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Aug. 9, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:00
THE MEANING OF LIFE!
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So some notes or thoughts on the question of the meaning of life.
Now, the meaning of life has always seemed a bit of a frou-frou question, like we got a bunch of stuff to get done.
And sort of mental masturbation over meaning has never seemed to me to be particularly important, but nonetheless, it is an essential question of philosophy.
And my impatience with it is no objective marker on its importance or relevance.
So let us take a swing at it.
I did talk about this last night in my August 6th, 2025 live stream, but I'm going to go into a little bit more detail now and see if we can unravel this vast oceanic mystery of the ages.
What is the meaning of life?
Well, first of all, of course, we have to know what meaning is.
I've always loved, I mean, there's so much to love about Hamlet, but one of the things I've always loved is the line, there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
And meaning, in a sense, is bound up with the idea that life is a kind of waking dream.
Because in dreams, things have significance, they have meaning, they have instructional abilities.
Dreams in general are tentative reachings for authenticity from the unconscious, put in allegorical form to see if it's safe to tell the truth.
Because telling the truth is very dangerous in the world.
And people get killed for that all the time.
Or imprisoned.
Or, I mean, there's literally laws throughout most of the West, with the exception of America, where you get punished in other ways for telling the truth, like a slander and deplatforming.
But yeah, it's very, very dangerous to tell the truth, yet we want to tell the truth because it's pretty depressing to be in a society where you're told as a child, just tell the truth, just tell the truth.
Just, I won't get mad at you.
Just tell me what happened.
Tell me the truth.
You're constantly told to tell the truth as a child.
And then when you tell the truth as an adult, you get shamed, attacked, ridiculed, imprisoned, and killed for it.
So it's a little bit of a shock to the old system when that enters into your brain.
So dreams, sort of this way of feeling out the possibility of telling the truth.
I mean, when I've analyzed my dreams, which I've done for myself, I've done for listeners of the show, I've done in therapy, there is a truth at the basis of the dream that you have to work to get.
In other words, is it worth telling the truth?
I'll give you the truth in an allegorical fashion.
And is it worth digging to find it?
If it's worth digging to find it, then it's probably worth expressing it.
You're probably in a safe place to do it.
And therefore, you can tell the truth.
So it's the burying the truth to see if you have the strength to dig up the truth, then you probably have the strength to speak it, but it's not going to be handed to you on a silver platter.
So a meaning.
Meaning.
What does this mean?
What is the meaning?
The meaning of things is usually a moral underpinning to circumstances.
So for instance, in the plague of medieval Europe, the Black Death, which was a whole series of plagues that went on for like 200 years, what is the meaning of all this sickness and dying?
Well, of course, you know, a lot of people, a lot of priests and so on would say, well, the meaning of all this sickening and dying is because we are being punished for turning away from God or sinning or liking to dance or fornication or pride.
Like there would be this, what is the meaning of this disease?
What is the moral underpinning of this activity?
Now, of course, there are some activities where the moral underpinning is not even an underpinning.
It's very clear.
So if somebody invades your home and you kill that person, that's a moral action of self-defense, fighting an immoral action of a home invasion, of a violation of property rights that is so egregious that believing that you're at imminent risk of grievous bodily harm or death is kind of a given, at least in places like Florida, other places, not so much.
But you don't have, you have no, you have to stand your ground laws.
You have no duty to retreat.
If somebody comes into your house at night, you can just kill them because you have to assume the worst in that sort of rational circumstance or situation.
So when moral things happen, people make Moral decisions, then there's no hidden meaning to that, right?
If somebody phones you up and says, your girlfriend is cheating on you, it's important for you to know the truth.
I want to tell the truth.
I need to do the right thing.
So here's my evidence: your girlfriend is cheating on you.
So we don't say, gee, what's the moral meaning behind that?
It's like, no, that's a clear moral action.
It's a clear moral.
You don't have to look for clues if it's spelled out for you, right?
So the meaning stuff is usually to do with looking for usually moral clues in actions that are not specifically moral.
So there's a really overused line in movies, right?
Number one line is, let's get out of here.
Probably number two is, I love you.
Number three is, what's that supposed to mean?
What's that supposed to mean?
Oh, there's a good reason why you weren't home yesterday.
What's that supposed to mean, right?
So what is the hidden meaning behind these statements?
It's not accidental.
It's assumed to be passive-aggressive or have some hidden insult or whatever it is, because it's usually a negative, right?
What's that supposed to mean?
It's very common, along with, and you know it.
Anyway, it's all bad writing.
But so meaning is when we impute moral values to non-moral events, right?
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
So the fall of a sparrow, there was a movie I called that I watched called, I think, The Fourth Man, which in which a man is constantly warned by nature that bad things are going to happen, but he ignores it all, like a seagull falls in front of him on the beach and he's constantly getting these warnings of death.
Nature is sort of trying to warn him in the movie of death, foreshadowing, right?
And he ignores it and dies, right?
And dies.
So happenstance is interpreted as a moral warning.
And of course, this would tie into the religious mindset that God is trying to warn you of bad things to come.
So if you're driving to go and cheat on your wife for the first time and your car breaks down, right?
If that would happen in a movie or that would happen in the religious world mindset, then the fact that you're going to go and cheat on your wife and your car breaks down would be a sign from the universe that you should not go and cheat on your wife.
Whereas assuming it's not an unconscious thing, right?
Like if you want to go and cheat on your wife and then you can't get an erection, well, that would be a psychological barrier to the wrong that you're doing, right?
But if it's just something coincidental, I mean, I can think of these kinds of things in my life.
There was a woman that I wanted to date many, many, many years ago.
And we ended up in a hot tub together at a hotel.
And things could have gone a particular way, except a bunch of really loudmouthed, you know, kind of trashy party in the business up front party in the back mullet guys came in and were drinking beer and being loud and obnoxious.
And, you know, and so I would say, if I were mystical in this way, I would say that the universe was sending me a sign to not get involved with this woman.
I remember many years ago, I visited a university where Edgar Allan Poe had once had his dorm room as a student at Gallen Poe, of course, famous writer of fictional horror.
And literally on the walkway out front of Edgar Allan Poe's dorm room was a dying bat.
There was a bat on its back.
It had been wounded.
It was flopping around.
This was daytime.
I've never seen that before or since.
Of course, the coincidence of the bat dying right outside one of the most famous horror writers' dorm room in history is obviously a pretty wild coincidence.
But was there a meaning in that?
So meaning is when we impute some sort of morality or some sort of wisdom or some sort of instruction when we impute the effects of consciousness into non-conscious, sorry, non-conscious phenomena.
So if you're on your way to cheat on your wife and your car dies, we would say the universe is trying to warn me and I should listen to that warning.
Or if you get sick after you do something wrong, we would say this is coincidence.
Now, of course, if you do something wrong and your conscience is bugging you, maybe that has an effect on your immune system.
So there could be something causal to it, but it is not the universe punishing you for wrongdoing.
It is not the moral hand of the universe flicking some sort of illness into your system because you did something wrong.
You're not being morally punished.
There may be, again, some stress based upon doing something wrong.
Maybe you did something wrong.
Maybe you're afraid of being caught and this stresses you out and you can't sleep.
That lowers your immune system and maybe you get sick because of that.
But it's not the universe punishing you because of course there are people who do things wrong who don't suffer really from it at all because they don't really have any conscience.
It doesn't trouble them.
They know they can get away with it or at least they believe that.
So they sleep like a baby.
And so it's not the universe punishing you.
It could be stress or something like that.
So meaning is when we take what is usually a coincidence and we insert a moral motive into what is generally a coincidence.
In other words, we create an ought from an is in the sort of famous Humean distinction.
So the is that I'm on my way to cheat on my wife, my car breaks down.
That's the is.
The ought is that is a sign that I ought not to cheat on my wife.
Well, that's the meaning.
What is the meaning of my car breaking down?
And we strive for meaning.
We are meaning producing, not creating, but meaning producing machines.
We are constantly looking for patterns.
We are constantly projecting our consciousness onto the world.
And we are taking meaning, right, out of the fall of a sparrow.
And people have this all the time, right?
They sleep in and they miss a flight and the flight crashes and they're like, oh my gosh, you know, that was a sign.
You know, the fact that I went to bed late, the fact that I didn't set my alarm meant I knew, but they create this meaning because meaning gives us a sense of control.
So let's say you chronically get ill and you say, well, I am getting ill because I am sinning.
And so if I reform my sinning, I won't get ill.
It's a punishment, Job-like punishment for being ill.
And maybe you can.
Maybe you just have a weak immune system or there's something environmental or something like that that's making you ill a lot or something genetic.
So it is the attempt to say, well, look, if I'm ill a lot because I'm sinful, then if I stop being sinful, I will stop being sick all the time.
And it gives you something to do that gives you the illusion of control.
Now, again, if you're sick because your wrongdoings are causing you stress and sleeplessness and it's harming your immune system or something like that, then sure.
I mean, I understand that that would be the case.
But that is the big question.
What does it mean that things happen?
Now, some things, it does mean something, right?
If you go and cheat on your wife and then you get beaten up by her husband, I mean, that's, I wonder what that means.
What is the meaning?
Well, he's angry and he's punishing you for sleeping with his wife.
So we wouldn't ponder the meaning of that.
We would know what the meaning of that is, that he was outrageous and angry and beat you up for sleeping with his wife.
What is the meaning of that?
We would know.
There wouldn't be, what does that mean?
So it means that you were sleeping with his wife and he beat you up because he was angry.
There's no, we don't, we defy augury, right?
It's not something you'd have to really ponder a lot, right?
But your car breaks down when you're on your way to cheat with your wife.
That's coincidence.
That's happenstance.
That's An accident, but it gives you a sense of meaning that you should not, that even your car doesn't want you to go, of course, your car doesn't care, right?
But you think your car or the universe is conspiring to have you not sleep with your wife.
And we can all think of things like this in our lives, right?
We can all think of the, oh my gosh, but I got this out of that, or I got this out of the other, or this accident, you know, caused me this good thing, right?
Or, you know, it's the issue where you dream of something, you dream of a child wearing a red backpack crossing in front of you, and then the next day, a child with a red backpack crosses in front of you, and you're like, ooh, time has no meaning.
I can see the future, blah, blah, blah, and see through space and, right, because the Earth is millions of miles away the next day than where you were dreaming that night.
So you can see through time and through space.
And of course, you forget.
You forget all of the dreams that you have that don't come true, but you get that ooh, goosebumpy sense, right, of what does what does come true.
So meaning is when we project the operations of consciousness onto accidental matter.
So I'll give you the example to continue with the cheating on your wife, right?
So you're going to go and cheat on your wife, and your friend sabotages your car.
He's tried to talk you out of it, but he's going to sabotage.
So he just sabotages your car.
So then there is meaning in your car breaking down.
Or maybe he takes the battery out so your car won't start or something.
So then there's meaning in that.
The meaning is your friend doesn't want you to cheat on your wife.
So there is morality in your car not working, which is your friend's moral decision to disable your car so you can't go and cheat on your wife.
So that is your car not starting is the operations of a moral consciousness, a moral decision on the part of your friend.
But if nobody sabotaged your car and your car has been well maintained and it just accidentally happens to not work, then that's not meaningful.
Now, you can extract meaning from that.
In other words, you can say, well, the reason my car doesn't start is because God doesn't want me to cheat on my wife or the universe doesn't want me to cheat on my wife or something like that.
But that's not true.
So you are inserting a causality that is moral into a circumstance that is accidental.
Because if your friend took your battery out of your car so that you couldn't cheat on your wife, then there's morality and moral meaning in your car not starting.
Your car not starting is the result of a moral decision on the part of your friend.
It's not accidental.
If you go and cheat on your wife and then you get a sexually transmitted disease, then the sexually transmitted disease arises from your sin.
It's not a direct punishment for your sin, because not everybody who cheats on the wife gets a venereal disease.
But in this case, you would get the disease because you'd sinned.
Or you'd get the disease as a result of your sin, not specifically because you'd sinned, because then everyone would have to get a venereal disease who sinned and the cheating would go way down.
So when we take accident or happenstance or coincidence or randomness and we infuse moral-willed conscious action into that which is accidental, then we create meaning.
And the creation of that meaning, which is not empirical, might be helpful.
So if your car breaks down, when you are going to go and cheat with your wife, or cheat on your wife, then maybe that gives you pause and you decide not to and you turn around and you walk home and you sort out your marriage.
And, you know, so it can be helpful, positive, or beneficial for that to happen.
You might get a better decision out of creating meaning where there is no meaning, like your car just happened to break or not work.
Sometimes there is unconscious meaning in that you go through a particular period of stress or upset, you're not sure why, but then it turns out that your particular environment is wrong or immoral or bad or something like that.
Like maybe your business environment is really, really corrupt.
And so you get stressed and upset, and you can't sleep, and maybe you get sick, and you say, Well, that's a punishment for me being in a corrupt business environment.
Maybe you're not particularly aware of it, being corrupt.
But that is not you being punished for immorality.
That is a consequence of you being stressed by being in a corrupt environment.
And you can say, gee, you know, me getting sick, you know, I got so sick I had to stay home from work for a week.
Being away from that job, I realized just how stressful it was, and I became a much better person.
I quit my bad job.
I stood up to my boss.
I got a better job.
So this can happen.
So there are times where morality that is unconscious creates situations where you can get meaning.
There are times where there's no meaning in the situations, but you imagine meaning.
And there are times where there is direct meaning in the situations.
Meaning, again, being moral purpose in decisions or circumstances or actions in life.
Is there moral meaning?
Is there special providence in the fall of a sparrow?
So what is the meaning of life?
Well, there is only meaning in human consciousness because only human consciousness is capable of moral evaluation.
In other words, only human consciousness is capable of comparing proposed actions to ideal moral standards.
The animal kingdom basically asks if it could, does this work?
And if the answer is yes, evolutionarily speaking, Darwinianly speaking, yes, we do that, right?
Or they would do that.
But only human consciousness asks, is this right?
Is this moral?
Is this good?
So the meaning of life is that only life can generate or identify meaning.
Generating meaning is when you infuse meaning into something that is meaningless, your car breaking down.
Identifying it is when you say, oh, my friend sabotaged my car so that I couldn't cheat on my wife.
And that's a moral decision that he made.
So there's meaning in your car not working.
The meaning being, don't cheat on your wife, right?
Which is not really something that animals think about unless they just happen to be biochemically pair bonded, in which case, it's not a moral decision.
So there is only meaning, in other words, the correct or incorrect infusion of moral choices or decisions in life as a whole.
So then the question is: what is meaning to be compared to?
Now, meaning, of course, can be compared to an accident.
And accidents do not have meaning if they're genuine accidents, right?
I mean, if somebody's driving enraged and they crash, then they were making a bad decision.
It's not just an accident.
So meaning occurs when something is chosen.
If a man curses you out, that has the meaning called hostility, danger, potential attack, and your fight or flight might be activated or something like that.
On the other hand, if later you find out that the man has Tourette's syndrome, or if somebody does have Tourette's syndrome, then you would not take it as an attack or an insult because it would be an involuntary.
For instance, the Joachim Phoenix character in the movie Joker has an involuntary laugh response.
And so that people don't think he's laughing at them or that he's mocking them or making fun of them, he has a card that he hands out which says, I have an involuntary laugh response.
Don't take it personally.
It's just a tick and so on, right?
So there's no meaning in his laughter.
He's not laughing at people.
He just has an involuntary laugh response.
Or another example would be if someone whacks you in the face, then that is an act of aggression and there's meaning behind it.
The person wants to hurt you.
If, on the other hand, it turns out that they have epilepsy and can't control their emotions, or if it's your spouse who turns over in her sleep, accidentally whacks you in the face, I mean, annoying, but not obviously, not obviously intentional in that way, right?
So, for something to have meaning, it must be chosen.
I'll give you another example.
A guy comes to bed and the woman says, Oh, I know you're drunk, right?
And he says, How do you know that?
How do you know that I'm drunk?
And she says, Because you're in the wrong house, right?
You're my neighbor.
You came to my house, not your house.
Now, of course, if someone comes into your house at night, you assume threat.
If it turns out it's a drunken neighbor who's coming into your house by mistake, then the same threat situation would not apply.
I mean, you might be annoyed, you might tell him to stop drinking or whatever, but you wouldn't think, oh my God, he's here to rob and kill me.
You'd just be like the drunken fool got into the wrong house.
There have been times where I've booked calls with people and they don't show up.
And the reason that they don't show up is not because they don't care or not because they don't want to, or not because they change their mind.
The reason they don't show up is because they mistook the time of the call based upon a difference in time zones.
So, in order for there to be meaning, moral meaning in someone's actions, it has to be a chosen action.
The last example I would provide, which I also provided last night, was a man who robs a bank of his own free will is responsible, right?
He's a criminal, he's robbed a bank.
However, if it turns out that the man was robbing a bank under threat, that the man was robbing the bank because someone had kidnapped his family and said, You have to, or I'll kill them, then we no longer think that there is moral meaning in his robbing the bank.
He didn't do it of his own free will, and we would not charge him with a crime.
We would instead, of course, charge the people who kidnapped his family with the crime, right?
So, that's important as well.
So, meaning must result from choice.
If I give $20 to a homeless guy, that could be considered generous.
That could be considered charity.
If the homeless guy picks the $20 bill out of my pocket, he's a pickpocket and a thief, then I have, it's true that the $20 has been transferred to the homeless guy, but it is not true that I have been charitable.
It goes from a positive, hopefully, which is giving somebody $20 because they're hungry, to a negative somebody stealing $20 from me.
So, the transfer is the same, but the meaning has changed completely from it being something positive, i.e., generosity, to something negative, which is stealing, based on the fact that I did not choose to transfer the $20 of my own free will to the poor person, right?
Obviously, voluntary sex is a plus for both parties.
Rape, sexual assault is a horrible negative for one party, but a horrible plus for another party.
So, where there is no choice, there can be no meaning.
If you grow up in a totalitarian dictatorship and you have a positive impression of the totalitarian dictator, well, there's no free speech.
You are programmed, you are brainwashed into having a positive response to that dictator.
So, in order for there to have any kind of meaning in life, life has to be voluntarily chosen.
The choices have to be made without coercion.
If a woman chooses to live with me because she loves me and she wants to spend her life with me, there's meaning in that.
If I simply chain her to the basement, there's not, I mean, there's crime to that.
But her choice is not meaningful because it has been coerced by a choice to stay in the house.
It's not even a choice, right?
She's just chained, right?
Horrible.
So, coercion is the opposite of meaning, because that which is coerced is meaningless.
It is simply survival.
Coercion takes us from moral agents into fight or flight survival machines with no particular Impulse above the animal.
What does the animal want to do?
Well, it wants to fight or fly.
It wants to get its food.
It wants to reproduce, but it's not making moral choices.
And so coercion is the opposite of meaning.
And therefore, the meaning of life primarily, right, there's different layers of meanings, right?
But the primary or foundational meaning of life is to oppose violence.
And again, by violence, I'm not talking about self-defense here.
I'm talking about the initiation of violence.
It's just easier and slightly more vivid.
So since violence is the opposite of meaning, violence strips human beings of the capacity to make meaningful choices.
And not all choices are meaningful, but every meaning, every aspect of meaning in human life results from a choice.
So since the meaning of life requires free will and coercion destroys free will, the meaning, the most foundational meaning of life is to oppose violence and promote choice.
Because without choice, there is no meaning.
So, in other words, choice or the opposing of violence, the maintenance of the non-aggression principle, choice is necessary, but not sufficient for meaning.
There can be no meaning without choice.
Choice opens up the possibility of meaning.
And there will be certainly meaningful things that you do with regards to moral choices in this life.
So if you're on a road trip and there's only one road that gets you to the place you want to go to next, and you're driving along and it turns out that a tree has fallen on the road, and let's say it's something that you can move, right?
Then the purpose of your road trip at that time is to remove the tree because you can't continue on your trip with that tree in the way.
Now, of course, once you have removed the tree, then the purpose of your road trip is to explore, to meet people, to see cool sights, to learn things, to like all of the other things.
But none of that achievement or none of those achievements are possible if you do not remove the log on the road.
So what should we do on our road trip today?
If you drive up and there's a log on the road, what you have to do in the moment, in the immediate, is to remove the log so that you can continue to drive.
I actually had to do this.
Believe it or not, I had to do this when I was working up in Northern Ontario.
We would use logging roads, which were actually quite hazardous because logging trucks would come screaming around the corners because there was no traffic on them.
And yeah, once I was driving and we needed to get to a particular location, of course, right, sorry, it's kind of pointless to say.
I was driving along and there was a log on the road.
It had fallen off one of the backs of the trucks.
And the person I was working with and I, we had to move the log out of the way.
In fact, it was even too tight to turn around and we didn't want to back all the way out.
So, and we had to get to our destination.
So what were we doing?
We were going to go and collect samples which were at the end of the road.
So our purpose was to collect samples.
However, we could not collect those samples unless and until we moved the log out of the way.
So the meaning of life is to oppose violence and promote choice.
That is not the only meaning of life.
In other words, the only purpose of the road trip is not just remove that log.
But if you don't remove that log, no other purpose of the road trip is possible.
The purpose of my day was to get soil samples, but I could not get soil samples without removing the log on the road.
So removing coercion from the realm of human affairs opens up the maximum possibility of moral choice and therefore meaning.
So when people say life is meaningless, what they're saying is they have no perception of their own free will.
Now, the will to survive violence, you know, some guy wants to mug you, do you fight him, do you run, those aren't free will choices.
Those are survival choices.
Because of course, whatever animals can do is not specific to humans, right?
Reproduction is not specific to humans because, you know, ants and ferrets can do it too.
Making a choice on compulsion is not the same as free will because animals can do it too.
And they do it all the time.
So free will is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, which only human beings are capable of.
So simply fight or flight survival choices or options or alternatives is not the same as free will.
Free will can only manifest in the absence of violence.
Or otherwise all you have are survival options, which is not, as I said, free will.
So when somebody says life is meaningless, what they're saying is, I have no belief in my ability to affect meaningful moral choices.
And the reason why you have no perception could be valid or invalid.
So obviously a guy who is locked in some totalitarian gulag dungeon has no capacity to affect meaningful moral choices.
He has no free will.
All he has is survival options.
So his life has no meaning because meaning is our capacity to make moral choices.
Now, somebody who grew up in a situation of extreme control and violence and bullying and domination, you can sort of think of the typical or stereotypical army dad who has to bounce a quarter off the bed to make sure it's been made properly and so on, right?
So people who have grown up as children under really hysterical and highly abusive levels of control don't feel that they can make meaningful moral choices.
And that feeling comes out of their experience as a child where they were punished for making meaningful moral choices, right?
So the old thing I've talked about before with my mother, she would tell me to do something.
I would do it.
She'd say, I did it wrong.
And you would say, I would say, but I thought, and she would say, but don't think, right?
Okay.
So don't think means don't have moral choice, don't have free will.
And she was unable to overthrow her own madness.
So she didn't have much effective moral free will either.
So if you grow up with a meaningless life as a child because you are not permitted or encouraged to make meaningful moral choices and not just make them, but be able to act on them as well, then you will come into an adulthood with a kind of depression, a kind of emptiness, and a sense that life is meaningless.
And your life as a child, meaning was punished, right?
In the same way when I would think it would be punished.
Or when I climbed the fence to get a soccer ball in boarding school, it was perfectly safe.
I knew how to climb it, but I was punished.
Even though, and there was no argument I could make, like, no, I was perfectly safe.
I wasn't harmed.
I got the ball.
It saved time.
There was nothing wrong with it.
I remember also being at a cottage with a friend of mine in my teens, and I was on the swim team, the water polo team.
I mean, I swam like a fish, right?
And I swam across the lake and back.
And when I got back, my friend's mother was very angry with me because she thought I wasn't going to make it.
So she was watching me anxious, waiting for me to cramp up and so on, right?
Now, of course, she didn't know that I was a semi-champion swimmer or whatever.
So I can understand that, but I was punished for making a choice that I knew was fine, but she felt was too dangerous and made her very anxious.
And this happens a lot with women and the women's anxiety and levels of neuroticism tend to be higher, which is great when you're little kids, but not so great when you get into your teens.
So when you become an adult, you have choices that you didn't have as a child.
And if as a child, you were punished for making choices, then you have a choice.
Now, fundamentally, you have a fundamental choice.
So, if you take your childhood and turn it from singular epistemology into universal metaphysics, then you are spreading the virus called lack of choice to others.
So, if I were to grow up, because my mother and a lot of the women around me were kind of crazy and high-maintenance and kind of hysterical.
And if I were to say, well, that's just female nature, then I'm going from individual epistemology, this is what I saw, to universal.
I mean, this would be metaphysics, human nature or female nature is to be this, right?
In which case, I would be entering into something that would be highly prejudicial and false, and then I'm spreading it to others.
And in the same way, if you grew up without choice as a child, and then you say, Life is meaningless, there's no free will, there's no choice, it's all deterministic, then you're taking your lack of choice as a child, and you are attempting to spread that helplessness and hopelessness, which you had as a child, legitimately, for which we can have great sympathy, to others as adults, and saying, It wasn't my parents in particular, it's the human condition.
And that is both wrong and horribly, horribly unjust.
And that's where the real problems arise.
When people take early experiences of a lack of free will or a punishment for exercising meaningful moral choices, and then they turn that into some sort of existential human nature, then what they're doing is they're taking violence and turning it into physics.
But violence itself is a choice, it's an anti-meaning choice.
It is stripping the meaning of human interactions to use violence, to initiate the use of force.
So, what they're doing is they're saying either we don't have any free will at all, turning us all into machines, or they say violence is endemic or inevitable in human relations.
Therefore, human life is foundationally meaningless because whatever choices you think you can make will always be interrupted and controlled by violent actors.
And so, your free will is a trembling, tentative illusion that is only sustainable as long as you don't bother anybody or provoke violence from the aggressive.
Like the woman thinks, Oh, I have free will as long as my boyfriend or husband doesn't get mad and beat me up or something like that.
Or the man says, Oh, I have free will to go golfing unless my wife gets mad and punishes me or whatever it is, like makes it such a negative experience that I don't want to go.
But the choice to inflict violence is itself a choice that is anti-meaning.
In other words, it has meaning in that it opposes meaning.
And attempting to turn violence into something endemic or overwhelming or a law of nature like physics is really bad.
It's not.
I mean, we can see, of course, throughout human history, violence has diminished in countless areas and ways, end of slavery and so on.
And so, violence has diminished, the emergence of the free market, violence has diminished over the course of human history significantly.
And there's no reason why that can't continue.
And I really kind of hate the people who throw their hands up and say, well, it's inevitable.
And so, the meaning of human life is to oppose violence, to promote free will and choice, because that turns human life into truly human life,
which is the pursuit of meaningful moral choices rather than just reactive fight-or-flight survival options, which are an affront to the dignity that we have as human beings.
So, the meaning of life, to promote virtue, which is the same as promoting free will and choice, and to promote moral virtues, moral choices, and to oppose violence, which strips life of meaning and turns us into animal-like machines dodging binary survival options.
The meaning of life is virtue.
The meaning of life is free will, because it is only through virtue, only through free will and virtue that virtuous choices are possible.
The purpose of life is to promote virtue.
the meaning of life is to promote virtue and combat evil.
And that is the most specifically human thing we can do.
And it is through that process that all other meanings become possible.
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Thank you so much, my friends.
I will talk to you soon.
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