March 9, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:53
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| Hey, what's up, Stefan? So, as you know, there's certain things that are a little bit further outside of the Overton window as others, and you particularly don't have much of a regard for going as far outside the Overton window as possible if you find it to be true. | |
| Do you think that maybe being more strategic in what you are talking about and maybe Trekking a little bit closer to the Overton windows so you can like Gradually move it into a place where you can speak more freely. | |
| Do you think that might be a better strategy? | |
| I mean, listen, I've certainly thought about that long and deep over the years. | |
| So first of all, you may be talking to the captain of the Titanic after he hit the iceberg saying, do you think you should have steered better? | |
| Because having been yeeted off most of the major platforms, you know, should I have been strategic in doing things differently? | |
| It's certainly a fair and a fine question. | |
| So It's the big question that everybody has to ask who doesn't want to just parrot the mainstream nonsense that passes as knowledge is how much do you compromise in order to have an audience? | |
| It's a big, deep question and I've put so much thought into this that it's kind of crazy. | |
| And some of it's thought and some of it's just kind of feeling my way through a sort of instinctual approach. | |
| But it is a very big question. | |
| It's a very deep question. So describing the complexity of the question doesn't do much to sort of answer it. | |
| And my goal has been to bring as much truth as I can to the conversation in as positive and pleasant a way as possible. | |
| You don't widen the Overton window for everyone. | |
| That's not a valid approach. | |
| And I'm not saying you would suggest that. | |
| My sort of thinking is that, okay, you move the Overton window for particular individuals. | |
| And I have had the good grace and good luck and great audience to have done this. | |
| Oh, gosh. I mean, you could argue credibly close to a billion views and downloads and books that have been read and so on over the last 16 years. | |
| So that's a billion people who've, you know, there's a saying that I heard when I was a kid that always stuck with me. | |
| This is, the mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape. | |
| That's kind of true, right? It's like a sweater in the rain, right? | |
| Never regains its original shape. | |
| So the Overton window has been moved for millions and millions and millions of individuals through what I've done and through the help and participation of the audience and supporters and so on. | |
| And the Overton window has moved for them a lot. | |
| Now, if the cost to going mainstream was to never talk about the most important issues, that's just not a cost I would be willing to. | |
| Because the question is, once you have a voice and a platform, what do you use it for? | |
| Now, do you use it for the... | |
| Gaining of money? Well, that's, you know, you've got to live and I ask for donations and so on, but the goal and purpose has never been money. | |
| I mean, other than, you know, survival and all of that, right? | |
| So for me, the goal has not been to have a giant audience. | |
| The goal has not been to have a giant income. | |
| The goal has not been to become famous. | |
| I actually quite dislike the whole process of being publicly known as a whole. | |
| But the goal has been to get the truth out there. | |
| With great power comes great responsibility and I have a great communicative power. | |
| I'm really good at analogies. | |
| I've got a pleasant speaking voice and I'm an original thinker and all of that. | |
| And a good sense of humor and a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down. | |
| So I have the Blarney Stone, as they would say in Ireland, or maybe even the Philosopher's Stone. | |
| And what do you do with that? | |
| Well, look, I mean, the fact that I have free speech is because other people burned up their reputations to To pave the way to a freer society. | |
| What matters to me is not fame. | |
| Outside of bare minimum, it's not even money that much. | |
| It is not having a reach. | |
| It's not any of those things. | |
| What matters to me is not my relationship to the world, but my relationship to my conscience. | |
| What Socrates used to call his daemon, not demon, not Matt Damon, but D-A-E-M-O-N, this daemon. | |
| If you are right with your own conscience, it almost doesn't matter what else happens to you. | |
| If you have a good relationship with your own conscience, and as I've argued before, a good conscience is simply our unconscious extrapolation of universally preferable behavior to everything, right? | |
| So if you have a good relationship with your own conscience, Then you can be loved by your friends, you will of course be hated by your enemies, and both of those things are necessary to guide you to the truth. | |
| What matters is how my daughter looks at me, what matters is how my wife looks at me, what matters is what my friends think of me. | |
| And most fundamentally, those relationships are all shadows cast by my own relationship to my conscience. | |
| Now, I knew very clearly that taking on particular topics was going to produce enormous blowback. | |
| And I did it out of love for the truth. | |
| I did it out of love for my daughter. | |
| So I know what you mean about couldn't you have not talked about this or couldn't you have not talked about that in order to what? | |
| I'll give you one analogy and then I'll turn it over back to you. | |
| And I could be wrong. | |
| Obviously, I could be wrong. This is not an objective, you know, should you strangle a hobo kind of situation. | |
| This is a navigation while often blindfolded kind of situation. | |
| But it's kind of like this. | |
| If you have a pill that cures cancer, and the people who sell other cures or remediations for cancer, they just hate your guts, right? | |
| I mean, all the people who sell chemo and radiation therapy and you name it, right? | |
| They all hate your guts because you're going to probably put them out of business, right? | |
| So you have a pill that cures cancer. | |
| Now, the pill has to be taken at full strength to cure cancer. | |
| If you give it to people at half strength, it doesn't cure their cancer. | |
| It doesn't cure the cancer. In fact, it might make their cancer worse. | |
| Because if people somehow think that there's a half-strength pill out there that cures cancer, they don't know it's half-strength, right? | |
| Then they might engage in more risky activities. | |
| Well, I don't need to put on sunscreen because there's a pill that cures cancer. | |
| I don't need to quit smoking. I don't need to, whatever, right? | |
| The pill that cures cancer. | |
| But they need the 100% dose. | |
| The 50% dose will result in more cancer. | |
| Or at least won't result in the cures. | |
| And also then people will get poisoned by chemo and radiation therapy and will suffer a lot of ill effects from those things as well, right? | |
| So you've got this pill and people hate you, but people need the cure, right? | |
| So what do you do? | |
| Do you sit there and say, well, I'll just dilute the pill to half-effectiveness knowing that it's not going to cure cancer? | |
| Then what the hell was the point of developing the pill? | |
| If you're just going to put it out there at half strength and it's not going to cure anybody, then you might as well not put it out at all. | |
| You say, oh, well, I'm going to put the pill out at full strength. | |
| Well, then you're going to get deplatformed by all the people currently profiting off cancer research and cancer cures and cancer biopsies and cancer surgeries and you name it, right? | |
| So what the hell would be the point? | |
| And I'm not mad at you. | |
| It's a fundamental question, right? | |
| I mean, what the hell would be the point of developing a cure for cancer if you couldn't put it out there in the world? | |
| Say, well, just put out half the cure. | |
| It's like, no, no, no, but half the cure is going to make things worse. | |
| You've got to put out your pill at 100% strength. | |
| And yeah, maybe you'll get deplatformed. | |
| Maybe you'll get called a Nazi and a white supremacist, and you'll get called a eugenicist, and people will make up lies about you all over the place. | |
| But still, Maybe, just maybe, you've cured a couple of million people of cancer before all that happens. | |
| Whereas if you did half strength, half truth, you're not curing anyone. | |
| In fact, you're making things worse. | |
| So that's the way that I sort of thought about it, is I'm going to go out there, I'm going to put the full strength pills out there. | |
| It's like you got the red pill and you got the blue pill, right? | |
| And the blue pill puts you back in the matrix, and the red pill takes you out of the matrix. | |
| Do you want the purple pill that just puts you into a coma? | |
| Well, no, not really. Don't bother with either pill, right? | |
| So for me, putting out the half-truths would be to set me against my own conscience. | |
| It would be to set me against the truth, because a half-truth is worse than no truth. | |
| Because if you have no truth, and you know you have no truth, you keep looking. | |
| If you have a half-truth that you think is true, you stop looking. | |
| You stop looking. And I just didn't want to do the half cure. | |
| I didn't want to do the half medicine. | |
| That makes people worse. | |
| And then it would be for some other reason. | |
| It would be for what? For fame? | |
| For more eyeballs on me? | |
| For more cameras on me? For more people wanting to shake my hand? | |
| For more money? But then I've sold something enormously important called the truth and my peace of mind and my integrity. | |
| For what? For money? I can't buy that back. | |
| I mean, you sell, you know, it's like if you love your child, you have a child, say, how much would you take for that child? | |
| I'll give you a million dollars, I'll give you five million dollars, ten million dollars for that child. | |
| I mean, come on, there's no amount of money that would have you give up that child. | |
| You love your wife. I will give you, Robert Redford style, a million dollars to sleep with your wife. | |
| It's like, no. I mean, first of all, no, she wouldn't take it. | |
| And no, I would never approve of that. | |
| Because this $10 million, don't care. | |
| I don't care. I don't care. | |
| I'm not for sale. My wife's not for sale. | |
| My daughter's not for sale. And my integrity's not for sale. | |
| And I'm not suggesting that you are trying to say I should sell it. | |
| I'm just telling you my perspective on this question, which is what matters to me It's being right with my conscience, being right in the eyes of the people who love me and the people I love, serving the goddess of philosophy as best as I am able, | |
| and to not be sold for fame or money or, quote, effectiveness, because that's the great, oh, you'll be more effective if you dilute the truth. | |
| It's like, well, no. If you take only half the antibiotics, You're actually creating or you are contributing to the creation of antibiotic-resistant superbugs because you are killing off the weakest of the bacteria, leaving the strongest ones alive. | |
| So half medicine in many ways is worse than no medicine at all. | |
| Half medicine creates superbugs. | |
| Half truths create dangerous delusions. | |
| And to me, If I develop a medicine that cures a disease, the disease in this case being ignorance of error, immorality, then putting out half the cure is worse than no cure at all. | |
| And the only reason I would do that is I hated the world and was greedy for money or approval. | |
| And I don't hate the world. | |
| I love the world. And I'm not greedy for money or greedy for approval. | |
| I'm greedy for a good relationship to my own conscience. | |
| There's only one way to do that. |
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