All Episodes
Previous Next
May 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:30
250 The Ethics of Bloodlines

Am I against the family?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, my brothers and sisters.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's 8.39.
I'm trundling off to work, and I hope you are having a great morning-slash-afternoon-slash-evening-slash-wee hours.
Do you know, I actually had a tough time falling asleep last night, and so I sort of went to bed with Christine at around 11.30, and around 12.30 I got up and I cruised the board a bit, and I've noticed that we have some night owls in the Freedom Aid Radio tribe,
and I just was wondering if that was the case for a large number of people who are into this kind of stuff, or whether we have a lot of early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Or the early bird gets the worm, or this kind of stuff.
My whole life, my whole life, endocrinologically speaking from the very day one, pretty much, since I first yowled and came up all pruned out and red-faced, and you would not believe it's eerie how much as a baby I look like Winston Churchill.
But hey, Apparently a lot of babies do, so I'm not going to claim that as any part of my claim to fame.
But since the very beginning of my life, I've always, always, always been a night owl.
When I was in boarding school, I distinctly remember being awake in the dormitory, aka the childhood pen.
When all the other kids were asleep, and...
Oh, I used to just make up stories.
I tried to entertain myself.
Now, of course, I fall asleep to audiobooks, which helps.
But I've always, since I was a little kid, been in ITAL. I can always stay up later, and it's...
It's never really been the case for me that Christina is really blessed this way.
And she has this enviable ability.
She actually literally cannot keep her eyes open at the end of the evening.
And not just because I keep talking.
Although, you know, it could have something to do with it.
But hey. Let's deal with that another time.
Or hopefully never.
But literally you can see her body begins to shut down.
And then she showers and she falls asleep.
Like literally, head hits the pillow and she's asleep.
And I don't think I have ever experienced that.
In my life, ever.
Where I'm so tired that I have to go to bed.
I go to bed, close my eyes, and fall asleep.
And I have maybe...
I can remember twice in my life where I've woken up...
See, this is why...
This is maybe why I don't believe in a God who's designed the human body to be as maximally efficient as possible.
I think twice in my life.
I distinctly remember once in my teens, and I think I remember one other time, but I can't remember when, when I woke up in the morning and it was like...
Ah, what a great night's sleep.
Boy, I just want to bounce out of bed and get going with my day.
With me, it's always this, like, Lazarus morning, you know?
It's like I'm booting up from single cell to me.
It's like, I'm carbon-based.
I'm exhausted. I'm multicellular.
I'm exhausted. And once I get going in my day, it's not too bad with the, you know, occasional crutch of I have two cups of coffee a day.
But... Oh man, I just, the mornings are, I never ever wake up and go, wow, what a wonderful, like, sleep.
And so for me, it really is like reassembling myself from my component atoms, all of which seem to be very tired, and then about 20 minutes after I wake up, I feel, um...
Good and energetic.
And of course, by the time I get podcasting, I've already done a couple of hits of cocaine off the steering wheel.
So obviously, I've got a bit of shine and polish to my voice by then.
And I have this mid-afternoon lull.
And I would say probably two days out of five when I get home, I'd give someone 50 bucks for a short nap.
But my concern, of course, is that if I do have that short nap, that sometimes I don't fall asleep in the evening at all.
And I also remember in my teens just desperately wishing that I could have, like I had a button, where I just push this button and fall asleep for eight hours.
Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful?
And I mean, I know I'm in good company.
I remember once reading that Galileo and people like that have had enormous problems sleeping.
Whether it's the overactive mind, I don't know.
I strongly suspect it's due to the enormous amount of negative stimuli that I experienced as a child that does have, I mean, it has a permanent effect.
On your autonomous nervous system.
And so I've always had that problem of sleeping.
I can't really ask anyone who will tell me the truth about what I was like as a kid, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that I was that way as a baby.
The other thing that's interesting for me is that on the weekends I have great sleep, like I'll fall asleep at 12 or 1, and then I'll wake up at 9 or 10, and that's good.
I don't wake up feeling really refreshed, But I actually am like, I go through the whole day, no lulls, no like, oh, faceplant on keyboard, get QWERTY forehead, must fight the struggle to keep upright.
I feel like Superman in those old Superman comics.
Those old Superman cartoons, if you ever watched it, where you had the guy who would insert the Shatner-esque pores between each word.
So on weekends, it's great.
And I think what that really indicates to me is that, genetically speaking, I am really wired for a life of leisure.
So that having been said, please come to freedomainradio.com, click on Donate, and hurl me some denarii.
It will be most appreciated.
And just think of what you're doing to reduce the amount of light sleep in the world.
Surely, one of the greatest things that you can do with your life.
And if you don't donate, my introductions might conceivably get even longer.
Well, not really, because then there won't be introductions.
They'll just be podcasts. Let me know.
Let me know if you're a night owl.
I'm curious if there is something that is...
I really do think that there's something kind of genetic about people who understand philosophy, are interested in philosophy, understand economics, and not just those who are interested in philosophy, but those who are interested in logical philosophy rather than The resentful philosophy,
as Nietzsche would put it, like the Marxists, the socialists, and those people who try to organize the world to resentfully accuse the state of what their family did to them and spend their whole lives acting out their childhoods.
But people who are actually interested in discovering the truth and piercing the veil of tribal illusion that we are all raised under Because I got an email last night.
I put it on the board when the board is fixed, and they're still working on it, although I did check this morning, and there was a longer post, so I'll check it later on today.
But I got an email from a young man who found my blog, and I keep forgetting, of course, that people are reading my blog, because I have about, I think, almost 70 articles there by now, but I'm spending, of course, a good deal of my effort on Free Domain Radio, rather than freedomain.blogspot.com.
But this gentleman, of course, he said, I was idle one day and I typed in Google libertarianism and I found your site.
And he said, I mean, I get this as a common thread in a number of emails where people have felt the futility of the argument from effect and the frustration of the argument from effect.
And then they find my position on the argument from morality and find it to be a liberating argument.
Step in the right direction to be a more effective communicator with regards to liberty.
And so I write them back and say, yes, it is a powerful weapon.
But it's going to fire.
It's a spear shop at both ends.
You can't use it on others without it penetrating your own soul as well.
I don't think I put it quite that dramatically.
I don't want to sort of come across messianistic.
But I do sort of point out that the argument for morality is not just an effective debating tool.
It is a life-changing understanding.
Because the argument for morality says that those who advocate your death are not people you should spend time with if they do not abandon that belief.
So all of the people that he feels that the argument for morality is going to help him convert will actually end up getting those people out of his life.
And I think that's for the better.
But the argument for morality is not a tool.
Excuse me? Apparently I'm getting younger.
Of course, this afternoon I have an audition to be that pimply guy from The Simpsons.
But it's not a tool.
It is a revolution.
It's not something that you use.
It's something that almost uses you.
So I sort of caution them about that, that it will bring them freedom, but it's not pretty.
Bringing the argument for morality into your own life is not exactly a three-point landing, but as they say in flying, any crash you can walk away from is a good crash, and every revolution in your life that you can walk away from...
Corruption is a good revolution, even if it's difficult to go through.
And I know there are a number of people who are emailing me or who are posting on the boards who are going through this process at the moment.
And there's more power to you, brothers and sisters.
I know, I know, I know how hard it is, but it's worth it.
It's hard to conceive what's on the other side and I can only talk about it in general terms and demonstrate it in my own level of personal freedom and the quality of my relationships because it is impossible to communicate what it means to be free except in very abstract terms and on the other side of understanding how the argument for morality It permeates your very life.
On the other side of that is real freedom, the freedom that makes you look back at your previous life, and only then do you understand the cages that you're living in.
But it is absolutely wonderful on the other side, and it is very, very difficult to go through.
So my sympathies, my encouragement, my concern, my affection to everyone who's going through this process of understanding what it really means to live with integrity, and not for the sake of, well, well, integrity is good and you get an integrity medal and you get to salute yourself as the maximum integrity dude or dudess in the mirror,
but simply because we want to be happy and living in a cage where we're frightened of other people's disapproval is not living free and also living in a cage where other people get to wave weapons and we get to pretend that we are debating them is not free either.
I just got another email two days ago where a gentleman took the usual tack of people who instinctively understand that the approach that I'm taking is going to have deleterious effects on their own family but want to criticize me rather than start to put these ideas into practice which, I mean, I understand.
I understand.
I really do.
A lot of fish, when they're out of water, want to get back into water rather than evolve, which is a pretty painful process.
So I certainly understand the biting and the kicking.
Kicking? Fish? Oh, I just broke the metaphor.
Oh, look at that. It spilled all over my lap, and now I'm going to have to go to the washroom when I get to work and dry my pants.
So, I got an email where somebody is saying, I'm troubled.
I'm troubled by your definition of hostility towards the family, or your approach to the family.
Your approach to the family, that all family relationships are bad, regardless of how well people get along.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy.
Does this person ever have a skill and ability to not listen to what people say?
It really is quite remarkable.
So, I did email him back.
And I said, good heavens, man, what on earth do I have against the family?
I have nothing against the family whatsoever, other than the fact that at the moment it seems to be a fairly corrupt institution.
But I would never, never, never categorize that as the family.
The whole point of what I take in terms of my philosophy is that concepts bow to instances.
Now, if... Every person with a peg leg turns out to be somebody who enjoys, I don't know, mutilating cats, then sure, you would look into that and say, well, maybe there's something with this peg leg that's infecting their brain with sepsis and making them crazy and evil in very specific ways.
But if you could find an exception to this, to this peg leg thing, then obviously it would not be the peg leg.
It would be something else. So maybe somebody had an immunity and you'd want to look into that.
But I have nothing against the family.
I hope to be a father.
I hope to be a family.
I mean, I am a family. I count Christine and I as family.
And I certainly count to the people who I chat with on the boards and those who email me, even those who email me with hostility, I count those as closer family than my own blood relatives because they're actually engaging in a debate with me, whereas my blood relatives...
Wish to believe that everything that I believe doesn't exist.
In fact, won't discuss it in any way, shape, or form, and live lives where they're not even striving to free themselves from corruption, but instead are pursuing it avidly and assiduously.
So, family is...
I have nothing against family whatsoever, as I'm sure you're aware.
What I do have a problem with is corruption.
And so, of course, he takes the tack as well that...
Oh, sorry, let me just finish that point about the family.
I have a problem with corruption, and the problem I have with the concept family is that the concept family blinds people to the reality of corruption in their blood relatives.
Because, you know, that old mafia thing, you know, family is everything, the family, blah, the family, family, makes people spend a lot of their time with other people who are corrupt, And that's fine, but they pretend that they're not corrupt.
And that is quite a different thing.
So if you spend time with your family and you say, yeah, they're corrupt and they want me killed, but men, do they ever fry up a mean barbecue and I just love the taste of those back ribs, well, that's fine.
I mean, I'm not saying it's great, but at least it's honest.
And that's the first step towards everything.
It's just honesty. You want to look at things as they are, not as propaganda has it, not as you want them to be.
Not as it would be great for your life if it was, but like any scientist or any empiricist, you have to deal with what is.
Before you can theorize about anything, you have to accept the basic facts of reality.
And so...
The approach to the family that I take is simply this.
There is no such thing as an abstract category called family that overrides the moral nature and properties of any individual.
Just as there's no such abstract as the state that overrides the properties of any individual that claims to represent the state or be in the state or whatever you like to call it.
There is no concept that contains a superset of properties that overrides the properties of any individual entity.
That's a pretty basic thing.
You can't define rocks as weightless and then say that there's no such thing as weight in rocks because the concept is defined as that which is weightless.
No. If the concept contradicts the properties of any of the instance, then the concept must be thrown away.
The concept is false.
That's the basic scientific method.
If you predict that a rock will do this and it does that, your theory, my friend, is wrong!
And so, that's basically all I'm talking about when it comes to the family.
That the abstract concept of family infuses zero value whatsoever into the moral nature and properties or any properties of any individual.
The fact that he is your brother or she is your sister, your mother, your father, your aunts, your children, anything, none of that whatsoever infuses any moral categories into that human being.
It provides no value.
Just as calling somebody a policeman does not change the moral nature of the fact that he's taken a weapon around and forcing other people to provide money, And is forcing other people to be disarmed, and is arresting people and throwing them, and is responsible for them being imprisoned for absolutely innocuous offenses.
And so this really, it's all one package.
I mean, I don't sort of just say, I dislike the family, and let me create a theory.
Trust me, I resisted the idea of the family corruption, of the empty family, I've been a moral category called family or the emptiness of that moral category of family and state for almost 20 years.
I only really became an anarchist about a year, maybe 18 months ago.
Actually, about 18 months ago.
And... So, I resisted this knowledge for a long time because it's very hard to be empirical and to be honest and to have integrity when you realize the devastation it's going to wreak on your fantasies about the value of your personal relationships.
So, I resisted this for a long time.
So, I understand that resistance.
That's why I have no problem with it.
But a lot of people think that I have had a bad family life and therefore I dislike the family.
Not true. I had a bad family life and therefore I tried to be as good to my family as possible as an adult.
I took care of my mom.
I gave her money. I went out with her.
I took her places. I went into business with my brother.
I put my whole career on the line to save his job when he was about to get fired.
I tried my best to be good to my family because an intelligent or self-aware person looks at their history and says, well, I don't want to do that again because that was really bad.
That was painful. And so I tried my best.
Where I grew up in a childhood situation of stinginess, I tried to become very generous.
And I think that I was very generous.
I think I was a little too generous.
It's hard to find the Aristotelian mean when you've only known extremes as a child.
But the best way, if you have a hole in your heart, this is from Dr.
Phil, I think it's a good phrase.
If you have a hole in your heart, the best way to fill it is to give away what you never got, or to create what you never had.
And I think that's actually good.
I think that's actually a pretty good approach.
So, I tried for many, and just found that it didn't work.
I found that it led to exploitation, and for myself, it led to insomnia and really a miserable personal existence.
And so, I had to try and take another approach, and it was a very difficult thing.
So, I did not start from family is bad.
I started, of course, from my family is bad, but I didn't start with families is bad, and of course, my family was bad.
I mean, nobody could tell me otherwise about that, of course.
So, I did not start from my family is bad, let me project all that badness on the families in general.
My family didn't work out, so let me work very hard to break up everybody else's family.
I'm fully aware that that could have been a psychological motivation.
When I was discussing Christina's family with her, I was fully aware and communicated constantly that I had had my own experiences with my family and had broken with them.
That it was important that we continue to check that it was not my agenda to cause this to occur with Christina's family as well.
And I'm fully aware of all of that.
And so people who say that I am projecting when I'm not are obviously themselves projecting.
So, they obviously have a bad family, and they wish to not confront them, and the free part of them, the honest, true self part of them that is yearning to be free of such corruption, Is drawn immediately to what it is that I say and what it is that I write.
Because we all want to be free and we all know the truth about our families.
My God! The idea that some anonymous blogger is going to make you react in a strong way about your family is ridiculous.
I mean, I'm just some guy out there.
To you, and I have no influence over you whatsoever.
So people who write to me like they're very upset about what I'm saying about their family, it's just funny.
It's got nothing to do with me.
What happens is I am awakening a part of them that knows the truth and giving it strength.
I'm feeding it weapons and food underneath the barbed wire as the false self patrols the borders of the soul.
I am arming the underground movement to set free, to become free.
And so the false self leaps into action the moment it detects stirrings of the true self, because originally it was designed to protect and unfortunately it's grown to enslave, which is the same thing that happens with the government, of course.
The government is originally designed to protect the individual, but it ends up destroying and controlling the individual, just as the false self originally starts on the basis of protecting the true self, but ends up destroying and enslaving the true self.
So the false self now, with its troops on the borders, as the reading is occurring and the external agreement, the denormalization of family corruption, as it seeps into the personality and begins to strengthen the true self, and it hears the cage in the chains rattling, it darts around and begins to discredit the source.
And so what it does is it projects all of the falsehoods believed by the false self about the family, it reverses them and projects them onto me.
So the false self can only deal with projection, right?
It's the only interaction that it's capable of achieving.
And so the false self says, family is good.
Family is good. Good family, family, good.
Good, good, good family. And...
When it comes across an opposite moral argument, the opposite moral argument to family is good is not family is bad.
That's not the opposite moral argument.
That's like saying that the antidote to fascism is communism.
It's not the opposite moral argument.
The opposite moral argument to family is good is family has no moral category.
Family is simply a statement of biology.
It's a classification of a bloodline.
That's all it is. Saying family is good is like saying zebra is good.
Zebra is moral.
And lion is immoral.
It's even more ridiculous than that.
It's like saying zebra is good and horse is evil.
It's just a zoological classification.
There's no moral category whatsoever.
No moral nature, no moral infusion, no moral judgment.
It's just an empty abstract category.
Now, the categories of good and evil have some moral content to them, and they're a little bit more tricky, but family is just genus.
It's nothing. It's DNA. It's ridiculous.
It's as much of a moral category as other genetic traits like big noses, baldness, and, I don't know, the ability to roll your tongue.
So, that is what happens.
The false self hears the argument that family has no moral category, and that, of course, is the absolute end of the false self, which, for most people, is their personality.
That's what they experience as their entire personality.
So, it really is like I'm holding a gun to their head.
And this is important to understand, as soon as you talk about freedom with people.
Freedom for their true self is great.
Freedom for their false self is death, right?
Because it's the end of the false self, which is what they know as their entire social world and their personal world and their way of relating to themselves and to others.
So you're not just taking away a toy.
You are taking them out back and putting a bullet through their head, which if you ever get a chance to see the original The Singing Detective, there's a great bit at the end when how he deals with his false self is actually quite, I think, quite gripping. But it's long.
I've not watched the one with, I think it is Mel Gibson, but the original one is good.
It's very good. So, this issue that the false self reframes my argument into not, when the false self family is good, family is everything, family is moral, we must be slaves to family, and that's called virtue.
Well, when it hears the opposite moral argument, it must immediately reframe that argument as, well...
This person is saying that family is bad.
Family by its very nature.
Family is a moral category called bad.
And, of course, that's not at all what I'm saying.
But if the false self were to try and analyze the argument from a logical standpoint, then the false self, which is only interested in absolutist, extremist fantasies, that's all the false self is based on.
based on.
That's why the false self is so wound up to things like patriotism and religion, because those are abstract absolutes that are fantasies, right?
Not empirically based, but you just start with a premise that suits the survival, the childhood survival, and you then extrapolate it forever, right?
So when you're a kid, in order to retain any sense of virtue, it sometimes can be important to think that bad people are good, otherwise you become a nihilist.
But...
But when you then say that bad people are good as an absolute, then you have crossed over from childhood to immature adulthood, and then you're usually trapped.
As soon as you don't re-examine the false ethics you were taught as a child, then you are trapped in them for the rest of your natural-born existence, which is what we're trying to free people from, but very few people who've invested themselves heavily in a false moral ideal will end up free.
So it's just important to pick your battles from that standpoint.
The interesting thing about another gentleman who emailed me, who was also reading through my blog, and who was saying, do you know, when you were talking about the violence of the state, it hit me like a thunderbolt.
It was like, yeah, you know, it's incredible how no one had ever talked about that in my entire life.
But the moment you sit down and think about it for like 10 seconds, it's completely true.
That if I don't pay my taxes, I get a letter, and then I get another letter, and then I get somebody coming by my house, and if I still don't respond, I get a court date.
Oh, you know, the whole thing, right?
And eventually, somebody's going to come to your house with a gun, and if you try and defend yourself against that person who's coming to your house with a gun, as you would with any other intruder to your personal property, then you will get killed, right?
I mean, so it all comes down, all threats are threats of murder, as I've talked about in a previous podcast.
So that's an important thing to understand, that this gentleman who sent me an email was like, you know, it's just like the light went on like that.
The light went on like that.
Well, these are the people that you want to spend your time with, in my humble opinion.
These are the people... Who you are going to have a great time chatting about freedom with.
Now this guy is still a minarchist, but you know the journey of a thousand miles can't be taken in two steps.
So I sent him to the podcast where hopefully he will get an even clearer understanding.
Because what happened was, and I can't explain this because the same thing occurred to me once you get that taxation is forced.
I don't know if it's a matter of intelligence.
For me, it had a lot to do with having no respect for authority figures and nothing to gain from submission to authority figures because, of course, I've been a...
Self-funding, self-sufficient since I was 14 or 15, sort of on my own.
So I had no...
And I never had any close relationships with teachers or priests or any kind of authority figure.
I just had no respect for authority figures when I was growing up.
But neither did I have this sort of nihilistic rage towards authority figures.
I just thought of them as sort of petty bureaucrats and sort of into their own power and into their own games and into their own self-aggrandizement.
Like, I never viewed teachers as evil.
I just thought they were just kind of...
Stupid. You know, just kind of self-serving, petty, and moralizing, right?
Moralizing is what you always get from these people, and I saw it pretty clearly early on.
So when I saw something like taxation is violence, it didn't violate any particular premises I had about authority, and it's innate virtue or anything like that, because I just found that idea to be kind of funny.
The world is just so petty and silly these days.
I mean, it's the smallness of the world that troubles me almost as much as the violence is.
Just the pettiness of the little boxes that we're in, that troubles me greatly.
And the fact that to live a life of any kind of size and grandeur is very difficult.
And there's the pettiness of school.
Nobody's ever given any really high, lofty, noble goals.
Oh, I want to become a doctor.
Who cares? I want to become a hero.
And so, for myself, when I got this argument, when I heard this argument, I was like, yeah, well, I mean, that kind of makes sense to me.
That seems to me how authority works.
It doesn't violate any basic emotional or moral investment that I have in this abstract concept called authority.
Which I never had any respect for.
I mean, I never thought I would have any reason to have any respect for it.
And it just clarified a lot of reasons as to why.
So, just wanted to point out that these are very interesting topics for me, but what I would say is interesting to you, I mean, hopefully the podcast as a whole, But also just remember that there are people out there who will get it at a moment's notice.
And given the shortness of life, the importance of the topic, and the frustration, the pointless frustration that comes from repeating arguments to people who won't listen, I would say focus your energies and attentions on those.
And also, focus your energies and attentions on coming by freedomainradio.com.
I haven't had a donation for two or three days.
I would really appreciate it if you could reverse that trend.
Come by and throw me a couple of lira.
I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
▲
Export Selection