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Feb. 24, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:20
SHAPE UP SON!
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Time Text
From Wojak Woz as we get down to the last few here.
Hi, guys. I'm a 19-year-old Zoomer with little to hope for.
Women are total trash.
Wages get destroyed by chief Chinese and foreign workers and relentless wokeism with zero representation.
Why shouldn't I and others be extremely angry?
We'll put it that way. And then the hashtag, screw boomers.
Stefan, anything to say about what Wojak brought up?
Well, show your pup, son. Are you drafted?
No. Are you facing polio?
Smallpox? No.
Do you have enough to eat?
Do you have shelter? Are you going to look forward to half your kids dying before the age of five?
No. Are you being hunted by any large predators they're going to rip your legs off?
No. Because if that's not the case, if you're not being drafted, if you're not dying of disease, starvation, predation, you're better off than 99.9999% of all humanity who ever came before you.
And they would look at your life while they're having their ass chewed off by a pack of wild hyenas.
And they'd say, oh, are you having some trouble with your existential angst?
I haven't eaten in three days.
I'm sorry, did you lose your saved game on cyberpunk?
You're privileged!
You live in the most magnificent era of peace and human communication that has ever existed in the history of the world.
Is there a shitstorm coming?
Yeah, kinda. But it ain't here.
And there's still things that you can do.
You understand that nihilism is the shit in your mouth that has you never taste a good meal in your life that's put there by the powers that be.
That you sigh and you stare at a wall and you feel hopeless.
So you're out of the equation.
You're out of the improvement. Imagine, imagine where you'd be or where you wouldn't be if your ancestors felt the same way.
If your ancestors said, holy crap, we just had a 30 years war and now we're going to have another 30 years war, I'm not having any kids.
I'm not getting out of bed.
They didn't. They had a lot more adversity than you or I or Joseph are ever going to have.
Their adversity was...
Shaking someone's hand, getting the bubonic plague, coughing up their lungs and sneezing until their eyeballs exploded Roger Rabbit style, okay?
That's the shit they had to go through.
People died of heat.
The Black Death was so bad that in many places in Europe, half the population died.
You get one...
Oh my gosh, there could be climate change.
Do you understand that? You get one bad winter...
You might end up eating pets, or even worse.
I had ancestors.
One of my ancestors was best friends with the English philosopher John Locke.
I read his biography.
My ancestor's name is William Molyneux.
He came up with a famous philosophical problem called the Molyneux problem, which apparently now is just me having a social media presence.
But... They were questioning certain aspects of divine rule and they were chased all over Ireland by the king's troops with pick axes.
Okay? Do you have any of that?
No. This is the beauty of studying history is by God does it ever have you appreciate the present.
Joseph and I and you can have this conversation.
Do you know what I would give?
I'm not comparing myself to Socrates, but do you know what I would give to be able to ask Socrates a question?
I mean, my God! I'm one of the preeminent philosophers of the modern world, and you can just ask me a question, and I love to answer it!
You look at any time throughout human history when that could have occurred, and you could get this kind of quality of unfettered, unfiltered, unedited, ungate-keepered conversation from other human beings Never before.
When did you ever have the entire universe of human knowledge in your ass when you have your phone in your back pocket?
Never. There was no butt-dialing people in the 19th century.
You live in a glorious land of almost infinite opportunity.
Yeah, if you're a young white male...
You're not going to get far in the corporate world because wokeism, because affirmative action, because you've got to hold your nose and go along with all of a crap, statist government policy is currently being vomited out of the estrogen whirlpool of HR. Oh no, that means I've got to start looking into Bitcoin and being an entrepreneur.
Oh no!
Heaven forbid! The corruption that I experienced in the business world was one of the things that drove me to do what I do.
I would kiss the hem of those garments of the people who were corrupt in the business world for putting me out here in this glorious mental landscape of human acuity.
The people who are doing you wrong can only do you wrong if you let them.
Again, assuming that they're not running after you with pickaxes like my ancestor, okay?
So you're barred from being in the veal-fattening, brain-emptying, cubicle pen of mainstream corporate America.
Oh no! Good!
Good! That opens up a whole vista of you to define your career for yourself.
Start adding to your human values.
Start learning stuff.
Important stuff. Start learning economics.
Start learning about the blockchain.
Start learning about political philosophy or philosophy as a whole.
Start learning about how to be a good parent and a good husband, which is a knowledge that's been lost for generations now for many people.
Start learning. You have an infinity of time.
You have an infinity.
of information relative to all prior aspects and times of human history.
The gods have given you gold and the capacity for glory that they incomprehensibly withheld from almost all human beings across the world and throughout human history.
So shake it off, son!
It's a glorious world out there.
Not seven months ago, Fifteen years of my life were erased.
Thousands of videos.
Hundreds of millions of conversations.
A platform I had developed since 2005 was vaporized.
Million followers, gone.
Half a million on Twitter, gone.
My income on PayPal, gone.
And what did you see me do?
Did you see me roll up into a ball?
Did you see me curl into a fetal position under a divan and cry for mom?
No. It's what happens when you do good in the world.
You're going to get punished for it.
But the punishment only lands if you let it.
You know, you hear the whistling sound and you stay where you are.
Something's going to hit you from the sky, but you just move.
Find something new.
Do something different. You're not in a cage.
You're not in a uniform.
You're not having a gun held to your head and saying, go over that trench and face the Bosch or I'll blow your brains all over the Somme.
No! You're not on the Titanic.
You're not lost in space.
You're here. You're here.
What opportunities you have!
And how many people across the world and throughout human history would not give their right arm to be where you are at this moment in time?
Bad things are happening.
Do not focus on them and magnify them to the point where you become paralyzed.
That's exactly what the bad people want you to do.
I'm here having this conversation, pouring my heart and soul into communicating with you I faced, yeah, a setback or two.
Couple of bumps in the road, couple of hiccups along the way.
And maybe it's just a post-cancer perspective.
But any day you don't get a, hey, you got cancer phone call, that's a pretty good day.
It's a pretty good day.
So, shake it off.
Shake it off.
Maybe you were raised without a dad.
It's one thing they don't talk about in the Joker movie much.
Single mom, no siblings, goes crazy.
Not a totally unknown scenario.
But it is an insult to all of the people who labored to bring you the precious gift of life under far worse circumstances than you or I could ever dream of.
To be paralyzed with all the opportunities that lie before you to do good in this world right now.
So people are going to hate you.
For doing the right thing.
Guess what? Welcome to the essential moral battle of the universe, not even just of this world.
People will hate you for doing good.
And their hatred is designed to paralyze you into not doing good, into not being ambitious, into not learning and growing and fighting for what's right and what's true.
And you probably have watched a whole bunch of Marvel movies and a whole bunch of DC Comics movies where the good guys keep going against impossible odds.
I'm giving you the superpower called philosophy.
Far more powerful than any of that crap they pull on CGI. Because it's not CGI. Philosophy is evil.
CGI is come get it!
If you dare. No.
Go out and do something good in the world.
Do something good for yourself. Do something good for your community.
Do something good for your family.
Do something good for the truth.
And learn to enjoy the moral battle.
Because it's the only reason you have any freedoms at all.
Don't just parasite off the people who came before you, who fought hard to give you everything you have, all the freedoms you possess, which are still greater than the freedoms of just about anybody else throughout human history.
You say, oh yes, but in the past, there weren't negative consequences for speaking to the world.
You didn't get deplatformed.
There weren't hate speech laws, blah, blah, blah.
Yes, but there was no internet.
So you couldn't talk anyway.
Did you hear of me before 2005?
No! Did you hear of me before YouTube?
No! So there are negative consequences only because you have a voice which nobody had in the past before.
So yeah, there's punishments and you can get...
People can get mad at you and you might get...
Toxic lunatics on Wikipedia projecting their inner selves onto your illustrious frame.
Yeah, okay. But we have a voice.
We have a capacity to communicate.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of people are going to listen to this over time.
Over the course of human history, this could be studied in the future.
If the speeches are as good as Joseph says.
Hope you're right. Oh, they are.
Right? They are.
They absolutely are. You have this capacity.
You can dig deep into the glory and power of the truth within you, which we all have.
All of us who study reality and face facts and consistency.
You have a modern world because scientists stood up to fastly more persecution than you can dream of.
Oh no, they took my Twitter account.
Yeah, you know what they're not doing?
Burning me at the stake!
Yay! That's what they call progress!
No hemlock! Come on!
If people could face far greater adversity to bring you the freedoms that you enjoy and you shrug and say, it's too hard.
What the hell did they do it for?
They did it. They sacrificed themselves so you could have a voice.
And you whine and say, it's too hard, there are too many negative consequences, I'm depressed, I'm tempted by nihilism.
You're taking a deep crap on all of the aspirations and all of the sacrifices and all the suffering that everyone went through to bring you the opportunities that you have.
If 12 people die to bring you the Mona Lisa, you don't wipe your ass with it, okay?
You add to the beauty and you show it to the world.
Honor what came before.
Add to it so that everybody can invite you to join the line of heroes who bring freedom to the world and say, good on you, mate.
You deserve a place with us.
That's available to you.
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