1332 You Are Because The World Is
A thought to lift your spirits.
April 15, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:17
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| Good afternoon, everybody. | |
| It's Steph. It's Thursday, the 16th or 17th or some dang time of April 2009, and I am going to run an errand or two with Missy Bella. | |
| So, we shall see how this goes. | |
| It may work, it may not work, but it's very interesting to be back in the car and with the podcasting. | |
| So, I'd like to start Today's breathless lecture with a proposition that I'd like to prove to you. | |
| And it may sound a little shocking, particularly to the cynics among you, but my proposition is this, that you live, my friend, my friends, in the very best of all possible worlds. | |
| And I will endeavor to make that case. | |
| Now, I certainly don't mean that it's the best conceivable possible world, but it is the best world for you to have been conceived. | |
| And I'll sort of trace a few. | |
| To me, it's an interesting perspective. | |
| It doesn't heal all wounds in life or anything, but it's an interesting perspective. | |
| And it really rests on the premise that life is better than non-existence. | |
| And I think we can all... | |
| Accept that as a basic axiom. | |
| Life is better than not, so much with the lifing. | |
| And if we accept that as a basic premise, then I think that we can accept that the circumstances which conspired, so to speak, to bring us to life are the best possible circumstances because they resulted in our life rather than our not-life. | |
| And, I mean, my family history, such as it is, goes back, if I remember rightly, to 1066, William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings, Herod with an arrow through his eye, and so on. | |
| And that is why we have a French last name, and if that war had gone the other way, we wouldn't have ended up in England, and if one of my ancestors had not pissed off the king or the queen, I can't remember which, We would not have been banished to Ireland to lick our aristocratic blue-blooded wounds, and if that had not happened, my grandparents or great-great-great-parents would not have met, and so on. | |
| So you can sort of go back through history and look at all of the events that were required, for want of a better word, in order for you to come into existence. | |
| And, I mean, obviously there's a certain amount of silliness in this, but there is also some seriousness as well. | |
| Because, you know, we look at the world and we chafe at the world. | |
| You know, like a nylon muscle tee against a marathon runner's nipples. | |
| We chafe at the world. | |
| I'm reminded of this metaphor because I was chatting with a guy in the hot tub last night at the gym, the night before last, who had band-aids on his nipples. | |
| And, of course, he was a runner, right? | |
| That's what they do. At least I hope he was a runner. | |
| No, he wasn't. And so there is some silliness, right? | |
| I mean, if the First World War had not occurred, then the Second World War would not have occurred. | |
| And if the Second World War had not occurred, my mother would have not fled Germany to become an international package courier person. | |
| She would not have ended up in Africa. | |
| She would not have met my father. | |
| My mother and father are not in the top 5.9 billion parents in the world. | |
| I don't like them as people at all, but if they hadn't met, I wouldn't be drinking and quaffing deep of the stuff of life. | |
| And if they had not met, then I would not have Isabella because I would not have existed and so on. | |
| If my mother had not, as she formerly fled Ireland and then fled Africa, she fled England to come to Canada. | |
| If I had not come to Canada, then I would not have met Christina or yes, I would not have the family that I have right now and I could not imagine A better family. | |
| So, if I had not been an entrepreneur, if my company had not been bought out, then it would be very unlikely that I would have taken the apartment that I took at Young and Eglinton in Toronto. | |
| Because it was originally... | |
| Originally I was in that apartment because I was doing R&D for four days a week and then a day a week I would go into the office. | |
| So I was doing R&D, building a new version of the software with some other programmers for four days a week and I ended up living there because I needed a place to live after my last relationship busted up. | |
| So that's how I ended up at Young and Eglinton because the company... | |
| I was doing R&D, the company was bought out, I took over a company apartment after the lease expired and that's... | |
| That's how I ended up in this neighborhood. | |
| And because I ended up in this neighborhood, I joined the volleyball league in that neighborhood, which is when Christina joined. | |
| She was living just a few blocks away. | |
| Again, if I hadn't pushed to get a job at RBC Dominion Securities, a brokerage firm in Toronto after university, I would not have met the fellow who convinced me or who got into the volleyball league that I joined, where I met Christina, if I had not wasted massive portions of my 20s writing books. | |
| Then I would not have had Revolutions published. | |
| I mean, if I hadn't decided to take a year and a half off and write books and try and get books published, I would not have had Revolutions published. | |
| Then I would not have... | |
| I may not have met, or I sort of met, but I wouldn't have gone out for dinner with Christina. | |
| Or it seems less likely. | |
| I guess when we finished a volleyball game with Christina, the first thing she spoke to me, other than as a teammate, you know, out of the way Whitey, First thing she spoke to me was, you know, how was your day? | |
| And I said, oh, fantastic day. | |
| I just got news that a book of mine is going to be published. | |
| I happen to have a copy with me. | |
| She was interested in reading it, and then she, you know, enjoyed the book very much. | |
| And so, you know, if I hadn't... | |
| So all of these things that I have my opinions about, when you break them down into things which I... Now have things which I now treasure. | |
| You know, if I hadn't had a traumatized youth, I would not have become, as so many traumatized youths do become, I would not have become good at computers. | |
| If I had not become good at computers, I wouldn't have been an entrepreneur. | |
| I wouldn't have learned all that I learned in the entrepreneurial world in order to start FDR. I would not have Learned the technical stuff that I needed to run FDR solo. | |
| I would not have the, you know, wild mix of skills that is sort of required for this kind of crazy life. | |
| So, all of these things which were bad have contributed to that which is good for me and for the world. | |
| So, I think if you look at your own life and say, oh, my parents were, you know, maybe your parents were bad. | |
| Oh, my parents were bad, but if... | |
| If one of them wasn't bad, then they wouldn't have both met and had you, right? | |
| So, in a way, your existence is an inevitability of your parents' attraction to each other, whether that's healthy or unhealthy. | |
| I mean, you understand, right? | |
| Everything that has conspired to get you to listen to this podcast, do what it is you're doing in your life with who it is that you are with or not with, that is all part of The sequence of events that has unfolded in the world as it is. | |
| So we say, well, to wish that the world is better than it was, or is, is fundamentally to wish for a kind of non-existence. | |
| More than a kind of non-existence. | |
| To wish for non-existence. | |
| To wish for a world that is better or different than the world that was or the world that is, is to wish for non-existence. | |
| And when we take and move, as we are trying to do, this big, squeaky, base-of-the-island lost lever that we're trying to move to change the world, we will, in a strange sense, be bringing lots of people into existence and preventing lots of other people from coming into existence because of the will that we're exerting and the energy that we're exerting. | |
| I mean, there are people who are, many people, thousands and thousands of people, who are either a little bit or a lot healthier mentally and perhaps physically as a result of Philosophy is a result of their exposure to philosophy through FDR. And those people are now not going to be as attracted to destructive and difficult and dangerous other people. | |
| And therefore, they won't get married to those people, they won't have kids with those people, and that sort of... | |
| So, you know, this is a huge lever that brings life into existence, and it's not my lever, it's just the lever of philosophy, which we're all kind of pushing at. | |
| It brings life into existence and it prevents life that would have come into existence from coming into existence. | |
| And so to look back, you say, well, I mean, it's an odd sort of question, right? | |
| To say, well, would I rather my parents have not met? | |
| And if the world were healthier, they would not have met because I bet you you can look at a lot of dysfunction that brought your parents together, whether your parents were dysfunctional or not, right? | |
| Certainly, you go back enough generations, everyone's dysfunctional, right? | |
| I mean, parenting only began to improve, really, in the 18th, 19th centuries, and then very slowly. | |
| So, if you say, well, I wish that the world had not been dysfunctional, then you are wishing for non-existence. | |
| And that is a kind of strange thing to think about, right? | |
| When you wish for a state, or I wish I'd been born into a stateless society, well, of course, the reality is that you would not have been born if there had been a stateless society 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 5,000 years ago. | |
| If Rome had transitioned not to a Christian theocratic dictatorship of blood and cross, but had rather transitioned into a stateless society, you for sure, you for absolutely, positively, for sure, would not exist. | |
| I mean, if your parents had sex a day or two earlier or later, you would not exist. | |
| Maybe even five minutes, right? | |
| Because you're a particular sperm out of millions and egg out of hundreds or thousands. | |
| So to wish for... | |
| I mean, this is a very interesting thing. | |
| You are because the world is. | |
| You are. You exist because the world is what it is. | |
| And that's something that I take comfort in, you know, when the nipple-chafing of the endless marathon gets a little too much, right? | |
| I sort of try to remember that, yes, I do want the world to be a better place, but the fact that the world was not a better place is why I'm here to make the world a better place. | |
| If the world had been a better place in the past, my parents would have been different people, they would have been in different countries, and they would not have met, and I would not be. | |
| Now, clearly, I'm, you know, if the question arises, and it may arise to your mind, it certainly did arise to mine, And this is where the theory or this perspective is a little less helpful. | |
| Oh, sorry. Short break to singing out to Bella, her favorite song. | |
| And here's where the theory becomes a challenge, right? | |
| and tries to say, well, if the Second World War had not happened, I would not have been born. | |
| Anyway, so you understand, right? | |
| You can go on. So, of course, I say, well, would I have been happy for the Second World War to not happen so that I would give up my life to prevent the... | |
| Whatever, right? I mean, you understand, right? | |
| I mean, that's not a choice or an option, right? | |
| I mean, we can have a choice or an option in how we look at things, but not what things we look at, you know, certainly in terms of history, right? | |
| So... So, just in case you start going down that road, you know, that, oh, but I mater myself to save the 40 million lives of the Second World. | |
| I mean, that can never happen. | |
| It's come and gone. But... | |
| Unless someone's going to make a comic book about it. | |
| But... I think this perspective has always been quite helpful for me. | |
| When I find that the world is too much, that there's too much to be fixed, there's too many fools in the world, to remember that the fools in the world have produced me and produced you and produced all the other things of greatness, wonder and depth that we value. | |
| Communism ejected and in a sense created Ayn Rand and objectivism and other great things. | |
| I think that we want to not take the vengeance of Socrates that I talked about in my recent series, but I think we want to try to create the best possible circumstances in the world as it is and as it is to be, as it is to come into existence in the future based on the principles that we're laying down now, we hope. But you don't want to make the world a worse place in the future. | |
| But at the same time, I think that it's really, really important to understand that we are because the world is. | |
| And therefore, there's a limit to the amount of chafing we can have against the world because if we shave too much, we begin to rub up against You know, the half in love with easeful death from Shelley. | |
| I think it is this problem that there is a kind of nihilism in the root of an extremity of social change, which is to create the world in a different kind of guise, which would be to make the world different is to unmake your own existence, because we are predicated on the world that was and is certainly the world that was. | |
| So, I think it's really important to remember that, however difficult the world may be, it is that very difficulty which is inherent in our own creation and existence and to remember that and I think that that certainly gives me some peace because to end up hating the world that is is to really end up hating the circumstances of your own creation which comes perilously close I think to self discontent and self-hatred which obviously can never achieve anything good or noble or true or wonderful so I hope that perspective helps we are because the world is and if you accept that I think that you will get some more peace in the world, | |
| that is, which will create a more peaceful world to come. | |
| Thank you so much for listening as always. |
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