0:04 - Introduction to Despair and Confusion
0:40 - Awakening from Lies and Violence
5:37 - The Role of Education and Culture
10:29 - The Consequences of Centralized Control
16:57 - The Tragic State of the Average Person
21:50 - The Risks of Pursuing Truth
23:38 - Conclusion and Holiday Wishes
In this lecture, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain examines the pervasive sense of despair and disorientation among individuals in modern society, particularly in work environments where conversations with "normies" reveal a troubling mindset hindered by dogma. He highlights the difficulty of engaging with people who exist in an echo chamber of baseless beliefs, raising questions about the nature of their confusion and the motivations behind their adherence to such ideologies.
Molyneux introduces the concept that true enlightenment or awakening often feels like a form of death, likening it to a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly—a transition that can be unfathomable for those who have only known their current state. He elaborates on the historical context of humanity, suggesting that conflict over limited resources has shaped our evolution towards violence and tribalism, where societal cohesion is often enforced through shared moral narratives. Delving into historical examples, he reflects on the extreme manifestations of tribal superiority, which have justified horrific acts in human history when groups believed themselves divinely favored or inherently superior.
He argues that our human adaptation to violence and the imposition of cultural myths have created a situation where individuals are biologically and psychologically conditioned to rally behind their own tribe's narratives, regardless of their moral implications. This need for cohesion perpetuates a cycle of lies and violence, creating a society where questioning the dominant narratives can feel life-threatening, akin to existential suicide.
Examining modern education and media's role, Molyneux contends that centralized control of information provides fertile ground for ideological enemies to undermine national pride and cohesion. He discusses how individuals are unwittingly indoctrinated in self-hatred and demoralization, stifling their capacity for critical thinking and questioning dominant paradigms. The struggle for identity within a culture that teaches shame and guilt becomes an arduous battle for many, as they grapple with the implications of their inherited lies.
As he navigates the personal ramifications of confronting these ideologies, Molyneux frames the pursuit of truth as a noble endeavor. However, he acknowledges the daunting consequences faced by those who wish to awaken from the slumber of complacency. The deep-seated connections to cultural narratives create an immense barrier to change and understanding, leading to hostility towards those who challenge the status quo.
Molyneux encourages individuals to express their perceptions candidly, testing the waters of discourse with others. He underscores that the trade-off for truth is often the risk of social ostracism, reflecting on his own journey and the sacrifices required to maintain honest relationships. As he concludes, he calls for reflection on the profound challenges faced by those who seek to break free from systemic lies and engage in genuine dialogues, ultimately emphasizing the importance of courage in the quest for clarity and understanding amidst a landscape filled with confusion and deception.
[0:00] Well, good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:04] Great questions from freedomain.locals.com. Somebody writes, When interacting with normies at work, I can sense a creeping tidal wave of despair and confusion in their words. It seems like they live in a senseless, dogmatic, dark and disoriented headspace. That's a great way to put it. Do people who really live like this? My natural reaction at work is to press for the particular information I need and then flee from the descending wave of baseless impressions and unquestionable dogma. As someone who has a lot of immature opinions, I also ask you this. How do you discern whether someone's confusion is malicious or not?
[0:40] Well, in general, there is, and I wrote this when I was like 17, that in order to be resurrected, we first have to be buried.
[0:52] Awakening out of Plato's cave, awakening out of the matrix, awakening out of the general lives of society, feels like dying. It feels like dying. Obviously, the caterpillar, to use an overused analogy, the caterpillar feels like it's dying because it has no conception of the butterfly. So, of course, throughout most of human history, there was a win-lose violent combat for scarce resources. A land, of course, There was hunting grounds, farms, trees, lumber, towns, like good locations for farming, right? There was just this win-lose, constant battle. So, the battles were not fundamentally moral in nature. The battles were violent, but the best way for human beings to fight together is to believe in the moral righteousness of their cause, right? That that is the best way to create cohesion in a group is for the group to have the belief that it is a moral good for them to win, right? And the moral good could be something fairly.
[2:07] A powerful, like, God is on the side of the winners, our ancestors are smiling down upon us, we are the greatest, we are the best. I mean, think of the amount of psychotic in-group preference it took for the Japanese to slaughter, torture, and experiment on, say, the Australian prisoners of war in the Second World War, right? They had to believe that they the japanese were near infinitely superior and and so on like i mean i don't know if you know this but when the bomb landed in the oppenheimer movie.
[2:44] On hiroshima in in south korea they cheered that's how much animosity and sort of hatred there was, and i'm not i know i don't know enough about the history to say whether it was justified or not but that certainly was the experience of many of the South Koreans. I mean, the rape of Nanking in China and so on. Anyway, so there was tribalism, and the tribalism was at its most effective.
[3:10] When, you know, the sort of we are the champions, we are the greatest stuff gave crazed levels of bravery and cohesion to the group. You know, we are chosen by God, we are the greatest, you know, all of this sort of stuff. That was foundational to strengthening people in situations of win-lose conflict, which characterize, you know, almost all of human history prior to the sort of very thin sliver slice of modern times. See, human beings are adapted to violence. We evolved through violence, right? You don't You don't get to be the top species in the world, the unquestioned alpha predator who can torpedo sperm whales and so on, right? You don't get to be without being adapted to violence. You've probably seen this meme, which is like, you know, the sort of peaceful suburbs and say, this is a real anomaly in human history. For most of it, it's just, then there's a picture of war, right? For most of human history, it's been this. And it's, yeah, that's the way that it is, right? I mean, the people who used to be in charge of society were warriors, right? I mean, that's what the aristocracy is, is that they're best warriors.
[4:34] And then the warriors would team up with the witch doctors, the witch doctors would justify the warriors morally, and the warriors would enforce the witch doctors' monopoly violently. So, lies and violence, lies and violence, lies and violence. That's what we're adapted to. That's what we're adapted for. And to try and live a life free of lies and violence, for many people, it feels, to try, even to try to do that, it feels suicidal. Because in order for there to be conformity and uniformity in a tribe of lies and violence, you need to attack anyone who undermines that perspective. And of course, if you want to harm another tribe, then you try to get that tribe to stop believing in its foundational myths, right? I mean, we can see this going on in the West as a whole, you know, getting you to curse your ancestors, getting you to abandon your gods.
[5:37] This is sort of foundational weakening of another country and culture.
[5:44] So, most people were adapted to live lies, lives of lies and violence. This is what human beings, right? The lie of the superiority of the group and the violence that is used to enforce that, both internally and externally. I mean, I think I was probably one of the last cohorts of people who grew up with any sort of national or cultural pride in, say, England. And after that, it was all sort of subverted and taken away and replaced with self-hatred, right? And most cultures don't have much defense against well-coordinated verbal abuse because it's not really something that we were adapted to deal with, this kind of infiltration stuff, right? Because you ruthlessly policed and patrolled your own internal tribalism. You know, in other words, you would kill or ostracize dissenters to your foundational myths.
[6:48] And then if you got conquered, then you were usually killed or usually the males were killed and the females were absorbed into the new tribe. And so people weren't used to dealing with or haven't really evolved to deal with this kind of propagandistic infiltration. Because normally, normally, the dominant classes were in charge of the education of the young, right? So the aristocracy was, or the government, the aristocracy was in charge of the education of the young. And of course, the aristocracy in England, let's say, the aristocracy would have been significantly responsible for the education of the young in terms of setting up schools and standards and universities and so on. And the aristocracy needed serfs or soldiers who were loyal to the cause. So they would set up a huge amount of national pride and respect for the culture and admiration for the ancestors and the history because that was needed in order to have a coterie of willing soldiers who are relatively eager to die for the cause. And I went through this process as a kid and sort of the worship of the culture, the worship of the ancestors, and the willingness to die to protect it. That's foundational. So when the people who are running.
[8:12] The culture of running the country generally are also in charge of the educational standards. And those standards may be to keep some people not educated, but they're generally in charge of the educational standards. And they run the sports, right? The battles in England were won on the playing fields of Eton, right? Which meant that the young people who got involved in tribalistic sports, that was all part of making sure that they were keen to fight and die for the aristocracy. So, when you have the same people in charge of education that you have in charge of the country, then those people instill national myths of superiority and pride and so on, so that people are willing to fight for that. However, when people who are relatively hostile to the dominant culture end up taking over in education, right? You can sort of think of the leftists as socialists and so on. People who are hostile to the dominant culture end up taking over the education, then they instill in the young despair, self-hatred, and shame, right?
[9:14] In other words, you conquer the country by disarming the population of pride and cohesion. So you'll set people against each other, tell them that their ancestors were evil and that everything they have were stolen, you know, just demoralized people, right? And this is, I mean, the foundational issue in the long run with government-controlled education is that it is a very tempting target for those who despise your culture to take over and attack your future through demoralizing propaganda inflicted through the universal educational system, right? Because there's no debate then, right? If there's a bunch of schools that are locally managed, right? Like schools that respond in a free market scenario to what the parents want, well, do the parents want their children to be demoralized and told that their culture is evil and their ancestors were monsters and all of that? I mean, parents don't want that, right? But if you have one big giant button that you can hammer at the top by setting curricula and standards, if you have one giant hammer that you can push to demoralize the country, well, then...
[10:30] For sure, that is going to happen. When you choose centralized coercive control over education, those who are best at propaganda will inevitably take it over to verbal abuse and demoralize your children. It's the price of ignoring violence, right? It's the price of ignoring violence. If you're willing to use violence to educate your children, then those who are best at aggression will take over their system.
[11:07] So you're looking at people who are captured and programmed against their nature by their ideological enemies, for the most part, right? I mean, not just education, the media, news, and so on, right? So they're unhappy. Because while they may have a significant amount of political and economic liberty left, they're conquered and colonized by people who hate their history and their system, right? The sort of remnants of the free market and free speech and so on, right? So very unhappy. Now, breaking from that feels like dying.
[11:48] Breaking from that, again, the analogy that I used many years ago is that you're in a city that cannot last. And to strike out, it's a city that cannot last in the desert, right? And to strike out into the desert in the hopes of finding a small sustainable village or some oasis where you can set up shop feels like dying. Roman talks about this in my novel, The Future, about, you know, Rome went from a couple of million inhabitants down to 19,000 inhabitants in six months when it ran out of food. What happened to all of those millions of people with their soft hands in there? Just roaming around, desperately trying to find some place to give them food and shelter. So, to abandon the remnants of your culture and to strike off to something better.
[12:42] Suicidal. It feels like you're dying. And of course, historically, you generally were. If you've got a bunch of tribes fighting over a particular location, you go enough to live in the woods on your own. Maybe you'll survive. Maybe you won't. But you won't reproduce. So your only chance of reproduction in a tribe based on lies and violence is to believe the lies as true and be willing to use violence against anybody who questions it, right? So, the shared delusions of superiority within a particular tribe gave it its greatest chance of survival and flourishing. And those who lost their delusions lost their battles.
[13:27] Lies are one of the most essential weapons in tribal conflict. So, most people are, you know, pretty thoroughly crushed and demoralized. And you can, and also aggressive, right? With the crushed and demoralized aspect comes aggression. And you can see this, right? You can see this in people's response to any controversial statements, that they have been programmed to attack any statement that might liberate them. So, if you believe in the sort of voodoo curse of original sin and you've sort of founded your entire social life and way of being and thinking and your marriage is founded on is how you raised your kids, right? And you've invested in it. Then if someone comes along and begins to really chip away at this concept of unearned guilt from ancient disobedience, you get mad. You don't want to be wrong. You don't want to raise your children wrong. And, can get you to sacrifice for an idea, then it's really hard to question that idea. It's really hard to question that idea. And this is why getting people to sacrifice for an idea is pretty essential, because it gives you a very large army of people who will defend that idea no matter what, simply because they've sacrificed so much for it that questioning it becomes unbearable.
[14:54] Unbearable. So, they're quite demoralized, and with that demoralization comes an aggression, because their unhappiness is because they were programmed with lies. And listen, there's not a lot of people who have the ability to, within themselves, overturn falsehoods, overturn what feels like universal falsehoods. Because when you believe universal falsehoods, right, so, I mean, And the obvious example would be the fine people hoax, right? That Trump referred to neo-Nazis as very fine people, which he didn't do, right? So if you believe that, then, of course, you will surround yourself by people who also believe that, and you will attack and reject and ostracize anyone who doesn't believe that.
[15:41] And the bigger the lie, the harder it is to overturn. So for people who take sort of the mainstream media as dispassionately interested in the truth that only wants what is accurate, right, moral, and just for society, to question that is very tough, especially if you have participated in falsehoods by amplifying, repeating them, and attacking anyone who raises any questions or objections, then you have been corrupted, right? You've been drafted, well, not even drafted, in the sense you voluntarily joined the orc army and are campaigning against the hobbits, well, it's pretty tough. And also, the more you participate in falsehoods, the uglier your soul gets. In the same way that slaves were not allowed to physically train, people enslaved to propaganda have to oppose critical thinking. And this was part of my tour in Australia, was an attempt to counter the sort of anti-Australian narrative with regards to the aborigines, right? To say, you know, you have something to be proud of, and there are significant problems in the aboriginal community.
[16:57] So an attempt to undo some of the demoralization, right?
[17:02] So when you're talking to the average person, it's a pretty tragic situation. They have believed falsehoods. They have ignored or approved of violence, they have attacked critical thinkers and subjugated themselves to corrosive and destructive lies, and they have handed over their children often to be indoctrinated. Now, once you've handed your children over to be indoctrinated, it's pretty tough to question that indoctrination. And once it becomes really hard to question that indoctrination, pretty much cements around you. So, yeah, people are unhappy, and there are some people who are unhappy and curious as to why and sort of willing and eager to learn better. And, you know, those people are wonderful. And, of course, I would consider myself as one of those people. I'm sure you're one of those people. that's very honorable and very noble and something to be appraised and also to be admired within yourself, right? This is a very, very legitimate feeling to take honest pride in the pursuit of truth against all obstacles. And the obstacles, as we know, are significant.
[18:18] But most people are not that way. They are not just demoralized, but they actively participate. In demoralizing others. And that is pretty rough, man. That is a pretty rough thing to count. And it's a pretty rough thing to be around. So I, in general, I mean, I obviously can't tell you what to do. I, in general, will occasionally, if it feels sort of the right thing to do, what I will do is I will occasionally put out something that is a little surprising, a little unusual, and so want, right? I will say, for instance, yeah, things got a little crazy there over COVID. Things got a little crazy there over COVID. And I just want to see if there's any response, right? If there's this sort of vaguely hostile, blank faced look, then I'm like, okay, so not someone to talk with, right? Which is fine. I mean, it's not everyone's job to, I mean, it's everyone's responsibility, ideally, to listen to reason, but most people...
[19:29] A lot for listening to reason. I myself generally feel that I'm better off listening to reason. And, you know, it's sort of my job, right? So it's one thing if you get paid for it. It's like abs, right? Like, I mean, if you are in the movie 300, which is 300 abs per actor, then you want to get some abs, right? There's a story of the guys in Top Gun 2 who had the scene where they're playing volleyball, and those guys had to be on these crazy strict diets and working out hours a day. And they shot the scene, and then it turns out the lighting wasn't right, or I don't know, maybe the cameraman left the cap on the camera, right? Of course not, right? But they had to redo the scene, and they had to do another week or two of those diets and all that exercise, and they were like half in tears because it was just such a strain on their system to be that lean and muscular, right? It's kind of funny how health has now, health is now defined by the ability to look like you're starving to death, because that's what abs would generally mean in the past, not particularly muscularity, but death, near death, right?
[20:42] So I will, in general, try to throw a comment out or two. And if people aren't willing, and of course, aren't paid, right? I mean, my income is based on telling the truth. Now, of course, it didn't start off that way and had to go through quite a lot to end up with that, quote, advantage. And, you know, things were looking pretty dicey for a while there. But it's sort of my job. So, just as actors are paid to have abs, therefore, it makes sense for them to have abs. I am, at this point in my life, paid for telling the truth, so I have a positive incentive to tell the truth. All my relationships are founded upon telling the truth, and my marriage, and how I've raised my daughters. So, what is it my daughter said? I'm locked in. I'm locked in. That seems to be that locked in. I'm committed, right? So, most people face massive negative consequences for telling the truth once they become adults, right? Their relationships, their jobs, their marriages, how they've raised their children, they are locked in. And in order for them to start believing and telling the truth, they have to be willing. Please understand this.
[21:51] They have to be willing to give up everything.
[21:55] They have to be willing to give up or at least to risk everything. Because going halfway to the truth and then scuttling back because you're threatened is pretty painful for people because it really makes them feel the humiliation which is implicit and it's a lot easier to live with being bullied, controlled, and enslaved if it's implicit rather than explicit, right? So if they start to pursue the truth, to talk about the truth, to try to understand the truth, and then they get threatened, attacked, ostracized, and so on. And this of course happened over COVID, right? I was reading this tweet this morning about someone who said you know that they were uninvited for I don't know one or two times or three times they were uninvited a couple of times to family gatherings over Christmas during COVID because they weren't vaccinated.
[22:41] They've finally been invited back, and they are trying to figure out what to do. They said they think they're going to go because they want to build bridges and have conversations.
[22:50] So if you do start to wake up, and you start to raise questions or try and tell some awkward truths to people who are propagandized, and then you realize, as is often the case, that those people will attack you and be hostile towards you, rather than question their propaganda, then they have a stronger relationship to strangers than their own flesh and blood. In other words, the strangers who propagandize them. That's really tough, right? It's really tough to see people put, you know, kind of false media outlets above the curiosity of their own family. But again, generally how you survived and got a family throughout most of history was to absorb and repeat falsehoods.
[23:38] So but people don't like to feel that right they don't like to feel that they like to feel that they're just in the right and honorable and good and virtuous and it just turns out that obedience to falsehoods is what's always defined as virtue and it is very very tough all right so i hope this helps freedom.com slash donate to help out the show merry merry christmas it is in fact christmas eve 2024 and because i'm half german we celebrate today and do presents today so i hope you're have a wonderful day. We will talk to you soon. Lots of love from up here. Bye.
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