Aug. 12, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:27
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| That's the meaning of life. | |
| The meaning of life is to promote meaning, and to promote meaning is to promote virtue, because all that is compelled has no meaning, right? | |
| If you ask a woman out and she wants to go with you, that has meaning. | |
| If you kidnap a woman and lock her in your basement, there's no meaning in that other than it's just evil, right? | |
| There's no meaning, there's no virtue or value. | |
| If you woo a woman into marrying you and living with you and having your children and loving you and all of that, beautiful, wonderful. | |
| That has meaning, right? | |
| But everything that is compelled has no meaning. | |
| Force, violence, restrictions, all sorts of government control strips life of meaning because meaning has to be voluntary. | |
| And so, as evil spreads, meaning vanishes. | |
| And all that is left is survival, compliance, and shame, or defiance, and death. | |
| That's all that is left when evil spreads. | |
| So, for there to be meaning, there has to be choice. | |
| To promote choice is to promote our capacity for meaning. | |
| But whenever you promote choice, you thwart the ambitions of evildoers. | |
| So, if schools were privatized, all the weird, creepy, shitty teachers who want to teach five-year-olds about masturbation, well, they might have to find, I don't know, some other weird place to go to pursue their dark arts. | |
| All of the good teachers would cheer and be paid a lot of money. | |
| All the bad teachers would be fired, or perhaps even go to jail in any kind of sane society. | |
| So, meaning expands choice, expands voluntarism. | |
| Virtue expands choice and expands voluntarism. | |
| Sorry, I should say virtue expands choice and voluntarism, which is the only place meaning can reside. | |
| And it harms those who exploit through sophistry and coercion. | |
| Sophistry is the drug that knocks you out so that your kidneys can be stolen without you particularly realizing it until you wake up in a toilet stall somewhere in Tijuana with some weird stitching on your side, a hazy memory, and a fairly deep inability to have two kidneys, right? | |
| So, you want to promote voluntarism, freedom, choice, free will. | |
| Free will operates in a state of voluntarism, not in a state of coercion. | |
| I mean, if you're being chased by a bear in the woods, you really don't have much freedom because you either run away from the bear or you die. | |
| You really don't have any choice. | |
| You don't have, hmm, I wonder what I should do with the next five minutes. | |
| You know, you're sitting at home alone, you're not busy with anything in particular. | |
| Hey, the world's your oyster. | |
| You can do just about anything you want. | |
| You hear some bear starts coming at you and chasing at you, like some Italian who forgot to shave his back that morning. | |
| And, well, you run away from it. | |
| There's no choice, really. | |
| You either turn and fight the bear, good luck, don't do that, or you run away from the bear. | |
| And that's your only thing. | |
| You have no particular free will at that point. | |
| It's fight or flight. | |
| That's it. | |
| So, evil is the bear. | |
| Evil reduces your choices to comply and feel shame, which you shouldn't necessarily, but there are times when you can not comply legally. | |
| So, you comply and feel shame, or you defy and risk imprisonment or death or fines or all. | |
| And to expand free choice, to expand free will, to expand opportunities, how should children be educated? | |
| Well, the answer is no one knows. | |
| No one knows how children should be educated because government power is so overwhelming in the field of education that you're either doing that or you're in reaction to that. | |
| And even if you're in reaction to that, even if you're homeschooling, if you're going to some private school, a lot of places, you still have to follow some kind of approved curriculum, especially if you want to get into university, God help you. | |
| But we want to expand voluntarism. | |
| Expanding voluntarism necessarily, necessarily, inevitably interferes with the exploitation of evil doers. | |
| And that is a very bad thing. | |
| They have their own say, they get to fight back. |
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