We all have archaeological markers or thoughts from earlier observations in our lives that stick with us for certain reasons. Stefan Molyneux breaks down clarified observation regarding the cooperative nature of society verses people who thrive in a win-lose environment - and what this means for the world moving forward. 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
I have these little archaeological markers in my head, these little bits of things that I have remembered for many years, for reasons that I cannot figure out for the life of me until usually many years after the event.
I'll give you sort of one example. I used to watch the television show MASH with Alan Alda back in the day, and in one scene...
The main character and another one of the doctors were pouring concrete into a gun in an attempt to turn it into something non-lethal.
And they were making, you know, quips and puns about what they were doing, and one of them just said, it's comedy of the highest caliber.
Now, of the shows that I watched when I was younger, of that television show, I remember that joke...
Out of all of them. I could be hard-pressed to think of another particular joke of the hours that I'd watched.
And every now and then, these things sort of pop up in my head, and I'm like, well, I wonder why, and I wonder why.
And every now and then, I'll sort of figure it out.
So when I was a teenager, I was surrounded by...
Very smart, but very nihilistic and acerbic people.
They were hilarious at the same time as they were deconstructionists to a truly atomic level.
And that took a long time for me to overcome.
And as a budding rationalist and a budding objective moralist and so on, it was very tough to go up against this acidic tsunami.
Of people who wanted to deconstruct everything, to undo everything, and who were cynical and skeptical about absolutely everything, and stripped off the joy, connection, and context of life to a naked, muscular, Darwinian, will-to-power, striving scenario.
And, I mean, funny, very funny.
Man, like I could barely keep up with participating in the jokes, because at the time I thought, well, maybe it's not that funny, but...
What they were talking about really wasn't that funny.
And what I realized many years later was the reason I remembered that dumb joke or that silly joke from MASH. It's humor of the highest caliber.
Macalibur, of course, is a measure of the strength of a weapon.
And I really, really understood that the humor around me was very destructive.
That the jokes that people made were acidic and dissolving and a sort of mask for a raging nihilism that, if confronted, could actually lead to substantial personality derangement, to... The deconstruction, not of the world, but of the personality.
Like, if you set yourself up to deconstruct the world, and the world fights back, you end up dissolving yourself, which is why the stakes are so high in politics, and particularly in epistemology, the study of knowledge, and in ethics, foundationally.
So, these little markers, these little markers.
Humor of the highest caliber.
And it stuck in my brain because instinctively I understood the nihilism and danger of the funny people who were around me in my teenage years.
I really relished and appreciated their intelligence.
But by God, it was a sandblast of everything that was glorious and decent in the world.
And not a religious soul among them.
Should have been a bit of a warning.
So that's sort of one example.
I mean, I could do shows on all the things that have stuck in my head for reasons I have often not figured out until much later.
But I'll give you another example.
So I watched a movie many years ago.
It was a bad movie. I don't remember much of it.
But it was a movie about a family with a whole bunch of greedy people who were circling The deathbed of some great-grandmother who was sitting on a huge fortune.
And they all wanted to not be written out of the will.
They all wanted to ingratiate themselves to her.
And, of course, she had negative qualities, and she was bitter, and she was mean, and I think she was a racist or something like that.
And, of course, she would say things that would shock people, and they'd be like, ah, ha, you know, good one, granny, you know, that kind of stuff, because they couldn't afford honor, because...
Because they were greedy. Now, I guess like everyone who watches movies, I've watched some great movies, and I've watched a few duds over the years.
I generally bail, but this one I went through to the end, and it kind of stuck with me, again, for reasons that it took me quite a while to figure out.
But I'll share this with you and see if it makes any sense to you.
When you are independent, when you...
Thrive on the sweat of your own brows and the exertion of your own musculature, the exercise of your own intellect, your creativity, your commitment, your willingness to go the extra mile, willingness to please customers, willingness to service whatever community supports you as I try my best to service you, then honor and dignity and self-respect and integrity and so on.
Well, that's the coin.
That is the gold standard of the interactions.
I mean, I owe you guys honesty.
I owe you guys integrity. I owe you guys courage.
I owe you a commitment to talk about essential things often that other people see me talking about and run screaming in the opposite direction.
So I owe you that directness.
Because you support what it is that I do.
That's the relationship. I will speak the things that maybe you don't want to speak or maybe that other people don't want to speak.
I will speak truth to power.
I will speak biology to prejudice.
And I will speak economics to leftists.
And, well, that gets some blowback and that's sort of naturally in part of the territory.
And then you support me.
You sort of share the videos and so on.
You sign up. You can sign up for subscriptions to help support what it is That I do at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Hugely, hugely appreciated.
Absolutely necessary. Really, really am grateful for this relationship that you pay me to speak truth that almost nobody else wants to speak.
And to go all the way, baby.
To go all the way with the non-aggression principle.
To dance in my gymnastic way through the landmines of things like race and IQ and peaceful parenting and taxation is theft and all the other things that I have brought to the world over the years.
We It blew past half a billion.
Sorry, half a million views.
I know. Yeah, half a billion views and downloads recently.
Half a billion. 500 million views and downloads.
Not even counting books and things like that.
So it's been a lot.
So when you are...
Gathering your resources from a voluntary world through trade, through transactions, through providing value to value, then not only can you afford integrity, but you kind of need it.
You kind of require integrity and honesty and morality, good high standards and so on.
So, if we think of this family in this movie from many years ago, all scrambling to try and ingratiate themselves to a bitter, vengeful old woman who enjoyed watching them dance, knowing exactly what the score was, that they did not like her, that she could be as unlikable as possible, but they could not afford, in their own minds, The barest shred of integrity or honor or decency.
They could not disagree with her.
They could not be disagreeable to her.
They had to ingratiate themselves.
They had to bow and lick and toady like your average court jester.
And she knew all of this about them, and she knew...
What they were all about. And there was a sort of mutual loathing and self-contempt and the exercise of bitter blue-rinse power from the aged creeper that guarded the doorway to the family fortune.
And so people were in favor and out of favor.
And of course, not only did they ingratiate themselves to her, pretending to be a lot better or nicer.
I mean, everyone had to pretend.
They had to pretend that the Old woman was nice.
The old woman had to pretend that they were being nice, and it was a whole, a horrible theater of rampant base mammalian greed.
And so they pretended to be better than they were to the old woman, and then they would turn on each other and ferociously undermine each other in the eyes of the old woman.
You know, so-and-so doesn't really like you, he's only pretending, and then so-and-so.
It was a horrible, horrible thing.
And I think the reason that I remember this movie, which was not remembered for its artistic content or value or great acting or whatever it was.
But I think the reason that I remember it, my friends, is because it had a very, very important lesson.
And I think that lesson is kind of playing out in politics at the moment.
That lesson is this. Not only...
Can you afford, but you absolutely require, honesty and integrity?
And even if it's just based on honesty and integrity, like I had a job when I was 12.
I would go down to a bookstore and I would assemble newspapers together and I would stock the shelves with books and so on.
And I had to show up on time and I had to do a decent job and I had to make them happy and I did that and I'd get up and Awfully early on a Sunday morning and I'd take a bus and a train and a bus to get to the job and I showed up and I did my work and they paid me.
They paid me in books and they paid me in money and it was a great job to have.
But I had to show up, and I had to do a good job, and I had to be on time, and I had to be reliable, and I had to be predictable.
You have to have at least that basic integrity to say what you're going to do.
Like, you want the job, I'll take the job.
Okay, you've got to show up at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, an hour and a half away from your home, and I'm not...
My family's not really been farmers for quite a while.
I'm not much of a morning person in general.
So you have to have that basic integrity.
Like when I had a paper route, I'm sure you had similar things when you were a kid, like I had a paper route, and that meant that I got paid a penny, an advertisement for stuffing them into, on a Wednesday it was, and I had to go after school every day, and on my bike, and go and deliver the newspapers, and then very, very early on Saturday I had to get up.
You know, the usual thing, right?
Not a natural state for me.
I'm not a, you know, sunrise that's like, oh no.
It's the worst fireworks show of exhaustion that you could ever imagine.
Please, son, just consume us now and end my bloodshot-eyed existence.
But you had to show up.
You had to show up. You had to show up and you just had to deliver the newspapers.
You had to go collect the money and deposit it so that the newspaper company could get its income.
So you just had to have that basic integrity.
You've got to provide value.
You've got to show up and you've got to do the job.
And that's if you're independent and you're owning your own keep in the free-ish market.
Now, if you are dependent, it's quite another matter entirely.
Because then, bad-mouthing, backstabbing, sycophancy, toadying, the currying of favor, the unleashing of venom, all of these things, they're all just part of an amoral strategy to acquire resources that depend not upon your ability to provide value, but on the whim of someone else.
It's a line, it's a very, very famous line.
One of the most famous lines in 20th century theater came out of Tennessee Williams' streetcar name, Lame Desire.
The character Blanche Dubois is a neurotic and, well, a gay man in women's clothing, as Tennessee Williams said that Blanche Dubois was himself.
And she's a neurotic slut who has delusions of sophistication and cultural and artistic grandeur, but basically is just a A drunken tart who attempts to destroy the marriage of a brute and his hyper-feminine wife.
But anyway, when...
Sorry, spoiler. But at the end, when she goes crazy...
She's picked up to go to an asylum.
And she says to the kind doctor who's saying, don't hold her down.
Just let her come of her own accord.
Give her some dignity. Give her some space.
Help her up. And she'll come with us of her own accord.
And she says to him, whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
That is a line that sends chills down everyone except me.
Like, I was in theater school for almost two years, acting, playwriting, full-time national theater school.
They take 1% of applicants.
I gave it a full old try.
And everyone was like, that line gives me goosebumps.
That line gives me. And for me, I was like, I don't get it.
Unfortunately, it happens. Or fortunately, I guess it happens quite a lot.
I don't get it. And I didn't.
And the reason I didn't get it was that I had never relied on the kindness of strangers.
I never relied on the kindness of strangers.
I'm a good old Protestant boy.
You wake up. Yeah.
Put in your work. And then when you feel like resting, you remember that you're a sinner and you put in some more work.
And then you remember that the world might fall apart unless you put in more work.
So you put in more work.
And then you see you're allowed to rest.
But not because you've earned it by working, but because resting is required to prepare you for the next day's working.
And, you know, when you're self-employed, sometimes you have a total asshole for a boss, and that can be the case when I do what I do because, you know, the stakes seem pretty high.
And I have a pretty unique ability to communicate complex ideas to smart people like yourselves.
So, I have always earned my way, and I've never relied on the kindness of strangers.
And so, for me, having integrity, keeping my word, being a decent person, providing value, well, that's how I have not just survived, but succeeded to a large degree as a human being.
So, I just didn't really get this I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.
And I've always tried to pursue fields where I can have the most control over my own success.
You know, one thing I hated about acting was, you know, it's like that Dustin Hoffman scene where he's, at the beginning of Tootsie, where he's trying to be an actor.
You're too tall, you're too short, you do this, you do that.
I hate the idea that, like, I always wanted to write plays and direct plays, which I did.
And I just hated the idea of going to audition and hoping that they liked you.
And, you know, it just drives me kind of crazy, right?
I don't like to have that little control over my own success, which is why being an entrepreneur is the way to go.
I'm going to succeed or fail based upon, you know, me and the ping pong ball white backdrop of I need to be halfway to a cartoon character to keep people's attention sometimes, which I'm fine with.
I like that kind of challenge.
But... Because I didn't rely on the kindness of strangers, which even if you're trying to provide value as, say, an actor or something where there's high supply and low demand, academia was the same way, too.
Which is that anytime you're not facing the customer directly, like if your customer is like a director, well, of course, the director is thinking of the customer, but not so much in Canada, where it's generally...
Certainly in theater, your customer is the government agency that gives you grants and stuff like that, but...
When you are directly facing a customer, to me, you then have a lot of control over the success or failure of what it is that you're doing.
You're not just relying on the kindness of strangers.
Is this person going to give me a job?
Are they going to say yes? It could be me.
It could be anyone, but I hope it's me.
I don't. Like that particular approach at all.
I've always kind of tried to avoid that and to rise and fall based upon my own efforts, my own merits, my own arguments, my own creativity, my own expressiveness in communication, my own capacity to, you know, eye contact the world and suck them into a vortex of dangerous ideas and spit them out broken but wiser.
I don't know. That's, well, it's only been my experience.
But, um, so this depend on the kindness of strangers.
And, um, If you are dependent on the whims of others, if you're dependent upon the pleasure of others, how much integrity, how much virtue can you really afford in that situation,
in that environment? If you are in this movie, right, and people have been in this situation in real life, matriarch or patriarch is dying, you've got to ingratiate yourself, you've got to give the praise, you know, like the three daughters...
Of King Lear at the beginning of the play, you know, you're the most wonderful thing ever.
You know, do your little song and dance to get your slice of the kingdom from the decrepit king.
Do you have to praise? Do you have to bootluck?
Do you rely on the kindness of strangers, even if they're family?
I mean, the strangers thing is a wide and sort of deep ocean to mull over.
But if you are dependent, Can you really afford honor?
Can you really afford integrity?
Can you really afford to say no?
Can you really afford to push back against People who might disapprove of you.
Can you tell the truth to the old woman on her deathbed who holds tens of millions of dollars in her hand and can sprinkle them at whim?
Can you say to her, you know, you're a nasty, manipulative, greedy old woman.
I really dislike you.
I think it's a terrible thing that you're doing, making everybody dance for their money and setting everyone against each other and playing favorites.
It's horrible. And are you willing to then...
Are you willing to walk away from the riches?
Or do you chew it down, bite it down and say, well, for the good of my kids and for the good of this, do you shut up and crack your own spine over your knee like a man breaking twigs to start a fire that consumes himself?
Would you be willing to stand up and speak the truth?
Honor, you see.
Honor. Only flourishes, is only necessary, only rewards the practitioner in a state of freedom, in a state of the exchange of value.
Now, you could say, and I understand this, there are emotional values as well as mere economic values, so you could say, well, the people in the movie, like the people flattering the old woman, To get her money and she's giving them the money, they're giving her flattery and her vanity and narcissism and shallowness require that or want that.
But it's still whim-based.
It's still whim-based.
It's not objective value that you're providing.
There's flattery and manipulation and so on, right?
Like, you know, if you're in a bar and you light a woman, you say, I'm an airline pilot.
Or I guess not an airline pilot.
That's when I was a kid. I'm a...
I don't know. I invested in X, Y, and Z company early.
I'm very wealthy or whatever.
Well, if you're lying, then you kind of are exchanging a value, which is you are triggering her desire for hypergamy, like to marry up and to date up and so on.
You're lying to her, so you're appealing to her vanity with something that isn't really there.
And it's the same thing with the old woman.
You're appealing to her vanity flattering her ego, but nobody believes.
It's a ridiculous show.
It's all sham.
It's all the Kabuki theater. Nobody really believes it.
And so the reason why I'm talking about all of this is I think it's really quite fascinating to think about this with regards to the difference between the left and the right as a whole.
Conservatives and liberals left and right.
Because the left very openly say we don't have any standards, we don't have any morals.
But we know you do, we know you do and we'll use those standards and morals against you.
I mean they all love Saul Alinsky and Hillary Clinton loved Saul Alinsky and so they're openly stating we don't have any ethics, we don't have any rules, we don't have any morals.
Why? Because They're in general representing a population that is dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
They're representing a population of people who rely on the government for income, who rely on the government for jobs, who rely on the government for welfare payments or free health care or whatever it is, right?
They rely upon the taxpayer.
They rely upon the generosity, so to speak, of the next generation whose economic futures have been pillaged to feed the insatiable democratic more of greed in the here and now.
They are dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
If you have earned your money, then you have independence from the kindness of strangers.
It's not just niceness.
Like, your boss doesn't pay you because you're nice or because he likes you or whatever.
He pays you because you generate more revenue from him than you cost, right?
So he pays you 10 bucks an hour because...
You make more than 10 bucks an hour for him.
It's not kindness.
It's mutual self-interest, not selfishness.
That's exploitation, but it's mutual self-interest.
So when I worked as a waiter, I got paid by the restaurant, and hey, just kind of struck me.
I worked for tips then as well.
Life is a circle.
And yeah, so when I worked at a seafood restaurant downtown, I worked at Swiss Chalet, I worked at Pizza Hut.
I spent three god-awful days as a dishwasher before escaping that.
Ugh, that Eric Blair hellscape.
But, you know, so when I was a waiter, why was I a waiter?
I was a waiter because I brought the food and I was pleasant to the customers and they liked me and they tipped me and the restaurant owner liked me and he paid me and so on, right?
So it wasn't just his kindness that I was depending on.
But if you have, I don't know, like you're some single mom, you've got two kids by two different guys, you are dependent on the kindness of strangers.
It's not an exchange of value.
It's not an exchange of value.
Now, again, you could take a non-market approach to it and say, well, there is a market, you're exchanging your vote for money, and like, I get all of that.
But it's still the kindness of strangers.
And that is really, really important to understand when it comes to looking at politics.
If you're dependent on the state, if you're dependent upon the kindness of taxpayers, or the blindness of taxpayers, or the sentimentality of taxpayers, then you're a minor working a finite scene of human sentimentality.
And you are dependent upon the kindness of strangers, which means you have to portray yourself in a certain kind of way, which is why the Victim Olympics has become such a passionate, obsessive pastime of Tens of millions of people in just America alone, hundreds of millions throughout the West.
You are dependent upon the kindness of strangers, which means you can't afford standards, you can't afford ethics, you can't afford virtue.
You've got to have the money, and you can't provide free market exchange value for it.
I need the money that you guys support me with, and I try to provide as much value as I humanly can in that exchange.
Unfortunately, enough of you appreciate what it is that I do.
Not enough of you relative to the total number of people watching and listening.
I know that. But enough of you that I can keep going with what I'm doing, and I really, really appreciate that again.
But it's an exchange of value.
But I think it's important to understand, and it took me a long time to get this, it's really, really important to understand the terrible anxiety that That is experienced by people who are dependent upon the kindness of strangers, who are not earning their own keep, who are not exchanging value for value.
They must become manipulative.
They must become sentimental manipulators.
They must become angry and vicious and attack people and condemn them.
And they don't have any exchange of value.
And therefore, they either damn people or they praise people.
They either provide the pseudo-benefit of rampant praise or they provide The actual danger of mass hostility.
Right? So, with regards to the state, they're sycophants, like the people in the movie with the old woman on her deathbed.
You're great. But among each other, there's backstabbing and viciousness and so on, right?
Because this explains why the leftists say people are pretty terrible.
People exploit. People are mean.
People should never be allowed to have guns and so on.
But when it comes to the state, that's completely different.
It's like in the movie, everyone in this family is a backstabber and mean and terrible.
But Granny's wonderful.
It's like, well, Granny raised the family.
She was the upside-down tip of the pyramid of how the family ethics flowed forward.
That's important. And so this, guns are terrible, only the government should have guns.
People are terrible, only people in the government do good, right?
This contradiction. It's the same thing.
Because they're fighting for a fixed amount of resources.
If the taxpayer gets to keep more of the taxpayer's money, there's less money available for social programs, at least in the short run.
And this panic, this hanging by a thread.
This is the Trump derangement syndrome, right?
Because people see or imagine that Trump is just Some free market guy who wants to get rid of the welfare state and transfer people.
I mean, of course he does, like any sane human being wants to transfer people from dependence to independence.
But that is a terrifying thing for people because if you've for a long time not provided value to the world, then the idea that you might actually have to provide value to the world is really, really terrifying because you just don't have the experience.
You don't have the confidence.
You don't have the empirical evidence that it's even possible for you to provide value to the world.
And so you become a manipulator.
You become a flatterer and an abuser in turn.
You provide the honey of praise and the acid of rage.
And this is, I think, a fundamental difference between the conservatives and the liberals, or the people in the free market and the people dependent upon the state.
They're very broad categories.
I understand there's lots of overlap and so on, right?
But if you have the confidence to know that you can survive and flourish by exchanging value for value, Which has resulted from your integrity, your honesty.
It's not like perfect virtue.
Not perfect virtue. You can show up at some crappy think tank and put in a dishonest day's work, but you're still providing value at least to that think tank or to the people who fund it or whatever.
