0:00 - Introduction to the Lecture
1:34 - Conformity and Rebellion
6:58 - The Duality of Good and Evil
10:16 - Accountability in Society
18:38 - Personal Reflections on Beliefs
25:09 - Accepting Aging Gracefully
30:47 - Closing Thoughts and Gratitude
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain explores the nuanced themes of conformity, aggression, and the duality of human nature as represented in classic literature, particularly through Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Molyneux argues against the interpretation of the novella as an allegory for alcoholism, suggesting instead that it embodies the conflict between societal norms and individual impulses. He highlights the consequences of enforced conformity, positing that such repression can lead to resentment and a latent aggression that ultimately seeks expression.
The lecturer elaborates on the idea that individuals harbor a complex psychological landscape, often featuring a "shadow self" that contrasts sharply with their public persona. This concept aligns with Jungian psychology, suggesting that those who appear mild-mannered may conceal aggressive tendencies. Molyneux asserts that societal pressures to conform can result not just in internalized anger but also in group dynamics where a collective aggression against dissenters can manifest, particularly in the current landscape of cultural discourse. The rise of aggressive social activism illustrates this point, as those pushing for conformity under the guise of tolerance often display hostility towards those advocating for diversity of thought.
Continuing the exploration of morality, Molyneux introduces a critical perspective on the nature of virtue signaling in contemporary society. He argues that those who advocate for seemingly righteous causes may, in fact, be masking deeper dysfunctions and complicities within their ideologies. This duality raises questions about the sincerity of moral positions and the potential for individuals to wield their perceived goodness as a shield for less admirable intentions. Molyneux challenges the audience to scrutinize the often unrecognized aggression lurking behind the rhetoric of kindness and inclusivity prevalent in various social movements.
Transitioning to a broader societal critique, Molyneux emphasizes the ethical responsibility of individuals to recognize their complicity in the prevailing systems of power and governance. He delves into the consequences of passive acceptance of harmful policies and the moral imperative to resist participating in actions that contradict one's ethical beliefs. This discussion is framed within the context of personal integrity, as Molyneux exhorts listeners to align their social ties and relationships with their moral stance, suggesting that prolonged association with those who actively promote immorality erodes one’s ethical foundation.
In the latter part of the lecture, the discussion turns toward aging and the acceptance of one's legacy in the fight for virtue. Molyneux posits that true fulfillment comes from a life dedicated to promoting moral excellence and combating immorality. He reflects on his own journey through philosophy, advocating for engagement with one’s principles as a means to find satisfaction in aging gracefully. The culmination of Molyneux’s arguments urges the audience to evaluate their lives through the lens of actions taken in the name of virtue, encouraging a proactive stance against vice as essential for achieving moral integrity.
Overall, the lecture weaves together themes of psychological depth, moral philosophy, and the dynamics of societal norms, challenging listeners to reflect upon their beliefs, interactions, and the authentic pursuit of virtue in a complex world. Molyneux closes by reinforcing the value of personal accountability and the importance of a moral compass in navigating modern societal pressures.
[0:00] Good afternoon, everybody. Stefan Molyneux, Freedomain. Hope you're doing well. And please help support the show, freedomain.com. These are questions from Facebook. Is the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde an allegory for alcoholism? I don't think so. So, I'm sure, as you know, this is a novella written by Robert Louis Stevenson, maybe based on a friend of his or an acquaintance of his who seemed outwardly normal, but actually killed his wife by poisoning her with opiates. And it is about an upright lawyer who is a secret killer. So I don't think it's about alcoholism. I think it's about two things. Number one is that conformity breeds rage. Forcing people to conform breeds resentment and anger. Censorship breeds rebellion, repression breeds revolution. revolution and so pushing down personalities, pushing down aspects of yourself breeds rebellion. Now, we all have an aggressive side and we should because there are a-holes out in the world who will strip us of our rights and liberties and property and freedoms and families and like there are people who will do all of that and we need to be able to get angry and fight where necessary.
[1:20] Now, society, when it becomes over-aggressive, dissolves into chaos and warlords and totalitarianism and all kinds of messy stuff. But when society gets agressive.
[1:35] Too conformist then progress tends to stop it's kind of like evolution right evolution needs a couple of random genes in order to progress and without those random genes things don't progress but too many random genes and the mutations are usually too strong for the organism to remain, viable so society as a whole needs its conformists and it needs its rebels and society will try and turn every rebel into a conformist and the rebels will rebel often against that so i think it is about if you force a an aggressive and a significantly aggressive nature instead of harnessing that instead of harnessing that in society to find some positive aspect to it maybe a soldier or a boxer or, you know, something where the, or maybe even a very aggressive business man or woman, usually men, but society needs to find a way to harness aggression rather than just shaming men for being aggressive, you know, toxic masculinity and all this kind of stuff. Like the fact that we have that, but no conversations about toxic femininity shows you just how completely one-sided and lopsided these conversations are.
[2:57] So, if you force too much conformity in society, there's going to be a rebellion against that conformity, and there should be. I'm not talking violence, I'm just talking about a rebellion against that conformity. And we can kind of see that happening right now. We have all of these, you know, fairly, I mean, very aggressive, woke language scolds and everyone's bad and phobic and racist and everything is toxic and appropriated and all of that. So, when the aggression of repression gets too great, then there is an explosion of anger. So, when you have an outwardly mild and conformist person, there is another person in there who's the polar opposite. This is sort of a Jungian thing, the shadow self and so on.
[3:51] Polite people, like hyper-polite people, can be incredibly aggressive.
[3:56] And we can see this, of course, that the more that there's this focus on diversity of thought and toleration and openness, you can see the shadow side of those ideals being the, you know, fairly hysterical and wild aggression and deplatforming and violence and censorship. So as you push for more and more, quote, diversity, then you actually end up with less and less diversity. You end up with this sort of chilling uniformity. And so we can see this everywhere in society, right? That those who push for the most tolerance have as the underside or the superstructure of their belief systems, like sentimentality and cruelty, often go hand in hand. People who start to become addicted to this idea of being sweet and nice and wonderful and they get addicted to the feelings of virtue signaling get very aggressive at people who point out that the virtue signaling is covering up massive dysfunctions and actually cruelties in society so people who like oh you know we need universal health care so that everyone gets health care and then you point out that people aren't able to access health care like in places here in Canada, you have to wait up to two plus years to get a doctor, a family doctor.
[5:21] And a referral to a specialist, I think, is at 27 weeks now, which is, you know, it's over six months, right? So when people say, well, I just like the idea of everyone getting free healthcare, and then you point out, well, you're actually denying people healthcare in many ways. They get angry because they want to feel good. So you see the supposed niceness when you point out that that it isn't actually very nice and is actually harmful, then they get very aggressive, right?
[5:49] So people who are conformists have underneath that conformity and that mildness and that pleasantness, they have very wild hostility, aggression, and the capacity for significant or extreme violence at times, or at least a support for it, right? A support for it. And i mean you can see this you know the all the my body my choice feminists and feminist allies, didn't have much to say when women were forced to take or i mean we are virtually forced in many ways to take vaccines and so on right so it is a unconscious recognition of the very real fact that conformists are very aggressive. And so this guy in the story who's very much a conformist has a hidden side of aggression to him. And I think that the story picks that up very well. That's number one. Number two is that if you want to do evil, the best way to do it is to pretend to be good.
[6:59] And if you want to do evil, the best way to do it is to pretend to be good. And so on On the one side of things, there is the sort of mild-mannered conformist main protagonist, right?
[7:15] And there is the underside of violence.
[7:20] Conformity is aggression, because how do you get people to conform as children, right? Society can't tell people how to be good because it doesn't really know how to be good. So all it can do is threaten children with aggression, spanking, rejection, violence, going to bed without supper, being forced to sit in a particular location and sort of the timeout stuff. So society can't teach people how to be good, I mean, until it accepts UPB, which will probably be at least one to three generations. Society can't teach people how to be good, so all it can do is threaten them. And so conformity results from threats, and that is why conformity has an understructure of violence underneath it, because conformity is enforced through violence and aggression and threats of ostracism and so on, which to children are threats of violence, of course.
[8:09] So that's on the one side. On the other side, if you want...
[8:13] To be somebody who's not suspected of being evil, then you want to drape yourself in the mantle of virtue.
[8:22] It's the great question of the sort of woke movement that's going on. It's really not a very organic movement, but this woke movement is, are people genuinely, they want to do good in the world and they get frustrated and angry at those who disagree with them, or are the most sufficient bullies those who cloak themselves in moral righteousness? In other words, do they want to be good but are frustrated or do they want to be bullies and the best way to do that is to take up this mantle of egalitarianism, right? Do, say, communists, do they just want a land of milk and honey and peace and reason for everyone and they just get frustrated and angry at those who disagree with them and reluctantly turn to aggression or violence, as generally tends to be the case, or is the best way to indulge your sadistic impulses to cloak yourself in an ideology that inevitably leads to mass violence, right? Are you a good person who descends into evil, or are you an evil person who pretends to be good? In other words, is the shadow side of the good person the evil side, side or is the shadow side of the evil person or the light side of the evil person the pretense to virtue?
[9:45] So, I mean, sort of typical example of this is, say, the boomers. The boomers will say, you know, we care about our life, our society, we care about our children, you know, our children are everything to us, right? And then you say, well, then you have to give up some retirement benefits and healthcare benefits because there's not enough money to pay and then they get very aggressive, right? So that's the shadow side. It's the shadow side. So I think the story goes quite deep into these issues. So, all right.
[10:17] How come we the people be held accountable for our complicity in the collapse of the Western world? We who stood by as we allowed them to sell our children's futures and 35 trillion in debt. All right. So we who spoke against the corrupt politicians and then abate them. Well, I mean, obviously my case for 20 years is called the against me argument. And so you sit down and talk with friends and family and you say, well, I don't support X, Y, or Z government action. And they say, well, I do support it. And then you say, well, do you support me being thrown in jail if I don't support it, right? And if they do support you being thrown in jail because you don't support X, Y, or Z program, then, like, let's say that if you say, I don't support, I don't know, foreign aid, right? Okay, then, but you would support me being thrown in jail if I don't pay for the foreign aid, right? That's sort of the question, right? And if people say yes, then I do support you being thrown in jail. Or the welfare state. day. Like I think the welfare state is toxic and destructive and harmful and immoral, then would you allow me or would you support me being able to withdraw from paying for that which violates my conscience, right?
[11:34] And if people say, yes, you should be thrown in jail if you don't do what I want, that's immoral. And I personally don't associate with those kinds of people. I just don't. It's a matter of basic elemental pride and self-respect. And so I think it was close to 20 years ago, I sort of introduced this argument to the world. And it's a way of making people take their beliefs seriously. See, people can mouth off whatever platitudes they want. But if they don't have any skin in the game, then the beliefs are not real. And they suffer no negative consequences. You know, I mean, the old sort of joke was sort of a bitter dark joke was everybody who put the Ukrainian flag in their bio with this sort of Slava Ukraine kind of thing, that they would then be drafted to go and fight the war in Ukraine. Well, you can imagine how quickly those flags would come down. Or if they alone got a bill for the support of the war in Ukraine, if they alone got the bill, how quickly would that, you know, they would have said, okay, well, if you have the flag in your bio, then you've got to pay $10,000 towards supporting the war in Ukraine how many people would then take that down and so you know one of the problems of course is that the people who are interested in freedom tend to be sort of very nice and one of the reasons that we care about freedom is we have empathy to people free will choice virtues morality.
[13:01] And all of that kind of good stuff and so we trend we tend to try to reason with people we don't like saying i'm not going to have anything to do with you if you continue to to want to force me to do things against my conscience, right? I'm talking obviously completely peacefully and voluntary and so on. It's like the intervention thing, like someone has a terrible addiction.
[13:26] And friends and family get together and say, you've got to go and get help for this addiction or we're cutting you out of our lives, right? Now, very few, as far as I understand it, sort of very few libertarians have gone down that path. I really haven't heard of any, but I mean, outside of people who sort of listen to the philosophy that I put forward, I haven't really heard of any. But if you look at something like COVID, then the people who believed in the efficacy and necessity of the vaccines were absolutely willing to cut off family members. Who didn't get vaccinated, or even who opposed these sort of mandatory vaccine.
[14:09] So the people who were pro-vaccine were willing to ostracize family members. And I was reading this really, really sad history. I mentioned it on the show the other day. It was under a Naomi Wolf post on X. It's a very sad history of how much ostracism was going on over the course of the pandemic. Pandemic so they were very serious about their beliefs and willing to sacrifice relationships for the sake of the vaccine and so they'll they'll win and until we are willing to ostracize people whose beliefs are immoral deeply immoral and i don't mean like right away you make the case You may make the case for some weeks or possibly even months, though years seems a bit ridiculous. But at some point, you have to take your beliefs seriously. And my argument has been, if an action is defined as immoral, right? If an action is defined as immoral, then people who advocate that action in particular against you are immoral people.
[15:19] And, of course, we try to help people who are immoral and we try to bring them to the light. But if they are steadfast in their immorality, then a moral person really can't hang out with them and retain integrity, right? An immoral person cannot remain in the social orbit forever of a moral person, and the moral person then still claims integrity. So you drop your morality after a certain amount of time, or you drop the relationship, or you accept that the morality doesn't really mean anything to you, it's just a pretense, and so on, right? I mean, if morality doesn't inform you who you spend time with, then the morality doesn't make any sense. Morality, one of the things it should do, is help define who you should spend time with. So, for instance, obviously, I am anti-spanking, right? Spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
[16:12] Now, if I had a relative who not only spanked his children, but also advocated for it, was very prominent and positive about it and constantly, you know, would post about the need for it and all of these kinds of things. So spanking is immoral. Now, I can understand that if you grew up this way, you know, it may take a little bit of time for you to see the immorality of it. But, you know, I would sit down with that person and say, okay, so this is your practice. Let me give you the moral arguments let me give you the consequentialist arguments let me give you the scientific arguments you know here's the lovely Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff to tell you about the meta-studies of spanking and how harmful spanking is to kids like all of that sort of stuff and then it comes down to a choice.
[17:01] If this family member or friend or whoever, even after being exposed to all of the rational and empirical and factual and scientific and consequentialist arguments documents, if this person still said, spanking is good, I don't care what you say, I'm going to hit my children, and I'm going to publicly advocate for hitting children, well, that person, again, after a certain amount of time, you give a little bit of time for the shock to set in, for the change to occur, you give some grace. And I remember giving a speech about this exact topic, and taking Q&As from the audience in a libertarian convention, I think it was out in California or something in 2011, like, you know, 13 plus years ago.
[17:45] So would I sit down happily and break bread with somebody who hits his children, even after I've explained all of the virtues, morals, and ethics of that? Would it be right and reasonable for me to sit down and expose my children to it and so on, right? What do my beliefs mean? what do moral beliefs mean if they don't change any of my actions, and in particular, my social actions, right? The moral beliefs would be just yapping, just noise. So, if you have made the case for the non-aggression principle, and you still have people in your life who want you thrown in jail for standing to or by your ethical beliefs, then you are responsible.
[18:38] And I've certainly made the case. So, all right. Do you enjoy Guinness beer? No, I don't. I don't really enjoy Guinness beer. You know, what if they'd hack me off a slice of Guinness? It's like if you carbonated bilge water and added some semi-toxic sludge to me, you would get a Guinness. It's not my thing. But then again, I'm not working in the fields and desperately need non-bacterial based energy in the Middle Ages. All right. How do we regulate the kids' use of iPad, I mean, I think it's fine to give them some access to an iPad, but your challenge as a parent is to be more engaging and enjoyable than your.
[19:12] Ipad right so my daughter really enjoys river walks right like we we go and walk up and down rivers turn over rocks and try to catch little fish and crayfish and so on she really loves doing that stuff so if she's on the ipad and i say let's do a river walk i can't think of a single time in fact we went today right i can't think of a single time when she didn't want a river walk over an ipad so you just have to find ways that you're more enjoyable than an ipad all right it. Somebody says, I think faith and first principles are technically identical in their function. I think the only difference between me and an atheist is this regard is that I accept my faith and they're in denial of theirs. Is there a good argument against that? Science doesn't exist without its methodology. Its methodology doesn't exist without philosophy. Philosophers have to make first principle assumptions about everything to say they can know anything. LOL. I'm probably too dumb to ask the question properly. I'll let God sort that out. Yeah, so this is the the idea that people say, well, I have faith in God, but you have faith in reason. But no, I don't have faith in reason, because reason is not something whose truth I need to accept without evidence.
[20:22] Reason is based on the essential properties of matter, and to some degree energy, but in particular of matter, right? If you think of Aristotle's three laws of logic, A is A, an object is itself. A is either A or non-A. A can't be both A and non-A at the same time. This is just stuff we all learn as kids, right? We learn that a ball is a ball. We learn that it continues to be a ball. We can't snap our fingers and turn it into candy, and Lord knows we've probably tried as kids to some degree or another. So a reason is valid because it describes the basic properties of matter and energy. That matter and energy is not self-contradictory that an object is itself an object is either itself or something else or nothing and an object cannot be both itself and something else or nothing at the same time right so when if you're a kid and you're supposed to give a kid three pieces of candy and you give him two pieces of candy you can't say that's three pieces of candy because the kid's going to say no no that's two one two that's where's the third right So you don't have to have faith in reason Because reason is derived from The stable, universal, and consistent properties of matter.
[21:41] Whereas God is not. So it's not faith. Somebody asks, you've embraced AI to help promote and expand your work in the last year or so. Have you had a chance to use it to challenge your own beliefs and philosophical theories or to point out any potential flaws in your thinking or anything like that? Have you actively debated it about anything? If so, what was your experience? How do you feel about AI overall and where do you see it going?
[22:06] Yeah, I mean, this is not your fault. I'm just telling you like a sort of minor irritation that I have about things, things like, well, Stef, you've been doing philosophy for 40 years. Have you ever challenged your own beliefs? It's like, what are you talking about? What do you mean that the whole point of philosophy is to challenge your assumptions? I've openly said, though, of course, I'm not expecting everyone to have heard every show, but I've openly talked about how I was mostly an Aristotelian slash objectivist for the first 20 years of my philosophical journey, and only after 20 years did I find that I had something of significant value to offer philosophy in the expansion of its methodology. And after that, right, so I'm talking about universally preferable behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics, and a lot of other things that I've talked about, some of which I've talked about in this actual show. And so when you say, have you had a chance to use it to challenge your own beliefs or philosophical theories. When I have been challenged by, I mean, I've done tons of debates, I've had people call in to disagree with me, I'm engaged in debates with people about their history, choices, circumstances, and free will all the time, and moral responsibility, and my call-in shows. So, AI, what on earth would AI have to offer me?
[23:23] Haven't already gotten from 20 years and from 40 years really of being opposed right so when i started getting into philosophy i was a socialist and i had to challenge that when i started getting into philosophy my friends generally were collectivists and mystics or subjectivists and i had to be challenged by that and had to debate that of course i was on the debate team in high school, I was on the debate team in university. I had to fight a lot with largely leftist and collectivist professors and so on, right? I had to fight in theater school really about the definition of art and its purpose, because for them, art and its purpose was generally the promotion of leftist political ideals, like sort of Mother Courage and her children Brecht kind of stuff.
[24:12] And the purpose of art was activism, whereas for me, the purpose of art is the exposure of moral truths and their consequences so i've had you know 40 years of you know massive amounts of opposition and you know after 40 years of massive amount of opposition and self-criticism i've got whole series of videos called i was wrong about you know so x y and z i've made apologies where i've gotten things incorrect and and was too hasty in my judgments and so on. So the idea that AI would do more than 40 years of massive opposition and flourishing and surviving through all of that, I think AI is a very good tool. It's a very interesting tool. I think for automated pseudo-intellectual tasks, it can be fine.
[25:00] But as far as it coming up with new ideas and theories and so on, anything truly useful that AI comes up with will just be censored anyway. Yeah.
[25:09] Accept aging gracefully? Well, the best way to accept aging gracefully is to promote virtue and fight evil over the course of your life. Otherwise, you're wasting your time in brutal, selfish hedonism. The purpose of our lives is to promote virtue and fight evil, to promote virtue and oppose immorality, to promote reason and oppose mysticism, violence, manipulation, neglect, gaslighting, you know, all of the softest Lord of the Rings ring style trickery that people use to baffle and control other people's minds and therefore the resources of their calloused hands. So how do you accept aging gracefully? I mean, I just turned 58, so I hope I have some reasonable thoughts about this, but the way that you accept aging gracefully is you look back in satisfaction faction at the virtue you have promoted and the vices you have opposed, both within yourself and, of course, in particular, in the world, since philosophy is about the world, not just about you or me or any particular individual.
[26:19] So I, of course, look back upon my life at my, at this point, 43-year promotion of virtue and fighting of immorality, and I've done as much as I can possibly do. I've taken as many risks as I can reasonably take and survive. And I have done as much as I possibly can to promote a virtue and to discourage vice. And I have received both, you know, massive social attacks and amazing and wonderful positives. So I have spent my scant time on this planet using, and this is straight out of Aristotle, right? That the expansion of moral excellence, the pursuit of moral excellence is the best way to spend our lives.
[27:10] Fully human is to manifest that which is the most human about us. And what is the most human about us is morality, because it's something that the animals don't have. They have loyalty, they have pair bonding, they have bonding, so to speak, but it's not morality, right? What we have is morality. So the degree to which we accept, review, understand, and promote morality is the degree to which we are most fully human. And I, without a doubt, have done as much as I I can, and worked as hard as I can, to promote virtue and fight immorality, oppose immorality. You know, as I talked about in a show recently, and in a practical, measurable way, right? I talked about this in a show recently. I've done probably a billion and a half reductions of violations of the non-aggression principle, just in terms of spanking, has arisen out of my show.
[28:04] So, I enjoy aging because I look back over the course of my life and I say, boy, look at all the good I've done. Look at all the good I've done. Look at all the immorality I prevented, minimized, opposed, or encouraged people to not even manifest in the first place. So do good have a good conscience fight immorality intelligently right i mean the analogy to wartime is that philosophy is always engaged in a war of anti-propaganda not of open violence right or so you know i oppose the use of violence of course except in an extremity of immediate self-defense. So how do you accept aging gracefully? Well, do good, oppose immorality.
[28:53] And you will enjoy aging because that's the best use of your time that you can possibly have. And it is the most human, of course, you know, you can remember, was it Da Vinci or I think it was Da Vinci who said, I dislike aging, but it sure beats the alternative. Knowing you're going to die and reminding yourself that you're going to die helps put your troubles in perspective and It helps you take the risks necessary to promote virtue. All right. Last question. You're the best. Well, that's not really a question. That's a statement. Look, I appreciate that. That's very kind, and I don't want to sort of brush that off as if that's irrelevant, but the philosophy that I generate, articulate, and provide to the world, in particular for free, the philosophy that I generate, articulate, and provide to the world is really good. It's really good in terms of its excellence. It's also really good in terms of its morality.
[29:44] So I can't imagine. I think it was da Vinci also who said that when he got older, he regretted that he'd put so little, to the talents that God gave him. And that was always kind of a chilling thing to me, right? Which is why I've written, you know, I don't know, two dozen books and I've got like close to 6,000 podcasts, three documentaries, you know, both fiction and nonfiction. I've written a bunch of poetry and I've just really tried to use the gifts that I've been given in the most benevolent and helpful way to the world as a whole. I did not earn these gifts and therefore I have to earn my pride in the gifts. And since I didn't earn my gifts of intelligence and eloquence and so on, since I didn't earn these gifts, I have to earn pride in using them in the best and most moral possible way. And I would really suggest that you try this in your own life. It is the only path, really, to sustained happiness and all of that. So when you say you're the best, I appreciate that. That's very kind and I certainly have done some things to earn that.
[30:47] But really it is about the the philosophy that I bring to bear on the world, that is really good, really helpful, really positive, and has changed the lives of millions around the world with your support and help, which I am very humbly grateful for. freedomain.com slash donate. Have yourself a joyous, joyous, wonderful day. Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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