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Oct. 16, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:28
NO FREAKING REGRETS! Freedomain Sunday Sermon 16 Oct 2022
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Time Text
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Good morning, everybody. Oh, good afternoon, I guess.
Welcome to the International Church of Philosophy this Sunday, the 16th of October 2022.
I hope you're having a wonderful weekend.
Hope you are enjoying your life, enjoying the decline and the general view of incipient catastrophe that characterizes the modern era.
We shall survive. Philosophy shall flourish.
But you have to take a bit of a long view these days, I would say, in order to hold fast to that supposition.
So I hope that you are checking out the History of Philosophers series.
It's some of my best work, and I don't say that lightly because, obviously, as you know, I believe I've done a fair amount of good work, but this stuff is really great.
I actually just did a An epic hour-long rant on just how much I loathed this series.
I enjoyed it right up until Blaise Pascal.
I really, really enjoyed it.
I was looking forward to each new installment, and then a great wave of weariness and anger.
Nay, rage, despair, all of these things.
Flew into my gullet and took roost there like a murder of crows.
And I think you'll understand why.
If you listen to this, you can get it, of course, at freedomand.locals.com.
You can enter a promo code, all caps UPB2022, and you can listen for free.
This also gives you access to my new book, which I hope you will check out.
I actually gave it out for free on my birthday, September 24th, last month.
But just in case you didn't get it there, you can get it at freedomand.locals.com.
I was reading today about a Twitch streamer.
This woman with enough jugs for a carton of milk crates.
She looks like she could comfortably feed a medium-sized Armenian village of children.
And it turns out the whole time that people have been giving her money.
She's been married.
And some people are demanding refunds.
The men, as they're called simps, right?
That they are absolutely demanding that they get refunds because apparently they thought that giving...
As an anonymous stranger on the internet, money to women means that they're going to get laid?
I don't know. I genuinely and generally cannot fathom the mindset of people who give money to women over the internet.
Now, giving money to philosophers over the internet, yeah, I think that's fair.
That's reasonable. FreeDomain.com.
But sending...
Money to a woman because, well, I assume that most of what the donations were for was for air conditioning because, by gosh, do these women seem to not, like they seem to be overheated because they really, I mean, they really expose a lot of flesh and I assume that's simply to cool down.
So maybe it was like a whip around crowdfunding for some air conditioning or something like that or maybe she couldn't afford it.
A top that covered more than half of her milkers.
But yeah, it's really something.
It's really, it's a desperate thing.
I remember seeing a picture of some guy who paid thousands and thousands of dollars to meet with and have a picture taken with some girl who then took his money and went on an expensive vacation with her boyfriend.
Oh gosh. Oh gosh.
Look, I understand the masculine need to give resources to pretty females.
I get that. And for a woman to accept a gift of yours is sort of a mating thing, right?
Like if a woman has no intention of going out with you and you buy her a present, she shouldn't take it, right?
That's sort of an honorable thing to not lead you on.
So I understand that for a man, there's an instinct to give resources to a woman in the hopes of beginning to win her heart and showing your resource acquisition and generosity and so on.
But that's for a woman right in front of you that most likely you kind of grew up with as well, right?
And sort of evolved in this tribal scenario.
But this firing off money...
Two women you'll never meet over the internet.
It's really, really degenerate and really degrading and absolutely destructive.
Simp culture is incredibly destructive.
It corrupts women. It corrupts men.
It completely changes incentives.
It is kind of satanic in a way because it might give you some immediate thrill.
You know, the woman accepts your gift and says, Oh, thank you, Simp666!
Thank you for your very kind present.
Blows you a kiss and you get a thrill.
And then, then what?
Well, then, of course, what happens is average-looking women in your environment and vicinity appear ugly to you.
Because you're looking at the, you know, one in 10,000 perfectly formed female, and you think you have some kind of imaginary relationship with her, and why would you settle for the girl next door?
When the supermodel is accepting your presence, like it really distorts your reality and allows you to aim far higher than you could probably achieve.
And the other thing about, you know, the hot crazy matrix, right?
Pretty girls. The prettier the girl, certainly if she grew up without a dad, the more likely she was targeted by predators as a child, and that's one of the reasons why the craziness occurs as that level of exploitation is pretty rough to survive psychologically.
So yeah, it's really, really destructive, but it just seems to be kind of an addiction that people have a very hard time Giving up.
And if you are doing it, please stop.
I'm begging you. Please stop.
Save your resources for a woman who will date you.
Save your standards.
You know, because there's always this for women, right?
This was a Kevin Samuels thing, right?
The late Kevin Samuels.
It was a, you know, be realistic in your standards.
Be realistic in your standards.
Aim too high and you miss.
Aim too low, you regret.
Aim too high and you miss.
And I mean, the listeners to this show, yes, above average.
I think significantly above average, particularly in the intellectual sphere.
But most people, in terms of looks, most people are average.
And if you focus on the super hotties, who often come with significant baggage, I mean, just power corrupts, right?
And physical beauty, particularly for youthful women, is a kind of power.
It's really, you could say, the greatest power.
And power corrupts.
This doesn't mean, of course, that all beautiful people are corrupt, but it means that they have to do a significant amount of work and have to really be able to resist the allure of the ego thrill that comes from Posting pictures to thirsty men on the internet.
And the pictures could be fully clothed.
They could be, you know, some, quote, influencers.
Because the word exploiters apparently is too tough to type out, too tough to spell.
But some influencers, they rent facsimiles of private planes, of the interior of private planes.
So that if we can look and say, you're just living your best life, you goddess, you queen.
Terrible. The purpose of beauty is the making of children.
I'll say it again.
The purpose of beauty is the making of children.
And if you hijack and exploit that for your own personal vanity, you spread a sterility across the universe.
The purpose of beauty is the making of children.
The purpose of labor, for men, the purpose of labor is the feeding of children.
If you labor to buy ridiculous things you don't need.
If you work to buy flashy, extravagant nonsense to show your wealth and you don't apply the resources you get to the feeding of your children, the feeding of your family, and the protection and shelter of your family, you are hijacking the most essential thing in life for your own personal vanity.
I have made it a particular deep and vital point of my personality and my morality to never take a shred of pride in that which I have not earned.
To never take a shred of pride in that which I have not earned.
Now, if you earn it, take all the pride in the world.
You deserve it. I have blue eyes.
Does that mean that I'm a better person?
No, I didn't earn that.
Nothing virtuous about that.
I have a strong jaw.
I, well, the good health, yeah, some of it you're born with and some of it you have to work to achieve.
90% of illnesses are stress-related.
Not cause, necessarily, but stress-related.
But you did not earn sex appeal.
Ah, yes, but I exercise for it.
Yeah, but you exercise because sex appeal exists and it's all the more valuable if you do exercise.
But you don't earn hormones.
You don't earn lust. You don't earn the wild desire to reproduce.
You don't earn the instincts of men to provide you resources if you're pretty and have a low-cut top.
You're hijacking the evolutionary demands of three billion years in order to buy another freaking purse.
Women don't earn male lust.
That's just baked in and built into men.
And if you exploit that which is designed to give life and bring life and protect and nurture life for the sake of exploitative, shallow, materialistic greed, that is truly, deeply, madly devilish.
It is a dark master you serve when you hijack that which is designed to bring life and beauty and truth and virtue into the world which is a shadow cast by the creation of sentient human beings that your body is capable of.
You hijack the glory of creation to serve your own petty materialistic shallow vanity.
I'm just working on or a friend of mine is working on the cover for The God of Atheists.
And it's an old painting of a woman looking into a mirror, staring into a mirror, beautifying herself, and when you zoom back a little and look at it, it's a skull.
Vanity is a form of death.
It certainly is a form of sterility.
Physical vanity for beauty, for sexiness, for hotness.
Congratulations! You are born into a body that men are programmed to provide resources to.
Wow! What a wonderfully, chillingly, deeply, powerfully, magnificently moral endeavor you have to happen to be in a shell that men want to throw resources at.
Ooh, wow! Wow!
You wear a low-cut top and men give you attention.
Well, it's not our choice. It's not our will.
It's what we're programmed to do.
It's what happens to us.
From girls being rather annoying but necessary younger sibling, additions to challenging sports teams at the age of 9 or 10, to girls being the singular focus and obsession when the hormones kick in.
It happens to men.
It's not something you earn.
It's not something you create. It's not something you made.
And you're destroying yourself.
You're destroying your future family.
You're destroying society.
And when the price comes, It's too late to fix.
See, that's what the devil does, right?
The devil will charm you with free stuff.
Stuff you don't have to earn. Oh, look.
You're kind of pretty. So wear a low-cut top and stream and guys will give you money.
Look at that. You get all this free stuff.
You don't really earn it. It's just free stuff.
And you get all this free stuff.
And the free stuff buys you zero happiness.
The free stuff buys you zero happiness.
A little bit of thrill in the moment.
Don't get me wrong. People aren't insane.
They don't do things for no reason.
You get a little bit of thrill in the moment for sure.
But that thrill diminishes over time and it is replaced by a weary contempt because when people are throwing resources at your cleavage, they are not appreciating any potential beauty of your soul.
It's not you as a person they're throwing money at.
It's your physical shell as a reproduction machine.
And so you get resources precisely because you're not you and you're not virtuous.
And you get a little bit of a thrill because now you know the price of your soul, which is kind of a relief because when you turn down that hyper-materialistic vanity path, You know the price of your soul and you are relieved from having to do any particular moral good in the universe.
You are relieved of the duty and burden of trying to be good in a world that is generally and to some degree increasingly dangerous for virtuous people.
You get the thrill of being wanted, which is not even you who's wanted, but rather your physical shell or the eggs it contains and the fertility signals you might provide through the accidental development of nature.
It's not you they want. It's not even the eggs.
The relief of orgasm.
And the casting aside.
I can't imagine a man being married who is okay with his wife shaking her cleavage on a stream for money from strangers.
This is what I mean. It's devilish, right?
So you get this thrill of being wanted, and you think it's you that they want, when it's just your flesh, your shell, your egg casing, your fertility markers.
So you get this stuff for degrading yourself to the merely mortal, the merely fleshy.
You are meat on a butcher's tray, glistening in the fluorescent light.
I will take 13 pounds of breast meat in Oakville.
And you get some stuff.
You get some stuff. The stuff is the grave of your potential.
It's a grave. Everything you buy based on money you extracted from simps based on vanity, everything you buy is merely a grave marker for your potential as a human being.
As a human being, not as an egg casing or a piece of fleshly Covering of fertility symbols.
It's a gravestone.
Here endeth my potential as a person.
My soul stopped here, withered under the green glow of the god of money, and expired like a bubbling jellyfish in the Sahara.
And a sticky residue of what I could have been lies at the base of the great god of materialism that Pac-Man style eats up everything we could be that is deeply human and deeply moral.
You have a price.
The price has been paid.
And your future is closed.
And you are left with aging egg casing, stuff And sorrow.
And in the meantime, the simps on the other side of the screen, they are left with sticky residue on their keyboards, regret, emptiness, and the decent, average, nice women around them.
We're left behind as you chase this chimera, this fantasy, this questing beast.
You chase this holy grail of ultimate fertility symbols off a cliff to the demise of the three billion year march of your genetics.
And you fall, and you fall, and you fall, and you don't even get the dignity of experiencing a thud.
There's not even anything solid at the bottom of that canyon, except the grave that you fall into, and fade out, and are left with nothing.
And the mark that you leave on the world is the shallowest of footprints as the waves of the days come in and out and erase you from everything that was.
And you won't even be remembered.
You know, I was thinking about this.
People who have been lost.
I was thinking of the fellow who wrote White Girl Believe a Lot.
I was thinking of Kevin Samuels.
I was thinking of Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens, I maybe think of twice a year.
And if you knew, I mean, outside of your immediate family, if you knew how quickly people were going to forget you after you died, you would please and aim to please only integrity, your conscience, and your virtue.
Or God, if that's what He means to you.
We will be forgotten so quickly when we die that we should aim to please virtue and do good.
Not only as certainly an increased chance of being remembered, but the only legacy we can leave in this world that means anything is the good we do, the love we create, the love we make, the love we share, the love we generate, the lives we generate. I write about this in two scenes in my novel, The Future.
Parents, the gravesite of their child, and an old man knowing that he'll never get up from his hospital bed, arranging desperately, claustrophobically his affairs at the end of things.
The crushing clarity and perspective that comes at the end makes a lie of all our corruption that came before.
It reveals the lie of all our corruption that came before.
I saw a video of a guy in a VR helmet.
An older guy. Maybe in his late 50s, early 60s.
And you could see that he used to be a football player and he was a VR helmet and his Grandson or whoever was telling him how to play the VR football game.
And he went back into the mechanics of his youth and 24-63.
And then he turned and ran straight into the closet door.
Probably knocked himself out.
It was so hard. And you could see part of it was just, you know, showing off.
Hey, I used to be this football guy, like Al Bundy style.
I used to be this football guy. Three touchdowns in a single game.
Meaning what? Meaning what?
I think about the times that I have showed off in my life.
And I have, you have, we all have.
It's a form of enslavement and humiliation to show off.
To be good, to do good, that's the meaning and purpose.
To show off, it's really, really sad.
You know, I was with, I mean, and you do this with your kids too.
I was with my daughter when she was first learning how to ride a bike.
And I can ride a bike, no hands.
But, you know, it's been a while.
And I wanted to show off to her, hey, look how cool your dad is.
He could ride a bike, no hands.
And I did. And down a hill, fairly steep hill.
And then I realized, you know, one wobble.
And that could be it.
What am I doing? And also I'm showing her that the coolest thing is to ride no hands, which then she wanted to do prior to being able to ride with hands.
Dangerous to me, dangerous to her.
Just sad and bad.
I remember once snorkeling and showing off to a date how deep I could swim and then getting an ear infection from the water, got trapped in my inner ear because I was an idiot.
Oh boy, I could go on and on about all of the ridiculous things that I've done defending your lifestyle when it comes to just showing off.
Stupid, dangerous things showing off.
And showing off is a kind of vampirism, right?
That you want other people to look up to you and you want other people to think you're cool and better.
Oh, it's tragic. When I was teaching my daughter how to rollerblade, I'm fairly okay at rollerblading.
It's not exactly Malcolm in the Middle's dad, but I'm fairly okay at rollerblading.
And, of course, I had the urge.
Let me show how cool I am.
Let me show off my rollerblading skills.
Oh, God, it's so ridiculous.
I mean, I understand it, and I'm not down on myself.
This is a natural peacock thing to do.
You know, we're still 90% Animal and 60% lizard.
14% trilobite or something like that.
So I understand this show-off thing.
I remember years ago I had a little iPod Touch and I was walking around in a mall and it was in my front pocket.
And I was like, well that probably looks kind of goofy.
I should put it in my back pocket so it doesn't look goofy when I'm walking around.
So I took it out, dropped it and broke it.
What's the point of that?
What am I doing? Does it matter?
I'm never going to see these people again?
Does it matter if there's a weird lump in the front of my pants?
Like, why? Why?
Oh, gosh, these things.
Again, I laugh because it's understandable.
I'm not down on myself.
Oh, man. It's ridiculous.
The things we do for vanity, the things we do to show off, the things we do so that we have value because other people are looking up to us rather than we have value because we have pride in having integrity to the satisfaction of our universal conscience.
Serve God, serve truth, serve philosophy, serve reason, serve virtue.
The shallowness will always try and eat us from below.
Like a shark, the more primitive form of our personality, attempting to drag us down to the depths of prehistory from the elevated semi-platonic realm of our potential.
The undertow, the drag down, the squid tentacles that wrap around our lower extremities, but to the girdle do the gods inherit below is all the fiends, and drag us down to the deep, dark, black, Wide-eyed, lantern-jawed, glow-angler-fish hellscape of the depths of the Mariana Trench to nothing.
Drag us down to being a peacock shaking our ass at the world, desperately attempting to have value because we do not love ourselves, and we have not earned our love for ourselves by being good, by being brave, by being honest.
And all the little compliances.
You know, I remember as a kid... Just being absolutely terrified at the number of petty, stupid, immature half-children in ancient skin that surrounded me.
Wrinkled toddlers slowly shrinking from their adult heights.
The petty, the Karens, the silly fights, the one-upmanship, the levelers.
The disassemblers of all potential, the demonstrators of the death of pettiness and vanity.
It's like those dirty old men that as a kid you're generally aware of, prey upon, those in the neighborhood to one degree or another, that you can be old, long past any height of your libido, and still be a TFC, a total freaking creep.
Twisted and demented and destroyed, cancerous, on the potential of the youth around you.
There's no guarantee that when you get old, you get wise at all.
Quite often it goes the other way, that old age is a mere crusty-eyed, liver-spotted reinforcement of all the prejudices hardened by time that you inherited or adopted or pursued in your youth.
Being 11 years old, on a bus, my first winter in Canada, and seeing a woman who was 60, having petty, stupid, shrill, empty-headed, pointless conflicts snapping back and forth with her mother who was 85.
You could get to be 60 and still have stupid proto-teenage fights with your 85-year-old mother.
That you can grow up while shrinking spiritually and morally.
That you can be a toddler in rhinestone classes with a gold chain behind your neck and the endless black chains of immaturity weighing down any conceivable potential you might have.
And I had friends who failed to grow, who failed to mature, who got stuck in a groundhog day like somebody who promises himself a journey of a thousand miles, leaves his apartment building, and goes round and round and round for the rest of his mortal days in the revolving door.
It's supposed to exit to the world, but just takes him round and round and round.
The people who play endless video games into their 50s.
The people who still have the same shallow, stupid, propagandized opinions they had when they were in government schools.
The people who avoid the challenges of dating.
The people who allow their own procrastination, laziness, and indifference to the disasters of destroying the day to form over their potential like a man who dives down under cold water and stays underwater so long that ice forms that he can never get back to the air.
And the ice is over in the green underglow below the ice.
Rapidly losing the strength to even claw his way back to the air, the sunshine, the future.
And we've kind of lost that terror over nothing life.
Because we are drugged with vanity.
And vanity is selling your future for the sake of a drug-like hit in the here and now.
Selling your future fertility for the sake of sex appeal in the here and now.
Not using your sex appeal, which is great, wonderful, love sex appeal, love sex.
But you're not using your sex appeal as the foundation for the future home of your family.
You're using it for free dinners and free trips and Venmo tips to accumulate resources The resource is only really available and only ever used to buy a tombstone for the end of your 3 billion year genetic line.
And then your fertility fades, your beauty fades, 40, 50, 60, 70, Or you go slowly mad in the isolation and deeply insane in the avoidance of regret because you can't look back and say, I've completely messed up my life.
I had a 20-year window or a 15-year window from 20 to 35 to settle down.
I blew it on nothing.
What are you going to do?
Regret is really only a vivid experience for those who can recover.
When you are past recovery, regret becomes too painful, but by avoiding the regret, you avoid your entire existence, your entire life.
Regret It's a good sign because regret flows into you as a form of panic about distraction.
Regret is panic about distraction.
You get distracted from what you need to do and pursue only what you want to do.
And initially it's because you want to do things, play video games, whatever, right?
You want to do things. And then, because you allow those things to eclipse everything else, you then flee to those distractions, not because they're good in and of themselves, but you need to be distracted for the growing void in your life that those things are creating or displacing.
If your life is not where you want it to be, and you're not 20, now is a good time to panic.
Panic is often... Referred to in a negative way.
Oh, I just had a panic attack.
Oh, don't panic. Don't panic.
Keep calm and carry on. How's that working out, England?
No, no, panic is great.
Panic is wonderful. Panic spurs you into action.
Panic is when mortality crashes into distraction.
The average person spends close to three years of his life playing video games.
Like three years. And you say, we've got eight productive hours of the day where we have choices.
Eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep out, eight hours of choices.
That's really nine years of your optional life.
Close to a decade of your optional life.
The life where you can make choices.
Close to a decade. Now, don't get me wrong.
I like video games. I played video games.
I... Stopped playing video games for the most part when my daughter was born.
I did play through Doom. But when my daughter was born, I didn't really play any video games, except I played a few with her.
But yeah, video game creators aren't going to sit around my deathbed holding my hand and weeping as the great fist of eternity closes over my future.
You're not going to call up John Cormack and say, hey man, I spent a lot of time playing your video games.
Can you come wipe my ass because I soiled myself in the old age home?
Well, he'll be dead. I just thought today, everyone from my childhood is dead now.
Everybody who was an adult when I was a child is dead now.
I mean, I know you can find some overlap, but for the most part, 90-95% of the adults when I was a child are dead now.
All who tyrannized or ignored me have gone to the great beyond.
The vengeance of time has scrubbed them from the future.
Zoom out of your life, my friends.
Zoom out of your life.
Where do you want to be?
What do you want to get?
What do you want to achieve? What is missing from what you are and what you could be?
Are you exploring and widening and pushing back against your own fantasies about your lack of potential?
Are you chiseling Scratching with bloody nails at the blank rocks of the indifference of those around you.
Are you clawing your way to prominence in virtue, despite the cost, because of the cost?
Or are you distracting yourself with a little erasure and a little avoidance every day?
Do you get that the days are numbered?
Like the calendar. Your days are numbered.
One less, one less, one less, one less.
We're not a cyclops in Krull.
We don't know the day of our demise.
But we know it's there.
Could be tomorrow, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, depending on your age.
Now that the war machines are back in power, could be a lot sooner than that.
And if it's true what they say, that at the end of your life, it all flashes back to you.
Like a movie, start to end, and you're strapped to the chair, Malcolm McDowell style, toothpicks propping over your eyes, and you can't look away, and you can't distract, and you see your life for what it is.
Stripped of distraction, stripped of illusion.
You look back at your life.
What will you think of how you spent today?
You're thinking back in your life and every day is a minute.
Maybe time stretches, relativistic style.
Every day is a minute.
You look at today. I think that listening to this, you'll be happy and satisfied that you allowed someone to chisel wide in the depth of your focus.
But if you had spent a day, you know, just kind of half distracted, watching videos, playing some video games, doing nothing, which is fine.
It's fine. You've got to rest from time to time.
I get that. It's not a waste of time to enjoy yourself.
Unless that's most of what you're doing, in which case you're distracting yourself from your potential.
What is your life going to look like?
What is your life going to look like when you look back on it?
Because there will come a time where there's no future and all there is is the past to look at because you don't have a future to plan for or look forward to.
You'll be in a deathbed. That's a good scenario.
The other scenario is getting hit by a bus or a comet.
You look back on your life.
How are you going to feel? Satisfied?
Yeah, I got this great glorious gift of existence.
I did pretty well with it.
Can't be perfect. Did pretty well with it.
I did more good than bad, spoke more truth than lies, worked hard at something good and important and meaningful, stood up to bad guys, supported the good guys, had a family, raised people who will love me, who will miss me, took my Oily, circular path in the well-greased bike chain of eternity.
Yeah, I was part of a larger chain, part of something larger.
It wasn't all just about for me.
I was part of something larger.
Whether that's philosophical or religious or genetic or cultural or artistic, I was part of something larger.
I was given the gift of life and cultural inheritance.
I continue it.
I add it to it.
More than that, no one can do.
You will look back on your life.
I mean, you can do it now.
You don't have to wait till your deathbed.
If you're 40, you can do it now.
Are you where you want to be? Do you have a plan to get where you want to be?
Are you willing to take the necessary risks?
Because remember, I mean, the majority of mankind is a zombie horde hypnotized by non-essentials and distractions.
You have clarity and you have focus.
You are a laser among the lazy.
You are a jet engine among the floating dandelion fluff of inconsequentialism that characterizes most people's non-planning for their non-lives.
Do you have a plan? Do you have a goal?
Are you willing to write it down? Are you willing to take steps to achieve it?
Are you willing to put yourself out there?
Embrace rejection.
You can't succeed unless you embrace rejection.
I don't mean to put up with rejection or survive rejection.
Embrace rejection as the honor medal that is pinned to the chest of those who take logical and legitimate risks.
Churchill used to say, you have enemies.
Good, good, good, good.
That means you have stood up for something, somewhere, sometime.
Are you enjoying being rejected?
Most people reject me.
Most people reject me. Most people reject philosophy.
The vast majority of you haven't donated, haven't written reviews, haven't pumped the ideas.
Most of you reject me when I say, you know, support the show and help out the show and so on, right?
I embrace that. I love you for that rejection.
I would prefer it if you support it, but I love you for the rejection because it means that If you listen to philosophy but you reject supporting philosophy, I don't just mean money, right?
I mean putting it into practice.
If you watch philosophy or listen to philosophy but don't act on philosophy, it relieves me of a great burden, which is your life won't go well.
In fact, listening to philosophy without living philosophy alienates you.
It's a form of isolation.
It puts a cyst around you.
Because you have values that contradict those around you, but you're not living those values enough to create a new community of people who also value philosophy.
Watching philosophy without living philosophy, learning about philosophy without putting it into practice, well, it's a form of self-punishment that isolates you, reproduces the isolation I assume that you had in your childhood.
You won't go with the flow, but you won't make your own flow.
You won't run with the lemmings, but you won't join a rational tribe.
Isolated, alone. That's on you.
And I sympathize and I understand, and this is not me coming down on you.
That's on you. If you choose to study philosophy without living it, living it means really telling the truth to the people around you, really standing up for what's right, really opposing peacefully and rationally that which is false and corrupt and immoral.
Really living it. And if I've convinced you to pursue a life of virtue and reason, and opening up the capacity for love, devotion, attachment, family, future, if that's not worth, say, ten bucks a month to you, what does that say about your view of yourself?
Philosophy saved me, and the guy who introduced me to philosophy is not worth ten bucks a month.
Well, what does that say about your valuation of yourself?
You will review your life.
I mean, you do it unconsciously every day anyway.
And where are you relative to where you want to be?
Where are you relative to how you're going to look back on your life at the end of it?
Are you going to say, it was tough, I took risks, I won some, I lost some, I engaged, I spread virtue, I opposed wickedness.
I inspired people to love.
I provoked people to hatred.
The virtuous loved me, the wicked hated me.
I embraced both.
Can't go north if there's no south.
You need to triangulate.
How do you identify a cell phone signal?
You triangulate. You've got three towers, right?
You need three towers. Three pings.
How do we navigate? The good.
You need three inputs.
You need your principles. You need the love of the virtuous.
And you need the hatred of the wicked.
Because you can't do good without It's impacting the preferences of the wicked.
It's like saying, well, I want to cure cancer, but I don't want to do anything negative to cancer cells.
It's like, well, you can't cure cancer if cancer isn't upset.
I want people to be more slender, but I don't want to shrink or eliminate any fat cells.
It's like, no, the fat cells are going to be annoyed when they don't get their food.
So, yeah, you absolutely need the principles that guide you, the love of the virtuous, and the hatred of the wicked.
you Thank you.
And if you enjoy the fruits of virtuous people who lived before you, without adding to any virtue in the world yourself, it's a little bit on the vampiric side.
It's exploitative. Like somebody who inherits a lot of money and then just blows it.
But worse, that's only material.
Are you willing to ruthlessly evaluate where you are in life relative to the perspective of the deathbed?
Because I'll tell you this, my friends, that deathbed comes along and all the little petty distractions and fears and anxieties will mean nothing to you.
All that will be stripped away.
All the cowardly little avoidances that you and I and everyone are tempted by, and sometimes you and I and others submit to.
Perfection is a delusion.
Perfection is paralysis.
Perfection is an absolute standard implanted in us by the wicked so that we will not interfere with their pursuit of power.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Yeah.
Perfectionism has implanted in us as a virus to paralyze us so that the wicked can pursue power over us.
Every little distraction and avoidance, and every little cowardice that you and I and others are tempted by and succumb to, will be revealed as nothing.
As nothing.
And the bald, bare, fat trajectory and lived principles of our life.
Because the principles we talk about, the principles we actually live.
But the actual lived principles of our life will be laid bare.
And the gap between our ideals and our actions will be like a sword through our chest.
With the gruesome reality that a sword through our chest would end us quick.
Whereas this level of horror at the gap between our ideals and our actions will We'll simply fill our end with agony, which we will be very tempted to keep quiet and to keep silent in order to not have people see the truth about ourselves at the end that we see about ourselves.
So I hope that this little chat We'll shock you into a larger perspective on your life and get you out of the ant-like grinding of the everyday into a larger and wider perspective of what you are capable of.
Because here's the thing, my friends, if you're listening to this conversation, if you're listening to this speech, you are listening and you are in the grip of what I'm saying because I am calling out to your potential.
It's like a mating cry of actualization to possibility.
And you are rising to meet my words because you damn well know what you're capable of.
You know the peaceful good and virtuous resistance to wickedness that you're capable of.
And you know because you studied these heroes in your youth, all the way from philosophers to activists to dissidents to comic book superheroes.
You studied the greats and you were inspired by the greats.
And no children, particularly no little boys, sit there and say, let's play accountant and avoider.
Let's play guy watching a guy watching a guy watching a guy who's playing a video game.
No! You play heroes.
War heroes when I was a kid, cops and robbers for some.
Superheroes for others, you play heroes.
What I'm saying is I'm reminding you of your capacity for the heroic.
And your capacity for the heroic is rising to meet me and trying to shatter through the ice of your procrastination and your indifference to your potential.
And the world is clamoring for you to crack through that ice and break through to the air and live philosophy in the world.
And even... Deep down in their blackened hearts, the wicked are also desperate for you to break through the ice of your own indifference and the sacrifice of your potential on the blank altar of distraction because we fight to redeem the wicked as well as inspire the good.
And I have. I have had conversations with people who were wicked, who have turned to virtue, because I did not back down, I did not compromise, and I did not apologize, despite the intense pressure and attacks that I've been subjected to from time to time.
You ever heard me apologize for what I know to be right and true and good?
No. You ever heard me back down from a principle?
No. I'm not perfect.
Lord knows. But I can do that much.
I can do that much. Even the wicked want to lose to the virtuous.
Deep down, they'll fight like hell, but they want it.
They need it. Particularly if they're parents.
They don't want their children to end up in the same situation as them.
There is nobody alive who doesn't want you to be good, though some may not know it themselves.
And the person alive who wants you most to be good is you.
Stop wasting time.
That old saying in real estate, buy land is the one thing they're not making more of.
C-Static excluded. Time.
It's the one thing you'll never get more of.
Well... With the exception of a good diet and exercise and living right will extend your time.
But not to eternity, not to infinity.
You don't get more time.
How are you going to spend the time that you have?
The great gift from the universe called the brilliant human mind.
It's the greatest gift.
Think of the greatest gift you ever got in your life.
It all pales relative to that which allows you to pick the greatest gift, the human mind.
Hierarchies, values, integrity, virtue, philosophy, the great golden good of the world, jammed into your brain against your will.
You follow it or you don't, in the same way that you can eat well or not.
You can exercise or not, but the effects on your mind, the effects on your body are the same.
Whether you like them or not, you fail to exercise and eat right, your body will deteriorate and decay and get ill.
Whether you like it or not. You fail to follow philosophy, it's baked into our brains.
Universals, absolutes, virtues, the pleasure in the good and the horror at the wicked.
It's all baked into our brains.
You can't change that. Any more than you can cause your body to digest gravel or grass.
Or have muscles strengthen the absence of exercise.
Or gain weight by eating less.
It is beyond our control.
It's beyond our power to find pleasure in the pursuit of wickedness or distraction.
Distraction is the getaway car for wickedness, right?
It's not the crime itself, but it's the only reason the crime can exist, is that we distract ourselves from the good.
Procrastination is the enabler of wickedness.
It may not take the drug, but it sure as hell supplies it.
And focusing on your life and focusing on your purpose and taking that wonderful, grand, great, relaxing acceptance that we cannot be happy without pursuing virtue.
And if you value yourself enough to be happy, then you will pursue virtue.
You speak the truth.
You be honest with the people in your life and with yourself.
Of course, first and foremost.
We are so constituted By God, by evolution, by nature, by the physical properties of our brain, if you like.
We are universalizing machines.
We are moral machines.
You'll notice that the wicked torture morality all the time in order to castrate the good.
The most evil, it seems, have the greatest knowledge of morality in the modern world because they use it the most and manipulate people through morality the most.
Well, don't let the province of morality be solely ruled over by the wicked.
Displace them from their throne with your example.
As localized as it may be, you don't have to get online, you don't have to put yourself out for the kind of risks that I have, you don't have to do any of that.
Everybody has their part to play, their role to play.
You can be as local as you want.
Once you recognize you cannot be happy without doing good, and the greatest enemy of the good is not the wicked, but our own distraction, and the little cowardice of avoiding honesty in the here and now, in the moment, and a moment, and a moment.
Well, then you can have a grand life.
You can have a great life. A life of some nervousness about the machinations of the wicked, For great joy and satisfaction in the pursuit and spread of virtue.
Mmm! Mmm!
It's good stuff, and once you taste it deeply, that's why I keep going, there ain't no turning back.
All right, not a bad way to spend some time on a Sunday, I hope.
Thank you everyone for dropping by today.
A great pleasure to chat with you.
I hope you have a great rest of the day.
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Gosh, gosh, gosh, do I need to tell you?
You know you can't get this anywhere else.
And as a monopoly of me, hopefully that's worth something to you.
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Take care everyone. Lots of love.
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