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Jan. 17, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:38
3967 VERY STABLE GENIUS
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It's a very interesting question that bears a lot of deep and important thought, the question of what does it mean to be sane?
What does it mean to be crazy?
It is no mark of mental health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick system.
If you are not well-adjusted to a sick and evil system, then You may be crazy, like you may want some new or different sick or evil system.
Like you might be like the new mafia gang that wants to kick out the old mafia gang.
It's not the same as virtue.
But you may be sane if you're not well adjusted to a profoundly sick system.
Now, whatever lives long enough, as Nietzsche says, Whatever lives long enough becomes so saturated in rationality, pseudo-rationality, that its improbable origins become hard to conceive of, I'm paraphrasing.
When a system has lasted a generation or two, and certainly longer than that, then it becomes the norm and thinking outside the paradigms of that system become crazy.
You know, so when slavery, which existed for tens of thousands of years in all corners and aspects of human society, including the indigenous people in America, When people said, you know, I don't think slavery is moral, I don't think slavery is good, they were considered insane.
Not like, oh that's crazy, like, you're genuinely insane, morally insane.
And When people say, oh, I don't think the welfare state is moral.
It's like, well, you're crazy. There's no other conceivable way to help the poor.
You want them to die in the streets and so on.
And of course, the opposite is true.
Under the welfare state, the poor are going to do absolutely wretchedly when the government runs out of money and trying to find a viable alternative before.
It's crazy to jump out of a plane unless you have a parachute and the plane is heading into a mountain.
You understand, right? Now, the arbiters of what is sane have been a wide variety of groups throughout human history.
They've been politicians, they have been priests, they have been artists a lot of times as well.
And in the modern world, they tend to be sort of mental health professionals, so psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, and so on.
Now, I'm no professional, these are just my thoughts on the matter, but I certainly have considered it.
For a long time, mental health issues are rampant in my family of origin, and so, you know, if your family's prone to heart disease, you better exercise and eat well and learn what is healthy pretty damn quickly, or you won't do very well in the long run.
And in the past, of course, if you were profoundly maladjusted, you were demonically possessed, evil had taken over your system.
Because the system in the world is very hard to reform.
It's very hard to reform.
And if you can label people as crazy, then they can be excluded From social discourse.
You can brush aside their arguments.
It's a fundamental ad hominem.
And you see this, of course, all over the place.
In the West, at the moment, it comes from the left and the right.
So for the left, you know, anyone to the right of Mao Zedong is like a Nazi, is an alt-right, is, you know, supremacist, a white nationalist, whatever it is, right?
And that's just a way of saying, well, they're crazy slash evil, right?
And therefore, don't listen to their arguments.
Don't waste your time. It's a way of creating a big, fiery, alligator-filled moat.
Actually, that wouldn't really work because the alligators would be on fire, but you get the point.
It creates a big, fiery moat around a particular school of thought so that it can no longer ever be examined.
With any curiosity, it can only be condemned from a distance.
And so, if you can create an accumulation of insanity or evil and wrap it around a particular belief system, or a particular argument, a particular ideology, then people will no longer examine that ideology because Any more than, you know, you sort of go follow the crazy guy ranting on the street corner, write down what he says in case there are pearls of wisdom.
I mean, there may be, but it'll be pretty accidental to say the least.
So, when you have a system, all systems outside of like a purely free society, which I've talked about before, but all systems become progressively crazier.
Over time, statist systems become, like government, coercive systems, monopoly on violence systems become progressively crazier over time.
I mean, look at the early Roman Empire versus the late Roman Empire, and you can check out my truth about the history of the Roman Empire on this very channel.
It's a great presentation. It's an axiom that all organizations not specifically devoted to the right will inexorably become more and more leftist.
The Democrat Party of 2018 is a long, long way from the Democrat Party of JFK in the early 1960s.
It has been progressively taken over by leftists, if not outright communists in some contexts, and there are some arguments about that with regards to libertarianism and just other groups.
They just get progressively more and more Leftist, especially if they gain any kind of power.
So the arbiters of a system and its relationship to sanity versus insanity are very often gatekeepers to protect that existing system.
So I'll give you an example.
So under the Soviet Union, Under, of course, under Lenin, under Stalin.
In the Soviet Union, well, by definition, communism was perfect.
The Soviet Union was perfect.
And therefore, of course, anyone who failed to be happy, who failed to be well-adjusted, who failed to be content, who failed to be productive, because the system was perfect, anybody who failed to flourish within that system Must be crazy.
Must be mentally ill.
And this was, of course, where they put people who were dissidents.
I mean, sometimes they would go to gulags, of course, if they were evil, according to the regime, but if they were just maladjusted but not traitors or couldn't be branded as counter-revolutionaries or something, then they went to mental institutions where they would be tranquilized with enough narcotics to put down half a horde of horses.
And this You are not adjusted, therefore you must be crazy.
It's one of the great scenes in Western literature in 1984, when O'Brien says to Winston Smith, basically, the system, like, you have to let go of any kind of rationality to fit into the system.
If the party requires that you say two and two make five, then you must not only say, but genuinely believe that two and two make five, which is a confession of A crazy system, and postmodernism is that way as well.
You must both simultaneously, under postmodernism, very, very toxic, very leftist, under totalitarian style postmodernism, you must simultaneously believe that there is no such thing as truth, and no such thing as good and evil, and at the same time, those who oppose you are absolutely wrong and absolutely evil.
It's a fundamental sanity test that goes on, on the left.
It's like being a determinist.
If you're a determinist and you believe that no one is responsible, no one has a choice, everybody's just like rocks bouncing down a mountainside.
Nobody has any choice, nobody has any free will, nobody's moral responsibility.
You must simultaneously believe that nobody has any moral responsibility and then go around calling someone a racist and that it's bad and wrong for them to hold those views.
You have to simultaneously hold these two completely contradictory Positions and this system that we kind of have going on in the world.
Look at the millionaires, like the rich people who say, tax me more, tax me more, I want to pay more taxes.
Well, that's an insane thing because no one's stopping you.
Obviously, if you want to pay more taxes, write a check to the government.
They'll cash it. They might even write you a thank you note.
So this idea that you have to force someone to do something which they voluntarily really want to do.
It's like... I don't know, I mean, Freddie Mercury gets resurrected from the dead and does a one-time concert, and it's like, well, government, you've really got to force me to go, because I'm totally desperate to go.
Well, it's like, I want to make love with you, therefore you should rape me.
Like, it's a complete, if you want to do it, you don't need the government to do it.
So, this insane system, and like, once you reason from first principles, this is the challenge that philosophy brings to these systems.
It's all mental. The government is how we do good in society.
The government is a monopoly on violence.
A monopoly on violence is the only way we can do good in society.
The majority of people choose to help the poor through the welfare state, but without the welfare state, no one will help the poor.
The majority of people really care about the sick, but if the government doesn't force them to care about the sick, and to pay for the sick, pay for sick people, sick people will never be, like, I could go on all day, and I have for many, many years, but this is all, it's all crazy stuff.
When you start to reason from first principles, it becomes very difficult to look at the system and not just see crazy stuff spilling out all over the place.
It's that, you know, unplug the matrix or from the matrix kind of issue.
And psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health professionals in general, and lots of good exceptions, I've had a lot of them on the show, but my particular perception is there's a very challenging Profession for many people to be in because who benefits the most from objective, rational, healthy mental health services?
Well, it's children. It's children.
But children don't pay the bills.
Who pays the bills?
Governments, schools, parents, and so on, right?
So if a family is crazy, if a school system If a society is crazy in its relationship to children, well, what are mental health professionals supposed to do?
If they take the side of the children, then they are seriously criticizing the adults and the system, but it's the adults and the system that pays them.
It is a big problem.
If you are a psychiatrist that's involved with some school system in the West, some government school system, Well, if a child is not doing well in that school system, well, the school system is perfect, right?
Because the school system is basically communist.
It's why everything drifts leftwards, because the educational system is fundamentally communist, right?
From each according to their ability to each according to their needs, a foundational aspect of Marxist thinking, from the taxpayers to the children.
And so if you are a mental health professional in the school system and some kid is not doing well in the school system, Do you take on the entire system and attempt to change it so that it gives, say, boys?
Boys are doing terribly under the revamped school system that was massively changed to address an imaginary problem of female underperformance.
It was all anecdotal and false when the data was drilled down, but it doesn't matter because it's Gynocracy, female privilege.
So, do you say to the kid, oh yeah, the system is crazy, you're sane, you're being bullied, you're being pressured, you're being under-stimulated, you're being asked to learn in some girly manner if you're some sort of hyper-creative boy or whatever, and so let's take on and fix the system.
Do you sit down with the teacher and say, he's restless because you're boring?
He's not interested because your curriculum is not interesting.
He's a hands-on learner.
He needs this. Do you sit down and sort of change the whole?
Well, what can you do?
I mean, there are a few people who will take that on, but not many.
Not many. Most people respond directly to these kinds of incentives.
Or do you say to the kid, well, take these pills and everything will be fine.
The system is great.
If you're not working within the system, if you're not flourishing within the system, like communism, if you're not flourishing within the system, then you are the problem and you need to be fixed.
And the reason why pills, of course, are so seductive is that if you start to drill in and you find out that the kid is really ambitious, is really creative, you know, reads books on the side and programs computers and, you know, fixes cars and so on, is motivated, does care, sits in the library.
Well, what happens is then the kid is fine, which means the system is crazy, and you can't really fix the system.
And it's the same thing, I think, that happens with parents sometimes, with social workers and so on, right?
The parents are paying the bills, say, or the parents are responsible for the bills being paid, if it's being paid through the government.
And if the family is crazy, you can say to the parents, well, your kid's fine, you're nuts.
Or, you know, however diplomatically that happens, I don't know.
Well, then the parents are going to be mad at you, and can the parents make your life more difficult compared to the kid?
Well, sure. You know, they can quit, they can complain, whatever, right?
So this aspect is really a great and huge challenge.
Nobody really knows how to solve it as yet.
I think the identification of it is really, really important.
So the key to understand is that Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
Whoever pays the bills for mental health professionals is in general the system that is considered the sane, the healthy, the good system.
And anybody who fails to conform to that system, in a sense you're being paid To excuse the system, right?
You are being paid to demonize the non-conformists with labels, and you are being paid to excuse the system, to say basically, implicitly or explicitly, nothing wrong with the school system, nothing wrong with communism, It is you who need to be fixed.
And now, of course, it generally is biochemically, which is, well, a challenge to put it mildly.
So the other thing, too, is that a lot of people...
Who go through arts degrees, who go through these kind of mental health professional degrees, kind of end up on the left.
So, because they end up on the left, they have a very tough time looking at the mainstream media and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a sec, you guys are, you are fomenting and whipping into a rabid hysteria, a significant mental health crisis in America, and don't underestimate this, it's a huge issue.
In America, the Trump derangement syndrome, as it's been called, is a huge and real issue.
People are going nuts.
People are, like, marriages are breaking up.
People are unable to sleep.
People are just having a hell of a time because the media is constantly whipping up this frenzy of this crazy, lunatic, illegitimate, Russia-colluding, bomb-pushing, you know, North Korea-taunting madman.
To the point where when Donald Trump tweets out, he says something along the lines of, well, you know, I've been very lucky over the course of my life to have a great deal of mental stability.
I'm really, really smart. I'm a genius and I'm a stable genius at that too.
And why? I'm big in TV and build houses and businesses all over the world, tens of thousands, 10,000 plus employees.
And first time I tried to become president against 17 very talented contenders for the nomination, I became.
President, so I'm a genius, but I'm a stable genius, right?
Now, this drives some people nuts.
I don't know why. I mean, it seems true, right?
I don't know if it's Danny Kruger. You can't recognize competence other people unless you're competent in something yourself.
I don't know. But it's a true statement.
They're saying he's crazy. Psychiatrists are out there saying he's crazy.
And he's saying, no, I'm very, very stable.
And all of the evidence is that, of course, he is stable and functioning at a very, very super high level.
And he is a genius. Like, it just is.
It just is a fact. I mean, you can look at his SAT source, you can extrapolate his IQ and it's staggeringly high.
And his practical experience in the application of that genius over many decades has left him almost without peer, I think, in terms of pragmatic action in the world, certainly in the West.
And so, The people who are saying Donald Trump is crazy Well, they are facing a lot of upset from their patients.
And people have talked about this, mental health professionals have talked about this, and they've said, you know, my patients, they can't sleep, they're anxious, they're worried all the time, they're freaking out and so on.
Well, I mean, that's mostly the mainstream media, I think.
There is a sort of elemental, if you're dependent on the state, anybody who threatens the existing system or the existing structure is dangerous to you, kind of existential.
Freedom can be ferocious.
Two people dependent on the fruits of coercion, right?
So if you are dependent on the power of the state, economic liberty, lower taxes, more economic freedom, and so on, they, you know, creak past like a tiger on an old boat, you know, they just like crawling around while you're sitting down.
It's scary. It's terrifying.
Liberty is a predator.
To those dependent on state power.
And they're kind of freaking out.
And you add to that natural anxiety, which could be calmed by the media as a whole, could be calmed.
But the media is basically Iago these days.
It's whispering massively inflammatory falsehoods into the minds of unstable people.
And of course, with the goal, I think, unconsciously or consciously, it's with the goal of escalating.
You continue to broadcast these crazy escalations, and sooner or later, I mean, someone's gonna, well, they already have, someone's gonna try and act on it.
So the mental health professionals are facing, I think, in their patients a lot of anxiety, and a lot of that has to do with Trump, right?
You know, Trump, it's an old thing Socrates said many, many years ago.
He said, problem with democracy, you know, you got one guy who says, here are your vegetables and here's your Bowflex.
You got to work out, you got to eat right.
Well, most people don't really want to do that.
You got another guy who says, hey, I got a great Barca lounger and here's your bowl of bonbons.
Donuts, right? So who are people going to vote for?
You know what life is? You pay me now, you pay me later, right?
I mean, you can defer gratification and end up with a more stable and prosperous life down the road, or you can eat all your goodies and forget about that winter is coming.
Winter is coming. I just started watching.
Anyway, man, that's gory.
So a lot of mental health professionals facing a lot of craziness coming out of their patients that's being whipped up into a frenzy by the mainstream Media who are, you know, preying on mentally fragile people in order to oppose the presidency.
It's cowardly, and I think it's horrible and incredibly exploitive.
Again, these are leftists very sensitive about the vulnerable being exploited, but you'll stoke the fears of very frightened people in order to pursue your political agenda.
It's, to me, absolutely beneath contempt.
There are rational things to be concerned about in the world, but Donald Trump's sanity is not That's one of them.
So, in this kind of environment, because the psychiatrists who are involved in this kind of stuff, I don't think they genuinely probably can't even see how much hysteria is being whipped up by the mainstream media and people are watching CNN all day.
It's like, oh my God, what's coming to an end?
And so they see all of this instability.
They can't identify the cause, which is the media, I think.
And so Trump's got to be crazy.
He's got to be crazy.
And when you are paid by a system, a lot of mental health professionals are, when you're paid by a system, you will naturally defend that system.
I mean, if there's a king who pays you and a usurper who doesn't, who are you going to defend?
Well, most times it's going to be the king who pays you.
So a lot of mental health professionals, again, there are noble exceptions, and I want to acknowledge that, but in general, human beings respond to incentives and direct financial incentives, so there is a system that pays mental health professionals, and that system is generally the state.
And Donald Trump is static in the state.
He's a disrupting influence.
He is breaking the continuum.
The continuum was heading down to disaster, so it's an updraft.
It won't keep us aloft forever, but it should keep us aloft, hopefully, to stabilize things a little, a lot.
And so he is disrupting a system which people who are paid by that system really, really want to defend.
Now, nobody wants to look in the mirror and say, I'm paid by bad people sometimes to do bad things.
It's natural, right? And again, there are exceptions, but if Donald Trump is not crazy, then the existing system is crazy.
Because they're in opposition. So, if the existing system is crazy, then people have to look at that which is funding their six-figure-plus lifestyles and say, if Donald Trump is sane, then the system is crazy, then I'm being paid to defend a system that's crazy, which means I have to punish the sane and reward the crazy.
And I'm not being objective.
I'm bought and paid for in my definitions.
And that's a very very difficult thing for people to do very difficult thing for people to do so If the existing system, which has lasted, you know, there's the prior Trump and then post-Trump, and I generally put the left and the right, the Republicans and the Democrats, in a big bucket of nastiness and corruption and betrayal, with, in some ways, the Republicans being worse than the Democrats, because the Republicans would promise what they did not deliver.
They would hold up this sort of small government, free market stuff, and then, well, Social spending of the government in general went up under Republican administrations because the Republicans weren't in opposition, the Democrats hit the gas, the Republicans hit the gas, and they're immense, again, with some exceptions.
Rand Paul, Ron Paul have come to mind and some others.
Prior to Trump, it was a swamp on both sides.
You got your blue swamp, you got your red swamp, but the dividing line is as thin as a hair, as thin as my mohawk.
And after Trump, Because Trump has, you know, he's shrunk significantly, shrunk regulations.
There's a lot of optimism. Apple is talking about, what, bringing $200 billion back in reparations.
40, 50 companies have now given their employees very significant bonuses, $1,000 to $3,000 as a result of the corporate tax cuts, which again, I entirely predicted, as did anyone who knows anything about the free market.
And things are going pretty well.
DACA may be an entirely other story.
See, here's the thing.
If the economy gets better and you don't have a wall, you have more gold on the front yard with no fence around it.
You're just attracting more criminals and pilferers and parasites.
Having a good economy without a wall is an invitation to disaster, like running through the worst neighborhood with $100 bills taped to your naked body.
And to Kim Kardashian, I don't know whoever's considered hot these days for the young.
So as Trump improves things, the craziness of the prior system becomes more and more evident, and then it begins to dawn, I think this is an unconscious process, but I think it begins to dawn on people that they may not have been serving a rational system, that they may not have been paid by and supporting and defending a rational system.
They may have been paid for, defended, and supported a crazy system.
That is very tough, especially, of course, if you're a mental health professional.
So the idea, and it's sort of the next stage, it's the next thing, right?
If the Russia collusion begins to collapse as these texts between Strunk and his lover emerge, and there'll be many, many more to come, and as the Department of Justice begins to open a backup investigations or opens up investigations into Clinton Foundation and into the email.
So the emails, you know, it's a deal because they say, oh, well, other people use private emails.
Yes, but not their own private email servers, right?
So if you used AOL or Yahoo or whatever, at least it was archived there.
But if you have your own server and you wipe it, it's really hard to reconstruct, to recreate it.
So as this begins to move forward, and as the Russian narrative, as it has been for a while, collapses further, well, they need something else.
I mean, they're not going to give up. You're not going to give up.
You know, if the wolves are chasing you and you're running through the woods and wolves can't climb trees, you've got to grab a tree and pull yourself up.
But if the first tree branch breaks, you go to the next tree branch.
And if that breaks and you can't reach the third, you go to another tree.
Like, you don't stop. There's opposition to Trump because this is an existential threat, psychologically, and the perception being physically to tens of millions of people, depending on the state.
I can't live without a current. The wolves, they're not going to stop, you understand?
They don't stop. They don't say, oh, well, you know, it turns out the Russia thing was, kind of was a nothing burger, so we better reevaluate all of this.
Maybe... Maybe we've been a bit hasty, or maybe we should, at some point, accept the results of the election.
Hey, why bother? They haven't had Brexit, haven't even implemented most of it.
So, they'll just keep going.
And Trump's goal of, like, people just got paid a couple of thousand bucks to have lower taxes, like, immediately.
And they're going to receive lower taxes going forward.
So, you can't argue.
I mean, even Bernie Sanders said that was a good thing.
You can't argue against that and say, no, you shouldn't have this money.
No, it's bad for you to have this money.
Oh, and the corporations are all evil.
See, that corporations are all evil has taken a big blow.
A big blow, because they get their...
Their tax is cut, corporate taxes get cut, and they're handing out money.
It's like Scrooge at the end of the movie, right?
I mean, or the end of the book. I mean, as you compare up in Canada here, I mean, the minimum wage just got jacked up, and Tim Hortons, I mean, has to cancel some benefits, has to cancel some paid breaks, I mean, You get two sides.
One coercive measure and one a reduction of coercive measures.
And so people are getting schooled empirically in their bank account, in their wallets, on the values of lower taxation and more liberty.
Now, all of this is going to need spending, and spending has been cut.
It needs to go a long way further.
You don't want to pull a Reagan, right, where you cut taxes but double the federal spending by two-thirds because that creates a huge mess.
But it's a lot easier to cut government spending when more people are working and fewer people are taking benefits.
So people are getting really schooled, and both the Republicans and the Democrats are not looking good, like the rhinos and the historians.
So it's a big problem for propagandists.
It's one thing for communism and socialism to repeatedly fail.
You know, there was an old saying, I think it was Milton Friedman who said, if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara, within five years you'd have no sand left, and it'd be out of sand.
Well, Venezuela's got the world's largest oil reserves, they're out of gasoline, no gasoline.
So, socialism not working, you can suppress that.
It's been so long since there's been a genuine reduction in the size and power of the state over the economy that, right now, we've got socialism not working, and at the same time, the free market working.
And that's, you know, working in a very tangible way.
And, like, let's say you cut a bunch of regulations and jobs get created, those people don't know directly that those jobs have been created because of cuts and regulations.
I mean, it's a seen versus the unseen, all the way back to Bastion.
And so, we've got this double whammy, this one-two, right?
Which is, socialism is failing around the world.
And here we have an example of the free market actually working.
It's actually being allowed to work a little bit.
Not much. It's a little bit of air pocket in the bottom of the Titanic.
And maybe that's enough to get you back to the surface, get you back to shore.
So, it's a tough thing.
It's a tough thing. If Donald Trump is sane, the system is crazy.
And those who represent the system, those who profit from the system, those who need the system, those who defend the system.
If the system is crazy, you're only not evil if you don't know the system is crazy.
If the system is corrupt, you're only not corrupt yourself if you can ignore that the system is corrupt.
But as this deep state apparatus begins to emerge, as the corruptions and predations of the system begin to emerge, as the corruptions in the FBI and other organizations begin to really emerge, Hmm.
It's tough. It's tough.
People are desperate to not know that the system is corrupt that pays them.
You don't want to be Tony Soprano's wife.
Edie Falco character. You don't want to be that person.
You want to be blind.
You don't want to... Don't let me see.
Don't let me see. See no evil.
Spend all good. See evil.
Blood money. And this is the fundamental battle that's going on, I believe.
This is why the next thing is I've got mental illness, craziness, sanity, and insanity.
It's tough, it's tough.
Because if the system is crazy and Donald Trump is a genius, two things I believe to be true, with good empirical evidence, then as Trump succeeds, the craziness of the system gets revealed more and more, both historically and in the present.
And if you are suddenly aware, it pops up in your mind that you may have been profiting from a corrupt and evil system.
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