- 4 months ago
This lecture analyzes the historical and philosophical factors that influenced the baby boomer generation, connecting their behaviors to the moral decline following the 20th century's upheavals. It outlines the transition from optimism in the 18th to early 20th centuries to a pervasive sense of despair shaped by the World Wars and totalitarian regimes. The speaker discusses the erosion of traditional values, emphasizing how existential crises and moral failures led to a shift towards self-indulgence and hedonism. Current societal trends, such as rising divorce rates and diminished long-term commitments, are examined as consequences of this hedonistic culture. The lecture advocates for the development of new moral frameworks that merge historical insights with contemporary realities, underscoring the importance of virtue, parenting, and communal responsibilities in addressing the current moral crisis.
FOLLOW ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!
You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025
FOLLOW ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!
You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00So, to understand the boomers, it's important to understand the nihilism and the hedonism
00:07that comes from a catastrophic fall from moral grace.
00:11Because the modern world is largely a technocratic semi-dictatorship hanging on to vestigial
00:18freedoms by the skin of its teeth, it's hard to remember, or it's hard to understand, not
00:23to remember, it's hard to understand the wild and not unjustified optimism that the
00:29West was experiencing from the 18th to the early 20th century.
00:35It's almost impossible for us to comprehend what was going on there.
00:41So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about all of this.
00:45I've done quite a lot of work on 19th century, 18th century history, so I'll try to keep it
00:51non-technical, of course, right?
00:52We want to keep it digestible and hopefully a smidge entertaining, but it is really important
00:58to know what was taken from us.
01:03So, you know, almost all of human history was wretched, you know, tooth problems and illnesses
01:08that couldn't be cured until the late 19th century.
01:11You were safer not going to a doctor than going to a doctor.
01:14Dentists only had pliers and that was about it.
01:17And people had ailments and allergies and illnesses that they could do almost nothing about, no
01:23antibiotics, one simple cut could get you infected and you could die, you know, relatively easily.
01:29Children died all over the place in childbirths and people regularly went through wars, famines,
01:35plagues, pestilences of just about every kind.
01:38And it was uncomfortable.
01:40It was wretched.
01:41You know, the sort of mind-body dichotomy where the mind and the soul are yearning to
01:45break free from the prison of the failing flesh.
01:48Well, that occurred.
01:49I mean, no glasses.
01:50You get older and you can't see very well and there are no glasses.
01:55Like, even things as simple as that.
01:59You know, soap was rare throughout most of human history.
02:02Bathing was rare throughout most of human history.
02:05People had constant skin infections and, you know, you'd get your cysts that would get infected
02:11and would erupt and painful and then you could get infection from that.
02:14I mean, honestly, just certainly by modern standards, this is why it's kind of tough to
02:19hear people complain about the modern world.
02:21While I understand it, and of course, I will share in it from time to time, for the most
02:26part, it's almost infinitely better than it was.
02:29Now, starting in the 17th, 18th centuries, there was an advancement in property rights and
02:40land ownership to the point where the most productive people started to be able to buy
02:46the most productive land.
02:48Or, if it wasn't very productive, you know, there are some people who just have these weird
02:52skills, right?
02:54They just have these weird skills.
02:57And it's almost impossible to replicate.
03:01It is hard to comprehend.
03:03Even the artists themselves who have, like, these weird skills don't know how it occurs,
03:08you listen to Roger Hodgson from Supertramp talk about writing the logical song, and he's
03:14like, I don't know where that came from.
03:15It just kind of popped in and, you know, Paul McCartney dreamed the lyrics, oh, sorry,
03:20the tune to Yesterday, and Bob Dylan is like, I don't know where that came from.
03:24I can't do it anymore, like his early hits.
03:26Artists, and Socrates pointed this out when he went to the artists to try and find wisdom.
03:30He realized they didn't really have any wisdom.
03:31They just had a kind of peculiar talent for language and dialogue sometimes in poetry that even
03:37they didn't understand, right?
03:38So, you know, the ability to write songs, the ability to, you know, there's the green
03:42thumb in gardening, there's the dollar thumb in a business where some people just have
03:48a kind of Midas touch when it comes to business, so the PayPal mafia and so on, just amazing.
03:52And even the people themselves don't really quite understand how this works.
03:56And so a talent had been kept from control of resources for almost all of human history,
04:03either through nobility, aristocracy, through slavery, and so on, and no particular free
04:09market and land.
04:10And so the modern world is birthed from the fact that the most talented now have access
04:16to the most resources.
04:18I mean, think of someone like you're going to a casino and, you know, on average, you're
04:23going to lose, right?
04:24The casinos exist because people lose, right?
04:27So then imagine that you have someone who wins 90% of the time.
04:34Well, what you would all do is you would all pool your money and give it to that guy so
04:38that he could give you a fortune back.
04:41In other words, you would take your capital and you would give it to the guy with the
04:44most talent for winning.
04:46I mean, people do this in sports betting all the time, right?
04:48They figure out, they try to figure out who's the most talented, who's the most likely to
04:51win, and then they bet on that.
04:53And the odds, certainly in horse riding and most betting, the odds are based upon what
04:58other people think is the most likely for someone to win.
05:03So the best singer in the band usually gets the microphone, right?
05:08And the best drummer in the band gets the drums.
05:11What is that great line?
05:12I don't know if it's true or not, but somebody asked one of the Beatles if Ringo Starr was
05:18the best drummer in the world.
05:19He said, they said he's not even the best drummer in the Beatles.
05:21Well, you give the most resources to the most talented, right?
05:28If you look at an NBA contract as a resource, well, you give the NBA contract to the player
05:35who is the most talented.
05:36And the movie Moneyball, where they say, you know, there's data out there that can really
05:40help us make these decisions rather than just trusting on our gut.
05:43And so in the 18th, 19th century, it's kind of called the enclosure movement.
05:49The most talented farmers were able to get a hold of the most farmland because there was
05:57finally somewhat of an increase in the free market in farmland.
06:03Now, and so the people who had historically gotten their farmland and divvied it up into
06:07like stained glass little divots and corners and twisty bits of land, which was almost
06:13impossible to plow efficiently and so on.
06:15I mean, they were kicked off their land, their ancestral hereditary tied to it like livestock
06:19surf land.
06:20They were kicked off.
06:22And that was very tough, of course.
06:24But because the land passed into the hands of the most talented agriculturalists, and
06:33there was a huge, I write about this in my novel, Just Poor, like there was a huge, post-printing
06:40press, there was a huge movement to share agricultural information.
06:44There was a guy named Turnip Townsend who was pretty keen on a winter crop like turnip,
06:48right?
06:48So you got better use of manure.
06:51You got better plowing situations with more rational land division, and you got winter
06:56crops like turnips.
06:57You got just better crop rotation, like just a wild ability.
07:02And if you've ever been around one of these productive people, like these mega productive
07:06people, it's wild.
07:07It is like a force of nature, right?
07:09They call these engineers like the 10x or the 20x people, and this is why they end up
07:14making so much money if there's any justice in their pay scale at all.
07:19There are some people who are just going to crank out and grind out reusable bulletproof
07:23code with great error handling, and they're going to think about, well, what happens if
07:28the disk fails halfway through the operation, and they're going to figure that out, and
07:31all this kind of stuff, right?
07:32So you're going to get all of these people who just have incredible productivity.
07:37It's why in a meritocracy, the Pareto principle, like 95% of the money goes to 5% of the people,
07:43because just this wild productivity thing that goes on.
07:46A comedian, it's the same thing, right?
07:49Lots of people try their hand at comedy.
07:51Lord knows I did.
07:52And as a comedian, I make a good philosopher, so to speak.
07:57So that's the way of the world.
08:01There's no way around it.
08:02And everyone gets resentful at the wealth generated by the crazy productivity people, and then they
08:08want to rope them in and take resources away from them, and then everybody ends up poor.
08:12Some people are great at creating jobs.
08:14Most people are not great at creating jobs.
08:17You know, I've probably created 80 to 100 jobs over the course of my business career.
08:23And, you know, that's not terrible, but, you know, there are people out there who create
08:27tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs.
08:30And they're way better at it than I am.
08:32So, the stranglehold that starvation had on the human community was broken in, I mean, really
08:43depends how you count it, late Middle Ages, definitely 18th, 17th, 18th century.
08:50And you had productivity increases per acre, or per farm, of 5 to 10 to 15 times or more.
09:025 to 10 to 15 times or more.
09:05Not percent.
09:06Times.
09:08So, that's staggering.
09:11That is staggering.
09:12So, you had excess food produced at the same time as you had people being kicked off their
09:17ancestral lands, which meant that cities could grow, and the beginning of capitalism was
09:23the end of slavery and the end of serfdom.
09:25And I've talked about that before, so I won't get too much into it now.
09:29I'm sure you've heard these arguments from me a bunch of times.
09:31So, what happened was, in the mid to late 18th, throughout the 19th century, into the early
09:3920th century, the stranglehold of starvation, want, and war, and pestilence, was lifted.
09:49To a large degree.
09:49Again, obviously, there were still hungry people, there were still wars, there was the
09:52Franco-Prussian War, I think, 1871.
09:54But from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the start of the First World War in 1914, you
10:00had, in Western Europe, a century of relative peace, of relative massive increases in prosperity,
10:06and so on.
10:07Massive increases in engineering, advancements in science, in medicine, in astronomy, physics,
10:14biology.
10:15This was the century, of course, 19th century produced, the theory of evolution by Darwin.
10:23And the progress in the West was staggering.
10:27And it was the age of reason, it was the age of science, it was the age of progress.
10:34And, you know, one of the big problems was that Europeans, both through imperialism and
10:38Christian charity, tried to spread these ideas and these opportunities across the world, which
10:44was a bad idea as a whole.
10:47But the progress was staggering.
10:50It was sunlight, finally getting through the clouds of endless human horrors and degradations.
10:59And the optimism was largely incomprehensible to us.
11:05I mean, it was the age of reason, it was the age of muscular Christianity, it was the age
11:11of the white man's burden, it was the age of plenty.
11:15Now, the 20th century was by almost no one, with a few exceptions, Nietzsche being one, the
11:2320th century was predicted by almost no one.
11:27There appeared to be no particular limit on our capacity for progress.
11:32And, of course, you look at early science fiction writers and so on, Jules Verne, H.G.
11:37Wells and so on, and they predicted a Star Trek-style future of peace and reason and plenty.
11:45We are a long way divorced from that, right?
11:49111 years since the First World War started.
11:51And the First World War was a deep seismic shock to the optimism of the 19th century.
11:59Now, one of the, of course, one of the things that happens is when you get peace and plenty,
12:03right?
12:03You had a free market, the likes of which we can scarcely conceive of.
12:07We had taxes that were virtually non-existent by modern standards.
12:11We have freedom of speech, absent, of course, when Lincoln muzzled the newspaper as an imprisoned
12:18journalist.
12:18But we had, certainly in America, I mean, it's the we, right?
12:23America had incredible freedom, incredible progress.
12:27Shining cities were built.
12:29Rails were built.
12:30Beginnings of flight were built.
12:32Steam engines, internal combustion engine.
12:34I mean, it's just amazing.
12:35Amazing.
12:36I finally figured out that blood circulates through the body pumped by the heart.
12:41So, the First World War was a shock.
12:44And what happens, of course, I'm sure you've known this, and I've done this myself, too.
12:46Like, I'm losing weight, and I'm like, oh, I've lost five pounds.
12:48I guess I can relax a little.
12:50And I think you really can't, because you've got to just keep going until you get to your
12:53set weight, and then just stay with those habits, right?
12:56Or, you know, I'll not eat sugar, right?
12:59Oh, I shouldn't eat sugar, shouldn't I?
13:00I go to the dentist, and it's like, wow, your teeth are really clean.
13:02Oh, maybe I can have a little sugar.
13:03You know, like, you get lazy, or you get inattentive when you have success.
13:07And after a hundred years without major wars in Western Europe, the young men were eager
13:15for war, because they'd read the tales of it in the past, and, you know, the war started,
13:19and everyone was, like, rushing to sign up, because, boy, they were just terrified.
13:22It'd be over by Christmas, and they'd miss out on the great adventure, and war had been
13:26transmitted through paintings and language and books, right, rather than vivid lived experience.
13:31So, it's hard to understand what the First World War did to the West, supposed to be
13:39a localized minor conflict over in a month or two, or three, maybe, and it turned into
13:45a four-plus-year appalling slugfest, which destroyed the currencies and the 19th century
13:54economies of the West, 10 million dead, millions and millions more wounded, both physically and
14:00psychologically. The term shell shock came into being, because war had lasted for so long,
14:03and under such helpless conditions, that people were driven mad. They were insane. They were
14:08driven insane by the war. Now, you have the rise of feminism, because there are so few men left
14:14that women need to turn to the government, demand the right to vote. And, of course, it was followed
14:20by the appalling Treaty of Versailles. It was followed by a crazy stock market bubble. It was followed by
14:25a 14-year Great Depression with 25-plus percent unemployment. And then it was followed by the
14:32Second World War, which multiplied the horrors of the First World War, already horrifying enough,
14:37almost to infinity. And then the Second World War culminated in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima
14:45and Nagasaki, and then the betrayal by the Rosenbergs of the nuclear secrets of the Soviet Union,
14:50followed by the Soviet Union, and the Communism, which had spread across a third of the world,
14:55the Soviet Union threatening the Cold War, and everything was turning to absolute shit.
15:03Communism had absorbed the Soviet Union very quickly after the Second World War. It absorbed
15:08China. Of course, it hit North Vietnam, North Korea. It hit Cambodia. It hit Cuba, other places.
15:16And, as the saying goes, during a time of extreme war, the only expediency that the Western powers
15:26failed to enact was cannibalism, and that's only because it was of doubtful utility.
15:32And what happened was, in the endless horrors of the 20th century, a quarter of a billion people
15:40murdered by their own governments outside of war. You know, 90 to 100 million people slaughtered
15:46by Communism. 60, 50-60 million people slaughtered in the two world wars. The rise of taxation,
15:54the destruction of the remnants of meritocracy in the free market, and the wild optimism,
16:03which for the first time in human history overtook the human mind, the wild optimism of
16:09the 18th and 19th centuries was destroyed by the middle of the 20th century. Like, utterly destroyed.
16:15And boomers grew up being, you know, often trained by Communists in the government educational system.
16:24I mean, the West really died in the 19th century when the government took over the education of the
16:29young, right? As the old saying goes, if you send your child to Caesar, don't be surprised if it comes
16:33back a Roman. And if you send your children to be educated by government, don't be shocked when
16:38they come back super pro-government. So, the boomers grew up in the shocked, eviscerated,
16:46disemboweled seppuku nihilism of the middle of the 20th century. And, I mean, there's a reason why
16:53people began to leave the church in significant numbers. And of course, part of it was propaganda,
16:57but, see, propaganda has to have some ring of truth. It has to have something that seems
17:03compelling to people. Like, you couldn't start a propaganda campaign about slavery is good these
17:08days, right? Because there's no virtue in slavery, it's evil, and people accept that. And so, you know,
17:14there has to be a kernel of truth for propaganda to work, or at least peneer of credibility.
17:23You know, you might think that somebody is not overweight if they're a little overweight and
17:28suck their stomach in, but you'll never think that a 300-pound person is not overweight if they suck
17:33their stomach in, right? So, by the middle of the 20th century, as the greatest generation, as they
17:41were called, were racing the boomers, there was a dull, eviscerated, horrified shock at the
17:49helplessness of people. How could it have gotten so bad? How could the world have gone from,
17:53the Western world in particular, gone from optimism to just endless, endless horrors?
17:58How could, well, all the wealth that was generated through the sacrifices and suffering of the 19th
18:03century was destroyed almost to the last dollar in the First World War? So, what was the point of
18:08all of that? And helplessness is the worst thing when it comes to optimism. And I remember, you know,
18:14when I was watching the movie Threads, which was, you know, some pretty aggro propaganda from the
18:18communists, but when I was watching the movie Threads, I was like, I felt helpless. I could do
18:24anything they want. People on the other side of the world can push a button and destroy all life on
18:27earth. And I'm helpless. And that's, of course, in the First World War, there was this helplessness.
18:34Someone just pushes a button a mile away and you get blown up. A skill doesn't matter.
18:38It's just luck. And virtue requires the ability to affect an outcome. And helplessness breeds nihilism
18:46and hedonism. So, after looking at, you know, 1914, let's say to 1950, after China was lost to
18:56communism, after that, well, people said in their heart of hearts, so this is the end result,
19:05this is the end product of almost 2,000 years of Christianity, Greco-Roman virtues. The end result
19:17has been this. And people fell away from the church because the church had been unable to stop the
19:24horrors of the 20th century or identify that they were coming, although, again, there were some who
19:28did, but it wasn't enough of a movement. And people felt helpless. A personal disasters don't usually breed
19:34nihilism because there's almost always something you can do. But universal disasters demoralize
19:41everyone. And by demoralize, it doesn't just mean that they feel hopeless and sad. It means that they
19:46lose their sense of the efficacy of virtue. It's like a poem I wrote when I was a teenager. It's not
19:52the best poem in the world, but it encapsulates a lot of what I mean by this. Two men in a wood,
19:57one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves. Virtue did not save you in the trenches. I mean, in former
20:04conflicts, like let's say some sort of medieval sword fight conflict, then, you know, courage
20:10and skill and all of that, and it could save you. But again, First World War, somebody pushes
20:16a button or you're ordered to go into machine gun fire, it doesn't matter how much you've
20:20trained. It doesn't matter how good you are with a weapon. You're just going to get blown
20:23up or gun down. So all of that vanished. All of that sense of virtue and its products just
20:31vanished. And of course, it is a sort of real, big, deep and important question, which is,
20:40how did things get so bad? After, you know, 5,000 years of the philosophical and religious
20:48moral mission to improve the lot of mankind, how did we end up taking the general technology
20:56developed in the free market and using it to slaughter humanity by the hundreds of millions?
21:03And this foundational question has remained unanswered for the most part. How do we combat
21:10evil? And the combating of evil has, in general, throughout human history, been a violence. That we
21:16identify the evildoers, and we use censorship, ostracism, violence, sort of you name it, to
21:25make, to take them out from society, right? That's the general, that's the general plan, the general
21:31idea. And it hasn't, it hasn't worked, right? It hasn't worked. And in general, the identification
21:41of evil has failed, and the combating of evil has failed. And since the purpose of moral philosophy
21:51is to identify and diminish evil, I suggest identify and diminish evil, the giant project
21:57has failed. And the failure of a central paradigm of human life, that morality has the power to
22:08identify and diminish evil. That failure has been catastrophic for the West. The West has
22:16had, at its core, a moral mission for at least 2,500 years. You could sort of say from Socrates
22:24onwards, it's had a moral mission to reject falsehood, to promote virtue, to fight corruption
22:30and evil, to diminish the power of malevolence, lies, backstabbing, violence, and so on. So, there's
22:39been this great plan that religion and philosophy have put forward. And the great plan is, virtue
22:48will lead to a better world. Now, of course, in Christianity, that better world is very often
22:53in the afterlife. And Christianity is very mixed in its optimism about virtue, right? So, there
23:00are some Christians who, of course, you know, fulfill the Ten Commandments, fight evil, do
23:04good. And these are, you know, the very noble Christians who ended the worldwide practice
23:08of slavery to a large degree in the, I mean, 19th century, basically. Again, one of the great
23:14successes of humanity. So, some Christians definitely take Christianity and successfully try to apply
23:23Christian morals to the world in the hope, not of creating heaven on earth, but in the
23:28hope of creating a better world. And the Christian belief that all the world could be the West
23:37was a foundational error, but given the lack of knowledge of modern science, it's sort of
23:43understandable. So, Christianity both ended slavery and then enslaved, in many ways, the
23:50Western man to the global improvement of the planet as a whole, which was a catastrophic
23:55failure. I mean, honestly, it's worse than a failure. So, on the other hand, there are Christians
24:01who say that this is a veil of tears, that Satan runs the world, that you cannot win against
24:08evil because human nature is so fallen and so corrupt that the best you can do is stave
24:15off evil a little bit, but it's going to win in the end, and the only salvation is going
24:21to come when Christ returns, brings the dead back to life, judges everyone, and takes the
24:25remainder of the planet, the remainder of the moral planet, to heaven. And this is sort of
24:30the end times, eschatology Christianity, this is the Christianity that, I wouldn't even say
24:35despairs. It just has, based upon the principle that human nature is irredeemably corrupt because
24:42of the fall of Adam and Eve and the fall, the original sin, human nature is so corrupt that
24:47we have no chance or capacity to create a moral world. And the best we can do is fight off evil
24:56in our own hearts. It's going to win in the world. This life is a trial, and a trail of
25:02tears, and evil rules, and so on, right? I mean, that is... And so, the form of Christianity,
25:09which is, we can make the world a substantially better place through the application of dedicated
25:15morals, which did seem to be doing a hell of a lot of good, and was, in fact, doing a hell
25:19of a lot of good in the 19th century, that all collapsed in the first half of the 20th century,
25:24and it's just, it's impossible to really conceive of just how disastrous the years from 1914
25:31to 1945 were. Like, I wrote a whole, in a sense, three-volume novel about this called
25:37Almost, which is a German family and a British family from 1914 to 1940. Now, the compression
25:51of these disasters from 1914 to 1940, which is a shockingly short period of time, right? It's 20,
26:0226 years. It was a shockingly short period of time for all of the optimism of the 19th, 18th and
26:1019th century to be utterly shredded and destroyed beyond recovery. Now, this is where the boomers
26:16were born into, which was a absolutely catastrophic collapse of moral optimism and a genuine and deep
26:25sense that virtue was powerless. Christianity was powerless to achieve and maintain the good.
26:32Reason was helpless and powerless to achieve and maintain the good. That morality
26:39was pointless. Morality was a fool's game. Morality was... And so, the entire moral order of the West
26:49collapsed in the 1940s. It collapsed earlier, but its sort of final... was in the 1940s. The 2,500-year
27:01moral journey of the West to rely on faith, Christianity, and reason to diminish evil and promote good
27:12had utterly failed and collapsed. Now, when morality is viewed as a sucker's game, as a fool's game,
27:20and morality has no power over evil, and evil has great power over the good, and we can sort of see this
27:30happening, right? This is... A woke culture is corrupt people enacting power over good people
27:37through their very virtues, right? Harnessing their virtues for fairness and equality and so on,
27:42and then using it to serve corruption. So, when virtue is helpless, and morality and reason
27:50can do nothing against the predations and all-powerful nature of evil, that evil can start wars,
27:59evil can run concentration camps, it can throw people in gulags, evil, if you look at sort of what
28:04the Russian army did to the West towards the end and after the Second World War, it was, you know,
28:11it's a complete, violent, corrupt, you know, for the most... Sorry, I say complete, for the most part,
28:16to a large degree, just a massive rape fest through the population, where, in particular, German women
28:21from the ages of 8 to 80 were raped with pretty much wanton abandon, repeatedly. So, which I'm
28:29obviously certain happened to my mother based upon hints that she passed over the years, so it's pretty
28:34personal to me, for what that's worth. Evil had proven itself triumphant, and nobody knew how to fix it,
28:44nobody knew how to stop it, nobody knew how to deal with it. How do you fight evil? How do you fight
28:49evil? Well, you had Christian nations, I mean, not Russia, of course, it was under communism by then,
28:58but in Western Europe, you had Christian nations who had turned to psychotic levels of wholesale
29:08slaughter of tens of millions against each other. Where was God? Where was Christ? Where was
29:14Christianity? Where was virtue? Virtue couldn't prevent you from being drafted and sent to die
29:22with very little power and control, if any, over what happened to you in battle. You just, you get
29:31strafed from above, a bomb gets dropped by a hyena screaming Stuka, a Lancaster drops bombs, like my
29:40grandmother, killed in the firebombing of Dresden, one of the first thousand plane raids. What could
29:47she do? There was no skill, there was no hand of God protecting her. She just ran from place to place
29:54or hid in a basement, the building that she was in blew up from a bomb, and they found nothing except
30:01the clasp from her purse. And that was the end of my grandmother. Nobody and nothing protected her
30:09from her fate. Now, her Christian faith was powerless to help her, the reason of Socrates and the virtues
30:19of Jesus were powerless to protect her, and she died like an animal huddled in a basement as fire rained
30:27down from the skies for the whole night. And, of course, everybody remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
30:33but, of course, the largely constructed out of wood and paper city of Tokyo had firebombings and
30:39firestorms that killed hundreds of thousands of people in a single night. You know how it goes,
30:44right? You get a big enough fire in the center of a city, and what happens is the fire consumes the
30:51oxygen, which sucks more oxygen in from the surrounding areas, which creates a terrible wind,
30:57that feeds the fire even more. And who could save themselves? Who could protect themselves?
31:04Who even understood the causality of what caused the war, either first or second in the first place?
31:12So, not many people know, of course, that one of the causes of the Second World War was a fear of
31:20communism, particularly in Germany. So, the moral mission, reason equals virtue equals happiness,
31:28faith in the Lord brings a better world. So, then we couldn't return in the West to original sin,
31:35the corruption of the world, Satan runs everything, because we'd had the fairly glorious example of the
31:4019th century, or 1750 to 1914, which was an age of immense agricultural scientific material and economic
31:50progress. So, we couldn't go back to, well, I mean, Satan runs the world and human nature is so evil,
31:57we'll never escape this veil of tears, because we did! Brothers and sisters, we did. We did.
32:02The world as evil, or the world as corrupt, or Satan running the world, or the irredeemable,
32:09horrifying nature of the human personality, post-fall from the Garden of Eden, could not be sustained
32:15in the enthusiasm, progress, and optimism of the 19th century. So, evil had been diminished,
32:23slavery had been ended, serfdom had been abolished, free markets had swollen and spread,
32:29material progress, agricultural progress, was all achieved. So, good seemed to be winning,
32:38and then it lost absolutely catastrophically. So, faith was not enough to sustain a moral world,
32:45the world could no longer just be perceived of as satanic because of the progress of 164 years,
32:521750 to 1914. So, what was left? Evil was triumphant, virtue was a sham, morality was a mirage,
33:02Christianity had failed, and sociopaths with itchy nuclear trigger fingers ruled the world,
33:09totalitarianism had taken over a third of the globe, politicians were revealed to be liars,
33:16right? The Americans sail, right? Woodrow Wilson's sail, this is the war to end war,
33:22the war for democracy. The world was more enslaved at the end of the Second World War than it was at
33:27the beginning of the First World War, so it was all for less than nothing. It was all for worse than
33:32nothing. What could be believed in anymore? Well, morality is what separates us from the animals,
33:40and when morality collapses, what is left for mankind but the life of an animal? A cunning animal,
33:49a brilliant animal, an engineering animal, but what is left? When the pleasures of virtue vanish,
33:59what is left? But hedonism, that's all that's left. Pleasure in the moment, pleasure for the self,
34:07no sense of obligation, no sense of honor, no sense of virtue, no sense of a noble fight to
34:14promote goodness and diminish evil. No, evil has won, we might as well have fun. Evil has won,
34:24we might as well have fun. That's the ethos of the boomers, which is why it is a peculiar
34:29combination of nihilism and hedonism, of compliance and self-gratification. I mean,
34:37they'll still talk about virtue and so on, and I get all of that, that's sort of inescapable in the
34:40human mind, but they will always let their virtues, quote virtues, be defined by those in power.
34:47I mean, the welfare state was hedonism, in a way, in a very real way, because it was saying,
34:52I will trade property rights and political liberties for consequence-free sex. I will trade
35:02the virtues of the spirit for the pleasures of the body. And all former virtues were found to be
35:10false. You say, ah, well, you know, but family is everything. Well, no, family wasn't everything.
35:16Because family being everything did not stop the wars. In fact, in the First World War, there were
35:23famously these women walking around handing out white feathers to men, not in uniform,
35:28the mark of cowardice. Many men were killed by feathers. And this massive shock, unprecedented in
35:36human history, unprecedented in any culture, this massive shock that Greek reason and Christian
35:44morality had failed, utterly failed, in the prevention and combating of evil, is the soil in which the
35:56boomers grew. And this is what Jim Morrison was singing about. Woke up this morning and I got
36:01myself a beer. The future's uncertain and the end is always near. Our selected behavior, if you know my
36:07presentations on the gene wars. Pleasure, hedonism. I like that house. I'll buy it. I want to go on a
36:15cruise. I'll go on a cruise. I want more free stuff from the government. I don't care about the debt.
36:19I'm going to spend my money and leave nothing to my kids. Why? When morality self-detonates,
36:26all that's left is pleasure. Morality is about making a better world in the future at the expense
36:33of happiness in the here and now. That's what virtue is. How many people worry about the health
36:39implications of their last meal before execution? Well, they don't worry about it because there's no
36:45future, right? We worry about fats and carbs and proteins and sugars and weight and health and
36:54diabetes. We worry about all of that because we have a future that we want to be better or at least
36:59not worse. Two major systems of virtue had failed. Greek reason, Christian faith, Christian morality,
37:09utterly failed. I mean, if you've got a plan called make the world a better place for 2,000 years and you
37:14end up with 1914 to 1945, can you really say that that 2,000-year project has succeeded?
37:22Give me some rounding if you don't mind. You can't. It's failed. If I have a 2,000-year,
37:30or let's say I have a 20-year business plan to make money and in the last few months of year 20,
37:36in the last few weeks of year 20, I lose a billion dollars, can we say that that is a good business
37:42plan? No. So, what could replace Christian faith and virtues and Greek rationality in the minds of
37:54the post-war, post-Second World War generation? What could grow there? Well, nothing. Sex, drugs,
38:01and rock and roll, right? Sex for stimulus, drugs for stimulus, rock and roll for stimulus,
38:08nihilism, five to one, one in five. No one here gets out alive. This is why the boomers don't care
38:15about the future. It's why they don't care about the debt. It's why they don't particularly care
38:18about their grandchildren. It's why they don't want to hand over their money. It's why they want to grab
38:25every selfish pleasure they can. It's why there's rampant promiscuity in old-age homes these days,
38:30STD spreading like wildfire. It's hedonism. It's what do you want for your last meal before you die?
38:40And this is why they don't care about the next generation. It's why they don't care about the
38:43future. I mean, do you see a lot of rabbits conserving grass for the next generation? No,
38:48the rabbits eat to their fill, and they have sex to their fill, and then they do it all over again.
38:55Hedonism. And this is why, when I was having conflicts with the atheists, I talked about
39:02hedonism. Their virtue, their quote virtue is, I like to tell the truth, I feel bad when I lie,
39:11and I get social benefits from telling the truth. So that's hedonism. It's not principles.
39:16And that has been the great legacy of the boomers. But it is not primarily or fundamentally the
39:21boomers' fault that they faced the post-war period, post-Second World War period, right?
39:28Obviously, it's not their fault that they were born at that time. It is their fault that they
39:33did not seek a third way. It is their fault that they did not seek a third way. It is true
39:39that all prior moral systems had failed to prevent the disasters of 1914 to 1945. It is true.
39:49That was significant and that was important. But it wasn't like everything had been tried.
39:54And that's been my mission. Find the third way. Greek reason, Roman republicanism, Christian faith
40:01and morality have not stopped evil. Fighting evil doesn't stop evil, like physically fighting it.
40:10Violence doesn't stop evil. And Christ, to his internal credit, did talk about this from time to
40:16time, but it's never particularly focused on, is that evil should be prevented rather than fought.
40:26And how do you prevent evil? Well, you uphold the non-aggression principle to children.
40:33All prior moralists have failed to prevent evil or to stop evil, but no prior moralists have
40:40fundamentally focused on the extension of moral rules to children.
40:46And have not talked much, if at all, about the morality of child raising, the moral requirements
40:54for parents, right? That has not been tried. To extend universal moral considerations to children
41:03has been my mission for 40 years, 20 of them in the public eye. The boomers said all prior moral
41:10systems have failed, therefore hedonism is the only good we can get out of life, right? Because we have the
41:16choice to do good or feel good. And all the do-goodery had resulted in the Second World War and the Cold
41:22War. And so, do-goodery doesn't work, feel-goodery is all we have. Because if you can't do good and you
41:28can't feel good, what's the point of being around? If you're helpless morally and can't even have fun
41:33physically, what's the point? Why get out of bed? Or, to put it another way, when you're helpless and
41:40you cannot enact any moral virtues, nature switches you to our selected behavior, which is hedonism, the
41:46pleasure of the body, the pleasure of the moment, and in the long run, we're all dead. And you lose your
41:52continuity of civilization and your care for your children, which is why the hedonism of the boomers
41:58led to the catastrophic divorce rates of the 70s and 80s, the materialism of the 80s, and that's how it went down.
42:07Now, are we to blame the boomers for this? Not for the circumstances. We don't blame anybody for
42:12circumstances. But we certainly can blame them for giving up when they were still, the most powerful
42:18option was still to be considered. Peacefulparenting.com. Love to know what you think. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
Be the first to comment