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Dec. 31, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:07
1245 The Meaning of Life Part 3 - Integrity as Salvation

How and why philosophy brings happiness...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing wonderfully.
Happy almost New Year to everyone.
It is just at the end of 2008.
I hope that 2009 and afterwards is a wonderful, wonderful year for you.
And this is The Meaning of Life, Part III. Meaning versus Integrity.
So I'm not going to recap this.
If you're jumping into this one, there are two videos earlier which go into this in more detail.
The argument has been that meaning, external meaning, meaning a purpose to your life which is generated outside of yourself does not exist in the universe or anywhere else, but people will fabricate such meanings for you like religion, like patriotism, like a wide variety of other mythological falsehoods will snare you and wrap you in these falsehoods and give you meaning in exchange for money.
The, of course, problem being that you lose authenticity and true self and love and real virtue and you end up being a slave to the mythologies and fairy tales of others, which is entirely destructive.
And you end up having to reproduce these mythologies and falsehoods in the minds of your children, which I consider to be pretty dastardly and a negative thing to do in the extreme.
So, let me sort of make the case here for the solution to the problem of meaninglessness.
Now, the opposite of meaning is integrity.
I'm not just making that up.
Meaning is false mythology.
There is no exonal meaning to your life.
Therefore, to accept that there is no meaning to your life, that is, outside of yourself, is to accept the truth.
And integrity is statements consistent with, or beliefs or thoughts or propositions that are consistent with, Reason and empirical evidence.
Of course, you can't turn a rock over anywhere in the universe and discover meaning.
You can't jet off to other dimensions like the fantasy agnostic spaceship does and think that you can find some sniff trace of a deity.
You can't wrap yourself in a flag and gain immunity from bullets.
There is no physical properties to these fantasies that changes anything anywhere in the universe.
So when we accept that there is no meaning, we are accepting a truth that is confirmed by reason and by empirical evidence.
When we live our life with integrity according to reason and evidence, then we reject fantasy mythological meanings that are created to ensnare and entrap our wallets by other people.
We reject the parasitism of fairy tales masquerading as truth and meaning.
And this is a very important process, this rejection of mythology.
And fundamentally...
And this is going to be in a book that will be coming out as soon as my baby is out of her screaming and crying face.
The reason that we want to do this, we want to reject...
Mythology and we want to accept reason and evidence.
There are many, many, many reasons why this is important, but why it's so hard to do is not intellectual.
This is the aspect or approach that I hope that I'm bringing to philosophy and to libertarianism, the freedom movement, whatever you want to call it, but for me it's all philosophy.
It's that the barrier to the acceptance of truth is not intellectual.
It's not intellectual because arguments like taxation equals force, there's no such thing as God, all of these kinds of things, They're not hard to get intellectually.
We all say there's no such thing as Zeus, there's no such thing as Set, there's no such thing as Baal, there's no such thing as Horus.
There's 9,999 gods that every religious person in the world marks at and looks at as purely mythological and ridiculous inventions of man.
But then when it comes to their own god, all that goes out the window and they cling to that god with desperation.
of a man clinging to a log in the middle of the ocean.
So everybody accepts that there's no such thing as all the other gods, right?
It's just We go one god further, as Dawkins says about the atheists.
So everyone accepts that there's no such thing as gods.
Everyone accepts that the patriotism of other countries is foolish prejudice or terrorism, but the patriotism of our country is virtue and service to the country and the people.
So everybody already accepts this stuff.
We just create all these exceptions.
And why do we create all of these exceptions to our gods, our countries, our particular preferences, our mythologies, our, quote, meaning?
It's not because it's so hard to understand that we are tax cattle herded around by a violent herdsman called the government.
That's not hard to understand intellectually.
The initiation of force that is at the root of taxation is very simple to us.
It's not relativity, right?
This is easy. But people reject it all the time.
Why do they reject it?
Not because they're too dumb, because if they were too dumb, we'd be living in a chimp house at a zoo, and freedom would be impossible.
It's because it's emotionally...
Freaky! Right?
You go up to someone, you say, taxation equals force.
What is their response? They don't say, well, that's interesting.
I've never heard that before. I'm not sure that I agree, but tell me your reason.
No. What they say is, no, it's not.
It's a social contract. You disprove the social contract.
Well, you were born here. You're not a patriot.
Oh, this is ridiculous. Oh, it'll never change.
Oh, it'll never... Everybody just comes up with all these objections.
And why? Is it because they have processed the intellectual arguments from root cause to final conclusions?
No, of course not, right?
It's because when you go up to someone...
And you say, hey, taxation equals force and there's no such thing as a social contract.
You are owned like livestock.
Even if you just don't go as far as the matrix thing that I did or just go to taxation equals force, people react emotionally.
They get upset. They get stressed.
They get contemptuous. They withdraw.
They recoil. They get angry.
They whatever, right? It's an emotional response.
It's not an intellectual response.
Austrian economists, philosophers, I mean, we've won the logical argument for 2,500 years, and we make very little progress because people have this emotional reaction, right?
And that's because they're heavily invested in a false meaning, and when that meaning is proven to be false, patriotism, religion, whatever it is that they've got going on, When that is proven to be false, they freak out, because you are actually attacking what they consider to be their identity.
It's like you are injecting LSD into their foreheads, which will never go away, right?
They would resist and fight that, and they resist and fight anything which breaks the matrix, which punctures the illusion of identity, because that's all they've got left, right?
The ship of the true self has sailed.
They're clinging to a desperate little log called false meaning, and when you take that log away, They perceive that they will drown.
They don't know that the true self will return for them.
You have to show them that through your example.
Show them that courage and confidence through your example, through your opening yourself up.
So, as I've always argued, and it's in my free book, Real-Time Relationships, at freedomainradio.com forward slash free, Virtue always starts with honesty.
Honesty is the first virtue.
So, when you go up to someone and you say, taxation equals force, of course they're going to freak out, right?
Because no one's told them that, the implications of the fact that no one's told them that are very important, and they realize that if they accept this, they're popping out of the matrix, they are going to be freaked out, a distant, an outsider, whatever it is, right?
The truth is not easy.
If it were, well, we'd already have it, right?
So, you've got to fight for it.
So, an honest person, a person with self-knowledge, which Aristotle said is the first virtue, the unexamined life, as reported by Plato that Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, self-knowledge is the first virtue, because if you don't know yourself and your feelings, you're just going to react in a prejudicial, blind, and vaguely simian manner.
So, when you see someone say, taxation equals force, if they're honest, they're going to say, that idea is really disturbing to me.
I feel nervous, I feel anxious, I feel afraid, I feel angry, I feel like...
They're not going to act out and say, you're an idiot, right?
Well, okay, unless they're doing YouTube comments, but they're going to say to you in an honest way, this is what I feel about what you're saying, and then you can talk about the real issues, which is how the truth makes you feel, not...
Acting out your rage against the truth because you've been lied to your whole life and taking it out on the person who actually brings you the truth, shooting the messenger, which is the all-too-common reaction when people hear the truth.
So integrity requires honesty, and first and foremost it requires honesty about feelings, because it's feelings which block people from the truth continually.
They make up arguments in an ex post facto or after-the-fact manner to justify their feelings.
I feel really anxious that taxation equals force, therefore the idea is bad, therefore you're wrong.
Therefore, I'm just going to make up whatever shit I can to get you to shut up and go away, because you're making me anxious.
So that's the way that it works.
So that's why I say integrity is the opposite of false meaning, of meaning that is outside yourself.
Because it takes integrity to recognize that that meaning is false.
It takes integrity to be honest about what you feel when confronted with the truth or when faced with the basic truth, that there's no external meaning.
And that's why the primary goal of philosophers and those who want to fight for freedom and the elevation of the species is self-knowledge about feelings.
That's why I have a book about feelings and honest communication, about emotion, because if we can't do that, then we're just going to keep going round and round in the same stupid, dumb circle that's been going on From Democritus to Socrates to Lucretius to you name them, right? All the philosophers who have tried and failed to bring basic reason to the world.
We want to do something different because 2,500 years of eternal fail might impel us into a different course.
So, integrity is the opposite of meaning, of false meaning.
Integrity brings happiness, and I'll tell you why.
I'll make an argument as to why, and you can let me know what you think.
But let me give you an example of how false meaning brings unhappiness.
We are so constituted because we're in constant contact with reality, empirical evidence, and reason.
We are so constituted That lies complicate and make us unhappy.
When we, you know, oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
When we begin to lie to ourselves, to others, we begin to misrepresent, prevaricate, fabricate, make up, fudge, fuzz, mess up reasoning in order to preserve our fantasy of meaning, we end up unhappy.
Lying to yourself, lying to others, misrepresenting, particularly in the realm of virtue and integrity, Makes us unhappy.
And this is a basic fact.
I mean, there's a few things that are basic in psychology, right?
One is that early experiences have enormous effect on later personality and thoughts.
The second is that repression is really bad.
And when you lie to yourself, you have to repress that knowledge because you can't say to yourself, I'm lying to myself, because then you will be compelled.
to correct it, right? So you have to lie to yourself, you have to lie to others, you have to misrepresent, you have to fudge, you have to fuzz, you have to fog, you have to change your story, you have to mislead, and then you have to tell yourself that You're not doing any of these things.
So you create this double, triple, quadruple, quadzillion thing within your mind, which makes you unhappy, and you become manipulative, and you become fearful of the truth, and you become opposed to reality, which you can never win, because it's reality.
It was there before you.
It's the reason you're here, and it will be here long after you.
You simply can't win against reality.
So you end up fighting this vain, futile, pathetic, cowardly battle against the truth.
You end up having to shun honest people, and you end up having to Slither and unite with other liars and prevaricators, which degrades your social environment.
You end up not being able to be honest with yourself, which means that you can't be honest with others.
If you can't be honest with others, You can't have love.
Love cannot coexist with falsehoods, misrepresentation, and cowardly lies that are repressed, right?
So, psychology is as a basis that repression is bad for your mental health.
It results in depression. It results in chronic rage.
It results in dysthymia. It results in extreme cases, borderline personalities.
It results in really, really narcissistic stuff, right?
Because it's my needs for meaning outstrip everything in the world.
So, let me give you an example of this.
As I've mentioned and will obsessively mention, I have recently, I guess 12 days ago, had a wonderful and beautiful daughter who is the charm and grace of my existence, only slightly less elevated in my worshipful esteem than her beloved mother.
Now, imagine, if you will, that a news report came out that I had nailed my daughter to the wall behind me, nailed her to the wall,
and when the police came to arrest me, I said, well, I'm afraid, officers, that I had to nail my daughter to the wall because I really needed to blink, and in order to blink, I had to nail My daughter to the wall.
Well, clearly I would be stone evil, or criminally insane, or both, but this would not be a virtuous action.
This would not be the paragon of virtue.
And even if you thought that I was not responsible because I was a short-circuited, crazy lobotomy head, that would be fine.
But what if people who listen to my show said, oh yeah, that Steph, what he did, that was the greatest virtue ever.
He is the most virtuous man for nailing his daughter to the wall.
Well, of course, this is the story of our good friend, Buddy Jesus, who, as the Son of God, was crucified in order to save mankind from an eternal stain upon its soul because a rib woman listened to a talking snake and a guy ate an apple.
Now, of course, God does not need...
God does not need to nail up a human being in order to forgive mankind.
Why? Because God is all-powerful.
If I say I have to nail up my daughter because I need to blink, It takes more effort for me to blink than for God to forgive mankind for the sin of Adam and Eve.
So why would he need to torture and murder his son in order to save mankind?
He could just will it, baby.
Well, that's kind of...
I mean, there's six billion contradictions and evil stinky poos in all religious mythology, but this is just one minor example, right, of something which is just stone evil.
Which is portrayed by the religious as the greatest possible virtue.
God did not need it. The torture and murder of Jesus, I mean, which is just a myth, right?
But the torture and murder of Jesus is a completely evil myth.
It's completely unnecessary.
God could just have willed it, but instead he chose to torture and murder his son.
Well, this of course is a myth because religion only survives through the torture and murder of reason in the minds of children, right?
So the fact that the myth is founded on The torture and murder of a child is entirely in accordance psychologically with the reality of religion, which is through assaulting reason and evidence and the capacity for truth and enlightenment in children.
That is how religion survives.
It prays and feasts upon the rational side of people, which is why the spear goes into the side of Jesus.
It's a side of children that is being murdered.
It is their capacity for reason, independent thought, critical evaluation, which children are born with.
They're entirely rational. And that has to be murdered off in order to continue preying upon them as adults, right?
So this is what people do, right?
They have beautiful, healthy, rational, wonderful babies, and what they do is they take a dusty and cracked 2,000-year-old Jewish zombie corpse, and they topple it into the cribs of their children, and they are crushed under its Grim and rotten embrace.
They topple a body into the cribs of their children.
And they say to their children, you killed him.
You are responsible for his death.
It is your sin that he died for.
He died for you. You killed the greatest.
They charged their children with the murder of the most virtuous being in existence.
Because they were born.
I mean, it's sick. It's beyond sick.
Psychotic is what it is.
And how do you defend this, right?
So if you're a Christian, you're confronted with this shit, with the lies and horror that you are poisoning your children's minds with, what do you say?
Well, if you're honest, you say, oh my God, that's shocking.
I'd never thought of that before. Why didn't anyone tell me?
Maybe it is exploitive. Let's hear more, right?
Let's hear how God, your highest moral value, condones and promotes selling Your daughters into sexual slavery, basically handing them over to pedophiles for money.
Is that virtuous? Come on, people.
Slavery is promoted.
Your wife is listed in the Ten Commandments as property, along with your ass.
Slavery, genocide, the slaughter of the innocent, The murder of children for disobeying parents.
All of this is promoted as virtuous in this hellish work of psychotic fiction.
And just, oh, well, Jesus changed all of that.
No, he didn't. Jesus openly and clearly says that he has come to fulfill all of the commandments in the Old Testament, and not one of the commandments in the Old Testament will pass away as a result of his arrival.
So, you don't get to do that, right?
Jesus says they're all valid.
And even if we say, well, all the Old Testament is evil, but that's God, right?
God is evil. Satan wrote the book, although Satan would never be so artless as to write a book containing such evil.
And it would be too obvious, right?
So anyway, and when you say, well, when you go to a Christian, you say, well, does God know what I'm going to do tomorrow?
And if the answer is yes, then I don't have free will.
If the answer is no, then God is not all-knowing.
And what do they do? God is outside of time.
It's like, well, you don't know that.
That's not in the Bible. It doesn't say God doesn't wear a wristwatch.
You're just making shit up to preserve your fantasy of false meaning.
So this is why when you are infected and exploited with the fantasy of false meaning, with the cash-based and cash-backed manipulative fairy tales of others who lie to you as a child, which is a very bad thing to do, right?
Then you end up having to lie to yourself, having to lie to others, having to make stuff up, right?
I remember Talking to a Christian, and he was saying, well, but they must have seen something amazing, you know, in the ancient times, because they were willing to die, but therefore they must have seen miracles, therefore Jesus was divine, therefore, therefore, therefore.
And I said, well, remember the guys recently who cut their balls off and killed themselves because they thought they were going to go join some comet in the sky?
Well, does that mean that the comet is divine and they were right?
No, people kill themselves all the time.
Otherwise, suicide bombers are affirming the divinity of Allah, right?
I mean, Or the rockets raining down on Hamas is affirming that the Jews are the chosen people or whatever, right?
I mean, the fact that people kill and die doesn't make anything true.
I mean, how many people died for Hitler?
Does that mean Hitler is right and moral?
Of course not, right? So what happens?
Well, they have to just make up more lies.
And they have to start slicing and dicing and say, well, the stuff that is evil in the Bible is metaphorical, but the stuff that is not evil is true, and they just make up, they have no way of knowing, this is all nonsense, just making stuff up after the fact.
And which results in them lying to themselves, which results in them lying to others, and cowardly backing away from the simple truths, in order to preserve the meaning, in order to avoid the anxiety of realizing they were lied to and exploited about morality, about truth, about virtue.
And the same thing is true of patriots, the same thing is true of people who are fans of the Hitman military.
It's all lies which exploit, corrode, and destroy our capacity for integrity and honesty, because then when we're confronted with honesty, we have to, like a squid who's grabbed underwater, eject all of this ink To blind ourselves,
others, and then pretend that we didn't, and we end up in this completely lunatic world where we're just constantly playing whack-a-mole with the truth and thinking that we're doing something virtuous, keeping the truth at bay, fighting, lying, making things up, lying to others, clinging to our fellow liars in order to create the illusion of consistency based on a verbal agreement.
To lies! So when we reject external meaning, As an exploit, a falset.
When we push off the rotting body of a dead god and refuse to pay for the honor of being reconciled with a deity who does not exist and whose death never occurred and which we would not be responsible for even if it did, when we push that body out of our lives, then we can actually stand tall and be proud Of who we are and we can clearly and consistently put forward the truth and virtue.
We reject false meaning and refuse to pay for an identity that is exploitive, destructive and false.
We don't give money or time or resources to con men and liars who break the minds of children in order to enslave the wallets of adults.
Whether they come from the state, or whether they come from the church, or the mosque, or the synagogue, we just reject it.
And we get our meaning from reason and evidence and truth and virtue and the purpose of spreading the light of reality through the world, not the fog and grasping fingers and rolling dead corpses in the cribs of all of these false identities.
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