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Aug. 4, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:23
Why the Boomers are Boomers
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So to understand the boomers, it's important to understand the nihilism and then the hedonism that comes from a catastrophic fall from moral grace.
Because the modern world is largely a technocratic semi-dictatorship hanging on to vestigial freedoms by the skin of its teeth, it's hard to remember or it's hard to understand, not to remember, it's hard to understand the wild and not unjustified optimism that the West was experiencing from the 18th to the early 20th century.
It's almost impossible for us to comprehend what was going on there.
So I'm going to tell you a little bit about all of this.
I've done quite a lot of work on 19th century, 18th century history.
So I'll try to keep it non-technical, of course, right?
I'm going to keep it digestible and hopefully a smidge entertaining.
But it is really important to know what was taken from us.
So, you know, almost all of human history was wretched, you know, tooth problems and illnesses that couldn't be cured until the late 19th century.
You were safer not going to a doctor than going to a doctor.
Dentists only had pliers and that was about it.
And people had ailments and allergies and illnesses that they could do almost nothing about, no antibiotics.
One simple cut could get you infected and you could die, you know, relatively easily.
Children died all over the place in childbirth and people regularly went through wars, famines, plagues, pestilences of just about every kind.
And it was uncomfortable.
It was wretched.
You know, the sort of mind-body dichotomy where the mind and the soul are yearning to break free from the prison of the failing flesh, well, that occurred.
I mean, no glasses.
You get older and you can't see very well and there are no glasses.
Like even things as simple as that.
You know, soap was rare throughout most of human history.
Bathing was rare throughout most of human history.
People had constant skin infections and, you know, you'd get your cysts that would get infected and would erupt and painful.
And then you could get infection from that.
I mean, honestly, just certainly by modern standards, this is why it's kind of tough to hear people complain about the modern world.
While I understand it, and of course, I will share in it from time to time, for the most part, it's almost infinitely better than it was.
Now, starting in the 17th, 18th centuries, there was an advancement in property rights and land ownership to the point where the most productive people started to be able to buy the most productive land.
Or if it wasn't very productive, you know, there are some people who just have these weird skills, right?
They just have these weird skills.
And it's almost impossible to replicate.
It is hard to comprehend.
Even the artists themselves who have like these weird skills don't know how it occurs, right?
You listen to Roger Hodgson from Supertramp talk about writing the super, the suit, the logical song.
And he's like, I don't know where that came from.
It just kind of popped in.
And, you know, Paul McCartney dreamed the lyrics, sorry, the tune to yesterday.
And Bob Dylan is like, I don't know where that came from.
I can't do it anymore.
Like his early hits.
Artists and Socrates pointed this out when he went to the artists to try and find wisdom.
He realized they didn't really have any wisdom.
They just had a kind of peculiar talent for language and dialogue sometimes in poetry that even they didn't understand, right?
So, you know, the ability to write songs, the ability to, you know, there's the green thumb in gardening, there's the dollar thumb in a business where some people just have a kind of midas touch when it comes to business.
So PayPal Mafia and so on, just amazing.
And even the people themselves don't really quite understand how this works.
And so a talent had been kept from control of resources for almost all of human history, either through nobility, aristocracy, through slavery, and so on, and no particular free market in land.
And so the modern world is birthed from the fact that the most talented now have access to the most resources.
I mean, think of someone, you're all going to a casino, and, you know, on average, you're going to lose, right?
The casinos exist because people lose, right?
So then imagine that you have someone who wins 90% of the time.
Well, what you would all do is you would all pool your money and give it to that guy so that he could give you a fortune back.
In other words, you would take your capital and you would give it to the guy with the most talent for winning.
I mean, people do this in sports betting all the time, right?
They figure out, they try to figure out who's the most talented, who's most likely to win, and then they bet on that.
And the odds, certainly in horse riding and most betting, the odds are based upon what other people think is the most likely for someone to win.
So the best singer in the band usually gets the microphone, right?
And the best drummer in the band gets the drums.
What is that great line?
I don't know if it's true or not, but somebody asked one of the Beatles if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world.
They said he's not even the best drummer in the Beatles.
You give the most resources to the most talented, right?
If you look at an NBA contract as a resource, well, you give the NBA contract to the player who is the most talented.
And the movie Moneyball, where they say, you know, there's data out there that can really help us make these decisions rather than just trusting on our gut.
And so in the 18th, 19th century, it's kind of called the enclosure movement.
The most talented farmers were able to get a hold of the most farmland because there was finally somewhat of an increase in the free market in farmland.
Now, and so the people who have historically gotten their farmland and divvied it up into like stained glass little divots and corners and twisty bits of land, which was almost impossible to plow efficiently and so on.
I mean, they were kicked off their land, their ancestral hereditary, tied to it like livestock surf land.
They were kicked off.
And that was very tough, of course.
But because the land passed into the hands of the most talented agriculturalists, and there was a huge, I write about this in my novel, Just Poor, like there was a huge post-printing press, there was a huge movement to share agricultural information.
There was a guy named Turnip Townsend who was really keen on a winter crop like turnip, right?
So you got better use of manure, you got better plowing situations with more rational land division, and you got winter crops like turnips, you got just better crop rotation, like just a wild ability.
And if you've ever been around one of these productive people, like these mega-productive people, it's wild.
It is like a force of nature, right?
They call these engineers like the 10X or the 20X people.
And this is why they end up making so much money, if there's any justice in their pay scale at all.
There are some people who are just going to crank out and grind out reusable bulletproof code with great error handling.
And they're going to think about, well, what happens if the disc fails halfway through the operation?
And they're going to figure that out and all this kind of stuff, right?
So you're going to get all of these people who just have incredible productivity.
It's why in a meritocracy, the Pareto principle, like 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people because just this wild productivity thing that goes on.
A comedian's the same thing, right?
Lots of people try their hand at comedy.
Lord knows I did.
And as a comedian, I make a good philosopher, so to speak.
So that's the way of the world.
There's no way around it.
And everyone gets resentful at the wealth generated by the crazy productivity people.
And then they want to rope them in and take resources away from them.
And then everybody ends up poor.
Some people are great at creating jobs.
Most people are not great at creating jobs.
You know, I've probably created 80 to 100 jobs over the course of my business career.
And, you know, that's not terrible.
But, you know, there are people out there who create tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs.
And they're way better at it than I am.
So the stranglehold that starvation had on the human community was broken in, I mean, really depends how you count it, late Middle Ages, definitely 18th, 17th, 18th century.
And you had productivity increases per acre or per farm of 5 to 10 to 15 times or more.
5 to 10 to 15 times or more, not percent times.
So that's staggering.
That is staggering.
So you had excess food produced at the same time as you had people being kicked off their ancestral lands, which meant that cities could grow.
And the beginning of capitalism was the end of slavery and the end of serfdom.
And I've talked about that before, so I won't get too much into it now.
I'm sure you've heard these arguments from me a bunch of times.
So what happened was in the mid to late 18th, throughout the 19th century, into the early 20th century, the stranglehold of starvation, want, and war and pestilence was lifted to a large degree.
Again, obviously, there were still hungry people.
There were still wars.
There was the Franco-Prussian War, I think, 1871.
But from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the start of the First World War in 1914, you had in Western Europe a century of relative peace, of relative, massive increases in prosperity, and so on.
Massive increases in engineering, advancements in science, in medicine, in astronomy, physics, biology.
This was the century, of course, 19th century produced the theory of evolution by Darwin.
And the progress in the West was staggering.
And it was the age of reason.
It was the age of science.
It was the age of progress.
And, you know, one of the big problems was that Europeans, both through imperialism and Christian charity, tried to spread these ideas and these opportunities across the world, which was a bad idea as a whole.
But the progress was staggering.
It was sunlight finally getting through the clouds of endless human horrors and degradations.
And the optimism was largely incomprehensible to us.
I mean, it was the age of reason.
It was the age of muscular Christianity.
It was the age of the white man's burden.
It was the age of plenty.
Now, the 20th century was by almost no one, with a few exceptions, Nietzsche being one.
The 20th century was predicted by almost no one.
There appeared to be no particular limit on our capacity for progress.
And of course, you look at early science fiction writers and so on, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and so on, and they predicted a Star Trek-style future of peace and reason and plenty.
We are a long way divorced from that, right?
111 years since the First World War started.
And the First World War was a deep seismic shock to the optimism of the 19th century.
Now, of course, one of the things that happens is when you get peace and plenty, right?
You had a free market, the likes of which we can scarcely conceive of.
We had taxes that were virtually non-existent by modern standards.
We have freedom of speech, absent, of course, when Lincoln Lincoln muscled the newspapers and imprisoned journalists.
But we had, certainly in America, I mean, we, right, America had incredible freedom, incredible progress.
Shining cities were built.
Rails were built.
The beginnings of flight were built.
Steam engines, internal combustion engine.
I mean, it's just amazing, amazing.
I finally figured out that blood circulates through the body, pumped by the heart.
So the First World War was a shock.
And what happens, of course, I'm sure you've known this, and I've done this myself too.
Like I'm losing weight and I'm like, oh, I've lost five pounds.
I guess I can relax a little.
And I think you really can't because you got to just keep going until you get to your set weight and then just stay with those habits, right?
Or, you know, I'll not eat sugar, right?
Oh, I shouldn't eat sugar.
Shouldn't I go to the dentist and it's like, wow, your teeth are really clean.
Oh, maybe I can have a little sugar.
You know, like you get lazy or you get inattentive when you have success.
And after 100 years without major wars in Western Europe, the young men were eager for war because they'd read the tales of it in the past.
And, you know, the war started and everyone was like rushing to sign up because, boy, they were just terrified it'd be over by Christmas and they'd miss out on the great adventure.
And war had been transmitted through paintings and language and books, right, rather than vivid lived experience.
So it's hard to understand what the First World War did to the West.
Supposed to be a localized minor conflict over in a month or two, or three maybe.
And it turned into a four-plus year appalling slug fest, which destroyed the currencies and the 19th century economies of the West, 10 million dead, millions of millions more wounded, both physically and psychologically.
The term shell shock came into being because war had lasted for so long and under such helpless conditions that people were driven mad.
They were insane.
They were driven insane by the war.
You have the rise of feminism because there are so few men left that women need to turn to the government, demand the right to vote.
And, of course, it was followed by the appalling Treaty of Versailles.
It was followed by a crazy stock market bubble.
It was followed by a 14-year Great Depression with 25 plus percent unemployment.
And then it was followed by the Second World War, which multiplied the horrors of the First World War, already horrifying enough, almost to infinity.
And then the Second World War culminated in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then the betrayal by the Rosenbergs of the nuclear secrets of the Soviet Union, followed by the Soviet Union under communism, which had spread across a third of the world, the Soviet Union threatening the Cold War, and everything was turning to absolute shit.
Communism had absorbed the Soviet Union very quickly after the Second World War.
It absorbed China.
Of course, it hit North Vietnam, North Korea.
It hit Cambodia.
It hit Cuba, other places.
And as the saying goes, the only during during a time of extreme war, the only expediency that the Western powers failed to enact was cannibalism, and that's only because it was of doubtful utility.
And what happened was in the endless horrors of the 20th century, a quarter of a billion people murdered by their own governments outside of war.
You know, 90 to 100 million people slaughtered by communism, 60, 50, 60 million people slaughtered in the two world wars.
The rise of taxation, the destruction of the remnants of meritocracy and the free market, and the wild optimism, which for the first time in human history overtook the human mind, the wild optimism of the 18th and 19th centuries was destroyed by the middle of the 20th century, like utterly destroyed.
And boomers grew up being, you know, often trained by our communists in the government educational system.
I mean, the West really died in the 19th century when the government took over the education of the young, right?
As the old saying goes, if you send your child to Caesar, don't be surprised if he comes back a Roman.
And if you send your children to be educated by government, don't be shocked when they come back super pro-government.
So the boomers grew up in the shocked, eviscerated, disemboweled seppuku nihilism of the middle of the 20th century.
And I mean, there's a reason why people began to leave the church in significant numbers.
And of course, part of it was propaganda.
But see, propaganda has to have some ring of truth.
It has to have something that seems compelling to people.
Like, you couldn't start a propaganda campaign about slavery as good these days, right?
Because there's no virtue in slavery.
It's evil.
And people accept that.
And so, you know, there has to be a kernel of truth for propaganda to work, or at least paneer of credibility.
You know, you might think that somebody is not overweight if they're a little overweight and suck their stomach in, but you'll never think that a 300-pound person is not overweight if they suck their stomach in, right?
So by the middle of the 20th century, as the greatest generation, as they were called, were raising the boomers, there was a dull, eviscerated, horrified shock at the helplessness of people.
How could it have gotten so bad?
How could the world have gone from, the Western world in particular, gone from optimism to just endless, endless horrors?
How could all the wealth that was generated through the sacrifices and suffering of the 19th century was destroyed almost to the last dollar in the First World War?
So what was the point of all of that?
And helplessness is the worst thing when it comes to optimism.
And I remember, you know, when I was watching the movie Threads, which was, you know, some pretty hygien propaganda from the communists, but I was watching the movie Threads, I was like, I felt helpless.
I could do anything they want.
People on the other side of the world can push a button and destroy all life on earth.
And I'm helpless.
And that's, of course, in the First World War, there was this helplessness.
Someone just pushes a button a mile away and you get blown up.
A skill doesn't matter.
It's just luck.
And virtue requires the ability to affect an outcome.
And helplessness breeds nihilism and hedonism.
So after looking at, you know, 1914, let's say to 1950, after China was lost to communism, after that, well, people said in their heart of hearts, so this is the end result.
This is the end product of almost 2,000 years of Christianity, Greco-Roman virtues.
The end result has been this.
And people fell away from the church because the church had been unable to stop the horrors of the 20th century or identify that they were coming.
Although, again, there were some who did, but it wasn't enough of a movement.
And people felt helpless.
Personal disasters don't usually breed nihilism because there's almost always something you can do.
But universal disasters demoralize everyone.
And by demoralize, it doesn't just mean that they feel hopeless and sad.
It means that they lose their sense of the efficacy of virtue.
It's like a poem I wrote when I was a teenager.
It's not the best poem in the world, but it encapsulates a lot of what I mean by this.
Two men in a wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
Virtue did not save you in the trenches.
I mean, in former conflicts, like let's say some sort of medieval sword fight conflict, then, you know, courage and skill and like all of that, and it could save you.
But again, First World War, somebody pushes a button or you're ordered to go into machine gun fire.
It doesn't matter how much you've trained.
It doesn't matter how good you are with a weapon.
You're just going to get blown up or gunned down.
So all of that vanished.
All of that sense of virtue and its products just vanished.
And of course, it is a sort of real, big, deep and important question, which is how did things get so bad after, you know, 5,000 years of the philosophical and religious moral mission to improve the lot of mankind, how did we end up taking the general technology developed in the free market and using it to slaughter humanity by the hundreds of millions.
And this foundational question has remained unanswered for the most part.
How do we combat evil?
And the combating of evil has in general throughout human history been a violence, that we identify the evildoers and we use censorship, ostracism, violence, sort of you name it, to make, to take them out from society, right?
That's the general, that's the general plan, the general idea.
And it hasn't worked, right?
It hasn't worked.
And in general, the identification of evil has failed and the combating of evil has failed.
And since the purpose of moral philosophy is to identify and diminish evil, I suggest identify and diminish evil, the giant project has failed.
And the failure of a central paradigm of human life, that morality has the power to identify and diminish evil, that failure has been catastrophic for the West.
The West has had at its core a moral mission for at least 2,500 years.
You could sort of say from Socrates onwards.
It's had a moral mission to reject falsehood, to promote virtue, to fight corruption and evil to diminish the power of malevolence, lies, backstabbing, violence, and so on.
So there's been this great plan that religion and philosophy have put forward.
And the great plan is virtue will lead to a better world.
Now, of course, in Christianity, that better world is very often in the afterlife.
And Christianity is very mixed in its optimism about virtue.
Right?
So there are some Christians who, of course, fulfill the Ten Commandments, fight evil, do good.
And these are, you know, the very noble Christians who ended the world by practice of slavery to a large degree in the 19th century, basically.
Again, one of the great progresses of humanity.
So some Christians definitely take Christianity and try to and successfully try to apply Christian morals to the world in the hope, not of creating heaven on earth, but in the hope of creating a better world.
And the Christian belief that all the world could be the West was a foundational error, but given the lack of knowledge of modern science, it's sort of understandable.
So Christianity both ended slavery and then enslaved, in many ways, the Western man to the global improvement of the planet as a whole, which was a catastrophic failure.
I mean, honestly, it's worse than a failure.
So on the other hand, there are Christians who say that this is a veil of tears, that Satan runs the world, that you cannot win against evil because human nature is so fallen and so corrupt that the best you can do is stave off evil a little bit, but it's going to win in the end.
And the only salvation is going to come when Christ returns, brings the dead back to life, judges everyone, and takes the remainder of the planet, the remainder of the moral planet, to heaven.
And this is sort of the end times, eschatology Christianity.
This is the Christianity that I wouldn't even say despairs.
It just has based upon the principle that human nature is irredeemably corrupt because of the fall of Adam and Eve and the fall, the original sin.
Human nature is so corrupt that we have no chance or capacity to create a moral world.
And the best we can do is fight off evil in our own hearts.
It's going to win in the world.
This life is a trial and a trail of tears and evil rules and so on, right?
I mean, that is.
And so the former Christianity, which is we can make the world a substantially better place through the application of dedicated morals, which did seem to be doing a hell of a lot of good and was in fact doing a hell of a lot of good in the 19th century, that all collapsed in the first half of the 20th century.
And it's just, it's impossible to really conceive of just how disastrous the years from 1914 to 1945 were.
Like I wrote a whole, in a sense, three-volume novel about this called Almost, which is a German family and a British family from 1914 to 1940.
Now, the compression of these disasters from 1914 to 1940, which is a shockingly short period of time, right?
It's 26 years.
It was a shockingly short period of time for all of the optimism of the 18th and 19th century to be utterly shredded and destroyed beyond recovery.
Now, this is where the boomers were born into, which was an absolutely catastrophic collapse of moral optimism and a genuine and deep sense that virtue was powerless.
Christianity was powerless to achieve and maintain the good.
Reason was helpless and powerless to achieve and maintain the good.
That morality was pointless.
morality was a fool's game.
Morality was...
Thank you.
It collapsed earlier, but its sort of final was in the 1940s.
The 2,500-year moral journey of the West to rely on faith, Christianity, and reason to diminish evil and promote good had utterly failed and collapsed.
Now, when morality is viewed as a sucker's game, as a fool's game, and morality has no power over evil, and evil has great power over the good, and we can sort of see this happening, right?
This is a woke culture is corrupt people enacting power over good people through their very virtues, right?
Harnessing their virtues for fairness and equality and so on, and then using it to serve corruption.
So when virtue is helpless and morality and reason can do nothing against the predations and all-powerful nature of evil, that evil can start wars, evil can run concentration camps, it can throw people in gulags.
Evil, if you look at sort of what the Russian army did to the West towards the end after the Second World War, it was a complete, violent, corrupt, you know, sorry, say complete, for the most part, to a large degree, just a massive rape fest through the population, where in particular, German women from the ages of eight to eighty were raped with pretty much wanton abandon repeatedly.
So, which I'm obviously certain happened to my mother based upon hints that she passed over the years, so it's pretty personal to me for what that's worth.
Evil had proven itself triumphant, and nobody knew how to fix it.
Nobody knew how to stop it.
Nobody knew how to deal with it.
How do you fight evil?
How do you fight evil?
Well, you had Christian nations.
I mean, not Russia, of course, it was under communism by then.
But in Western Europe, you had Christian nations who had turned to psychotic levels of wholesale slaughter of tens of millions against each other.
Where was God?
Where was Christ?
Where was Christianity?
Where was virtue?
Virtue couldn't prevent you from being drafted and sent to die with very little power and control, if any, over what happened to you in battle.
You just, you get strafed from above.
A bomb gets dropped by a hyena screaming stuka.
A Lancaster drops bombs, like my grandmother, killed in the firebombing of Dresden, one of the first thousand plane raids.
What could she do?
There was no skill.
There was no hand of God protecting her.
She just ran from place to place or hid in a basement, the building that she was in blew up from a bomb, And they found nothing except the clasp from her purse.
And that was the end of my grandmother.
Nobody and nothing protected her from her fate.
Now, her Christian faith was powerless to help her.
The reason of Socrates and the virtues of Jesus were powerless to protect her.
And she died like an animal, huddled in a basement, as fire rained down from the skies for the whole night.
And of course, everybody remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but of course, the largely constructed out-of-wood and paper city of Tokyo had fire bombings and firestorms that killed hundreds of thousands of people in a single night.
You know how it goes, right?
You get a big enough fire in the center of a city, and what happens is the fire consumes the oxygen, which sucks more oxygen in from the surrounding areas, which creates a terrible wind that feeds the fire even more.
And who could save themselves?
Who could protect themselves?
Who even understood the causality of what caused the war, either first or second in the first place?
So not many people know, of course, that one of the causes of the Second World War was a fear of communism, particularly in Germany.
So the moral mission, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
Faith in the Lord brings a better world.
So then we couldn't return in the West to original sin, the corruption of the world, Satan runs everything, because we'd had the fairly glorious example of the 19th century or 1750 to 1914, which was an age of immense agricultural, scientific, material, and economic progress.
So we couldn't go back to, well, I mean, Satan runs the world and human nature is so evil, we'll never escape this veil of tears because we did.
Brothers and sisters, we did.
We did.
The world is evil, or the world is corrupt, or Satan running the world, or the irredeemable, horrifying nature of the human personality post-fall from the Garden of Eden could not be sustained in the enthusiasm, progress, and optimism of the 19th century.
So evil had been diminished.
Slavery had been ended, serfdom had been abolished, free markets had swollen and spread.
Material progress, agricultural progress was all achieved.
So good seemed to be winning.
And then it lost absolutely catastrophically.
So faith was not enough to sustain a moral world.
The world could no longer just be perceived of as satanic because of the progress of 164 years, 1750 to 1914.
So what was left?
Evil was triumphant.
Virtue was a sham.
Morality was a mirage.
Christianity had failed.
And sociopaths with itchy nuclear trigger fingers ruled the world.
Totalitarianism had taken over a third of the globe.
Politicians were revealed to be liars, right?
The Americans sail, right?
Woodrow Wilson sail, this is the war to end war, the war for democracy.
The world was more enslaved at the end of the Second World War than it was at the beginning of the First World War, so it was all for less than nothing.
It was all for worse than nothing.
What could be believed in anymore?
Well, morality is what separates us from the animals.
And when morality collapses, what is left for mankind but the life of an animal?
A cunning animal, a brilliant animal, an engineering animal.
But what is left?
When the pleasures of virtue vanish, what is left?
But hedonism.
That's all that's left.
Pleasure in the moment.
Pleasure for the self.
No sense of obligation.
No sense of honor, no sense of virtue, no sense of a noble fight to promote goodness and diminish evil.
Nope.
Evil has won.
We might as well have fun.
Evil has won.
We might as well have fun.
That's the ethos of the boomers, which is why it is a peculiar combination of nihilism and hedonism, of compliance and self-gratification.
I mean, they'll still talk about virtue and so on, and I get all of that.
That's sort of inescapable in the human mind.
But they will always let their virtues, quote, virtues, be defined by those in power.
I mean, the welfare state was hedonism in a way, in a very real way, because it was saying, I will trade property rights and political liberties for consequence-free sex.
I will trade the virtues of the spirit for the pleasures of the body.
And all former virtues were found to be false.
You say, ah, well, you know, but family is everything.
Well, no, family wasn't everything.
Because family being everything did not stop the wars.
In fact, in the First World War, there were famously these women walking around handing out white feathers to men not in uniform, the mark of cowardice.
Many men were killed by feathers.
And this massive shock, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in any culture, this massive shock that Greek reason and Christian morality had failed, utterly failed in the prevention and combating of evil is the soil in which the boomers grew.
And this is what Jim Morrison was singing about.
Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.
The future's uncertain and the end is always near.
Our selected behavior, if you know my presentations on the gene wars.
Pleasure, hedonism.
I like that house.
I'll buy it.
I want to go on a cruise.
I'll go on a cruise.
I want more free stuff from the government.
I don't care about the debt.
I'm going to spend my money and leave nothing to my kids.
Why?
When morality self-detonates, all that's left is pleasure.
Morality is about making a better world in the future at the expense of happiness in the here and now.
That's what virtue is.
How many people worry about the health implications of their last meal before execution?
Well, they don't worry about it because there's no future, right?
We worry about fats and carbs and proteins and sugars and weight and health and diabetes.
We worry about all of that because we have a future that we want to be better, or at least not worse.
Two major systems of virtue had failed.
Greek reason, Christian faith, Christian morality.
Utterly failed.
I mean, if you've got a plan called make the world a better place for 2,000 years and you end up with 1914 to 1945, can you really say that that 2,000-year project has succeeded?
Give me some rounding, if you don't mind.
You can't.
It's failed.
If I have a 2,000-year, well, let's say I have a 20-year business plan to make money, and in the last few months of year 20, in the last few weeks of year 20, I lose a billion dollars.
Can we say that that is a good business plan?
No.
So, what could replace Christian faith and virtues and Greek rationality in the minds of the post-war, post-Second World War generation?
What could grow there?
Well, nothing.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, right?
Sex for stimulus, drugs for stimulus, rock and roll for stimulus.
Nihilism.
Five to one.
One in five.
No one here gets out alive.
This is why the boomers don't care about the future.
It's why they don't care about the debt.
It's why they don't particularly care about their grandchildren.
It's why they don't want to hand over their money.
It's why they want to grab every selfish pleasure they can.
It's why there's rampant promiscuity in old age homes these days.
STD spreading like wildfire.
It's hedonism.
It's what do you want for your last meal before you die?
And this is why they don't care about the next generation, why they don't care about the future.
I mean, do you see a lot of rabbits conserving grass for the next generation?
No, the rabbits eat to their fill and they have sex to their fill and then they do it all over again.
Hedonism.
And this is why when I was having conflicts with the atheists, I talked about hedonism.
Their virtue, their quote virtue is, I like to tell the truth.
I feel bad when I lie.
And I get social benefits from telling the truth.
So that's hedonism.
It's not principles.
And that has been the great legacy of the boomers.
But it is not primarily or fundamentally the boomers' fault that they faced the post-war period, post-second World War period.
Obviously, it's not their fault that they were born at that time.
It is their fault that they did not seek a third way.
It is their fault that they did not seek a third way.
It is true that all prior moral systems had failed to prevent the disasters of 1914 to 1945.
It is true.
That was significant and that was important.
But it wasn't like everything had been tried.
And that's been my mission.
Find the third way.
Greek reason, Roman republicanism, Christian faith and morality have not stopped evil.
Fighting evil doesn't stop evil, like physically fighting it.
Violence doesn't stop evil.
And Christ, to his internal credit, did talk about this from time to time, but it's never particularly focused on, is that evil should be prevented rather than fought.
And how do you prevent evil?
Well, you uphold the non-aggression principle to children.
All prior moralists have failed to prevent evil or to stop evil, but no prior moralists have fundamentally focused on the extension of moral rules to children and have not talked much, if at all, about the morality of child raising, the moral requirements for parents, right?
That has not been tried.
To extend universal moral considerations to children has been my mission for 40 years, 20 of them in the public eye.
The boomers said all prior moral systems have failed, therefore hedonism is the only good we can get out of life, right?
Because we have the choice to do good or feel good.
And all the do-goodery had resulted in the Second World War and the Cold War.
And so do-goodery doesn't work.
Feel goodery is all we have.
Because if you can't do good and you can't feel good, what's the point of being around?
If you're helpless morally and can't even have fun physically, what's the point?
Why get out of bed?
Or to put it another way, when you're helpless and cannot enact any moral virtues, nature switches you to our selected behavior, which is hedonism, the pleasure of the body, the pleasure of the moment, and in the long run, we're all dead.
And you lose your continuity of civilization and your care for your children, which is why the hedonism of the boomers led to the catastrophic divorce rates of the 70s and 80s, the materialism of the 80s, and that's how it went down.
Are we to blame the boomers for this?
Not for the circumstances.
we don't blame anybody for circumstances, but we certainly can blame them for giving up when they were still a...
Love to know what you think.
Thanks, everyone.
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