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June 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:13
281 External Validation

Notes from the bottomless hole of approval-seeking

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Good morning, one and all.
Hope you're doing well. The cold is on its way out.
I know that you're fascinated with everything that's going on with my biological system, but I just wanted to mention that the cold is on its way out.
I had a good night's sleep last night for the first night in a couple of nights, so I'm pumped, baby!
I'm ready to chat!
I hope you're doing well. It is today, I think, the 16th of June, 2006, 8.25 in the morning.
Off to work, I give.
So, I wanted to mention something.
I've once or twice been slightly down on the even bigger, chattier forehead of Dr.
Phil, and I wanted to mention something I thought that was very good that he said.
I'd like to try and be fair where fair is due, and talk about something that he mentioned that was very interesting, very positive, and something that I hadn't considered at all, which is always particularly delicious to me.
Well, what he said was, this is on one of the shows where a father was hyper-competitive I mentioned this a couple of podcasts ago.
And it was sort of a win-lose thing.
And this was on a show where there were all these two 47-year-old twins who were also hyper-competitive and Southern, right?
So, you know, Southern women...
God bless y'all, but sometimes there seems to be a slight shallow side to this approach to femininity.
But what I wanted to chat about was this idea of external validation, which came up in this Dr.
Phil show. I thought he had very wise things to say, so I'll sort of lay out the issue that was in the show and then his solution.
Which I think was excellent.
So, he said that...
Sorry, let me start with the issues that came up from the guests.
So the first were these two bubbly, giddy, idiotic, shallow, vain southern women from Texas who were twins and were absolutely obsessed with competing with each other on the basis of, you know, who weighs less, who's prettier, who got whose boyfriend, all this, like, completely idiotic and insulting to women everywhere kind of stuff.
And what Dr.
Phil pointed out, and this is something that you never really see in this kind of situation.
I've mentioned many, many podcasts ago, my skepticism towards this idea of excellence.
And the reason that I dislike the idea of excellence in the business world is that excellence in the business world always translates to more work without pay.
So this is something that...
There's a wonderful, wonderful Dilbert that I still use sometimes at work when I'm discussing salary at the CXO level.
And there's this great Dilbert where Dilbert's boss says, we want nothing but the best, the industry best to work here.
And Dilbert says, well, yeah, but you guys, we pay industry average here.
He's like, right.
We like them bright but clueless.
I think that's over.
It's very funny because I'm always very suspicious about people who use superlatives in terms of quality with no tangible, measurable thing around them.
So, yeah, everybody wants to hire the best people.
Well, Our people are the best in the industry.
We want you to be totally dedicated.
We want you to pursue excellence in your job.
And, you know, hey, nothing wrong with that.
Quality is wonderful, but quality is expensive, right?
I mean, if I say to the car salesman, I'm looking to buy a car, and I say to the car salesman, I want nothing but the best for my...
I want nothing but the best car.
The salesman's like, Yahoo!
Ka-ching! I get to retire on the commission from this loaded up baby.
And so he's going to lead me to the, you know, mega turbo vertical takeoff and landing kind of sports car and say, okay, well, here's the price tag because you wanted nothing but the best.
So this is your price tag for excellence.
And this is, of course, something that, you know, I want nothing but the very best education.
Okay, well, now here's a, you know, I want nothing but the best executive MBA. Okay, here's a $200,000 bill from Harvard.
Right? You know, everybody talks about excellence, and nobody ever wants to talk about the cost.
And this is something that I've always sort of found funny.
And so... That's something that is well worth thinking about, I think, not only in terms of your professional context, but in terms of your private life.
If you want to be a very good person or an excellent person, the only place to do that is in ethics, right?
Now, unfortunately, the price of ethics is rather high these days because most of our family and our companions, which we have accidentally inherited, are not...
Not virtuous, right?
I mean, this is where the ABC, why they call it the accidental biological cage.
The reason that I chisel so hard at the innate virtue of family is that family is absolutely accidental.
And if you were to ask just about any moralist...
I don't know throughout history, but probably throughout history.
But let's just say in the modern world, if you were to ask any moralist, you know, throw a dot at a map, and let's just say your map is detailed enough that...
Sorry, I didn't work this metaphor out too much well to begin with.
Let's just say that the map is detailed enough that you can figure out who you've hit on the map.
Maybe... Oh, open the phone book and point at a random name.
That works even better.
And then say that you now have to spend time with this person for the rest of your life and you have to love them and so on.
Well, of course, most people would say that the odds of you finding somebody who's really compatible with your values and somebody who's really honorable and somebody who's virtuous and somebody who's intelligent or whatever it is that you're...
the characteristics are that you look for in any kind of relationship, friend or lover or whatever.
The odds of you finding that person by pointing at a random...
Name in a phone book is ridiculous.
And if you were to say that the whole world over, the phone book is the whole world, then you'd say the odds go down even more, right?
And so, this for me, because, I mean, friendships, at least you choose, so there's more likelihood, unless it's, you know, unless your friends are scar tissue from your family, there's more likelihood you're going to have some compatibility with your friends, but family, I mean, just, the odds are low.
It doesn't mean that it's impossible.
I mean, I'm not anti-family, just for those of you who are, who this type of topic always rubs the wrong way.
I'm not anti-family at all.
All I'm saying is that virtue is more important than genetics, right?
I mean, because if it's not, then aren't we sort of open to racism as well?
I mean, if genetics are really important in terms of the family, then wouldn't they be really important in terms of judging the races?
I mean, aren't we then aristocrats of family, right?
Aristocrats say that we are powerful and virtuous and good by blood, by blue blood, by our inheritance of genes.
And if we say that that's true of our own family, then we're just aristocratics of us, right?
And I don't think most libertarians are really keen on inherited virtue or forced association by blood.
That wouldn't make any sense. So this question of excellence is always fascinating to me, and it's never excellence in virtue, right?
That's That never occurs.
Excellence is always, be really, really good, but I don't want to pay you for it, so I'm going to give you a medal called Excellence, right?
It's exploitive, but it's exploitive based on our own naivete.
So, I mean, as I said to a boss I had once, he said, you know, I want you to be the best in the industry.
I'm like, fantastic.
I think that's a wonderful goal.
I'm totally behind it.
Because I've looked at the pay curve for my job, and the best in the industry, they earn a fortune.
So, absolutely, you tell me what it looks like to you to be the best in the industry, because for you, it's a productivity goal, and for me, it is as well.
But for me, primarily, it's a salary goal.
So, that, of course, didn't go very far, but at least he stopped bugging me about excellence, which was nice enough to begin with.
So, the issue that came up in the Dr.
Phil show was competition, right?
Competition being a form of excellence.
I'm tying it together. I know you think I'm drifting, but it's all part of a subtle web that I'm weaving.
So, this idea of excellence is always in some damn shallow thing, like who's thinner, who's prettier, and all this kind of, whose car is cooler, who can drink more, it's all these stupid little competitions, and sports, of course, is definitely core to this kind of stuff.
And so, of course, he seems a little bit impatient these days, which I think is interesting.
He's 55, so he said that the time he has left in his life can be measured in weeks.
So it's like 1,500 weeks when he's got left to live.
And so he seems to be a little bit impatient with people because there's so many people who are just missing their whole lives.
There's so many people just missing their whole lives.
And people who are into these totally shallow and ridiculous competitions are definitely those kinds of people.
I mean, I like to win, sure.
I like to win in business, absolutely.
But I don't consider it any kind of virtue.
I mean, I have no idea.
Garry Kaspikov, or whatever his name was, the chess champion, I have no idea of his virtue.
I know that he's smart at chess, I know he can win at chess, but I have no idea if he's a good or bad person because of that.
And so, this idea of competition is a very, very dangerous one.
Because in competition, there's always a winner, of course, and a loser.
and there are far more losers than winners, right?
So if I did an RFP recently, and we didn't win it, and there were 35 people who submitted RFPs, and one company got the business, and 34 of us were left to suck eggs and count up the hours we'd spent to no avail.
And it wasn't an RFP I thought we should.
I mean, just for those who were in the business, if you submit an unsolicited RFP, you have about a 3% chance of winning.
you...
And I've been on the other side of this, where you help people to shape the RFPs so that it matches your products.
That's how you get around competition rules and public sector and so on.
So, I mean, this stuff's all nonsense.
Every rule that you have is broken.
Every rule that you can imagine is broken.
Just about every which way you can think of.
But... This idea of competition in interpersonal relationships is definitely a baddie, definitely the wrong thing to be doing, the wrong thing to approach.
Anytime you're in this sort of personal relationships with people, the only excellence that you have is involved in virtue and supporting each other.
That's the excellence that you have.
I was competitive with my brother.
And I wouldn't say that I'm naturally a very competitive person, because I enjoy sports.
I really don't mind losing.
I don't like getting involved in sports where I'm continually losing.
So I was pretty good at Unreal Tournament, to use the term sports pretty loosely.
And there was a guy at my work.
Who was just a sheer genius.
The man could do like... He could like walk through walls and do backflips and, you know, fire 12 rockets at your groin while he was, you know, doing somersaults through the air.
And I just... I could never beat him.
Never. Never. I mean, once accidentally, I think.
So I didn't really...
We'd go online and I'd make sure he was on my team.
That's how we'd play. But...
I wouldn't say that I'm too naturally competitive.
I did go through a pretty competitive phase with my brother when I was younger because, like all idiot older brothers, he was very proud of his ability to be bigger and stronger than I was based on Being born a couple of years sooner.
And for guys, that's a big deal, right?
Because, I mean, the puberty thing is pretty important.
And he's a pretty big size and strength differential in that situation.
And he was very keen on beating me.
And what he would do was he would beat me in a very cold and hostile fashion.
And then he would berate me and humiliate me because I would be a sore loser.
And I mean... It's all so horribly predictable.
I wish somebody had just told me, just sat me down and said...
In hindsight, looking back, it's all such a ridiculously obvious pattern, but of course, at the time, it all seemed like life and death, that I thought that somehow I would retain some sense of...
or gather, or sort of increase some sense that I had of self-efficacy or whatever, just by beating him once.
I had to beat him once. Of course, once I started beating him in tennis and stuff, it was...
It was quite different, but it didn't solve the problem.
As I say in The God of Atheists, there's no external problem to the problem of insecurity.
There's nothing outside of yourself that will help you with insecurity.
If you're going balding, you can get hair transplants.
If you're overweight, you can get liposuction.
If you're showing wrinkles, you can get Botox.
You can buy a fancy car.
You can buy a beautiful house.
You can... Buy a beautiful wife or husband if you're into the trophy thing, but none of that will solve your problem of insecurity.
In fact, it will make it worse because you're acting on the premise that there's some external problem to insecurity, external solution to insecurity, and now you've sort of made a shrine to that belief, which is false.
So it's actually going to make you more trapped in that belief.
So don't do that.
That's what I'm saying. Don't do that.
Now, as far as competition goes, the issue with it in a personal sense is there's a winner and a loser, and I don't think that it's very virtuous, if you claim to love someone, to say, I want to win and to walk away from that interaction, dusting off your hands and saying, Well, they're down in the dirt, and I've beaten them, and I feel great, and that that's got anything to do with love.
Well, of course, it doesn't have anything to do with love.
But what it does have to do is the false self, sadistic triumph over the humiliation of others.
And what you are conquering, of course, is your own humiliation.
The desire to humiliate other people is not related to them.
It's impossible to be related to them because...
To have a them in your life requires empathy.
To really have other people show up in your life as separate individuals requires empathy.
Empathy does not involve sadism in any way.
Sadism is an absence of empathy.
And so if you feel cruel towards someone, you know it's got nothing to do with them.
It's only your own sense of humiliation that you are trying to master, and it's very complicated in this sense because sadism is self-humiliation to the nth degree, and so by trying to humiliate others or trying to beat others or trying to win and to dance around in your own mind as the champion of the conquester, then, hey, George Bush can make up words like decider, so can I. There's self-humiliation and external validation.
There's subjugation and external validation.
And by external validation, I'm just talking about what Ayn Rand calls the second-hander thing, right?
Which is...
I mean, she discusses quite well in her novels and in her non-fiction, but, in my humble opinion, misses the point completely because she talks about it in a business sense, in a political sense, in a financial sense, in a whatever-you-want sense, but she never talks about it in terms of parenting.
I mean, she was not a parent herself and doesn't seem to have spent much thought on the topic.
There's a very brief... Sketch of healthy children in Galt's Gulch at the end of Atlas Shrugged, but she really doesn't seem to have done much thinking about it for obvious reasons that her parents were probably very corrupt, which her not focusing on that issue meant that when she recreated a community, It was judgmental and hostile.
You had to...
Talk about external validation, right?
Ayn Rand is very much against being a second-hander, and then everyone has to submit her judgments to Ayn Rand in order to have them validated.
It's funny, right?
It's sad, but it's funny.
This is the kind of stuff that happens when you don't deal with your childhood.
You recreate what you most despise for a variety of reasons.
I think we've talked about it at length before, so if you're aiming at virtue and you haven't dealt with your childhood, and we all had childhoods that were corrupt to one degree or another, Well, then you are going to not make it.
And then you better not try, is sort of what I would suggest.
Because if you're really into virtue and you try and aim it to being a virtuous person, but you don't deal with your childhood, then you're really setting yourself up for real humiliation at a moral level.
Because if you really are aiming for integrity and virtue and all this kind of good stuff, but you don't deal with your childhood, then...
You're going to miss and create all this bad stuff, which is going to be all the worse because you're really aiming at virtue, right?
If you aim at, I don't know, being an NBA star and you miss, that's bad, but at least you're not corrupt, right?
But if you aim at being a virtuous person, a really virtuous person, and you miss, then that's really humiliating.
And so what I mean by all of this is that we're interested in virtue, most of us, because we grew up in corrupt environments, just as everyone else did, but for a variety of reasons we've talked about in one of our early A call-in shows, for a variety of reasons, we felt the corruption and we aim at less corruption and communicating about more integrity and so on in our lives.
But what happens is that if we don't deal with the early humiliation of being raised by corrupt and hypocritical people or parents, then when we aim to be virtuous in our adult life, we'll simply recreate that humiliation by undermining The virtue that we're aiming at, right? So we'll end up being hypocritical and causing more problems than we're solving because we haven't dealt with our first humiliation, so we end up having to recreate it in a moral sense, right?
So I would imagine maybe it's possible that most of us went through this kind of humiliation based on moral standards.
I know that I did more, I think, a little bit more for my brother than I did for my mother, and a little bit more for my father, though he was not around, so it was less intense, but...
The control that I was subjected to was very much on a moral basis, and so maybe that moral humiliation or subjugation from a false argument for morality is more what we experienced, which is why we want to try and be more moral, but we still have to deal with that humiliation or we're going to recreate it for other people.
Now, in the realm of competition and in the realm of excellence, Dr.
Phil said something that I think was really great and has pretty profound implications for me at least.
And what he said was, he said, like this guy who I mentioned in a couple of podcasts ago, hyper-competitive, and if his kids aren't going to win a game with a friend, they just send the friend away.
If you're playing Scrabble and you're going to lose with your friend, then you just stop the game, so you don't have to deal with losing.
And what Dr.
Phil said, he said two things, one that was sort of interesting from an anecdotal standpoint and one that was interesting from a profound standpoint.
The first was he said that in sort of studies that have been done, people have been given tests where the knowledge increment on each of their tests is really minor, so there's no real effort for them in getting A's and so on.
And then when they actually get a real test, like they get out into the real world, and they face this...
This problem of not being able to do perfectly on a test.
They panic, they paralyze, they have panic attacks, they freeze up.
I mean, they haven't learned how to manage the stress of failing, right?
Managing the stress of failure is very, very important.
Learning to manage the stress of failure is very important.
And it will make you robust, right?
And... I think it was football that he played.
And he would be up against a far superior team and he would just get hammered.
I mean, they would just smear him, I think was his phrase.
And he said, I'd be standing there watching him and I would feel so proud of him for getting back up and fighting and, you know, although it was hopeless, right?
Getting back up and fighting.
And, of course, this may have something to do with the libertarian movement or not.
We don't know because we can't read the future.
But he said, and when my son came off the field...
I asked him, I said, are you proud of the way you played today?
Now that's a very important statement and a very interesting statement to make.
Are you proud of the way that you played today?
How fascinating. How amazingly fascinating.
Not, I'm proud of the way you played today.
Not, you did a great job.
But are you proud of the way you played today?
Now that says a lot in a few sentences.
Now the first thing that it says, obviously, is I don't want you to be dependent upon my validation.
I don't want you to be dependent on any external validation.
Any external validation.
Whether you're tall or pretty or handsome or rich or poor or cool or...
Whether you should get a girlfriend or should get a boyfriend or shouldn't have a girlfriend or a boyfriend who's the way.
Anybody else is judgment.
So he's saying, I don't want you to be dependent even on my judgment.
I'm unbearably proud of you for what you've done.
I don't want you to be dependent on my judgment.
That is a wonderful thing to say and a great foundation.
So if you've got kids, give it a shot.
I think it's a wonderful foundation for them to grow up with integrity.
The most important thing, which Dr.
Phil didn't mention, though I'm sure he knows, is that it says that you have a conscience.
See, the problem with parenting, one of the major problems with parenting, is that parents assume that children do not have a conscience.
This is why bullying exists.
This is why the state exists.
The state exists because people don't believe that there's a conscience, such a thing as a conscience, that motivates people.
I believe very strongly That we know what's right and wrong.
I mean, we know what's right and wrong.
And if you've spent any time around mentally ill people or people who are going through significant dysfunction in their lives, the first thing that you're always going to see is hypocrisy.
It's lies. I mean, believing lies is like feeding your body motor oil.
I mean, yeah, maybe you'll survive for a little bit, like a couple of tablespoons of motor oil every day, but after a while, you're going to get sick.
Really sick, and it might be irreversible.
Our minds process truth the way our bodies process nutrition.
And we don't have to feed our brains the truth.
We don't have to feed our bodies healthy foods.
And we can stand a few white lies the same way that we can have McDonald's every week or two.
But on a steady diet, we're toast.
And so when you say to someone, are you proud of the way you behave today?
A lot of people will shy away from that because they think it's subjective.
Like he's just going to say, yeah, I'm proud.
Yeah, I pushed that little kid down and stomped on his back and I'm proud of that because it helped us win.
And they think that if they say to someone, are you proud of the way that you behaved or are you proud of the way you're living, that people are just going to make stuff up and not suffer any consequences, right?
They just want to make stuff up. Well, of course, the majority of our brain activity is beyond our control.
The vast majority of our brain activity is beyond our control.
I mean, there's no way you can sit and visualize a purple duck and feel happy.
Happiness is certainly outside of our control.
Insomnia, panic attacks, all of these things, depression, all of these things are outside of our conscious control.
And so... Our unconscious is designed to guide us and help us, right?
It's not designed to trip us up.
It's only designed to trip us up if we willfully believe garbage, willfully believe nonsense, willfully advocate falsehoods, willfully corrupt ourselves or others, then yes, it's going to get in your way.
But that's what it's designed to do.
And so, if you say, even to a little, little kid, I mean, their unconscious is formed already.
If you say to a little, little kid...
If you catch them on videotape pushing over their little brother or little sister, pinching them, and you say, are you proud of what you did?
They won't say yes.
I mean, they might, but they're not going to say yes without a belligerence or a hostility or some sort of warped interpersonal activity.
Because we all have a conscience.
It's called reality.
It's called our reality processing.
And it accumulates everything that we do in the world and compares it with our values.
And our values are not up to us.
I mean, the values that we hold consciously, yeah, absolutely, it's up to us.
I can say that up is down and black is white and good is evil and evil is good.
I can do all of that sort of stuff.
I can be a postmodernist and turn my brain into a kind of rarefied atomic gas, for sure.
No container can hold me.
But we don't have a choice as to what that does to us unconsciously.
We need to discover our values as well as analyze them.
As well as synthesize, we need to explore.
And I would say that when you're an adult, the exploring is more important than the synthesizing.
You need to not say to yourself, well, rationally, I believe X. But you need to look at what you do to find out where the values are that you're really acting on, right?
So, I mean, if somebody had said this to me when I was 25, you know, I'd say, well, I believe in virtue and rationality and so on.
It's like, well, do you believe that it's...
It's virtuous to hang around corrupt people who are never going to change.
And I'd say, well, no, of course not.
And then that's all I would then say, well, look at your family.
I mean, it would need to be this what's so annoying.
It's like it would take five seconds.
For me, anyway. I mean, other people seems to take a little bit longer, but maybe I'm sort of a...
You know what? I'm probably going backwards with all the knowledge I have now and saying it would take five seconds.
But of course, it didn't.
But of course, it took me... It took my therapist 18 months to say it, and I'm not sure exactly why, but I think I was educating her as well as she was educating me.
But it is something that you need to explore within yourself, or you need to put your conscious values aside and say, how am I acting?
If I didn't know anything, if I get to see a silent movie of my life, and I didn't know anything about who I was, Then what would I assume the values were that I was acting on, right?
I mean, this is a pretty important thing.
So if people didn't get to hear your words and your brilliant arguments and your great metaphors and your whatever it is that you're working with in your life to promote the cause of virtue, if people didn't get to see all of that, but simply got to look at how you act in your life,
who you spent your time with, how you spent your time, Would they say, just based on your actions, well, here is somebody who is, you know, really, they've got consistency, they've got integrity, they're really into virtue because they spend time around the people who obviously are treating them well with respect, and there's lots of laughter and intimacy and hugs and happiness and all that kind of stuff.
Or would they say, well, here's kind of a lost soul who has these ideas but doesn't really believe them.
I mean, they wouldn't even know your ideas, but they would see a certain sadness in your interaction with people, right?
The silent movie is the real values of our life, right?
What we're actually doing rather than what we're saying.
And so we have complete knowledge of what we need to do.
We have complete knowledge of how we need to live.
We have complete knowledge of what we need to do.
And this is why it's so funny to me when people fight me.
I mean, if I'm saying something that's ridiculous to you, discard it.
I mean, I would certainly appreciate it if you would help me to understand that it's ridiculous, because I don't want to believe in ridiculous things any more than you do.
But people just get offended and mad, right?
And then they get angry at me, which is funny, because what do I know, right, about your family, about your life?
You know everything you need to know.
And that's why I sort of caution people, and Greg on the board said this as well.
He's one of our most prolific, and I think sometimes a very wise poster.
Greg said, you know, when I get offended about something that Steph says or posts or something somebody else posts, I give myself a day or two to think about it.
It's a wise thing. You know, count to ten.
It's not an unwise thing to say at all.
And... That's something to understand.
You know what you need to do in your life.
You know how you need to act in your life.
You know exactly the nature of your relationships.
You know exactly the virtue and the vices of those around you.
You know exactly down to the tiniest dotted I and cross T. The full moral map of your entire world.
You know it right down to the last detail.
Well, you don't have to act on it at all.
I mean, that's our choice.
You can reject that knowledge.
You can't erase that knowledge because the controls are beyond your grasp, right?
But you can ignore that knowledge for sure, right?
You can pretend that a cancer that's eating your esophagus doesn't exist.
And you can take drugs to numb the pain.
I mean, All that means is that it gets worse.
You can't get rid of it by willing it, but you can certainly get rid of the belief in it or the pain of it by drugging yourself or whatever.
And so you know everything that there is to know.
I mean, let me ask you this.
How does your liver work?
I have vague notions, but I don't know.
I eat food and I have energy.
I have no idea what's going on down there in any substantive detail.
No idea at all. I don't really even get the whole breathing thing.
So everything that's going on...
I'm not sitting here figuring out how to work my voice and drive and all that sort of stuff.
I'm relying so much on everything that is going on in the unconscious.
I mean, what I'm doing at a conscious level is about 5% of what's going into these podcasts.
And that might be optimistic.
So... Even my desire to pursue these topics for 20 years is not a conscious...
I didn't will that. I just had that desire since I was a little kid.
And so you can successfully understand everything about your own life just by relaxing and stopping the fight, fighting the knowledge you already have.
Forget about the way you want the world to be.
Forget about the way you want people to be.
What you want in terms of other people's behavior doesn't mean shit, frankly.
What you prefer doesn't add up to a fight and a thunderstorm.
Because your desires are only important relative to you, not to other people in your life.
You might think, oh, this person could be better, or this person, I'll hang around to make them a better person, or they'll change, or they're not that bad.
But you have no control over your opinions about other people, deep down.
Other people control your opinions of them by how they act.
That's virtue, that's responsibility.
How people act determines how you feel about them.
You don't have any control over that.
You can accept or reject how they act.
You can accept or reject your feelings about how they act, but you can't change how they act, and you can't change how that makes you feel.
It's beyond your control. Somebody beats you, you can't make yourself love them.
You can't. It's completely impossible.
You can't find any value in somebody who is violent or corrupt towards you.
None. Not a shred.
Especially when you're an adult and your parents have been a kid, you can't go back and undo all of that, and neither can they.
And of course, as I've mentioned before, anything which they do now in terms of, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, only occurs, or is only occurring.
A, because you bring it up, and B, because they don't have any power anymore over you.
And in fact, they need you, because they're getting older.
Nonsense. Way too late.
And so, this idea that you don't need any external validation is absolutely crucial.
Absolutely crucial.
To understand. You know the truth about everything in your life.
You know the truth about everyone in your life.
You know the truth about yourself. You know what you need to do to be a virtuous and happy person.
You know everything there is to know.
And that's why you don't need any external validation.
That's why you don't need other people to tell you that you're right or that you're wrong.
You just need to look inwards.
You just need to look inwards.
We know all of this stuff.
We know it all.
So, you don't need to listen to me anymore, I guess.
My major goal in all of this is to get you out of opinion, right?
I mean, that's my basic goal, is to get you out of opinion.
When it comes to moral judgments of relationships, the way to get out of opinion is through introspection, through accepting that you know everything and not fighting yourself anymore.
That's all you need to know.
You know everything. You have a conscience.
You've processed everything that's gone on in your life.
You've come to absolute conclusions that are not subjective but based entirely upon the accumulated behavior of others and how it's affected you.
You know everything that there is to know, and so you don't need anybody else's opinion about what's right or what's wrong in terms of what to do in your relationships.
So, I mean, that's what to me is funny about people who get mad at me.
It's like, well, they know, right?
They're only getting mad at me because I'm, it's their false self getting mad at me because I'm pointing out the facts, right?
That, you know, as I mentioned yesterday, if you had a good relationship with your family, you would never be upset about somebody who says that most people don't have a good relationship with their family because you'd recognize that you were Pretty much an exception, and you'd know how different you were just based on having grown up and being in the world.
So you'd probably say, yes, thank you.
I appreciate that. You're absolutely right.
So either you didn't have a good relationship with your family, in which case you're going to either listen to what I'm saying as someone who's trying to help you, or you're going to get mad at me because I'm telling the truth and you don't want to handle it, which is very bad, right?
And then you're sort of being your parents, right?
And you don't want to do that because that's going to make you unhappy.
It's not going to make me unhappy because I know what's going on.
It's going to make you unhappy and that's sort of my major concern.
Or, you know, you had a good relationship with your family, in which case you're going to appreciate that I'm bringing up that most people don't because you know how unique you are.
So that's sort of my major issue.
External validation is not anything that you need.
I mean, I'm not talking about the scientific method and so on.
We're not talking about empirical, physical measurements.
We're talking about the truth about the moral nature of everyone around you.
You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know.
You don't need anyone else to tell you what's going on in your relationships.
You know the facts of the matter right down to the core.
Now, for Dr. Phil, he's religious, so he believes that you have a conscience that's placed there by God.
But in the metaphor that I've been working with from 277 onwards, all this means is that the unconscious, which processes, absorbs and processes reality and produces emotions based on the principles that come in from the external world in terms of people's behavior and your own behavior as well.
Well, that God is the unconscious.
And so you absolutely have access to all that knowledge.
And you can pray to yourself if you like.
But you need to get access to that because consistency with the truth is freedom.
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
The unconscious to be commanded must be obeyed.
Actually, not to be commanded, but for the unconscious to work with you rather than against you, you have to ask it questions, and you have to submit to the judgment because the conscious mind is far too prone to falsifying for the sake of immediate comfort.
Thank you so much for listening. As my voice gives out, I will stop podcasting, and I will talk to you soon.
I really appreciate it.
I got two donations last night.
Thank you so, so much.
It means everything to me, and trust me, if you spend less than 20K... On Free Domain Radio, you're doing a whole lot better than I did in terms of generating these ideas through therapy and so on.
So I appreciate donations that you hand my way.
For $50, you get a copy of The God of Atheists, my novel.
For $100, you get The God of Atheists and almost a three-volume novel, which I think is very good.
And I really appreciate your donations.
I will talk to you soon.
Oh, I did put the iTunes thing up, by the way.
So the iTunes is now available as Free Domain Radio Part 2.
Two, which is shows 271 and above.
So thanks again for listening.
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