Aug. 15, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:33
4167 I BEAT CANCER
On May 2nd, 2013, Stefan Molyneux announced his cancer diagnosis to the world and on August 13th, 2018 he walked out of his final five year cancer checkup with a resounding "all clear." Stefan explains how this "life changing" experience has forever impacted him and what can be learned from a brush with possible death.Flashback: A Personal Message From Stefan Molyneuxhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwmr1elnxjgYour 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
Six years ago or so, when I was visiting my dentist, she found a lump in my throat.
It was considered to be maybe just a lymph node reacting to an infection, but it had not gone away when I came back for a checkup.
And then I was sent to a doctor, and then I was sent to get a biopsy, which came back non-cancerous.
And then I endured a turnstile Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to get action in the Canadian healthcare system, which ended up with me fleeing to the United States, to the Oklahoma Surgery Center, where the great Dr.
Keith Smith saved my life.
Removed the tumor which had grown, or removed the lump which had grown, and you can see the scar here.
The Canadian surgeon was going to open up my whole jawline, and he went in up from below.
A much more, I think, skilled procedure.
And I was told that it would take months to get the surgery in Canada, but strangely enough, when I was just being wheeled into the operating room in Oklahoma, I got a call from Canada saying that I could get the surgery done more quickly.
But at that point, I was pretty much committed to a free market, or at least more free market solutions.
So I went ahead with the surgery, and then a short time thereafter, after an analysis of the lump that was pulled from my neck, It was found to be, it had lymphoma cells, cancer cells in it.
And I took this to my doctor and went to a cancer specialist and I went through a couple of rounds of chemo therapy and radiation therapy, which have had some lasting effects.
And I went back for my regular checkups.
Went for blood work. I went for a wide variety of tests to make sure nothing was returning.
And the reason I'm telling you all of this bittersweet story is that just yesterday I went for my final checkup.
And my blood work was perfect.
My health is good.
And I am now considered to be cancer-free in no need of additional Visits.
So there's six years of your life with something in the back of your mind, you know, like every time you wash your armpits and your groin, you check for all these things.
And I've been fortunate, but also well prepared in terms of health.
I've had pretty good health habits my whole life.
I've exercised since I was in my mid-teens, so pretty hard.
And I eat fairly well.
I weigh less than I weighed when I was 20 at the moment.
I clock in just under 200 pounds, just under 6 feet tall.
And I have cut out almost all sugar from my diet and a wide variety of other things I've done to stay as healthy as possible.
But it is a wild thing to suddenly have that whole...
Six-year sequence encapsulated in one bookend start and one bookend end.
And I remember when I got the phone call from my doctor in the States and he said it was cancer.
You know those weird things they do in movies where they zoom in and pull back at the same time and you get these weird distortion things where you feel very close and very distant at the same time?
It's kind of the same thing when you get a diagnosis of what has a pretty reasonable chance of...
Dry erasering you off the whiteboard of life when you get the news of what may reasonably likely kill you in a painful and horrible way.
And it's, of course, in particularly painful because I had a young daughter and a wonderful wife and a great life.
When you get that kind of news, there's this giant zoom out where you see your life in a big perspective.
You know what it is? It's like a little flash forward to your deathbed.
And it's funny, the very first video I did was called Live Like You're Dying, which was live like you're looking back on your life.
Like you get all the way to the end of your life, you get to your deathbed, and you're lying there looking back at your life.
Live like you get to go back in time, 50 years, 40 years, 60 years, 30 years, whatever.
Like you just, you're on your deathbed, you have hours to live.
And you get to go back in time and live your life again.
You get to go back with the knowledge and wisdom of your deathbed to live your life again.
Now, I've lived my life that way, and it wasn't like I had regrets for my past, but I certainly had regrets about what seemed to be an extraordinarily diminished future.
But there's this gift that sudden...
Sword-swinging mortality gives you which is other problems, other issues fade into fair insignificance.
And the requirement for courage becomes immediate and very vivid.
There's a scene in the movie The Matrix where one of the characters dies in a very ignoble way and she says, not like this, not this way, not like this.
And I felt that very strongly in the moment that the diagnosis was handed to me.
Like, you bastard of a lump, you don't get me.
Time will get me, but you won't.
And that will to survive, I believe, is important.
It's not the only thing.
And there are people who fight as hard as I did who are felled by this...
Satanic disease and I do not wish to say that it was for lack of courage or lack of want or lack of trying or lack of willpower that they succumbed.
I am lucky, but my luck was influenced by the titanic willpower and opposition that I had.
And to have something to live for is so important.
If you want to live well, And not just if you get a terrible disease, but if you want to live well, you must have things to live for.
And that means being courageous, and that means being virtuous, and that means speaking the truth, and that means fighting evil, and that means all of the great things that I have continually talked about on this channel for more than a decade, I guess, at this point.
You must build yourself a fortress of virtue in order to conquer the kingdom of happiness.
There is no other way to do it.
You must act in a way that stimulates genuine love in the people around you.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
There's no way to aim at love directly, more than there's any way to aim at happiness directly, any more than there's any way to aim at health directly.
There's no point waking up in the morning and saying, I want to be healthy, and then just going about your day as if nothing had changed.
You must aim at the actions which promote health.
You're going to eat better, you're going to exercise more, you're going to learn more about your body, you're going to study, and you're going to change your behavior.
Repeating, I want to be thin, into the mirror does nothing, if you don't change your behavior.
And we all want to aim at the shortcut which produces the result rather than the difficult slog which actually produces the outcome.
I want you to have a life if you've not been informed by the sudden guillotine of sudden illness.
I want your life at least to be informed if possible by my drive-by shooting of lumps into my neck.
And that means To really, really build the kind of life that you want brick by brick, virtue by virtue.
Because we all have choices.
We can avoid. We can diminish.
We can self-erase ourselves.
We can self-censor ourselves.
We can become little or nothing.
We can hope to vanish into general floating dust in order to avoid the challenges and the tragedies and the evils of this world.
And don't you dare do it.
Don't you dare do it.
Don't you dare. Everything that's great that we have in this life, all of our freedoms, came from our ancestors who stood up against lies, bullying, tyranny, hatred, division, class baiting, gender baiting, race baiting, you name it.
People stood up to those bullies and said, NO! Get thee behind me, sophist, is the rallying cry of world freedoms.
And you have your part to play, I have my part to play.
Now, I am not grateful for the illness, but I have wrung as much positivity out of the illness as I possibly could have.
And I said to myself, when I am in possession of an essential truth, I've said this from the very beginning, but it became even more vivid.
As the truths that I was accumulating became even more challenging.
I've always told the truth on this show.
But as the truths that accumulated to me became more challenging, it required more resolution, more commitment, more courage to speak them.
But when I faced down this grim reaper in this swordplay of mortality, I said to myself, there will be no truth that I will not speak.
There will be no essential truth that I will not give voice to.
I don't care the controversy.
I don't care the hatred. I don't care the opposition.
That is natural. When you speak the truth in a world that profits from falsehood, will you threaten the economic and power interests of a vast multitude of people both powerful and seemingly insignificant, the powers that be, and those who vote for them out of greed and desire for the unearned, the root of all, immorality?
And those of you who have been very grateful to me for speaking the truths that others do not speak, and a lot of the truths that I talk about I know for a fact there are other people, prominent people, prominent intellectuals who also know these truths, maybe because they haven't had the brush by of grim mortality when they have not been pulled into an unwanted dance off a cliff edge with the grim reaper.
They don't speak these truths, but I will.
I will. There is no truth that will not pass my lips.
That is essential for you to know that I believe.
And that is the commitment that mortality infused within my spine, within my soul, I dare say.
And I want you to partake of that kind of courage.
The old saying, as you know, is the only thing for evil to triumph.
The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.
We all know the entropy of freedoms.
We all know the general decay of liberty that occurs when you live in a society dominated by a virtually all-powerful state.
Everybody tries to grab it to use its weaponry to advance their interests, to punish They're enemies to reward their friends.
We all know the grim decay, the mortality of the body politic.
It does not have to be anymore that we are involved in this grim cycle of history, of rise and freedom and corruption and fall.
We have this conversation in the world to push back against the wheel of history, to stop it in its tracks and to reverse it, I believe.
But that is not an act of collective inevitability.
That is an act of individual will, your will, my will.
Will you speak the truth?
Will you profit from my near-death experience so that you can have a full life experience?
I have. And it is a glorious thing to stand on such a high mountain, to gaze across the world, to see what is necessary to say and to speak it with courage, with good humor, with conviction, with love.
There is no need to hate evil, and it is suicidal to love it.
But we must love the truth.
We must love the truth.
If you spend your time in love and pursuit of the truth and sharing your love for the truth, you don't need to fight evil because your love of the truth will burn it away over time.
I genuinely believe that, and it has certainly been the case in my personal life.
I hope it's the case in your personal life.
I think it is the case for us collectively, societally as well.
Do not hate evil. Love the truth.
Do not hate illness.
Love health. Do not hate immorality.
Love virtue.
Love your life.
Celebrate the beauty and the complexity of the challenges we all face.
The grave will claim you and will claim me soon enough.
In the span of human history, we are one flicker of a transient firefly.
The grave will take you, and I believe that shortly before we all topple over, pushed by the bony hands of time into the six-foot-deep dirt nap that awaits us all, we get a moment And it may seem like a very long moment, you know that cliché that before you die your life flashes before you?
I think there's truth in that.
And if you have been cowardly, if you have made horrible compromises, If you have maintained the grimly predictable company of low people,
of mean people, of petty people, of small people, of vicious people, of inconsequential people, if you have refused to climb out of the muck of your origins to the potential that biology and grace offers you, Who you could be rather than who you happened to be.
If you have refused to pursue the Aristotelian goal of Eudomania, of excellence in moral virtue, and encourage in speaking the truth, if you have refused that, I believe that there is a hell that stretches before you die where it's too late to change, but you live long enough to regret everything.
Regret everything.
Because when You are going to die, as you will, as I will.
When you are going to die, you will look back upon your life if you have failed to be courageous in the pursuit and spread of the truth and of virtue.
You will look back upon your life and you will find not one single solid reason for your cowardice.
And there will be no excuses in the doorway to infinity.
There will be no apologies that will be accepted Your ancestors, in your mind, may crowd around you and scorn you for failing to uphold what they sacrificed themselves to build for you.
And you will live long enough to regret everything that you did not do.
And everything you did do.
And there's a way to avoid that.
Do not regret your life at the end of it.
Build a life that is worth celebrating.
Right now. Today.
Get up. Learn the truth.
Speak the truth. Shame evil into inconsequentiality through your burning love of virtue.
