June 6, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:00
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| Time | Text |
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| I thought philosophy was the study of what makes a good life. | |
| What is a good life? | |
| But now, it seems that the philosophy generally, at least I sense, that there seems to be a huge component of, well, what makes a good life is getting over on other people, taking advantage of other people, hoaxing other people, defrauding them. | |
| That's a real badge of honor, sort of like the Axelrod character in that series Billions. | |
| So just take it away and tell us, where are we in the West? | |
| Where are we where philosophy is concerned? | |
| Or is it just an arcane study now, just known to only a few? | |
| Well, that's a great question. | |
| So we're currently on a rapid downward path, but I don't discount the possibility of a bounce, which is kind of what we need. | |
| It's happened before in history. | |
| There has become a very strange thing that has occurred in the world, in the West as a whole. | |
| Which is somehow to upset people, to be triggering them, for them to find you outrageous or upsetting, to be offensive and so on, has somehow become a disproof of the value of what you're saying. | |
| Now, the entire modern world was built on offending people The sensibilities of just about all of human history. | |
| Throughout all of human history, you had brutal child abuse. | |
| You had rape as a weapon of war. | |
| You had slavery. | |
| You had the subjugation of women. | |
| You had mass brutality, mass starvation, no free markets, no property rights, and no free speech. | |
| So when the first people who came along said, you know, maybe we should have some property rights. | |
| Maybe we should be allowed to trade freely. | |
| Maybe we should have free speech. | |
| Maybe citizens should be allowed to own guns or weapons because governments are historically – they grow like cancers and usually with the same effect on their societies. | |
| So everything that we have that is the modern world was founded upon offending the moral sensibilities of the old world, the Middle Ages and so on. | |
| And now, suddenly, we've kind of reversed course. | |
| And now, if you upset people, if you're considered offensive, if you're triggering, then somehow you're wrong, you're bad, and you shouldn't be allowed a voice. | |
| In other words, we've taken the entire propulsion that gave us the modern world and turned it and reversed it upon the modern world. | |
| And if we don't find a way to embrace what people call offensive and upsetting, we are going to lose the modern world. | |
| I mean, boy, you can see this happening in Minneapolis over the last couple of days. | |
| Like, it's going to get bad. | |
| Because people think, if I'm upset, that means someone's wrong. | |
| But given how corrupt modern thinking is, how corrupt academia is, and the media, and Hollywood, and you name it, I mean, if you're upsetting bad people, you're a good guy. | |
| But of course, bad people want to say, well, hey, if we're upset, that means someone's wrong, and should be silenced. | |
| But that only serves the bad actors. | |
| It only serves those with ill intent. | |
| And I hope, I hope, I hope, this is just coming out today, I just did a live stream on this on my channel about Donald Trump putting an executive order out, which is really a shot across the bowels of the social media companies saying, hey, if you guys want to start filtering based on content, if you want to start monitoring and approving or disapproving what people say, guess what? | |
| You're opening yourselves up to losing the immunity from lawsuits for content that you've had since the dawn of the internet, which is really the only reason you've grown as companies. | |
| And I hope it's going to be enough of a shot across the bow to get social media companies to withdraw from the great temptation. | |
| You know, wherever there is power, there is corruption. | |
| Wherever there is power, there is temptation. | |
| And the one thing we know about human beings is we are really, really bad at handling power. | |
| It is too great a temptation. | |
| Excessive power appeals to the mammalian Nietzschean will to power a model grasping for resources that characterizes our harsh evolution as a species. | |
| And if we can find a way to... |
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