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Dec. 28, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:47
Twitter thoughts: BRITAIN WILL BE SIBERIA IN 3 DAYS!
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Inn.
Hope you're doing well. Twitter thoughts this morning.
Very interesting day on Twitter, as it usually is.
So, this ex-boxer, very funny guy, Ed Lattimore...
Wrote, in all of my Twitter experience, I've never seen people have a more hit-dog reaction to statements condemning marijuana.
I make hundreds of crackhead jokes, crickets.
Let me make one about potheads, and they act like a white boy dropped an n-bomb.
And I wrote back and said, all too often, marijuana starts as a recreation.
Then... It becomes a lifestyle.
Then it becomes a social circle.
Then it becomes an identity.
And that's really, really important.
I mean, this does happen with other things, too.
It happens with alcohol and so on, where you just become a party animal, and you can't imagine social gatherings without drinking, and it becomes a lifestyle.
This is what you do on the weekends.
Your entire social circle is defined by people who are pro-alcohol, and then it just becomes an identity, like I'm a party guy.
I've said this before.
I was on a... I had a volleyball team with a guy, a friend of mine, who said, had a story about his friend, who was also on the team, that his friend fell asleep at a party holding a beer, right?
And somebody tried to take that beer, and he's like, hey!
That's what he woke up for, was to hold his beer, and this was considered a core part of his identity.
You really, really have to be careful about activities that substitute...
Social conformity for critical thinking, for individuality, for just being who you are.
That's really, really important.
So what happens is, of course, if somebody has absorbed marijuana or drinking or whatever it is, it could be extreme sports, it could be going to the gym, to the point where it defines kind of who they are, then when you criticize the activity, people take it as a very personal attack because The activity has become such a core part of their identity that a criticism of the activity is now a criticism of them and it undoes their sense of who they are and it's really very interesting.
One of the things that I sort of dedicated myself to, I know it sounds like a lot of self-praise, but I'm just I'm trying to pass along some hard-won wisdom here, but one of the things that I dedicated myself to in doing this show was to commit to a process rather than a conclusion.
the process of philosophy to absorb evidence to resolve contradictions to build from first principles a consistent and coherent explanation and predictive power for the world all of that means that you don't Wed your identity to any particular conclusion, which is why when people come with counter data, I'm happy to re-examine, I'm happy to overturn prior conclusions, because I'm not ego-identified with conclusions.
You could say, well, I'm ego-identified with the process of thinking, but that's a very fluid and responsive and reactive thing that's easy to adapt to new data.
In fact, it really insists that you adapt to new data.
So that's my focus, and I really, really strongly suggest that.
Don't Commit yourself and your identity and your sense of who you are to anything outside of critical thinking and reason and evidence and all that kind of stuff.
That is the way to go.
That gives you flexibility and keeps you away from that hardening of dogma, right?
And therefore, you are anti-philosophical, you are anti-reason, you are anti-evidence.
And in fact, when you harden yourself into ego-identifying with a conclusion, which is dogmatic, or is dogma, what happens is counter-evidence is considered to be a test of your faith, and you double down on identifying and approving that particular...
To take an example out of the abstract, right?
So there's Trump derangement syndrome, like orange man bad, everything Trump does is evil, he's a fascist, he's a Nazi, whatever it is, right?
Well, once your ego identify with that conclusion, any counter evidence to that is considered to be a manipulative test of faith designed to draw you into evil.
It's a very fundamentalist religious way of viewing the world.
I have perfect knowledge.
I have virtuous knowledge.
Any counter evidence, counter arguments, counter incentives is a screw tape letter situation wherein a smoky finger devil is trying to stick his appendage up my nose and rewire my brain to serve immoral ends.
And This is why people when presented with counter evidence who are dogmatic, they double down on their original beliefs because it is resisting temptation.
You can drive religion out of people, but you can't drive fundamentalism out of people.
And when you replace Christianity with secularism, most times you get dogmatic leftism.
And Christianity, of course, has had very strong debates about the nature of of God, the nature of Jesus, the interpretations of the Bible as a strong...
I mean, these two parallel and sometimes opposing trends within Christianity, right?
Which is, one is like The Word of God is a starting place, the Bible is a starting place, and you pray and you debate and you argue and so on, and that's how you reason your way closer to God.
It's a very sort of strong tradition, which is why the scholastic theologians in the Middle Ages referred to Aristotle simply as the philosopher.
They didn't have much use for Plato until the Neoplatonist movement pre-Enlightenment, but There was this focus on reason and evidence, and I did a great show with Tom Woods on the scientific history of the Catholic Church, which you should really check out.
But this idea that the word is a starting point for debate...
It's one of the reasons why Christianity has had, in many ways, a very strong intellectual tradition.
The wrestling between Aristotle, Socrates, and Jesus has been a very fertile ground of sort of cross-pollination and so on.
And on the other hand, though, you have the people who dogmatically invest themselves in a conclusion.
This can be political.
It can be scientific sometimes, as the old saying goes.
Science advances one grave at a time, right?
And people have to kind of die for new thoughts to come along.
It also happens religiously as well, of course, where people say, this is the word of God.
I understand it perfectly.
And anyone who tries to provide a nuance or a counterexample or attempt to sort of flesh out the word of God more deeply is a heretic and an unbeliever and must be punished, right?
This is a very tragic and horrifying response to the complexity of man's relationship with a god, right?
Obviously a highly, highly complex thing to think about and to talk about.
And so what's happened is we've driven...
Christianity out of the hearts of people.
And what's happened is people have really tipped over into fundamentalist dogma usually on the left.
Although it does happen on the right as well, but it seems more prevalent on the left because of the sort of leftist or communist infiltration of the media and academia and you name it, basic publishing.
And so having driven the complexity of God out of people's hearts, it gets...
Replaced with this dogmatic, bichromatic rainbow of good, bad, left, right, Bernie Sanders cares about the poor and Trump is a fascist who locks people in cages, right?
That loss of subtlety, that loss of curiosity, that loss of exploration is a great tragedy because when you're certain...
Then censorship is the next step, if you're absolutely certain.
Then censorship is the next step.
And censorship, of course, is an act of vanity.
Censorship is saying, well, I'm in possession of perfect eternal truth that can never be questioned.
And anybody who questions or opposes what I believe is a heretic and a bad person and is leading people to perdition and so on.
And that's all just really, really tragic.
Now, let's talk about something else.
So, Andy Ngo released a video recorded in Richmond, California, showing thieves making off with huge piles of clothing at Sears.
And Ezra Levant, worth checking out at Rebel Media, he said, One of the best things about the West, something that took centuries to develop, is a high-trust society.
It requires more than a majority to work.
It requires near-unanimity.
We're losing it, including to immigration from ultra-low-trust countries.
And this is something I've mentioned before, and something that I feel very, very sad that kids, you know, on average are not experiencing this.
I said, And I worked with a guy, my boss at the last company in Safa that I worked with, and he was talking about how, you know, when he was a kid, he'd just go and play everywhere and roam everywhere and you'd find other kids and you'd just make up games and negotiate the rules and figure out how to make it work, which is really training for a free and productive adult life.
It's this constant negotiation, lack of structure and lack of money because we were all pretty poor in the neighborhood that I grew up in.
And that's all kind of falling apart because this guy was telling me that his kids, he's got to drive them everywhere.
Everything is 50 bucks.
You got to go Chuck E. Cheese or arcades or you got to go bowling or you got to go to mini golf.
Like there's no just go out and play.
I mean, this has something to do with diversity.
Diversity does end up creating low-trust societies, even low-trust within particular ethnic groups.
It's very, very tragic. You can look at the Putnam studies, P-U-T-M-A-N, Robert Putnam studies.
I think he sat on these studies for like half a decade.
He was so appalled at how they showed diversity to be a huge failure when it comes to social cohesion and trust.
And so because parents don't feel as comfortable saying to kids, just go out and play.
Now, there is, of course, a lot of fears and media fears and white van kidnappings and so on that people are terrified of.
But this free-range childhood where you just go out and play.
And, I mean, that was my childhood.
I come home from school. I'd ignore my homework.
I would go out and play and then my mom would lean out the window and ring this big bell to call us in for dinner and then we'd go back out until it was dark and We had no money, no cars.
We would rarely take buses places, although I used to, from the age of six or seven onwards, I used to take buses all over London when I was a kid to go swimming or do other things.
I used to go to the War Museum at a good children's rate and all that.
And that sort of free-range childhood It's putting a lot of burden on parents.
It's one of the reasons why childhood is so expensive these days.
As my friend said, like 50 bucks every time you got to go, you got to drive, you got to sit around.
You know, your kids don't just go out and play pickup soccer or baseball or basketball as much anymore now.
They've got to be in leagues and they've got to be driven and the kids go, parents got to sit there and it's, you know, much more time consuming and much more expensive.
And this is why I'm saying like modern society does not really work for parenting.
Like after, I mean, I went to boarding school when I was six or I was put in boarding school when I was six.
But for the most part, my mother's direct parental responsibilities outside of food and rent and so on, they kind of petered out when I was...
6, 7, 8, 9 years old, I was largely unattended.
Of course, until I got my first job at 10, I didn't really have any money.
So you just go out and you make your fun.
And there's so much that I learned from that, how to negotiate.
Also, one of the reasons why I developed this idea that ostracism is how society will enforce rules in the absence of state, which is the only way a society can be moral and sustainable...
It's because that's how we enforced rules when we were kids.
So if you go to an organized event, you know, there's an umpire, or there's parents there, and they make the calls, right?
They say who's playing fair, who's not playing fair, and so on.
But when I was a kid, we'd play all these games, and either they would be structured games like soccer, or football as we called it in England, In which case everybody knew the rules or they'd be completely unstructured games like you just make up a game.
You play war and sticks and point and shoot and bang and who got wounded and so on.
You just make up the rules and there were no umpires.
There was no outside adult third party to adjudicate our disputes.
So we as kids had to figure out how we were going to have rules and enforce rules in the absence of a central authority.
And the way we did it, of course, as you know, if you have this kind of childhood, as you may still have this kind of childhood, what you do is you say, okay, here are the rules, we get a rough agreement, we start playing, and people who break the rules get a warning, get two warnings, maybe get three warnings, and then they're told to go home.
Or, you know, kids would pretend to break up the game and then reform it somewhere else without that particular kid.
And then when that particular kid came along and said, can I play?
They'd say, no. They'd say, well, why?
Was it the last time you didn't obey the rules?
You just made things up.
You know, it was no fun.
It was no fun. So then they're like, okay, fine.
I'll obey the rules so I can play, right?
And so ostracism was how the rules were enforced in the absence of a parent, in the absence of an umpire, in the absence of whatever, right?
And so for me, I mean, I know it can work, because if it can work with seven-year-olds, it can work with 30-year-olds, but of course kids don't really have that as much, and that is a real shame.
Now, what else is going on?
Well, there was a report in 2004 that came out, I think it came out of the Department of Defense, What it was talking about was how climate change was going to cause major cities to be underwater by 2020,
right? And also that England would basically have been turned into Siberia, you know, with cripplingly low temperatures in a very short summer, and that there was fears that nuclear war, nuclear weapons would be deployed to hang onto and manage the scarce resources in an increasingly frostbitten planet and all of this, right? This came out in 2004, obviously almost 16 years ago.
And what do we have? Like three days left before England turns into Siberia?
And of course none of this has come to pass.
And there's an old saying in the stock market that says that the people who make money off a bear market are the people who make money off all the people who've never experienced a bear market before.
And for this Terror and this fear and this, you know, paranoia of the weather, you know, like there used to be crazy rituals that people would perform in order to get good crops, crop weather and so on, and they'd perform all these rituals and now it's subsequence to Greta Thunberg and mouthing the platitudes of the...
Pseudoscience of climate change. And I say pseudoscience not because there's no science involved, but because modeling is not the same as science.
Like plugging in environmental models is not the same as science.
And they have to put in these multiples because they can't get the effects of CO2 that they want.
And as there's more CO2, it tends to plateau and then diminish the effects and so on.
So it's... It's pseudoscience because projecting the weather based upon computer models 100 years from now is so ridiculously speculative that it does not form into the realm of science.
It doesn't mean there's no science involved, and there certainly is, and some of it is valid, but this is back to dogma versus science, or dogma versus philosophy.
The people who are skeptics of the absolute certain value of being able to predict the temperature 100 years from now say, well, you know, we need to do more research, we need to argue, we need to debate, we need to really, you need to open up all these models, you need to release all the source data, it needs to be, you need to fund the counter research as well as the pro research so we get a robust debate about this stuff, which I think is exactly what science is supposed to be doing.
But the dogmatists are like, well, it's settled science.
The debate is over.
Anybody who questions it is a denier of science and hates Mother Nature and wants people to burst into flames on a regular basis.
Well, that's, again, you can chase religion out of people, but it just gets replaced with dogmatism.
And that's the real challenge.
And those of us who are a little bit older, I mean, we've gone through so many of these scares.
I did a video on this years ago that...
The media keeps telling you about all these terrible things that are going to happen that don't come to pass, and then they don't tell you all the terrible things that are going to happen that do come to pass, like invading Iraq, Afghanistan, destabilizing Syria, destroying Muammar Gaddafi and returning Libya to open-air slave markets and so on.
Like, they don't tell you any of that stuff, which actually is disastrous and does have terrible effects.
They, in fact, cheerlead that kind of stuff.
Why? When there's a war, people tune in and you can sell more ads because you have more eyeballs.
In other words, you're trading human life for cash, which is horrible beyond words.
And so the media, when I was a kid, of course, there was a nuclear war, of course, which didn't come to pass, but was definitely a risk.
There were razor blades in Halloween candy.
Never established, to my knowledge.
Alar in the apples.
There was going to be global cooling.
When I was a kid, everything was going to turn into a giant ice ball.
And then there was peak oil.
We're going to run out of oil.
Now, oil production in the U.S. is much higher, even than it was before, because now they have these crazy, snaky tubes that can go around big bedrock and get to the oil underneath and so on.
It's just amazing stuff. And, oh yes, in the 1970s, I remember very clearly, we're going to run out of coal, but it turned out that was just because the government was in charge of managing coal, or at least negotiating with the coal miners.
Then we were going to, I remember very clearly in the 1970s when I was a kid, reading reports that there was going to be worldwide famine by 1980.
That was another one that was floating around.
And so, all of these disasters...
I mean, I can't imagine. You know, I get a little thing wrong and it kind of drives me crazy.
But to be...
I can't imagine living in a world where you get that much wrong.
You predict world catastrophes and you're continually wrong.
And you just sail on. Like, you just keep going.
You just... Bump!
Should we turn around and see if we hit anything on the road?
No, just hit the gas. Let's keep going.
That's an amazing but terrifying situation to be in.
And it just shows you how to touch and how to reality it is.
And the other thing too, I mean, my gosh.
When I was a kid, you kind of had to split your mind into two things, right?
There was a part of you that was aware of this information, and you really couldn't avoid it because it'd be in the school sometimes and all that.
There was part of you that was aware of this information.
There's going to be starvation.
There's going to be famine. Nuclear winter is coming.
There's going to be global cooling.
No, global warming. No, just the climate's going to change.
Like, all of these disasters being pumped, you know, like that scene in Clockwork Orange where...
The guy has his...
Malcolm McDowell has his eyes propped open and all that.
That is...
That information is being force-fed into you.
It's just being cannon-blasted into you and discombobulating you.
And to frighten children, to give them despair, nihilism, hatred of the future, horror of their existence, in return for political power, I can't imagine...
Like, I can't imagine...
You know, when I was a kid, you didn't show horror movies to kids, but you can turn the entire future into a horror movie.
You can say it's science. You can demand the kids bow down to the power of the state, and you can demand that home ownership should be destroyed because of climate change, all for the sake of political power.
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