Oct. 29, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:55
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| So there's not a huge amount that I hate in this world, but I'll tell you something that I do hate, and that is the tyranny, the programming, the train track off the cliff edge known as cool as being cool. | |
| So I read, as you probably did a couple of days ago, that Mexican drug cartels had defeated the government We're good to go. | |
| Collector John Fowle's style is quite the opposite, so private stuff beats public stuff. | |
| So the cartels, evil and horrible though they are, shadow cast by the giant drug war, they beat the government. | |
| And what this reminded me of was, years ago I was in Mexico, some absolute backhole, out of the way, edge of the planet, Tatooine-style village, and there was a cart that was selling... | |
| Tacos and stuff like that. It was really, really good food. | |
| But one of the things that I noticed on the taco stand was a giant poster of Scarface, right? | |
| Like the Al Pacino character, right? | |
| Let me introduce you to my little friend! | |
| That guy, right? And it was cool. | |
| He was the cool guy. | |
| And that tyranny of cool, how it programs people into these gravity wells of future disasters, is something that we're really not as conscious of as we should be. | |
| But the tyranny of cool, why is it that in Mexico, in other places, This cool gangster violence happens in the hood, right? | |
| It happens in the ghettos with the thug life and so on. | |
| It's just cool to steal a car, flash a wad of cash and have women around who seem to have their own portable chairs on their backsides. | |
| That is considered cool. | |
| When I was about 11 or 12, when I lived in Toronto, A friend of mine and I were about to cross the street to the Don Mills Mall, and this sort of big Arab came up to us, and I don't know, | |
| he was like 16 or 17 or whatever, and he was Palestinian, and he was berating us, regaling us with all of these stories about how Many criminal connections he had. | |
| Everyone who he could get killed if they so much looked at him wrong. | |
| He was glorying in this vat of violence because I don't know if it was his culture or his family or his environment or his peers, but it was cool because, you know, I've done some nutty things in my life, but I don't think I've ever, ever Not only I've never discussed nor have I even thought about how cool it would be to regale everyone with all the tales of everyone I could have killed. | |
| I just would find that kind of freaky and weird. | |
| But for this guy this was I think his culture wherein your access to staggering levels of hair trigger violence made you cool and that's kind of tough to escape from. | |
| To dip over to whites a little here, the cool around drinking is horrendous. | |
| Like, there's this old saying, you can see it on, like, wall plaques for, like, cottages and so on, like... | |
| No great story ever started with, first I had a salad, right? | |
| It's always, I got so drunk that I got so wasted that and God, I hate those stories. | |
| Oh man, I'm like, I'm a really, really polite and nice guy. | |
| People who meet me like person to person are like, whoa, dude, you're like a nice guy. | |
| I'm like, I am a nice guy. | |
| I really am a nice guy. | |
| But there are a few times when I would be really, really blunt with people. | |
| And one of them is if they start drinking stories. | |
| We got so drunk that, and then I did this, and then that happened, and then I fell down the stairs. | |
| And it's like, yeah, I get it. | |
| You've messed up your brain. | |
| Good for you. It's basically the same as, well, then I spun around 1,500 times really fast, got on a pogo stick, and fell down an icy sidewalk. | |
| It's like... That's just a story of being stupid. | |
| That is not a story that is actually interesting to anybody who's not drunk. | |
| I mean, it's the other problem, too. Like, if you go to parties, it becomes cool to drink, like when you're younger. | |
| I had a friend, a guy I worked with, and we were sitting around, and there was this story about how he fell asleep at a party holding a beer. | |
| And he was like, he was so far out, you know, snoring away. | |
| He fell asleep at a party. He was holding a beer. | |
| And then someone gently tried to take that beer away from him. | |
| He was like, don't take my beer, right? | |
| And this was considered to be, like, this was this guy's defining moment. | |
| This was his Rubicon. This was his stamp and imprint of cool, that he was such an alcoholic, you see, that if anyone tried to take his beer while he was sleeping... | |
| That was terrible. And of course, you know, drinking becomes this horrible self-sealing cyst of a social circle. | |
| There's some sibilance for you. | |
| Because if you drink and other people are drinking, they seem interesting. | |
| Even though when you don't drink and you're around people who are drinking, you can just see... | |
| You know, like you turn over sand in an hourglass and it kind of drains away. | |
| You can just see intelligence, coherence, any capacity for conversation or being interesting. | |
| You can just see it draining away, you know, just draining away. | |
| So it's beer for men, of course, it's wine for women. | |
| Wine is just considered really, really cool. | |
| There's this haunting scene from a Glenn Close series called Damages. | |
| Oh, it's actually more than one scene. | |
| So Glenn Close plays this, you know, psycho bitter, well, she plays Glenn Close, right? | |
| And she's this lawyer, and she screams at people all the time and is a real bully. | |
| And she's sitting at home in this like perfectly clean apartment, like this beautiful condo, like everything is just so, you know, like there's some women, particularly like a man's job is his penis, a woman's home, it's her vagina. | |
| And there are some women out there who are like, I'm sorry, I can't relax because at any moment in my life, the Architectural Digest helicopter is going to come right past my window and take photos and send them. | |
| To my grandmother or something like that. | |
| I don't exactly know how that brain series works, but that's what seems to happen a lot of times. | |
| So, Glenn Close is sitting in this beautiful, pristine condo, you know, reading a file for her law practice, and she has this glass of wine, you know, like this beautiful blood-of-the-vampire self-erasure glass of wine. | |
| And that, for women, is, oh, wine, you know? | |
| I was posting this on Twitter. | |
| There's, like, I don't know, way over 100,000 women part of a Facebook group called I Need a Glass of Wine So Badly I'd Sell My Kids to Get One. | |
| And, you know, mommy wine, mommy drinking, women drinking. | |
| The meme on the internet of the cool wine aunt. | |
| You know, like, she's single. | |
| She's past her prime. | |
| She is a woman past a certain age. | |
| She's got that roadrunner, slightly pear-shaped outline straight through the wall of her 30s. | |
| And she's coasting off into the interstellar, invisible depths of post-menopausal womanhood. | |
| And she comes over. She's a little kooky. | |
| She's got scarves. | |
| She's got stories of people who passed by her lonely table in gay Paris when she was drinking wine and dodging migrants. | |
| And that's the cool wine art. | |
| And it's called cool because, you know, glass of wine. | |
| Let's have some wine. And it becomes cool. | |
| And because it becomes cool, there's this kind of weird gravity well that this is kind of But you have to be. | |
| It's not cool to be white, of course, anymore. | |
| It was cool for a while when whites made the absolutely massive catastrophe of thinking they could wander around the world and make all the countries into white countries. | |
| Just a terrible, terrible idea. | |
| You see, because whites went over to third world countries, Made deals with the government against the will of the people and then took resources out of that country. | |
| Now, of course, it's exactly the same thing, this reverse colonialism, that migrants and economic blah-blahs come into Western countries against the will of the local population, take resources through the welfare state, cipher it off back home. | |
| You can't ever complain about colonialism again because it's happening right now and nobody seems to give much of a rat's booger about it. | |
| This question of what is cool is really foundational to the world. | |
| And you have to kind of look grimly in the mirror. | |
| Stare deep, deep into that mirror. | |
| And say to yourself, what is cool in your life? | |
| Other than me, of course, and philosophy. | |
| But what is cool? | |
| What is the definition, the essence of cool in your life? | |
| Because that's the train track that you're on, my friends. | |
| That is a train track that you're on. | |
| And it's really, really hard to jump that train track. | |
| So we used to have this thing called, am I good? | |
| Am I virtuous? | |
| Do I provide for my family? | |
| Am I a good, honest citizen? | |
| Do I take care of others? | |
| Am I fighting evil and promoting virtue? | |
| That used to be something which we had. | |
| But then, of course, when religion, Christianity fell, we lost a virtue. | |
| We got cool. And a cool, of course, is so often programmed by capitalists to eviscerate our future. | |
| What's cool? Well... |
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