Aug. 4, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:54
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| Hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. Welcome to your daily arguments. | |
| It's kind of hot out here, my friends. | |
| Hot! So hot! I can cook things in them. | |
| So I want to talk about the red pill. | |
| You know, this argument or the idea that there's something that enters into your system that radically reshapes your relationship with social reality. | |
| And tell me in the comments below, I'm curious, what was your biggest red pill thing? | |
| So I was thinking about this morning as I want to do when grazing over my... | |
| And I was thinking that for me, it's a sort of Greg House principle from House MD, this idea like everybody lies. | |
| Everybody in power lies. | |
| With, you know, maybe a few exceptions, but most everyone. | |
| And... I was thinking about it just in terms of how glibly people lie. | |
| You know, I mean, lying should make you uncomfortable. | |
| You know, even if it's an absolute moral necessity to save the lives of your loved ones or whatever. | |
| I mean, lying shouldn't make you that. | |
| But people just, they just glibly... | |
| You know, like they're standing on solid earth. | |
| There's no thin ice, no sense of danger. | |
| Just glibly lie and stick to their statements and pushback or rebuttals or rejections just don't seem to mean a damn thing to them at all. | |
| And I think about this, you know, 97% of climate scientists say anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming and And the wage gender gap between men and women and the wage gap between, say, Japanese and blacks is because of racism. | |
| They know, they're just absolutely certain. | |
| And these falsehoods, how much people lie who have control over you, particularly when you're young and relatively defenseless intellectually and need the approval of the powers that be, whether they're principals or teachers or parents or priests or whatever, you need their approval. | |
| There is so much falsehood that goes on. | |
| That, to me, is absolutely astounding. | |
| Diversity is a strength. | |
| Well, of course, it is a strength to the left because third world immigrants vote for leftist policy. | |
| So, of course, it's a strength to them. It's just a weakness. | |
| You know, whites vote for smaller government and third world immigrants vote for a bigger government. | |
| That's a very... You can put money on that and you win just about every single time. | |
| And so, how many lies are told? | |
| I mean, I've talked about this before, but I remember... | |
| Driving in the States, I was helping a salesman, when I was an entrepreneur, I was helping a salesman sell a technical product, and I would do the technical part of the demonstration and answer technical questions. | |
| And on the radio, it came out about Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, you know, him getting blowjobs, semen on the dress. | |
| In the White House from this intern, he's using like a Kleenex. | |
| And the fact that he was putting cigars up her vagina. | |
| I just remember thinking like, oh my God, this is going to change everything. | |
| This is going to change everything because I've been told about cigars. | |
| Sexual harassment in the workplace. | |
| I've been told that power disparities make sexual contact akin to assault. | |
| I've been told just how terrible it is for men to abuse their power. | |
| And of course, there's no greater power disparity in the universe, really, between an intern and the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States. | |
| And I just remember thinking, man, that's it. | |
| They tore Nixon up because of tapes in a third-rate break-in where people got like 10-plus years in prison with no prior convictions in a break-in where little was broken and little was stolen. | |
| I mean, it's just incredible. So I remember thinking, man, that's it. | |
| These standards are just going to chew the Clintons up. | |
| And it wasn't like And therefore, everything's going to be alright. | |
| But it was like, this was the stand. | |
| This was the time when I said, okay, society has its standards and its morals, which have been, you know, ground into me over and over again. | |
| And the standards and sexism and don't use women as sex objects and don't be a patriarch. | |
| And this is, I mean, come on. | |
| You couldn't get a more textbook example of this. | |
| You put this in a movie, people would say it's way too obvious. | |
| And I remember just thinking that there was going to be this silent thunderclap across the human landscape, particularly in America, but around the world, and that this guy was just going to get torn up. | |
| And then, the most amazing... | |
| It's like that old Monty Python bit. | |
| And then... Nothing happened. | |
| Nothing happened. Nothing happened. | |
| I mean, the Republicans impeached him, they tried him, he perjured himself, he lost his law license, but he sailed on. | |
| He sailed on. | |
| And the feminists rushed to his defense. | |
| Hell, I'll give him a blowjob if he allows women to continue killing their unborn children. | |
| And I remember thinking, wow, okay. | |
| It was a big moment for me. | |
| I mean, I'd had a lot of things before, but you see, here's the thing. | |
| So before, when I was an objectivist, I was like, you know, taxation is theft, and the government should have concerned itself with police, military, law courts, and so on, and all of that. | |
| And... So I knew that people didn't share those values. | |
| I didn't consider them hypocritical for opposing me on those positions because they didn't hold those values. | |
| Those values were relatively new to people. | |
| They were shocking. They were alarming. | |
| But this was the first time when I clearly, clearly remember thinking, oh my God, they do hold these values and they don't hold these values at all. | |
| Oh, man. So the thunderclap And the sort of atomic disintegration that I thought was going to happen in society actually happened to me. | |
| Society barely touched anything. | |
| But me? I mean, that was a... | |
| Talk about a house of cards coming down. | |
| I mean, for me, that was just an amazing, powerful, wild moment where I thought, man, It's way worse than I thought. | |
| Because, like, if people have bad values, but they have integrity to those bad values, at least they have integrity, which means that if you can shift them to better values, well, it's like turning the sail of a sailboat. | |
| The sailboat's going to change direction. | |
| If people have integrity to bad values, then they are... | |
| Not honorable, but misguided. | |
| And therefore, if you give them better information and better values, but they have integrity, then the integrity will then cause them to pursue those better values, those good values, those true honest values, assiduously and purposefully and honestly. | |
| But that moment was like, okay, this is the first time, the first time when I have seen Massive entire segments of society who have invested decades into the promulgation of particular values, throw those values completely out of the window when it comes to political expediency. | |
| And that was when I really just, oh my God, I just like rocked my world, baby. | |
| It rocked my world. | |
| And that's when I really began to focus less on Mere abstract arguments began to focus more on self-knowledge. | |
| And if you can't confront your own capacity for evil, if you can't confront your own capacity for corruption, for manipulation, if you can't recognize that you two have the power and indeed the impulse to use ethics as a manipulative tool of resource gathering rather than an abstract program of ideal virtue to be followed, then you're going to be a dangerous person in the world. | |
| You just really are I began to really think, okay, well, ethics are invented to gain conformity among people. | |
| Ethics are invented as a system of control. | |
| Ethics were invented as a way of capturing and fencing in people. | |
| If you get the livestock to stay in a perimeter of their own volition, you don't need to build fences. | |
| You don't need to run electricity through those fences. | |
| It's way cheaper. It becomes way more profitable. | |
| If your livestock are self-fencing and it becomes way more profitable if people think that you're about morals and therefore will restrain their own behavior rather than they know that you're not about morals and therefore it's a game of cat and mouse and whack-a-mole and it's a strategic, it's nothing to do with good, bad, right, wrong. | |
| And that ethics may well have been invented. | |
| As a mechanism of human control, and attempting to wrestle ethics back from a system of human control to a system of objective and virtuous standards is not upgrading ethics. | |
| It is taking it and reversing it from its original intent. | |
| That is really, really a tough thing to do, and it's one of the reasons I really began to pursue self-knowledge, understanding history, and the examination of You know, the sun and moon and midnight in every human heart, that it's very tempting to convince people of the good when it turns out the good is just good for you. | |
| The powers that be will tell you that taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society, that the welfare state helps the poor, that Obamacare is there to help the poor, that socialized medicine helps the sick, that government education, without it, nobody would be educated, because they know you care about these things. | |
| And the fact that these things don't deliver what is promised, or if they do it for a very short time while building up massive amounts of debt, that they don't want you to know. | |
| That was my biggest red pill. | |
| I'm curious. I'm curious. Tell me what is yours. | |
| I look forward to your responses. |
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