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Sept. 20, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:17
5262 How to Not Be GOD!

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux walks in the woods and discusses how to combat the most deadly vice of all!Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!Get access to StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, my new book and the History of Philosophers series!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022

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Well, well, well, good morning everybody.
Out for a wee bitter morning constitutional.
Had a couple of questions from freedomain.locals.com.
So I thought I would take them on as I walk through the dewy Canadian hinterlands, getting my feet progressively more swampy.
So the first question was, how do I avoid the messianic
Impulse.
The Messianic impulse is to sort of be, I guess, a charismatic leader who promises peace and plenty and prosperity and all kinds of wonderful things to people in return for obedience, right?
It's a sort of time-honored way for charismatic, verbally skilled people to gain access to resources.
So let's just say it's not completely off the table for me, and I understand that.
And, you know, it's hard to know what the greatest sin is.
We're just working on the truth about sin as a whole.
So it's kind of hard to know what the greatest sin is.
Oh, woodpecker.
But one of them, of course, has to be vanity, right?
So to me, vanity is when you believe that what you did not earn is your treasure and triumph.
That you have value for things that you did not earn.
I mean, the typical example, of course, is a woman who is young and pretty and shapely and so on, and then she believes that she has value because men desire her.
Well, did she earn her shapeliness?
I mean, she probably exercises and all that, but she gets such a great incentive for exercising.
You know, if somebody paid me, I don't know, $100,000 to have abs, I'd probably have abs, right?
So, she does exercise and eat well, but the payoff is so enormous that we don't really consider that to be much of a treasure and a bonus.
I just want to make sure things don't get too windy here.
So, what I think we can safely say is that she gets great value, she's in sort of great demand and so on, for things that she has not earned.
That sort of male lust or male desire and hormones and and all of the historical or I guess biological evolution of four billion years.
She is, it sort of dropped in her lap so to speak.
So I think it's tough to say that she has owned all of this and she just has value because
Of evolution, and drive, and hormones, and desire, and reproductive urges, and all of that sort of stuff.
So, that's not... A man who inherits a wealth is in a similar situation.
Though, of course, these days, men who are accidentally handsome... Right?
It's what... How about Bones says this in the television show Bones from many years ago?
Some... A plastic surgeon
She compliments her bone structure and she says, well, it's just my bone structure.
I didn't earn it.
It's not me.
I just happened to inherit it.
Well, people with good skin or great hair and so on, right?
They toss their hair around like Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
I'm so lucky!
So all of these people who have these accidental positive characteristics that they did not earn, it's then, of course, extraordinarily easy for them
To believe that they have value because of what they didn't earn.
So that's really important.
Guys who are really tall.
Guys who are naturally lean.
Guys who are really good at, say, sports.
Guys who are really good at sports believe that they have value because people value sports.
People should value sports.
Sports are great.
But
It's a lot of it is accidental.
People who are accidentally born into a great household, right?
People who are accidentally born into a household with sort of two functional, relatively happy working parents.
They're lucky, right?
I mean, I do from time to time remind my daughter that she was the recipient of some significant good fortune being born into the family she's born into.
And she should be happy about that.
I mean, you don't take it for granted and you don't view it as perfectly neutral, but I think it is important to understand that it is not something that you have earned.
So the reason why the devil is constantly tempting you, so to speak, with what you have not earned, is so that you avoid virtue.
Right?
So you avoid virtue.
So we should gain value and satisfaction from moral virtues that we have earned, right?
So we learn about them.
We figure out how to bring them into our lives in a sort of rational and sensible and survivable manner.
And just around the tree branch here.
So we do all of that.
And then we gain, you know, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
We gain all of that.
It's a good thing.
It's what we want.
It's what we should have.
It's what virtue, in a sense, demands from us in order to give us happiness.
So the devil, again, to use whether you consider a personification or an analogy is not particularly relevant to this context, but the devil
Wishes to have you believe that you have come home when you haven't come home.
That way you stop going.
So of course, let's say you live alone in the middle of nowhere, right?
And imagine some elaborate scheme has
Let's go back here a little bit.
Some elaborate scheme has been put into place.
Some nefarious billionaire has adjusted your GPS and has created a simulation of your house.
And so you think you're home and it's down to the last detail.
So you think you're home and you're not home.
Of course you get in there and you're like, oh great, good.
I got home.
I'm home, everything looks the same, everything's identical, and so you think you're home, and so you don't go to your real home when you believe that you're already home, when you're not.
When you're home, you stop going home.
So, the devil, what he does is he says, yeah man, don't worry, you can get happiness from vanity.
Vanity, right?
You can get happiness from vanity.
It's not really vanity.
You can feel good about yourself because you virtue-signaled.
You can feel good about yourself because you were born into a happy family.
You can feel good about yourself because you're pretty.
You can feel good about yourself because you're handsome.
You can feel good about yourself because you inherited money.
You can feel good about yourself like those Instagram kids from rich families constantly filming themselves on yachts and various other
Expensive planes and so on.
So now they have value because their parents have money.
So once you feel that you have value, that you have worth, then you stop looking for it.
Or rather you get addicted to generating envy rather than self-respect through moral excellence.
The substitution, like it's a drug, right?
If you live a virtuous life, it's your best chance to be happy.
However, obviously, you can also take some very powerful drugs to feel happy.
And taking those very powerful drugs will give you being home without actually being home.
So you get the happiness without the virtue.
And the devil, of course, constantly wants to give you happiness without virtue.
Nature is so beautiful.
I hope you take time to absorb and admire it every day.
So, the devil is saying, oh man, that virtue stuff, that's for suckers, man.
Don't go down that road.
That's nerdy.
That's low status.
What you want to do is you want to get status by having really cool drinking stories, man.
You know, the, I was so wasted that stories.
That's what you want to do.
You want to get, you want to get value from sleeping with men or sleeping with women.
You want to get value from people thinking you're pretty on the internet.
You want to get value from flashing your money.
You want to get value from status, man.
None of this virtue stuff.
That's like choir boy nonsense.
And of course, there's a whole army of people out there.
It ain't just the devil, right?
There's a whole army of people out there who are constantly leading you in the wrong direction.
And they offer you status because they want you to join them in hell subconsciously, or maybe even consciously.
So what they do
is they offer you constant positive feedback for pursuing something that ain't virtue.
Right?
You've got all these neighbors, in a sense, in your fake house saying, oh, no, no, you're home.
What are you talking about?
You're home.
So.
Oh, under the tree.
So that's what's going down.
And if you, of course, look at modern society, a lot of it is, well, you have value, man, because you're just cool and down with drug use and marijuana.
And, you know, you've got value because of that.
Just relax, man.
Don't be so uptight.
Have value by partaking of the herb and living in nature and teaching, taking the natural remedies of life.
So all about status.
All about status.
Now,
Once the devil can trick you into believing you have value for that which you did not earn, once he can get you to believe that you have value in the absence of virtue, well, then he's prevented you from getting to virtue.
He's offered substitutes.
You know, like, I mean, how many people, men and women, right, how many people spend their lives
in the gym without giving any care or thought to the health, virtue and value of their souls?
How much time do people spend binge watching streaming services without learning anything about how to be good?
How much time do women spend on makeup
Rather than learning how to be a good, productive, virtuous, and healthy woman.
How much time do men spend watching sports rather than learning about virtue and how to achieve it?
It's all a distraction, right?
It's all a distraction.
And of course, socially, when you get a bunch of people who substitute crap for virtue,
Then they don't want to talk to you about virtue anymore, right?
Obviously, they don't want to talk to you about virtue.
What they want to do is talk to you about crap.
And I was joking with my daughter the other day about Smalltalk.
She's not at all a fan of Smalltalk.
She considers it skin-crawlingly appalling to go through Smalltalk.
I was saying, well, if the devil was really, really smart, he would invent
He would invent an endless cocktail party with people you barely know who are really boring and just talk about nothing.
And that would be hell.
That would be hell.
It wouldn't start off hell, but it would quickly become that and forevermore.
Amen.
So, vanity.
So the reason I'm talking about all of this, of course, is because
If you are given gifts, and I think we're all given gifts to one degree or another, but if you're given gifts, whether it's eloquence, or looks, or money, or a stable family, or whatever it is, whatever gifts you're given, you're given these gifts, and those gifts have value to others, but a lot of times the value that others place on those gifts is to lead you away from virtue.
Why do men
Well, it's a devilish impulse to keep the women away from virtue.
The men complain about women monetizing their beauty, but who's paying the bills?
There ain't no dealers without consumers.
That's people that are paying the women to monetize their beauty out of vengeance for women, hatred and hostility towards the mother, and so on, right?
So all of that stuff is really loud.
Really... sort of barked at me, this thing.
So that way?
No, let's not go that way.
Wait.
Yes, let's go that way.
So, I mean, obviously I believe, and I think the world agrees, that I've been given some fairly decent gifts in terms of eloquence and intelligence and creativity and debating skills and rationality and, I mean, whatever.
And, you know, not too bad looking and blue eyes and square jaw and all of that kind of stuff.
So, you know, I've been given some benefits about that.
So the devil, of course, were to say, ooh, Steph, you know what?
You got a lot of gifts, man.
You're a lot of eloquence, kind of funny, got some charisma.
You got a fruity little accent there that adds the perception of intelligence to whatever you say.
Bro, you got to use this for yourself, for your family, for your resources.
For your genetics, for your whatever, right?
You gotta get resources.
And you should use your gifts to get resources.
Right?
Now, what that would be to say is that the gifts that I did not earn should be used for my material benefit, my immediate material benefit.
And men get mad.
At women who monetize beauty, but men monetize intelligence, right?
Often, or charisma, or sense of humor.
Because, you know, men a little bit more than women, I think, develop a sense of humor because we don't have the same TNA to fall back on, right?
So men monetize intelligence, women monetize beauty, and both are a form of mating display that's kind of a dead end, right?
So, I mean, if you look at influencers, even on the right, who are not Christians,
They tend to not have families, right?
They're monetizing their intelligence rather than using it in the service of humanity, in my opinion, and not anyone in particular.
It's just the sort of trend that I've kind of noticed.
So, Steph, you've got to take your charisma, your reasoning skills, your eloquence, your humor, your looks, whatever, and you've got to monetize that, baby.
You've got to chase the dollar.
Um, that's not particularly tempting to me, as you can imagine.
That's not particularly tempting to me at all.
Uh, that would hollow me out.
So you end up with all this money and you get this sort of flush of success and praise and, and then what happens?
Well, you're kind of living a lie so no one can get close to you because you are taking as personally valuable that which you inherited from nature.
Your taking is personally valuable to that which you have inherited nature.
In other words, you're substituting accident for virtue.
You're substituting accident for virtue.
Not good.
Not good at all.
So what should you do?
Well, of course, you should reject that and you say
That which I have accidentally inherited is a birthright to benefit all, not just me.
Now, I mean, I'm not a Kantian, I'm not a self-sacrifice guy, so it shouldn't be that it never benefits me at all, or I get no value out of it.
That would be a contradiction, because that would be to say that my accidental gifts should benefit people, but apparently I'm not a person, so it should never benefit me, right?
That doesn't really make much sense.
So yeah, I think my accidental gifts should benefit people as much as possible.
I am one of those people, so of course I should have some income and so on from that.
Which way?
Let's try this.
But that which I did not earn should not benefit solely me.
Does that make sense?
And of course also that which I did not earn I only have because other people made sacrifices, right?
So I didn't earn, let's say, intelligence, but the only reason I have intelligence is because people in the past
You know, had kids, raised kids, made those sacrifices.
So the idea that the sum total of four billion years of evolution should be my own personal benefits when the only reason that I exist is because of the sacrifice of others would be, again, to exclude me from the common wheel and the general good.
And it should be to say that four billion years of sacrifice and effort
For others, namely offspring, should culminate in me grabbing it all for myself.
I mean, if you had a family fortune that had been accumulated over, let's say, four billion years, and it had grown, then you don't get to blow it all on yourself.
I mean, that would be very selfish, obviously, and very destructive.
And tragic, really.
Because you would have inherited great wealth and leave nothing to the future, right?
It would be to consume the present.
I mean, that's about as sensible as, you know, you've lived for 40 years in a cold climate as a farmer, so you keep your seed crop, you keep your seed grain every winter, but then just one winter you decide to eat it all.
Well, then you starve, right?
It's not sensible.
It's not sustainable.
So, to avoid
The messianic complex.
You have to just hammer yourself with the reality that you don't take as something that you've earned something that you haven't earned.
I mean, we should feel better about things that we've earned than things we've inherited.
You should feel more proud if you do the tough stuff and ask a woman out and end up marrying her.
You should feel more pride in that.
Than if a woman was simply assigned to you in some arranged marriage scenario and forced to marry you.
You should feel more proud of the money you've justly earned rather than the money that you have accidentally inherited.
Right?
So we should feel more pride in what we have earned than what we have not earned.
And so since I think everybody wants a sense of self-respect and pride or what have you, the way to do that is to not mistake things you haven't earned for things you have earned, because the things you have earned will give you a greater and deeper sense of pride and happiness in what you have created.
So, and of course you end up with much more interesting questions.
If you say, how can I use my gift to benefit solely me?
Well, I mean, that's not a very interesting question, right?
You just go out and promise people things using your eloquence and then dodge whatever doesn't materialize, right?
So that you just go out and lie to people, promise them a bunch of stuff you can't deliver.
Well, and if it happens, you claim credit, and if it doesn't happen, you claim that the other people weren't following your program.
I have the perfect diet, you would say.
And if people lose weight, great, you have the perfect diet.
If people don't lose weight, well, clearly they're not following your diet, and you can castigate them or whatever, right?
So, if you say, in a sort of predatory mammalian
Reptile brain fashion, how can I use my gifts to benefit myself?
Well, that's not particularly elevated, to put it mildly, and it's fairly easy to answer.
And it's kind of boring.
We all have those instincts, right?
On the other hand, if you say, how can my gifts benefit
Others and me, right?
So, if you say, well, how can my gifts benefit others and you don't have a sense of your own self-interest and so on, then you just do what other people want you to do, which also is bad, right?
It's also enabling, right?
And doing what other people want you to do is not having value.
That's just being a slave in a way, right?
So, saying, how can my skills benefit the world and me?
I'm part of the world, right?
Then that's a very interesting challenge.
And that's, to me, an intellectual feat well worth pursuing.
I mean, it's true.
It's valid.
It's moral.
It's good and all of that.
And it's interesting because it's complex.
Like, how does philosophy benefit people?
Now, if I could say, how would, I mean, how could I twist morality to benefit myself, either in terms of vanity, like everyone thinks I'm super smart, or in terms of material resources and stuff like that?
It's kind of boring.
But, because I don't have to say what is true and what is virtuous.
What I have to say is, what can I tell people so they will surrender their wills to me?
And again, we all have those instincts.
It's kind of baked in to manipulate in that way.
It's sort of baked into human nature.
A devilish, right?
The dark side, the shadow self.
So we all have that.
So, just walked through a spider web.
So what we have to do is say something, at least what I feel is important to do and much more interesting,
And brings pride is to say, not, what do I say that has people surrender their will to me, but rather, what is true and virtuous that we can all partake in.
Ah, you know, that's interesting.
Like, here's the thing.
If you have the need for good weather, right?
All farming societies have a need for good weather.
Doesn't mean pleasant weather, it just means good for crops, right?
So,
If you are a guy in a farming society who's really great at storytelling and really charismatic and really funny and has that sort of weird confidence of those who have strong verbal abilities but no moral center, then what you do is you say, give me resources and I will pray to the gods and I will make the rains good.
Give me resources, I will pray to the gods, and I will make the rains good.
Well, it's pretty easy to do, right?
On the other hand, if you say, well, I want to work within reality to objectively benefit people the most, then you figure out not what lies can I tell to get people to give me resources while promising them something I can't deliver.
And of course, if it works and you get good weather, you say, aha, your sacrifice to me was worth it.
If it doesn't work and you get bad weather, you say, well, there's an unbeliever among you, hunt him out, and you just end up with this gross and vile chaos that characterizes most of human history.
Now, if on the other hand, you actually want to benefit your farming community, then you would say, okay, let me learn about the science of plants and growing.
Let me figure out a scarecrow to chase the birds away.
Let me figure out how to bring water in through irrigation.
Let me do engineering.
Let me figure out which crops, like turnips, we can plant in the winter so we don't starve over the big freeze.
You would actually do things to benefit
Humanity, now, just lying to people, promising them things you can't deliver in order to get them to subject themselves to your will, is easy and boring and commonplace and lazy and evil, obviously, to some degree.
Fraud.
It's fraud, right?
Because you can't deliver what you claim you can.
So that's bad.
On the other hand, how
When do you ever become a perfect farmer?
You don't, right?
I mean, things change.
Crops evolve.
New forms of bacteria come along and parasites of some kind.
There are new birds.
The weather might change a little from time to time.
You've got an ice age or two.
So, you know, I mean, they're still studying and improving agriculture.
Some people say in the wrong direction.
I'm sure that they're right in some ways, but
So, if you simply are going to use your talents for your own benefit.
I want to be the witch doctor.
I want to promise good weather or victory in battle or something like that.
Okay, it's another one, right?
I promise victory in battle if you give me resources.
Okay, well, that's one guy.
Promises victory in battle.
Another guy invents the longbow.
Right, so one is fraudulent in that the guy offering a victory in battle is not someone who can give you victory in battle, but the guy actually inventing the longbow might, or plate armor, or whatever it is, might actually, or swords, I guess, back in the Bronze Age.
So that guy can actually do you some real good.
Now,
So if you don't do the easy part of offering to relieve people's anxiety without solving their problems, right?
So if you're worried about the weather as a farmer, then you go to the witch doctor and the witch doctor says, oh, I'll, you know, give me three sheep and I'll make sure you have good weather.
You're not changing the weather, obviously.
All you're doing is you're managing the anxiety of the farmer.
And that's ensuring that it goes on in perpetuity.
On the other hand, if you, instead, you say, well, I'm gonna figure out irrigation for you, brother, then you are doing something, assuming that you work on it and it works out, that will actually, will actually relieve the farmer, won't worry about is it gonna rain, because he's got irrigation for his crops.
So that's a real thing.
Now, I don't generally think that people end up with a lot of pride and happiness
By lying to people and promising what they can't deliver in return for resources.
Defrauding them, bamboozling them, whatever you want to call it.
I don't generally think that people end up with a lot of happiness based on that.
So it's not a very productive thing.
I mean, obviously you get resources, but it's not a very productive thing.
On the other hand, people who generally bend themselves towards the overall good end up with a much more interesting life.
It's not repetitive.
You don't live in fear of exposure.
You don't live in fear of someone even more eloquent coming along.
You don't have to unite with secular forces of violence to maintain your monopoly on falsehood.
Like, there's lots of things that are kind of beneficial to it.
And you do actually do good.
And you end up, I think, with a very beneficial state of mind wherein you have a situation where
The things that you have not actually invented, like your own self, your intelligence, and so on, because you are the recipient of the common good, you apply your gifts to the common good, right?
So, you're a recipient.
You're the recipient of the common good, which is people making sacrifices to have children, to raise children, and so on, and to keep them alive, and certainly the people who made the sacrifices to give us the levels of free speech that we have, and so on.
They made a lot of sacrifices.
There have been wars fought for this kind of stuff.
We are really the recipients of common sacrifice.
And so the idea that as the recipients for common sacrifice, we should just use them for our own benefit and not make any sacrifices to return the gifts that we've been given or to add to the gifts that we've been given.
It's really terrible.
It's really terrible.
I mean, it is like, to a large degree, it's like some guy who's, and this actually happened in my family.
One of my not too distant ancestors,
Inherited a bunch of land that had been sort of hard-fought, hard-won, hard-farmed by his ancestors, and then was a gambler and a drunk, I think, and ended up losing all the family lands.
And with the last scraps of money he had, he put my father's generation through school.
So, that's kind of selfish, right?
And that's pretty awful in sort of very many ways.
And not interesting.
So trying to find a way to serve the gifts that you've inherited through the sacrifice of others into something that is to the benefit of others, because all your gifts result from the sacrifices of others to a large degree.
And so they're not just for you.
Right.
Why is there female beauty?
Because women worked hard to find appropriate mates to make themselves pretty, to raise children and you know in a time when raising children was brutal and horrible and hard and you know half of them died before the age of five.
A lot of heartbreak.
I mean there's a
In Uncle Tom's Cabin there's a little bit I sort of vividly remember when reading the book many years ago.
There's a little bit in the book about every mother has the drawer full of baby clothes from the babies who died.
It's a secret drawer of sorrow and it's just horrible how people had to find a way to have kids and survive in that kind of situation.
And because they did that, you have the gifts that you have.
You have the gifts that you have.
Now, should you just use those gifts for your own immediate benefit, paying none of it forward?
I mean, I used to get, of course, my excitements on Twitter when I would sort of post to women that it might be slightly less selfish to have kids.
And, you know, some of the women would listen.
But a lot of the women were like, well, now I want a life of travel and education and yoga.
I guess that's nice.
But, of course, you only exist
To consume that stuff because your ancestors didn't consume that stuff.
So the better your life is, the more you owe it to the future to pay it forward by having kids.
And if your life is bad, maybe it's bad because you didn't have kids and you are lacking meaning and continuity.
For me, I just feel I see this big chain going back 4 billion years and
It would be entirely dishonorable to me.
Again, some people can and can't have kids, but if you can, it would be entirely dishonorable for me to not pay it forward.
So, yeah, how do you avoid the messianic complexes?
Well, you recognize that you're going to have a happier life and a more interesting life
Working to use your accidental gifts to benefit people as a whole, to benefit society and community as a whole.
Now, benefiting virtue does mean, of course, interfering with the interests of evildoers so you can, you know, theoretically expect some blowback in the future.
Could happen.
You never know.
Could happen.
Keep my eyes peeled.
So, yeah, that's my general idea of how to avoid the messianic complex.
You accidentally inherited some gifts.
It's a more proud and virtuous and happier life to use those gifts to benefit the world and yourself.
And those who greedily exploit everything they inherited for their own personal vanity are interfered with by the devil, who wants you to avoid pursuing virtue, and thus will give you the happiness of vanity, which is temporary and destructive.
He'll give you the happiness of vanity.
See, genuine virtue is win-win for all virtuous people, but vanity is win-lose for everyone who envies you.
You win, they lose.
And what you win is
Far less than what other people lose.
It's like a thief.
Like a thief might steal $1,000, but then everyone's kind of paranoid about getting stolen from, so they have to spend $10,000 on theft prevention measures, right?
So, the thief is winning far less than everyone else is losing, if that makes sense.
So, yeah, the devil will offer you the false happiness of vanity.
By telling you that the gifts are for you and you alone and he prevents you from getting to virtue and also by sort of posting I'm so pretty stuff on Instagram or whatever then what happens is other people feel unhappy because they're not as pretty or they're not as wealthy or whatever it is.
They feel unhappy because of that so then they genuinely believe
That the solution to their unhappiness is to get thinner, get prettier, get more money, get a Bugatti.
Whatever nonsense you want to talk about.
And so you lure them by inflicting unhappiness based on low status.
You give them the delusion that the way that you solve the unhappiness of low status is to become high status.
High status!
And that leads them to status and not to virtue.
Status is the dominance of one over another, and that leads them to want to dominate others as they feel dominated.
And in general, as we can see through this process, the world goes to hell.
But yeah, so that's why I've sort of written about relationships and love and happiness.
That's why I wrote UPB.
That's why I've talked about these universal virtues and values.
Why I did the Introduction to Philosophy series, which is to say that
Your gifts came from the world and therefore the world, but the world includes you.
So neither sacrifice nor selfishness is the order of the day.
And if we all try to use our gifts for the common betterment and virtue improvement of mankind, all but the evildoers, when and we and our lives and our futures get infinitely better.
Thank you so much.
Freedomman.com slash donate.
Great to see you guys again in the great outdoors.
Lots of love from up here.
Have yourself a wonderful day.
I'll talk to you soon.
Bye.
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