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July 3, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:50
3733 What Pisses Me Off About Independence Day | Fourth of July
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Hey America, I want to wish you...
A very happy Independence Day.
But there's a few things that we need to clear up first.
Enjoy your burgers, your booze, your friends, your family, your reunions, your picnics.
Enjoy it all.
Relish it.
Drink it up in the shrinking circle of liberty that currently sustains you.
There's a few things we need to clear up first.
And then you can have a great time with a good conscience, which makes all the difference in the world, really.
241 years ago, July 4th, 1776, the Continental Congress declared that the 13 American colonies regarded themselves as a new nation, the United States of America.
They detached themselves, I guess as England was later to do, from a larger conglomeration.
The United States of America was no longer part of the British Empire.
Now, the Congress actually voted to declare independence on July 2nd, 1776, two days earlier.
So what is Independence Day these days?
What do you see on the news?
What do you see on television?
What do you see in your neighborhood?
Well, for those who are waving the American flag, and like some of American friends who've arrived south from the border...
Independence Day is fireworks, parades, concerts, barbecues, carnivals, fairs, picnics, baseball games, reunions, fun, food, often fat.
Who built what you celebrate with such a slavish submission to the senses?
Who came?
Who conquered the wilderness?
Who carved a new nation from what existed already?
What should you be grateful for?
And how should that gratitude manifest itself?
In stuffing your faces and watching fireworks?
Sure!
That's fun too!
But what do you really owe the people who came?
Do you know how bad it was to come to America?
How hard it was To come to America.
Let's go to 1750.
This is an eyewitness account of the voyage from England to America.
An unbelievably horrifying seven-week voyage.
Now, a lot of the people who immigrated to America were too poor to pay for their passage.
So the way that they got across was to sell themselves into indentured slavery to people who'd come before who had more money.
So you'd sell your services for a number of years in return for having your passage paid over.
There's a tiny wooden ship rolling and rocking, the sea pounding all over the place.
Hardships that are scarcely imaginable to us today.
So here is an eyewitness of what people had to suffer to build what you enjoy.
During the voyage, there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably.
Add to the want of provisions hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations together with other trouble, as e.g.
the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body.
The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights and days so that everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board.
In such a visitation, the people cry and pray most piteously.
No one can have an idea of the sufferings which women in confinement have to bear with their innocent children on board these days.
Few of this class escape with their lives.
Many a mother is cast into the water with her child as soon as she is dead.
One day, just as we had a heavy gale, a woman in our ship, who was to give birth and could not give birth under the circumstances, was pushed through a porthole in the ship and dropped into the sea because she was far in the rear of the ship and could not be brought forward.
Children from one to seven years rarely survive the voyage, and many a time parents are compelled to see their children miserably suffer and die from hunger, thirst, and sickness, and then to see them cast into the water.
I witnessed such misery in no less than thirty-two children in our ship, all of whom were thrown into the sea.
The parents grieve all the more since their children find no resting place in the earth but are devoured by the monsters of the sea.
It is a notable fact that children who have not yet had the measles or smallpox generally get them on board the ship and mostly die of them.
When the ships have landed at Philadelphia after their long voyage, no one is permitted to leave them, except those who pay for their passage or can give good security.
The others who cannot pay must remain on board the ships till they are purchased and are released from the ships by their purchasers.
The sick always fare the worst, for the healthy are naturally preferred and purchased first, and so the sick and wretched must often remain on board in front of the city for two or three weeks and frequently die, whereas many a one, if he could pay his debts and were permitted to leave the ship immediately, might recover and remain alive.
The sale of human beings in the market on board the ship is carried on thus.
Every day, Englishmen, Dutchmen and high German people come from the city of Philadelphia and other places, in part from a great distance, say 20, 30 or 40 hours away, and go on board the newly arrived ship that has brought And offers for sale passengers from Europe and select among the healthy persons such as they deem suitable for their business and bargain with them how long they will serve for their passage money, which most of them are still in debt for.
When they have come to an agreement, it happens that adult persons bind themselves in writing to serve three, four, five, or six years for the amount due by them, according to their age and strength.
But very young people from 10 to 15 years must serve till they are 21 years old.
Many parents must.
Sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle, for if their children take the debt upon themselves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained.
But as the parents often do not know where and to what people their children are going, it often happens that such parents and children, after leaving the ship, do not see each other again for many years, perhaps no more in all their lives.
It often happens that whole families, husband, wife, and children are separated by being sold to different purchases, especially when they have not paid any part of their passage money.
When a husband or wife has died at sea, when the ship has made more than half of her trip, the survivor must pay or serve not only for himself or herself, but also for the deceased.
When both parents have died over halfway at sea, their children, especially when they are young and have nothing to pawn or to pay, must stand for their own and their parents' passage and serve till they are twenty-one years old.
This is what it took to come to the new world, to forge in the furnace of labor and debt and enslavement the freest country the world has ever seen.
And imagine What your thought would have been of your own potential to risk death to escape the serfdom and the bondage and the religious wars of Europe, to come to a land where what awaited you, But at least only a temporary serfdom back-breaking labor.
New diseases, attacks from the indigenous population.
But freedom.
Imagine how much you must hate subjugation to risk such a voyage.
you To simply breathe free.
I wonder if the sick and dying in the hold of the ship unable to leave their watery prison perhaps could breathe in the air through the porthole and say, I breathe free air before I die, and that will have to be enough.
The smartest people came to America.
If you're not smart, if you're not ambitious, if you're not thirsty to stretch yourself to your full potential, if you're not mad for ambition, you stay in Europe.
A third of the people who came to America in the 19th century went back.
It was the smartest people who came.
Because smart people...
We prefer freedom with the risk of death to the security and living death of subjugation to the state or to a theocracy.
The smartest people will claw their way out of enslaving societies like a man prematurely buried will break his fingernails on the velvet of his coffin.
To try and scrape his way through the six feet back to air, back to light, back to humanity.
The smartest people came and they wanted nothing to do with the state.
You could live your whole life in the new world and never be touched by the government and never be touched by the state.
The frontier, they talk about it as the Wild West, lots of shootings.
No, it was peaceful.
The real predators, the real thieves.
Enter the halls of power, which barely existed in the New World.
There was very little crime on the frontier.
Criminals prefer cities where the prey is easy and concentrated, and the eloquent and the evil prefer, in general, politics.
So, the smartest people came because they would rather risk their lives to breathe free than continue in the world that was.
And these are the people who built the greatest nation in the history of the world.
The nation that saved the West.
The nation that was the shining city on the hill.
The nation that To which the grateful nation of France bestowed the Statue of Liberty.
The nation that invited all who wished to taste freedom, not feed off the public purse through welfare parasitism, but breathe freedom and contribute to the market and the tapestry and the culture and the art of America.
This was a population That devoured books as complicated as Moby Dick.
This was a population that read Thomas Paine.
This was a population that debated freedom.
This is a population estimated to be one to two times a standard deviation smarter than the Morlocks who still inhabit the red, white, and blue.
Because all the values that were founded on such hardship, and we avoid hardship now.
We wish for a life of soft ease.
We wish for a life of no disturbance.
We wish for a life of artificial challenges.
But coal is turned into diamond by pressure.
Sparks accompany the sharpening of a sword.
We avoid suffering.
Because we do not respect the strength that suffering will give us.
And we think that by avoiding suffering we live an easy life, but by avoiding suffering we degenerate.
The avoidance of suffering is one fundamental reason for the endless entropy and decay of values in the West.
Because when you have a free society, You have inequality.
There's a bell curve of intelligence.
There's a bell curve of ambition.
Personalities are different.
Inequality.
Freedom produces inequality.
Now, the rising tide lifts all boats.
But the boats end up different sizes.
Freedom produces inequality.
And then, with inequality, you get the resentment of people who are not told why they're poor.
In America, the poor spend 40% of their income on luxuries.
Average poor two-person household, the parents work 15 hours a week.
Or the two people work 15 hours a week.
Why are you poor?
Why are you poor?
It has something to do with whether you're smart and it has something to do with whether you work.
But rather than say to people, it is not the fault of the rich that you are poor, people come slithering in from the old world as well.
Ancient thoughts, ancient faiths slithered in.
And said to the poor, you are poor because the rich have stolen everything from you.
You are poor because the predators, the robber barons, the capitalists, the owners of the means of production have hoarded everything from you and stripped from you what was rightfully yours and stolen and exploited and subjugated and robbed.
So we'll fix that all with the state you provoke rage against the successful.
And that rage coagulates into a cyst of resentment.
And resentment breeds the capacity to prey through the state on the productive and redirect resources from those who have the most capacity to increase it into your frivolous and wasteful fingers.
The poor outnumber the rich.
When the socialists provoke resentment among the poor, the poor use democracy to vote away the wealth of the rich, and everyone in time starves.
We should celebrate inequality.
Everybody treasures inequality when they're a consumer.
We want the people best at making smartphones making smartphones.
We want the best singers and songwriters to be Mainlining the concert!
You can't charge much for karaoke.
We all treasure inequality when we are consumers.
But then, when we are offered the satanic poison fruit of redistributed income through the force of the state, suddenly inequality becomes just terrible, and it must be fixed with the sword of the state.
And that is how the values that created this productivity decay and die.
A big part of this is of course government schools.
John Dewey pushed for government schools, was instrumental in getting them developed.
Guy was an out-and-out socialist who wished to sell you the great lie of equality without subjugation, of equality without violence.
Of an equality that lifts everyone up rather than lowers everyone down to an equal pit of pigeon-hunting Venezuelan misery.
And when you got government schools, what happened?
When you have different beliefs in society, parents want their children to learn values.
Frankly, Facts are less important than values.
It is better to be good than no trivia.
It is better to be moral than memorize mere facts.
Facts are essential and important.
But when you think about the decisions that you make as an adult, do you make more decisions relative to the triangle inequality theorem you learned in grade 8 or to the fundamental core values that guide your life, that guide your choices, that guide your relationships?
But guide your moral courage or convince it to sit back and let the detritus of history rule over your future.
When you get government schools, you start jamming people of different beliefs and faiths and values into the same place.
And then what happens is, whatever you teach is going to offend someone.
You teach the separation of church and state, that's going to offend people who don't like that separation of church and state.
You teach Christian values, that's going to offend non-Christians, so you have to strip it out and strip it out.
And the whole point of education is moral education.
Facts you can look up, morals you must embody.
They must be netted into your bone marrow through repetition, enthusiasm, ostracism, and excitement.
You must learn to sacrifice.
Facts require no sacrifice.
Morals require that you believe in something larger than yourself, something that you can serve.
Morals put you in the great chain of history.
Another link in the chain of history, the chain of truth, of philosophy that breaks the chains of subjugation and control.
You get government schools' values.
Virtues must be stripped out.
And you are left with a boring cycle of brain-deadening trivia that teaches you that books are things to slowly thump you in the head until you fall asleep for the rest of your life.
Knowledge is boredom.
Learning is loss.
Because nothing excites you, nothing guides you, nothing makes the world comprehensible.
We can never comprehend the world through facts.
Science will never give us meaning.
Virtue.
Ethics.
Something to strive for, something to fight for, something to defend.
That gives us meaning.
And we all want meaning without risk.
We want meaning that requires no courage.
We want to have value, but not expend one calorie defending it.
Meaning is danger.
Meaning is discomforted.
Anybody who offers you easy meaning is the fiat currency that inflates your ego and bursts the future.
So when values get stripped out of government schools, the only values that remain in society are those taught at home, outside the school.
You've got two parent working households.
How are they going to teach a lot of values?
You have people who've fallen away from the great faith of the West, from Christianity.
What do they teach their children?
Tolerance.
Multiculturalism.
Anti-racism.
These aren't enough.
Tolerance is saying all values are the same.
Tolerance is anti-values.
Tolerance is like going to a hospital which fully believes that sickness and health are of equal value and turning your future over to the care of such pretend doctors.
And so what happens is the existing culture gets scrubbed of values.
New cultures come in with greater values who are willing to teach values at home.
And so those new values begin to gain ascendancy in social discourse.
Because the nihilism of the existing culture and its lack of values taught at home.
Single moms.
Values a single mom is going to teach.
It's important to sacrifice.
Well, you broke up the marriage or you...
Became pregnant by a guy.
You either drove off if he was a good guy or was a bad guy and you shouldn't have gotten pregnant by him.
What are they going to teach?
You're dependent on the state for survival.
What are you going to teach?
Small government?
Whereas the single moms reducing the National Debt Association doesn't exist.
What are you going to teach?
Manipulation, politics, rage, the defense of the unjustly acquired.
When you turn your children over to the state, you turn your future over to propaganda.
And when new people come to America, to the West, not because they treasure freedom, opportunity, liberty, small government, property rights, contract, independence.
When they are bribed to come through the welfare state, through food stamps, through government programs and government transfers of every conceivable kind, through free healthcare, free education, free this, free that.
You want free stuff or you want freedom?
The two are complete opposites and only one will dominate over time.
When people come to America not because they value freedom, but because they are bribed into voting for leftist governments with the promise of free stuff.
What are you going to teach those people who come to the West?
Are you going to teach them about the glories and sophistication and moral power and strength of the West?
Are you going to teach people that the West invented political freedom?
Are you going to teach people that the West invented philosophy?
Are you going to teach people that the West ended slavery and produced rights for women, which had never before been seen in human society?
The West is the best.
Are you going to teach that?
Well, if people come to the West because they love the West, this will not be controversial.
If I go to a French restaurant and they serve me French food, I'm happy.
Kebab?
Not so much.
If you come to the West because you love freedom, being taught that the West is the center of human freedom will not offend you.
It will reaffirm your decision.
It will prove the wisdom of your sacrifice in moving.
But if you come to the West for free stuff, you will be opposed to small government, opposed to property rights, opposed to lower taxation, opposed to freedom.
The welfare state brings in people antithetical to the source of the wealth that produces the capacity for the welfare state.
It is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
So if you start teaching the West is the best in the West, the people who've come for free stuff get angry, get offended, cause trouble.
So now you must teach not the glories of the West, not the virtues of the West.
You must now endlessly parade the zombified, scare-headed sins of the West.
The West, prior to To oppose immigration prior to opposed assimilation.
It's like Adam before Eve in paradise.
But after governments take over schools, you begin this insidious and invidious process of teaching that the history of the West is nothing but a catalogue of the greatest and sole crimes in human history.
And you end up being trained to hate yourself, to hate your history.
You end up being a tree not chopped down in an honest fashion but poisoned in the roots.
And you end up living and dying in a world where you and your culture and your history are always wrong.
Always wrong.
And you are given...
The cheap, pig-snout, resource-pillaging facade of democracy instead of the limited republic that was the ideal of the Founding Fathers.
Democracy is the suicidal cocaine of the species.
I'm great!
I'm happy!
Things are perfect!
I'm bleeding from the nose, and then I'm dead.
This is a quote from a great intellectual from the 18th and 19th century.
And this used to be common knowledge.
This used to be fought against.
The point of immigrants is to swell those who share your values and strengthen your society.
Not cheap labor or propping up left-wing parties or any of that crap.
This is what was known from the objective study of prior democracies and their demise.
Roman, Greek, you name it.
The list goes on and on.
This is what Alexander Fraser Tittler, also known as Lord Wood Housley, who was a Scottish lawyer and writer and professor, and a historian, this is what he said.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves, largesse, from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses of a loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence, from bondage to spiritual faith.
From spiritual faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependence.
From dependence back into bondage.
200 years.
America was founded 241 years ago.
1776 to 1965 was 189 years.
The Immigration Act, the welfare state, the warfare welfare state, imperialism.
Democracy died in the 60s.
Democracy died right on time.
What we have been Living on is the stored value of those who are far freer and better than us.
Two hundred years.
Democracy died right on time.
What comes back to life from democracy's corpse will be ferocious or fair.
It will be feral or free.
It will be little to nothing in between.
And which way it resurrects itself as a soulless dictatorship or living freedoms, that is up to you.
And this is why I wanted to talk to you about all of this.
Yes, I am eloquent.
Yes, I am passionate.
But I can win nothing.
I can do nothing.
The war of words cannot be won by the eloquent.
A war cannot be won by the generals.
Churchill's speeches did not win World War II. The war of words is up to you, the victory.
I can gather the seeds.
I can scatter the seeds.
You must prepare the soil.
You must have the conversations with those around you about what it means to be free, about what it means to be enslaved, about what it means to be courageous.
You must tell them, but most importantly, you must show them.
The West is dead.
We can learn the lessons and restore the freedoms to a greater extent than we even had before in a sustainable way.
Because we look back in history and we say to people all the time, why didn't you solve the problem while it was still solvable peacefully?
Why didn't you speak out Against the totalitarians?
Why didn't you push back against the communists?
Why didn't you push back against the fascists with eloquence and passion and power?
Why is history always about the bloody cures rather than the peaceful prevention?
Why didn't you?
You will, if you don't act, probably live long enough to curse your younger self for not acting when you could in a peaceful manner.
There's another quote from Thomas Paine, which you need to ponder, think about, to mull over.
Thomas Paine said, I prefer peace, but if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.
The time...
For pure peace has passed.
The time for war is yet to come.
Now is the time to fight with your courage, to fight with your words, to bring the truth to those around you so that the most eloquent among us will cast their soils into rich earth and not stony ignorance.
Fight now with words or you will be silenced and your children will know war.
And I dreamed I was dying.
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly, looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly.
And I dreamed I was flying.
And high up above my eyes could clearly see the Statue of Liberty.
Sailing away to sea.
And I dreamed I was dying.
Come back to life.
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