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Nov. 2, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

14:36

2021 The Euro Plays Russian Roulette - And The Morality of Consequences

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, shows you the data that dooms the Euro, and discusses the consequences of our addiction to state power.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Good thinkers work with facts, not opinions.
	We studiously avoid words like the plague that they so often are.
	Words can be manipulated.
	Language can be manipulated.
	Language is the matrix. And reality is the antidote.
	The facts, the truth is the antidote.
	Which is why everybody who propagandizes you wants to draw you, ensnare you, or coercively pull you.
	Into their soft, corrosive, foggy matrix of caressing and strangling syllables.
	And they pull you into a world of words.
	Like country. Like patriotism.
	Like culture. Like even, to a large degree, history, as it's taught.
	And try and stay away from that.
	So, for instance, you've been told that a top cadre of politicians is working on the Eurozone crisis.
	And they are working to solve it.
	Well... That's all nonsense.
	If they were to just print the actual yields on European bonds, particularly Portugal, Greece of course is ridiculous, but Portugal and Italy, much larger economies than...
	Greece is pretty inconsequential.
	You would see the reality that as they say that they're solving the problems, the yields on these bonds go up.
	And the yields are going up because there is a diminishing confidence in Portugal and Italy's ability to repay its debts, to maintain its deficits.
	Which means that there's going to be a crash.
	There's going to be a default.
	Greece is already defaulting.
	They just can't use that word because that would actually trigger other financial consequences that they want to avoid.
	And remember, if you remember, these are the lessons.
	I mean, this is what is so tragic.
	These are the lessons that we are teaching our young.
	That if you rob a bank, that's just terrible.
	That's just, oh my goodness, that's just wretched.
	That's horrible. You've got to go to jail. With lots of tattoos, get your brother out.
	Go, go, go. But you see, if you collude with a financial skullduggery ass clown company like Greece did to get into the euro by cooking your books and lying and falsifying, well, you just got to pretend that that never happened.
	Nobody ever goes to jail there who basically defrauded their way into feasting on the pulsing, largely German jugular of euro productivity or what remains of it.
	Well, that's okay.
	That's just... Something we can't really talk about and certainly nothing that will ever be prosecuted.
	So, I mean, all we're teaching our children is that you have to, you know, you have to be a sociopath and you have to think really big.
	Don't be a sociopath and think about small crimes, because small crimes will land you in jail.
	Be a sociopath and think about absolutely enormous crimes, right?
	Herman McCain was talking to Bill O'Reilly, I think it was yesterday.
	And was perfectly willing to put ships and apply embargoes and enter into a shooting war with Iran.
	Man's openly talking about initiating war against Iran.
	I mean, be a big criminal.
	Be a big Criminal that strides the world like a colossus because small criminals get squashed, but big criminals rule the world.
	And that's what we're teaching children.
	We are inflating the ambitions of the coldest and hard-heartedest among us.
	And another thing that people have been sort of asking me about, and it's a perfectly fair question, is What do I think is going to happen to all of the people who are on fixed incomes, who are elderly, who are poor, who have grown up dependent upon the welfare state and so on when the shite hits the fan of statism?
	Well, you know, if you ever really want to get out of the matrix of society, it's actually very, very easy.
	And I strongly suggest that you do it.
	It's the only lifeboat there is.
	But all you have to do is, it's very simple, and this is all I've ever done, is I listened to the moral instructions that I was given when I was a child by my parents, by my extended family, by my priests, by my politicians, by a wide variety of teachers.
	All I did was listen.
	And I remember that I listened, and I remember what those moral instructions were.
	And I've got a podcast, if you're interested, that morality basically is synonymous with memory.
	You can look for it on the website at freedomainradio.com if you like.
	It's a good podcast, I think. But all I did was listen.
	And so when I was a kid, if...
	I didn't study for a test that I knew was coming.
	I didn't get an extension.
	I just got an F. And if I didn't pass enough grades when I was a kid, I would be held back a year.
	And so basically I would have to spend a year of my life again in the brain-squeezing sardine can of airless claustrophobic propaganda we call government schools.
	Those were the rules. There really weren't any exceptions.
	If I didn't bring the money for a school trip, and I grew up absolutely dirt poor and often didn't have the money for that, if I didn't bring the money for a school trip while I didn't go on the school trip, There were consequences, and these were consequences to things that I didn't even have a lot of control over.
	I didn't have a lot of control over whether my mom had the money for school trips.
	I didn't have a lot of control over whether I could study or not.
	I mean, home life was completely insane and chaotic and violent, so I didn't have a lot of control over whether I could study or not.
	I mean, I could go to the library sometimes, as I did, but, you know, with your brain buzzing with family craziness, you have a tough time relative to others.
	I didn't have a lot of control. Over that.
	But there were no excuses for a lack of preparation or a lack of knowledge.
	And those were the rules when I was 5 or 6 or 7 or 10 or 15.
	I don't think it's ridiculous to say to society as a whole That it's probably more reasonable to apply even stricter moral rules to somebody who's 50 than to somebody who's 5, right?
	See, it's an extrapolation of moral.
	So let's say that here, right, on this side is the 5-year-old, and here's the 50-year-old.
	We say we move the moral standards up half an inch for the 5-year-old.
	They've got to go up at least a foot or two.
	For the 50-year-old, right?
	So you'd move the moral standards for a 5-year-old or a 10-year-old a little bit.
	They go up and down much more extremely or much more broadly for somebody who's older.
	And so we should have far higher and stricter moral rules and consequences in place for somebody who's 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 than we do for somebody who's 5 or 6 or 10 or 15.
	Of course! Somebody who's 50 has a fully mature brain.
	They have independence. They have financial independence.
	They have political legal independence, which a child doesn't have.
	They are responsible, at least at that age, for their own circumstances in life.
	A child is not responsible for his or her own circumstances.
	And... So it seems perfectly rational to me to say to all the people, you know, can we speak this collectively?
	I think to some degree we can.
	It's a pretty universal phenomenon.
	So the people who lectured me when I was a kid and said that there are negative consequences for not being prepared, for failing, for not studying, for not getting ready, for not doing the work that needs to be done, there are negative consequences to that.
	And those negative consequences are severe.
	I mean, losing a year of your life when you were a kid was a pretty significant threat.
	Having to repeat courses, losing your summers by having to go back into courses was a pretty significant threat or negative consequences.
	Or even being kicked out of school was in those days a pretty negative consequence.
	Probably still is. So all I did was I listened and I took very seriously the moral rules that were imposed upon me as a child.
	And I also accepted what people said, that The political system reflects the will of the people.
	So clearly the will of the people is bankruptcy.
	Clearly the will of the people is default.
	Because that's what the political system has been doing the whole time that everyone has told me that politics reflects the will of the people.
	This is what the people want. And I was also told that the minority had to submit to the will of the majority.
	That was the way the system worked.
	And so when people who are On Social Security or have old age pensions if their old age pensions get cut in half.
	Because politics has reflected the will of the people.
	I'm not sure how I'm supposed to view that as something terrible and awful that they did not bring on themselves.
	I mean, there were no excuses for me when I was 6 or 7 or 10 years old.
	I'm not sure what excuses somebody can claim when they're 50 or 60.
	When it's been known for many years that the system can't continue.
	So, it's sort of, to me, like this.
	I mean, I view myself as a kind of doctor in a time of plague.
	Unfortunately, the pill that I want to give people, they view as poison and they view their illnesses as health.
	So, it's a bit of a challenge, let's say.
	But I feel sort of like a doctor, and I've had a patient for 30 years, and that patient has been a chain smoker.
	And I've said, listen, you really need to quit smoking.
	It's very likely to kill you.
	It's very harmful to you.
	Emphysema, lung cancer, various ailments, heart disease, it's really bad for you.
	And here are the facts, here are the statistics, here are the studies.
	And my patient, who's been sitting across From me for 30 years has continually told me that I'm full of shit.
	That I'm just anti-cigarette.
	I hate RJ Reynolds.
	I hate cigarette companies.
	I'm irrational. I'm skewing the data.
	I have some weird thing emotionally that I haven't processed, that I'm just bizarre, that I want to just throw tobacco workers and tobacco farmers out of a job, that I hate all of those people.
	And all of this nonsense and insults and calamity has been invented and thrown at me.
	And I have, I think relatively patiently, sometimes passionately, continued to say to this patient, here are the facts, here are the studies, here are the statistics, here is the reality that smoking is going to make you, most likely, very, very sick.
	In fact, it may even kill you.
	And again, I've been sort of mocked and attacked and ridiculed and all of that.
	A fearmonger, a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, somebody who doesn't care about the poor, and somebody who hates the state for irrational reasons, and somebody who just bashes anyone who tries to get anything done in the political...
	You know, we've all heard this.
	We don't have to sort of go into it over and over.
	And it's not like you want to be right as the doctor when you say to your patient, smoking may kill you.
	You don't want to be right. You'd rather be wrong.
	But then the terrible shadow shows up on the lung in the x-ray and terminal lung cancer has infested the man's lungs.
	It's not like you don't feel some pity for the man, but you feel sorrow.
	I mean, I do feel genuine sorrow.
	There's a kind of black comedy in all of it.
	I feel a genuine sorrow for the people who are going to, through their lack of listening, through their emotional reactiveness, through their childishness, and that really is an insult to children, through their defensiveness, through their inability to deal with reality, their hostility to reality and to those who are talking about reality, you feel a kind of pity for them.
	I feel a kind of pity for them.
	But I have accepted that they know and that they accept that we all have to accept the consequences of our decisions in life.
	If I had to accept them when I was six, people have to accept them when they're sixty.
	They have to. Because that's what they taught me when I was six, and I get it.
	I got it. I understood. I accepted that when I was a child, and I began to, and as much as I could, took responsibility for my actions, and I think that's been a large part of the degree of success that I've had in life.
	But I accepted that.
	I said, no excuses. You're responsible for the effects of your actions.
	And so, particularly over the past 20 years, or you could say 15, there's been huge amounts of information available, from the libertarian perspective, on the world crisis and the current problems in the system.
	And people have avoided them.
	Seven million copies of Atlas Shrugged sold?
	That's a lot of copies. Everyone has met an objectivist at one time or another, or seen the name, or has seen the arguments.
	And so people have rejected them, like the guy who continues to chainsmoke.
	He's rejected the advice of his doctor.
	And society, through deficit financing, through fiat currency, through increasing state control, has taken the short-term hit of avoiding conflict so often at the expense of children, as is the case with the public sector teachers' union.
	But we have avoided conflict, and we have avoided the reality of our direction.
	And so when the tumor shows up, And the person continues to deny that there's a tumor.
	It's kind of funny. It's very sad.
	It's very tragic. And the reality is, though, that we all have to live with the consequences of our actions.
	And the grave danger of the person who's been warned for years about cancer, who continues to smoke, Is that by not learning himself, he cannot change either his own future, because this is still curable.

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