How to Not Be GOD!

Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux
  • last year
Philosopher Stefan Molyneux walks in the woods and discusses how to combat the most deadly vice of all!

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Transcript
00:00 Well, well, well, good morning everybody.
00:04 Out for a wee bit of a morning constitutional.
00:06 Had a couple of questions from freedomain.locals.com.
00:12 So I thought I would take them on as I walk through the dewy Canadian hinterlands, getting
00:19 my feet progressively more swampy.
00:22 So the first question was how do I avoid the messianic impulse?
00:27 And the messianic impulse is to sort of be, I guess, a charismatic leader who promises
00:35 peace and plenty and prosperity and all kinds of wonderful things to people in return for
00:40 obedience.
00:41 Right?
00:42 It's a, it's a sort of time honored way for charismatic, verbally skilled people to gain
00:47 access to resources.
00:49 So let's just say it's not completely off the table for me.
00:53 And I understand that.
00:57 And you know, it's hard to know what the greatest sin is.
00:59 We're just working on the truth about sin as a whole.
01:02 So it's kind of hard to know what the greatest sin is.
01:05 Oh, woodpecker.
01:07 But one of them, of course, has to be vanity.
01:12 Right?
01:14 So to me, vanity is when you believe that what you did not earn is your treasure and
01:25 triumph that you have value for things that you did not earn.
01:32 I mean, the typical example, of course, is a woman who is young and pretty and shapely
01:39 and so on, and then she believes that she has value because men desire her.
01:45 Well, did she earn her shapeliness?
01:47 I mean, she probably exercises and all that, but she gets such a great incentive for exercising.
01:54 You know, if somebody paid me, I don't know, $100,000 to have abs, I'd probably have abs.
02:00 Right?
02:01 So she does exercise and eat well, but the payoff is so enormous that we don't really
02:08 consider that to be much of a treasure and a bonus.
02:13 I just want to make sure things don't get too windy here.
02:18 So what I think we can safely say is that she
02:30 gets great value, she's in sort of great demand and so on, for things that she has not earned.
02:38 That sort of male lust or male desire and hormones and all of the historical or, I guess,
02:44 biological evolution of four billion years, it's sort of dropped in her lap, so to speak.
02:51 So I think it's tough to say that she has earned all of this and she just has value
02:56 because of evolution and drive and hormones and desire and reproductive urges and all
03:04 of that sort of stuff.
03:05 No, that's not.
03:06 A man who inherits a wealth is in a similar situation, though of course these days men
03:13 who are accidentally handsome, right, it's what, how about Bones says this in the television
03:21 show Bones from many years ago.
03:24 A plastic surgeon compliments her bone structure and she says, "Well, it's just my bone structure,
03:29 I didn't earn it.
03:30 It's not me.
03:31 I just happened to inherit it."
03:34 Or people with good skin or great hair and so on, right, they toss their hair around
03:40 like Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
03:41 "I'm so lucky!"
03:43 So all of these people who have these accidental positive characteristics that they did not
03:48 earn, it's then of course extraordinarily easy for them to believe that they have value
03:56 because of what they did not earn.
03:58 So that's really important.
04:00 Guys who are really tall, guys who are naturally lean, guys who are really good at, say, sports.
04:12 Guys who are really good at sports believe that they have value because people value
04:19 sports.
04:20 They believe that good values sports, sports are great, but a lot of it is accidental.
04:29 People who are accidentally born into a great household, right, people who are accidentally
04:35 born into a household with sort of two functional, relatively happy working parents, they're
04:43 lucky, right?
04:44 I mean, I do from time to time remind my daughter that she was the recipient of some significant
04:52 good fortune being born into the family she's born into.
04:57 And she should be happy about that.
04:59 I mean, you don't take it for granted and you don't view it as perfectly neutral, but
05:04 I think it is important to understand that it is not something that you have earned.
05:12 So the reason why the devil is constantly tempting you, so to speak, with what you have
05:19 not earned is so that you avoid virtue.
05:24 Right?
05:25 So you avoid virtue.
05:29 So we should gain value and satisfaction from moral virtues that we have earned.
05:37 Right?
05:38 We learn about them, we figure out how to bring them into our lives in a sort of rational
05:44 and sensible and survivable manner.
05:49 And just around the tree branch here.
05:55 So we do all of that and then we gain, you know, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
06:01 We gain all of that.
06:02 It's a good thing.
06:03 It's what we want, what we should have.
06:06 It's what virtue, in a sense, demands from us in order to give us happiness.
06:12 So the devil, again, to use whether you consider it a personification or an analogy is not
06:18 particularly relevant to this context, but the devil wishes to have you believe that
06:31 you have come home when you haven't come home.
06:35 That way you stop going.
06:37 So of course, if you could, let's say you live alone in the middle of nowhere, right?
06:41 And imagine some elaborate scheme has, let's go back here a little bit, that some elaborate
06:51 scheme has been put into place.
06:53 Some nefarious billionaire has adjusted your GPS and has created a simulation of your house.
07:07 And so you think you're home and it's down to the last detail.
07:11 So you think you're home when you're not home.
07:12 Of course you get in there and you're like, oh great, good.
07:17 I got home.
07:18 I'm home.
07:19 Everything looks the same.
07:20 Everything's identical.
07:21 And so you think you're home and so you don't go to your real home when you believe that
07:27 you're already home when you're not.
07:30 When you're home, you stop going home.
07:33 So the devil, what he does is he says, "Yeah, man, don't worry.
07:38 You can get, you can get happiness from vanity.
07:44 You can get happiness from vanity.
07:47 It's not really vanity.
07:49 Like you can feel good about yourself because you virtue signal.
07:53 You can feel good about yourself because you were born into a happy family.
07:56 You can feel good about yourself because you're pretty.
07:57 You can feel good about yourself because you're handsome.
07:59 You can feel good about yourself because you inherited money.
08:02 You can feel good about yourself."
08:03 Like those Instagram kids from rich families constantly filming themselves on yachts and
08:11 various other expensive planes and so on.
08:16 So now they have value because their parents have money.
08:22 So once you feel that you have value, that you have worth, then you stop looking for
08:32 it or rather you get addicted to generating envy rather than self-respect through moral
08:39 excellence.
08:42 So the substitution, like it's a drug, right?
08:46 If you live a virtuous life, it's your best chance to be happy.
08:51 However, obviously, you can also take some very powerful drugs to feel happy.
09:00 And taking those very powerful drugs will give you being home without actually being
09:05 home.
09:06 So you get the happiness without the virtue.
09:08 And the devil, of course, constantly wants to give you happiness without virtue.
09:13 Nature is so beautiful.
09:17 I hope you take time to absorb and admire it every day.
09:21 So the devil is saying, "Oh man, that virtue stuff, that's for suckers, man.
09:28 Don't go down that road.
09:30 That's nerdy.
09:32 That's low status."
09:35 What you want to do is you want to get status by having really cool drinking stories, man.
09:41 You know, the "I was so wasted that" stories.
09:43 That's what you want to do.
09:44 You want to get value from sleeping with men or sleeping with women.
09:52 You want to get value from people thinking you're pretty on the internet.
09:57 You want to get value from flashing your money.
10:00 You want to get value from status, man.
10:04 None of this virtue stuff, that's like choir boy nonsense.
10:10 And of course, there's a whole army of people out there.
10:12 It ain't just the devil, right?
10:13 There's a whole army of people out there who are constantly leading you in the wrong direction.
10:18 And they offer you status because they want you to join them in hell subconsciously or
10:24 maybe even consciously.
10:26 So what they do is they offer you constant positive feedback for pursuing something that
10:39 ain't virtue.
10:40 Right?
10:41 You've got all these neighbors, in a sense, in your fake house saying, "Oh, no, no, you're
10:44 home.
10:45 What are you talking about?
10:46 You're home."
10:48 So under the tree.
10:54 So that's what's going down.
11:00 And if you, of course, look at modern society, a lot of it is, "Well, you have value, man,
11:04 because you're just cool and down with drug use and marijuana and you've got value because
11:09 of that.
11:11 Just relax, man.
11:12 Don't be so uptight.
11:13 Have value by partaking of the herb and living in nature and taking the natural remedies
11:20 of life."
11:21 So all about status.
11:26 All about status.
11:28 Now, once the devil can trick you into believing you have value for that which you did not
11:36 earn, once he can get you to believe that you have value in the absence of virtue, well,
11:46 then he's prevented you from getting to virtue.
11:51 He's offered substitutes.
11:54 You know, like, I mean, how many people, men and women, right, how many people spend their
11:58 lives in the gym without giving any care or thought to the health, virtue, and value of
12:07 their souls?
12:10 How much time do people spend binge watching streaming services without learning anything
12:19 about how to be good?
12:25 How much time do women spend on makeup rather than learning how to be good, productive,
12:35 virtuous, and healthy women?
12:38 How much time do men spend watching sports rather than learning about virtue and how
12:46 to achieve it?
12:47 It's all a distraction, right?
12:51 It's all a distraction.
12:52 And, of course, socially, when you get a bunch of people who substitute crap for virtue,
12:59 then they don't want to talk to you about virtue anymore, right?
13:01 Obviously, they don't want to talk to you about virtue.
13:02 What they want to do is talk to you about crap.
13:05 And I was joking with my daughter the other day about Small Talk.
13:12 She's not at all a fan of Small Talk.
13:15 She considers it skin-crawlingly appalling to go through Small Talk.
13:19 I was saying, "Well, if the devil was really, really smart, he would invent an endless cocktail
13:28 party with people you barely know who are really boring and just talk about nothing.
13:32 That would be hell.
13:33 That would be hell.
13:35 It wouldn't start off hell, but it would quickly become that and forevermore.
13:40 Amen."
13:42 So vanity.
13:46 So the reason I'm talking about all of this, of course, is because if you are given gifts—and
13:54 I think we're all given gifts to one degree or another—but if you're given gifts, whether
13:58 it's eloquence or looks or money or a stable family or whatever it is, whatever gifts you're
14:04 given, you're given these gifts and those gifts have value to others, but a lot of times
14:14 the value that others place on those gifts is to lead you away from virtue.
14:18 Why do men constantly offer money to women on the intranet?
14:23 Well, it's a devilish impulse to keep the women away from virtue.
14:27 The men complain about women monetizing their beauty, but who's paying the bills?
14:33 There ain't no dealers without consumers.
14:37 So this is people that are paying the women to monetize their beauty out of vengeance
14:44 for women, hatred and hostility towards the mother and so on.
14:48 So all of that stuff is really loud.
14:51 Really—oh, it sort of barked at me, this thing.
14:55 So that way.
14:56 No, let's not go that way.
14:57 Wait.
14:58 Yes, let's go that way.
14:59 Yes, let's go that way.
15:06 So I mean, obviously I believe and I think the world agrees that I've been given some
15:10 fairly decent gifts in terms of eloquence and intelligence and creativity and debating
15:15 skills and rationality and whatever.
15:19 And you know, not too bad looking and blue eyes and square jaw and all of that kind of
15:23 stuff.
15:24 But you know, I've been given some benefits about that.
15:32 So if I—so the devil, of course, were to say, "Oh, Steph, you know what?
15:38 You got a lot of gifts, man.
15:39 You got a lot of eloquence, kind of funny, got some charisma.
15:43 You got a fruity little accent there that adds the perception of intelligence to whatever
15:48 you say.
15:49 So you got to use this for yourself, for your family, for your resources, for your genetics,
15:59 for your whatever, right?
16:00 You got to get resources and you should use your gifts to get resources."
16:08 Now what that would be to say is that the gifts that I did not earn should be used for
16:11 my material benefit, my immediate material benefit.
16:18 And men get mad at women who monetize beauty, but men monetize intelligence, right?
16:27 Often or charisma or sense of humor.
16:29 Because, you know, men a little bit more than women, I think, develop a sense of humor because
16:33 we don't have the same TNA to fall back on, right?
16:38 So men monetize intelligence, women monetize beauty, and both are a form of mating display
16:43 that's kind of a dead end, right?
16:46 So I mean, if you look at influences even on the right who are not Christians, they
16:52 tend to not have families, right?
16:54 They're monetizing their intelligence rather than using it in the service of humanity,
17:00 in my opinion, and not anyone in particular.
17:02 It's just a sort of trend that I've kind of noticed.
17:05 So Steph, you got to take your charisma, your reasoning skills, your eloquence, your humor,
17:14 your looks, whatever, and you've got to monetize that, baby.
17:18 You've got to chase the dollar.
17:26 That's not particularly tempting to me, as you can imagine.
17:30 That's not particularly tempting to me at all.
17:34 That would hollow me out.
17:35 So you end up with all this money and you get this sort of flush of success and praise
17:39 and then what happens?
17:42 You're kind of living a lie so no one can get close to you because you are taking as
17:47 personally valuable that which you inherited from nature.
17:51 You are taking as personally valuable that which you have inherited from nature.
17:54 In other words, you're substituting accident for virtue.
17:57 You're substituting accident for virtue.
18:03 Not good.
18:04 Not good at all.
18:14 So what should you do?
18:15 Well, of course, you should reject that and you say, "That which I have accidentally
18:23 inherited is a birthright to benefit all, not just me."
18:29 Now I'm not a Kantian, I'm not a self-sacrifice guy, so it shouldn't be that it never benefits
18:33 me at all or I get no value out of it.
18:35 That would be a contradiction because that would be to say that my accidental gifts should
18:41 benefit people, but apparently I'm not a person so it should never benefit me.
18:45 That doesn't really make much sense.
18:46 So yeah, I think my accidental gifts should benefit people as much as possible.
18:51 I am one of those people, so of course I should have some income and so on from that.
18:57 Which way?
18:58 Let's try this.
19:01 But that which I did not earn should not benefit solely me.
19:14 Does that make sense?
19:17 And of course also that which I did not earn I only have because other people made sacrifices,
19:23 right?
19:24 So I didn't earn, let's say, intelligence, but the only reason I have intelligence is
19:30 because people in the past had kids, raised kids, made those sacrifices.
19:36 So the idea that the sum total of four billion years of evolution should be my own personal
19:42 benefits when the only reason that I exist is because of the sacrifice of others would
19:45 be again to exclude me from the common wheel and the general good.
19:53 And it should be to say that four billion years of sacrifice and effort for others,
20:00 namely offspring, should culminate in me grabbing it all for myself.
20:05 I mean, if you had a family fortune that had been accumulated over, let's say, four billion
20:16 years and it had grown, then you don't get to blow it all on yourself.
20:21 I mean, that would be very selfish, obviously, and very destructive and tragic, really, because
20:28 you would have inherited great wealth and leave nothing to the future, right?
20:32 It would be to consume the present.
20:34 I mean, that's about as sensible as, you know, you've lived for 40 years in a cold climate
20:41 as a farmer, so you keep your seed crop, you keep your seed grain every winter, but then
20:47 just one winter you decide to eat it all, well, then you starve, right?
20:52 It's not sensible.
20:53 It's not sustainable.
20:56 So to avoid the messianic complex, you have to just hammer yourself with the reality that
21:06 you don't take as something that you've earned something that you haven't earned.
21:11 I mean, we should feel better about things that we've earned than things we've inherited.
21:17 You should feel more proud if you do the tough stuff and ask a woman out and end up marrying
21:24 her.
21:25 You should feel more pride in that than if a woman was simply assigned to you in some
21:33 arranged marriage scenario and forced to marry you.
21:36 You should feel more proud of the money you've justly earned rather than the money that you
21:42 have accidentally inherited.
21:44 So we should feel more pride in what we have earned than what we have not earned.
21:54 And so since I think everybody wants a sense of self-respect and pride or what have you,
22:01 the way to do that is to not mistake things you haven't earned for things you have earned,
22:05 because the things you have earned will give you a greater and deeper sense of pride and
22:11 happiness in what you have created.
22:21 And of course you end up with much more interesting questions.
22:23 If you say, "How can I use my gift to benefit solely me?"
22:28 Well, I mean, that's not a very interesting question, right?
22:32 You just go out and promise people things using your eloquence and then dodge whatever
22:38 doesn't materialize, right?
22:41 So that you just go out and lie to people, promise them a bunch of stuff you can't deliver.
22:46 And if it happens, you claim credit.
22:47 And if it doesn't happen, you claim that the other people weren't following your program.
22:50 "I have the perfect diet," you would say.
22:54 And if people lose weight, great, you have the perfect diet.
22:56 If people don't lose weight, well, clearly they're not following your diet.
22:58 You can castigate them or whatever, right?
23:00 So if you say in a sort of predatory mammalian reptile brain fashion, "How can I use my gifts
23:10 to benefit myself?"
23:11 Well, that's not particularly elevated, to put it mildly.
23:15 And it's fairly easy to answer.
23:20 And it's kind of boring.
23:21 We all have those instincts, right?
23:24 On the other hand, if you say, "How can my gifts benefit others and me?"
23:30 Right?
23:31 So if you say, "Well, how can my gifts benefit others?"
23:33 And you don't have a sense of your own self-interest and so on, then you just do what other people
23:37 want you to do.
23:38 Which also is bad, right?
23:40 It's also enabling, right?
23:42 And doing what other people want you to do is not having value.
23:47 That's just being a slave in a way, right?
23:50 So saying, "How can my skills benefit the world and me?"
23:57 I'm part of the world, right?
23:59 Then that's a very interesting challenge.
24:05 And that's, to me, an intellectual feat well worth pursuing.
24:09 I mean, it's true.
24:12 It's valid.
24:13 It's moral.
24:15 It's good and all of that.
24:20 And it's interesting because it's complex.
24:22 Like, how does philosophy benefit people?
24:26 Now if I could say, "How could I twist morality to benefit myself?"
24:32 Either in terms of vanity, like everyone thinks I'm super smart, or in terms of material resources
24:40 and stuff like that.
24:41 It's kind of boring.
24:44 Because I don't have to say what is true and what is virtuous.
24:50 What I have to say is, "What can I tell people so they will surrender their wills to me?"
24:58 And again, we all have those instincts.
24:59 It's kind of baked in to manipulate in that way.
25:02 It's sort of baked into human nature.
25:03 Devilish, right?
25:04 The dark side, the shadow self.
25:07 So we all have that.
25:10 So what we have to do is say something, at least what I feel is important to do and much
25:18 more interesting and brings pride, is to say, not, "What do I say that has people surrender
25:25 their will to me?" but rather, "What is true and virtuous that we can all partake in?"
25:32 Ah, you know, that's interesting.
25:35 Like here's the thing.
25:37 If you have the need for good weather, right?
25:41 All farming societies have a need for good weather.
25:44 Doesn't mean pleasant weather, it just means good for crops, right?
25:48 So if you are a guy in a farming society who's really great at storytelling and really charismatic
25:54 and really funny and has that sort of weird confidence of those who have strong verbal
25:58 abilities but no moral center, then what you do is you say, "Give me resources and I will
26:09 pray to the gods and I will make the rains good."
26:11 "Give me resources, I will pray to the gods and I will make the rains good."
26:17 Well, it's pretty easy to do, right?
26:24 On the other hand, if you say, "Well, I want to work within reality to objectively benefit
26:28 people the most," then you figure out not, "What lies can I tell to get people to give
26:36 me resources while promising them something I can't deliver?"
26:39 And of course, if it works and you get good weather, you say, "Aha, your sacrifice to
26:42 me was worth it."
26:43 If it doesn't work and you get bad weather, you say, "Well, there's an unbeliever among
26:46 you, hunt him out," and you just end up with this gross and vile chaos that characterizes
26:52 most of human history.
26:54 Now, if on the other hand, you actually want to benefit your farming community, then you
27:03 would say, "Okay, let me learn about the science of plants and growing.
27:09 Let me figure out a scarecrow to chase the birds away.
27:12 Let me figure out how to bring water in through irrigation.
27:15 Let me do engineering.
27:16 Let me figure out which crops like turnips we can plant in the winter so we don't starve
27:21 over the big freeze."
27:22 You would actually do things to benefit humanity.
27:26 Now, just lying to people, promising them things you can't deliver in order to get them
27:31 to subject themselves to your will is easy and boring and commonplace and lazy and evil,
27:38 obviously, to some degree.
27:41 Fraud, it's fraud, right?
27:43 Because you can't deliver what you claim you can.
27:45 So that's bad.
27:46 On the other hand, when do you ever become a perfect farmer?
27:55 You don't, right?
27:56 I mean, things change, crops evolve, new forms of bacteria come along and parasites of some
28:06 kind.
28:07 There are new birds.
28:08 The weather might change a little from time to time, you've got an ice age or two.
28:11 So, you know, I mean, they're still studying and improving agriculture.
28:18 Some people say in the wrong direction.
28:20 I'm sure that they're right in some ways.
28:24 So if you simply are going to use your talents for your own benefit, I want to be the witch
28:30 doctor, I want to promise good weather or victory in battle or something like that.
28:36 Okay, so another one, right?
28:37 I promise victory in battle.
28:40 If you give me resources.
28:42 Okay, well, that's one guy promises victory in battle.
28:47 Another guy invents the longbow, right?
28:50 So one is fraudulent in that the guy offering a victory in battle is not someone who can
28:56 give you victory in battle, but the guy actually inventing the longbow might or plate armor
29:00 or whatever it is might actually, or swords, I guess, back in the Bronze Age.
29:05 So that guy can actually do you some real good.
29:09 Now, so if you don't do the easy part of offering to relieve people's anxiety without solving
29:18 their problems, right?
29:20 So if you're worried about the weather as a farmer, then you go to the witch doctor
29:24 and the witch doctor says, "Oh, I'll, you know, give me three sheep and I'll make sure
29:28 you have good weather."
29:29 You're not changing the weather, obviously.
29:32 All you're doing is you're managing the anxiety of the farmer and thus ensuring that it goes
29:39 on in perpetuity.
29:41 On the other hand, if you instead, you say, "Well, I'm going to figure out irrigation
29:50 for your brother," then you are doing something, assuming that you work on it and it works
29:55 out that will actually, will actually relieve.
29:57 The farmer won't worry about is it going to rain because he's got irrigation for his crops.
30:02 So that's a real thing.
30:04 Now, I don't generally think that people end up with a lot of pride and happiness by lying
30:12 to people and promising what they can't deliver in return for resources, defrauding them,
30:18 bamboozling them, whatever you want to call it.
30:20 I don't generally think that people end up with a lot of happiness based on that.
30:26 So it's not a very productive thing.
30:27 I mean, obviously you get resources, but it's not a very productive thing.
30:32 On the other hand, people who generally bend themselves towards the overall good end up
30:38 with a much more interesting life.
30:41 It's not repetitive.
30:42 You don't live in fear of exposure.
30:43 You don't live in fear of someone even more eloquent coming along.
30:48 You don't have to unite with secular forces of violence to maintain your monopoly on falsehood.
30:52 Like there's lots of things that are kind of beneficial to it and you do actually do
30:57 good.
30:58 And you end up, I think, with a very beneficial state of mind wherein you have a situation
31:06 where the things that you have not actually invented, like your own self, your intelligence
31:13 and so on, because you are the recipient of the common good, you apply your gifts to the
31:19 common good.
31:20 So you're the recipient of the common good, which is people making sacrifices to have
31:27 children, to raise children and so on, and to keep them alive.
31:32 And certainly the people who made the sacrifices to give us the levels of free speech that
31:36 we have and so on, they made a lot of sacrifices.
31:38 There have been wars fought for this kind of stuff.
31:40 So we are really the recipients of common sacrifice.
31:44 And so the idea that as the recipients for common sacrifice, we should just use them
31:47 for our own benefit and not make any sacrifices to return the gifts that we've been given
31:52 or to add to the gifts that we've been given.
31:55 It's really terrible.
31:57 It's really terrible.
31:58 I mean, it is like, to a large degree, it's like some guy who's... and this actually happened
32:05 in my family.
32:06 One of my not too distant ancestors inherited a bunch of land that had been sort of hard
32:12 fought, hard won, hard farmed by his ancestors, and then was a gambler and a drunk, I think,
32:19 and ended up losing all the family lands.
32:22 And with the last scraps of money he had, he put my father's generation through school.
32:29 So that's kind of selfish, right?
32:32 And that's pretty awful in sort of very many ways.
32:37 And not interesting.
32:40 So trying to find a way to serve the gifts that you've inherited through the sacrifice
32:45 of others into something that is to the benefit of others, because all your gifts result from
32:52 the sacrifices of others to a large degree.
32:55 And so they're not just for you.
32:59 Why is there female beauty?
33:00 Because women worked hard to find appropriate mates to make themselves pretty, to raise
33:06 children in a time when raising children was brutal and horrible and hard, and half of
33:12 them died before the age of five.
33:13 A lot of heartbreak.
33:14 I mean, there's a... in Uncle Tom's cabin, there's a little bit I sort of vividly remember
33:19 when reading the book many years ago, there's a little bit in the book about every mother
33:23 has the drawer full of baby clothes from the babies who died.
33:27 It's a secret drawer of sorrow.
33:29 And it's just horrible how people had to find a way to have kids and survive in that kind
33:34 of situation.
33:36 And because they did that, you have the gifts that you have.
33:39 You have the gifts that you have.
33:42 Now should you just use those gifts for your own immediate benefit, paying none of it forward?
33:46 I was like, I mean, I used to get, of course, my excitements on Twitter when I would sort
33:50 of post to women that, you know, it might be a good idea, it might be slightly less
33:55 selfish to have kids.
33:56 And you know, some of the women would listen, but a lot of the women were like, "Well, now
33:59 I want a life of travel and education and yoga and..."
34:03 That's...
34:04 I guess that's nice.
34:06 But of course you only exist to consume that stuff because your ancestors didn't consume
34:12 that stuff.
34:14 The better your life is, the more you owe it to the future to pay it forward by having
34:17 kids.
34:19 And if your life is bad, well, maybe it's bad because you didn't have kids and you are
34:23 lacking meaning and continuity.
34:26 For me, I just feel I see this big chain going back four billion years and it would be entirely
34:31 dishonorable to me.
34:32 Again, some people can and can't have kids, but if you can, right, it would be entirely
34:36 dishonorable for me to not pay it forward.
34:41 So yeah, how do you avoid the messianic complexes?
34:46 Well, you recognize that you're going to have a happier life and a more interesting life
34:53 working to use your accidental gifts to benefit people as a whole, to benefit society and
34:58 community as a whole.
34:59 Now, benefiting virtue does mean, of course, interfering with the interests of evildoers
35:03 so you can, you know, theoretically expect some blowback in the future.
35:07 Could happen.
35:08 You never know.
35:09 Could happen.
35:10 Keep my eyes peeled.
35:11 So yeah, that's my general idea of how to avoid the messianic complex.
35:19 You accidentally inherited some gifts.
35:22 It's a more proud and virtuous and happier life to use those gifts to benefit the world
35:27 and yourself.
35:30 And those who greedily exploit everything they inherited for their own personal vanity
35:36 are interfered with by the devil who wants you to avoid pursuing virtue and thus will
35:40 give you the happiness of vanity, which is temporary and destructive.
35:44 He'll give you the happiness of vanity.
35:45 See genuine virtue is win-win for all virtuous people, but vanity is win-lose for everyone
35:49 who envies you.
35:51 You win, they lose.
35:52 And what you win is far less than what other people lose.
35:57 It's like a thief.
35:58 Like a thief might steal a thousand dollars, but then everyone's kind of paranoid about
36:02 getting stolen from, so they have to spend $10,000 on theft prevention measures.
36:06 Right?
36:08 So the thief is winning far less than everyone else is losing, if that makes sense.
36:17 So yeah, the devil will offer you the false happiness of vanity by telling you that the
36:23 gifts are for you and you alone, and he prevents you from getting to virtue.
36:33 And also by sort of posting I'm so pretty stuff on Instagram or whatever, then what
36:38 happens is other people feel unhappy because they're not as pretty or they're not as wealthy
36:46 or whatever it is.
36:47 They feel unhappy because of that.
36:49 So then they genuinely believe that the solution to their unhappiness is to get thinner, get
36:56 prettier, get more money, get a Bugatti, whatever nonsense you want to talk about.
37:03 And so you lure them by inflicting unhappiness based on low status, you give them the delusion
37:09 that the way that you solve the unhappiness of low status is to become high status.
37:14 High status.
37:17 And that leads them to status and not to virtue.
37:20 Status is the dominance of one over another, and that leads them to want to dominate others
37:25 as they feel dominated.
37:27 And in general, as we can see through this process, the world goes to hell.
37:34 But yeah, so that's why I've sort of written about relationships and love and happiness.
37:37 That's why I wrote UPB.
37:39 That's why I've talked about these universal virtues and values.
37:41 Why I did the introduction to philosophy series, which is to say that your gifts came from
37:48 the world and therefore the world, but the world includes you.
37:51 So neither sacrifice nor selfishness is the order of the day.
37:56 And if we all try to use our gifts for the common betterment and virtue improvement of
38:01 mankind, all but the evil doers win, and we and our lives and our futures get infinitely
38:08 better.
38:09 Thank you so much.
38:10 Freedomman.com/donate.
38:11 Great to see you guys again in the great outdoors.
38:14 Lots of love from up here.
38:15 Have yourself a wonderful day.
38:16 I'll talk to you soon.