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Nov. 6, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:35
2523 Lies, Corruption and the Moral Decay of America

Standing opposed to the lies of those in power...

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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Just going to put out a kind of rumination here about something I think is really important, kind of understated a lot of times.
There are certain corruptions that occur that I think are really important turning points about In societies, in Western societies in particular.
I think we just kind of had one of them.
I just wanted to share my thoughts on this and hopefully it makes some sense to you.
I know for a fact, based on decades studying history, I know for a fact that there are increasingly narrowed and reptilian predatory eyes always looking on society to see what can be gotten away with, what is possible to get away with.
And the more that we let that standard slide, the more that we let Any residual after-effect or human nuclear shadow of ethics crumble and fall away in society,
the more we lure these narrowed reptilian eyes out of the fetid undergrowth into view— and the more we're sort of horrified at monsters that we ourselves have called into being there are historical examples of these Robespierre,
Napoleon, Nero, Hitler, Mussolini and there's a certain amount of corruption that is necessary Before these people can take power.
And those whose capacity for immorality, for downright, base of the spine, human, skull-crushing, satanic evil, those whose capacity for that kind of behavior It's really deep and present in, I guess, the hollow black obsidian interstellar deep space cavity where normally a soul would be.
They're always watching.
They're always watching what is going on in society, what can be gotten away with.
Now, I remember, I guess, 15 years ago now, whatever it was, I was driving with a salesman in the States.
I was like the guy who gave the technical side of the presentation in software.
And we heard on the radio about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and the blowjobs and the semen stains and the use of a cigar as a Sex toy, and so on.
Like, all of this unbelievably sleazy, repulsive, mafia-layer stuff that was going on.
And I remember feeling like a real sort of stick-insect, cold-feated horror walk up and down my spine.
And I remember thinking, wow...
This is a turning point.
This is a moment when the moral outrage of society is going to be so clear and so decisive.
I mean, the president's lied to get into wars, but that's all kind of vaguely foreign and vaguely not part of what people process who aren't sort of in the war.
But this was something that was so visceral and so repulsive and revealed such...
A monstrous deficiency of any kind of character and a monstrous predatory beast in the White House.
And of course, I'd been raised with all of this mainstream feminist stuff around you don't abuse your power and you don't have sex with underlings.
I mean, could there be a greater power differential than between the President of the United States and I mean, there's no greater power disparity.
And I just remember thinking, well, boy, that's it.
There's going to be a real shock and horror over this.
And I guess this is probably what happened to some people earlier with Nixon, right?
That he had bugged the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and so on, which, you know, third-rate burglary, Nothing was stolen.
I mean, it was...
And everybody bugged everyone.
JFK did it.
LBJ did it and all that.
So all of this stuff that occurred, and people just went insane over Nixon.
I mean, you're still getting movies made out of it like 30 years later.
And this was much, much worse.
What Clinton did is much, much worse than what Nixon did, at least in this instance.
And I remember driving along, and I remember thinking, Wow!
Wow!
It's like you see this blind finger god, like blinding finger god flicking a streak of lightning straight over your head, and you just stand there amazed, agog, looking at the sky, waiting for the thunder to just split the hairs on your skin.
It would be so loud.
And it was like I remember hearing that, and I couldn't even speak.
I was like, wow!
What an astounding thing to do.
What an astounding thing to lie about.
This is going to cause an enormous amount of soul searching in America.
I mean, like, in Toronto, near where I live, the Mayor is a complete, drunken, corrupt lout.
I mean, the Marion Barry Award for Mayordom goes to Rob Ford, this corpulent, beluga-obese pile of drunken heart attack in a bag.
He just basically admitted to smoking crack with gangsters.
And I was reading...
I'm old enough now that I don't really expect that much to sort of come of these things anymore.
But there's a lot of sort of soul-searching and, you know...
But there's no soul-searching about, like, what does it say about politics that this kind of human being has risen to the top?
People think it's just some individual, oh, he pulled the wool over the voter's eyes.
What does it say about politics and the whole system of the escalator up to the sort of summit of power?
What does it say about our entire system when someone like this can get to the very top?
And people think, well, this Rob Ford guy, he should resign.
They don't think that the system itself is a problem.
They don't think that he is a symptom rather than a cause.
Like, oh, if he resigns, then everything's fine again.
But it means that everyone who helped him up this escalator to the summit of political power, the power of coercion, which is what political power is, that's all it is, really.
Everyone who helped him up to the summit of power Either did not recognize how corrupt and ugly a human being he was, or they did.
Now, if they didn't recognize it, then they have a complete incapacity to recognize evil in front of them, which means, what are they doing with violent power?
It means they don't even recognize what evil is.
It's like being a doctor and not being able to recognize a sick person in any way, shape or form.
You shouldn't be a doctor.
Or they did recognize that he was corrupt and evil and they were fine with that.
The moment that somebody truly immoral reaches the top of an organization He damns the entire organization, the entire structure.
The entirety of the hierarchy is damned by the person at the top.
Because it takes an entire culture of corruption to push someone like that through the viscous ooze of politics and money and power and favors and bribery and back-slapping and back-stabbing.
It takes an entire corrupt system to push someone like that to the top.
A whole bunch of virtuous, strong, courageous, moral people of integrity would identify someone like that and would not even buy a used fucking lawnmower from such a scumbag, let alone push him to the pinnacle of political power.
And it's something that we know, right?
We know this.
You don't need me to tell you.
We know this deep down.
We know that And I know Clinton bombed Kosovo and did all these terrible things.
I get all of that, but it's foreign policy.
You can't expect the average person to really emotionally persist that, but this married man who's basically a sexual predator, you know, sleeping around on his wife and getting blowjobs from fairly idiotic interns, and he's been incredibly accused of rape by Juanita Broderick.
There's the whole Paula Jones thing.
I mean, this guy, he's like a...
I mean, not like a sociopath, but he's a sociopath, right?
I mean, he's a serial predator on women.
And, of course, I mean, to be fair, a lot of democratic politicians are that way inclined, right?
Eliot Spitzer, Weiner, Clinton.
I mean, there's this whole...
mess that they have, this horrible view that they have of women as sexual objects, as a sort of Tom-like view.
But...
With Clinton, it was like a trial balloon.
Like, can I do these most egregiously horrifying things and get away with it?
And, I mean, there were two groups that should have punished him enormously.
Two groups which, from that time on, I've had nothing but contempt for.
One is, of course, mainstream feminism.
Mainstream feminism should have...
I mean, this man was completely abusing the power of the office.
And...
I mean, if you tried anything like that in the private sector, you would...
I mean, you would just be shredded.
And the mainstream feminists were completely silent about what Bill Clinton was doing to the women around him.
And that, to me, was just like, okay, you have no principles.
I mean, once you get that the leading, quote, moralists in society have no principles...
For me, like I'm a good person, for me, that opens up like, oh my god, we really don't know what the hell we're doing here.
Like we say, we have principles.
We don't actually have any principles.
That's really bad.
So I'm going to work to try and figure out what those principles are, how to communicate them.
That's why I came up with universally preferable behavior and so on.
Because it's like, we completely, we think we've got a map.
We think we've got a compass.
We think we know which way to point the ship under which stars and all that.
But we don't.
We have no clue, so we better figure it out.
The other kind of person, sort of my, I guess my nemesis, my polar opposite, you know, we're still in the late sophist phase, not quite in the open sociopath phase, but it won't be long unless we really wake up and change.
But my polar opposite, what they do is they say, oh, so all the primary moralists In society, are complete bullshitters.
They don't believe anything.
They just use it to gain power.
So they use ethics, they use virtue just to gain power.
They don't believe any of it, because when they're asked to be consistent, they just vanish and vaporize.
Okay, good.
Well, then I know how to use...
I don't have to respect any morality.
I don't have to respect any ethical standards, because nobody in society does.
They claim all of this stuff.
But then someone comes along and violates, flagrantly violates...
Openly stated, openly enforced moral standards in society.
It doesn't matter.
And that kind of guy looks and says, well, Bill Clinton gets asked to speak all over the world.
Bill Clinton is an elder statesman.
He's a respected public figure.
This unbelievable dirtbag...
Well, that's fantastic.
So once I use ethics to gain power, once I have power, I need not fear the moralists at all.
Because once I have power, I need not fear the moralists at all.
And they see this with the media.
And the media, of course, is the second, right?
The mainstream feminists.
Well, the first media was the second that the media just...
Oh, it's just about sex.
No, not really.
I mean, if you break a vow to your wife for monogamy, can you...
Keep a vow to, say, the future, to strangers, to foreigners, to the unborn, in terms of campaign promises, in terms of foreign policy, in terms of debt?
I mean, of course not.
If you break sacred vows to your wife, can you be trusted in anything?
He faces far more negative consequences from breaking vows to his wife than he does from breaking promises to the electorate.
And the electorate is just like, oh, okay.
Sounds good.
It's just about sex.
And then if you have a problem with it, what, you're some sort of prude?
But this is the nonsense, this is the story.
And this is what the media says, right?
And now we've got the same kind of thing happening again.
Slightly different.
But in a way, even more important, and again, I fully recognize way more, way more problems with foreign policy and even with certain elements of domestic policy than with this particular issue.
But this particular issue is one that strikes really close to home for people, right?
So this is Barack Obama's administration for over four years has known that you can't keep Your current insurance package, right, for healthcare.
They've known, even according to their own documentation, between 43% and 70% of people will lose their healthcare, you know, the privately insured.
Next year, it'll probably kick into the people who are insured through their businesses.
So they've known this for four years, and yet Obama has openly been saying, repeatedly, that I think there are about 33 or 35 instances of him saying this very openly, very clearly, that if you like your insurance, you get to keep your insurance.
Period.
No caveats, no if.
Now he's changing his story and saying, well, unless it's been changed or altered or whatever, right?
And the reason, of course, is that In order to get votes they have been selling to people, well, we'll put your requirements on everyone's insurance, so everyone has to pay, right?
So women are getting their maternity benefits and doctor's visits, pediatric visits, and so on, paid for by everyone else, because now you have to buy this, even if you're single, if you're old, if you're infertile, you still have to pay for All of these women's maternity benefits.
Now, in the past, there used to be someone who would pay or help pay for a woman's maternity benefits and the medical costs of having children.
That person was, in fact, archaically called a husband, and the husband would do that.
Now, of course, the majority of women born to children, to women under 30, are born out of wedlock.
There's no husband around, nor is there likely to be any quality husband around, because once you Have kids, men of quality, dentists, steer clear.
So it's just, you know, more of Democrats buying votes.
Single mothers are one of the most reliable voting blocs for Democrats, so they have to give them health care funded by people who aren't single mothers.
You can't ask for single mothers to fund their own health care, otherwise the cost of single motherhood is borne by single mothers rather than by society as a whole in terms of costs and crime and Disruptions in the classroom from screwed up kids and stuff like that.
So it's just vote buying and, you know, immigrants and single moms, a big voting block base for Democrats.
So you understand Democrats gain power by breaking up the family.
Because when you break up the family, women and children become more dependent on the state.
And since Democrats are more into those kinds of things, They are the ones who are providing all these benefits to these women, so bust up the family and lower the border restrictions, and this is how you gain votes in the democratic environment.
But this is a monstrous lie.
I mean, it's a monstrously immoral lie.
I mean, can you imagine if people signed on to a bunch of benefits that were promised by a private insurance company?
And then the private insurance company simply refused to pay up.
I mean, this would be all over the papers.
I mean, Obama is trying now to put it off on, well, you see those greedy insurance companies, right?
Well, greedy.
I mean, the insurance companies aren't legally allowed to lie to you about what they're going to offer, but this has become standard operating procedure for presidents.
Openly lie to you about what the law is going to result in, Well, completely knowing that it is a lie.
The great temptation, of course, is to shut your eyes from the moral horror of the system that you inhabit, that has you in its pterodactyl talons by the neck, and to look away, to turn on the TV, but don't, don't, don't, don't, come on.
Come on.
This has got to stop.
I mean, we all understand.
If you have presidents lying to people about health care, this isn't something as innocuous, so to speak, as the national debt, which is all kind of abstract and it has really slow effects on the growth of your money and so on.
This is health care.
This is what keeps you alive.
This is what is the difference between life and death.
And your life and death, not some people in Kosovo or Iraq, and this is all monstrous and evil enough, but we're not expecting people to have the sensitivity or moral integrity to feel empathy for the poor victims of foreign policy.
This is your health.
I mean, you were lied to by the leader of your country for years about whether you could keep essential care services And medical attention, whether you could keep your doctor, whether you could keep your insurance plan.
This is really important.
If he gets away with this, I mean, if there's not a genuine popular revolt, if there's not letters to congressmen, if there's not letters to the editor, if there's not marches and rallies, and, dear God, this is unacceptable!
Well...
Well...
The narrowed reptilian eyes that are always watching from the undergrowth about what you can get away with in society, well, they're going to get a hell of a lot closer.
Yeah, the jaws open, the yellow fangs come out, and as has happened to so many civilizations and cultures before, the good get eaten by the worst among us.
This is something in which it is important to take a stand.
This is not something to flush down the memory hole.
We have to push this stuff back just so we can buy enough time to raise children rationally so we can have a better society.
I'm not a fan of political action, but I am a fan of throwing up some standards that say this is not acceptable.
It's not that the system will change.
But it will drive the beast back into the undergrowth a little bit if there is a popular outcry, deep and harsh, splitting the very skies, about what has just happened.
If this goes into the memory hole, your children will follow.
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