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Nov. 11, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:31
3891 REMEMBRANCE DAY

As many honor and mourn those who died in military service to their respective countries on Remembrance Day, Stefan Molyneux suggests also honoring those who have tirelessly worked to prevent the human-slaughterhouse of war.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

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Had a dream last night.
This morning, in fact.
It was wild.
I was in a movie.
A heroic movie.
And I was in a choir in the movie.
And the director of the movie was getting really upset.
Because everyone in the choir was singing very tentatively, very softly.
And it didn't have the power of...
United voices that was needed for the heroism to be achieved.
And the director was really frustrated because he couldn't get everyone to sing with the martial power that was necessary for inspiration.
And I jumped up on scaffolding and hung off the cold poles and yelled down at the crowd in my most evocative manner.
And I said this, I said, first of all, if you are afraid that your voice isn't that great, everybody who sings softly is only revealing that they feel their voice is not strong or good.
Because when you sing softly, you're hoping to be drowned out by everyone else.
Now, we are a team.
We have come together for a purpose to inspire heroism in the world.
And As a team, we must support each other, and that means singing loudly and strongly.
Because if you don't have a great voice when everyone is singing loudly, it will tend not to matter.
I mean, you know, just think of the old World War I. It's a long way to Tipperary.
It's a long way to go.
There was hearty singing from soldiers, and nobody cared.
They cared... That the chorus, that the singers sounded strong and confident.
They didn't care about the quality of the individual voices.
When we merge together, our voices are enormous.
And singing quality does not matter as much as heroic intention.
I said that. And I said, well, we have a responsibility.
We've kind of signed up for this.
We have a responsibility to provide the director what he wants.
To inspire the hero, to inspire the audience to greatness.
And that means casting aside insecurities, committing yourself, singing loudly and proudly, and joining together as one.
Then it worked. The...
Dream is not very subtle.
The analogy of we are afraid of being singled out for a weak voice, therefore we sing softly, thus bringing down the heroism of any particular movement or approach is very clear.
We must stick with each other.
We must raise our voices.
We must find harmony in passion.
And insecurity merely loses the future.
Because insecurity is a great thing.
Doubt is a great thing.
It is the foundation of philosophy, of science.
Humility is a great thing.
To subject your conjectures, your hypotheses, your thoughts, your arguments to reason and evidence is a great thing.
We must have confidence in the methodology while being humble at the process.
The problem with universal insecurity is that there are bad people in the world And it's somewhat known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, while the less competent and the less intelligent you are in any particular field, the easier you think it is to master that field.
And there are groups in the world who are entirely wrong and entirely confident.
The wrongness of their position is revealed by the methodology of reason and evidence.
We must have confidence in that.
Not in ourselves, not in our individual judgment, but in the process of reasoning and evidence.
And the reason, I think, I dreamt this.
I'm taking a tiny bit of a risk, I suppose, today.
November the 11th, 2017.
It is, of course, Remembrance Day.
And I have done shows before talking about the soldiers and...
I still stand by everything that I've said before, and I did not want to hijack this moment of reflection on martial heroism in order to twist it for some other agenda.
But I think the dream and what I was reading about this morning is important.
We remember those who have died in the sparks of sword-crossed battles.
We remember those who Whose toes were snapped off with frostbite and whose knees were bitten by feral rats in some soupy, stinky, mustard-gas-laced World War I trench, we remember the civilians standing and shaking their fists at the searchlight-stabbed sky over London in 1940 under the bombardment of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force.
We see amputees, double, triple, quadruple amputees who have returned from battle and who modern medicine has rescued from yet another white-crossed grave in Arlington.
And we respect their sacrifice.
But what is not often talked about, not often enough, is those who work to prevent war.
War is a cure born of massive extremity.
It is like the chemo of society.
It's what happens when the only alternative is extinction.
It is a poison, in a sense, that kills sometimes as much health as sickness, in that when there is a war, the state grows.
War is the health of the state, as the saying goes.
When war spreads, the state grows, and the state never returns back to its original size and shape.
Brought fiat currency, the Second World War.
Bought a third of the world and draped in the iron curtains of asphyxiating communism.
The war on terror has spread and expanded terrorism in many ways.
The state never shrinks back to where it started after we fight a war and bleed a war and die in a war for freedom.
This year, I think, I'd like to take a moment to have you think about those who've worked hard to prevent war, who've worked hard to substitute reason, evidence, philosophy, critical thinking, negotiation, arguments, The Art of the Argument, my new book.
I hope you'll check it out. Those who attempt to substitute reason for violence, negotiation for force, and who are often taken down In bloody or poisoned ways by the very society they seek to sway from the arbitration of steel and spurting jugulars of death and raining limbs and exploded cities and destroyed civilizations and radiation.
Those who strive to prevent the scourge of war are not often as celebrated as those who are caught up in what happens when society fails to listen to philosophers and often Throws them in jail, kills them, tortures them, harangues them, and harasses them legally.
When society, and it's a choice, when society fails to listen to philosophy, not philosophers, I guess, in particular, but the very process of philosophy, of subjugating the angry Darwinian will to the strictness, the universality, and the humility of reason and evidence.
It is reason and evidence that determine the value of our propositions, not our sophistry, not our eloquence, not our charisma, not our will, certainly not our weapons.
So I thought I'd run through a few of these heroes, unsung heroes, genuinely unsung heroes.
Of course, everyone knows Socrates, 399 BCE, condemned to death for the twin...
Sins that philosophers are generally accused of.
Corrupting the young, which means teaching the young to think for themselves and question the automatic power and wisdom and benevolence of their elders.
Corrupting the young and failing to believe in the gods of the city.
Now the gods of the city used to be pretty specific.
Quasi-human deities.
Now the gods of the cities are things like diversity and the moral value of taxation and intergenerational debt.
All of the open borders.
These are the new gods of the city, and if you question them, well, Socrates was condemned to death, forced to drink hemlock among his friends, and you can read more about that in Plato's Republic.
I've also done a six-part series on the trial and death of Socrates, which you can check out.
320 BCE, Nakari on the Thailand had Anaxarchus pounded to death in a mortar with iron pestles.
This was a Anaxarchus was a companion and friend of Alexander the Great during his Asiatic campaign.
And he actually made Alexander the Great weep because he said there was an infinite number of worlds.
And Alexander the Great wept because he said, and here I have not conquered even one.
And he specifically resisted the concept that gods were divine.
Gods were, of course, initially specifically divine, and then through the divine rite of kings in the Christian period, they were infused with the spirit of divinity.
They were moved by God himself, and to disobey the king was to disobey God.
And when Alexander claimed to have been the son of Zeus and Ammon, Anaxarchus pointed to a wound that Alexander has that was bleeding.
And he said, see the blood of a mortal, not ichor, such as flows from the veins of the immortal gods.
He is a mere mortal.
65, C.E. Seneca, known as the Younger sometimes, was forced to commit suicide because he fell out with Emperor Nero.
There was a Bisonian conspiracy, a plot to kill Nero, and it It does not seem very likely that Seneca was part of this plot, but Nero, nonetheless, ordered him to kill himself, and he severed several of his veins to bleed to death, and his wife attempted to share his fate.
He succeeded. 526.
Bothius strangled on the orders of the Ostrogoth king.
Theodoric, who was his employer.
1180, Abraham Ibn Dowd, martyred.
1415, John Hus, executed at the Council of Constance.
He had heresy against the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.
He had different theories on ecclesiology, other theological topics, the Eucharist as well.
1535, Star of a Man for All Seasons, a great play, Thomas More, executed by beheading.
After He was turned on by King Henry VIII. 1572, Girolamo Maggi was strangled to death on the orders of a prison captain in Constantinople.
1572, Peter Ramos was murdered in the St.
Bartholomew's Day's massacre.
1600, the Inquisition burnt Giordano Bruno to death.
1619, This is a guy you should probably know and read more about.
Algernon, Sydney. 1683, he was executed for treason.
As the old saying goes, treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason? Why? If it prosper, none dare call it treason.
His most famous work was called Discourses on Government, and that is the one that cost him his head.
And he was, along with John Locke, his writings are considered a cornerstone of Western political thought around limitation of state power.
He himself opposed the divine right of King's political theory, and he said, gosh, you know, it'd be great, limited government, by and for the people, according to the consent of the people, that the government is a servant of the people, and that citizens have the right to alter or abolish a government that has become irredeemably corrupt.
This book, Discourses on Revolution, has been called the textbook of the American Revolution.
He was very brave even up to the scaffold.
He was arguing that his conviction was unlawful.
He said that the quality of the evidence against him was faulty.
There were deviations from legal proceedings during his trial.
And he also reiterated his very strong objections to absolutist, divinely inspired monarchy, which is from his discourses concerning government, and said this is not treason, this is reason.
It's just one little t-word between treason and reason.
He said that he did not Described truly great matters in his final speech from the scaffold because, and he said, and I quote, we live in an age that makes truth pass for treason.
I think we all know what that means.
There was, of course, a lot of people who resisted the spread of communism, 100th year anniversary, this, uh, Yeah, spread of communism.
1937, Gustav Spett executed because he was accused of being involved in an anti-Soviet organization.
This guy was a genius, Ukrainian and Russian philosopher.
He was a psychologist, art theoretician, and interpreter.
The guy knew 17 languages.
There's many, many examples.
1939, Stanislaw Ignasky Witkiewicz committed suicide.
He took an overdose of Vernal and trying to slit his wrists.
A day after the Soviets invaded Poland.
His close friend was supposed to join him in a suicide pact, but she survived the attempt.
And I don't agree, of course, with everything that these philosophers say, but the point is that they did not murder their ideological opponents.
They did not call for the force and power of the state to silence those with whom they disagreed.
They committed themselves to writing, to rhetoric, to eloquence, to reason.
This does not mean that everything they reasoned was true any more than everything that I reasoned is true, but it means that they committed themselves to the process.
And when we talk about fallen heroes, when reason fails, war emerges.
When conversation stops, swords are unsheathed.
When the sparks of verbal debate diminish into the night of a new dark age.
It is the sparks of swords and blades and severings and bleedings that take their place.
We have for many years spent November the 11th in mourning, in remembrance, in recognition for those who have lost their lives in a war and there are the declared wars and a lot of the men who fought in the declared wars were victims themselves having been forced or indoctrinated into the army and fought for purposes they do not understand for consequences they scarce would have countenanced but there is of course another battle and war is a symptom of the last battle of reason and those who have stood up for reason throughout history and paid for it with their lives Well,
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