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April 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:22
184 Empathy Part 1

Speaking volumes by asking questions

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Good morning everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is the 10th of April 2006.
I'm getting so good at this.
It's almost too fluid for words, isn't it?
Just tossing off those dates like nobody's business.
I hope you had a great weekend.
I know I haven't podcasted since Friday.
I was a bit knocked out after the podcast on Friday.
They can be A bit of a drain, and knowing, you know, what I want to communicate is very clear to me.
Communicating it in a way that is motivating without being overwhelming, that is passionate without sounding like I'm yelling at people, all of that is a very tricky business all around.
And Christina was feeling a bit under the weather, so I was Muchly doting.
And then we did have a two-hour chat on Sunday with the crew from the board, or some of the crew from the board, which is very enjoyable.
And thank you so much for the people who called in.
It's really exploratory, trying to figure out a good roundtable situation.
We had five people on the call.
Christina joined as well.
And it was very enjoyable.
Thank you so much again for everyone who called in.
I'm mulling it over, setting it up as a Sunday 2 p.m.
thing.
It's a pretty good time for me, and except for the gentleman who phoned in from Romania, it's probably a good time for other people, you know, because it's after church, and that's the key thing, of course.
So there was quite a bit of FDR stuff.
I also spent some of Saturday promoting it.
I have, of course, three emails that I send out, which I don't believe is not accurate.
It's just something that is a little focused, you know, you know your audience.
So I have one that goes out Which says, come to a libertarian site.
And then there's one that says, come out to an atheist site.
And then there's one that says, come out to a humanist site.
I think I have had an objectivist one as well.
And of course there is an anarchist site or an anarchist podcast.
So I spent some of Saturday doing that, trying to drive up the traffic and get the word out.
And it's good.
We're starting to get some pretty interesting cross-links coming in from lots of places all over.
And so that was fun, in a way.
It's not that much fun, but it's interesting to see what's out there on the web that's similar that's worth sending an email out to invite.
So, musical recommendations.
I was listening to an album last night and wanted to pass it along to you.
It's a very sad story, which sort of adds, I think, to the movement of the music or the emotional content of the music, but have a listen to Eva Cassidy's Live at Blues Alley.
Eva Cassidy is a woman who was discovered just as she died.
It's a very sad tale.
She had, I think, skin cancer, and she'd been a very shy girl and hadn't really pushed her talent, although she was an extraordinary singer, a very gifted singer, and not just in terms of the vocal quality, which was astounding, the flexibility of the voice, but the emotional connection the flexibility of the voice, but the emotional connection she had through her voice to the music was really quite remarkable.
Listen to her do a cover of Sting's Fields of Gold live.
Oh, it just makes your heartache.
And another thing that's interesting, just in terms of psychology, for me at least, is to listen to her do a song called Tall Trees in Georgia, which is one of the most difficult songs to sing I think I've ever heard of in my life.
Try that in your shower and you'll realize why there are very few people who get paid a lot of money to do it.
And she was talking about how, just when she introduces the song, and the song is basically about don't fool around when you're younger, not from any sort of moral standpoint, but just because if you don't sort of settle down when you're young, then you'll find that there aren't any men at all for you as but just because if you don't sort of settle down when you're young,
And one of the things I think that's quite interesting, at least for me, is that when you listen to her introduce the song, she says, I love this song.
When I was a kid, my parents had a record.
I love this song.
I used to listen to it over and over and over again.
And I think that's very interesting because she never did marry.
And she never did.
I don't think she was like sleeping around or anything, but she never did settle down, never did marry.
And I always think that's quite interesting, just how much of her personality is embedded from the very beginning, those kinds of
conversations that you hear people have sort of with with themselves and with others through music where you hear this woman who just loves and plays the song over and over and over again about a woman who won't ever get married and then she ends up not getting married and I don't think it's because you know she liked the music and therefore she ended up not getting married it could absolutely be a coincidence but if you see these kinds of things in people sort of ask them early memories and so on to me it's all somewhat clear I mean I
Many, many years ago, I guess not that many years ago, there's a song that came out by Black Eyed Peas called Where Is The Love, which I thought was pretty good.
I liked the beat.
I'm not a big one for rap, but I thought this rap wasn't so bad.
And in my own, I guess, I can, you know, you can call it vain or megalomaniacal or whatever, but in my own way, when they were saying, you know, where's the love, you know, who will tell us where the love is?
Who will tell us where the truth is?
And I started jumping up and down when I heard that song.
Ooh, me, me, I just don't know how to get there yet.
So, I'm glad that I have a venue for that, and I'm glad that it's helpful, and I'm glad that you've made it this far.
Congratulations to you on listening to one past 183, I guess, to one past what it is that I wanted to talk about in terms of personal freedom.
So, good for you.
I know that it wasn't necessarily an easy conversation to have, but today I would like to talk a little bit about empathy.
Not because I don't think that there's lots of empathetic people in the libertarian movement.
Okay, well, maybe there's not a lot of empathetic people in the libertarian movement, but because I think it's so important to sort of understand and be sensitive to the people that we're talking to so that we can connect with them in an emotional way, in a way that really makes sense.
We were on the, on the sort of, I could call it a phone-in show, but that sounds a little grandiose, on the conference call yesterday, the Freedom Aid radio conference call, we were talking with one gentleman about his mother, who's never particularly warm to libertarian ideals, and she's a public school teacher.
And I had a little bit of experience with this because Christina worked in a hospital, a public hospital, which of course all hospitals are up here in the great white socialist north, and
He was saying she never quite warmed to these ideas, and I was just sort of asking him if she liked working in the public sector, if she felt that the rules, the regulations, the protection of poor teachers that goes on in this sort of situation, the fact that she was an atheist but was unable to talk about atheism in the class setting, the rigid and somewhat blatantly unimaginative and outwardly and openly destructive Curriculum and so on that she didn't really have any input in.
Did she really enjoy all of those things?
And of course she didn't, right?
I mean, there's no sane, non-sadistic or non-masochistic human being who would enjoy those things.
And so then you can, you know, I was sort of saying, then you can sort of say, well, wouldn't it be great if you could have those things?
And kids could be better educated.
And by the way, it wouldn't be based on force, right?
Because if you start on force, then people are, their backs are going to go up because immediately they're going to hear, what they're going to hear is, Because they know there's a gun in the room.
And I know I've talked about pointing out that there's a gun in the room, which is very important.
But it's only important for people who are Not even aware that there's any force through government at all.
But if you're talking with somebody, especially somebody who's a woman, in my particular opinion, the gentler sex, in a way, needs to be approached in a different way.
But you can just talk about their personal career things, right?
Women, in my particular opinion, tend to focus on what is tangible to them, what is immediate to them.
What is going to... the cost-benefit is more immediate.
Now, that's not worse.
I mean, because men sometimes don't focus on the immediate cost-benefit at all, much to their detriment, right?
So, I think this is one of the reasons why men and women are so complementary and balance each other out so much, if they respect each other's contributions and attributes and abilities.
But to simply walk up to, say, a public school teacher who's a woman, and a woman, I think, would be a good example in this case, and say, you know, it's blood money, the state is violence, everything should be privatized.
She is going to feel kind of like, you know, I can't really argue that there's a gun in the room.
I mean, I can, but I'm not going to get very far.
But I really don't like the feeling that I'm some sort of state parasite.
I actually am trying to help these kids.
Yes, I understand the money comes from the taxpayers.
Non-voluntarily, but it's not much I can do about that I've been trying to do my best in a bad situation and here's this guy coming along telling me that I am You know that I'm taking the receipts of violence as if I were a mafia mall, and I think that That doesn't really get you very far, but if you do start talking about the difficulties that women are very sensitive to, difficulties within hierarchies, and very, in my view, very sensitive to injustice and unfairness.
And I think that's a pretty important characteristic that women have.
A little bit more so than men, and a little bit more in an immediate sense than men.
It doesn't mean they always act on it.
If you can talk, say, with a woman about the difficulties that she's having in her career in the public sector, and how unpleasant it is, and how difficult it is, and how many co-workers she has that are non-productive, and so on, then you can begin to talk about, well, there's ways that that could be eliminated, and by the way, wouldn't it be great if this didn't have to be done through violence?
I'm sure you don't teach your children that the best way to solve problems is through violence, and so on.
It's sort of a way of inviting people into Into the movement and I just I think that it's a little bit more It's a little bit different than men and I'm sorry that I wasn't clear about that earlier.
We're not at all clear I didn't even mention it.
I don't think but I think that it's important with women to talk about Men get riled up about Another man dominating them right we were a bit of a hierarchical crew, and I think that's fine.
I think that's good and I mean this part of the competition and desire for excellence that is great within society now Don't get me wrong women Women are very competitive and have a desire for excellence as well.
In general, in slightly different spheres.
So with men, saying, oh there's a gun in the room, I think can be very helpful because it sort of riles them up, you know, they don't like to be Beholden to people with guns, right?
I mean, that's not sort of in our nature.
Neither do women, either.
Neither do women, either.
You know, I'm just going to start rhyming and rapping right now.
We're going for iambic, baby.
Strap yourself in.
But women prefer to figure out that their own personal difficulties are being increased, that their own personal situations are being harmed, and that there's a lot of immediate and local injustice in their work environment, if they work in the public sector, and if they work in the private sector.
They're probably dealing with people in the public sector because it's just so large these days that you can't avoid it.
But I think that's sort of an interesting way of approaching it.
This is all the kind of sensitivity and delicacy that is important to get a hang of, or get the hang of.
You know, just talk in general terms, ask people like... One of the ways that you can talk to someone who's in the public school system or works for the post office to say, Wow, you know, what's it like working there?
I mean, I hear that the public sector is pretty political, it's pretty hierarchical, that there's a lot of sort of people who aren't very productive, and that sort of puts more work on other people.
I hear it's a lot, it's a real top-down hierarchy, like you just kind of got to do what people tell you to do, and I hear it's real tough to get the right things done.
I mean, what's your experience with that?
You know, uncork the well-shaken champagne flute of bile and disgust and frustration and you're then in some place, you know, like I've sort of thought it would be great if you could have a system where You could choose the school that had the values that you believed in, so you could teach children what is right, rather than what some bureaucrat tells you.
You've got to teach them, or you've got to sneak in some sort of facts on the side as best you can, always with the fear that you might be disciplined.
Let's talk about that, and then talk about, overall, I think that the system is problematic, not only because of the difficulties it creates for you, which are significant and very important, but also because You know, we generally prefer peaceful solutions to violent solutions, I think, as a society and as people.
And I'm sure that's what you taught your kids and all.
We don't really explore this anymore.
This has sort of become something that we don't even talk about.
Whether there's a peaceful solution to these kinds of problems is something that we don't talk about, but I think we kind of should talk about it.
I think it would be very important to talk about it because I mean the education of children is the most important thing in the world for a society and I just think that it's become really bureaucratic really top-heavy really and it's sort of based on forcing people to pay for stuff which they may or may not want and I think it produces a lot of the problems in a sort of long chain of causality produces a lot of problems that you're facing in your life which you would be I'm sure much happier I think it's a conversation worth having that you'd be much happier if there was another way of doing it you know that sort of one way of approaching it that's sort of an invitation
Now, this kind of empathy... Believe it or not, I'm going to talk about a dream that I had for many years.
One of the few recurring dreams.
I don't have any recurring dreams anymore, but I did have this dream for many years, and it was always a real... It was a disturbing dream, and a scary dream, but not in any way supernatural.
So, the dream was basically this.
That I would be by the sea.
And I would be, I don't know, lunching at a little cafe.
It all started off very nicely, right?
I would be lunching at this little cafe by the sea.
And the seagulls would be going and the surf would be pounding and so on.
And then I'd be there, lunching with Christina, or just alone, or with a friend, or whatever, and it's sunny, basking in the sun, very happy, and I think distant steel drums and so on.
It's all very relaxing.
And then there'd be this long, horrible dragging sound, and I'd look and see that the sea was being slowly sucked out to far away.
And then I'd realize I was in my repetitive dream.
I'd sort of never realized that beforehand.
And this wasn't always the case.
Once I was in a hotel at a conference, and then a hotel by the sea at a conference when this all occurred.
And then what would happen is there would be this absolutely enormous wave, right?
Basically a tsunami that would come in that would be like 10 stories or 12 stories high.
And I would be desperate, desperate to find some way of escaping this calamity.
And I'd realized that, of course, the wave was coming towards the shore with such speed that you couldn't possibly outrun it.
And I would try and figure out if I curl into a ball and take a deep breath, if I do this, if I do that.
And I think only one time did I actually survive it and I ended up floating.
This is the dream that I had where I was in a hotel and I ended up After the wave had come by, I was floating above the hotel, like a half a mile above the hotel with the water.
So much water had come in over the shore.
I was floating about, I don't know, half a mile or a quarter of a mile above the hotel.
I could see it very deep down in the murk.
It was all smashed and broken and so on.
And I myself had had a chunk taken out of my car for some reason.
I think I talked about this with Christina.
We worked it out.
I can't remember what this all meant now.
But for years I had this dream, and I remember I rented... Oh, there was some movie, Deep Impact or something like that, about a comet hitting the Earth.
And I saw in the previews there was this wave, right?
This wave because a comet hit the Earth in the ocean.
And I rented this whole movie and sat through this whole dang movie because I just wanted to see that scene.
And I played it a couple of times.
It wasn't a great movie, but I did sort of play that scene.
And it didn't sort of give me... It was just interesting to see, but it didn't sort of give me any insight as to why I kept having this dream.
And I kept thinking, oh, is there something in my unconscious that I haven't dealt with that's going to overwhelm me, or blah blah blah.
I couldn't sort of figure out why I wasn't having as much luck communicating with people about freedom.
Didn't sort of enter into it, right?
Because I very much want to pass along whatever knowledge I have about freedom, and I just wasn't able to get that conversation, those conversations, going with people.
These dreams continued, gosh, even after I got married, even after we moved.
I mean, they occurred up to about eight months ago.
And I finally sort of woke up after having one of these dreams.
This is the dream where I was in the hotel and the wave completely destroyed the hotel and I ended up floating way, way above the hotel looking down at its sort of smashed remnants under the sea with no land in sight and a chunk torn out or bitten out of my calf, my left calf.
And I just couldn't... And these dreams used to wake me up.
And they would wake me up, not exactly in a panic, but it was overwhelming.
And I just found it to be really... Like I would wake up and I'd sort of be like, argh!
And it would be tough to get back to sleep.
Anyway, so I finally...
I gave up on everything that I knew, because I'd sort of thought, well, there's something in my unconscious I haven't dealt with, and so I was sort of, I guess, worried about my own mental health.
Not that I felt that I was in any sort of, you know, I'm not going to go crazy and trot off to the funny farm or anything like that, but I was just worried about my own self-knowledge, because there was obviously something big in myself that I couldn't figure out.
So anyway, one morning early I woke up, and Christina was awake, so we started talking about it.
I was so sick of this dream, and so tired of this dream, and I've spent years trying to figure it out, and I'm just not having any luck.
So I'm just going to throw out everything that I know about it, and I'm going to say, what is the major difficulty in my life?
Well, the major difficulty in my life is that I'm not having the kind of effect that I want in talking to people about freedom.
And Christina said, well, maybe that's what the dream's about.
And then it clicked for me.
And I was very lucky that it clicked for me.
And this is part of the whole thing about throwing out everything you know, which is, you know, a good thing to do from time to time.
It's what science does.
And we who are moral scientists should do no less, right?
So to throw out everything you know and work from first principles is a very useful thing to do.
I mean, this is sort of why I'm talking to you.
Because about a year and a half ago, I started working out everything from first principles, and that's where anarchism and these sorts of ideas about freedom began to really be worked out.
And I gave up on the argument from effect, and worked on the argument for morality, and gave up on politics, and gave up on... Anyway, so you know that story.
So I just by throwing everything out that I knew and reinventing my perception of this particular dream it sort of hit me that I was dreaming that the dream was trying to teach me empathy but I was not empathetic enough to the dream or I was too prejudicial to the dream or I mean it's sort of weird because And I'm not sure exactly how this works as a psychological mechanism, but the dream was trying to teach me empathy by putting myself in somebody else's position, but I kept thinking that that somebody else was me.
And I mean, empathy is a complicated thing, and we'll talk about it this afternoon as well.
Empathy is a complicated thing.
I know I've mentioned it once before, the difference between empathy and sympathy, but basically what the dream was about was, when I began talking about freedom, this wave this tsunami, this overwhelming thing which destroys everybody, everybody's world, and causes them to rise.
That's what the sea does when it comes in.
Everything rises that can float.
And it changes.
They're alone.
They look down at their old lives and so on.
So when I begin, and this may be true for you as well, you can sort of look into your own life and see to what degree this dream can help you.
That when I begin talking to people about freedom, they experience the conversation, they experience my ideas with the same emotional content that I experienced this immense destructive wave That I experienced in my dream.
And that really helped me to understand the delicacy that was required in order to communicate effectively about personal freedom.
But people would even experience this in the realm of political freedom.
Because the unconscious is an enormous and powerful net that grabs everything and organizes everything.
And so when you talk to people about political freedom, their unconscious will translate that into personal freedom.
That's why it's important to talk about personal freedom usually first, rather than political freedom.
Because you're going to be talking about personal freedom with them anyway.
You can just either talk about it in terms that they're translating into themselves for, right?
So it's like, oh, well, if we're not supposed to have a state, What the heck's my relationship with my parents all about?
If we're not supposed to have any unchosen obligations, if people aren't supposed to be paying taxes because the majority votes that they do, then why should I have a relationship with my parents who I do not like just because the majority says it's good?
This is the translation that the unconscious is doing for them, so you might as well go to the source and talk to them about their They're personal interactions with freedom.
So you say to a public school teacher that the schools are based on coercion, then she feels that her whole life is invalidated because she's been working in a coercive environment and not even known about it.
And she has known about it in an unconscious sense, but she's never found a way to reconcile it.
And everyone else has been doing the same thing.
And, you know, she's got to eat.
So you're bringing up a lot of discomfort for her, whereas you might as well start talking about all of this stuff, I think, right up front.
And just talk about the personal issues, because that's where people really live.
That's what their unconscious is translating them, right?
That's why I say everyone who's talking about politics is really talking about their family, unless they've really worked through family issues for many years.
So that wave, that enormous, overwhelming wave, is the argument for morality.
I mean, that's sort of how I discovered it, right?
This is the argument for morality.
This is what people face when you use the argument for morality.
And to some degree, in an unconscious sense, this is what they face when you use any arguments about, there's a gun in the room, Even the argument from effect, to some degree, if you say, for instance, to a public school teacher that test scores in a private system would be enormously higher, children would be better served, then she's going to translate that, or he's going to translate that into their own mind, that they are harming children.
I mean, that's how it's going to land for them.
And it's true.
I mean, it's true.
They are harming children.
But they're harming children the same way that a doctor who's never heard of penicillin is harming people by prescribing something less effective, right?
I mean, he's harming relative to if he'd learned about penicillin.
So if they don't know, ignorance is why people don't go and look stuff up on the web, right?
I mean, I always say, well, it's just a couple of mouse clicks away.
But people don't go and look up that stuff because then they're responsible and they don't know how to fix it and they don't feel any hope that there is going to be anything that can be fixed.
And so why learn about something?
It'd be like if somebody said to you, do you want to know the day of your own death?
Well, you know, you might hesitate about that.
I kind of like not knowing.
It spurs my ambition.
And so that's why people do shy away from knowledge that they don't feel they can have any chance to affect or can't see the sort of route out of solving.
But I think that it's important to understand the overwhelming nature of what it is that we're communicating to people.
I think that it's a step forward to use the argument for morality, to talk about it in personal terms with people, because that's where it really has an effect for them.
Otherwise, it's like talking about how NASA calculates the Voyager's journey past Jupiter.
I mean, it's interesting, but it's no real relevance to my life.
But in this realm, in any realm to do with relationships and violence, there is always a translation down to the personal, in the unconscious.
And the degree to which it is unconscious is the height of the wave.
So if you start talking to people about their personal issues, they don't experience the tsunami because there's no downshift of translation from the unconscious.
But if you begin talking about politics and violence and so on, then...
You are always going to be overwhelming people because there is this translation that is unmanaged.
And they can't manage it themselves because they've known it all along, which is why the wave is so high, but they don't have any way of managing it or dealing with it, which is why it feels so overwhelming, like they're absolutely just going to get washed away.
Now, one thing that occurred, that somebody mentioned on the board, that I think ties into this a little bit, and I know, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, whoever posted this, but I just know that this person is British, because This is such a British way of dealing with moral issues that, boy, does it ever evoke for me my whole childhood and my whole time in boarding school, and especially my brother.
Somebody was on the TV, their house was, I think, spared, or their life was spared from a tornado, one of these American tornadoes.
And they said, Oh, God spared my house, spared my life, blah, blah, blah.
And they were praying for thanks and so on.
He said, oh, what a load of nonsense, right?
He was watching TV and his flatmate, or his roommate for those who are not in England, or part of the colonies, his flatmate said...
Now, now, if she wants to believe that, that's perfectly all right.
And then, the next night, of course, there was a woman who died because the 911 service didn't show up, and somebody was saying, well, where was God?
And he said, well, where was God there, right?
So he saves this American woman, and God doesn't save this other woman with the 911 call.
And this guy said, now, now, it is perfectly all right if it gives... and people want to believe what they want to believe, and all that kind of stuff.
Now, This flatmate, I feel pretty comfortable giving a diagnosis of, because this is such a common ailment that it is possible to diagnose with little information, right?
You know, like if somebody says, my ankle is swollen, I can't walk in it, and I fell off my bike and twisted it really badly, you'd say, sprained ankle, rest ice, compression, elevation, rise it.
And so I can pretty much say for sure that this person has experienced an enormous amount of verbal abuse in his life, has never been allowed to think for himself, and now has turned conformity, especially moral conformity, into a virtue, and also has turned what he would term open-mindedness, support for other people, non-judgmental approaches to analyzing people's desires,
into a virtue, which is why he chides, in this now-now, this very British way, he chides somebody who says, this person's beliefs are nonsense, because he's turned open-mindedness, postmodernism, a lack of any kind of logical approach to analyzing things as a virtue.
But of course he knows it's all nonsense, right?
He knows it's complete nonsense, because, I mean, basically even any kind of argument for morality It has to be logically consistent, right?
So if he says that open-mindedness is a virtue, then he has to be open-minded to people who are closed-minded, right?
I mean, that's just natural.
If everyone's beliefs that give them comfort are valuable, then somebody's belief, even if it's perfectly irrational, that gives them comfort, which is that other people should not believe that God is picking this person off and crushing this person and letting this person live and killing this person off.
If that gives somebody comfort then that should be something which is perfectly all right for them to believe, right?
Because everything's relative and so on.
But of course it's not, right?
The reason that this gentleman on the board who said this to the television, the reason that this person gets chided and chastised is because he's right.
So, people who are open-minded to everything, or people who don't like to judge, or this or that, they are open-minded or relativistic to everything except the truth, right?
I mean, they have to be, because the truth destroys their false self.
The truth reveals that they were in fact abused when they thought they were being instructed, or they've told themselves that they were being instructed for their own good, that they were actually being abused and destroyed and not allowed to develop a self.
And that's a pretty hard thing to do to a child, and it only occurs When you consistently, and either through emotional violence, physical violence, sexual abuse, emotional withdrawal, contempt, disgust, whatever, very, very harsh things occur.
I mean, there's no bigger wave to the child than parental disapproval or abuse.
I mean, it's just enormous.
So that this person himself was never allowed to grow.
He was turned supposed to be relativistic and he bought that it's a virtue, although he knows it was just a cover for abuse.
So when this flatmate turns and says something that's actually true and accurate and honest and virtuous, This guy says, no, no, no.
It's a virtue.
You can't say that.
It's bad, right?
Because you're actually provoking discomfort in this person about his history.
More than discomfort.
It's the wave, right?
This is how people quell it.
They ignore it.
They pretend that it's not there.
They get angry.
They feel assaulted.
That's why this guy came down on you so hard, just in case you were sort of wondering.
Because what you need to do, if your roommate's in the room and you're saying this, it's because you want to change that person's mind.
I mean, unless you feel that changing the mind of your television is a good idea, I can tell you that it's because you wanted to change this person's mind.
And I think that's great!
But you're not going to change this person's mind without directly talking about his history, his past, his own perceptions of freedom.
It's a premature elaboration, as I've mentioned before.
It happens in sales as well, where you just go in and BLURP!
Everything that you believe comes out, and you hope that, you know, it's also called spray and pray in software demos, where you just, you don't ask people what it is that their needs are, what is it that's beneficial, what would make their lives better.
You simply show every single feature and hope that they can translate that into some kind of value for themselves.
You sort of spray all your features and pray that they stick, right?
Just throw everything you can at the wall and just see what's left sticking to the wall when everything's done.
And that's the same thing that occurs if you are going to make a comment when watching television, which is moral in nature and touches upon ethics and religion and society and so on, then you're probably not going to do anything but provoke anger from people and dismissal and contempt or boredom or some sort of disapproval, some sort of negative emotion.
If you simply touch on these issues obliquely, you provoke People's defenses and people's history of abuse, of being abused.
And, you know, this guy now has turned into somebody who's dangerously close to perpetuating the virus, right?
He wasn't only assaulted morally when he was a child and not allowed to develop any kind of moral certainty, which is innate to a child, right?
As I said before, if you try taking candy from a baby, you'll see just how abstract property rights are and how tough of a concept they really are.
But this guy is dangerously close to being somebody who is no longer just infected but is spreading the virus, which is where his soul will be completely lost and he will be unrecoverable.
So...
If you want to have a conversation with this guy or change his mind, then I think you need to understand the wave.
You need to understand the power of what it is that you're talking about, and you need to be very delicate, and you need to listen first.
You need to listen first.
This is what empathy is all about.
If you want to change people's minds, I'm not saying you have to.
Again, we're not slaves for freedom.
If you want to change this person's mind, then you need to listen first.
You need to understand his beliefs.
You need to understand where he's coming from.
You need to map out his arguments for morality, his false arguments for morality, so that you can understand where he's coming from.
What is he translating what you're saying into for himself, right?
So if you say there should be no social security, then most people who are not schooled in this kind of knowledge Or knowledge.
Not this kind of knowledge as a whole.
We'll translate that into, I don't like helping old people, I want to see them starve.
Right?
I mean, that's going to be the translation.
And so saying this is negative, right?
I mean, unless you actually understand what people's arguments for morality are that are chucking along with them in their own mind, how have they been brutalized into subjectivism or relativism or How have they been so brutalized that they no longer understand that there's a gun in the room when it comes to government, right?
I mean, how much emotional or physical violence do they experience in their families?
And this doesn't have to be coercive.
It doesn't have to be screaming at people.
It can be scowls, disapprovals, frowns, yawns, boredom, disengagement.
snapping at a child, exasperation, a consistent lack of patience.
It can be anything that the children are so dependent on parents that, I mean, the parents are the ultimate wave, right?
You don't need a heavy hand with the parents to destroy a child's sense of self.
It is a very subtle and delicate and dependent relationship, and so the ultimate gentleness, right?
The ultimate gentleness that we all needed was as children, because the true self will grow beautifully in the absence of coercion, but the temptation to coerce children one way or another is very, very strong.
And to be exasperated with children because they're not obedient, most parents will have no luck resisting the impulse to then just steamroller the children in one form or another.
And not explain, not help them understand, not help them grow, not be delicate, not be open, not be generous, not be kind, not be curious about the child's development, and so on.
And so, what happens is, the children just end up conforming and calling it virtue.
You can't conform and not call it virtue, because that's a pretty ghastly situation to be in, which people just don't want to have.
And so, if you want to change somebody, then you have to start listening to them first.
You have to understand what is driving them.
You have to understand what their history is, so that you can figure out if they are changeable.
And so, because what happens is, if you just drop a bleak hint, or even if you just talk about politics and don't ask them questions, then you are absolutely tsunami-ing them, so to speak.
You are overwhelming them completely, and all they will do is resist and push back and make you vanish, make your arguments vanish in one way.
And somebody was saying that in regards to people that they were talking to, that they get it, and then the next day they don't get it, and of course that's perfectly fine.
Knowledge is something, wisdom in particular, is something that comes in waves, so to speak.
And so people aren't going to just, oh, I've changed my mind.
Everything's different, night and day.
It certainly wasn't the case with me.
I mean, I got the principles pretty early.
It took me 20 years to work out the details, so I can't claim to be too speedy that way.
But empathy, if you want to change someone, empathy is so important.
Because you also, through empathy, you can figure out if they can be changed.
And that's very crucial.
You don't want to waste time with people who are just going to butt heads with you and make you upset and make you doubt your own philosophy and make you... I mean, that's sort of pointless.
I mean, you don't... I mean, if you're a Republican candidate, you don't go into a district that's been voting Democrat for the past 50 years and has an incumbent who has given them, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal grants and say, I want to talk about the free market.
I mean, you just don't bother because you're not going to get anywhere.
And every moment that you spend talking to somebody in that district, you could be talking to somebody who might actually help get you elected.
Sorry, that's not the best metaphor, because we don't like politics.
But I think you understand what I'm saying.
Don't waste your time.
Don't blunt your enthusiasm.
Don't set back, in a sense, the cause of freedom, right?
Because if you just talk about things obliquely, then people are going to view you, as this guy's flatmate did, as confused, or intolerant, or weird, or whatever.
And you just want to be curious about them.
Ask them about their own lives.
And if they can't even talk about their own lives, If they can't say, oh yeah, you know, my parents were like this, and I grew up like that, and, you know, if you sort of say, well, how did you come about these particular beliefs?
I've always been fascinated by how people develop their beliefs.
If they say, well, you know, it's just common sense.
I mean, it's just what you, I mean, who would have any kind of different beliefs?
It would be crazy, right?
And if they won't tell you anything about the etymology of their own beliefs, then they're not going to be somebody you can ever change.
They don't mind change.
There's no opinions to change.
They're just one of these brutes, that's the way it is, period, kind of guys.
And so don't waste your time.
I would say don't bother making comments because don't needle them, right?
I mean, it's just sort of pointless.
It's like kicking a dog.
So I think that that empathy is pretty important to develop.
I think that asking people questions rather than telling them how it is, is a very important thing to do.
And I guess I could say, and you could say, well, what about these podcasts?
Aren't you telling people what to do?
No, of course not.
I'm actually asking a lot of questions, getting a lot of feedback.
And also, after 20 years of finally sort of slowly figuring this out and asking people questions, I think that I have some stuff to say that doesn't involve asking you questions, because I've asked so many people, so many people questions.
Like, you know, if you've seen 6,000 sprained ankles already and somebody on the phone says, I have a, you know, these symptoms, you say, it's a sprained ankle, I don't need to come over and have a look and I don't need to ask you for a whole lot more symptoms.
So, I think that... Try it out!
Instead of... And it's scary!
It's scary!
Because you're actually dealing with the heart of the conflict, rather than, in a sense, sniping about it from the sidelines.
You're actually getting into the field, getting on the pitch, and...
Going for the heart of the matter, which is, what was the history that led you to these beliefs?
Because if that can't be talked about, can't be understood, can't be communicated, and can't be understood by you, then anything that you say is simply going to be an overwhelming way for them that they're going to have to reject in some violent or irrational manner.
And the irrational manner can be as simple as, Don't be harsh, don't be judgmental, don't be this, don't be that.
That's somebody just pushing back the wave because they know that you're not being harsh or judgmental but merely rational.
But they've been so frightened by rationality that it overwhelms them, right?
Objectivity, rationality, and the idea of freedom and unchosen obligations absolutely overwhelms them because the false self
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