Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, describes the "virtue signalling" involved in promising to others what you do not have to pay for yourself - and how these empty promises are the greatest single threat to Western Civilization.▶️ 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
So I'm standing in the woods for reasons that will become apparent in just a moment.
Please notice they're cold woods.
There's actually snow on the ground and you could wander these woods for days.
Maybe you'd find a couple of half-rotted berries, maybe you'd find a dead squirrel, but it would be pretty tough going as opposed to some tropical area where everywhere you walk fruit salads are falling down into your face from the trees.
I want to talk about this and these words to explain exactly why virtue signaling is so annoying.
So virtue signaling is when you take a moral position that costs you nothing and gives you that pompous sense of moral self-congratulation while Particularly imposing burdens on others.
So people who say, welcome refugees.
Well, they're not often paying all of the taxes that are required.
Like in Germany, it takes 12 taxpayers to fund one refugee.
So everyone's saying welcome refugees who aren't themselves paying for it.
And even if they're paying for it in taxes, a lot of it is through debt and inflation and so on.
It's really annoying. So I want to explain to you why it's so annoying so that you can see it clearly for what it is.
I'm going to give you two scenarios.
Here's the first one. You're walking down the street and there's a beggar and you feel the impulse to be very generous towards that beggar.
So you walk up to the beggar and the beggar says, can you help me?
Give me five dollars. I really, really need to get some lunch.
I'm hungry. And what you do is you go up to the beggar and you say you sort of waft your hands forward and you say here's some oxygen here's some air my good fellow and then you pat yourself on the back and and walk off thinking that you've done some extraordinarily positive and noble deed for the day what's the beggar going to think when you've simply wafted some air towards him well he's going to think what a pompous expletive deleted how annoying that is the air was here anyway and there's basically air is an infinite resource So you're not generous if you're providing something to someone that's already available to everyone.
And this is sort of like when you say, well, the government should spend on, say, migrants or healthcare or whatever, foreign aid.
The government should spend it.
But you don't also say, here's where the government should cut in order to spend on what it is that I want it to spend.
You just have this illusion of an infinite resource.
And being generous with an infinite resource is not being generous.
It is posturing.
You have to recognize that resources are finite if you want to be generous.
Let's look at another scenario.
Let's say you're scuba diving with your friend and your friend's regulator stops working and he sort of signals to you like, I got no air, I don't know, whatever the gesture is, I got no air, and you go over to him and you start sharing your air with him and then you rise like the bubbles to avoid the bends to get to the surface and so on.
Well, that's an example of you sharing a resource called air that is scarce rather than common.
In other words, he can't just sit there and say, well, if I don't get air from you, I'll just turn my, you know, suck the lungs of a guppy or something like that.
Doesn't happen. So in one situation, you're giving somebody air when it's infinite.
In another situation, you're giving someone air where it's finite.
And the second one is generous because you can't both be breathing that air at the same time.
If you're giving your regulator to him, he's breathing.
And then when he's finished breathing, you breathe, but you can't both breathe it at the same time.
That's called scarcity. of resources.
Now, if you're of European extract, if you're Caucasian, if you're white, these woods out here, this was our natural habitat and it gave us virtually no food for four to five to sometimes six months or more of the year.
So what did you have to do? Well, you had to store up for the winter.
You know, the grasshopper and the ant, the squirrel getting the nuts in its cheeks and burying it somewhere so that it can survive through the winter.
Resource scarcity is the foundation of European civilization and it's one of the reasons why European civilization developed free market economics and separation of church and state and a relatively free society and freedom of speech because If you act as if resources are infinite in this environment, if you act more like the grasshopper who plays all summer and doesn't prepare for the winter and less like the ant who spends all summer beavering, to mix my animal metaphors, to save up resources for the winter.
If you try to live Like you're in a tropical paradise when you're actually living in half-frozen woods.
Well, you're going to run out of resources over the winter.
So, basic tenet of economics.
There's basically two. One is that all human desires are infinite, but all resources are finite.
And you can sort of think about that.
Is your cell phone ever fast enough?
Is the camera ever really good enough?
Do you have everything in your life that's perfect and you never want anything more?
Of course not. Human desires are infinite, but resources are finite.
That's one principle of economics.
The second is that people respond to incentives.
That's not particularly relevant here.
It's just kind of interesting. So resources are finite.
So when people say, well, we should spend money on this and we should spend money on that, and it's not their money.
And they're not explaining how it should be paid for.
They're kind of acting as if resources are infinite.
And that is a very, very dangerous thing.
And that's not what European civilization is designed for, or how we evolved.
We evolved, and one of the reasons why our culture evolved the way it did is because resources are very scarce for about half the year.
And at least until the advent of winter crops in the sort of mid-middle ages, like turnips and so on, you really had to be very careful in managing your food supply.
And you also had to temper your generosity.
Because the people who didn't plan for winter, if you just gave them all your food, then you would all starve to death.
So you had to have charity, but the charity was around prevention, not cure.
So you'd be charitable. You'd go over and help someone.
To pick their crops.
You'd help someone to plan.
You'd help someone fence in to make sure that their chickens weren't taken by wolves or coyotes or whatever.
So you would help others, but it would be prevention.
If they didn't listen to your help, if they just said, ah, you know, work is for idiots.
I'm just going to sit here and strum my guitar all summer and things will just work out.
Well, you can do that when there's fruit on every tree.
Year-round. You can do that when you can hunt game easily year-round.
You can do that when there's nuts and berries and honey year-round.
You can't do that when nature contracts her generosity for half the year.
You have to plan. So the European model is resources are finite.
I'm not going to probably help you if you don't listen to my good advice, but you end up lazing away.
I can't help you because I have to feed my own family.
If I feed my family plus your family when you didn't plan for anything, we all starve.
And this is part of the, and we know, based on biology, we know that people did starve who didn't plan because Europeans are pretty good planners.
Europeans are pretty good at resource management.
So, this is the problem.
As soon as governments came along and took over the money supply and basically started printing money as much as they wanted, borrowing money as much as they wanted, selling bonds to defer costs to future generations, we had a civilization and a culture That was based on limits and on scarcity and on hoarding to survive the winter.
The whole European character developed in woods like this.
But what happened was we introduced a tropical style abundance through the creation of as much money as we wanted.
We introduced a tropical style abundance Two, a European-style development in the realm of scarcity.
And this collision between these two systems is one of the foundational currents and counter-currents that is literally tearing the West apart at the moment.
If you believe that government resources are infinite, then denying government resources to someone must just be because you're mean, because you're a jerk, because you don't like that person, because you're prejudiced, because you're bigoted, because you're racist, because you're whatever.
Because resources are infinite.
So why would you deny someone resources if they're infinite?
Europeans, Caucasians, know very deeply, and this is true of East Asians as well, that resources are not infinite.
And that everything that you want has to be paid for sooner or later.
So a lot of the people who come from the Third World come from cultures where physical resources are virtually infinite.
There's fruit everywhere, there's game everywhere, and so denying someone food is a very nasty and dastardly act.
However, The European tradition is that resources are finite.
Responsibility is essential. And if people say, let's be generous to Group X, Group Y, Group Z, Country, ABC, it doesn't really matter.
If people say, let's be generous, and they don't have a plan to pay for it, and they don't say, well, here's what we have to cut elsewhere in order to pay for what I want, then they're coming from an infinite abundance mindset that is not just out of tune with European history, but is out of tune With reality itself, where resources are always finite and deferring the bill only escalates the price you have to pay at the end.
So remember this, the next time some lefty, some socialist, or it could be a conservative as well, says, let's spend money on X. Look for the other side.
Look for the dark side, the counter side.
Look for what's in the other hand. Are they saying how to pay for it?
No. Then they're trying to fool you.
They're trying to drag you into an infinite, abundant, psychotic mindset.
It's insane to think that money and resources are as infinite as oxygen and air.
So when somebody virtue signals, they're attempting to draw you into the delusion that resources are infinite, and the only reason you'd ever say no to someone is because you hate them in your heart, and it's evidence of meanness and coarseness and ugliness and bigotry.
That is not the true facts of reality in the world.
And those of us who evolved in the West know this deep in our bones.
There's an old saying that goes all the way back to ancient Greece.
