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April 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:47
179 Human Nature
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
All right.
I'm sitting here in my car and I'm going to look at the date.
It is 2006.
That much I know because it has been three years since my podcast from this morning.
It is 2006.
It is April the 5th.
And my car clock says 4.30, because I haven't moved it forward, but it is in fact 5.30.
So I do believe that we are now officially synced.
So, it's nice to get the date right.
Well, you know, once in a very great while.
So, I hope you're doing well.
A few things that came up on the boards today.
Things like, what if I don't have money to contribute to FDR because, not to the dead president, but Freedom Aid Radio, because we hope to own the acronyms again for freedom.
But, you know, my only thing to say about that is just don't worry about it at all.
I mean, don't feel guilty.
If you can't pay me, trust your own integrity.
You will get whatever you need back to me at whatever time is appropriate for you, and it'll be better than anything you can do right now.
So trust your conscience.
Trust your integrity, and all will be well.
So don't sweat it, my friend.
Don't sweat it.
Enjoy.
Be free.
Have fun.
Consume.
And when the time is right, you will do what is right.
Don't worry about that one minute more than you absolutely have to, which is now.
So stop.
And there were some questions about that, so I guess I will talk about it.
So, enjoy.
The question, sort of, how did I come up with 50 Cent's?
Eh, you know, I want to be a rapper, and 50 Cent, I believe, is about as close as I'm going to get.
But, you know, I sort of did the math around, you know, what's a movie.
Movie is, you know, I went through the math the other day, so I'm sure you understand it.
Movies generally suck.
FDR, generally, because of the quality of the responses and the listeners, generally does not suck, I would say.
And so, that seemed reasonable.
And, of course, I have a whole business plan of quitting all of this nonsense and doing it full-time, which you can get from the website if you so choose or so desire.
Am I actually...?
Let me just double-check.
Am I...?
Yes, I am.
Okay.
Sorry, I was just checking to see that I was actually on the microphone, because sometimes I'm not, but I do believe that I am.
Sometimes Windows XP doesn't seem to recognize when you plug a microphone in if you don't reboot with the microphone in or come out of hibernation with the microphone has been in.
Again, more fascinating technical details for you as I slowly rev my brain up to the current topic at hand.
Now, as I promised a FDR poster, one of the most prolific and, I think, well, they're all brilliant, but a brilliant FDR poster, I was going to get to something called Human Nature this week.
Actually, Monday.
But, obviously, I'm not any better at scheduling the podcasts than I am at telling you what day of the week it is that I'm podcasting.
And so, let's start now with Human Nature.
Now, the question is, and I think it of course is a fascinating question, like all universal and deep questions, is there such a thing as human nature?
Well, I think there is.
And I think that human nature is essentially to wrap around and conform with reality.
And that's, I think, all I need to say.
Wow.
Shortest podcast ever.
Well, let me tell you about my day then.
So, I had a granola bar for breakfast.
Now, what does it mean?
What do I mean when I say that human nature is that which, you know, sort of wraps around and conforms with reality?
Well, as we know, everything that is within the organism is geared towards not just survival, but flourishing.
And I'm aware, before any Dawkins fans write into me about the selfish gene, that human beings as a whole are not interested at all in survival, but rather it is each individual component down to the cellular level, or the DNA level, of a human being that wishes to survive and flourish.
So, for instance, my kneecap doesn't care about me, except as a methodology for making another kneecap.
And that really occurs at the genetic level, at the DNA level, that all that's happening is my DNA is trying to reproduce itself.
And, you know, my little toe just looks at me as a big mothership designed entirely to reproduce another little toe.
And everything is sort of designed for that end.
And I have no problem with all of that.
I'm no biologist, but it seems to make sense to me.
So the purpose of everything that is within the human body and within human nature is to survive and flourish.
And, of course, we gain our sustenance from reality.
And we can only manipulate reality through logic and empiricism and all those good things.
And so that which conforms to logic and reality and empiricism and so on is...
Good for us!
Now, that which is voluntary is good for most of us in a natural state, right?
I mean, in a natural state, which of course has its own logical problems, but I'm not going to pretend that all of this is syllogistic.
These are just my thoughts on this, and we'll see if we can't wrap it into something that is Vaguely acceptable through repetition, if not logic.
So we'll go for that and see what sticks.
So, that which sort of wraps around and conforms to reality is going to serve human beings better than that which does not.
And yet, And also, that which is voluntary, like trade, is far better for the survival of human beings than war.
Especially war in the past, when you basically would go to war when you were 12, and this might be before you had any kind of Before you lost your virginity, you might be at war, in which case your genes sort of get wiped out.
The genes for baldness don't get wiped out, even if everybody thought baldness was ugly, because it doesn't show up until after you've reproduced.
So that's not really such a big issue.
So the genes for violence or aggression and so on are absolutely latent within the human mind.
And I've talked about this in a podcast many moons ago now, I think.
Actually, about twelve and a half.
But we can sort of go either way.
We can go peaceful and positive and kind and empathetic.
Or we can go sort of mean and sadistic and sociopathic and grabby.
And that's part of the current adaptive mechanism of the human mind, which I've talked about in the past.
Which says, okay, how many resources are available, and if there aren't many or people are mean to me, then I'm going to develop a meaner personality, and if there's lots of resources and people are kind to me, I'm going to develop a kind personality, and so on.
Now, war can absolutely further the spread of genes, right?
I mean, because the general privilege of the victors is to rape the wives and girlfriends and cousins and daughters of the vanquished, right?
So, you can absolutely have this tidal wave of, you know, bloody semen, for want of a better phrase, washing back and forth across the continents, seeking to impregnate those who are weaker.
But that really doesn't have as much to do with human success, with human genetic success, as A conformity to reality.
And the reality is, as we can see from the examples of capitalism versus the Middle Ages, that volatilism and pacifism and trade and free markets and property rights are all far better for the organism than war and central command and control and the aristocracy and the rule of the priests and the kings and the warlords and so on.
And I don't just mean sort of materially, and I don't just mean genetically.
I mean obviously far fewer children die now in childbirth than used to, which was a huge waste of time and energy, and often killed the mother in the past.
So even from a genetic standpoint, you know, the genes are able to be passed along just a little bit more efficiently now.
And I mean now, sort of up to the 50s, before families began shrinking because nobody had any money or time to have more than one to two children.
But in a sort of free society, you can have as many kids as you want.
Those kids are going to survive.
They're going to flourish and so on.
Now, over the superstructure of the biological imperatives, you know, the sort of screwing and fighting stuff, you know, eating and bowel movements and that kind of stuff, above the sort of base biological impulses or urges are layered to the human nature, above the sort of base biological impulses or urges are layered to the human Now, obviously there's a huge degree of variation in human personalities, but there are some things in common.
Some things that I do believe are generally the case across the planet.
Now, if you are bullied, then you are not going to be happy.
You'll find pretty much that's a common given.
I take this from nine Dr. Phil shows.
I take this from nine Dr. Phil shows and lots of conversations with people and the fact that my wife is a counselor with 15 years experience, a therapist, a psychological associate with 15 years of experience who has given me detailed case histories.
We've talked about this sort of stuff in general.
And it is the case, I know this from my own experience as well, that if you are bullied, you're generally not happy.
And you're not happy because you sort of end up in this sort of twin forks in the road.
You end up with sort of either A, you are a victim and you have a low self-esteem and you feel like you don't amount to anything and you feel that your voice doesn't mean anything and nobody Interacts with you except to tell you what to do and your personal wishes and desires and dreams and hopes and fears and Thoughts and all of that have nothing they impact on no one no one even interest about them.
So basically you're just a Sort of little robot does what people tell you to and you have no identity yourself or ideas or thoughts that you can be shared It's like you can share with anyone or anyone is interested in and so you're pretty miserable, right?
Because you feel lonely and you feel undervalued and you feel hopeless and you know, it's not generally positive.
Or you take the other fork in the road and become sadistic, in which case you are not happy because you are constantly having to navigate the hierarchy.
You're constantly having to figure out, is anybody dissing you?
Is anybody putting you down?
Is anybody breaking away from who you have power over?
And so on.
And it's very tough to be intimate In fact, I would pretty much go off this limb completely and say that it's impossible to be intimate when you become a bully because you can't reveal yourself because you kind of hate yourself.
Nobody bullies weak children or girls or anything.
And feels like great about themselves, right?
Because it's a pretty pathetic thing to do to ape strength by attacking weakness.
I mean, that's pretty sad.
And that's got a lot of self-hatred associated with it.
And it is a way, of course, of dealing with vulnerability, right?
I mean, this concept of projection is that a bully feels horribly vulnerable and exploited at some point in his or her life.
Let's just say his for the moment.
A bully feels horribly vulnerable and exploited and hates that feeling.
And so, shuts that feeling off completely, but the feeling hasn't gone away.
And so what happens is, when somebody shows up in that bully's life, who appears to be weak or tentative... Oh, just in case you're wondering, that was a motorcycle without a muffler.
I did not actually have Indian or Mexican for lunch.
Just in case you're wondering whether I was actually crying while I was podcasting, if you heard that background noise.
If you didn't, boy, that was pretty funny.
So, let's find out later if that actually showed up on the recording.
When the bully comes across somebody who is evidencing some sort of weakness or tentativeness or insecurity, then that triggers the feelings, the sort of buried feelings of inadequacy and helplessness within the bully, and the bully then experiences rage against his own helpless feelings.
But because he can't acknowledge his own helpless feelings, he projects his helpless feelings onto the person he is Who is provoking them?
The person who is weak or tentative or seems to be insecure?
And then what happens, of course, is that the bully feels that that weak person is disgusting, and horrible, and hateful, and also, in a pretty real sense, that the weak person is aggressing against them.
Because the weaker tentative person is evoking feelings of vulnerability and pain in the bully, and so the bully attacks them, and tortures them, and so on.
And that's pretty well understood in psychological circles.
You've probably heard this before, so I don't need to go into it into a great deal.
And so this is how the vicious cycle continues, right?
So the person who is weak or tentative or low self-esteem is sort of broadcasting out there, hurt me, hurt me, hurt me, to all of the bullies around, right?
By being vulnerable.
And the bullies then oblige by sort of mentally or physically or verbally beating up or downgrading or being contemptuous towards that person.
And so the bully then ends up feeling that vulnerability is even more horrible and dangerous and should be smashed because they are now smashing it.
So the last thing you ever want to be is vulnerable.
And so they end up having to attack more of the vulnerable people.
And the vulnerable people who feel helpless and have low self-esteem and that no one cares about them and everyone is mean, by provoking the bullies unconsciously, they end up reinforcing that.
And it's all this vicious cycle.
It's very hard to get out of for most people.
And so I can sympathize with both sides, although the bully is much worse, morally.
I mean, you could say that as the victim gets older, they need to deal with their victimhood, but the bully is always more at fault, because it's pretty obvious that you don't go around beating up on weaker kids, right?
I mean, that's, or yelling at them, putting them down, or whatever.
So the reason that I'm talking about that is that if you look at human nature in these two situations, this is human nature as the result of excessive verbal or emotional or sexual violence, abuse or indifference.
Not sexual indifference.
That one doesn't really work so well together.
But the other ones I think do.
Violent indifference?
Could be.
They turn away violently.
The natural feelings of a parent towards a child and a child towards a parent is sort of dependence and love and affection and that sort of thing.
And when that does not occur, it is always the result of prior abuse or indifference of some kind.
Because children who are raised well are sort of loving and warm and open and friendly and so on, and usually bond well with their children, and children that are raised badly are not done that way, right?
So the reason that I'm talking about this is that I think it's fair to say that if we do want to understand what human nature is, we do need to study people who have been raised in an absence of violence or neglect.
Violence and neglect have very strong effects on the human personality.
So if you want to know what the natural body is, you can't study the bodies of people who've been extraordinarily malnourished or who've been beaten with baseball bats as children.
Because all you're going to see is injury and malnutrition.
So you're going to get a whole host of ailments and problems and complaints and weaknesses and bones that set badly and flinchings and so on.
And you're going to say, OK, well the human body in its natural state is malnourished and broken.
But that's not the human body in its natural state, because the natural state of the human body is sort of health and so on, and that comes about from having enough to eat and not being beaten with the aforementioned baseball bat.
So if you want to look at human nature, the first thing you have to do is pry off the twin devils of abuse and neglect to find out what human nature sort of is like.
Because if there's a cycle of abuse that is continuing for generations, and has probably continued for thousands of generations throughout human history, if there is this cycle of abuse...
Then you're not looking at human nature in an unaffected state, in a natural state.
Now, you could, of course, argue that the natural state of human nature is violence and this and that, but I don't think that that's the case.
Because when you see that violence is no longer inflicted upon people, then they generally, and pretty immediately, within a single generation, cease to be violent.
So you can't say that violence is the natural state, because in the absence of violence being inflicted upon children, usually, I mean occasionally upon adults, but definitely upon children, in the absence of violence or neglect being inflicted upon those children, they grow up without tendencies towards those things.
So, in the absence of being put in a very small box for years, a human being generally grows up with a straight spine.
A generally straight spine.
The sort of natural state of the spine is to be straight.
But if you put it in a tiny box, it's going to get all weird and warped.
I know that it's been a while since I've used the foot-binding metaphor, but I know that some people are listening to this out of sequence, because they've told me they have.
Maybe this is the first time for you.
Otherwise, I'm sorry, I will try and work on some better metaphors, or at least newer ones.
But, as you know, there's a Chinese practice of foot binding where they would curl a young girl's foot into a little ball through extraordinarily painful measures.
Well, that's not the natural state of the foot.
That's the state of the foot after incredibly violent pressure is applied to it over the course of years.
That's what the foot looks like, but it's not the natural state of the foot.
So we have to look at the natural behavior of any kind of organism free of horrendous and external negatives.
So if you put a polar bear In Hawaii, that polar bear is going to die.
So you say, OK, well, it's the nature of the polar bear to get dehydrated and to die.
Well, it's not.
It's just out of its element, right?
As I mentioned before, the fish flopping around on the bottom of the boat, it's the nature of a fish to flop around and die, so it's out of its element, right?
And if you feed a shark broccoli, you'd say that, I don't know, the nature of a shark is to leave tiny bubbles in the water as it swims around gasoline?
I don't know.
But definitely the shark has to have its natural food, and to sort of discover the nature of the shark.
What is it sort of all about?
So you have to do that in order to understand what the nature of something is.
Remove external elements and figure out what is going on.
Because if you're just looking at the thing regardless of the external elements, then you're not grasping anything particularly relevant about that thing other than this is what it looks like with those external and outside forces imposed upon it.
To take a sort of perhaps silly example, you know there's that ivy that climbs up walls, which is very big in England, and you get those little rooms.
They're very cozy.
My aunt had it on her house when I was a kid.
Probably still does now, actually.
And you see this ivy that creeps up these walls.
Well, if you look at the ivy and don't notice the wall that it's creeping up, you would say, how bizarre!
This ivy appears to grow perfectly vertically.
It's the only plant in the animal kingdom, or the plant kingdom, which grows perfectly vertically.
Astounding!
By Jove!
And so, yes, I could, I think, play a good friend of Sherlock Holmes.
Anyway.
But you're going to look at this ivy and say, wow, it's growing really vertically, and if you don't see the wall, you're really not going to understand anything about the real nature of ivy, which is that without the wall, it's going to kind of fall over.
Right?
Just sort of look like crap on the ground that's curly and green.
So...
I think that's sort of important as well.
One last example, because I do want to add to my metaphor kitty.
One last example would be that if you look at the Western Front in World War I, you would say something like, well, if you didn't notice the fact that there were shells and rifles and machine guns and so on going on,
Then you would look at this people huddled in the trenches and you would say, well, it appears that the nature of man is to sit in a trench with rats and water up to your waist to get food rot, to get sickly, to get scurvy, and then to stand up and get shot.
But you would sort of try and analyze that.
Those decisions that people made, if you didn't notice, the extreme violence all around them, you would not be able to analyze their choices or their natures with any degree of accuracy.
And so the first thing you would say is that this is how human beings behave in a situation of extreme violence, right?
They panic, they get shell-shocked, they go insane, they shoot themselves in the foot or in the head, they frag their officers, they run screaming into no-man's land and die.
They, you know, whatever.
I mean, just read All Quiet on the Western Front and you'll get a good sense of all of this kind of stuff.
And so, you're just going to be able to study what is sickly rather than what is natural.
And it's the same thing that happens with Freud and with Jung.
They base their human personality model on sexual abuse victims, which is really not very accurate.
It's like basing the human body on studies of people who have come out of Auschwitz and saying, wow, the average human being weighs like 60 pounds and doesn't seem to want to eat.
And that's trouble sleeping!
You wouldn't really learn anything other than, this is what it looks like under extreme violence.
So, in order to understand human nature, we do need to understand that violence is not a preferred state, or a natural state of human beings.
And we know this, because no matter how long violence has gone on for in a family tree, it is still always horrible.
You don't get people who've been subjected to extreme violence or neglect as children and have them grow up to be happy people.
So human nature exists independently of violence or non-violence because it does not react equally to violence and to non-violence.
So there is something which is independent of violence, which exists as a superstructure or a substructure of the human personality.
So for instance, if you don't feed the body, it will always get thin and be malnourished, right?
If you don't drink, you will always get dehydrated.
So there's a property of the body that is independent of water, right?
Because it reacts differently to the presence or absence of water.
It's the same thing with violence and neglect within the human personality.
There is nobody alive ever who has been or will be who has been subject to extreme violence and neglect as a child who grows up to be a happy... I mean, I'm talking without out so significant intervention, right?
I mean, you can even heal certain aspects of malnutrition if you sort of deal with it later on in life, but There is nobody who, without significant intervention, grows up to be happy if they've been subject to extreme violence.
Now, if somebody is an abuser, if you now become somebody who does evil rather than had evil done unto them, Then you're even worse, right?
There is nobody who does evil who is happy.
There is nobody who does evil who is content or is peaceful in their mind or feels that their relationships are rich and rewarding.
And so again, you have a human nature here that exists independently of violence and therefore You can't say that violence is the natural state, because if violence were the natural state, then human beings would be happy when they were violent, and they would be unhappy when they were peaceful.
But quite the reverse is true.
Human beings are happy and productive and flourish when they are peaceful, and they are unhappy and...
The food supply gets a little scraggly and human mortality sort of shoots up and infant mortality shoots up and people's levels of happiness are completely eradicated and replaced with endless degrees of human misery when people are violent, particularly when society as a whole is violent.
So I think, given all this, it's pretty safe to say that human beings, the sort of natural state of human beings, or human nature, is to love peace, to love non-violence, to love intimacy, to love openness, to love curiosity, all of the things that bring joy, and to love helping others.
I mean, the degree to which people are stingy or mean or won't help others is the degree to which they have been brutalized in their youths.
And so this is why, with this free-domain radio idea that we're talking about, or have been for the last couple of months, the motto is the logic of personal and political liberty.
Personal and political freedom.
Personal first.
Society is an effect of the personality.
Our relationship to the state is merely an effect of our relationship to ourselves, and our relationship to our histories, and our relationship to our honesty about ourselves.
And so, personal always comes first.
And so, human beings desperately want liberty.
If you've ever spent much time around people from Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, sort of when they sort of just managed to struggle out through hooker-by-crop or through whatever means that they could, a couple of them that I worked with when I was, oh gosh, in my teens I was a waiter.
Well, They really were kind of like beaten dogs.
I mean, they downcast eyes, they were frightened, they were aggressive, they were uptight, they were... And who can blame them?
I mean, I would be exactly the same way growing up in that kind of violent hellhole.
And so this is the effects, the counterproductive, counter-happiness effects of people who've been subjected to extreme violence.
I mean, that's extreme violence in the Eastern Bloc countries before the fall of communism, for sure.
I mean, it's just gulags and death camps and murders all over the place.
But even so, those people, if they hadn't experienced it with their family, which is possible, of course, you can still have a nice family in a totalitarian system, then they're not going to have all of that.
So this is sort of why human beings are drawn towards freedom.
This is why, as I mentioned in a podcast a couple of weeks ago, the Eastern European economists were all pro-free market, because they knew you can't erase this, right?
As Murray Rothbard says about 1984, it's a great book, but it's just not true.
You cannot erase a human being's desire for freedom, because our innate human nature is a love of peace, a desire for freedom, and that can only be corrupted through violence, neglect, propaganda, brutality.
I mean, that is Evil is the vine which requires lies and propaganda and brutality to climb up.
Otherwise it has no structure, it has no spine of its own whatsoever.
And you also know that human nature resists propaganda, because the degree of propaganda that is required every generation does not diminish.
Human beings are born free.
You know, it's what Rousseau said, right?
Human beings are born free, but everywhere they are in chains.
And that's because of lies and propaganda and so on.
And freedom is something that always is yearned for by human beings, in personal relationships and in state relationships.
And I will talk tomorrow morning about what freedom means for me, at least in personal relationships.
Which is obviously, I mean, just to foreshadow, it means that other people buy me dinner.
So if you ever come to Toronto, give me a shout, and I'd like to exercise some of my freedom with you.
And I would also obviously prefer it if I got to choose the restaurant, because I sought by price.
Anyway, so freedom in personal relationships is what is most important, because that we can affect.
We can't affect the state, but we can affect the quality of our own personal relationships.
And freedom, of course, is freedom from obligation, freedom from coercion, freedom from bullying, freedom from propaganda.
And the most important propaganda that we face is the propaganda about family, and to some degree about siblings, but in particular about parents.
I mean, the propaganda around parents is just staggering.
I mean, we don't like the church-state thing.
You look at the sentimentality associated with parents, and it's got nothing to do with... I mean, it's got nothing on... The church-state thing has nothing on that!
That is particularly important to understand.
Personal relationships are absolutely essential.
Freedom in personal relationships.
And if you don't have that, you will be miserable.
Because you're human nature, which you have no control over.
You have no control over, right?
You can choose whether you eat arsenic or not, but you cannot choose whether you live or die.
If you do, right?
If you eat arsenic, you're gonna die.
And you can't choose that.
And you can choose whether you're, you know, have honest and open and positive and peaceful and non-coercive and non-bullying and non-propagandized and non-sentimental and non, you know, dictatorial relationships in your life.
You can choose that.
I mean, that's totally up to you.
But you can't choose whether you're going to be happy or not with those relationships.
That is subject to your human nature.
And then your desire for freedom, your desire for self-esteem, and love, and generosity, and kindness, and integrity, and intimacy, and all of that kind of stuff.
And justice, justice above all.
And so when we talk about freedom, we talk, I mean I talk about that you have particular aspects of freedom that you absolutely require if you want to be happy.
And if you don't want to be happy, well that's fine.
I mean then you can have all of the manipulative and bullying and boring, boring relationships too.
Absolutely important to understand that boring relationships are a complete freaking nightmare.
That if you are bored by your parents, or you are bored by your friends, or you are bored by your girlfriend or boyfriend, That is one of the worst things ever, because that's really a drug that drives you completely crazy through an absence and evacuation of your natural self.
Even if they're yelling at you, that's generally better than boredom, because boredom is just stultifying and it just completely crushes the soul.
But you can't choose.
If you have these people in your life, you will not be happy.
And you have no choice about that.
It's like wishing for radiant health and refusing to eat.
I mean, it's not going to happen.
So that's pretty important, I think, to understand when it comes to human nature.
We are free to choose what it is to who we have in our lives and what kind of relationships we have and what we do with our time, but we are not choosed to free the consequences of that in terms of happiness and unhappiness for ourselves, because our human nature trumps our conscious mind every single time.
Because we don't get to choose whether or not certain things make us happy or sad.
That's not up to us.
Which is why it's so important to have a philosophy that promotes freedom and promotes responsibility and promotes joy and promotes productive relationships.
So, I hope this has been helpful.
Obviously, I look forward to everybody's comments and I will talk a little bit in the morning about what personal freedom means to me and, you know, I guess some ways in which I've managed to achieve it in my life to the degree that I've had, which I think is pretty good.
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