The Superiority of Western Culture? - Molyneux is Kind of Right

Well alright, I wanted to comment on a video that I just watched that I highly recommend that you watch. It's from Stefan Molyneux, which

I know that name will trigger many of you, but that's okay. It's called Winter is Coming, and a lot of you consider

Stefan in the alt -right. I don't think that's fair. That's kind of like the reverse of calling someone a cultural

Marxist, because they say some things that are similar to Marxism. And so you would probably say that Stefan says some things that are similar to what the alt -right says.

Whether he's in the alt -right or not, I don't really care. Some of what he says I agree with, some of what he says

I don't think is very good at all. But anyway, this is a video about scarcity.

And so I recommend that you watch it. It's only ten minutes long. It's really good, and it talks about how the necessity for Europeans to prepare, and really anyone who lives in these kinds of climates, the necessity to prepare for winter where things aren't abundant, where fruit doesn't grow on trees all year round, where it's harder to hunt all year round.

It creates sort of a need to plan ahead and to prepare and to save and to have these kinds of things.

And so that led to a lot of the success, he would argue, of the Western civilization.

And he would say that the idea of resources being almost infinite, where fruit is always growing on the trees, where it's easy to hunt all year round, that leads to this idea that resources are infinite.

And since resources aren't infinite, it creates sort of a mindset that is not helpful for surviving in the world.

And so that's what his argument would be. And actually, I think there's a lot of truth to that. But he does something that I think a lot of people on the alt -right do, and he attributes this to white people.

He attributes this to Europeans. I want to let you hear him say this, because I don't think he's entirely wrong, but I think he has the wrong foundation.

Let's listen to this. You can't both breathe it at the same time. That's called scarcity of resources. Now, if you're of European extract, if you're

Caucasian, if you're white, these woods out here, this was our natural habitat, and it gave us virtually no food for four to five to sometimes six months or more of the year.

So what did you have to do? Well, you had to store up for the winter. You know, the grasshopper and the ant, the squirrel, getting the nuts in its cheeks and burying it somewhere so that it can survive through the winter.

Resource scarcity is the foundation of European civilization, and it's one of the reasons why European civilization developed free market economics and separation of church and state and a relatively free society and freedom of speech, because if you act as if resources are infinite in this environment, if you act more like the grasshopper who plays all summer and doesn't prepare for the winter and less like the ant who spends all summer beavering, to mix my animal metaphors, to save up resources for the winter, if you try to live like you're in a tropical paradise when you're actually living in half frozen woods, well, you're going to run out of resources over the winter.

So hear what he's saying here, right? So you know, what he's saying is that because of the geography, white people,

Europeans sort of developed and grew these principles, these ideas that they needed in order to survive, but actually also help with competition, and they actually helped to increase the amount of freedom, and they actually make civilization or your culture better.

And I would actually not disagree with that. I think that those things do make culture better.

But the difference is, though, that I don't think that it's just because they had this climate that forced them into it, that that's the reason why it makes your culture better.

Because here's the reality of these principles, this idea of planning ahead, this idea of saving, this idea of hard work, and things like that.

These are biblical ideas. These are ideas that come straight from God's morality. So when

God commands the people to have a Sabbath where they set one day aside from work, that forces you to sort of plan ahead a day.

So if you wanted to eat that day, you cook the day before. One of the laws about the

Sabbath is you can't kindle a fire on the Sabbath day. Well, if you wanted to cook on the Sabbath day, well, you better have that fire set up from the day before, that kind of thing.

And so God's people were doing this all along. In fact, there's a whole Sabbath year.

And so you really needed to plan ahead. And so God had this idea of forward thinking, planning ahead, saving up, storing up, things like that.

These are all part of biblical morality. God told his people that this is how you live. And the reason he did that is because he knows how he created the world to work.

And so people who were hard workers, people who did store and save, people who didn't get into debt or didn't play all day on their harp instead of working, those people didn't survive in God's world.

But God's people did because they had the law that told them what to do. In fact, if you remember

Joseph with the Egyptians, right? The Pharaoh has the dreams and the three lean years are going to follow the three years of plenty.

And so what was the plan as far as how to survive that? Well, God gave Joseph the wisdom to say, well, we better save right now while things are good, because when they're not so good, we want to be able to survive.

And so this kind of planning ahead, this has been part of the word of God. This has been part of God's commands for his people from the beginning.

Now, what else do we know about Europe, right? The gospel spread to Europe. And so these kinds of work ethic, you ever want to talk about the

Protestant work ethic. It has nothing really to do with whiteness of skin. God's morality regarding work, regarding money, regarding these kinds of things.

These are things that come directly from the Bible. So Western civilization is superior. Western culture is superior to many cultures, but not because of the greatness of the white race or things like that.

No, it's superior in the ways that it conforms to God's word better. And in the ways where it doesn't conform to God's words better, it's inferior.

And so that's how we have to look at this. It's not about how great white people are or pragmatic reasons.

No, we look at the scripture and we say, how closely does your culture match up with the scripture says? And if it does match up very closely, then that's a superior culture to another culture who maybe doesn't.

And we're not talking about perfection here, right? So I'm not saying that European or Western culture matches up to it perfectly.

Obviously it doesn't. But that's the reality. I think sometimes people, I've heard alt -right people make this argument, but many times they put all of these things that really what the

Holy Spirit brings to people who accept the gospel and are being sanctified by God, they take all those good things and apply it to white skin.

And it's like, well, see, that's the problem. You don't have the foundations correct. And so yeah, Europeans might have all of these good aspects of their culture, but they're only good because they conform to what

God says a culture should be. And so that's the issue, right? So, so here's the reality.

Any culture that accepts the gospel and starts applying the gospel to different areas of life is going to have success.

And any culture that does that is going to be able to plan ahead. Now, later in this video, he talks about charity, right?

And he says, like, you can't just have the kind of charity where you just give everything you have willy nilly. Because if you like, let's say, let's say, you know, you give all of your stuff to a poor person who didn't plan for the future, right?

If you didn't plan for the lean months of the winter. Well, then you and that family are going to starve, and that's not good for the kingdom of God, right?

The Bible actually has this principle as well. This is this comes straight from the scriptures. It comes straight from the letter of Paul.

If someone doesn't work, someone doesn't eat. And so if your charity doesn't take that into consideration, if your politics and your kind of programs you support in government doesn't take that into consideration, what

God says about let them, if they don't work, they let them starve. Then you don't have a godly ethic there.

You don't have a godly charity. And so this is the thing. So, you know,

Stefan is not a Christian, so he's not going to attribute this to the Holy Spirit. He's not going to attribute this to God, obviously.

But what he's saying here about, you know, planning for winter and how that's a good thing for a culture and how planning ahead and saving and being being good stewards.

I mean, we have we have parables about Jesus talks about this and he talks about it in economic terms. The Bible is full of economic wisdom and economic law.

And so these things, these are gospel things. These are biblical justice things. They're not you can't attribute that just to the white race.

You can't attribute it just to the geography of the region. What you can attribute it to is God knows how his world works.

And so if you do things that are more in line with what God says, you're going to have more success. It's just the reality.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful. God bless. You know, just in case

I haven't triggered you enough, this is also a reason why in some ways colonization was ended up being a good thing.

Now, don't at the outset. Let me let me say that in the ways that people sinned in the slave trade or in colonization where they were killing people and things like that, that's not good.

So you can't you can't you can't get away with it. God's law isn't pragmatic in that way. Just because somebody has a positive result doesn't mean that it was a positive thing.

So, you know, don't hear me saying that. But the reality is, and all I have to do to prove that is to cite the

Joseph example again. Joseph being beaten up and sold into slavery wasn't a good thing, even though it had a good result for the people of Israel.

So you can't say, oh, I got a good idea. Let's beat up my brother. No, it doesn't work that way. But the reality is, if the slave trade didn't happen and if countries weren't colonized and things like that, there's a good chance my life would be way worse now than it is.

I'm not saying it definitely would be, but there's a very good chance that it would be. And so that's why, you know, the black community in the

United States has a bigger GDP, just the black community than many entire countries around the world, because they actually benefited from the correct aspects of the

Western worldview, the ones that actually did conform to the Bible. And again, not all of them did. And so just because there's a potentially positive economic result for black people and minorities like my own family in the

United States doesn't mean that's something that I'm saying that that was a good thing. But the thing is, when a culture applies

God's law correctly in some areas, everybody benefits from that. And so anyway,

I just thought I'd throw that one in there in case I hadn't triggered you enough again, not calling colonization good in and of itself, but it definitely had positive results when the gospel spreads.