1244 The Meaning of Life Part 2 - Identity as Heroin
Avoiding the straitjacket of inflicted identity...
Dec. 30, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:03
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I hope that you're doing very well. | |
| Thank you all so much for your wonderfully kind good wishes about or with regards to my recent fatherhood. | |
| I am now in day 10 of being a daddles and I must tell you it is an absolutely wonderful And delightful and charming and intimate and a weepy and beautiful and relaxing experience. | |
| Of course, like all fathers, I have the most beautiful and best behaved, calmest and most affectionate baby, so that helps a lot, of course, and my wonderful wife, who is the best mother on the planet. | |
| It's obviously helping make it all too wonderful for words, so thank you so much for your kind wishes. | |
| If you have the right person, it is absolutely a recommended experience. | |
| It is just beautiful. So, the meaning of life. | |
| Let's dive into part two and see if we can't make some sense. | |
| And I'm not just on a neutron bomb destructo-head mission here. | |
| I am, in fact, going to try or make my best attempt to offer you the possibility of joy, happiness, virtue, integrity, and the resulting Non-need for artificial meaning at the end of this, but again, we still have a little bit of rubble to clear, so I am leading you towards something I hope will be helpful and positive in your life, but we do need to deal with this particular issue first. | |
| We talked about... I'm not going to revamp the last video, but we talked about meaning as a deficiency that represents a kind of dysthymia or depression, and meaning is something that Is to me highly analogous. | |
| The offering of meaning to people, to children in particular, but to people as a whole, the offering of meaning is kind of like a drug. | |
| Because what it does is drugs, the real problem with drugs is they give you the illusion of achievement without the strain of the cause, right? | |
| So, if you're miserable and you take heroin, then you can become happier, so you get happiness. | |
| I believe it's the old Socratic equation, right? | |
| Reason equals virtue equals happiness. | |
| Happiness is the result of reason and integrity and virtue and all of those very difficult and challenging things, particularly in the world as it is. | |
| To get happiness, we have to do all of these difficult things, like to lose weight, to gain health, to eat well. | |
| We have to change our lifestyles and our habits. | |
| These are all challenging things, and the result is health. | |
| If there was a pill we could pop, then we would pop the pill and not go through all the difficulty, but there's no pill for happiness that leads to long-term and sustained happiness other than reason equals virtue equals So, meaning gives you the effect of authenticity, of developing what is valuable to you in your life, of living with integrity and achieving the resulting happiness. | |
| The imposed or artificial meaning from outside will give you that effect, but you don't actually have to go through the work of defining who you are and what is of value to you and what is truth and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So, it is very much like a drug. | |
| And the problem with drugs is that they give you a high that is the goal you want, happiness, or whatever, self-escape, self-erasure, whatever it is that is the happiness that drives people to do drugs. | |
| It'll give you that effect, and then it will give you a lower trough afterwards, and that is the case with This idea of external meaning, of who you are being defined by people outside yourself, by your culture, by your religion, by your country, by your town, by your sports team, | |
| by whatever, your socioeconomic class, your race, whatever it is that is handing you a prefabricated identity, this straitjacket of false meaning, is going to give you relief from the challenge of authenticity and becoming who you really are. | |
| And then it's going to give you a trough, which then drives you to come back to get more of this artificial meaning to avoid the anxiety of inner emptiness that comes from taking on somebody else's meaning as if it were your own. | |
| So, it's really, really not a positive thing. | |
| It's very tempting in the short run, like all drugs, I suppose, but it's really, really bad in the long run. | |
| So, I mean, the great challenge of what Jung and others have called authentication or authenticity is defining who you are, what your purpose in life is, and what are your goals? | |
| Relative to what your desires are, relative to objective virtue, and all of these kinds of things. | |
| And when we all face that challenge of who we are, Which starts relatively early in life. | |
| What happens is there are 10,000, 10 million or more con men and women who will come swarming in and will offer you a prefabricated identity which is designed to have you avoid the challenge of doing the Nietzsche thing, | |
| looking into the abyss, letting the abyss look into you, figuring out who you are relative to reality rather than relative to what Ayn Rand called the social metaphysics of other people's preferences For instance, when you are faced with the problem of who you are, you can obey men in funny hats who claim to be channeling a mythical Jewish zombie. | |
| One possibility. Or, I suppose, you could obey other men who claim that you are one of the chosen people because some crazed Stone Age Bedouin sun-baked desert tribesman had visions of being picked out of a crowd by some invisible sky ghost. | |
| You could, I guess, go that. | |
| Or you could take on some prefabricated identity called being an American, a Bostonian, a Red Sox fan, a Texan, a redneck, a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, a Socialist, a Communist, whatever. | |
| All of these things are entirely possible, and there are lots of people who are going to give you those prefabricated identities, which you can grab onto and you can use as a substitute for being who you really are. | |
| The problem is, of course, that it erodes, undermines, and eventually destroys who you really are, leaving you in a state of permanent addiction to these false and externally offered identities. | |
| So that's That's not where you want to go. | |
| I mean, it may feel tempting, and we've all had those temptations, it may feel tempting in the short run, but it really is going to be unpleasant for you in the long run. | |
| And I'll get sort of as to why and how to avoid it in the next show. | |
| So, when we look at these swarming con men and all of their prefabricated chainmail straightjacket identities that they offer in exchange for, well, what? | |
| What are they? What is the one thing that is common to all of these prefabricated identities? | |
| Well, ka-ching! | |
| They all cost money. | |
| It's a savage and corrosive economic transaction at its core, because they all cost money, right? | |
| You want to be an American? | |
| Pay your taxes! Bostonian, even. | |
| You have to pay your city taxes, municipal taxes. | |
| You want to be a sports fan, you've got to buy tickets, or you've got to sit through commercials, or buy memorabilia. | |
| It's all a cash transaction. | |
| You've got tithes for religious organizations, dues, donations, etc. | |
| Now, I take donations, but I don't offer identity. | |
| I offer reason and the possibility for you to work out your own authenticity. | |
| And, of course, everything I do is free. | |
| If you want to join a synagogue, what is it? | |
| Two grand a year? | |
| You've got to pay for these drugs, for these self-erasing drugs, these anxiety-reducing fake identities. | |
| Fabricated identities, when you take on the ultra-confining, straitjacket of a prefabricated identity you get a lifelong series of bills. | |
| It's just pay ARMING. | |
| Pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay, PAY. | |
| It is the ultimate renewable income source. | |
| And that is one of the reasons why these prefabricated identities are so consistently manufactured and imposed on children, because, you know, once a Catholic, always a Catholic, You will end up being homesick. | |
| If you try to flee these straitjackets, you will end up being homesick for the exploitation and predation. | |
| Because if you put your arm on a cast, it becomes that much harder when you take the cast off to do anything useful with it, because the muscles have all withered. | |
| It's like your bones in zero gravity. | |
| They tend to decay in the absence of you. | |
| So your true self, your authentic self, your genuine self, who you really are, decays and withers and eventually dies. | |
| In the shadow, in the constrictive cave, in the straitjacket of these false identities, right? | |
| So, the longer you stay in this addiction, the harder it is, and eventually it does become Impossible, right? | |
| The longer you smoke these false identities, the greater your eventual risk of developing something terminal called soul death, which is where you can no longer recover your original self. | |
| It has been so erased and only shows up as agony and discontent. | |
| And I really, really don't want that for you, so let's see if we can build something better. | |
| So, lots of people will take lifelong cash from you And what is it in America? | |
| Religion alone rakes in a hundred billion dollars a year. | |
| People pay a lot to avoid truth and authenticity, because it's a lot easier to just slot yourself into somebody else's fantasy than it is to be courageous, stand independently, think for yourself, and find out who you really are. | |
| That is very hard, and of course, it's very hard to not end up as a drug addict when everything around you is drugs, and there's drugs in the water, and you have to be really careful, right? | |
| And because there's these swarming False identities around that are trying to, you know, suck onto our faces like that little hand beast from Alien. | |
| It's very hard to avoid those and to, you know, find a way to be who you are in the face of all of these jostling demands, exploitations, and tempting offers to slot yourself into somebody else's. | |
| Exploitive mythology, so it's tough, right? | |
| But true identity, who you really are, is the opposite of conformity to exploitive fantasies, the exploitive fantasies of other people, because whether you call yourself Jewish or Muslim or Christian or American or white or whatever, a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, there's nothing real there. | |
| It's not... It's a cloud castle, right? | |
| It's not real. There's no... | |
| There are no chosen people. | |
| There's no such thing as America. | |
| You don't... You don't have a soul. | |
| Your sports team cares about your money. | |
| There's no God. Politics is not going to set you free. | |
| There's no government. It's just a bunch of people with guns. | |
| These are all... | |
| exploitive fantasies. | |
| They're just going to rot your soul. | |
| And fundamentally, and finally, before we get to the next segment, in the long run, when it comes to your happiness, your efficacy, your capacity for love, and to be loved. | |
| Nobody can love a cliché, and all of these fabricated identities are just clichés. | |
| And you can only be loved for who you truly and really are, because that is unique, right? | |
| You are a virtuous snowflake self-deity. | |
| To be who you truly are is to be individuated, is to be individual, is to be open to being loved. | |
| So you can't be loved if you're sliding yourself into somebody else's mythology because you've become a cliché. |
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