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Jan. 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:06
70 How to control a human soul
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Hello, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I'm talking to you from the future.
This was a very popular podcast which I have done a little bit of mixing and remastering on to make it sound a little bit better.
This is just a note from 2007 to remind you to please donate to Free Domain Radio and also that I have a number of books available for sale at freedomainradio.com, On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, and the fine comedic novel The God of Atheists.
So please enjoy this podcast and thank you for listening so much.
Good afternoon, everybody.
It is Wednesday at about four twenty-something on Wednesday, January the 25th, so I hope you're doing well.
We are going to chat about a most exciting topic today.
Not that they're all not exciting, but this one in particular is juicy to the point almost of being overbearing to one's intellectual taste buds to mix metaphors so much that I might as well put my brain on frappé.
So, the topic that I'd like to chat about today is the question of exercising power.
How do you exercise power over another human being?
How do you corrupt them?
How do you take our natural integrity, intelligence, and all the wonder that is the human mind, and turn it against itself, and get it to eat itself, and get it to be sort of a snake consuming its own tail?
How do you wrap people up in neuroses, and how do you make them obedient And how do you get them to subjugate themselves to your will without you even having to lift a finger, barely even an eyebrow?
And the reason that I want to talk about this is that I'm very interested in starting a cult.
No, actually, I think that if you've got to know the weapons of your enemies, if you are going to be able to successfully oppose them, you kind of need to know, in my view, what they're doing.
So that you can sort of unravel the damage that historically, you know, we've all had done to us in this rather messy culture that we live in.
And, you know, so that we can not only begin to reverse the effects of this kind of power structure within our own minds and hearts and souls, but also so that we can help other people unravel the mess that they have become.
I mean...
I view certain damages that are done early to the mind in life as pretty irrevocable.
The mind is not so plastic that you could say, for instance, be locked in a cupboard for 20 years, for your first 20 years, and then end up being a normal human being.
You do experience some particular phases in your brain development which are pretty central and may or may not be reversible.
And generally, the earlier the experiences, the less reversible they are, of course.
So, I'm not saying that we can lickety-split fix ourselves up and be right as rain, but, you know, we can at least learn to strengthen where we are weakest, and there is always adaptability within the human mind, as we know from seeing people who have terrible brain injuries who find other ways of adapting, even within their own brains.
So, I think that it's well worth having a look at the methodology by which one twists the human mind so that we can, to some degree, Allow ourselves or invite ourselves to become untwisted, which is quite a bit of work, let me tell you!
But it is entirely satisfying in its conclusion.
I myself make no claims to be perfectly sane by any stretch of the imagination.
I had, in a sense, my intellectual foot binding just like everybody else, but what I have done is sort of explored, I guess, the aches and creaks of my mental joints to the point where I think I have some pretty good idea, or fairly good idea, of how a straightening out could occur and what it might look like.
So, let's start at the very beginning, which is, how do you get people, children, how do you get children to detach themselves from two basic things?
Sensual evidence and simple fact.
You know, it's really amazing when you think about it, how power structures work to do this, and the amazing and fantastic success that they have in this area.
It's mind-blowing!
So how do you get children to ignore the evidence of their senses, right?
The evidence of the senses transmitted to the mind through the autonomous nervous system is absolutely outside of our control.
I mean, we can choose to open our eyes or close them, but we can't choose, if we open our eyes, not to see, right?
I mean, other than pulling a King Lear, or I guess a Gloucester, and gouging out eyes.
So, we don't have any control over the actions of our autonomous nervous system in its perception and transmission of external material reality, or the evidence of external material reality.
So, you know, it would seem fairly hard to get children Who love to explore the world, and sort of curl and uncurl their limbs, and figure out object constancy, and figure out how the world works, and so on.
That's what children love to do, right?
That's what a lot of logic games are all about.
That's what a lot of physical games, sports and so on, are all about.
It's, you know, exploring the world, controlling one's body, controlling one's mind, and focusing, and becoming disciplined in a sort of happy way towards the exercise of one's
uh... creative and intellectual powers so this is a perfectly natural development that occurs within children so how on earth is it so possible and and seems so easy to twist children into these obedient neurotic slaves to power which so many of us end up becoming to one degree or another not just slaves to power but you know we're all infected with this wild stockholm syndrome Wherein, you know, people love the state!
They love religion!
They love God!
They love all this stuff!
It's more than just, you know, well, I don't have a hope, and I was raised this way, and, you know, I guess this is what is considered normal, and what do I know?
I mean, people, like, will go out and have banner-waving, cheering, standing ovation, mad stampede, crowd lunacy!
for the President or for the Pope or for, you know, sort of leaders or members of the cultural elite or the political elite or even the economic elite to some degree.
I mean, they are not just hammered down.
They're hammered down, reforged, reshaped, recharged, re-energized, reformed as people who love slavery to the point where they think that slavery is freedom.
I mean, we live in a 1984 universe intellectually.
The only reason we don't live in a 1984 universe physically is because there's some leftovers still, of course, from the Enlightenment and from capitalism, which have managed to keep us going, to some degree, in a diminishing kind of way.
But intellectually, I mean, we are just... It's Spanish Inquisition time, like, as far as people's ability to reason goes.
And so how is it possible that human beings who are so constructed to love freedom, to love the exercise of ability, to love rationality, to automatically transmit or receive the evidence of the senses, how is it that human beings are so turned against all of this as children?
Well, you know, the first thing that you need to do in order to begin the process of destroying a child's mind
is you need to set up categories empty categories which are moral absolutes yeah i know it's uh... not exactly in the kindergarten book but trust me this one don't trust me let me reason it out and see if you believe me uh... but this this is how it works you with great reverence as the corrupting teacher or parent or person of authority
With great reverence, you describe and are enormously passionate about things which the child cannot see.
And of course the one that leaps to mind for most people is God, but that's just one aspect of this crazy kaleidoscope of fantasy that children's brains are squeezed into and cut up on.
So, of course, God.
You know, people also, let's have grace, let's pray, let's do this, let's do that.
Of course, Santa Claus is just one thin edge of the wedge in this, right?
But you speak with enormous reverence and passion about things that the child cannot see.
And the child, of course, is baffled.
And you are enormously playing on The power that you hold over the child, right?
You hold the power of life and death over the child.
There's simply no way to get around that.
That is just the nature of biology, right?
Children will cleave to the wishes of their parents above all else, because without the parents there's no survival.
And so, biologically, those children who fought the moral absolutes or commandments of their parents were just died off, right?
I mean, because parents have absolutely no problem sacrificing children to abstract moral ideals that we see throughout the history of the world in terms of, you know, wars and so on.
So, you know, the child is going to have to cleave to the will of the parent.
And so what you do, if you're this evil, corrupting parent, is you will, with wild-eyed or calm or passionate or some kind of reverence, you will talk about things that aren't there.
As if it's perfectly natural that you would talk about these things that don't exist.
Right?
So you might as well say that there's an invisible There's an invisible apple on the table, right?
And this would be your approach to sort of wrecking a child's mind very early on in life.
The child knows apples and he knows oranges and he's getting the hang of that stuff.
So he's maybe two years old, two and a half years old, maybe if he's bright 18 months.
So he's getting the hang of material reality and how to describe things and categorize things and understand them.
What you do to start to undermine the child's sense of competency in the physical realm, in the realm of the senses, is you all sit down for dinner and there's nothing on the table, right?
And you, with great solemnity, you reach over and you pick up an invisible apple, or an invisible piece of fruit, or whatever you want to call it.
Let's just say it's an apple.
So you pick up this invisible apple.
And the whole family does this, right?
This has to be the youngest child, let's say.
The whole family does this.
And with great solemnity, you take a bite out of this invisible apple and you say, oh, that just tastes, that is about the best, that is the best apple I have ever tasted in my life.
It tastes like all the sugar and chocolate and glucose and fructose and caramel that you could dream of all piled in together and it's just, it's a mouth orgasm that I just can't even speak about.
And, you know, everybody agrees.
I mean, this is the Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome, right?
Everybody agrees, and then everybody mimes, and so on.
And the child, of course, is completely bewildered.
The youngest child is completely baffled.
Can't, for the life of him, understand what on earth is going on.
Everything has kind of made sense so far.
Right?
Every sort of concept or abstraction that they're building on, based on the evidence of their senses, kind of makes sense, right?
So, in the beginning, right, with the little baby, you roll the ball, you roll a ball that they can see, you roll it under a blanket and they just lose interest because they think it ceased to exist, right?
At some point, you know, a couple of months, six months, seven months, eight months, they begin to develop object constancy where they go, ah, the ball that has rolled under the blanket has not ceased to exist.
It is simply under the blanket.
And then they pull the blanket off the ball and continue to play with it, if that's what they want.
So, you know, every abstraction that the child has built up on, you know, that the letters mean things on the page, that mean objects that are transmitted through the senses, and there's a correlation between concepts and instances, and all the amazing and fantastic development of neuron complexity and brain complexity that is going on in a child's mind for the first couple of years, It all comes to a complete shuddering halt during this imaginary fruit-eating dinner table conversation.
Because everything that he's eaten before has substance and tastes and he can see it.
And everybody else can see it.
And now the whole family is saying, well, everybody around the table is eating something and you can't see it.
And then you think, if you were a child, you're like, well, maybe nobody else could see it.
So you reach out to where everybody seems to be taking the fruit from, and you can't feel anything.
Well, what are you going to do?
I mean, it's a bizarre and deranged situation.
I mean, this is how... It used to be called... Gosh, what it used to be called?
There was a play that was put on in the 1930s, I think it was, And a man was trying to drive his wife insane, so he just rearranged things within the house.
He would sort of put a picture up, and then they would all comment on how lovely the picture was, and then she'd say, he'd take the picture down, and she would then say, well, where did the picture go?
And he'd say, well, what picture?
And she'd, you know, say, well, the picture we were talking about.
No, we were never talking about a picture.
What do you mean?
And he would, you know, be completely baffled, and he continued to do this over and over again, and of course, Completely messing with her sense of reality.
And so this kind of behavior at this dinner table is just so astoundingly corrupting and destructive of the child's mind.
So the child, of course, the first reaction is horror and fear.
Because one of two things is occurring, right?
Either they've lost the ability to process essential, sensual information, right?
Which to a living organism is, you know, is a death sentence.
And it's a murderously horrible death sentence because it's going to be like a slow, horrible death.
You either can't figure out what to eat or you try to eat a pine cone or you can't hear the lion coming or, you know, you try and drink water and it turns out to be blood or urine.
I mean, it's just a horrible death sentence if you lose the ability to process essential sensual information.
That's just a terrible thing to happen, right?
There's almost no worse fate to an organism other than some quick death.
So either the child has lost the ability to process sensual information or the child has the ability to process sensual information and his entire family is lying to him about a very essential fact.
I mean, those are two absolutely, unbelievably terrible options for a child, a young child, to have.
Either I've lost the ability for my brain to work effectively with reality and therefore I'm going to face a life of incredible struggle, danger, and death, and it's going to be a very short life at that, too.
Either that has happened, or My family is lying to me in such a fundamentally destructive way that I would actually prefer it if they just beat me across the head with a stick.
I mean, if somebody beats you across the head with it, at least you feel it.
It doesn't interfere with your ability to process reality.
It doesn't make you doubt your senses.
It doesn't make you believe in things that aren't true.
It's just like, ow, that hurts!
And you, you know, take cover or go for shelter or whatever.
But this is much worse.
This is worse than a direct assault on the body, which at least reaffirms the evidence of the senses in a brutal kind of manner.
This is a direct assault on one's capacity to trust one's own senses and one's own mind to perceive reality.
And we can't survive without a successful or accurate perception of reality at the material level.
So it's a death sentence that the family is passing upon this young mind that is opening to all the wonders of the physical world.
When they're miming eating things and saying, mmm, that tastes wonderful, and everybody's pretending that they're eating, and if they're not eating and they're lying, oh, it's unbelievably destructive.
Oh, it's the worst kind of abuse, to tell a child that their entire brain has ceased to function correctly.
So the child is in an absolutely impossible situation, and if you want to look at the foundation of all the corruption of power that exists within the material world, within human society, everything from, you know, a cop Pulling you over when you're going, you know, one kilometer an hour over the speed limit and giving you a big fine because he's got to meet his quota.
All the way to, like, the deaths of millions in gulags.
You can trace it right back, all the way back, to this one core central moment.
When the child is faced with people he has to trust.
Creating a situation.
where he either has to hate them for their direct assault upon his capacity to understand the world and to live within it because they're lying to him or he has to look within himself and say that he is insane and deranged and reality no longer makes any sense and as an organism he is not going to survive.
Every single aspect of human corruption and human evil and human madness and human hatred and human fear that is existential in nature goes directly back to this fork in the road that every child faces when they're in a society, when they're in a family that believes in things that are not sensual, not rational, not provable, not logical, not true.
The child also recognizes that his parents And his siblings have no problem doing this to him.
How is this going to affect his capacity to love them, and to love himself, and to love the world, and to love the society he's in, if people are perfectly willing to do this to him?
In fact, they want to do it to him.
They're not even being forced to.
It's not indifferent.
It's a staged show.
Because every human being who comes into society, who is not insane by nature, is capable of blowing this nonsensical, irrational, crazy scheme right out of the water.
And they must be inoculated against empirical reality, truth, and reason from the very beginning.
And everybody recognizes the risk that is involved in this, and everybody recognizes the danger of somebody breaking through this sick ice and actually finding out the truth about the nonsense that people call truth and reality, socially.
So every child goes through this horrible fork in the road where they're told things that directly contradict the evidence of logic in their senses, which they need, which they must rely on in order to survive as an organism, which they are passionate about and enjoy the exercise of and development of.
This direct assault on one's identity as a species, as an animal, as a rational creature.
Every child faces this fork in the road And the destruction and corruption that is everywhere in society flows directly out of this particular road.
So, you know, we're at this child who's at this dinner table and everyone is sort of very seriously telling this child that there's this invisible apple to eat and they're eating it.
So what is the child to do?
He's at this unbelievable fork in the road where he either has to hate those who are attacking him in such a fundamentally destructive manner, or he has to doubt his own sanity and capacity to survive as an organism, as a life, as a human being.
And it is this fork in the road that is where the true destruction of what a psychologist might call the true self, or our honest self, or our integrity, or what I might just call our actual personality, like our real personality, You know, our bodies have a natural growth to them, right?
We're going to grow and get a certain amount of height and a certain amount of average weight and, you know, that's our sort of natural body.
But if we're put in these, you know, horrible contortion machines, then we're going to end up with an unnatural body that is all we've got to work with, right?
I mean, it's like the foot binding thing I've used before.
That if you're this Chinese woman in the 19th century and you have your feet bound, you know, for a number of years, you end up with these sort of horrible little stumps.
And, you know, that's what you have to work with.
Now, there's no sort of original foot for you to get back to, but there is an original foot, you know, that you could have had if you hadn't been bound.
So, you know, that's sort of how I feel about the personality structure of a human being, that we are sort of warped by these, you know, insane experiences, but we can get back to something a lot healthier.
And that's sort of the purpose of my conversations with the segments of the world who enjoy the conversation, I guess.
So, you know, the fundamental break that occurs, it's a reality break or a break in belonging or a break in attachment that occurs at this, you know, dinner table from hell, is the problem that the child is facing is I now live, like there's the statement that sort of scrolls across our minds in these moments, and I don't know if you can remember yours.
I can sort of remember the after-effects of mine.
I don't remember the one directly, but I remember very shortly thereafter.
I can mention it later if it comes back to my mind.
But the statement that's going to scroll across the child's mind when he or she is at this dinner table is, I am now doomed to live in an asylum.
And that asylum is called the world.
That asylum is called my family.
That asylum is called those who are close to me.
That asylum is called society or normalcy or however you want to put it.
But the basic statement is I am now condemned to live in an asylum.
And that encompasses both of the options that the child is really facing.
The first option is that those around him or her are trying to harm the child and undermine the child's capacity to have any kind of trust in those who sort of claim to care about him.
And that is, you know, just a horrible thing to contemplate or to face, I guess you could say.
And that is sort of the one aspect that is going to occur.
And the second aspect that is going to occur is that the child, that people are lovingly actually seeing these apples, but that the child in no way is capable of perceiving them and therefore is, you know, fundamentally flawed, dangerous, and sort of mentally ill as a living organism, fundamentally flawed, dangerous, and sort of mentally ill as a living organism, as a So the asylum that the child is now facing is that he lives in a world of insanity, and either he is sane,
But those around him are telling him or pretending to him that he is insane, which means that the asylum is composed of those around him.
Or, he is... the asylum is actually... everyone else around him is sane, but he is the only member of this asylum.
But the asylum is absolutely there.
So the asylum is either his own mind or everyone around him.
And that is, you know, the break in belonging that occurs for a child when people around him tell him that things are there and exist and are real, that he can clearly and plainly see are not there, don't exist, and are not real.
Now, of course, the question then becomes, Why does he believe that it is him, right?
Why doesn't he just sort of believe that it's everyone else around him who is just kind of messing with his head and just take that approach to the problem of being lied to?
Well, that is a perfectly valid and logical response, and we'll get back to that in a second, but I'd like to deal with the problem of virtue.
The problem that power has is not with other people who want power, but rather with people who are moral.
Morality is the opposite of power.
Morality is the opposite of dominance.
Morality is the opposite of Subjugation or exploitation.
Because morality is all about finding what is common and true in the world.
Common to all human beings and true empirically and also biologically.
And therefore it's not about subjugation because it's creating one rule for everyone.
And the only way that you can have subjugation or exploitation is if you create different rules for different people.
So the threat That power structure's face is not from those who would wrest that power structure away from them, because they can be beaten.
Or even if they can't be beaten, the vast majority of those who benefit from a power structure are not those at the top, but those in the sort of hazy middle, right?
The bureaucrats, the money changers, the legislators in the background, and so on.
You know, the sort of bureaucratic parasitical power structure feasts on subjugation and is deathly afraid of morality, right?
Because if morality is applied to the situation, the whole gig is up, right?
I mean, that's why they focus so much on owning morality, these power structures.
So, who they really have to worry about are those who are concerned with goodness, who are concerned with morality and righteousness and, you know, sort of uprightness and logical consistency.
So how does this invisible apple-eating madness contest, how does it deal with the problem of somebody saying, you know, you guys are just immoral?
You're trying to harm me.
You're trying to exercise power and control over me.
I mean, obviously, that's unusual.
That would be highly unusual for a child to say.
In fact, I think it would be fairly unprecedented for a child to say that.
But you never know, right?
They get into their teenage years and so on.
So those who are keen on exploitation and, you know, destructive and exploitive power structures, those people are deathly afraid of the moral man, the moral woman, the person who logically points out the inconsistencies in what they're doing and the hypocrisy and the immorality.
So what they have to do, the ingredient that they have to mix in, is that only bad people can't see the apple.
Seeing the apple is synonymous with virtue.
Right, so if you say, well, the apple just, the invisible apple, if you say to this child, mmm, mmm, mmm, that invisible apple tastes fantastic.
Well, you're not going to get a whole lot of allegiance from the child, because the invisible apple doesn't exist, so it's not going to taste good to them.
So why on earth would they sort of involve themselves in this charade?
Well, of course, the thing you do is you say that only a good little boy or a good little girl can see this apple, right?
Again, we're back to sort of the Emperor's New Clothes, right?
Which is a fantastic, one of the most amazing stories in all of literature, in my view, and entirely unappreciated by those who study politics.
Because it is politics.
I mean, that's exactly what politics is.
And religion, for that matter.
And nationalism.
And racism.
Sexism, all of the isms that so corrupt our natural and common humanity and interconnectedness.
So, you say that only a good little boy can see the apple, and that the more good you are, the better the apple tastes.
Right?
So, I mean, this is, of course, the false dichotomy that then is how they trap those who have a natural inclination towards logical consistency or morality, which is the people that they're most concerned about or afraid of, right?
So they say, only the good little boy can see the apple.
So then, of course, you're faced with another choice.
But now you have a moral element.
So you're not faced with sort of either I'm insane or they're insane.
Either I'm unable to survive or they're trying to kill me or kill my mental development.
Now you have an additional element layered into the sickness, or in this case it's the inculcation of an illness in another.
It follows the same sort of pattern as a viral invasion in your body would.
So now you have an additional layer, which is that you want to be good, right?
Now, if you don't care about being good, we'll get to that in a second, but if you do care about being good, if you have that sort of empathetic sensitivity and moral nature, it's sort of innate within you, and I'm not saying this is by any means the majority of people, but it certainly does exist, then you are going to be very interested in being a good person.
And it also raises the stakes of questioning those who are telling you that there's an apple there and maybe you just can't see it, right?
Because, you know, you could at least stay at the level of sensual error, right?
Of error in the senses or an interpretation of the senses.
It's like, well, maybe they really can see the apple, but, you know, if I tell them that they're wrong, I'm telling them that their, you know, their sense apparatus is faulty, or their conclusions are faulty, or maybe they've been struck with some sort of ailment that they're not aware of that's affecting their vision or their ability to process physical or visual stimuli.
The child obviously isn't going to say it in that kind of manner, but that's still a thought that can occur to a child who's being told that something exists that patently does not exist.
They can still then trust their senses, and they can then say, well, you know, you bad people.
Sorry, not you bad people.
You people who are telling me that this thing exists, you're obviously not doing very well in terms of your ability to process things, because it quite obviously doesn't.
But the wonderfully invasive and horrible thing that happens when you begin to say only good boys can see the invisible apple is you now raise the stakes for that boy to contradict you.
Alright, if you're the sort of evil corrupting parent, right?
You raise the stakes for that boy to contradict you because now you've said that only immoral people cannot see the apple.
So, if you're the child, you are then faced with this choice.
You then either say, I'm an immoral boy and I can't see the apple, right, which is sort of surrendering the premise and giving up something sort of even more important in a sense than sensual competence or the ability to process information correctly, which is, you know, your moral nature, your goodness, right, which I would rather be blind than evil, so let's just say that it would be
pretty catastrophic for anybody interested or has a natural bent towards morality, empathy, and an ethical approach to things, to label themselves as evil because they can't see the apple.
So then, if they don't want to label themselves as evil, and they can't approach the parent who's telling them that the apple exists, from a standpoint of error, because the parent has said, only evil boys can't see the apple, evil people cannot see the apple, good people can see the apple.
Right, so if you say, uh, dad or mom, I don't think that you can see the apple because there's no apple there.
Then you're automatically calling them evil.
Right?
And you're not going to have a whole lot of luck when you're a child calling your parents evil.
That's why they layer in this moral dimension.
Right?
They raise the stakes to the point where, you know, if you say you can't see the apple, then you're evil.
But if you say that the apple doesn't exist and you guys are trying to mess with my head, then because the parents have layered in the moral dimension, they're now able to... they now cannot withdraw from the position.
Right?
Because they've now taken the argument for morality, and once you take the argument for morality out of its scabbard, it's a sort that you just can't sheath again.
I mean, it's out there, and it's just a fact.
You simply can't withdraw from it, but you lose all parental authority.
So, that is a pretty important aspect.
to what happens in this particular realm.
You can't call those who are telling you all this corrupting, immoral nonsense evil, because they simply won't accept it.
And of course, even as a child, the horror of what is occurring at this moment is so hard to understand.
It's It is just so hard to understand and to process this kind of unbelievable destruction of your identity and complete rejection and repudiation of your mental development and a crippling blow to your self-esteem.
I mean, this is where the root of neurosis and religious fanaticism and, you know, people who grow up to become dictatorial or bullying or whatever, this is where the root of all... or, you know, overly subservient.
This is where the root of all of this starts from.
So, if they can get the person who is moral, who is interested in morality, or the child who is moral by nature, sort of good by nature, wants to please, wants to be a good person, Then, you know, by getting the person to believe that if they can't see the invisible apple they're bad, well then you torture them and you set them up with this lifelong quest to see an invisible apple, which they just frickin' well can't do!
So, you know, you've kind of put them into the sort of mode of a dog chasing its own tail for the rest of its life, and that person is then going to pose absolutely zero threat to the power structures that exist within the world, because they're going to be so consumed with their own inability to see this invisible apple that they're not going to raise any sort of basic or sensible questions to those in power.
So that's how you defuse the moral kid, right?
Now there's another kind of kid who doesn't necessarily have... Let's just theoretically call that person, say, the older brother.
That person does not have the same amount of natural empathy, right?
Probably because that person is now complicit in the destruction of their younger sibling's mind.
And so they have a lot more aggression and a lot more natural dominance built into their personalities.
Whether that's innate or based on the fact that they're an elder sibling, I don't know.
But it does seem to follow that pattern, right?
The birth order is pretty important.
I mean, of course, there are exceptions, but that's fine.
I can live with exceptions as long as there's a general trend that can be identified.
That's good enough for me.
So, this naturally aggressive person becomes, in this moment, when this occurs to them or when they're inflicting it on someone else, this person becomes cynical.
And that's perfectly fine for those in power.
You know, if you are chasing your own tail and wondering why you can't be a better person and see this magical invisible apple that everyone else can see, you're fine.
You know, you're going to work, you're kowtowing, you're obedient, you're always like, oh, what else can I do to become a better person?
I really want to be a better person, blah blah blah.
You're just running around chasing your own tail.
You're no threat to anybody in power, because you're just sort of a compliant weenie.
And if you are an overly aggressive person, then you're going to look at that and say, you know, everyone's a jerk.
There's no such thing as goodness.
Everything's just about power and control.
So, but you can't use the argument for morality because you've given up your values, you've given up the idea that there's such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil, and you're just saying, yeah, well, this is what they tell you just to control you.
You know, I wanted to mention this point earlier, but it escaped my mind.
One of the ways that you would test the theory of the fact that a lie that is told to children that is not moral in nature can be withdrawn, but a lie that is told to children that is moral in nature, or is presented as moral in nature, that it can't be withdrawn,
You would obviously contrast something like Christianity, which is a lie told to children that is moral in nature, is fantasized as moral in nature, or presented as moral in nature, versus, you know, the Easter Bunny and the Santa Claus and so on, which are lies told to children that are not moral in nature, where the parents end up withdrawing this and sort of ha ha ha, right?
But you don't get that with religion, because religion is presented as moral in nature, Therefore, it can no longer be withdrawn from the discussion, right?
Because then, you know, you've portrayed yourself as an unbelievable destructive hypocrite, which parents generally aren't that keen on doing, because they want to continue to pillage their children's time and attention for the remainder of their natural-born lives.
So if you do have this more aggressive style of personality, then when you're faced with that terrible choice at the dining table, Um, which is to believe that you are insane or other people are bad or, you know, trying to control you.
Then what you do is you say, OK, well, I don't care about the moral argument.
That just is nonsense.
Right.
Because I don't believe in morality.
I don't believe in right or wrong.
Everyone's just trying to mess with me.
Right.
So then you become sort of pugilistic and aggressive.
And you're mad, you're angry, and you're cynical, and you're nihilistic.
Again, you're absolutely zero threat to those in power.
I mean, you can rail if you want, you can fight the cops, you can get mad at them, you can yell epithets at them, and so on.
You can throw stones at the police cars.
Zero threat to those in power.
I mean, just absolutely no threat.
You might as well just be, you know, spitting in the wind and hoping to bring down a cloud.
So, this is sort of the duality that occurs, and it's somewhat depending, perhaps, on birth order, on personality type, or, you know, the way in which it's applied, right?
You could just have jerky parents who are just, you know, overbearing orifices, let's say, to keep my iTunes rating, and those parents are going to sort of yell at you, and bully at you, and drag you around, and, you know, they're not, you know, and then you have the other type, and that may produce somebody who's more aggressive.
And then you have the other type of parent who is like, you know, generally you could say it's more associated with the feminine, who's sort of soft and wispy and gets disappointed if you don't see the apple and wants you so desperately to be a good person and guilts and manipulates you and so on.
And, you know, that is the type of person who may produce more of the compliant woman or man through that kind of emotional problem.
But once you have created this invisible category of virtue Virtue that is not associated with any logic, is not associated with anything material or anything verifiable or anything rational or available through the senses.
Once you've created this incredible imaginary category of virtue, and you have forced your child to have to kowtow to that concept, Well, you're set.
I mean, you're absolutely set.
This child who grows into an adult is going to be completely compliant for the rest of his or her natural life.
You have won the battle.
You have completely realigned their reality processing to not have any concern with things like facts, except in a sort of lesser kind of way, like, you know, I gotta drive and put my signal on and I gotta go and get groceries and I gotta eat when I'm hungry and wash when I'm dirty.
I mean, they'll deal with it at that sort of basic level.
But when it comes to anything to do with virtue, They have no interest in the facts.
In fact, facts are a direct threat to them.
Because they have now had to swallow this whole lie and base their whole attachments on their family and their basis of their identity and, if they're moral in nature, the root of their morals, on a falsehood.
Right?
So anytime you start bringing up facts, These people are gonna get angry, or petty, or pouty, or withdrawn, or... You know, there's gonna be some negative spray of emotion that's gonna try and coat and repel anyone who gets close to talking to the truth about the truth with these people.
It's what Noam Chomsky calls the narrative, right?
I mean, he's a crazy lefty, but he's got some good points.
The narrative is the story that people are told about the moral history or the sort of nature of their country, you know, good versus bad, us versus them, you know, the British are great, the Germans were evil, we have nothing in common with them except right after the war then we're going to give money to the Germans.
I mean, people just make stuff up all the time.
Right?
I mean, this is, you know, 90% of the emails that I get are people just making up stuff, you know?
And thinking that it's got something to do with reality, right?
But you start bringing facts to bear on these people and they get kind of hostile in one form or another.
It's passive-aggressive or outright aggressive.
And that's because once they had to swallow this madness of the invisible apple, What relationship to facts could their ethical reasoning ever have in the future?
It simply can't exist.
Once you believe that something is invisible, that is invisible is the center of morality, and the center of truth and right and all that is good in the world, what possible reference could you have to facts in the future about ethics?
Or about anything for that matter, about the existence of things?
Right?
You're going to be drawn towards emotionally compelling stories and you're going to be drawn towards emotional bullying and you're going to be drawn towards just making other people feel guilty for not believing you or, you know, being aggressive and basically saying, well, if you believe this or that, you're a bad person.
But you're not going to have any reference to a single fact or a single statistic.
I mean, other than those that are sort of made up by people with a like-minded view, right?
But you're not going to have any reference to any facts.
You're going to have instantaneous answers that you make up on the spot based on prior prejudices.
I mean, how could it be otherwise?
You've already accepted as the core of your reality processing that invisible things exist and have supreme value and ultimate moral authority.
How on earth are you going to process anything from even a remotely reality-based or empirical-based or fact-based standpoint ever again?
But you can't.
And that's fantastic for the people in power.
Because if you can't track anything to do with material reality, if you can't track anything to do with facts, if you can't apply logic and empiricism to something like morality, you're completely helpless.
You are a lamb in a slaughterhouse when it comes to being abused by power, by those in power, by those willing to use violence to achieve their ends.
You are absolutely without defenses in this realm.
And you can groan and you can grumble and you can roll your eyes and you can write in your blog that you're mad at things and so on.
But it really doesn't matter.
You're fundamentally, absolutely and completely helpless.
Because how are you going to question the morality of those in power with reference to logic and facts and our common humanity?
When at the very beginning of things, you swallowed this invisible apple and called it tasty.
I mean, your reality processing and your logical processing and your sensual processing is completely wrecked.
You might as well drive a car off a cliff and then try and win a race with it.
It's just wrecked.
It's smoking.
Its wheels have fallen off.
And it can be repaired, of course.
But it takes a lot of work, and the first thing you have to do is recognize that it's broken.
Right?
So, I mean, I went through a lot of years of figuring out, my lord, this doesn't work in my head, and that doesn't work in my head, and, you know, I have silly ideas about this, that, and the other.
And I may have silly ideas at the moment, which I'm going to need to correct.
But now I have a great methodology, and I have lots of people who help me, so that's wonderful.
But, you know, you've got to recognize that your mind is kind of broken.
Your mind is kind of damaged.
Right?
What they call the norm is an asylum.
What they call the norm is mentally ill.
What they call the norm is people who believe in things like a government.
Government doesn't exist.
There's no such thing as a state.
There's people with guns and there's people who obey them.
That's it.
I mean, there's no such thing as a state.
There's no such thing as countries.
No such thing as gods or demons.
It's all just such complete nonsense.
Even gender exists, at least, in reality, that you have biological differences that you can apply a category to.
But nations don't exist in reality.
Culture doesn't exist in reality.
Culture is... I mean, I'll do another podcast on this, but culture is just the scar tissue of child abuse.
I mean, why do Americans believe different things than French children?
Why does everyone love their own country and love their own culture, so to speak?
Because of child abuse.
Because that's what they're told.
They're told all these false things.
My wife was told, oh, Greeks are the best, we gave the world this, that, and the other.
And, you know, the Italian kids, oh yeah, Italians are the best, and the other British kids, oh, the British are the best.
It's all just nonsense.
You're just filling your children up with complete idiocies and falsehoods and telling them that it's all morality and self-esteem based.
That's complete child abuse.
All culture that is not just sort of based on the simple observable facts of reality is just the scar tissue that grows over being lied to as children.
But, I mean, we can sort of deal with that another time.
But, you know, I think it is very important to understand the number of things that you're told as a child that have any kind of reality, that you're told to be loyal to, that you're told to believe in, that you're told to infuse some sort of moral energy into, they're all complete falsehoods.
And the wonderful thing about it is that concepts have no voice.
This is the sort of nail in the coffin as far as obeying things like the state and politicians and priests and the military and so on.
Well, if the country is virtue, you know, my country, right or wrong, if the country is virtue, but the country doesn't exist, then the country obviously can't tell you what to do.
Right?
If God is goodness, God doesn't exist, therefore God cannot tell you what to do.
So who gets to tell you what to do?
Well, the person who claims to represent this fantasy abstract.
So, it's how one human being bypasses another human being's legitimate anger at being bullied and told what to do.
Right?
The priest doesn't say, give me your money because my name is Bob and I want your money.
Right?
The priest says, Give me... Give God your money.
Because God wants you to give Him your money.
Because God says, help the poor.
It's not, obey me!
It's, obey this abstract entity that I made up that... I know what they want.
I mean, it's ridiculous!
It is absolutely insane!
I mean... These things don't exist, and because they don't exist, they can't voice anything.
And so the people who make them up and get you to believe in them say that you have to obey, oh, not me.
It's not me.
It's for the good of the country.
The country.
Your country needs you.
It's like, no, FDR needs you.
People who profit from war need you to go and get killed.
Your country does not need you because countries don't exist.
God is not telling you to do anything.
The priest is telling you to do things.
Crazy lunatic monks 5,000 years dead are telling you to do things.
There's no such thing as God or country or state.
They can't tell you to do anything because they don't exist.
It's like trying to cash in.
It's like trying to get paid with the idea of money.
It doesn't exist.
It's a mere conceptual tag that is imperfectly derived from physical instances.
And in the case of country, it's not even derived from anything.
It's a line in a map in somebody's head.
Your country doesn't need you.
Countries don't have needs because countries don't exist.
And that's how they bypass your natural resentment of being told what to do.
And it's time that we got that natural resentment back.
Your country doesn't need you.
George Bush needs you to go shoot people.
Or he wants you to.
And if you reframe that a little bit more accurately in your head, you'll just see why I say it's so insane.
George Bush says, I want you to go and shoot that guy.
You're going to be like, well, who the hell are you?
But you drape him in all this pomp and circumstance, and he is the President of the United States.
Well, President doesn't exist.
It's just a weird little conceptual label for a political fantasy.
The United States doesn't exist.
Iraq doesn't exist.
There's desert, and there's people.
There's no such thing as Iraq.
There's no such thing as the United States.
They simply don't exist.
A tree exists.
The concept of tree, or the abstract notion of a forest, does not exist.
A tree exists, a forest does not exist.
A forest is an aggregate, it's a collection.
It does not exist.
But if they can get you to believe that these things do exist, Then they can say, your country needs you to do this, God needs you to do that.
Your father needs you to do the other.
Well, tell you what, father does not exist.
There's a guy who had sex with your mother, whose name is Bob, who's telling you what to do.
Your father, your mother.
I mean, in order to speak sensibly about Christina's family, we had to start referring to them by their Christian names.
You can't refer to these things in any kind of abstract way that makes sense.
Father is a category.
It doesn't exist.
It's like forest.
It applies to more than one person, therefore it doesn't exist!
You listen to your father.
You listen to Bob.
Which one sounds more compelling?
Because if you obey a category, you feel like you're obeying something larger than the person who inhabits it.
I'm obeying a priest.
I'm not obeying Ralph.
Because if you say, I'm obeying Ralph, you kind of feel like a slave, right?
But if you say, I'm obeying the will of God, you feel a smug kind of virtue creeping over you and fogging up your head, right?
And that's exactly what the point of all of these ridiculous moral abstractions are.
They are to bypass your natural animal resentment at being ordered around by idiots.
And as soon as you stop believing in this nonsense, then you get some healthy anger which allows you to push back to these people who just make up all this stuff.
To cripple your minds and to cripple your animal instincts, to cripple your natural self-esteem and healthy pushback at people who tell you what to do.
And that's why I dislike these categories so much.
Because they are the root.
of abuse.
They are the root of exploitation.
They are the root of the destruction of the human mind and the human personality and the human morality.
Human capacity for morality is completely destroyed if you come up with these all-powerful overarching moral constructs that have no existence and therefore have to be interpreted by individuals who are only doing it in an instinct to exploit you.
I hate these things.
They are the cancer of the human soul.
You know, as Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Pekalago, that secrecy is our cancer.
And in this case, dishonesty is our cancer.
Right?
There is no invisible apple.
Your family was brutalizing you.
There is no state.
There is no God.
There is no country.
There is no such thing as a municipality or a city.
There are things.
There are buildings.
There are people.
There are guns.
There are trees.
There are no concepts that exist anywhere in the world.
They exist in our minds as useful ways to organize physical objects.
And that's it.
They mean nothing.
They have no existence.
Whatsoever.
And to obey a concept is as ridiculous as trying to eat the idea of food.
It is as ridiculous as trying to chop down a forest without touching any single tree.
It is completely insane.
And this insanity is a sickness that human beings have to outgrow.
We have to fight our way out of this fog that is placed here to exploit us.
And we do this in compassion for ourselves and in compassion for those who are our fellow exploitees.
But perhaps it's possible also To find just a shred of compassion for those who claim to be our masters and are as absolutely enslaved in this sick fantasy as enslaved as everybody else.
George Bush is not a free man!
Vladimir Putin is not a free man!
They're slaves!
They're slaves to this illusion that we all feed into and try and live on.
I mean, it's not about fighting the rulers.
It's about fighting the falsehoods.
It's not about bringing down the government.
It's about exposing the facts.
It's not about overturning authority.
It's about affirming the truth.
And if we can do that, if we can affirm the truth, if we can simply state the facts that have been so long obscured to us in our own hearts because of the corruption that we all faced as children, the lies that we were all force-fed as children, the terrible and horrible choices that we all faced as children, if we have the strength to face up to that and to speak the truth and to stay in the conversation about what is real and what is true and what exists in reality,
rather than what exists as sick exploitive fantasies in people's minds.
Then, by God, we can free the world!
By God, we can wake humanity up from this nightmarish thousand-thousand-year slumber of the damned!
We can end war!
We can end poverty!
We can end hunger!
We can end violence!
We can end murder and theft and rape!
Because all of these sicknesses can be traced back to that awful crossroads early in life, where we are forced to choose loyalty to lies and corruption over the truth.
And if we can reach back to that part of us that could never believe in such sickness, that could never believe that the world is an asylum, people by those who have power over us, who are insane, If we can reach back to that part of us that never believed, and reach into that part of us that never believed that, then we really can remake the world.
We really can bring a new light to humanity.
We really can.
New light?
It's the first light!
The Enlightenment came a little close, but it all backed away because they couldn't get rid of the state, and they couldn't get rid of God.
They all became deists and just let it trundle along, and so the cancer grew back.
But we can make a new world that will be as unrecognizable to us now as We are to people in the 15th century.
And, you know, we made that leap in the past because we started to recognize things like property rights and the common humanity of all.
And we began to question authority and remove the state and remove the intertwining of state and religion.
And there's absolutely no reason why we can't continue to do it.
But we have to continue to tell the truth at all times.
So thank you so much for listening.
I hope this has been helpful.
It's been quite exciting for me.
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