June 6, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:41
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So I'll go back to the original question, as simplistic as it may be. | |
| Where do we start the fire? | |
| So we are a fascinating species in terms of we love ease and we love to fight. | |
| And we've had a lot of ease over the last half century. | |
| Whenever we've had a problem, we've just printed money. | |
| Whenever there's been a war, it's been distant and overseas and very few people know the people who are shipped back in body bags or who come back without limbs or eyes or whatever. | |
| So we've had a lot of ease in a sense over the past half century. | |
| And that gets kind of addictive because, you know, there are two kinds of people in the world, the people who just want to be left alone and the people who just won't leave them alone. | |
| You just want to control them and bully them and take their stuff and indoctrinate them and so on. | |
| And so I would love a life where we could talk abstract philosophy for a couple of hours and, you know, put a few finishing touches on this giant cathedral of civilization that we've been building for the past 100,000 years or so. | |
| But this is a time where it's like, suit up and shield up. | |
| I'm sorry, this is a time, not of plowsheds, but of metaphorical sorts. | |
| Now, there is great joy in combat. | |
| There is great honor in combat, and particularly this kind of combat where you're not going to lose a limb. | |
| You're not going to get your head blown off. | |
| Well, hopefully. Anyway, I mean, certainly I've had attacks on my speeches and death threats and so on, but... | |
| So far, so good. So, recognizing that things are going to get infinitely worse if we don't act, and that once you get over, this is why I gave this sort of speech about learn to embrace the hatred of evildoers, that can be the North Star you guide yourself by, and thwarting and opposing evildoers, it's great. | |
| And it's funny, too, because we watch all these movies where the good guys take on the bad guys at far greater physical risk Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. It's something that Churchill said, I guess in 1940 or thereabouts. | |
| He said, you know, there's something worse than losing, and that is continuing to have to fight knowing that you're going to lose inevitably anyway. | |
| Now, if we leave it too late... | |
| We're going to be engaged in a desperate battle that we know we're going to lose. | |
| That is the worst kind of fight to be involved in. | |
| Of course, the powers that be want us to surrender our pushback to the point where they have enough control that they can guarantee themselves victory, regardless of what we do. | |
| You don't want to wake up to the necessity of the fight when the fight can no longer be won. | |
| See, the devil, in a sense, doesn't mind you waking up to his nature, but only after you're going to lose. | |
| Because that's the additional sadism. | |
| It's like, oh, great, now you know exactly who I am and who's got control over you, and it's too late to fix. | |
| And coronavirus, of course, and the totalitarianism that is spreading, right? | |
| I said this, I think, back in February or end of January, that communism is the real virus. | |
| Coronavirus is just how it spreads. | |
| And this sudden acceleration, as we talked about before, of totalitarianism and the growth of state power because of coronavirus is waking people up to the necessity of a battle. | |
| Now, a lot of people, of course, don't want to get involved in this battle. | |
| They like things to be easier and so on. | |
| I get that. And I sympathize with that. | |
| And, you know, it would be fun as well to plan trips to Switzerland rather than take on, you know, communist trolls on social media. | |
| But, of course, everything that we have, that we treasure... | |
| We have inherited from men who fought the good fight. | |
| You know, why do we have a society with liberties? | |
| Because men fought and fought hard and under far worse circumstances than we have to fight now. | |
| Why does America have a republic? | |
| Why do we have property rights? | |
| Why do we have relatively limited governments? | |
| Why do we have the rule of law to some degree? | |
| Why do we have free speech? | |
| Because literally countless men, mostly men, some women, laid down their lives, choked out their blood, cried for their mothers, hanging on barbed wire in order to, shaking bloody hand, deliver to us the golden gifts of liberty, the remnants of which we still enjoy. | |
| Now, I don't know about you, man, but my family on both my Irish and my German side have been fighters, soldiers. | |
| I mean... The majority of the males on my father's side died in the First World War. | |
| Now, I'm not saying they all died to hand me these liberties, but this battle has been ongoing since the days of Socrates. | |
| Did Socrates take his hemlock for nothing? | |
| Did Plato have to flee after he attempted to get involved in politics and ended up being sold as a slave and only redeemed by accident? | |
| Did Aristotle have to flee? | |
| The mob saying he would not allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice? | |
| Did all of the people who fought hard and given us these incredible gifts, if we abandon this fight, they all died for nothing. | |
| And we will, at some point, look back and say, now that it's too late, by God above, I wish I had fought earlier. | |
| By all that is holy and virtuous and good, I wish with all of my heart and all of my soul that I had fought before. | |
| It was a desperate battle called too late. | |
| So the suffering is coming. | |
| We can embrace a small amount of it in the here and now when we have a chance to avert disaster. | |
| Or the suffering will be inflicted endlessly upon us at a time where no more pushback is possible. | |
| And pulling people away from their distractions, having them honor the gifts their ancestors gave to them, and having take the small pain now and the great glory and self-esteem and self-respect that comes from taking that small pain now, rather than the escalating avalanche of statism burying us all alive down the road, |
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