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April 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:36
192 Curiosity and Personal Relationships

The primal value of curiosity in personal relationships

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Well, good morning everybody.
It's Steph. I hope you're doing well.
It's 10 to 11 on Easter Sunday, sweetie.
Is it Easter Sunday? I do believe we have an Easter Sunday on our hands, so it's time to talk about the resurrection and how believable all of that sort of stuff is.
I saw a funny t-shirt online which had the evolution of superstition.
So when a very young child was praying to the Easter Bunny, a slightly older child was praying to Santa Claus, and then an adult was praying to God, which I thought was pretty funny.
Anyway, so I wanted to talk about an interesting thing that sort of occurred to me emotionally over the past couple of days.
I haven't podcasted since Thursday and that was partly because I just didn't sort of have the time because the weather is nice out and I had to go shopping with Christina and we had to go do this and that.
So I just didn't really... But it's also interesting to me that I didn't get round to it because podcasting is normally a fairly high priority in my life.
And so I was sort of wondering and I felt a sort of resistance to it.
Like I didn't want to sit down.
It wasn't exactly petty, but it wasn't exactly elevated, I guess you could say either.
And I had this resistance to sitting down and podcasting.
So I was talking about it with Christine and we were trying to sort of sort out what kind of resistance I might have to podcasting.
And sort of what I worked out I think is interesting and might be of help to people who are listening to this, particularly those who've been posting on the board.
And I think there were sort of two reasons, one of which I can deal with and another which I sort of put out there as a conversation topic.
One of the reasons was that, of course, I've been talking about the donations and they've been very scanty.
I've received like one or two donations over the last week.
And so part of me felt a little bit like I didn't feel like podcasting because I didn't feel that there was enough reciprocity in what was coming back from the donation standpoint.
But that isn't really a reason to not podcast.
That's a reason to find another way of solving the problem of remuneration in podcasting.
And I think I've got a solution which I'll talk about another time.
So that normally doesn't give me a resistance to podcasting.
It's a challenge which you have to overcome as a podcaster who's looking to get some money back from the investment.
That's just a challenge, right?
I mean, I'm not going to complain about the lazy and good-for-nothing media companies who simply rail against and sue people and rail against them for downloading songs and then not apply my own creativity and business knowledge to the problem of remuneration in podcasting.
So that really wasn't the answer as to why I didn't feel or didn't want to podcast anything.
And I think that sort of after working it out emotionally, I think I came up with the following answer.
And I'm putting this out there not because anyone's particularly thrilled or fascinated by my own emotional machinations, but I think that it's something that's worth thinking about because it's a, I guess I could say it's a topic around freedom that is so advanced that That I didn't even have a clue about it, really, until, I guess, last night when Christina and I sort of figured it out and it was very interesting.
So I'll put it out there just sort of, this is the cutting edge for me in terms of personal freedom.
And since everybody seems to be both eager for very advanced topics and also perfectly able to process them and deal with them, I thought I'd throw it out there just so you can see where the frontier is for me in terms of personal freedom.
So there were sort of two things that bothered me a little bit about stuff that was posted on the board.
I shouldn't say it. It bothered me quite a bit.
Now, this is an important thing to understand.
When I say something bothers me, it has absolutely nothing to do with anybody needing to change their own behavior or their own honesty or their own posting or anything like that.
When I say that something bothers me, it has no impetus whatsoever, whatsoever, To imply or suggest or demand or say in any way whatsoever that other people need to change their behavior.
This occurs in my marriage, of course.
If Christina says that something bothers her, then, of course, I go and thump whoever is troubling her because that's what I do as a guy.
But on the board, it's different because I can't thump you.
So, there's just no way that you need to change your behavior based on what I say bothers me.
But what is interesting, perhaps, is why it bothered me and what, for me at least, the solution was.
So, what bothered me was sort of a twofold thing.
One was that...
People who reacted to the Christian podcast, and I got some emails and I got some posts on this.
There was a number of Christian podcasts that I did recently, of course, and some of which involved some biblical contradiction droning, and I understand that that's not too, too thrilling for a lot of people.
But there was a general, not say general, but somewhat pervasive sense of discontent with the recent Christian podcasts.
And I found that to be not problematic because people didn't like the Christian podcast.
I mean, heck, you can like or not like the podcast as you see fit.
But what I found problematic was that there was no curiosity about why I was pursuing this particular course in terms of talking about Christianity.
Now, the vast majority of my podcasts don't have anything to do with Christianity-specific biblical things and so on.
It's like 1% or maybe 1.5% of the podcasts.
So when I do a series on Christianity, I guess it sort of bothered me that nobody was curious about why I was doing these things.
And I'll sort of get to why I think that that's not freeing in just a sec.
now the other thing that was going on of course was that I did a podcast about a week ago regarding somebody's a gentleman's family and his brother and the the story about the the story about the racist town and the black man and love it or leave it and so on all that kind of stuff and I got an email back sorry I got a post back which was sort of saying that you know don't
Don't treat me, from the gentleman in question, sort of saying, don't treat me like I'm made out of glass.
You know, just be upfront. I can take it.
I'm not, you know, this, that, and the other.
And he was also mildly irritated that I seemed to be, I guess, kissing his butt, so to speak, because I was saying that he was a very intelligent man and so on.
And I think that also bothered me, again, nothing to do with changing anybody else's behavior, but it kind of bothered me because there was no curiosity about why I would do those two things, like why I would call this fellow, from his perspective, why I would call this fellow intelligent, and also why I would be very delicate about approaching somebody's familial relationships.
Now, both of the people who posted, or both of the groups, it wasn't just one person in either case, but both of the people or groups who posted this information posted it as if, sorry, posted it in the manner of saying, I'm going to keep it real, I'm going to be honest, I'm going to be upfront, blah, you know, this is the issue that I'm having.
And The reason that that ended up pushing buttons in me, you know, which is not to say that it should or shouldn't be done again, it's just, this is what it sort of did to me, was that it did not feel like a conversation.
Like, it felt like I had done something, and then other people felt irritated or bored or this or that, and then just went, bleh!
I feel bored, I feel irritated, and this is the issue.
Now, This is a very complicated one for me.
Maybe it's obvious to other people, but I thought it would be worth sharing sort of my own mini-breakthrough in the realm of freedom just to sort of give a sense of where I am in terms of cutting through this foliage of historical, I guess, button-pushing or lack of freedom in the area of interaction.
One of the things that was most incredibly powerful in...
My marriage with Christina was when we discovered the principle, sort of a curiosity, as opposed to jumping to conclusions.
Curiosity is trying to figure out why the other person is feeling the way that they are or why the other person is acting in the way that they are.
And so, for instance, I think I've mentioned this before, that one day Christina and I came home from doing the groceries and I put a grocery bag on the carpet.
And Christina, not exactly snapped, but sort of said, in a mildly curt manner, which is very unusual for us, of course, that I shouldn't put the grocery bags on the carpet.
It sort of stung me a little bit.
It sort of hurt me a little bit, because the tone was a little bit abrupt, which is unusual.
Now, I don't want to sound like some hypersensitive guy, but when you have a relationship that's based on such an enormous degree of mutual respect, any kind of short or curt or mildly cutting comment, you know, really, when you're sort of open and vulnerable to that degree, it kind of stings.
Now... My impulse at the time, of course, was to say, you know, I really don't appreciate it when you talk to me like that, blah, blah, blah.
And that, for some reason I can't recall now, I didn't do that.
And what I did instead was to start asking questions about what she was experiencing when I put the grocery bag on the carpet.
And we went, honestly, we talked about this for hours, and it really was the most fascinating conversation, because I wanted to understand where this impulse had come from.
And through my curiosity about where her impulse came from, and we had to revisit this issue a number of times, we found out a good deal about how her mother had treated her, how her father had treated her, how her sister had treated her, how her extended community and the priests and everyone in her world and in her life had treated her in the manner of...
If someone is doing something that is irritating to you, you can either just sort of say, what you're doing is irritating or annoying or boring or makes me upset or this or that or the other.
That didn't feel good from my standpoint, and as we began to explore it within our marriage and within our conversation, we also began to find out through unearthing Christina's own experience and history in this matter that she neither felt good doing it to me, nor did she ever feel good when it was done to her.
So, being there for someone and trying to understand their motivations when someone does something to you that is negative, I mean, you sort of have three choices, right?
You can either ignore it and say, well, I guess I'm just being petty.
And that's my great temptation, just in case you're interested in that.
My great temptation is to, when I have an instinct that something is awry in a relationship, My instinct is to say, oh, it's too, I'm being petty, I'm being oversensitive, it's my own history, blah, blah, blah, and then just not bring it up.
The second option in dealing with the issue is to blurp your reaction back, to say, I don't like it when you talk to me like that, or hey, there's nothing wrong with putting these groceries on the carpet, it really doesn't matter.
Or whatever it is that you're sort of going to bounce back the stimuli that you're receiving, right?
So I received a stimuli that kind of stung.
I could either repress my own instincts or suppress my own response in terms of not speaking about it at all, but simply chastising myself in a way for being oversensitive.
Or I can sort of blurp.
Bounce it straight back, like returning a hard serve instinctually, and just say, either minimize the other person's stimuli.
So if Christina says, don't put that stuff on the carpet, then I can either sort of say, it's no big deal to put it on the carpet, you're being petty, Or I don't like it when you talk to me like that and, you know, get offended or whatever, which is going to be very confusing to Christina because the last thing that Christina wants to do is to cause me any pain.
And so it's not really going to help her if I just sort of snap back.
And it's not really, I guess you could say, taking the high road, which is in a sense to say to take the practical road.
Now, the third thing that you can do is you can be curious about the other person's experience, history and motives that led up to a particular moment that caused you pain or upset or boredom or irritation or whatever it is that you're experiencing.
And that, to me, is a way of really digging in and trying to solve the problem at the root level.
To sort of see what steps in your life led to this moment where...
When I did something that you felt was incorrect or inappropriate or wrong, that you snapped at me.
Because, of course...
At that moment, Christina was not looking at me putting the grocery bags on the carpet and saying, I wonder how Steph got to whatever the place where he didn't know this pretty elementary thing, which is to not put grocery bags on a carpet.
It could be a leak, there could be a hole, something, some sticky strawberry juice could ooze out onto the carpet and then you've got to, you know, get it cleaned and it's a big mess and so on.
And to take a sort of parallel example, you know, the job that I've mentioned before, my job around the house is to clean the bathrooms.
Now, of course, I grew up in the anti-Martha Stewart house of pure chaos and entropy, and so in my own particular experience, there was no regular schedule for cleaning anything, and so I didn't really know at all how to clean bathrooms.
Or the schedule, or the time frame, or the ingredients.
Basically what I did was pray for cleanliness, and that's the main reason why I became an atheist, of course.
And so when I did clean the bathrooms, one of the things that Christina had, you know, she looked at them.
She looked at me having cleaned the bathrooms, right?
Because she inherited... The fine hover spirit of her mother in terms of cleanliness.
And so she looked at the bathrooms and I hadn't cleaned around the backs of the toilets or I hadn't used a particular spray in the corners of the shower and so on.
I mean, and all of this stuff makes sense.
And so we talked about it and I ended up being motivated to do it because she said something, you know, like, well, we own the backs of those and here's the results of what happens if you don't use the spray on this.
You get mold, which is almost impossible to get out and so on.
Now, she didn't actually sort of ask me what my history was in terms of cleaning and how I ended up being at the age of 36 or 37 with no particular knowledge of how to clean a bathroom other than just sort of swab in effectually with whatever spray happened to be handy, which was hairspray, unfortunately, at the time.
Our bathroom ended up very nicely coiffed.
But we hadn't really got, this was very early in our marriage, we hadn't really got the hang of this whole curiosity thing about what is somebody else's experience that leads them to this particular kind of action.
Now, the problem with these sort of three options, right?
The first being suppression, the second being sort of acting out or blurping, to use a technical phrase, and the third being curiosity about the other person's motives.
I guess the thing that I have a problem with in terms of the first two is that they're not very free and neither are they the foundation for real problem solving in human relations, right?
So the first one where you just say, oh, I'm sure that I'm oversensitive.
Oh, I've had this past.
Oh, my mother was this and my brother was that and my father was the other, so I should not feel...
And what she's just saying to take the groceries, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right?
Where you just don't give your own instincts any kind of real credence.
That is not very free, of course, because you're basically just disowning yourself, disowning your own responses, dishonoring your own instincts, and to some degree dishonoring your partner.
I mean, that's sort of the major issue that I have with all of the responses except the third one, that if Christina does something, we call it zinging, where she just says something and there's no...
I mean, she never raises her voice or uses any negative words or anything like that, but there's just an emotional content that used to occur in our marriage for the first year or 18 months...
Every now and then there would just be something and it would be like zing!
Like a little dart into the side and I couldn't quite figure it out.
We had spent a lot of time trying to deal with this.
Well, if this occurs and if I just totally blame myself then I'm obviously disowning myself from the interaction but I'm also disowning Christina because I'm not letting her know that something she's doing was upsetting me.
And so I'm not giving her the option to be curious about my upset to understand her own behavior.
I'm not giving her any pushback So that she can understand that there is an issue which is not laying the foundation for a productive and positive growth in problem solving in the relationship.
Everybody brings things to the relationship which need to be corrected.
Even if they're purely subjective things, the interaction between two human personalities has some certain jagged edges, even if both people are perfectly wonderful people.
And if you don't sort of point out these interactions when they occur, you can't solve them and find productive solutions and so on.
Now, the second one of simply blurping back and saying, you know, it bugs me when you do this or I don't like it or I'm this, I'm that, I'm bored, I'm whatever, right?
That, of course, is not at all taking the high road and it's a little bit hypocritical, right?
Because if I'm saying that I don't like it when Christina...
Blurps out something from her own sort of history and then I blurp something back without particularly processing it or understanding it, then it's tough for me to take a moral stand on you shouldn't act out.
You shouldn't say anything or you shouldn't just say things without thinking that cause me upset.
Because if I'm simply shooting back, in a sense, it's not exactly self-defense.
I mean, this principle doesn't apply in a loving relationship.
But it does mean that I don't really have much of a logical leg to stand on.
If Christina simply is acting out something and then I act out something back, then we don't get anywhere.
The problem is that both of us have to disown what we're doing.
And we just have to say, well, that was kind of weird.
I guess we better not...
I better not say this specific thing, and then you better not say that specific thing, and all we've done is we've whittled down freedom.
I want Christina to have the freedom in our relationship to tell me not to put the grocery bags on the carpet.
The solution to that problem is not...
to say that Christina should not tell me I can't put the grocery bags on the carpet and the solution for me to that problem is not to say I have the freedom to snap back if I feel like I'm being snapped at because then you both end up having to avoid those topics and what happens is the freedom within your relationship gets diminished Atom by atom, inch by inch, because you end up not being able to go here, not being able to go over there, not being able to go...
And because you haven't dealt with the underlying issues, they just pop up somewhere else, right?
It's the old whack-a-mole, right?
Except that you end up with 5 million moles and a very tiny hammer.
So... When you have those kinds of interactions, you can either dig to the root of them and find your freedom out through that exploration, or you can just either blurp back or dismiss or whatever your own feelings, which causes a great diminishment thereby.
And the third option, which is the option of curiosity, Is, in sort of our experience, the way that you free yourself from the past.
The way that you free yourself from this kind of interaction.
And the way that you stand for what is best in your partner.
So in the conversation with Christina about where this particular habit of hers came from...
We found out a lot about her family and her history and how she was treated and how when she was doing something that her own family didn't like or caused problems for them, how she was treated and what happened to her own experience.
So, to take an example, when Christina was very young, I think about 23, no, I'm kidding, very young, she was asked by her mother to bring a glass of water in to a guest who was in the living room.
So Christina went into the kitchen, got a glass of water, and brought it in, and just take a moment, because this is so horrifying, it's almost impossible to explain this without a shudder of moral horror passing through your very soul.
But she brought in the cup, just holding it, without a plate underneath it.
Oh, wait a moment. Okay.
So, her mother, of course, was appalled at this, because, I mean, there are venal sins and there are mortal sins, right?
Like a venal sin is raising your voice at the dinner table, a mortal sin where you burn in hell forever is to bring a cup of water into a guest without putting it on a little plate first.
And so, there was horror, there was appalliness, there was, you know, the very heavens split, it rained frogs and terrible things occurred.
And, of course, Christina's mom didn't exactly say to her afterwards, you know, here's the reason why it's important to bring it, or it's nicer to bring it on a plate.
I'm not sure exactly what the reasons why are, but it's got something to do with not touching around the rim and putting your germs and this and that and the other, right?
It's like why you don't double dip into dip, right?
Unless no one's looking. So, this particular thing where you can say to a child, you know, chastise them in public, you sort of would say afterwards, and we'll get to this libertarian parenting thing in a little bit, but you would say, you know, here's the thing, right?
I mean, you might have germs on your hands, it's around their cup, they're going to pick the cup up and they may then get germs, and, you know, so put it on a plate, it's a little bit nicer.
To which the child might respond, well, I have to put my hands on the outside to put it on a plate, So hasn't the germ transfer already occurred?
You know, there's lots of ways that you could question this particular approach to serving up a glass of water.
But basically, this is not, of course, how it was handled, that there was a Christina's mom experience of flush of embarrassment and shame and chastised Christina publicly and harshly and so on.
And, you know, perhaps with a half-smile of, oh, children, kind of stuff, right?
So, this kind of approach, where you don't ask the child, tell me what you thought when you were going to get the class, you know, just get them to understand their own thinking, and if there's a better way of doing it, helping them to understand it on their own.
Of course, none of that occurred, as it barely occurred for any of us.
And, of course, in my family...
Whenever I was asked, my mother would say, well, why did you do this?
And I would start to say, well, I thought, and she would interrupt me and say, well, don't think.
And, of course, me being a philosopher has nothing to do with the rebellion against that.
Just in case you were wondering, nothing at all.
So, if you have reasons for things that you do, it's important in relationships to explore those reasons so that you can actually get to the root of the issue.
So, to swing back to the board commentary, I think what bugged me, again, not that that's anything to do with anyone changing their behavior, it's just sort of me working out this thing around my resistance to podcasting and around where I didn't feel free, in a sense, to podcast was that I put stuff out there and people just said, I didn't like this or this bugged me or that or the other.
And they actually said so in a manner which implied that they were being honest, that they were being truthful and forthright and blunt and, you know, I'm just trying to keep it real.
And I would submit that that's actually not being very honest, in my particular opinion, and I would certainly say that this has been the case in our relationship, Christina and I's relationship.
When Christina snaps at me about putting grocery bags on the carpet, I don't know why she's doing that.
And if I then say, I don't like it when you do this, then it puts the whole onus on her to solve the problem.
I don't even know for an absolute fact that it is Christina's problem.
I mean, I didn't grow up with the gentlest of maternal authorities, so when Christina tells me to do something or asks me to do something, I don't know if I'm bouncing off my own history.
And getting upset with Christina unjustly, I don't know if Christina snapping at me in that particular instance is the result of something that I've been doing all day that's been irritating her.
And I don't know if this is something that is in her past.
I don't know if it's something that I'm doing in the present.
I don't know if it's something she's Anticipating I'm going to do in the future, like if you can't not keep the grocery bags off the carpet, then you're probably going to leave the kids at the mall and not know where they are.
I mean, who knows? Who knows?
There's simply no way to know where the emotional energy behind the interaction is coming from.
Now, as you grow into a relationship and you start to become more familiar with these issues, then you can become more efficient at figuring out the emotional source of these issues.
But when Christina snapped to me about the grocery bags, if I just snapped back to her and said, it bugs me that you say this.
I don't want you to say it.
I don't want you to do it. I want you to change your behavior.
I mean, in a sense, I'm being honest, but so what?
Because I'm not actually dealing with anything in terms of knowledge.
I'm just simply saying what I feel.
Like if we sit down with a Christian and say, we don't think there's a God, and the Christian says, well, I really feel that there is a God.
Well, the Christian's being honest, but they're just not being accurate.
They're being honest, but they don't have any truth value in their statement other than talking about their feelings.
So the honest thing to do is to say, I mean, in my view, the honest thing to do in a relationship is to say, as I did to Christina that day, I feel hurt that you said this and I don't know why.
I don't know if it's you.
I don't know if it's me. I don't know if it's my own history.
I don't know if it's your history.
I don't know if it's your personality or some scar tissue from your past or whatever.
And so I feel upset and And I don't know why.
And so help me understand what was going on for you.
I'll tell you what was going on for me.
And we'll get to the root of this and we'll find ways of solving it that don't involve a diminishment in the freedom that we experience in our relationship.
To be honest is not to say, what you're doing is bugging me, but to say, I am experiencing irritation.
Help me understand what your thoughts were, what my thoughts were.
I mean, that's really, to be honest, I think, rather than just saying, it bugs me.
Because where you don't want to get to in your personal relationships, if you want freedom, is you don't want to get to the emotionally blunt, no-win Mexican standoff.
I'm sorry for using such a little example, but I think it allows us to focus on the principles rather than the event itself.
So I put the grocery bags on the carpet.
Christina says, don't put the grocery bags on the carpet.
And then I say, I don't like it when you talk to me like that.
And then she says, because that's what I feel.
I feel irritation and resentment about being snapped at.
And then Christina feels exasperation that I'm fighting her or pushing back on such an obvious topic or such an obviously better way of doing things than to put the grocery bags one and a half foot to the right on the tile, right, rather than on the carpet.
And then she thinks about my whole history and my mom, and she says, oh, you're just being oversensitive.
I'm not your mom. I'm not bossing you around.
I'm simply offering you a better way of doing things.
So I don't see what the issue is.
I wasn't trying to hurt you. You're just being oversensitive, which is what she is honestly feeling in that moment.
Well, where are we going to go from there?
There's no place to go.
There's no place to go to solve the issue.
If I go blurp, it irritates me when you talk to me like that, and she goes blurp, it irritates me that you're irritated because it's oversensitive and I'm just trying to get you to do one little thing that's obviously logically better.
Then we might end up with the ridiculous situation of arguing about the grocery bags, right?
Where I'm going to say, look, well, it's double-bagged, and there isn't even any strawberries in this one, and it's just a bag of milk, which itself has a bag, so there's no...
Whatever, right? And then she's going to say, oh, so you thought of all of that, and you absolutely knew everything that was in the grocery bags, and you put it on the carpet while going through this whole process.
Why wouldn't you just put it on the tile to begin with?
Well, I know what I... Like, you could end up having this ridiculous discussion About grocery bags, which you are never going to be able to solve, which is totally polarized, which you can have both perfectly logical and valid views for, which you're going to simply exhaust yourself talking about, and which is going to be a topic that simply can't come up again, but it will within your own minds, right?
So if we'd taken that approach to dealing with the problem, then every time I bought grocery bags into the, I guess we were living in the condo back then, I would sit there and think, well, if I put them on the tile, like it would be a constant source of mental energy, a constant drain on mental energy for that particular issue to keep recurring because we were a constant drain on mental energy for that particular issue to keep recurring I'm irritated at the way you talk to me.
Well, I'm irritated that this is even an issue for you and don't confuse me with your mom and blah, blah, blah, right?
Both of us are being honest about our feelings, but the problem is we're not being curious about what the other person is experiencing and what led up to that moment, and so we can't actually get to the root of the matter and solve it.
So that possible theoretical foundation having been laid down, I'll talk about what I experienced from responses that I had to recent podcasts and talk about how I didn't feel free and, And the point of all of this, of course, is to try and open up some thinking in yourself about your own relationships and being free in those kinds of situations.
Now... To take the first issue with the gentleman who had the brother who talked about the love and relieve it argument of the black man in the racist town, this gentleman had two particular complaints.
One is that he said, I had called him a very intelligent individual and he didn't feel that way, and that he felt that I was overpraising him or kissing his butt or something like that.
And the second issue was that...
He felt that I was treating him with kid gloves like he was some sort of porcelain glass thing and being overly sensitive to his situation, which he felt was condescending or supercilious.
Now, to the first issue, he could, I mean, I think what would be more honest, and this is just not to criticize anyone in particular, but just sort of as a principle, could be more honest to say, well, help me understand why you think that I'm so intelligent.
That would be sort of helpful to me because I don't feel that way and I feel there's a disparity in our perceptions and so on.
And the second issue would be to say, I found it irritating that you were treating me with such kid gloves, so to help me understand why you were doing that, help me understand what your approach was.
Now, to the first one that I could say, look, we talked on the first call-in show for quite some time.
You have posted hundreds of emails, or hundreds of posts, and sent me some emails that And you were one of the earliest and most generous contributors towards Free Domain Radio, so I think that you're a person of great intelligence and integrity, and I have some reason for believing that.
It's not sort of based on kissing up to people or whatever, right?
I have some reason to believe that. Now, that would be sort of my approach to him, and we could have a discussion about that, right?
And then he might find out that he's overly sensitive to praise, maybe, or I might find out that I am actually overpraising people, and it's kind of sickening.
And it's because I feel that, unless I overpraise, I mean, one theory could be that I end up overpraising people who are involved in the board because I want them to stay, I want them to contribute, I want them to feel good about themselves, so I just pump all of this We don't know what was actually going on because...
Any number of about a million things could be going on, but there was no curiosity on this other person's part about my particular statement.
Now, the second one, wherein that person is saying, it bugs me, I feel condescended to that you're treating me with such kid gloves and being so careful and so on.
And one thing could be, I think, more honest in that sort of response, which is to say, you know, I felt irritated when you were dancing around the topic a bit and setting it up a little bit and saying, this is just my theory.
I felt it was irritating to me.
Like, I felt like it was, I can take it, just tell me the truth, you don't have to treat me with kid gloves.
And, you know, that was an interesting feeling for me.
I'm not sure why I experienced it. Tell me what was going on for you when that was occurring.
And my answer would be something like this.
Well, when I'm talking in a public podcast that is being downloaded by, I don't know, hundreds or thousands of people a day, that I'm not just talking to you.
It's not a private email.
It's a public podcast.
and what that means is that there are a lot of people out there who are not nearly as far ahead in the road to being desensitized around family mythologies as you are.
They're much more bound up in family is perfect virtue, I've got to be there for my family, it doesn't matter how they treat me, blah, blah, blah.
So when I'm talking about myths involving the possible complete destruction of a family unit, then I have to be sensitive to other people to people as a whole, to listeners as a whole.
And it may be that I'm too sensitive to it.
It may be that I do turn people off by being overly sensitive to it.
And there could be many reasons for that, of course, right?
That I feel that I don't want to get flamed, that I feel like people are much too frail to deal with this.
But of course, there's reasons that I feel that as well.
I mean, my perception of people's frailty in regards to having their family bonds questioned is not something that I just sort of made up out of nowhere.
Having had these conversations with people for 20 years, having a wife who practices psychology, who has many, many patients, we don't come up with this strength of the family unit and it's...
The sort of hostility and defensiveness that you provoke when questioning loyalty to family units or the value of that loyalty, that stuff gets kicked up pretty hard and you get a lot of pushback on those kinds of issues.
And so I think, in my experience, it has been very important to approach this from a very gentle standpoint.
Now, the fact that it irritates you Sort of as a listener, if it did irritate you, and I'm not just talking to this gentleman, but in general, if it did irritate you, if you were like, fine, fine, stop at the fine print, get on with the topic, I can take it, then that's interesting that you wouldn't sort of ask me, like, what were you doing in terms of this particular approach?
So that assumption that the irritation is valid and that it needs to be sort of blurped at me, And that's the end of it, really.
I would characterize that as not an honest approach, in my humble opinion, to an interaction.
Because you don't want to have a button pushed and then just blurp out your response.
That is not freedom, right? Having buttons and having emotional responses that you just act out, and I'm talking about this in a very minor and relatively inconsequential way here, but I'm just sort of trying to draw out the principle of Having a big red button or many big red buttons or having an entire suit of armor made up of thousands of little red buttons that somebody says something And you experience an emotion and you don't stop to sort of say,
well, I wonder why, I wonder what that other person is thinking or feeling, I wonder how I ended up with this motion, but simply saying to that person, sort of verbally or through text, I'm bored, I'm irritated, I don't like what you're doing, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're doing the other, you're treating me in a supercilious manner by thinking I'm made of glass, you're you're treating me in a supercilious manner by thinking I'm made of glass, you're blowing smoke up my butt by saying that I'm smart, or I'm bored by these podcasts, and I, you know, how many times do we need to hear this or
It's not, I think, an honest way of interacting with me or with other people.
I mean, just putting it out there as a possibility, because you are experiencing an emotion, and you are simply reacting to it and putting it And not understanding or being curious about the other person's motives in your interaction does not breed freedom because it doesn't breed understanding.
It doesn't breed a real analysis or real curiosity or real depth of knowledge about the actual issues that are going on.
Maybe everything that I'm doing Is perfectly valid and the people who are reacting to it in ways of irritation and boredom and frustration or whatever, maybe they have legitimate issues that need to be dealt with and by pushing it back onto me and saying, you're doing this, you're doing that, they're not able to deal with those issues, which is not progress, right?
It's not freedom. Now, maybe those people are perfectly right and I have particular issues around...
Overpraising people or being overly solicitous of other people's feelings.
Maybe. Perfectly valid.
Perfectly willing to look at that as a possibility.
But blarping me back and saying...
I feel irritated, blah, blah, blah.
It doesn't help me to understand if it is my issue.
Like, if it is my issue, then you being curious about why I am doing what I'm doing is going to make me curious about it and it's going to help me to see something about myself that I might not otherwise see.
In fact, I can guarantee you that if you react in a way and just blurp at me, I'm not going to see it at all.
In the same way that if I had said to Christina, I don't like it when you talk to me like that, then she would have just probably would have said, no, I guess I shouldn't.
I don't want to make him upset. I'm not going to talk about this.
I'll find some other way to do it.
It would have been very overcomplicated for her.
She would have ended up sort of managing my feelings or managing my emotional reactions rather than simply being free, easy, relaxed, and at liberty in our relationship.
I want her to be able to...
Even I want her to have the liberty to snap at me because...
That's an indication that there's an issue that we need to deal with, whether it's my issue in that she wasn't snapping at me but I thought she was, or it's her issue in that she thought she wasn't snapping when she was, then we want to have to be free to have that.
So I'm certainly not saying anybody needs to change their behavior, but it's just that if it is true that I'm doing something that is false, if I'm doing something that is manipulative, like I'm overpraising people, or I'm droning on about Christian stuff for whatever reason, or I am...
Being over delicate with people's family issues, then that's something I need to learn.
It's not something that I experience, but it's something that I need to learn.
And if you're curious about why I'm doing what I'm doing, then I have a chance to learn that.
But if you simply tell me that you're irritated, I don't have a chance to learn that.
Like, you're not helping me out, sort of brother to brother or sister to brother, to help me to understand my own self and my own instincts and my own actions and their source.
Because I think I'm doing one thing, and if it turns out I'm doing another thing, it's not going to come out of people telling me that they're bugged by something that I'm doing.
It's going to come out of curiosity.
Now, to take this topic from the micro level to the macro level, I'll just touch on this briefly and we can have a discussion about it if people are more interested in it, but one of the things that I've noticed from the Free Domain Radio listeners is this shock and horror about the evil of the world.
I've received large numbers of emails about how can you stay calm in the face of this marine's email or this religious person's email or this news article or that or the other.
Well, because I want to be free.
I mean, that's really all it comes down to.
The reason that I stay calm is because I want to own my own emotional reactions.
I want to own my own personal space.
And I don't want the evil of the world, which I have no control over other than doing what it is that I'm doing.
I don't want that evil to overrun my emotional reactions and to be somebody who's constantly being jabbed through the heart with this sort of spear of irrationality and this spear of government violence and corruption and so on.
Yes, the world is a cesspool of evil for the most part, except for our glowing island.
The world is a cesspool of evil.
I'm fully aware of that.
There are people who go into the military.
There are people who praise the government.
There are politicians.
There are lobbyists.
There are corporations taking state subsidies.
There are foreign dictators being subsidized by foreign aid.
There is huge national debt.
There is corrupt school teams.
I understand all of that.
I mean, I'm perfectly aware of all of that.
But the question is, when it comes to freedom, why should the corruptions of others discombobulate or upset my peace of mind?
How free am I if my entire...
I'm talking about extremes here, so please don't think this applies to you...
How free am I if my entire emotional apparatus is a whole series of buttons that the world pushes every single day, 24-7?
The whole world, by the way.
I've got 6 billion people lining up to push all my buttons, to take an extreme example, and every time I pick up the newspaper, and every time I turn on the news, and every time this, and every time that, and every time I have a conversation with a non-libertarian, and 90% of the times I have a conversation with a libertarian...
Or, you know, of the emails that I get, of the 50% of them that are really negative or, you know, whatever.
Why on earth should that interfere with my pleasure in living?
Why on earth should my emotions be completely subject to the random, wild, blind swings of crazy, irrational, propagandized people?
How free am I if everybody in the whole world gets to push my buttons and make me upset?
I can't really see that that has anything to do with freedom whatsoever.
And what is the antidote to having your buttons pushed all the time?
It's one simple thing.
It's what we've been talking about.
It's curiosity.
Curiosity. So, some guy who's in the military sends me emails, and I get a couple of these a week.
Well, I don't know why they are in the military.
I really don't.
It could be any number of reasons that they're in the military.
I don't know. Somebody says that they're a Christian.
I can either just say, well, they're a corrupt idiot who is very much for the pedophilia of the priests and who hates everybody who thinks free and would love to get the Inquisition started again, whatever, right?
Or they could be somebody who knows everything there is to know about atheism and has decided to just become a corrupt religious person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, I don't know. I have no idea.
I have no idea whatsoever why this person became a Christian.
I mean, to take a silly example, they could be directly off the boat from Uzbekistan, and they are a staunch libertarian, but someone as a joke told them that the word Christian meant libertarian.
So he goes around saying, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian.
And then I can say, well, you should really be a libertarian and an atheist.
And he's like, I am a Christian.
And it turns out he's just using the wrong word, right?
It could be that silly a possibility.
And that, of course, is a metaphor.
I'm sure you're aware, right?
So somebody might say, well, God is free markets, God is freedom, God is individual responsibility, God is universal ethics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's kind of important, right?
I mean, if they already believe in those things and you can prove to them that atheism and libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism provide those things in a better, more consistent, more humane, more reproducible, more sustainable format, that's great.
But if they used to be an anarcho-capitalist and then for a weird reason we don't even know, they just decided to become a Christian and they're fully aware of all of the counter-arguments, then you can have a different response to them altogether.
If they simply have never heard that there is such a thing as contradictions in the Bible, if they were put into Sunday school at the age of four and were forced to go, you know, if it's just a big mass of scar tissue, you can have another approach.
But you don't know why somebody is the way that they are until you ask them.
I mean, you can claim knowledge, as some people do, and just say, well, everybody who believes in God is an idiot and corrupt, and everybody who believes in the state is an idiot and corrupt, and so on.
I mean, that's completely irrational.
I mean, you're claiming knowledge you simply don't have.
We simply don't know why the world is evil.
I mean, we may have some theories about how it developed into its particular state, and state schooling has, and philosophy has, and all these things that bad philosophy has to do with all of these sorts of things, but as far as each individual person goes, we do not know the history of how they became the way they are.
Some reporter who's out there praising how the FDA is doing X, Y, or Z, of course you're going to feel some exasperation to some degree, but only because you're so familiar with it and the other person is not so familiar with the counter-arguments.
And if they decide to start publishing those counter-arguments, they're going to be out of a job and out of a career.
I mean, I would assume that most people who are libertarians are libertarians...
Based on the fact that it doesn't cost them their career and their livelihood to be so.
But if you're a reporter or a public school teacher or a university professor or this or that, all of the people who shape opinion, somebody in the media who wants to get into the White House press briefing room is probably not going to get there if they're an anarcho-capitalist who are basically going to say, why do we even care who's in the White House?
Why is there a White House?
We should not have a government at all.
I mean, they're not going to get into the debate.
Of course not. So, somebody might be a socialist or believe in the government or even a republican or whatever, or even a libertarian like they just want smaller government.
They might be that way simply because they've got to put food on the table.
And unless you're willing to give up your entire career to become a libertarian with no pay, then it's hard to criticize them, I think.
I mean, you can criticize them sort of intellectually, but you've got to understand where they're coming from.
Few people are going to give up eating and feeding their children for the sake of ideas.
I'm not. I assume you're not, if you've got the means to download and listen to this podcast.
You know, there's just a certain amount of freedom that we need to retain in the face of evil, in the face of corruption, in the face of irrationality, in the face of all this faith-based stuff.
We need to maintain our freedom.
Your freedom is to have not all of these big flashing buttons that the whole world pushes all the time, and you spend your life in a state of chronic irritation and frustration.
But that's not really being very free at all.
We didn't create the evil in the world, but we can at least be curious about its source.
That, to me, curiosity in the face of evil is having strength in the face of evil.
Getting angry, irritated, and frustrated by the fact that there's evil in the world is not being strong in the face of evil.
In fact, I think it's letting yourself be completely overrun by evil.
And so, at this very micro level, you can do whatever you want on the boards, you can do whatever you want in your relationships, that's around freedom.
I'm just trying to argue for some important consequences that come about if you don't have curiosity about the other person's motives.
If you don't say, hey, Steph, why are you doing all these Christian podcasts so that I can respond?
Look, I've got a whole bunch of emails from Christians asking for this, that, or the other.
And the reason that I'm doing these Christian podcasts is because I'm trying to reach out to them.
And you're not the only person that I'm trying to reach out to.
I'm not trying to reach out to atheists because atheists already don't believe in this.
But the whole purpose is to expand the people who are listening to these podcasts and not just to keep podcasting to the same 1,500 or 2,000 people or however many there are out there.
Because we want to get people to come into this area and the only way we're going to do that is by getting, in my particular view, by getting people to understand that there are some contradictions in the details that they take for granted.
You don't convert people, in my view, by talking about the big logical issues.
What you do is you start to chip away and create doubt among the details.
I mean, this is arguable. This just happens to be my approach.
Chip away at the details, begin to sow the seeds of doubt, and then you can start to bring other arguments to bear.
But if you bring all the big arguments to bear on a standing and stable edifice of false belief, You're just crashing one building into another.
I mean, it's either going to cause a mess or it's going to bounce right off.
But if you can start to get doubts sewn into, and start to chip at the foundations and so on, and then it's the same thing we're trying to do with the state, right?
It's the chip away at the foundations.
When we start talking about libertarianism, You can start with, there's a gun in the room and everything's violent and so on, which is one possible approach.
But another possible approach is to sort of say to people, well, can you think of a government program that works?
Can you think of this? Can you think of that?
Well, how about this? And how about that?
And did you know this about the FDA? And did you know that about the welfare state?
And so on. And if they don't show any desire to doubt or question any of even the tiny little things, then you're of course not going to have any luck with the big things.
And so... It's the first thing you do when you're a salesperson, right?
Is you say, I have a $100,000 system, or you actually don't even say that.
You say, what's your signing limit?
And if they say, I can sign for anything up to a million dollars, then you say, great, let's keep talking.
But if you go into somebody's office and you say, what's your signing limit, in one way or another, and they say, I've got a signing limit of $500, and if your software system is $100,000, then you look for somebody else to talk to.
to.
If you can't get people online with the little things, you're not going to have any luck with the big things.
And they're more likely to be curious and to discuss about the little things.
So that's my particular approach.
Yes, of course, if you're already an atheist, discussing what color Jesus' robe is at different points in the Bible, it's completely mind-blowingly boring.
It's boring for me too. Look, I mean, I understand that.
But I'm not talking to you.
I'm talking to the other people that I'm trying to get on board who are passionate about morality, who are passionate about objective truth, who are passionate about the right method of organizing things politically and just have heard about nothing but how Christianity or the Old Testament or the New Testament solves all these problems beautifully.
So I'm talking to those people.
And then you might say, well, I think that's a waste of time.
You shouldn't talk to those people.
We can have that discussion.
But simply to say, well, I'm bored by these things.
I fast-forwarded them. I don't care.
And put that out publicly, I mean, yeah, you can do whatever you want, right?
But I'm just saying that a more honest statement might be to say to me, hey, Steph, why are you doing this?
I mean, this seems kind of like droning on.
It seems kind of redundant to me.
Help me understand what you're trying to do with this.
And then maybe I will learn that it is completely boring and pointless, in which case I won't waste anybody else's time.
But it doesn't help to just blurp out your reactions, and it doesn't help me learn anything.
It also doesn't help you learn anything.
So, that's sort of just an invitation that's out there.
I think there's a lot in this curiosity and freedom.
There's a lot in this don't just react to things emotionally and, in a sense, dump them on other people's lap, but be curious about their motives.
I'm certainly curious about everybody's motives.
That's always been something that I've really found incredibly powerful in my relationships.
It helps get the people who are great closer I hope that this is a helpful topic.
It certainly has been for me.
In understanding why I felt a lack of desire to podcast and to participate in this aspect of the conversation, it's really helped me to work out that what bugged me, not that it has to do anything to do with you, but what bugged me was people's lack of curiosity about my motives in the podcasting or in the recent things that I've been doing.
And so my reaction was not free when I just said, well, that's it.
I don't want to podcast for a little bit.
And I felt sort of petty and pouty.
That was not a free reaction.
What is free is to say, this was my emotional experience.
It doesn't mean you need to change a thing.
But here's a possibility that I'm curious about people's emotional reactions as to why, you know, they posted or emailed or said what they said.
I'm obviously very curious about that kind of stuff.
So... And to keep the conversation open, let me know.
Post it on the board. Send me an email.
It'll be fascinating to hear about why there was this reaction to the recent podcasts.
And I'm very happy to be podcasting again.
And I hope that this process of me working through this is of some help to you in your own personal and professional relationships.
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
Oh, did I even do the date?
I don't think so. It is the 16th of April, 2006.
And please, come and donate to the podcast.
I think that it will be enormously appreciated and I'm working out giving some bonuses that won't be available to everyone, to those people who do donate and you will get more of those benefits if you donate early rather than after I announce them.
So, If you want to get in before the gate closes about some significant benefits that you would get that won't be available to everyone else, I'd appreciate it if you would come and donate now.
Thanks so much. It's at www.freedomainradio.com.
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