All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 18, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:18
3131 The World Crisis: A Plea for Sanity in an Insane World

With uncertainty and fear grasping the throat of the world - Stefan Molyneux makes a plea for sanity and rationality in an insane world.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Duane Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Doesn't it feel a little bit, at the moment, like the world is falling apart?
I don't have to go through the list.
We all know it.
Those of us who read the feeds and follow the state of the world, the slow paroxysm of what feels like a dying civilization, not just of the West or of the East, but of mankind.
Of the civilized bridges that reason and evidence used to build between people are shattering under bombs, acidic rhetoric, horrifying violence, fear retaliation, huddling, hiding, cocooning, and being afraid to speak our thoughts and our fears to everyone around us, to anyone around us, perhaps.
When I was a little kid, I grew up in a pretty poor, pretty rough section of town, and people would scream at each other and throw things and slam doors and break plates from time to time.
None of it made any sense to me.
People would be getting divorced and they'd be screaming accusations and approbations at each other and just horrifying, scalding words like people would spit acidic geisters of hatred at each other and melt.
You could see people melt and harden and turn inside out and become like...
Giant ant people, all exoskeleton with soft emptiness inside.
Everyone became this empty hide of bright armor based upon the wild, angry, bitter words that raged around them like locusts.
I remember as a kid, and maybe you do too when you were a little kid, when the world was bright and the doorways were like the archways of the gods and everyone strode around seemingly in slow motion.
And you could see the dust in the air.
When I was a kid, it didn't make any sense to me.
Why all the fighting?
Why all the aggression?
Why the rage?
Why the rage?
Why are people blowing each other up?
Why do we have drone operators?
Needing to down fistfuls of sleeping pills just to bury their conscience for seven straight hours?
Why do we have these monsters in charge of us all?
Why are children so herded and confined and boxed and bored in these horrifying prisons we laughingly call schools?
Why are people so desperate to flee From the empty, echoless conformity of their own identity, of their own company.
Why have we become spiritually like porcupines where all the spikes point inward and we constantly have to move and dance and sing and jump and play video games and grab our tablets and we can't even take a crap without crushing candies because we are uncomfortable.
With the crazy electrical jostling space, the war within, the conflict within.
And when I was a kid, I never understood why, why, why are these people yelling at each other?
What the hell is going on in the world?
You know, when I was a kid in boarding school, you get caned.
You would get caned for misbehavior.
And when I got hit in boarding school, Why?
Who's this person hating?
What the hell is going on?
Now the answer is a lot simpler than you think.
It's a lot simpler than you think.
We, you and I, the people horizontally, we serfs and slaves of the rulers, we are kind of designed to get along.
You know, I walk into a convenience store and there's a guy with a turban back there.
How you doing?
You know, I'll have some gum.
We exchange pleasantries.
It's fine.
We horizontally, we're designed to get along.
But what comes between us?
What is the great shadow that arms and separates us?
Our naturally congruent human hearts.
What?
What is it that comes between us?
You see kids playing happily, pleasantly, regardless of race, gender.
When I was six, I went to South Africa, played with the black kids around.
We had a blast.
Well, they had a blast.
I had, as you can imagine, copious amount of cover my inflamed Irish hide sunscreen, but...
It was fun.
What came between us?
What always seems to come between us?
Why does something have to come between us?
Why do human beings need to be born like trees with the roots flowing into the ground and the arms reaching up into the air and we are cut and we are sawn and we are chopped, we are divided from each other and sat against each other?
Why?
Well, the real answer, of course, is that we are divided and set against each other for the same reason that animals are put in cages in a zoo, because it's profitable.
It makes money.
Creating an enemy, creating hatred, creating opposition, that makes money.
It's blood money.
It's blood money, and it's particularly extracted from the crushed independence and integrity and empiricism of children.
But when we are molded into ideological robots, then we will pay for the conformity that hides the horror of what we have become from ourselves.
If you are the only crazy person, you feel your insanity, and it is unbearable.
But if you can get in a frog march with all the other crazy people, look, we have a culture, we have a religion, we have a nation, we have a race.
It's a race off a cliff and we're a bunch of lemmings, but if you can crush the curiosity of children and provide them brain-burning, scalding, horrifying answers to the questions of morality and identity, We can say, ah, you see, you're a Christian child, you're a Muslim child, you're a Zoroastrian child, and you are good and everyone else is not so good or bad.
Then you take the natural conformity of we horizontally hugging slaves and turn it into fists and elbows and bombs and bullets.
You gotta turn people crazy when they're young so that they don't see that the world is an asylum.
You understand?
The world is an asylum.
We don't live on a planet.
We live in a ward.
We live in a rubber room.
We don't put on t-shirts, we put on straitjackets, or they're put on us when we're little.
And the natural pleasure of our own thoughts and our own identity and our own curiosity comes BAM!
up against the hysterical prejudices and superstitions of everyone around us.
And to the crazed adults of the world, the natural and curious empiricism of children, the endless why, why, why, why, why, why, why, to crazy adults, the natural curiosity, rationality and empiricism the natural curiosity, rationality and empiricism of children is something that must be destroyed.
you You have to break the children so you don't, as an adult, feel how broken you are.
Hurt people, as the saying goes.
Hurt people hurt people.
And what comes between our natural compatibility is the artificial tribalism of the scattered madnesses around the world we call countries, we call religions, we call culture, we call nationalism.
My team good, your team bad.
Why the hell are there teams to begin with?
There's an old saying in the Bible that you must build your house on rock, not on sand.
Why is the world falling apart?
Because we have built everything.
Everything.
Everything has been built on sand.
Everything has been built on sand.
On a volcano.
Let me mix up my metaphors just a little.
So when you were a kid, and your world was bright, and the doorways loomed large, the world made sense, right?
Made sense.
Wasn't that confusing?
Dragons didn't poke their head in through the windows.
Unicorns didn't slowly thunder down the hallways.
Bitter words, yet not fire, would spout from people's mouths.
But the world was not mad.
And when you were a baby and you explored the world, the stability, the object constancy, the stability and the predictability of the aggregation of atoms that hit our senses was glorious.
If we could make the people in the world one-tenth as stable as a glass of water on a train, we would be infinitely better off as a species.
The glorious stability of the world that we explored as children.
I don't know.
Maybe I was left alone a lot as a kid and explored more the world than reacted to the shiny, sparkly, crazy nonsense of people.
But the stability of the senses, the stability of the world...
It's glorious.
And that really is the foundation of our compatibility.
We all live in the same world.
We're all subject to the same gravity.
We all sweat under the same sun.
We all shiver under the same cold.
We have a basic biocompatibility with each other.
And it is only when adults and educators, for want of a better word, see fit To slide this jagged, broken, breaking, bleeding, stained glass window guillotine of crazy language between us.
And the walls come down.
And we see each other through a glass darkly as shadows and threats and horrible ogres and monsters.
Ninety percent of that.
Is the twisting vehemence of the language we are surrounded by and drowned in and encased in like a straitjacket.
And 10% of it is our own reflection back the gargoyles we have become.
As Nietzsche said, when you look deep into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
And do not spend so much of your life fighting monsters that you become a monster yourself.
And we are created as hostile tribes and they are bad and we are good.
Now, There are some objective values and you can look at different cultures and see different things of value that are better and worse.
I'm not a complete relative like Kumbaya, we're all the same.
But to what degree could we be all the same without the spiky vehemence of throat-slashing language?
Emptying out the arteries of our initial empiricism as children.
How much could we be alike?
How much could we overlap?
How much could we meet in reality if we weren't bludgeoned by the empty sacks of fantasy until we became scarecrows to the birds of her early experiences?
Because the world is cracking and tipping and falling over because we have built our identities, we have built our societies, we have built our cultures, and we have planted our gods on the endless manipulations of language rather than the concrete empiricism of sensual, tangible reality.
We can only meet in reality.
We can never meet in fantasy.
Because fantasy is so manipulatable.
Fantasy is so subject to alteration.
No amount of words can turn a tree into a tiger.
But with enough...
Horrifying, abusive, scolding, dismissive, divisive, undermining language.
I can turn a friend into a foe, and that is what is done to us.
And the first foe that is made is ourselves.
It is ourselves that are turned against us to begin with.
When I was a boy, I said...
I can't see God anywhere.
And I was taken on a trip to the Houses of Parliament in London, in England.
And they said, what do you think of your government?
And I said, all I see are buildings.
There was no God anywhere I looked.
Oh, he's in your heart.
Where in my heart?
Gonna show up on an x-ray?
I can't see him.
I can't feel him.
What do you think of these old buildings that rule over you?
I just see bricks and mortar.
And if you want me to see metaphors, mostly blood.
We kill each other.
You understand.
For ghosts.
And ghosts rarely haunt the houses of the living.
Ghosts inhabit the empty chambers of the self-abdicated and the brutalized and the exiled from identity.
Soulless people that we have so often become in the world.
When they can drive out your simple empiricism they can replace you with their words which can turn no tree into a tiger but can turn a friend into an enemy like that.
We have tried for many thousands of years This is what I want to say to the fantasists, to the sorcerers, to the mad magicians of black magic known as the propagandists, as the liars, as the indoctrinators.
Actually forget that.
Scratch that completely.
You can't talk to those people because they're insane.
And I learned pretty early on there's no point arguing with a crazy person because he'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience as the saying goes.
Forget them.
Let's just talk you and I. Send everyone else out of the room.
Put your headphones on.
Line back.
Relax.
Physically relax.
It's you and I. Just you and I talk.
And this is what I really, really want to say.
Listen, we've tried it their way for thousands of years.
You understand?
We have tried it.
We've tried the black magic of fantasy and language and gods and countries and demons and heavens and hells and hysteria and punishments and scolding language and burning and hellfire and all of it.
We have tried that for thousands of years.
And a few disgraceful mad bastards have gotten very rich and very powerful.
As a result, my God, we can't even have meaning in money.
We can't even have tangibility in money.
We print exotic toilet paper and call it gold and art and truth and real.
And all it is is a paper mortgage and noose around the necks of the unborn.
We create debt and we call it wealth.
We create thousands of regulations, a complex web of strangling laws that no one can possibly follow when we call it wealth.
We create vilely, massively punishing institutions that throw you in jail for nonconformity, for having the wrong piece of vegetation in your pocket, or for not obeying any of the thousand black widow spiderweb laws that constantly crawl down the throat of humanity.
You can go to jail for things you don't even know are wrong.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but there's no law that could be understood in any society in the world.
So we create hysterical punishments of jail and hell.
And we call it virtue.
That is madness.
Virtue is a seduction.
It is not a rape.
Virtue is a choice.
It is not a conformity based on rank base animal shitting yourself terror.
Philosophy, virtue, is a conversation.
It is not a clop.
Slow motion exploding teeth out the cheeks of humanity from here to eternity.
We've tried it their way.
We have tried it their way for thousands and thousands of years, and what do we have?
What do we have?
People dancing and singing and getting shot.
People trying to live with depleted uranium shells, dying of cancers at an alarming rate in the Middle East.
We have fences, we have borders, we have bombs, we have drones, we have aircraft carriers.
We have weapons of mass destruction of every shape and hue.
We have giant bottles of infinite murder scattered all the way through the planet.
We have rifles and weaponry swimming almost through the air Like thin swordfish regularly stabbing into the throats of humanity around the world.
We have child rape.
We have beatings.
We have human trafficking.
We have sexual slavery.
We have a justice system that is the exact opposite of both justice and anything that could be systematized.
We have children bored and herded into prisons called schools with metal detectors.
So that people don't get stabbed quite as much.
We have people unable to enjoy a sporting event for fear that some piece of shrapnel is going to blow their eyeball out through the back of their head.
We've tried it their way.
We have tried nationalism.
We have tried superstition.
We've tried religiosity.
We have tried culture.
And I don't mean Rembrandt.
I mean all the lies of you're better.
Because of dirt proximity called nationalism.
We've tried all of that.
And for the thousands of years, we philosophers have been regularly pounding the distant drum of the jungle saying, wrong way people, wrong way people, wrong way people, wrong way people, wrong way people, come on back, come on back, come over here.
Over here we reason.
Over here we converse.
Over here we listen.
Over here we are strong in the face of injustice.
Over here we are deep in the power of wisdom.
Over here we are firm in the saddle of righteousness.
Over here, it is not my opinion or your opinion that wins the day, but reason and evidence that rule.
You will have to leave a lot of your luggage behind, but don't worry, most of that luggage has bombs in it anyway.
You will have to leave a lot of your luggage behind to join us out here on the edge of humanity where the future is if there is to be a future.
We have tried it.
The ways of the madmen.
For tens of thousands of years we have tried it with the warlords.
We have tried it with the high priests.
We have tried it with the politicians.
We have tried it with the central banksters.
We have tried it with foreign aid.
We have tried it with national debt.
We have tried it with the mob rule pillaging of the newborns known as democracy.
We have tried it with the lawyers.
We have tried it and tried it and tried it and it gets.
All the time.
All the time.
It gets worse.
What is it going to take?
What is it going to take for the world to start listening to the rational people who still shoot up the flares of truth, light, liberty, philosophy, empiricism, reason, and virtue into the sky?
You know, you bring reason to a conversation.
It's like you whip out a flashlight among primitive savages.
Tie him to a tree.
Bring on the fire ants.
The man has evil magic.
No, it's good magic.
It only seems like magic because so many people are crazy.
Reason and evidence.
Not superstition.
Not ancient texts, for heaven's sakes.
If you want to run your life with a text at a thousand years old, try it first with a medical text, see how that works for you, and then you can see what it's doing to your brain.
Exactly as the thousand-year-old medical text does to your body, these leeches should cure everything.
We've tried it their way.
How about stepping into reason and evidence and philosophy?
How about abandoning the superstitions that so destroyed the lives of everyone who has come before and just about everyone around the world?
How about discarding that?
As we shoot to the stratosphere of a new world, all of this stuff, maybe it was a fuel that got us here, but we need to discard it.
Like the stage of a rocket that is empty and dragging us back.
It must be jettisoned.
We have no choice in the matter anymore if we wish to have a future that is not ever-escalating bloodshed, because the rationality among scientists, among mathematicians, engineers, and the vestiges of the free market have produced such Thor-hammer, soul-destroying, continent-wrecking weapons that unless we damn well learn to reason...
We are like a baby playing with a flamethrower.
We have primitive lizard brains of fear, reaction, superstition and fantasy and hatred in charge of weapons.
Well, let's just say that kind of global warming It will not be so gradual, and it is coming.
Trust me, it is coming.
You look at the past, you look at terrorism over the last decade even.
This year, 2015, terrorism deaths are up 80% over last year.
It is coming.
And the only thing that will stop this torture and death of the last vestiges of civilization in the world is a return to reason, or, in fact, an advance to reason for the very first time.
If you can't prove it, it's false.
If you can't show it, it's false.
If you can't establish it, independent of your perspectives and opinions and appeals to thousand-year-old texts written by crazy people, if you can't prove it, if you can't show it, if it's not valid, if it's not rational, if it's not empirical, it's false!
It is false.
That is the only standard that we need.
We need to appeal back to the early childhood empiricism before the swords of fantasy put out our original eyeballs.
They're in there somewhere.
Just got to reach in and dig them out.
It can be painful, but it can be done.
And it is time.
We have let the madman lead us to the very edge of the abyss, my friends.
If we have any respect for the future, for the scant glories of the past that gave us the vestigial freedoms of the present, if we have any love for our children, if we don't want the world to do to them what was done under us, we have to stop this fantasies.
We have to stop them.
We are at a fork in the road.
We speak the truth.
We learn reason.
We forgo fantasy and superstition.
Or we die.
▲
Export Selection