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Feb. 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:00
102 The Libertarian Love Doctor

Thoughts on romance for libertarians (because we must breeeed!)

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Good morning everybody.
It is the 16th, no wait, the 15th of February 2006.
8.40 in the morning.
I am Joe alternate route this morning.
The roads are a bit of a mess up here so it's going to be a lengthy podcast.
So I hope you're doing well, and I hope that those of you who had Valentine's Day celebrations with lovers and wives and husbands had a great and wonderful time.
And I also wanted to put a shout-out, bro, To those who are still in search of a love relationship, one gentleman emailed me a little while back saying, how on earth are you supposed to meet a quality woman, given that the world is more or less mad?
And he had some options, which I didn't consider to be too good an idea.
But what I did say to him was that it can take a while.
I mean, I met Christina when I was 35.
After 20, well, I guess 18 or 19 years of dating, not exactly lunatics, but not exactly, you know, I was inching my standards up, I guess, relationship by relationship, until they took a quantum leap towards the end.
But, of course, the reason that they did take a quantum leap, and this is why it's important to listen to the love doctor, this is why it's important to strive for self-knowledge and self-actualization and The contacting and nourishing of your true self, because that's the only part of your psychological makeup, your honest true self, that can love and be loved.
There's no possibility.
Everything else is oblique, and a hall of mirrors, and manipulation, and upset, and to and fro.
Whereas, I mean, the false self desperately wants connection, but it reaches for it so violently, it always knocks it over, because it is false, and it is based on propaganda, and it's based on Family lies, and it's based on self-justification, and putting a sort of foot forward to that is not real, and therefore there's no capacity for intimacy if you're not very honest.
And, of course, I never mean brutally honest.
I mean very gently, gently honest.
But, you know, the thing to do if you want love, and we all do,
The thing to do, in my humble opinion, is to know yourself, to be as honest with yourself as possible, and through that, I mean, it's not going to make you meet the right person, but it's going to start to put you in the right circles, and you're going to be less prey to the manipulation of others, of women if you're a man, of men if you're a woman, of men if you're a woman, and so you want to just work on your own ethics, your own integrity, in a joyful sense, not in a sort of dutiful, I've got to be good kind of sense.
And you want to display the courage of your convictions.
You want to, you know, be very, very honest with yourself about your virtues and your flaws.
And then, once that starts to happen, you will then be able to talk about yourself and attract the right kind of people and develop a real bond that's based on very solid things.
I mean, it's funny in a sense.
And I know I've thrown a couple of tangents here in the beginning because it's been a while.
You know, I've been really focused.
It's been a real strain.
It's funny how libertarians, and I don't view libertarians as any better or worse at dating than anybody else because I don't really know much about how libertarians date, but just in general, I do view it as sort of ironic that we don't like state intervention and we believe that everybody should interact based on mutual value and honestly and so on, with honesty.
We don't like state interaction.
However, when it comes to emotions, in a sense, when emotions are our free market, And our repression is the state, a lot of times people will repress their own, the free play of their own emotions and the natural expression of their own emotions, which is, you know, of which love is the greatest.
And if you suppress your emotions, you can't just suppress one of them.
I mean, there's no, you know, we always know that in the free market, you can't just suppress one aspect of it.
You can only suppress or control or regulate all of it, Or none of it.
That's really the whole deal.
Because as soon as you start to regulate the free market, for a variety of reasons we can get into another time, you will always end up having to regulate more and more and more until the system collapses.
That's why even the first hint of regulation is a terrible thing.
So, with the emotions it's the same thing.
As soon as you start to say, this emotion that I'm feeling is unacceptable to me, that emotion that I'm feeling is unacceptable to me, that's a bad emotion, that's a good emotion, then you have become to your emotions as the state is to the free market in a mixed economy.
And I do believe that to some degree, there's nothing like psychologizing at a distance, is there?
But I do believe that to some degree the freedom that we are all hoping to get from the state is a projection of the freedom that our passions and feelings and true selves hope to get from The falsehoods that we, unfortunately, all have inflicted upon us in varying degrees of brutality throughout our childhood and growing up.
So, that's why I sort of try to focus on psychology as well as economics and philosophy.
And the reason for that is that this is the logic of political and personal freedom.
Of personal and political freedom, the personal comes first.
You want to stop regulating yourself and be honest with yourself and let the free flow of your emotions go and then you are free and then you can be more Powerful in your advocacy for political freedom, but to focus on political freedom first without focusing on the Natural free play of your emotions first will simply render you Less effective as a communicator and less happy as a person.
I mean I remember I mean I've done a lot of work on myself because I I kind of knew that I'd come from a difficult childhood and so I did a lot of work on myself and worked hard and didn't work alone at all times.
So I worked very hard to get through all of the nonsense that I told myself about my past and all of the nonsense that everybody else, which was the nonsense everyone else told me about my past, was even more.
Oppressive and in a sense powerful because I was just an opinion of one and there seemed to be a unanimity about one's relationship to one's parents after You grow up and you don't have to interact with bad people anymore there's a unanimity about how you should relate to your parents and And I did a lot of work on it.
I did a lot of work on it.
And I think that I had really, through years of work, had come through to being able to talk about it and experience it and feel it without my emotions being false or manipulative or, you know, oh, I'm feeling something and being self-conscious and so on.
And what happened was that I so distinctly remember that when Christina and I met, we were, as I mentioned before, we were on a volleyball team, and she was, I mean, one of the things that struck me was she was very brave.
I mean, she's not the most Amazonian stature of women, and she was, you know, right up there, not aggressively, but bravely, Dealing with these jerks.
You know, I mean, you get this in sort of public leagues of sports that there are the jerks who just want to show how big and tough and strong they are and feel that it's great to spike volleyballs into the heads of women who are five foot two and so on.
And Christina was, you know, she's very slight and she was just brave and right in there and, you know, when she got clipped once in a while she was great about it.
But at the same time she was also very clear that it was inappropriate behavior for some 220 pound muscle man to spike a ball directly into a 5 foot 205 pound woman.
And it is.
I mean, what a ridiculously stupid thing to do.
So I really admired her for her courage, and I really admired her for her outspokenness.
And she actually asked me, uh, how was your day?
And I just was beaming from ear to ear, and I said, great!
And she's like, well, why?
And I said, well, I've just gotten my very first novel published.
I just got the Approval yesterday, so I'm over the moon.
I'm just ecstatic.
I mean, I've been writing since I was 18, and I guess I was 34 at this point, so it had been some years, let's say, and I finally got a novel published, and I was very excited and happy, and it was wonderful, so she said, well, that's great!
How exciting!
And then I asked her about herself.
Again, another thing about the true self is that you don't have to talk about yourself anymore.
Once you have reached who you really are, you don't actually have to worry about impressing other people, about talking about how great you are to other people, because that's what the false self needs, is the empty admiration of others.
I mean, I was happy, I told her why, and then I didn't need to say, well, it's a great novel, and I've done this, and I've done that, and isn't it great, and I've been working for so hard, and it's taken years, and blah blah blah blah blah.
I just said I'm enormously, I'm overjoyed.
I have just, after a long time of writing, I've received word that my first novel is going to be published, and I'm just over the moon.
And how was your week?
And so she told me a little bit about her week, and then she told me about what she did, and she was a psychologist, and sorry, psychological associate, the technical terms are very finely sliced here in Canada, and I was of course very interested in that, because psychology, as you may or may not be aware, is not an insignificant interest or hobby of mine.
So we began talking about that, and then we went, the whole team was supposed to go to dinner, But a lot of people dropped out for a variety of reasons, so it ended up just being Christina and I, and we just had a wonderful time.
And then we got together a couple of days later.
I mean, I thought she was wonderful, and she emailed me and said that she had a good time, she'd like to see me again.
So we went out and then we had a wonderful time.
We went out with some friends of ours and we went for dinner.
We had a couple of martinis and the conversation was one of these evenings where the conversation just flows beautifully.
And I don't know if this interests anyone but I remember at one point making a joke about how I'm not bald but I've got more than that sort of blank scalped horseshoe of hair that some men get.
But it's fairly it's pretty thin and fuzzy on top and not so much around the sides and back and I just remember I can't remember why the topic came up about sexiness and or attractiveness and baldness and I had a beige turtleneck on and I talked about how sexy Baldness could be.
And then I put the turtleneck over my head and said, doesn't this look sexy?
And I pulled the turtleneck down over my head and everybody just began laughing.
I hope that wasn't that you had to be there.
I'm sure you can get some of the physical humor of it.
But Christina just laughed very heartily and I really like the fact that there's earthy humor that people can appreciate and enjoy without feeling like, oh, that's bad.
Oh, that's rude.
Whatever.
I mean, I think that sophistication is not something which can't include physical humor.
I think it's sad that people can't feel that.
But one of the things that happened on our next date, which is sort of what I'm trying to get to here, one of the things that happened on our next date is that I invited Christina over to watch a film I enjoyed, I liked very much, which I'd just gotten on DVD, which was A Room with a View.
It's an Ian Foster novel that was adapted by Merchant Ivory.
And just a great movie.
I've always really liked it.
And if you get a chance to check it out, I certainly would recommend it.
And we were talking and then, of course, the dreaded question came up for me, which was...
Well, tell me a little bit about your family.
Now, you know, there's always been a problem for me with that.
I've never liked to talk about it, not because I find it so horrifying to talk about.
I mean, it had been, I guess by this point, almost two decades since I had had any regular... since I'd sort of lived with my mother as a child.
But I've never liked the question because, you know, sort of rightly or wrongly, and probably to some degree wrongly epistemologically, but not psychologically, I feel that... I feel ashamed.
I feel ashamed that I had to deal with these people, with these crazy, narcissistic, violent, evil, sadistic people.
You know, if you're born into a den of thieves and you fight your way free of that, then it's hard to explain to people about your family without feeling like there's a taint on you, without feeling like Not that it's your fault that you were born into this den of thieves, but that there's something that leaves a residue on you when you come from a past that is sort of black and evil and full of violence and despair.
It's hard not to feel that that leaves a stain on you.
And that's partly because there's just an echo of it.
There's also some beliefs out there which are, I mean, just purely evil, which I've heard about.
Somebody who claimed to be a Buddhist, and I don't know if they really were a Buddhist or where they got this belief from, but there was this belief that, you know, we choose our own parents.
Our parents are given to us for a reason.
It's part of our growth as human beings over the long-term reincarnation-based life cycle of our spirit.
We choose our parents for a reason.
Our parents are given to us for a reason to help us grow, to help us this, to help us that, which I just, you know, whenever I came across that opinion, I just let loose because I just found that to be unbelievably corrupt.
You know, did the Jews choose their jailers and their murderers in the 1940s?
Did the Kulaks choose their murderers?
Did women who are sexually abused choose their parents because they have a secret rape fantasy before they're born?
It's all just so astonishingly evil to give a moral responsibility for being the subject of abuse when you're a child.
To give that moral responsibility to a child is just astoundingly evil.
And this is one of the reasons why, rightly or wrongly, I have a perception of Buddhism that may not be as charitable as A lot of people.
A lot of people.
Buddhism is always the exception for people, right?
Organized religions are really evil.
But Buddhism doesn't seem so bad.
You know, there's always something.
There's always some little corner that people want to let corruption escape out of.
That way, you see, they never have to deal with principles.
They never have to deal with the facts.
Once you deal with principles, you know that you simply don't get anything good out of religious fantasies and indoctrination, whether they're Buddhist, or Rastafarian, or Norse, or Greek, or Christian, or anything else.
But people always want to have exceptions to these rules so that they never have to deal with the principals.
So when I say that schools are bad, people will say, well, I remember a good teacher.
And so they just get to completely escape the responsibility of having to deal with principals.
It's similar to when the abolitionists were in In full swing in the 19th century, a lot of people they talked to said, yeah, I know there's a lot of bad slave owners, but there's a couple that are really good.
And so it's sort of hard to say slavery is bad when there's a couple of slave owners who are really considerate towards their slaves.
Well, I mean, what ridiculous evil and complicity with evil that is.
Once you get the principles, you don't have to worry about the instances.
So, the idea that we're responsible for the choice of our own parents, or that there's some sort of moral residue that comes from growing up in a situation of evil,
It's hard to sort of get rid of, and of course you try talking about all of that with a psychologist who you just know is not exactly blind to the effects, the after-effects of this kind of behavior, this kind of situation when you're a child.
Of course, any competent psychologist knows that what occurs in the first couple of years of life is pretty important and pretty central and perhaps even insurmountable.
for the problems or virtues that arise later in life.
I mean, without intervention.
Without intervention, for sure, it's going to be a disaster.
But with intervention, it's years of hard work and so on.
So, we're sitting on the couch and Christina tells me a little bit about her family and then says, OK, well, tell me about your family.
And I had a challenge, right?
I really liked this woman.
I thought she was really great, vivacious and curious and energetic and exciting.
One of the problems that happens when you get into your 30s is that if you haven't found the right person, and I don't mean to pressure anyone else out there because It can happen, but if you haven't found the right person, you have a sort of growing problem, which is that the people who are left aren't exactly the cream of the crop, so to speak, even in a sort of base functional sense.
So there is a wariness when people get together in their 30s, and I'm talking mid to late 30s, there's a pressure to sort of explain why you're not taken.
That's a fairly significant thing, and people who are in their 30s probably know what I'm talking about.
People in their 20s, just, you know, work on yourself as much as you can, find the right person, and then when you get into, if that doesn't happen by the time you get into your 30s, just be aware of this.
People will tell a story, most people in their 30s who are dating will tell a story about why it is that they're still single.
And it usually is a fairly imaginative story which involves ...a problem with the people that they're dating that they claim no responsibility for, and that's usually a warning sign, right?
I mean, if somebody says, well, you know, every guy I've dated has just been this jerk, and I don't know why, and men are jerks, and it's never quite that openly expressed, but usually there's that, and I can only speak, of course, from women, although, you know, I can speak from men, because I've talked with some of my male friends, a number of whom are bachelors, about this problem.
The question is, why are you not in a relationship?
Well, this guy, he strung me along for three years, and this guy, and so on.
And it's the same thing with bachelors.
I mean, some of the bachelors that I've known, their opinions have sort of hardened into this kind of women that are just shallow, and they want pretty boys, and they're not interested in guys who are a little short, or guys who are a little chunky, or guys who are a little...
Whatever negative aspects you want to attribute.
But of course the funny thing is with these bachelors is that they still want Penelope Cruz.
So it's kind of funny, right?
Women shouldn't judge me in a shallow sense, man.
But I'm going to judge women in a shallow sense and somehow this translates as an unfair situation.
So I've always found that to be kind of funny.
And I went through that in my 20s where I wanted to go out with women who were just You know, the ultimate hotties.
And then I'd get upset with them because they wanted to go out with prettier men, more handsome men than I was.
I remember... I know this is simply segues, but what the heck.
It's post-Valentine's Day.
Let's go on a journey.
I remember I was interested in a yoga teacher.
I took yoga for a couple of years when I had issues with light sleep.
And it was great.
I took yoga and aromatherapy.
I just recommended highly.
Ashtanga yoga was the one that I took and that was the one that was Really great.
Don't take the sort of just stretch and breathe yoga.
At least don't.
I found that stuff kind of annoying.
But the Ashtanga yoga was great.
It's very physical, it's very hard, and it is very relaxing.
But I was very interested in the yoga teacher, and she wasn't a bimbo.
She was very attractive, but she was doing her PhD in a medical field, and so she was smart and so on.
And I would hang out and chat with her for like 10 or 15 minutes after class, and I was always getting these kinds of like, well, you know, it's great chatting with you, but I'm never, you know, there was never any sort of move forward like, hey, let's go get a coffee or whatever, and I did suggest it at one point, but it's always, you know, it's scary doing that as a guy, because, you know, you're just waiting to get shot down.
To some degree, it's not that I'm not confident in these ways, but, you know, when there's no particular signal, there's still this fantasy that if you ask in the right way, that it's gonna just work fine.
So I was chatting with her, and I chatted with her for a couple of months, and then the day that I sort of asked her out, she sort of, maybe, and so on, she was busy, but she didn't sort of say, oh, are you kidding?
Or whatever, I can't date my students, or whatever.
So, I never did go out with her, and one of the things that did occur, I don't know, about a week or two after I asked her out, was that a guy came into the class, and he was kind of... Well, he was a pretty boy, for sure.
He sort of looked vaguely like Michael Vartan, the guy in Alias, but without the omnipresent stubble.
But he was a pretty good-looking guy, and, you know, tall, and athletic, and so on.
And hair.
Let's be frank.
And he had hair, and he was a little younger than I was, and so on.
Anyway, so we're in the change room, and we're changing away, and this guy sort of looks over at me and says, she's pretty attractive, right?
I said, yeah, she's a pretty girl.
She's an attractive woman.
And he's like, yeah, I mean, and she is exhausting.
I said, yeah, that's a tough class.
He's like, oh, I don't just mean the class.
And then he, I said, OK, OK.
You know, I didn't want to ask any further because the implication was fairly clear.
But then he said, you know, she teaches 18 classes a week, which sort of explained the figure that she had.
But she teaches 18 classes a week and she's been dragging me to like almost all of them.
And I'm just dying.
And that's not the only exercise she wants me to perform, and oh my heavens, she is just completely exhausting, blah blah blah.
So basically, of course, this guy wanted, and not in a very subtle manner, wanted to let me know that he was having a sexual relationship with the yoga teacher.
You know, me.
Some guy he's never met before who's just changing in a men's change room.
And I just thought, oh my god.
Oh my god.
I mean, ew.
Yuck.
And I thought, how sad.
How sad for this woman.
I mean, this is one of the prisons that great physical attractiveness can put you in.
How sad for this woman that this is the kind of guy she feels she needs to go out with, right?
Because maybe she felt, well, I'm really attractive, and Steph is not as attractive, and therefore, if I go out with Steph, people are going to be wondering, like, well, what's wrong with her that she has to go for a bald guy?
I don't know.
Sort of make things up.
And whereas this guy, you know, I guess the other women would sort of look at this guy and say, wow, you know, he's a real hottie and, you know, boy, they must be happy and she's really attractive.
And so, I don't know if women do this for the envy of other women, but I just thought it was kind of funny that way.
So I just thought how sad and how inevitable that this woman wouldn't go out with me, and how inevitable that my own shallowness led me to judge this woman by standards only based on attractiveness.
Now, I mean, she wasn't dumb or anything like that, but Only based on attractiveness.
I'd never got a strong sense of virtue or intelligence or self-knowledge or integrity or anything like that.
I just knew that she was, you know, a decently educated and pretty hardy yoga instructor and so that was enough for me to spark my interest.
In the conversations with her, I was being false myself and I was being shallow myself because I wasn't asking the kinds of questions that will help reveal somebody's virtue, which are not that hard to figure out.
But I simply was trying to talk with her because she was physically attractive and I was glad that she was educated but I'm not sure that even if she wasn't that would have stopped me from my pursuit.
And this was true of a number of women in the yoga class and who I would occasionally chat with and one of them I did ask out but she was very well educated and very attractive and We did go out, but she ended up being a bit of a lunatic.
But of course, it sort of became very obvious to me, after a certain amount of time, that this incident in the locker room really helped out in this area.
It became very obvious to me, the hypocrisy that I was basically living.
I mean, just the silly hypocrisy.
That I would say that I wanted these women to go out with me regardless of my looks.
I wanted these women to date me regardless of my looks, but I was only choosing them because of their looks.
So I just found that to be kind of funny and sort of sad.
I mean, it's sort of pitiful and hypocritical.
And of course it didn't work out.
And the women I dated who were very attractive, it didn't work out either.
And so the fact that I managed to find Christina, who is gorgeous, was a real fluke.
And of course she had the same issue.
Guys would go for her because she was very attractive and then they would never really want to get to know her or they themselves were just shallow and so on.
So this kind of problem that men face wherein they say well women are just shallow and women don't know what's good for them and they're attracted to bad boys or pretty boys or boys you know guys who aren't good for them or who aren't good providers.
And I've got a good job, and I've got a steady income, and why don't the women like me?
Well, because deep down, if you're that obviously hypocritical, then women aren't going to go for you, and nobody, in fact, is going to go for you in a romantic way.
And so, because the yoga teacher and this doofus blabber, I'm doing the teacher guy, We're perfectly suited in that they were both attractive, they were both shallow, and they were both very into status.
Sort of in hindsight, doing 18 classes a week might be considered a bit excessive, but I guess she liked being admired for her physical attractiveness, and so she had a sort of shallow status-based relationship to those in the class, and so naturally she's going to choose a guy who's got a shallow status-based relationship to the yoga teacher, and he was going to want to trumpet around that He's having sex with the yoga teacher who's attractive and that makes him a great guy.
And of course, the other final thing was that because I went kind of mentally ill to this guy who was kissing and telling to a pretty obscene level, I realized that the fact that someone is attractive or dating somebody who's attractive does not give them any status in my view.
So why would I assume?
Why would I only go for the women who are physically attractive in this sense?
Because I wanted status and because I wanted, whatever, to be thought of as an attractive guy because I was dating an attractive woman or whatever.
Even in my own mind, that was the idea that the attractiveness of my partner translates into my attractiveness.
All this sort of nonsense.
I mean, that's all true, but it's true in a moral sense.
It's not true in a physical sense.
To some degree.
I mean, somebody who's, you know, 300 pounds probably isn't taking good care of themselves and some psychological issues and so on, but I'm just talking about sort of the base physical structure of a human being, which they don't have much control over.
But I sort of really got the principle that here I was standing next to a guy who was dating the yoga teacher, which is something that I wanted to do, and I had no respect for him as a human being because of that.
Now, I mean, obviously the fact that he was talking about his relationship with her to a complete stranger, and I wasn't the only guy in the room, But I was the guy he felt it was important to talk to about this, maybe because I was one of the few attractive guys in the yoga studio.
Who knows?
One of the few guys, let's just say.
Then I sort of looked at him and said, Ew, like, that's gross.
The fact that you're dating this woman and talking about it actually lowers you in my estimation.
And so realizing that I could look at someone who was dating a very attractive woman and say, You're just gross.
You're just shallow, insecure, neurotic, You're an empty shell of a human being who is just clawing for status and it's pitiful.
And so seeing that, it sort of separated in my own mind and heart this idea that attractiveness is the big thing and you've got to whatever date.
So after that long segue, let's get back to the couch with Christina and I. So she was asking me about my family.
And I was saying... I told her the truth, as I've sort of told the truth on this podcast.
I told the truth about my family.
I didn't hide anything.
I wasn't defensive, because I had gotten to the point where I no longer... I'd separated from my mother for, oh, I don't know how many years, six, five or six years at this point.
And I had also separated from my brother for a couple of years at this point.
We were seeing each other very intermittently at this point, because I didn't see him for about a year, year and a half when I first broke with him.
But that sort of definitely trailed off.
But I told her about this and I could because I hadn't been in contact with these people and that's sort of so important.
It's one of the reasons why I do counsel that if your family is corrupt, then you do need to stop seeing them.
Basically, I can't sort of put it any more in any more detailed sense.
And you do that because it's your life to live now, and you can't live a happy life and feel like a good person if you're still in contact with people who are evil and bad.
And you can't change them to be better people.
Maybe they can change to be better people, but you sure as heck can't do that.
A prison guard may become a moral person, but it's not the prisoner's job to do that.
So it's not your job to fix your parents, and it's not your job to hang around hoping that they're going to be great people.
But because I had separated from my family of origin and I had done lots of work on myself I was able to talk about my family with a frankness and with a lack of guilt or complexity that Christina openly confessed was astounding to her but bewildering because she told me this sort of a couple of dates later that when I began to talk about my family
All the red flags in the world went up for her and she was saying, oh, you know, I'm listening, just going, oh man, this guy is going to be a mess.
And she was very sad, but she was confused because we'd had these great conversations.
I was a positive and happy person.
I was really, I mean, this was a wonderful time in my life.
Most of my life, most of my adult life, I've been incredibly fortunate and happy and worked hard for it, but had a wonderful life as an adult.
This was a particularly rich time because I'd taken about a year off at this point and I was working away on... I wrote sort of four books during this year-and-a-half period and I was just having a wonderfully creative life and didn't have to get up and go to work and so on.
So I was very happy.
So she said, you know, it's really confusing because you're so happy and you're so You're talking about these things frankly and openly, and I was really looking hard for any kind of manipulation that may be occurring during this conversation, but there wasn't any, and so I was just baffled, because you'd obviously come from such a dysfunctional past, but I couldn't pick up any dysfunction in your interaction with me during the time you were telling me this story about your family.
And we talked about it for about an hour, hour and a half.
She had lots of questions, so I couldn't sort of Oh yeah, well, you know, my family's crazy, and sort of move on.
I mean, she really did dig in and ask about what happened, and what the circumstances were, and what the effects were, and what the effects were on me.
And she was really not grilling me, because she's a very gentle soul deep down, but she was definitely, you know, you want to talk about Socratic persistence, that's my wife when she needs to know something.
And so when she began to sort of examine me on these issues, it was difficult.
And it was difficult because I had to talk about these things as unfortunate incidents that occurred to me.
And, I mean, if you're driving really well and, I don't know, a helicopter crashes into your car out of nowhere or, I mean, it's hard to sort of say, but some, you know, or your engine just explodes even though you've kept it well maintained, you know, whatever.
Then you talk about this as a really unfortunate incident, but you don't talk about it as if it's left a moral stain upon you, and this is exactly true of the family.
I mean, we're born into this, our families, and we have no choice about our families, and we work to do the best that we can within the limitations of our family situations, but it means no moral stain, no moral residue, no moral stain.
The only moral stain, interestingly enough, is the self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a good person does not abandon his family of origin, a good person takes care of his parents, especially as they get older, and that if you believe that there's a moral stain, if you break with your family, then there is a moral stain if you stay with them.
I mean, that's sort of, you know, we only stay with corrupt people.
We only hang out with corrupt people.
We only remain in contact with corrupt people because of the propaganda about the family.
It's not to do with anything to do with our pleasure, our own moral instincts, or our own moral evaluations.
It's just because we've got a lot of propaganda about it and we've sort of swallowed it, as I did myself for many years.
We swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
So the moral stain that remains is simply that you are giving aid and sanction, if these are your sort of parents to whatever degree, you're giving aid and sanction to these very corrupt people.
And that is the moral stain that is generated through your actions as an adult.
It doesn't sort of follow you through your childhood.
Children are always victims.
But then once you start to understand about morality, and you continue to see your corrupt and bad parents, because you say, oh, they did the best they could, or whatever, then that is the moral stain that you have, right?
That's the hypocrisy that you have, and that is the immorality that you have, and that I had for many years.
Please don't think I'm sort of on some... I'm not hurling thunderbolts from a mountain here, because I gave aid and comfort to my mother and to my brother for many years, until my early thirties.
So I understand the strength of this propaganda, but nonetheless, you still shouldn't You shouldn't spend time with people who are corrupt.
And why?
Well, because you should have your own life.
You should have your own life with your own morals and your own choices.
And they've already made their choices.
Why should you wreck your life to support the choices of people who you disagree with?
My mother, you know, she lives alone.
She is, you know, crazy as all get-up.
She's on disability.
Her place is a pigsty.
I have no idea how she spends her days, but she's a miserable, old, broken, horrible, vile woman.
And, unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about that.
I mean, I could go over and do X, Y, and Z, clean up her... go see her and clean up her place or whatever.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, the hell is inside and I can't do anything about it because I can't undo the past.
It's possible, conceivable, remotely, that somebody might make my mother their project, but I can't do it.
You can't save people if you've been harmed by them, because your very presence reminds them of the harm they've done and provokes their defenses.
I mean, it's absolutely impossible to save the people who've done you harm to affect them to make any kind of better choices or experience any self-examination, because the fact that you're the person they've done harm to will always provoke their self-justifications and their hostility or their withdrawal or their pain to such unmanageable levels that you simply can't do it.
So my mother had made her choices.
She did what she did to her children.
She did what she did to her husband.
She was who she was.
And those are the choices she made.
That's her life.
The consequences of that are her life.
It's It's not my job to go and backfill all of the mess that that's made in their lives, because that's their lives.
They've made their choices and now it's my life and I want to make my choices.
And my choice is to live a good life with a good woman and to be a happy guy and to live in a moral way, in a way that makes sense morally and logically.
That's my choice.
I can't have that choice if I end up going around backfilling and supporting the issues of evil people, or bad people, or corrupt people, or false people, or shallow people.
I can't have that life, and I want that life.
That's the life that works for me.
I think that's the life that works for everyone.
So, the fact that I had already made that break allowed me to be honest about my family, with integrity, because I didn't have to explain I didn't get caught in that vice.
I didn't have to explain, well, my mom's really evil, you see, and my brother's kind of sadistic, and my father is just nuts and...
And I didn't have to say, and let's go for brunch on Sunday.
Because that's just a lunatic perspective to have.
So you either have to say, well, they weren't that bad, which is false, and that's why you're having lunch with them, or they were that bad, which is true, but then you have to explain why you're seeing these people who are really bad.
So you really can't win in that situation.
You know, like that old quote from the movie War Games, you know, about nuclear war?
A funny game, the only way to win is not to play.
And that's very true when it comes to corrupt families.
The only way to win is not to play.
And that way you save something from the wreckage of your past, right?
You save the capacity to love and to be intimate and to be honest and to be joyful.
And if that means ditching bad people, as it does, as a basic fact, Then ditch them.
I mean, it's your life.
They've made their choices.
You make your choices.
Your choices aren't dictated by their needs.
Your choices aren't dictated by the wants and needs of crazy people in your life.
They've made their choices.
They are who they are because they have done what they've done.
And you can't undo that.
You can't change history.
You can't make them different.
You can make up all the excuses that you want for them, but it doesn't really matter.
They still did what they did, and their salvation, if it is to ever be achieved, is never going to come from you.
So, you know, one of the ways that I viewed it in my own life was to say, well, I was sort of born into a prison, and the prison guards were really brutal, and I have now escaped from that prison, and the prison guards are unhappy.
They miss me.
I mean, this is really how it is.
I mean, when you say it like this, it sounds, even after these many years that I thought about it, it still sounds very funny to me.
I mean, it's not even that darkly funny, it just is funny.
That I was born into a prison, the prison guards were brutal, and now that I've left the prison, I've escaped and I'm out.
The prison guards are very unhappy because they miss me.
Well, of course, what would they miss about me?
Well, they wouldn't miss me as an individual because they didn't know me, right?
If they had any empathy to me and knew me, they wouldn't have been brutal towards me, these prison guards.
And so I'm out of the prison.
I'm free.
I'm dedicating my life to trying to set as many people free from prison as I can.
And I hate prison, and I think prison guards are vile and the root of all evil.
And so the prison guards who had power over me when I was in prison, they miss me, and they're unhappy, and they want me to go to lunch.
What lunacy would it be to go back into prison when I'm now free?
And to go back and say, well, I'm going to make these prison guards better people.
Why?
Why would that be my job?
They made their choices.
They chose to be prison guards.
They chose to be these kinds of corrupt, brutal people.
Why would I?
And I know that I can't make them better and all that's going to happen is they're going to drag me down into their level of misery.
Why would it be my job?
Nothing at all.
Why would it be my job?
Let's say that they get sick.
Well, the prison guard who took care of you while you were growing up, who was brutal, or cold, or distant, or vicious, or even if they were relatively nice, it was still a prison.
Well, oh, they've gotten sick.
Oh, man, they're going to be in a hospital.
Well, so what?
It's not your job.
And when people say, well, your parents took care of you, and they shielded and nurtured you, and gave you a roof over your head, and they gave you food, well, so do you get that in prison too.
You know, if you were sucked into the underworld of the gulags in Soviet Russia, well, they gave you a roof over your head and they gave you food too.
Doesn't really matter.
If I kidnap you and lock you in my basement and feed you caviar and T-bone steak, then I am giving you food and shelter as well.
So what?
Doesn't matter.
The question is not whether you give another human being food or shelter.
That doesn't matter at all.
In fact, you might do that because they're your slave, right?
Slave owners always gave their slaves food and shelter because that was beneficial to them.
So the fact that your parents gave you food and shelter means absolutely nothing when it comes to understanding anything about morality.
So I guess my final point to say is that you really don't want to stay around your parents if they're bad people.
And I'm guessing that mostly they are because most people in these days in this very corrupt culture are pretty bad.
And you don't want to do that because you want to find love.
And if you want to find love, the first thing you have to do is get the bad people out of your life.
You can't have integrity, you can't have joy, you can't have love or passion or intimacy or any of these wonderful things while you've still got your face being rubbed in this sort of stinking open sores of evil or corruption.
Or coldness, or incomprehension, or resistance, or any of the things that you want to talk about.
If you can't talk passionately about your ideas because everyone rolls their eyes, even if they never laid a hand on you, get rid of them!
It's your life.
Take your pleasure.
You're not going to get another chance.
Every day that you spend with people that you don't like, you don't get tacked on to your life at the end.
It's a day that is lost and gone forever.
Never going to come back.
You're never going to get a chance to live it over again.
Every day that you spend without being purely in the joy of being a good person and having integrity and loving and being loved and having intimacy and sharing, every day that you don't do that is a day you never get back.
It's a day completely subtracted from your life and don't have any more of them than absolutely necessary.
So that's my Valentine's Day message.
Get the corrupt people out of your life.
Open yourself up to love and it's more wonderful than I can even describe.
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