Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - How the Soul is BORN! Listener Questions

Nov. 23, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

30:50

How the Soul is BORN! Listener Questions

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	All right, two questions, great questions from the fine readers at x, fdral.com slash x.
	If you don't subscribe, you're missing out on some really, really great stuff.
	Now, the first question, where was my consciousness before my birth?
	I mean, there's two answers to that.
	One is all of the atoms that compose your consciousness were always there for as long as the universe has existed from a sort of functional physics standpoint, given that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted to energy and back, the atoms that make up your consciousness are immortal.
	I mean, which is a way of saying that they are eternal.
	Of course, they're not immortal because atoms don't live or die.
	So you and I are composed of the bowels of exploding stars that have crossed across the universe to aggregate on planet Earth and become our consciousness as a whole.
	So it's a beautiful thing.
	It's a beautiful, we were forged in the furnace of a dying star.
	And that's a beautiful thing.
	We have brought a dead star back to life through the blinding luminosity of thought.
	So the atoms that make up your consciousness have been around forever and ever.
	Amen.
	And will be around forever and ever.
	Amen.
	When we die, we will go into the ground.
	We will go into the bellies of worms.
	And the worms will excrete.
	We will be used as food for plants.
	That plant may be eaten by another human being.
	And then we merge into another life.
	Though, of course, we, as an entity, are long gone.
	But our atoms, we're just borrowing them.
	You're just borrowing them.
	You know, you ever find a really old penny, 1913 or, you know, whatever it is, you find a really old penny.
	And of course, we can while away an idle moment or two by wondering just how many pockets that penny has been through, how many times it has been spent, on what items, how many people it has passed between how long has it journeyed from its origin in the mint in 1913 to our pocket in the present.
	And I mean, back when you could spend pennies, we would then go and buy something and use it as spare change.
	It would sit in the cashier, and then it would be maybe paid out in a pay and go somewhere else.
	So we are merely custodians of the coin for the moment, and it passes from us to other people in its very lengthy journey towards its final decommission when it is a worn-down nub.
	But even then, the atoms that are in the coin continue forever and ever.
	Amen.
	When we have a baby, we have assembled atoms into the shape, form, content, and substance of a human life.
	We have not created a baby.
	We have simply assembled the atoms.
	When I have just finished writing a book, very good book called Dissolution.
	And in writing that book, I have taken atoms and assembled them into text on a screen, on paper, if you print it out.
	I have taken the atoms in my fingers, used them to type a book, which has changed the atoms on the screen, changed the atoms on the hard drive, and then changed the atoms on your screen when you read it, which changes the atoms in your mind when you process it, right?
	You think about the book, and it changes who you are to one degree or another.
	There have been some books that have completely reshaped who I am, and there have been other books that have had a minor effect, but have been fun.
	So no, we're just in a constant state of shuffling eternal atoms.
	That's all that is going on.
	So your consciousness did not exist prior to you coming into being.
	All consciousness is based on the brain, but the atoms within the brain are eternal.
	We are a temporary assemblage of eternal fragments.
	And we should really relish and enjoy and appreciate that, the odds against it.
	I mean, if you've ever had this thought, you're sort of lying in a bed.
	It's a beautiful summer's night.
	There are some crickets, a little bit of wind in the trees.
	The window's open.
	It's an outward opening window.
	And you have some Venetian blinds.
	And you catch sight of a star through the black bars opening to the midnight sky through the Venetian blinds.
	And the star might be 200 light years away.
	Sirius, or I don't know.
	I mean, it's a long way away.
	200 light years away.
	So a photon erupted from that star as the result of a wild multi-billion year nuclear explosion.
	A photon erupted from that star and went spitting and scurrying out into the universe and traveled in the empty wastes of space for 200 years.
	In 1825, it started.
	Now, the light only comes into conscious existence when it lands in a human eye or an animal eye, but in this case, we just talk about a human eye because only the human eye can call it a star.
	The animal eye only looks at it as undifferentiated dots in the sky.
	That's not what they are.
	So if we can imagine that that photon, that light particle, a particle or a wave, that star erupts, sorry, that light erupts from a star 200 years ago.
	And absolutely, I mean, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and it has been traveling for 200 years.
	And as the photon begins to approach our solar system, it notices a star is getting bigger.
	And then it notices that it is approaching a planet.
	And it's actually going to land upon a planet.
	Let us imagine that the purpose of a photon, its desire, is to light up something, to land on something and light it up.
	That the photons that leave the sun are thrilled when they land on the moon because they get to light something up.
	Rather than just cooking their way through the immeasurable wastes of space, they light something up.
	They land on something and light it up.
	And the only thing greater for a photon than lighting something up is to be perceived as lighting something up.
	There's not much point playing a beautiful song in your basement that no one gets to hear.
	The purpose of a musician, Of course, is to be heard.
	So the photon from an incalculable or barely calculable distance away, hundreds of trillions of miles, 300,000 kilometers a second.
	I mean, it takes light a quarter second to get from the moon to us and eight minutes to get from the sun to us.
	200 years of travel.
	And the sun sparkle, like the sun sparkle, the sun effluent, the radiant beams of nuclear delight from 200 light years away, doesn't just get to a solar system, doesn't just get to a star, a sun, our sun, doesn't just get to a planet, doesn't just get to the surface, doesn't bounce off in some cloud.
	But the star spatter of light actually makes it to your eyeball across 200 light years.
	It passes, let's say there are clouds in the sky, it passes through the cloud at night, passes through the Venetian blind, even.
	If your head had been one inch higher or one inch lower, you would not have seen that star.
	And that particular photon would never have landed in your eye and been identified as a star, not just a dot of light, but a star with purpose and meaning and comprehension and definition and understanding and appreciation.
	So you think of the odds of any random photon being blasted off the foreign sun's surface 200 light years away of making it all the way across the universe, landing in our solar system on our planet at night, right?
	Because if it's during the day, the photon is swallowed up by the general brightness of the sky, never reaches your eye, really.
	Makes it past the clouds, through the window, past the Venetian blind, and into your eye, where it sparks its definition.
	Oh, I'm looking at a star.
	What is a star?
	Oh, it's a giant nuclear reaction occurring hundreds of light years away.
	I think of the absolutely, I mean, what odds would you put on any random photon traveling across the universe, unable to change its path?
	What odds would you give any random star spray of light that it traveled 200 light years and landed in a human eye?
	My God, any individual photon, if you'd blinked, it might have traveled all that distance.
	Oh, I so want to be consummated and defined by a human eye.
	A human eye is the only thing in the universe that we know of that can define me as a photon, as a wave/slash particle, as the product of a nuclear explosion occurring hundreds of light years away.
	Oh, it blinked!
	Oh, it came all this way!
	Or, oh, it came all this way and there was a notification on the phone, and the person looked away and to actually land in your eye is incredible.
	I mean, the odds, right?
	The odds are even smaller that you are here.
	What an incredible gift life is.
	I mean, real life, thinking life, not just an animal.
	What is that old joke about a meadow on a summer's evening and the call and chirp and rustle and bustle of all the animals seeking to eat and screw?
	That's all they do, just machines of eating and screwing, right?
	Like hedonists.
	So, your consciousness is the most improbable, exciting, fantastic, and amazing assemblage of atoms that could possibly exist.
	What are the odds of any atom across this entire universe that it assembles into the three pounds of wetware at the top of your spinal column and your brainstem?
	And not only the atoms that are in your brains, but not even the atoms that are layers of old stuff, right?
	The lizard brain, the, oh, let's keep the heart pumping and the kidney and let's get the hormones balanced and like all of this, to keep the breathing going, like all the stupid stuff in the brain, all the lizard brain and lower lizard brain stuff, but actual neofrontal cortex, the higher seat of reason.
	Your atoms, in assembling into your consciousness, have won a near, infinitely impossible lottery.
	And your atoms have meaning because they participate in human consciousness, which is the only entity to create, define, and pursue meaning in the universe that we know of.
	So, you had no consciousness before your birth.
	You have no consciousness after you are born.
	Where is the star before the matter aggregates and starts the nuclear explosion?
	There is no star.
	Where is the star after it has exploded?
	Assuming it goes full supernova.
	Well, it didn't exist, it existed, and then it stops existing, but the atoms are eternal.
	And we should be incredibly grateful that we have assembled these atoms in consciousness, which is winning the lottery for blind matter, to have it unblinded for a very brief span.
	So that's the first question, comment.
	The second is, is the Enlightenment or the French Revolution more of the reason for where we are today?
	So my character Roman, in my novel The Future, which you should definitely read or even better listen to at freedommain.com slash books.
	So Roman basically says that success is failure in societies.
	That when societies succeed, in other words, they become materially wealthy, successful, and powerful, sorry, succeed, successful, bit of a redundancy there.
	But when societies become wealthy and powerful, that the seeds of their destruction are sown, right?
	We know the cycle, right?
	Good men, hard times, blah, blah, blah.
	And I don't believe that's true at all.
	I think that it is simply because of the government.
	The government is the course and reason for the cycle of civilization.
	Nothing more, nothing less.
	It's not complicated.
	And what happens is there is an increase in freedom and in particular, economic freedom.
	With economic freedom, relative free trade, with economic freedom comes wealth.
	And with economic freedom comes wealth disparity.
	With economic freedom, right, the Pareto principle, the blinding geniuses of productivity that end up being, you know, multi-decade millionaires and billionaires and I guess at some point a trillionaire.
	With economic freedom comes wealth, but wealth only happens with economic disparity.
	I mean, that's the only way that wealth can happen is economic disparity.
	For reasons I've gone into a bunch of times, so I won't repeat them here.
	Now, with economic disparity, you end up with a few people who have created a lot of money, a lot of value, and a lot of people who are relatively poor.
	I mean, they're wealthier than they would have been otherwise, but they're relatively poor.
	And I'm going to use an acronym, AFM.
	Absolute fucking morons view this as a horrible injustice that needs to be remedied by the rich people giving money to the poorer people.
	AFMs, AFMs.
	I was going to go with TFM total, but it's not absolute enough.
	The absolute fucking morons look at the wealthy and they are tempted.
	They are tempted.
	And the temptation is, instead of enjoying and appreciating the wealth, jobs, technology, and opportunities that the wealthy people have created, not stolen, created, created, all the matter that Elon Musk has forged into the boring company, into the current incarnation of Twitter, or X, into Rockets, into all of the other Starlink, all of the other great things that he's done.
	All of those atoms existed.
	He hasn't created anything.
	He simply assembled them into things that have value.
	A fish at the bottom of a lake has no value.
	Can't eat it.
	Somebody who goes and moves the fish from the bottom of the lake into a frying pan through hooking or netting or something, well, that person has created value.
	He's not created the fish, but he's created the fish in a state of value.
	He's turned the fish into property.
	Property is that which has value that you own.
	And you own it because it has value.
	So the AFMs are subject to a great temptation, which is fanned and fueled by the sophists.
	Because, you see, of course, the absolute fucking morons, and I say this not because they're dumb, but because they're greedy, the absolute fucking morons look at the wealthy people and say, gimme that shit.
	Gimme.
	Or else.
	It's like all the people who win the lottery, all of their friends and relatives come out of the woodwork.
	Hey, you're the greatest guy ever.
	Hey, hey, I need this.
	Hey, I need that.
	Hey, I need the other.
	Gimme, gimme, gimme.
	So rather than saying, you know, people can understand the non-obvious if it's taught well.
	So it's not a matter of them being too dumb to understand it.
	But the way, I mean, the way you would explain it to, say, the average young woman, is to say, would you be happy if some random person in the audience at a Taylor Swift concert, some random person in the audience took the microphone and started singing and dancing instead of Taylor Swift?
	Should Taylor Swift give her microphone and stage to a random person in the audience?
	And then that random person in the audience would take home Taylor Swift's, I don't know, million-dollar paycheck for the concert or whatever she makes, right?
	So if a bunch of people had paid thousands of dollars, which you can for a Taylor Swift concert, a bunch of people had paid that money, they went to Taylor Swift, and instead of Taylor Swift, each song was sung by a random person in the audience.
	I mean, maybe there'd be occasionally good singers or whatever, but for the most part, it would be bad, right?
	They would be upset.
	Well, that is Taylor Swift taking her resources and giving them to other people.
	Now, would you pay thousands of dollars to go to a Taylor Swift concert if you knew ahead of time that each song was going to be sung by a random person in the audience and Taylor Swift wasn't even going to be there?
	You would not.
	That would be called karaoke.
	And you would not pay thousands of dollars to go to some random karaoke event.
	Right?
	Again, this is not super complicated.
	Everybody understands this.
	I mean, you can explain socialism or the welfare state by whichever kid fakes a headache, gets all out of their chores.
	Everyone else has to do all of their chores and they will get paid.
	You'll take the money out of the money that you pay the kids to do the chores and you give it to the kids who have a headache or claim to have a headache.
	You can't prove it, right?
	Claim to have a headache.
	Well, clearly, no chores would get done and everyone would claim to have a headache.
	Again, this is not complicated stuff to teach people at all.
	So the AFMs look at wealthy people and say, you've got to give your resources to the less wealthy, which means Taylor Swift taking her microphone and handing it to people who aren't Taylor Swift.
	And then people say, well, I wouldn't go to that concert.
	I wouldn't pay for that concert.
	It's right.
	Right.
	When you take resources from Taylor Swift and give it to people who aren't Taylor Swift, the value evaporates.
	There's no value.
	It's gone.
	Well, somebody, of course, gets a great story.
	Hey, I remember I was at the Taylor Swift concert and there was a surprise.
	Everybody got a chance at their microphone or random people in the audience.
	And I sang badly a Taylor Swift song to like 5,000 people or 10,000 people.
	So, you know, people get cool stories, for sure.
	They get cool stories.
	So isn't that worth it?
	Well, no.
	I mean, not to labor the point too much, but if the NBA were to have basketball games where they pick random people from the audience to play basketball, including people who are 70 or 80, like some Jack Nicholson wobble clone, would there be an NBA?
	Would people pay to go to those games?
	Well, that is taking resources from the more able and the more competent and giving them to the less able and the less competent, right?
	But everyone understands there would be no NBA if you did that.
	You would simply be taking value from those who were competent and giving value to those who were less competent and thus destroying value, destroying that value.
	But again, you have to, and the reason I say this is this stuff is not hard to understand.
	Like everybody with an IQ north of 80 can understand this.
	I mean, obviously you have to teach it in the right way and you have to make it comprehensible.
	And I get all of that, right?
	But, you know, you just give examples that people understand.
	Would you go to a concert, would you pay $3,000 for a Taylor Swift concert if Taylor Swift didn't even show up and random people were singing Taylor Swift songs?
	You would not.
	You would not do that in any way, shape, or form.
	You would not pay for that.
	And so the value is simply by transferring value from the more competent to the less competent, you just destroy that value.
	That's all.
	So again, this is not hard to understand.
	And the reason I say AFMs is because it is easy to understand.
	And nobody lives that way, right?
	Everybody in the first world has a whole lot more resources than just about everybody in the third world, and yet they don't handed that.
	It's always other people who have to do all of this and so on, right?
	And so that is the great temptation.
	There's people who have more than I have, and there are evil sophists who whip them into a frenzy of rage, entitlement, and hostility, which then produces predation, war, social collapse, right?
	But the endless violence of the perceived justification of threats and theft.
	I talked about this in my documentary on China, that they come to a country, the communists come to a country, and they say, oh, that guy on the hill with the big house and the pretty wife, he's only wealthy because he stole from you and so on.
	And people are tempted into this kind of evil.
	And I think it's a little bit more women than men, but it's not particularly relevant to this discussion.
	I just think it's a little bit more women than men.
	Women tend to fall prey a little bit more to the sin of envy.
	Men a little bit more for pride, women a little bit more for envy.
	So the reason I'm saying all this is that the Enlightenment was the movement that said human reason can understand the universe.
	And in order to do that, they had to push back God from domination of the universe to some degree.
	Or at least they had to say God designed a rational universe.
	God gave us reason.
	Therefore, reason can understand the universe.
	We weren't just sort of cowering in superstitious fear, which was a lot of the sort of post-Roman world, the dark ages.
	So the French Revolution was the culmination of two things.
	One was the wealth, and I go into this for 12 hours in my presentation on the French Revolution that's available at first subscribers at freedomain.com slash donate.
	But sort of very briefly, two things happen.
	One is that you end up with a wealthy group of people that everyone else, instead of working hard to produce their own value, they switch to whining, bleating, complaining, threatening, and attacking the wealthy.
	It's what people do.
	Oh, that guy's got a lot of food.
	So let's pretend that the food is in some permanent state of preservation.
	It's not like milk left out in the sun.
	Let's pay it's been pickled or jammed or whatever it is.
	It's been put into a state of preservation.
	So what happens is, over the course of the summer, you've got some guy who's working like hell, who's working really hard to get enough food and more food than he needs for the winter, right?
	In case of emergencies and so on, right?
	Or because he's got two kids on the way, he's got maybe twins on the way or whatever it is, right?
	Who knows, right?
	Or he's getting older and he knows that there's a gap between his productivity and his son's productivity to the point where he needs to store up extra for whatever reason, right?
	He's got extra.
	He's got extra food.
	Now, there are all of these people around who basically say, oh, well, that guy's got extra food.
	So I don't need to work as hard because I'll just nag, bully, threaten, and manipulate him into giving me his extra food.
	So I don't need to work so hard.
	Fantastic.
	That's the great temptation.
	That's the great temptation.
	Now, of course, this guy, because he's really good at creating value, he has a lot of farmland.
	He hires a lot of people.
	And those people, rather than saying, wow, this guy's really good at, he's got a real green thumb.
	He's great at agriculture.
	So rather than being thankful that he's so good at agriculture that he can pay them and give them more stability and increase their income and so on, there's more food in the entire community, not just for him, but for everyone because he's so good at growing.
	Rather than being grateful for that, they say, oh, well, I only have less because he's stolen from me.
	And again, there's all of these worm-tongue sophists who are very happy to say all of this.
	So, Bob the Genius grower has extra food that's preserved for his own reasons.
	And he's using that extra food maybe to hire even more workers so that his green thumb can be turned into even more food productivity and so on.
	Like, he's a real, pretty to principle.
	He's a moneymaker.
	He's a value creator.
	But what happens is, because he's got all this extra food, people start circulating among the workers and saying, well, he's stolen all that fruit.
	That food rightfully belongs to you.
	You did all the work.
	You were the one hoeing the back 40 and digging the ditches and milking the cows and building the fences and all the stuff that goes on in farming.
	You were the one doing all of that.
	And the resentment starts and the jealousy starts and the aggression starts and all of this, you know, boring, useless stuff, right?
	Now, this only happens, though, because of the state.
	Without the state, this would all be, well, first of all, without the state, people would be trained into the reality of free markets, capitalism, and value add.
	So they wouldn't resent.
	I mean, they might be jealous from time to time, but they wouldn't resent it.
	You know, I might be jealous of a guy who's got ripped abs.
	I mean, not that I would do much with ripped abs, but let's just say it'd be kind of cool to have ripped abs, right?
	Well, I don't think this guy's stolen my ripped abs.
	Well, the reason I don't have ripped abs and he does ripped abs is because he stole the abs from you, right?
	He stole your abs.
	No, it's like he's put a lot of work, discipline, right?
	A lot of protein powders and sit-ups and deferral of gratification.
	And he eats like, I don't know, boiled chicken and rice twice a day, whatever.
	Like, you know, good for him.
	He's got abs, whatever, right?
	He didn't steal them from me.
	So the sophists, though, will always come along and say, oh, he stole from you, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So then what happens is people start to threaten the wealthy guy, the guy with the food, and they stop working as hard on his land because they feel ripped off.
	So they have less and he's still got all his savings.
	But because of resentment, they're working less and they start to gather and mutter and threaten him, right?
	You better give us some, my baby's hungry.
	You better give us some food or we're going to storm your house and take it by force, right?
	You know, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way, you know, that kind of garbage, right?
	So he's scared and he starts to give food away.
	Now, without the state, he can just hire guards and pay the guards really well.
	And then people can't come and take his stuff.
	But when it's voters, then the government can take his stuff.
	So he's got to really listen to them as a whole, right?
	Or if worse comes to worse, he can just move.
	He could just sell his place and move somewhere else.
	And then people are, they don't have any jobs, right?
	They're going to go back to their own productivity, which is bad.
	But what happens is people threaten through the power of the state.
	They threaten the wealthy guy.
	And then the wealthy guy, he's outvoted, right?
	He's got to give up his resources.
	And then he wants to help them.
	And he has to say stuff.
	Like he can't say, well, I've created way more value than you have.
	And this resentment is really immoral, right?
	It's petty, it's vengeful, and you need to be better people, right?
	And we need to respect property rights because that gives the sophists ammunition.
	Oh, see, he's against you getting anything and he wants to steal more from you.
	And right?
	So the sophists whip up the absolute fucking morons into a hostile frenzy.
	So He's just got to give up resources in order to buy protection from the rage of the mob riled up by the sophists and manifested in their votes for limitless political coercion against him.
	It's a shakedown, right?
	And that's one of the things in the French Revolution.
	The other one I talked about, which is child abuse, you've got to go to my presentation for that.
	I leave you a few teasers here, but it's really, really important.
	So, yeah, the French Revolution is the culmination of people listening to sophists rather than listening to reason.
	And so what happens is they stop producing as much.
	They get lazy.
	They get entitled.
	They end up dependent upon the millionaire's largesse.
	And then eventually the millionaire says, fuck it.
	And he starts producing stuff.
	And then everyone starves.
	And they still blame the millionaire.
	And then they start it all again because of the power of the state.
	So the cycle of civilization is just the cycle of state violence.
	Nothing more, nothing less.
	And as long as we keep having this status-based society, we get to keep doing the stupid merry-go-round.
	Freedomaine.com slash annate.
	Thank you.

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