https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-_7mfCvX72o
So this week we’ve had the Google thing, there was the YouTube thing that happened last week. What’s going on with censorship and what should people do about it? If you’re in a workplace and pathological things are happening, this is easy, I can tell you how you know if pathological things are happening at your workplace. Or they’re happening with you, one of the two, but you can straighten that out. If you’re being required to do things that make you weak and ashamed, then stop. Don’t do them. Like one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn and Frankel was that systems go terribly out of control when people don’t stop them when they’re going mildly out of control. You know when you might say, I should just keep my goddamn head down and shut up. It’s like maybe you should, like that’s not bad advice. You know, you don’t want to make unnecessary enemies and you don’t need any more trouble than you need. But you’ve got to ask yourself on a day to day basis, what makes you think you’re not selling your soul? You know, and there’s so much foolishness going on in the mid-level bureaucratic world now. That’s where all the tyranny seems to be focused. And the reason that it multiplies is because sensible people say nothing when they should say something. And what’s so strange about that is that there are way more sensible people than people who aren’t sensible. They’re just not as noisy. So what you’ll turn out if, like, you know, so let’s say something’s bugging the hell out of you at work. Well, then you have to prepare to find another job. That’s the first thing you have to do. I don’t think that you should find another job, but you should prepare to find another job. And if possible, you should prepare to find a better job. Because if you can’t tell someone to go to hell, then you can’t negotiate with them. And if they’ve got you over a barrel, then you can’t say anything. So you’ve got to set yourself up so you’ve got some mobility. And actually, that’s a really good principle in your life, period. You should set yourself up so that you have a lateral move at hand. And then you should find out, well, are there things at work that are disturbing my soul? You know, and you find that out. First of all, you ask yourself, OK, I’m disturbed at work. OK, I’m probably weak and deceitful and useless and lazy. You might as well start with that. And then you talk to some people like your your wife, your friends, your coworkers and find out. Are you stupid, deceitful and lazy? Or is there something not so good going on at work? And so if you if you can then eliminate your own personal pathology as a cause of your dissatisfaction, then maybe there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. And maybe you should say something about it before the whole goddamn thing collapses, because that can happen. It can happen in companies a lot faster than people ever think. You know, and you may find that, well, first of all, you may find if you say something, well, first of all, that’s an adventure. That’s for sure. That’s a bloody adventure. And you have to do it carefully. And you have to be prepared for it. But it might be the best thing that ever happened to you. And the other thing is, if you’re careful about it, you get your words right. Like in this is a this is strategic battle, right? It’s not something you wander into carelessly. Then you may find that there’s lots of people who feel exactly the same way you do and that you’ve actually cottoned on to something. You’re a canary in a coal mine and not just some like psychopathic mouthpiece. So you got to ask yourself when you go and do what you do, like, is this making you stronger? Is this making you weaker? And if it’s making you weaker, then you got to ask yourself, do you really want to be weaker? Because the weaker you get, the more you’re tyrannized. And then worse than that, like the weaker you get, the more bitter you get. And the more you work towards terrible things, the more you’ll snap at your wife, the more you’ll kick your kids, you know, like it’s no joke to be tyrannized at work. And so I would say you have an ethical responsibility as a citizen. To forthrightly confront creeping tyranny, no matter where it occurs. And part of part of what we’re learning, I would say, from these stories, if we’re learning anything at all, is that. If you’re aimed at the good, which is a question you really got to ask yourself, you know, if you’re genuinely aimed at the good, then take heart. Because you’re a lot stronger than you think. So. I have a follow up question. Okay. So I’m speaking to there’s lots of people who are in this situation. Like, you know, people at universities and corporations all over the place. I, you know, Google is not the only company that is no, I mean, probably not the worst repressive freedom of speech denying workplace codes. And everybody feels alone. Right. They’re all like, why should I stand up? Be a martyr. Get fired. This guy at Google got fired. Yeah. What’s the point? Like, I’m asking rhetoric. No, no, it’s a good question. And how do you how do you convince people that there’s a point to standing up when it appears to be futile? Well, the first thing I think is you convince them that it’s not futile. It might be difficult. But it’s not futile. If you get your words right, you have something to say, there’ll be an impact of those words. It might not be the impact that you would choose. But the other thing you got to tell people is, pick your poison. You don’t. You may be in a situation where you don’t have. You don’t have a cakewalk to the Garden of Paradise. You got tyranny or famine. Those are your choices. But you get to pick which one you have. And I would say if if you’re being oppressed, and I mean in your soul by what you’re required to swallow at work. Well, you think you’re not paying a price for that. You got no self respect. And rightly so. But worse than that, you’re an agent of your own. You’re an agent of your own destruction. You’re destroying your own ideal and you’re letting people who are weak and corrupt win. And if you stood up and and stood up properly, but you have to put yourself in order to do this, at least to some degree, right? You can’t do it casually. You have to do it from some position of preparedness and strength. Then what makes you think you couldn’t scare them back into the corners? And that would be a good thing. And, you know, the alternative personally is bad because there’s a psychological degeneration that goes along with it. I’ve seen this with many, many of the people that I work with who have been tyrannized in the workplace to the absolute detriment of their psychological and physical health, right? To the point of collapse, confronting these crazy, crazy things when they were sensible people. That’s a terrible price to pay, man. Like it’s it’s a bad price. And then if the foolishness isn’t dealt with at the local level, when it’s still relatively trivial, then it will multiply until it’s dealt with at the social level. And we’re seeing signs of that already. Antifa is a good sign of that, you know, and problems that aren’t solved multiply and soon people fight. And, you know, better to argue than to fight. Unless you want to fight. And some people want to fight. And I can argue that. Unless you want to fight. And some people want to fight. And I can understand why, but I wouldn’t recommend it because. That doesn’t lead good places. It really doesn’t lead good places. So I say you have a duty. Maybe that’s that’s why you stand up. It’s because you have a goddamn duty to stand up and say, just say what you have to say. You don’t even have to be trying to make a point exactly or trying to get something done. It’s like this is how it looks to me. That’s what that guy at Google did. He wrote this memo and he said, I talked to him today. He said, well, he went to a diversity training seminar and he thought, no, I don’t agree with that. And so then they asked for feedback. So we wrote this document a month ago. This was written a month ago. Got no real response to it. Well, it bounced around inside Google until a lot of people, you know, got interested in. Then it escaped into the outside world. But all he was doing was he was told a bunch of things he didn’t think were true. He wrote down a bunch of things he thought were probably true. He launched that out and said, well, I think these things are probably true. It’s like, well, probably they’re true. Well, so he paid a price for it, but maybe we’ll see what sort of price he paid for it, man. It’s going to be a lot tougher in two years than he was two years ago.