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July 27, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:12
1713 Priests to Media

Where did the priests ago when religion began to decline?

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Here's an interesting question.
What happens to all of the people, all of the particular psycho class, all the members of a particular psycho class, when the environment it was developed for ceases?
So, to talk about what I mean, let's talk about the Priestley class.
So, the witch doctors in the Priestley class lived and flourished and developed their sinister skill sets Of emotional abuse and manipulation and probably rampant pedophilia.
They developed all of this during a time of almost bottomless and limitless superstition.
And that superstition has, not everywhere, particularly in the US, but it's not everywhere but most places, fallen away.
And now we live in a relatively secular world and people don't believe that demons control the weather and so on.
So my question is, what happens to all of the members of that class, all of the members of the superstitious exploitation class, when society becomes a lot less superstitious?
And I think that's a very interesting question.
It's not like when the horse and carriage...
Industry gives way to the car that everyone who was involved in designing and building horses and carriages starves to death, right?
No, they adapt to the new environment and they end up probably designing cars and so on.
What happened to the slave hunting, slave capturing, slave transporting, slave selling, and slave owning classes?
Well, that's an interesting question.
They don't just vanish. And what they're going to do is they're going to try and find...
An area which has as complementary a set of skill requirements as possible, right?
So if you lose your job as an electrical engineer, you're not going to go and try and get a job as a surgeon.
You're going to try and get a job as close to an electrical engineer and as close to your previous position, probably, as possible.
And that may be entrepreneurial or whatever, but you're going to try and adapt your existing skill set to the new environment.
So what happened to all the priests?
Well, I'm going to tell you what happened to all the priests.
All the priests became the media.
Ooh. Gives me goosebumps.
How about you? Let's take a look at the logic.
Well, what do the priests do?
I would submit that the priests did three things.
The first thing the priests did was they scared the living shit out of every poor...
of the general population with the tales of hell and eternal punishment and the wrath of God and so on.
And they just scared the living shit out of everyone and they were trained to terrify everyone so that everyone would run and cling to the military leaders called the aristocracy.
So keep people in a perpetual state of fear and self-management and self-attack and they're very, very easy to And that was really the job of the priest.
We can see this. It's clear in the mainstream media.
The mainstream media invents seven panics a day to keep people in a state of anxiety, terror, and hopelessness and despair and to keep them submissive, right?
To keep them running to the herd, running to the leader for protection from all of these invented ghosts.
And we used to have the devil and now we have global warming.
And we used to have the devil and now we have nuclear war.
And we used to have demons and now we have...
All the, oh, there's bad stuff in your food and bad disasters and this and that's going to happen and the bees are all gone and everything causes cancer.
So this is the same skill set, right?
The ability to terrify people switched from the priestly class to the media class.
They serve the same function, which is to keep people frightened, cowards, submissive, and obedient to those in power.
What else did the priestly class do?
Well, the priestly class said that you should take an interest in your political environment and you should remonstrate with the king and you should attempt to cajole your masters into better behavior.
Yes, they said, in the end, you must submit to the will of the ruler even if you don't agree with it because he's put there by the divine right of kings.
And this is...
Particularly in Protestantism, but to some degree in Catholicism, this interest in politics is very key.
And the reason they do that is so that you will focus on attempting to manage the king rather than ask yourself why there is a king.
So that you can particularly just get obsessed with the king said this and the king did that and the lord said this and the lord did that.
They passed this law, they passed that law, my taxes are going up.
And all you do is send your petitions and clamor to the king and so on rather than ask why the fuck do we have this in the first place?
So keep people obsessed with the minutiae of attempting to rule people who are ruling them with near-infinite force.
Well, that's what the priest did, and of course that's what the media does.
Ooh, Barack Obama did this.
Ooh, George Bush said that.
Ooh, Al Gore said the other.
Ooh, they're passing this law.
Ooh, this is going on over here.
And everybody's just stampeding all around, obsessively fascinated with the illusion that any of this shit makes a damn bit of difference.
Whether they say this, and whether, ooh, you know, George Bush said the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper.
Ooh, you know, Ron Paul is trying to get an order, the Fed bill passed.
Ooh, Sarah Palin's coming, and oh my god, Al Gore's giving a speech.
Let's go and tell him he's wrong about global...
Like, just get obsessed with the soap opera of nonsense of theater that doesn't matter a damn.
Alright, everybody knows about politicians and their personal lives, and nobody knows about the history of the Federal Reserve, where the real power is, of course, right?
So, priests and the media get you obsessed with the politics and your rulers rather than say, well, because what is a rational approach to having rulers that you can't outgun and can't outrun?
Well, you say, fuck them.
I'll pay them off and I'm not going to pay them additional time in mental energy as well as my taxation.
I'm just not going to do it.
If I'm getting shaken down by a mafia that has a million guns to my one, I'll pay them their money and I'll go home and have a pleasant time with my family.
I won't give them additional time and write blogs about them and do this about them and focus on that and try and get them to change because that's just paying tax upon tax upon tax upon tax for no...
And then there's a fallacy of sunk costs, which happens, right?
Which is that once you get obsessed with the political process, it's hard to pull back because you've already invested so much time and energy, and so it's hard to wait.
It's hard to walk when you've waited for the bus for two days, right?
You feel like, oh man, why the hell didn't I do this a long time ago?
And there's a fallacy of sunk costs.
And so the media and the priesthood, I see that there's a complementary skill set here, right?
that it's the most efficient use of the existing skill set to go from superstition, old superstition, supernatural superstition, to status superstition, which is the media.
And the third thing that they did was they promoted obsessive self-criticism and self-attack among the population by holding up impossible standards of habits, behavior, and personas.
So, in the priestly class, it was Jesus was perfect, and you were imperfect, and the thought is the deed.
So, if you have impure thoughts about your neighbor's wife, by God, it's the same as adultery.
So, you end up with this obsessive self-monitoring, self-control, self-censorship, self-attack.
And the reason they do that is that people fundamentally cannot live in societies which do not match their psyches.
People fundamentally cannot live in societies that do not match their psyches.
And so that's why when you live in an oppressive society, it can only survive if the people oppress themselves, because society as a whole must mirror the psyche of the citizens.
Otherwise, it doesn't work.
The citizens fall into a depression or the system changes.
So when you have a system of repression and control and attack and bullying and aggression and threats, then you have to create this within the The population, otherwise, it won't work.
A man who self-attacks cannot survive in a dictatorship, and a dictatorship cannot survive among people who do not self-attack.
So the priest provoked endless self-attack with original sin, and the thought is the deed, and evil is omnipresent, and Jesus might save you, but the devil will always tempt you, and so and so and so and so, right?
And the same thing happens with the media, right?
Do you have now...
See, it's different now, because now...
Nobody really believes that the thought is the deed, and we've secularized consciousness enough to believe that we're not being tempted by the devil or whatever.
We just maybe have bad habits or whatever.
And so the impossible standard is, you know, the six-pack perfectly toned youth with lustrous hair and pearly white teeth.
So you have a standard now where a normally healthy human being It's flabby and yellow-toothed and deficient and not lustrous-haired.
I mean, Jesus, Brooke Shields was on a commercial, I don't know, six or twelve months ago, where she was pimping fuller eyelashes.
You put this shit on your eyelashes and they might fall out and they might grow in and they might infect your eye, but you might get slightly thicker eyelashes.
This is the obsessive self-criticism, self-obsession and narcissistic It's perfectionism that is provoked by the media in people, in women to some degree, and now more increasingly so in men.
Men's health, how to get a six-pack ab while watching Baywatch.
That is all nonsense, right?
So now you're supposed to, oh, my hair is thinning.
Oh, my teeth could be wider.
Oh, I have a mole.
Oh, you know, I need to wear glasses and that's bad.
And oh, blah, blah, blah, right?
I should get laser surgery because it's more attractive that way, right?
Do I have the right shoes? Do I have the right friends?
Do I have the right car? Is my car too old?
I have a pimple.
All of this crazy shit that goes on, where the few freakily, genetically perfect people are catapulted into the IMAX of our inner imaginations, and we constantly compare ourselves to those.
Perfections, right? Beauty is the new Jesus, and imperfections are the new Satan.
And the degree of obsessive self-attack and self-criticism that goes on, where 80% of women Want to have sex with the lights off because they hate their bodies.
I mean, what a nightmare. So the original sin now is imperfection.
And that's what we spend our time obsessing and worrying about rather than are we free human beings?
Do we live noble, productive, and happy lives?
No, no, no, no. We have to worry about whether we have a little bit of muffin top or whether we should have a skinny or 2% latte because that's the shit that really matters.
And we could go on with this, right?
This is where the priestly class went, was into the media.
Same skill set, same purpose, right?
You can remonstrate against the king in the Middle Ages, but you have to submit because he was appointed by the divine right of kings by God.
And you can remonstrate with the president, but you in the end have to submit to his will because he was appointed by the divine right of the democratic God, called the majority.
And so it's the same thing.
And the slave-owning class and the slave-capturing class Became the police, and so on.
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