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Feb. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:47
112 But *my* parents were really nice! (Part 4)

The null hypothesis for the declaration of love

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Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 8.30 on Thursday, the 23rd of February, 2006, and I'm going for a four-putter, babies!
I'm going for a four.
I wanted to finish off the idea of your parents.
Your parents were nice, so what do you do?
And I'm going to finish it off.
I wasn't going to, but I'm being backed into a corner by an email or two wherein people have said, That the one problem that they have is that they more or less follow what I've been saying and more or less agree with it.
I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I'm fairly sure this would not be an issue if they didn't.
So they say, well, but the problem is I feel such a desperate pity for my parents.
I feel that they're so wretched.
I mean, wretched probably is the wrong word.
It's not the word they use.
Pity.
For the parents, pity was the word that came up a couple of times.
And that is obviously a very difficult situation to be in.
Pity is one of the most crippling and debilitating of emotions.
And it is one of the emotions that it is very hard to resist.
And, of course, without going much into my own history, which I'm sure has become fairly evident to most people by now, it's pretty easy for me to... it would be pretty easy for me to feel pity for my mother as well, of course, because she... you know, her fangs... age has defanged her, right?
I mean, she has...
no longer any real capacity to harm I would say the last time that I saw her really blow up oh gosh probably eight years ago I was at my brother's and I was there with his wife and I think my then girlfriend was there This is all too wonderful for words.
And what happened was... I don't think... Oh, no, no.
She wasn't there.
She wasn't there.
We'd already broken up by this point.
Anyway, so it's just myself, my brother, and my sister-in-law.
And what happened was... My mother, as I've mentioned before, is a real hypochondriac and has pursued these highly destructive and publicly subsidized lawsuits against doctors who I have no idea whether they're good or bad, guilty or innocent.
But I do have some indication that at least one of them was pretty corrupt based on some dealings that I had with him, but she was pursuing this lawsuit and it would see it seemed that and this this occurred for I don't know many many years like Seven or eight or nine years it occurred that or what happened was every time we got together All we would hear about is these unbelievably
Both horrible, invasive, and boring details about her court case.
I've learned this.
I've discovered that.
Can you believe this?
Can you believe that?
If she'd had access to the internet, I can't imagine what would have happened.
As it was, her apartment was a real mess of papers, and post-it notes, and highlighters, and highlighted text.
I mean, it was a real OCD nest.
And I just, I mean, I was already feeling the need to reconstruct the relationship or to, you know, face its ending.
And this was occurring in a number of relationships in my life at this time, but particularly in my primary relationships.
It has been about, I guess, eight years since I've seen my mother, and about almost six years since I've seen my brother, with any, I mean, more than just once a year, with no regular contact.
So, it's, you know, I guess it's been a while, which has been wonderful.
And, so I said to my mother, I said, you know, and I'd known, I'd learned enough, even from talking about this in public, that she would simply go completely
Ballistic if I brought up any skepticism towards her hypochondria, so I did at least say I said something like this I said mom Every time we get together It seems like and you know I fully respect that you have these difficulties with your doctors And you're doing everything in your power to deal with them, but it seems like I
That every time we get together what happens is that we talk about this court case and what's going on with your lawyers and what's going on with the doctors.
And what you've learned about your illnesses.
And we talk about that to the exclusion of everything else.
We don't get to talk about anything else.
And that's something that I'm not too happy with.
I don't think it's a satisfying relationship for me.
I want sort of more conversations about ourselves, about what's happened with you, about what's happening with me, rather than all of our conversations being an update on the legal case.
And I'm not saying I never want to hear about the legal case.
Of course, I know it's important to you, but it's got to be about more than just the law case, because otherwise I sort of feel like I'm sort of another lawyer or something.
Anyway, I mean, I sort of got that much out before she went completely ballistic and, you know, we turned against her.
The insurance company had bought us out.
We were now in league with the doctors.
How could we turn on her?
And, you know, she began screaming and sobbing and throwing cushions around.
And, you know, she was really having a free-for-all.
And that was really the last time that I ever tried anything with my mother in terms of... I mean, you really can't... One of the great things about being reasonable with people is that, and being respectful to even their craziness, is that when things go really badly, you know who's at fault.
I mean, this is one of the main reasons why it's so important to approach people reasonably, so that when they go mad or they become hostile or they get angry, then you'd simply know that they have real problems, that there's no possibility of Ever altering their behavior.
That's something that's absolutely key.
There's no possibility of ever changing their behavior and so for a number of years prior to that I've been trying to adjust my mother's behavior and to try and get her to understand that her behavior would be better or I would enjoy seeing her more if she behaved differently.
Because I had this fantasy I had this fantasy that there was reciprocity in the relationship, and that's something that I was talking about with Christina last night, and it's something that is the great fantasy of children, right?
Because we are told, I mean, that the first propaganda that we get in life, and again, I'm not... I'm gonna throw all the caveats in at the beginning here, and then if it doesn't apply to you, then don't worry about it.
The greatest propaganda that children who have difficult parents receive Is they say, we love you, we love you, we want nothing but the best for you, all we want is for you to be happy.
I mean, the amount of parental cliches that you can throw around in this area is pretty significant, and there's just no end of them.
All you hear is, Oh, I love you so much.
Oh, I want nothing but the best for you.
Oh, if you're happy, I'm happy.
Oh, when you don't call, I worry.
I just want to know that you're alright.
All you ever hear from parents is protestations of how much they love you, How much they want you to be happy, how much they care, how much they... whatever.
I mean, you throw your own clichés in, there's thousands of them.
And this leads us to believe, of course, that there's reciprocity.
So, for instance, if your mother says to you, all I want is for you to be happy, Then, you know, as my mother would say, then I would say to her, well, one thing that would make me happy is for us to talk about more than, or not talk about, for me to not just have to sit there and listen to you go on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
Logorrhea is the name for this sort of verbal diarrhea.
To just go on and on about this court case and all the minutiae of all the medical evidence that you've come up with and so on.
And...
That would make me happy.
So then you would think that there would be a connection between the two.
I mean, you would think until you actually try it, which is why so few people do.
You would think, well, my mother has said for 15 years or 20 years or 30 years or 60 years that all she wants is for me to be happy.
And so, when she's doing something that makes me unhappy, all I need to do is to say, you know, I would, if you don't mind, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't do this, or if you did less of it, or if we could find some other way of doing it.
Well, then she should say, well, absolutely, of course.
I mean, all I want is for you to be happy.
Therefore, I will adjust whatever behavior I am performing that is making you unhappy.
That would be the logical result of All I want is for you to be happy.
Or, it would also be the logical result of, I love you.
Christina can ask me to do anything.
I mean, that's the trust that we have in our relationship.
She can ask me to do anything, I will do it.
Without question.
Doesn't mean that I always agree with her or she always agrees with me.
But...
The idea that she would ask me to do something that would be wrong would be just so incomprehensible that, you know, when she says that she loves me and she says that I should do X, Y, and Z, then I know that she's doing it because she cares about me.
So, I mean, to take a tiny example, I've never been one for buying clothes for myself, as most guys aren't, and one of the early sort of pretty mild conflicts we had was I was not working when I met her and then after we got married I got a job and I had some sort of slightly dated casual wear because it had been, I don't know, a couple of years since I had been in the workforce.
And so she kept saying, you know, we really should go and get you some better clothes.
And, and I don't like to spend money and I don't really like, don't like to spend money on clothes.
And so, and it's not because I don't like nice clothes.
I mean, actually, once I went shopping with Christina, it really became, became pleasurable because I could actually buy some really nice stuff.
It's not something that I'd ever really had a lot of experience with.
So she said at one point, she just said, look, we really have to go and get you clothes.
I know that you don't feel comfortable.
I know you don't want to spend the money.
I know that.
But it's important.
It's important how you present yourself at this organization.
And it's important if clients drop by.
It's not like you look bad.
But it just looks a little dated and you're at the director level.
You're a senior executive.
You really should look really good.
And after we talked about it back and forth, I sort of realized, understood and appreciated what she was doing.
And off we went and spent a lot of money, which has been, in hindsight, fantastic.
I have to iron fewer pants.
I have more variety in my wardrobe.
And the clothes are more comfortable because, you know, they're higher quality and better fitting and all that kind of stuff.
So, good for her.
You know, she was absolutely right and she came across a hiccup, some scar tissue from my past, which was a sort of lack of self-care or self-presentation in a minor sort of way.
And she helped remediate it.
She actually was completely responsible for remediating it.
I just had to sort of say, well, I'm not going to make up any excuses.
I'm just going to accept that you love me, you want the right thing for me, so we're going to do this.
And she was absolutely right.
And this has happened countless times in our marriage and in our courtship beforehand.
And it's reciprocal.
I've helped her with, I mean, I helped get her out of the hospital where she worked in a hospital for 10 years in the public sector and I got her out of that, set her up, helped set her up in private practice because I had some entrepreneurial skills so I knew How to advertise, how to get business, how to, you know, get all that stuff going.
So it's been very reciprocal.
She's helped me enormously, I've helped her enormously, because we love each other and we genuinely want the best for each other.
So we're able to get each other over the kind of hiccups that occur for all of us.
And she had a pretty different family situation from mine in a lot of ways.
And yet somewhat similar in other ways as well.
Which, you know, I won't get into now.
I sort of want to talk about this with Christina before I talk about any of her family history or her choices.
Over the past couple of years, but suffice to say that when we say that we love each other, we really mean it, and we really do want the best for each other, even when we know better than the other person, right?
I mean, that's not common for either of us, but it certainly occurs, and it is always worked out so beneficially that we trust that that is how it's going to be and what's going to happen.
So when your parents say this, that they love you, then it must mean that they see you, that they understand you, that they appreciate your values, that they share your values.
You can't love someone whose values are opposite.
I mean, if somebody is a pacifist and somebody else is a warmonger, you can't love.
I mean, you can quote love if you're a Republican or a Democrat because you're two sides of the same coin, but if one of you is a pacifist and one of you is A military man, it's going to be kind of tough for you to love each other.
In fact, I would say it's just patently impossible and absurd to think so.
It would be like trying to live on a steady diet of ball bearings.
So if your parents say that they love you, then they really should understand you, and appreciate your values, and know what you're all about, and be enthusiastic about what you're enthusiastic about, and respect you, and honor you, and look at you as just a wonderful, wonderful person that they can completely trust with anything that, you know, would not step a foot wrong consciously, that has no hidden agendas, and all this sort of stuff.
Now I know, I know that based on the audience that I'm talking to, That libertarians... I mean, how many of us are respected by our family for our beliefs?
How many of us have had any luck converting our family to a more rational standpoint or approach to life?
I would guess very few.
I've never met any.
Maybe you've met some.
Maybe you are one.
And if so, I'd love to hear your story.
I know there's no magic button for changing people's beliefs.
In fact, given the reinforcement that people get from culture, it's almost impossible to change someone's beliefs.
Even if you convert them for an hour, the next time they sit down and go through the evening news or read the newspaper, they're right back where they started.
What seems like the window of truth opens up during a libertarian conversation.
And then they go back into the squalid, disassociated, blamey, statist, relativist, subjectivist media, and they're swamped again, right?
I mean, so they get their head above water for a moment, and then a tsunami comes crashing down on them, and they're lost aside again.
So, if your parents say that they love you and they want the best for you, then they should really respect, understand, and be curious about your values.
So, if you get into things like libertarianism, or anarchism, or anarcho-capitalism or objectivism, then they should say, wow, that's really fascinating, you must really be into these beliefs.
I tell you what, give me some books to read, I'd love to debate these issues with you.
I'm really curious, because you're a great guy, you're a great woman, and I really want to know what's going on with you, and maybe there's something to learn.
I mean, I certainly taught you a lot when you were younger, and wouldn't it be fantastic if it could be reciprocal and I could learn something from my own child?
And then they would read the books with great gusto, they would Debate those issues they would say I don't understand this will help me understand that this is really fascinating I really respect you for taking the time to learn about all this stuff and teach me because obviously it's a moral journey for you and it's very important and I mean this would be the fantasy camp of parenting right I mean this would be how families would run in a free society when when these ideas that we're talking about here
I mean and I hope people don't feel that it's just a sort of royal we here because I do have a lot of feedback and a lot of very interesting conversations with people so it is a conversation.
I just get to report on it a little bit more because I have access to the emails and the podcast so I can talk about it a little bit more but it is something that we as a community are talking about so please I always invite you to and encourage you to join in the conversation.
Reach across the gulf of loneliness that rationality Confers upon people or the canyon between the rational individual and the collectivist goo.
Reach across that and contact other people.
Talk about things with them.
And let's remove some of the hurt of exclusion by becoming a stronger community by talking to each other and learning from each other.
And I've had wonderful learning experiences dealing with others.
So, you know, come to the freedomainradio.com board.
Or whatever it is that you can find that's a good community for you and it's amazing how wonderfully positive things can be.
A minor segue, I was on the board last night and one very witty gentleman posted a picture, my picture, which was actually taken for a speaking engagement.
So it's a pretty formal picture.
I'm in a suit and there's a little glow behind my head.
And somebody put a picture of that and said, does anybody see any resemblances?
And next to it was a picture, I think it was of Krishna sitting on some lotus leaves, cross-legged, with a glow behind his or her head.
It was a pretty androgynous picture.
And I just thought that was hilarious.
And I think I wrote something like, well, it was the glow behind the head that was the joke.
And if you get a chance to see it, have a look.
It's pretty funny.
It's in the Radio Show Feedback, Free Domain Radio Feedback Forum.
But I think I wrote something like, this is eerie.
I mean, eerily familiar, eerily similar.
And it would only be even more identical if Krishna were wrapped in a Volvo and foaming at the mouth or something like that.
Because that's what I'm doing in these podcasts.
I drive a Volvo.
I'm sometimes foaming at the mouth.
So, in the fantasy camp of parents, this is what is occurring.
You get into some new belief, or new idea, or new philosophy, and the whole family is like, that's amazing.
I mean, you're a great guy.
You must be onto something.
Let's all learn about it.
Let's have a debate.
Let's really dig into this and try and understand it as a group.
You know, we're good people.
This is a moral subject.
We're rational people.
We want to learn about things that, even if we find out that we're false, we want to learn about them just to begin with.
Now, if you've had this experience, then obviously you are a robot from the future.
Obviously you've been beaten back in time from families of the future, wherein this kind of paradise can absolutely exist.
But I doubt very much, because I've never heard of it at all.
The best I've heard is amused tolerance of libertarian ideas.
Oh, yeah, that's Joe.
He's just crazy about these libertarian ideas.
I guess he gets off on them and, you know, we let him talk a little bit, but we don't let him ruin family dinners.
So there's this amused tolerance, you know, like you are, you know, a kid who likes to do a lot of paintings and it's slightly inconvenient for the family, but you'll hang up the watercolors for a little bit and then throw them away and you buy the paint.
So you tolerate this eccentricity, but, I mean, nobody ever digs in or actually says, well, is it true or is it false?
So, that's the best that you can hope for, and most of it is a lot worse.
Most of it, like, you'll get shut down if you even bring these topics up, and nobody at all is interested in going along with you on the journey, too, and they will slam you repeatedly for having the temerity to ask any fundamental moral questions.
Or to have opinions.
And this, what it does, is it creates a tension in you to bring these ideas up, which is exactly what they want.
They want you to feel uncomfortable and alienated and weird and cultish and all this sort of nonsense for bringing these ideas up, for being a philosopher, which is at root what these people are, what libertarians, what we all are as philosophers.
So they want you to just feel weird, and disconnected, and odd, and left out, and excluded, and absolutely non-mainstream, let's say, and freaky, but for bringing these topics up, because they want to cut you off from the power of these ideas.
And the real reason, the basic reason that they do it, of course, is because They get deep down that you're not talking about the state, but you're talking about the family.
Or, if you genuinely have passed through the family into the state, that you only became interested in these topics because of your experiences in the family.
Or, it is possible, and I certainly can think of one example of somebody who had a pretty good family life, and ended up as a libertarian anyway, but it's pretty rare.
Most times we learn about power And the abuses of power because of our parents.
So parents don't want to talk about these ideas about the abuses of power and the problems with the state because it's really what you're talking about is the problems with a disparity of power and authority in a situation where there is a disparity of power.
You and I don't have an army.
That's why we pay our taxes.
So there's a disparity of power.
There's no disparity of power between me and Walmart because I could just not shop there.
I can mail order if I want.
Even if there's no other store.
But there is a disparity of power between the state and its citizens, and you're saying that that is a corrupt and problematic thing to have.
There is a disparity of power between a priest and its congregation, and of course between God and the congregation is perhaps the greatest of all, even though it's imaginary.
And they know that what you're talking about when you talk about the corruption of humanity that occurs during a situation where there is an authority in a disparity, in a power disparity situation, is they know you're talking about parenting.
They know, they know, they know, they know, they know, they know, they know.
That's why they're so seamless about opposing it.
That's why they absolutely won't talk about it.
Or if they do, it's sort of curious and blank and weird and they just, you kind of gauge them in that topic because they feel guilty.
They feel guilty and they're afraid that you're gonna figure it out.
Now, why are they afraid that you're gonna figure it out?
Because they need you.
Because they need you.
It's very important to do this when you're young.
If you're gonna ditch the foo and climb to a healthier climate, then do it while you're young.
Don't wait.
For a number of reasons.
And I'll just sort of talk briefly about my mother again and then talk about the principles.
One of the things that, of course, has crossed my mind, as it does for everyone who goes through this process from time to time, is, well, what am I going to do when my mother gets, you know, sick, yay, unto death?
When she's on her deathbed, when she's obviously not getting back up, and she's calling for me.
My son, my golden boy, come to me!
What am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
Am I going to say, well, I'm going to go see her and I'm going to give her some comfort at the end of her life?
Or am I not going to see her?
And actually, it's certainly not.
It would not be at all past my brother, I think, for my mother to die and him simply not to tell me.
I think that would be part of his sadism, because he would feel that that would be a bad thing.
And of course, this is where you hear a lot of this propaganda.
That if you don't see your parents, you will regret it as you get older.
It may seem like a good thing now, but you will feel sad and unhappy and guilty and you will realize that you missed out on a great treasure and that you should have reconciled and blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, it's not true.
It's not true.
I have a friend of mine whose father left him when he was very young.
He tried a couple of times to get in touch with him.
They had a few awkward lunches and then this guy's father got old and died and never contacted him again.
I mean, there's no fantasy out there.
There's no extruded reality.
There's no oppositional fantasy camp of platonic ideals where you can go and meet good parents.
You just can't.
I mean, they are who they are.
There's no There's no interaction other than what they do.
There's no personality other than what people say and how they act.
And there's no fantasy wherein there's some other good person.
This is a Christian hangover, right?
This idea that you can have a great relationship with bad people.
It's a Christian hangover because the Christians believe that the soul is good and therefore there is good even in the worst of us and you can't corrupt and destroy what God has made.
And therefore, there's good in the worst of us.
And it's just not true, of course.
It's absolutely not true.
When you go bad, you go bad.
You know, when an apple gets rotten, there's not a magic apple somewhere inside there that's not rotten.
It's rotten.
And when your leg is gangrenous, there's no healthy leg somewhere in there that you can just believe in hot enough and magically produce into existence.
No.
You're rotten.
You're rotten through and through.
And you have become a cancer on society.
And I hate to sound harsh, but it's the people who abuse children.
So don't look to me for sympathy.
Don't look to me for gentleness.
Don't look to me for kindness or forgiveness.
There is no forgiveness when it comes to the abuse of children.
There is no forgiveness when it comes to the abuse of citizens through violence.
There is no forgiveness for the abuse of children either through religious instruction or propaganda or physical or emotional or verbal abuse.
There is no excuse.
There is no forgiveness for it.
Because it can't ever be undone.
If I borrow your car and crash it, I could buy you a new car and give you a couple hundred bucks or a couple of thousand bucks for your inconvenience.
There is no recompensing for an undermined or a harmed childhood.
There's no way that you can go back and restore that and therefore there is no forgiveness.
There can be forgiveness where there can be restitution.
Where there is no restitution, there is no forgiveness.
You don't forgive people for rape.
Or murder.
Or theft, which they will not recompense you for.
Or abuse.
Or fraud.
Or anything where they don't strive mightily to put things right.
You simply don't forgive people for it.
And you can say that you do.
Of course, you can imagine that you do.
But you don't, in fact.
Because it hasn't been undone.
And so there is no forgiveness in these areas.
So I wondered about whether I would see my mother, and of course I have decided, as I'm sure you can imagine, that I won't.
Because what would it mean?
It's going to be traumatic for me.
It's going to be really unpleasant for me.
And why would I want to put myself through that?
In what way has she earned any comfort?
And wouldn't it be... It is then, of course, saying to myself, not to anybody else, because really it's my own heart that matters here, it would be saying to myself that it was wrong to not see her.
And I just can't see my way clear to figuring out how that could be the case.
I mean, I'll tell you, I hope that she lives for another 20 years.
I really do.
I hope that she lives a long, long, long, long life.
Because I've thought over the years, wouldn't it be sort of sad and ironic if I went through all this struggle and I said, oh, I mean, I think my mother is 69 now.
I went through this long struggle and I ended up breaking with my mother and wouldn't it be sad if she keeled over and died the next day?
Then I'd won one day of freedom.
I'd won one day of integrity.
I hope she lives for a long time because that way that's more time that I didn't have to see her.
It makes the decision to break with her all the more valuable.
If she lives, I guess it's been seven or eight years now, and if she lives for another 20 years or 10 years, Then that's been 20 or 30 years of freedom, and that was worth going through that hellish decision for.
It would be a little less worth it if it was a couple of days, I guess is what I'm saying.
That's why you should do it while you're young, because you get the longest term benefit of it.
And the other thing that I would say, why do it when you're young, is because your parents will let you go.
They will not probably let you go when they get older, because they need you.
Of course, as we get older, we become frail, we become sickly, we become demanding.
We need Resources from people and it's I think somewhat important to to some degree and not not in any morbid sense But to live your life with one eye on the deathbed working backwards, right?
So who what do I need when I'm dying?
Who do I need to be there?
And how am I gonna get that?
I mean that's important because you don't want to just sort of live your life in this shallow frivolous or alienated or lonely way and then as you get older realize that oh man, I didn't nobody likes me nobody Nobody wants to spend any time with me and I'm gonna grow old and die alone That's a pretty sad exit strategy.
That's not a good endgame in my book.
So what's going to happen as your parents age if you haven't broken with them?
Is there going to start to play the pity game?
They're going to start to throw an endless pity party.
And what that means is they are going to withdraw all of their aggression, and they're going to start manipulating you through sadness, through mild depression, through sighs, through aches and pains, through rambling reminiscences about what through rambling reminiscences about what could have been.
And they're going to start to need or want or beg for pity from you.
And that is going to be very hard to resist.
Because you're going to feel, well, you know, they did the best they could, now they're pretty vulnerable, they're not so bad, blah, blah, blah.
But it's all an act.
I mean, it's all an act.
Once, you know, you have to make the moral decisions before the circumstances force a change in behavior.
If you kill someone and you brag about it, and then when you're caught, you fight and you flee, and then when you are interrogated, you lie and say, I never did it, I was somewhere else, and everything breaks down.
And then when you are presented with incontrovertible proof, there is a videotape.
of you killing someone.
And then you say, you burst into tears and you say, well, it's the worst thing ever.
I feel so guilty.
I feel so bad.
Well, obviously, it's just a ploy.
Obviously, it's just a manipulation.
Obviously, it's got nothing to do with any inner kind of moral compass.
And obviously, if you could get a chance to escape, you would do it in a split second.
So you can cry and say, oh, I did this terrible thing.
And I feel so bad.
And I throw myself on the mercy of the court.
And if I could undo it, I would.
And I'm the worst person ever.
Well, if you evince that kind of guilt, and so on, only when you're cornered, then obviously it's just a maneuver, it's just a ploy.
So, you want to do this when your parents are young and healthy, they'll probably let you go, figuring, eh, he'll come back, or we'll find alternatives, or whatever, right?
Let him go, he's just become some libertarian nutjob, what do we need him for anyway?
This, of course, is a lot easier if you have siblings.
I mean, if you're a single child, it's going to be tougher.
And, of course, the other thing, too, you don't want to be the last one out of the building, right?
If you've got siblings who are staying close with your parents, you don't want to be the last one.
If they decide to go and you're the last one, then you're going to get all of the intense pressure and parental stalking that you could imagine to try and stay in the nest.
Fortunately, my brother has decided to stay with my mother because he's just so much of a better person than me.
So, you definitely want to get out while you can.
Get out quick, get out early.
And when your parents start to play the pity game, of course, it's absolutely up to you what you do with it.
You can still choose to see them and support them and nurse them and give them money and put them in homes and go and wipe their chins when they get old and give them adult diapers and all that.
You can choose to do all of that stuff.
But for God's sake, don't imagine that you're doing it for any moral reason.
You're doing it because you're being manipulated into giving resources to bad people.
And if you still want to do that after you've fully recognized that, that's fine.
But if you don't, just don't imagine that it's any kind of moral transaction.
You're being manipulated into giving resources to bad people at the expense of your own life.
This is going to harm all of your primary relationships that are valuable.
We'll be completely and utterly undermined and destroyed.
And if not destroyed, it's certainly undermined and weakened and made all the less satisfying by your continual contact with your parents and your continual giving a value to people who have either harmed you or just not benefited you that much.
And you owe them nothing.
You owe them absolutely nothing.
There is no contract in biology.
There is no... I wrote in a poem many years ago, construct is not contract.
If you build another human being, it's not a contract.
You owe them absolutely nothing.
You owe them what you owe everybody, which is justice.
And justice means to be good to the good and to withdraw sanctions from evil, to withdraw resources from evil, or to withdraw resources from people you just don't particularly care for.
So, don't imagine that it's any kind of moral transaction if you want to go and spend time with your parents because you feel guilty.
It's a specifically immoral transaction, because you're saying that emotional bullying is a higher value than virtue, which undermines virtue in your life, in your marriage, in your relationships.
It's going to really harm what you do with your kids, trust me on this one.
And it's not a moral transaction.
It is a net loss to everyone except for the base material needs of your parents.
So you want to make sure that if you're going to do this thing, and I certainly recommend that you do it unless you have a great relationship with your parents, if you're going to do this thing, do it when you're young.
If you wait until the pity game starts, until they're old and need resources and can't bully you anymore, then it's going to be harder.
Still do it!
But it's going to be harder.
Recognize that it is going to be harder, and that you're going to be more criticized for it, but who cares?
I mean, we don't care about society as a whole because it's pretty corrupt, so why would we care about the criticism of people who get upset with us for not giving resources to parents which we do not love?
So, thanks so much for listening.
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