Unabashed libertarian motivation - a THANK YOU from the future for all freedom activists! A speech by Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio - http://www.freedomainradio.com
So one of the things that I've felt my whole life is that - gratitude from the culture that we live in can sometimes be a little -- short, you know, and one of the things that I think is that we are all philosophers. Everybody who works from first principles, everyone who talks about nonviolence, we all are philosophers - and the one thing that's very true about philosophers is that they don't get a lot of 'sugar,' they don't get a lot of love in their own time. It's true - well OK, except for you, absolutely -- you're handing it out like candy and that's nice!
But we don't get a lot of that juice, don't get a lot of that love. Socrates got some hemlock, Spinoza was kicked out of his -- everywhere... I mean - Ayn Rand, even now after being right for sixty years in a row, she still gets spat on by the main culture, so it is hard! Wouldn't you say? I mean look, we've all faced it, you've all had difficulties at work, you've had difficulties in your relationships because of your commitment to ideals. That's a hard thing to live with.
So -- the one place that I go, when I sort of need to feel replenished and strengthened -- I mean we have each other, for those of you who have people around (this is the beautiful thing about what's happening here) - but I kind of go into the future in my mind, because I think the world are trying to build, the world that we want to create, the world that we're laying the foundations for that we may never live to see... I mean, I don't think that we'll live to see it, maybe those of you who had great sex last night, there's an egg and a sperm in there who may live to see it - maybe - but I don't think we're going to live to see exactly the kind of world that we want - a world of statelessness, a world without war, a world without incarceration, a world without violence... I don't think we're going to live to see it -- but that's all the more heroic I think for us to try to build it even though we're not going to live to see it.
So I go to the future. I think - I am so happy to live in a world without slavery in the way that it used to exist -- I'm so happy to live in that world - and the first people who started talking about there being no slavery, were like us... And the first people who started talking about "women should be equal to men" were kind of like us, and they faced a lot of opposition, they faced a lot of skepticism -- I mean the first guy who came up and said, "Blacks should be equal to whites," was not a popular man or woman, and he faced a lot of opposition from everyone around him and the general culture spat on him a lot, and people thought he was crazy or mad or evil or bad - but we all take that stuff for granted now, and it's so impossible - you know - like moral change in the world, you stand below it and it looks like a cliff, it's so high, a mountain so high that you can't get over it, you can get through it, you feel like you're going to beat your head against the wall for the rest of your life and never make a dent...
But then a weird thing happens when the change occurs -- when people get over that wall or they walk through that wall and then they look back, and it's like there's nothing there! It's really strange...
Before the end of slavery, people said (and we've all heard these arguments before, right?) - people said: "You know, there's never been a society without slavery, so... You point to me a society without slavery - you can't do it! You point to me a society where there's equality for women, you can do it! You point to me a society where there is no government, and you can't do it!" That's all we hear!
Well because we can see it, it will be here! It will be here!
Because the vision is everything!
So, I'm going to just end up by saying that - yeah, this battle's been going on for a long time. And it is a battle of good versus evil, there's no doubt about it. And - I'm going to close with a line from one of my favorite speeches in a movie - Morpheus:
"It has been a long time coming, but we are going to win. Because WE ARE STILL HERE!!!!"
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