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June 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:22
290 Why We Hurt The Ones We Love (Part 2)
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Good afternoon, people.
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
We have returned to the silvery, dulcet tones of the Logitech.
Noise-canceling headphones, so I hope you're doing well.
Sorry about the last couple of days of audio quality.
Agonizing, I know, to hear less than the perfect voice of Steph, but it's a lot better than the notebook.
That I used last December, the notebook speaker, which really did sound like I was speaking from a sub in 1950.
So I hope that you're doing well.
I'm finding this free will debate fascinating, of course.
It's a very interesting one to come by and swing by the boards.
Excellent cases being made.
A hit, a very palpable hit, is being struck on both sides.
So good for the debaters, and I put my two cents in where I can.
And good for you. So I did figure out what was wrong with my headphones.
I kept starting up the computer and could not get it to recognize these headphones, right?
So I kept doing this, that, and the other.
And I'm glad that I didn't try and fix it last night because it was one of these ones that had to come a little bit bolt out of the blue.
Because there's so many things that can, I mean, I don't know if this is of interest to you.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. There's so many things that can make a microphone not work in Windows, right?
So I could have the mute button on the notebook could be pressed.
The recording could be set to line in or something or what you hear rather than to the microphone.
The microphone might not be at the right level either in the Windows setting or in the Audacity settings.
When I... Boot up a computer after a cold...
When I cold-boot the computer, if I don't have the microphone plugged in, this notebook at least never recognizes it, so then I have to do another cold-boot, which is a pain in the neck because I can't exactly lock in while I'm driving.
I'm brave, but not foolhardy.
And that's just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
The problem solving for no audio, senor, is quite complex.
So it's a bit of a pain in the neck.
But what happened, of course, well, not of course, but what happened was that I had a meeting yesterday, which was a seven-hour meeting over webcam.
And so I installed a webcam onto this notebook computer because that's where I was demoing from.
And, for some reason, the microphone became the webcam.
So, plugging a microphone into the outlet didn't cause Windows to say, hey, you know, the webcam isn't plugged in, but the microphone is.
Maybe I should use the microphone.
That's asking a lot from old Billy G. So, I got the bolt out of the blue.
What changed? I installed this, and so I... Ended up getting rid of the...
And of course, there was no way to switch it back, right?
There was no setting, so I uninstalled the webcam drivers and software, and lo and behold, the voice is back, back, back!
So, to continue the topic from this morning, lo, as if the intervening day has not occurreth, we will go on with why do we treat those we love?
Why do we always hurt the ones we love?
Well... The second thing that I would say, we've sort of talked about it from the bad guy side of things.
I would also like to talk about it, though, from the victim side of things.
Now, I know that in relationships it's mutual and blah, blah, blah, but let's just pretend it's polarized for the moment and see if we can't tease out a few principles that might be worthwhile understanding from a reciprocity standpoint.
So, the first thing that I would say is that to a large degree, when we're adults, we train people on how to treat us.
We train people's perceptions of us.
So, I don't know if you've ever met someone like this.
They're pretty much a dime a dozen of these kinds of people, so maybe you have.
But if you say you're at some party, and you're introduced to some...
Woman. And she gives you this big, giddy, fake smile.
She's got these kind of eager, desperate eyes, obviously looking for approval.
She laughs too hard at everything that people say.
She's always rushing up to offer to help the hostess to get more drinks or fill up the chip bowl or remove the dancing Cuban boy or whatever it is that's going on.
All of this stuff is part of her personality.
And she doesn't really seem to have any opinions of her own, and she just sits there and listens wide-eyed, nodding eagerly the whole time, almost sweating and trembling and glowing with the energy of wanting to be liked and to please people.
Well, if you've ever met someone like that, then from the moment that they interact with you, they are training you on how to treat them.
So if, for instance, you bump into someone and they look up and they mutter and then they look down and their cheeks go red and they say, like, you've walked into them, but they say, oh, I'm so sorry.
Well, They've pretty much unfurled the banner saying, no self-esteem, can be pushed around, will apologize for everything, and has never been taught any boundaries, has no capacity to assert myself, and therefore you will get passive compliance followed by passive aggression if you enter into any kind of relationship with me, sort of friends or anything like that.
So you can see this kind of stuff fairly early on.
In fact, I would say that you probably get this within the first...
Second or two seconds, you get a read on the entire personality.
I certainly have not come across things in Christina since I have met her, I guess, almost four years ago now.
I've not come across anything in Christina where it's suddenly like, whoa, where the hell did this come from?
This is weird.
It's not really been the case at all.
She was delightful and positive and pleasant when we first met.
And she was even politeful and positive and pleasant when she first saw my cave-like bachelor apartment with stalagmites and strange cave fish in the bath and bat squeaks from the cupboards and so on.
Fantastic. Very patient and positive and happy person.
Does that mean she has not changed?
Well, no, of course. She's become more that, right?
So we've worked in our relationship to overcome hiccups that we got, scar tissue that we got from other people.
So she's become more that than she was before, but it's not like she's a different person than she was in the past.
And I sort of can't think of...
I can't think of anything that has occurred in my life where I've met someone and then like a year or two later I meet them again and they're like really different, like totally different.
I would say that for myself, and they may experience inward changes in this manner, but I would say that for myself...
I've always been outwardly confident, but a certain amount of it when I was younger was sheer bravado.
I mean, I used to think that I was less confident when I was younger, but sort of thinking back and looking at my journal and all that, I'm still doing some pretty courageous stuff, but...
I was sort of forcing myself to do it, whereas now it's a little bit more easy.
So, for instance, today there's this guy at work who's trying to pillage an account that I've worked on.
I worked on last year for about a month on this account to sell a software package, and now this guy's trying to pillage it from me.
That's probably not quite the right phrase.
He feels he's entitled to it because he was in contact with them earlier.
But didn't put nearly as much work in and so on.
And isn't even, you know, so I just said, you know, you and I, I said, sit down.
And I was pretty calm about it because I was curious about his motives and his understanding and so on.
And it turns out that he feels I pillaged a whole bunch of accounts from him because our previous sales manager handed a whole bunch of stuff to me without telling me that it was this other guy's thought it was his.
So, you know, we kind of entered into a state of nature with each other where we don't look out for each other's best interests because of poor management in the past.
So, of course, we have to find a way to work together.
So going in and doing that stuff, I used to force myself to do when I was younger, but I used to feel really nervous, right?
Because I used to feel like I'd have to go in and make something happen, make this guy give me the account or make him understand that he couldn't treat me this way.
Of course, the moment you go into any kind of negotiation with the intention of changing somebody else's behavior, you're just screwed to begin with because you have no control over that.
So this is where things escalate to temper pretty quickly.
You go in being curious about whether or not the person is going to be reasonable rather than demanding or with the expectation that they will be reasonable or with the expectation that you can get them to change their behaviors or their beliefs.
That's just not rational, right?
Because you don't have that capacity.
You can go into a meeting saying, I'm not going to punch the guy.
You have control over that.
But you can't go into the meeting saying, boy, if I can't convert this guy to anarcho-capitalism in this sales call as well as close a half-million-dollar deal, then I'm a bad communicator.
Well, you have no control over that.
You have no control over your own behavior.
So that's sort of one aspect of my personality that I've become more inwardly confident relative to what I felt, what I was always doing, which was more outwardly confident.
And that's certainly been a de-stressor for me.
It's been a beneficial thing for me, for sure.
And that has been something that...
I've really been, I guess, proud of and feel that it's an achievement, despite the comments that are going on in the deterministic sphere, which I'm still mulling over, of course.
Interesting arguments, no complaints that they're being made, of course.
New knowledge, even if I believe it's false, is always valuable.
And so this idea that we train people how to treat us is important.
I mean, not to pick off Francois, but, you know, since sort of day one, he's had this edge to him, and I knew that to disagree with him would rouse his ire.
And this was always a particular kind of problem.
I had to kick him off the boards for swearing at board members, and of course, I just thought that was silly because I would actually have some respect for somebody who swore on the board if they also swore...
To a Hells Angels guy standing over them with a pool cue in a bar, right?
Then it would be like, okay, so you're just into swearing, and that's great, you know?
Good luck with that, and, you know, you go cuss out that Hells Angels guy, and I'll really have respect for you, but if they only cuss on boards and not in person, and if they don't cuss to people who might actually be able to, you know, do something to them that might not be too pleasant, then, you know, it's just kind of, it's obvious bullying, right?
So... So I had to kick him off the board, and he got upset about that.
And I said, well, if I had people over for dinner who started swearing at my wife, then I would ask them to leave.
In fact, I wouldn't even ask them to leave.
I'd just tell them to leave. And so when people start swearing at people I care about...
To a degree or another, I care about the people on the board.
I really do. Then, you know, I consider you guys my friends, and I certainly appreciate the enormous wisdom that's on the board and the enormous intelligence and care and concern and curiosity that people put into the debates.
I consider you guys closer than my family because, well, my family of origin.
I guess that's not the biggest compliment in the world, but...
Certainly we are brothers in spirit, if not in flesh.
And so if people go around insulting people that I care about, and I have any control, it's sort of my house, right?
Like, I mean, I'm paying for the board. Then, of course I'm going to ask someone to leave.
I'll ask them to apologize, and if they won't, then I'll ask them to leave.
leave.
I mean, why, why would I not do that?
And, you know, then he's on the phone and, you know, he's on the call-in shows.
And then what happens is when you disagree with him or have a question or, you know, just disagree with something he's saying, he doesn't sort of ask you, well, tell me what it is that you have a problem with.
Maybe I can help it.
Maybe I'm not right.
You know, all that kind of, he just sort of raises his voice and starts yelling at you and all that kind of stuff.
Right.
So, you know, he's been kicked off countless boards and, Now he's off this one and he's off the calls and all that.
So what that means, of course, is that he's training people on how to interact with him.
He's training them to end up disliking him or he's training them to end up finding him unmanageable and hostile and difficult and unpleasant.
And he's doing that in a situation not where he's, you know, the union boss or something, where he's got real, I guess you could say, some sort of economic control or whatever, but he's doing that in a situation where, you know, people are not being paid, that it's a voluntary pursuit of knowledge, where there's no incentive to put up with unpleasantness, right?
So, I mean, that's what I mean about training people to treat you in a particular kind of way.
And this really, really works in the realm of submission.
And this is a very important thing to understand, that where you end up in life in terms of your relationships.
As a kid, you know, you're a real victim, nothing but sympathy for the kids.
And that leaves scar tissue, which, you know, it sucks to have to deal with, but what are you going to do, right?
I mean, somebody breaks your leg when you're a kid.
You don't spite them by, you know, hobbling around your whole life, right?
You work to heal it, and if it healed crooked, you might get it re-broken, or you might...
You end up doing some sort of physical rehabilitation or something.
You're not going to say, well, that's it.
Somebody broke my leg when I was a kid, so I'm going to hobble around or sit in a wheelchair my whole life, and that's called progress in the human condition.
No, you would deal with it, right?
Same thing if you had a family history of heart disease, you wouldn't eat nothing but onion rings and never go and exercise, right?
I mean, you would say, wow, you know, geez, my family has a history of heart disease, so I better really take care of things, right?
I mean, you respond to those detriments or those problems with positive behavior designed to counteract them, I think.
And I think that's a responsible thing to do.
As an adult. So the onus is on your parents when you're a kid, and then it shifts to you when you become an adult.
And people often ask me when, and it's actually 17 and three-quarter years exactly, just in case you're wondering.
I've worked it out mathematically, but unfortunately, those space aliens from Luxembourg beamed it up.
Otherwise, I would share it with you.
But you can just trust me.
17 and three-quarters. I could go into further decimal places, but they escape me now.
Something like that. So...
When you become an adult, then you are now meeting new people on your own terms.
You're not in a situation of forced association.
So a family, whether we like it or not, whether a family is good or bad or whatever, it is a situation of forced association.
This is why I say it's heavily related to the state, what happens in the state.
A family is forced association.
Born into a family, you can't just say, well, that's it, I'm leaving, right?
Or if you do, then you're either going to get yelled at or, you know, more likely your genial but distant and perhaps somewhat jerky dad is going to say, well, I'll help you pack and good luck, right?
Because that's going to humiliate the child, right?
Rather than saying, wow, you must be really unhappy what's causing this, right?
Help me to understand what's so unpleasant because we kind of want you to enjoy being part of this family.
So the issue with families is that it's forced association in a way that even the state is not, right?
Because you can move to get away from a particular state that you dislike, right?
So if you're facing the draft in the United States, you can move to Canada.
That's one thing that you could conceivably do.
So, you have forced association with your family in a way that you just don't have with anything else other than a totalitarian state, I guess you could say, or if you're in prison, then you have forced association, you can't do anything about it.
But family is forced association.
So, what that means, of course, is that you learn these habits of interaction from your parents or from your elder siblings or whatever, right?
So, if you say, I would like something different for dinner, and your mother says, you'll eat what's put in front of you.
Well... Obviously, that's not a heavily negotiated situation, and so you're pretty much, your desire to have an effect on your environment is blunted, and so on.
And if any time you do anything to, like if your parents' marriage is this house of cards, which is constantly bursting into flames, or crumbling down, or giving you Paper cuts to work the metaphor perhaps too hard.
Then you're going to face a situation where you're in a landmine continually, so you're not going to be able to develop much of a robust sense of assertiveness, right?
Because any time you try and assert yourself, your mom bursts into tears and your father goes drinking or something.
I don't know. But you're not going to be able to develop a sense of assertiveness, and if you are into highly status-based parents, then you are going to be somebody that your parents trot out like jewelry to show how wonderful they are, and sing for the nice people, and show, oh, she gets all straight A's, oh, she's so pretty, oh, she does this, she does that.
Never does anything, never had a moment's trouble with her, blah, blah, blah.
And you're going to end up growing up with no sense of yourself as someone who should have your own ideas and please yourself and negotiate with others rather than just instantly comply with whatever it is that they want.
So, I mean, you could sort of go on all day, which I won't, but there's lots of ways in which your parental upbringing is going to shape your sense of self, or usually your lack of sense of self, and your role and purpose within the world, right?
So, is your role and purpose within the world to make things nice for others?
It's your role and purpose in the world to be continually frustrated by the indifference of others, which draws some people into this anarcho-capitalist world, or libertarian world, or objectivist world.
They're playing out being a hyper-intellectual kid in an indifferent family.
So, if you're a really smart man or woman, and you're really into reading and thinking, but your family doesn't give a crap and puts you down for it, then you're going to end up in a movement that is kind of not mainstream, And you're going to present the ideas in such a way, if you haven't dealt with it, you're going to present the ideas in such a way that you turn people off.
You're not inviting, you're not fun to chat with, you don't get people pumped or juiced, you just end up with these horrible, degenerating kind of conversations where everybody ends up frustrated.
So then you're two people sort of both simultaneously playing each other's parents and being children, which is intelligent kids either in school or in an indifferent family.
You're going to end up in this kind of situation where you feel like you really desperately want to get a truth across to someone that's really important and is going to help them, but lo and behold, they're just indifferent and callous and careless and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They don't care about what you think or they have no respect for your particular intellectual desires.
And so until you deal with that, until you deal with the pain of that and work through the pain of that with your parents, you're just going to end up recreating that in chat rooms and conversations and you're going to live this life of perpetual frustration and rejection and feeling that every great treasure in your heart that you try to offer to the world is shrugged at and spat on and dropped and is not cared for and so on.
And don't do that.
You had to experience that in the forced association when you were a kid.
You don't have to do that as an adult, but the only way to get out of that is to recognize the pain of what happened to you when you were a kid, and that will give you the possibility to change what happens in the present.
In a purely predetermined manner, of course.
Just kidding. Anyway, so in relationships, the question is, well, how are you training people to treat you?
So, on the second date that I had with Christine, as I've mentioned before, she said to me, what are your intentions?
Are you interested in getting married?
Are you interested in having children?
Are you ever going to get a job?
Are you ever going to stop talking?
Can you stop scratching yourself for five minutes?
You can go up to the elbow in your nose.
You're not going to find any more boogers.
There's lots of things that she asked me on that first date, which really helped me to understand that she knew what she wanted.
She was interested in me, right?
Because You don't get asked salary in a job interview unless they're interested in you, right?
I mean, if they're like, thanks, that's great.
I don't have any questions for you.
That's usually not good, right? So that's the same thing with I was flattered that she would ask me all these things because it meant that she was interested.
And it also meant to me that she was not somebody who didn't understand the values of intentions and values themselves, of course.
So that all helps. And on some unrelated note, and it wasn't anything like a threat, she said to me, well, infidelity I would never tolerate in a relationship.
If you were ever unfaithful to me, that would be it right away, of course.
So then I said, so I guess this thing I'm working on with Heidi Klum and her sheep...
An entire Portland isn't really going to work out, so I had to, of course, make some phone calls and unravel all of that, so to speak.
So there were lots of things that Christina has done throughout the relationship to say, these are sort of my expectations.
One of the great things that she taught me early on in our relationship was we would meet, we were sort of meeting some friends for dinner, and she would come from work, and I was working on books at the time.
I was unemployed when she met me by choice, and I sort of wanted to work on books.
But she would come and meet me, and then we would have five minutes and we would go out to see our friends.
And then the evening would be just a bit awkward or a bit odd, or it could be strained at times.
And so after the first one or two times, she said, well, you know, the issue is that we're not getting reconnected as a couple before we go out socializing.
So we're kind of like two halves of a whole without being united when we go out to socialize and...
So, of course, we made sure that we didn't book social engagements without the 20 or 25 minutes to get sort of reconnected.
How was your day? And all that. And that's been fantastic, right?
That took a lot of strain out of our social engagements.
And looking back over my life, that would have been a useful thing to know earlier.
So I'll pass it along to you for good measure.
But she was very much helpful about these kinds of things.
And She was also somebody who was a very sort of calm and collected, I guess you could say, which, since I'm madly hysterical, actually works out really well.
It's so funny that the Greek woman is the calm one and the British man is the hysterical one.
But, you know, we like to mix and match the stereotypes just a little bit.
It feels like individuality.
So, for instance, I lived in a bachelor, one-bedroom bachelor apartment, and it was fairly...
Hobbesian, I guess you could say.
And Christina was kind enough to lend me her vacuum cleaner, which she'd had for like seven years, was top of the line, and was in perfect shape because she takes care of things really well, as I can vouch for.
And boy, there is just this guy in a Porsche next to me who just looks like such a stereotypical midlife crisis guy.
He's got, you know, hair plugs and shirt open to the nipples a little bit.
It's just like, wow, I guess they do make Viagra out of ground-up little sports cars.
Anyway... So she lent me her vacuum cleaner, and I used it.
I guess she'd gotten tired of walking around my apartment and feeling like she was on a beach.
But, you know, so I did the vacuuming, which was great.
I found out that I actually had a green carpet.
Who knew? And so then I was returning it to her, and I had to...
I can't even remember why now.
I had to leave the vacuum cleaner unattended, and it was for literally 30 seconds.
I got off the elevator... And I had to...
Oh, I wanted to go and get my car because it was a hugely heavy vacuum cleaner.
My car was at the far end of the parking lot.
So I wanted to leave it there and then bring my car by and put it in the car so I wouldn't sort of strain myself carrying this monster vacuum cleaner all the way over the parking lot.
And so I went...
I left the vacuum cleaner by the garage...
Sorry, by the elevator.
I went to go and get my car.
I came back like 30 or 40 seconds later and it was gone.
It was stolen, right? And I was really shocked because it was a pretty nice building.
It wasn't like, you know, Hell's Acre or anything like that.
And so I told Christine, I was like, oh man, I lost your vacuum cleaner.
Like, it was stolen. I can't believe it.
And she was like, oh, well, you know, I'm sorry about that, of course.
But, you know, no problem.
These things happen, right? I mean, it's not the end of the world.
And I was just really impressed with her in that situation because that's sort of my belief about things, you know.
No point getting mad, but she didn't sort of say, well, why on earth did you leave it unattended, and why weren't you more careful, and, you know, that was very expensive, and I've had that for many years, and it's a sentimental value.
I once dated that vacuum cleaner before I bought it, and look at the flowers and poems it gave me, and now you've loved it.
Right, there wasn't all of that kind of stuff which I've experienced in previous relationships where...
When you make a mistake and somebody sees that you've made a mistake, they just grind the thumbscrews into your soul to wring out all of the misery and unhappiness and sorrow and apologies.
They just grind you down.
It's like putting a Barbie doll in a vice and just closing it.
You can't even breathe.
It's just terrible. And that's sadly all too common in relationships.
And I've had relationships wherein you just had to hide mistakes.
I remember when I was a kid, I could be nailed for just about two or three things at any given time.
You know, like I'd borrowed a flashlight and broken it and then put it back in the drawer.
And, you know, or I'd, you know, I remember in boarding school, I'd lost one of my garters, those things that keep your socks up.
And one of the quaint British expressions is, if you don't do this, I'll have your guts for garters, which means I'll rip out your larynx and use it to tie up my socks.
It's a lovely culture, and I can't believe they ever ended up trying to rule the world, because it seems to be relatively pacifistic in its nature.
And I lost my garter, and I was terrified.
Oh, my garter, this tiny, stupid piece of elastic.
And I just remember once that the headmaster...
Who was, you know, kind of an ogre and kind of terrifying, you know, like Shrek, but without the cute Scottish accent and the decent personality.
He's like, why is one of your socks down, Mr.
Molyneux? And it's like, oh my god!
And so I pretended to adjust it and had to walk between, so he couldn't see me.
I walked over to my bed. And then they said, well, later they found out, it didn't have my garter.
It's like, well, where would your garter go?
And it's like, and the lying is so fluid, right?
When you're a kid and you're in these irrational, punitive situations where you get caned and stuff.
I mean, you don't even think about it.
It's like, where's your garter, Mr.
Molyne? It's like, I lost it in gym.
It's like, today is not gym day.
I'm like, oh, busted.
And then out comes the cane and down comes the pants and you're like, that's just not right.
I mean, it's not even that painful, but it's just not right.
That a grown man should enjoy whipping at a child's body.
But hey, this is the British culture that I was in when I was growing up.
It was nice to see that the violence that was in my family could be extended but made a lot more formal and that there pretended to be rules around it so that I could make sure that I didn't accidentally mistake my family for something really unusual.
It was clarifying, I guess you could say.
It was helpful from that standpoint.
So, enough of that.
Enough of the spanking stories.
But if you do ever get a chance to listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall or to watch the movie, you'll know the kind of teacher that I'm talking about.
It's the guy in the subway tunnel.
How can you have any pudding if you don't finish your meat?
Or what's that song?
When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children any way they could.
By pouring their derision upon anything they did, exposing every weakness, however carefully hidden by the kid.
But in the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.
It's a great song.
It's a really fascinating album.
I was quite into it when I was a teenager, and it is quite an analysis of matriarchy and the problems of school and the hell of modern childhood.
It's really, really very well done.
And there's a graphic image in the movie of children on this conveyor belt with no sort of really defined faces who are...
Falling into this sausage maker and being turned into this paste.
So it's like the blank, empty children go from the family and deliver to the state schools and then turn into undifferentiated paste.
It can be a little hard to take the movie at times, but it is quite an adventure of the mind.
And the trial scene really is quite fascinating and very, very well animated.
So if you get a chance, it's my media recommendation.
I haven't done too many lately.
But it's quite an adventure watching Bob Geldof look like he's about to throw up for two hours.
So in possibly what is going to win roundabout podcast of the month, I will keep going back to the central topic, but perhaps without breaking into more melodies.
But this question, so if you go through this sort of stuff when you're a kid, and you're in this forced association with your school, with your parents, with your extended family, and with your siblings...
And then what happens is, and I've talked about this before, so I'll be brief, you are taught that it's moral, that it's good what you are going through in your forced association with people.
Not that it's not forced association, that it's moral association, right?
All of which are using the argument for morality.
I mean, if you're in school and you act up, or you're bored, or you're restless, or you're challenged, you're a bad kid.
You're a bad kid.
You get bad marks. You get downgraded.
Your future's in jeopardy.
You're irresponsible. Everybody's had those just ridiculous lectures from the guidance counselors.
At least I did. I remember, oh, you know what?
I'm giving up. We've got tangents, but I'll still see if I can close it off.
And one of the reasons we have tangents is that traffic is unbelievably slow.
I would have been home normally, oh gosh, five minutes ago.
Or I guess about ten minutes ago.
Well, you know, I would have been home.
Certainly by now, but I'm even halfway from home.
So we're going to go on a nice Mobius strip kaleidoscopic sort of Chuck E. Cheese tunnel journey.
But, yeah, we'll come out at the other end with a central thrust embellished with a few pirouettes.
But I remember getting, because I never enjoyed math, and I think I would now if I could go back, because I would understand the logic and the value of it in terms of philosophical understanding, but of course it was always just a bunch of repetitive stuff that seemed really dull, that was also assigned as punishment at times, and also which, if you don't have a stable home life, you just can't get the homework done.
And so... I ended up not being very good at math and I was dragged into this.
I was obviously a bright kid, right?
But just didn't... I was sort of 52, 55, 57 at math.
You know, I just... Charity, so I wouldn't come back, I think.
And I was taking it to the guidance cast.
I got this long lecture. Like, there was a chart on the wall.
Like, look at all these jobs you can't get a hold of if you don't know math and accountant and...
Tax auditor. Really?
Because that seems to me fairly efficient then, because I don't think I'd want any of those anyway.
And of course, here I am taking career advice from a guy whose career ended up with him being a guidance counselor with a little smelly office in an out-of-the-way high school.
Can I follow your lead?
Because you really seem to have it going on.
So... Hey, I never even got to the first round of American Idol.
Let me be your coach.
Actually, they booed me off.
I was in the outtakes.
Let me be your singing coach.
Anyway, so what happens is you go through all of this stuff when you're a kid, and you normalize it, right?
Because you've got the argument for morality, which is directly wired into your base brain.
There's nothing you can do about that.
So you normalize this kind of stuff when you are a kid, and...
By normalizing it, it means that it's good.
Not just that it's okay, but it's appropriate.
It's right. It's fine.
It's good in some manner.
My parents, they loved me, although they were drunken, and they beat me, and they this, and they ignored, and my mom had all these boyfriends, and my stepdad did this.
But they were trying their best with good people.
I want to see them, blah, blah, blah. So you normalize it at some point.
It becomes something that is a value to you.
No matter what happened to you when you were a kid, kids end up thinking that it's good.
Or at the very least that it's their fault.
So, you know, if this is an example from Dr.
Phil, like if your parents are fighting about money and you're a kid, you're like, oh man, I needed that seven bucks for that swim team.
If only I hadn't asked for that seven bucks, then my parents wouldn't be fighting about money and blah, blah, blah.
They don't understand that are big money decisions, you know, mortgages and taxes and so on.
They can only see it from their own perspective.
So you normalize it when you're a kid, and that's great because it gets you through that hellish situation, right?
Because you don't wake up every day saying, I'm in a gulag and I'm going to be here for the next ten years.
And I can't possibly get away, and I get to go out every day to another Google ad called The School, where I'm going to have my brain systematically dismantled into a kind of smelly paste that's kind of gone off.
And so on, and these are going to be my companions.
I mean, you don't want to... You deal with that as a kid, so you say, well, it's plodding along, and you make it sort of okay, or good, what you're going through, and so you deal with that, and then when you become an adult, though, the problem is that you hang on to it way too long, right?
So you become an adult, and then you've still normalized it, right?
So you're pacing back and forth in a prison when you're a kid, I mean, for most kids, maybe not all, but you're pacing back and forth in a prison when you're a kid, And then when you get out, you end up pacing back and forth in an open field because you convinced yourself that pacing back and forth was really the right thing for you to be doing as a human being and it was good and only bad people didn't do something other than pace back and forth.
So you kind of like...
You're now in a prison of the mind, right?
The prison of the body, the forced association with your parents and your school is all gone, but you're now in a prison of the mind, which biologically speaking is pretty inevitable.
But you have to sort of face your fears and break out of that prison of the mind when you're an adult, I think, in order to become free, which is why I keep talking about the freedom of the family and of your personal relationships long before we worry about dismantling the military and the state.
But you're in a prison of the mind when you become an adult and you want to break out of that.
You want to take that step beyond those imaginary walls to a state of real freedom and it's painful and it's horrible and people will be throwing stuff at you and saying that you're a bad guy and they'll lob rotten tomatoes at you and say that you're the most evil guy in the world and everyone who steps over that line is going to be jeered at and excluded and viciously attacked verbally and maybe even physically and And then, of course, you step over that line and those voices all vanish, right?
It's just an illusion.
I mean, you break with your family and suddenly you're in this clear zone, right?
So you're in the eye of the storm, I guess you could say.
Because I had a certain amount of people who castigated me wildly or, you know, sort of quote patiently in the sort of Zen way, forgiveness is all, brother.
Yeah, so trickily.
And... You know, if forgiveness is all, then you should forgive me for breaking with my family, right?
That's not what I mean.
There's a couple of idiot mystics around, right?
So people would castigate me either sort of openly or in a volatile manner or in this sort of syrupy kind of passive-aggressive way.
But, boy, you just keep sailing, and you break past that last bit, and it's just like, whoa, boy, you're in the zone.
You're in the clear zone, you're in the eye of the storm, and you're traveling with the storm, and it never gets rough again.
So that's, you know, it's almost impossible to imagine what that's like beforehand, but once you break that, right, when you've taken the Band-Aid off, it's horrible, right?
And that's why I say just do it fast, right?
But when you're done, you're done.
I mean, you don't, you have a little bit of discomfort from time to time when people say, hey, how's your mom, right?
Or you can just say, oh, I'm sure, same as always, I think.
Whatever it is that you want to say.
But aside from that, they don't miss you, you don't miss them.
It's one of these things where once you break orbit and you get past all the criticisms, you really, there's no real problems.
But, you know, people don't see that from the inside.
They think that the storm is just going to keep getting worse and worse and worse until they go insane.
and they don't get that once you sort of stand up to these phantoms, these phantoms vanish, right?
The ghost, when spoken back to, is banished.
That's a very common theme in mythology, and this is where it comes from, that when you act with integrity...
You get an enormous amount of vituperation and hostility and hatred directed at you.
And you keep acting with integrity and it all goes poof in a way that's absolutely surprising.
It's absolutely surprising.
You're in the worst extremity and then poof it all goes.
Like once people get too serious they just run off to find other victims, right?
The people who are bullying you for acting with integrity don't want to realize that they are doing so because they have no power except bullying and that they're not doing it for virtue.
So the moment that you stand tall against people who are bullying you using a false argument for morality and remain curious or even yell back if you want, there's nothing wrong with that, right?
I mean, there's nothing wrong with getting angry in the defense of liberty and freedom and truth.
There's nothing wrong with that at all.
Your anger is there to help you.
And so once you stand firm and they realize that they're not going to be able to bully you, but they just vanish.
Absolutely just vanish.
It's really quite remarkable. And so, you know, you can't see that when you're going in and you just think it's going to get worse and worse and worse.
And it does for a while.
And then you just keep going over.
There's a technique called the broken record where you just keep repeating, keep repeating.
Yes, I understand that, but I don't enjoy spending time with them.
Well, you have to spend time with your parents.
Yes, I understand that you feel that, but...
I don't enjoy spending time with them.
Well, yes, but if you forgave them, you would enjoy spending time with them.
It's like, well, that's certainly possible, but I don't want to forgive them because that would be against my values.
Well, you should change your values.
Well, that may be the case.
Maybe you should make a case for that, but right now, these are my values and I have to live by them.
You may have noticed that I did this at the end of the conversation on Sunday.
I understand that you want me to apologize, but that would be against my values because I don't think I've said anything to insult you.
So, And people will just, they'll claw at you and once they realize that they can't get through to you and they can't do anything, they'll just vanish.
They'll just vanish. You can't pay them to spend time around you because they see their own emptiness in your resolution, right?
They see their own hollowness in your integrity.
They see their own viciousness in your certainty.
They see their own bullying in your integrity.
And they can't see that in themselves.
They can't see that mirror.
So they'll lash out, and then they'll just vanish.
Right? So this has happened with one guy.
We called him Spear for a while, and he was very interested in debating with us.
And then he called me, he tried to bully me by calling me arrogant.
And I responded to him that if arrogance were to be something that would be a criteria, then he was religious, right?
Then the people who say there should be a God because I believe in it could be called arrogant.
That would sort of be my definition of it.
It's not arrogant to question people's beliefs who have beliefs that are contrary to sense reason and experience.
It's not arrogant. And so he vanished, right?
And then there was another guy, I can't remember his name, he was on the board recently, who got really angry at us for even questioning whether or not we should see a corrupt family of origin, whether we should have them in our lives.
And he got really volatile and really aggressive saying, you know, we're culty and we're jerks and he used even stronger language.
And so, you know, I tried being curious and other people tried being curious and tell us how you feel, why you feel that way.
You know, we don't take it lightly. It's a big decision, blah, blah, blah.
And then when somebody was complaining about his own dad, this guy said, well, you should just never see him again.
And I said, well, aren't you the guy who was saying that this was a bad, you know, we shouldn't do this with our family?
It's like, well, that's different, right?
And so we'd asked him more questions about his family.
And then he said, my parents have absolutely no power over me.
They have no clue what it is that I'm doing.
They have no clue what I'm doing in my life.
They have no power over me at all.
So I feel perfectly fine to see them.
And I said, well, it sounds a little bit like they don't have much interest in you.
And that doesn't seem like intimacy to me, right?
So, of course, that's a perfectly predictable response.
You guys are just narrow-minded jerks, and you're living a nice way to live life, just judging and condemning people, and I'm out of here.
I'm never coming back, right? So, you know, just patience and conviction, and not being intimidated by somebody's bullying.
It just drives them away.
I'm not equating Lance.
I'm not equating the guy who was here before, who's out there.
I'm not equating the two together with this guy because he wasn't that way at all, except maybe a little bit with the arrogance thing.
But it's just something you have to stand up to.
This is a question of how it is that we train people to treat us.
So if somebody starts bullying us and we back down, oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to offend you.
I didn't mean you to feel that I absolutely retract.
I didn't mean to imply, well, all you're doing is you're training them to bully you.
I mean, you might as well be training a puppy.
You're training people to bully you.
As most people don't have...
I was going to say free will, and I think there's some truth in that, right?
In the absence of wisdom, people just usually react to past wrongs and they're run by the false self, which is mostly a reactive organism.
Or a reactive element of psychological energy.
And so they don't end up really in this situation where they can really choose stuff.
They just react. Like when you know that a conversation, you feel this inevitability in conversations that you're having with people that it's just going to end up this way.
And you know what they're going to say next.
And you know that they're going to get angry.
You know that they're going to get contemptuous.
I mean, we have this with family all the time.
Well, it's because they don't have any self-knowledge or any wisdom, which means that really, in my sort of particular view, they don't have a whole lot of free will.
They have the free will if they want to explore that thing, but until they do, they don't have the free will really to act differently under pressure, at least not much of it.
Certainly it's diminished, let's say, considerably.
And so, when we allow people to treat us badly, then we're training them in our life to treat us badly.
So, you're rewarding them, right?
So, you see these women on Dr.
Phil, and it's women, it happens sometimes to men too, but I see more women doing this.
You see these women on Dr.
Phil, and they're sitting there, my husband is such a jerk, and he says, I wish I weren't married to him, and blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, well, but you got married to him, right?
Well, yeah, but I thought he was going to be different, and all this and that.
It's like, well, what evidence did you have of that?
Well, he told me. It's like, well, yeah, but anyone can tell you anything, right?
If I tell you you owe me 500 bucks, are you going to hand it over?
I guess that would be a thousand podcasts, so we've still got a ways to go there.
But you married the guy.
Obviously, that's a pretty significant reward for his behavior.
After you got married to the guy, you said, oh, this isn't the guy I thought I married.
But then you had kids with him, and then you had another kid with him, right?
So you're continuing to have sex, and this guy's being a jerk or lazy or whatever you don't like.
Well, how on earth could you complain about this guy's behavior when you got married to him and you had children with him and you sort of substantially and consistently rewarded him?
Him for his behavior.
And yeah, you've been nagging and so on, but that's all words, right?
You don't judge people by what they say.
You judge people by what they do.
Well, sorry, except for me.
Me, you can judge by what I say because you don't really know what I do until I get the webcam.
And you'll realize that I'm actually looking at Playboy and driving while podcasting.
And then you can judge me based on that, which makes sense.
So, this issue of complaining about people in our lives, well, by associating with them to begin with, we are automatically approving of them.
We are automatically giving them a reward.
This is sort of important to understand.
By associating with people, we are automatically approving of them in a very fundamental manner.
So it's like some woman says, oh, I hate that guy.
He's a terrible guy. He's a bad guy.
I hate him. I'm going on a second date with him.
Well, I'm just sort of like, what are you talking about?
You hate that guy. You think he's smelly and unpleasant, and he's just not bold enough to be attractive.
And then you're going on a second date.
You're going on the next date. Oh, I still hate that guy.
Going on the next date, and then you're giving him back rubs, and then you pay him $500 to go on the sixth date with you.
Oh, but I hate that guy. And then you promise to support him while he works on books.
Oh, I hate that guy. Well, at what point does it just say, well, what the hell are you talking about?
I mean, you're continually rewarding this guy with sex and money and your attention and so on.
You clean his house and then you're complaining that he's a bad guy.
Well, if he's such a bad guy, he is that way to a large degree because you've trained him to be that way.
That you've given him constant positive reinforcement for who he is as a human being.
And I think that's, to be honest, somewhat significant.
So, the real question is, when people are in your life who are treating you badly, how are you training them to do it?
Has it been since the very first time you met them when you wouldn't look them in the eye and you apologized when they stepped on your foot and you never said boo when they did things against your self-interest?
Have you sort of let yourself become that kind of wallpaint?
That people brush by without even noticing and then complain that people take advantage of you when all you've done is give them positive reinforcement for them taking advantage of you.
Because it really doesn't take more than a shot or two across someone's bowels to gain their respect.
So there's this guy at my office who's a military guy.
He had a really bad temper, would swear at people in meetings, and so I had to have it out with him a couple of times, and we've now had a perfectly civil working relationship for the last two, two and a half years.
And it doesn't really take a whole lot, right?
People will do what they can get away with.
I mean, most people don't have this kind of inner integrity that I'm not going to take advantage of anyone who's begging me for it.
And so you see this too with kids, right?
Kids who are really angry at their parents but can't express it, will act in really provocative ways, and so their parents get angry so the kids can get angry back and release their anger that way without being in the doghouse for initiating anger against the parents.
So this is something that you see quite a bit of in life.
So the answer that I'm trying to work my way in a roundabout kind of way to is that we treat people badly in our lives who are close to us because they let us.
And we are treated badly by people in our lives who are close to us because we let them.
I mean, if you go to the library and you start yelling at people, they can call security and kick you out.
So we tend to be a little bit nicer to the librarian.
Obviously, we tend to be a little bit nicer to the cop, right, who can...
Shoot us, really. So we tend to be a little bit nicer to the cop.
And if the IRS calls, it seems likely, I mean, unless you're feeling particularly self-destructive, that you're not going to be screaming at them for X, Y, and Z. So that's sort of another thing that will occur.
So where people have the authority and the power over us to retaliate against bad behavior...
Or to leave us, then we're on better behavior.
So, when...
And this sort of ties into what I was saying this morning, in a way that's almost chillingly integrated.
Would you like just a moment to shiver in the chilling blast of this kind of integration?
I know I would. Let me just turn my AC up for a moment here.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, baby, that's good stuff.
So, when you're on a first date with someone...
You don't have the authority over them.
Their investment in you is not very high in order to get them to come back.
So you go out with some woman and, you know, you're picking your nose and talking about your hatred of all things ethnic at the meal.
Well, she's going to be like, she's going to get that mysterious phone call she's arranged beforehand with a friend to get her out of this kind of situation, for sure.
And so she's going to do that, and you're never going to see her again, right?
So you have no authority over her, no power over her.
Now, that is going to mean that you're going to be on better behavior because once she's got two kids with you and can't get away and you're really heavily embedded and it's going to be an enormous amount of time and effort and energy and pain and struggle and expense for her to get out of the relationship.
Then you can start to behave more poorly, and so on.
But of course, what you've also done is you've established over time, you try it bit by bit.
I'm saying if you're not a moral guy, but you're just like most people, you just do what you can get away with.
You'll try the behavior bit by bit.
So you don't sit there and you're a really great guy, and then...
You know, two years into the marriage after you've had a kid, you become this, you know, lazy, thumb-sucking jerk.
Who knows, right? That's not how it works in relationships.
What happens in relationships is people try a little bit at a time, right?
They try a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, right?
So, you know, the second date, the guy's five minutes late and says, oh, I'm really, really sorry.
And then he notices, like he tries to figure out, okay, did I get away with that?
Like I'm five minutes late.
Is the woman willing to sort of say, oh no, no, no, there's no problem.
No problem at all. No problem.
Whatever you need is fine with me.
Well, then the guy's just automatically got permission for a lot more than being five minutes late.
Whatever you want is fine with me.
Whatever the woman's going to say. You can flip the genders if you want.
And then he's going to be ten minutes late.
No, no problem. Ten minutes late, I know traffic can be arrested.
Oh, no problem. And so basically it's going to be this process of incrementalism.
I mean, Hitler didn't go and invade the whole world all at once, bit by bit.
Don't you love the extreme width of the metaphors here?
Five minutes late to the death of 40 million people.
I like not to cover a lot of middle ground.
I consider that to be the donut of philosophy.
The donut hole of philosophy.
I try and stay away from it as much as possible, one extreme to another, and find the mean if you like.
Anyway, so...
The way that it works in relationships is this sort of training bit by bit by bit to find out what the limits of behavior are.
Of course, this happens with kids all the time.
And, you know, if they're not, they're raised in a sort of loving environment.
But this is sort of, I think, an important thing to understand that we treat people badly in our life because we're constantly testing them.
And this is the same thing with the state, right?
The state will keep screwing around with your civil rights and human rights and tax you until such time as they get significant rumblings, right?
And I'm not saying that the population controls the state.
It's just that at an individual level, they will try and get away with the stuff until they can't get away with it, right?
And then there'll be some sort of backlash, right?
But as long as we keep praising everyone in the state and saying, yes, you all are the best human beings in the world, and there's nothing but the state...
The state is the only thing that can ever make us happy and free and moral and good and take care of the poor and this and that.
Well, of course they're going to keep getting away with what they want to get away with because we're not offering up any resistance.
We're just getting vaguely resentful at times and then praising them wherever we can.
So this situation of why we treat people badly that we love, or sort of that we're close to, is because we've gotten to the place where incrementally, bit by bit, time over time, we have managed to...
To get them to accept progressively worse and worse behavior.
And that's the answer as to why the relationship has been going long enough.
The boundaries have been switched over long enough to the point where people know exactly what the boundaries are, exactly what they can get away with.
And so, of course, this is why I rail, rail, rail against any, any kind of forced association in the whole wide goddamn world.
Any kind of forced association to me is a violation of the most fundamental human boundary, which is choice in participation.
It corrupts, it destroys, it undermines, it degrades, it humiliates, it abuses.
This unchosen obligation to another human being is corrupting.
And, yeah, parents and children, fine.
No problem with that, and that's not even that big an issue in society.
But all forms of forced association I consider to be corrupt and evil.
And that's why I rail so hard against the family.
Not because I'm anti-family, but because wherever you have forced association, whether it's in the state, or it's in the church, or it's in the race, or it's in the gender, or it's in the family, It has to be opposed because it's incredibly corrupting.
It creates the largest amount of human misery.
Because wherever you don't have a free market, do you understand?
A free market is all of your time.
It's not just your money. A free market is your time, it's your energy, it's your intellect, it's your love, it's your passion, it's your semen, it's your hugs, it's your approval, it's everything that you say and do.
The free market is social, not economic.
Economically, secondly, social, first.
The free market is social.
You can't say that we should have free trade and we should not have government intervention in the economy and then drag yourself over to a hated parent's house for Father's Day.
Those two positions are elementarily contradictory.
You cannot have those two positions and be consistent as a thinker or as a moral agent.
If you don't believe that people should be forced to associate with each other through unions, or through the state, or through the church, or in any way, shape, or form, then you cannot accept that the family is something where people should be compelled to spend time, energy, and resources with each other.
These two positions are perfectly mutually contradictory and exclusively opposite.
And that's why, I mean, people, oh, you're against the family, you're anti-family.
No, I'm anti-compulsion.
I'm anti-forced association.
I am pro-free market in relationships.
In relationships.
I am not anti-family any more than somebody who's against arranged marriages is anti-marriage.
No, I'm against the arrangement of it.
I'm against the force of it.
I'm against the guilt.
I'm against the manipulation. Because all of that is a form of slavery and manipulation that is a residue of a wild and corrupt power disparity that goes on between parents and children.
It is the after-effects of a power disparity that corrupts just about everyone it touches.
So, no, I'm not anti-family at all.
God, I love my wife.
She's my family. It's the best thing in the world.
I'm anti-coercion.
I'm anti-guilt. I'm anti-manipulation.
I'm anti-unchosen obligations.
I am for the free market primarily in relationships and only secondarily in the state and the church and the economy.
That stuff is all absolutely derived from the primary free market, which is the choice not on where to spend your money and not that you have to go and spend your money here and you have to join this union and you have to pay these dues.
And you have to pay these taxes.
And if you try and buy goods from that guy, we're going to throw you in jail.
And you have to pay these import taxes and duties.
Or you have to pay for these subsidies to this company.
All of that stuff is piss poor shadows of the primary problem.
Which is that the free market is fundamentally about relationships and not about your money.
If you feel that it's wrong to force people to spend money at a certain store, what the hell does that have to do about freedom relative to having to go over to somebody's house that you hate, smile and grin and pretend to have a good time?
The free market is not about money.
Fundamentally, the free market is about your time and your energies and your approval.
And I've never understood how people can say, we shouldn't have unions that are, you know, controlled by the, subsidized and enforced by the government.
We shouldn't have all of these things.
And we shouldn't have taxation.
We shouldn't have a war on drugs.
We shouldn't have a government.
We shouldn't have all of these forced associations.
But you know what?
My mother wants me to come over to Mother's Day, so I'm going to go.
I mean, really, people, what the hell is that?
How about seeing the trees and forgetting about the forest just for a little bit?
Just a little bit.
That's all I'm asking. Look at the free market and look at voluntarism and look at voluntary association.
Not in terms of the market or in terms of unions or in terms of the state.
Look at your own personal relationships, your own personal lives.
Are you subject to an unchosen obligation to see someone?
An unpleasurable obligation, a sense of guilt, a sense of duty, a sense of responsibility, a fear of disapproval, a fear of criticism, a fear of something.
Negative that is going to occur to you.
Well, then you're in the land. You're just buying a cessation of pain.
You're a junkie, right? You're an absolute junkie.
You are buying.
You're like a heroin addict, right?
Rather than face the pain of withdrawal, you're going to take a heroin hit.
Rather than face the pain of disapproval or somebody saying, well, it's bad not to go and see your father on Father's Day.
Rather than face up to that, you're just going to go.
You're going to drug yourself with compliance so that you don't have to face the pain of disapproval.
Yes, well, it says Steph.
It's 9.40pm.
I know it's shocking, but I actually out-berated the battery life of my computer.
Or, my computer was tired of being berated and shut itself down.
It's really hard to tell. But we will be having stern work later this evening.
So thanks so much for listening to this podcast.
I hope you're doing well. It was a lot of fun.
It certainly helped while away a long and unpleasant drive because there were two accidents on the highway.
None of which were me careening into my own ego.
That... It's scheduled to tomorrow.
So, I hope you're doing well.
And please drop by and donate.
Perk me up a little. I have not received any donations for the last few days.
And I would certainly appreciate that.
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