July 13, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:07
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Humanity, it seems, is divided into two categories. | |
| Those who embrace criticism and those who attack it. | |
| All progress comes from the former, who all too often have the dubious distinction of being hated by the latter. | |
| Accepting criticism is a foundational act of humility. | |
| It is how we all learn. | |
| Children are constantly corrected when they misspell a word, miscalculate a sum, or swing their tennis rackets badly. | |
| As a result, they improve. | |
| Most of childhood is spent being corrected. | |
| That essential process, however, grinds to a halt for many adults who imagine that they are in possession of perfect knowledge and therefore should be immune from criticism. | |
| Of course, they are not in possession of perfect knowledge, but even if they were, why should they fear criticism? | |
| The best tennis player in the world should not fear the serve of a first-time player. | |
| All our moral progressions, the roots and seeds of the modern world, arose from questioning the unquestionable. | |
| Slavery was an approved practice across the world for the entirety of human history until The late 18th century, when the abolitionists began to question the morality of owning people. | |
| Mankind's actual position in the universe, on a planet, orbiting a sun, orbiting a galaxy which orbits nothing, was considered heretical for many decades. | |
| The phrase trial by fire refers to the early medieval practice of forcing a person accused of a crime to walk three paces holding a red-hot iron. | |
| If God healed his burns, he was innocent. | |
| The modern judicial process of requiring evidence, allowing the accused to confront the accuser, a trial by a jury of your peers, access to a lawyer, these all required the substitution of empirical mortal mechanics for murky divine feedback. | |
| Since the tragically shortened days of Socrates, philosophers have hurled reason and evidence against the accepted beliefs of the time. | |
| Our most treasured beliefs must be subjected to rational arguments and empirical evidence because so many treasured beliefs failed these tests in the past. | |
| The wrenching expansion of morality beyond its original limits produces real progress. | |
| The end of slavery was the expansion of the ban on human ownership from whites to blacks. | |
| Men can enter into contracts, giving that capacity to women was a rational and moral extension of a universal right. | |
| Subjecting political elites to the rule of law, still a very shaky proposition, was the extension of universal morality up through the ranks of power. | |
| Science rests on the proposition that the age of miracles is over. | |
| Mankind strives to improve, then gets lazy and brittle. | |
| As a species, we have not reached the end of our moral progress. | |
| There are in fact significant indicators that we have gone in some very bad directions indeed. | |
| Every moral advancement undermines the status quo, which in turn produces a new status quo that opposes the next advancement. | |
| I am concerned about free speech in the West. | |
| There's little point talking about it anywhere else. | |
| Everywhere I go, even if people have a legal right to speak, they censor themselves for fear of being attacked, of losing careers, savings, relationships, families. | |
| They fear visits from the police. | |
| The interconnected web of conversation called the internet has been hijacked by malevolent forces threatening to disrupt and destroy our capacity to reason with one another. | |
| The span and potential of human communication currently hangs. | |
| Like a sun low on the horizon, it is impossible to know whether it is a sunrise or a sunset. | |
| We can finally speak with each other, all of us around the world. | |
| Does that mean the world gets better or worse? | |
| If we reason with each other, the world improves. | |
| If we smash conversations through threats, intimidation, violence and legalese, the world decays and darkens. | |
| This is very serious. | |
| The last time humanity had a similar breakthrough in communications was the invention of the printing press, which resulted in the immense progress of the Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, but also in places, totalitarianism and decades of religious warfare. | |
| The capacity to share ideas can produce either the American Revolution or Or the French? | |
| The Bill of Rights? | |
| Or the ever-thirsty guillotine? | |
| We will always have disagreements. | |
| How do we resolve them? | |
| We have only two choices. | |
| Force or debate. | |
| Civilization is the substitution of conversation for naked violence. | |
| The moment we agree to submit to reason and evidence is the moment that we become or stay civilized. | |
| Many ideas offend many people. | |
| If we allow offense to silence debate, we elevate ignorant passions above reasoned discourse and will lose all of the freedoms we have inherited, all the freedoms our ancestors fought and bled and died to hand to us. | |
| The philosopher may not always be right, but the enraged mob is always wrong. | |
| Surrender to them and we lose everything. | |
| I look forward to engaging in this conversation in Australia and New Zealand over the coming weeks. | |
| We have not finished our moral journey. | |
| Let us Join hands in reason, peace, and conversation, and strive to magnify the freedoms we inherited, not abandon them to appease an enraged mob that will only trample them, snarl, and then come for us. |
Export Selection