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June 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:45
272 Freud, Somalia and Cults in General

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 3 p.m.
on June 7, 2006.
It is my brother's birthday, so let's not all sing him Happy Birthday.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I'm lazing in the backyard with the beloved Wiflet, who is slightly poorly.
She has contracted a minor cold.
So, of course, there's a good deal of doting going on.
And I'm actually forgiving her for getting behind on her backgrubs and housework.
So, you know, it's important to be magnanimous in a marriage.
Otherwise, you're not as magnanimous.
So, I'm going to have a ramble fest this afternoon.
And it's going to be relatively quiet because I don't want to keep Christina up.
So just in case she decides to relax and put back her eyes, close her eyes and put back her head and watch those little light paintings that go on, those little neon crawly things that go across your eyelids when they're closed and it's sunny out.
Very relaxing and very prone to making one fall asleep.
So I'm not going to yell at anyone today.
It's going to be a rather shocking podcast from that standpoint.
Also, it's going to be a shocking podcast from the fact that I actually have some reference materials.
I know. It's really counter to the whole mission statement of Free Domain Radio, which is pretty much traffic fumes-induced ranting in a car with no reference material.
See, that's why I really have to podcast with the car, because otherwise I will be asked for any kind of backup, and that clearly isn't going to serve the rants very well.
It's going to interrupt the flow of opinions with a disconcerting number of facts, which is obviously not going to work out for me very well.
So I actually do have some facts with me today, or at least some sort of backup material, so hopefully that will help.
So we've got a couple of topics today.
We've got Enron, we have Somalia, and we have Freud.
Of course, I'm sure that if you were a betting man or woman, you would have put good money on those being the next topics because they are, of course, the natural next topics from the highly tightly organized course syllabus that has been going on for the past six months or so.
But before we get into any of that, I just wanted to mention something.
Email has gone a little bit quiet.
The boards are still happening. Email's gone a little bit quiet over the last week or two.
And I'm usually sensitive to that.
Of course, some of it is natural variations, and that doesn't bother me.
I just sort of have to trust my gut on this.
But I think that the listenership, if you're out there listening to this and you're feeling any kind of...
Thank you. Thank you. We started,
Just to give you the big overview of the sort of philosophical approach that we've been taking here, we started with the government, with the state, the society, and so on, and I think that was very important.
It was important to get the methodology across, to get rid of the argument from effect, to get rid of the argument from utilitarianism, to get rid of all of that kind of stuff.
It was very, very, very important for a variety of reasons, which we can talk about another time.
But I wanted to start with society as a whole, because that's where you can see hypocrisy, and that's where you can see moral corruption, and that's where you can see all of these things occurring, without the ego being threatened, right?
Without the false self being threatened.
Now, this, unfortunately, is where a lot of people who are very interested in freedom get stuck, right?
They get stuck in talking about the state and thus never have to deal with the emotional source of their lack of freedom, which is the family and the schools and so on.
So we started with the state, which I think was exactly right.
I mean, that was sort of my major goal, was to start with the state.
And then we moved a little bit closer.
And we started talking about individual governments and the effects of those, and I think that was good, right?
So we're going from the most abstract to the most personal, in the general flow of things at Free Domain Radio.
That's sort of the general idea.
And so the motto is the logic of personal and political freedom, which is great, I think.
But we actually go in reverse when it comes to understanding the concepts, right?
We start with that which is easiest to us, and we end up with that Which is hardest to us, which I think is a productive and useful flow of learning, especially in very volatile ideas like personal freedom.
So we start with the state as a concept, and then we start with individual states and their actions, and then we look at particular political methodologies like democracy and so on, and then we've sort of got a good outline of why the state is corrupt, and this is sort of the sneaky thing that I've been doing here, and I'll be fairly upfront with it now because you've come this far, so there's really no need for any of this, so...
We start with extracting the principles of corruption from the state, which is something that we're pretty comfortable analyzing relative to the family or to ourselves.
And so we abstract concepts of moral corruption from the government, which is not volatile, and we're all willing to go that route, right?
So falsehood, manipulation, propaganda, corruption, and hypocrisy and contradiction and all that kind of stuff.
Unjust authority in the form of the state we talk about, which is great.
And we extract principles from it.
And that sort of wasn't an accident, right?
That the argument for morality that I started, people are pretty comfortable putting it out there in terms of the state, right?
So, oh, the argument for morality.
So theft is bad for one person.
It's bad for another person. So, yes, now that we have this idea of universal absolute ethics, then we can dissect the government and other institutions of power, like religion.
Of course, we talked about religion quite a bit as well.
It's important to understand the...
The moral problems and the hypocrisies and the contradictions associated with organized religion and, of course, personal religions as well.
So we did a fair amount of that.
And so now we have extracted the principles from our analysis of power structures within the world.
Fantastic! That's great!
Now, then we begin the process of turning those principles on the family, right?
Because the argument for morality is universal.
Universal doesn't mean those within the state and those not within the state.
Universal ethics or the argument for morality does not mean that the policeman is one thing and the citizen is another.
The soldier is one thing and the citizen is the opposite thing.
I mean, yes it does, but that's not all it means, right?
Because once you have the argument for morality, then the next logical power structure to look at after you've absorbed abstract political structures, more tangible and personal political structures, abstract religion, your own personal religion, once you've absorbed all of that and understood the principles of morality around those things, then of course it's very important to look at the family.
Now, the reason that we did the state first was it's easier and less emotionally volatile to abstract the principles of justice, truth, honor, integrity, and virtue in regards to the state than it is in regards to the family.
Things are so much more mucked up with the family because we have all of this contradictory experience and personal investment and there's much more propaganda associated with the family than there is with the state.
So, then we began to look at the...
the family, which made good sense, and of course, because we'd already accepted the arguments for morality, and we'd already accepted the general principles of analyzing corruption, and despotic, or arbitrary, or unjust authority in the form of the state, and the church, religion, priests, and so on, then, of course, or unjust authority in the form of the state, and the church, religion, priests, and so on, then, of course, what we want to do is we want to apply those exact same principles, because they are universal, which doesn't mean just state and
We want to take those same principles and we want to apply those to the family, which is, of course, fantastic, right?
But much more emotionally volatile, right?
Because we can jaw about the state from here to kingdom come without changing a damn thing in our personal lives.
But what we really want to do, I think, is to change our personal lives where we have some control and some effect and we can actually bring freedom around within our personal lives.
And that seems like a good thing to do, right?
You take those principles and apply them, right?
You take the principle that the speed of light is constant and you apply it everywhere, even where it freaks you out, like...
That things get more massive as they approach the speed of light and time slows down and things are just kind of freaky, right?
But that's okay. I mean, if it's a principle, it's a principle and you have to apply it universally.
Or you can, you know, bow out of the conversation and just say, okay, well, I'm going to just prefer to talk about the state than to deal with anything that's actually tangible and immediate in my life.
And that's fine, too. I mean, you can't claim that it's anything to do with ethics anymore, but you can certainly get back to reading Hayek and think that you're doing something about your own personal level of freedom.
But now, of course, we are with the introduction of the false self, true self ideas, and other forms of personal integrity.
The three-parter, I think, I did on honor, justice, and integrity.
Over the past, I think, month or so, we've been talking a lot about the false self and the true self.
And the reason for that, of course, is that, you know, we have these sort of four general stages of approaching integrity, of approaching the truth, of approaching ethics, right?
Abstract authority in the form of the state, less abstract authority, or the state and religion, less abstract authority in terms of your government and your particular religion, if you have one.
And then we move to the family, and then we move to you, right?
So we're sort of at the final stage of approaching integrity, of approaching the understanding of virtue.
And universal ethics, which is to look at not the government, not your government, not reading the paper about what's going on in Iraq and so on, and not even just confronting your family, but instead to confront yourself, right?
This is sort of where the final core, this is where the sort of molten lava core of the...
The approach to freedom that we're taking here, right?
This is where it really occurs, where you have to look at not the corruption of those around you, but your own corruption.
Because, of course, it is our own corruption that makes us susceptible to corrupt people around us.
I mean, that's the basic thing, that in order to become free in the final analysis, so to speak, you have to confront your own corruption, which means that you can no longer project your false self into the world and get angry at other people for being hypocritical and get angry at other people for being...
For false or for being sophisticated or whatever you want to call it.
You have to withdraw your projections from the world and incorporate them back into your own personality and deal with them as personal attributes if you want to be truly free.
We don't want to spend our lives being angry at the world.
We don't want to spend our lives being angry at those who are corrupt.
And the best way to stop, to be free of that kind of anger is to withdraw your...
I mean, I know this is very abstract, but just bear with me for a moment.
You want to withdraw your projections from those around you and deal with them as aspects of your own personality.
So we've had a brave board member who's taken on his family.
And his mother's depressed, and so everyone is in the family, or he and his father, and I think one of their brothers is sort of saying, well, how do we get mom into therapy, right?
Now, this is the example. I mean, congratulations.
Fantastic. This is an enormous journey, right?
The journey to the corruption of the self is a long way, and the final step is a real doozy.
But, you know, be enormously proud, I think, in the six months or five months that you've been listening to this.
How far you've come is fantastic.
I mean, you should really, really be honored and salute yourself in the mirror because this is how the world gets saved and very few people come this far.
So as far as a companion on this journey, I would just really, really honor you and truly respect the journey that you've taken.
It took me 20 years and you all are coming along with flying colors in five months, which you should be, six months I guess, should be enormously proud of.
But of course, in regards to this family, the natural tendency is, how do we get my depressed mom into counseling?
Well, of course, that is the third stage, where you're dealing with your family, the corruption within your family, that's fantastic.
However, of course, trying to trick or manipulate your mom into therapy doesn't work, and I can certainly speak from personal experience that way.
And what does need to happen is you need to look at your own Corruption and craziness, right?
And we all have it, not because we're corrupt or crazy by nature, but we've been raised so badly and we've received so much false instruction at the hands of the state and the church and family and culture and the media and all that.
I mean, all we do is get lied to our whole life long until we really fight our way free to the truth.
And so it's not too surprising to me that we have all of these issues around trying to figure out what is true and what is false.
But, of course, in the final analysis, what you need to do is to be free yourself, which you can never, ever achieve by trying to free others through manipulation or control, whatever, right?
We want to lead by example.
So, of course, my response to this gentleman who's working on these family issues is to say, of course, I'm sure you know what I'm going to say, Which is that it's not your mother that you need to get into therapy, but yourself, right?
Because the fact that you want to manipulate your mother into getting into therapy is a part of your own corruption and craziness.
And I say that with all due respect, because I have my own corruption and craziness, which I've had to wrestle with quite considerably.
And so I don't say this, again, with any sort of leaning down from an ivory chariot of pure light riding in the sky with heavens of pure integrity, but having been to the trenches myself and had to deal with my own corruption.
It's very important to understand that in the final analysis, the state is you.
You are the state.
To be angry at the state, to be angry at soldiers, to be angry at your parents, to be angry at all of these things...
It's definitely the first step and a very important step.
So don't say, oh, well, I shouldn't be angry at these people and then stop.
But it's only part of the journey, right?
The journey is to confront the craziness in yourself because once you're free of your own craziness and corruption and once you have integrated and accepted the energy of the false self back into your ego, then you're no longer susceptible to the craziness and corruption of others and can actually make rational decisions and I mean,
once you've dealt with your own false self...
I'm not saying those decisions become instantly easy and you're riding this sort of high-surf Himalaya wonder carpet of abstract Zen integrity, but you do in fact see the situations for what they really are.
Which is that, of course, you are not responsible for anybody else's happiness.
You are not responsible for anybody else's freedom.
You are not responsible to make anybody else sane.
You are not responsible to save anybody else.
Because it's impossible, and the more that you try to do it, the worse your life is going to become.
It's one of these situations where in trying to break somebody out of prison, you both end up in prison.
And the idea that misery loves company may be fine for the people in prison, but it doesn't help the world as a whole.
And so the final thing that we're dealing with right now when we're looking at the principles of ethics is within yourself, right?
It's within yourself that you need to deal with the principles of ethics.
So I received a sort of a slap and a kiss from...
I found it to be quite fascinating because he said, oh, Steph, you know, bright guy, great podcast, but the one thing that seems culty is that Steph says that you have to break with just about everyone in your life, and that seems kind of culty, that you have to get rid of everyone in your life.
And I'm assuming that this person is relatively new to the podcast series because there's two things that I would say about that.
And it's important to understand this sort of from the perception of personal freedom that we're talking about here, which is where you don't focus on whether you can get rid of the state, and you don't focus on whether you can fix your parents, and you don't focus on whether you can fix your boss or your girlfriend or your boyfriend, but you focus on yourself, which is where the true liberation is.
The reason that it's important to talk about this person's review is It's because I think it gives a strong indication of where somebody is in a certain phase in their development, with all due respect to this person, right?
I'm not trying to put them down or to sort of float above them in some abstract, perfect way, but I can very clearly see where this person is.
So what this person is doing, and maybe you've gone through this phase, maybe you're going through this phase right now, or maybe this will help you in other areas of your life, What this person is doing is they're making sort of two major errors.
The first is that they're saying, that I'm saying, as Steph is saying, that you have to do something.
I mean, what kind of advocate of personal freedom would I be?
If I said that personal freedom is very important and you have to do X, I mean, that is not a very good definition of personal liberty.
To give people orders in order to free them would not be any sort of sense of personal liberty.
What I do say is that if virtue and ethics are universal and absolute, Then, if you believe, for instance, that lying and manipulation and possibly if your parents were bad, right, physical or verbal abuse when you were a kid, that it continues into adulthood, which of course it always does without significant intervention, self-intervention on the part of the parents.
If ethics are universal, and I believe that they are, if Ethics produce happiness, and if you want to be happy, then you have to get rid of people in your life who aren't ethical.
I mean, I'm not telling people what to do.
I'm simply pointing out that choices have consequences.
We assume that rationality and integrity is virtue, and that virtue brings happiness, and I think that all makes sense, because obviously we don't want to get involved in something that brings unhappiness.
That would be very Catholic of us, I guess you could say.
So, we do want to perform actions or bring about actions or bring about behavior within ourselves that makes us happy.
Now, we do believe, of course, that freedom and rationality, integrity and virtue bring happiness.
And happiness is involved with kindness and benevolence and justice and all the stuff we've been talking about.
But universally preferred human behavior, as we discuss on the boards at times and as I've written about on Lou Rockwell.
So, if...
You want to be happy, then you have to be rational.
And you can't say that rationality is a value and then have all these people in your life who are the exact opposite of rationality.
So you can't say that the non-aggression principle is valid and valuable in relation to the government, that the government should not exert unjust authority and corrupting authority over children or adults.
And then have people in your life who are corrupt and unjust in their wielding of authority, whether those are siblings or parents or priests or people in your community or your sort of social circle or whatever, or within your romantic relationship, of course, pretty significant, right?
I am saying that that is logical.
Now, what this person is also making the mistake of saying is not only that I'm telling people to do something which I'm not, I'm simply pointing out that there's an inconsistency and that that's going to make people unhappy.
They can always choose unhappiness, that's freedom, right?
But the other thing is that he's saying that it's my argument.
And this, of course, is really, really fascinating.
The idea that people associate a logical argument with me is really quite grandiose on their part, and quite a projection of grandiosity on their part.
And, of course, what they're projecting in terms of grandiosity is the idea that truth can be willed.
So I'm telling people what to do, and my argument, like Steph's argument, is that you've got to get rid of your family or something like that.
As if it's my argument.
Of course, if it was my argument, then it would be not rational, right?
I mean, if it's a rational argument to say that if you value integrity, you can't have people who have no integrity in your life.
I mean, that would be... It's not my argument, no more so than if I say that 2 plus 2 is 4.
That's not, well, Steph's just telling people that 2 plus 2 is 4.
Well, if I'm just telling someone, then clearly it's not logical.
Now, the grandiosity of imagining that I can come up with some argument that people should believe because I say it is really quite a remarkable thing.
I don't think that I've ever said that anybody should believe anything that I say because I say it.
But what is being projected in this particular situation, of course, is that this person wishes to disbelieve in rationality because they say it.
So they're projecting that grandiosity onto me and saying that I somehow have the power to make up arguments that people should or should not believe based on the fact that I'm saying it, when the fact of the matter, of course, is that this gentleman wishes to disbelieve in an argument that is logical because he wishes it.
And so this grandiosity in relation to rationality and empiricism is being projected onto me, and therefore the argument is being dismissed according to that.
However, if somebody says that I'm incorrect in saying that virtuous people cannot claim to believe in universal virtue and also have corrupt people in their life or evil people in their life, If that is an incorrect argument, then of course I would be heavily desirous of being corrected so that I can give my brother a phone call and wish him happy birthday.
Because if I'm incorrect in this, then I absolutely submit to anybody's rationality in this particular circumstance.
So the idea that I'm telling people what to do or that it's my argument or my commandment or anything like that is really quite a fantasy.
And this person is obviously having a great deal of difficulty integrating this argument because they have a lot of corrupt people in their life and there's a lot of guilt, of course, which is then being projected.
They have a susceptibility to unjust authority and therefore they're projecting that unjust authority onto me, which is, of course, not being free at all.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that because I think it's interesting to be able to understand where people are in their development, in their development towards sort of a clear-eyed and objective rationality.
And so, of course, I've asked this person on the board.
I did manage to identify him because he used the same name, and I certainly appreciate responses that he might post.
I haven't read them yet. But of course, I've asked him to understand, to help me understand how it is that I'm forcing people or telling people to do something or that it's my argument and not a rational argument.
See, if it's a rational argument to say that if you believe in virtue, you should get corrupt people out of your life, then you can't just dismiss it by saying, well, that's just what Steph says and it's kind of culty, right?
That's just magical thinking. Now, the reason that this is important as well is that I think that this person is in need of help from the board or from his own true self, or maybe from me if that's a value, because of course what he's done is he's put in a public forum,
a very public forum, The accusation towards me that I'm engaged in sort of culty commandments of telling people to break with the family or whatever, which of course means that he is very much torn about the value of what we're doing here.
So of course he appreciates the rationality, but then when the rationality triggers something emotional for him, then he wishes to engage in magical thinking.
And then project that onto me to dismiss the rationality.
And he's so torn about it that he's putting a highly, highly ambivalent message in a public forum about Free Domain Radio, which means that, of course, he's going to go through a very rocky transition process into something a little bit more rational.
And I would, of course, love to help him with that if I can, or if anyone else can, that would be great as well.
So I'm certainly looking forward to hearing his response as to how it is that I have this magical power A, to command people to do something, and B, to make up arguments that aren't related to reality or to rationality, and have a sort of culty influence based on that.
I'm really, really looking forward to hearing responses about that.
Now, there's one other thing that I wanted to mention.
I don't want to sound defensive of this, and of course you could interpret it that way, but I think it's important.
There's self-interest in it too, but I like to think of it as enlightened self-interest from that standpoint.
But if you go into a public forum and you start putting out scare stuff about a resource like Free Domain Radio, where you say...
Well, it's culty, and it's a guy's questioning relationships with families, and he's actually extending virtue not only to the state, but also to one's personal relationships.
I understand that impulse, of course, because nobody likes to say to themselves, perhaps, that they just agree with everything that someone says, or agree with most of it, so there's a lot of people who want to retain a kind of independence by saying, well, I disagree with Steph about this, and disagree with Steph about that, and that's fine, of course, good heavens, I mean, the last thing I'm going to say is that I have any kind of monopoly on truth, but...
Of course, it's not me that disagreeing with me means nothing.
It's like disagreeing with me about, well, Steph likes, I don't know, the house TV show, but I think it's bad.
It's even more subjective than that.
I mean, I'm just putting forth arguments which people can question or debate.
But if you put something out there in the public sphere about, you know, that it's cultier, it's this or that, the only thing that I would caution to you, and of course I want to appeal to your self-interest in this, right, because what do you care about whether I think, It's true or not.
But your self-interest, I think, is important to pursue in this manner.
Let's say that you're wrong.
Let's say that Freedom Aid Radio, or the stuff that I'm putting out there, is not culty.
Maybe I'm really, really working hard in a very explosive and emotionally difficult area.
Maybe I'm working really, really hard to try and get people out of corrupt and destructive relationships.
Maybe, just maybe. Now, I would say that until you've either...
Like, either these things make sense to you or you get punchy and you send me an aggressive email, in which case we can have a chance to have a dialogue, or you really sort of look into your heart and figure out if what I'm saying is true or false.
But when you hear these ideas, like let's just say you went through the podcast on parenting or podcast 183 or whatever, and you just get upset.
Oh, this is culty. You just dismiss it or he's, you know...
Now, if you work through those ideas yourself, or you come on the board, or you talk to me, or you talk to a counselor, or you talk to anyone, right?
And you sort of work these ideas out yourself, logically, or whatever, and you come to the conclusion that it's culty, fantastic.
You know, then help me, because I don't want to be culty, of course, so help me to liberate myself from that illusion.
I mean, obviously I'm putting a lot of resources out there to try and help other people be free in the ways that I've logically worked out my own freedom.
But if you enjoy the fact or you appreciate the fact that I'm putting stuff out there that helps you be free, but you think that I'm being culty, obviously being culty is not being free.
So I would appreciate it if you would then contact me directly or...
However you want to do it, and help me to liberate myself from any culty tendencies that I might have.
But people don't really do that, right?
So the only thing that I would caution you is that if you're wrong about this, right?
So if you've just listened to a podcast or two on parenting, and you're just all up in arms about how I'm culty, if you're wrong about it, and you put something out there in the public sphere, which causes people to shy away from free domain radio, oh, wow, that's culty or whatever, right?
Then if you're wrong, and you find that out later, you're going to feel really, really, really bad.
And I don't want you to feel bad.
I really don't want you to feel bad.
I mean, that's not my goal, right?
Of course, I want you to feel free.
And I want you to be free of guilt or self-recrimination and so on.
And so the only thing that I would suggest is that if you feel it's culty or if you feel that I'm making a terrible error in my approach to saying that if you have values that you should try and lift them consistently throughout your life, if you feel that that's culty, then absolutely help me to free myself from my own error, debate with me and so on, just as I'm trying to debate with other people on the boards and also in the call-in shows and also in these podcasts where I'm batting forth ideas back that I've received from people.
Because if you're actually incorrect, and when I say to people that if you believe in virtue, that if you want to be happy, you need to live it with integrity, or don't bother with virtue at all and just go and conform with people, because that's going to bring you happiness as well.
I just don't want people to get stuck in the worst of both worlds, where they neither have all of the social sanctions and frankly cash rewards that come from conformity.
Neither do they have the joy and great relationships that you get when you get corrupt people out of your life.
I just don't want the idea of freedom to be a lose-lose situation where you end up being glued to a corrupt family and yet you also get all the social rejection that comes from being original and thinking for yourself.
I just want it to be a win-win situation, right?
So personal freedom comes from living with integrity.
So that's all I'm offering to people, right?
So if you put something out in the public sphere like...
It's culty and so on. Then you're going to make people shy away.
They will never, ever listen to Free Domain Radio.
They may also associate this with libertarianism.
Who knows, right? Now, if you then down the road find out through your own sort of self-examination, your own understanding, your conversations with people, you find out that it's not culty.
And that you were mistaken, and that you've now put something out there in the public sphere, which has been out there for months, and it's going to be out there until the end of time.
You can't go and get rid of a review, or whatever you're posting, if you post on message boards or whatever.
Then you're going to, like your true self, you're going to have to look in the mirror and you're going to have to say that I caused people to shy away from something that was really going to help them.
I've actually kept people trapped in corrupt relationships because I wasn't able to handle the truth and I reacted too quickly and I went out there and put something out there that has caused a lot of people now to shy away from something which has really benefited me because I stuck with it.
And that is going to make you feel very bad.
And that, you know, the thing that's important in life, the thing that's always important in life, don't do something which can't be undone.
Right? So if you hurt someone, then you go and apologize.
The stuff that's out there in the public sphere, though, my friends, I'm telling you, cannot be undone.
So, just be very careful.
That's my only suggestion. Not because, oh, I don't want to offend Steph or whatever, right?
Not because of that. Not because, oh, Steph's worried about donations because people aren't going to come to Free Domain Radio.
Forget about all of that.
What I am concerned about, though, is that you don't do something that can't be undone In terms of helping other people.
Because if it does turn out that...
And of course, there's a plus side, right?
If it does turn out that I am some crazy cult leader David Koresh fellow, then of course you have warned people away, and that's great, but then it's a little confusing why I would then be called a very bright guy with a lot to offer, but also culty.
So that's my sort of major issue, that I want to protect you from putting stuff out there possibly, prematurely, which is going to cause people to shy away from a resource like this, which I think is a good resource to get people interested in freedom at a personal level and at a practical level.
And if you do put something out there that causes people to shy away and you later find out that you're wrong, then you're going to feel terrible.
And it took me 20 years to work this stuff out All I'm saying is don't be too hasty.
I mean, it's really when it comes right down to it, that's all I'm saying.
Because if you're hasty and you cause people to shy away from a resource that can really make them free and happy or help them on that journey considerably, then you can't undo that, right?
You can't go and find all the people who looked at a review or looked at something you posted on the board or who got emails from you about, oh, it's good, but it's really culty.
I don't know what's going on out there.
I'm just sort of going on some of the things that I've read and seen on the boards because, of course, I know where people come from or don't come from in the sites.
And I see the discussions that go on around Free Domain Radio.
And I see that people are posting a lot of sort of quasi-individualistic, some sort of hostile stuff.
And a lot of it is focused on this sort of culty stuff around the family or this perceived culty stuff around the family.
Just be careful, because if you're wrong, you will never be able to undo that thing.
If you find out that it's not culty, but in fact that I'm really focused on trying to get people free, you won't be able to undo it, and try not to do stuff in your life that you can't undo.
We all make mistakes.
But try and make the kind of mistakes that you can undo, and this one I'm not sure is one that can occur.
So that's the last thing that I'm going to do in terms of nagging the listenership, which I think seems only fair, because I'm doing it all for you and for me, of course, too, because...
I think that, as I mentioned before, what you don't receive, you should try and pass along.
That's the best way to fill up a hole in your heart, is to try and fill up the holes in other people's hearts.
That sort of works beautifully, or at least it has for me.
And so I would suggest that you give that a shot.
Now, I get a Maclean's magazine these days, which came with my internet provider service.
And I start flipping through from time to time and a couple of really good articles on it.
Now, there's this one on Freud that I think is just fantastic.
Not the Freud that's so much to do with your sort of itching desire to seduce your cross-gender parent, but the Freud who talks about the talking cure and so on.
And you may have heard a lot of back and forth about whether psychotherapy and the non-medication kind of psychiatry, so we'll just talk about it as the talking cure, that it doesn't work or stuff like that.
But this is actually becoming quite interesting.
So psychoanalysis is the long-term version of the talking cure.
So sometimes Christina has patients who can only come for 6 or 12 sessions.
So what she does, of course, is make them sit down and listen to Free Domain Radio for about 46 hours straight.
Is that right? And she keeps them awake, of course, because they shouldn't miss a single gem-like moment of one of my syllables.
But she'll work on sort of behavior modifications and self-examination in terms of what thoughts is it that are creating the behaviors that make you unhappy.
And so, you know, this is a cognitive therapy approach.
It's very Adlerian in a way.
So it is something that can work in a short term.
But we're talking about longer term therapy.
The therapy that I took in my early 30s was, I took for just a little under two years.
And for a good chunk of that time, it was three hours a week, right?
So I did an hour and a half twice a week.
And did usually an hour or two of homework a night in terms of writing about what it is that I was going through, analyzing my dreams, and of course I had lots of conversations with John at the time, who was I think really the only person that I could talk about what I was going through.
It's quite a lot of work.
It cost me a lot of money.
Gosh, I think close to $20,000.
Worth absolutely every penny.
And also I would mention too that the person who was my therapist was a mystic.
I know everyone thinks, well, I want to go to therapy, but what if I don't find an objectivist therapist?
Well, just in case Nathaniel Brandon is booked, you can, of course, find somebody who has the skill set that you're missing, right?
So for me, and I'll go into this another time if people are interested, but for me, what was missing was respect for the emotional content of my nature, respect for the unconscious.
And as a mystic, she had a great deal of respect for the emotional content and value of the unconscious, and that's what she really helped me learn.
I didn't care much for her metaphysics, of course, because she was a mystic, but what I did get an enormous amount of benefit from was the stuff that I was missing, which, of course, like a lot of rationalists, I was missing respect for the cognitive aspects of the emotional life and the unconscious and the instincts and so on.
So don't worry about that.
And you'll know when you're talking to the right person.
I went to a therapist in my 20s, but the guy almost seemed to fall asleep when I started talking.
And so I thought I'd wait for marriage to recreate that.
But, uh...
So don't worry so much about what kind of therapist.
You know, just trust yourself. You'll go.
And then you'll find the right therapist and it'll chug along.
But it's really great.
And I found it to be enormously healing, right?
I mean, it was fantastic. It really got me free of corrupt relationships.
It was while I was going through the process of breaking with just about everybody in my life, really.
I mean, I broke with my family, my extended family, about 90% of my friends, my business partners.
Most of my employees, of course, except for a few that I've retained as acquaintances.
And that was just a little bit more than I could manage on my own.
And of course, the problems that are generated in solitude cannot be solved on your own, right?
You need connection with someone to solve problems that are caused with solitude.
And of course, most of the problems that we have Come from feeling alone as children, either rejected or abused or whatever.
We can talk about that more another time, if people are interested.
If you want to hear more stories about me and therapy, please feel free to let me know.
But anyway, there's this new stuff that's come in around this.
So some... There was a lot of Freud bashing that occurred towards the end of the last century, and Freud is dead, and some psychopharmacologists, behaviorists, and feminists declared Freud was passé or wrong.
And so people really got into this brief of therapy, so 10 sessions or so, and they asserted they could accomplish as much as analysts who saw patients four times a week for several years, and of course managed care insurance companies.
They wanted to get drug treatments instead of therapy because it was cheaper, and they said, oh, an analysis doesn't work.
And so what's happened is, of course, there's been quite a bit of research into whether it works or not, right?
Sort of long-term therapy.
And I'm not specifically talking about Freudianism because my therapist certainly wasn't a Freudian, but this sort of idea that a longer-term therapeutic relationship is benefit or not.
Now, there's no real research.
I mean, they just said, oh, analysis doesn't work, but the scientific research says that it does, right?
And that's sort of important.
So, psychoanalysis is really quite on the upswing at the moment.
So, in 2005, a new study from the University of Göttingen, Germany, showed that 80%, sorry, whenever I get a German word, I just feel it's important to snarl it or bark it, I guess, based on my own heritage.
80% of patients in analysis showed significant improvement Their symptoms decreased and they improved their interpersonal problems and general sense of well-being and continued to improve a year after their analysis ended.
These patients did better than those in shorter-term treatments, and this supplements a series of recent German studies that show patients in psychoanalysis and related therapies end up using less medication, have fewer visits to the doctors, fewer days off work or days in the hospital than others.
And another study by Rolf Sendl in Linköping, University, Sweden, Sweden, Sweden, showed that patients in psychoanalysis compared to those in less intensive therapy continue to make gains even three years after therapy and to hold on to the gains they have made.
Those who have had analysis are also far less likely to require more treatment later in life.
So that's very interesting.
There's lots of empirical ways of showing that the therapeutic relationship with a competent therapist and a motivated patient provides enormous benefits.
80% of patients showed significant improvement.
That's a pretty exciting finding in my view.
Now... There's also ways in which neuroscience is beginning to support this kind of stuff.
Neuroscience has got a new generation of brain scans.
It's supporting Freud's assertion that the majority of our thinking and much of our motivation goes on beyond our conscious awareness or is in the unconscious.
And Freud, of course, was not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist because those sciences didn't exist when he started, but he was a neuroscientist, so he worked in a lab and he made important discoveries about the brain's nerve cells or neurons.
So Freud argued in the 1890s that neurons connect between small junctions, now called synapses, and that when we learn, two neurons fire at the same time and they connect more closely.
When he began seeing patients, he wrote a manuscript called The Project, and his goal was to unite the science of the brain with the science of the mind and meaning, but he eventually concluded the brain science was not yet up to the task.
Now, of course, brain scanning techniques can show us our brain while it does mental processing, and study of the mind and brain can be bridged, so consciousness and the matter.
So there's a new discipline.
It's called Neuropsychoanalysis.
It's trying to complete Freud's big project.
And it's made up of many of the world's most impressive neuroscientists and so on.
So they're drawn to Freud because they see him as having a far more adequate picture of mind and brain integration than those who see the brain as nothing more than a sophisticated chemistry set into which you add medications to make it work better.
Medication has a role, but it is not everything.
So this guy, Kendall, he's a Nobel Prize winner...
He benefited greatly from being psychoanalyzed, wanted to become a psychoanalyst.
So he reasoned that psychoanalysts and other therapies work by learning, and he set out to understand learning and memory in the brain.
So he won his Nobel Prize in 2000 for showing that when animals learn and remember, the actual structure between the nerves change, and the synaptic connections strengthen, as Freud imagines sitting in Bergasi 19.
Candles was one of the most compelling proofs that the brain is plastic and that thinking changes the brain structure.
Indeed, a number of recent studies show that psychotherapy actually rewires the brain and its changes are no less structural than those seen with medication.
Brain scans now show that thought processing goes on beyond awareness, and desires, emotions, and emotional conflicts can actually be unconscious.
This means we can, for example, have guilt without being aware of it, or anger or attraction towards others that we dare not face.
A 2004 study by Kendall and his colleagues at Columbia University in New York, published in Neuron, I guess it's a magazine, demonstrates that when people are shown photos of frightened faces too fast for them to register consciously, the almond-shaped amygdala, a part of the brain that processes anxiety and emotions, lights up on functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRI scans.
The study also showed that the amygdala...
Isn't that the woman from Star Wars?
She was a queen? Anyway, we'll come back to that.
The amygdala uses one set of neurons when we perceive an emotional experience unconsciously and another when we perceive it consciously.
Scientists studying brainwaves, the electrical fields given off when thousands of our neuron cells fire, have learned to detect recognition waves, forms of brain activity manifested when the brain recognizes something.
Dr. Howard Chevron at the University of Michigan has used these techniques to examine Freud's theories.
After subjects received extensive psychological testing by clinicians to determine their core unconscious emotional conflicts, e.g. hidden guilt, anxiety, or love, or hate for something, or ambivalence about free domain radio.
Hey, we made it to McLean's!
Cool. All right.
Words summarizing those conflicts were flashed at them in two ways.
First, they were flashed subliminally, too fast for the subjects to consciously register them, as some of my podcasts actually go to.
Next, they were flashed superliminally, or just fast enough for them to register.
When words connected to a patient's unconscious conflicts were flashed subliminally, their brains had a quick recognition wave.
When they were flashed supra-liminally, or consciously, the patients were very slow to recognize them.
This is quite important. In other words, their brains recognized their conflicts unconsciously, but had inhibited conscious recognition of them.
When words were flashed that had nothing to do with it, then the pattern was reversed, so we don't repress unconflicted ideas.
Now, Freud's theory that dreams are the royal road to understanding unconscious thought has also received support from brain imaging.
Alan Brown, a researcher at the National Institute of Health in Washington, has used positron emission tomography, PET scans, to measure brain activity in dreaming subjects.
He has shown that the region known as the limbic system, which processes emotional, sexual survival, and aggressive instincts, and interpersonal attachments, shows high activity in dreaming.
But the prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for achieving goals, discipline, postponing gratification, and whatever that is, and controlling our impulses, shows lower activity.
With the emotional instinctual processing areas of the brain turned on and the part that controls our impulses relatively inhibited, it is no wonder wishes and impulses we normally restrain or are unaware of are more likely to be expressed in dreams.
Another Freudian idea that is being vindicated by brain scans is how formative early childhood experience is.
This is a debate that's going on on the boards at the moment, so this might be of value to bring something a little bit more objective to the debate as well.
Before Freud, it was assumed that since most adults couldn't recall very early childhood, all that occurred then, good or bad, was forgotten.
Now, brain scans and other techniques show that when infants undergo great stress, such as extended separation or depression, a part of the brain called the hippocampus, required for laying down verbal or explicit memories, shrinks and stops functioning normally.
A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002 showed the hippocampus of depressed adults who suffered childhood trauma is 18% smaller than that of depressed adults without childhood trauma.
Although I wonder what it is with people who have not been depressed or have not had childhood trauma.
Oh, wait, that may not exist.
Just kidding, maybe it does.
This contributes to sketchy memories of traumatic events, but that doesn't mean the events don't affect us.
Another memory system called the implicit memory system, which encodes our emotional patterns for relating, does register the trauma, so traumas can be encoded without us being able to remember them.
Now, Freud divided the mind into the ego, the aspect of our self, part conscious, part unconscious, that regulates the rest of us and is the seed of rational thought and our sense of who we are, and the id, which includes our repressed unconscious wishes.
The goal of the analytic cure was, where the id was, there shall the ego be, i.e.
to learn to consciously reclaim and regulate those unconscious parts of ourselves that seem alien or driven urges.
Scans show that the prefrontal lobes are the part of the brain that performs ego functions of regulation.
During post-traumatic states, when people have flashbacks and emotional control is lost, blood flow to the prefrontal lobes decreases.
A 2001 brain scan study from UCLA of depressed patients treated with Interpersonal psychotherapy, a treatment of Kandel's Columbia colleague Myrna Weissman, developed by taking some key features from psychoanalytic approaches, showed that prefrontal brain activity normalizes with treatment.
Kandel is now on the board of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which is looking at developing routine ways of using fMRI scans to evaluate psychotherapy outcomes.
And his institution, Columbia University, just received the largest ever grant to a single university faculty, 200 million, for a neuroscience research program called Mind, Brain, and Behavior.
So, this is quite interesting to see that there is beginning to sort of become objective metrics by which childhood trauma and the unconscious and so on can all be perceived.
It certainly has been my strong personal experience, which is, of course, why it is a wonderful thing to recount.
Anything which proves my theories, I will tell you about.
Now, the last thing which we'll talk about today is this issue of Somalia, and this is something which has been floating around for quite a while on the boards, and I really haven't had enough time to get into.
I've done a little bit more studying in it, and it all seems to fall into two camps, right?
So there are people who are anarchists who go to Somalia and say, wow, Somalia has like the best telecommunications system in that region of the world, and it's all developed in the absence of a state, because Somalia has been without a central government, at least one part of Somalia, since 1994, I think it is.
So they'll say, well, you see how well the free market functions in the absence of the state?
This is proof that anarchism works, and we should all get rid of the government, and it's all wonderful, right?
So that's sort of one approach that people take, which I'm skeptical of, of course, because it's not quite that simple.
It never is. Now, there is another group of people who look into Somalia, and they are statists who say, well, there are all these warlords, and there's crime, and there's this, and there's that, and yeah, people have internet and cell phones, but they're worried about walking down the streets.
Like, that doesn't happen in Washington, D.C., but anyway.
I'm also skeptical of that, of course.
So people are going to Somalia to find what they want and reporting back with a one-sided view of things, and I, of course, don't have the time or money or inclination to go to Somalia for any extended period of time to look into it myself, although I had briefly toyed with the idea of going over there and setting up DROs, but we can talk about that another time.
But, what I would like to say about Somalia, and I'm fully aware that this is what communists say about communism too, so, I mean, just know that I'm aware of it so that when you feel the urge to email me and tell me exactly what I'm not aware of, that you'll know of this part at least that I am aware of, although there may be other things that I'm not.
Communists would always say, whenever communism was put into place and then failed, they'd say, well, you see, that wasn't real communism because of X, Y, and Z. So when I say that it's not real anarchy in Somalia, then I'm aware that I'm saying the same thing the communists do, so bear with me while I try and make this brief case, and then you can tell me whether I am in fact just aping what the totalitarian apologists do, and I will then correct myself.
The basic argument that I'd like to make about Somalia is this, that anarchy, the sort of market anarchy, is not the absence of a government.
It's not the absence of a government.
I mean, that is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for the establishment of a market anarchy society.
And so I'd like to use this sort of brief metaphor, because it's so much easier than arguing.
I mean, I think it's a good basis for coming up with an approach to this topic.
But if you are wanting to make people atheists, do you A, argue and reason with them, or B, go and blow up a bunch of churches?
Because, of course, if people are atheists, then the churches will be torn down.
If everyone becomes an atheist, then the churches will be torn down.
But it's just so important not to mistake cause or effect in this area.
So, if you go and blow up all the churches, then there are no more churches.
But does that mean that there is no such thing as religion anymore?
Well, of course not. All it means is that people will go and rebuild the churches.
So, in the absence of any kind of real understanding...
of ethics and the role of the government, and I mean a conscious understanding, I mean everyone gets it at an unconscious level with a conscious understanding, then simply detonating the government is not going to produce market anarchy any more than detonating churches will make everyone an atheist.
So that's sort of one approach that I would like to sort of take to help people understand at least my perception of Somalia.
Somalia is not America just before the Revolutionary War.
It is not England during the time of the 17th century.
It is not France when they were trying to get rid of their aristocrats.
So simply getting rid of a symptom is not changing the cause.
The cause has to be changed intellectually so that people have a fuller understanding of what it is that they're doing.
There have been revolutions and turnovers and coups and everything that you can imagine all the way throughout history, but only a tiny minority of those have ever produced any kind of additional freedom for the citizens of the countries that they've occurred in.
So, I mean, you've had coups all over the Third World.
You've had coups. You've had the Tudor replacement in England.
We had the Wars of the Roses. All of this stuff going on, and very little of it has ever produced any additional freedom.
So getting rid of one government, replacing it with another, getting rid of a government completely, as is in the case with Somalia, does not produce freedom.
Freedom is produced through conscious intent.
It's like saying the moment that you divorce from your miserable spouse that you will absolutely have a great relationship.
No, all that means is you've gotten rid of one And you're going to replace it with another one until you figure out the cause.
A bad relationship is a symptom of mental dysfunction.
Low self-esteem, lack of integrity, whatever it is.
And so, just getting rid of the symptom, like divorcing your husband or your wife, which you're miserable with, is not going to be to solve the problem.
So that's sort of something that I would sort of really say is very important to understand.
Another way of looking at it, of course, is to say that people who are dysfunctional in one form or another will often manifest a kind of addiction.
So let's just say we've got some miserable woman out there who is an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic.
You could say, of course, that the way that you need to solve this woman's dysfunction is to get her to stop drinking.
Now, I would say that that is a necessary but not sufficient process, part of the process of getting her to become a healthy person.
So the first thing she's got to do is to stop drinking.
Therapists don't take on patients who continue to drink because you can't work with them.
So... If somebody stops drinking, they have the capacity to become healthy, but it doesn't mean that they're going to become healthy because it's just the first step, right?
You're just getting rid of one symptom and now you need to start to deal with the cause.
Otherwise, there's just going to be a relapse, right?
This is sort of what happens with substance abusers continually, right?
I'm going to quit drinking. They go to rehab, or it's court-mandated rehab, and then they end up relapsing back into their original state and getting drunk again, and eventually they'll hit bottom, and maybe they'll change, and they'll really sort of get it, like what self-destruction and what destruction to others they're causing through their substance abuse.
But simply getting rid of a symptom is not creating a cure, not solving the underlying problems.
So, if...
You say to somebody who's an alcoholic, if you stop drinking, you will be perfectly healthy.
That is a lie.
If you stop drinking...
You will then have a clearer mind with which to deal with the root issues.
If you don't deal with those root issues, then you're going to start drinking again, right?
That would be, to me, the situation, right?
So we came close at the end of the 18th century with the minichist approach, right?
So let's get rid of violence, let's reduce violence to a minimum, but we never dealt with it at a really fundamental level because there was still religion, there was still slavery, there was still all of these irrationalities that are in the world which haven't been dealt with.
There were corrupt family relationships, there was abusive authority, there were bad teachers, everything that you could imagine.
And so what happened, of course, was that a problem was solved temporarily and then a relapse occurred within a couple of generations.
The state starts growing again and now we've got this big monster, this leviathan to deal with and so on.
So until you actually deal with the underlying issues, you're going to continue to produce the same symptomology.
The underlying issues within society is corruption and evil, bad relationships, corrupt relationships, exploitation of children from corrupt authority, whether it's a church, state, parents, extended family, what have you.
And the symptom of that, as I've argued for quite some time, is the state.
The state cashes in on the corruption that we all experience as children.
Now, in Somalia, what happened was they basically quit drinking because things just got so bad, right?
Now, what's happening is they sort of staggered along for a while, and now there's, you know, the crazy Muslims are going to go in there and try and create an Islamic state and this and that and the other.
But I think if you were to stop most of the people, even the educated people in Somalia, and say, what does freedom mean?
What do you understand about the principle of non-aggression?
What's your relationship to the state and so on?
I think that most of them would say, well, yeah, we kind of miss having a state because, you know, I've got to pay these warlords to do business or whatever.
But I don't think any of them would say, well, the state is an evil and we're trying to deal with the evil of violence and we don't solve the evil of violence from warlords by creating a monopolistic warlord in the form of a state, right?
I don't think they would... And it's not a hard concept to grasp.
It's just that they're very religious, they're very mystical, they're very collectivist, and they're not exactly the most rational system in the world.
So, basically what I'm saying is that you don't create the Enlightenment by shooting all of the aristocrats and the priests and the popes of the Middle Ages.
If you go and assassinate the ruling classes, you don't create a state of freedom.
We can see this from Russia in 1917.
It doesn't always change for the better.
In fact, Russia was doing a lot better before the communists came along.
And so that would be my sort of main approach to understanding Somalia from a distance.
I mean, I spent a couple of hours on message boards to do with Somalia, read a bunch of articles, and there really doesn't seem to be any particularly clear way of understanding it.
But I will say this for sure, this is not a country of the Enlightenment, right?
This is not a country that has gone through that process of triumphing the individual, of pushing back the sort of suffocating acidic fogs of religious thought, of mysticism and collectivism and so on.
And so simply decapitating the ruling class, getting rid of the government, does not produce a market anarchy society.
A market anarchy society will not occur because people get rid of the state and then inrushes this.
It will occur because people stop believing in the state.
As soon as the state loses its moral legitimacy, its days are numbered, as we've sort of seen with the Soviet example and so on.
So, that would be my approach to understanding Somalia.
I know it's a pretty sketchy one, but I just don't think that you can legitimately say that this brutal, backward, collectivist country that accidentally ended up without a government is a great example of a rational and enlightened country.
Thank you so much for listening,
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