Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I do agree with that, and he was not unique in saying that. Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty had to be watered with the blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that we can’t live off the laurels of the American Revolution. That we had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died. They gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their property, and they put it all on the line to give us our Bill of Rights and that, but those Bill of Rights, the moment that we signed them, there were forces within our society that began trying to chip away at them, and that happens in every generation. And it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms. The blood of each generation. You mentioned your interest, your admiration of Al Albert Camus, of Stoicism, perhaps your interest in existentialism. Camus said, I believe in Myth of Sisyphus, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. ” What do you think he means by that? I suppose the way that Camus viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and a lot of the existentialists, it was that it was so absurd and that the problems and the tasks that were given just to live a life are so insurmountable that the only way that we can get back the gods for giving us this impossible task of living life was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it. To me, I read Camus, and particularly in The Myth of Sisyphus as a parable that… And it’s the same lesson that I think he writes about in The Plague, where we’re all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives, but that by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos and we can bring order to the universe. And Sisyphus was the iconic hero of the Stoics, and he was a man because he did something good. He delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day, and then it would roll down. When he got to the top, it would roll down and he’d spend the night going back down the hill to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again. And the task was absurd, it was insurmountable. He could never win, but the last line of that book is one of the great lines, which is something to the extent that I can picture as of his smiling, because Camus’ belief was that even though his task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man and he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone. He took his duty, he embraced the task and the absurdity of life, and he pushed the stone up the hill. And that if we do that, and if we find ways of being service to others, that is the ultimate, that’s the key to the lock, that’s the solution to the puzzle.…

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