June 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:02
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| All right. | |
| How does modern brainwashing work on smart, educated people? | |
| So, brainwashing is a simple mechanism of punishment and reward. | |
| So, they say: if you say X, whatever outlandish and anti-rational and anti-empirical statement they're going to make, if you say X, you will be praised and rewarded. | |
| You know, you'll get your professorship, you'll be maybe in the media, your friends will praise and reward you and so on. | |
| So it's just kibbles, right? | |
| It's sticks and carrots. | |
| So if you say X, which is not true and absurd and obviously not true, then you will be praised and rewarded. | |
| If you oppose X or you don't affirm it, you will be punished. | |
| You will be deplatformed. | |
| You will be ostracized. | |
| Your friends won't like you. | |
| Your family might turn on you and so on, right? | |
| So that is how propaganda and brainwashing works. | |
| Smart educated people want to do well. | |
| Smart educated people can usually see further into the consequences of their choices. | |
| So what you do is you just say to people, well, we have money and status and power and jobs and resources, and we'll give them to you if you affirm this ridiculous, absurd thing. | |
| And if you don't affirm this ridiculous and absurd thing, we will F you up. | |
| Like we will, we will mess you up. | |
| You won't get the tenureship. | |
| You won't get the job. | |
| The girls won't date you. | |
| The women won't like you and your friends will turn on you. | |
| And, you know, we saw all of this in the political realm and we've seen it in the healthcare realm and so on, right? | |
| But smart educated people don't like to look in the mirror and say, well, I'm basically just like a rat in a maze avoiding the mousetrap and getting the cheese. | |
| I'm just bribed and threatened in order to hold the moral opinions, quote, moral opinions that I hold. | |
| They don't like to look in the mirror and say, I'm just a reward-seeking protoplasm bald biped, right? | |
| So they have to say, once you threaten people and reward people into saying absurd things, then they have to, almost like it's ex post facto rationalization, they have to say, well, I'm a good person, right? | |
| And they say I'm a good person foundationally rather than I have to earn being good through the consistent application and promotion of virtue. | |
| They say, well, I'm a good person. | |
| If I believe X, X must be good. | |
| Rather than I'm a person who's responding, as most animals do, to punishments and rewards. | |
| So I'll just say absurd things because I don't want to be punished and I like to be rewarded, as we all do, right? | |
| Which is why we need the discipline of virtue. | |
| I mean, if you ate like your tongue just wanted to, you would be unhealthy, right? | |
| Because what the tongue likes, often the body doesn't, and what the body likes, the tongue often doesn't, right? | |
| So if I were to say, well, I'm just going to follow eating whatever I like, and I'm going to call it healthy, nutritious food, I would be wrong. | |
| We need the discipline of nutrition because our tongue often motivates us to eat badly, right? | |
| Kids prefer candy to vegetables, obviously, right? | |
| So we need the discipline of virtue so that we can surmount the punishment-reward system that characterizes almost all of human history. | |
| And I mean, it's heaven and hell too, right? | |
| So educated people are subtly or sometimes not so subtly, and we all are, promised rewards if we affirm absurdity, threatened with punishments if we don't. | |
| And then when people take the route of affirming absurdities for the sake of avoiding punishment and achieving a reward, they don't want to look themselves in the mirror and say, well, that's what I'm doing. | |
| So what they do is they say, well, that must be the good, because I'm a good person, and if I believe that, that must be the good. |
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