June 9, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:33
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| But the question is, how many of us do you think it will take to cause, to compel a philosophical shift, starting with, say, why don't we study philosophy anymore? | |
| Why is it you have to seek this out on some university campus, then wind up in some leftist classroom, talking about how most of the Western philosophers, that stuff's just rubbish, it's touchy-feely, that's not reality. | |
| How do we get this thing, how do we get this boulder moving? | |
| It's an interesting question, and I have some more sympathy for masks, particularly for older people, but there really doesn't seem to be much evidence of outdoor transmission. | |
| Wearing masks at the beach seems to me worse than useless. | |
| Plus, of course, you're then breathing in your own CO2, which ain't that great for you either. | |
| So one of the things that has been really influential for me is manual labor, which sounds kind of odd. | |
| So after high school, I worked up north as a gold panner and a prospector and did really, really hard manual labor in a place where you had to take an ice plane out for half a day just to get to this remote location where the gold was supposed to be. | |
| And working hard with your hands for a long time gives you a great respect for nature. | |
| It gives you a great respect for reality. | |
| If all you do is sit in books and talk to people and manipulate people and you can talk people into and out of anything, then you get this kind of loosey-goosey subjectivist worldview because you're surrounded by the infinitely malleable human mind rather than the not-quite-so-infinitely-malleable human mind. | |
| And so one of the things that I look for when I'm looking for a serious thinker is, and it's not the most sophisticated argument, but I found that it really, really kind of holds true, is has that person ever worked a job where a part of their body aches at the end of the day? | |
| For, you know, more than, I don't know, I helped someone dig a well at a cottage once. | |
| And so I think that the one thing that's going to come out of this This is COVID-19 crisis and so on, is that I think a lot of people are recognizing that reality isn't quite as manipulative as you want it to be, right? Because politicians, what do they do? | |
| Well, they make all these promises and they don't have to raise taxes to pay for them because they can just borrow and print and all of that. | |
| And G. Edward Griffin, who I've had on my show a couple of times, is fantastic with regards to this. | |
| And I highly recommend his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island for this. | |
| They can just type whatever they want into their own bank account. | |
| They don't have to deal with reality. | |
| They don't have to deal with limitation. | |
| They don't have to deal with math or facts or all of that. | |
| And so we've kind of drifted off into space. | |
| We've disconnected ourselves from reality because we can just make up the money. | |
| We can just make up the language. | |
| You can be whatever you want to be. | |
| You can self-identify as whatever you want to be. | |
| And we've lost the basic empirical Aristotelian reality that was the common sense foundation of the Western world, of Western empiricism. | |
| And so the one thing people can't just will away is, okay, this China, well, however the source of the virus originated, I don't think we'll know for sure, but I certainly suspect the bio lab. | |
| It's here. It's something that can't be willed away. | |
| There is a limitation on people's reality. | |
| And so it's woken them up to the fact that you can't just wish something away by printing money. | |
| And also what it's done is it's really fast forwarded people's perception of how dangerous the state can be. | |
| Because this, you know, this slow creeping socialism that was happening, you know, it's one thing if it's like, OK, well, you know, there's a little bit more debt every year and a couple of tiny restrictions here and there every year. | |
| And people I don't like get deplatformed, but it's not really affecting me. | |
| But then when it's like, well, wait, what do you mean I can't go to the beach? | |
| What do you mean I'm going to get arrested if I open my barber shop, even if I take sensible precautions? | |
| What do you mean I can't have a normal life until this fantasy vaccine that probably will never emerge because we've been fighting coronaviruses for 100 years. | |
| We've never come up with a vaccine for one. | |
| So what's happened is people are like, whoa, the government has a huge amount of power. | |
| Wow, they're willing to exercise it at the drop of a hat and for extended periods of time. | |
| So I'm hoping... That the limitation on reality that's showing the mask is on the people but the mask is off the state, how much they can do, how much they can control, how much they can bully and control your life and they can just snap their fingers and put you in house arrest for a crime that China did and I think people are going to wake up to that. | |
| It's a sudden shock to the system. | |
| That it's going to be pretty hard for people to recover from. |
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