Dec. 24, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:34
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| Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. | |
| Hope you're doing well. I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to thank you and tell you what, to me, the true and deep and powerful meaning of Christmas is. | |
| So first of all, I really, really want to thank you for giving me the resources to bring philosophy To the world, I can't believe, I literally can't believe it's been 15 years. | |
| I still feel like a spring chicken and I look a little bit more like a chicken egg. | |
| But thank you everyone so much for giving me the resources to do. | |
| I mean, just this last year, a little over a year, I've done three documentaries. | |
| One on Poland, one on California, one on Hong Kong. | |
| And you can find these at freedomain.com forward slash documentaries. | |
| I've done over 250 shows. | |
| I spoke at the European Union. | |
| I mean, boy, it's just been... | |
| Wild and amazing. | |
| And I thank you so much for the opportunity to do this, to bring over 650 million views and downloads of Philosophy to the world, to have my books downloaded 100,000 times a month. | |
| Wow. I mean, thank you, thank you, thank you, my friends. | |
| It moves me beyond words. | |
| And of course, if you are feeling in the Christmas spirit and want to help me move on, I really, really want to do a History of Philosophy In Greece and Italy. | |
| That to me would be an incredible thing to do, to remind everyone of the beauties of our civilization and the glories of which we are capable. | |
| And if you want to help out, please, freedomain.com forward slash donate. | |
| You can actually donate completely anonymously now if you want, freedomain.com forward slash donate. | |
| So thank you. Now, as far as the meaning of Christmas goes, let me start with a sad story and I will... | |
| Turn it twist style into a great story because that's kind of the story of my life. | |
| It started out as a tragedy and it ended up as, well, whatever it is now, we'll just say it's not a tragedy anymore. | |
| So when I was a kid growing up, Christmas was like a paralysingly, paralysically, desperately sad time. | |
| A broken time. Why? | |
| Because Christmas is a beautiful time of year. | |
| I love snow myself. | |
| Well, you can't live in Canada and hate snow, where if you do, you're not going to have much of a fun time for half the year. | |
| So I love snow. | |
| I love snow sports. I love tobogganing and skiing and hiking in the snow and snowshoeing and all of that. | |
| It's wonderful. I mean, the country snow, city snow is just slushy trash, but the country snow is beautiful. | |
| And when I first came to Canada in 1977, I came from England where I'd seen little light frosting dustings of snow, like the stuff you drop down on your gingerbread house when you're making it at home. | |
| I'd only seen a little bit of snow in my life. | |
| And I didn't know this at the time, but 1977, when I first came to Canada and my family, we couldn't afford to fly to Toronto. | |
| We flew Freddie Laker. | |
| From London to New York and then we took a bus up to Canada which is where we of course stayed and settled. | |
| I didn't know this at the time but 1977 was a famously astoundingly deep and of course if you're trying to get to work catastrophically It was a horribly cold and snowy winter. | |
| Now, I loved it, of course, because, you know, you put me in a snowsuit as a kid and I'm basically like Superman. | |
| I'm bulletproof. I could ride down after flipping off a sled on my head down a hill and get up laughing and giggling. | |
| So I loved that winter and was a little bit disappointed at the following winters because that just happened to be... | |
| It was like a whole series of mattress snowdrops from the sky, and it was just wonderful. | |
| And because I loved snow, being in that was magical. | |
| But all of that going on outside, inside the home, the family life, was horrible and catastrophic. | |
| And it was worse around Christmas. | |
| Why? Because, as you know, Christmas is this... | |
| Wonderful time with sentimentality and presence and thinking of each other and hugs and that godforsaken juice known as buttermilk and eggnog and so on. | |
| And it's supposed to be a time of warmth and comfort and reflection and closeness and love and all of that. | |
| And it's supposed to be a time where you reconnect from the hurly-burly of daily life to the people you love and care about and so on. | |
| Now if you live in a functional family and you have a good environment, Christmas makes good, great. | |
| But if you live in a dysfunctional environment, then Christmas makes bad worse. | |
| Because the gap, right? | |
| The gap between what's going on in the household and what's going on on the, you know, warm, treacly, loving... | |
| Family Christmas specials on television and what's going on when you read a Christmas carol and what's going on when Scrooge gets reformed and all of the happy, the beautiful music. | |
| Christmas music is beautiful, even that Wham thing, though not the One Queen song, which is terrible. | |
| But... The gap between what's going on in your house and what's going on in the season is so great that it really is. | |
| It's terrible. It's like when you have a birthday and your family is dysfunctional and there's blow-ups on the birthday, you'd rather not have a birthday because Having that birthday makes things worse. | |
| It's more painful. | |
| And I mean, just stupid little tragedies that go on when you're a kid. | |
| My mom entirely forgot my 13th birthday and the only thing that happened was a friend of mine's mom gave me $5. | |
| That was it, man. So... | |
| That is painful, of course, when you're a kid, and I sort of hate to say you want it to be painful, but you do because you don't want that to become the norm. | |
| So this is what Christmas is. | |
| So Christmas is generally an elevation of the human condition. | |
| Christmas and love and depth and reflection, and particularly, of course, if you are Christian, a recommitment to the values, the abstract, universal moral values of Christianity. | |
| It is a time to forgive those who have earned it and to forgive those who have failed to earn it. | |
| This is really, really important. So there are people in your life who have wronged you, and you've wronged others, just as I have, and you acknowledge it and you apologize for it and you make amends and so on. | |
| Now, there are people in your life who've wronged you and they haven't made any amends. | |
| They may have doubled down. They may have escalated. | |
| And I don't forgive those people in the way that I forgive people who've earned it because I pay my debts, right? | |
| I pay what I owe, which is respect and bills. | |
| And I don't pay what I don't owe, which is social contracts and bad behavior. | |
| I just can't extend the same positive regard to people who act badly as to people who act well because there has to be a reward for acting well. | |
| But you can forgive the people who have failed to earn your forgiveness. | |
| And what I mean by that is recognize they're not going to change and move on. | |
| And don't dwell, don't brood, right? | |
| Your emotions are there to keep you safe. | |
| And if people have harmed you and doubled down, then they're only promising to harm you again, right? | |
| Excuses are promises of repetition. | |
| Somebody does wrong to you and they excuse that or they blame you. | |
| They're simply promising to do it again. | |
| And your emotions want to keep you safe. | |
| And so... You know, if you can't get the bear out of the house, then get out of the house with the bear. | |
| So, Christmas is this wonderfully elevated time. | |
| And it would be lovely, of course, and wonderful if that elevation stayed with us for longer than Christmas, right? | |
| I remember giving a speech many, many years ago when my best friend got married. | |
| And I said, look at the day that you're married. | |
| Look at the love and the perfection and the glories and the commitment and so on. | |
| And if and when you run into trouble in your marriage, you're not getting along, you're fighting over silly things, you've got to return to this well of your wedding day. | |
| And remember, that's what marriage is. | |
| That's what that love, that commitment, that looking at your partner as perfect, which I do. | |
| Nothing needs to change. | |
| Nothing needs to be fixed. Nothing is broken. | |
| That's where you return to. | |
| And Christmas is supposed to be this time of elevated joy and happiness and commitment. | |
| That we return to during the year when the inevitable hurly-burly and undertow and, you know, black-assed gravity well of daily strife takes us away from the depth and glory of our relationships with virtue, with happiness, with each other. | |
| We're supposed to return to Christmas and say, remember how wonderful it was, sipping hot chocolate around the fire, talking about the year. | |
| Everyone was happy. Everyone was content. | |
| Everyone's belly was probably a little too full. | |
| And what a wonderful time that was. | |
| That's... The oasis that you return to, that's where you recharge and refuel in those memories of togetherness and commitment and the true beauty of Christmas connection. | |
| Now, if you had it tough or if you're having it tough right now, it's painful. | |
| And I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry about that. | |
| But let me tell you what Christmas is in that circumstance. | |
| So... The stratification of society is really, really terrifying when you see it. | |
| And I've had this, I think, kind of a rare opportunity to start at the bottom and go to the middle, be at the top sometimes and down to the middle and so on because, you know, I started off, you know, very, very poor and, you know, mom's been on welfare for decades and so on. | |
| And down in that realm of life, I mean, things are pretty bad. | |
| And they're pretty bad everywhere you look. | |
| Because you can't really look up. | |
| It's kind of too painful. And people who are sort of above you, I don't mean in terms of money, but in terms of functionality and happiness and so on, they rarely drill down and give you light through the ceiling, the dungeon ceiling of your dysfunctional class system. | |
| But I did have some of that when I was a kid. | |
| One family in particular that I've mentioned in passing on this show really did give me a view of what life could be like in the same middle classes, so to speak. | |
| And again, it's not primarily functional. | |
| You can be poor and very, very together and happy and so on. | |
| And you can be wealthy, as we all know, and have a completely miserable, messed up life. | |
| Life. And so this dungeon of dysfunction that people get trapped in, Christmas, is something that drills down from a higher place, from a better place, from the sunlit upper. | |
| Reaches and mountains of the human condition. | |
| And Christmas just augers down and gives you a view of what life should be like and could be like and what you should strive and aim for. | |
| Because getting out of those dungeons, man, it's like watching Harry Houdini. | |
| You know, triple-chained, underwater, shark-circling, getting out is tough. | |
| Because people who are down there, they don't want you to get out. | |
| Because the reason they're down in those dungeons of dysfunction is because they don't believe there's any other way. | |
| This is the real world. | |
| This is the human condition. | |
| They've encapsulated themselves in a cyst of world-spanning justifications and proofs of the necessity of their dysfunction. | |
| In other words, these are the kinds of people, and I knew these cynical people when I was growing up, and I've seen how it plays out for them. | |
| It's really not good. Which is they say that happy, you know, shiny happy people holding hands, you know, happiness is stupidity and the real depth of the human condition is horror and anybody who skates on the surface and avoids that is a fool and is blind and is an idiot. | |
| I mean, that's terrible. Then you've sealed yourself in to this dungeon with a cyst of universal justification. | |
| And you have defined dysfunction as depth and happiness as shallowness. | |
| And you can't get out of that, right? | |
| Then you've just sealed over and walled in any kind of pipe out of this dungeon of dysfunction. | |
| But Christmas drills down and opens that up and you can see how life is supposed to be. | |
| We're supposed to be happy. | |
| We're supposed to be content. | |
| We're supposed to be close. We're supposed to be honest. | |
| We're supposed to be in love. | |
| And Christmas bungees in with a big fat lollipop fist-holding Santa and says, wappity wappity wap, wake up. | |
| Wake up from sadness. | |
| Wake up from anger. | |
| Wake up from pettiness. | |
| The great tiny devils that hold us down. | |
| Wake up from dysfunction. | |
| Commit to a glorious life. | |
| Commit to being honest with the people around you. | |
| Though the skies fall. | |
| Because it's not the skies fall. | |
| It's not the skies that will fall when you're honest. | |
| It just feels that way. It feels like the skies are falling, but what's happening is you're elevating. | |
| You know, when you climb a mountain, you are closer to the sky and closer to the sun by a tiny amount and further from these dungeons. | |
| Commit to being honest. | |
| Commit to being yourself. | |
| Commit to being authentic. | |
| Find out who loves you for who you are, not who approves of you for what you comply. | |
| This Christmas, next Christmas, all Christmases and all the times in between, my friends, commit to being yourself. | |
| Commit to being honest. And say to yourself, it's my life. | |
| I will accept. | |
| No. Substitute. |
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