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Oct. 5, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:43
2005 Life is Beautiful - A Confession

A listener asks why life is worth living... Here is my answer.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. I just got back from Phoenix, can you see from the tan, where I did some interviewing and hosting and moderating at the Casey Research Summit, When Money Dies, which you can check out at caseyresearch.com, highly recommended.
I got an email, and it's a wonderful email, and I'm going to read it.
It says, Hello, Mr. Molyneux.
May I call you Stefan?
You can call me Bobly Von Discohead if you like.
They're just labels. He said, First of all, I'd like to express my gratitude towards your parents for bringing you into this world and keeping you out of harm's way.
long enough for you to grow into a mature adult with thoughts and ideas which flourished into Freedom Aid Radio.
I would like to then direct all of this gratitude towards you for putting up with this world and even surviving quite resiliently and successfully.
Thank you for constantly seeking truth, enduring endless criticism and negativity, and bringing what you discover to the rest of the world.
That's very kind.
And remember, they only shoot flack at you when you're close to the target.
I haven't yet found another human being more inspiring than you have been to me, and I just discovered you and your work a week or two ago.
That position was previously held by Ron Paul, and I still love everything that that man has to say, but your philosophy and teachings just speak that much more to the ideals of freedom that I hold so close to my heart.
And I think Ron Paul is an amazing guy, and obviously a great writer, a great communicator, and exceedingly well-learned.
So you can't go far wrong looking at what Ron Paul has to say, as far as the content and his analysis of current events and so on.
It's great stuff. So, he says, I have...
Let's see. Before you had a wife and children, what kept you from killing yourself?
I don't mean this in the, like, I'm depressed and lonely sense, but rather you are an atheist and therefore don't believe in an afterlife.
And as an intelligent individual, you surely knew that your life is not going to be an easy one.
We as human beings living in the 21st century face an ever-increasing number of complex problems that can seem daunting to any individual who examines them closely.
Well, it's a great question, and it is an important question to ask, which is really the question, why live, as opposed to the alternative, which is always available to us from any high ledge or sharp object.
I will tell you what I think about life and the reasons for it, and hopefully this will make some sense to you.
Have you ever seen a Picture of a bed bug up close, you know, the big mandibles and 12,000 eyes and antennae and hooks on their cheeks.
I mean, that's pretty monstrous.
That's a bed bug that's going to burrow and feast on blood and lay eggs and so on.
And that's a living organism.
You know, we could be that, which would suck.
Pretty much. We could be the matter, the star stuff that floated down to Earth.
We could be a rock and have no thoughts or experience or sensations or anything like that.
We could be born in the 12th century, as a poor Spanish or French boy in the early to mid-medieval period.
Monstrous, monstrous time to be alive.
Life expectancy was terrible, and you would die from a toothache, and you lived in these insane mental superstition bonds of Christendom where people would go so mad regularly that entire villages would get up and dance themselves to death.
You would live through the Black Death if you indeed lived when a third of the population would be killed.
You read about in Florence or Rome, they would find people who were sick and they would just nail up their houses so that they would all die inside, so they wouldn't spread their disease.
You could be nailed up dying of the bubonic plague at the age of eight.
I mean, you could go on and on in terms of What kind of organism you could be, whether you would be an organism, and if you're a human being, what kind of human being you could be.
Now, this may be a little personal, but I hope that you'll understand why I'm telling you this.
I think my life view was probably quite shaped early on.
I had two friends who died very, very young.
One of them was a friend that I made when I came to Canada.
He was my closest friend when I was 11 and 12.
And he was a wonderful, wonderful boy, wonderful young man, very intelligent, very Very sensitive, very curious, very introspective, just a great kid.
And we were, you know, as close as brothers ought to be.
And we had a wonderful time together.
And, you know, just these people you can really unpack your heart to in an open, wonderful, golden space of listening.
It was a beautiful friendship.
And then he died.
He had a heart defect that nobody was aware of.
And he just up and died.
And it was just awful. Another friend of mine A rougher friend, a tougher friend who did teach me a little bit about life on the darker side of the tracks, but also a great influence on me.
He was in a motorcycle accident and was beheaded.
So I think these two events Helped me to understand just, I mean, how lucky I am to have health, to have vigor, to have strength.
Now, yeah, I exercise three or four times a week.
I try to eat well and all of that, but that doesn't guarantee you anything, right?
My meteor could hit the house before the end of this video.
And I consider...
If I can use the phrase, the divine disco ball sparkle of human intellect to be the brightest thing in this universe, it puts Betelgeuse to shame.
The capacity of the human mind to encompass the entire universe through physics and mathematics And to encompass all human knowledge and all science through philosophy, I think is as close to a divine power as this heart-bitten atheist is ever likely to see.
I consider it an enormous privilege to be alive.
Certainly nothing in the universe has been flowing towards my existence, but when you look back at the great causal chain of genetics and circumstance and survival and evolution that has traced some kind of crazy direct path from single-celled organism in the primordial but when you look back at the great causal chain of genetics and circumstance and survival and evolution that has traced some kind of crazy direct path from single-celled organism in the primordial soup through It's absolutely astounding.
And it is an incredible privilege to be alive.
It is an incredible privilege to be alive in a relatively free society where I can have this kind of challenging and engaging conversation with the world to put the best of my mental efforts to raise it up like a statue.
like a A bright cathedral, if I can say that too, like a lighthouse.
And to see how many ships out at sea find whatever I argue to be of value, it's an immense privilege.
I'm so lucky to have the abilities that I have.
To have the listenership that I have, to have the support that I have, to have the interest that I have.
I get so many emails about how much philosophy has helped people and the philosophy that we talk about here.
It's an enormous, immense, fundamental, beautiful, beautiful privilege to be alive.
And I would no more think of ending my own life than I would think of buying the most beautiful piece of art that could be imagined in the world and immediately consigning it to the bonfire.
That would be the actions of madness.
Glowing gems of cascading creation from the beginning of time to who we are now.
And it is such a privilege to have the life that I have, to have the wife that I have, to have the daughter that I have.
I genuinely feel like the luckiest, luckiest man alive.
And a lot of that has to do with the people who are watching and listening to this, because I could not do what I do without people's interest and support in sharing and donating and making all of this possible.
And I've always felt that life has been an incredible blessing, and it is a gift.
I didn't do anything to earn this.
Now what I do with my life, I earn to some degree.
But life itself was a gift of coincidence and It is the ultimate lottery ticket to be born as a human being and to be born as a healthy human being in a relatively free society and particularly at this age of incredible technological Gutenberg pressism, I think, where we can really shatter the delusions and mysticisms of prior ages through clear and powerful communication.
What a gift! What a gift!
What an incredible intersection of circumstances has made what I do and this whole conversation possible.
I am stewed in deep delight at the possibilities and the achievements of this conversation.
And so life to me is an incredibly precious thing.
So he's concerned about climate change and the coming economic collapse, which will send civilization back to the Dark Ages.
I am a climate change skeptic.
And... I am a skeptic about most things.
I'm skeptical about the official story of 9-11, simply because it's the government, right?
How do you know the government is lying?
Its lips are moving. It's breathing.
So I'm a skeptic, and I'm certainly a skeptic about climate.
And the reason that I'm a skeptic about climate science is obviously there's contradictory information, which I am not even remotely competent.
To evaluate. I'm no scientist.
I'm no physicist. I'm no climatologist.
To me, evolution is a bit of a different matter because evolution has some very simple tests for failure.
In terms of the sequence of the fossil records and so on, finding something way out of sequence would be immediate disproof of the theory.
You can read Richard Dawkins for more on that.
The fact that there's an immediate disproof of the theory I find very comforting from a skeptical standpoint.
But climate change is a different matter.
Again, it could be true. It could all be true.
I don't have anywhere close to the ability to evaluate stuff.
but there has been a lot of pretty shady stuff going on.
There were the ClimateGate emails back in the, I think in early 2000s, there was this famous hockey stick graph that was turned out, no matter what numbers you put in, you got that same hockey stick graph because of an error in the programming.
And there's been so many scares in science throughout my life that they've just cried wolf once too often.
And it's not so much that there is a new alarmism that's going on, but what I'm concerned about is I don't think that science has put in place measures to, I should put this, but what I'm concerned about is I don't think that science has put in this.
I don't think science has put in place correct measures to figure out why there were so many alarmist scares in the past that have not come true and to figure out how to avoid creating this alarmism in the future.
There's big money in alarmism.
You get massive amounts of government funding and publicity and fame and conferences.
That doesn't mean it's all false.
It just means that we have a reason and a right to be skeptical of this kind of stuff.
And... My skepticism only increases when I talk with people who accept the sort of official or mainstream view of climate science and I argue that the free market is the way to solve these problems if they exist and they won't even look in that direction.
That to me is very suspicious because then it means that what you want to do is increase government power and you're looking at the right sequence of syllables to pick the lock of the taxpayer's heart to further steal from his diminishing vault.
So, I don't...
Climate change, I mean, things to worry about.
Economic problems and economic collapses?
No, no, no, no, no. It's not going to collapse.
We're not going back to the Dark Ages.
Do you know why we're not going back to the Dark Ages?
Because the political rulers don't want to go back to the Dark Ages.
I mean, I understand, right? This is not...
There are not historical movements that roll down the hillside of the human landscape like boulders coming off a mountainside.
I mean, nothing is inevitable.
Everything is chosen. It is the will of the individual that is everything in history.
There are no massive historical movements.
There are tendencies for sure, right?
Like, why is Keynesianism so popular in economics?
For a simple reason that it serves the interests of those in power.
Same thing is true of climate change.
It is... Theories which serve the interests of those in power.
Oh, Keynesianism, you mean I get to borrow and spend and bribe more as a political leader?
Yay! Right?
And so... You know, economic arguments in favor of fiat currency and Federal Reserve and Central Bank.
And of course, politicians love for those to dominate the mental landscape.
Justifications for war, faith in the UN. I mean, all of these beliefs serve those in power, and those in power have the money to bribe and benefit and subsidize all those who speak Lies which allow them to further pick the pockets of the general population.
So yeah, there are tendencies for sure.
If you're someone like Paul Krugman and you talk about policies which expand the power of those at the top, of course those people are going to be very happy that you're going to be doing it and they will invite you to great conferences and they will give you subsidies and they will give you fame.
And of course, I mean, there's no question of that.
But... There is no inevitable sliding of society into the dark ages.
This is not how society works.
The ruling class really likes the modern era.
I mean, don't you? I mean, go to a dentist now, go to a dentist 500 or even 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago, and look at the difference.
Look at the life expectancy.
Look at the technology that's available.
The ruling class love, love, love, love all of the benefits of the free market.
They do. Now, the freer a society becomes, the more wealth is generated through the free market.
The more wealth that is generated through the free market, the more can be diverted to feed this swelling, beastly maw of the state.
Freedom breeds collapse whenever you have a state.
That's why you can't have a state. Just can't.
Freedom is food for cancer.
That means this is inevitable.
If you look at the Greeks had the freest market and became the biggest empire.
The Romans had the freest market and became the biggest empire.
The British had the freest market and became the biggest empire.
The Americans had the freest market and became the biggest empire.
It is almost a law of gravity in history that freedom leads to empire.
And the smallest state leads to the biggest state.
Right? America was an experiment in the smallest government possible at the time.
Feasible. Conceptual, I suppose.
Conceivable. And it led to the biggest government, the most powerful government, the best armed government that the world has ever known or seen or imagined.
So there are definitely trends in history, but there's no way the ruling class is going to go back to the Middle Ages.
They're not going to let it happen. The ruling class have been around for tens of thousands of years.
They're not... I mean, they're not going away and they're not going to backslide.
They don't want to go live, you know, sitting on the back of an ass in medieval France or Europe or America again.
So, yeah, they've skimmed off the profits of freedom for themselves.
They've created a Roman-style dependent class of bread and circuses addicts.
Yeah, of course. But the ruling classes, they just screw the dependent classes when the time comes.
Oh, sorry, we have too many dependents?
Well, we're just going to preach austerity and cut you off.
And they will restore economic freedom.
They know what's going on.
I mean, they know that they've got too many dependents.
The government has become too big.
There's too many interferences in the free market.
They're not going to ride that.
I mean, these are not captains who go down with the ship.
They elbow aside the urchins to get to the lifeboats.
And the rulers are now so dependent upon the productivity of the free market class, of the entrepreneurial class, of the capitalist class.
They will screw Goldman Sachs.
They will screw retirees.
They will shaft and cut contracts with everyone that they have contracted with to provide the benefits from the capitalist classes.
They're not going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
So don't worry about this economic collapse.
I mean, worry about it to the point where, you know, in my opinion, you know, get some gold, get some food.
And, I mean, you'd be ready for it for sure.
But I'll go back to the Stone Age.
We're just not going to do it.
The rulers won't let it.
And if you think they care about retirees when they have all the guns, weapons, money, and bombs in the world, think again.
Last question.
It's a great email. I'm sorry I have to skim some of it.
So this one actually has to do with anarchism.
Let's say somehow we get society on board to do away with the concept of a centralized government.
What happens to everything in the public sphere?
Land, buildings, bridges, roads.
Sure, privatize them. I get that.
But how will we determine who gets what?
Businesses will buy them, okay?
But from who? Who is the check made out to?
The government doesn't exist anymore.
Will the former taxpayers get those billions of dollars reimbursed to them in the form of a check broken up 300 million ways?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, there's simply no way to know for sure.
I mean, I can tell you the way that I would think about doing it is I think that government debt should be repudiated.
Of course, it's an unjust debt.
And I think that government assets should be sold off.
I think that the proceeds should go in proportion to the degree to which people have been stolen from.
I think it should go to them.
I also think it should not necessarily go to those who have paid a lot of taxes because they're multimillionaires or billionaires.
I mean, that's my particular preference.
I think that somebody who's had...
15% of his wage is stolen from him by the state for Social Security.
Should get some of that money back from the sale of public assets, I think.
I mean, this is a fantasy, because, you know, it's going to happen the way it's going to happen, but this would sort of be my ideal scenario.
And, um... So I think it should go to parents who have kids so that they can get their kids into some reasonable kind of education.
I think that it should go to the poor.
I think that the poor, of course, should have the opportunity to get their own housing, right?
So if you're going to get rid of public housing, you don't sell it to some landlord, just give it to the poor and then they can sell it or they can stay in it or do whatever they want with it.
But then they can't blame anybody else if things go awry because they at least had that choice, that option.
So yeah, I mean, I think it should devolve to people who have been the most harmed by the government.
It should devolve to people who've become the most dependent to the government in ways that make them less dependent.
But all of this will function perfectly well, because by the time we've recognized the evils of government, we've evolved so much as a species that charity and kindness and also there will be an exit of people dependent on the state prior to The end of the state.
So, it's not like you're going to take the state that exists right now and then just detonate it and, you know, all these dependents and so on.
No, no, I mean, people are going to exit the state as an institution.
People are going to find it repulsive to enter into it.
It's going to be something that's kind of gross.
Statism is going to become like racism.
I mean, they'll still be there, but it will be underground because it's so socially disapproved of.
So, yeah, you may let some comments drop with some old friends who are racist or whatever.
But in general, this applied society simply won't bring up racist comments or slurs because it's just socially frowned upon.
And the same thing with statism.
So the state is going to be starved of resources in terms of human capital and so on.
And also, you know, selling to the state and doing business with the state will be like selling to and doing business with the KKK.
I mean, it won't be illegal.
But if you found out that someone you knew was doing a lot of business with the KKK, you'd be like, you know, that's kind of gross.
I mean, I really can't respect that.
I don't think that's a good idea and so on.
And so there will be such a degree of social disapproval about getting involved in statism and so on that by the time it's, you know, dismantled.
It's going to be very small to begin with.
I mean, the state ends with a yawn.
It ends with a whimper. It does not end with a bang.
It certainly doesn't end with violence.
It ends with social disapproval and contempt, eye-rolling, boredom.
You know, an idea dies when it bores people.
And, I mean, this is where I am with these Wall Street protests, right?
Where we want a guaranteed living wage for every human being on Earth, regardless of employment.
I mean, that was old in the days of Rome, right?
Over 2,000 years ago.
It's such a boring, stupid idea.
I mean, you don't need to refute stuff which is just boring and dumb and dull and has been disproven in practical and theoretical terms so many times.
I mean, who cares? I mean, it's just like, ugh...
Here you go again with your, let's steal a living wage from every productive person and that's going to solve all human problems.
I mean, theft and violence as the default position for solving social problems?
It's dull, it's boring, it's ridiculous, it's embarrassing, it's stupid.
Of course it's immoral, but I mean...
People get on fire about immorality, which gets the reaction of virtue trolls, of philosophy trolls, of which we can count the majority of the human race.
But an idea dies when it bores you.
So hopefully I haven't bored you with this long video.
Thanks for your emails. Please keep them coming.
Look forward to your donations at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
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