Dec. 15, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:10
On Hedonism vs Nihilism
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All right, good morning, everybody.
Good afternoon, actually.
Sorry.
Hope you're doing well, Stephen Molly from Free Domain.
Some questions from listeners.
And yeah, it's going to be a little spicy.
A little spicy.
That's all right.
We can handle some spice, right?
All right.
So first question is this.
Philosophers and psychologists will state that when people lose meaning in their life, they will turn to nihilism.
But why would that be the destination rather than hedonism?
It's a great question, and I appreciate the depth, clarity, and subtlety of the question.
And I will give a ham-fisted, monochromatic answer.
Oh, I should try not to.
So nihilism is the belief that there's nothing of value.
Hedonism is the belief that pleasure is the purpose of life.
And generally by pleasure, we're talking about a short-term physical stimuli such as sex, drugs, rock and roll, that kind of stuff.
So the first and most important question we ask of our lives, of our days when we wake up, of our months or years as we plan, is what do I want to achieve?
What do I want to achieve?
Now, my particular goal and approach is to say, I would like to achieve the expansion of virtue in the world.
So I aim to be a good person.
I aim to do good shows, have good conversations.
So that's my goal.
And that's how I organize my life.
It's how I organize what I do with the 16 hours a day that I'm up and about.
And you need to have that in your life.
You have to have some way of organizing your day because as human beings, we have kind of an infinity of choices, right?
I mean, for lions, it's like hunt, don't hunt, have sex, don't have sex, play with your cubs, don't play with your cubs, whatever, right?
There's not an infinity of choices.
But the higher your consciousness, the more choices you have, the more choices you have, the more you need principles by which to organize your day.
Like if you are a monarch butterfly and you're flitting down to Mexico because it's winter or you're a Canada geese heading south, you really only have one place to go, one way to go and one way to get there, right?
You follow the herd, you follow the flock and you fly south, right?
So that's your life.
You don't really have any choice.
The higher your consciousness and the more options you have, the more you need organizing principles.
So you have a way of prioritizing your actions or your activities.
So meaning, people say meaning, what's meaning, but the purpose is virtue.
That's the highest purpose.
This is an old eudaimania, Aristotelian argument that there's no greater happiness than the pursuit of excellence in moral virtues.
It seems to be true.
I feel that it's true.
And so when people lose meaning, what is generally what is generally meant by that, not that the people mean it, but what it generally means to lose meaning is to lose belief in virtue, in morals, in excellence.
Either you think that there is no such thing as morality or that morality will always lose and there's no purpose in pursuing it.
So if you were an athlete and you did not believe that athletic excellence was possible, or you believed that it might be possible but not for you, or that it didn't even exist and there was no way to get there, then you would lose your motivation to exercise, to approach and hopefully achieve your highest potential as an athlete.
So in general, when people lose their morals, and the purpose of propaganda is to substitute anything other than clear rationality and moral purpose, then when you lose your morals, people with more energy become hedonists.
People with less energy become nihilists.
So if we already kind of have a tendency towards depression and you lose your morals, then you will become a nihilist.
If you don't take pleasure in much of anything and you lose your morals, you will become a nihilist.
If you do have energy and you're not sort of prone to depression and you do take pleasure in things, when you lose your morals, you will become a hedonist for a time.
But the problem, of course, with being a hedonist is you end up as a nihilist in the long run because you need to renew your dopamine.
You need to recharge your dopamine.
So for instance, when you master walking as a kid, you know, yay, good job.
Right.
You master walking as a baby, as a toddler, you're very excited.
You're very happy.
You're very thrilled.
I remember when I first mastered walking, it was great.
I remember when I first mastered riding a bike, it was great.
I remember when I first mastered how to write a poem or spell complex words, like I felt good, I felt great.
And that's nice.
But it diminishes.
And it's supposed to diminish.
If we had the same level of joy over the course of our lives from walking as we did when we first learned to walk, we would do nothing but be overjoyed at walking around and never get anything of any greater note or import achieved, right?
So happiness diminishes on reuse.
The first time you ask a girl out and she says yes, you're thrilled.
And then if you date her for a year and the first time you said, are you free Saturday?
Would you like to go out?
And she says yes, and you've never dated her before, you're thrilled and excited and you can't wait.
And right?
But after you've dated her for a year and you say, hey, are you free Saturday?
I mean, you're happy when she says yes, right?
But not as happy as when you first asked her out.
Of course, right?
So pursuing pleasure diminishes unless the skill level increases.
The first time I did a great serve in tennis, I was very happy.
But if I do a great serve in tennis now, I'm less happy.
That's sort of become the norm.
And if I serve badly, and then I'm unhappy, so to speak, right?
So the problem with hedonism is it's repetitive.
Oh, I had sex.
Oh, I had sex.
Okay, but building towards what?
Growing towards what?
There's an old David Spade routine about some friend of his who was a stoner who was in the basement with the aquarium and it's like, oh, yeah, this fish, she really likes going back there by that little plastic skull.
She really likes that spot.
And it's like, meaning what?
And the reason it was depressing, there was a, I can't remember her name.
I think she's an Asian comedian who was talking about how she didn't want to become one of these women in their early 50s who are lonely and isolated and go and float in the public pool at five o'clock in the morning trying to achieve peace of mind.
Very vivid.
Very vivid.
So people who continue to do the same things will get diminished pleasure each time, right?
The first time you make any decent money, you're completely thrilled.
Oh, I made $10,000.
I'm thrilled, right?
But if you're already a multi-millionaire and you make another $10,000, which you probably do every day with your investments, it's less thrilling, right?
So I don't think I need to understand the hedonic treadmill, right?
That pleasure diminishes if you keep doing the same thing.
Hedonism is keeping doing the same thing and it diminishes.
The pleasure diminishes.
And because hedonism comes at the expense of virtue, when the happiness in hedonism diminishes, as it will, inevitably, then you're left with nothing and then you become a nihilist, which is a very sort of common frame of mind.
It's a very common process, right?
So the end result of no longer believing in or acting on objective morality, whether you go straight to nihilism or you go through hedonism, you get to nihilism by a slightly more circuitous route.
Either way, you're not happy.
Either way, you end up with nothing.
So if you like a girl is a teenager, but you don't ask her out, and then you end up not asking other girls out, and you end up right.
So in the immediate, like in the moment, in the immediate, you feel relief.
Oh, right.
If you were going to ask that girl out for sure today, and it turns out at school, like she was sick that day or wasn't available or whatever it was, then you're like, oh, thanks.
Thank goodness I don't have to go through and face that rejection today, right?
So there's relief, right?
Which is a pleasure, or at least not a pain.
If you continue to not ask girls out, women out, then you're going to end up pretty miserable and isolated and lonely.
And you will end up entrenching that avoidance.
So the way that people deal with the collapse in purpose that arises from disbelieving in the virtue and value of objective morality, there's two ways that people deal with it, which characterize both nihilism and hedonism.
So the nihilist distracts himself in general.
He doesn't believe in morality.
He has no way really to organize his life.
It doesn't really matter what he does, right or wrong, good or bad, doesn't really matter.
He may, in fact, turn toxic, right?
A lot of nihilists turn toxic and aggressive.
And in the misery loves company scenario, they end up destroying the concepts of objective morality in everyone else so that, you know, everyone else can be, well, as miserable as they are, right?
That's the general approach, right?
So when you lose meaning, you become a nihilist or you cement your relationship with nihilism with distractions.
And because hedonism is another kind of distraction, but it's more the pursuit of a positive.
So nihilists will get into a lot of video gaming.
They might get into other things that distract them, certain kinds of meditations and so on, but they will work to distract themselves from the emptiness of a life without moral purpose.
Hedonists will jam-packed their dopamine receptors with immediate stimuli, but with no progress, with no purpose.
So in particular, if they focus on sex, then they just have a lot of empty, meaningless, bad sex that generates resentment and disappointment.
And then they end up running out of pleasure, but they burnt out their dopamine receptors.
They have given up on virtue.
And then they've usually done so much harm by being hedonists that they can't ever really achieve virtue again.
I was talking to a woman 34 years old who had a mother who had two bad marriages and this woman had two bad relationships, live in relationships, one marriage, one not.
And I was sort of pointing out that her mother probably cannot be criticized anymore because she's made so many mistakes and done so dirty by her kids that she can't, she couldn't take any kind of objective moral examination of what she was doing.
So hedonism is kind of like a dead cat bounce, you know, like a cat dies and falls, but its legs cause it to bounce, right?
So it's a dead cat bounce, or it's like how the fingernails keep growing after you're dead, you're here and so on, right?
So hedonism is, I've fallen into the abyss of anti-humanity called not believing in the virtue and value of objective morals.
But I'm going to bounce into hedonism because not believing in objective morals releases you from moral standards and allows you to do what you want, do what they will.
It shall be the whole of the law.
So now you can just chase your dopamine, but it's repetitive.
And of course, you know, sex in a pair bonding relationship, I mean, it's not like you're doing crazy acrobatics every week, but it is serving the purpose of cementing love and pair bonding and happiness in each other and all of that.
So it has sort of a purpose, right?
Empty sex is just feeding the dopamine in a diminishing way because it's not building towards anything.
It's not cementing a family bond.
It's not providing a stable foundation from which to raise children and so on, right?
If I did the same show over and over, I mean, this whole hedonism and nihilism distinction is a new argument.
It's a new idea.
It's a new approach.
If I was doing the same thing over and over again, and I've seen people do that, it's the same speech.
I saw the same speech from one guy at a libertarian conference.
You know, five years later, he gave the same speech.
I couldn't.
I couldn't.
I couldn't do it.
I can't even do, I can't even debate using the same arguments I did previously.
So happiness in virtue works because you can always increase your expertise in virtue and you can always increase the spread and reach and efficacy of your communication about virtue.
So you can always, there's an infinite growth to being better at virtue.
It doesn't end, right?
It doesn't end.
Like love.
If you love someone, you love them more and more until it's like crazy.
You think, oh my God, I love this person so much.
And then the next week, month, year, you love them even more.
So there's no end to that.
There's no cap to that.
Like if you're really into sprinting, right?
You're really good at sprinting.
Well, unless you love Hernias, you may not have a lifelong devotion or dedication to sprinting.
If you like, I don't know, picking up young women and having sex with them, it's like, okay, when you get into your 40s and your 50s, like that old Eddie Murphy routine about being the crusty old guy in the club, then you're going to run out of that.
If you really like drugs, then you're going to start off by chasing a high and end up by being enslaved to avoiding a low, a down, right?
So virtue is the one thing that you can keep getting better at and keep enjoying.
I would say that I've been at a steady eight out of 10 happiness for decades.
I mean, not steady, but it kind of bounces back to that after being up and down sometimes for various reasons.
And I would say that's pretty good.
I would say, for me, I don't know objectively, for me, eight out of 10 in terms of happiness, like minus 10 being suicidal, a plus 10 being like sheer orgasmic bliss.
So plus eight is pretty good.
And if I was simply repeating the same things that I did 20 years ago, I would not get that.
You must progress in order to maintain your happiness.
And virtue is really the one thing that you can continue to increase and improve upon and spread in your life until you're dead.
Again, sort of barring some sort of mental degenerative disorder, which is going to affect everything.
It's not like that just affects a virtue.
And so spreading happiness through reason and virtue is the best thing that you can do for continued happiness, which is why when people want to make you miserable, they will try and talk you out of a belief in objective virtue.
Trust me, it happens just about in each one of my call-in shows.
There's usually one person who is trying to talk me out of objective virtues and values or being highly skeptical about it.
And I understand where it comes from.
Misery loves company, but I have to sort of push back hard against it, as you can imagine.
All right.
I hope that makes sense.
Another question is mentioning a Shiron Moore scandal and was asking me, Steph, what is the relationship between keeping temptation out of your life and resisting temptation?
In other words, should a successful man hire a super hot assistant or should he not do that in order to remove temptation from his path?
So I don't know if I have any objective answer to this.
I'll just sort of tell you my personal answer, which is, you know, I have a sweet tooth and it comes from growing up poor and British, but I have a sweet tooth.
And one of the reasons, of course, that British people have sweet tooths and sweet teeth is because a lot of her ancestors were over the empire and on the high seas and so on, like the British Empire.
And you needed to enjoy citrus fruits in order to get the vitamin C to avoid scurvy.
So those who didn't have a sweet tooth, because a sweet tooth is designed to draw you towards fruit, right?
Fruit is brightly colored and sweet.
Candy wrappers are brightly colored and sweet, right?
So sweet tooth is sort of a British thing.
In other words, those who had sweet teeth and sought out more exotic fruits tended to do better overall.
So because I have a sweet tooth, if there's candy around, I might snack on it a bit.
And it's not just, you know, whether it's weight or anything like that.
You know, when you get older, I mean, you should try and take care of your teeth as a whole.
But as you get older, I really don't want any teeth problems.
So I keep away from that kind of stuff.
So I just find it easier.
The four C's, right?
Cookies, candy, chips, and chocolate.
Crisps, as they'd say.
Bit odd, innit?
So I don't have those things in the house.
I asked my wife, my wife is better with this sort of stuff.
She doesn't have the same kind of sweet tooth.
But I've asked my wife not to buy that stuff for many, many years, and she's fine with that.
I mean, around Christmas, I'll have a little bit more.
But in general, I will avoid that stuff.
And it's easier for me just to not have it in the house.
In the same way, you've got some glass-walled office, you're some executive, and you've got some super hot Donna-style receptionist or secretary out there, and you're going to start probably fantasizing and eyeballing and so on.
And she may in fact have designs upon you as sort of the alpha.
And it just seems like it's just easier.
You know, if you've got a sweet tooth, don't put a big pile of your favorite chocolates in a bowl on your desk.
Just why?
Why would you want to put temptation right there if you have a weakness for a certain thing, right?
Like, I don't like lollipops.
So, if there was a big bowl of lollipops, I would be pretty easy to not get them.
So, I think in general, prevention is better than cure.
And to not have that kind of temptation around is just better and wiser as a whole.
Somebody has asked me about the general state of the economy and what my thoughts are while recognizing that I'm not exactly a subject matter expert.
And the economy is an illusion.
The Matrix is fiat currency.
The matrix is a psychotic fantasy that makes people insane by not giving them accurate feedback about their bad choices.
So, people make bad choices and the government prints upon a bunch of money and people are buying elimination of the effects of bad choices through their vote, right?
And if you vote for the right people, then those people will counterfeit a bunch of money, stealing from the more productive and the more responsible and the savers in order to hurl money at you so you can avoid the negative consequences of your bad choices.
Oh, I just talked about this in the show last night, so I won't go through the whole list.
I think we're all aware of what it is.
So, the economy is bribing idiots by taxing the responsible, either directly or indirectly through inflation.
But that is the entire purpose of the modern economy, is to subsidize fools at the expense of the wise.
And therefore, it becomes unwise to become wise and a certain kind of wisdom to be a fool.
So, the economy is not real.
The economy is like a guy who owes the casino $10,000 and he's just starting to leave, so he's fine.
Like, he's not cornered and aggressed against or whatever they would do to get you to pay up, you know, whether it's sinister or not.
So, if you have a neighbor and he lays us around a lot and doesn't really seem to work and seems to be doing just fine, you say, oh, maybe he won the lottery, maybe he inherited a bunch of money, maybe this, maybe that.
But the reality, of course, is that it's an illusion.
He's just getting more and more into debt and he's going to lose everything over time, or at least he would in a sort of sane economic universe and so on.
So he is very irresponsible and his kids' private school is going to vanish, you know, like one of the Gibb brothers who got into cocaine, the youngest one, and his brother said, if you keep doing the cocaine, like all of these gold records, this house, this pool, these nice cars, all of it goes away.
And I think he ended up dying of the drugs.
And so, yeah, it's all an illusion.
Like I look around and I see everything is Is shimmering.
Everything is unreal.
And the wake up, the waking up is going to be brutal.
And tragically and sadly, ultra-violent and so on.
And hopefully, hopefully, this will be mankind's never again moment that you can't just print your way into prosperity, that democracy is inevitable, and that whatever you create to protect you will end up consuming and destroying you, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And hopefully we'll have this never again moment where the correct, I mean, my purpose here is to document the decline so that in the future, after the cataclysms, or I to write about in my novel, The Future, that in the future, they will look back and they'll say, oh, okay, so that's what happened.
Okay.
Good to know.
It's good to know that that's what happened so that we don't do it again.
That is the goal.
I'm not, you know, I had some hope at the beginning, of course, that I and others would be able to avert the disaster.
But we have either we failed or it was impossible to succeed.
I tend a little bit more towards the latter, but I'm very glad that I tried.
But yeah, I do the same thing with society that I did with my family, which is to try and make them sane and good.
And if they won't listen, I am free from responsibility.
I'm free of, like I did my best.
I put the information in front of the world.
I made the case.
I put the data together.
I took the hits and the blowback and the this and that.
So I did everything reasonable to avert the disaster that is coming.
But I can't make people do the right thing.
It's a free will thing.
I can't make people do the right thing.
I don't think I could have done more.
I think if I'd done more, I could have been kirked and not in the William Shanna way.
So then I would not be able to pursue my goal, which is to produce maximum philosophy over the course of my life, right?
And it's like when I was playing Zork when I was a kid, I remember a friend of mine was talking about maximum verbosity.
And he was very excited by you could type in maximum verbosity into the text game Zork and it would reply, maximum verbosity.
And it would give you the most detailed explanations.
And that's really been sort of my goal and approach in life as a whole is to maximum philosophy, maximum philosophy.
And I think I did that.
And I may have been too early, but you don't know that you're too early, right?
If you say, charge, right, then you're running across a field and then you look back and nobody's following you.
Well, were you too early?
No, it's just that people chose, well, not to follow you, which, you know, maybe a failure on my part or whatever, but I'm not really sure what I could have done that would have been remarkably different.
But so I did maximum philosophy and it wasn't enough.
And that is, I don't know that I could have been clearer.
I don't know that I could have been, I tried to be engaging, enjoyable, tried to interview the experts so people didn't think that stuff was just my particular personal opinion.
And so I think I did the maximum that I could.
Certainly with, you know, 12 books and 6,500 shows, I'm not sure I could have done more.
And so I did the maximum that I could.
So, yeah, the economy is a mirage.
The people are ghosts in a way.
So if you're kept alive by moral crimes, in other words, if your sustenance is from theft, predation, lies, fraud, then you are not survivable in a free society.
Like you will not survive, at least without massive change.
So if you are stealing and cheating and lying, then you are not viable in a free economy in your current state, right?
So there are billions of people around the world who are alive because of debt, which is looting from the next generation and unfunded liabilities and all the stuff that we've talked about a lot before.
So they're kind of ghosts in a way.
Because if you survive based on debt and the debt is unsustainable, then your life is unsustainable.
Now, of course, some people, of course, will make the change and make the transition and so on and adapt and some people won't.
I mean, most people will, but some people won't.
So the buildings are holograms and some not insignificant proportion of the population are kind of ghosts just feeding like time vampires off the unborn and it's not real.
None of it is in particular real.
It is pillaging from the past in the momentum of prior expertise and it is stealing from the future to bribe people into precarious existence in the here and now.
So a lot of people are kind of ghostly and most of what we have is just prior momentum, right?
Like if you're in a jet fighter and you're climbing skyward and then both of your engines fail or all four of your engines fail, you'll still have some upward momentum, but you're going to crash, right?
So you don't have any thrust.
You don't have any energy that's keeping you aloft anymore.
So that is where things are.
The engines are gone.
There's momentum from prior intellectual energy and the prior meritocracy.
Like we built our civilization, at least in the West, based upon a pretty raw meritocracy.
And we've replaced that with feelings and hysterical equality, fetishes, and so on.
And so the meritocracy that drives our civilization is gone.
And so we still have upward momentum, but the engine, the propulsion power, is no more.
And so the economy is an illusion.
All right.
P.S. Morgan's attacks on Nick Fuentes are driven by the same internal emotional energy that made Will Smith's attack Chris Rock thoughts.
I don't know.
I don't really know why Chris Rock was attacked by Will Smith.
But I don't want to speak for Monsieur Signor Fuentes.
But I will say this, sort of young edge lords who are like saying Hitler is there's pluses to Hitler and stuff like that.
I mean, they're just exposing this kind of hypocrisy on the boomers.
And the boomers, I don't think, will ever see it.
Boomers are absolutely immune to self-knowledge and perception of their own hypocrisy.
So if totalitarians like Hitler are really bad, which they are, then why are there communists all throughout academia?
If praising totalitarians is so absolutely unacceptable, then why do people throughout history who praised totalitarians, why are they still acceptable?
I mean, we can go through a list.
I mean, Will Duranti and Vladimir Lenin talked about how, sorry, Albert Einstein talked about how positive Vladimir Lenin was.
And so, I mean, there's sort of endless lists of pro-socialists, pro-communist intellectuals.
There's endless lists of people who praise murderous dictators and so on.
And they're all fine.
So there's not a principle here, right?
There's no principle here.
It's turf war.
It's bloods versus crypts.
There's no principle.
I mean, if those who start wars and cause the deaths of countless people are bad, then what's more vivid and recent and punishable, I suppose, are the architects of the war on terror and the Iraq war in particular.
It was based on the lie as sold by the media and so on.
And what about the people who pushed all the COVID stuff?
I mean, if Hitler is evil, as he is, as he was, then one of the things that made the Nazis evil were forcing people to take medical treatments without informed consent, right?
So that's, I mean, literally was called the Nuremberg Code because it came out of the Nazi regimes.
So if Nazism is so bad, then, which it is, right, then why do people get away with praising dictators on the left?
And why are people still praising COVID responses?
And why are the architects of the Iraq war not facing any negatives, right?
So boomers have emotions and they don't have principles.
They're programmed.
They don't sit there and say, okay, so why was Hitler bad?
Well, he was a totalitarian and a dictator.
Okay, all right.
So then totalitarians and dictators are the category of which Hitler is a part, and therefore all totalitarians and dictators should be hated and feared.
And we should have disgust with anyone who supports any totalitarians and dictators.
Oh, why else was Hitler bad?
Well, he started wars.
And so everyone who starts wars that are not defensive should be condemned.
So there's no principles at play here.
Just everyone knows.
And so I think that's one of the things that is occurring.
And the boomer thing is to just repeat what somebody says with shock and incredulity.
You're really saying that, oh, I'm stunned.
I'm stunned that you would even think, right?
And this sort of shock and, you know, it's not an argument, right?
But of course, the reasons why people can't say why they're upset about something is because they don't have defensible positions.
So they just have to have outrage and shock.
And I can't believe it.
You really because if they say, well, Hitler was bad because of X, Y, and Z, which I'm sure I would agree with 99.9999% of all of that, it's like, okay, well, then who else displays those characteristics?
Who is more current, more present?
And you don't have to go back 80 or 90 years, right?
Who is more vivid and more present in these horrific crimes that the Nazis did?
Who's more vivid and present in these issues?
Well, of course, it generally tends to be these leftist, socialist, communists.
And so if Nazism is bad, which it is, then it's a dead and spent historical force, right?
And so if Nazism is bad, then we have to deal with the other totalitarians, the totalitarians of the left.
But nobody notices, nobody cares.
Or the totalitarians of the right who started the Iraq war.
I mean, again, just sort of one of sort of many instances or potentialities.
But yeah, so they won't act on principle.
And I think that's where the edgelords are coming.