4220 The First Temptations of Christ: Stefan Molyneux Speaks at the Eagle Forum in St Louis
Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio delivers a powerful speech at the Eagle Forum in St Louis.▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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
Hello, I'm here to introduce the next speaker who has internet following all over the world.
Can you hear me now?
Has internet following all over the world, has hundreds if not thousands of podcasts and millions of subscribers on YouTube and his other channels.
And he also has lots of interviews of public intellectuals.
My cheat sheet says his interviews include people from Noam Chomsky to Jordan Peterson, but of course his most important interview was with Phyllis Schlafly that he did a couple of very excellent interviews with two or three years ago, and I recommend those.
A couple of things I especially like about his podcast I'd like to mention.
First of all, there are on the internet, in the news, it seems like a couple of times a week there's some issue in the news that everyone's talking about and the mainstream news meeting has got some spin on it and it sounds a little bit fishy, but you don't know what.
When that happens, I suggest you go straight to Free Domain Radio, and there's a good chance Stefan Molyneux has got a video or a podcast in which he spells it all out.
He lays out the facts, he tells you what you need to know, he tells you how it's been distorted, you watch that, and then that's all you need to know on that particular subject.
And they're excellent. The other thing I like about his podcast is that he's a big picture guy.
He likes to look at the big picture.
He doesn't get dragged down by the nitty-gritty of partisan politics, but if it's something big like the election being Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and he thinks the survival of Western civilization is at stake, then he's all in.
And he doesn't hold back from telling you what he thinks is going on and what he thinks you need to know and what he thinks is going to happen.
And he's just excellent on these big picture topics.
So, I'd like to let him go.
I'm happy to introduce the Stefan Molyneux. - Thank you very much, thank you.
Absolutely wonderful to be here.
It's St.
Louis, right? It's got an S at the end, because I have a silent X at the end of mine, so it's always kind of confusing.
But what a great city.
We came in a couple of days ago, went to the Botanical Gardens.
My daughter went to the Butterfly Conservatory today.
So it's fantastic, and thanks so much.
It's been wonderful to meet everyone here.
I really want to thank Jim Hoft and everyone for the invitation, because I'm going to give a surprising speech.
Now, just before I do, though, I wonder, just scanning here, are there any protesters here?
You know who you are.
You're kind of sitting in the back there with a little bubbly effervescence of self-righteous chantiness coming up.
Smell your armpits.
You know, if your eyes water, I don't know.
We'll see. But I know security's been pretty good, but I do want to talk today.
The philosophy and liberty is very, very important because we like freedom.
We really need to drill down and figure out what is the real essence of what it is that we're fighting for.
There's an old saying by a philosopher, I have a very ambivalent relationship, Friedrich Nietzsche.
He says, give a man a why he can bear almost any how.
If we have a big enough goal, we will walk through dragons, thorny bushes, anything to get there.
So I do want to talk about that.
Now, I'm going to talk about Jesus.
I'm not a theologian.
I'm a philosopher, so I'm going to recast this in the realm of philosophy.
So let me ask you, this is going to be a bit of a back and forth, because, you know, you can just box me in a screen anytime, so let's do a little back and forth.
When I say 40 days and 40 nights, what comes to your minds?
The desert.
That's right. The desert.
Jesus had been baptized.
He had received His approval from His heavenly Father.
And the Holy Spirit led Him out into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights.
Now, was it exactly 40 days?
It's kind of like a generational thing.
The number 40 in the Bible is like 40 years in the wilderness.
It's just Time enough to get hungry, I think, is the phrase.
And so, at the end of 40 days and 40 nights, who appears?
Satan. Now, there are three tests, and two of them are flipped, depending on which parts of the Bible you're reading.
There are three tests.
Who remembers the first temptation of Satan?
That's right. Okay, so Jesus is hungry.
40 days, 40 nights.
He's famished. And Satan comes up to him and says, if you are the son of God, surely you can just change these stones into bread and feed yourself that way.
Now that to be is fascinating on so many levels.
So first of all, well, does anybody remember what Jesus says?
It's very specific and very interesting.
I think I remembered it, but I wrote it down just in case.
Does anyone remember what Jesus says?
That is good, that is good.
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
That is an amazing statement.
And it has so much to do with liberty.
All of these temptations have so much to do with the liberty that we're so passionately committed to holding on to, to protecting, to preserving, to expanding.
Man does not live by bread alone.
In the Darwinian world, you do.
In the world without spirit, in the world without philosophy, in the world without ideals, in the world without values, ethics, You do live by bread alone, because you are an animal who needs food and shelter and reproduction like any single-celled organism.
You do live by bread alone, but Jesus says man does not live by bread alone.
Now, you need bread. He doesn't say, don't eat bread at all, right?
You need bread. But that is the least of what we are, as sentient, conscious human beings.
The bread We share with the seagulls.
They seemingly could live by bread alone and grab pizza off your plate and so on.
So I think it's fascinating that the devil says, use magic.
Use your powers. Use your power of miracles.
Now, we know Jesus can do it, right?
Because what else has Jesus done but food?
Water into wine, infinite loaves, infinite fishes.
I mean, he can do it.
So, he can turn, or this is what the devil says, you can turn the stones into bread.
You can create something out of nothing.
You can create something that's valuable out of something that is negative.
I think we have some flyby protestors, actually.
I gotta commit. That's committed, man.
You get an airplane. So the first thing that's fascinating is he says, you're hungry.
You're hungry in the desert.
Make yourself some food.
And I think what Jesus does is he very specifically says, by rejecting that, I am not a victim here.
I chose to be here.
I chose to be in the desert.
I chose to go without food for 40 days.
So I'm not just going to go make food because I chose to be here.
I am not a victim.
I am here by choice.
I am mortifying, sanctifying my flesh through hunger to focus on the spiritual.
I'm not just going to feed myself.
Because it's not a problem that I'm hungry, it is the result of my choices that I am hungry and I do not need salvation.
That's number one. Number two, there is a saying, and I think it's quite true, that says all evil arises out of a desire for the unearned.
The unearned.
If you use your powers, your magic, your God-given ability for miracles to make bread out of nothing, To sate your hunger.
You're saying that the animal, the physical, the material, the hunger is more important than the spirit, more important than the divine, more important than the abstracts.
And there's not a Darwinian alive who would have much of a problem with that.
Because what's happened in the West Since secular humanism, since Darwinianism, is we have said to people, you don't need freedom.
You just need stuff.
You don't need liberty, you don't need property rights, you don't need responsibility.
We'll give you free stuff.
We can turn nothing into something.
We can turn debt into food.
Because you have something in the desert so common, so negative, it's a burden, it's negative.
It needs to move it out of the way. Through the horrible alchemy, the dark magic of government, we can turn debt into food stamps.
We can get rid of people's freedoms and feed merely their bodies.
And is that not a great temptation that is handed to the voters?
Is that not the great sophistry that drives The democracy that is rapidly replacing the republic.
You can have free stuff.
As the government, we're going to pretend that we can provide value to you through debt, through money printing, through financial instruments like bonds.
We have nothing to offer you because we don't create anything.
But we can steal from the unborn.
We can steal from the next generation.
We can buy your votes.
We can satisfy your flesh at the expense of your virtues.
And that is the first temptation that the devil offered to Jesus.
Who knows the second?
Well, just one of the others, because they flip around a little bit.
Next one is...
Sorry?
Ah, should we do that one first?
No, let's do that one in a second. Okay, what was the one other than earthly power?
There we go.
All right. So let's say the second one, Jesus is taken by the devil to the top of a temple.
And what does the devil say to Jesus after Jesus passed the first temptation?
What does the devil say to Jesus when he puts him on top of the temple?
Jump! Why?
Because it is said, he quotes the Bible, and he says basically that the angels will catch you, your feet will not touch the stomach.
And what does Jesus say?
Do not test the Lord your God.
Now that to me is fascinating.
We are all subject to accidents.
Like I just, the other day, I was, I got new sneakers.
You know, the ones that beep, beep, beep the whole time.
I've got these new sneakers. I'm running down the hallway chasing my daughter because apparently I forget that I'm over 50.
And, you know, you go beep, and then your leg stops, but your momentum continues.
And I just went crashing down and my knee got a little gimmied and all that.
But anyway, it's just things that happen.
You know, you got to get up, you got to move around.
If you sit around, you just get fat, so you got to move around, but then you can fall, you got to exercise, but then you trip.
So there are accidents that happen in life all the time.
And I think we should be charitable to people who suffer from accidents.
You know, some window washer, he's all strapped in, he's got good ropes.
The ropes break. His strap breaks.
Really bad luck. He falls down.
He breaks his leg. Sure, let's help him out.
That's bad luck. And that is Christian charity.
That is charity as a whole, where we say, couldn't have seen that one coming.
Bad luck. We're going to help you out.
But that's not what the devil says to Jesus.
The devil says to Jesus, jump.
Be the architect voluntarily of your own misfortune, and God will save you in all of that.
And Jesus says, do not test God.
To me, this translates to the virtue of charity versus the evils of the welfare state.
If you've ever really, really tried, and I'm sure everyone in this room has, if you've really tried to help someone, It's tough.
Have you known an alcoholic, you've known a drug addict, you've known somebody who's sexually addicted or has some laziness, or you know, one of any of the various dealt out cards of the deadly sins, getting them to change is really tough.
Anybody ever tried to lose weight?
I know I... Yeah, kind of tricky, right?
Do you know the percentage of people who lose weight and keep it off?
Like, 3%, 4%, something like that.
In fact, you lose weight, your body's like, oh no!
It's the ice age!
Hang on to every calorie!
And then you eat, you know, one crack of blah!
So it's hard. And, you know, people, you want to lose weight, and it's hard.
You've got to change everything. You can't ever go back.
It's, you know, you've got to do boring exercises, man.
So it's really, even if you want to help yourself, and you gain the benefits of losing weight, it's hard to do.
And so there used to be a lot of tests for charity, which is, are you the architect of your own misfortune?
Did you get pregnant outside a wedlock?
Are you a drinker?
Do you gamble? In which case, what does giving money do to someone who is the architect of their own misfortune?
What does it do to them? Yeah, makes it worse, right?
Oh, do you have a drinking problem?
Here's $10,000. Or should I just give it to the bar?
Because it's the same effect, right?
Helping people is really tough because there are people who have bad luck.
Maybe one or two bad mistakes or whatever, but then there are people you give them money and it gets worse and worse and worse.
So I think Jesus is saying something like, if you accidentally trip and fall off the temple, You can get some help.
But if you try to manipulate God, you try to control God, you try to make God make you look really cool by floating you down from the temple like a dove's wing in front of everyone to say, woo, what a trick, I'm the son of God.
That is not right.
Charity works When we can judge people and judge the efficacy of what we're doing.
Charity works when we can ostracize people because sometimes people are helped by giving them resources and sometimes people are helped by withholding resources from them and it's really hard to know the difference.
Really hard to know.
Certainly the government has no interest in it whatsoever.
Churches were very good at it because they had developed this kind of charity.
And, of course, in Christianity it's not a virtue if you're compelled, right?
Not a virtue if you're forced.
Charity, if it's voluntary, accrues to your good conscience through free will.
If charity is the government pointing a gun at you, taking your money and using it to buy votes from incompetent people, it's no longer a virtue.
It has become a vice.
So when Jesus says, I'm not going to jump Because that's not what salvation is for.
That's not what grace is for.
That's not what charity and help is for.
It's not there to control people.
It's not there to remove from me the consequences of my own bad decisions.
It's there if something accidentally bad or wrong happens.
Number three. Third time lucky, says Satan, and he comes up to Jesus and says, that's right.
He takes him. To a very high mountain.
Now I got to tell you this is kind of allegorical because they're really in Israel, that region, not a lot of high mountains.
So he's up on the rooftop of the world and he says, look at all these kingdoms.
Look at all this gold.
Look at all this power. I'm sure there's a harem or two scattered in there and it can be all yours if you Worship me.
If you bow down and worship me.
Jesus says...
I have this written down too.
I should have memorized it, but anyway.
He says...
Away with you, Satan!
For it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shall you serve.
This is a fascinating interaction when it comes to thinking about political freedom, economic freedom, personal freedom.
It's fascinating. Do the kingdoms belong to Satan?
No. Satan is offering to buy the allegiance of Jesus with something that isn't even his.
Does that sound like something politicians have been known to indulge in from time to time?
I will give you money.
I will give you power.
I will shield you from the consequences of your bad decisions.
I will do all of this.
It's not their money.
If you bow down and worship the state, the state will give you what isn't even the governments to begin with.
It is debt. It is taxation.
It is money printing. It is all that horrible stuff.
And he says not only, no thanks, but also, get lost.
Stop offering me what you do not have.
Stop offering me what you do not own.
Stop offering me what you do not possess.
Stop trying to buy my allegiance with stolen goods.
Can you imagine? 2016 accepted.
Can you imagine a political cycle, a cycle of voting, That occurs without offering the taxpayers anything.
Without buying their allegiance.
And they can't even buy their allegiance with taxes they're taking in the here and now.
They're buying their allegiance because they're hoping future generations of tax slaves will pay the debt off for buying the allegiance of people in the here and now.
That is an astounding phenomenon.
And then, after the third time Jesus rejects Satan, what happens?
Yes darling?
Well, Satan leaves.
And the angels arrive.
And the angels minister to Jesus.
I assume they give him a little aloe vera because he's been out in the sun for a while.
I'm from Ireland, so I'm always thinking about these things.
And food and water, if you resist the temptation to take what is not yours, you get everything.
If you establish and maintain property rights, what do you get?
The free market, incentives, productivity, growth.
You get paradise if you reject what you have not earned, the temptation that appeals to your Darwinian self, your physical self, your body.
Give up your freedoms for food stamps.
Give up your freedoms for student loans.
Give up your freedoms for welfare.
Give up your freedoms for the military-industrial complex.
It works on the rich and the poor.
It's the middle who generally get carved up like a Christmas turkey.
But this is the great offer.
That is made to us.
It's all we need food and shelter.
because the government can provide that at the expense of freedom, property, virtue, sustainability, culture, responsibility.
And this in a bigger context, no, that's wrong.
There's no bigger context than what I was just talking about.
Let me, in a different context.
Here's an interesting question.
Nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, five-year journey on the Beagle, takes all of his notes, comes up with, it wasn't his, I mean, Lamarck had come up with it earlier, but he, and he sat on it for a long time, theory of evolution.
Because I think that there are two kinds of people in the world.
There are people who seek truth and the people who seek power.
Truth is relative to reality.
Power is relative to people.
So here's something that's fascinating.
Science, 400 years old, in general.
Now, science has given us absolutely unrivaled power over the material world.
I mean, no question. I mean, it was nicer to fly here than walk here.
I have no doubt about that.
Even my voice is being amplified by science.
I mean, most of us got here through science.
Half of us are alive through science.
Science has given us unrivaled power over the material world, but what has occurred simultaneous with the rise and spread of science is the fall of ethics, the fall of virtue, because science feeds our material self,
right? Science protects and Supports and keeps us full of nutrition and gets our teeth cleaned and does all of these amazing things, x-rays and chemotherapy, you name it.
Incredible stuff that science does.
It's almost like science was a devil that stood and then released the croquet.
It's almost like science has given this Deal to us like the devil did to Jesus.
And don't get me wrong, I have no problem with science.
Look, I have a watch. Like I have no problem with science, but I think we have to understand what it's cost us and how to backfill what it's cost us.
The devil says to Jesus, I will give you control over the whole world if you worship me.
Science has given us control over the whole world.
We've gone to the moon.
We've gone to the bottom of the oceans.
Science has given us control over the world.
But science gave us evolution, which gave us a post-Christian world of Nietzschean will to power struggle.
What is wrong about receiving stolen goods?
You know, it happens in nature all the time.
Does anyone know any examples of Nature thieves?
Crows? Yeah, the crows will steal just about anything that's not nailed down, right?
Seagulls? Bunch of flying white rat thieves?
Yes. Anything else?
Squirrels? Rats or tails?
Sounds personal. Anything else?
Raccoons, that's right. And think about the anti-kidnapping of the cuckoo bird, right?
They dump their egg into some other bird's nest and they just raise him saying, well, I guess he just took steroids or something.
So in nature, this happens all the time.
They're constantly trying to fool each other.
There's an old cartoon, it's like the Battle of Anchencourt, you know, the first time they used these giant longbows and they could launch these arrows, like, way further than anyone else, and the people who are running on the other side are like, hey, can they do that?
It's war, of course they can, right?
I mean, there's the Second World War that Churchill said, the only two strategies that these supposedly wonderful, moral, and virtuous nations did not avail themselves of were torture and cannibalism, and only because they were of doubtful utility.
So in the world of nature, there are no rules other than did you get your food and did you make a baby or two?
That's it. Did you run away from something that was going to eat you?
Did you get to eat something else and did you make your babies?
That's it. You know, the zebra is not cheating with those stripes.
That's the point, right? So in the natural world, no ethics, no rule.
And when Darwin came along, I think a lot of people kind of took that to heart quite a bit, which is where I think you get all of this falsification, this lying, this manipulation.
You know, these crazy postmodernists who say, there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as virtue, but you're objectively racist.
I mean, you understand, this makes no sense at all.
I don't, sorry to break my daughter's heart here, but I'm just kidding.
So I don't sit there on September, sorry, on December 24th, I don't sit there with milk and cookies and a big net waiting to catch the guy in red.
Because I gave up on Santa Claus quite some time ago.
I don't believe in ghosts, so I don't go checking out ghost places with spectro detectors and a talking dog.
I mean, I don't do any of these, because when I was a kid, I was into telekinesis, because it was like the 70s, so reality was crumbling around us.
And I tried, you know, can I lift things with my brain?
All it produces is a headache.
And so when you start believing in things, you don't pursue them anymore, right?
So it's like the philosophers who say, well, there's no such thing as truth, it's like, then shut it down.
Shut it down. It's done.
There's nothing there. If there's no such thing as truth and no such thing as virtue, why are you taking a paycheck?
Because you've got nothing to offer.
You've just told me that the one thing you're supposed to sell, truth and virtue, well, neither of them exist.
But they keep taking paychecks.
Why? Because it's the Darwinian, Nietzschean, will-to-power universe.
Because they can, and it feeds their body.
They get tenure, they get summers off, what is it, three or four months in the summer?
You get sabbaticals, you get conferences, Very warm locations.
It's cool. It's fun.
It's okay. What do I need to say to get my stuff?
Who do I need to vote for to get my stuff?
What lies do I need to tell to get my stuff?
Because the body wants stuff.
The soul wants virtue.
But the body just wants stuff.
And for a long time I was somewhat skeptical of the Christian skepticism of the physical.
But I'm kind of getting it now.
As I get older and see the greed for the unearned.
It's horrible. And it's cancerous.
And it is undermining all of these virtues that we inherited that we are squandering.
Animals can be really tricky.
They hide. They're sneaky.
They change color. You know, you get those weird octopuses and chameleons.
Is there anything else that changes color?
I was just thinking about that today. Cuttlefish, oh yes, very, very good.
Me, five minutes of sunshine, Mr.
Tomato Head. No, there's other sneaky, it changes color, like there's other sneaky stuff.
And it's like, is that cheating?
No, it's whatever you do to get your resources.
There's that freaky thing with the cuttlefish, right?
So the cuttlefish, the male cuttlefish can pretend to be a female, like the males are all fighting.
With each other for access to the females, and there's a male cuttlefish that kind of shrink itself and make it look female, and then it kind of switches down along the bottom, hoping that the male...
He's cheating! It's like, no, that's what gets the next generation of cuttlefish more power to him, right?
There's no right or wrong in the animal kingdom other than survival.
And that's not moral.
That's just DNA photocopying.
Mindless. But we, as human beings, have to be separate from that.
We have to be above that.
But the government comes along and what do they say?
I will give you the unearned, which I, as the government, did not earn.
And all you have to do is worship me.
All you have to do is give me your allegiance.
Aiming for the good is costly.
To the biological. This is why Jesus is starving.
This is why Jesus is thirsty.
Because he's aiming for spiritual purity.
Enlightenment. And that's painful to the body.
Because virtue is the deferral of gratification.
Fundamentally. And of course in Christianity, as in a lot of religions, the deferral of gratification is suffer now to gain paradise.
The body very rarely recognizes the value of the deferral of gratification, right?
Candy is good.
Very good indeed.
And your tongue likes the candy because it made you go eat fruit and rip up honey bees nest and so on.
So your body doesn't want to defer gratification.
Your soul, your higher being philosophy says defer gratification.
And the government will come along and say, there's no need for you to defer gratification because if you mess up, we got you.
Oh, they really got you.
The welfare state is a single mother state.
Charlie Kirk was talking about this just the other day.
I saw the numbers myself this morning.
Three things you need to do if you're born poor to get to the middle class.
Graduate high school. Sorry?
Get and keep a job, usually for at least a year.
Don't have a kid before 21 or before you're married.
Failing that, if you are a cuttlefish, just pretend to go down.
Yeah, so these things, if you do these things, you have less than 2% chance of remaining poor.
And if you do these things, you get to the middle class office every single time, but these things all involve the deferral of gratification.
Did anybody have a first job that didn't suck?
Anybody? They're all terrible.
Because, well, we've been so wonderfully educated by the government school system that we're just so jam-packed of economic value.
So yeah, my first job, 1977, I was painting plaques for the Silver Jubilee.
And, oh yeah, then I worked in a bookstore, which was like three buses and an hour and a half to get to.
I was putting newspapers together, and it was just like, I think a robot would kill himself at this job.
I mean, they're terrible.
Those jobs are awful.
So of course you have to defer gratification.
Of course you have to get up and do stuff that is terrible.
I cleaned offices, and this is like, you know, you clean a doctor's office, it's like, oh man, what happened in here?
It's just set fire to the thing, calling a priest to take off on foot.
So there's a lot of deferral gratification.
Sexual impulses, if you can learn to control your sexual impulses, channel them towards, I don't know, a stable family structure rather than spray and pray of modern youth, I don't know.
It would be better. It would be better for everyone.
But the body says, now.
And virtue says, not so much.
Let's wait. Let's get it right.
But the state, by systematically coming in and removing the negative consequences of bad choices, All it's doing is funding those choices.
One of the reasons, I believe, that Jesus said to Satan, no, I'm not jumping off this temple, because if he had been caught and wafted down and gained great renown and great theological power because of this miracle, what's the next thing that would have happened?
You got a lineup of everyone jumping off the temple.
Wow, one jump?
I float down like a dandelion fluff and I'm praised and all the gold you can eat.
I mean, this is not...
It doesn't work.
It's fundamentally, it doesn't work at all.
It works in the short run.
Because the devil...
He has no power. That's the fascinating thing about this story as well.
The devil isn't sitting there saying, I'm going to create a forest of 6,000 flaming swords, and you have to fight your way out, or I'm slicing and dicing you like some divine fruit ninja.
He doesn't do any of that. He says, oh, you can make the rocks into bread.
Oh, you should jump off the tower.
You? Well, he can't even hand over these kingdoms.
He'd say, oh, yeah, the kingdom's yours, and he'd walk away.
And then Jesus would say, Oh, you've got to go get them, obviously.
They're yours. I'm just going to say that they're yours.
So the devil doesn't really have anything to offer.
He doesn't have anything to provide.
He has nothing of substance other than the tempting you to want something for nothing, the temptation to want something for nothing.
It's the fundamental temptation, I think, that drives so much political decay these days.
I want something, but I don't want to work for it.
I don't want to pay for it. I don't want to defer gratification for it.
I want it now. Because that is the world of the animal.
That is the world. You guys heard of the marshmallow test?
They give this test to little kids.
And the test is, right, you get one marshmallow, you can eat it now, and then you don't get another one later, or you can, we'll leave it here.
If in 15 minutes you don't eat it, you get two, right?
Well, the animal says, Why?
Because if you don't eat it, some other kid's going to come and grab it.
You know, you don't just leave food lying around because then the seagulls and the squirrels, I remember you were personal with that one.
Yeah, so something else gets you.
Grab it now! Eat it now!
Do it now! But as far as success goes, we have to defer gratification.
I'm dreaming, probably madly, but I'm dreaming of one day that the politician comes up and says, no more free stuff, it's bad for you.
You know, like, you know, you got kids and it's Halloween and, you know, they get the chipmunk cheeks full of, like, really bad stuff.
Like, you gotta stop. You gotta stop.
No more stuff is bad for you.
It comes at other people's expense.
Do you know, every single human life on this planet right now is sustained by $30,000 of debt.
That is the indebtedness of our financial system.
$30,000 for every man, woman and child alive on this planet right now.
Check your pockets. We're not going to do so well when the debt comes to you.
Because the devil just gives you liabilities in the long run, right?
Like the government. You guys know what the unfunded liabilities of the US government are?
$170, $180 trillion.
Ten times the GDP. Ten times the GDP. That's not the national debt, it's just unfunded promises the government has made that they cannot pay for it.
No idea how to pay for it.
So, we didn't get wealthier.
If you look at median wages from the 1970s onwards, the welfare state, all this borrowing, all of this massive redistribution, trillions of dollars, didn't make us wealthier.
It brought a lot of allegiance to power.
I mean, who on welfare, who in the military-industrial complex, who on the receiving end of all this government money can possibly vote objectively?
When I was on the board of a software company that I co-founded, I got so many lectures about conflict of interest.
It's conflict of interest. Oh, you can't do that.
That's a conflict of interest. Voting?
Are you kidding me? If your entire existence is dependent upon the government giving you free stuff and you don't pay any taxes and you're on the receiving end of everyone else's taxes, oh yeah, let's just hear your ringing objectivity about the tax question.
It's madness. It's madness.
They're just bought and paid for.
And it's wrong and it's unhealthy.
And you ever heard this?
Like, I'm very much against the welfare state on moral grounds.
It's a violation of the non-aggression principles, a violation of property rights.
It's corrupt. It corrupts everything it touches.
And then people say, oh, but if the welfare state goes away, how are people going to live?
Well, first of all, you've just given me their entire conflict of interest, which is why voting is a ridiculous exercise for the most part.
But also, There's this fantasy that it's not going to go away anyway.
It is going to go away. Mathematically, that which cannot continue will not continue.
The welfare state is going to end.
Debt is going to need to be paid off.
It is all going to end.
Now, we can either have a soft landing with the wheels down because we know what's coming, or plane, airplane, cliff wall, fireball...
Oops.
And that is a terrible thing.
So I think that there's really great lessons to be learned from the three temptations of Jesus.
Do not thirst for the unearned.
Do not let anyone portray you as a victim.
Because with victimhood comes entitlement, and with victimhood comes not just a relaxation but a collapse of moral standards.
Because if you feel victimized, Than you feel by any means necessary.
Like if you were a kid and someone stole your bike, like, hey, I'm gonna get my friends and go get my bike back.
I've been victimized. Moral standards collapse.
But if you're genuinely victimized, that's another story.
But if you're just told that you're victimized, people tell you that you're victimized so you let them do terrible things in your name.
You've been oppressed, so I'm gonna go steal a bunch of money for you, keep most of it for myself, and then make you addicted on the remnants.
But as long as you're a victim, you will then countenance other people doing terrible things on your name and your behalf.
Don't be a victim. Don't thirst for the unearned.
Reject. Mere Darwinian materialism.
The will to power benefits the most corrupt, the most false, the most vicious.
It's a race to the bottom for moral standards, and I'm sick of losing that battle myself.
Because one of the greatest statements in the Bible, I'll finish with this, thank you for your patience, one of the greatest statements in the Bible is this.
What shall not profit a man if he gains the whole world But loses his soul.
Science gave us the world.
Politicians gave us free stuff.
But I'm very concerned it's going to cost us absolutely everything.
