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Dec. 3, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:17
STAND UP FOR THE F***ING TRUTH!
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I mean, we are the real resistance because we oppose the initiation of the use of force in all contexts and under all circumstances.
So we're the underground. We are hopefully the future.
Hopefully not the past.
Hopefully not to be hunted down. But yeah, we are the future.
And I mean, they'll look back.
Of course, you know, it's going to be like, you know how it goes.
You know how it goes, right? So for hundreds of years, people debated the question of slavery, right?
The abolitionists wanted to abolish slavery.
The people wanted to keep slavery.
And, of course, everyone in their dark, you look back at it now, right?
And you say, how could there have been a debate?
How could there have been a debate about the morality of owning human beings like livestock?
How could there have... People debated serfdom.
In fact, serfdom was diminishing in Russia in the 19th century, early 20th century.
And people are like, how could you really debate buying and selling people with plots of land like they were livestock?
How could this even really debate?
How could that be a debate?
Now, people, of course, in the future, if there is to be a future, people in the future will look back at these conversations.
I'm conscious of this all the time.
Like, what keeps you going? What keeps you going is the applause of the future.
The giant fuck you that comes out of the present That's necessary for the applause of the future.
Like the first guy who woke up and said, you know what?
This slavery thing, it's not right.
I know it's every human institution.
I know it's every human society.
I know it's all across the world.
I know it's all throughout time.
I know it's the foundation of everything.
I know we don't have a clue how to get crops in, how to get clothes made, how to get earth clear.
We don't have a clue how to do any of this without slaves, but nonetheless, Something's not right about all of this.
Well, that guy, the first spark, right?
That's not me with regards to statism and anti-statism.
But we look back and say, how on earth could there really have been any kind of debate?
Now, if there is a future, and eventually there will be, a future is going to look back and say, those magnificent, brave, lonely bastards.
And I'm telling you, man, there'll be statues.
There'll be movies made.
There'll be novels.
There'll be cheers.
They'll play. Maybe they'll play this little bit a hundred years from now, five hundred years from now, a thousand years.
They'll play this bit. And they'll say, my God, to have stood tall in the face of everything.
You magnificent bastards.
You heroes. You staunch souls.
You adamanting spines which stood unmovable as if you were nailed to the center of the fucking planet.
You heroic skyscraper fireworks of human beings who managed to pass a torch that you made Through a hell of a storm, through raining frogs, through lashings of rain, as my aunts used to say, lashings of rain out there, you managed to pass this fire to the future.
And you suffered for it, and you were attacked for it, and you were lied about for it.
And still, you fucking did it.
A little crazy. All the progress of the future looks like madness to the present, particularly.
Moral progress. Moral progress looks like evil to the mindless around you in the present, but to the future who thank you enormously, thank me enormously for what we are doing at the moment, for the stand we are taking in the face of near-universal attacks,
deplatforming, defunding, The lies of fools and sophists and malevolent souls or soulless of all dimensions.
That we are standing here guarding this and these precious truths.
Because without us, the fire goes right out.
Without us, the fire goes right out.
As Churchill said on the eve of World War II, lamps are going out all across Europe.
and I do not know if we shall see them lit again in our lifetime.
But the lights are going out.
We've had a brief incandescent moment, a couple of years, where three-quarters of a billion philosophy shows just from this My brain and my listeners and my interview subjects got three-quarters of a billion points of light spread out across the world like fireflies shot into deep space from a fucking cannon.
It was a beautiful eruption of light, truth, reason and reality such as the world has never seen before.
And then the blowback comes and the lashings of rain comes and the lies come Sky reigns with spears, it seems, and we're down now a couple hundred.
But that is because of the success of the previous round.
You know, if you take the heavyweight championship, everybody guns through you, and a lot of people would just rather drug you than fight you.
A lot of people would just rather knock pepper into your eyes than put him up and step up.
Because I get asked this, like, what does it keep you going?
All this opposition, all these lies, all these attacks.
Everybody in the future loves us.
Everybody in the deep future loves us, worships us, thanks us, names schools after us, names pets after us.
We will be on maps, you understand?
We'll be on maps. Do you know how much they need us?
Do you know how much they love us?
Do you know how much they revere us?
Think of your heroes in the past.
They faced the same storms, the same chasms, the same canyons, the same lies, the same threats, the same danger, and they just went on anyway.
Why? Because fuck the liars, right?
Fuck the scurvy-tongued sons of bitches who make up terrible insults on good people and fuck all of the idiots who listen to them as well.
The two sides of the same coin.
The liars and the fools.
Two sides of the same coin.
Fuck them both. We have what we have now.
Because people just put their fucking heads down, braced into the storm, and just kept going.
The option being what?
Falling down in the mud?
Drinking it deep?
And choking out?
That's the choice?
To be honest, these days is to be beaten down, to be truthful, to be courageous, is to be attacked in silence.
That's what it means to get out of bed.
Look out your fucking window and say, hey, I saw something true and I'm going to tell the world.
Hey, I read some interesting data.
I'm going to tell the world.
Hey, there's something people aren't talking about that's really important.
I'm going to tell the world.
Right? And the future, this fork in the road.
The future, this fork in the road.
Do you know what it's doing?
Everybody, think of the most intense, intense sports ball game you've ever watched.
For me, I think it was like the 93 World Series in baseball.
I think that was like the last baseball game I ever watched.
I went out when they won Toronto Blue Jays and led the crowd in a rousing rendition of We Are the Champions, which was quite a night.
And think of you at the edge of your seat.
Someone says, I want this person to win.
I want this team to win. I want this.
Now imagine, imagine you've got all your savings tied up in the victory of one team, one person.
All your savings, every piece of money you have in the world is tied up on one side winning.
I'll tell you what's happening.
There are two worlds in the future that have diverged.
The world that goes down into totalitarianism, into slavery, into the deaths of billions of people.
The lamps of civilization going out all across the world and we do not know if we shall see them lit again in our lifetime.
That is one path.
There's another path where we fight through and tell the truth and we take our blows and we get up and we take our blows and we get the fuck back up and we take our blows and we get up and we just keep going.
Now, people of the future are going to have to live in a world either made by the bad guys or made by the good guys.
And do you know what they're doing?
In a sense, in a very real way, Is there on the edge of their fucking seats, man?
Those people in the future are on the edge of their fucking seats and they're saying, please don't give up, man.
Please don't give up.
Please, please, please don't give up.
Don't fade. Don't fail.
Don't fall. Don't even fucking falter.
Okay, falter a little bit because you're human, but for God's sakes!
Don't fail us. Because we're helpless to live in the time that you influence.
But please, God above, please, please, please build a world that we can live in and not just be enslaved in.
And millions, hundreds of millions, tens of millions, billions, whatever number you want to put on it, it's a lot of people.
Sitting there on the edge of their cosmic seats in Plato's pre-dawn world of forms.
They're sitting there looking down at this death match and seeing that we stand before a tide of power such as the world has never seen before.
We stand before a tide of power that the world has never seen before.
The bad guys, the people who oppose us, who lie about us.
They control the money supply.
They control academia.
They control public schools.
They control the mainstream media.
They control newspapers, magazines, reporters, movie studios.
They control e-commerce to a large degree.
They control social media platforms.
They can indoctrinate children virtually from birth onwards.
And we have to take these broken people and try and breathe feral life into their withered and twisted brains.
Do you know what it takes to stand against this kind of power?
You know what it takes.
Talking to the people out there.
Talking to the people who are watching this a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years.
It's pretty fucking scary sometimes, man.
It really is.
You look at this structure, this power to buy off, to indoctrinate, to silence.
I am just an aging drummer boy and the wars I used to play And I've called the tune to many a torture session.
The man's too big. The man's too strong.
It's too big out there, man.
It's too strong. We've all had that feeling, obviously, from time to time.
Maybe more than from time to time, right?
Can't be done. Can't be won.
It's fool's quest. It's masochism to try.
It's pathological.
It's a form of Societal suicide.
It's not worth it.
It can't be done.
It's pointless suffering.
It's like you're a monk beating himself for a God you don't even believe in anymore.
And of course, the closer you get to the base of that power, The bigger it looks.
You see a giant building on the horizon.
It's tall. It's tall, but it still looks pretty small.
You get closer, that building gets taller and taller.
You stand at the bottom of it.
You look up. It's pretty dizzy.
You see that vertical ice cube tray of perfect symmetry and plunged like a sword into the hilt of the earth verticality.
You look up at that shit and it's like, oh my, I can't even see the top anymore.
The closer you get to the roots of power, the more terrifying it is.
And that's designed to have you flee.
It's not accidental, these perspectives.
And the warning shots are getting pretty brutal these days, as you know.
You don't have to tell me.
I don't have to tell you.
And everybody is holding their breath who has to live in the world that we can create or fail.
We either turn this light on or it's midnight forever.
And the future is holding its breath.
And the future is saying, do we name the schools for the bad guys or do we get to name our freedoms for the good guys?
Are we going to be forced to put up statues of Karl Marx?
Or are we going to be free to honor those who in some of the darkest nights of humanity stood tall with the brightest collateral-style lights and kept on going?
I won't say no matter what.
I won't say no matter what.
are still peaceful, reasonable, voluntary solutions.
But if you think about what your life would be like if the abolitionists had given up, Think of what your life would be like if Socrates had given up.
Think of what your life would be like if the founding fathers had given up and a king still ruled America.
That's the perspective that gives you the strength.
You won't get strength from the present.
You won't get strength from the present.
Because a truly moral man, a truly moral woman, appears as some scalding, incandescent, eye-burning vampire of who knows what the hell it is to the people in the present.
We are largely incomprehensible to the people in the present.
Because when you're founded on principle, You are incomprehensible to the base mammalian pragmatism of modern, amoral, bullshit, sophist society where to lie is to gain resources, and you gain resources, you win! We are incomprehensible to the present.
And not because we're so hard to understand, but because we're so easy to understand, and people don't want to understand the lost mazes they've been jammed into.
Their brains have been liquefied and poured into contorted glass tubes that conveys the blood of the future to the Moors of the rulers in a very efficient manner.
And they strike out at the moral, the masses, they strike out at the moral for the example they don't want to believe is true.
If we stand up and we are successful, not in our victory, because our victory is not determined by us.
Our victory is determined by the courage.
Somebody at the very beginning said, Steph, come and save the Republic.
Entirely wrong.
You're entirely wrong.
The quality of listenership, the quality of listening that you can summon and generate is the key to the future.
Amen.
Not expecting somebody else to come riding in and solve the problem for you.
You understand that when morals come shooting at you and you want to hold up a mirrored shield and deflect it to someone else, integrity is coming at you and you want to deflect it to someone else.
No, drop that shield, man.
You've got to take that up yourself.
You've got to take it up. I can't do it.
No one can do it. Trump can't do it.
No one can do it. Who is an individual?
Obviously Barr can't do it.
Sessions couldn't do it. Comey couldn't do it.
Expecting somebody to ride in and save you is exactly the narrative that the leaders want you to absorb.
To absorb that narrative is to absolve yourself of the personal responsibility that you need.
To make good on the promise of goodness in this darkening world.
No one is coming to save you.
I'm only here to tell you that no one is coming to save you.
It's to your personal relationships, your integrity, what you choose to speak or stay silent about.
The people of the future who have to live in the fork of the road that we determine with the willpower of the present, the people in the future, you know, they're not looking to me.
They're not looking to me.
They're looking to you.
If they are looking at me, they're only looking at me so they can get to you.
There is no institutional salvation in the West.
There is only personal integrity and personal action.
Are you willing to have in your life people whose morals are the opposite of yours?
It's all it comes down to.
Are you willing to enforce your morality through voluntarism and ostracism?
If necessary, if people simply oppose without reason, won't listen, avoid, deflect, pretend to agree and then change their minds the next day and can't be recovered.
There is only life where there is thought.
You understand? There is only life where there is thought.
If there is no thought, there is no life.
And I'm begging you, do not take your short precious time in this world and march in a stupid, slow, empty-headed drum beat Phalanx surrounded by the dead.
Do not join the dead before you die!
And do not surrender the vital life of your conceptual brilliance and originality for the sake of not startling the dead into sudden attack.
It's like this old show, it's kind of an old show now, The Walking Dead, where they have to rub themselves With zombie juice, with zombie goop, in order not to be attacked by the zombies?
Don't do that. Of course, they never do it again for the rest of the damn show, which is sort of stupid, but anyway.
Don't cover your brilliance up for the sake of not being attacked by the dull and the frightened.
They'll attack you, they'll attack you, so what?
They'll attack you, so what?
Again, assuming they're not going to put a brick through your head, which is a distinct possibility these days.
It's called a shit test, people.
They attack you to see if you actually believe in what you say.
Do you know how desperately most of the people who attack you for your virtues don't want you to fail that test?
Do you know how desperate they are?
Not just the people of the future, the people all around you in your current life.
Do you know how desperate they are that you fucking stand up for what you believe in?
No bullshit. No compromises.
You stand the fuck up for what you believe in.
even.
They're desperate for you to do that.
It's like they're leaning over a cliff and they're about to fall and all you can do is throw them a rub.
Thank you.
Do you know how strong they want that rope to be?
Because otherwise they fall to their death.
There's a canyon of the collective unconscious.
There's a canyon of the general NPC, empty-headed nonsense we call living these days.
And people are falling around you, left, right, and center.
They're falling into this canyon where they don't get to be alive anymore.
They don't get to have thoughts. They don't get to be themselves.
They don't get to challenge. They don't get to question.
They don't get to be what it is to be human.
They lose their souls. Lose their souls.
And they're all falling over.
And they're standing at your back, you've got your feet planted, and you've got a belt full of fucking rope.
Right? People are falling down like bowling pins on the edge of this cliff.
And you're like, here's a rope!
Psych! Just kidding! Here's a rope!
Oh, sorry, that's candy floss.
Here's a rope! Oh, sorry, it's mostly chewed through, you're going to fall anyway.
Do you know how strong they want that rope to be?
So that you can pull them back from the edge of death?
Spiritual death? Intellectual death?
Slavery? How many of us are actually free?
Fewer than light in the night sky.
Cloudless, no moon. That's all I can offer you.
We points of light are constellations of thought in a mostly dark sky, not just of human history, but across the world at present.
And you understand, mankind can only navigate by the stars.
No stars. Everyone gets lost.
We wink out our candlelight, we wink out our searchlights, we wink out our brilliance.
No one can navigate to the rocks, to the founding, to the shipwreck, to the drowning.
Do they go? People desperately want you to stand up and survive their shit test so they can follow you.
Think of an addict.
Somebody who is a just stone, alcoholic, liver-rotted, pancreas-rotted, half-poisoned-with-alcohol compulsive drinker.
Now, they're standing on the edge of that cliff and they're about to fall, not into the collective unconscious, but into a literal grave.
Now, every time you say to them, stop drinking, they'll fight you.
I'll fight you like crazy.
Attack you, fight you. Do you know how badly they want you to stand up and say to them, no more.
No more. You touch alcohol, you're out of my life.
I won't stand the chaos.
I won't stand the abuse.
I won't stand the violence. I won't stand the stealing.
I won't stand the dysfunction.
I'm not having it in my life.
I've got a short, precious life.
I'm not going to spend it dragged along some dysfunctional drunk like a broken can on a kite's tail.
No, thank you. And they want everyone in their life.
See, everybody needs an excuse to drop their devils.
You understand? They need an excuse to drop their devils.
You know, like when you were a kid, you didn't want to go to some kid's party, what would you say?
Ah, I'd love to come, man.
My mom won't let me. Ah, I'm grounded.
Oh, I did this. I gotta walk the dog.
I gotta clean the house. I can't come, man.
I can't. Sorry. I'd love to.
Can't come. You need an excuse.
To drop your devils, you need an excuse.
This man's squaring off with his alcoholism.
He's been losing against that alcoholism for 20 fucking years.
Why? Because no one's giving him an excuse to stand up to his devil.
Now, if everyone in his life says, this is what's called an intervention, everyone in his life says, quit drinking or we're gone.
Go get treatment. You touch alcohol again.
Now, he's got an excuse to kick out his demon.
Say, hey, man. Hey, alcoholism, good run, man.
You really had me by the short and curly.
You had me by the balls, and you squeezed until they turned from castanets to atoms.
Good job, man. But, you know, love to accommodate you.
Love to help. Love to come to your party, but my mom won't let me.
I'm sorry.
You know, like the old excuse, I'd love to go out with you Friday, Steph, but I've got to wash my hair.
So, everybody's looking for an excuse to kick their conformity, their compliance, their subjugation.
Sorry, government, love to listen to everything you say.
Sorry, but hey, man.
My best friend, my buddy, my brother, my father, my cousin, my sister, my wife, they say to me, if I absorb any more propaganda, they're not going to have anything to do with me.
Sorry, CNN, I love you guys, but I mean, hey man, I'd love to come watch the CNN, but my mom won't let me.
They're looking for you and begging you to stand between them and their disease.
You know how somebody, kidneys are failing, you're a genetic match.
Do you know how much they want your kidney to live?
That's what people need from your integrity.
You understand? That's what people need from you.
They need you to stand the fuck up so they have an ally against the devils pulling them down.
Stop enabling. Stop supporting.
Stop funding. Stop pretending everything's fine.
Stop ignoring the toxic dysfunction of people addicted to lies, sophistry, institutional violence, and frankly, your potential demise.
Stop it.
Stop it now.
Stop it tomorrow.
Stop it next week. Stop it forever.
Give people a weapon that they can use against conformity.
Stop fucking conforming.
And stop enabling and supporting conformity.
You have the power.
You have the paddles.
You understand? You have the electricity to shock people.
Back into thought to bring them to life.
You have that power.
You've got the defibrillator.
Somebody's coding out.
All you've got to do is shock them back into coherence, cohesiveness, consciousness, comprehension.
Stand between them and their devils.
They're begging you to.
Yeah, they'll fight you, of course.
It's not them fighting you. It's the devil's fighting you, right?
The priest comes in. It's not the little girl who's fighting the priest.
It's a demon in the priest, right?
And the people in the future need to know who they're going to name their schools after.
Who are they going to name their parks after?
Who are they going to name their libraries after?
Or, to be more precise, the people in the future need to know who they're going to name their spaceships after, who they're going to name their jetpacks after, who they're going to name their time travel devices after.
Because if we fail now, they ain't going to have shit.
They give them nothing. But slavery and subjugation.
And they didn't choose it.
And we have a chance. They won't.
In the future, they won't have a chance.
We have a chance now. We have a chance now.
I've always been the kind of person that the harder you throw me down, the higher I'm going to come up.
Why did they kick me off YouTube?
Why did they kick me off YouTube? Because they had tried for a year and a half to suppress the living shit out of me.
And I was still standing firm and I was still doing good views.
They demonetized me.
I was getting 10,000 new views.
Listeners, a month, they suppressed me.
They took me out of the search results.
They took me out of the autocomplete.
They took me out of everything.
And I was still going.
I got thrown down. And the speech of this quality doesn't come if I'm not.
It's kind of true, though. It's kind of true.
Maybe it's my Christian upbringing, but I do my best work when cornered.
But you guys, you all got to stop listening and start doing.
You got to stop listening and start doing.
And I'm not talking anything violent.
I'm not talking anything abusive.
You stand quiet in the certainty of your own integrity and you refuse to fucking participate with people who want you jailed for disagreeing with them.
You understand that If you hold the value of the non-aggression principle and you hang with people who want to violate your personal property for disagreement, you are doing more harm to honor than they are.
A man who claims honor and acts basely does more harm to the concept of honor than somebody who never claims to be honorable in the first place.
If you want to discredit a diet book, you pay fat people to praise it.
The diet book is not discredited by people who've never heard of it or don't care about dieting.
The diet book is discredited by people who claim to value it but act in the opposite manner.
Honor, virtue, integrity, courage are all discredited by you claiming to hold them as a value and refusing to act on them.
Drop the values or live up to them.
But walking around chest-thumping and parading about your virtue means that people can call virtue bullshit because of you.
Because of you.
You know, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, classical liberals all rail against the Federal Reserve.
You see, it just counterfeits money.
What's fucking worse in this life?
Counterfeiting money or counterfeiting virtue?
What's worse? What does more damage to you on a day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year basis?
What does more damage to you?
The fact that your money is losing value bit by bit or the fact that you have taken the greatest glory of mankind, a virtuous presentation, and turned into a hollow-shelled vanity feeding of your own narcissism?
Yeah, may cost me a couple of listeners.
I don't fucking care. I don't care.
This is the beauty of being out in the wilderness.
I don't care what your blueprints are.
I don't care what the traffic is.
I'm out here in the desert.
We happy few.
Virtue is not something that you use to feel good about yourself or feel cool or feel different or feel edgy or feel alternative or feel part of the resistance.
Reading Murray Rothbard isn't going to do shit.
Saying to people in your life, be good or be gone.
That will get some shit done.
Be good or be gone.
Be good or be gone.
And I say this about the realm of virtue too.
Be good or be gone. Stop discrediting virtue by claiming, oh, I'm into the non-aggression principle and taxation is theft and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, you believe in the state?
You want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with you?
That's fine. That's fine.
Let's watch some TV together.
You understand, you couldn't be working for the opposition more if you tried.
You couldn't be discrediting virtue more if you tried.
You couldn't be discrediting philosophy more if you tried.
Do not hang with people who want you killed.
I don't even know why I need to say this.
I have no idea why I need to say this.
Do not say I love you to people who want you in jail.
Do not say, let's break bread to people who want to break you.
Don't say, let's dine to people who want to dine on you.
We could do this all day, but you get the point.
Because we have profited the vestiges of virtue and liberty that remain.
We have profited from those who actually live their fucking values to not betray them and betray the future by failing to live up to yours.
Be good or be gone.
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