All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 7, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:14
MY GREATEST BATTLE!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
Facebook questions, part two.
You can, of course. And with great humility and gratitude, I offer up freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
What are good techniques to introduce philosophy to people who've gone astray?
I grew up and live in a pretty leftist area, but there are also a lot of people on the far right who could use philosophy.
Virtually everyone I know is a statist that doesn't even know the definition of voluntarism, much less the underlying principles.
The problem I tend to encounter is that people on both sides tend to think that logic and reason that doesn't fit their programming must be on the opposite extreme relative to where they're at.
It seems like anything rational is often strongly opposed by at least one side and often both sides.
I was fortunate to be going through some stuff that required me to open my mind to new ideas in order to survive and or thrive.
Some would call it the gift of desperation.
How does one approach people who aren't even willing to have an open mind?
So, the answer is to recognize that there is but one realm of reason.
There is but one realm of reason.
There aren't different layers of metaphysical reality.
There isn't a higher realm where the reverse is true.
There isn't a nuomenal realm.
There isn't a nirvana.
There isn't a platonic realm of forms and ideas.
There is no place where the opposite of reason is reason.
Can you follow? There is no place in which the opposite of reason is reason.
There is no common or collective good wherein the opposite of morality is morality.
There is no place where the opposite of the good is the good.
There is no place where evil becomes virtue through metaphysical brainwashing tricks from Plato to Kant to the Hegelian world spirit.
Everybody wants to invent a realm where evil becomes good.
And they do that by appealing to fear and greed and tribalism, of course.
So they say, well, without evil, good cannot survive.
Without people coercively taking your property, your property cannot be protected.
Without people brutally indoctrinating and destroying the souls and consciences of your children, children cannot be educated.
The roads!
Whatever. People who want to rule over you.
We'll find what you want the most.
Your greatest desire, which is to say your greatest vulnerability.
Your greatest desire is a beautiful thing in a loving relationship and it is a suicidal admission in a destructive relationship, in a sociopathic exploitive relationship.
So people who want to rule over you will find your greatest desire Your greatest goal, your most morally sensitive area, and then they will say, if you don't give power to us, your greatest moral goal will never be achieved.
In fact, the exact opposite will be achieved.
If you don't want the world to burn and drown, sort of an interesting combo, right?
If you don't want the world to burn and drown, you need to give hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars to us.
If you want your property to be protected, everything that you have gathered together through hard-won labor, if you want your property to be protected, then you need to surrender your rights to us.
If you want children to be educated, then you have to hand your children over to us.
If you want people who are ill to get healthcare, you need to hand over money and medical autonomy to us.
And they just kind of paint you into a corner.
They fence you in. They put you on a train track that leads only to subjugation to them.
If you want poor people to be helped, then you need to surrender your property to us.
Now, the people in power do not care about the poor.
They do not care about the sick. They do not care about the old.
They do not care about educating children.
They certainly don't care about protecting your property as a whole.
They care about power.
Now, they know that you care about helping the sick, the old, the poor, the sad, the vulnerable.
The unprotected, they know you care about that, so they'll dangle that in front of you in order to get your property and your obedience.
I mean, you go and dig up some worms, you put them on a hook, and you put your fish hook in the water.
And the fish thinks, mmm, free food!
Yum, yum, yum! And that's the whole thing, right?
You put your little piece of cheese in the mousetrap, and the mouse thinks, free cheese!
So, it's all just bait for control, as a whole.
So, if people sort of understand that there is no place Where evil becomes good.
It's just a logical contradiction.
Violations of property cannot protect your property.
The initiation of the use of force is immoral and cannot lead to virtue.
And all we do is bounce from one coercive solution to another, like mad blood-soaked
pinballs in an infinite arcade from hell.
So philosophy is not so much invention as it is extension.
Which sounds like a bit of a fortune cookie, but actually is pretty important and profound.
So what were you told as a little, little kid?
You were told, don't lie, don't hit, don't grab.
Don't lie, don't hit, don't grab.
Don't lie, don't hit, don't grab.
That's what you were told. Over and over.
Repeatedly. Objectively.
Universally. Not on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Not in the morning. Not when it's cloudy.
Not at night.
Not when you have a headache.
Right? Don't lie.
Don't hit. Don't steal.
Okay? Don't lie is keep your contracts.
Don't hit is don't initiate the use of force.
Don't steal is respect persons and property.
Keep your contracts is civil law.
Don't use force.
Don't steal is criminal law.
It's really not very complicated, is it?
Complications are used to hide corruption.
And so, it is a really bone-chilling thing for people to think and to realize and to understand that the moral rules they were given as children are all that is needed to run society.
Kindergarten morality is morality.
Now, justifying it, explaining it, the history of it, I mean, these things can be more complicated, although I will certainly say that at about two and a half, my daughter fully understood UPB because it's just logical and makes sense.
It's my rational theory of secular ethics.
It's a proof. It's more than a theory by now.
So that can be a little bit more complicated, but we were told, keep your word, don't hit, don't take.
And it is really kind of bone-chilling for people to think that everything after that in society is all about justifying
the opposite.
So government schools are generally funded by property taxes.
Property taxes are an infinite rent on your property that means you never own it.
You simply rent it from the powers that be for 2% a year.
So the teachers who were telling you, don't use force, don't take other people's property,
are violating it in the entirety of the educational system as it currently stands, at least under
the aegis of the powers that be.
There was in the ancient world a contradiction between the local and the remote.
I mean, throughout most of cosmology up until the Copernican era, There was the local, and then there was the remote.
You take a ball, you drop it, it bounces.
Here's a ping pong ball. You take a ball, you drop it, it bounces.
And that physics is true for a ping pong ball.
It is true for you, although with, I guess, less bouncing, unless you're a gymnast.
It is true for the Earth.
It is true for the Moon. It is true for the solar system.
It is true for the galaxy.
It is true everywhere and forever and always.
Amen. There's a reason why they can send a probe past Jupiter, past Pluto.
It's because the moral rules, sorry, the physical rules of the bouncing ping-pong
ball are the same all over the universe.
Everything falls.
The combination of gravity wells and centrifugal force creates stable orbits if such orbits can be maintained.
It's true everywhere, forever, and always.
Not in the morning, not at night, not on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, not when the moon is full, but always and forever.
The speed of light is constant.
The inverse square law is valid.
Gases expand when heated, always and forever, no matter what.
That atoms are the same all throughout the universe, and morals are the same all throughout society.
I used to refer to this as, people want a utopia.
A wonderful place.
Thomas More wrote about it.
A utopia, right? A perfect society.
And I say, well, you have a utopia called Y-O-U. U-topia.
I've never talked to anyone in the realm of philosophy, and if I say, if you're short on money, will you just go rob a convenience store?
And they would say, nobody's ever said, well, yeah, totally.
I don't move in those circles, right?
People are short of money, they say, well, I'll borrow, I'll beg, I'll work, I'll get it through some voluntary fashion.
So, that's how people live.
People do not shake guns in each other's faces, at least the people you're probably talking to.
There's certainly the 1% of violent people in the world, maybe 1%, maybe 2%.
But the people that I talk to, the people that you talk to, would never dream of using violence to get their way.
Ah, you see?
Utopia. Why are you?
Utopia. You reject theft and force and fraud in your life.
And that's it. The ball bounces for you.
Gravity works everywhere.
So it is simply extending the ethics that everyone takes for granted to universals.
Now that freaks people out.
But that's moral progress.
Moral progress is the extension of personally viable ethics to more and more and more people.
The end of slavery was the extension of the ethics of self-ownership to formerly excluded sections of the population, sometimes very large sections of the population, the extension to women of the rights of contract property and protection.
The process which I've been working on for 40 years of the extension of the moral rights of independence and protection, as much as is possible, to children.
We can hit adults.
We cannot hit adults.
We cannot hit children.
So, morality does not need to be invented because we already accept it in our lives.
We don't use force. We don't use fraud.
We don't steal in our personal lives.
And it is simply the basic and elemental recognition that what is moral for you, what you accept as moral, the way you live as moral, is the moral.
Keep your word. Don't use violence.
Don't steal. We all accept it And it is simply a matter of getting people to slowly, slowly undo all of the tortuous mental gymnastics that they have to go through to end up justifying that which is personally evil to them to be somehow moral for others.
We are not telling people anything new.
We are not inventing morality.
We are justifying and extending it any more than Copernicus or Tycho Brahe or Galileo invented gravity.
Did not invent gravity.
Simply identify it and extend it.
Everybody accepts gravity and we're saying it goes on and on forever.
It's valid everywhere. So, the way that you talk to people is to say, well, what do you accept as the good?
And forget about the justifications.
What do you accept as the good? Well, if you sign a contract, should you keep it?
Well, yes. Otherwise, it's a kind of fraud.
Okay, so you shouldn't defraud.
Shouldn't lie to people for material gain.
Okay. What about hitting?
When you were a kid and some kid was annoying you, could you punch him in the face and break his glasses?
Well, no. Okay. All right.
Accept that. Okay, let's say some other kid has a toy that you like.
Can you just grab it and go home?
Can you grab and steal that?
No? Okay, so that's all the complicated justifications.
Who cares, right? Those are the morals that we accept.
Those are the morals you teach your children.
Those are the morals you live by in your daily life.
Okay. The ball bounces for you because of gravity.
A kite stays up in the air because of the tension between the pull-down from the string and the push-up from the wind.
We accept all of that.
Planes fly because of the different surface areas top and bottom of the wing.
Okay? It's true everywhere.
No tennis player Matthew Perry was a pretty good tennis player in Canada, but Canada, in general, you don't get to play tennis, certainly not outdoors.
I certainly don't get to play tennis all year.
So, he moved to L.A., and he tried to become a tennis player in the Sunshine State, and he flamed out, because the other tennis players had had year-round outdoor tennis practice, and he had not.
But what he didn't do when he went To Los Angeles, as you didn't say, what's the gravity like here?
And do they have a different system of scoring and are the tennis courts a different size?
No. The man-made conventions were the same.
The size of the tennis courts and the rules of tennis were the same.
And the physics were the same.
Right? Airline pilots, when crossing in the airspace from one country to another, do not need to adjust their instruments because the physics are different.
Nope. Universal.
Accepting that is progress.
But it's incredibly painful for people to say the morals they were taught as children are the universal morals that apply to everyone.
It's incredibly painful because they realize how much they've been lied to and exploited.
The problem we have is not a rational one, it's an emotional one, which is why I talk so much about feelings and the unconscious and so on.
The barrier to virtue is not rational.
It is emotional.
It is very hard.
It's easier to fool someone than to convince him that he's been fooled.
Alright, let's see here.
It's a theological question.
I don't really... I have a good answer to that.
I'm no theologian.
Hi, Stefan. Number one, during your life of philosophical inquiry, what would the top, say, six insights that were most meaningful to you, that teleported you ahead in life, and that you're willing to share?
Gems of knowledge do have this power.
I wouldn't necessarily say six insights.
So... For me, it was the confrontation.
I was going to give you the top one, which I think encompasses many of the others.
But the top one was the confrontation with the angry, manipulative will that wishes to falsify and misrepresent for profit.
The camouflage, shape-shifting, predatory manipulator within me.
Confronting that. It is taking down a mythical beast of almost universal dimension and terror.
That confrontation with the black beast of camouflage and falsehood that characterizes those of us who have great language skills, great communication skills, the dark side beckons.
When you're good, With language.
Your first temptation is to use language for profit.
To use words.
To lie.
To misrepresent.
To falsify. To defraud.
To manipulate. Language was largely invented as a method of extracting resources for those rich in mind and weak in body.
Somebody who was really good at telling stories would get tips for telling stories at the end of a long day and then at some point figured out that if he invented various morals and gods and devils that he could use His stories to make far more money through mythology, and I don't just mean theological mythology, I mean lying to people about the common good and the propping up of political and military leaders through pomp, circumstance,
mythology, collectivism, and lies, that lies were more profitable than the truth.
When someone does something funny on a hunting expedition and you tell that story, people will laugh and tip you.
On the other hand, political leaders will give you a lot of money if you prop up the legitimacy of their rule.
And people will pay to avoid hell.
And so, language...
It's far more profitable in falsehood than it is in truth.
And my abilities with language are very strong.
And realizing that I could talk people into and out of just about anything, had a black
beast arise in my heart that wished to strike out and make my fortune through falsehood.
And making the decision to face down this shape-shifting, brain-dissolving,
will-eroding in others' beast and not use language to extract subjugation and resources from others.
Well, that was a black time in my life.
Not wishing to go the route of so many that I had seen before me and most of whom I saw around me who used language to manipulate.
Particularly, I happened to be raised among a group of linguistically very skilled people and very smart people.
And their first use of language was to get women into bed, was to talk their way into jobs, was to make people afraid, FOMO, to generate fear of missing out, to get people to lower inhibitions with, you only live once, and these kinds of exhortations, the salespeople and sophists
and manipulators of every stripe, spot and hue, and taming that beast with the whips and
swords and mental airstrikes of reason and evidence.
Tame that beast to the service of virtue.
Tame that mofo to the service of virtue.
Oh, man. Oh, that was brutal.
Because the angry will wishes to hoover up resources through language skills.
And to tame a beast invented for war to the cause of peace.
To tame the beast of language intended for the cause of exploitation to the service of virtue.
Oh, God, that was hard!
That was hard because the temptation would make my hands shake.
The temptation would make my hands shake.
Imagine what I could do if I just let rip with my language powers and my charisma and my reasoning skills and my confidence.
Imagine what I could do if I stepped fully into the Bladed, shiny, bloody armor of endless sophistry, and used the whips of my words to herd a population.
Always thirsty for a ruler.
Oof! In my own small way, I really understood the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the desert when the devil came to him, laid before him all the kingdoms of the world, and said, All this can be yours.
You just have to follow me.
The devil is a sophist.
The devil uses language, temptation, not force.
Not force. The devil will offer you material benefits in return to your soul, which is use sophistry to control people rather than.
Use the power of reason and language to serve and enhance the conscience that you possess and to serve and enhance the conscience that others possess throughout the world.
We all have the swords called words.
We all have the weapon called a tongue.
We all have the power of language, which can create the greatest goods and the greatest hells in the world.
So for me, when I came across The return fire of philosophy because I was pinned down and being eaten alive by this beast, by this sophist, by the exploitation potential of language and my abilities.
I was being eaten alive.
I was being led astray.
I was being dragged down into darkness.
I was losing the fight in the desert.
I was bowing down before the black beast of linguistic exploitation.
Because it had been used on me and I saw no alternative, and so I was being consumed by that beast, and I almost had to fight from its gumline, from its throat.
And when I came across philosophy, ah, the great goddess, who hands you weapons to fight back the beast of exploitation, ooh, man!
The sword came to my hand and glowed with the light of a thousand suns, and I stood And I flexed and I fought.
And the battle was not a quick one, and vestigial flickers of the battle still flame within my heart from time to time, though it has been forty years of relative victories.
But taking on that beast, the witch-doctor, the magic-user, the sophist, the one ring, That binds others through persuasion and language.
The ring in Lord of the Rings is sophistry.
It has no direct power, but it uses emotions to convince.
To stand tall against the devouring beast of sophistry is the job of a true philosopher.
And when I tamed that beast within me, when I liberated the beast within me from its own worst instincts and was able to harness and serve it to, not a wolf that devours children, but a sheepdog that protects the livelihood of mankind, ah, to tame the beast.
And turn it to virtue. The beast within.
The beast we all have to face.
The beast of lying.
The beast of pettiness. The beast of using language to be justified at the expense of everyone else.
The beast of using fear and people's desire for good and avoidance of the evil to turn them to the avoidance of good and the embrace of evil.
Ah, that was an epic battle.
That was an epic battle.
Still some vague aftershocks.
Because the beast within me that has been tamed to the pursuit of virtue still hears the howl of the beasts.
All over the world, all calling to each other, join us.
We are winning. We have power.
Reason. Must be fragmented for us to maintain power, and these beasts are constantly calling to each other across the world.
The howls and yips of the coyotes and the wolves and the lions and the roars echo across the dim forests of our unconscious, and they're all reaching out for each other, and they're all trying to gather together, and they're all looking.
To woodchip are the best hopes of mankind.
Because those who are powerless in the face of their own beasts must end up inevitably thirsting for endless power over others.
And the beast wants to kill, in many ways, spiritually, emotionally, all who fall for its siren song.
All who nod and follow and bow and are consumed end up as arms on the beast, To rake and claw and strip down the independence, rational thought and critical thinking skills of all those who stand against it.
And the beast has come for me.
And the beast is coming for you.
And you have to tame the beast within yourself.
When someone shows a flash of fear of what you do to comfort them rather than double down.
you When someone lies, do you correct them, though that correction brings other beasts.
At your door, clawing, biting, scratching, tunneling, burrowing.
So the biggest insight I had was to tame language and its capacity to exploit and turn it to
the pursuit of virtue to clarify.
To accept that that which is claimed to be universal is in fact universal.
That that which is claimed to be the good for one is in fact the good for all.
That. That.
It's the biggest insight.
That language, through sketchy definitions, has the power to pick the pockets of the dead and to steal the souls of the unborn.
I mean, just look at the national debt.
The national debt is using language to hide the theft from the unborn.
And this is where conservatives, to me, have so little credibility, because they say we must protect the unborn from the abortioners' cudgel.
And I understand that, and I appreciate that.
But why would you want to protect the unborn only to have them born into debt slavery to foreign banksters?
We must preserve the life of the unborn so we can have them born into debt slavery.
It does not seem to me the final and most elevated conception of the rights of the unborn.
The rights of the unborn should, without a doubt, be to be born without their lives stolen from them by prior sophistry and the covering up of crimes.
One small example.
And I do believe that we all have that beast within us.
And I do believe that we all, especially if you're listening to this kind of show and have an appreciation for the flourishes and gymnastics of scintillating language, well, you have that beast and that beast is calling for you to use your power, to use your power of language for the covering up and justification of endless crimes.
And I say, use your language to turn the light on so that people can see the bloody fists in the velvet gloves of social compulsion so that the crimes are uncovered.
The truth is seen.
Virtue is clear. And through using language to clarify rather than to cannibalize We give people through clear definitions the possibility of actual choice and true free will for the first time in human history,
▲
Export Selection