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June 28, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:41
3727 What Pisses Me Off About Fake News
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This is battle for your soul, for your mind, for your allegiance, for your survival, for your future, the future of your children.
This battle has been going on for thousands of years.
It was first really talked about by Socrates 2,500 years ago in his war against the Sophists, the Sophists who told The volatile mob, what the mob wanted to hear, what confirmed their prejudices, what challenged them not at all,
and what reinforced their most dangerous and destructive impulses, and they bayingly accepted these flaming arrowed words to fire up the timbers of their heart to do dastardly deeds that brought down Their entire civilization.
We face this same battle.
Now, today, as people have throughout history, there are the pine pipers of people with silver-tongued syllables designed to slice you into oblivion, to serve their cannibalistic impulses for power over you, for the destruction of all that allows you to think freely and converse openly.
The Pied Pipers of the Sophists are constantly trying to draw you away from reality, into the glittering madness disco caves of their relativistic manipulations, so that you live inside the chasm and the prison of their words, rather than the simple and clear reality.
And this is...
The mainstream media versus the internet.
Versus you, versus me, versus others.
Who think clearly, who reason openly.
And who source what the hell they're talking about.
In syllogisms, in evidence, in empiricism.
The sophists versus the thinkers.
This is what we are facing today.
And those civilizations who face this fork in the road, and it's a continual fork in the road, the sophists will always emerge to try and gaslight you with their madness, so that you prefer to live in their asylums than the clear reality of the open world.
This tension, this battle, is coming to a climax.
We have never had an avenue to bring truth to people in the way that we have.
Through this medium, through the internet, the last great explosion of accessible information to the masses was the printing press, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and that brought extraordinary social changes that gave birth to the modern world.
Hopefully, we can do it more peacefully.
But those societies, those mobs, those individuals who follow the sophists follow these liars, these manipulators to their doom.
This is why it is so important.
Ancient Greece The mob voted to murder Socrates for the crimes of corrupting the young, which really means giving the young questions which the old find uncomfortable to answer, and not believing in the gods of the city.
But think of all the false gods that exist around us.
Class-baiting, race-baiting, the innate and automatic virtues of diversity, all of the lies.
That float around us, infesting us, like ghosts that never get their fill by feeding on the spine of our civilization.
Ancient Greece murdered Socrates to appease the Sophists, and Ancient Greece ceased to be.
The Ancient Roman Republic Fed the ideals of freedom, where the average Roman citizen worked for about two days a year to pay his taxes to support a giant empire.
No, no, no, no.
You see, they said we must help the poor.
They said we can have free and easy divorce.
They said we can have promiscuity.
They fed the base reptilian appetites of the masses with the future of their freedoms.
And Rome, when following the sophists and rejecting, the philosophers ceased to be.
And now, for the past few decades, The mainstream media and, of course, government schools are cranking out people with a desperate thirst to attach themselves to a narrative because they cannot think for themselves.
Think of everything that is robbed from children when they're imprisoned in government schools, when the parents are forced to send them there so often, when they're certainly forced to pay whether they send them or not to these brain-deadening indoctrination camps.
Imagine what is robbed of these children.
It is the birthright of every child to learn how to THINK Because thinking is what makes us human.
It is the one thing that differentiates us from all other carbon-based life forms.
If you deny or withhold from children their capacity to think, if you oppose and attack them for thinking, you are stripping them of that which makes them human.
It is a form of demonic possession of madness and subjectivity and subjugation that displaces the human soul of rationality that defines us.
As humans.
So there are two doctors.
Well, one is a real doctor, one is not.
There's a doctor who tells you what you want to hear.
Oh, you're fine.
That pot belly is no problem.
You're doing well.
Everything's fine.
Give me some money.
And you feel better in the moment.
Oh, good.
I don't have to change a damn thing.
And then there's another doctor who says, you need to lose weight.
You need to exercise.
You're fat.
You're unhealthy.
You need to shape up.
Which doctor makes you feel better in the moment?
Which doctor keeps you alive in the long run?
The doctor who tells the truth, yes, patients feel bad.
For now.
But they feel a lot better in the future when they're not staring with dead eyes at six feet of damp earth and worms incoming to recycle them in the great circle of life.
Now, if you...
Are a physician of social ills and you tell the people what they want to hear if you reinforce their prejudices and harden them into empty shells of former thought?
Don't call yourself a doctor!
I don't know, maybe you're some kind of life coach.
You can say, I'm an enthusiasm czar!
But no one thinks a cheerleader is a sportscaster or a coach or a player.
The reason I'm not talking about any one or any group in particular, but these all came to mind, all these thoughts.
I did a video yesterday on James O'Keefe's expose of CNN and how at least one fairly senior producer there thinks that the entire Russian narrative is bullshit.
And I read these words put out by CNN. I didn't believe them at the time, but I didn't have any proof.
So I didn't want to say anything.
Responsibility.
Turns out, like, they withdrew the story, they apologized, they fired, or the people resigned, the three people who were in charge of this story.
Why?
Oh, a sudden attack of conscience, you see?
And I said, no, it was a sudden attack of conscience.
Of blowback.
In this case, I think it's fairly safe to say, according to the New York Post, it was the fact that CNN was facing a hundred million dollar libel suit.
That's why they retracted this poorly reported and poorly sourced story that was aiming to pour a massive amount of black ink slime over an ally of President Trump's.
So here's the thing.
They lied about why they retracted the story that appears to be a lie about an ally of President Trump's.
They can't stop lying!
There's no other way for them to operate.
Why did we retract the story?
Well, it didn't meet our high editorial standards and it didn't go through the proper channels.
No!
You face a hundred million dollar lawsuit and you blinked.
Go Sarah Palin!
No integrity!
They weren't sorry for the article, they were sorry they got caught, and they were fearful of the threats against them, so they lied about the article that lied about someone.
There's no truth!
They can't wake and draw breath without committing treason to truth!
These sophists!
I'm detaching from the immediate story and returning to the abstractions.
They're preying on the crappy schools that are continually delivering Pink Floyd's The Walls style, the empty-headed fear robots of leftist determinism.
That is what replaces the soulful personality when it is evacuated by idiots and taught propaganda.
They're preying on the crappy schools.
You are delivered.
Children who've been eviscerated and had carved out from their minds and their hearts the capacity to think.
And rather than saying, wow, I'm really sorry you went to such terrible schools, but don't worry, we as the media will help you out.
We will resurrect in you the soul of humanity and teach you how to think gently, positively, patiently, calmly, energetically, humorously, however we have to.
Because that's your job when you have a public voice.
If you have a shred of integrity.
The goal is to ease tensions with truth.
When we have the truth, we have peace.
Right?
No truth, no peace.
No truth, no peace.
Basic reality.
Human beings can be naturally tribal.
That's how evolution works, you see.
And if we've got all of these ethnicities and belief systems, so and so on, in the high virtue and cathedral of multiculturalism, attempting to all live together, of course, it'd be way better if we weren't all trying to feed off the same trough of government money, but all trying to live together.
Then, given that human beings are naturally tribal and we're all getting jammed together, If you are a public voice who's into race-baiting, well, that's going to lead to a massive amount of conflict now, isn't it?
There are many truths that you can say that calm people down.
You can start talking about ethnic IQ differences, which really helps lower the pressure cooker of endless white racism.
You can point out to, you know, help things out a little bit between the genders.
It's really not much of a wage gap between men and women when you take into account different life choices.
There's lots of things that you can push forward that helps people.
We say we care about our kids.
How about, mainstream media, you talk about how despite the best efforts of many single moms, single motherhood functions as an environmental toxin on most children.
It's disastrous for them.
How about you talk about that?
So the burden of dysfunction is lifted from the children and placed back on stupid-ass society that wrecked the family to begin with.
How about the old take some responsibility for the choices that they've made and we lift the burden from the young?
Sorry we put you in shitty schools.
Sorry we busted up the family.
Sorry we destroyed your dad and family courts.
Oops!
Badass!
Hey, you know what we'll do?
We'll hand back all the money we're now stealing from you for our old age pensions that we voted for but never wanted to pay for in the first place.
Oh no, that would mean taking responsibility and there being consequences.
See, if you're a kid and you don't study for a test, you get an F. But if you're an entire generation that destroyed the freedoms your forefathers fought for, set up a system to destroy the family, put kids in unutterable debt, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and unfunded liabilities, where they draw their first cattle-walling, indebted, slave-chain, bankster-owned breath, maybe you got a little bit of apologizing to do, but this is why we can't have ethics anymore.
Because the old don't want the consequences of having listened to the sophists.
Banksy Media tells people what they want to hear.
Now, that's not the end of the world if people are rational.
You tell them what they want to hear, they hear the truth, they appreciate the truth, they're willing to chew on the difficult bones of the truth, thus harden their teeth and their spirits.
But when you masticate out truths that fools revere, well, then you're adding another log on the fire that is burning down freedom in the future.
You can bring difficult truths out.
To your audience.
You may have noticed a pattern in this show.
I explode like a flare on some new intellectual scene and everyone loves me and then I bring truth to that scene that they don't like and they don't like me anymore.
That's just fine.
That's the gig.
That's natural.
That's natural.
Make friends, break friends.
It's just the way philosophy works and it's okay.
In time, they recognize that I was right and I'll come back.
And I bring difficult truths to you.
I have changed my mind on important issues over the years.
I've provided good reasons and evidence as to why.
But you can bring difficult truths to your audience.
There's no reason why you can't.
And if you do bring difficult truths to your audience, you make the world a more peaceful place and you help avert the first red tentacles and tendrils of the coming gods of war.
But to bring difficult truths to your audience, you need to be better.
You need to be courageous.
You need to be engaged.
You need to be authoritative.
You need to be good at what you do.
You need to be engaging and funny and intense sometimes.
And if you withhold difficult truths from your audience, you make them weak.
You're like the personal trainer who says, Hey, man.
Here's another bag of no-name potato chips.
Just sit on the couch.
Maybe I'll give you an oil massage, but you don't really need to.
He's like, oh, that man, that feels great.
Chips taste good.
Couch feels good.
Fall asleep, I will.
Live long, I will not.
When you withhold difficult truths from people, you make people weak.
Conformation bias is the osteoporosis of mental integrity.
I hear what I want to hear.
I don't develop the staunch strength to accept and process opinions that go against my emotional grain, that go against my intellectual perceptions.
Sophists make you weak.
Because when you're weak, you need the sophist.
When you're weak, you need the state.
I can't have free speech.
I can't debate.
Because I don't like being around opposing opinions.
I can't debate.
So I need laws to keep unpopular opinions.
I need to pull fire alarms.
I need to make Acid attack and events threats against people because I can't handle opposing opinions.
Why?
Because opposing opinions have been withheld from me by the schools and by the universities and by the mainstream media who tell you what you want to hear like a kid being bought off from a tantrum with a candy bar.
But he wants his candy!
Doesn't mean he should get his candy at all.
This is horrifying stuff.
It doesn't take a lot of historical view to recognize and understand just where this leads.
If you reject reality for long enough, you have no future.
Individually, socially, culturally, nationalistically.
This is a...
An argument out there in the world that if you lie to a woman to get laid, that's kind of rape.
I will leave it to you.
My truly beloved audience, and thank you so much for supporting the show, for listening, for being open-minded, for accepting the potential value of the arguments I put forward, for pushing back, for making me better at what I do, for supporting and donating to the show, which is the only reason it exists.
Please help out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Please, please, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Help me bring more philosophy to an increasingly thirsty and desperate world.
It is our only chance.
But I've gone through a bunch of different words and phrases in my head.
None of them are very satisfying to me.
So I leave this to you, my truly beloved audience.
If the argument is...
That lying to a woman to get sex is a form of rape.
I'm not saying it's a good argument.
I'm saying if that is an argument.
What do we call the act of propagandizing a population into hatred and slavery for mere ratings, money, and power?
What would you call that?
Let me know in the comments below because I can't figure it out.
And thank you so much again for listening and for watching.
Don't forget to like, subscribe.
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