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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:27
My Enemy: The Soul
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My Enemy, The Soul by Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedom Aid Radio.
Yes, I've used it.
I have used the word.
But I am here to argue against the word.
The soul.
The soul is a very dangerous notion.
Perhaps the most dangerous notion when it comes to understanding humanity.
The soul is a sleight-of-hand trick that almost inevitably causes the abused to weld in perpetual hope to their abusers.
Let me tell you why.
Imagine this.
Imagine that you have been a lifelong two-pack-a-day smoker.
You wake up one morning, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, feeling just absolutely beyond terrible.
In your chest there is still a perfect set of healthy lungs that cannot be harmed by anything that you do.
got tumors all over your lungs.
That is not good.
Tumors all over your lungs.
You say, wow, God, that's terrible.
What should I do?
You said, don't worry.
In your chest, there is still a perfect set of healthy lungs that cannot be harmed by anything that you do.
A perfect set of healthy lungs.
And what you need to do is you need to get on your knees, you need to clasp your hands together and you need to wish for those perfect lungs to replace your diseased lungs.
And And all will be better.
In fact, there's no other way to get better, because the lungs that you have, like your lungs that you're breathing with right now, I mean, they're toast.
They're shot.
You're dead in three months.
But the perfect lungs still within your chest, if you concentrate, if you meditate, if you pray, then those lungs will magically replace your tumor-laced lungs and all will be well.
Or, imagine that you have some horrible twist-break on your arm and you go to a doctor and the doctor says, listen, you know,
I'm not going to set it or cast it or anything because inside your twisted arm, you know, underneath the bone fragments sticking out through your skin, there's a perfect unbroken arm that you just have to meditate and concentrate and pray on and it will just magically replace your shattered and broken arm and no intervention, no physical intervention is required because you've got a magic backup arm.
In case of emergency, smash back up perfect organ and you're all set.
Or last thing, you know, imagine you, 18th century, some woman in China, you're a woman in China, you got your foot have been bound, they've been crushed and forced back so that the toes are curling in to the heels and you're hobbling around in agony.
And you go to a doctor, say, Doc, you got to fix this.
What are we going to do?
Maybe you need to amputate them, give me artificial feet.
He's like, are you crazy?
I have to do that.
Do you know you have a perfect set of healthy, unbroken feet at the end of your legs?
And you're like, what the hell are you talking about?
No, no, you have a perfect set of healthy, unbroken, unbound feet at the end of your legs.
You just have to concentrate on them, pray for them, want them badly enough, and ask for forgiveness from a bunch of cloud people, and you will wake up one day with perfectly healthy feet.
Would that not be mad?
Would that not be insane?
Would you not consider these the worst conceivable doctors?
And of course, if you believed that you had a perfect set of backup lungs that you could concentrate on and that would, in the pink freshness of a newborn day, replace the lungs that you'd screwed up with smoking.
Would that not encourage you to smoke all the more?
No, no, I got backup lungs.
I just concentrate, I'll wish hard enough, I'll pray hard enough, and bink!
My backup lungs will replace my diseased lungs, and all will be well!
So light me up, baby!
Would you not live more dangerously?
With the promise of emergency and infinitely replenishable backup organs, would you not live more dangerously?
Would you not take more risks?
Of course you would.
Would you also not really believe that anybody was sick, fundamentally?
I mean, let's say that you really believe this.
Magical backup organs.
And if somebody did die of lung cancer, you would say to yourself, well, I guess they just didn't want their healthy lungs enough.
I guess they didn't really want to pull the magical backup switch and replace their diseased lungs with their perfectly healthy lungs.
I don't know why.
They're right there.
Lots of people will help you do it.
I guess they just didn't really want that very much.
Sickness would always be the result of a lack of belief in the backup organs, in the backup bone, in the backup skin.
People who say to me, oh Steph, no, no, no.
You see, you have a full, perfect, lustrous, Brad Pitt style shrubbery of extra hair on top of your head.
You can have a mohawk if you want it.
You've just got to concentrate and it will be there.
It will shimmer into existence.
Dentist says, oh, I'll pull a tooth.
Don't worry.
Another tooth will come up and it'll be even better than this one.
It's a perfect tooth and it will never get any decay, never have any problems.
You'd be like, yeah, I'll pull my tooth.
I want that next tooth.
So all of this stuff would be a pretty deranged set of beliefs to have, right?
We understand that.
Really dangerous.
But this is the problem of the soul.
See the soul is the perfect, eternal, virtuous part of you that cannot be corrupted, that cannot be killed, that cannot become immoral, that cannot do evil.
And if you find yourself becoming corrupted and evil, or you have become corrupted and evil, why you just need to get on your knees and pray and you will have virtue back.
Your brain has not become fundamentally corrupted through bad habits, bad patterns.
It hasn't become riddled or ridden with cancer, the cancer of immorality, the cancer of exploitation, the cancer of theft and brutality.
It has not become physically grooved with the bad choices that you have made, the immoral choices you have made, or the immoralities that you have not resisted that were inflicted upon you when you were young.
See, your brain is not a physical organ that can be corrupted beyond repair the way that a lung can or a liver can through cirrhosis, through drinking.
Your brain And the material reality of your brain is immaterial to the essence of your personality, to the essence of your being, which is perfect and uncorruptible and always available to those who want it bad enough, who will pray for it hard enough, who yearn for it enough.
Well, it's a very dangerous notion.
It's an exceedingly dangerous notion.
There's a scene at the end of Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov After having been in a, I think, Siberian prison for years with Sonya, his unbelievably codependent animus, his shadow, he finally, it clicks and he gets that the murder of the old woman was wrong and immoral and he falls to his knees and he's possessed of grace and his magical backup lungs replace his diseased lungs.
That is the fantasy, right?
And you have heard this, even if you are incredibly secular, you have heard this.
You have heard this.
Because there's this belief that our brains are not the fixed material results of our choices, in the same way that our lungs are the fixed material results of our choices to smoke or not to smoke, to exercise or not to smoke, to exercise or not.
But our personalities are immaterial, they're not bound upon the material and therefore they are not subject to material forces.
As I mentioned before, the book The Shining by Stephen King, there's some retarded guy who then at one point in a dream speaks very fluently and he says, I'm God's Bob, right?
I am the part of this guy that is in no way dependent upon the physically destroyed capacity of his brain.
It's like there's a midget and then in a dream there's a really tall guy and he says, no, I'm Bob.
I'm God's midget.
I'm not a midget.
There's an immaterial part of me that is essential that has nothing to do with my physical reality.
I have a perfect set of backup lungs that are uncorrupted by smoking by the choices that I've made.
And you have heard all of this.
It's incredibly dangerous.
If We believe, or if we accept, is a better way of putting it, if we accept that the man with terminal lung cancer will not run a marathon if he wants it bad enough, we give up asking him to do that.
We give up wanting him, maybe not wanting, but we give up expecting him to run the marathon because he's cuffing up his lungs and he's doing chemo or radiation therapy or something like that.
We don't urge the bald guy to become a hair model because he's got no hair.
We don't urge the fat guy to become a swimwear model because he's fat and even if he loses weight his skin's gonna hang and all that, right?
We accept the physical reality that results from people's choices, right?
We don't ask the heroin addict to quit heroin without negative consequences because he's grooved the addiction response and requirement into his very brain, into his very physiology.
It's why if you quit drinking or quit drugs, if you're really addicted, you can just die.
But we don't expect that there's some perfect, flawless, or less crystalline non-addict inside who can shrug off the drug with no physical negative effects because the non-addict inside the addict's body has never been touched by the drug because the non-addict is immaterial but the drug is material and therefore cannot touch the soul of the addict but there is no soul of the addict in the The addict's body has responded to, has initiated and responded to the drug.
Immorality changes the brain.
Cowardice changes the brain.
Brutality changes the brain.
And it changes it in a permanent way.
It doesn't mean that it's irrevocable, perhaps.
But it changes the brain.
In the same way that smoking damages the lungs, immorality damages the brain at a physical level.
And there is no backup brain That you can rely on.
There's no, in case of extreme immorality, break glass and perfect soul will replace morally diseased brain.
The immaterial mind is immune from the effects of material choices.
For instance, if you miss receiving empathy when you're a baby and a toddler, you don't get the mirror neurons which allow you to empathize with other people.
There's no backup mirror neurons that you can suddenly access later on in life.
If you don't get the proper nutrition and you grow up stunted and malnourished, that's going to leave you shorter and weaker.
But there's no part of you that did get enough nourishment and if you just get in touch with that part of you, you're going to grow another foot and be stronger.
It's not how it works.
The material is the material.
There is no immaterial part of you that can escape the effects of your material choices, whether they are health choices or moral choices.
And this is so important.
Have you ever heard the phrase, well, there's a little good even in the worst of us?
Well, that comes directly from the soul.
We would never say to the man dying of lung cancer, well there's some health in his diseased lungs.
I mean I guess you could say that but we certainly wouldn't say that that will save him.
And it's so cruel for people to imagine or to believe that there is a healthy virtuous person somewhere deep down in a bad person's brain or an evil person's brain that there's this immaterial virtue that escapes all of the physical effects of immoral choices.
If you continually harm other people, you destroy your capacity, whatever vestigial capacity you may have had, you destroy your capacity for empathy, for self-empathy, for empathy with others.
At some point, you understand, if you neglect bone health, you are too weak to exercise.
If your bones have become like honeycombs, like balsa wood, then you can't lift the weights that would strengthen your bones because your bones will just break.
They're too brittle.
You have weakened your bones too much to be able to exercise and repair them.
And in the same way, if you act immorally for long enough, there is no longer a part of you that can reverse that process.
You have weakened your moral center to the point where it can no longer.
The cost benefit, right?
All immoral decisions are faulty cost benefit, right?
Immediate gratification at the expense of long-term peace of mind.
And if you continue to exercise your evil choices...
You go rape someone rather than be patient and have someone be virtuous, be patient and fall in love and be loved, right?
You steal rather than earn.
You print money rather than create money, create wealth, create value.
If you keep making these immoral choices then the moral part of you gets weaker and weaker and then eventually it is impossible.
It's a tipping point.
You can't recover.
You can't return.
Because if you continually take short-term gains over long-term gains, at the expense of long-term gains, you train yourself to do that.
And if it's not possible for you to lift a five-pound weight when you're 50 and you don't exercise at all, you're not going to be able to lift it when you're 80.
And so if you continually make choices that benefit short-term at the expense of long-term, what you're doing is you're making it even harder and more painful to reverse those choices later on.
So if you go around beating people up, then if you want to try and develop a moral sense, every person you beat up makes it that much harder to develop empathy in the future, because whenever you develop empathy, it's going to be all the more painful to remember your fist crashing into these helpless people's faces all the time.
This is why child abuse is so astoundingly unrecoverable from, if it's at all significant.
Because you have taken the short-term gain of exercising power and brutality over children rather than the long-term gain and short-term pain of not doing that and of having a happy, valuable, virtuous and loving relationship with your children.
And so if you've done that for a number of years, you've trained yourself to do that, you have atrophied your capacity to defer gratification, you have become impulse-driven, evil-driven at the expense of others.
And so if you couldn't defer gratification before you started abusing people then it becomes even more painful.
to develop empathy after you've done that or to try to then you functionally cannot do it.
You can't do it.
It's like I remember reading an article years ago by a journalist who was in his 50s and he decided to quit smoking and his doctor had said well it doesn't really matter if you quit smoking now it's too late but if you want to I certainly support it but it's not going to do anything to really affect your health in the long run.
Or rather you're not going to reap any significant benefits because you've been smoking for over 30 years or something, heavily.
The damage is all done.
If you want to quit, fine, but it's not like you're then going to go run a marathon next year.
And this is really, really essential to understand.
It's very painful to understand, but it is essential to understand.
If we believe in the soul, if we believe that there is indestructible virtue in another person that they can access no matter what they have done, then we're going to hang around in the saddest, most pitiful, most humiliating, most exploited kind of hope imaginable.
You know, if someone we love is dying of lung cancer and we believe in this perfect backup just in case of emergency break glass magic lungs, we're going to be desperate for that, and we're going to blame ourselves if it doesn't work, and we're going to really keep hoping, as opposed to resigning ourselves to the inevitable that they can't be cured, barring some incredible miraculous scientific advance, which is, you know, given the FDA in particular, it's not going to happen.
We accept, right?
But I really believe that the concept of the soul was invented by evil people to dangle The bait of hope on the hook of continuing their abuse.
I can be cured at any time.
I can become virtuous at any time.
I am addicted to evil but there's a part of me that has never tasted evil, has never touched evil and cannot be touched by evil.
And therefore you just have to find whatever plugs that part in and I will be virtuous and never harm you again.
So there's a virtuous person inside of me called a soul that has never been touched by the decisions that I've made.
You've got to hang around and we'll find a way to make this magic happen.
But no, but no.
Particularly evil against children.
I mean, the odds of reversal and recovery.
Well, I shouldn't say that because, I mean, let me put it this way.
It's never going to happen without massive unrelenting and agonizing effort.
Right.
But the idea that grace, the rays of light can come down from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir cover art and just radiate your heart and you become a good person, I mean, that's pure fantasy.
I mean, maybe an evil person with massive amounts of work and so on, but of course they wouldn't be evil if they were willing to do any kind of work like that.
And the fact that they've been evil for years has only diminished their capacity to do work like that.
So it is functionally impossible.
I mean, it's almost A priori impossible.
You know, like a man who can't lift five pounds can't lift ten pounds.
Well, he could have been thinking about the five pounds.
Right.
Forget that.
We all have to make choices, right?
A man who could not resist evil before it was really costly to resist evil cannot resist evil when it has become much more costly to resist evil.
A man who cannot resist evil when it's easier to do so, in other words, before he's become abusive, cannot resist evil when it's harder to do so, in other words, to recover from the abuses and to recover his conscience and his virtue from the evils that he's done.
Because we only do evils because we're unable to resist evil.
And the evil that you have to overcome, the resistance that you have to overcome to being good after you have been evil for a number of years is infinitely higher than it was, almost infinitely higher than it was before.
So again, to recover before you do evil from the impulse to do evil or to avoid it is lifting a five-pound weight up.
After you've been evil for a while, it's a 500 pound weight.
And maybe with massive amounts of training, you can lift a 500 pound weight.
But if the person is continuing to do evil, they're just adding weight to the 5 pounds that they couldn't lift in the beginning.
Do you understand?
If someone continues to do evil, then they're just adding to the weight that they couldn't lift to resist evil to begin with.
And there's no perfect backup soul anywhere in there.
It is the grooves that are worn into the brain.
It is the associations that are made in the brain.
Somewhere after killing six million Jews, Hitler wasn't going to head up the Kiwanis club.
Wasn't going to do it.
Couldn't happen.
And this is, of course, his last statements before heading into the bunker to kill himself, was, according to his secretary, a tired rehashing of all the same paranoid evil nonsense that he had been spouting his whole life.
There was no revelation.
The fact that she was expecting a revelation only shows that she comes from Germany, about the most religious country in Europe, in the middle of the last century.
There is only the material.
And the material is affected by choices.
Your lungs are affected by your choice to smoke.
Your liver is affected by your choice to drink.
And there's no backup, there's no magic.
Once you got that cancer, there are no backup lungs.
Your lungs are diseased.
Once you got that cirrhosis, once your liver is dying, your liver is just fucking dying.
There is no backup liver hidden away behind the real one that faith and clasped hands and pious mutterings can Replace your liver.
There's no backup donor called your perfect God-given self with which you can piecemeal replace the organs that you have corrupted.
The most important organ being your brain.
As Gabor Maté says, the problem with self-healing is that the brain has to make the choice to heal, but the brain is the organ that is broken.
And I would add to that that the brain has to decide to defer gratification after being evil for many years.
And if it could not defer gratification, which resulted in evil 10 years ago or 20 years ago, how on earth is it going to be able to do it now?
If you couldn't lift five pounds when you were 20, you sure as hell aren't going to be able to lift 500 pounds when you're 40.
And this is why it is so essential.
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