Sept. 26, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:57
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| All right, we got some lovely questions from the fine supporters at freedomain.locals.com. | |
| That's freedomain.locals.com. | |
| Let's get into the great questions. | |
| First, there seems to be a lot of resignation among the right. | |
| No matter how violent the left gets, the right is not allowed to fight back with violence. | |
| Of course, I, like others on the right, do not advocate the use of violence under any circumstances whatsoever. | |
| Well, I'm sure that you'd be fine with violence in an extremity of self-defense, and most legal systems would as well. | |
| But yeah, it's true, of course, right? | |
| I mean, the ruling classes sympathize with the left, and the left have done their long march through the institutions that they promised in the 60s, 50s, and 60s, and they are in general control of most of the major organs of society. | |
| And so the left is fine with violence from those on the left. | |
| But if you even think about it on the right, you are in serious trouble. | |
| So yeah, it's asymmetric. | |
| And of course, it's asymmetric that tells you that the ideas are bad. | |
| Like if you need violence to enforce your ideas, by definition, your ideas are terrible. | |
| And I mean, you don't need to rape a woman who actually wants to sleep with you, who finds you attractive and sexy and wants to sleep with you. | |
| So rape is a confession that you know the person doesn't want to sleep with you. | |
| Theft is a confession of the knowledge that you know the person doesn't want to give their property to you and so on. | |
| So I hate to say it is what it is, but this is why I'm not a statist, right? | |
| Because whatever institutions you build that are supposed to protect you will end up being taken over by your worst conceivable enemies and end up being used against you, which is why statism always fails. | |
| Now, this is just a fact of life that if you are, I mean, what was it in America that there was a Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about voting late and everyone thought it was funny, like Trump supporters go vote late, whereas somebody made a funny meme about that on the left and got arrested. | |
| So, yeah, of course, it's I mean, it's completely asymmetric. | |
| And the left can riot in the summer of love 2020 with relative impunity. | |
| And the right can't say anything. | |
| What can I tell you? | |
| It's the nature of the beast. | |
| And philosophy is a whole mournful series of being incredibly sad that you were right, but recognizing that being right gives you future credibility. | |
| So being right, of course, gets you harmed in the present, but being right gives you future credibility. | |
| All right. | |
| Somebody says, what's the point of playing board games in the world? | |
| At least those who have the most power of the direction of the world, are sort of hell-bent on making it impossible for people to simply enjoy a 45 to 60 minute puzzle to solve. | |
| Listen, I hear what you're saying, and maybe I'm wrong about this, as I'm, of course, capable of being wrong about anything. | |
| But when I've done a good day's work and I'm chatting with my wife and my family, we decide to have a nice game of Catan. | |
| We put on a little classical music or jazz, and we have a funny game of Catan, which is enjoyable and so on. | |
| I mean, don't give bad people more than you have to. | |
| Don't give bad people more than you have to. | |
| So you don't have to give up your pleasure and your happiness in playing a board game. | |
| And demoralization, which is where you can't enjoy anything because of evildoers in the world, is one of the foundational ways in which evildoers win. | |
| Like you have to have some happiness to be fighting for. | |
| You have to have some love of what you're fighting for in order to have the willpower, energy, dedication, and focus to resist the temptations of evildoers and hopefully to push back and thwart their plans to some degree. | |
| It is happiness that is the greatest enemy of evil, not virtue. | |
| Because virtuous people, as you say, can be stripmined into endless bouts of despair. | |
| And then when you despair, you don't have the energy or happiness to fight evil. | |
| You have to have something to fight for. | |
| You have to have some happiness that is a product of virtue. | |
| And we do have an immense chance and opportunity for great happiness in the world because we have this wonderful, amazing technology, communication stuff, the opportunity to spread virtue is on the side of the good for the first time in human history. | |
| So spreading corruption has been the job of the elites through elite control of education and religion and so on. | |
| I mean, from all of human history, you could only learn what those in power were willing to allow you to be taught, which generally inevitably was to the interests of those in power. | |
| So for the first time, really, good people have the capacity to communicate not just locally, not just nationally, not just internationally in the moment, but for all time. | |
| So think, of course, of the amount of brilliant people who said brilliant things before the invention of writing. | |
| And people thought wonderful poems and plays and stories and maybe told them to people and told them to friends. | |
| But in general, it was kind of, you know, think of The Hobbit was like J.R.R. Tolkien's. | |
| I think it was his bedtime story for his kids or his grandkids or whatever. | |
| But because of written language, because of letters and you could write these things down and have them for all time. | |
| Of course, it would get destroyed over time, but it's pretty hard to destroy things all over the world on everyone's computers all the time. | |
| So we get to actually talk to the world instantaneously, have conversations around the world promoting virtue for the first time in human history. | |
| And it will last for all time. | |
| Now, if you predict things are going to get bad, and of course, I've been talking about the rise of political violence for like 20 years. | |
| You know, when I gave a speech at a men's rights conference in Orlando, I said that they call you bad names so that crazy people will shoot you. | |
| And yes, sadly, you know, a week and change ago. | |
| I mean, it's happened more than once, but I also said deplatforming is a prequel to mass murder, all these kinds of things. | |
| So it helps, of course, if you are right over time. | |
| And the people who can predict these things long ahead of time gain more credibility as the events come to pass. | |
| It would be nice, of course, if people learned from philosophers, but at least they can learn from philosophers being right. | |
| So, yeah, don't let the bad guys take away every shred of joy in your life. | |
| That's a bad, it's a bad plan. | |
| And don't give the enemy anything more than they demand, right? | |
| All right. | |
| Somebody says, I believe you said in the past that unjustly harming others, especially in cases where restitution is impossible, leaves a permanent scar on the unconscious. | |
| Could you elaborate on the dynamics behind that? | |
| And if someone regrets the irreparable harm they caused and devoted their life to advocating against the harmful actions, how would that impact their unconscious? | |
| Right. | |
| So let's say that you know a family where there's been a significant amount of abuse, neglect, violence, dysfunction, and then the kids, let's say they're in the 30s, right? | |
| The kids have grown up and they're in the 30s. | |
| You can't fix that, right? | |
| There's no repairing that. | |
| You can't go back and have a do-over from childhood, right? | |
| You know, like if some kid gets starved, like their parents starve them as punishment, and they end up growing up much shorter than they otherwise would have been, can't fix that later, right? | |
| They miss their growth spur, right? | |
| You can't just go and get more food and fix it later. | |
| So when restitution becomes impossible, what people do is they simply ignore or defend against the bad feelings. | |
| They ignore the bad feelings or they defend against the bad feelings. | |
| They ignore or defend against the guilt. | |
| Oh, it wasn't that bad. | |
| Oh, they're exaggerating. | |
| Oh, I had it tough too. | |
| So they either come up with a huge amount of defenses or what they do is they end up ignoring all the negative feelings. | |
| But ignoring the negative feelings means that you're more prone to redoing, to acting out again whatever the negative thing was that you did. | |
| So if some guy cheats on his wife and he then justifies it by saying, well, I was lonely, she provoked me, the marriage was doing badly, I was stressed, or simply ignores it, then he's, you know, those justifications or those justifications for negative actions or ignoring the emotional effects of negative actions make you much more likely to repeat those negative actions, right? | |
| I mean, if you, you know, like most kids, you touch something that's hot, you get a burn that teaches you for the rest of your life to not do those things again, right? | |
| I remember touching a hot knife on a stove when I was a little kid, hurt like hell. | |
| I also remember when I was with one of my mother's boyfriends, he took me gliding, strangely enough, but he had a lamp, a sort of propane lamp, and I picked it up by the base. | |
| It was crazy hot. | |
| I burnt myself. | |
| Had to put my hand in butter and then flour, apparently. | |
| It did help. | |
| So I remember those things vividly from, you know, many, many decades ago. | |
| But if you didn't have any negative feelings, you'd be more likely to burn yourself again. | |
| So when you harm people, the purpose of guilt is to have you stop harming people and apologize and make restitution. | |
| If you ignore those bad feelings and continue to do harm to people, then you develop these effortless ability to avoid negative feelings. | |
| And when you avoid negative feelings, you're just going to continue to do bad things, which means you can't have self-respect, you can't have love, you can't have sustainable virtues. | |
| And so, yeah, it's a permanent scar on the unconscious. | |
| And certainly if you've done years of wrong, particularly to sort of innocent, dependent, and helpless children, if you've done years of wrong to people, then you have avoided your own conscience for years, and your conscience then becomes feral and you have to keep it at bay for the rest of your life, which means you don't have the guidance of conscience and therefore you can't really do good. | |
| So if someone regrets the irreparable harm, devote their life, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Well, you know, that's theoretically possible, I suppose. | |
| But I can't imagine how that would happen. | |
| I can't imagine how someone would do, you know, great, horrible wrongs to people for decades and then have some sudden turnaround, grow a conscience and be a virtuous person. | |
| I don't see how that's possible. | |
| Is there such a thing as a collective consciousness? | |
| I was watching a video about what it is to be English, and they use this phrase. | |
| Well, I don't think there's collective consciousness. | |
| Sorry, don't know why there was that pause there. | |
| Collective consciousness. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| Yeah, there is no such thing as collective consciousness. | |
| In other words, we don't share a mind. | |
| But when values are shared often enough and people are ostracized for not sharing those values, then you genetically prune the population. | |
| So in England, politeness is very strong, very strongly enforced socially. | |
| And so rude people tend to not succeed. | |
| They may, in fact, even be ostracized. | |
| And if rude people don't succeed and are ostracized, then you're going to prune the genetics to people who are more polite. | |
| And of course, we know this in England. | |
| One of the reasons why there's this icy politeness in England and less overt violence, at least in the middle to upper classes, is because for about 1% of the psychotic and violent population was killed or ostracized or sent to Australia every year, right? | |
| Deported, so to speak. | |
| And so because of that, you end up with a more peaceful set of genetics. | |
| And you end up with those who are best able to enforce social rules through ostracism rather than violence. | |
| So you end up with a similarity in genetics, but it's not the same as a collective consciousness. | |
| I hope that helps. | |
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| Thanks, everyone. |
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