Sept. 23, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| So today is September the 23rd, 2016. | |
| I myself was born in a little hospital in Athlone, Ireland. | |
| 6 p.m. | |
| on September the 24th, 1966. | |
| So that means that tomorrow be my 50th birthday. | |
| And that means I'm entering into my 6th decade and out of my 5th. | |
| My life has not been broken up into these decades so far. | |
| I didn't really notice my 30s in terms of passing 30 or passing 40 didn't really matter much to me. | |
| Maybe it's because I've had some health issues or maybe it's because... | |
| When you turn 50, you're much more likely to have the majority of your life in the rear view rather than ahead of you. | |
| There is kind of a tipping point of reflection. | |
| And it's hard to avoid thinking about your life in the big picture. | |
| You know, we all... | |
| I feel like my days sometimes, like I get shot out of a cannon. | |
| I burst through my day doing enjoyable, interesting, and exciting things. | |
| And then I just basically land in my bed and... | |
| And so there are times of course when the view has to rise up. | |
| You have to look at a bigger picture of your life, where you are, what you've done and where you're going. | |
| Illness does that and one of the reasons why I probably didn't notice too much about time passing in the past was I had this kind of Bulletproof health that never gave me a moment's trouble. | |
| I never broke a bone. | |
| I never spent a night in a hospital. | |
| And then a couple of years ago I got cancer and I have a bit of an ear problem now. | |
| So I think it's just kind of wear and tear perhaps or some bad luck. | |
| But there is more thoughts about mortality than when I was this bulletproof health-based terminator that was sort of moving forward without any hiccups as far as that went. | |
| So It is an interesting time to reflect. | |
| First of all, I am aware that I am an enormously lucky person. | |
| And some of it is luck. | |
| And some of it, of course, some of the luck has been the result of Choices that I've made, I gave up a very stable and peaceful and lucrative career as a software executive and software entrepreneur about 10 years ago or 8 years ago and decided to do philosophy full-time on the web. | |
| I have very good abilities that way. | |
| I have very good reasoning abilities. | |
| I have very good communication abilities. | |
| So some of it I was obviously born with, which I think to that degree means that it can be reasonably used in the service of humanity in the future. | |
| Some of it is my choices, my willpower, the ethics that inform what I do. | |
| And it is interesting to me, I was an objectivist for many years and still consider myself metaphysically and epistemologically mostly objectivist, but I have kind of noticed, like I was looking up some, Mike Sonovich posted how some publishers were losing money. | |
| Now for many years I was working on novels and plays and short stories and poetry and so on, and I found very little receptivity in the publishing world for reasons that I kind of understand now in hindsight but didn't really at the time. | |
| It sort of struck me that what I do in this philosophy show is really in the service of humanity and in the service of the future and in the service of bringing clarity to the confusing sort of sense-based mess that is fired at us sort of every day, trying to organize it into principles that help people make sense of it all and hopefully act for the better to better the world. | |
| There was something that in my sort of art career, I went to the National Theatre School and studied writing at various places and there was something about that that was for me and there's something about this philosophy show that is for the world and what I find fascinating It's that all the things that were more for me than for the world didn't work out. | |
| But now that I'm doing something more for the world than for me, and don't get me wrong, I really enjoy what I'm doing, but it is a different kind of animal, and it's one that's really, really flourishing. | |
| You know, I couldn't sell any books really to publishers to save my life, and now through what I'm doing in this conversation, I have 150,000 books downloaded and hopefully read or viewed every single month, every single month. | |
| Best seller is like 5,000. | |
| This is 150,000 a month. | |
| We're doing close to 15 million views and downloads every month. | |
| And that is an incredible opportunity. | |
| I am... | |
| I'm enormously and humbly grateful to everyone's interest and fascination and sharing of what it is that I do in this show. | |
| It is a humbling and beautiful experience to see how many people out there are hungry for reason, for evidence, for clarity, for consistency. | |
| And when you, I guess when I turn 50 tomorrow, and if you would like to send a little prezzy my way, I certainly would not object to that. | |
| We use it for the show, and I think it'll help us grow at freedomainradio.com slash donate. | |
| But when I turn 50 tomorrow, looking back at the sort of mark that I've made on the world is... | |
| A beautiful thing. | |
| It's beautiful to see how many people are out there. | |
| I grew up in a very irrational environment and I had one or two friends who were more rational, but for the most part it was just crazy town everywhere I looked. | |
| 360 madness. | |
| And seeing just how many like-minded people or just really minded people there are out there has been a beautiful experience over the past decade. | |
| Because when you turn 50, you realize, of course, that your life is somewhat statistically more behind you than ahead of you. | |
| And it really helps me to focus on the need to get your sounds out before you die. | |
| Get the treasure that is in you up and out into the world before you die. | |
| You're going to die either way, whether you speak your precious truths to the world or you hold them to yourself out of fear and starve the world. | |
| Of reason and treasure and beauty thereby. | |
| But get the sounds out of you before you die. | |
| Death is going to take you whether you have spoken or whether you are silent. | |
| Death is going to take you whether you cry your barbaric truths at the rooftop of the world or you are ploughed under the sod of history and your life vanishes like a javelin dropped from a great height into a still pond. | |
| Bloop! | |
| And you're gone. | |
| And I made a very strong commitment to myself and to you when I first started this, which was I was going to be faithful to a methodology, never to a conclusion. | |
| I was going to be faithful to the facts, and I was going to follow the facts and the evidence and the arguments wherever they led. | |
| And that has been one of the greatest gifts and beauties of this conversation with the world, is that If you are wed to a conclusion, then you attract people who share the same conclusions, but you haven't reasoned your way to them, and therefore you're stuck together in your prejudices. | |
| And you're trapped there, really, because if you start to change your mind, and people have been attracted to you for your conclusions rather than your methodology, right? | |
| For the destination, not the journey. | |
| Then they will leave you and you may not be able to get to a new audience. | |
| But because I made that commitment to focus on the methodology of reason and evidence, the process rather than the conclusions, I have been able to be consistent while changing my conclusions. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, when you get new information, when you get new arguments, you must follow them, right? | |
| I mean, you must if you want to have any kind of integrity. | |
| So making a promise to be faithful to philosophy rather than to conclusions has given me the power to adapt to new information, to adapt to new situations without breaking integrity at all. | |
| And I know for some people it's been really tough, you know, they think, oh, flip-flopping or whatever. | |
| But I have made that commitment. | |
| You cannot be a thinker and be wedded to conclusions. | |
| You must focus on the process. | |
| You can't be a scientist and be wedded to the outcome of a particular hypothesis. | |
| You must be wedded to the scientific method. | |
| That's the way that it works. | |
| So, yeah, it's been tough. | |
| It's been tough for all of us sometimes as information changes, as arguments changes, as circumstances change. | |
| But I am incredibly grateful. | |
| I'm very happy that I made the decision to do what I'm doing. | |
| But I'm most happy that I made the decision. | |
| And early on, even before I went full-time, I put out a 17-part introduction to philosophy series where I explained the methodology I was going to use and everything that was going to condition what I produced. | |
| And I'm really, really happy that I made that decision. | |
| And I'm really, really thrilled and pleased and honored that so much of the world seems to have... | |
| Appreciate it and accepted that position and hopefully me changing positions when new information comes along has given the world some small permission perhaps to be less dogmatic in its own approaches and to recognize that you can have honor, integrity and integrity if you follow reason and evidence. | |
| In fact, I think that's the only way you can have honor and integrity. | |
| So, I mean, as far as my personal life goes, it's greater than I could have imagined when I was younger. | |
| I grew up in a world starved of love. | |
| There was as much love in the world around me when I was a child as there is. | |
| Waterfalls in the desert. | |
| And I am... | |
| I mean, I shouldn't say blessed or lucky and so on, because I have sort of argued in the past, in my book, free book, if you want, freedomainradio.com slash free, real-time relationships, the logic of love, that love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous. | |
| So I know that I've earned the love that I... Get from the world and thank you everyone so much for your kind birthday wishes that are coming in. | |
| I appreciated it. | |
| It moves me more than I can probably express. | |
| But in my life I have just an incredible wife. | |
| I love beyond measure. | |
| I have a beautiful child who is the joy of my existence and I love, love, love being a husband and being a father and I have good friends I have a wonderful community of people who I love and who I support and it goes both ways and I've made great friends even remotely through what I do in this show so I do have love and it's hard to imagine Great | |
| happiness without great love. | |
| It is the soil and nutrient of my day. | |
| It is the ballast and stabilization of my existence. | |
| to know that I have earned the love that I receive and that I am honorable in my return of love. | |
| And that is an incredibly, that's really the thing that I'm proudest of. | |
| And I know that it informs what I do in this show as well. | |
| But that is a very powerful bedrock to what it is that I do. | |
| And of course, also, you know, if you've had brushes with some alarming stuff, you know, cancer being fairly alarming, having health is something that you, I guess, never really take for granted again. | |
| I mean, I eat well, I exercise, I've lost some weight since back in the day. | |
| Yeah, look at my old 240p Pillsbury Doughboy videos in the Red Room. | |
| And so, I take good care of myself and make sure that I get my relaxation and my leisure and my fun times as well as the challenging work of... | |
| Helping to sand down the irrationalities of the world, the fullness of reason and evidence. | |
| But there is one thing. | |
| I mean, there are a number of things that are beneficial about having had a brush with bad health, which is that, I tell you this, you never, ever, I never, ever will complain about getting older, given that that was not something that was automatically assumed to be in the cards some years back. | |
| So there is a great gratitude within me for every day, On the sunny side of the six-foot-deep dirt net that we're all eventually going to take. | |
| So that is something that I'm immensely relieved and happy about. | |
| I think you can, of course, take a brush with ill health and turn it into a commitment for even better health and better habits and better tactics. | |
| It can actually make you healthier than you would have been otherwise. | |
| Of course, in taking that approach, I I want to be around for my family. | |
| I want to be around for the world. | |
| And I want to see this amazing transition called hope. | |
| You know, those of us who've been trying to bring reason and evidence and critical thinking to the world for... | |
| I mean, I started in my sort of mid-teens, so it's been over three decades for me. | |
| Well, you know, we accumulated a lot of losing. | |
| A whole lot of losing. | |
| You know, as the government grew bigger, as the government grew more powerful, as debt escalated, as dependence on the state grew, as education got worse, it really, really looked that... | |
| That we were really, really going to lose. | |
| And there was a time with me that I genuinely felt or believed, or found it irrational to think otherwise, that basically what I was doing was creating a body of thought That would not prevent any kind of decay or disaster in society, but would be there as a guidepost or a signpost for the future. | |
| That I could not prevent the terrible things that were happening in society and their escalation, but I could create a body of thought. | |
| That would be used after the Dark Ages to help rebuild. | |
| You know, like Aristotle wrote, he couldn't prevent. | |
| Plato wrote, he couldn't prevent, actually may have accelerated. | |
| Socrates spoke, couldn't prevent the decay of their civilization. | |
| But their writings after the Dark Ages helped to re-inform and escalate the mental conversations of mankind afterwards. | |
| So I thought I was creating kind of a Rosetta Stone of reason and evidence that could not prevent the decay and the disasters but could be used to resurrect society after a dark age. | |
| And then, and then, it really began to change. | |
| It really began to change. | |
| And now, hope is not just a thing with feathers, but hope is... | |
| I have an ambivalent relationship with hope. | |
| I like having hope, but I think having hope in the absence of possibility is a... | |
| A self-destructive mark of self-deception. | |
| You don't want to have hope where there's no hope, but you don't want to deny hope where there is. | |
| And this gathering together of thinkers, of conversations that are possible through this show, through many other people's shows, the information sharing that is going on through various social media, through the internet as a whole, through YouTube. | |
| I mean, this is strengthening and emboldening the isolated fragments of original thinkers, of critical thinkers out there. | |
| You know, we used to just be tiny stars in a night sky of ignorance and self-deception and self-manipulation and delusion. | |
| We were these tiny, tiny little stars. | |
| And, you know, I guess people many centuries or millennia ago looked up at the stars and began drawing lines between them and creating stories. | |
| And the stars turned from Pointless points of light into sky-spanning stories that informed people. | |
| And it's like there are these lines connecting. | |
| We disparate stars of distant thought. | |
| And we are connecting and we are reinforcing and we are helping and we are supporting and we are growing together. | |
| And enough of these coalesce together and we get a brighter sun than we have right now. | |
| and that is an incredible experience to be part of and it does give me genuine hope that disaster can be averted we can get the information out we can get the arguments out we can get the facts out tribes of thinkers never coalesce right because in the past thinkers were isolated and ostracized and so on or attacked or beheaded or burnt at the stake or thrown in jail or whatever but now we can connect only connect as the enforcer said and | |
| And through that connection, we can create, blast wide, a tunnel through to the future. | |
| And this is one of the reasons why the people I've met through the show, the people I do shows with, are very close to my heart. | |
| And I will do as much as possible to help support and encourage them as they help support and encourage me. | |
| And that kind of connection... | |
| That is where I think the real possibilities for freedom in the future come from. | |
| Yes, there will be enemies in the way. | |
| Yes, there will be lies. | |
| There will be attacks and all of that. | |
| But nobody has to stand these alone. | |
| And I would really strongly urge you, if you think for yourself, find people, connect with people, even if it's just online, in person is even better. | |
| And if you get that kind of connection, you can get the kind of strength. | |
| You know, we are not... | |
| We are not, as Aristotle said, the only beings that can live alone are beasts or gods. | |
| And human beings are social animals. | |
| We need that. | |
| And I'm very happy to have that. | |
| And I love the people that I do the shows with. | |
| I love what they're up to. | |
| Do we agree on everything? | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| We are there in the same direction. | |
| And, you know, you can walk side by side with people without them having to go exactly into your own footsteps. | |
| As long as you're heading in the right direction with the right positive energy and willpower and virtue, fellow travelers are essential in this kind of journey. | |
| And I've really, really learned that. | |
| I mean, it wasn't like I was choosing to be isolated in the past, but there just didn't seem to be any particular way to connect with people. | |
| And, of course, I have sanded down some of my rough edges with regards to perfectionism and idealism. | |
| And I'm certainly willing to entertain fellow travelers in the same direction in a way that I wasn't before. | |
| But before, it really wasn't that possible anyway. | |
| So... | |
| So I have hope, and that is bringing me great joy. | |
| So I didn't want to make this too long. | |
| I just wanted to give you a sense of what it is like. | |
| You know, maybe you've turned 50. | |
| I know a lot of my listeners are older. | |
| Maybe turning 50 just seems kind of incomprehensible to you. | |
| I get it. | |
| I was there too. | |
| But I wanted to give you a sense of what it's like to turn 50, what it feels like, and try and... | |
| Make a life for yourself. | |
| Don't inherit a life. | |
| Don't accept a life. | |
| Don't be like a train on a train tracks, laid by history, just going in some direction that seems to be appropriate because that's what other people have done or that's what people did before you or that's what people are telling you is the right thing to do. | |
| You know, carve your own channel. | |
| Make your own train tracks. | |
| And in fact, if you get wings and learn to fly, you don't have to worry about the ground or gravity itself. | |
| Or train tracks at all. | |
| So try and make your life what it is that is going to make you the most proud, the most happy, the most self-satisfied, the most empowered when you get to be my age and hopefully way beyond. | |
| Because in the short run it's easier to live a life dictated by others. | |
| But in the long run it's really no life at all. | |
| Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Thank you again so much. | |
| And again, if you would like to send a little something my way, I would hugely, hugely appreciate it. | |
| Let me see where the love is at freedomainradio.com slash donate. | |
| All the very best. |
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