Jan. 23, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:53
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| Hey everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain. | |
| Hope you're doing well. So I posted something on Twitter the other day which was a study that was put out which, through a variety of mechanisms, in particular Believing or based upon the assumption that low cloud cover had not been sufficiently taken into account by the IPCC in the calculation of anthropogenic causes of climate change, | |
| they had adjusted the calculation so that the human contribution to climate change was 0.01 degrees Celsius. | |
| I am not a scientist. I'm not a mathematician. | |
| I thought it was an interesting approach, an interesting argument. | |
| And, of course, I didn't claim that it was true, but it's important to get all sides of a debate, and I tend to bring up the least cited aspects of any particular conversation, which is why I don't post a lot of Here's the proof for global warming because that's kind of everywhere, right? But I think it's important to get counter-narratives, which is what I do on a regular basis. | |
| Now, people get really, really angry and really, really upset about this stuff, about arguments that go against climate change. | |
| Now, I get that the argument is, well, you know, it's a planet catastrophe and we're all going to die and all of that. | |
| And, you know, okay, there's that aspect to it, of course. | |
| In general, like there's an old saying in the stock market that the people who make money off the bear market make money off the people who've never been through a bear market before, like people who short stocks and so on. | |
| And I understand that too, because I'm old enough, of course, that this is probably my... | |
| Fourth or fifth imminent ecological planetary catastrophe that has been going on in my lifetime. | |
| So when I was a little kid, we were regularly told when I was growing up in England that the world was going to run out of oil, that the world was going to run out of coal, that the world was going to run out of food. | |
| I remember very, very clearly being told and there being books all over the bookstore about how the world was going to run out of food. | |
| There'd be worldwide famine by 1980. | |
| Right. | |
| I remember people just talking about all of these imminent catastrophes. | |
| There was holes in the ozone layer. | |
| There was global cooling. | |
| There was global warming. | |
| There was now climate change as a whole. | |
| Now, you know, maybe after these whole successive series of imminent catastrophes and, of course, nuclear war, which I know is not exactly environmental, but, you know, would have environmental effects. | |
| Maybe after all of these catastrophes have turned out to be not true, in fact, quite the opposite in many ways, maybe the next one is true. | |
| Certainly within the realm of possibility. | |
| But the one thing that always makes me kind of suspicious is... | |
| When I was Chief Technical Officer in a software company, we would have these big projects. | |
| And then after the projects, we would have what we call postmortems, right? | |
| So we'd go off-site for a day or two. | |
| We'd go over everything that happened in the project, what happened well, what happened badly, what could be improved, and so on. | |
| Because, you know, there's nothing worse in life than making the same mistakes over and over and over again. | |
| It really feels like you're trapped in this revolving door of descending spiral boredom and frustration. | |
| And so you don't want to make the same mistakes again. | |
| The environmentalists who generate these stories of imminent disaster and doom and famine and starvation and disease and plague and pestilence and weather events and you name it, when they turn out to be wrong, there's not a big staring... | |
| Hamlet style into the deep Yorick skulls of the mirror and figuring out what went wrong. | |
| What did we do wrong? What mistakes did we make? | |
| What did we overlook? What did we miss? | |
| No, they just scurry on to the next goddamn catastrophe with which they can eviscerate children of their joy of childhood. | |
| So this lack of circling back, this lack of post-mortem, to me is a very, very strong indication. | |
| That there's just a blur-of-the-fingers magician con man that's going on to pick the pockets of the next and future generations based upon fear-mongering in the here and now. | |
| Because they don't sit there and say, wow, we scared the living crap out of people. | |
| We ruin people's childhoods. | |
| We cause people to spiral into nihilism and to feel that there was no future. | |
| We cause Greta Thunberg to lose a huge amount of weight and be depressed and all of that. | |
| So, you know, that was clearly very bad because we got it wrong. | |
| So let's put the mechanisms in place to make sure it never happens again. | |
| That never happens. It's a runoff to the next catastrophe. | |
| So, I understand that people are kind of invested in this, like, boy, you know, Steph, if you're wrong about having any skepticism about this stuff, boy, you're contributing to the demise of the planet. | |
| It's like, yeah, but you could say that about anything. | |
| That's Pascal's wager, right? | |
| You could say that about anything. | |
| So, but I want to sort of explain to people why there's such emotional investment in this topic of climate change and imminent catastrophe. | |
| So, if you can convince people that the world is going to be irreversibly If you can convince people that the world is going to end, which has been a favorite cult tactic since the dawn of time, then what happens is... | |
| Well, first of all, they get wrapped up in this very big drama. | |
| And, you know, that kind of hysterical, world-ending, Armageddon, Revelation-style drama does tend to displace the normal pursuits in life. | |
| It tends to make people feel that they're in some big, grand, apocalyptic action movie rather than the general sitcom of the everyday, which is where most of us find our sustenance, life, and love. | |
| So the drama can get very, very addicting very, very quickly. | |
| But it's even more subtle and fundamental than that. | |
| If you can convince people, didn't they just take down the signs in some glacier park that said these glaciers will be gone by 2020? | |
| They just had to take those signs down because, lo and behold, the glaciers are still there. | |
| If you can get people to genuinely believe the world's going to end, those people make very deep, very foundational, and often irreversible life choices. | |
| Based upon that information. | |
| So when I was a child, I was drawn into a form of hedonistic nihilism because of all of these imminent predictions of disasters, because of the constant threat of nuclear war and the Kremlin-funded agiprop known as Nuclear Winter and so on. | |
| And there didn't seem to be much point studying for the math test, and there didn't seem to be much point deferring gratification because the world was going to end. | |
| And so, if you fall into that, you make foundational life choices. | |
| Now, I managed through philosophy and through a lot of research to wrestle my way out of that nihilism and into a better, more humane, longer-term, more positive frame of mind, which has been literally a lifesaver for me. | |
| But if you don't fight your way free of those smoky, eye-blinding tentacles Of nihilistic propaganda coming out of the left, coming out of the environmental movement. | |
| Then what happens is you end up making kind of irreversible life decisions based upon the imminent end of all things. | |
| And if you're wrong about that, if all things are not about to end, if the world is not on a slippery slope to a smoky death... | |
| Then you have fracked up almost beyond human imagination. | |
| So, I mean, I remember some years ago having a very intense conversation with a woman who said, well, I'm not going to have kids because climate change and overpopulation and, you know, all of the usual high IQ decimating propaganda that comes out of the left. | |
| I mean, nobody's going to Nigeria or Somalia where the birth rates are 6, 7 plus. | |
| Kids, a woman, and doing all of that, right? | |
| It's always in the left and always in the West and all that. | |
| And you're usually aimed at sort of the hyper-conscience of the high IQ individuals. | |
| And she then, you know, and I talked to her about this, and I said, you know, here's the arguments against it. | |
| And also, you know, maybe your kid, because you care so much about these issues, maybe your child is going to be the one to figure out how to solve all these issues or solve some part of these issues. | |
| Like, there's no reason why that couldn't be the case, because you'll transmit your values to him. | |
| So then she ended up getting married, and now, unfortunately, she just... | |
| I just can't have kids. | |
| It's just, it's too late. | |
| It's too late. And she's really struggling with this, right? | |
| Because if you've been lied to the point where you've not got your education or you've got your education in something frivolous or you've not dug in and got yourself a career, you've not deferred gratification to the point where you've Become a high-quality person. | |
| Maybe you've compromised your health. | |
| Maybe you've smoked or drank or take drugs or whatever. | |
| Maybe you've had a lot of promiscuity or whatever because you're like, hey, the world's going to end. | |
| Get your kicks in while you can. | |
| And then it turns out that this was all fabrication, that this was, if it does turn out to be the case, that it's a lie or a fabrication, then you've made irreversible and catastrophic life decisions based upon the cult mentality of imminent doom. | |
| World-spanning catastrophe. | |
| That is a very difficult thing to come to grips with. | |
| That you may have ruined your life because you were lied to by people given great credibility by the mainstream of society. | |
| I'm sorry if it turns out to be the case. |
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