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April 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:37

182 Freedom Part 3: Siblings

Ahhh, the great horizontal dictatorship... (sorry about the rain background!)

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Time	Text
	Good morning, everybody.
	It's Steph.
	I hope you're doing well.
	I hope you're doing better than me.
	It's the ungodly hour of 7.30 in the morning, and I have to drive down to the city about two hours out of Toronto for a meeting, and so I thought I would have a little chat.
	I don't know if I'm going to make the whole two hours.
	Who am I kidding?
	I could probably talk for ten, but I'll do my best to stay on topic and on target, and I'm actually glad
	that this has worked out this way because the most complicated relationship that I have ever had in my life has been with my brother and it's almost completely been complicated by my refusal to see what is right in front of me it's just amazing I mean I fully understand it when people say that they have sentimentality around their family or they
	Understand how difficult it is to break free of a corrupt family structure or corrupt family members.
	Oh, my brothers and sisters, could I tell you stories?
	And I don't, I mean, I don't want this to be a sort of sob fest, you know, that, oh, I had it so bad, and so on.
	I'm just telling you that, from my standpoint, It's sort of a paradox insofar as the worse you have it, in a sense, the easier it should be.
	But that's not often the case.
	When you have a really well-structured personality disorder in your family, it is very hard.
	I found it very hard.
	I think I have a sort of great interest in morality and a natural interest in integrity.
	And I found this was just amazing.
	It was like peeling off my own skin breaking out of this relationship.
	So the reason that I'm talking about this is that I think that, based on some comments on the board, I don't want this to be sort of about me.
	It really is, of course, about you.
	But it's not often that you'll hear someone, I think, frankly, talk about difficulties and challenges in their lives without pretension and without agenda and without manipulation.
	And I try to do that.
	I think that I do that.
	So I think that through me talking about what I've gone through, I think it can be helpful.
	for other people because I've always been rather appalled at the lack of frankness in human life at the number or amount of just falsehoods that go on.
	I remember discussing politics with one fellow who worked for me for quite some time and We never were able to get anywhere and he was constantly oblique and framing and changing topics and going back and forth and then retreating back to a kind of dull patriotism and so on.
	And it wasn't until later that I found out that his father was the principal of a public school and so he was quite wounded and offended by Me saying that, you know, government is force and it's all blood money, while of course never raising myself above the fray because I have been paid through selling to government agencies at times as well.
	But I don't take moral responsibility for the existence of this system.
	I know there's some debate.
	About the degree to which we should or should not involve ourselves in state activities, but I don't feel at all that it's possible to exclude yourself from the world unless you're sort of living on a farm and growing your own food and so on.
	Even then, what are you going to do when you get a toothache?
	So I don't sort of believe in that.
	And so I had already worked that stuff out when I was debating with this fellow.
	But boy, it would have been so much easier if he just said to me, hey, you know, you're really bugging me with talking about this blood money stuff, because my dad, you know, to sort of assume that my dad is some sort of criminal.
	I mean, wouldn't that have been a much more honest and open and frank conversation?
	And we could have had much more productive conversations that way.
	And I'm also sort of constantly amazed at the degree to which people will not be frank about their own family histories.
	And I mean, of course, Christina gets this to some degree quite a lot.
	And just things that would sort of be obvious.
	I remember talking to Oh, I guess an ex-friend of Christina's by now.
	It's been a couple of years.
	But we were at a bar with her boyfriend and we were chatting and she had a family situation wherein her father had left her when she was like, I think, five or six years old.
	She had then sort of grown up with her mother alone, and then she had recently found the urge to, and had acted on that urge to go back and find her father overseas.
	And she went to find him, and, you know, she was saying to me, talking all this nonsense about how, oh, you know, I chatted with him, I spent a couple of days with him, and it was actually quite wonderful.
	There was real closure.
	And, oh, it's so hard not to just roll your eyes when people talk about this kind of stuff.
	Not that closure is impossible, but closure isn't exactly like shutting the lid on a garbage can.
	Closure is quite a lot of work.
	So, just hearing this woman talk about how she had achieved some kind of psychological equilibrium with her father, who was still drinking, you know, it's just amazing.
	And I looked at him, and I just accepted who he was, and all these psychobabble terms that are thrown around these days, which are not without value, but are often always devalued.
	Like, you just sort of go for a day or two and talk to someone who abandoned you 25 years ago, and Left you with a mom who wasn't that nice and suddenly everything's hunky-dory because you spent a day or two with this guy and everything's resolved.
	And I just think that's... I think that's kind of... I mean, I hate to say the term because I know it sounds too harsh, but I think that's kind of like a thought crime.
	And I would never, of course, there would never be any sanctions that I would apply against it other than social sanctions, but I think that falsehood about one's own past is really a bad, bad, bad thought crime and is responsible for an enormous amount of suffering and insecurity in the world.
	And I think that's something that's very, very important to understand, at least from my standpoint.
	If you are false about your past, Then you are completely sending off the wrong signals to other people.
	We're all part of the same human tribe, but we all deal with the same situations, more or less.
	These days, for sure, because the culture is so corrupt, and parents are so corrupt.
	But we all deal with the same problems, and What that means to me is that there should be an enormous amount of commonality and strength in what we have faced and what we can rescue and how strong we can become after all of that.
	But the moment that people lie about their histories and are obscure or overcompensate Sure, they gain a sort of short-term emotional satisfaction.
	It's a pretty black satisfaction of pretending to be somebody who's more together than they are, but it really is just a horrible thing to do to somebody else, because that's somebody else who is probably suffering and has not achieved closure.
	Let's say that this woman is talking to me, right?
	She's talking to me.
	Now, I have... My own father left when I was, I don't know, 12 months, 14 months old.
	Too young to remember him ever being there.
	And then I saw him occasionally in the summers when he would come to Ireland and I would go to Ireland.
	And then I saw him for a little bit longer when I was about six when my brother and I went to Africa back in the days when two kids that age could, and my brother's two and a half years older than I am, could travel.
	And then I saw him again one-on-one when I was 16 and when I was out for Africa for another couple of months.
	So if this woman were to talk to me about how she... I mean, I have closure with my father, but it wasn't easy to achieve.
	And even as close as recently as three and a half years ago, I was considering visiting him with Christina.
	I mean, Christina's never met my mother, never met my father, has only a couple of times met my brother, and has never spent any real time with them.
	But we were planning to go to Ireland as a general trip and then to drop past my father's.
	It was just crazy.
	And Christina then had a terrible dream which we spent some time analyzing and figured out that it was about my father and so we bailed on that much to our relief and our relaxation of psychic defenses and so on.
	But if I had all of this struggle with resolving things with my own father and then I'd heard someone just say, oh yeah, I did it in like two days.
	I mean, can you imagine how painful that would be if you believed that person?
	That it was possible to get all this kind of closure, but that I must be so neurotic and insecure and unforgiving and rigid and whatever because I can't achieve closure in two days of hanging out with a guy who left 25 years ago.
	So the reason I'm saying all of that is that the lies of other people are very much involved in our personal freedoms.
	And the degree to which people around us are not honest about their own histories, for the better and for the worse, is the degree to which we will be insecure and confused and subject to the self-lacerations of feeling left behind.
	You know, like everyone else is just moving and cruising and doing great things and so on.
	And we, or I, are sort of left behind And struggling and so on.
	And it really is an absolute siphoning of self-esteem.
	You drain real self-esteem from people and leave them with insecurity in order to gain a false self-esteem high that is temporary and destructive.
	I mean, that's if you are sort of lying to people about your past.
	So I think it's important to be frank about difficulties and challenges so that we don't feel alone.
	Now, somebody on the board said, after I talked about feelings of rejection, yesterday said that I was nowhere close to the true nature of feelings of rejection because, well, there was no reason that was given, but I'm sure that we can imagine some.
	I mean, enormous amounts of sympathy to that person, really.
	I mean, I scarcely, scarcely, scarcely would ever say that I've had the worst life in the world.
	I mean, I'm still in the top 5% if you look around the world as a whole, and I'm constantly aware of that.
	Yes, I had a bad childhood relative to a lot of people around me, but I've had an enormously positive childhood relative to a kid in Tehran, right?
	So, I think that's important for me to at least understand, and there's lots of people who've had it worse than me.
	And when I talk frankly about difficulties that I've had, I certainly in no way, shape or form mean for those to be the worst or some sort of pain party prioritization that I'm sort of winning.
	Nobody wants to win that kind of race anyway.
	I just think it's so important to be frank and honest with each other about emotional difficulties that we've had because there is such a relaxation in a very good way in understanding that you're not alone in the difficulties that you have.
	The difficulties that we as libertarians have are not only that it's in our blood and it's in our bones and you simply, you know, like the question around homosexuality, right?
	Our fabulous friends.
	That the question is, you know, is genetic or environment or preference or whatever, right?
	Now certainly preference seems to be kind of silly.
	We've talked about this before.
	But it would seem to me unlikely that environment would produce a libertarian.
	I personally think that it's an excess of intelligence relative to the general population.
	I personally think that we're just smarter, you know, when we When you're a baby, your brain is born with like, I don't know, like one twentieth the amount of brain cells that you end up with later on in life, and those brain cells divide.
	In my particular opinion, we just get one extra division.
	We get one extra division, and I think that we get, like, there's one extra division which makes someone doubt, right?
	So if you're not very bright, you're just certain about everything, and you thump the table in your dive bar, and you tell everybody exactly how it is, like somebody I knew once in high school would always say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, period!
	You know, like, that's the end of discussion!
	That's just the way it is, dammit!
	And it doesn't take a lot of brain cells to be certain.
	I mean, to be wrong, but to be certain.
	And it takes more brain cells to be, and so to me that's sort of one extra division of cells, to be doubting, to be doubtful.
	And it takes another division of brain cells, which, you know, as you know, this is like a cubing, right?
	I mean, it's pretty significant in terms of the actual increase, to be doubting and then to be certain.
	And correct, right?
	You don't want to be certain and not correct.
	That puts you in the ideological camp rather than the scientific camp.
	But I would say that we just have these extra divisions, which makes us different.
	Sort of fundamentally different.
	Not a different species, but an extension.
	And a pretty significant, like, asymptotic extension of the intelligence of the general population.
	And given the way that the culture is now, like through most of history, people who had gone through a period of uncertainty followed by certainty, in other words, the most intelligent people in society, Generally pretty excluded.
	We disturb people.
	We get a lot of hostility.
	So the culture is pretty corrupt.
	Parenting is pretty corrupt to begin with.
	And we get a lot of hostility because we are comfortable with questions that freak people out to the degree with which you and I can barely imagine it.
	I mean, there's just... I was sort of trying to think of an example that might be parallel to us, but it would be something... I mean, so I was thinking, okay, well, what if a government program really works?
	Well, that would blow our minds, but not really, because that would be just, okay, so we've missed something.
	There's something that's not... Like, whenever somebody... I don't pick up the newspaper and hear, this government program is a stellar success, and they go, wow, okay, I guess everything I believe is wrong.
	I read this the other day that the Canadian economy grew by blah blah blah percent.
	It's a massive increase.
	Blah blah blah.
	Everybody's happy.
	It's wonderful.
	And then I found out that they're counting income transfers from the wealthy to the poor as part of GDP because they're counting that increase in the wages or the increase in the income of the poor.
	And they're counting transfer payments from the federal government to the provincial government and from each provincial government to each other.
	And so basically it was all made up of government transfers, so it's not like I go, oh my god, all of libertarianism is false, and then I just rescue myself from the brink by... I'm like, okay, well, so somebody's lying, let's just find out where.
	And, you know, after doing this for about eight million times, you sort of can...
	I think, respectively develop and inculcate a pattern of thinking that is, you know, always subject to revision, but, you know, it's like my...
	By thinking about gravity, maybe subject to revision, but it would take a pretty significant event, like everything's starting to float, in order for me to do that.
	So we face a lot of problems within society because we really, really, really, really, really disturb people.
	Everybody yearns for freedom and morality.
	Everybody yearns for morality, and this is sort of the part that I was going to wrap up with at the end, and we'll talk about that at the end of this series, if this series does in fact end.
	But everybody yearns for morality, which is why the argument for morality is so powerful.
	It's why our enemies use the enemies of freedom, the enemies of liberty.
	That's why these people use the argument for morality, because they know how effective it is.
	So everybody yearns for morality, and so do we.
	But we actually don't know what it is.
	We know what it is.
	We're not making things up for ourselves.
	We're trying to understand it logically, empirically, and scientifically.
	So we actually are right on.
	I think bang on.
	I think that the DRL model that we've been discussing is pretty bang on.
	I think that it is a pretty good leap forward in terms of theorizing about a stateless society.
	And the methodology solves a lot of problems and sort of as you get comfortable with the ideas you realize just how many more problems it solves.
	And so everybody yearns for morality and believes that they are moral, but they believe that they are moral because they have followed the arguments for morality that have been placed around them, sort of inculcated into them through the state and through the media that depends on the state and so on.
	But The fact of the matter is that they're not moral.
	Now, when you walk up to someone and you say, you're not good, but you only think you are, I mean, there's a reason why the story of Socrates has remained so powerful for so many years, because people will want to kill you.
	I mean, don't underestimate this.
	The impulses that they feel towards you are actually murderous.
	When you violate somebody's argument for morality, when you disprove somebody's argument for morality, it feels to them exactly like you are pushing them off a cliff.
	It feels to them exactly like you have a knife to their throat.
	Because their false self is the only self they know, and the false self dies before evidence and logic.
	I mean, the false self is only exercisable by...
	Exorcisable, just in case I didn't pronounce that in a way that made sense to you.
	It's only exercisable by logic, empiricism, the scientific method.
	That is what gets rid of superstitions, right?
	And the most fundamental superstition is the argument for morality that is put forward by those in power, in order to maintain their power.
	Sort of as Nietzsche said, morality is something that is invented by the strong to keep the weak weak.
	And that is exactly the case, not with morality as a whole, but with false morality, with the arguments for morality that are specious and False and based on self-interest and class interest and so on.
	So I know that it sounds like I'm wandering far afoot but I am circling in a slow and measured way to sort of make my point.
	So we, as libertarians, face an enormous amount of hostility because we are innocent and curious and intelligent, right?
	I mean, innocent just means that we ourselves have not done grave wrong, and we have not lied fundamentally.
	This has been my experience with libertarians, that most of them are very, very good people.
	And I don't mean that in terms of the Christian nice people like we help out in soup kitchens.
	But they're very good people insofar as they don't do wrong.
	I've never known a libertarian who beats up on people.
	I've never known a libertarian who espouses or practices fraud.
	I've never known a libertarian who does things which we would consider to be pretty immoral.
	With the minor exception that there are times when libertarians are not frank about their past, but that would be only because they don't understand how important it is.
	When it comes to inculcating honesty and integrity in the world, it is more important to be honest about your own life with the appropriate people.
	I mean, you don't sort of go out and broadcast to everyone.
	Except for me.
	Well, no, that's different, because I don't have any direct interaction with these people.
	But I don't go to work and say, oh, let me tell you, I got a call from my brother this weekend, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, nobody at work knows my history there.
	I guess two women at work who I went to lunch with once to thank them for helping me develop and plan a user conference.
	And they sort of asked me about how Christina got along with my mother.
	And I said, Christina's never met my mother.
	And we had a little chat about that, because that blew their minds.
	But overall, It is entirely the case that where it's appropriate, and where there is honesty in the room, and where people are being open with you, it is absolutely incumbent upon you, I think from an honor standpoint, to be open about your own life.
	Because that's freedom, right?
	Telling the truth is freedom.
	Having to lie is freedom.
	One of the ghastly things that I went through, and still go through occasionally, though not very often, is, given that I haven't seen my mother in eight years, I actually had a dream about her dying last night, which I'll have to mull over a little bit more.
	I dreamt that, probably because I was doing this podcast today on siblings, I dreamt last night that my mother had died and my brother had kept it from me and was being a total jerk, and then was completely frustrated by the fact that I wouldn't have actually wanted to go to her deathbed and didn't care to attend her funeral and so on.
	So this probably had something to do with shoring up my confidence about this morning's podcast.
	I ride the unconscious language center much like the guy rides the bomb at the end of Doctor Strangelove, though hopefully with a flashier but not as destructive ending.
	So I do go through this thing where people say, how's your mother?
	Like, if they haven't seen me for a while, how's your mother?
	And it feels not good to say... I don't want to say, oh, I haven't seen her in eight years, because that makes them very uncomfortable and so on.
	And, to me, the very fact that somebody were to ask me, how is my mother, while having some idea of who my mother is, is somebody who's probably not very trustworthy, right?
	I don't really understand.
	I mean, they would probably, sort of, want... Somebody with a bit more kindness would, of course, know already that I hadn't seen her, or somebody with a bit more sensitivity, or they wouldn't ask that question, because they know that my mother was a difficult, horrible, evil woman, and so on.
	So I'm not talking about being honest with everybody, like just go talk about your feelings with the guy on the bus or whatever, but where there is questions about things, I think it's important to be honest.
	So of course I said to this woman, who was telling me in the bar about her two-day closure session with her father, who she had not seen in 20 years, or some length of time that was pretty significant,
	I simply said to her, wow, I've got to tell you, you're either not being completely frank with me, or you have an uncanny ability to process closure, because I'm in a very similar situation to you, but I have not achieved closure with my father.
	More or less recently it's occurred.
	But it took a lot of work, and I've been working at it pretty hard, so if you did it in two days, either A, you haven't done it, and I'm not saying you're lying, I'm sure you believe that you have, but it may turn out to be the case that you haven't, in which case you might want to hold off on that story until you figure that out, or you've had some enormously wonderful trick for doing it, which I would really appreciate it if you could tell me, because I don't want to spend any more time on this than absolutely necessary.
	And of course she said, well, it's all about forgiveness, don't worry, it'll come.
	You know, that sort of condescending stuff.
	At which point I just knew that she was a liar and that kind of stuff.
	And Christina and I no longer see her and haven't for some years.
	So that's the kind of test that you put out there, right?
	If you say to someone, well, you know, you did it really quickly and you seem to have no problem with it, whereas I'm still struggling with it.
	Is there a secret you can tell me?
	Now, if they just say, well, it's all just about forgiveness and, you know, you just have to will it.
	I mean, that's just making things up, right?
	Who wants to will additional pain?
	But it's hard to achieve closure, right?
	If it wasn't, then we would be a free society already.
	If it was easy to use the argument for morality, or to achieve closure with corruption, then we would all be free, and the society would be free, and it would come out of the family, and it would spread to politics, and so on.
	Spread through philosophy, to art, to politics, and so on.
	And eventually end up with children's stories.
	Actually, that is maybe where it starts, I don't know.
	But we face these kinds of grave difficulties emotionally when we are libertarians because we are walking in a minefield all the time.
	All the time.
	We have to navigate and negotiate and juggle this essential problem.
	A feeling that we know the truth and everybody hates us for it.
	And everybody is hostile for it.
	And everybody is indifferent to it.
	And indifferent in a very conscious way.
	I mean, the indifference that people have towards libertarian ideas is scarcely something that you could ascribe to mere boredom.
	I mean, there is such a thing called politeness in the world, and if somebody corners me at a party and tells me about their stamp collection, I will be interested, at least feign interest, for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, and then make my excuses.
	And that's a stamp collection, assuming I have no interest in stamp collecting, which I haven't since I was about eight years old.
	But to actually be in a situation where talking about right and wrong and true and false and good and evil and the self and the collective and the individual and the state and corruption and honesty and integrity and virtue and morality and logic and I mean all of these things.
	I mean nobody's bored by that.
	I trust you.
	Trust me on this one.
	Nobody, nobody whatsoever is bored by that stuff.
	They just pretend to be bored so that you'll stop talking.
	It's a passive-aggressive way of telling someone to shut up, is to pretend to be bored, or to change the topic abruptly.
	This used to happen sometimes with Christina and I when we were first going out, because she wasn't comfortable talking about her family, frankly.
	So sometimes we'd be talking about something and she'd say, you know, hey, do you want to go see this on Friday?
	I'd be like, um, aren't we sort of in the middle of talking?
	Like, you know, pardon me for, I think I just got whiplash, you know.
	So that is another way of all of these signs that we get.
	All these constant and insistent signs that we get.
	Don't talk about this!
	Stop talking about this!
	I don't want you to talk about this!
	I'm not comfortable with this!
	Shut up!
	You're making me nervous!
	You're making me angry!
	You're making me fidgety!
	You're making me upset!
	You're rocking my apple cart!
	Everything's spilling over!
	I'm upset!
	And we get these signs from everyone all the time.
	Yet at the same time, we as libertarians generally don't feel comfortable just going, yeah, well, you know, I'm going to read some libertarian literature and listen to all the crap that people shovel out day by day all the time and not be affected by it.
	It's very hard to read things or to hear people talk about things and realize just how wrong and corrupt their statements are and to not feel either anger or frustration or irritation or some sort of response so as libertarians we're constantly being you know having things thrown at us you know we're trying to concentrate we're trying to live and people are like
	Like, we're on a balance beam or something and we're trying to get through life, and people are throwing spitballs at us and catcalling us and pushing us and so on, and then when we get irritated and tell them to stop, they assume that we are emotionally unhealthy because we seem to be irritable all the time, which I think is, you know, it's kind of funny, but I mean, I understand where they're coming from, but their own actions in this area might be instructive to some degree.
	So, the reason that I'm saying all of this is that we all go through the same thing as libertarians.
	We all feel alienated at times.
	We all feel isolated at times.
	We all feel hopeless at times.
	We all feel like we're not part of the human race at times, or that if we are part of the human race, we are so far ahead of the species that it almost seems like a shame to have to save them along with ourselves.
	And I think we need to speak frankly about all of these.
	things, because otherwise we're going to feel weak, right?
	In community, community is strength, but only if it's an honest community.
	If I felt that I was the only person, the only libertarian going through any kind of alienation or frustration or despair or feelings of not being part of the species at times, if I felt that every other libertarian was perfectly comfortable with libertarianism and never had any problems with debating in if I felt that every other libertarian was perfectly comfortable with libertarianism and never had any problems with debating in public and never had any, you know, like you're at a dinner party and somebody's spewing some crap out of their mouth about how
	And, you know, I don't necessarily relish because I don't want to be the eternal combat warrior of freedom.
	I don't always relish that fork in the road where I've got to, like, suit up again and say, well, you know, one of the problems, blah, blah, blah.
	Because I know that it's going to be very difficult for people emotionally.
	I know that I may never be invited back to that dinner party.
	I also know that I will never, ever be able to speak to that person again without a vestigial memory of the interaction where I basically said that they were advocating the use of violence.
	So, you know, it's a little stressful at times, I guess is what I say.
	I'd say generally it's always stressful.
	I don't dislike that stress because stress can be a good thing at times.
	But it is always stressful.
	That fork in the road is never easy.
	And it's even harder.
	I mean, I'll tell you this, honestly, you know, brother to brother and sister, it is even harder to do two things.
	I mean, to just say, oh, you're an idiot, you know, government programs never work.
	You know, that's sort of the Republican-Democrat thing, right?
	You're an idiot.
	To do two things is very hard.
	Is to keep your cool, to be bland and curious and Socratic, which is essential because if people see you snapping at people they're not going to think that you're happy and you're violating the whole demonstrate success thing which is important as an advocate for freedom.
	But to not lose your temper, to have empathy and sympathy for people who have obviously been programmed and haven't thought about things and don't even know of an alternative, right?
	So to be gentle and kind to somebody who is spewing the most astoundingly evil doctrines without knowing it.
	Well, you assume that they're without knowing it, right?
	So you start talking sort of frankly and openly and without losing your cool and so on.
	That's not easy.
	And then to take out the bloody great sword of the argument for morality is really, really hard.
	And to do it without escalating, to do it mildly, to take out the greatest sword in the world and to point out to somebody that it's got a bloody edge because they're swinging it.
	And that they shouldn't do that is about the hardest thing in the world.
	You can do that angrily a lot more easily.
	But you can't do that kindly very easily.
	At least I can't.
	And I think it would be impossible to do it easily.
	I mean, it's becoming easier for me now.
	But I gotta tell you, the first time I tried it, I really thought that I was going to vomit or something.
	I mean, it was just awful.
	But, you know, you keep doing it and you get better and so on.
	I'm sure that was true when I went skydiving as well.
	The first time was a real nightmare.
	And so, you know, it's something that we face all the time.
	And the reason that I'm talking about all of this is that it's important to talk about our pasts frankly and openly.
	And that doesn't just mean, you know, my parents were mean or blah blah blah.
	It also means to speak frankly about the difficulties that we face.
	Because we are a legion of freedom fighters and we are working together and we are trying to make the world a better place.
	And humanity does owe all of its progress to we lonely valiant few who fight for the better in the face of the worse and the universal worst.
	So, if we're frank with each other, we can gain strength from honesty.
	You gain strength in relationships through honesty.
	You don't gain any strength in a collective which is based on propaganda.
	It'll just leech you away and inflate your false self until your true self barely exists at all.
	In a community of valiant, courageous and honest people who speak openly and frankly about difficulties that they experience, which it would be insane and irrational to expect not to experience, we can gain great strength, which is perhaps the longest-winded justification or explanation for Why it is that I'm talking about my own personal experience, because I think that it gives us strength.
	I think that there is a relaxation when you see that somebody else has also had the same difficulties that you're having, and has struggled through them, and finds it worthwhile to do so, and enjoys the battle overall, and I can't spend my life in any better way than the pursuit of truth and integrity and honesty and freedom.
	There's simply no greater meaning to inject into a human being's life than to fight for morality, because it is just such a beautiful thing to do, but it is a bloody and difficult thing to do at times, and I understand that, and for those of us who are out there on the front lines, I really do sympathize.
	And let's be honest about our difficulties so that we can be strong and remain empathetic.
	In order to be effective, we have to remain empathetic.
	And you can't empathize with other people unless you're empathizing with yourself.
	And you can't empathize with yourself unless you accept your emotional difficulties as real.
	Not as like, oh, I just shouldn't feel this.
	Or, oh, these other guys don't seem to be having any problems.
	I must be weak.
	I must reject these feelings.
	They are weakness.
	I don't know, I always sound like a bad overdub of a kung-fu movie at these times, but it does seem like that kind of silly philosophy, right?
	And so, you have to be empathetic with yourself, which means that the difficulties that you're facing are honest and genuine and real and legitimate and worth exploring and worth accepting, and you have to understand that your emotional apparatus is there to help, so you can keep empathy with yourself.
	And that if you have empathy with yourself, you can have empathy with other people.
	It comes sort of as the day follows the night, right?
	You will then have empathy for other people, which doesn't mean that you'll sympathize with them, but it means that you will feel what is the best way to deal with them, or whether it's worth dealing with them at all, or whether they're just sort of crazy, evil and corrupt, in which case you will save your sanity and your time and your emotional strength for more productive combats, I guess you could say, or more productive interactions.
	So that's my sort of spin, I guess you could say, on why talking about personal things is important and where it's come up on the board.
	And, you know, kudos to the board members.
	I mean, you guys are just, you men and women are just fantastic.
	And the boy, too, because I know that we have a 13-year-old listening to the podcast, which is one of the reasons why I try not to talk about the naughty bits too much or use too many base sailor cuss words.
	Every now and then I edit these out, but every now and then I'll come up with a ripe, juicy Anglo-Saxon phrase.
	I have to go, oh, let me pause for a moment and then come up with a more gentle version for our younger listeners.
	But, you know, I do want this to go out to younger people because it is, you know, they are the future, right?
	I mean, this is how I think.
	And they, of course, are much more intimately aware of parental corruption being sort of thick in the nest of it and all that.
	So let's keep them in the conversation, for me at least, which means keeping it squeaky clean!
	So, not because they can't handle the words, I just don't want the parents to hear Freedom Aid radio playing somewhere.
	He said, what?
	With a pomegranate?
	Anyway, so that having been said, that all having been said, let me talk a little bit about my brother.
	My brother was the most significant force against freedom.
	He was the most significant totalitarian system in my world as a child.
	And my very first memory, this is my very first memory of all time, is of my brother.
	I remember I was very, very young, I think I was still in diapers, and I was sitting on the carpet in the living room of the apartment that we had in London, and my brother was sort of Poking at me and sneering at me and saying, you know, Stefan is a baby, Stefan is a baby, in a really sort of snotty voice.
	And I remember sort of crying out no and feeling very frustrated and feeling very helpless because I didn't think I could even walk away.
	My brother... I do have really one nice memory of my brother teaching me about the solar system with fruit.
	It was kind of cool.
	We were staying at a... we had a baby... not a babysitter exactly, like somebody who took kids in in their house when we were kids.
	And my mother was a big... she was big on dating back then.
	I mean, my mother's a very beautiful woman and slender and a nice figure and so on.
	So she dated a lot when she was younger and so we would, I guess while she was having her flings, we would get lodged with this woman and I remember being upstairs in her room and looking at the moon and I was about five or so, my brother was about seven I guess, and He was telling me all about the solar system with apples and oranges and I think some grapes for the moons of Jupiter or something like that.
	And it was a wonderful, wonderful thing.
	I mean, that's really the one lovely and great memory that I have with my brother.
	All of the rest of them are pretty horrible.
	Now, my brother was sent off to boarding school when he was seven and I was five and then I spent a year without him because he was away at boarding school.
	And then, I was sent to boarding school when I was six, and he pretty much ignored me the whole time, right?
	Because it wasn't cool to have a younger brother, especially, I mean, I was the youngest kid in the whole school, right?
	So especially to have a younger brother, who'd sort of been torn away from home, shipped out on a train to go to boarding school, and was not happy.
	I mean, I wasn't miserable, but I wasn't happy.
	And My brother pretty much ignored me and rejected me the whole time.
	He sort of walked away when I came close.
	He was with his friends and it wasn't cool to have a pathetically eager, as it always was, a pathetically eager and vulnerable Brother coming up to you wanting a hug.
	I was always very physically affectionate and always eager to talk and eager to find out what was going on.
	I was not too intelligently or discriminatingly eager, but I've always had that in my characteristic.
	As I was talking about with Christina the other day, I have always been optimistic, but I have not always had hope, which is a very interesting thing.
	We can talk about that another time if you're interested at all in that.
	I felt a very great sense of rejection from my brother during these times.
	And I can sort of understand it.
	I mean, it would have taken a pretty great soul to cleave to a younger brother in the face of scorn from all your friends.
	Like, oh, here comes your snot-nosed little brother.
	That kind of stuff, right?
	I come trotting up like, hey, Hugh, how's it going?
	you know, and, you know, you sort of sneer at me and, and, and wander off, right, or leave me standing there, and there was that kind of stuff.
	Now, my brother did have some trauma, I mean, you know, to, to, to give him some, some kudos or some cred, I don't know what my father was like as a father, because my brother was around for two and a half years longer with him, but I think he was a, a pretty mean and vicious guy, and, as My father, of course, has been periodically suicidal and full of rage.
	He's had to be hospitalized for depression.
	He's gone through electroshock therapy.
	All this kind of stuff.
	So he really was an unhinged personality.
	And, you know, he married my mother.
	What more do you really need to know?
	My brother faced that, you know, at a time when I didn't really, because I was just too young.
	So that, you know, probably didn't have some good stuff.
	My brother was born in Africa and had a, I guess, an African nanny.
	And I had this very kind and sweet and nice and cuddly and affectionate and warm Irish nanny, as I've mentioned before, who took to me so much that she named her firstborn after me, which is not a very common name in Ireland.
	Sean, maybe, my boy.
	But not Stefan, so to speak.
	But so he obviously didn't have the kind of bonding that I had and which left me with a very affectionate nature.
	I mean, it was only about two months when I was a baby, but I mean, that seems to be enough, right?
	Your brain is forming so rapidly then that what happens in the first two to six months is, you know, pretty crucial.
	It is like you get a different brain if you experience affection rather than coldness.
	So, I don't think that my brother experienced any real affection.
	My mother is occasionally clingy and grabby in terms of affection, but it never feels good.
	It's never like, oh, what a lovely hug.
	That's for me, too.
	It's always just like, come, my boys, I need a hug.
	It's like, ew.
	Instead of fill up the constantly draining bathwater of the false self, it's not exactly what you feel like doing.
	So he did experience, I think, a complete lack of empathy.
	My father has none.
	My mother has none.
	I don't think his African nanny had any.
	I've since seen pictures of her.
	Doesn't look like the warmest creature in the world.
	So he definitely experienced all of that mess.
	And so he is a cold, cold human being.
	Like a lot of British people, especially those from the upper classes who've been to boarding school, there's some coldness.
	There's humor.
	My brother can be unbelievably funny.
	Boy, if you've got a giggle out of my podcast, if my brother were ever to let rip on you, your sides would be doubling.
	He is to my comedy as my philosophy is to his philosophy.
	I certainly am fully aware that he has by far the greater funny gene than I do.
	And so, when we were at boarding school, he kind of ignored me, but he was kind of cold, and he was constantly embarrassed by me.
	I also remember when we went to... The things my father signed us up to, it just baffles the mind.
	We were sent to explore the Outer Hebrides with the Young Royal Explorers Society, or something like that.
	We're some crazy guy who had a 90-pound typewriter that we got points for dragging around as children.
	This is my first skepticism around rewards from authority.
	I guess I was around seven.
	It's like, you'll get points if you carry my typewriter across these, you know?
	It's like, points?
	Are they redeemable for candy?
	I just don't see that they're much good for me at all.
	Ah, points.
	Well, for sure.
	Let me be your Sherpa.
	Let me be your Burrow.
	Let me be your Mule.
	Love to.
	Couldn't be happier thinking to do that kind of stuff.
	So, We were out in the Outer Hebrides and it was a ridiculously stupid trip.
	I can't remember what time of year we went.
	I think it was spring.
	But the weather was just so ludicrously bad that we were out there for two weeks supposed to be camping in the Outer Hebrides.
	I mean, my God!
	What sort of madness is this, right?
	And the weather was so bad that we ended up, except for two nights, we ended up sleeping in like bus shelters and garages and we sort of pitched up our tents in somebody's barn because we just, it was ridiculous, like tents got blown away and you know, we, children were lost into the spiraling up into the storm.
	I mean, it was that bad.
	But I do remember one time that we were hiking along, and it was actually quite nice and sunny.
	We were hiking along.
	We ended up camping on a beach, and I was really tired.
	I mean, this was like, oh, I mean, I was, again, I was always the youngest.
	I guess because my brother was shipped off places, and it was like, hey, send Steph too.
	So I was always the youngest, and everybody else there was like seven or eight.
	Sorry, it was like eight or nine or ten, and I just turned seven.
	And I was tired.
	I mean, I was actually not... I wasn't exactly scrawny as a kid, but I certainly... I mean, I got a lot bulkier as I got older, partly because of weightlifting, and just partly because I ended up with this sort of barrel chest kind of thing, and I don't know exactly where it came from, because I was kind of chicken-chested as a kid, you know?
	But...
	I was tired and we were hiking all day and I was sort of tired and I could get whiny.
	Unlike every other younger sibling in the world, I could sort of get a little whiny.
	And of course my whole childhood everybody was walking ahead of me.
	My whole childhood I was saying, wait up, I'm coming.
	Nobody had any patience for the fact that I was smaller and my legs were shorter.
	And that my frame was smaller, and I just couldn't keep up with everybody.
	My brother's taller than I am, and my mom's pretty tall, and my dad's tall, and I was running along on these little stumpy legs.
	I just couldn't ever keep up.
	So we're hiking along in the Outer Hebrides, and I'm tired and I'm hot and I just don't want to walk anymore and everybody's pulling ahead of me.
	This is the kind of warm, cuddly empathy that British people have.
	It's like, you keep up or we'll leave you for the wolves.
	I was beginning to freak out a little bit because I didn't know where we were going and everybody was pulling away from me.
	Everybody was walking ahead and my brother was walking ahead.
	I was beginning to sort of freak out a little bit, and I was sort of saying, wait, and so on, and of course the guy, the fabulous guy who was, I guess, who had made so many wonderful career plans that he'd ended up taking a bunch of kids to the Outer Hebrides for two weeks.
	If you're not a pedophile, you've really failed in your career, if that's your major goal, right?
	But I just remember sort of freaking out on this walk, thinking I'm going to get lost.
	I don't know where everybody is, and there's no cell phones, right?
	I'm just going to get lost.
	Then I turned around because I sort of noticed things were getting slightly easier and I turned around and my pack had opened up and I basically was trailing everything.
	So my clothes and some of my food and all this kind of stuff.
	I could see sort of on the hills behind me stretching back as far as I could see little bits of clothes and this and that because I guess something had come untied and I just sort of I kind of freaked out, but I sort of panicked in a way because nobody in life likes those impossible situations.
	I can't go back and get my stuff without losing the group.
	I can't go forward if I don't have any stuff because I've still got a week and a half of hiking left and I need clothing and I need food.
	So it really was an impossible situation and I did start crying and I did cry out for people to wait and so on and I was really in a state because I was tired and hungry and hot and I wasn't having a good time and I'd been sort of stressed out for the last hour as people began to sort of pull away into the distance.
	So yeah, I screamed out that people had to wait and then I went back and started gathering up my stuff and I was crying and I was beside myself and so on.
	And, I mean, totally understand it.
	What a stupid situation to put a child in.
	I mean, if you're hiking with a small... Let me give you a tip.
	If you're a parent, or you're going to be one, if you're hiking with a small child, do not hike ahead of them and lose track of where they are.
	I mean, that's just so elementary, that to not do that is indication of an extraordinarily sadistic personality.
	Also, don't put children in impossible situations, because that undermines the capacity to reason and undermines the capacity of the self to process.
	These are things that scarcely should need to be said, but to my British listeners, this is something that is pretty horrific to do.
	I just remember that my brother literally hid.
	I was so embarrassed by my behavior.
	And my brother, of course.
	This is the British disease.
	Embarrassment is the British disease, as John Cleese talks about in Fish Called Wanda, which is a great film, by the way.
	The London Underground is not a political movement.
	The central tenet of Buddhism is not every man for himself.
	Otto, fabulous character.
	But he was so embarrassed to be associated with my crying and upset and so on.
	He didn't come over and sort of help and give me a hug and say, don't worry.
	All the things that you would expect any sort of decent brother to do, I mean, he just didn't.
	And of course I understand that in hindsight now, looking back upon his own childhood, it seems to me incontestable that he simply had been shamed by my father.
	My mother wasn't as much into shaming because she was too narcissistic.
	My mother is much more narcissistic and violent than she is sadistic, right?
	My mother doesn't sort of coldly eye you and figure out how to Unpeel off your defenses and hurt you in your most vulnerable places.
	That's really the province of my father and my brother.
	And those two were not accidental, those two co-joinings of personality traits, because my father is very much into shaming and humiliating people.
	And so, of course, he did that to my brother when my brother was very young, and so my brother could not... As I talked about before with the bullies, these theories don't all come out of thin air.
	As I talked about with bullies, I guess, yesterday morning, or was it It doesn't matter.
	Hey, if I can't even get today's date right, when am I going to remember the dates of other podcasts?
	That seems unlikely.
	So, there was those kinds of situations, and this is the only way my brother could handle it at the time, right?
	And then as we got older, he got into this constant teasing.
	And teasing, of course, is something that sounds relatively innocuous.
	Like, if I said my brother punched me up every day, I'd get sympathy, but this sort of psychological torture that's associated with teasing You know, the sort of, no means yes and yes means no.
	Do you want me to hit you?
	You know, and then you can't sort of figure out, you're just going to get hit anyway and blamed for it.
	And, you know, he'd sort of take my stuff and then tell me that he hadn't seen it or, you know, constantly make up these weird voices and he'd come and sit on me and then wouldn't, you know, get off.
	He wouldn't leave me alone.
	He wouldn't let me concentrate.
	He'd throw stuff at me while I was reading.
	Like, just constantly invasive, right?
	I mean, which means that he has no self and he's trying to drive out myself, my true self, by being constantly invasive and tortuous, right?
	So, you know, he knew all of my weak spots, all of my vulnerabilities, and he would just attack me and attack me and attack me to the point where it's just like I had to leave the house, like continually.
	And, I mean, that's pretty horrendous stuff, right?
	So I'd always be in this situation where, I remember this particularly after we moved to Canada, but before he went back to England, that I would sort of be home after school and he would sort of start in on me and start sort of torturing me and verbally abusing me and so on.
	I sort of end up in tears.
	I guess I was about 11 at this point.
	I sort of end up in tears.
	And then my mother would come home and she would sort of say, what's wrong?
	And sort of get angry.
	And my brother, of course, knew that I was caught in this impossible situation, right?
	Because if I ended up telling my mother that my brother had been sort of cruel and tortuous and made me cry and so on, Then my mother would sort of get angry at my brother and scream at him, or whatever, or hit him, and then it would just come back to me double, right?
	I mean, my brother would be like, sure, I'll take all this, because I got someone that I'm perfectly willing to exercise this venom and spew this vitriol I'm taking back out on double.
	And so, I was sort of in that situation.
	Plus, I didn't want... I mean, my mother wasn't exactly a just human being who was like, ah, but let me sit down and figure out what the real issues are and we'll talk about it.
	I mean, she'd just lash out, right?
	So, it wasn't like that was solving my problem, was having somebody lash out.
	Like, having my mother lash out at my brother did not solve the problem of my brother being sort of mean and vicious and teasy and abusive and so on.
	And then he went away for two years.
	And as I've talked about before, this was a very dark time.
	My mother ceased to be able to work.
	She lay in bed for weeks at a time and really hit the catatonia of depression.
	And for a variety of reasons I've talked about before, she ended up being institutionalized.
	My brother came back.
	She was institutionalized again.
	And then...
	I guess I went away to university.
	My brother was away.
	I went away to university.
	Then my brother went up to work up north as a gold panner, which I also later did.
	So we sort of didn't see each other nearly as much as we got older as teenagers.
	But as soon as I'd finished my physical maturation and become a sort of husky lad and a strong guy and I was gaining confidence in the world and so on, then the teasing began to diminish.
	I mean, there still would be these kinds of things where I'd be sort of desperately awaiting a letter from my girlfriend at the time, and my brother would come in and sort of say, oh, yeah, I had that letter, but I left it on your desk, right?
	And I would then go and look for it for two hours, and then he would say, oh, no, I'm sorry, it's in my pocket, and he'd give me this smile like he knew it all along.
	Just that kind of stuff, right?
	This constantly sort of maddening, stupid Practical joke that's never funny kind of stuff, which is just constant.
	My brother's still doing this stuff to his own kids.
	It really turns my stomach.
	So these were all things that were still problems.
	Now what happened was, I mean, sort of my emotional development began to really come along when I read a good book called The Psychology of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon, who was a confederate of Ayn Rand's and is her lover for some icky part of time.
	I began to sort of recognize that my own emotional development was not going to grow if I kept rejecting my feelings.
	Like, I had this habit at the time, because I'd experienced quite a bit of trauma by this time in my life.
	So I had this habit, like, whenever I felt bad, I just sort of, I'd take a deep breath, and I would just sort of put my mind to other things and repress those feelings.
	And they would sort of meekly go away and growl in a corner saying, yeah, okay, we'll get you later.
	And once I read Nathaniel Brandon's book about the importance of accepting your own emotions and not repressing them and so on, then I began to practice that.
	And I still remember very clearly I was trying to pick a girl up at a bar.
	She said she was going to call and she didn't.
	And I was sitting in a sauna after working out at the University of Thunder Bay.
	I was stationed in Thunder Bay for a while.
	Sitting in the sauna there and I felt a real stab of disappointment that this girl hadn't called.
	Not realizing that it's not a good sign if you're the one who has to give out the number.
	If she's like, no, I'm not going to give you a number, but yeah, let me take yours.
	I'll write it down on this napkin with my invisible pencil.
	I wasn't mature enough or old enough to know that that's not a good sign.
	If you have to give the number, then you're not going to call.
	But I remember feeling this sort of stab of disappointment, and then I could feel myself.
	I took a deep breath and repressed it, and then I just said to myself, no, let's try this other thing.
	Let me feel it, right?
	So I began to sort of let myself feel stuff, and that was sort of the beginning of self-empathy and sort of the real growth of my emotional and intellectual apparatus, which is accepting the feelings, right?
	If you accept the feelings, then you accept the instincts, and if you accept the instincts, then you get all of this additional processing of reality, right?
	The instincts aren't magical or superstitions.
	The instincts are the sum collected total and stored facts of reality that is in your mind and so it's a lot easier to do that than to try and reason through everything.
	The instincts are what are driving the car right now while I'm doing the podcast so I think that they're a good thing.
	Now you might not if you wanted a shorter podcast but hey you can always play this at a better faster speed.
	So I sort of began to do that and then I decided to sort of talk about things with my brother in a more open way.
	We were still living together at the time and so I... No, sorry, this is a little later.
	After I'd worked for a year I then went back to university because I now had money to do it because you make a lot of money gold panning and you can't spend it because you're in the bush for the most part.
	So I ended up deciding to... I came back and my brother and I were living together and I was going to university.
	I was taking an English degree.
	And I decided to talk about it with my brother.
	I said, we're sort of living together, we're not getting along, I don't like him, he's still as cold, and sort of whatever.
	And he also, sorry, just before I get into this, he was also a real moralist when I was younger.
	And he was very much around to kick me under the table if I said, like I remember saying to once when we were watching a friend play a video game and his parents were in the room and I said, you jammy bastard, which is the British phrase for you lucky guy.
	And my brother kicked me and gave me this absolutely appalled look, like just horrified that I would actually say the word bastard in front of this guy's parents as if Maybe it was inappropriate.
	I don't really think so.
	My brother was never the guy to sort of say, you know, one of the things that might not be the best thing is to sort of cuss in front of other people's parents.
	You know, just tell me what was going on in your mind.
	He's just like kick someone and glare at them and then, you know, never talk about it again, right?
	My brother was never one for talking about things at all.
	In fact, I remember once, and this was during pretty desperate financial times, when Things were just terrible.
	We had no money.
	This was before we got roommates.
	After she'd been institutionalized, we sent her off to B.C.
	so that she'd be out of her hair.
	We just had no money.
	It was down to, like, do I have bus fare?
	I remember one time that I had drunk some milk that my brother wanted for cereal the next morning.
	And so he was very upset, and he sort of shook me awake and screamed at me like, where's the goddamn milk?
	I want to eat my cereal.
	And I said, I don't know.
	I drank the milk.
	Maybe you can fry up some spam or something.
	So basically what he did was he got so angry, and this is the kind of guy that he was, right, and is, that he grabbed his sort of half-soggy with a little bit of milk cereal, lifted up my bed covers at sort of 7 in the morning, and threw the cereal in the bowl into my bed.
	And then stormed out, and you know, this is the sort of family stuff that was going on, right?
	I mean, this is sort of who my brother is.
	While we were going through these difficulties, he wasn't exactly someone to sort of say, let's you and I, brother to brother, shoulder this burden together.
	He was very much like, I'm feeling helpless and out of control, so I'm going to achieve a sense of control and a sense of power by viciously bullying my younger brother.
	And this is one of the reasons that I do recognize that if you want to understand the corruption of the state, it's very important to start with the family, because that's what renders people blind to the corruption of the state.
	You're talking past the real facts of the matter if you start talking about the state without understanding people's family history.
	That's sort of my opinion.
	And so, what we did was we, we, I just, I then gathered up the cornflakes and put them in his bed and then he put them back in my bed the next day and this sort of went back and forth for a couple of days until I just threw them out and moved on.
	But this, this was the kind of stuff that was pretty constant.
	Like, I remember getting caught out in the rain with a sweater that he liked and the sweater got, the sweater got a little swatched.
	The sweater got... Reboot, reboot.
	We are starting over.
	Hello everybody, it's Steph.
	I hope you're doing well.
	His sweater got a little stretched in the rain and of course he was just angry and contemptuous and vicious about it all and so on.
	And all that having been said, could be the funniest guy in the world, was a great conversationalist at times and had some good ideas.
	He's very intelligent.
	He's like the Lex Luthor intelligence.
	If only you could use this for the power of good.
	What a great thing that would be.
	The thing that occurred then later on was I decided that I want to sit down with him and talk to him about our childhoods and our teenage years.
	This was when I was about 19 or 20, I think I was, and starting to go to school.
	And so we did sit down and I finally, after weeks of sort of pestering him, I got him to sit down and I sort of had a list of things that I wanted to talk about, just so I sort of wouldn't forget anything.
	And I have a list for the podcast, too.
	Yeah, that's it.
	It's written on my forearm, so I can see it while I drive.
	What happened was, and I think I've mentioned this before, but this encounter, this conversation, did not go very well for me at all.
	What happened was, we began to talk about it.
	And my brother just burst into tears in a way that I don't think I have ever seen anybody do since, before or since, and I doubt that I ever will in my life again.
	But he was just absolutely wrecked with sobs, couldn't even speak, just completely wrecked.
	And, you know, he started talking about how he hated himself for doing it, that he knew it was wrong, that he couldn't stop himself, this torturing me and the viciousness and the violence, sometimes physical but mostly emotional.
	And he just completely fell apart.
	I've never seen anything like it.
	It really was quite an astounding force of nature to see.
	The power of the true self, the conscience, the moment that happens when the defenses come down.
	And then what's also equally amazing is to see how quickly the defenses come back up.
	Because he did this for a few minutes, and I was sort of surprised to see, right, this is why you know that the people who have these sadistic tendencies are still yearning for freedom and peace, because otherwise they wouldn't feel this enormous amount of emotional horror at because otherwise they wouldn't feel this enormous amount of emotional horror at their core if they didn't still have this true You can never escape.
	I mean, There's no such thing as a sociopath with no conscience.
	There's people who have no connection with their conscience, but there's nobody who has no conscience, at least not that I can understand.
	That would sort of appear to me to be something like my brother.
	But if you confront that person in a way that gets through their defenses, you will see the emotional hell and the emotional horror that is at their core, and their knowledge the whole way through.
	Like the fact that he said he knew it the whole way through, but he couldn't stop himself or didn't stop himself, means that he knew.
	He knew it was wrong.
	He knew it was bad.
	He just chose not to stop him.
	And he could have stopped it, because he didn't do it in front of other people.
	He sort of did it while we were alone.
	And so that's the key, right?
	I mean, if he really was schizophrenic, mentally ill, and couldn't control himself, then he would do it at school in front of the principal.
	He would do it in front of my mother.
	He would do it in front of our cousins.
	But no, he was always sort of sugar and spice and all things nice at those times.
	So he absolutely, like my mother and like my father, had the capacity to not be abusive.
	He just wasn't so much with exercising it when he could get away with it, right?
	So that's how you know that there's a morally responsible choice in there.
	They're just choosing not to exercise it.
	That's sort of important.
	And I've talked about that before.
	So this time, this evening, I remember this so vividly.
	This ugly puffy green couch.
	And he was sitting on it and he just wailed and sobbed and couldn't even breathe.
	It was just wild.
	And then, within a few minutes, he felt better.
	He felt like, oh, I feel better.
	And then I began talking about the issues for me, but he sort of yawned, and he looked at his watch, and he didn't want to hear.
	So, this was not a very satisfying session for me, I'll tell you that.
	And I can only sort of laugh about it now, because it was almost 20 years ago, so I've had some time to process it.
	But it was not satisfying for me because he got his emotional release, but I didn't get to get hurt at all.
	It was really sort of back to this sort of narcissism.
	It was all about him, right?
	It was all about, oh, I feel so bad.
	Oh, good, I feel better now.
	I'm going to head out and go watch a movie with some friends.
	And you're not invited or whatever, right?
	So it's like, oh, that's better.
	And so I didn't really feel that was too satisfying.
	And we were never able to revisit that topic again.
	I didn't want to because I think I'd gotten enough information about where my brother was at in order to be able to not feel a great desire to do it again.
	And so I think that I didn't really respect that particular interaction.
	I thought that was pretty narcissistic and so on.
	But what happened next was I went away and then I went to Montreal and he'd come and visit once or twice in Montreal and I remember he visited over New Year's once when I was living in Montreal and then he was driving back and he phoned me on one of the first cell phones saying how he just felt so depressed, so unutterably depressed that we hadn't connected and so on.
	And then we didn't see each other really very much for a couple of years and then we got into business together and yes yes and I know before you all write and tell me what are you crazy it had been a couple of years he had gone through some therapy he had done this that and the other and he seemed to be a good deal better and so I felt and of course I'd been a couple years away and you know I was only 26 so
	We did that, and I've talked about this in another podcast, one of the early ones, so I'm not going to talk about the result of the business other than to say that my brother turned out to have not changed at all, but simply to become a more sophisticated sadist, and thus a much more destructive one.
	So now we don't see each other at all.
	And he still calls me from time to time begging for us to get together, but I don't I don't say never because I don't want to provoke any kind of unbalance in the guy But I just oh yeah, let me think about it.
	I'll get back to you kind of thing So and and the way that that came about if I think it's kind of interesting Sort of part of the instincts thing that I wanted to talk to you about or I have tried to be talked about to you about for some time now what happened was
	My brother was going to get fired and I put my own job on the line to keep his... The guys who owned the company wanted to get rid of my brother because he was heavily involved with the CEO who had been sort of problematic.
	And so I said, if you fire... This sentimentality and loyalty, right?
	If you fire my brother, you know, we've started this thing together.
	If you fire my brother, you fire me too.
	And so they ended up giving him his job because they knew they needed me as the head technical guy, as the CTO, Chief Technical Officer of the software company.
	They needed me, for sure.
	And so they were willing to put up with my brother and pay him a pretty exorbitant salary to do very little.
	Because they needed me, and so I was like, ah, brother to brother, we will stand firm, all that kind of nonsense, right?
	So, you know, I understand the perils of family loyalty and sentimentality and the argument for morality when applied incorrectly.
	It is an absolute tomb.
	And so what happened then was, a couple of months later, my brother just decided to quit and go and join our ex-CEO in a new venture.
	And he didn't even tell me.
	He just said, oh, I've quit.
	And he didn't tell me that he was going to this new venture with this guy who had robbed and cheated me blind.
	Both of us blind.
	And so what happened was, he then told me that one evening.
	That, you know, I was pretty appalled and I said, you know, so basically I put my entire career on the line to save your job because we started this thing together and we're supposed to be a team and then you quit and go with this guy who's a complete guy.
	I didn't even know what the legalities of all this are so I'm going to be pretty pretty hedgy.
	A guy I don't like.
	A guy with bad financial body odor.
	You're gonna go with him, and you don't even tell me or consult with me, you just up and do it, right?
	So I said, I think I get a pretty strong sense of where your loyalties lie and so on.
	And so then what happened was, a day or two after that, I went away to visit a friend of mine in Guatemala, and I was in Guatemala for a couple of weeks.
	And I was only supposed to be there for two weeks, but I met this woman who was traveling around, and we traveled together.
	It was purely a platonic thing, but she was a lot of fun to travel with.
	And we travelled around for about a week, and then she was going to go and see the ruins at Tikka, I think it is.
	I'm sorry if I've gotten that wrong.
	Or Tulum?
	I can't remember.
	Anyway, there's some Aztec ruins, and I'd already seen them.
	I'd actually flown out from Guatemala City to go and see these ruins, and then we actually ended up driving near there, so she wanted to go see these ruins.
	I didn't want to go and see them again.
	So, she left me, and then went to go and see these ruins, and I then had the day, and I was in a small village or town in, I think we were in Guatemala, we were later in Belize, but I think this was Guatemala, and I was, I didn't sort of, I was mildly at sixes and sevens, but I ended up Climbing over a fence into a resort and sitting on a hammock.
	Now, I sat on this hammock for about six hours.
	I lay in this hammock.
	It was really a wild thing for me.
	So I had a little Diamond Rio 500 with fully 96 megabytes of RAM.
	This is my first mp3 player and I'd filled it up with songs that I liked for this trip.
	This is before I had audiobooks, otherwise I would have done that.
	But I listened to this CD.
	It really enjoyed, loved the music.
	Felt great listening to it.
	And then I dozed a little bit.
	I remember hearing somebody as I was dozing talking about how they'd had Montezuma's revenge and weren't feeling well and so on.
	Somebody on a terrace somewhere.
	And then I sort of dosed in and out and I was really, really, very, very relaxed.
	And it was warm and I was just sitting in this hammock for hours and hours and felt no desire to get up and go anywhere.
	I felt perfectly relaxed.
	And then, and it was a very strange thing, I wasn't even thinking about my brother.
	But it came to me fully, completely and finally that I had to break with my brother.
	It just appeared almost like out of nowhere.
	Like you just suddenly have an extra limb out of nowhere.
	Like a completely fully formed and finalized and completed emotional journey that wasn't even on my mind.
	That's why meditation and taking the time to sit and think about your life or just sit and do nothing is so so so important.
	Don't be too busy.
	Don't be too busy.
	Nap.
	Lie doing nothing.
	It is where you get the journey of your life and where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to do.
	I don't mean supposed to in some sort of external sense, but just in terms of processing your instincts while listening to what's actually going on in your life, because you can't think through everything.
	You have to use your unconscious.
	You have to use your instincts, as I've talked about before.
	And this thing just kind of came out of me, fully formed, and it was just amazing.
	Because it has never been anything that I have doubted.
	And I, you know, I doubt.
	I mean, I doubt.
	I question.
	That's sort of one of my natures.
	And every shred of certainty that I have arrived at, I have arrived at through significant amounts of work.
	And it is still generally conditional upon reason, always conditional upon reason and evidence.
	I mean, there's some stuff that I genuinely do believe and, you know, would be sort of pretty unlikely to change my mind on.
	But It is really just amazing what happened that day, that I just fully formed, got this, I have to break with my brother.
	And it's similar in a way, sort of just strikes me now, and of course it should be obvious but I hadn't really thought about it, it just sort of strikes me now that it's exactly the same as what happened with my mother.
	that I had been going through a significant amount of insomnia during the breakup of this business because, again, fundamentally I knew that I was not living the right life.
	I was with a woman I didn't love.
	I was involved with business people who didn't have any integrity.
	And there were lots of problems in my life that were related to false arguments for morality.
	So I had these sort of blind family loyalties and so on without any ethics and without any reciprocity.
	That was the problem.
	And that's what sort of came about.
	I was sort of blindly loyal to people and then when I began asking for reciprocity is when all those relationships fell apart.
	And that was a significant moment in my life.
	That's why it is important in your life to ask for reciprocity.
	You don't want to leave that unspoken.
	You don't want to have any kind of assumptions around that.
	Ask for reciprocity and find out if you get it.
	Say that you need to be listened to.
	Say that you need a favor.
	Say that you need something to occur.
	Because you need to find out if your loyalties are reciprocal.
	And if they're not, then get out.
	My opinion.
	But the same thing happened with my mother.
	I had not been sleeping very well at all for some months.
	I was supposed to go and see my mother that day for lunch.
	It was a Friday morning.
	This was about 8 years ago now, I think.
	And it came to me.
	It sort of popped into my head.
	It's like, I don't have to see her.
	There's no absolute.
	There's no one with a gun at my head saying, go and see your mother.
	And I also noticed that when I see my mother, I sleep even worse.
	And I really needed to sleep at this point.
	I was going through a significant period of insomnia, which is rare in my life.
	I don't normally have any particular problems sleeping.
	I'm a light sleeper, but that's not exactly the same as being insomniac, right?
	And so I got up, and I showered, and I shaved, and I wrote a note to my mother saying that basically I need some time to figure things out.
	I sort of need a break from the family.
	And I put it in her... I drove down to where she lived, and I put it in the mailbox of her little apartment building, and did not see her.
	She dropped by the office once more, but that was it.
	And so that's what it came sort of fully formed this realization and it didn't waver.
	It didn't waver and that's what closure is.
	It's not closure if you break up with the girl and there's like oh let's get back together and I miss you and this and that.
	But it is closure when it comes to you fully formed, fully complete, and you feel no doubt afterwards.
	And that only comes from, and I say meditation, not like you've got to sit there and go om, or meditate on the seven-armed goddess of the Indian religions or anything.
	But what I say is you simply need to listen to yourself and give yourself, give your conscience and your instincts and your unconscious the time to speak.
	Which means, you know, listen to your dreams and try and figure them out.
	And listen to your instincts and sit and sort of think about your life and meditate on your life and be receptive to the information that's coming to you through your instincts.
	That's sort of very important.
	That's where certainty comes from.
	Certainty does not come through logical reasoning.
	It is aided by logical reasoning and should always be validated by logical reasoning.
	But certainty comes from the emotions, and the emotions require to be listened to in order to provide you with certainty.
	In other words, you have to be reciprocal with your emotions.
	If you give them respect, then they will help you win your life.
	And if you don't give them respect, then your life will continually be difficult and problematic and random, and you're going to waste a lot of time, like I did, not listening to your instincts.
	So do it!
	Listen to your instincts!
	They're trying to help you.
	So that particular moment in In Guatemala was an astounding, astounding event for me.
	The one with my mother was, you know, kind of inevitable.
	The one with my brother, I didn't necessarily feel that way, but the fact that we had all these problems in business, that he told me he was going into business with this other guy who was the ex-CEO of our company, that he had quit without telling me, and so on.
	And there were other things, too, that were occurring at the time that were just kind of giving like he was having a lot of problems with his wife and then for their anniversary he was going to buy her this enormous diamond and i just remember saying well i don't really sort of understand that like you're sort of having a lot of problems with her but at the same time you want to buy her this enormous diamond that like things that he was doing that just didn't make any sense and also as i got more experience in business i began to realize just how badly he had uh worked out the whole business like Like, we had no project plans.
	We just had, like, vague phone calls and notes for developing these multi-hundred-thousand-dollar systems, which were causing nothing but grief.
	And, of course, he'd worked as a project manager before.
	And he'd had ten years more experience in business than I did.
	And the CEO had had even twice that.
	But they did not Do anything in terms of project planning.
	I mean, all this stuff.
	And so I sort of learned it all by bootstrapping and figuring out on the fly and so on.
	So there were just lots and lots of indications.
	And I also did get a very strong sense.
	And this was sort of interesting because I respected his marriage to some degree.
	He was married and he is still married.
	And you know, his wife was, you know, I knew they had lots of problems, but you know, I was sticking it through and so on.
	A big house, you know, so it was a little bit shallow.
	And I suddenly got a very strong vision as well.
	This was even before the whole Guatemala thing.
	I got a very strong vision that when my brother and his wife got older, that they were going to be very unhappy.
	They were pretty unhappy to begin with, but they were going to be very unhappy when the kids left and so on.
	They were going to be this bitter old sniping couple, you know, you ruined my life kind of thing, right?
	You ruined my life and I'm never going to set you free, like all of that kind of nonsense.
	And I just remember thinking, well, that's not That's not the flag that I want to plant in the future to aim at, right?
	That's not the goal that I want.
	That's not the kind of people that I want in my life.
	And so, sort of peeling off that idea of there was an ideal, something associated with this kind of marriage, or this kind of life, or this kind of materialism, right?
	Because he was doing well, as we both did, from the sale of the company.
	And so that was sort of pre-stage there, but then I sort of just got this fully formed notion of the need to break with my brother, and then that's exactly what I did, right?
	And then what happened was I didn't speak to him for a couple of weeks, and then he wrote me an email.
	Oh, so there's one other thing that I want to talk about just before that.
	We have time, because I'm not a big speeder.
	Which was that my brother took something called the Landmark Forum, and the Landmark Forum comes out of Est.
	Weiner Eckhart was a California kind of guru, kind of philosopher, and he developed something called Est, which was sort of confronting people's personal demons in a pretty intense three-day session where you're sort of there for 18 hours a day and you can't go and pee and stuff like that.
	And then this developed into something called, after he had a tangle with Scientology, they accused him of child molestation, he fled overseas, all this sort of mess.
	He ended up developing this thing called the Landmark Forum.
	And I'll talk about my own experiences with it another time, but my brother took this, and one of the things that he complained about in the Landmark Forum was that he had a bad relationship with me.
	And so one of the things that they said was, well, what's the reasons?
	And of course he said, oh, I don't know, I don't know.
	Never accept that from somebody.
	Never accept when they say, I don't know, that they know.
	They always, always, always know.
	I mean, if you're not talking about the capital of Mozambique from somebody who just came off a spaceship, they always know.
	Like when it comes to, what is your brother's or sister's motivation for doing this?
	And they say, well, I don't know.
	Nonsense.
	You always know.
	You always know.
	You just don't want to listen to yourself.
	So my brother was like, Oh, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	So they kept confronting him and kept pushing him.
	Finally, he burst into tears and says, Well, he's been a writer for 15 years and I've never read anything that he's written.
	Right?
	So he knew exactly what the one of the problems was.
	And it was a problem.
	He'd never written anything, read anything that I'd given himself to read, but he just never read it.
	And so he knew exactly what the issue was.
	So of course he comes over to my... So they give him this thing.
	Go and read your brother's stuff, right?
	So he comes over to my house.
	This is when I was in graduate school.
	He comes over to where I was living and at one o'clock in the morning he gets me out of bed and says, I want to read your stuff.
	So I'm like still naive and still untutored and idiotic.
	And so I get up and I print off one of my novels and he starts reading it and he starts giving me comments on it and we stay up till like five o'clock in the morning or six o'clock in the morning reading it and then he catches an hour nap and goes back to the forum and so on and yeah I guess I could say that I sort of felt that this was like a breakthrough like he'd understood something and I you know but of course it never happened again right I mean like the defenses that are torn down almost with everybody almost instantly rebuild themselves.
	And so that is just too common for words, and it's not even really worth speaking about it.
	But don't be fooled when people open up.
	Now, when people open up, who have had a long history of not opening up, it is not going to last.
	It is not going to last.
	Now, I'm not saying it's impossible for it to last.
	I'm just saying, statistically, it's not going to last.
	It has to continue for at least two to three months, this sort of openness and vulnerability and willingness to talk about stuff, and they have to initiate it too, and then you will know that it is progress.
	But don't be fooled by some big tear fest or some big opening up or some big mutual understanding.
	It feels like a big step forward.
	It has been my experience that this kind of intimacy Often it's the last gasp of a dying fire, right?
	So if you have long-term relationships, and I've experienced this before, where there's a sudden flaring of intimacy and an opening up and so on, this usually then ends up being like the dying gasp of the relationship.
	So you think it's a step forward, but it really is just the scream as somebody goes off a cliff into the void of no-self, right?
	So it is a very easy thing to be fooled by.
	I've been fooled by it a number of times, but now I'm aware that where there is intimacy, it is usually the last gasp of possible intimacy.
	It is the ceiling of a tomb, not the opening of a new vista.
	This definitely occurred with this reading.
	I've been up all night reading my stuff, and he's like, oh, this is great, this is nice and interesting.
	He's got some intelligent comments to make about it.
	Unfortunately, though, it never happens again.
	He never read anything else that I'd ever read.
	He never even read the book that I got published.
	Never, ever.
	And it's because he can't handle the inner world.
	His own inner world is so tiny and constrained and self-destructive.
	That the rich imagination and a rich envisioning and empathy to characters is just far more than he can handle, right?
	He likes a good story about the SAS in Vietnam or something.
	I mean, that's the level that he likes to read at.
	Violence and coolness and stuff like that.
	And it's not because he's not intelligent.
	It's just that he's emotionally undeveloped and sadistic.
	So he likes stories about cruelty and violence and the excellence in martial arts rather than anything that's sort of empathetic and stirring, I think.
	So then when I got back from Guatemala I did not speak to him for a couple of weeks and then he sent me an email basically because he was in the orbit of this new guy he was in business with who was very hostile towards me and recognized me as a pretty significant moral opposite and was concerned about my brother and he needed my brother to get funding because my brother is really good at presentations and so on.
	And so he was probably completely aware that I was not going to be speaking well of this brand new hellish partnership.
	And so he began pouring the kind of poison into my brother's ear that corrupt people will always do to draw other people deeper into their circle of evil.
	And so my brother then was like, Oh, you sent me an email.
	You're so judgmental.
	I haven't heard from you for weeks because I guess you're all now you're all up in arms about what I've done and blah, blah, blah.
	And you're just so intolerant and judgmental and blah, blah, blah.
	I understand that you feel that way, but I got to tell you that I think I need a break from this family.
	I feel like there are these problems that my views are never taken into account.
	I'm not blaming anybody.
	I'm just saying that this is something that I need to work out, so I need a bit of a break.
	And then he sort of wrote me back and said, fine, you know, you take as much time as you want, but know this, you will not be able to see my, you will never be able to see my daughters again, your nieces, your godchildren.
	You will never have this, you will never have that.
	If you try and contact them, I'm going to call the authorities.
	And he really went off into a fine flying rage.
	Which is, you know, again, this is back to the cereal being poured into my bed, right?
	Because I happen to drink the milk.
	Like somehow his nutritional needs supersede mine and so on.
	And so this is the kind of continuity of personality that always occurs in the absence of significant intervention.
	And him going to the forum and taking a bit of therapy just wasn't quite enough to cut it.
	So, this is the kind of problem that if you have these people in your life, a one-sided argument for morality, a lack of empathy, a lack of ability to negotiate with them, and all these kinds of things, you are going to end up with significant problems in your life.
	You know, if you have difficult people in your life, your life becomes difficult.
	It will never become easier through any action of yours.
	You will never be able to trigger or spark anything that is going to be able to help these people change.
	It has to come from them and it has to come quickly enough that you will be able to turn the situation around.
	Certainly after a couple of decades of having corruption and problems in your life, it is never going to occur in any way that's going to be able to be restorable or solvable.
	So I'm going to actually have to sort of stop now.
	I'm tidying things up very quickly.
	I sort of have to stop now because I have some complicated directions to get to my meeting.
	It's raining pretty hard.
	So I hope that these sort of personal tales have at least illuminated my journey towards freedom in my life.
	Recognizing that people do have one-sided arguments.
	That it is exploitive.
	That you can't ask them for favors.
	That it's not mutual.
	That it's not reciprocal.
	And you can't change that in people.
	You can't rearrange relationships one-sidedly.
	If the relationship is one-sided to begin with, trying to change somebody else from your own initiative is just more one-sidedness.
	So, I hope that's been helpful.
	Thank you so much for listening, as always.
	And I will talk to you, I guess, when my meeting is done.

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