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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:25
Shape the hell up world!
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There's two questions that we haven't dealt with.
One is, how do you balance your life, you know, having a life with your family and yourself and your friends while, you know, having this city-state world empire on the internet?
Well, I mean, to me it's a very simple thing in theory and it can be tough to achieve in practice, but I do the very best I can to Push this card forward, and I have no investment in whether it goes forward or not.
That's the best that I've been able to come up with.
So I will...
I would expend every ounce of mental sweat and blood that I can to make the most compelling and entertaining and engaging and hopefully rational and empirical arguments for truth, consistency, reason, and virtue.
And I have no investment if anybody listens.
I mean, that's a dialogue you can't sing without an audience.
When we start, no one's listening.
You know, your first episode, how many people listened to it that week?
Some guy in the next car because I'm a window down.
I desperately want to change the world and I'm putting every ounce of effort that I can as consistently and hopefully adroitly applied as I can.
I have no power over whether the world will change or not.
You make your most compelling... It's like a doctor.
You can say to the guy, listen, if you keep eating like this, you keep smoking like this, you keep drinking like this, you're going to get sick.
And you can make that really passionate case to him.
And the more passionate you make that case, the more likely he is to listen.
But you have no control what he does when he leaves your office.
So you make that case and you really don't want the guy to get sick.
You really want him to live well.
And then he walks out and you have no ownership anymore of what he does.
It's that balance.
And very often, we follow people out of the waiting room.
In the waiting room, we follow them.
Put down that cigarette.
Don't drive so fast.
You can't have that cheeseburger.
That's not good for you.
You know, whatever it is.
Come back for a checkup.
You need to get your blood tested.
Is that as severe as your foot's looking black?
Do you have diabetes?
We follow people.
We stalk the world.
We can stalk the world.
I mean, we can.
It's just going to make us miserable.
It's going to change the world.
So, you push as hard as you can and you don't care if it moves or not.
That's the only thing that I can do that has given me, I think, the most freedom.
I'm very passionate about the course of truth, reason, and philosophy.
And I am as indifferent as I possibly can be as to whether people listen or not.
Because that is the most rational thing that I can do.
I only have control over what I do.
Of course, I have no control over what anybody else does.
And, I mean, I can't even control my daughter.
She's three, trying to have a conversation with her mom at dinner.
She is an unbelievable wind-up chatterbox.
Now, I can't exactly complain about where she might have gotten that from.
It's a mystery.
Obviously, it must skip a generation.
But, I mean, I can't even control my daughter who's three, and I'm ten times her size, and, you know, I hopefully have a few more bits of knowledge.
If I can't control my three-year-old, I'm not going to pretend I control someone else, right?
And so I really want to change the world.
I'm going to put every effort that I can into it.
Whether the world changes or not, fundamentally I could care less, because I have no control over it, and I try not to imagine I have control where I don't, because that's a sure path to misery.
Worms.
So, final question.
And this is a big one for me, because as I said, I listen to you and Bad Quaker when the weight of the world is scaring my little brain.
I vacillate between really just thinking, we are fucked, and thinking, you know, there might be hope.
And you know, I'm 47, my dad's 90, and I have a healthy lifestyle.
I don't smoke or drink or do drugs, so I will probably live to be maybe about that old, you know, bar, getting hit by a bus, or whatever.
I'm wondering, when I'm that age, if things will be better or worse.
Is it going to be Hitler's Germany?
Is it going to be Brave New World?
Or is it going to be Libertarian Paradise or something in between?
And what do you think and how do you deal with those thoughts, if you have them at all?
No, of course I have them.
I mean, I think it's impossible to not have them.
I mean, it would be mental to not have them.
When you study deeply the syphilis of the world, you've got to look into the future.
We, you know, we are a kind of doctor, I believe, and doctors...
gain efficacy through studying disease and so yeah we study evil you know we study evil and we attempt at least I should say I study evil and I attempt to come up with as many antidotes and preventions as possible because it's almost impossible to cure evil so it's you know evil is stage four lung cancer.
All you can do is prevent.
Tell people to put down the cigarettes because by then it's usually too late if they haven't.
So yeah if you study disease then You're going to see that and you're going to see where it leads.
The signs are not good.
The signs are not good.
The power of evil is greater because we have generated so much wealth in society that they can use The sweat of our labors and the genius of our minds is unbelievable collateral to sell us into the distant future to banksters and other white-collar criminals.
And so we have fed the cancer of the state with the fuel of our productivity to the point where it towers over us with a size and strength that is unimaginable in the past.
You know, in the past, Macbeth could kill the king and become a new king.
Done.
Cool!
Done!
Right?
Because there were no surveillance cameras, no weapons of mass destruction, no endless gulags all over the planet, no extraordinary rendition.
So, no passports, all of that sort of stuff.
Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that anything to do with killing, because it's not how you overturn the state.
But, you know, these mofos have some significant power juice in their engines, and all we have, really, is Three chords of the truth, as Jimmy says, right?
We have the truth and we have this amazing medium which allows us to have conversations.
I never would have had anything I mean, I would never even have the little show that I have if it wasn't for the internet.
I wouldn't know you existed.
I mean, maybe you would have gotten a book into borders and I might have stumbled across it with a hundred other books that I'd thumbed through that day.
But I consider that unlikely.
Yeah, because the gatekeepers of culture have come crashing down with the rise of the internet.
The gatekeepers of culture and culture I view as the enemy of truth and reason.
Culture's upset about that.
Yeah, yeah, well, culture should get some goddamn reason and evidence and philosophize itself a little bit.
Culture should get some culture.
Yeah, I know.
It's the reason that we use the same word for delusions of grandeur and things that infest and grow and kill things, right?
A culture of germs.
Anyway, so yeah, I mean, we can't help but look into the future with extraordinary trepidation.
Because the technology is so great that I fear that if liberty is lost it will be very hard to recover.
And this is not the end of Rome.
This is not the end of the British Empire.
This is not the end of the Ottoman Empire.
This is very different.
This is a very different environment that we have.
The possibility of mass surveillance and mass information gathering, chip IDs and RFIDs and everything.
The possibility of controlling the human livestock has become so powerful and so extraordinary that I fear I fear that this may be freedom's last stand and its greatest stand.
We have the greatest opportunity.
The same technology that might cast it into darkness forever might rise to the light in perpetuity.
And I think it's that essential a crossroad that we are at.
I hope this is being followed with a conjunction like but, because you're making me feel worse, not better, so far.
Scared.
I'm scared.
I'm just trying to please you.
But, right, but the possibilities are extraordinary.
It's a race, you know, it is a race and we are in incredibly fast vehicles, right?
There is the vehicle of the bad guys over to our right and they are hitting the gas with everything they can.
They're passing as many laws as they can, they're using as much indoctrination as they can, they're controlling as much media as they can, they're opposing as much as they can, and there's this fucked up endless tentacle of brain-crossing technology called the Internet which is racing them to the finish line.
And we better hit the fucking gas because if we lose, I don't think anyone's going to win again in the future.
But if we win, we win for good in every sense of the word.
And I think that We have a damn good shot, but it is all about the efficacy, the focus, the intensity, the passion, and the conviction that we bring to bear.
that we bring to bear on these essential questions of voluntarism versus violence.
It's the only two, right?
Those are the two massive motorcycle car spaceships we're driving at Mach 12 million.
It's violence versus voluntarism.
They edge ahead sometimes, we edge ahead sometimes.
We gotta hit the gas because they're not going to pull back.
They're not going to hold off.
This is an ancient race.
of rulers and their dependents who wish to rule and command the human soul and the human spirit.
And we've got to hit the fucking gas.
They're not going to slow down.
They're not going to turn aside.
And either they hit the wall or we do, metaphorically.
And so all I say is, fuck where we end up.
We don't control that.
Fuck where the people listen to us, we don't control that.
The only thing that we control is the power and the intensity and the focus and the reason and the evidence and the passion that we bring to this calling.
That's all we can control.
The vulnerability of wanting the world to get better is a terrifying place to be at times.
The vulnerability of having children and needing the world to get better.
I am so embarrassed to introduce this planet to my daughter.
This planet better shape the fuck up before I have to introduce it to my daughter because I don't want to describe the shit that goes down in this world to my daughter.
It's an embarrassment.
It is an embarrassment to have to describe war.
It is an embarrassment to have to describe the prison industrial complex.
It is an embarrassment to describe why she's not going to the public school down the corner.
It is an embarrassment to describe national debt, what has been done to her before she was even born.
This world better shape the fuck up so I can introduce it properly to my daughter and I'm going to do everything that I can to help that along with the full knowledge that there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect it.
Wow.
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