Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Virtue and the Meaning of Life
Aired: 2025-08-12
Duration: 04:27


=== Promoting Virtue and Choice (04:27) ===

[00:00:00]  That's the meaning of life.
[00:00:01]  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?
[00:00:10]  If you ask a woman out and she wants to go with you, that has meaning.
[00:00:14]  If you kidnap a woman and lock her in your basement, there's no meaning in that other than it's just evil, right?
[00:00:19]  There's no meaning, there's no virtue or value.
[00:00:22]  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.
[00:00:28]  That has meaning, right?
[00:00:29]  But everything that is compelled has no meaning.
[00:00:32]  Force, violence, restrictions, all sorts of government control strips life of meaning because meaning has to be voluntary.
[00:00:43]  And so as evil spreads, meaning vanishes.
[00:00:46]  And all that is left is survival, compliance, and shame, or defiance and death.
[00:00:54]  That's all that is left when evil spreads.
[00:00:58]  So for there to be meaning, there has to be choice.
[00:01:03]  To promote choice is to promote our capacity for meaning.
[00:01:08]  But whenever you promote choice, you thwart the ambitions of evildoers.
[00:01:13]  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.
[00:01:28]  All of the good teachers would cheer and be paid a lot of money.
[00:01:32]  All the bad teachers would be fired or perhaps even go to jail in any kind of sane society.
[00:01:39]  So meaning expands choice, expands voluntarism.
[00:01:45]  Virtue expands choice and expands voluntarism.
[00:01:48]  Sorry, I should say virtue expands choice and voluntarism, which is the only place meaning can reside.
[00:01:52]  And it harms those who exploit through sophistry and coercion.
[00:01:57]  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?
[00:02:16]  So you want to promote voluntarism, freedom, choice, free will.
[00:02:22]  Free will operates in a state of voluntarism, not in a state of coercion.
[00:02:27]  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.
[00:02:35]  You really don't have any choice.
[00:02:36]  You don't have, hmm, I wonder what I should do with the next five minutes.
[00:02:39]  You know, you're sitting at home alone.
[00:02:40]  You're not busy with anything in particular.
[00:02:43]  Hey, the world's your oyster.
[00:02:44]  You can do just about anything you want.
[00:02:47]  You hear some bear starts coming at you and chasing at you, like some Italian who forgot to shave his back that morning.
[00:02:56]  And, well, you run away from it.
[00:02:58]  There's no choice, really.
[00:02:59]  You either turn and fight the bear, good luck, don't do that, or you run away from the bear.
[00:03:03]  And that's your only thing.
[00:03:04]  You have no particular free will at that point.
[00:03:06]  It's fight or flight.
[00:03:07]  That's it.
[00:03:09]  So evil is the bear.
[00:03:11]  Evil reduces your choices to comply and feel shame, which you shouldn't necessarily, but there are times when you can not comply legally.
[00:03:20]  So you comply and feel shame, or you defy and risk imprisonment or death or fines or all.
[00:03:30]  And to expand free choice, to expand free will, to expand opportunities, how should children be educated?
[00:03:41]  Well, the answer is no one knows.
[00:03:44]  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.
[00:03:55]  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.
[00:04:08]  But we want to expand voluntarism.
[00:04:14]  Expanding voluntarism necessarily, necessarily, inevitably interferes with the exploitation of evil doers, and that is a very bad thing.
[00:04:25]  They have their own say.
[00:04:26]  They get to fight back.