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Nov. 29, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:02
A Lesson on Potential
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And hit me with a why if you've ever gone looking for comets or meteors, I guess, right?
Was it August 12th, this sort of meteor shower?
It's always a filthy lie in general.
Even if I go out to the country and spend half an hour letting my eyes adjust, which I've done sometimes with my daughter, because we kind of think that space is cool, and it is.
You ever gone meteor hunting?
Are the asteroids supposed to be raining down on you?
You ever done that?
Maybe you've had more luck than I have.
But I have not had much luck.
Put it mildly.
My daughter and I, though, went hiking in the night many years ago.
We did see a really bright flash.
That was a kind of come-and-go thing, right?
So you think of that, right?
You've got all that stored up energy that was converted to light when the meteor, which has been traveling around, maybe from other solar systems, right?
The meteor has been traveling around for billions of years, just nothing.
And then it turns into a blaze.
The energy, the matter is converted into energy.
The energy then hits your optic nerve and you go.
It goes into your memory.
Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey.
Look out on a summer's day with eyes that see the darkness in your soul.
It's a lovely song, Starry, Starry Night, by Don McLean.
I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.
I actually saw him at Ontario Place playing with three other people in the audience.
He did a Sam Cooke cover.
And, of course, American Pie.
I couldn't sleep in Europe and for some reason went here and came right to this speech.
If you
don't know what the future holds, which nobody does, because the future is a product of forces beyond unpredictable, predictability and consciousness, actually beyond our predictability because of free will.
If you, if you can't predict the future, you can't possibly predict your potential.
It is satanic vanity to think that you know your potential when most of what you are is utterly unknown to you and to me and you are a mortal mind trying to predict the potential of that which is as close to immortal or immortal as is possible to be.
It is an insult to your potential to think that you know what it is.
You don't.
The odds that I had the mind...
I mean, this is deep and a little vulnerable.
I hope you'll forgive me.
Perhaps it's self-indulgence.
Perhaps not.
So I've constantly had to wrestle with skepticism about my own potential.
The odds that I was going to be the one to solve the greatest problem in the world, honestly, which is the problem of secular ethics, the odds that I was going to be the person to solve it was so minuscule that it seemed like mad vanity to think I could.
The odds that I could be a great writer, a great communicator, a great philosopher, a great public speaker were so tiny that it seemed that I would be far more in accordance with the odds of the universe to not work but simply play the lottery to win a fortune.
I have constantly had to remind myself to be humble in the face of my own potential because it's not mine.
My potential is not mine.
Your potential is not yours.
It is the flash fire of a semi-random assemblage of universal parts with a sum total that cannot be encompassed within the human mind.
The emergent properties of your potential cannot be summarized.
I see all the argument, life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.
We have to live life forward, but we can only understand it backward.
It has been a constant wrestling with fear of my potential because society worships innocuous potential but savages moral potential.
If you are a tall, skinny, pretty girl with a pleasing voice who writes catchy songs, you get a billion dollars.
inconsequential Inconsequential, amusing, entertaining and distracting excellence is worshipped by the mob.
Oh, he is good at sports ball.
I will buy his baseball card.
Oh, he's good at morality.
I will fuck him up and flush his descendants down the toilet.
Excellence is permitted in all things save money and morality.
Excellence is worshipped in all things save money and morality.
Because excellence in morality reminds people that everyone they worship, they worship to distract themselves from virtue.
you.
Thank you.
Everyone they praise, they praise to distract themselves from virtue.
And back to numerology, they worship patterns so they don't have to enact virtue.
I mean, you remember the Q thing?
Q. Don't worry, Q's got it.
Jeff Sessions is doing this, that, and the other, but don't worry, because there's a plan.
Trust the plan.
Q, right?
I mean, I remember when I was out on the planet, Talking to the flesh people and looking at the big blue room.
When I was out on the planet, every time I'd go to give a speech, there'd be people who would kind of corner me and pants-weaty breath into my face about, Q, man, you've got to talk about Q. Q. Well, that was a made-up pattern, I'm sure, that came from some alphabet soup agency, but it's there to lull you into, hey, man, it's going to happen.
Virtue's just going to happen.
People have got it in hand.
You don't need to be good.
You don't need to take the risks.
You don't need to be virtuous.
You don't need to run your relationships.
According to virtue and the demands of virtue, Elon Musk was like, Oh, I haven't ostracized anyone who voted for Kamalala.
Her middle name should have been Toe.
But no, it's a pride, a point of pride, a point of pride.
Oh, you see, communists are perfectly welcome in my life.
Oh, yes, I have no problem with people who want to engage in mass slaughter and starvation.
Why would I have a problem with it?
I am open-minded, you see.
I am open-minded in the same way that someone committing seppuku is open-bellied.
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