Oct. 13, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:13
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| Hi everybody, Stephen Mullen from Freedomain. | |
| Hope you're doing well. Just wanted to bunge in real quick to your Thanksgiving to say thank you, of course, so much for your wonderful support of what it is that I do, philosophically speaking, over the last incredibly challenging and difficult year. | |
| Thank you, thank you so much. | |
| I want to offer a few words, hopefully, of wisdom, of encouragement, and to ask you for absolutely nothing whatsoever, because my heart is overflowing with... | |
| Well, the spirit of the season, the spirit of the day. | |
| My heart is overflowing with Thanksgiving and I wanted to share with you some thoughts. | |
| First of all, I hope that you are surrounded by good people and good food and good conversation. | |
| And again, it's okay to put the battle aside for a little while. | |
| In fact, I would argue it's really, really important to do so. | |
| You cannot spend your life immersed in a toxic vat of falsehoods and manipulations and evil deeds and evil speeches. | |
| It's really, really important, as Nietzsche says. | |
| That if you spend your life fighting monsters, it's really, really important that you do not yourself become a monster. | |
| And the way to avoid that is to drink deep of the clear, crystal, crisp beauty that surrounds all of us all the time. | |
| The beauty of the good hearts and virtues that I hope are in your life. | |
| The beauty of life itself, of feeling the blood in your veins and rushing through your ears. | |
| The beauty of the fresh, full air. | |
| The beauty of... The trees, the wonderful colors that are out there. | |
| These are base, sense, joys. | |
| It's really, really important. You've got to have something to fight for, otherwise you're going to burn out from the fight. | |
| And that deep well of beauty that surrounds us at all times, it's really important. | |
| You know, tear your eyes off the screen. | |
| Not right now, but in a minute or so. | |
| Tear your eyes from the screen. Go and enjoy the world and make sure that you sink deep into the blissful reality of being alive and being human and make sure that you do not Scour and sand yourself and cheese gravy yourself down into nothing by battling evildoers for forever. | |
| So, yeah, pace yourself. | |
| Saving the world, being a good person, bringing value to the world. | |
| That is all a marathon and not a sprint. | |
| And it's probably completely unrelated. | |
| It's just something that I've noticed over the last little while. | |
| There are a number of commentators... | |
| And they're going through some pretty significant health issues at the moment. | |
| Probably completely unrelated, but, you know, Dan Bongino has got a terrible lymphoma tumor removed from his neck. | |
| Bill Mitchell got kicked off Twitter, lost most of his income, and now is facing a 12-hour surgery to repair heart and lung issues. | |
| My heart goes out to them both, my sympathies go out to them both, and to other people I've read about who are suffering from health issues at the moment. | |
| And it could be completely unrelated to stress, but... | |
| Just saying. These can be little warning shots for you to remember. | |
| To just remember that you've got to manage your stress. | |
| Do not get addicted to cortisol and stress and tension. | |
| Remember that you can change things in your own mind. | |
| You can affect things in your own life. | |
| But you cannot change the world directly. | |
| You can only change the world directly. | |
| through influence and it is finally it is up to other people as to whether or not they want to listen to you it's not up to you you can put out the best argument you want to the best argument that you can other people either listen and accept it or don't and that part is not up to you so put out your best arguments but you cannot be wedded to your effects you cannot be wedded to what happens in the world because that, due to free will, is out of your hands. | |
| Put out your best arguments and then let the world fall where it may. | |
| So I wanted to mention that. Last thing I wanted to say is We know that throughout history, those of us who've studied history, and I have quite extensively, so those of us who've studied history know it's usually not the good guys who win, at least not in the short run. | |
| It takes quite a while for the good guys to win. | |
| And so it is kind of easy to feel despair in this kind of situation, especially the odds of it being a very peaceful transition of power in November in America are... | |
| Well, they're not very high, unfortunately. | |
| And that's because nobody expected this kind of change in 2016. | |
| So people were allowed to have their YouTube channels, their Twitter accounts. | |
| They were allowed to make their case because nobody thought that any change would really occur because change did occur and is in the process of occurring. | |
| People are fighting back now. So it's going to be pretty rough. | |
| But here's the thing. History provides warnings and incentives, but history cannot predict the future now, because we've never had these kinds of communications capacities in human history. | |
| Which means that all the inevitable entropy and decay of virtue into selfishness, all of that occurred prior to us being able to have these kinds of amazing and direct conversations. | |
| And because something utterly new exists in history, there is no inevitability based upon History. | |
| It's like saying, well, you know, everybody had to die of smallpox because there was smallpox. | |
| And it's like, well, then you get something new, a vaccine, and look at that, no smallpox. | |
| So just remember that, that with new tools comes a new world and a new life. | |
| And the future is not inevitable, dominoed, determined by history, because we have new technology, which means history provides merely a warning, not a final recipe. | |
| So Recognize that there are reasons to be concerned, of course, in the world at the moment. | |
| If you've listened to me, you've known about these conflicts coming for a long time. | |
| I hope that you're ready. I hope you're prepared. | |
| There's still time. But the important thing is, give thanks for what you have. | |
| Give thanks for life and breath and the beauty in the world that you can immerse yourself in. | |
| Give thanks for your relationships and work to keep virtuous people very close to your heart. | |
| Do not, do not be paralyzed by fear of the future. | |
| That's really, really important. | |
| Be prepared, but don't be scared. | |
| Thank you so much. Lots of love from up here. |
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