Stefan Molyneux explores the connection between irreligiosity, hedonism in the physical world, economic determinism and the rise of the socialist ideology. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| This is going to be a playground of ideas. | |
| Just trying to work something out before a big interview tomorrow. | |
| And in these kinds of explorations, sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don't. | |
| I have high hopes for this one, but there's no guarantees. | |
| You're watching me rap and scat and play something out, which I normally do sort of Privately, but I thought it might be. | |
| I always like the making of kinds of things. | |
| How was a song made and so on. | |
| So this is me working out an idea. | |
| So, first we must talk about Satan. | |
| Satan. | |
| And then we're going to tie Satan into something, also starting with S, a little more modern. | |
| But I'm going to make the case as best I can about how these two things could be tied together. | |
| So, Satan, of course, is the god of this world, and Satan asks you to forego the benefits of morality for the sake of comfort, success, and power, material gain, political gain. | |
| Gains of authority over other human beings. | |
| That's what Satan offers you in exchange for your soul. | |
| Forget about the future. | |
| Forget about heaven. | |
| Forget about hell. | |
| That's all nonsense. | |
| That's all fantasy. | |
| What you want to do is follow your base DNA program, Darwinian biological instincts, and you want to grab power and resources in the here and now. | |
| And do you know what virtue is? | |
| This is what he says. | |
| Do you know what virtue is? | |
| Virtue was invented by the weak in the hopes of castrating your animal dominant nature. | |
| So that you will not dominate over them. | |
| They cannot fight you by physical strength. | |
| They cannot fight you by reason. | |
| They cannot fight you by force of intellect. | |
| They cannot fight you by willpower. | |
| They are weak and broken down and pathetic. | |
| And they invent this thing called morality in the hopes of stimulating a cancerous conscience in your mind so that you will not follow your basic alpha right to dominate and use people. | |
| So forget about Morality, that was invented by the weak to choke down, paralyze and enslave the strong. | |
| They can't fight you with arms. | |
| They can't fight you with debate. | |
| All they can do is infect you with guilt, with self-reproach, with a conscience. | |
| And it is their strategy so that they are not dominated and therefore may lose access to, you know, the female photocopy cave that we all need in order to replicate our genes. | |
| So Satan says, you are not a higher animal. | |
| You are not a ghost in a machine of meat. | |
| You are an animal. | |
| And you are a powerful intellectual predatory animal and you should do what all animals do and you should use the power of your intellect, the power of your muscles, the power of your mind and of your tongue To gather as many resources together as possible, to have as many children as possible, and therefore to spread the essence of you, which is genetic, throughout the world as much as possible. | |
| Genghis Khan sprays semen like a sleet of freezing rain across the landscape, and that is success. | |
| Success is biological reproduction. | |
| Success is the gathering of material resources and everything that stands in your way. | |
| It's a lie invented by those who cannot fight you directly and therefore must stimulate you into self-reproachful paralysis. | |
| And that is the best that they can hope for. | |
| Don't fall for it. | |
| Don't take the strength and nobility and power and ubermensch Will to power excellent essence of your genetics and have it overturned by these termites of mere guilt-inducing language. | |
| Do not fall for the beta paralysis scam called morality. | |
| Fight for what you want. | |
| Dominate for what you need. | |
| Spread your seed. | |
| Spread your genes. | |
| That is how The race, that is how the species as a whole is improved, is when the very best dominate and control, overturn, and capture the resources they need for their genes. | |
| And this approach that the devil takes in whispering has obviously some biological realities behind it, just in terms of Darwinian evolution and so on. | |
| It has some biological realities behind it. | |
| That the strong and the successful, those who can gather the most resources throughout history, did tend to be able to propagate the most. | |
| And originally, this was to do with physical strength and cunning and hunting and so on, and then it became aggression to dominate other human beings. | |
| It's important to remember just how rare humanity was, at least outside of the tropics in the past. | |
| You know, when the ice age occurred, the last ice age occurred, we were down to like, you know, 10,000 to 15,000 people. | |
| That's all that was left on the entire planet. | |
| It was a pretty risky gambit, you know. | |
| The wet fingers of extinction were just closing over the candle flame of our species. | |
| And we just managed to flare our way back up when they were withdrawn. | |
| Now... | |
| This is what the devil offers. | |
| Power over resources. | |
| The deep biological thrill and satisfaction of dominating others and controlling their resources. | |
| Having people serve you does give a huge amount of an endorphin rush to people. | |
| Political power in particular is as addictive as a more addictive, in fact, Then cocaine, which I hear is quite addictive. | |
| So this rush of power that we get, this satanic joy we get out of controlling other human beings and having them serve us and having them crushed beneath us, you know, that old Conan thing or the ancient saying of, you know, the joy is to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women and so on. | |
| This is a sort of very real phenomenon and that is one approach that materialism or Darwinism And I'm talking prior to the free market. | |
| In the free market, a lot of these aggressions are sublimated into, well, you gain the most resources by being of service to your customers rather than controlling them and, you know, selling them for parts and grinding up their children for your wine. | |
| So in the free market, humans' aggressive impulses and impulses to dominate and control and gather resources for themselves is sublimated into... | |
| You get the most resources if you can satisfy the most people in the most positive way. | |
| It doesn't mean all their desires are just and so on, but if you can satisfy the most people who voluntarily choose your services, you get the most resources. | |
| This is the only way to harness Our aggressive impulses for the general social good. | |
| The free market. | |
| It's the free market or totalitarianism. | |
| Over time, these are just the two options that we have, and there's no third way. | |
| I mean, the third way is, well, totalitarianism slightly more slowly, which means it has more time to infect and control the minds of the people, and they have less capacity to resist it over time. | |
| So that's the devil. | |
| Now, I'm going to make a case here that when we abandon religion, when we abandon God, when we abandon, I specifically talk about Christianity, when we abandon Christianity, a number of problems begin to arise. | |
| Christianity Solves the problem of free will by inserting the soul into the equation. | |
| We are not a mere machinery of meat. | |
| There is a soul, a ghost in the machine. | |
| There is an essence to our identity and to our existence that goes beyond physics, goes beyond mere materialism, and therefore is not subject to natural laws, and therefore has the capacity for free will. | |
| Clearly, mechanistic Newtonian, or I guess Einsteinian physics, operates at the level of matter and energy. | |
| If you have an essence to your being that is abstracted from matter and energy, what happens is you have free will, because you can bring choice from the ghostly realm of the great beyond, untainted, unconstrained by mere material laws, because it operates. | |
| The soul is no more subject to material laws than God himself is, and therefore Christianity solved the problem of free will. | |
| When you have free will as the basis for your understanding, the basis for your approach to morality, and you can have morality without free will, which is why animals don't have morality, they don't possess free will. | |
| Free will is the ability to compare proposed courses of action to ideal standards of behavior. | |
| Morality, right? | |
| What should we do? | |
| What should we do next? | |
| What ought we do next, right? | |
| This comparison between the ought and the should with the is is... | |
| Sorry, it's a little... | |
| Not very clear. | |
| I have a goal. | |
| I want money. | |
| I could rob a store or I could get a job, which ought I to do. | |
| And I've got a whole book on ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior. | |
| A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics available for free. | |
| Please read it, download it. | |
| It's free at freedomainradio.com slash free. | |
| So, when you have free will in the equation of how you view the world... | |
| What happens is you hold people responsible for their choices. | |
| When we have free will and we are instructed in Christianity and we have access to the Bible, we have access obviously to prayer any time we want, we have access to priests, we have access to a congregation, to a community of like-souled thinkers and believers, then we are fully responsible For the results of our choices. | |
| For our choices and the results, I should say. | |
| So if I'm on a desert island and I don't eat any cheesecake, nobody thinks I'm on a diet because I'm going to go out on a limb and assume no cheesecake on a desert island. | |
| On the other hand, if I'm at a buffet where there's, you know, a whole... | |
| A bushel full of pieces of cheesecake and somebody says, do you want some cheesecake? | |
| I say, no, no, that's okay. | |
| Then I will be perceived as having rejected cheesecake. | |
| Why? | |
| Because I have the option to consume cheesecake. | |
| If I say no, if I don't eat cheesecake on a desert island, I'm not rejecting anything because I can't eat the cheesecake. | |
| There's no cheesecake there. | |
| If I say no to cheesecake at a buffet, I'm rejecting something and that is my choice. | |
| So, think of cheesecake as sort of virtue, the salvation of your soul, the pathway to heaven. | |
| You're never on a desert island, you're always at a buffet, because the cheesecake is always available. | |
| So if you're saying no to the cheesecake that's right in front of you, right in front of your face, that's a choice. | |
| If you say no to the cheesecake that is not around, it's not really a choice, it's acceptance of the inevitable. | |
| Which is why, and theologians wrestled with this for a long time, it's why Socrates was not perceived as going to heaven. | |
| Hell! | |
| Socrates was accepted as a virtuous man, which he largely was except for the terrible curse he gave mankind at the end to obey authority no matter what, the authority that killed him. | |
| Anyway... | |
| Socrates was not sent to hell because he was a good man, but he was on a desert island with regards to the cheesecake. | |
| It is neither virtuous nor a vice to eat cheesecake. | |
| Let's say you have diabetes. | |
| Cheesecake is bad. | |
| Cheesecake is a lot of sugar. | |
| So if you have diabetes and you're on a desert island, it is neither virtuous It's neither good nor bad to not eat cheesecake when it's not available for you. | |
| If you have diabetes and you go and stuff your face with cheesecake, that's a bad decision for your health and so on. | |
| So when you have Christianity, you have free will, you have moral responsibility, and people are then in control of their choices. | |
| They have the option to pray, to submit themselves to Jesus, to follow the Ten Commandments, to follow the tenets of Old Testament God and the New Testament God. | |
| And therefore, when they do bad things or they make mistakes, they're responsible. | |
| This granting of responsibility was the very essence of Christianity. | |
| Individual soul, individual conscience. | |
| It was not conformity. | |
| To authority, and I was raised more in the Protestant tradition, so I'll speak more to that. | |
| I know that there were commandments in the Catholic tradition through the Pope and so on, but the way that I was raised is that you don't conform to authority, to merely man-made authority, because all man-made authority structures are subject to the problem of corruption, of self-interest, of succumbing to temptation for power and political influence and devilry of all kind. | |
| So, it was your individual conscience and your prayer and your fidelity or dedication to Christian virtues that earned you the path to heaven. | |
| No other way. | |
| This kind of individualism, your conscience, your choice, your responsibility, is one of the things that led to the individualism which turned to atomization, which turned to relativism of the West as a whole. | |
| Because philosophers didn't do their damn jobs and come in and solve the problems left by the gaping void of God's exit from the scene. | |
| So, you get free will. | |
| People are responsible for their choices. | |
| They can always do better. | |
| And if they do badly, if they do badly, if they... | |
| If they get fired, if they become gambling addicts, if they have an affair outside of marriage and ruin their marriage, if they get fat, if they smoke, if they rob from someone, if they succumb to temptation and do evil things, well, they're responsible. | |
| Now, when you do something that's bad, Generally, assuming you're not a complete sociopath, generally, you will suffer. | |
| You will suffer. | |
| So, the man who steals a car goes to jail. | |
| And he suffers, right? | |
| It's a criminal record and so on. | |
| So... | |
| When you have free will, and you have easy, moment by moment, get on your knees and pray, accept Jesus, be filled with loving grace, be born again, and be a good person, when that is available to you at any time, at any time, night and day, and you reject it, then you're responsible. | |
| Now, if you suffer because you follow the path of unrighteousness, you follow the path of the devil, of materialism, then you will suffer now because you had the choice to do better and you suffer your suffering was created by yourself which allows good people to stand back and say I'm sorry you made that choice the suffering is natural and the suffering is actually good because suffering is your soul's way of saying | |
| This is bad for me, right? | |
| It's pain, right? | |
| You touch something hot when you're a kid. | |
| For me, it was a knife that had been sitting by the gas stove that we had as a kid in the apartment I grew up in. | |
| One of them. | |
| You touch the hot stove, you touch the hot knife, and it burns. | |
| It burns. | |
| Ah, like a foretaste of hell. | |
| And then that's your body's way of saying, this is bad for us. | |
| This damages our cells, and pain is your body's way of saying, no, no, don't do that again. | |
| And so the pain of sin, the pain of deviating from the path of righteousness is your soul's way. | |
| The existential pain, the suffering, the depression, the anxiety, the reproach, the guilt. | |
| That is your soul's way of saying this is deviating us from the path to heaven. | |
| So Christianity gives moral responsibility Moral authority, moral opportunity to get to heaven and is able to accept the suffering that is produced by sin. | |
| And I don't just mean sin like disobeying Some rule. | |
| I mean, sin like acting with cruelty, acting with malevolence, acting destructively, self-destructively when other people depend on you. | |
| Sins, regardless of whether you're Christian or agnostic or atheist, sins that we would recognize are bad things to do really no matter. | |
| I mean, stealing, killing, murdering, betraying, trust, faith, so on. | |
| So, when you... | |
| You take God, right? | |
| The Jenga blocks game, you know, you get these blocks in these little squares and you try and... | |
| When you take the God block out of the base of civilization, it's not just church attendance that declines. | |
| The people don't just not go to church. | |
| They don't go to a whole other places. | |
| They don't go to self-conscious-based autonomy in moral decision-making. | |
| That's an awkward phrase. | |
| Sorry, let me... | |
| I told you we were working it out as we went along. | |
| Let me try that again. | |
| When you take God out of the equation, the Christian God out of the equation, you also take out the soul. | |
| Now when you take out the soul from the body, our susceptibility to the merely mechanistic, deterministic view of the universe, the materialistic view of the universe, of our body. | |
| There's no ghost in the machine. | |
| When you take the ghost out of the machine, what is left? | |
| Just a machine. | |
| Just a machine. | |
| So when you get rid of God, you get rid of the soul. | |
| When you get rid of the soul, you get rid of an easily understandable way that our mechanistic bodies can act outside of. | |
| A mechanistic universe. | |
| We are now just wind-up toys. | |
| We are now just rocks bouncing down a hill. | |
| We are now just the weather. | |
| We may not be able to predict it perfectly, but we know certain patterns exist and we don't think that the weather is conscious or has a conscience or has moral choice or moral responsibility. | |
| Now, when we take the soul out of the body and we take moral responsibility Out of the equation of our choices. | |
| What happens is we need a way of understanding and explaining the differences in outcomes between different individuals, different groups, different ethnicities, different countries, and so on. | |
| And the way that we do it in the absence of God, in the absence of a soul, is that we The way that we explain why people do differently, why outcomes are different, is because, we say, the environment has changed this person. | |
| The environment has changed this person. | |
| And also, we come up with a scale of human value that's pretty materialistic. | |
| So, a poor person... | |
| Poor people hugely celebrated in... | |
| The Christian religion. | |
| And not just because, you know, there's a cynical part of most people that would say, well, you know, they had to venerate the poor person because there was a philosophy or an ideal set, an idea set, designed to appeal to slaves and the poor, so they had to praise. | |
| I don't think it's that, fundamentally. | |
| I think, in Christianity, the rich man who goes to hell is far worse off, infinitely worse off, than the poor man who goes to heaven. | |
| And therefore, We cannot take pity on the poor fundamentally, and we cannot say that the most ideal state of society is to reduce or eliminate poverty. | |
| It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. | |
| I remember that very clearly from church several times a week when I was young. | |
| We pity the rich man who has deviated from virtue. | |
| We have huge respect for the poor man or the poor family that holds tight and fast to virtue, slowly ascending the thorny steps to heaven itself. | |
| So poverty is not a massive problem to be solved by enormous coercive social engineering through the power of the state. | |
| Now, I know Jesus said, whoever would follow me, sell all your belongings, give the money to the poor, come follow me. | |
| So clearly he recognized that poverty was a problem. | |
| But he was not, you know, thou shalt not steal is the foundational commandment, one of the foundational commandments, and certainly the government. | |
| Initiates force to transfer property, to put it as nicely as possible. | |
| So poverty is not a huge problem to be solved because the purpose of society, the purpose of, not society, the purpose of each individual's soul and their conscience is to get you to heaven, not to get you to a boardroom. | |
| It's to get you a seat in the kingdom of God after life, not a seat on the board. | |
| It is to get you a ticket to heaven rather than a pile of gold. | |
| So poverty is not just this massive problem to be solved and of course there is temptation in wealth. | |
| There is temptation in power which should be issued. | |
| Jesus didn't run for office. | |
| Jesus didn't try to make a lot of money. | |
| Jesus dedicated himself to the perfection of his soul and the encouragement of virtue in the hearts, minds and in particular the souls of his followers and dedicates. | |
| Now All have access to heaven. | |
| All have access to redemption and salvation. | |
| All have access to the rules by which you follow and wish to follow. | |
| Not just following them is enough. | |
| You have to want to follow them. | |
| You take all of that away. | |
| Again, it's that bottom of the gen. | |
| You take all of that away. | |
| And what happens is materialism, determinism, and a focus on the satisfaction of the body wants. | |
| The satisfaction of the body wants. | |
| It becomes all-important. | |
| And the explanation for disparities in outcomes between individuals becomes mechanistic, becomes environmental-based. | |
| Well, he was born rich, therefore he did well. | |
| Well, he was born poor, therefore he had no opportunity. | |
| Now, that's kind of a flip from the Christian mindset. | |
| The Christian mindset might say something like this. | |
| Well, he was born rich, therefore he was susceptible to greater temptations of materialism and wealth and power and the devil danced a jig all around this guy's heart and soul, so don't envy him. | |
| He's got greater temptations because of his wealth and therefore has potentially less chance to get into heaven. | |
| Whereas we'd say to the poor person, well, you know, he lives a simple life. | |
| He's untempted by great events. | |
| He's untempted by great power and great authority. | |
| He knows his friends are his friends because he's poor. | |
| The rich man's friends may be his friends because he's rich and they wish to share in his wealth and so on. | |
| Poverty was not a giant problem to be solved. | |
| When you get to the materialistic realm, the poor person versus the rich person, well, what's the difference? | |
| Well, what's perceived to be the difference is that the rich person had a rich parent. | |
| The rich person's rich parent could pay for that person to go to private school, could have tutors, could have all this, giving them a huge leg up, a huge advantage, which is unfair. | |
| Whereas the poor person is poor because... | |
| He didn't have such privilege. | |
| He didn't have such a history. | |
| He was oppressed. | |
| He was exploited. | |
| This guy, the rich person's boss, was exploiting the poor person, and that's why there's this difference. | |
| Like, there's just this fixed sum of money, and if one person has a million extra dollars, it's because he stole one dollar from each of a million workers. | |
| Whatever it is, right? | |
| I mean, there's that aspect of things. | |
| And it becomes a very pressing problem to be solved. | |
| Because in the Christian world, the inequality of outcome has to do with one's personal choices relative to one's conscience. | |
| Some people go to heaven, some people go to hell because of what they damn well do, the choices they make. | |
| That's what sends them down the down staircase or up the up staircase. | |
| Whereas in a materialistic God-emptied universe, we perceive much more injustice in disparities because we do not... | |
| We view materialism as the key. | |
| The poor person must be miserable because they're poor. | |
| The rich person must be happy because he's rich. | |
| And it's a huge problem to be solved. | |
| And it's no one's responsibility, in particular, as to how it came about. | |
| Now, to do... | |
| To maintain all of this, and this is why the left ruthlessly suppresses all this, you have to not deal with the bell curve, the fact that intelligence is largely genetic and is widely dispersed among the population, so that there's this kind of bell curve that's narrower for women and wider for men and so on. | |
| So I've talked about that before. | |
| I just put that to one side for the moment. | |
| It's just important to remember that. | |
| So then what happens is you say, okay, well, without God, without conscience, without the soul, without moral responsibility, with determinism, we say, okay, well, now we need to change the environment of people. | |
| We need to give more opportunities to poor people, and if it comes at the expense of rich people, well, that's okay. | |
| It's okay because they didn't earn their wealth. | |
| It just was given to them by their parents. | |
| Of course, the real wealth that you inherited from your parents tends to be genetic rather than material, as is evidenced by the fact that dumb people of rich and smart parents end up losing all their money and the very intelligent children of poor parents end up usually making a fortune or becoming very successful if that's what they choose to do. | |
| So a lot of it has to do with genetics, but again, that has to be put to one side because if it's genetics, you can't talk about exploitation. | |
| You can't talk in this sort of leftist or Marxist or socialist fantasy that the workers and the bosses, they're all the same, but the boss is just crueler and meaner and nastier and is willing to enslave the virtuous, innocent, genius workers and so on. | |
| If you understand the bell curve, you understand that there are very smart people and people who are on the average and people who aren't so smart. | |
| And nature sorts, the market really, the market sorts these out. | |
| More resources tend to accumulate to intelligent people because intelligent people are better at creating more resources from existing resources, which makes everyone wealthier and so on. | |
| There's a reason why the countries that have embraced the free market have, even with all the government interference and control, there's a reason why those countries have Increased production about 70-fold. | |
| They have doubled lifespan, halved the work week, and so on. | |
| The free market simply is just allowing smart people to work as best they can to maximize and create more resources out of the scarce or limited existing resources that we're always subject to. | |
| Human desires are infinite. | |
| Human resources are always finite. | |
| So we want to give the resources to those who are best able to do the magic multiplier of entrepreneurship and create more out of seemingly nothing. | |
| So, you end up with this materialistic focus on the manipulation of resources called the modern welfare state or socialist engineering or central planning or communism or fascism or, you know, all the stuff that's been going on in the West for the past hundred years or so, really since the fall of classical liberalism under the horrendous blood-soaked plow of Fabian socialism, which led to a huge number of, well, Communism alone, 100 million deaths, I think is a conservative estimate, just over the 20th century alone. | |
| The state killed a quarter of a billion people outside of war, a quarter billion of its own citizens in the 20th century alone. | |
| You can Google Demoside, D-E-M-O-C-I-D-E, for more on that. | |
| So, the temptation of Satan Is not to live anti-God. | |
| Because God is defined as the good. | |
| Satan is defined as the evil. | |
| So Satan can't whisper into your ear and say, you have to live against virtue. | |
| You have to live against the good. | |
| Very few nihilistic or cynical or masochistic or basically sadistic people might fall for that. | |
| Good is bad. | |
| Bad is good kind of thing. | |
| But the majority of people, born with a conscience and basic levels of care for other human beings, can't fall for that. | |
| So Satan doesn't say live against God. | |
| Satan says live without God. | |
| Satan doesn't say Be evil. | |
| Evil be thou my good, right? | |
| Satan doesn't say that. | |
| Satan says, There's no God. | |
| There's no God but nature. | |
| There's no God but nature. | |
| And nature commands you, Darwinianly speaking, or from a Darwinian perspective. | |
| Nature commands you to spread your genes by gathering as many resources as humanly possible. | |
| To have power over others. | |
| Human beings are, we're all animals striving for power, striving for dominance, striving for the reproduction of our genes. | |
| And so, it's win-lose. | |
| Darwinian is win-lose, right? | |
| I mean, if you are the giraffe with the slightly taller neck, you get more of the leaves, and those who don't, well, the reason giraffes end up with the taller neck is because the ones with the shorter necks die off before reproduction age, and therefore, it's win-lose, right? | |
| The market is win-win. | |
| The free market is win-win, but this is what the devil says. | |
| The devil doesn't Doesn't want win-win. | |
| It's not destructive. | |
| It causes human beings to flourish. | |
| So the devil says, live without God, and don't say, evil be thou my good. | |
| The devil says, That rather than the joy of what Aristotle called eudomania or the excellence in moral pursuit of moral virtues, forget about all of that abstract. | |
| The morality stuff is just, again, remember morality is invented by weak people to enslave and control the strong who they can't otherwise control and enslave because they're weak, small people. | |
| So forget about this pursuit of virtue. | |
| Pursuit of virtue makes you a slave to slaves. | |
| The slaves invent morality, control the powerful, to make them feel guilty, to paralyze them. | |
| So if you pursue morality, you're a slave to a slave. | |
| Because in the absence of God, where's morality? | |
| Philosophers have not been able to answer that, at least until I did. | |
| Anyway, so... | |
| You can't pursue virtue, but nature, says Satan, nature has implanted in you a wonderful endorphin rush when you gain power over other human beings, when you control resources, when you gain political power, when you gain financial power, when you gain even the ear of those who have financial power to sway them, or political power to sway them. | |
| To you, to give you resources. | |
| If you're a businessman, and you get the ear of a politician who could then give you preferential legislation, that feels good. | |
| It feels good. | |
| It does. | |
| It feels good. | |
| And he says, that's what you should be guiding your actions. | |
| Forget this namby-pamby ethereal. | |
| You have to do things that are good because of that, right? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Seek power. | |
| Seek power. | |
| Be dominant. | |
| Have sex. | |
| Provide for your children. | |
| Provide for your family. | |
| Accumulate resources. | |
| Gain security. | |
| Gain power. | |
| Or at least the ears of those who have power. | |
| And enjoy that bonobo cocaine rush. | |
| Of climbing up the hierarchy in your society. | |
| That's what you need to do. | |
| Now, there are some people who will follow that. | |
| But there are other people, those who have more of a conscience, empathy. | |
| Who face a real challenge with this formulation. | |
| Not just that they're going to be preyed upon, but also because when you take away God, you take away the soul, you take away free will, you take away moral responsibility, then people who suffer are suffering why? | |
| Why does someone become an addict? | |
| Why does someone become unfaithful, sleep around on their wife or their husband? | |
| Why does someone become a killer or a thief? | |
| Well, the Christians could answer because they had the choice. | |
| They had the choice. | |
| They could eat the cheesecake, but they didn't. | |
| They succumbed to the lure of Satan, and they followed the path of evil. | |
| And they didn't have to, but that was the choice they made. | |
| That's the glorious gift of free will that God gives mankind. | |
| Now, when you don't have the soul, what conditions what you do? | |
| It's really tough to go with free will. | |
| A lot of people who are materialists, atheists, agnostics have big problems with the question of free will. | |
| So then it has to be mechanistic. | |
| In other words, you have to be born and what shapes you is your environment. | |
| And therefore, if we change your environment, we change where you go. | |
| If we take the child This is the trading place. | |
| You take the movie, right? | |
| You take the child of the poor man and you give him a great education, he becomes a rich man. | |
| You take the child who is rich, of the rich family, and you move him to the poor household and you deny him various things. | |
| He's going to be poor and so on. | |
| This doesn't... | |
| It's not true. | |
| I mean, it's fundamentally not true because Assuming that the poverty is not so great, that intellectual capacity is stunted, physical growth is stunted, and so on, as long as it's not chronic malnutrition, it doesn't matter. | |
| And even in situations of chronic malnutrition, I mean, they've taken kids from North Korean nurseries who were starved, living on nothing, starved for most of their infancy, and they grew up to have IQs of 106, just like everyone else from that region of the world. | |
| So... | |
| It's not true. | |
| It would be cool if it were true, because then we'd have a way of solving some of these problems, but it's not true. | |
| It's not true. | |
| The studies have shown it doesn't matter where you go to school, it doesn't matter whether you go to private school, or probably it doesn't matter the quality of education, you can end up about the same anyway. | |
| It is not quite this absolute, but it's kind of, you know, if you take... | |
| Your average Chinese child and have him raised by a Danish family, he's not going to be as tall as your average Dane. | |
| If you take your average Danish child and have him raised by a Chinese family, he's not going to be as short as your average Chinese person. | |
| I mean, there's just a lot of genetics involved and we have to accept that along with the question of free will. | |
| So what happens is we can stand to see people suffer when we believe in free will and that they have a soul, that they have access and the capacity to do better in their lives. | |
| We can see people suffer if We grant them full moral responsibility. | |
| And in fact, we may say the suffering is good for you. | |
| It helps. | |
| You become a better person. | |
| But when we take away God, moral responsibility, free will, and access to virtue, then the suffering of an individual seems pointless and cruel. | |
| It's not a tonic. | |
| It's not a painful signal that they need to change their moral course. | |
| And this is why we recast what used to be called moral deficiencies. | |
| We recast them as physical deficiencies. | |
| Right? | |
| So gambling used to be a moral deficiency. | |
| You should have not gambled. | |
| The devil is tempting you like Dostoevsky, like he tempted Dostoevsky to come and gamble and gamble. | |
| It's so much fun, so exciting. | |
| You'll be a winner this time. | |
| Blows all your resources, cause discord in your family, breaks up your family, smashes up your children's futures, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Right? | |
| So devil's happy. | |
| But now it's an illness, right? | |
| Now it's an illness. | |
| And whereas before, something like depression, anxiety, alienation, what may be often seen as spiritual ailments. | |
| You have distanced yourself from virtue. | |
| You've distanced yourself from God. | |
| You've distanced yourself from good. | |
| You are falling into the prey. | |
| You're falling prey to the sin of despair and so on, right? | |
| And you get to recommit yourself to virtue and pray and reconnect with God and this will... | |
| But now this is all, you have the wrong balance of things in the brain, which they can't test for, and it's just a theory. | |
| It's akin to the medieval concept of humor, so the four different humors that would influence your personality. | |
| I've got a whole video called There's No Such Thing as Mental Illness. | |
| But anyway, so now your suffering must be recast as physical rather than spiritual, as biological rather than moral. | |
| Now, If someone accidentally cuts their finger off, and it wasn't like they were doing something silly, right? | |
| It wasn't like they were using some buzz saw with no protection or something like that, but if someone cuts their finger off completely by accident, they weren't being careless. | |
| I can't even imagine. | |
| I should imagine some way, right? | |
| No, let's change that. | |
| Who cuts their finger off? | |
| See? | |
| Doing this in real time. | |
| Who cuts their finger off accidentally? | |
| Let's say that a man's walking down the street and a bird flies into the side of his head out of nowhere. | |
| First time it's ever happened. | |
| He slips, cracks his head on the sidewalk. | |
| What do we say? | |
| That'll teach you to what? | |
| To not go outside? | |
| To wear a helmet at all times? | |
| I mean, how many times do birds fly into people's heads? | |
| Well, okay, ostriches have tried to hatch my thoughts from time to time, but that's really another topic. | |
| So warm, so furry. | |
| I kind of poopy. | |
| Anyway, so this would not be a teachable moment. | |
| This would not be an example. | |
| It would just be really, really bad luck. | |
| So, the suffering of the person who gets a concussion from falling on the sidewalk because a bird flew in the side of their head is not instructive, it doesn't do anything to help that person. | |
| If you let them suffer, we would take them to the hospital, we'd get them checked out, but we would not blame them for what they did because that's happenstance, right? | |
| But when you take God, the soul, moral responsibility, free will, moral opportunism out of the equation, Suffering becomes not chosen. | |
| It is not the result of people's bad choices, not the result of bad things they did, not the result of cowardice or avoidance of self-knowledge or avoidance of Jesus or avoidance of virtue, temptation from the devil. | |
| Suffering, in the absence of the soul, in the absence of moral choice, becomes unbearable to see. | |
| And it becomes fundamentally unjust to let people suffer. | |
| Now, if In the Christian paradigm, a man has cheated on his wife and is wracked with guilt and horror and so on. | |
| The Christian looks and says, sure. | |
| I mean, that's why we don't say that your soul is having an allergic reaction to your choices, to your immorality. | |
| And it's a self-inflicted wound, in other words. | |
| But we can't stand to see the suffering in a world without free will and moral choice. | |
| And the world becomes like an animal shelter. | |
| We don't say cats are responsible for being abandoned or something. | |
| So we've got this materialistic idea that we are shaped by our environment, whereas in the Christian conception we are shaped by our moral choices. | |
| We are shaped by our environment, and poverty is not something that reduces temptations of power, but poverty is something that produces Dysfunction, right? | |
| There's this terrible old false idea that it's poverty that produces crime, and I've pushed back against this so many times, it's ridiculous, but it's crime that produces poverty, I think, much more arguably, or you can argue much more coherently in that position, but here's the thing. | |
| When we don't have moral choice in our minds, and we don't look at people as self-generating, self-sustaining, self-choosing moral agents, we have the explanation of materialism as to the disparate outcomes of human beings. | |
| We have an instinctual horror at suffering as never being self-inflicted, as always being accidental or biological or whatever. | |
| And we see this, right? | |
| I mean, women who had children when they weren't married used to be called some pretty terrible names. | |
| And now they're excused, right? | |
| It's a choice. | |
| It's a lifestyle choice. | |
| They're not responsible. | |
| I mean, the fact that it does terrible things to the futures of their children, we don't care about. | |
| It's all about excusing people because a semen girl just flew into the side of their vagina and they got pregnant, right? | |
| It's all immaculate conception now. | |
| And so what happens is we are then tempted to create or to invest massive powers in the state. | |
| Disparities in income are unjust. | |
| Suffering is unbearable to see. | |
| Nobody's at fault. | |
| And therefore it's perfectly just to take from the rich and give to the poor. | |
| Not only is it just, it's necessary, it's good. | |
| It's good. | |
| It's sort of like an animal shelter where one kitten is born in a tiny cage and the other one is born in some sort of lush room with lots of play toys. | |
| And we say, well, that's not fair. | |
| We've got to fix this. | |
| Let's join these two cages together and divide them. | |
| Now they can both play together. | |
| It's fair. | |
| It's fair. | |
| Now, to do that, we need a giant apparatus of state compulsion. | |
| To raise taxes, to borrow, and then we start shoveling resources from one place to another. | |
| It turns into, obviously, rampant vote-buying and sentimentality and corruption and all of this sort of stuff. | |
| And this is the great glee of the devil. | |
| And this is what I'm trying to argue for here. | |
| Incompletely, I understand. | |
| I want to get your thoughts on something that's in progress. | |
| You want to see a couple of the before sketches? | |
| Well, here's one. | |
| So, what I'm saying is that socialism is Satanism. | |
| Central planning is Satanism. | |
| Totalitarianism is Satanism. | |
| And if you look at something like Marxism, Marxism is purely materialistic. | |
| And it is economic determinism that your future is determined by the class that you're born into. | |
| It's not free will, moral responsibility, in the sense that Christians would understand it. | |
| Deterministic, based upon economic resources and where you sit, in relation to the means of production. | |
| And so now, since there's unjust bosses and victimized workers, if all the workers become bosses and all the bosses become workers, then everyone's going to end up the same. | |
| Not only is it the environment that shapes our thinking in our early life, but it's our environment that shapes our personalities in the present. | |
| So if you change people's relationship to the means of production, you change who they are as human beings. | |
| We are permanent water to be poured into whatever container the Marxist sees fit, and we will immediately conform to that shape. | |
| Now the terrible thing is that the destruction that is wrought by socialism, by central planning, we can see this going on in Venezuela at the moment after the heavy socialist Hugo Chavez got into power some time back and put into, nationalized a whole bunch of places. | |
| They drove the whites away from the farmland and now they can't. | |
| There's an IQ of 84 on average in the country and that's from some time ago. | |
| It's probably lower now on average. | |
| Smart people have left. | |
| And now look at the suffering. | |
| Look at the suffering. | |
| Look at the suffering. | |
| When you start reallocating resources, when you start taking from the rich, which often means the smart, and giving to the poor, which often means the less smart, then you are paying the poor to have more children. | |
| Genetically, this means you can end up with less smart people in society as a whole. | |
| You are punishing the rich for being rich and often driving them into middle class or even poverty. | |
| And you are borrowing, which means that you're artificially inflating the population in the present at the expense of the population in the future. | |
| All life requires resources, and we can see this again. | |
| We've seen this happening all over the world. | |
| Countries that run out of money and have massive debts have significant die-offs. | |
| So you've artificially created this huge oversupply of people based upon a prosperity that is borrowed and printed and can't possibly be sustained, and then you have a great die-off. | |
| So you've brought people into the world only to have them die slowly, painfully, or quickly and brutally, whether it's going to be war or famine or pestilence or political upheaval or who knows, right? | |
| I mean, a breakdown in the water supply and diseases in the water supply, who knows, right? | |
| And this materialism, this idea that human beings just, you pour them into any container and they'll take the shape of that container, this is what is radical, insane, absolutist, environmental cause explanations for human behavior. | |
| This has also created the fantasy that we just bring huge numbers of people from the Middle East into Europe and they'll be just like Europeans. | |
| You take this water, right, called Middle Eastern migrants or economic opportunists or occasionally refugees, you pour it into Europe, they'll be just like Europeans. | |
| Now, the Christians would never accept that. | |
| Would never accept that at all. | |
| So this idea that socialism is Satanism, all of the dominoes that fall when you choose to live without a deity, I think is very interesting. | |
| I'll tell you, if I keep working on this, and I think I should, but I'll tell you where I got this idea from. | |
| But just, yeah, leave me your comments. | |
| Let me know what you think. | |
| I think that there's great potential in this formulation. | |
| But I really, really look forward to your feedback. | |
| Thanks so much for listening. |