Oct. 31, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:30
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Totally fine and legitimate questions that I'm getting about whether I would go on Twitter, back on Twitter again now that Elon Musk seems to have taken over the platform and has renewed its original commitment to free speech and so on. | |
| I just, I have to follow principle. | |
| Like, if I don't follow principle, then everything in my life has been a lie, and I might as well have just compromised and gone for money, fame, riches, and power with all of my skills. | |
| So, I'll sort of tell you the way it works from a principled standpoint. | |
| So, in my view, Twitter did me a great wrong and a great injustice, and when someone We'll just talk about it individually. | |
| I'll talk about the corporate elements. | |
| So when someone does you a great wrong, then what you have to do is wait for them to make it right. | |
| Forgiveness is something that is not will, it is earned. | |
| Forgiveness like love or respect or trust is earned by other people. | |
| If someone does you a great wrong, It happens, right? | |
| Nobody's perfect. We wrung each other, step on each other's toes. | |
| It happens, right? If somebody does you a great wrong, it's not that complicated. | |
| So what they have to do is they have to admit the fault, they have to make restitution, and they have to give you some reasonable guarantee that steps are in place so that it won't happen again. | |
| So, if somebody harms you because they were drunk, then they have to stop drinking at least that badly or to that extent. | |
| They have to make restitution for whatever they did was wrong, and then they have to say that they're not going to drink anymore because clearly they can't handle it and bad things occur. | |
| And that's the only way you can maintain trust. | |
| And trust is actually built in a relationship by things going wrong and then fixing them again because we're not perfect. | |
| So we don't trust because people are perfect. | |
| We trust because they apologize, make restitution, and put plans in place so that it doesn't repeat. | |
| Anybody who makes excuses is promising a repetition of the wrong. | |
| And in particular, people who ignore the wrong that they've done you are absolutely wrong. | |
| Promising a repetition of the issue. | |
| So imagine if some girlfriend a couple of years back, she cheated on you, she lied about you to her friends and tried to ruin your reputation or whatever. | |
| And then you just get a message from her saying, yeah, you can date me again. | |
| Yeah, we can pick up where we left off. | |
| You can date me again. Would you trust that person? | |
| No, that would be kind of crazy to not acknowledge that. | |
| Any wrong that had been done in the relationship. | |
| No acknowledgement, no apology, no restitution, nothing like that, right? | |
| And I've always made, this is the same advice I've always given to people who have been wronged in their relationship, right? | |
| So let's say there's a guy, Bob, we did you something significant wrong, then... | |
| You tell Bob what you're upset with, what the issues are, and that's pretty clear with my social media relationships and so on. | |
| And so you then wait and see if Bob cares about you enough or cares about the relationship enough or cares about his own virtue enough to apologize, make restitution, and show you reasonable assurances, give you reasonable assurances that things aren't going to happen again. | |
| This is the advice I've always given to everyone. | |
| It's the advice I've followed in my life. | |
| It's the moral advice. You don't just wander back into a relationship where someone who's done you a great wrong won't even acknowledge that any wrong has been done. | |
| Because all you're going to do is end up in the same terrible relationship. | |
| And, you know, fool me once kind of thing, fool me twice, shame on me, right? | |
| Now, of course, I fully understand this devilish argument. | |
| I know I'm poisoning the world a little bit here. | |
| I fully understand the devilish argument, which is to say, ah, Steph... | |
| Get over yourself, man. Get over your pride. | |
| Hold your nose. Just wade back in to social media. | |
| You can do so much good, man. | |
| You can promote peaceful parenting. | |
| You can promote moral integrity. | |
| You can promote rational thinking. | |
| You can promote universal ethics. | |
| Oh, you've just got to do the greater good and step over this, you know, this little hiccup, this little speed bump. | |
| Get back out there and do all of the good you can do in the world. | |
| I understand that. I really do and appreciate the argument. | |
| And Many of you are making that argument from a very positive and affectionate and great place, and I thank you for it. | |
| It's wonderful. But it's not even remotely attempting. | |
| So, if I were to say to you, you can get a great effect from a bad cause, what would you say? | |
| Well, what the end justifies the means? | |
| Oh boy. You know, if you want to get really healthy, all you have to do is do the opposite of what's healthy. | |
| If you want to be really honest, all you have to do is lie your way there. | |
| If you want to have great integrity and be a model of integrity, you just have to break integrity in order to get there. | |
| This is a devilish argument. | |
| This is Satan taking Jesus to the rooftop of the world and saying, all this can be yours. | |
| Just deny that you're the son of God and break integrity and break virtue. | |
| And, you know, Jesus, you know, quite rightly in the Howard Rourkean sense says, no, that's not really very tempting because... | |
| What happens on the other side of a break of integrity isn't worth having. | |
| This idea that you hold your nose and you break integrity and you break the very values and virtues, you shatter the very values and virtues you've been talking to other people, for me, for the last 18 years as a public philosopher, the idea that you're going to get a good effect, that you're going to be a moral paragon and inspire people to virtue by breaking integrity and doing the opposite of what you've recommended to other people or suggested to other people for close to two decades. | |
| That's not even remotely tempting. | |
| You can't become a great runner by doing the opposite of running. | |
| You can't become healthy by doing the opposite of what gets you to be healthy. | |
| And it can't be out there having this big influence because it's saying, well, trade your integrity for power. | |
| That's what the argument comes down to. | |
| Trade in your integrity. | |
| Trade in your virtue. Trade in your consistency. | |
| Exclude yourself from the good advice you've given to other people for 20 years. | |
| Exclude yourself from virtue and just think of all the good you can do. | |
| Well, that's the trick, right? | |
| It's never going to happen. The whole point of the devil is he offers you power in exchange for your soul. | |
| And by the time you get the power, you neither have your soul nor any love of what you have gotten. | |
| So, no, it's not... Tempting to me at all, the idea that I will trade virtue for influence, virtue for power. | |
| Think of all the good you can do if you do the opposite of good to begin with. | |
| That's like a drug. Think of all the happiness you can have if you simply drug yourself beforehand. | |
| Well, you end up with an addiction, you end up with withdrawal, you end up with neither happiness. | |
| Nor integrity. So no, that's not... | |
| I appreciate it where a lot of people come in for a very good thing. | |
| Hold your nose, step over this beer. | |
| Not even remotely. Tempting. | |
| In the slightest. So the issue, which I think people are going to come back with perfectly fine, perfectly valid... | |
| To have these issues. The issue is they say, well, but Twitter is a corporation and Elon Musk is a new guy. | |
| And as the new guy, he shouldn't apologize for what the last guys did. | |
| And it's like, well, ask me how I know you've never been on a corporate board, you've never run a corporation. | |
| So Elon Musk, you know, seems like a nice enough guy. | |
| When he bought Twitter, he's buying All of their past deeds and misdeeds, right? | |
| So he's buying their income streams, right? | |
| All of the clientele that they built up over the years, all of the revenue streams, relationships with advertisers, the existing workforce, the contracts, the leases, you know, all of that stuff. | |
| He's buying the entirety of the history of the company. | |
| The entirety of the history of the company is now his. | |
| The good and the bad, right? | |
| So because he's now getting Twitter's income stream, He also gets Twitter's wrongdoing in the past, right? | |
| If a company has done something really bad in the past and you buy it, it doesn't vanish, right? | |
| You now have bought the assets and the liabilities, right? | |
| That's what happens when you buy a corporation. | |
| You get its assets, you get its income stream, you get its employees, so to speak, you get all of its contracts, you get its assets, and you get its liabilities. | |
| Twitter, of course, has many assets. | |
| It also has some liabilities, which, in my view, is the way in which it's treated people in the past. | |
| So, he has inherited the liabilities as well as the assets of Twitter. | |
| So, since he's going to keep the profits, he also needs to make the apologies because he is now Twitter. | |
| That's what happens when you buy a company, right? | |
| So, he has now got the pluses and minuses of Twitter and So there's no old Twitter and new Twitter. | |
| You say, ah, yes, well, but the people who are responsible for it, they might be gone. | |
| It's like, yeah, but I still think they're getting some pretty big severance packages. | |
| And the purpose, of course, of the apology would not be because Elon Musk did bad things, because he didn't own Twitter. | |
| I get all of that. It's not like he is personally responsible for the bad things. | |
| The purpose of the apology... | |
| And it could be a blanket apology. | |
| It could be any number of things. | |
| Now, I get. I understand that, of course, in the highly litigious American business landscape, if you make an apology, you could be opening yourselves up to lawsuits and so on. | |
| I don't know. Maybe that's the case. | |
| In which case, you simply put it past your counsel and you find a way to make it work, right? | |
| But the reason you have the apology is so that People who've been wronged by the company in the past understand that a significant effort is being made to change the culture. | |
| To change the culture. | |
| In other words, we are now committed to free speech. | |
| We're not going to arbitrarily de-platform people and so on, or de-platform them based upon their political beliefs. | |
| And of course, the employees of Twitter were appalled at the idea that they might be Fired because of their political beliefs, so they would, you know, if you want a particular standard to be applied to you, and you've never applied it, or you've applied the opposite standard to other people, you kind of have a logical and moral problem on your hands, right? So, of course I'm not expecting this. | |
| I understand I'm not expecting this, but it's pretty easy for me. | |
| If this is a standard I've applied to long relationships I've had in the past, to my own particular family of origin, if these are standards that I've applied to People very, very close to me, or people I thought were close to me, of course I'm going to apply it to people much more distant from me in a sort of quasi-business relationship. | |
| So understand, I'm not expecting any of this to happen, but this would be my standards for resuming a relationship, whether it's in the personal realm, whether it's in the business realm, some sort of professional realm. | |
| Romantic realm, friendship realm, you name it, right? | |
| Those are the standards that I've always advocated, and this is the element of pride that I think is actually quite important. | |
| If you've been really mistreated by someone, and then they say, okay, fine, you can come back, and you're like, oh, great, you know, they don't admit any fault, they don't show how the processes have changed, they don't make any kind of restitution, and I don't know what the restitution could be. | |
| It could be the promotion of particular accounts as a result of past It doesn't have to be obviously cash or anything like that. | |
| Not that it ever would be. But there's lots of ways that you could make it to be free advertising. | |
| It could be any way, any number of ways that you could make things right. | |
| But yeah, that would be the standard of moral behavior that I would require. |
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