April 5, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:19
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| *Music* *Music* | |
| *Music* *Music* *Music* My history with Christianity in particular has been very complex. | |
| There have been times where I have been enormously critical of Christianity. | |
| And then there are times, as in now, where I feel almost hovering above a precipice that falls to the wisdom of the divine. | |
| I am decreasingly of the belief that philosophy can race ahead of anti-rational prejudice and save the West from totalitarianism. | |
| There have been times during the difficult path of philosophy when I have said that I'm in the service of philosophy and may even be protected by philosophy in the same way that Christians believe they're in the service of Jesus and we've been protected by God. | |
| But it's not a two-way conversation. | |
| Philosophy is an abstract discipline, not a loving father. | |
| And I fear, or feel, or perhaps hope that the day may come when I ask myself this question. | |
| would I convert to Christianity if it would help save the West? | |
| In the Christianity that I grew up in, in the Christianity I believe as a whole, there is a great emphasis on the necessity of suffering, on life as a veil of tears, of life on life as a veil of tears, of life as an antechamber to eternity and perfection, necessarily bound down by the chains of flesh and the body and pain. | |
| Adam was cursed with what? | |
| After disobeying God and eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he was cursed with work. | |
| The sweat of your brow is how you will make your food. | |
| Eve was cursed with the pain of childbirth, which is maturity. | |
| When we become adults, we put away childish things. | |
| And we fend for ourselves. | |
| And there is work, and there is childbirth, and there is pain. | |
| And there is loss. | |
| Everyone we love will either lose us or we will lose them. | |
| That is the way of the world. | |
| We are mortal. And I've really been thinking about this idea that a lot of the leftists have, which is that we can make a paradise on this earth. | |
| We can eliminate suffering. | |
| Not 40 feet from where I stand here giving this speech, there is a man trying to get some sleep on a park bench. | |
| Under a fairly filthy blanket. | |
| Would we wave our wand, snap our fingers, and make all that suffering go away? | |
| Of course we would! And that is the great temptation, a world without suffering, a world where all of the poor are housed, where all of the sick get health care, all of the lonely have friends, all of the loveless are embraced. | |
| And in pursuit, in pursuit of that heaven, So many Gehennas, so many hells have been created in this earth. | |
| To try to eliminate the little sufferings, and to each one of us our own individual suffering is huge, but in society as a whole, to try to eliminate the little sufferings creates hell on earth. | |
| I want you to think of being a homeowner. | |
| You don't take out fire insurance on your home and your home burns to the ground. | |
| And you call up the fire insurance company and say, hey man, I really, really meant to. | |
| Get it. Can you help a brother out? | |
| Can you just pay for my house? | |
| And they're going to say what? They're going to say, no, you didn't get the insurance. | |
| That's suffering, you understand. | |
| That's recrimination. | |
| That's you look in the mirror saying, damn it, why didn't I get fire insurance? | |
| Now, other people don't get fire insurance their whole lives. | |
| Their house doesn't burn down and they've just saved themselves thousands of dollars. | |
| Do they sit there and say, oh, I can't believe I paid for fire insurance? | |
| Well, maybe a little. They're suffering no matter what. | |
| But if you call up that fire insurance company and they decide to cover you anyway, and you talk to people about it, as you would, hey, I didn't even have fire insurance, they covered me anyway. | |
| What do people do? Well, they will stop buying fire insurance for their house and the whole system falls apart if you eliminate the little suffering. | |
| Great and great and great and greater suffering accumulates. | |
| If you eliminate the little suffering called going to the dentist, getting your teeth scraped and cleaned, you get the big suffering. | |
| Tooth decay, swallowing, so your heart explodes. | |
| There is no system that can get rid of suffering because suffering is not always an evil and suffering is sometimes a choice. | |
| And if you want to eliminate suffering, you have to eliminate choice and you have to eliminate consequences. | |
| And we have to live in a crib We have to live as infants with everyone else taking care of our needs. | |
| You notice that a crib has little bars just like a prison. | |
| A crib is great for babies. | |
| It is a prison for adults. | |
| So I want you to think about suffering because this is how the leftists will get you. | |
| They'll show you someone suffering and say, we can eliminate that suffering. | |
| And we want to create a paradise where nothing bad ever happens to anyone. | |
| But it costs us our freedom. | |
| If we don't have consequences, we don't have freedom. | |
| You can't make rational decisions if someone is coming up to clean up all of your messes and give you money when you're broke and give you health care when you're sick, if you haven't got insurance, if you haven't taken care of your health. | |
| If people are rushing, oh, you have three children by three different guys, don't worry, we'll give you free food, free housing, free health care, free, you name it, free education. | |
| We never grow up if we don't have consequences. | |
| Now, I understand when people make bad decisions. | |
| Sometimes you don't even know ahead of time. | |
| There are lots of people who don't buy house insurance and guess what? | |
| Their house never burns down. | |
| They're ahead of the game by thousands of dollars. | |
| Good call! But if your house does burn down and you don't suffer, the whole system falls apart. | |
| It's little suffering. | |
| Or very big suffering. | |
| Those are our only choices. | |
| If we try to eliminate the little sufferings, we eliminate choice, consequence, adulthood, free will. | |
| We eliminate everything that makes us human. | |
| And when we eliminate adulthood, we eliminate everything. | |
| It was Jacob Zetter. | |
| This, uh, this could be me. | |
| Even down to the color of the tie. | |
| You can see down here, it says Cathedral School, 1966. | |
| That's the year I was born. | |
| And when I was six, 1971, 1972, I went to boarding school to basically sleepover boarding school, and we had outfits not dissimilar to this, and I went to church many times a week. | |
| And I was in the choir and you see this serene woman. | |
| This was like the matron in my boarding school. | |
| Look at these pictures. | |
| It's quite emotional for me because I remember back in this time looking at, like looking up at the elders in the boarding school, in the society, in the community, in England. | |
| And they seemed so wise. | |
| You know, we had a headmaster of the boarding school, looked a little bit like Prince Philip, aristocratic, gave these wonderfully sonorous speeches about the values and the virtues of the West and how evil had been conquered in the Second World War and a shining future of stability and peace and plenty lay before us. | |
| I mean, just look at these statues. | |
| Playful, joyful, the spirit of the West. | |
| And this is not the adulthood that I really ever thought I would be inhabiting. | |
| I thought I was going to be in great pursuit of beauty, in creating and achieving beauty, not spending this endless amount of energy fighting an amorphous, anti-rational, evil That almost nobody seems to recognize, screaming that there is a poison gas in the air that is taking our civilization down that nobody else seems to notice or smell or even the bodies falling around they don't seem to notice or care about. | |
| And when I was young, in choir, in school, in uniform, I imagined the year 2019 to be a time of Maybe not intergalactic, maybe not interstellar, maybe even just interplanetary space travel. | |
| That there would be peace, that there would be reason, that there would be security, that there would be continuity. | |
| Because when I was a child, I was told that all the monsters were slain and all the evil was vanquished. | |
| But it just lay in wait. | |
| It just spread. It transferred itself to anti-rationality, to postmodernism, to demographic replacement, identity politics. | |
| Endless cries of racism, the silencing of an entire philosophical tradition with multi-ethnic hysteria. | |
| This is not the world that I expected to live in as an adult. | |
| This is not the profession or the manifestation of the profession that I expected To have as an adult. | |
| And it's hard sometimes. | |
| It's hard sometimes. | |
| I think, and it tortures me, it really does. | |
| I think sometimes just how much time and energy we all spend and waste because crazy people with bad ideas have so much power over us. | |
| That's what Joe Biden said about Obamacare. | |
| Stroke of the pen, law of the land. | |
| That's pretty cool. But it is that law of the land that organizes and controls us, that is managed by crazy people. | |
| I feel like I'm bound, gagged and blinded in the trunk of a car being driven by insane people in dangerous territory. | |
| And it's hard to relax. | |
| When crazy people are in charge of your life and your children's future. | |
| When they borrow and enslave and in debt and promise and fund and indoctrinate on your dollar, on your freedoms. | |
| I don't know. | |
| This is the part of Christianity that I have the toughest part with, to be honest with you. | |
| It's the question of forgiveness. | |
| I know that's what this church was built on. | |
| I know that's what Jesus says, forgive your enemies. | |
| I know Jesus says, if your enemy asks you for your cloak, give him your shirt as well. | |
| If he asks you to walk a mile with him, walk two miles with him. | |
| I know that Jesus commands you to love your enemies. | |
| But I really don't know. | |
| I really don't know. | |
| I really don't know if I have in my heart forgiveness for who took that childhood dream from me and that promise of peace and security and tore it to shreds right in front of me. | |
| The history of the Golden Gate Bridge is powerful, inspiring, revolutionary. | |
| And yet, at the same time, like so much here in California, strangely mournful, strangely sad. | |
| What was the last major, powerful engineering feat of triumph that you have seen in the West? | |
| This is the glory that was American engineering. |
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