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Feb. 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:04
110 But *my* parents were really nice! (Part 2)

Some further explorations of the theory of parental corruption

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is the 22nd of February, 2003.
It is a Wednesday and it is 8.35 in the morning.
I'm heading into work, of course, and wanted to pick up where we left off yesterday in regards to the child and our relationship to our parents.
And why it is not particularly relevant or productive to say that our relationship to our parents can be judged and redefined later on in life as good enough or they did the right thing more or less or they did what everyone else did or they never really thought about their own parenting they just were habitual parenters or any sort of way that you can you can sort of slice and dice it.
The reason that I want to talk about that is that that is a very common kind of moral justification that is given towards problematic parenting.
And in a sense, I'm not really talking about abusive parenting in the way that I experienced it.
Because the kind of parenting that I experienced was actually kind of easier to figure out than the kind of parenting that a lot of other people, I mean my wife for instance, experienced.
So, because I faced more of an extremity, I was able to see more of the principles involved.
And that was something that was very helpful.
It's not an uncommon phenomenon for a person who faces an extremity to discover a principle which is useful, you know, without there having to be that extremity, but it doesn't make the principle any less valid.
So that's, I think, why I had a bit of a leg up, you could say, in discovering some of this stuff, or at least theorizing some of this stuff.
And so I would sort of submit that using the mechanism or the logical mechanism of saying, well, I can understand why Steph has ditched his foo, as it's known, the family of origin, because I certainly wouldn't want to say that I am without family, because I have the most wonderful family in the world at the moment.
And have had for the last couple of years, and will have for the next 50 years.
And so to ditch the foo is one thing that people understand who know anything about my family.
So some of my friends, and I don't think any of my relatives, just some of my friends.
They have no problem with me really ditching my mother.
It was an interesting thing to explain to Christina's parents, who of course the Greeks would find it incomprehensible.
But it's not something that my friends are very baffled about.
There's one or two who are, but I've sort of drifted away from them over the last couple of years.
So, they really sort of understand they had a hard time with my brother.
When I dissociated myself from my brother, people had a much tougher time.
In fact, a number of the people who I stayed friends with who were my employees at Caribou, at the company I worked at before this one, They knew my brother, who worked there as well.
Of course, we'd co-founded the business in the mid-90s, and so they had a really tough time trying to make a decision about what it meant that I was no longer associated with my brother.
Because my brother is funny, and he's charming, and he's intelligent, and he's well presented, and He's not obviously corrupt.
I mean, my mother is, you know, she's spraying off signals like water out of a fire hose.
But my brother is more subtle in terms of his corruption.
And so people had a tougher time.
And of course, to some degree, they felt that they were being forced to choose, is probably one way of putting it.
But the interesting thing is that I never forced them to choose.
I never once said to my friends, If you continue to like my brother, I'm going to have nothing to do with you.
So I certainly never forced the issue.
Because really, you know, you don't have to.
When it comes to morality, we fight like devils against the state and against religion using the best conceptual tools and the most passionate arguments we can find.
But when it comes to, is there a choice to be made between my brother and myself, or in a larger sense, or in the actual real sense, is there a choice to be made between right and wrong, between honesty, however flawed and struggling, and corruption, which is absolutely intended, insofar as there's lots of evidence that there is corruption,
But there's no attempt to change the behavior.
In fact, there's nothing but pompous justifications for the behavior.
So, I didn't need to force the issue because the issue is forced anyway.
I mean, the issue is forced by the nature of reality.
The issue is forced by the universality and absolutism of morality.
So, I didn't actually need to force people to choose, but they felt forced to choose.
That's the physics of ethics.
There's nothing you can do about that.
They actually did have to choose.
And one friend of mine, Who was a guy I met at Caribou, and a good friend for a number of years.
It was very interesting, because he had this... Oh, I can understand things with your...
Mother, but I can't you know, I don't I don't get it with your brother.
I don't sort of doesn't make sense Yeah, your brother's this.
Yeah, your brother's that but everyone has their flaws and you're being too rigid and you're being too Judgmental and you're not being at all flexible and you know, he brought the standard Canadian wishy-washy fog-bound relativistic arguments to bear And I thought that was quite interesting and painful, of course.
And so our friendship began to falter a little bit.
Not because he disagreed with me.
Good heavens!
If I didn't associate with anybody who ever disagreed with me, then I would be the only one on the island, I guess.
It's not that people disagree with me that ever bothers me.
It does become a significant problem when they disagree with me and they put forth reasons which are easily disprovable and then they continue to disagree with me without addressing the reasons.
That becomes a problem.
Somebody posted on the message board recently saying, well you don't want to become this guy or you don't want to have this This idea that everyone who disagrees with you is just out and out bad and wrong and evil and you won't join forces with them and... I mean, that's the topic for another podcast, but I just find that a very pretty specious argument.
I don't think that there's anything...
Valid about that at all, and just because people like Ayn Rand got pretty cultish doesn't mean that morality has changed based on her decisions, right?
The facts are the facts.
If people sanction the use of force knowingly, or they sanction the use of falsehoods knowingly, and they inflict those falsehoods or that violence particularly on children, terribly sorry, but we really aren't going to have anything in common from a moral standpoint.
And they are an enemy, not to me.
I mean, it's not to me.
It's to the truth.
It's to morality.
I mean, to be an enemy of me is sort of ridiculous.
I'm just some guy in Canada.
But you don't want to get on the bad side of reality, right?
That's, you know, and not because of hell, but because of Love, because of integrity, because of joy, because of happiness.
That's why you don't want to do these things.
And if you continue to do them, all you're doing is spreading your meme or your virus of irrationality and unhappiness to others.
So, let's not worry about being cultish.
I mean, that's silly.
Just saying anybody who's an absolutist is a cultist is itself a specious and corrupt argument.
Because then you just say, well, I really strongly believe in these things.
I have massive of sensual, logical and empirical truth and evidence for them.
But if you believe the opposite, that's fine with me, too.
I mean, that's just silly.
Why bother?
As I've said before, why bother getting involved?
In philosophy, why get involved in libertarianism or anarchism or objectivism or any of the isms which are anti-violence?
Why bother getting involved in these if you're just going to shrug your shoulders if people disagree or if people act against what is obviously true and if they don't accept your arguments and continue to point out their falsehoods, then What would it mean to have beliefs and then have people completely reject those beliefs without any evidence?
Would you just consider these people friends anyway?
I mean, it would just seem to be silly.
So my friend wasn't able to understand... I mean, of course he was absolutely able to understand.
He suffered greatly at the hands of my brother as well, for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here.
So he absolutely did understand what was going on and what the nature of my brother was.
He just didn't want to see it.
And, of course, I'm sure as you will know by now, my response to that would be, well, look at your family.
The reason that you can't see the corruption in my brother or deal with it, you can see it, but you can't deal with it is because it's the case in your family as well.
But this fine gentleman took the stand and so our relationship began to deteriorate.
There wasn't much that I could do about it.
I wasn't actively condemning him.
It's just that when you have values and people oppose them, your heart goes a particular way.
You can get all lofty and Christian-like and say, I forgive them, but it doesn't really matter.
The values, once defined by the mind and once worked into the system, become autonomous.
You can't will love, you can't will friendship, you can't will affection, you can't will any of these things.
All you do is work on your values and let your emotions have their free play.
The idea of willing the emotions is one of the most catastrophic ideas in all of psychology or philosophy.
So, I have my values.
He did what he did, and our relationship began to deteriorate.
We didn't fight or anything, we just saw each other less.
And then what happened was, shortly, I guess about a year or a year and two months or so after I got married, he called me up because he had a problem with a friend of his fiancée.
And this woman, he was MSN-ing back and forth with her, and this woman suddenly began to rip into him in a pretty personal way.
And he was pretty shocked.
And this woman was pretty bad-tempered.
I actually knew her very vaguely.
From social circles, and she was a pretty bad-tempered woman, and you could just see that this was going to be a complete disaster.
But her fiancé was the son of a military man, and so was doomed to emotional violence for the rest of his life, of course.
So this woman ripped into him pretty personally.
Now, not altogether unjustly, and I won't get into the circumstances or the details, but in my view, not unjustly, but that's the wonderful thing about sadists, that they know just enough truth to hurt, but not enough truth to help.
So they'll rip into you about things about yourself which are genuinely problematic, but they will do it in such a way that makes it more problematic.
They're like viruses that are looking for open sores to enter the bloodstream.
They look for where you're weakest and attack you there, so they know where there are genuine flaws or problems in your personality or your moral makeup or your choices, and they'll attack you based on that.
I know that from long experience.
So she was right, in a way, but of course her approach was purely sadistic and harmful.
So this gentleman, this friend of mine, asked me my opinion.
And I was quite fascinated by this.
Because if I'd have said, well, you've known her for a long time, you're good friends with her fiancé, so yeah, you know, just let it go, just be friends with her anyway.
If I'd have said that, he would have been appalled.
Because I knew, based on how he told me the story, I knew exactly what he was looking for.
So I tried this approach, and I said, well, I think that if somebody attacks you, or if somebody is very harmful to you emotionally, you can't really trust them again.
Unless they... I mean, if you sit down with them and you say, this really hurt me, and they say, oh, you know, heavens, I'm so sorry, I realize... Or even if they just say, I don't quite understand it, but let's talk about it some more, because the last thing I want to do is hurt you, and so on.
If they just say, oh, suck it up.
Oh, take it!
Oh, can't you take a joke?
Oh, you're so sensitive!
You know, if they start that sort of stuff, then you know for sure that they have attacked you, and that because they're not willing to admit that it was any kind of problematic behavior, you're absolutely guaranteed that it's going to happen again, so you're going to be jumpy, and you're going to be unable to be intimate with that person, and you're going to be unable to be vulnerable.
Or honest, or open, or relaxed around that person.
So, it's like these are autonomic defense systems.
You can't control them.
I mean, if somebody punches you in the face, the next time they make a sudden movement, you're gonna flinch.
And the same thing happens with your emotions.
You simply can't trust people who've been abusive and have not admitted to, sought help for, and dealt with that Even if it's just this once.
Even if it was just on MSN.
Even if it was 10 minutes.
Even if it's been a five-year relationship.
You can't undo the past.
You can't just make things not happen that happened.
And if people do that, and people change, right?
They don't stay the same way their whole life.
So if somebody does that and does not If you can't deal with it in an open and honest manner, then you can't trust them.
I mean, you can say that you do, you can say that you forgive them, you can watch all the Oprah and Dr. Phil that you want, you can burst into tears, you can tell them you love them.
It doesn't matter.
The fact is that human beings have an emotional immune system, just as we have an immune system against viruses and bacilli and all these other ickies that try and attack us.
We have the same thing emotionally.
That's why you can't will love.
That's why you can't will intimacy.
You can't will friendship.
These are autonomic effects of values in the emotional limbic system.
There's nothing you can do to will them.
You only focus on your values.
Like you can't will health.
You can only will the behaviors that lead to health, right?
You can't will love.
You can only will the behaviors that lead to love or being loved.
So I said to this gentleman, you know, it seems to me impossible that you would be able to stay.
And he was like, you know, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
So he ended up basically breaking with this woman or not seeing her anymore.
And of course, this was a consequence of not seeing his friend of many years.
And I think he went to their wedding when they eventually got married in this unholy union.
But I don't think he ever was particularly close to them again.
Now, I'm not a big one for telling people how it is, and I know that sounds kind of odd because I've got hours and hours of podcasts, but in my personal relationships, I am perfectly willing to discuss issues with people.
I am perfectly willing to bring up issues with people if there has been a history of open and honest communication in the past.
If every time I bring up an issue, they mock or scorn or degrade or whatever, then I simply stop doing it.
I mean, why would I bother?
You don't beat your head against a wall, what's the point?
So, with this gentleman, I sort of waited, and I was like, huh, I wonder if he's going to get the connection.
So I brought up my brother again the next time we were there, talked about some latest message that he'd gotten to me, or he'd sent me, or he'd left in my voicemail, telling me that he was getting back involved with the same people who had corrupted the company that we founded.
And I waited.
I was looking at him, thinking, okay, what are you going to say about this?
And he's going to say, well, I mean, of course, inevitably, and it's sad that it is so inevitable.
He just said, well, you know, I still don't understand your issue with him.
This is just Huey.
He's trying to provide for his family.
He's a little lost.
He's definitely not the most honest guy in the world, but nobody's perfect.
Blah, blah, blah.
And I was thinking, you son of a witch!
You know, you have this interaction with one woman on MSN for a few minutes and you completely accept and understand and appreciate and perform the action of cutting her out of your life.
My brother colludes with the destruction of seven years of my work and destroys a company that we founded and runs off with the guy who masterminded it to do business again.
And this guy who I was sitting across the table with on this issue said he actually experienced this directly because he was supposed to get stock options and bonuses which were lied to him by Hugh and then Hugh lied about what the status was and so on and he knew all of that so he had a direct negative impact not only
Had he ended up losing his job, not only had he ended up losing quite a sum of money based on fraudulent stock options, but he knew... He also, as a programmer, when my brother over-promised to clients, we were the ones in nights and weekends trying to make it all work, so he had this fantastic amount of overwork that occurred.
So he had direct evidence for years and years and years of corruption.
And he didn't get it.
And he has one ten-minute conversation with a woman on MSN and says, well, that's it.
You know, once I sort of explained to him the theory, he's like, well, that's it.
And what do you say to that?
What do you say to someone like that?
Well, you really can't say anything.
You really can't.
If you start to point out, look, for the last couple of years you have had this position with my brother where you say, I should not break off with him.
I should not fail.
I should not refrain from seeing him because he's not that bad.
Well, then, now you have this interaction with this woman and cut her out based on 10 minutes of remote scolding and, you know, bad, nasty, angry scolding.
That's enough for you to break it off, but for me to have experienced a lifetime of problems with my brother is not.
So what do you say about that?
Because it's so completely predictable what's going to come out.
You're going to have the awful spectacle of watching somebody gruesomely twist themselves into a moral contortionist kaleidoscope just to try and justify what is a blatant betrayal.
Not of me, but of values, and only as a consequence of me.
But a blatant moral hypocrisy would then be revealed.
Now, how do people generally deal with blatant and long-term moral hypocrisies?
Well, with aggression.
They deal with it by becoming hostile.
They deal with it by blaming... I mean, the conversation would be so... I mean, I've had these before.
They're so completely predictable that I didn't want to have it again, because that would destroy even the decent memories that I had of this friendship, which had some real positive aspects to it.
But the conversation would be, well, it's different.
Well, why is it different?
It just is.
He's family.
Right?
And so they'd bring the family club in, and once you dissolved that, then you'd say, well, the reason that you should never have broken with Hugh is because you were also complicit in this company's destruction, and therefore it would seem hypocritical of you to... I mean, you know exactly how this stuff is going to go, because when people are faced with their own corruption, There are only two people in the known universe who I've ever known directly who have dealt with, in a positive, powerful, constructive and amazing manner, with their own corruption.
And that's myself and my wife.
And that's why we have such a passionate, wonderful and incredible relationship.
Because we faced up to our own demons.
Yes, of course I was complicit in the destruction of my company.
There was evidence that there was an intense amount of corruption.
Not intense.
There was evidence that there was corruption going on.
And I saw it, and I did not process it, because I wanted to make a lot of money.
And I think I've talked about that briefly before, but I had to go through quite a bit of introspection and quite a bit of difficulty.
For 12 to 18 months I had to work on why didn't I see it?
What was the blindness?
Why did I want these material goods over my integrity?
Why did I not confront these executives who I had pretty strong indicators were doing something wrong?
And so I really had to look inward and deal with that, and it's really, really difficult.
And the end result is that I ended up having a break with my family and lost a lot of friends.
Once you become a really good person, not just like a pseudo-good person, not just like a I-forgive-people good person, not like a Christian, Not like somebody who's able to quote Ayn Rand and Leonard Picoff and Murray Rothbard and say, look, that makes me a good person, I'm fighting for the truth.
But once you really absorb it and understand it, then You are going to face a lot of challenges, because you're going to have so many of these conversations, it's going to make your head spin, where you do point out people's moral hypocrisies, and they'll just ditch you.
They will just ditch you.
You think you have these close relationships with people.
You think you have these close relationships with your family, and with your friends, and with your extended family, but I'm telling you, the moment that you really understand the ethics of life, and not my ethics, and not your ethics, but the simple facts of ethics in life, Then you will begin to have conversations with people which will run along the lines I've outlined above.
You will get bafflement, curiosity, anger, rage, contempt, threats, withdrawals.
You will get everything that you can conceivably imagine that is horrible in a human personality Thrown right in your face and you will absolutely realize that all of your relationships hang by a thread and you think it's a mighty oak and it's a mere thread and that thread is we don't talk about ethics.
That thread is we do not talk about morality.
We do not talk about hypocrisy.
We do not talk about violence.
We don't talk about God.
We do not talk about the facts of life.
We do not talk about corruption.
We do not talk about integrity.
We don't talk about war in any real sense.
We don't talk about taxes.
We don't talk about social coercion.
We don't talk about any of that stuff.
What we do talk about is I had crumpets for lunch today, and did you know that so-and-so is doing such-and-such, and here's an update on so-and-so, and this guy's having trouble in his marriage, and did you see that on the news, or I read this in the newspaper, or anything other than anything real.
Anything other than anything true.
Anything other than anything that matters.
And you say, well, maybe people don't want to talk about things.
Sorry, maybe people don't know that they matter.
Well, of course they know that it matters.
Of course they know that these topics like morality and truth and philosophy and integrity and honesty and pacifism and anarchism and the state, of course they know these topics matter.
And the reason that you know that these topics matter is their complete absence from family conversations.
Or if they are present, then they're present in these grindingly repetitive conversations where nobody's position ever changes, nobody ever deals with the basics, nobody ever looks at those things in their own life.
So you get like the Republican father and the Democrat son, and they're just grindingly predictable defensive standpoints that have nothing to do with any kind of intellectual integrity or honesty or exploration.
And maybe you say, well, these people aren't capable of that.
Well, how do you know?
Because they simply don't allow the conversations to occur.
So they know that they're capable of it.
I mean, it's like me, someone saying to me, you know, you should come play tennis.
And my whole life I say, no, I don't want to come and play tennis.
I think tennis is ridiculous.
Tennis is for idiots.
And then you might say, well, maybe he doesn't think he has the capacity to play tennis.
But how would I know?
Because I just simply don't allow it.
You don't even start.
You don't even get started with this stuff.
And if you start to talk about your parents, or you start to talk with your friends, or your extended family, about anything that matters, about anything that's true, and I don't mean sort of, I think we should get out of the war in Iraq, because of X, Y, and Z, that's not what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is things like, do you think that the government should even have the right to declare war?
Do you think that there should be such a thing as a government?
How on earth can you justify one human being having power over another human being from a coercive standpoint?
What would that mean?
You're saying one human being has one properties and another human being has another properties?
Isn't that kind of arbitrary?
You can do it in a very nice way, in a way that's engaging and enjoyable, as I hope that I achieve To some degree, but the moment that you really try and start to have these conversations with people, you will realize just how tenuous your supposed relationships are and how much they're dependent on everybody shutting up and saying nothing about anything.
This is, I think, particularly true with parents.
I had a gentleman who sent me a message saying that his parents, you know, he said, my parents aren't bad.
But, you know, we don't talk about anything.
It's like, how was your day?
Fine.
It's raining today.
Boy, that couch needs a good dusting.
Oh, wow, you know, do you think we should repaint the living room?
Blah, blah, blah.
And it's not like I never have these conversations, of course, but you'd think that a family, which is supposed to be based on intimacy and supposed to be based on togetherness and connection and warmth and all of these good things, That a family might just be able to see their way clear to having a conversation about right and wrong from time to time, you know, given that the parents pretty much told the kid about right and wrong to begin with, right?
And this is the great danger of parenting.
This is why parents can never respond to The questions of morality, because parents put themselves forward when children are young as experts on morality.
You should do this, you should do that, because, because, because.
And then, of course, when the children get older, and this is the problem with the teenage years, that you start to ask your parents about morality.
And what do you get in return?
You get shut down in the conversation.
Now that is going to lead you to be just a tad suspicious about your parents' morality.
And then it should make you a tad suspicious about the fact that they were absolutists and inflicted morality upon you while having no clue about what they were doing.
And all that meant is that they were either just trying to get you to conform, but they didn't tell you that.
They told you don't conform.
You know, if everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?
So they told you don't conform, but at the same time they themselves were simply getting you to conform, or even worse, they were simply exercising power over you because they could, and they were calling it morality.
Now that's quite a different matter.
And this brings us to the final question, and I know we didn't get to the question that I talked about last night, but that's all right.
I think that this is important to establish beforehand.
This gets us to the final question around your relationship with your parents, which is, yeah, do you want to see them or don't you?
Well, what I would suggest, and I think that it's only logical and consistent to suggest it, is that you simply look at your parents as you would look at anybody else in a social situation.
There's no moral absolute which says you have to see your parents, the fact that they took care of you, is not morally relevant.
I mean, they chose to have you, and of course, if I kidnap you and take care of you, then I've given you food and shelter, but so what?
You were in a powerless position, and also, even if it were the case that it was a moral benefit to have been taken care of, then all it says is that your allegiance, your morality, your love, your affection, your time, your energy, your resources, your loyalties, you know, can be bought.
So, the problem with saying that, well, my parents took care of me, therefore I should take care of them, or whatever, is simply saying that your morality is viable, right?
Somebody takes care of you, then you will take care of them back, and there's no independent evaluation of that situation.
You're simply paid for.
I mean, that's probably... bribery is probably not what we would call the best approach to making moral decisions.
But what helped me in my decision was to simply say, okay, well, if I didn't know these people at all, I didn't know my mother or my brother or my father or extended family, if I didn't know them at all, and I just got sat next to them at a dinner party, would I become bosom buddies with them?
Would I be great friends with them?
So, you know, just imagine you're sitting, you don't know your parents at all, you're some wild wolf child orphan or something, And you're sitting down at a dinner party, and lo and behold, your mother and father, or whoever you're thinking about in question, they sit down opposite from you, and you might have a pleasant chat, and it might be this or that, but would you become bosom buddies with them?
Would they be, you know, people that you would really get passionate about getting to know and exploring ideas with and learning?
And all that with?
And doing fun things together with?
Well, if yes, then fantastic!
You've won the lottery, you have a great family, and of course it would be crazy to say that you should do anything other than love them to death and spend all your time with them.
But if, on the other hand, like everybody, pretty much, you say to yourself, well, you know, they're nice enough people, I guess, but they don't really understand that much about me, they don't really like this ideas game that I have going on, they don't want to talk about anything that I find important, You know, they're okay people.
They're kind of dull.
But I'd say, well, what are you doing there?
So, I mean, it's an interesting question.
Feel free to let me know what you think.
But integrity is not always the easiest thing in the world.
And parents definitely want you to hang out because then it's an implicit forgiveness for everything that they did in the past.
But even if all that you have is, you're just kind of bored, or you just don't find them particularly interesting or stimulating, then be honest about that and act with integrity, which is to say, you know, okay, maybe I'll see them once a year for old time's sake, the same way you might some old friend who's a socialist, but, you know, getting heavily involved and seeing them every week, I mean, that just seems kind of silly.
But of course, on the other side, you then can't take a lot of resources from them anymore, right?
You know, pay for university or whatever.
So, we'll get to the other aforementioned promise topic of why you don't really believe that your parents were only just nice people.
We'll get to that this afternoon.
I'm sorry for the detour, but I do think it's important to talk about this before I talk about that.
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