March 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:14
4320 Stefan Molyneux Shut Down! The Speech They Could Not Silence!
Stefan Molyneux's speech in Vancouver Canada was shut down by leftist thugs on Friday 15 March 2019 - THIS is the speech that got him deplatformed - please like, subscribe and share to get the word out!▶️ 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
It's a great challenge of philosophy to figure out how to turn evil into good, but we can do that together today.
I hope that you will listen through to this, perhaps my most important speech, certainly the one I've worked on the hardest.
A great evil was done to me recently and to the organizers of a free speech event.
I was invited late last year, that's in 2018, to give a speech on the philosophy of free speech at a university in British Columbia in Canada.
And we had to switch venues because of death threats and other forms of threats and vicious verbal attacks, falsifying my philosophical positions, of course.
And eventually, we were unable to do the event at all, largely because of actual on-site visits from leftist thugs, and also because the Vancouver Police Department, according to the organizer, did not respond to a 911 emergency call.
And also threatened to bill the people who were going to host the speech with at least a $40,000 bill for what?
To protect my rights and the rights of hundreds of people who wanted to come and talk about philosophy to protect our rights constitutionally guaranteed of free speech and freedom of association.
You pay massive taxes in Canada and then apparently you get a bill for $40,000 plus for peaceable assembly.
That is where things stand.
It is a great stain upon the freedoms of Canada.
And it is a challenge.
So how do we turn this evil into a good?
Well...
I would really hope that you will listen to this speech, that you will understand and process the arguments, that you will repeat the arguments that you hear in this speech, and also that you will share this speech so that it gets far greater exposure as a result of
The successful attempt to de-platform a philosophical conversation that we get, in a sense, splash damage from the impact of this kind of de-platforming to spread these ideas even further.
That is the greatest good that we can get out of this truly abominable situation, and I hope that you will take it.
And if you would like to help out, of course, with the costs associated, With all this kind of stuff I would really appreciate it.
freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
So this is the speech that I was going to give.
You know when you pass a half century You really can't say when I was younger.
You really have to say when I was young.
So, to start, when I was young, I was invited to a friend of a friend's wedding.
Now, I love weddings myself.
Great food, great conversation, great company, and a wonderful sense of love and togetherness and fertility and future and so on.
And I remember giving a speech at a wedding where I was best man.
Well, I said to the bride and the groom, I said, the feeling and the love that you have today should be the place that you return to should you ever run into trouble in your marriage.
The love and togetherness and connection and community and joy that you have, that's the essence and the heart and the soul and the spine of your marriage.
And should you ever drift from that, this is the day you need to return to because this is the reality of your marriage.
Everything else is just kind of a strange and odd distraction or delusion.
So, at my friend of a friend's wedding, I enjoyed some of it, but it seemed a bit off and a bit odd.
Now, every wedding has a theme song.
Every couple, I guess, has a theme song.
My wife and I's is L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole.
But this wedding had, as its theme song, a song by Blue Rodeo called, We Are Lost Together.
We are lost together, and I thought, What an odd sentiment.
What a very odd sentiment to have at the heart of your marriage.
Almost like a claim of desperate clingy nihilism.
I would rather be lost with you than found with the truth or something like that.
It was very strange.
And many years later I did check in on this marriage and lo and behold to Nobody with half an eyeball's surprise, it was, well, it turned out exactly as you would expect it to with that kind of sentiment at the wedding.
Now when I was, this is sort of a lift the curtain backstory to the speech, when I was thinking about that speech, this speech, that song kept popping into my mind.
We are lost together.
And I couldn't figure out why until I realized That really was the heart of the speech because that describes where we are in the West at the moment.
We're still in our countries.
We're still nominally in our cultures.
We are still in proximity to each other.
But we are lost.
We are together, but we are lost.
And I'm going to tell you why we are lost.
And I'm going to tell you How we can be found in a way that is so foundationally glorious that it puts all the past triumphs of our culture almost to shame.
So, let's start with perhaps the most common story in religions.
And the story is that there is a devil.
And what does the devil do?
Well, the devil can't take over your free will.
He can't control you directly.
He can't make you into a Gepetti, marionette, puppet.
But, what can the devil do?
The devil can tempt you.
The devil can tempt you with whatever is going to fill the hole in your heart that causes you unease.
If you are physically homely, he can tempt you with beauty.
If you are obscure, but you thirst for recognition, he can offer you fame.
If you are poor, he can offer you money.
If you are of ill health, he can offer you robustness.
If you are insecure, he can offer you praise and adulation and worship.
Whatever it is that is in your secret heart, that you somehow believe, if it were fixed, you would be happy forever, that's what the devil will offer you, of course.
And what does he want in return for usually material wealth, fame, success, talent, comfort, adulation?
Well, he wants your soul.
He wants your soul.
He wants your moral center.
He wants the essence of what it is for you to be human in return.
Now you take all of this to serve your vanity, your insecurity, your narcissism, your greed, your desire really for power.
And in return, it feels like you're just giving up something immaterial.
Eh, it's just the soul.
What does it really matter?
You don't even notice when it's gone until... until what happens?
We know the arc of this story, right?
The bell curve, we could say, of this story.
The...
Temporary joy that you experience when your anxiety and your insecurity is relieved.
When you gain the fame, the wealth, the power, the attention, the adulation, whatever it is.
You have a short time of significant joy.
And then, what do you realize then?
You realize that you have made a terribly, terribly bad deal.
But you've made a catastrophic monumental mistake.
The joy of material plenty and success and fame and money fade.
They turn to ashes in your mouth.
Like going to a wonderful buffet when you're starving full of fruit and then finding that they're all made of wax and plastic.
Your anxiety is not relieved.
Your unhappiness is not relieved.
And now you face the additional dread of having lost your soul and knowing the destination, the train track of descending fire that it leads you down.
This is a very old story.
It's been told many, many, many times.
And when I was younger, when I was young, I thought this story was a silly fable.
And now as I look at the unfolding story of the West, I know that it's true.
But it's true in a way that can be quite hard to see.
Over the past few hundred years, we in the West have gained material control, scientific power, and free market wealth.
That is beyond even the most fantastical dreams of people just a few hundred years ago.
For 150,000 years of modern human history, modern human existence, we have lived lives of scarcity, incredible scarcity.
We were down to about 10,000 people during the last ice age, that close to being Wiped out as a botched experiment.
And then, and it's so recent, it's an eye blink.
In not just the history of the universe, the history of the world, the history of life, but even within the history of our own species.
Out of 150,000 years, we're talking a few hundred years of significant scientific advancements.
A few hundred years ago, people thought that the Earth was the center, not just of the solar system, but of the universe.
Doctors thought that your blood sat in your body, immobile, like milk in a bag.
We could not fly, we did not have an internal combustion engine, certainly no electronics, no computers, our engineering was very primitive.
A hundred years ago, a little more, was when Orville and Wilbur Wright first coasted human beings for a few hundred yards above the surface of the world.
Within a half century or so from that time, we had gone from coasting over the grass to going to the moon and back.
I still remember that as a very little kid watching that on a very grainy black-and-white television, imagining a future where we could step across the stars like a man traversing a stream on visible rocks.
This, of course, has not played out, but we have the technology if we wanted to go to Mars.
Jupiter.
We have gained material wealth beyond the dreams of anybody in the past.
It is said of the French king a few hundred years ago that he would open his windows to enjoy the view of Paris and sometimes he would faint from the stench.
People talk about the pollution of cars, the pollution of horses, and the manure was indescribable.
People would dump their excrement, their urine, out of the window onto the street.
What we have now, the safety and security of our water supply, of our electricity, of the comfort of our homes, the heating and the cooling, the antibiotics.
It's astonishing what lives of absolute power and security and wealth we live at the moment.
And it's a very complicated thing.
Because as we have gained material wealth and material power and material security, we have lost our values.
And this is a related phenomenon.
It's a related phenomenon.
It's like a pendulum.
On the one side, you can have very strong values, but very weak science.
On the other hand, you can have very strong science, But we're very weak values.
Just as the story of the devil would predict that the devil will offer you material comfort, security from want, wealth, power, fame, glory beyond your wildest dreams.
And it costs you your soul.
The free market, science, engineering, technology has fed our bodies sometimes to the bursting point.
Has encased us in an amniotic sack of modern security and comfort.
And we have lost our values.
We have lost our souls in the process.
If you have strong religion, you have weak science.
If you have strong science, you have weak religion.
As you gain science, you lose morality.
As you gain morality, you lose science.
Why?
Now, let me tell you that in a moment.
Because I'm saying that we've lost our values and we're not particularly happy.
Well, maybe you're very happy.
I'm generally quite happy, but what's my evidence for this?
Well, just in various places across the West, I mean, in particular, female unhappiness has grown and grown and grown.
Misery.
is spreading among women and has in ever escalating steps ever since the 1960s.
Every single decade women get unhappier and unhappier and unhappier.
Now 25, this is in various countries around the West, now 25% of women are on antidepressants.
Our families have fallen apart.
Cultures have dissolved.
Opiates and addictions and suicides are all skyrocketing.
In particular, for white males.
Over 50% of college students reported being so depressed in the previous academic year that they found it difficult to function.
Just here in Canada, more than 6.7 million people suffer from mental illness.
By the time Canadians reach the age of 40, one in two of them will have or have had a mental illness, 50% by the age of 40.
In Canada, opioid overdoses now kill more people than automobile accidents.
Mental illness, whether it comes from adult dysfunction, adult addiction, compulsion, Whether it comes from childhood trauma can be enormously detrimental to your health and longevity.
I've done a whole presentation on this.
You can check it out called The Bomb in the Brain.
I'll put a link to it below.
Mental illness, trauma, dysfunction can slice 10 to 20 years off your lifespan.
It's not just limited to Canada.
The World Health Organization estimates that one person commits suicide every 40 seconds.
In Canada, 4,000 people a year take their own lives.
That's 11 per day on average.
Among Ontarians aged 25 to 34, one in eight deaths is associated with opioid use.
These are not the patterns of a healthy and functional and positive and moral society.
There's an indigenous population, a tribe, in North America, North-Eastern United States, a little bit of Quebec, called the Mohawk.
The Mohawk have, I guess like all tribes, they have an origin story, they have a cosmology, a mythology.
Where did the universe come from?
And their answer is this.
The universe was birthed from a woman, and the woman gave birth to twins.
One good, one evil.
Now, I know that physicists are having trouble pinpointing the exact origins of the universe and why and how it came to be.
They're getting close, but they're not quite there yet.
But I think we're on fairly thick ice when we say that the Mohawk story of the woman who gave birth to the universe and twins, one good, one evil, that's not factually true.
It's not true.
It's not scientifically true.
But the Mohawks created a culture that lasted for thousands of years.
In the West, the cycle of civilization, 230, 240, 250 years.
up and down, rise and fall, flourish and crash, thrive and decline.
Why?
The Mohawk story keeps the fire and ice of good and evil in your mind continually.
You get stronger values if you have weaker science.
In the Old Testament, right, the foundation of Judaism and Islam and Christianity, the moral law is given to Moses.
The moral law, the Ten Commandments, are given to humanity by God.
What is the source of our ethics?
Why be good?
Why be virtuous?
Why suffer and sacrifice for virtue?
Because that's God's law and that's the purpose of your existence.
You see, that is the meaning of humanity is to struggle through this veil of tears to avoid the slippery temptations and bribes of the devil and make your way up the staircase to heaven.
That is the purpose.
That is the meaning.
That is the challenge.
And we've lost that.
And we've gained.
I'm not anti-science.
I'm very, very pro-science.
And I'm pro-ethics and virtue and universal values.
This is by just pointing out a paradox that we're facing.
This horrible choice that if we get the physical comforts of science and the free market, we lose the moral purpose and compass of ethics.
To gain science, we needed to push Eternal consciousness out of our calculations.
In order to understand the universe, we needed to push aside revelation, we needed to push aside miracles, we needed to push aside the ultimate consciousness of God.
Even moving Earth from the center of the universe was an incredibly powerful event, which is why it was fought so hard by some sectors of the church.
I mean, the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Sun is not the center of the universe, we're just on a fairly indistinguishable galaxy in the middle of what seems like a nearly infinite universe.
We are happenstance and evolution.
Now we get to understand the world when we take moral consciousness out of the equation.
As it was famously said with the onset of science in the 17th century under the Baconian Revolution, it was famously said that the age of miracles It's over.
It's past.
But in order to believe in good, miracles are necessary.
In order to believe in virtue, miracles are necessary.
We need loaves and fishes spilling out in infinity.
We need walking on water.
We need burning bushes.
We need resurrection from the dead.
We need the healing of lepers.
We need an anti-rational existential miracle to believe in virtues, to believe in our ethics.
But in order to have control over nature we need to push those aside and say the universe is matter and energy and universal law is inviolate, absolute.
We need to push out eternal consciousness in order to truly understand and control the universe.
And that's a devil's bargain.
We gain material power, but we lose our virtues.
We lose our ethics.
We lose what makes us human.
Now, this is a problem that is not unknown.
In philosophy it's called the facts-values dichotomy.
One guy strangles another guy, the other guy dies because you need oxygen to live.
That we know, it's a fact, right?
Why is it immoral?
Why is it evil to strangle a guy?
We know deep down that it must be.
But when we understood the universe in a purely material sense, we lost the divine commandments to virtue.
It's the trade.
I don't think it has to be the trade, but it is.
It has been.
Why should we not murder?
Why should we not steal?
Why should we not assault?
If you remember the movie, this is going back a ways now, Terminator 2.
There's the kid and there's the giant killer robot.
And the killer robot is about to kill someone.
And the kid says, stop.
And the robot says, why?
The kid says, you can't just go around killing people.
The robot says, why?
The material robot, the robot of matter and energy with no soul, with no conscience, with no God, there's no God of robots.
Why?
That's the answer.
Now the answer used to, that's the question, the answer used to be because God has forbidden it, because it is against the moral law of God.
which is more important than material concerns.
And then we had to treat the universe as if there was no God in order to gain power over matter in the comforts of the modern world.
And we lost our ethics.
And Darwin established That evolution was a blind striving for the gathering of resources by whatever means necessary to gain power.
And that was a very dangerous situation.
Now, once God began to evaporate from our calculations of the universe, taking with him our morals, It was incumbent upon philosophers, and this is what they should have done, first and foremost, is they should have said, Oh Lord above, we are losing our morals when God evaporates.
We must find a universal proof of secular ethics.
We must find a way for people to be good, not because of the commands of a disappearing God, not because A fear of the guns, of the state, and of the prison.
We must find a way to internalize conscience by understanding, creating, disseminating a system of universal ethics.
That should have been the job one.
And one of my ancestors, William Molyneux, best friends with John Locke, talked about this.
But largely because of censorship, they were not able to pursue this most essential goal.
Now, 15 years ago when I first appeared in the public as an intellectual, my very second article was Proving Morality.
And I have a whole free book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
I have rewritten and updated that in my newest book, Essential Philosophy, where I talk about, in a very short and compressed format, What virtue is and how to prove it universally, philosophically.
It's the greatest prize in philosophy.
You really should check it out.
I've made these books free because I really, really want to complete this quest of saving ethics from base materialism.
There is no inscription of the Ten Commandments on the whirligig Brownian motion carousel of atoms and cells.
There's nothing there.
There's nothing there.
Why be good?
Well, you could fake good, I suppose, in order to lull other people into giving you resources.
You could create moral rules that other people have to obey that you get to be excluded from.
There's lots of ways you can manipulate morality.
But why be good?
We don't have an answer.
And The moral certainties under Christendom that first began to collapse under the assault of Martin Luther 1.0, the moral rules collapsed into the will to power, Nietzscheanism, Darwinism, and the great totalitarian brutalities of the 20th century, all the way from Communism to National Socialism to Fascism.
These were all striving to organize society by appeals to sentimentality and the fist to the face of totalitarian brutality.
camouflage and attack the most primal, predatory maneuvers.
The fact-value dichotomy can't be easily escaped.
Where do morals live in the universe?
They don't.
without God.
It's also called the Humean distinction between ought and is.
There is the is of the universe.
What ought we to do?
What is the moral thing to do?
You cannot get, according to Hume, the ought, the morals, from the physics.
You cannot get the Ten Commandments from the theory of relativity.
You can't do it.
Now I have taken an approach I've solved this problem.
I have done dozens of debates, dozens of presentations, live, in person, online, written books.
I've solved the problem.
The solution is actually quite simple, as these things tend to be.
If you take the speed of light as constant, the universe falls into place.
The non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force against others.
How is it validated?
Think of theft.
Can theft be moral?
Stealing, can stealing be moral?
Can stealing be universally preferable behavior?
Something which can be preferred by all people at all times.
It has to be universal otherwise it's taste or aesthetics or politeness or something.
It's nice but it's not universal.
It has to be preferable because if you can't prefer it You can't ever achieve the moral goal.
And it has to be behavior, because what we do is empirical, what we think is not.
So it has to be something measurable.
That's why there really shouldn't be any such thing as thought crime, although it seems increasingly that there is.
Can stealing be universally preferable behavior?
The answer is no.
No, it can't be.
Because if everybody wants to steal and be stolen from, The very concept of theft disappears, because theft is when someone takes your property when you don't want them to.
If I put a lawnmower out front of my house with a sign that says, take me, I'm free, and someone takes it, I can't really charge them with theft, can I?
If I go into a boxing ring, I'm consenting to being hit.
If the guy punches me, can I say, I'm charging you with assault?
Not really.
Theft is when you don't want someone to take your property.
But if theft is universally preferable behavior, you want to steal and be stolen from, but the moment you want to be stolen from, it's no longer theft.
Now, respect for property rights, that you can achieve.
It's the same thing with assault.
It's the same thing with rape.
They cannot be universally preferable behavior, otherwise they cease to exist as a category.
This is a very compressed form of the argument.
It's an old argument from Aristotle that if you come up with a moral system that somehow justifies rape, theft, assault, and murder, you've gone wrong somewhere.
When we made the sun the center of the solar system, we gained an accurate but disorienting view of the world, and it fundamentally cracked existing power structures of the time.
Because the Earth was the center of the solar system, it was the jewel of God's existence, and it was the purpose of existence, and God stared at Earth And measured the morals of everyone on the planet.
When the sun became the center of the solar system, and then when the sun was no longer even the center of the universe, it cracked existing power structures.
Because the aristocracy was justified by appeals to the divine right of kings.
But if the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, it's hard to make the case, and as God began to evaporate, it's hard to make the case that aristocracy should last.
And it's no accident that after Galileo and others established that the sun was the center of the solar system, it was not too, too long before the aristocracy in the West was either gone or was reduced to a ceremonial role.
Philosophers failed to develop a system of ethics that could survive the disappearance of God from a central cultural discourse.
And when Christendom fragmented into Catholicism and then various sects within Protestantism, Europe, on average, not everywhere, Europe descended into a chaos of several hundred years of religious warfare.
Why?
Because the state The secular authority had the power to legislate religious morality.
And every religious group felt that it was divinely commanded to impose its morality as the sole path to heaven on every other person.
So every religious group strove to gain control over the power of the state in order to impose its religious morality on others.
And after several hundred years of religious warfare, the idea grew that the separation of church and state was essential.
For survival.
For survival.
And this occurred.
The state became secular and ethics were considered a matter of personal conscience.
Now from there, from everybody with moral absolutes going into their corners and saying live and let live, the false virtue of tolerance emerged.
We must tolerate each other even though we disagree fundamentally on morals.
This opened the door, the portal, so to speak, to relativism, to subjectivism, to postmodernism, which, strangely enough, produced the totalitarianism of the state.
If people won't self-regulate, if they're told that ethics is an illusion, everything you believe is true, there's no such thing as goodness, society falls apart, which brings in Into the vacuum of a lack of self-regulation, of a lack of conscience, comes tyrannical social structures to reorganize society.
We can see this in the modern left, which claims there's no such thing as truth, no such thing as objectivity, no such thing as virtue.
But if you disagree with them, you're a Nazi.
Extreme tolerance leads to extreme totalitarianism in thought and political structures.
And that's where we stand at the moment.
And that's really why I was deplatformed.
Why was I deplatformed?
Well first there is the lies that are said that I'm a fascist and a racist and appallingly people say that I refer to the Holocaust as an overreaction.
This is all false, absolutely false, highly offensive and is really an incitement to violence.
If there was somebody around like that it would be pretty easy to slip into the use of violence to prevent catastrophe and that's really what it's for.
It's to paint a targeting laser on your head so that unstable people will attack you.
Now, all of that being false, the question is, why in particular was a free speech event so targeted?
Which really begs the question, what is free speech for?
Now, do you need free speech if you happen to be born into that Mohawk tribe 500 years ago and you agree with everyone else?
That the universe was birthed from a woman into twins called good and evil.
Not really.
Because you all agree on the same mythology.
You all agree.
Do you need free speech if you disagree with the weather?
No.
You can just open the window and have a look.
Do you need free speech if you disagree on how to bake the best apple rhubarb pie?
No.
Now I'm drooling.
Not really, you can just go make your own pie, you can experiment and so on.
Do scientists need free speech at their conferences when they're merely discussing science?
No, because they have an objective methodology for resolving their disputes, which is the scientific method.
Do mathematicians need free speech when they're disagreeing on mathematical theorems?
No, not really, because they can just reason it through.
What do we need free speech for?
What is the essence of free speech?
What is the purpose of free speech?
Free speech is for moral differences, where we differ on morality.
That's where we most fundamentally need free speech.
That's what free speech is for, is for conflicts about morality.
Now there are those in our society and they're happy to de-platform, they're happy to attack, they're happy to send death threats, they're happy to physically intimidate people.
Why?
Because they somehow imagine.
They picture in some deluded overarching warping of the mind.
They imagine.
That we have, or they have, I suppose, completely and totally reached the end of their moral examinations of the universe and of human society.
They are 100% certain of everything that they believe and anyone who even questions what they believe is 100% evil.
And therefore, words are considered weapons, it is considered an act of aggression to disagree with them morally, and therefore violence is justified in self-defense or defense of others or whatever it is, right?
It's complete madness, and it means that they've never studied the first thing about philosophy.
The first thing about philosophy, as is science as well, is you must start with a blank slate.
You must start with no certainty.
Why did I work on a system of ethics 15 years ago?
Because I realized I did not know what ethics was.
I was raised a Christian, I studied philosophers in many different formats and from many different schools, and I would hold on to an idea about philosophy, like the categorical imperative and so on, and I would realize that there were problems with it, that there were contradictions in it, there were situations where it could not apply.
So eventually I realized, since all the food I was given was fake, I had to grow my own.
That's the story of Socrates, which I'm sure you know.
Socrates' friend went to the oracle at Delphi, which cannot lie, and said, who is the wisest man?
The oracle at Delphi said, Socrates is the wisest man.
He went and told Socrates, and Socrates said, well, that makes no sense at all to me, because I know almost nothing.
And he said, but the oracle can't lie, so what could this mean?
So he went and he questioned all of the wise men or supposedly wise men in his environment.
He went to the teachers who said, Oh, I know what justice is.
I know what virtue is.
I know what truth is.
I know what kindness is.
And he would ask people and he would examine them.
And the hot curious breath of his endless questions blew down their house of cards like a tornado on a Kansas farmhouse.
And they hated him, of course, for revealing that they didn't know much of anything.
And then, Socrates understood what the oracle meant.
The oracle said that Socrates was the wisest man, because he knew that he knew almost nothing.
And from a place of uncertainty, from a place of a lack of knowledge, you can explore You know, if you're driving home, when you get home, you stop driving because you're home.
And if you think that we have answered every conceivable moral question with 100% certainty, you are not only delusional, you are actually dangerous.
Because your certainty will oppose any exploration that other people might continue.
And the idea that we have answered all moral questions to the point where we can de-platform and silence and aggress against people who disagree with us is delusional.
To the point of moral insanity and physical danger.
The two things go hand in hand.
Come on.
200 years ago it was considered absolutely immoral to even question whether it was ethical to own other human beings as slaves.
The slave trade which had gone on for tens of thousands of years was finally questioned a few hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago It was considered radical, immoral and destabilizing, heretical almost, to suggest that women should have equal rights to men.
Now I advocate for the rights of children.
You can't hit adults, but you can hit kids.
Why?
You can't be forced into an occupation as an adult, but you can be forced to attend a particular school as a child.
Why?
We're not done.
We're not finished.
We're not even close to finished.
We have a lot more to explore.
in the moral universe of humankind.
We are not done.
It's like saying science is finished, science is done, science is complete.
Nothing more to learn.
We must continue our exploration.
Because we don't have the absolutes of religion anymore, we must pursue philosophy in order to gain our certainties.
We cannot gain them from tolerance.
Tolerance is a fine virtue, but in its extremity, it's destructive.
In an extremity, it's like using acid to clean rust.
A little bit cleans the rust, too much dissolves whatever it is that you're cleaning.
We need the Aristotelian mean when it comes to tolerance.
Too little tolerance makes you bigoted and prejudiced.
Too much tolerance makes you flaccid and self-destructive.
And the big question is, how do we tolerate the intolerant?
Do we tolerate the intolerant?
But you can't just say yes.
Because then intolerance and tolerance both become a virtue, which can't be the same.
They're opposites, right?
We need to explore this balance.
But we can't if we're silenced.
That's really the point.
We need free speech to explore moral questions.
And it's exceedingly hypocritical for people to shut down free speech in moral examinations of our societies and of our ethics, in particular because we only advanced as a society by questioning the moral principles that came before us and overturning many of them.
Ah, said the medievals, there's a divine rite of kings.
There's a great chain of being.
God and then the aristocracy and the priests and then the lower aristocracy and then the humans and then the animals and then the plants and the minerals and it's all a big great chain of being.
It's all organized by God and you better damn well stay in your place or you're a heretic and you're a disobeying God.
That was gospel.
for many, many centuries.
Slavery in the ancient world, slavery in the modern world, slavery in the Muslim world, all taken for granted is perfectly moral.
There was never any question that you could take the women as the spoils of war in many conflicts.
There was no Geneva Convention, there was no Nuremberg Trials after great societal immoralities.
We have grown by questioning the moral assumptions and we will stop growing If we are no longer allowed to question and explore and push our definitions of morality to a more rational place, to a more universal place, we will stop our progress and we will fall and decay. we will stop our progress and we will fall and
Many of our modern concepts of free will come out of just such an environment of moral conflict.
Famous poet John Milton published a work called Areopagitica, 1644, the 23rd of November.
Why?
Well, he and others were facing censorship.
1644 was the height of the English Civil War, where three kingdoms vied for control.
And what were they fighting for?
Well, they were fighting for some of the usual things, territory and control over the tax service and so on.
But they also fought over morality.
And John Locke understood that if we are not allowed to explore our differences in morality in a verbal form, it turns to war.
It turns to violence.
If we are not allowed to discuss our moral differences, to question and oppose each other in the jousting combat of verbal debate, well, The word words and the word swords have only one letter between them and it's the same letter that starts the word silence.
To go from words to swords all you need to do is silence people's right to speak and eventually the violence will erupt and that's what I am desperate to prevent.
and I still hope to prevent as best I can.
Those on the extreme left, in particular the communists, I mean have substantial issues with their ideology and And in particular the violent verbal abuse that they heap upon others, racist and anti-semitic and so on,
Well, they have a particular challenge in that the founding prophet of their new religion, new cult really, was himself viciously anti-semitic and racist.
And that seems like something worth discussing.
I've had, of course, to the bothersome reaction of many communists and leftists over the years, I have an entire presentation, The Truth About Karl Marx.
I mean, for heaven's sakes, do communists hate racism and anti-semitism?
Karl Marx wrote a work called World Without Jews, considered by some to be a precursor to Hitler's Mein Kampf.
It's so virulent.
Hitler was a rabid racist, as you can see reflected in many of his writings.
So do they care about racism and anti-semitism?
Well, I do, and I think that these are abhorrent perspectives to have.
But you see, they want certainty.
And there's two ways that you can get certainty.
One is that you can do the difficult, cumbersome, onerous task of studying and learning and thinking and debating and drawing rational conclusions that are sometimes emotionally difficult.
Or you can blend yourself into an ideology like Homer Simpson wriggling backwards into a hedge And then call all of your newfound commandments absolute certainty.
And the problem is that you lose what makes you human when you dissolve yourself into an aggressive ideology.
And all ideologies are aggressive because they cannot stand to be questioned because the certainties have no rational basis.
And when you build your intellectual castles on air, you have to spend the rest of your life attacking gravity.
Where you have certainty, you have peace, you have curiosity.
You welcome conversations when you have certainty, which is why I've had so many people on my show over the years to push back against universally preferable behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics.
I'm certain of it.
So I welcome disagreement when you're uncertain.
You view disagreement as an attack.
Why?
Children are curious.
Children want to learn and they want to understand.
They want to think for themselves.
They want to exercise the basic right of free thought, free speech, free exploration, which is our essence of humanity.
So often in what is these days laughingly referred to as education, there is the imprinting.
There is the imprinting of anti-rational edicts on children with no discussion.
You are not allowed to disagree.
You are not allowed to question.
Otherwise, you are ex-phobic.
You are racist.
You are hateful.
You are whatever, right?
I mean, you're failed.
You're kicked out.
You're excluded.
You're mocked.
You're attacked.
That's not... That's not civilized.
That's not thinking.
That's not reasoning.
There are abhorrent belief systems in the world, absolutely.
And we need to engage with those abhorrent belief systems in the same way that a priest needs to engage with a demonically possessed person to free them of their error.
Or at least to expose how bad those ideas are.
You drive those ideas underground, you can't measure them, you can't track them, you can't engage with them.
They become a cyst, they become self-sealed, self-reinforcing, self-reflecting.
I'll tell you this, man, at a time where tens of thousands of outright Marxists are teaching in American universities, I gotta tell ya, I'm having a little trouble seeing the massive social threat coming from Nazism.
Nazism.
National Socialists are not by the tens of thousands indoctrinating the young in America or throughout the West.
We know the threat at the moment comes from the left.
And if we can't have that conversation, it's only going to escalate.
And the people who are part of the cult of conclusions, where you don't have a process or a methodology for thinking, you have hardened, aggressive, defensive conclusions, and anyone who questions them, you have or you feel the right to attack them.
Right?
Punch a Nazi, turns out everyone who disagrees with the left is a Nazi.
You understand?
We've seen this before.
We know where this leads.
This is 1920s, 1930s, Weimar Germany.
We know exactly where this leads, if we don't push back against it and stop this aggression against free speech.
When you imbibe, or you get imprinted, or you absorb, or you voluntarily join an ideology, that ideology replaces your identity.
It replaces your personality.
You then become programmed.
You become reactionary.
You become thoughtless and aggressive.
Because if you think that the conclusions are your identity, rather than the process or the methodology, if you think that the conclusions are your identity, then anyone who questions your conclusions or opposes your ethics, you feel like they are disassembling your entire personality.
You feel like they are undoing what you perceive as your identity.
That's an existential crisis.
that's terrifying for people and they lash out, of course, when this occurs.
We can't go back.
Where can we go?
We can't go back.
Nobody's really going to believe in Zeus or the great chain of being or the divine right of kings.
We can't go back.
Where can we go?
Well, we can go to increasingly aggressive shutdowns of free speech.
We can go to a physical war of moral standards instead of a philosophical Debate about ethics.
We don't want that.
We don't want that.
Well, I guess a few people do, but no sane person wants fighting in the streets.
Terrorism.
No sane person wants that.
We debate or we die.
We have words or we have swords.
To think that there's anything else is a delusion.
We must push forward, we must reason together, we must recognize that we are trying to steer a fast, complicated, complex society blindfolded, with no set of universal ethics, no set of moral standards.
We need to recognize that, and we need to put our heads together, break bread together, reason together, to find the truth of the morals that can support the future.
When I was deplatformed, I was in Vancouver and I was in a hotel room with big windows and I was looking out over the city.
And the city looks sophisticated, modern, technological, civilized.
People walking back and forth, elevators going up and down, buildings light going on and off.
I sat there and looked as the sun went down over the city.
And I saw what the city really was.
Was a city built on engineering absolutes and moral relativism.
A city that took shape because of the absolutes in people's minds.
Engineers, the architects.
City planners and builders.
The city rose from nature.
The frozen shape of human abstractions thrown to the sky and held there.
By reason and evidence.
Giving us great comfort, giving us great security.
But the city was hollow.
The city had comfort, and power, and electricity, and motion.
But it had no virtue.
It had no ethics.
It had no philosophical absolutes.
In the realm of values, it was hollowed out.
That which is hollowed out cannot stand.
It will not stand.
Just as Rome did not stand.
Just as the British Empire did not stand.
And I'm not saying we can go back to the British Empire or it was universally good or the Roman Empire was universally good.
I'm not saying any of that.
I'm saying that we can't stay where we are.
We can't go backwards.
There's just a fork in the path ahead of us and one of it leads back To the brutalities of the past, to the religious warfares of the past, to the hundred million killed under communism, to the quarter of a billion human beings slaughtered by their own governments in the 20th century alone, outside of war.
And I see that path very clearly.
History dictates that path if we lose our free speech, if we lose our capacity to negotiate in the realm of ethics.
The other path leads to A truly powerful moral breakthrough in our ethics, in our virtues, in our conversation.
Where we can reclaim what it is to be human, which is to negotiate about ethics.
That's what it is to be human.
Animals can camouflage.
Animals can hunt, as I was hunted.
Animals can gather resources.
Animals can conquer others, drive them out.
We have to be more than that.
We have to be more than sophistry.
We have to be more than lies.
We have to be more than violence in the face of language.
That is an ape clawing down a human mind.
Those who silence, those who claim the right to deplatform,
and chest thumpingly parade around as if they have done a wonderful thing do not have the power that they seek as yet they seek political power and we all know history is very very clear on what happens when the censorious the totalitarian the violent gain control of political power we know exactly what happens the old saying goes they shoot everyone
Wearing glasses.
They don't have that power yet.
They want that power.
They thirst and yearn and burn for that power.
But they don't have it yet.
And I'm a test case.
It's not going to end with me.
You understand?
It's not going to end with me.
They just choose me for a variety of reasons and after me they go for years.
What I said to a journalist in Vancouver.
Think it's going to stop with me?
One day you're going to say something that bothers them.
They're going to take you down.
You stand with me or the dominoes get bigger and bigger and you can't stand at the end.
They don't have the power that they seek yet.
They desperately want it, but they need your permission to get it.
They need for you to approve of what they're doing.
They need for you to stand with them against philosophy, against reason, against free speech.
You don't have to agree with me, but you do have to agree that I have the right to speak.
They thirst for that power over you, over me, over our children.
And they will use it to the most unholy destructive ends that can be imagined.
