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Jan. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:25
72 Bullies and Victims: The aftermath of culture
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Good afternoon everybody.
It is January the 27th at five to five.
I'm on my way home for a lovely weekend with my wife and I wanted to sort of Finish off the unholy trinity of soul murder, which is, boy, what a lovely topic we are doing at the moment.
I promise it'll be nothing but fun and giggles next week.
But I wanted to talk about, you know, so far we've really been chatting mostly about The Done Unto Scenario.
And I wanted to talk a little bit more about the Doing Unto Others Scenario, which of course, a bit more than a scenario, it's sort of the inevitable cycle of this kind of problem.
of this kind of corruption.
So, of course, you have... we've sort of talked about two major areas.
One is the invisible apple dinner, and the other is what happens to keep you dependent upon that kind of fantasy, which is, you know, during the destruction of the true self that occurs in the appeal to morality around the eating of the apple,
In the next part, we have the replacement of the decaying or destroyed true self with the false self that is generated by an appeal to vanity, an appeal to sort of empty vanity, which is culture, which is, you know, we're the best, and so on.
And, you know, this of course bears its fruit in things like nationalism and so on.
And what I wanted to talk about then was, you know, when you become an adult, after you've gone through this sort of process, and this process generally occurs before puberty.
In fact, I would say that it almost always occurs before puberty.
Of course, you want to corrupt children's thinking, Before they have the capacity for rational analysis.
You know, get them while they're young is the order of the day when it comes to this kind of propaganda.
You know, as it is with all kinds of propaganda, really.
So, in the same way that You know, parents or those who are older and more powerful tend to bully children when they're children precisely because they lack the physical strength to fight back or the independence to make better choices or to make happier choices than associating with their own family, if their family is, you know, out and out nasty, which is not too uncommon in my experience.
In the same way that you want to abuse a child physically when that child is young, You also want to abuse that child mentally when that child is young.
And I know that there's lots of questions here around the term abuse in this scenario.
We could change it to corruption if you like, but it doesn't really matter.
It is the infliction of things which are patently false upon children with no examination of the alternatives.
And, you know, that is corrupt no matter which way you cut it.
And it is certainly abusive to teach children that things are false when you yourself do not know for them to be true.
And also it definitely teaches children, sorry, it is bad to teach children even things that are true if you do not teach them the methodology of thinking.
Right?
So even if you tell them 2 plus 2 is 4, but you teach them nothing about mathematics and have them repeat it back by rote, then, of course, that is as corrupt, almost as corrupt, as teaching them things that are false.
In fact, it could be said to be more corrupt when I think about it, because, you know, this is further confusing the child by providing them with the right answer.
But no methodology, right?
The only process of raising a child that is absolutely central to parenting is to teach the child independent thought.
This is the only possibility that the child has of happiness, of good relationships with others, of integrity, of decency, of morality.
You have to teach the child independent thinking.
And this means, of course, I mean, independent and thinking is sort of redundant, since you can't think collectively.
But you absolutely, first and foremost, want to teach a child how to think, how to reason, how to determine truth from falsehood.
Otherwise, of course, you are completely crippling their mental faculties.
So, in that, that's what I mean when I talk about corruption.
And of course, the reason that parents know that it's corruption is that they don't accept it in other areas, right?
I mean, if I were to say to somebody who is, you know, 30 years old, listen, you come and work for me and I will give you an imaginary paycheck.
that is really real but, you know, you can't ever cash it or you'll be able to cash it after you're dead or, you know, whatever.
You can only cash it in the eighteenth century or something.
Then, of course, they would just laugh at me and say, look, you're not giving me anything of value here because, you know, a paycheck which I can't cash in this life or in this time frame is not a paycheck at all.
It's just imaginary.
And so that's how you know for sure that the parents are corrupt, because they absolutely do have the ability to tell a real gain from a false... excuse me... from a false gain... to tell a real gain from a false gain, and therefore they know fully how to reason and rationalize to their own self-interest.
So, if you tell them that they should play tennis and there's an imaginary person who's going to play tennis with them who's just very bad, but they should coach that person on how to hit the ball back better, they would look at you askance and strangely and say, what are you trying to pull here, right?
I mean, if I don't see this person on the other side of the tennis net, then I'm not going to pretend to be coaching an invisible friend of yours, right?
And of course, invisible friends is one of the things that children are supposed to outgrow, and if they don't, It's considered to be a mark of psychological ill-health.
So parents, of course, or those who are in authority, have absolutely no problem whatsoever determining true values from false values when it is to their detriment in the short run or even the medium run to believe in the false values.
So for instance, you know, the government says, we are the government, we have rights that are different from you, And therefore we can tax you.
Of course, if you say to them, well, I am Stefan Molyneux, I have rights different from everybody else, so I don't have to pay taxes.
Well, they're not going to let you do that, right?
They're going to subdivide themselves or split themselves away from the general rights of humanity through this abstract thing called the government.
But if you create some abstract entity of your own called FUBAR, Assign yourself to that abstract entity and then say that that abstract entity which you represent obviates your need to pay taxes.
They're going to laugh and send the cops out to drag you off to jail.
Because, of course, the true facts of the matter are, if you are rational enough to invent a false absolute which you can claim to represent, which is the certain knowledge within a situation, then you obviously know enough to manipulate logic to your own self-interest or to your own advantage, and therefore you're fully responsible for the corruption of thinking which you're undergoing.
so you know when somebody says when a child says uh... why should i obey you to to her his father and his father says you must obey me because i am your father luke and then uh... of course the the uh... the father of the the the the dude is creating an abstract entity called fatherhood or the father or father which contains all of the certainties that are required to win the argument
Now, of course...
To allow the child the same capacity is obviously not allowed, right?
So when, let's say that the child is 16 years old, so sort of able to reason and able to think for themselves, and the child says, I am going to create a capacity of obedience or a category of obedience called 16 years old, and you have to obey that category, Then, you know, the father's going to say, well, that's nonsense.
There's no such category.
Sixteen years old and blah blah blah blah blah.
And even if there were, it wouldn't have any moral stature and so on.
And to one level of degree of sophistication or another, that is what the father is going to say.
And so, of course, the father is able to puncture any opposing or alternate claims to moral certainty based on irrational Absolutes.
So that, of course, is where the hypocrisy and the abuse and the corruption comes in.
So, you know, this priest says, I worship God A, and you say, well, I worship God B. And if the priest says God A is better than God B, and you say God B is better than God A, well, the priest, of course, cannot say no to you, logically.
So the priest can't say that I've created this imaginary fictional entity that is the best.
Of course, you're just attaching the label the best, which is obviously an empty category without any content.
Like if I said to you, what is the best hymeni-hymeni, you wouldn't know what I was talking about, right?
It may not even be positive in the normal sense, right?
The best hymeni-hymeni might be the most challenging case for a cancer specialist, which is probably not considered to be the most positive thing if you're the patient.
So, the category best is empty or meaningless without any content, and since something like a god has no intellectual content whatsoever, but is simply a negation of logic and empiricism and so on, then saying, this is the best god, this is the true god, this is the whatever, doesn't mean anything But it's an absolute.
So, a priest cannot say to another priest, your God is wrong.
He also cannot say to an individual that, you know, my invisible friend who is more powerful than your God and better than your God is who I choose to worship.
Well, the priest, of course, is going to say, no, that's not correct.
Your imaginary friend, your imaginary construct is incorrect for this, that, or the other reason.
So, of course, to logically follow the criteria of empty, abstract categories, you would have to logically say, sure, your imaginary friend is a perfectly valid thing to worship, and you couldn't just sort of say no to that, but of course they do, right?
The same way that a person who says, for instance, you must obey me because I'm older than you, in every...
Let's say the mother says, you must obey me because I'm older than you and therefore you must obey me without question and blah blah blah.
Now, if her husband happens to be older than her, then logically, of course, the husband should say, well, you are now younger than me and therefore you, my wife, must obey me without question and without any independent thought.
But of course, the mother doesn't do that, right?
And so, all of these categories that are generated in order to bully other people are not ever accepted by the people who create them as logical categories in and of themselves.
Right?
Because somebody who had a logical category in and of itself would be curious about situations or circumstances under which that construct didn't work.
Right?
So if your mom says to you, if she says, well, I don't know what is right or wrong, but I'm going to think about it and I'm going to come up with A moral rule called the oldest person wins and the youngest person must submit without any complaint and without any questions.
Well, if that was genuinely her process of thinking, then she would say to you, you have to obey me because I'm older.
And then you would say, well, you don't obey dad and dad's older.
And then she'd say, you know, I hadn't really thought of that.
That's an absolutely excellent point.
You know, let's sit down and talk about it.
And congratulations on reaching the age of reason.
You know, similarly, if you have an older brother or sister, and whoever's older is the master without any interference, then what happens if your mother and your older brother or sister give you a contradictory instruction?
Well, you have two people who are older, Who are then giving you instructions which conflict, and so there's no way to know, of course, who to obey, and they're in an impossible situation, which means there's a flaw in the logic, which means that the rule is probably immoral.
One of them is, for sure.
So, you know, if those who came up with these rules that they claim as the basis for their justifications actually formulated those rules based on thought, then once a contradiction was pointed out, they would go, oh, wow, that's pretty interesting.
Maybe I should change my mind about that.
But they never do.
They never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never do.
All they do is they come up with some other justification.
You know, so for instance, I mean, George Bush these days is on the sort of rescue the war in Iraq kick, right, because they're not done bleeding the treasury dry and pillaging the taxpayers, so they have to keep it going.
So, So he's saying, well, look, everybody in the whole wide world thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So, you know, you can't blame us.
Well, of course, that's not true at all.
Those who did believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those who were fed intelligence either by the CIA or the US intelligence agencies.
Or by the Mossad or the Israeli intelligence agencies and of course the Israeli intelligence agencies had an enormous incentive to get rid of Hussein because Hussein was funding the PLO and Arafat and so on and directly paying the survival benefits of those families that had a member that was a suicide bomber and you know destabilizing the region and you know in the first Iraq war he threatened to send he sent scuds into Israel and so on.
So, you know, it wasn't like every country in the world had all these constellations of spies deep in Iraq who were, you know, trying to figure out if there were weapons of mass destruction and they all independently came to the same conclusion.
I mean, that's nonsense, right?
I mean, that's just a complete fiction.
Now, of course, George Bush is completely aware of this.
He knows for an absolute fact that the U.S.
had intelligence and was paying Chalabi and all these people who came out of Iraq to give them information that would lead to a war.
And that he knew that the Israeli intelligence agency not noted for its objective adherence to facts that this agency also had a strong self-interest in getting the U.S.
to invade Iraq.
So he's perfectly aware of all of this.
It's just an empty excuse clad in a rational justification.
And you know it's an empty excuse, clad in irrational justification, because as soon as you apply the same logic to something else, then it doesn't really matter, right?
So if you join some libertarian group where nobody believes you have to pay taxes, and you sort of say to George Bush, sorry, you know, everybody, and you don't pay your taxes for ten years, well, you know, you can't prosecute me because everyone around me also thought I didn't have to pay taxes.
They're going to say, sorry, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
It was pretty easy to check up on, and you know, you shouldn't have, you shouldn't have taken that step, and so on.
And didn't you notice all of the other people who weren't paying taxes, right?
That's what you'd get back from George Bush.
So he's perfectly aware of processing all this information.
You know, in the Iraq war, the similar line of reasoning would be, well, everyone else thought that they were, you know, but it's like you were telling all these people that there was no weapons, and then when they tell you back, you claim it as justification.
But also, didn't you notice that nobody else was actually invading Iraq at the time, and so on?
And also, you claim for an absolute certainty that you didn't say we think, right?
You said they absolutely are, we know where they are, we have the locations, we have the videos, we have the footage, we have the...
You know, they know exactly where they are.
So, I mean, it's pure nonsense that these people are coming up with.
And to argue them at a logical level is ridiculous, right?
You call them stone evil, and you go on your merry way.
But you don't sort of discuss.
That's one of the things I get a little irritated about with these libertarians trying to discuss this or that political issue.
I mean, as if there's any rationality in it whatsoever.
You know, there's pompous, windy self-justification, but that's about it.
So, when you become an adult, and you've gone through this sort of soul murder at the beginning, followed by the substitution of the false self with the true self through the application of vainglorious cultural absolutes, then you are ready to go out into the world and to complete the cycle.
And what does that look like?
Well, as I've mentioned just previously, you have this wonderful ability now to come up with sort of fluid rationalizations and justifications for everything that you're doing, so that you'll never have any self-knowledge, you'll never be caught in any way, shape or form, you'll always have a perfect answer for any question that can't be argued with, because, you know, you're dead.
Like, emotionally and spiritually, you are a corpse.
You are one of the walking undead.
You are a blight upon the world.
You are a hatred and hostility to all that is good and true.
And your entire purpose of existence now has become the destruction of truth and virtue in others.
You know, that pain which we fail to acknowledge, we will always reproduce in others.
And these unbelievably hateful specimens of humanity, which is, you know, in my experience, most of humanity, they claim, you know, to be acting for virtue, but they're doing the complete opposite.
And when faced with a contradiction, they always just have another bullcrap answer at the ready to continue justifying their exploitations of others.
So the cycle then becomes, sort of emotionally, you know, the agony that we talked about a couple of days ago at the table of the invisible apples, the agony of realizing that you are your soul and primary means of survival.
Sorry, that's redundant.
Soul is primary.
Your sole means of survival, which is your capacity to understand things rationally, is under direct attack by those who claim to love you, that the horror of facing that you are surrounded by people who are hoping to destroy your capacity for love, happiness, truth, and virtue, or that you are insane and nobody knows it or that you are insane and nobody knows it except you, right?
Because they're all believing that you can see this invisible apple.
And of course nobody knows, and nobody really believes the latter.
And people really just, they know the former, right?
They know that it's the straight desire to corrupt them and destroy them that this invisible apple is held up, whatever it is, you know, God or country or the family or culture or whatever.
So they know for a fact that they're trying to be corrupted and destroyed, and the agony and terror of that, right, gets repressed.
And it gets suppressed initially and then repressed eventually, so that you no longer feel that kind of pain and horror.
But that pain and horror still exists in the world.
Right?
And whatever we don't permit ourselves to feel we end up causing other people to feel like ten times over.
Right?
So that's why the sociopath who's gone through so much horror in usually his early life feels no pain or guilt but is continually cruel towards others because the pain and the guilt are facts of reality and they have to be manifest somewhere and therefore they get manifest as vicious behavior towards others with no guilt or shame.
So if you don't acknowledge the agony of this early and incredibly successful assault upon your personality and your being, then what happens?
Well, whenever you are in a situation of power, whenever you face somebody who is dependent upon you or who is in your control in some manner, what happens psychologically is you get these faint echoes of that early Pillage of your personality.
This sort of early rape of your natural faculties.
And the sort of whiff of that pain, and I'm not saying this happens at a conscious level, but the whiff of that pain causes you to react aggressively.
You faced incredibly extreme aggression against yourself when you were young.
The worst kind of aggression, which is a soul murder.
And then when people are now dependent on you, this primarily happens with children, but it can also happen if you're a TA.
It can also happen if you work in a daycare, or you have younger siblings, or you have employees.
It doesn't have to necessarily only occur when you have children, but the subterranean agony of what it is that occurred for you is always manifest then when you're in a position of power.
And so you're going to become Ether-compliant in general.
Right?
So in other words you take the side of the abused child mentally and submit.
But you also don't process the agony and therefore you end up having to continually submit so that you don't feel the agony, right?
You submit in order to avoid feeling the agony of this soul murder.
And so you are going to continue to submit because the moment you fight back, you're exposing the true facts of the situation, which is that you were horribly preyed upon when you were younger and exploited and people were out to really destroy your personality in order to exercise power over you.
And so if you cease obeying, you awaken that old wound and it becomes a possibility that you didn't have to obey and thus the evil of those who preyed upon you becomes more and more clear.
So you end up either obeying or you end up preying on others.
So if you take the second route that we talked about on Wednesday, which is you become cynical and give up on morality.
If you take the first route and you try and be a good person, then you're going to end up having to be an obedient sucker for the rest of your life.
And if you take the second route, which is the amoral, I-give-up-on-morality route and truth, then you become one of the abusers.
Rather than a continual victim, you become a continual abuser.
And you will have no choice, really, but to continue to prey upon those whenever you're in a situation of power.
Because if you don't exercise your power in a horribly destructive way when you're in that situation,
Then again, what you are going to inevitably be starting to think about is, well, gee, if I can get by without abusing those who are in my power, then it was possible, of course, then it's possible to do that, which means it was possible for my parents and those around me to do it, which means that they chose to abuse me, which means that they are evil, which means that I was hurt, which means that there's agony and there's, you know,
You're going to have to make decisions about your family of origin, and you're going to have to make decisions about your whole culture and community, and nobody wants to do that, of course, because it's incredibly painful, and time-consuming, and mental energy-consuming.
So, you either then have to perfectly comply In principle, I mean it doesn't mean you're always going to comply, or you are going to become an abuser and then commit the sole murder on others.
So either way you have to turn either abuse or victimhood into an absolute so that you can avoid the pain of knowing that people chose to hurt you when they could have chosen otherwise.
So, what we can't handle emotionally, we pretend are absolutes, right?
So, if we have been victimized, then we pretend that victimhood is simply the best and responsible way to deal with conflict, and it's a virtue, and turn the other cheek, and blah blah blah, right?
And if we take the amoral route, then it becomes an eye for an eye, vengeance is all, power over the weak is the way to go.
And both of these strategies are simply designed to help avoid the natural agony of being horribly preyed on.
by those who had almost infinite power over you as a child, right?
And, of course, you can see this line of passivity versus hyper-aggression going all the way through most systems of thought, right?
I mean, if you look at Nietzsche's thought, his division of philosophy into master morality and slave morality, this falls very much along those lines, of course.
If you look at the instructions in the Bible, these contradictory instructions of either A, turn the other cheek, and if your enemy asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles, and if he asks for your cloak, give him your shirt as well.
If you look at that side of things, that's very much from the victimhood is inevitable, nobody has a choice, you must submit to power.
Then you can see that side, and on the other side the sort of Old Testament damning God, thunder and fire and brimstone and hell.
This is all the amoral, you know, one has no choice but to exercise power over the weak, they deserve it, whatever, right?
They are weak, and they must be toughened up, and so on.
You can see this, of course, in the traditional male-female, although it's not as traditional anymore, the male-female approach to parenting, right?
The sort of, you know, shape-up kind of stuff, which your sergeant made your dad, and the more sort of gentle and kind and sympathetic side of your mother, that's often kind of split that way.
You also see this, of course, in the velvet fist of government, right?
So on the one hand, you chose us, and we are your responsibility to save the politicians.
You voted for us, and this is the system, and so on.
And it's a fundamental value to help the poor and help the sick, as I was talking about this morning.
And that's sort of the victimhood side of things, that you are responsible for us, and you created us as the voters, and so on.
So you have to obey.
And the second, of course, is that if you don't do what they tell you to do, then they'll rain down the police and the military on you and shoot you if you don't go along with things.
And that, of course, is the sadism side of the masochism and sadism continuum.
And so the effects in the long run are perfectly constellated to exploitation, right?
For exploitation to occur, you need two parties.
You need somebody to exploit and somebody to be exploited.
So what you really want is obedient people who are in the majority and a minority of sadistic, cold, hypocritical, and pseudo-moralistic exploiters.
And, you know, these can be either those who do it verbally through politics or, you know, violently through the military, like if you're a military man or a policeman.
So this is how the system perpetuates itself, how it reproduces itself, I guess you could say, in that you have a majority, and it has to be a majority of compliant people, because if you have a majority of aggressive people, then the society self-destructs.
So if you have a majority of sadists, you end up with Nazi Germany, where You just have.
And even they, the people who paid taxes and obeyed the government, were by far in the majority compared to those who preyed on the population and murdered so many people.
So that's how it reproduces.
And that's why I said when I said the other day that all of the Predation, that all of the evil and corruption and predation within the world occurs in this moment where this invisible apple is proffered and you are considered to be a horrible person for hesitating or refusing or questioning whether or not it is the right, whether or not something valid is occurring or whether you're just being exploited.
This is why.
Because this moment, this dinner table from hell, is what pushes you, sort of inevitably, into this... either you are going to be an aggressive exploiter, or you are going to be a passive-aggressive, self-justified, hypocritical... well, both sides a hypocritical victim.
And, you know, all of it is to avoid the amount of pain.
And I think if you understand the agony that the world is in at the moment.
I mean, the agony that the world is in at the moment is mind-bending.
It is just beyond description.
It beggars description.
Even if you take out of the equation all of the horrible countries with theological dictatorships and military dictatorships and Juntas and all that.
Then, you still, and even if you just look at the West, the amount of agony that is in the West at the moment is just staggering.
I mean, the West is in its death throes of, you know, irrationality, but with all the added bonuses of the products of a rational framework of capitalism, which is, you know, the guns, the bombs, and so on, you know, paid for by taxation, but produced by the market, or through the products of the free market.
I mean, so the West is absolutely in its paroxysm of death and destruction, sort of mentally, And this is why nobody's relationships are very satisfying.
I mean, except for, you know, maybe if you've gotten this far in the podcast, you might be one of the people who has seen through some of this stuff.
But, you know, it's why people's relationships are so unsatisfying and why everybody's so, you know, why the good men are all full of jumpiness and the bad men are all full of conviction.
And so this situation which is occurring, this agony that's in the world, and the agony, of course, that the West, through foreign policy, is inflicting upon the victims, is just staggering.
I mean, the genocidal uh... impacts of foreign policy on uh... you know uh... external countries particularly from the west is just beyond belief right i mean it also beggars description though perhaps i'll take a stab at this weekend But if you get a sense of the agony of the world, then you get a sense of the horror of this moment around the table when you are offered this fruit that has no existence and told that you must believe in it or die to one degree or another or be condemned at the very least.
The agony that is spread out through the world and manifested across many decades of a man's life or a woman's life That is the effect of this unbelievable betrayal and destruction and the soul murder that occurs very, very early in life.
And that's what points people towards these two poles of sadism and masochism.
And that is, you know, what at root we need to oppose.
That's what at root we need to fight.
Because if we can't fight that early moment, and in ourselves as well, we need to fight it first, right?
That's where clarity has to come from, is through the acceptance of the agony of that initial moment of ultimate betrayal.
and destruction.
If we can't accept and fight that within ourselves, you know, we're not going to have any luck trying to fix and fight anything in the world.
Because the strength that comes from self-knowledge and the acceptance of the horrors that were perpetrated upon us as children by our parents, by our school teachers, by our priests, by our politicians, by our community leaders, by everyone, sort of epistemologically at first, or metaphysically actually,
All of that then flows into the corruption that we see into the world, and there's really no point trying to fight that corruption without first being aware of its source within ourselves and, you know, re-experiencing the pain and horror of that early betrayal so that we can become strong and passionate and integrated, and that way we can have an effect on the world that probably has never, ever been seen before.
Thank you so much for listening.
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