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Aug. 21, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:34
Why You Are Lonely...
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well. So I had a good question that showed up last night on Twitter.
And really, if you're not following me on Twitter, you should be at Stefan Molyneux.
Link is below. And the question was around loneliness.
Loneliness. Not just a constant refrain of Sting and the Police songs, but a huge challenge in modern life, right?
I mean, a lot of people are very lonely and we're dogs, not cats as a species.
We need... People.
We are not self-sufficient in that kind of way and shouldn't be.
And loneliness is bad for you, man.
I don't mean to alarm you, but I'm sort of trying to wake you up to the dangers that you may be facing if you're lonely.
I mean, we're talking...
It's about the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Solitude. It's not...
It's not good for us.
And the question is...
Why do we experience it?
Well, loneliness, of course, is a powerful emotion, and said powerful emotions generally arise because they're beneficial to our survival.
So, of course, as we evolved in our tribal natures or in our tribal environments, solitude was really bad.
And solitude is bad because we need other humans to protect us, When we sleep, we need other humans to protect us if we come across other tribes that may be violent and so on.
And we need other human beings in particular to help us with our child raising, right?
Because human beings are born in what is sometimes called the fourth trimester, which is that...
We're born so helpless.
I mean, it takes us a year to learn how to walk, give or take, right?
So we desperately need others.
And so isolation triggers grave warning signs within us that we are vulnerable and that we are in danger.
And we literally are in danger when we are alone.
So now, of course, we can survive without...
Other tribe members, so to speak.
But, I mean, you can do web coding at home and you can only deal with people remotely and, you know, you don't have to hunt and you don't have to have kids.
So, you don't need other people, but our emotional apparatus...
Still has not, of course, evolved to the point where it's taken into account the new independence of the last couple decades.
I mean, we're still mammals with a four billion year span back to single-celled organisms, so our emotions have not caught up.
So loneliness is a sign that you lack the social bonds to survive.
And loneliness is very painful to us.
Ostracism triggers the same brain mechanisms within us as torture.
It's actually a kind of torture to be isolated.
So... Why do we experience it and what can we do about it?
Well, the why I think we just talked about.
What we can do about it.
Well, way back in my very first book that I wrote, my first philosophical book, far from my first book, called On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, I talked about a city, a desert, and a village.
Now, the city is where most people live.
Normieville, Mugglesville, whatever you want to call it.
It's Plato's Cave. It's where most people live and they are embedded, ensconced, trapped like Han Solo in a copper casket in illusion, in lies, in propaganda, in the manipulation of the elites, you name it, right?
And that's a city.
Now, in that city...
The only way to pretend to connect to people is to share in the lives that they believe.
It's the only way you can do it.
It's the only way you can pretend to connect to people.
Now, we can only actually connect, really connect, as E.M. Forster cried out, the novelist, only connect.
So important. To have honest connections with people.
We can only actually connect in reality.
We can only connect in reality.
We cannot connect in fantasy.
Fantasy is isolating, but fantasy...
Fantasy is to genuine human connection as porn is to sex.
It provides the illusion, but not the reality.
So if you...
You know, marching with a bunch of pussy hats or whatever, and you all believe the same nonsense.
You feel like you're connected, but you're not.
You've surrendered your identity and submerged yourself into a general fog and swamp of collective delusion, and you call that a tribe or a group or a gathering or a squad, come to think of it for that matter.
So that's...
Well, there's some bugs out today.
So that's the reality.
Now, that's the city where everyone lives, and The streets are paved with bullcrap, and everyone mouths the same nonsense and pretends to believe the same things.
Nobody actually believes anything, but the price of seeming connection is authenticity, integrity, actualization, honesty, truth.
That's what you have to give up to live in the mirrored city of general delusion.
Should we take a tiny pause? Ah!
Look at this. Isn't that beautiful?
I hope everyone is out there enjoying nature, enjoying all the beauty that nature has to offer.
It's truly stunning.
It's truly stunning, and I hope that you love nature.
Well, I won't say as much as I do, like I'm the measure of all things, but I hope you love it a lot.
So that's the city. Now, in that city, you get the pornography of pretend connection by sharing in the common delusions of everyone.
And the price of thinking for yourself is you lose the key to the city, right?
You lose your capacity to pretend connect with people.
You start to wake up, you start to think for yourself, you start to reason, you start to look at Unapproved sources of information.
You start to do all of these things.
And suddenly, the people that you thought were so close and so connected and so friendly and loving and your friends, your family, whatever, right?
Suddenly, boom! Right?
If you question the city...
The city vanishes, and what you realize, or where you realize you are, is a zoo.
It's a cage. It's a prison.
A very profitable prison, of course, for those in power, but a prison nonetheless.
And that's where you are.
A farm. I called it many years ago in my video, the story of your enslavement.
That's where you are. And you wake up to that matrix that you are not free but owned and that the price of pretend connection is identity and integrity.
You wake up to that and the city is never the same.
It's never seen by you again as a city.
And then you stand outside the walls of the city, or in general, you're kicked outside the walls of the city, and what happens?
You look out and there's nothing out there.
Nothing out there.
It's desert that stretches on forever.
Like you are a tiny drop of civilization in a vast tattooing eternity.
Oh, look at me with the Star Wars analogies today.
So, that's the reality.
You stand...
Outside the city walls.
And you are mocked and you're attacked and you're jeered at.
And people have to attack you because the alternative to attacking you is for them to start asking questions themselves.
And given what they're doing to you, they now expect everyone else to do that to them.
You understand, right?
It's bad. It's bad.
It's hard. It's tough.
It's progress. Of course, it's the only thing that gives us progress.
But it's hard.
Now, you stand outside the city walls and you look across at the desert of the real.
And you see the Shimmering mirages and you think that the sirens of individualism are luring you out to your death.
To die with a caked nose and a dry throat out there in the desert.
And... But you hear...
Almost like a hammering sound or a sound of song, a couple of shouts, snatches of music.
You hear something and you don't know, because you can see the mirage with your eyes, but you don't know if it's a mirage of the ears, that there's something going on out there beyond the desert.
You can't go back into the city.
I mean, you can go in, but you're...
You have the mark of Cain, so to speak, the mark of thought in your mind.
So you can go back into the city, but it's never satisfying.
Now you know you're always pretending.
And so you stand outside the city walls and you decide that there must be something out there.
Beyond the desert. A habitat.
A habitation. Something.
Some humanity.
Some people. Something.
So what do you do?
Well, you gather your wineskin of water, your lembas bread, and you strike out.
You strike out.
To the world.
To the desert. To see if there's anything on the other side.
Well that's the process of thinking for yourself.
There is a village out here. It's smallish.
But it sure as hell is growing.
People who think. People who reason.
People who ask questions that are forbidden.
And we want to see you and we want you to join us.
Because there is a tribe of the real.
There is a tribe of thought.
There is a tribe of curiosity.
There is a tribe of love.
Love of wisdom. Love of truth.
The only place you can really connect is out here in this growing village of those who tell the truth.
It's the only place there is love.
It's the only place there is connection.
It's the only place there is satisfaction.
It's the only place that you can truly live rather than be a shell dominated over and dictated to by the lies of the unliving.
Can't do it. You think you're in a party, you're in a graveyard of ghosts like Geppetto moving your limbs to their own long dead but still living purposes.
And The loneliness occurs, you see.
See, there's quick loneliness and there's slow loneliness.
So the slow loneliness is you stay inside the city.
You never think for yourself. You veer away from originality, from thought.
You veer away from it.
You fear it. You attack anyone who dares ask questions that make you uncomfortable.
Because it has all become about emotion.
They had to destroy our reason so they could program our emotions to reject evidence.
That's the reality of where we live.
So if you stay in there, in the city of illusion, then what happens is you slowly decay into isolation.
But it's a very slow process, very slow process.
It's like that wait and watch tumor.
It's a very slow process.
It's not fast enough to jolt you into any kind of activity.
It's a slow strangulation of incremental satanic immobility.
And then when you get old, you realize that What do you realize?
You realize that it's all nonsense, that everything was a lie, but you can't say anything about it anymore, because not only have you drunk that lie so much that you can't drink anything else, but you've also forced other people to imbibe those lies.
And it's one thing to destroy your own mind, you can survive that, you can rebuild, but once you've destroyed the minds of others, particularly children, no restitution is possible.
This is why all people are isolated, depressed, like all the people, particularly women, who need...
Women need connection more than men, which is why when you want to destroy a culture, you tell women to live like men.
That's how you do it. So, that's one way that you end up, is you stay in the city, but the satisfactions of...
The pretend connection diminish.
But then by the time they've diminished to the point where you might panic, it's too late to cross the desert.
You're too old. Skin is too dry to risk the Kalihari individualism of philosophy.
So, you continue.
You stay. You participate.
You recreate the destruction that was wreaked upon you upon others.
And that's one way that we die, we fade, we collapse.
But the other is the quick way, right?
So the quick way is when you just start asking questions.
In full naivety, in imagining that a society, a city that says, we value the truth, we value reason, we value evidence, we value science, and you say, oh, here's the truth, here's the facts, here's the reason, here's the evidence, here's the science, and boom!
You get eviscerated.
Right? We've all experienced this, we've thought for ourselves, you get eviscerated by people.
They can't stand that you think.
They can't stand that you reason.
You see, it's a trap.
It's just a trap. It's like the king spy who comes up to you and says, don't you ever think ill of the king?
And you say, well, you know, on occasion, boom!
Ah, are you into facts, reason, evidence, and science?
Yes. Okay, tell me your facts, recent evidence, and science.
Boom! Right?
It's a trap. It's just a trap.
A little more and a little less.
So, evil people will isolate you for telling the truth.
That's called loneliness. Because evil is a cult.
You can't think for yourself.
You can't genuinely connect with people.
Right? So...
Evil people surround you with loneliness to punish you for thinking for yourself.
You start to think for yourself.
I'm telling you this, man.
You ain't long for that city.
Gird your loins. Cross the desert.
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