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June 24, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:15
3006 My Dylann Roof Dream | How to Stop Mass Shootings

In the aftermath of the Charleston Church Shooting by Dylann Roof - something just didn't feel right. Then last night, I had the strangest dream which helped put things into perspective.

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So I did a show about Dylann Ruth, the Charleston shooter, this weekend.
And I felt something was wrong with it.
It was incomplete.
It was empty of something.
I couldn't figure out what.
And the facts were all there, and I thought the conclusions were reasonable, and the arguments were strong.
But I just felt dissatisfied.
So...
This morning, in the wee hours, you know, the sort of 3 a.m.
hours, I woke up and I had this dream.
My dreams normally are pretty positive.
Like, the night before, I'd had a dream about dancing on collapsing geometrical structures to the opening piano bars of Seven Seas of Rye.
But this was a dark dream.
A nightmare.
Really.
And it opened me up to the tragedy of evil, in a way that I hope will make some sense to you.
So, in the dream, I was in a huge stadium with unbelievably bright Klieg lights, you know, the ones that look like it's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, everything's just spiraling down to beam you up to another dimension, and And there were tens of thousands of people in the stands.
Some sitting, some cheering, some eating, some making out.
All the usual variety you see in an aggregation of people.
And there was entertainment in the center of the stadium, of course.
There were some singers.
There was, I think, a football game.
And there was car racing and...
Beyond the stadium, partly because of the lights, but beyond the stadium was blackness.
And it felt like the stadium was the world.
Like beyond the stadium wasn't just blackness because the lights were shining at you, but blackness like nothingness.
And when something positive occurred, when there was a touchdown or a car went super fast around the track, a man with a rifle would take aim and shoot someone in the audience.
And there was this creeping horror in the dream.
Because...
I couldn't say...
The roar of the crowd was too loud.
I wanted to yell, but...
And the goal of the sniper was a kill shot.
He wanted to kill someone, like, explode their head into red mist.
A kill shot was...
And this was all...
It was on the Jumbotron.
It wasn't hidden.
It wasn't like a criminal action.
It was part of the entertainment.
It would take aim against someone in the audience.
And...
And people would even cheer that.
Great shot, man!
And I saw this happen over and over, and I grew to...
I felt like I couldn't act, I couldn't do anything, and I felt like this horror.
I couldn't understand why people were still in the stadium.
Like, wouldn't somebody shooting, wouldn't you get out as quickly as humanly possible?
But they didn't.
They just stayed there.
And when the people were shot, and every shot was a kill shot, but when the people were shot in the stadium stands, I don't know if you've ever seen this like in cartoons, old cartoons, like the Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Somebody would be flattened and then they'd go down the stairs like a carpet, like a moving carpet.
You could see the stair outline in their backs like they had no bones.
They were just a bag of nothingness, like a slinky or something, just going down the stairs.
And people would kind of flow down the stairs like that, like no spine, no bones, no being.
And then they just get there was this growing pile of people.
And I grew to dread success in the games and in the driving.
Because when there was success, you would get the shot, the kill shot.
And I could not understand why I had this dream.
I thought about it, and I thought about it in the morning.
And then I remembered that in the presentation I had done on Dylann Roof, on the shooter, he had a black friend whose name was Scriven.
And Scriven said that he never spoke with Dylann Roof about race.
Instead, they chatted about fishing and NASCAR and guns.
And then I realized what the dream was about.
These boys, young men, were in this trailer park and they were...
I think Scriven couldn't keep Dylann Roof's gun, his girlfriend informed him, because Scriven had a record and something like that.
They were a whole lot of go-and-nowhere kind of young men.
In a trailer park, no jobs, lots of booze, lots of drugs, lots of...
chilling, hanging out, as they said.
Now...
Dylann Roof's friends, of course, I'm sure, could see or sense.
We're all designed as animals to sense predators.
And I'm sure that they could all see this Mental disintegration of their friend, that this is a man being sucked into obsessive thoughts of murder, of violence, of race wars, into this apocalyptic furnace of human evil, that this young man was being dragged like a chain around his ankle, pulling him into a furnace, being dragged into it.
And Dylan was talking to them and was telling them, I'm going to kill.
I want to kill people.
I'm going to kill people.
I'm going to murder people.
They've only got six months, five months, four months, seven days.
Bang!
So these friends, and I'm telling you this is not, what I'm saying is not about his friends in particular, they're just the example that gave me the dream, that gives me this conversation, which hopefully helps the world.
The mind of their friend was breaking up like a meteor, hitting the atmosphere at an ungodly slant.
Just falling apart.
Disintegrating.
He was being preyed upon by his inner demons.
And through what he read and through the extremists that he imbibed, the virus of hatred passed and amplified into his mind, into his soul.
And it replaced his heart, which is the seed of empathy, into a bag of pumping blood.
Whose only job was to get nutrients to his trigger finger.
His friends see Dylan's mind breaking up, breaking apart, and they talk about fishing and NASCAR and guns.
What kind of tires did this driver use?
What kind of lure do you use when you're fly fishing for this kind of fish?
How would you hunt a bear?
Would you ever hunt a bear with a crossbow or a bow and arrow?
This was their conversation.
Now, what's incredible about this is that if you remember Elliot Rodger, the shooter in California, in his La Vista, Elliot Rodger started off by killing his roommates.
Elliot Rogers started off his mass murdering spree by killing his roommates.
So the fact that this guy was, at least to another one of his white friends, spouting this racial hatred and trying to start a race war and so on, the fact that he was talking openly about committing mass murder and that one of the more recent mass murders started off by killing his roommates, these guys...
We're willing to risk death rather than death.
Rather than say, you're breaking up, man.
Mentally, emotionally, you are, you know, we've got to get you off these drugs.
We've got to get you off this booth.
We've got to get you out into the sunlight.
We've got to get you maybe to rehab.
We've got to get you to hospital.
You've got to talk to someone.
Talk to me.
Talk to anyone.
But we've got to talk.
Something is going wrong with you.
Something is being disassembled in you.
Something original, something healthy is being disassembled within you.
And you are being reassembled into a murderous machine.
Your humanity is dissolving and it is reforming as a death machine.
We need to talk.
What the hell is going on with you?
Rather than have any kind of conversation which acknowledged Dylan's growing hysterical, ever-voiced agony, his depression, his murderous rage, rather than have any conversation about anything open, vulnerable, immediate, true, connected, they were willing to be shot.
They were willing to risk being murdered before he went off on his crime spree, as has happened to other mass murderers.
Adam Lanza shot his mother before he...
They shoot sometimes, and often, they shoot people close to them, and then they go off and do their mass murdering.
It took me forever to figure this out, but I really want to get this across.
They chose death over depth.
They chose death over depth.
If not their own deaths, at least the deaths of other people.
This is not uncommon.
This is not uncommon.
One of my favorite writers, C.M. Forster, wrote at the end of Howard's End, Only Connect.
Only.
Connect, connect, connect.
Be honest, be open, be vulnerable.
I've got a whole free book, Real-Time Relationships, freedomainradio.com slash free, about being honest in the moment with the people in your life.
Listening and being honest and open with the people in your life.
We are, to some degree, in this stadium of entertainment and slaughter.
Of distractions and murder.
And these guys could only talk about the shallowest, non-essential, irrelevant trivia, rather than simply note that this man's mind was slowly swiveling from light to ultimate darkness.
They could not talk, they could not ask, they could not Feel?
They could not empathize.
They could not be curious.
What the hell is wrong with us as a culture, goddammit, as a species that we cannot openly ask people how they're doing and care about the answer?
How many lives could be saved?
I mean, it's not just his friends.
It's all of us.
There's a picture that haunts me.
And it's a Muslim man lying in the grave of his little girl.
She's in a wooden box and he's lying in her grave and he won't let her go.
And she has died.
I believe it was an Iraqi man.
The child died in another friendly fire or rather civilian casualty incident.
Collateral damage.
And if we had thought of...
The deaths that were going to occur.
Would we have?
Would America have gone to war in 2003?
Would it have caused the deaths of between 500,000 or a million Iraqis?
Would it have displaced millions more?
If we had the empathy to ask each other how we're doing and to put ourselves into other people's shoes, If we had practiced that empathy, if we practiced that empathy, what would the world look like?
The parents who hit their children.
Feeling somebody five times your size towering over you with a fist as big as an oar.
If we could see ourselves as our children see us.
If we could all remember how bored and frustrated and alienated and depressed we were in government schools.
If we could sympathize or empathize with the fact that our children are being born into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and millions of dollars of unfunded liabilities because we cannot curb our greed for conformity and stuff.
If we could talk and empathize, listen and speak and be curious and open, that does not mean unjudgmental.
We are not open like a whore is open.
We are open like a lover of wisdom is open.
If we could really empathize and understand and talk and listen, how many deaths outside of the horrible nine that occurred, In Charleston, how many deaths could be prevented?
If we cared about children and toddlers, how many of them would grow up to be drug users and criminals?
If we loved them?
If we cared about them?
And it doesn't have to be you.
It can be anyone who puts any caring into the universe, into the world.
If we were not so distracted by shallow entertainments and nothing topics and weather and sports and politics and all of the nonsense that passes, For connection in this world where we think and feel from the depths of our beings communicate and listen to each other.
How many of the world's evils could be dissolved and destroyed?
Not through prisons or bombs or guns.
Bullets.
How many of the world's evils could be destroyed by gentleness, by...
Curiosity, humanity, empathy, asking and listening, being honest with people.
I've had someone write to me who said that he felt that he was on the same trajectory as Dylan Roof, except that he found philosophy.
And as a result...
He knows what honesty is, how to be honest, why be honest, what's the value, what's the good.
The good is honesty, curiosity and empathy are unbelievably healing forces.
They bring clarity.
Empathy turns the lights on around you and you find yourself sometimes in a room of people who care about you and sometimes in a stadium of people who don't.
People stayed in that stadium in my dream, risking being shot randomly.
Not on the failures of the entertainment, but on the successes of the entertainment.
On the capacity of the entertainment to distract and fill them with the gassy, burpy farts of nationalism and team worship.
And cheering the rich from the trench of poverty.
They stayed there because there was nowhere to go.
There was nowhere outside of entertainment and the imaginary connection of the crowd.
There was nowhere to go.
I said, well, why didn't they flee the stadium?
I was still there.
But why didn't they flee the stadium?
They didn't flee the stadium because there was nothing outside that world.
What are we so afraid of?
Why are we so terrified to have conversations of depth and meaning?
What is goodness?
What is truth?
What is courage?
Who am I? Who are you?
What shaped us?
Would we be different if time and circumstance had tunneled through the world and ejected us on the other side?
What is me?
What is history?
What is culture?
What is religion?
What is nationalism?
What is language?
What is race?
What is gender?
Who am I? Outside of biology, inertia, propaganda, history.
Who am I? Who are you?
To ask these questions is to honestly confront a gap.
A gap between connections.
And the more that we avoid connecting with each other, the more we stay in the stadium stands and risk death.
Because everybody was cheering these empty entertainments and everyone was terrified to leave to a world they could not imagine.
They were willing to risk death, to risk being shot, to stay in the tribe, in the tribe of the dying.
And all tribes are dying because they value conformity over individuality.
They value following as opposed to thinking.
Somebody wrote today, Well, I'm not a fan of staffs, but...
I don't want fans.
The world doesn't need fans of anyone.
The world needs independent thinkers who communicate honestly and openly with those around them.
And people call me.
I do these call-in shows Wednesday nights and Saturday nights, and people call me.
We spend six, seven, eight hours a week talking about important things.
Where did you come from?
What influenced you?
Why do you think this?
Why do you feel this?
What does it serve in you?
Are you serving yourself?
Are you serving virtue?
Are you serving truth?
Or are you serving evil?
These are all questions we must confront within ourselves.
How are we going to guide ourselves across the endless Sargasso Sea between now and the future?
How the fuck are we going to navigate it?
Who knows?
When I was a teenager, I remember with some friends of mine and I, we had debates about abortion once, and we had debates about the death penalty, and it just devolved into this shrieky kind of...
Empty posturing stuff.
And nobody got anywhere.
And this is why without principles, it's really, really hard to connect with people.
How the hell are you going to connect?
Without principles of language, you can't listen and speak.
Without organized thoughts, without some principle by which disagreements can be resolved, everything is a religion and there's no greater gap between two thought systems than religions.
Because within, it is truth.
And outside, it must be ignored in order to avoid conflict.
Bottomless conflict.
And where we are mystical and irrational, in our essence, we are shamed, we are shameful.
We are irrational because we are broken by culture.
We are broken by lies.
We live trapped in a world of lies.
And because...
Our minds are broken and shredded by propaganda of the statist kind and of the superstitious kind and of the blood is thicker than water kind, which is accidental biological proximity over connection and adherence to universal values and virtues, philosophy to wisdom to truth to virtue.
Because we are broken on the wheel of history.
We cannot achieve depth because what is down there for us is pain, is loss, is sorrow, is anger at how we have been treated so often.
And because we must pretend we are not broken, we cannot be who we are with other people.
I was broken young.
My parents divorced when I was a couple of months old.
I saw my mother's mind disintegrate.
She ended up being institutionalized.
I was sent off to boarding school at the age of six.
I was caned when I did wrong.
I was beaten.
I was terrified.
But we have to hide that and we have to be tough and strong and together.
But we are holding our identities like broken wine glasses in our hand.
We can make a fist only to the degree that we are willing to bleed and hurt.
I fall into this trap as well.
Seeming tougher than I am.
But I think we are broken and the degree to which we hide our brokenness is the degree to which it reproduces.
And because we do not admit how much we are broken, we are drawn to others who are broken.
Think of these young men around Dylann Roof, how broken they were, what horrible histories they had, how little future they had, how much pain did they have to be in to self-medicate to that degree?
What inner hell required the endless cooling rain of morphine and LSD and marijuana and alcohol?
and obsession and paranoia.
Creativity is like a stone egg that is cracked where the light comes out, but only if we know that it's cracked.
it.
And we are people with broken legs doing gymnastics and everyone pretends that there's not bones sticking out and blood on the mat, the balance beam.
We have to hide from each other because we think we're the only ones broken.
We think we're the only ones whose original pure selves were ground and smashed.
Under the jackbooted heel of culture lies superstition, patriotism, war lust, war hunger, and a denial of aggression against children that is the foundation of culture.
Culture is everything that is not true.
If it's true, It's called math or science or facts.
Culture is the Stockholm Syndrome we have with the historical lies that are convenient to the rulers.
We love the lies because we don't think we can be loved if we don't pretend at least to love the lies.
I was proud of being British.
I was proud of the Battle of Britain.
And we can't connect with each other unless we are honest about our experiences.
And I think that you have been harmed by lies.
I think I have been harmed by lies.
I was lied to about The government.
I was lied to about deities.
I was lied to about history.
I was lied to about culture and race and diversity.
I was lied to about men and women.
I was lied to about intelligence.
I was lied to about genetics.
I was lied to about the virtue and glory of war.
I was lied to about the magical properties that uniforms have to turn murderers into heroes.
I was lied about the fact that a guy in an uncomfortable hat can grant you absolution from an imaginary curse called sin, and also that another guy in an uncomfortable hat can give you the magical power to receive not a prison sentence for killing on order, but a pension, a medal, and a ticket tape parade.
The distance we are driven out from truth and reason and virtue.
We are driven away from these things with the whips and scourges of ostracisms and beatings and being pushed into the historical coffins of original sin.
You take a wonderful, glorious baby who grows up ready to embrace and love the world.
When you push him into history, and you push him into uniforms, and you push him into the embrace of the dead, known as evil for breathing.
And we are so far.
From truth, from reason, from where we were born into, from what we were born into.
There's a study...
80% of babies, 3 months old, 80% of 3 month old babies, 80% plus of 3 month old babies choose a good character in a story and reject the bad character.
At 3 months old, we know what is good, what is virtuous, what is helpful, what is kind, what is empathetic.
At 3 months old, we know this.
How much work does it take to scour in and excavate the natural virtues of our biology, of our instincts, of what we are born with?
We are not born a bank's blank slate.
We are born lovers of virtue and wisdom and truth and goodness.
Three months old, we have a powerful moral sense, and more than 80% of babies three months old, six months old, choose virtue over evil.
We are allergic to immorality.
In the Second World War, the vast majority of soldiers never shot at anyone.
That's why they had to change the training to brutalize people for Vietnam.
We are allergic to evil.
We are like plants grow towards the sunlight.
We grow towards virtue.
We grow towards truth.
How much damage has to be done to us in order to turn us From these natural specimens of healthy virtues into cowed, frightened, broken, drug-addicted, media-addicted, tablet-addicted, video game-addicted, pornography-addicted, empty shells of avoidance.
Somebody's saying something real.
I feel anxious.
Someone's saying something real.
I must distract them.
Someone's saying something real.
I must run away.
Someone's saying something real.
I must attack them.
Because if somebody says something real, those words will bounce around inside my empty heart like a bat in a cave it cannot escape.
And they will die there if something real emerges in the human landscape.
I do not know if I will be alive enough to join it.
This is everything that we're hiding.
All the pain, all the suffering, all the brokenness, all the lies, all the humiliation, all the subjugation that was inflicted on us by our society, which is as far from our natural state as a stuffed tiger is to a natural animal.
We are domesticated.
We are curbed.
We are preserved.
We are pickled.
We are fried.
We are broken and remade.
in the image of that which is convenient to everyone who tells us what to do but that.
And we would rather risk death in the stadium of empty entertainment than look beyond its walls.
you Where we were born.
We were born in the stadium.
Rather than walking out the stadium, one by one, enough will come.
And we have a tribe called reality.
We have a tribe called truth.
We have a tribe called intimacy, which is no longer a tribe.
It is no longer bound by lies.
It is no longer in the mutual subjugation to historical error that we flourish.
But it is in truth and connection.
When was the last time that you said what was on your mind without censorship to someone you cared about?
When was the last time you pick up the phone, you call someone, you talk to someone, you sit down face-to-face with someone and say, I need a couple of hours, I need to unpack what I've been thinking of, I need to get out of this little egg box of a prison called my own mind?
When was the last time you did that?
Do you think you will have forever to do that?
Do you think that you will live for eternity?
Do you think it's somehow automatically going to happen to you?
After you're dead, you're going to wind together with everyone you cared about, like two chimney smokes blowing together in a high breeze.
You will not.
You will die.
You will go into the ground.
Worms will eat out your eyeballs.
And you will never come back.
And everyone who died before you, who you did not have these conversations with, who you did not unpack your heart to, who you did not listen and speak with honestly and openly, that connection will never occur.
We need to panic about our distance.
We need to freak out and panic about how far apart we are from each other and how these ghosts, these lies, these imaginary monsters of social attack keep us from speaking the truth to each other.
War is murder.
Taxation is theft.
Government is sociopathy.
Religion is superstition.
We are mammals stuffed with meaning.
But we have no meaning without each other.
Language was developed to speak and to listen.
So please, please, for the sake of the future, for the sake of the world, that my daughter and your children have to grow up in.
Please, please, please.
I'm finishing up here.
When I'm done, don't let this moment, don't let this opportunity, don't let my dream die in my head or live only in my life.
Talk to someone you care about.
Tell them what you've been thinking.
Tell them everything you've been avoiding.
Tell them everything that hurt you.
Tell them everything that healed you.
Tell them everything that's on your mind.
Iris Murdoch wrote, I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy.
The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself, which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.
The company which I need is the company which a pub or cafe will provide.
I have never wanted a communion of souls.
It is already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
Tell the truth to yourself.
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