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May 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:17
251 The Subtle Strength of the True Self
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Good afternoon, brothers and sisters.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph.
Well, we are back on for the board.
It was an issue not to do with community service...
server, sorry, not to do with the generic server-based software that GoDaddy has installed.
It was an issue with the SQL Server database.
All I can say is that I'm sure it's because we have such a voluminous and brilliant set of posters that we overwhelmed the poor SQL Server database that GoDaddy was using to host the community server.
So, So we are back after reading a bunch of horror stories about the service levels at GoDaddy.com.
I actually must say that I'm quite pleased.
It was a tricky technical issue.
They resolved it within 24 hours, so I can't really say that I have any complaints about it.
I think they did a fine job.
So we're back up.
That's nice. Of course, it is an enormous strain to try and keep posts down to any kind of reasonable length.
So, it's good that that restriction on the posting was lifted.
Fantastic. Now, I was going to chat this afternoon about Somalia...
But I'm not going to, for two reasons.
One is I need to do more research.
And two, there seems to be some interest on the boards today on this topic of the false self and the true self.
And I've talked about these a number of times before.
And the etymology and growth of the two aspects of psychological energy, shall we say, or two aspects of the adaptive personality structure that human beings are possessed of.
And I wanted to mention something that I think is interesting.
The question came from one of the board members, which is, well, doesn't the true self...
Want to survive as well.
Now, the true self is our honest, authentic self, the self that is empirical.
This is the scientific self, is another way of putting it.
The logical, rational, empirical, objective, scientific, truth-oriented self, that is the true self.
And true means, of course, incongruence with reality.
And of course, the false self is a reality, but it is a reality, a psychological reality, that is in direct opposition to the facts of sensual empirical reality.
So, for instance, you meet someone these days who's a Marxist.
We'll take a nice, non-offensive political premise.
You meet someone today who's not a Marxist.
Well, are they...
Sorry, who is a Marxist.
Are they a Marxist because they have looked at all the facts of reality...
Have extrapolated from their own lives and from the lives of those around them and begin building piece by piece a theory up from empirical instances through to theory which then can be extrapolated to explain further theories and so on.
Well, no. Of course not.
What's happened is they had a particular constellation of parenting, and I am working on, by the by, I'm working on a, I guess you could say, a compendium of what kinds of people are produced by what styles of parenting.
In other words, what kinds of false selves are produced by which kinds of parenting.
So, I won't give you much of a preview here, but suffice to say that a particular constellation of parenting will produce a socialist, and And that socialist is not working empirically, but instead is working from fantasy and then jamming all of reality into that fantasy.
What Stephen Colbert brilliantly calls truthiness.
And this is true of anarcho-capitalists at times as well.
And naturally, when I was reviewing the literature on Somalia, I was naturally drawn towards those that, ah, Somalia, the violence is overblown, it's doing great.
Of course, my particular bias is towards looking towards that kind of information, so I have to consciously go to the critics.
To start with, to make sure that I'm not overindulging myself in the addiction to truthiness that we all have.
I want to find stuff that supports our theories and reject stuff that doesn't.
So I find it important and helpful to focus on the most critical stuff and see if I can find flaws in that.
So, this is the same thing that's true with a statist, right?
I mean, nobody sits there and starts reasoning from first principles and comes up with a collective that has rights, a collective entity which somehow wraps and reverses the nature and properties of human beings as individuals so that one person is not allowed to steal, but another person must steal to be moral.
I mean, nobody would come up with that from an empirical standpoint.
So, they just dive into...
Crazy fantasy abstractions, and that becomes their reality.
And the false self is absolutely addicted to these kinds of fantasy abstractions, these kinds of irrational superstitions, because the false self is anti-empirical, and the false self is anti-individualistic.
The false self is anti-truth history.
The false self is anti-clear-eyed moral assessments of those around you.
The false self is pro-political, Pro-spiritual, in the superstitious sense.
Pro-religious, pro-patriotic.
It is pro-fantasy of every kind.
And it is really the scar tissue of the fantasies that were inflicted upon you as a child.
As I mentioned in the podcast on the dinner with the apple, at some point in your childhood, your parents, your family, your extended family, your priests, your teachers, they said to you, This fantasy thing does, the state, the school, whatever, right?
The country. This fantasy thing does exist.
And the scar tissue of their fantasies, the only way that you can then relate to people who have fantasies that they are absolutely unwilling to give up is to enter into those fantasies.
So let's just say your father grew up I went to the military and got involved in, you know, the state-sanctioned slaughter fest overseas that we call foreign policy and came back and felt that he had done his country proud and that killing the damned gooks was a good thing and So he is, or, you know, at whatever elevated, maybe he became a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, who knows?
But at whatever level, he believes absolutely in the ethics of what he was doing as a paid killer and that you couldn't really ask for a better moral life in the universe than to be somebody who's a weapon who goes and blows the head off people that other people point at.
Well, what are your options when you are the child of this father?
Well, of course you're going to have some questions.
Did you kill people?
Why is it okay for you?
Why do you get a medal for killing people in war and you get sent to jail for killing them in peacetime?
How come you could kill then but you can't kill now?
How come you could kill out in the jungle but you couldn't kill when you were on leave?
I mean, all of these questions are going to occur to you as a child.
And I can absolutely guarantee you that these questions are going to make your father angry, because they begin to expose the mealy-mouthed, patriotic, self-serving, evil, mumbo-jumbo nonsense bullshit that he's serving up to himself and to others, and he doesn't want to get near any of that pile of corpses that he has generated in his life as a mercenary.
So, he's at first going to laugh at you, and he's going to answer it if it's obvious, or he's going to say it's complicated, but he's going to be amused at first, and if you persist, he's going to get short-tempered, then he's going to get angry, and if you continue to persist, at some point you will just break him down to white-hot, naked rage, shame, and violence.
I mean, there's no... No question.
It's absolutely inevitable. You don't get to go and kill people and call yourself a hero, killing, of course, mostly the unarmed and mostly the helpless.
And call yourself a hero, your soul knows better.
Your true self knows better.
And so you have this kind of father.
What are you going to do? What are you going to do?
What are you going to do? You can't conceivably hold it within your mind, your true self and his false self, which dominates your entire life and world.
You can't hold those two things simultaneous.
You simply can't.
It's the... It's the doublethink of Orwell, right?
It holds both the belief and its opposite simultaneously.
It's a form of madness.
I mean, that is an intense destruction of the human mind.
You have to retain somehow your capacity for consistency.
And so you can either hold on to your own truth and your father's false self, your military father's false self, will absolutely be able to smell that true self on you from the far side of the moon.
You can glance at Earth and say, ah, my son is thinking about the moral reality of what I did when I was in Vietnam or in the Gulf War or whatever.
And so, you have this choice, right?
I mean, basically and fundamentally at a survival level, you have this choice.
You have this fantasy which can never be discarded because, you know, it's been sanctified, dipped, drowned, you could say, in the blood of the innocent.
And so, there's no possibility of your father...
Being able to deal with this fantasy directly and expose it and become honest with himself because he would probably kill himself.
That would probably be the inevitable result of understanding that you were a paid murderer.
I mean, I'm not saying he should.
It could be conceivable that he could then dedicate his life to telling the truth to others about the military and find ways of sanctifying his evil through that kind of situation.
But that's not likely to be someone who...
I mean, the guy goes into the military, right?
And not likely to be somebody who would be interested in that kind of thing.
Plus, of course, he's constantly going to get the positive reinforcement of everyone around him calling him a hero...
And he can go down to the Legion Club or the VA hospital.
I mean, he can be a hero.
All the kids, oh, wow.
You know, a metal, a touch of metal.
He's always going to get that reinforcement.
So it's like asking a really beautiful, shallow woman to grow up and be deep when she can get that kind of positive reinforcement that false self craves because it lives in the eyes and fantasies of others.
There's just very little possibility of that occurring.
And it could happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
So you're growing up with this father, and you have the choice to look at him with clear-eyed moral curiosity, as I talk about in The God of Atheists, which, if your father is a military man, is going to provoke absolute rage, beatings, violence, for sure.
No question whatsoever that that is going to occur.
And that's one choice.
The other choice that you have is to just sort of get wide-eyed, to get sucked into the fantasy, to abandon your own honest appreciation, understanding, and processing of reality, and to go, well, everyone around him is saying he's a hero.
He says he's a hero. He gets really angry and dangerous around me when I question him.
So, obviously, you know, he's got a medal, the president gave him a medal, or I got a picture of him getting speeches and everyone says he's a hero and all these war movies.
Okay, well, I guess I'm not correct about this one because everyone else disagrees with me and if I continue to persist this way, frankly, I am scared of the outcome.
And your father does not have to be a military man.
It can be a mother who's incredibly vain and angry and entitled, as I know from my own experience.
It doesn't have to be the military.
It can be less dramatic things.
But if you have someone around you who's got a rigid fantasy, religious, political, social, military, or whatever, Somebody who's got a rigid fantasy, then your choice is to conform with that fantasy, and basically what happens is you either become an enthusiastic participant if you're frightened enough, and if your father is aggressive enough, or the person who's got the fantasy is aggressive enough, they won't be happy with letting the topic drop.
they will require you to continue to feed that fantasy.
So it won't be enough to just drop the topic.
They won't be like your Christian brother you just don't talk to about religion anymore.
There'll be somebody who absolutely will continue to try and convert you.
There's no middle ground for them, and that's really dangerous to be around, of course.
There are other people who will be like, well, we'll just agree to...
They get that tight-lipped sort of horrible approach to relativism.
It's like, well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
And they get all tight-lipped and disapproving and they feel perfectly magnanimous in allowing you to continue in your era as long as you can just sort of keep the peace because you're obviously too crazy to be reasoned with with your opposition to God and the military and the...
Church in the state. So, we'll just agree to disagree.
Okay? That's what you're going to get from that kind of person.
And, of course, your third option is, which I guess was originally the first option, your third option is to continue to oppose their fantasies, which is impossible.
It's impossible. They will simply cut off the conversation.
They simply won't talk to you. And they will get progressively angrier every single time you bring up the topic.
I mean, this is an impossible situation.
There's no true self left for them anyway.
So, doesn't the true self want to survive?
Well, of course the true self wants to survive.
Absolutely. But when you're underwater, you hold your breath.
Because if you try breathing, you're going to die.
And when you're underwater, you hold your breath for the time when you can get back to the surface and start breathing again.
I mean, that's pretty obvious, right?
So, I mean, if somebody's trying to drown you and they're jamming your head into the water, then you're going to hold your breath while your head's underwater.
And then when they bring your head back up, you're going to take a gasp.
And that's exactly the relationship between the false self and the true self.
The true self allows the false self to grow because the...
The false self is what allows it to survive in a situation of extreme moral corruption, where brutal fantasies of whatever kind are a requirement for survival, then the false self lets the true self grow.
And what happens is then all you need for the true self to resurrect itself is philosophy, is empiricism, is rationalism, is science, is morality, ethics.
That's all you need.
It's really, really simple.
And so when I say that concepts mean nothing except as they describe instances or entities, what I'm saying is that the false self means nothing.
Because the false self is fantasies which don't describe entities, which describe the exact opposite of entities.
Wherever you have an extrusional concept or a concept that bulges into empirical reality, which contains the exact opposite of Nature and properties than in material reality.
So you have a thing called a state, right?
A big, gassy, windy concept called the state, which contains completely opposite moral instructions for those who are in its shadow than those who are not.
Well, you're dealing with the false self.
You're dealing with a non-empirical fantasy.
And you're dealing with a primacy of concepts over instances.
A primacy of theory over evidence.
In other words, you're dealing with faith.
Oh, I wish that word had as much of a negative connotation for everyone else.
You know, when I hear the word faith, I use the word faith.
All I hear is brutal bigotry.
That's all it means to me. Brutal bigotry.
Brutal, brutal bigotry.
That's all that faith means to me.
Whereas I remember, she said, Melissa Etheridge.
No, no, I can't remember. Melissa Manchester.
I saw some concert. She's like, faith, feel as if there's hope.
Oh, it's all too lovely. Except it's just brutal bigotry.
I believe because I want to believe and I'll kill anyone who disagrees.
That's what it all comes down to.
And of course, that's the basic threat that parents have with the withdrawal of affection and violence.
Emotional violence, withdrawal of affection, coldness, physical, sexual brutality.
Parents are just threatening the children with death.
I mean, it's a withdrawal of parental affection, as I've mentioned before.
It's perfectly equivalent in a child's mind and soul to a death sentence.
So, this is all that's occurring.
Now... Unfortunately, what happens with the false self when the adult grows up is the false self achieves a kind of, and I know this isn't empirical, but just, you know, go with me.
It's empirical in terms of, like, you can see it going on.
I can't say that I have proof for it as an empirical thing, but, you know, bear with me, but we can find something useful.
When the false self grows up, it doesn't want to go away, right?
It becomes like the state.
Oh, I dare to serve and protect you.
Hey, you know, if we treat you like cattle and skin you alive and eat your bones, it's a lot more fun.
So that's what happens.
The false self grows up.
It doesn't want to go away again.
The true self wants to get rid of the false self, but it has no crowbar.
It has no leverage. It has no way of getting out from underneath this huge squashing marble pillar of the false self.
Because the false self is the abandonment of empiricism for the sake of conforming and subjective fantasies and brutal fantasies.
Brutal bigotry, that's the nature of the beast.
So the true self wants to get out from underneath the rubble of the false self, but it can't, because the empiricism has been abandoned when you're a child, right?
So, Dad, aren't you just like somebody who kills someone because someone tells you to?
Well, that's the empiricism, and that's how a child thinks.
You can't, as a child, understand why you get a medal for killing someone here and get thrown in jail for killing someone there.
It doesn't make any sense. But you throw away that stuff in order to survive among and conform with brutal, bigoted fantasies.
Now then, when you become an adult, you desperately want to get this, you know, plastic bag off your head so you can breathe and be free.
But unfortunately, here, philosophy lets you down completely.
Because a clear-eyed Aristotelian, Randian, whatever, Stephan-esque philosophy is something that you desperately need.
In order to be able to reach past the fantasies of the false self to tangible reality, which is the empirical enemy of the false self.
But philosophy completely lets you down, completely betrays you, because philosophy is subjective.
Modern philosophy is nothing more than the rantings of the crazed, bigoted, imaginary false self.
Because it's overcomplicated, it's supercilious, it's insulting, it's POMO, right?
It's postmodernism. And...
So there's no longer any allies in the outside world that help and strengthen the false self.
Now that's one, so the true self.
The other aspect of why the false self continues to win is that the false self hates and loathes and fears the true self, right?
Just as a liar hates and fears and loathes somebody who will expose them as a liar, right?
I mean, it's a terrifying thing.
If you've ever told a lie and been close to being caught, it really is a terrifying thing.
When I applied for my first job at a daycare, I was 15 but said I was 16, and then I had to fess up because I had to have a chest x-ray, so I had to give my date of birth, and I had to go and fess up.
It's an awful, awful experience, so it's one of the things that I don't do so much after that.
But the false self can only relate to other false selves, right?
So you sort of see these two guys at a dinner party or two guys at some sort of business function and they're all talking about how great they are and how, you know, amazing they are and how they really are this, all this, that, and the other.
Well, these are just two false selves pumping each other up and then they'll run out of interest with each other and move on.
And you see guys at bars, you know, hey, I got a beautiful Camaro, yeah.
I mean, it's all just false self, pompous, windbag nonsense.
So... The false self can't relate to anything other than a false self.
It can't relate to anything, but it can't even be in the same room with any entity other than another false self.
And so the problem is, as the number of false selves go up in the world, as philosophy begins to come up with wilder and stupider concepts and notions, then it begins to cause the spread, like a virus, of the false self around the world.
Then, if you have a true self, it's like you speak Esperanto.
I mean, there are significant negatives.
When there are lots of true selves floating around, and I do believe that that's the case with the board for the most part, and the conversations that I have with a lot of people on Sundays, when you do have the true self floating around, then there's lots of true selves floating around, then having a true self becomes advantageous.
When it's mostly false selves floating around, then having a false self becomes advantageous.
I'm just talking about in terms of getting along with people, having people to go to movies with, or having business contacts.
So if you are in possession of a true self, you really have a juggling act, right?
You've got to play your cards pretty close to your chest.
Because it is going to be a significant challenge for you to interact with false selves.
Because they'll be on the lookout for you, and they'll see you, and they'll notice you.
So I find this a constant and rather dull challenge to handle in the modern world.
So when you start, so there's sort of these two aspects of society.
This is why when societies get false, when they start to believe things that aren't true, it really tends to snowball and it tends to take a long time for this plague to run its course, right?
This is why you get things like the Dark Ages lasting over a thousand years.
I mean, it's a pretty bad situation.
And in our society, fortunately, thanks to the internet, we can get contact with True Self to True Self, which nourishes and feeds me certainly more than I can possibly express.
The quality of the podcast is directly resulting from the quality of the conversations and the questions.
So my True Self is directly nourished by this conversation, which is why I enjoy it so much and why I put so much time and energy into it.
So, that's helped, but we're certainly going in the wrong direction, completely.
I mean, everybody's told all these things which aren't true and told to believe in things which don't exist, and it's all a very bad situation.
So, when the false selves begin to multiply, then two things occur.
One is that there are no longer any conceptual, intellectual, rational hooks to sort of throw past, that reality can throw past the false self to hook and reel in the...
The true self. I probably should reverse the metaphor, right?
There's nothing that the true self can use to cast out and hook into reality and haul it in past the fog of the false self so that it can connect with reality, be scientific, empirical, logical, and moral, and so on.
So it stays pretty much sort of semi-lost in this fantasy, foggy, crazy, bigoted world of the false self, all of these crazy, irrational absolutes.
So that's sort of one thing that happens.
Society has fewer hooks by which the true self can make contact with reality and sort of get itself ashore out of this pea soup fog of fantasies.
So that's one thing. The second thing is that When you begin to wrestle with the false self as an adult, you are not only having the personal difficulty of giving up on your fantasies and also of accepting the pain of incomprehension and rejection and violence or withdrawal from your parents that caused The generation of your false self to begin with, right? You have to suffer all this pain.
You have to, oh, my parents weren't trying to help me.
They're in fact trying to hurt me to feed their own fantasies and whatever.
You have to go through that.
You have to give up your own fantasies.
You have to look at your own history and see what the fantasies have done to your life and what you have done to others in the name of those fantasies.
All a very difficult process.
And, and, you have to do it alone.
Well, I guess until, not just the board, but I think the board helps, right?
But, you know, these podcasts, these conversations we have on Sunday, but you have to do it alone.
Why? Because there aren't any other true selves around you.
The false self is like a cancer.
In the same way that bad money drives out good money, like counterfeit money will drive out good money, bad false selves drive out true selves.
So these two fundamental aspects of difficulty is what causes the false selves to grow and swell and multiply, you know, like a bacilli in a Petri dish feasting on the carcasses of honesty that the true self-abandonment results in.
Well, it's pretty difficult then.
It becomes a pretty high tree to climb, you know.
It's pretty hard to get over those two electrified, spiked, barking dog walls Of no philosophy and complete isolation.
The true self is important for yourself.
It's important for contact with others as well.
This is why you need a competent therapist if you're going to take this job.
It's sort of my view. If you're going to take this defooing situation, get yourself a competent therapist.
That would be my suggestion. And because you can't, you know, this stuff is all caused by isolation, right?
I mean, this pain is all caused by isolation.
And that is a sort of unpleasant truth that you can't solve these problems in isolation because they're caused by isolation, by the fact that your parents lied to you and told you all this stuff that wasn't true because they themselves were scared and Lonely and bitter and whatever.
I mean, I don't know what your parents' motivation were, but, you know, it wasn't noble.
I'll tell you that much.
They weren't trying to help you out there.
So, from that standpoint, that's another reason why.
It's that it's very hard to find contact with people who have a true self.
And so, when you start to develop your true self, the major issue is that, of course, you have no...
Like, your social life will crumble.
Your social, familial life will crumble and your professional life will become difficult.
And, you know, you're kind of, you know, as far as the progress of mankind goes, in a lot of ways it feels like you're kind of taking a bullet for the team, right?
So I would sort of also encourage you to understand that prospect so that when you do start to lean over this cliff and start to get all dizzy and nervous that you understand sort of what's going on.
Just so that you know, the barriers that are facing the development of truth and authenticity and integrity in the modern world, they're considerable.
They're not insignificant at all.
So I would really recommend that you understand that, just so you understand that you take one step.
It looks like a set of stairs that are going down, but you take one step on it.
And suddenly it becomes like this icy chute that you kind of just end up having to go down almost involuntarily.
But you might as well know what's coming up and what you're in for just so when it starts to happen, you won't say that you weren't warned.
I think that's only fair. And secondly, you won't feel inadequate to the task because it's like in the old Monty Python film, you know, your mission is to cut down the biggest tree in the forest with a herring.
Well, you know, that's going to take a couple of whacks.
So I don't want you to feel like you've got this big axe when you're actually trying to chop down a tree with a herring.
I can't believe the metaphors that I'm using these days.
Let me get a nap and start this again.
But, you know, don't feel inadequate.
Don't feel weak. Don't feel, I mean, what you're doing is how the social body evolves, and it is horrendous.
It is horrendous. The rewards on the other side are absolutely fantastic.
You will have a lifetime of joy.
And peace of mind on the other side, but, ooh, that first couple of steps, I've got to tell you, they're really difficult, and your false self will forever, it will feel like murder, right?
Because as soon as you take away other false selves from the false self, it crumbles, which is why idiots run in hurts, right?
I mean, that's sort of inevitable.
So... Yeah, so I would say to really understand that those levels of difficulty, it's not that the true self doesn't want to protect itself.
It certainly does, and it certainly wants to be saved from the false self.
It's just that the more false selves there are out there, the harder, harder, harder all of that is to achieve.
Thanks so much for listening. I got a donation today.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
$75. And I certainly look forward to more.
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