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Feb. 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:30
111 But *my* parents were really nice! (Part 3)
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It is 10 past 6 on the 22nd of February 2006, and just before I forget, if you are subscribing to this podcast through a website called mississaugatherapy.com, which as I'm sure as you can imagine is a little bit more to do with Christina's private practice than it is to do with my podcasting, I do have a new feed, which I would really appreciate it if you could update, because at some point I'm going to stop updating the Mississauga Therapy one.
And the new feed is available through the new website for this podcast.
It's called freedomainradio.com.
And it's freedomain__radio__podcast.xml.
But if you want to not have to remember that, but can actually go to the website to get it listed, no problem.
Just go to freedomainradio.com.
And if you could update your feed, that would be fantastic.
I've also got a bunch of Links up there under the left-hand banner called Get the Feed, which will allow you to access it online from anywhere, just in case you're a little bit short of vaguely fruity accents with vaguely squeaky moral outrage from time to time.
So I hope that you could get around to doing that so that I can stop having to update two different websites and two different podcasts.
That would be excellent.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I just wanted to, well, a short bit on you people with your atoms.
I talk about atoms being a metaphor and it's amazing to me what comes back from people in terms of their level of interest or their level of outrage.
Not outrage exactly, but their level of emotional energy.
So, yeah, I talk about the corruption of family and the destruction of war and, you know, people are pretty quiet.
I make one statement about atoms and, man, people are all over me!
Like white on rice.
And so I've had some corrections.
I'll maybe go into them in more detail during Emails of the Week, but apparently there are electron microscopes out there of such power, clarity, depth, and brilliance That they can look at atoms from just about every angle and also see it through time and also see the electrons and the sub-electrons and the sub-sub-electrons and all of that sort of stuff.
So, apparently atoms can be seen.
I've only had a look at one paper that somebody sent me where they talk about Adam showing up as a blip in a graph, which to me is not quite the same.
But I had quite a spirited discussion with a fine, fine thinker who was going at me, and I think quite rightly so, and intelligently so, about the difference between waveforms and atoms.
Very interesting discussion, which you can find reproduced on the boards at freedomainradio.com forward slash board.
That's not B-O-R-E-D.
Although perhaps it should be, but B-O-A-R-D.
So, have a look there and give us your thoughts.
We're always eager, I'm always eager to have a discussion with people, so please drop by the discussion boards and let us know what you think.
So, I'm absolutely, positively, lutely, lutely, lutely going to get to the topic at hand.
I really feel focused today.
I really feel that it is within my grasp.
Somehow to get to the topic that I want to get to today.
I really feel like it.
Sometimes getting to the topic feels like swimming up a waterfall, but I really feel well lubricated mentally.
I'm limber, I'm gonna stick the landing, and the Russian judge even is going to give me a 9.9.
So, the topic is why you don't believe that your parents did the best they could.
Don't you just love it when I tell you what you do and don't believe?
Doesn't that give you all the warm tinglys inside that you can imagine?
It's like a massive hive of caterpillars of joy just crawling up and down your spine, isn't it?
So, I apologize in advance.
This is not going to be hectoring, but it's going to be something similarly rhymey, which is lecturing.
And I am going to probably rub you the wrong way by telling you what you think and believe and telling you what your experience is.
So, I apologize in advance if you'd like to think of this as a theory, if that would help you swallow it, or if you'd like to think that I'm just describing myself.
By all means, feel free to do so.
But of course, remember, I can't make you think anything.
If I could... Ah, no, I wouldn't even want that power anyway.
What kind of libertarian would I be if I wanted to make other people think things?
Ah, the worst kind of all.
A Republican.
Anyway, so... Why do you not believe that your parents did the best they could?
Well, when you were but a wee tot, somewhere in between being a gleam in your daddy's eye and somebody whose voice went down the manly register and found himself itchy all the time, when you were a toddler, or I guess from a baby to a toddler, Your mind had needs just as your body had needs.
Now, human beings are controllable through their desire to survive.
Human beings are only controllable because we want to live.
If you don't want to live, you tend to be sort of not easy to control.
And I don't count suicide bombers in this because they want eternal life, which is quite a bit different from not wanting to live.
So your mind has certain requirements when you're a toddler.
And those requirements are organic.
You can't really do anything about them.
So, for instance, we all have the general requirement to be loved rather than hated, to be cuddled rather than struck, to be fed rather than starved, to be greeted positively rather than snarled at, to be spoken softly to rather than screamed at.
We all have those requirements or desires.
It's sort of organic to our nature.
There's not much we can do about it.
It's not that we can't survive if we don't get them, but generally most people would prefer, as children as we would prefer as adults, to be treated with gently, kindly, respectfully, morally, with curiosity, with respect, with empathy, with sympathy, with love, and all that good stuff.
And, when you are a child, you cannot compare the behavior of your own parents to anything else other than your own needs and requirements.
When you are a very young child, and I need to sort of, let me take you on a journey, we're going back, back, back in time, and I want to talk about when you are very young, You don't have a sociological overview or a psychological overview of parenting.
You don't have the capacity to understand your own parents' parenting styles and behaviors in the context of larger cultural mores, or wider groupthink, or the parenting that they themselves received when they were children.
You simply don't have that perspective.
And you know what they say, first impressions count for quite a lot.
So, you don't have the capacity when you first experience your parents' parenting to judge it by any other standard or context other than your own innate needs and desires as a human being.
So if, for instance, when you start to go through what are commonly called by evil people the terrible twos, which is the time which I've talked about once before, wherein you begin to assert your own willpower and you begin to realize that you're a separate human being from your parents, and you begin the great and lengthy art of infantile manipulation, which for most people continues until their last dying breath.
So you have your own opinion to begin to say no to everything.
You begin to realize that you're not just a fleshy extrusion of your parents' bodies and minds, but you actually have your own independent thoughts and feelings, which you will probably get to keep until you go to public school and they get scrubbed out of you in the mincemeat paste that they make of individuality in public school systems.
And private school systems, too.
So once you get into the twos, you begin to understand that you have your own opinions and your own thoughts and your own ideas and you don't want to do certain things and you do want to do other things and so on.
Well, of course, most parents react in a similar manner to a prison guard who's had way too much cappuccino, who spies a prisoner heading for the wall, and who has at his hand a big button saying, release the tigers.
Parents view this as a very difficult and annoying phase.
It's considered kind of cute when children say no, but if they continue to say no, then parents just get at first amused, and then irritated, and then angry, and then raging, and then destructive.
I mean, generally, right?
Because they have no capacity to negotiate things with others, because they've never been taught it, and lots of reasons we can go into another time.
But most parents will try, to one degree or another, to thwart, or undermine, or reject, or brutalize the toddler's growing independence for their own needs, wants, and desires.
They'll look at it as kind of cute.
Oh, isn't that cute?
He wants us to deal with him differently.
Well, that's too bad.
We're the parents, and so there.
And of course it's important to remember just how thwarted and angry most people do feel in their lives.
I mean, if you go into message boards, and I don't think it's just message boards that have this, and certainly not the Free Domain Radio message boards, which are a land of milk and honey populated by intensely benevolent people who will love you to death and provide everything for you that your parents and public school education did not.
It's wonderful.
Come on over.
Join the cult!
That most people are pretty thwarted and angry.
They feel unfulfilled in their jobs and in their personal lives and they feel like they could have amounted to more, that I could have been a contender line from On the Waterfront, great film, get a chance to see it.
That's a pretty famous line because most people feel that they have vastly underachieved relative to their potential and they're right.
It's not necessarily their fault alone, because we have a pretty sick culture, but they're pretty right insofar as what we can actually achieve versus what we're allowed to achieve and what we're encouraged to achieve is light years apart.
So when they see the sort of flourishing energy of a young child and the willpower, the amazing willpower that toddlers have, it's just astounding, the willpower that toddlers have.
Well, you know, for most people this is something to be broken.
And I don't mean violently or anything like that, at least not for the most part, but it is definitely something to be punished and to be undermined and to be laughed at and to be exasperated about.
Mommy's just a little tired right now, or, you know, that kind of stuff.
And this can happen to perfectly, sort of, quote, nice parents and so on, but from the perspective of the toddler, from the perspective of the toddler, They don't have the capacity to say, well, you know, mom's probably a little thwarted in her life.
Mom has never really learned how to negotiate with others.
Mom doesn't really view me as a separate being with rights and a moral nature, and she still views me as kind of like An extrusion of her own personality and boy you know she may be kinda coming down hard on me for reasons that don't really make any sense to me right now but boy she's doing a heck of a lot better than her parents did because her parents blah blah blah blah blah.
Now we can later on in life we may understand these things from an intellectual standpoint but when we're children these perspectives don't even exist And it would be impossible to imagine that they would exist, because you're asking for a child to have an in-depth and complex understanding and relationship to the psychology, culture, social norms, individual parental history.
I mean, it's just crazy to imagine that this would be the case, that a child could handle this kind of thought model or thought process.
I mean, it's hard enough to do it objectively as an adult, let alone when you're a toddler.
So when I say that you don't believe these things, what I'm saying is that your parents did the best they could, and they were doing what everyone else was doing, and they were nice people, and they had their own problems with their parents, and they did better than those parents did, and so on.
Well, I gotta tell you, you know, the first five years of your impressions, I mean, this is really generous.
In fact, you know, it's far too generous.
Let's just say that this begins happening for you around the age of two.
I mean, it may be earlier, it may be slightly later, but it probably would be around two or, you know, so 14 to 24 months that you begin to run into this kind of problem with your parents.
Well, you don't have any of that context whatsoever.
All you know is that you're trying to communicate something with your parents, and there are problems with it.
And I simply know that there are problems with these sorts of things, because the vast majority of people grow up to be not very mentally healthy.
And it's not just the government's fault, and it's not just public school education's fault, and it's not just the fault of the Adams we can't see, or can see.
It's the fault of parents.
And as children, we experience this directly.
We experience this directly.
And we don't have any control over the opinions that we form about it, because we don't have any control as a biological species over what is good for us and what is bad for us.
That's a very important thing to understand.
I can think that a diet of candy bars and cookies and chocolate and chips is the best way for me to stay healthy, And I can fervently write that out a hundred times a day, but it really doesn't matter, because my body, once I put it into my body, my body is going to do what bodies do with those things, which is, you know, in my case, put it in my sort of mid-lower back as a nice pillowy chunk of back fat.
Maybe more than you need to know.
Actually, it's not too bad anymore, because I've been working out pretty hard.
We really don't have any choice about what is good for us and what is bad for us.
Well, we can say that we do, but it doesn't really matter.
So, I love Mexican food.
It makes me a little gassy.
So, I can say, well, Mexican food doesn't make me gassy.
It doesn't matter.
I put it in my body and I'm like the Taco Bell hot air balloon.
So, it's the same thing with our minds.
We don't have any control over whether it's better for us To be, you know, thwarted and controlled or kindly mocked or ignored or viewed as a sort of hyper special pet or whatever.
We don't have any choice over that.
We can only experience it relative to the natures to the sort of structure and requirements of our minds and our souls.
That's all we can do.
We can't change what we need as human beings.
And so, if your parents only fed you the four C's, right?
Cookies, chips, chocolate and cake, then you would grow up pretty anemic, diabetic, overweight.
And you would experience that diet, which I'm sure would become pretty horrible pretty quickly.
You would experience that diet as a negative, horrible thing that made you tired and ill and whatever all the time.
You would experience that not in relationship to, well, my mother's mother had an eating disorder and she was doing blah blah blah and others.
You simply experience it when we're talking two-year-olds.
You're simply experiencing it in relation not to other social norms or to any wider psychological, cultural or social knowledge, but simply in relationship to your own requirements as a human being.
And that's a pretty long phase.
To understand the psychological motivations of one's own parents It's a long and complicated process.
And I don't know about you, I mean maybe you did a whole lot better than I did, but I don't think I really got there until I was 33 or 34 maybe even.
And it was a long time, and that was, I mean I worked hard at it.
And I've read an enormous amount, and I talked about it an enormous amount, and I wrote about it an enormous amount, and it still took me, heavens, I mean, at the very best estimate, the kindest estimate, it took me a decade.
It took me ten long years.
Even if we say that I only started when I was 24, which, I mean, I would say that it probably was closer to 15 years.
And I'm not too dumb a bunny.
I mean, I gave a really good shot at it.
I have a very moral nature, just sort of in my heart of hearts.
And I'm pretty logical, or at least I try to be.
And I have pretty good criteria for determining truth and falsehood, and I didn't just accept what everybody else said.
I really tried to figure it out for myself.
And it took me 10 to 15 years.
And!
And!
Oh, sorry, let me... The other important thing is that I had pretty solid and obvious evidence.
As a number of people have pointed out and said, you know, boy, you had a... Well, your childhood... Well, my childhood was... Oh, but your childhood and so on.
So I had a pretty smart guy, I guess.
I had 10 to 15 years of work with pretty obvious evidence of parental corruption.
And then I got it.
I got it.
I got it.
I got it, got it, got it.
So, what I'm saying is that, and I know that you can really just sort of say in your mind later on in life, well, they did the best they could, and boy, you should have seen the other Greek families, or the other Croatian families, or the other Martian families.
Boy, my parents did a lot better than their parents did.
There was nothing but progress.
Boy, we evolved like you wouldn't believe.
It was like a rocket, I'm telling you.
We went up, up, up.
You may say this to yourself later in life, but, you know, riddle me this, Batman.
I mean, you had, at the very least, 15 years of first impressions wherein you did not have any real access to the wider perspectives that you kind of sort of have access to later in life.
So from the age of 2, and I'm being generous here, I'm being generous, I'm trying not to stack the case in my favor.
from the age of two to the age of 17 is 15 years.
Now, maybe in your mid to late teens, you're starting to get a sense of being able to look at your parents in a more objective light.
But That's pretty early.
That's pretty early.
I mean, I knew that I didn't like my mother in my teens, but that didn't mean that I understood the moral nature of her as a parent.
For another 20 years!
And just sort of looking at the world, I don't get the feeling that I'm a real slug in this area.
Looking at the world and people's relationships to their families and to the state and to God and so on, I don't think that I missed the bus.
I don't think that everyone else was like, oh yeah, we solved that years ago.
Oh, we have a perfectly rational understanding of our parents and our families.
And we've fully processed all of the emotional stuff that happened as children.
Oh, because the culture is so great and there's no such thing as war and the state is We've just about vanished and there's no, you know, corruption.
I mean, I don't really think that I missed the boat on this.
I think that I might have, in fact, have been a bit of an icebreaker in terms of getting this knowledge from the frozen wastelands of social and familial repression.
So you got 15 years.
15 years.
And not just 15 years like you were 40 to 55.
We're talking 15 formative years that you can maybe remember.
Plus two that you probably can't.
Like the first two years of your life.
It's a long time.
It's 17 years in total of first impressions with no real access to outside perspectives.
And formative years as well.
And so when people say to me, Yeah, my parents weren't great, but they did the best they could.
I know they don't believe it.
I know for a simple, absolute, honest, basic, honest-to-goodness fact, they just don't believe it.
Because you can't erase 17 years of first impressions upon a formative mind by reciting the mantric tantric formula, they did the best they could.
You can't erase those things.
You can't erase 17 years of first impressions.
When the power disparity is so mind-bogglingly enormous, it will never be reproduced in your life ever again.
You can be a paraplegic on your deathbed.
You have more rights and independence and capacity for affecting your own life than a child.
So, if you have a problem with your parents, Instead of talking it out of your emotional system or trying to just wish it away with these magic, nonsensical, pseudo-Buddhist, pseudo-Christian, I forgive them, they did the best they could, other people had it worse.
What you need to do is be honest with yourself and say, what was it like as a child to experience their behavior for the very first time For 17 years!
At a minimum.
That's what you need.
That's the perspective that's honest.
That's the perspective that's real.
And let's just say the only thing wrong with your parents was that they were a little pedantic, kind of boring, never really had any real opinions, blah blah blah.
Well, It's important to understand that if you're listening to these podcasts, I assume you've got some serious juice between your ears, because these aren't always the easiest things to follow, and not just because I speak quickly and have one of those European hairstyling moose accents.
It's tough stuff to follow, and it's work.
I know.
I hope it's work, because it's work for me, let me tell you that.
I hope I'm not the only person working here.
Otherwise, I'm going to feel a little bit alone in this.
So it's hard stuff.
And you've got to get back to your first impressions for, I mean, at least do 10 years, at least do 2 to 12, even if you don't want to give me 15 or 17 or 20 or 30 years.
I mean, it was 20 years for me.
Just to figure it out from the time I first knew that my mom was a weird, crazy, evil woman.
20 years to really absorb all those lessons because there's nothing out in society that helps us.
There are no movies or books that clarifies anything for us in terms of moral reality.
There's no one out there shouldering us and supporting us through these horrible moral choices that are frowned upon by just about everybody in society and which we're going to get cast out for should we have the temerity.
To ditch our family of origin and strike out for healthier climes.
And it's one of the reasons I want to do these podcasts.
It's basically one of the reasons for the younger people out there who are facing these kinds of problems to at least know that on the other side is this wonderful, wonderful life and it's well worth doing.
But, even if you only give me 10 years.
So maybe I'm an idiot, right?
Maybe it was for, you know, 32 years for me, but maybe it was only 10 years for you because, you know, you're just so much smarter.
Fantastic.
You know, more power to you.
Wish I'd been there.
Good for you.
So, just give me 10 years.
Give me 10 years of first impressions.
I mean, that's insane.
It's insane to say that you can go back and erase those ten years of first impressions with some magic formula called, they did the best they could, voopa voopa, I forgive you.
It's just not going to happen.
You're wishing away your entire childhood experiences, which is going to cost you enormously in your life.
You can't just wish away your entire vulnerability and emotional life as a child and think that you're going to have this great, emotionally rich, wonderful, loving, passionate, exciting adult life.
You're not!
If you strike out or erase the first 20 years of your experience for the sake of some mantra that gets you to avoid emotional and social discomfort, you're simply erasing yourself.
You can't ditch 20 years of first impressions and expect to have a rich emotional life.
I don't want to get into the technicalities of that, but it certainly is a fact that repression does not lead to a rich emotional life.
Ignoring one's own experiences, ignoring all of the incredible emotional richness that is involved in being a child, and your first impressions, you know, painful, bad, good, indifference, all of the wonder and richness that comes with our first impressions of the world, and terror and horror sometimes.
You can't just erase that and say, OK, well, pretend the first 20 years never happened, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to ditch all of my emotional apparatus, all of my first impressions, everything that happened to me as a child, I'm going to ditch all of that, and what I'm going to do is replace that incredibly rich ecosystem, that jungle of passion and excitement and fear and love and trust and anger.
I'm going to get rid of all of that wonderful, complex, difficult, challenging, exciting ecosystem.
But, in return, what I'm going to replace all of that with is a couple of scraps of fortune cookies called, I forgive you and they did the best they could.
I can tell you that if you did that, you're probably going to be a lot more interested in whether atoms exist than whether your parents are good or evil.
And that's one of the main reasons why the freedom movement, in my humble opinion, is not getting anywhere.
Because we're not looking at ourselves.
We're not looking at the family.
We were all about truth and honesty as a movement.
This is what we say that we value.
And we are very hostile towards things like war and the state and abuses of authority.
But we won't look at what we've actually directly experienced in our own lives.
We'll talk about the inequalities of the tax code.
But we won't talk about what we experienced as children.
And let's say your parents are fantastic.
I mean, I'm not trying to come between everybody and their family and say that you must do what I must do and you must ditch your family of origin.
Let's say your family was fantastic.
Then the only problem that you have is with your teachers and with anybody, probably, that you were employed by as a teenager.
Or maybe that was your extended family or maybe you were put in some language or evening class school.
Where there was bullies there, or maybe they were just bullies in the schoolyard.
I mean, I don't know what it was.
Maybe it wasn't your parents.
But don't tell me for one split second, and I'm not saying that you are, but please don't email me and tell me, well, you know, I never experienced any abuses of authority when I was a child, because my God, even in a perfect world, you'd run into some.
And this is about as far from a perfect world as you can get without literally being in hell.
So we really do need to go back and understand our first impressions of the world because that's the truth and honesty and, in fact, it is the genesis of our philosophy.
It is the root of the truth that we are seeking to find.
What you don't want to do with your emotional apparatus is something called projection.
This is sort of a dull technical term for, you know, if I was abused by my father, if my father was a bully, And I don't want to process that emotionally, because I'm intellectualized, I'm big on intellectualizing emotions.
Then what I can do, and this is usually an unconscious situation, is I'm going to project all of my anger and mistrust of my father into this abstract political entity called the state.
And I'm going to get really emotional about these arguments, and I'm going to feel shattered when people disagree with me, and I'm going to get really passionately over-involved and wrapped up in abstract political discussions because, and I don't want to oversimplify this whole process because it's quite technical, But basically because I'm talking about my father.
I'm talking about my father, but I'm calling him the state.
And I'm not trying to say that everybody who has political theories is working out family issues, because there's me.
Because it's not the case for everyone, maybe.
I mean, most of the people that I've known, definitely that is the case.
But you don't want to misdirect the emotional energy that you had as a child, your initial experiences of authority, your initial experiences of individuality, your initial experiences of disagreeing with people.
Because you don't want to project your own experiences as a child of not being listened to, maybe, or of not being allowed to have your own opinion, or of being subjected to arbitrary authority, whether that's of the nice kind of socialism with a human face kind, or the more brutal, dictatorial, Stalinist kind.
If you weren't allowed to develop your own opinions and thoughts, and even if you were in your family, you sure as hell weren't allowed to in public school, my god, or private school probably for that matter, So we've all gone through this experience of having any kind of individuality in a public or social or interactive scenario, just being scrubbed and opposed and violently thrown down and or mocked or, you know, we're never allowed to develop our own thoughts.
I mean, you're just not allowed to.
Because it threatens the fantasies that society currently rests on, the exploitive fantasies.
So you're not allowed to have all of those, and so you really want to deal with that emotionally and deal with the pain of all of that before you start mucking about with big intellectual topics like the state.
Not because you can't.
I mean, there are lots of brilliant people out there, but you're just not going to have You're not going to be right.
You're not going to be accurate.
You have to make sure that you're not projecting your emotions.
That you're not trying to deal or trying to avoid dealing with your family by getting angry at the government.
Or trying to avoid dealing with brutal or boring or pedantic or contemptuous or scornful teachers by complaining about God.
Because it's a lot safer, right?
The state isn't going to argue back.
The God isn't going to argue back.
So it's one thing that you can do that's pretty safe, emotionally, is to get angry at the God and get angry at the state.
And I'm not saying you shouldn't be, but what I am saying is that that's all fine and dandy if you've gone through the rather intense and difficult discipline of dealing with your own emotions and your own history first.
So that you know that you're talking about what you're talking about when you're talking about the state.
So that you're not trying to work out or to avoid, in fact, working out emotional issues that you experienced or emotional problems or challenges you experienced as a child.
You don't want to be trying to work those out in the freedom movement.
And I know you've got them.
Because we all do.
So I hope that's helpful.
I hope that's not too confusing.
And I hope that's not too irritating, of course.
I know it's always irritating, generally.
Well, generally it's irritating.
When somebody says to you, I know what you know, I know what you experienced, and I know what you feel better than you do yourself.
And I'm not saying that at all, because I don't know what you experienced, but I do know that the culture is very unwell, that the schools are run by the government, that our parents were brought up in schools that were run by the government.
I know that in my family the war had an enormous and magnificently horrifying effect on the psychological makeup of people on both sides of my family.
So we're all enormously corrupted and undermined by state power, even if you don't want to talk about your parents in particular.
We know that that's the case and it's going to lead you back to your parents anyway because you simply can't be raised by the state As we all are, and not end up with corruptions in power and problems with the exercise of power.
And since the greatest power disparity is between a parent and a child, that's going to come out in their parenting.
And you don't know any of that history when you're a child.
All you know is that you're not getting what you want, and you're thwarted, and you're unhappy.
And that is a very important feeling to explore, to understand, to rectify, to experience, not to repress, not to undermine it, not to sort of speak it away with the magic words of Buddhist abstractions of, they did the best they could and I forgive them because it's a noble thing to do.
But to genuinely experience those feelings so that you can deal with your family and then once you have dealt with your family and you have dealt with your experiences of your family, and I hope it works out well, but I'm guessing that it won't,
Then you can deal with issues of the state and of philosophy and of economics and of epistemology and metaphysics and ethics without being clouded in your judgment and mislaid in your emotions because you are projecting trauma that you experienced in the past on abstract topics where it is inappropriate to place those feelings.
So, that's sort of my suggestion.
The self-knowledge is everything, right?
As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
If you do not have self-knowledge, you will not be effective in this movement.
You will not bring about freedom.
And we need everybody to be as capable as they possibly can to bring about freedom.
Because it's so freaking hard to do!
So, anyway, I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I will talk to you probably tomorrow.
Oh, no podcasting Friday.
I'm going to go to Washington for a meeting.
Thanks, Bill.
Thanks again.
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