Aug. 27, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:37
3804 HOUSTON
Freedomain Mailing List Sign Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterWe Need Your Support: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donateThe fourth-largest city in the United States is underwater as Tropical Storm Harvey has lead to devastating flooding at a scale not seen since Hurricane Katrina. Stefan Molyneux discusses the unique human response to deadly natural disasters and the hope of individuals working together to help their fellow man. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We are a strange and heartbreaking species, we humans.
So much of what we do is fractious and nasty and vicious and undermining and we attack and we pilfer and we abuse.
Except in these emergencies, except in these state of disasters.
You know, this tropical storm Harvey that is currently lashing its way, or has lashed its way through Texas, leaving devastation and massive flooding, rainfall in its wake.
There's evacuations.
There are people who are trapped in their homes.
I've seen videos of people fishing in their homes.
It is all across the Houston area.
And there are stories...
Of incredible generosity, of kindness, of bravery, courage, help, people who've lived next to each other for years and barely spoken words to each other, helping each other.
There is a community and a commitment and a connection that occurs in the face of these disasters.
And it is Hopeful, and at the same time it's frustrating.
Hope and frustration often go hand in hand.
It is hopeful that we have this capacity to unite and to bond together, to put aside differences, and to be there for each other.
It is, of course, frustrating, and at times makes one despair, makes me despair, that it takes these kinds of crises to occur.
The political divisions, look at the Britain, or England in particular, in the 1930s, the political divisions were savage and huge.
And then when war came in September of 1939, and when the bombing started and the Battle of Britain occurred in the summer of 1941, a glorious summer in England, people were relatively cheerful.
People pulled together. People helped each other.
Though they faced death, they found life around them.
Death rained down from above, and compassion and hope and community arose in people's hearts.
Our potential for cooperation is so enormous that seeing it devolve into petty infighting so often in life, in the world, in the system that we live under, that grinds us down.
We have such capacity for courage and connection and community.
You know, there was a guy who wanted to know where monarch butterflies flew to when they He left Canada and America and flew south.
And he couldn't figure it out.
He couldn't follow them. So what he did was he tagged them, little tiny tags.
And this is long before computers, the internet in people's homes.
And he put this little tiny tag in and he put the word out and volunteers came together, thousands of them.
They'd catch these butterflies, they'd get these tags, and they would write back to this man where the monarchs were.
And he'd put the pins on the map and he began to figure out where the monarchs were going, and eventually he found it in Mexico where they ended up.
That world...
Don't you want to live in that world where people care enough about butterflies to track where they go, for no pay to volunteer to go and find them and report on them and for someone to track them?
To satisfy our curiosity for the beautiful.
Do you want to live in that world where people cooperate, where people care?
Because when there is danger, when there is the possibility of death, when there are these disasters, we know That we evolve to the basics.
We evolve to what is really important, that you want to live, that the petit frisson of your life is just a mere acidic foam that is covering up the true meat and metal of existence, your connection to those you love, your connection to yourself, your connection to virtue.
The Petty idiocy of life gets sandblasted away by disaster and we are revealed as courageous, compassionate mammals who need each other.
And to try and hold that, to try and catch that, to try and capture that, to try and maintain that is so important.
There's no reason why that mindset cannot continue.
After the disaster, there's no need for us to fall back into these petty, warring, vicious, verbally abusive, hateful tribesmen and tribeswomen.
We can retain that common humanity in the face of disaster after disaster.
In other words, there's no need to substitute the disaster of social, pointless social friction.
There's no need to substitute the pointless social friction for the actual natural disasters.
There's no need to manufacture the narcissism of tiny differences to replace the natural disasters that Mother Nature will so generously bestow upon us on a regular basis.
Some disasters we cannot avoid, other disasters we can, and we must.
And, of course, there are those who will take these disasters, who will take these horrors, and instead of attempting to help us build bridges to each other, we'll use it to further divide.
Ah, Katrina, the racism, The attacks on 9-11.
Well, now we need the Patriot Act and we need more imperialism and we need to sell more arms around the world and we need to invade countries.
Cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Rather than come together in humility and wisdom to try to understand what happened.
The reaction, the sword comes out of the scabbard.
The heads and the bodies fly.
And we consider ourselves evolved.
When we perceive ourselves to be living in a system or a situation of limited resources, we turn pretty mean.
You know, if you have enough food to get through the winter, easily, then you can have a party every weekend.
If there's ten people and only enough food for five, we get mean.
And the more we transfer resources from the free market to the state, the more those resources become win-lose limited.
The more the state takes over the economy, the more the state takes over healthcare, the more the state takes over race relations and gender relations and the family education, The fewer resources there are, and the more, if I have it, you don't, and if you have it, I don't, and we turn on each other.
A lack of freedom leads to viciousness.
And our capacity for sacrifice should not be provoked by imminent disaster.
Everybody knows that in order to change the system that we live under for the better, sacrifices are going to need to be made.
The government can't pay everyone every penny, it is promised.
It's impossible. It's not even close to possible.
Unfunded liabilities in the US like 10 times the GDP or so.
Sacrifices are going to need to be made.
And it's like if you ask people to make sacrifices in the absence of an immediate emergency, They go insane like you're stealing a four-year-old's Halloween candy.
But in a state of emergency, people will make sacrifices far greater.
Can we not find that capacity to make productive sacrifices, to give up our thirst for the unearned, for what we know was not allocated for?
Can we find a way to give up what we do not deserve and did not earn in the absence of emergency?
Or are we forever going to have to be schooled By brutal nature, by mortality, can we learn something from the angels, or do we forever have to be beaten into fatal wisdom by the devils?
Now, What we see in these kinds of disasters is that our capacity for kindness, our capacity to see through artificial barriers, our capacity to recognize our common humanity is virtually unlimited.
Our kindness can be unlimited, but for that, We need to love virtue.
I've argued before, I believe as strongly now as when I first argued it, if not more so, that love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
We cannot love each other without first loving virtue.
Once we love virtue, we can love each other.
And once we can love each other, the resource called love is not finite anymore.
What we thirst for, love, acceptance, approval, self-respect, become infinite resources and we may have infinite resources that further reinforces our capacity for kindness and courage and generosity and community.
And we look at what is done, I look, I look at what is done in these disastrous And I always ask myself, I always wonder why are the disasters necessary to produce this kind of connection, this kind of courage, this kind of togetherness, this love for your fellow man?
