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April 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:11
185 Empathy Part 2
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is just past five o'clock on April the 10th, 2006.
Heading home.
And I'm going to chat a little bit more about, or I could say we, but it's a little bit of me, since I haven't received any feedback from this podcast this morning.
But I'm going to chat a little bit more about empathy.
Because I do think that it's one thing that The freedom movement, the libertarian movement, lacks a little bit is empathy.
And I think that philosophers as a whole are not so great with the whole feeling the feelings of others kind of thing.
And one of the examples that I've sort of used is that the last piano teacher that you'd ever want in the whole wide world would be Mozart.
Mozart would be a complete nightmare as a piano teacher because for Mozart it all comes so easily that all he would do is get irritated with you for not, you know, assuming you weren't, you know, Mozart the Second or Mozart Mach 2.
Then you would end up being tied up in knots, and so would he, because he would be like, don't you just get it?
He was doing it at the age of four, so it's hard for him to imagine that other people have difficulties.
So having empathy for what is difficult for others but easy for ourselves is something that I think the freedom movement has been Lacking a little bit.
And to me, I mean, this is pretty subjective and a complete opinion, right?
Like, I mean, it's something to do with one of the things that is my revenge.
I mean, this is my revenge, and it's a subtle revenge.
My revenge against people who've treated me badly is to refrain from correcting them.
That is sort of my revenge, right?
So if somebody's treated me badly, I could theoretically sort of get in there, like with my brother or whatever, and really get that person to understand and stay in until they understood and this and that and the other.
But part of my vengeance for being treated badly, what Nietzsche termed resentment, or he used the French "ressentiment", I think.
But one of the ways that I end up having vengeance or taking vengeance upon those who've wronged me is to agree with them when they're being crazy.
I mean, this was sort of before I ended up having nothing to... this was the final stage of my relationship with these people before I just got them out of my life.
was that I no longer confronted them about anything that was problematic that they were doing.
And this was an important phase for me in breaking free, but it had a lot to do with, you know, my vengeance upon these people for treating me badly is to no longer resist them when they're being crazy.
And that resentment has, I think, something to do with the lack of empathy in the freedom movement.
As I've talked about, fairly frankly, last Friday, the problems that we face as people who are interested in freedom and pacifism is not inconsiderable, these problems.
They're pretty enormous, socially and emotionally and so on.
And sexually, right?
I mean, it's hard to find a date when you're really interested in libertarianism, right?
It's an all-male movement.
Not all male, but largely male.
It's a Greek movement, let's say.
So there's lots of problems in being a libertarian and I think part of the vengeance that we take upon a world that doesn't listen to us is to not be empathetic.
Which I think is a real shame as I've talked about before and I mean this with myself because I have some facility with these ideas.
I have in the past been impatient with people and frustrated with people and felt anger and contempt towards people because It just comes so easily to me.
It comes without me bidding it.
It comes without me willing it.
I mean, you wouldn't want somebody to be composing a novel while driving a car.
You wouldn't want to have somebody be doing surgery while driving a car.
But it comes so easily to me, at least, that I can come up with some fairly useful stuff while driving a car.
So, given that it's so easy for me, it's always been rather difficult for me to understand why it's so hard for other people.
And this is where, for me, going to a place where things were not easy for me was very valuable.
So for instance...
For me, I could let go of certain people in my life relatively easily.
I could not, for the life of me, emotionally easily let go of my brother and let go of that side of my life and even my then-girlfriend, who I left after we'd gone out for a number of years.
I found it was relatively easy because of course I had exhausted all possible options which is where closure.
Closure is just exhaustion, right?
Closure is just, I'm out of things to try and I've honorably tried and openly tried everything and nothing is working so I'll call it closure when it's really just sort of falling over to pick yourself up to go in a different direction.
But for me, to let go of my family, and to let go of my brother in particular, was enormously difficult.
And that was actually the most personal coercive relationship or corrupt relationship in my life.
In fact, it was pretty much the only one after I had gotten rid of my then girlfriend.
The way that empathy came upon me was through the dream that I talked about this morning, the dream of the wave, the dream of the giant tsunami.
And I would sort of invite you to take this little thought experiment under your wing and just see where it lands with you, see where it sits.
I would suggest that if you want to understand how people feel when you talk about the free market, when you talk about the freedom that is inherent in the free market, and even if you don't go the whole hog and talk about No state.
But even if you talk like from the objectivist or libertarian, sort of classical liberal standpoint of like a small government, when you talk about no social security, no welfare, no drug programs for the elderly, no whatever, you know, we all know the huge stinking pile of state programs.
When you say that to people, I would submit to you that they feel exactly the same complete lack of ease As you would feel if I said to you, you have to stop seeing your parents right now.
I think that's a really important thing to understand in terms of empathy.
When you say we need a radical re-evaluation of our ethics, and we need a radical rewriting of the basic science of human relations, from coercion to voluntarism, From dictatorship to property rights, from collectivism to individualism, from war to peace, from violence to words, from governments to DROs, when we need a rewriting of the fundamental science of human relationships,
People feel as freaked out about that as you do about not seeing your parents, or if you like your parents, not seeing anybody you feel obligated to ever again.
Doesn't that make you feel just a little bit dizzy?
Doesn't that make you feel just a little spaced out?
Because that's the feeling you get when new neural pathways are opening up in your mind, and it's a wonderful feeling.
But that feeling that you get when contemplating eliminating all undesirable, all non-positive, all non-joyous relationships in your life, that dizziness and that disorientation and that fear.
Because it's one thing to just sort of contemplate it, like, wouldn't it be nice to... But when you actually think about, okay, I'm going to do it Friday.
Forget Friday.
I'm going to do it when I get home.
I'm driving and it's now 20 minutes from when I make that phone call or write that letter or do whatever it is.
Or, because that's even more proactive, the other thing which people often say is, I'm going to taper things off.
And of course, gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.
I'm going to taper things off.
Which is fine if the other person really wants to taper things off as well, but it's not often that both desires are so co-joined in a relationship.
But, if you say to yourself, When I get home tonight, or if you're home, now!
Do it now!
If you're home, you know, when you finish listening to this podcast, and you say to yourself, when I finish listening to this podcast, and I know that it's Steph, and so it's going to be a while, and we'll have gotten so many tensions, I'll have forgotten my commitment by the time we get to the end, but hey, let's just say that you can remember this at the end, and I'll try and remember it too.
At the end of this podcast, I'm going to phone everyone in my life that I do not have a joyous relationship with, And tell them that I need to take a break indefinitely.
Do you feel a little nervous about that?
Do you feel like that's kind of dizzy-making-ish?
Well, of course it is.
That's terrifying.
It's completely terrifying.
At least, maybe there's somebody out there that it's not terrifying for.
I know it was for me, and everybody else I know who's defood.
It's pretty terrifying.
And it's worse than the thousand-mile walk to your boss's office, at least that I had when I was quitting a solid job at a bank to go be an entrepreneur.
And it's worse than going up to ask the prettiest girl in school for a date when you're 15.
And it's worse than anything.
It's worse than karaoke for the tone-deaf.
It's worse.
It's the most frightening thing.
And I understand that.
I mean, if it wasn't frightening, then the world would be free, right?
I mean, because when people knew that if they didn't act well in relationships, they were going to be left behind, they would act better in relationships, which would mean less bullying, less manipulation, less bad ugi things overall.
So, the feeling that you get in your heart, the terrifying flutter, the arms windmilling off the edge of a cliff kind of fear that you get when you think of, in twenty minutes, in ten minutes, in five minutes, now, I am going to make those phone calls and ditch all the people from my life who I do not feel joy in the presence of.
Well, that's what people feel when you talk about no state, or a small state.
And I would submit That if you talk about getting rid of bad relationships in your life, directly to people, they're going to feel unease and they're going to need to immediately create a defense against you and label it, he's an extremist, he's intolerant, he's bigoted, he's going to be unhappy, I'm tolerant, I'm nice, I'm non-judgmental, I'm open, I'm caring.
All the kind of slathery, goopy, oily crap that people pour all over their bad false arguments for morality in order to make the pile of dung tastes better with some conceptual icing on it.
All of that stuff, they will be able to label you with all of that, and so they will be able to manage their own feelings through dissociating from you, right?
Through pushing you away, through withdrawing from you, and making you wrong in their own mind, right?
It's what people do when they're threatened by someone, and they're not aware of their own selves, or their own processes, and they're not mature, which is, very few people are that way.
If you threaten someone, an honest and mature person will say, you know, you're really making me feel uneasy.
Isn't that interesting?
Because what you're saying isn't offensive, but I'm really feeling uneasy.
Isn't that interesting?
I wonder why?
What do you think?
I mean, that's a mature person.
That's a person who actually takes responsibility for his or her feelings.
And that is a huge rarity, my friends.
That is a huge rarity.
But we should all become that person.
I mean, that's honesty, right?
And when you say that you have ditched all the bad relationships in your life to people Then they at least can get defensive in the sort of time-honored, pathetic, human, historical fashion, which is just to say, you're bad, I'm withdrawing from this conversation.
That's what people do when they feel threatened.
They push you away and they label you as bad.
It's so inevitable that it's sort of like saying human beings have a heartbeat to say that.
There are some enormously rare exceptions, but don't hold your breath waiting for one of them to walk into your living room.
You want to become that kind of person before you can be with that kind of person anyway.
But when you talk about the state, it's even worse for people.
Because, as I've maybe mentioned once or twice, when you talk about the state, most people automatically downshift that to their own parents.
And so when you're talking about the evil of the state, people hear, your parents are evil.
And when people talk about the gun in the room, they remember abuse or neglect or mistreatment they received at the hands of authority figures when they were children, which they have since slathered over with this sickly pink icing sugar of moral justifications over a pretty brutal and black transaction.
I mean, children are just treated abysmally in the modern world.
I mean, throughout history in general, but we can only deal with sort of what's going on now.
And so when you start talking about the state with people, the feeling that you get when you think of five, ten minutes now phoning everybody and saying, I'm no longer going to continue in this relationship because it doesn't give me joy.
The fear that you feel about picking up that phone and making that phone call, the dizziness, the possible nausea, the terror that you feel, is about one one-hundredth of what people are feeling when you talk to them about no state.
And that's what I mean when I talk about empathy.
When I suggest things to you that you know are logical, you know they're logical.
That you should be free within your own life before demanding that we all be politically free.
That you demonstrate freedom before you can inspire freedom in others.
You know that's true, and when I say it, you're like, oh yeah, I guess I do need to look at some of my relationships.
And I'll bet you, I mean, what you did was, and some credit to you, of course, what you did was you sat down and thought about some acquaintances you could maybe slowly edge away from.
That's great, you know, that's a start.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry to disappoint you.
And of course, it doesn't matter what I'm talking about.
I'm just saying to you, I mean, good heavens, you can do whatever you want, but I'm just telling you that's not what I'm talking about.
For me, drifting away from a few acquaintances is not what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is getting bad people out of your life.
And that's people who treated you not in a way that made you very happy when you were a child.
And I mean very happy, right?
I would assume that even though my podcast can get a little streaky, a little shrill, and occasionally the jokes can be a little labored, the metaphors can be a little long, and the tangents are at least 27 quantum string dimensions of traversing to go there and back again.
But it's a positive relationship that we have, right?
I mean, I give some podcasts.
You throw me a bone of cash every now and then if you feel like it.
I run a board.
There's lots of stuff to browse there.
You know, it's mutually beneficial.
I assume you like the podcasts.
I assume that they're bringing you some sort of spark to your thinking and spring in your mental step, which is great.
But that's an example of a positive relationship.
And family, you know, somebody was talking about, you know, my father was bad and now he's sort of, we don't talk about it, and he's sort of changed a little bit.
So, okay, great!
You know, we're back on.
And that's nonsense.
That's not what I'm talking about either.
People who did not make you feel happy, happy, happy, happy.
Not, it was okay, it was fine, I had fun with my friends.
But people, when your mom or dad came home, did you feel joy that they came home?
Did you sort of jump up when you were a kid and rush into their arms?
Did you, as a teenager, did you jump up and say, hey it's great to see you?
Do you feel joy when people Right?
And this is the unconscious.
This is where your instincts will tell you everything you need to know.
This is the blink.
This is the thin slicing.
The door opens and they come home.
What do you feel?
Do you feel joy?
Or do you feel like nervousness?
Do you feel like caution?
Do you feel like boredom?
Do you feel like, oh damn, they're home and here I was, whatever, right?
Doing something that was more enjoyable.
Because I'll tell you, when Christina gets home, I jumped down the stairs to see her.
It's just too much pleasure for words.
My heart is bursting.
And that's the standard.
That's a real possibility.
That's how relationships should be.
It should be a mutual flourishing and an orgiastic carpet ride of pure joy.
And when somebody comes home or the phone rings and you see that caller ID, what do you feel?
Do you feel joy?
Yay!
I get to talk to this person.
How cool!
Or do you feel like, uh... I'll pick it up later.
Or whatever.
I mean, that's sort of important.
It's those relationships you need to focus on, and of course you need to stop making excuses.
In my humble opinion, you really need to stop making excuses for these people and just recognize that if you don't feel that joy, then you've got to ditch those relationships.
Now, I know that you're going to disagree with me.
You're going to say, no, he's changed and this and that.
Fine, fine, fine, fine.
You still don't feel joy.
You can't feel 20 years or 30 years of feeling fearful of someone if they were your parents and were treating you in a way that made you feel bad, even if it wasn't anything overt.
It was just sort of like, Not feeling joyous, not feeling real pleasure.
And of course, if you can't talk to them about your ideas, like these ideas, then you can't get any real pleasure out of them anyway.
Because if you're interested in this podcast, if you're interested in these podcasts to this degree, that you've come to 185, then you really love these ideas.
This is who you are.
This is your soul.
And if you can't talk about this with people, then... I don't mean to the exclusion of, right?
But it's got to be a pretty important part of your conversation with them.
If you can't do that, then it's not a joyous relationship, because this is what gives you joy.
And so I don't want you to sort of...
Make the mistake of misinterpreting what I'm saying.
That's why, before people write to me and tell me that they've done a great thing because they have decided to start phasing out two acquaintances that they see every couple of months, and feel that, look, I've dealt with my issues, and if it was this easy for me, then it should be this easy for other people to hear about freedom.
Well, my friends, I have to tell you that that's not what I mean.
What do you care what I mean?
Nothing, other than the fact that if this is something that of interest to you, if there is a part of your soul that is really reaching out to what I'm saying as a sort of rope down a well to haul you out of obligated relationships and the nightmarish world of positive rights and obligations, Then grab the right rope, right?
Don't grab a thin rope that thinks you're gonna get somewhere.
It snaps and you fall back down, and then you're down in the well, plus you broke your ankle to boot.
And you're more cynical about the next rope that comes down a well, right?
These ropes don't keep coming down the well.
Grab the right rope and haul, and you will get out.
But don't pretend to yourself that dumping or planning to phase out a few Maybe acquaintances over time is exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about that at all.
I mean, I'll sort of drop all pretense at a nice way of putting it and just saying that I know that your parents treated you badly.
I just know it.
I know that your parents treated you badly.
I know that your parents are irrational.
I know that your parents are religious, or if not religious, irrational in some other manner.
I know that your parents aren't interested in talking to you about these ideas, because if they were, you would have had a podcast long before I did.
And so you'd be too busy making your own podcast rather than listening to mine.
And so I just know it.
And so if you want to be free, if you want to call yourself a libertarian, then you have to do it.
You have to do it.
And this is probably going to be true of your siblings as well.
In fact, I can almost guarantee that it's going to be true of your siblings as well.
That's what I mean.
And I know I'm going to get lots of letters.
People write to me saying, my parents were nice.
My parents were nice.
They did this.
They played with me.
We had good conversations around the dinner table.
Fine.
Fine.
Then tell them what you're thinking about freedom.
Do you feel joy when your parents call?
Do you feel a thrill?
Are you excited?
Do you get along well with your siblings?
Do they intervene in fights with you with your siblings?
Did they intervene positively?
Did they teach you justice?
All the things that... I know it's a high standard.
I know it's a ridiculously high standard.
But so is no state, right?
I mean, so is no government, or even little government is a ridiculously high standard, given where we're going.
But what's wrong with having high standards?
I mean, the world doesn't advance.
Incrementally, the world doesn't advance, because people say, I'd like a scientific theory to be 1% better, or more accurate.
No, science advances, knowledge advances, especially moral knowledge, because people simply come Come up with revelations and new ideas that are logical and empirical and apply them consistently.
Let's make slavery better, right?
Let's get rid of it.
And I'm not saying this to force you into a corner mentally to say, Ha!
You must defoo!
You must eliminate all non-pleasurable relationships, all non-joyous relationships.
I'm not trying to say that at all.
What I am saying is that if you want to have empathy, if you want to be an effective communicator and you want to have empathy towards people that you're talking about with freedom, then you need to feel the same fear that they feel about freedom.
Because then you can be an effective communicator.
And then you can be delicate.
And then you can be trustworthy.
And then you can be gentle and curious and effective.
And kind.
But in order to do that, you have to understand, you have to feel, you have to have empathy for the fear that the very idea of freedom brings into people's lives.
So, I mean, that's the reason I didn't talk about all this stuff till later, because, you know, you had to have at least some trust in what I was saying in order to be able to listen to something as radical as no unchosen obligations.
And what that really means.
But if you feel the fear that people feel, if you have empathy for the fear and anger and panic that people feel about freedom, and you feel that not like they feel it, but like you feel it, Right?
So you're more advanced than most people and just about anybody in the world.
Because you're already free of the lies of the state.
And you're already free of the lies of religion.
Now, you're not free of the lies of the family.
And that's okay.
I mean, Rome wasn't built in a day, right?
And our home wasn't unbuilt in a day, I guess you could say.
But that fear that you face with your family is still less than the fear that people face with freedom, political freedom, philosophical freedom, personal freedom.
So the dizziness, the sweaty palms, the palpitations, the lightheadedness, the terror that you experience with the idea of calling up your folks and saying, I need a break.
I'm taking a break and I can't tell you for how long.
And I can't even tell you why, because obviously I've spent 20 or 30 years trying to tell you why.
I need something from you that you can't give.
that I'm no longer interested in what is habitual.
That I'm no longer interested in what gives you comfort at my expense.
That I'm no longer interested in anything which does not give me joy because my life is short and I have so much to offer.
The terror that you feel is still one tenth to one one hundredth The terror that people feel when you talk about political freedom for two reasons.
One, they still usually have political and state enslavement in their minds, which you're free of.
And secondly, because They are translating and applying it to their own parents unconsciously, which is why you just get this instant and immediate resistance.
Instant and immediate resistance!
Haven't you always been rather stunned at the staggering lack of curiosity in people around you about ideas which are obviously fascinating?
Obviously!
Obviously fascinating!
Why it is that The moment that you open your mouth, people are like, nope, it's this way.
Oh, come on, what about this?
Well, there's this, that, and the other.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Oh my god, what are you, crazy?
You must be a lunatic!
What a ridiculous notion.
Oh, come on, the world isn't that bad.
Stop being such a doomsayer.
Oh, my God.
Yes, yes, yes.
Why don't you go and join all of the conspiracy theorists that the world is coming to an end.
I can't believe that you're against religion and you have your own little revelations of the coming collapse of everything.
Ease up.
Relax a little.
Good Lord.
Don't get so intense.
Don't get so uptight.
Enjoy.
Now, now, now, now.
Don't be so judgmental.
Don't be so judgmental.
Don't be such a moralist.
People just want to sort of have fun.
Yeah, the world isn't perfect, but what are you going to do?
Tie yourself up in knots about everything that's not perfect?
I could do like three hours of podcasts on all of the nonsense that you hear about why you should not talk or think about freedom.
It's just absolutely... People don't even have to think about it.
This is, again, this is an autonomous section of their brain, right?
It's the false self, which instantly and easily bats away any challenge that does not entail empathy, any challenge that is not involved in empathy.
See, the false self is entirely about non-empathy.
The false self is entirely about justifying falsehood, which means not having empathy.
If you're going to justify falsehood in your own life, it's because you don't have empathy for your true self, which demands truth, which needs the truth, which needs honesty, which needs integrity.
So you have to have no integrity in the false self.
They're synonyms.
And so the false self can never be defeated.
You can never reach through to people's true selves and real selves and honest parts that have integrity and yearn for freedom.
You can never reach through to that in the absence of empathy.
And you can't have any more empathy for others than you have for yourself.
And so if you feel the fear of freedom that is the real core of what I was talking about on Friday, that's good.
Feel that fear.
I'm not saying you've got to act on anything, but feel the fear for sure.
And then understand that when you talk to people about freedom, that fear that you feel, which is almost overwhelming for you, especially the closer you come to really acting on it, is still one tiny portion of the terror that you are provoking in others.
And they don't usually even feel it.
That's how dominant their false self is.
They just bat it away.
But they won't be able to bat it away if you approach the topic with empathy.
And of course the logical next question is, what on earth does that look like?
It's all very nice to talk about this as an abstract, but what does this look like in the real world?
Well, tomorrow we will talk about that.
So I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph signing off for the afternoon.
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