July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope that you're doing very well. | |
| Here, at last, we come to the core of philosophy and the purpose of philosophy and wisdom and self-knowledge, which is Happiness. | |
| Now, happiness is a very little or misunderstood phenomenon in human life. | |
| It is the one thing, as Aristotle says, that we try to achieve not for the sake of some other thing, but for the thing itself. | |
| When we are happy, we are not happy in order to do something else, but everything else that we do is in order to become healthy and happy. | |
| And I think it's really, really important to understand that happiness is the end, which is a process. | |
| It's not the end like you drive home and then you're home and you stop driving home. | |
| You try to achieve happiness and sustainable happiness, which is to do with self-regard, self-respect and love of others. | |
| We achieve that happiness in a sustainable way. | |
| That is the ideal. We get money in order to buy things. | |
| We don't get money, unless we're crazy, to fondle it in a bathtub or something. | |
| But we do not achieve happiness or try to gain happiness in order to get something else. | |
| But it is the thing itself which philosophy is designed to aim at. | |
| Now, in the formulation that I've always used, there is a three-stage process to the achievement of happiness. | |
| Reason equals virtue equals happiness. | |
| You have rational, empirical, objective, sensible thoughts in your head that conform with reality and reason. | |
| You then put those theories or those values into practice, which is virtue. | |
| Virtue is not a thought, but an action. | |
| If you have rational ideas and you act in a consistently virtuous manner, you will achieve consistent happiness. | |
| All other things being equal. | |
| Obviously, you stub your toe or get struck by lightning, you're going to have a dip in your happiness factor. | |
| But that fundamental sequence, reason equals virtue equals happiness, is the only way that I know of and have been able to achieve consistent joy within my own life. | |
| This is not particularly shocking. | |
| When you look at something like achieving physical health, there are two major components, diet and exercise. | |
| And in order to effectively have a healthy diet, you need to have the theory or the knowledge of nutrition. | |
| You need to actually eat The foods that are healthy, and as a result, you will gain optimal weight. | |
| You will lose weight or gain weight, or you end up with a healthy weight or whatever is the most healthy for your body, which can vary, of course. | |
| So you have the theory, you have the practice, and you achieve the result. | |
| It's the same thing with exercise. | |
| You have to know how to exercise, you have to actually exercise, and then you will achieve the benefits. | |
| If you only know how to exercise but don't exercise, you achieve no benefits. | |
| In fact, you just waste time. If you don't know how to exercise but just go and start hurling yourself at weights and things, then you will most likely injure yourself or not gain particular benefits. | |
| And so you will not gain the health benefits. | |
| So theory, practice equals results. | |
| If you're an athlete, you have to know how to train, you have to actually train, and then you achieve mastery of expertise. | |
| If you're an opera singer, you have to know how to use your voice, how to sing, you have to actually practice, and as a result, you gain practical expertise. | |
| And happiness is the practical expertise of living in a self-respecting, virtuous, rational manner. | |
| That having been said, and I think we can all understand and agree with that as a basic principle or a sequence of steps that are needed to take and achieve happiness, I will say that we face particular challenges when it comes to being happy in our lives. | |
| I mean, my daughter is two days shy of being six months old and it is just a fascinating and beautiful thing to see the degree to which we are born happy and affectionate and content and unselfconscious and curious and energetic and assertive that we are born in this beautiful, beautiful natural state. | |
| Sadly, and this of course is the greatest tragedy that the world has, because it is the tragedy out of which all other tragedies arise, there are significant negative, destructive and abusive interventions in the natural joy and assertiveness that we have in being alive. | |
| Fundamentally, they're the three that I've talked about. | |
| Religion, statism, which includes public school education. | |
| And families. Now, religion and statism are innately immoral. | |
| Religion is innately corrupt and evil in the degree to which it harms the minds of children. | |
| Statism is innately immoral and corrupt to the degree with which it uses. | |
| The initiation of force to achieve its ends, violence, is immoral. | |
| Religion and statism are innately moral. | |
| The family is not. | |
| The family is the source of the greatest virtues and joys that the world can conceivably achieve and individuals can conceivably experience, but the family is also the source of the greatest immoralities and destructions that human beings are capable of. | |
| And when the family goes wrong, society goes wrong. | |
| Almost all the ills that we see in society, crime, assaults, rapes, murderers, wars, abuses of power that go on in almost every hierarchy, Almost all of these can be traced back to experiences within the family, particularly in early childhood. | |
| I hope that if you have some knowledge of psychology, if not philosophy, this is not too startling a notion for you. | |
| But all of the evils which things like religion and statism Both create and by the uninformed are supposed to be invented to ameliorate, arise from predations and destructions within the family, and since the evils that we attempt to manage within the world arise from the family, | |
| it is in the family that we must turn these destructive tendencies towards virtue so that the world can be free of superstition and the institutionalized violence of statism. | |
| So, it is in the family that we really need to turn our attention when it comes to making the world a better place. | |
| And the reason that we have such a great deal of difficulty achieving sustainable happiness as adults is that so many of us, if not most of us, have gone through Either a religious or anti-rational status upbringing, or we've had irrational and destructive parents, we are certainly embedded in an irrational and largely destructive culture. | |
| So we are born healthy. | |
| We are corrupted by the anti-rational manipulations and aggressions of those around us, particularly our elders. | |
| And then we have the challenge Socrates, for instance, is often thought of as a philosopher, but primarily he was interested in self-knowledge. | |
| The unexamined life is not... | |
| Worth living in his first commandment was, know thyself. | |
| Because we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are, and we need to align our own irrationalities. | |
| We need to examine and eliminate, through patient Socratic reasoning, our own irrationalities, so that we can see the world as it actually is, rather than as a projection of our own disowned selves. | |
| So I'm continuing in a very early and fundamental two and a half centuries old tradition of knowing yourself. | |
| Before pretending to know the world. | |
| So that's why I work with self-knowledge psychology as well as scientific empiricism and Aristotelian logic to achieve this unity of self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, which really can't be achieved in exclusion of the other. | |
| So we have all of this anti-rational hypocrisy and emotional manipulation and abuse heaped upon us when we were children. | |
| And that leaves us with significant scarring and psychological problems when we become adults. | |
| And the process of reclaiming and healing these scarred minds of ours is the great challenge of adulthood. | |
| And this is why I'm going to make a case for happiness that is probably quite different. | |
| Actually, I know that it's very different from cases for happiness that you've probably heard before. | |
| To take an analogy, we are born slender and healthy, and we are force-fed junk food for 15 to 20 years, and we emerge into adulthood terribly obese. | |
| We have to find a way to return to a healthy weight. | |
| And that is a terrific struggle which requires deep knowledge, emotional processing of trauma, and a commitment to virtuous and healthy behavior. | |
| And that is really the, or to put it perhaps a bit better metaphorically, Our legs are smashed. | |
| We end up in wheelchairs. | |
| We are born healthy. Our legs are smashed. | |
| We end up in wheelchairs. And it's an agonizing amount of physiotherapy and strain and struggle and sweat and lip-biting tension to get out of the wheelchair and learn how to use our legs again. | |
| And it's very painful, but the alternative, of course, is to rot in a wheelchair for the rest of our life. | |
| That will not bring us happiness. | |
| So, happiness is not something that is going to come to us. | |
| Happiness is not something that develops within us, you know, like the naughty bits in puberty. | |
| Happiness is something that we have to actively pursue. | |
| We have to hunt it down. | |
| We have to bring it down. | |
| Sometimes with our teeth, it feels like. | |
| We have to know what it is. | |
| We have to pursue it. We have to overcome our fears. | |
| Of virtue and what practical virtue will do to our immediate relationships, which is often lay waste of them considerably before it gives us new and better companions. | |
| So, happiness is something that we need to hunt. | |
| We need to hunt down like a grim bear hunter of the far north. | |
| We have to track it, we have to learn its habitat, and we have to hunt it, and we have to bring it down, we have to skin it. | |
| And we have to eat it and wear it. | |
| And that is not something that you often hear. | |
| Happiness is often considered to be something that you dissociate yourself into in the sort of Buddhist model that you give up your desires and you end up happy. | |
| I don't believe that's the case. And logically, it's completely irrational. | |
| You can't have a desire to give up your desires. | |
| That's a contradiction. Or it's something that is going to come to us if we win the lottery, if we find the love of our life, if we get the right job or the right house, or whatever it is, that happiness is then going to accumulate towards us. | |
| But that's not the case at all, and statistical studies bear this out very, very considerably. | |
| People who win the lottery experience maybe six to twelve months of happiness, and then they're exactly back to where they were. | |
| In the first biochemical flush of sexual romance, we go three to six months with that high, and then it begins to decline. | |
| Sustainable happiness is not something that is going to happen to us. | |
| It's not going to happen if we win the lottery or win Wimbledon or win American Idol or whatever it is that we have as a desire for some external solution to the problem of happiness. | |
| There is no external solution that is permanent to the problem of happiness. | |
| Everything that happens from an external standpoint is like a hit of heroin. | |
| It will make you feel good for a while and afterwards you will feel worse and then you will continue to chase it, which doesn't happen. | |
| You don't get to reclaim it and continue with that. | |
| Happiness is something that is a form of practical virtuous excellence in life. | |
| It is something that we need to rigorously define, we need to energetically pursue, will cause within us great fear and anxiety. | |
| It is very hard to be a virtuous man and woman in a carafe world, right? | |
| You basically are popping your head up the gopher hole into society that hates and fears virtue because when you are virtuous, you remind other people that virtue is possible and that creates great anger if they will not do it, right? | |
| Because... No man can forgive you the botched opportunity you can give him to be a greater man, a greater person. | |
| So when you become virtuous, you pop your king overhead up, and you get these lasers, right? | |
| Because everybody feels angry and fearful that you are virtuous, and so we have to pursue it with the greatest opposition possible, against the greatest opposition. | |
| We really are swimming against the tide, if not running headlong into a towering tsunami. | |
| So virtue, the pursuit of, is a very stressful and difficult thing, but the pursuit of every kind of excellence is stressful and difficult, and the payoff is, of course, a sustainable joy, happiness, self-regard, contentment, and courage and energy in the necessary fight to raise the moral standards of mankind. | |
| So, I'll give you a few thoughts about happiness and how to achieve it. | |
| Obviously, I have a whole podcast series on how to achieve this, but I thought I would throw a few things your way, just so that you can get a sense of how it is that I work with the concept of the idea, and hopefully it will make some sense to you. | |
| So, imagine that a terrible fate overtook you. | |
| This afternoon. Today. | |
| Now. You felt a twinge, you went to the doctor, you were diagnosed with some horrible disease, leukemia, cancer, something like that. | |
| And after a year of chemotherapy or some sort of hellish medical intervention, you totteringly regained your shaky health and you were back to where you are right now. | |
| Well, wouldn't that be something that would be a joyful thing for you? | |
| That after you shook off this illness or recovered from this illness, you would wake up thinking, oh my God, I'm not sick. | |
| And for a certain time at least, that would be a deep, deep joy to you. | |
| But this, of course, brings up that basic question, which is why do we have to lose what we already have in order to value what we have? | |
| Because right now, we already have it. | |
| I'm going to assume that you do have your health, or at least the reasonable facsimile thereof. | |
| So if you were to lose it and then enormously appreciate the regaining of your health, why not just enormously appreciate the regaining of your health without having to go through the hell of losing it? | |
| As I mentioned, I have a wife and daughter who I completely worship, love, and adore. | |
| If they were kidnapped and I had to give up everything and struggle and strain for months to get them back, when they returned to me, would I not shower them with joy, tears and kisses and feel that that was the most wonderful day in my life? | |
| Well, they leave and come back every day sometimes, and why would I not feel that same joy? | |
| Why would they have to be kidnapped and then return to me in order for me to appreciate just how much joy my wife and my daughter bring to my life? | |
| Why would I have to lose something in order to gain it? | |
| Let's take another scenario. Imagine that you get the bang-bang-bang of your local statist Gestapo on the door, and you were accused of, and tried and convicted of, a crime that was manufactured, pinned on you. | |
| It was unjust. And you were facing five or ten or more years in jail. | |
| And then at the last minute, some new evidence arose. | |
| Someone confessed or somebody, you know, your alibi checked out. | |
| And you were then released from the death grip of the state and its unjust and brutal and rapey kinds of prisons. | |
| And you were returned to your family or to your home. | |
| And you were restored to the liberties that you currently possess. | |
| Would you not feel an unbelievable welling of gratitude for the very freedoms that you have now that were on the verge of being taken away? | |
| Why would you need to have them almost taken away in order to appreciate the liberties that you have in your life at the moment? | |
| So I'm talking about your health, your relationships, the freedoms that you do have. | |
| I think it's so important to just relish and feel joy in that which we have. | |
| Because we're all going to age. | |
| We're all going to die. | |
| On your deathbed, how much would you give? | |
| When you are staring down the great black shark jaws of death itself, what would you give to be returned to where you are right now, sitting, listening and watching to this, with relative youth, with relative health, with relative... | |
| with the future? | |
| Because when you're staring down that black wormhole of death, knowing that there's no turning back, you would give almost anything to go back to where you are right now, with the full appreciation of how precious and important every moment really is. | |
| Because that is going to be your fate, of course. | |
| Like myself, you are going to be a trussed up, like a bag of offal thrown into the ground. | |
| They're going to heap dirt on your face, and stick a tombstone on your forehead, and you will live in memories and videos, and you will be gone. | |
| And at that moment, on the brink of death, when you're toppling, like a tree on the edge of the cliff whose roots have finally given way, and you're toppling down, You would give anything to be returned to a place where you had choice and a future. | |
| But you have that choice and you have that future right now. | |
| There is no need to wait for it all to go away to appreciate what you have. | |
| And that's what I mean when I say that happiness is a discipline. | |
| Happiness is a remembrance of everything that we're going to lose. | |
| And an appreciation of it While we still have it. | |
| It's not the only component of happiness, but it is a very key component of happiness. | |
| So, why don't you look at your life and say... | |
| Today, I have dodged illness. | |
| Today, I still have people in my life who love me, or I have the potential thereof. | |
| Today, I still have my liberty. | |
| Today, I still have my freedom. | |
| Today, I have dodged death. | |
| and loss and terror and tragedy and one day I won't but that day is not today so let me love the day that I have as recognizing the gift that it is and let me share the joy in existence with as many people as I can scorning the slings and arrows of outrageous doubters and those who would bring us down because our happiness threatens their misery and corruption Why don't I open my forehead like a beacon of light, | |
| like a lighthouse in stormy seas to guide those far out at sea clinging to barrels and timbers to kick towards a firmer shore and a more peaceful life? | |
| Why don't I open myself up like a geyser, like a firework? | |
| To bring joy to those around me. | |
| To bring a deep appreciation of the glory and beauty that is life. | |
| This incredible rare gift that we in this tiny corner of the cosmos have been given to appreciate. | |
| The very flow of blood in our veins. | |
| The very flow of breath in our lungs. | |
| The very gift of every day. | |
| That is a discipline that will bring incredible joy to your life. | |
| But we have to remember it, and we have to appreciate it, and we also have to remember that, though these are trying times, there is no time, there is no time that I would rather live in. | |
| I would not want to live in the Middle Ages. | |
| I would not want to live in Roman times. | |
| I would not want to live in prehistoric times. | |
| I would not want to be... | |
| A sweaty, back-broken slave of the Egyptian pyramids. | |
| I would not want to live in the 19th century. | |
| I would not want to live in Africa. | |
| I would want to live where I am living now if I had any choice in history. | |
| And I think it's really important to appreciate all that has been achieved and all that has been brought in terms of freedom and technology and the chance to have this amazing conversation. | |
| Appreciation, appreciation, appreciation. | |
| If you were sent back... | |
| To the 18th century, and you had a toothache or an infection, what would you give, what would you not give to be able to be sent back in time to 2009 where we have dentistry with painkillers and antibiotics? | |
| What would you not give to be where you are right now if you were sent anywhere else in time, space, health, relationships, or mortality? | |
| Well, you're already there. | |
| You already have. | |
| That which you would mourn the loss of beyond words should it be taken away. | |
| Don't wait to lose it, to love it. |
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