way that will convey it to you.
But I'm sure that you feel it deep down, that this is a remarkable thing.
It is a remarkable and unprecedented thing that we are all doing.
And the reason that the conversation remains exciting and thrilling and challenging is because it is a methodology and not a series of conclusions, right?
What is the goal of a lot of philosophies?
To give you answers, right? Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
Be rational, do good, you'll be happy.
Well, that's great and that's a good framework.
But of course the MECO system It's not an answer.
It is a process. RTR is not an answer.
It is a process. Practical anarchy is not an answer.
It is a process. Even on truth, it doesn't tell you anything about your family, but it gives you the process of evaluation and communication that will Help make things clearer for you.
And that's what I want to give is that fluid, objective, rational process of evaluation.
Not answers which stupefy people.
All answers, just do this.
Stupefy. Just, you know, vote for Rombon.
Love God. Accept Jesus.
Obey me. I mean, that just stupefies and beheads human potential in a truly soul genocidal kind of way.
So I want to be remembered as quicksilver, in a way, of that Socratic gnat, you know, that buzzes around.
And provokes and questions and harries and loves and startles and, you know, shakes up the rusty armor of the human mind.
I want to be remembered as somebody who was exciting, obviously.
Not, again, nothing to do with me or vanity.
Because excitement is happiness.
It is a form of happiness, right?
And the constant challenge of applying the fluid methodology...
Of the process of reason and evidence instead of the conclusions of dogma is what makes this so thrilling, right?
And why we continue to have an even richer and deeper and more powerful conversation.
I want to be remembered as giving people access to the glittering treasure box that is themselves, that is you.
Everything that your amazing, deep, rich, wonderful soul has to offer.
All of the accumulated wisdoms of millions of years of evolution, these amazing instincts and capacities that we have, that make mere mind reading, if it were possible, a boring parlor trick.
So I want people to be excited about themselves and to remember that as part of my life, to be fascinated and ferociously interested in others, right?
And in ourselves.
Because, of course, life is a process.
What is appropriate at 20? At 20 is not appropriate necessarily at 40, as I found from the gym.
What is appropriate at 40 is not appropriate at 70.
Life is a process. It constantly changes.
You can't hang on to dogma. You can't.
I mean, you can, but all it does is reduce you and reduce others to a form of catatonic, rigor mortis ashes.
To thunderously mix my metaphors.
And I do want to be remembered as somebody who had a lot of compassion and a lot of gentleness with himself and with people who were genuinely and honestly striving for the greatest goal of self-knowledge, of virtue, of knowledge about the self.
I mean, I really do care so much about Everyone that I have the conversations with, I really do.
I care so much about the quality of your experience of yourself and of your relationships and of your life and I want to be remembered as somebody for whom there was not a cap or a ceiling on care, love, devotion, curiosity intimacy
Intimacy. Sensitivity. I want to be remembered as that.
I want to be remembered as somebody who...
I mean, who was an open book.
But not a free book, if that makes any sense.
And... I want to be remembered as...
I want to be remembered as kind of like a dancer.
So when I'm in a conversation with someone where a gentle and hopefully well-timed joke can loosen some of the tension before continuing on to figure out what is really going on, who was sensitive to listening, who was sensitive to communication, who helped open people up to themselves in terms of self-knowledge and curiosity and gentleness with the self,
And who never pretended to be, obviously, to be perfect, who never pretended to be one of these robot Randian heroes, who never pretended to not struggle, who never pretended to not be afraid, who never pretended that courage was unnecessary beyond a certain point of self-knowledge.
So that kind of humility, I think, is also something that I want to be remembered for.
That may not be number one on people's lists.
I can tell you it's there, but that would sort of be up for you to judge in time.
I also want to be remembered as a friend to the body, as a friend to physicality.
And unfortunately there are a number of conversations about sexuality which won't be available unless people change their minds about.
But I want to be remembered as somebody who was a great fan of the flesh.
It's gonna sound a little weird, but who was a great fan of the body and who had nothing but a huge respect for the contributions that the body has.
To everything that we do.
Obviously, with no body, there's no mind, there's no thought, there's no anything.
But a great fan of the body.
And in that sense, I want to be remembered as, I mean, obviously an intellectual and a philosopher, but as earthy, right?
You know, that glorious foundation that shits and giggles and farts and orgasms and all that.
I want to be remembered as a massive fan boy of the body, of the flesh.
And to avoid that addiction to abstractions that plague so many philosophers.
And also the addiction to the body which plagues so many hedonists, right?
But to... I don't want to be remembered as somebody who had the pendulum loyalties to the mind slash body.
I don't want to be remembered as somebody who did anything to reinforce but rather only undermine the mind-body dichotomy.
And... I also want to be remembered as...
Again, this sounds completely ridiculous, I think, but nonetheless, I want to be remembered as terrible in my wrath against the corruptions and evils in the world.
Ferocious! Ferocious in my wrath against the injustices and the violence and the evils and the humiliations and the degradations of this world.
I mean, people are upset by the defoos, but the defoos is the kindest thing that I would ever Think of inflicting upon these monsters who abuse children and these monsters who lie to children and talk about the virtues of the military.
I want to be remembered as ferocious in my anger towards the injustices of the world.
And as I sort of mentioned earlier, to be remembered as To me, it's always great when someone doesn't have the capacity for anger, their compassion, their, quote, gentleness means nothing to me.
It means nothing to me.
And so, to me, it's always been very important to have people accept or understand or at least see whether they agree with me or not, it doesn't matter, right?
But to at least understand that That I do have the capacity for anger.
I do have the capacity for outrage.
I do have the capacity to raise my voice and to swear.
Because I think that makes the gentleness mean something, right?
I mean, you're probably not that impressed if I say I've decided not to win gold at the women's gymnastics in the Olympics, right?
It's like, because I can't.
I don't...
well, like I have to tell you.
So, if people claim all this compassion and yet can never get angry, then the compassion is a defense.
It is a fear-based hiding place.
It is not a virtue.
This comes back to determinants.
If you don't have a choice, there is no ethics.
If you can't ever express your anger, then expressing your, quote, gentility is nothing more than a defense, right?
So I want to be remembered as somebody who could be ferocious in his wrath.
Whether that scares anybody doesn't matter to me particularly, but I do want to be remembered as somebody who had the capacity for anger.
And the capacity for outrage.
Capacity for hostility.
For rage, even. And yet, also had the capacity for gentleness.
Right? Because the gentleness...
Capacity for gentleness gives the rage credibility, I think, or the anger.
And the capacity for anger gives the gentleness credibility.
And again, what I'm trying to do is not create the either-or, right?
These false dichotomies. If you're gentle, you can't be angry.
If you want to love the world, you can never hate anyone, right?
Because I want to be remembered as the The advocate for ambivalence, right?
Ambivalence man! I have to have a costume, but I can't decide which.
So, I want to be remembered as somebody who recognized that we stretch our humanity in every direction.
It's not like pushing a balloon and you push one side, the other side pops out.
We stretch, in a sense, the balloon in every direction.
Sorry about the inevitable popping metaphor.
That's not what happens, right? That we stretch our humanity down into the instincts without sacrificing the reason of the intellect.
We go up into abstractions without sacrificing the instincts of the body.
We go into compassion without sacrificing anger.
We can be angry without sacrificing gentility, gentleness.
We can be judgmental without sacrificing curiosity.
We can be curious without sacrificing Our capacity for judgment and outrage.
That we go in every direction, right?
That's why this conversation is so exciting, because we are crashing down barriers everywhere by refusing to be hemmed in, bottled in, ground down by these false dichotomies.
And that's sort of the all dimensions of human experience, pushing out in every direction to absorb and embrace More and more depth and sensitivity and intelligence and curiosity and perception.
I mean, these are all things that I want to be remembered for.
And, of course, it's ridiculous in many ways, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to give up on the goal, right?
To stretch.
Because this is what some of the great writers did, right?
That was originally my goal, was to be, you know, Shakespeare, Dickens, Molyneux.
That was in fiction, which, you know, nobody cares about particularly.
But... Shakespeare stretched the dimensions of human self-knowledge.
He's not a hero for me, philosophically, but artistically, yes, as is Dickens.
Socrates, of course, stretched the dimensions of human thought, not emotional, unfortunately, but intellectual, and we can be great and grateful for that.
The great scientific philosophers You know, Kepler, Bacon, Copernicus, Brahe, Psycho Brahe, they stretched our perception of the universe to the point where we are attempting to do the amazing feat of fitting the universe inside our mind, right? Which is astounding, right?
Well, I want to do that with...
I mean, I can't do that for science because I'm not a scientist.
I can't do that for music.
I'm not a musician. I don't think I'll be able to do that for fiction because this is a better calling.
But I want to do that for the mind of the body, right?
I want to do that for the mind of the body, to stretch what it means to be a human being, deep and wide, high and far.
And the reason that I'm trying to do that is we can't fight evil if we're slow.
Evil is very fast.
Because evil is corrupt instincts, the will to power.
Evil is very fast.
And good people can't fight evil if we're trapped in slow motion sickness.
If we have to painstakingly reason everything out.
Evil people take what they want.
Do what they will. Bush invades Iraq and then makes stupid videos about his dog at Christmas.
That's evil people.
Do whatever they want, when they want.
With all the fluidity and impulsiveness and irresistibility of evil instincts.
And if good people have to painstakingly reason everything out, We're always going to lose because we're fighting with two hands tied behind our back and no legs and no teeth.
And so I want good people to trust their instincts, to view their feelings and their intuitions with respect so that we can fight evil and win because we'll have the same speed but we'll also have the truth and real virtue.
So it's about cranking up the speed of we rusty intellectual warriors to actually fight the evils in this world.
And to call bullshit where it's bullshit.
And that's the point of UPB, right?
With UPB, some of the things that maybe people only got instinctually, but with UPB, I have validated the moral instincts.
No theft, no rape.
We know why those things are wrong.
Or why theories which advocate those things as being right are illogical and incorrect.
I'm aiming to validate the moral instincts of good people.
To say you feel this way because your reason and your instincts are united.
And therefore, if you feel that something is wrong, go with it.
It doesn't mean don't ask questions, it doesn't mean don't reassess, it doesn't mean don't reevaluate, but go with it.
If you feel that something is weird, something is weird.
If you feel that something is wrong, something is wrong.
So it's aiming to spur us up to the same speed that the evil and the corrupt have always had.
Religious people have those very quick instincts.
They know when God is being threatened.
They know where every argument is going to go.
And they nimbly and deftly, with the grace of Bruce Lee plus Mikhail Baryshnikov, they dodge and weave and slither and slime and redirect and fuzz and confuse and baffle and manipulate.
They do that with incredible dexterity and rapidity.
And so far, philosophers, rationalists, have been dum-di-dum plodding, right?
We plod, we think. We don't trust our instincts.
We don't ferociously engage in this kind of combat with all the full force of our instincts behind us.
And that's why they always win, right?
They win because Socrates did not get angry.
And because of the uneasy relationship that philosophers have with the instincts.
Uneasy, hell, they hate it for the most part.
So, I want to be remembered for that, right?
To finally give the Jedi's their lightsabers, so to speak, if you understand what I'm saying.
Sorry for the future who might not get this reference.
Oh hell, the chance of the future will know FDR but not Star Wars relatively slim, so to speak.
So I want to be remembered for that as well.
You know, laughing deep, rich ferocity with love.
That's sort of the action figure that I want in the future.
And obviously, and I'll just end up with this, I mean, this is a lifelong...
A lifelong rewriting of the eulogy you want is an essential part for making the big decisions in your life, right?
Because it takes years to build a big bridge and it takes years to become the person who will earn the eulogy that you want, that you will feel will make your life the most meaningful.
There's no point having a meaningful life for yourself.
I mean, no general point for others.
Having a meaningful life for yourself that It is forgotten, turns to dust, and is ignored, rejected, and ceases to exist functionally when you die.
You want to spread that light, spread that joy.
And because of UPB, because we have received the joy and the light that was spread by earlier philosophers, and if we value it, then we should do the UPB compliant thing and provide it to others.
That's good. I'm glad that somebody else invented logic and science, and I'm incredibly grateful to the Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers who braved a far more dangerous environment than we could ever conceive of to bring the light of reason and science to the world.
Because I'm so grateful to them for the joy and clarity they have brought to my life.
Clearly, there's a future who wants us to pass the torch forward, and that's what we should do, I think.
If you don't care about science, then you don't have to.
So, of course, I want to be remembered as somebody who had a startlingly benevolent and beneficent impact on people's lives.
I mean, I want people to care when they hear that I am dead or they hear that I am dying.
I want people to care. I want people to feel that a kind of light is passing from the world.
I want them to feel that.
Call me crazy. But that's what I want.
That's what I want my life to stand for.
For people to care that I'm dying.
And I don't mean like, you know, people care that Princess Diana was dead or whatever, right?
But I want people to really care.
Not like, I don't know.
I've thought since I was in my 20s, right?
I don't know, Sting, I don't know how old he is, right?
But he's older than, I don't know, 10 or 20 years older than I am.
Maybe 20, 15, something like that.
Anyway, I care...
I sort of thought, you know, Sting one day is going to die.
He's a singer that I used to really like.
I still like him, but I don't listen to him as much anymore.
And how am I going to feel? Well, it's going to be sad.
He's dead. Freddie Mercury died.
I felt sad. Great singer.
I love the music. Although the later stuff sucks pretty much.
But songs about cats, not good.
But fundamentally, it didn't really matter, right?
There was talent passing from the world, but not the light of reason and truth passing from the world, right?
And I want people to...
to...
to note my passage, or more than note my passage, and to mourn my absence.
Now, obviously, I mean, whenever Christalina and I talk about it, we just burst into tears, right?
I mean, we just can't imagine life without each other.
It would be... I can totally see why people whose spouses die, die soon after, and it would be just the most horrible thing ever.
And it is an awareness of that that keeps me from pettiness and keeps me for intimacy in the present.
But I want to blaze through the world like a comet and I want to leave light in my wake.
I want people to care.
I want people to cry at my funeral.
I want people to feel that there's been a great loss.
Not for vanity. I'll be dead.
I don't care. But because if they yearn for my passing, It means that they're yearning for something that is good, something that is true, something that is brave, whatever it is that they're mourning for.
Mourning means yearning, right?
When Christina dies, I will mourn for her because I yearn to see her spend time with her.
And that yearning can be translated into positive action to achieve the goal, right?
And I want to do this obviously through content, but I obviously want to do all this through form as well.
I want to just talk about it. I want to do it.
I want to do it, you know, for real, for sure.
If I talk about courage, I'm going to quit my job and rely on donations, right?
If I talk about love, I'm going to do my best to help the people that I care about who are involved in this conversation, which is you, guaranteed.
If I talk about generosity, I want to give my books away.
Thank you.
With all the knowledge that I'm not perfect, obviously.
I don't even need to say it. And again, I don't want to bore you too much with this, and obviously this is a long way of putting it, but I've had more time to think about it.
But tell me.
Tell me. Tell yourself.
What do you want said around your coffin?
How do you want people to feel about your passing from this world?
What residue, what afterimage do you want to leave in people's minds?
What do you want people to remember about you?
What are they going to cry about when you slip into nothing?
What are they going to miss?
How many people are going to be there?
What are they going to say?
Is it going to be a funeral that they go to and they're sad and then a month later they're not and don't think of you much?
What is the after image not just of your life but of your funeral in people's minds?
Yes.
How much of yourself are you going to give to implant as like a beneficial virus in other people's minds?
Will the challenge and creativity and generosity and originality of your life raise their sense of what it is to be human forever?
Why not? Why not have that as a goal?
That, I guarantee you, will help you organize your life, what you're going to do with it, and help you keep steady when the going gets rough, as it always does.
To help you keep strong when the going gets rough, as it always does.
Help you stand tall in the face of biting, sniping criticism, which is inevitable.
You can't lift humanity without some bite marks.
I can guarantee you that.
And to learn to relish even those, right?
As the scars of a noble battle.
But what is your eulogy going to look like?
If the person you end up loving the most in this world is going to give you a eulogy, what is she going to say?
What is he going to say? What are your children going to say about you as a parent, about you as a mentor, about you as a coach, about you as a friend?
Who will mourn you?
And why? Think about it.
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