July 13, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:11
4141 What Pisses Me Off About Endless Leftist Hysteria
So what benign previously-common action is the radical left claiming will end civil society as we know it, today? Stefan Molyneux looks at the recent unhinged leftist hysteria around the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump as an example of an unhealthy and sustained derangement which can only result from a true lack of love, meaning and purpose. 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
So I've been thinking about hysteria lately because, boy, there's just no shortage of it these days with Trump's new SCOTUS pick and just about everything.
There's this professional hysterical cattle prod to the nads outrage squad that is constantly leaving footprints on the ceiling and flaming paths down every avenue of human interactions.
And I've been thinking a lot about sort of what drives all this hysteria, all this upset, all of this...
Everywhere I walk is a thorny bush of horror.
Now, of course, the new SCOTUS pick is like, well, Roe v.
Wade is going to be overturned and women are going to die and society is going to collapse.
Man, there are things to be concerned about in the world and I think I've made my positions on those things fairly clear.
But this hysteria is really interesting because it's not...
Real. It's not real.
It's made up.
It's fake. And it does seem to be really, really addictive.
When you get addicted to this cortisol of stress and the dopamine of the resistance and the challenge and the fight and the companionship and the war, it seems to be a really hard addiction to give up.
People have a really, really tough time letting go of just being I'm crazily outraged against everything and banding together and there's a new panic and there's a new problem and there's a new disaster and there's a new catastrophe.
Because then, of course, you end up with the continual invention of enemies.
Because if there's going to be a catastrophe, then someone, as a human being, human catastrophe, someone has to be engineering that catastrophe.
They have to be evil.
They have to be immoral. They have to be Nazis.
They have to be alt-right or whatever it is.
You have to continually invent new enemies in order to maintain The fight or flight mechanism that has got you so jangled up and bolts you out of bed and gives you a purpose and a reason.
It is a kind of new religion.
It's a kind of new mythology. The religion of panic.
I guess it's following the Loki god of leftist outrage right off the cliff of sanity.
And it's really dangerous.
People have a very tough time giving this up.
And it doesn't matter how much it...
Splits them, how much it fractures their relationships.
It doesn't matter how many people they end up hating.
It doesn't matter what immoral, if not downright, evil deeds they end up justifying, you know, go punch a Nazi.
Hey, spoiler, everyone's a Nazi who's not on your side.
So it's just punch everyone. And then after justifying the punch a Nazi thing, when people punch back, it's like, oh, they're so violent, you know, like it's crazy.
And I've known a few people like this in my life.
Knew a few people like this.
They're too exhausting to be around.
I mean, you've got to have some peace of mind.
You've got to have serenity.
You've got to have some, you know, rest between the endless battles of the everyday.
And hopefully it's not every day for you.
I mean, this is a job for some of us, but hopefully for you it's not.
I've known some people like that. A couple of things that I've noticed about them.
First of all, in order to maintain this level of outrage...
The rest of your life has got to be pretty empty.
Pretty empty. Like, you know you can't get an echo without a giant empty space, but you can't get outrage without a void within your life, significant voids within your life.
If you have love, if you have connection, if you have intimacy, if you have a great family life, or you have wonderful hobbies, or you love beautiful music, and you have Joy and beauty and connection in your life.
It's pretty tough to be outraged all the time.
And I think this is particularly true if you have children.
Because... When you have kids, you kind of look for a long term and you pace yourself for the marathon of improving the world rather than for the hysterical cocaine-laced pinball reaction of outrage over every new tweet or every new political decision or anything like that.
If you have kids, you're like, okay, I want to make the world a better place.
But it's going to take a while.
So we're going to build this very carefully and sanely and rationally and peacefully and so on to build the path to the better world when you have kids comes a lot more gradually and a lot more patiently.
So I've noticed that the people who don't have kids tend to be more around this.
And they've got a lot more time.
When you have kids, man, they get up early in the morning.
They're around all day.
And, well, if you have a kid like mine, they go to bed very late at night, too, much as you try to avoid that.
So, you know, your day's just kind of busy.
And when your day's kind of busy...
A lot of times having fun with your kids, then it's really, really tough to feel that kind of outrage and that kind of tension.
Again, it's not like you don't care about the future.
You do. It's just a little bit less hysteria in the moment because you got time.
You got time. My daughter's not going to be an adult for another eight and a half years, so you got time.
You got time. They also have time a lot of times because they're underemployed or unemployed.
This is a fundamental lack of equality in the loudest trumpet winds democratic cacophony that we've got going on right now where the You know, the biggest shrieker tends to get their way.
It's just fundamentally unfair.
So those of us who have jobs, those of us who are raising children and so on, we just don't have that much time.
And, you know, it's the old thing which we've all thought about if we work hard in our life.
You know, it's 2 o'clock on a Thursday.
Seem to be a lot of people protesting.
Did they get the day off work or have they had the life off work at my expense?
So, yeah, paying people to gather together to...
Advocate for stripping more of your property through taxes and debt?
Well, it's really annoying.
It's really annoying, right?
To be forced to pay for people who want to escalate the use of force against you and your future, your property, your savings and all that, it's pretty bad.
It's pretty, pretty bad.
For those who don't have kids, for those who don't have jobs, Or even satisfying hobbies, well, what do they get together?
Well, they get together through false unity.
And when you have real values, then you get together based upon those values.
Like the people I have in my life, all philosophically minded.
All philosophically minded and, which is to say, minded.
You can't really think without philosophy.
And so what binds us together, my community, is that we share the same values.
Now, if you don't really have any values, you don't really stand for anything, but you just kind of have these weird, inchoate desires to make the world a better place without really thinking anything through, then you don't have any positive values with which to connect with other people.
You know, I mean, if you're a Christian of one denomination, you go to the church, you have to share values.
But for a lot of people, they don't have much unity because they don't have much identity.
A cloud can't hug.
You understand, right?
Vapor can't be caressed or massaged or you can't shake your hands with air.
And so when people don't have identity, they don't have values, they don't have things that they're willing to stand for, well, they can't really get connection.
They can't really get intimacy.
Love. You don't get love.
You get love as a shadow cast by courage, the courage to stand up for your values and do the right thing.
Love is our involuntary response to manifested virtue, if we are ourselves virtuous.
Otherwise, if we're evil and we see manifested virtue, we feel hatred, which explains, well, good chunks of the internet.
Let's just put it that way.
So if you don't stand for anything, if you don't have any real values, if you just have wishful thinking and crap like that, well, what happens?
You have no community. Now, there's this old...
I think Paul Krugman made it in one of his rambling, nonsensical essays, which is the only way to band humanity together is for there to be some external space alien force that's going to destroy us all and we'll all get together, right?
So you can create artificial community in the presence of external danger, right?
In the presence of external danger.
It's like, you know, two guys... Who are fighting with each other and then there's a giant bear burst into the woods.
Well, they're going to stop fighting with each other and turn face the bear, right?
Well, we're at least human, so we'll fight after we take care of the bear.
And so when you don't have a community, when you don't have any particular reason why people would treasure you or love you or value you or maybe even care about you, then if you can invent this external danger, then you can all huddle together.
And be afraid and plot and plan and you have this community that's created through panic.
It's a panic prison, but for some people, prison is still better than loneliness because at least there's some companions.
We are social creatures, right?
And the way that we band together in a tribe is we either manifest virtue and find virtuous people and we bind ourselves, we bind our hearts together in the heavy threads and ropes of Good actions in the world.
Or we invent an external enemy and we all huddle together in a panic and we all find companionship and purpose and necessity out of an invented foe rather than the pursuit of a laudatory and positive goal.
And I think that's really, really tough.
You know, people have lost a lot of community and we've lost a lot of community in the world, not just because of mobility and all of the other junk that people talk about, but because we've lost...
Our virtues. We've lost our purpose.
We've lost our meaning. If you're doing good, you don't have to ask about the meaning of life.
The meaning of life is...
The questions about the meaning of life is a void that fills in when you're not actively in pursuit of virtue.
If you're actively in pursuit of virtue, you don't have to worry about the meaning of life.
We feel meaningless when we are meaningless.
We feel our lives are empty when they're empty of good actions and courage and Knowing that you've left the world a better place today than it was yesterday, as best you can and in reasonable proportion.
When you're doing good, you don't worry about meaning.
You worry about meaning when you're not doing good.
And so then rather than do the difficult task of actually starting to do good in the world, to stand up against the initiation of the use of force, to stand against spanking, to teach people about peaceful parenting, to remind people that taxation is force and the state is an agency of violence, to spread wisdom and knowledge and truth and virtue,
Well, that's tough. So much easier to invent an external foe and pretend that you have some band of resistance fighters wherein you don't have to do good in order to gain companions.
You merely have to be angry and afraid.
And this is why I say when people are very much into this hysteria, what's really going on is that they lack true companionship.
The true companionship that comes From virtue.
From doing actual, tangible, meaningful good in the world.
They tend to be the kind of people who run to the government to solve social problems.
You know, like if you want to raise the minimum wage, if you want to raise the wage of workers, go start a company and hire some workers!
That way you're driving up the demand for workers which is going to raise their salaries over time.
No! Yell and chant and cheer.
You don't want to actually do good. You just want the appearance of doing good.
Right? If you say, well, we want fewer people to end up in jail, well, convince men and women to date smarter and wiser people and convince them to raise their children peacefully and that's how you lower crime and the incarceration rate as best you can.
And that's more difficult though than yelling at the government to stop putting people in jail, right?
And Most of us if we have any kind of real heart and real conscience will look and we know we know you know deep down whether you're doing good or just virtue signaling whether you actually want to solve problems or you just want to get the sick adulation from like-minded fools who are looking at you and pretending that you're trying to solve any particular problem if you want to help the poor You can actually get involved in their lives.
You can hire them. You can teach them wiser methods of financial management.
You can help them to understand the value of clear thinking of philosophy.
You can educate them on economics so they don't hate and resent the system which is their only path out of poverty.
You can do lots of things or you can just scream and yell at the government and wave signs and get enraged.
Because the government isn't forcing people to pay more money to the poor, which in general, being on the receipt end of stolen goods is not a very elevating process, which is why the poor have become this semi-hardened underclass that...
Sadly, very few people around them have any direct incentive to solve the problem of poverty.
The bureaucrats feed off it.
The government requires poor in order to continue to have dependent votes.
The poor, crabs in the bucket style, want to keep other people from climbing out of poverty a lot of times because they say it's systemic and if one person gets out then it's not systemic.
Anyway, it's a whole lot of problems.
Do you actually want to solve these problems or do you Do you just want to pretend to be good?
Pretending to be good is a lot easier than being good, right?
Of course, right? Wearing Spanx is a lot easier than losing weight, although losing weight is more comfortable in the long run.
And so this hysteria is really, really important to understand that people are creating these external enemies to gain the illusion of community, to gain the illusion that they can do good By having emotional meltdowns, whether it's of the panic, anxiety, or rage flavor.
That emotional bleh is the way that you solve problems.
And of course it's not. You go to a doctor with a tumor and you don't want the doctor to yell abuse at your tumor.
It's not going to do you much good.
It's just a big waste of time and energy.
You want the doctor to study really hard on how to excise the tumor and what treatments might prevent its recurrence and so on, right?
So people who Just are indulging in the fascism of feels.
They just want their emotions to somehow dictate a solution.
This is a spoiled brat, right?
This is the kid who is pounding his way on the...
Floor of the store because parents won't buy him a candy bar.
Not the fault of the kid. That's the result of parenting.
I mean, I get this question, what do you do when your daughter has a temper tantrum?
It's like, she's never had a temper tantrum because we listen and we try to negotiate so she doesn't need to get hysterical because she has the capacity for, the encouragement for a conversation.
So when you have this chilly, empty, heart of darkness tribe that is bound together by fear and anger because they can't find companions based upon virtue, it's a very dangerous situation.
They need their enemies, right?
They need their enemies.
Their companionship, their whole sense of tribe, their whole sense of connectivity depends upon endless series of malevolent disasters being inflicted upon them by other people.
And because they're only interested in the appearance of doing good rather than actually doing good, reason and evidence won't really touch them.
And this is a very dangerous and serious topic and the way out of it.
You know, provide solutions as best I can.
The way out of it, of course, is to start doing good rather than aping good.
To actually be virtuous rather than Think that your emotions produce paradise.
To learn the root causes of things and intelligently work to their solution rather than having tantrums.
And thinking that the candy bar of utopia is just on its way because you're holding your breath until you turn blue.
And the more that we can help people generate real, meaningful, loving, positive relationships, the more we can rescue them From the panic prison, which either we get them out or they're gonna put us in.
