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June 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:03
291 The Joy of Failure

Sprinkling the tasty spice of acceptance over the bitter ashes of defeat!

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. How are you?
It's 8.29 in the morning on the 21st of June, 2006.
And this morning, we're going to take a break from me yelling at people about personal growth, and I think we're going to yell about government this morning.
And what I wanted to do was a couple of brief IM chats yesterday.
Brief because my boss might be listening.
A couple of IM chats yesterday were sort of interesting to me.
There's a lot of challenge out there in debating freedom, especially political freedom with people.
Personal freedom, well, yeah, I think people can see that some of the people that we've chatted to on the board are rather explosive when it comes to dealing with personal issues.
And it really is a huge challenge to communicate with people about personal growth.
And so there's a reason why they have professionals, right?
And the professionals find it very difficult to work with people, even when those people are coming to their office in tears saying that their life is a mess and they need to get it fixed, right?
So I'm just sort of putting it out there that you should not feel like you are a...
Somehow at fault if you don't turn people around.
So Christina practices psychology and so people are in her office and messed up and sobbing and she still finds it very, very difficult.
When she is a recognized authority and they are genuinely in distress and she has their sole attention and they're paying her to do it and she has them for weeks or months, she still finds it.
Very difficult to affect meaningful change in people.
And that could be a lot of times because I'm upstairs and what I'm doing is...
We have a vent system in our house and Christina works in the house.
And so if I'm home, like if I'm working from home or if she's got an early evening patient and I'm home and I'm upstairs, what I'm doing is...
I'm in the vent system, I'm sort of listening, and I'm...
I mean, she calls it heckling.
I don't really call it heckling.
I just call it providing suggestions about how things should go and that the people should donate to Free Domain Radio.
I mean, it takes them a little while to figure out what on earth that is, but I do sort of try and put my two cents in, and Christina says that that sometimes can be a little distracting and so on.
But even with the combined weight of her, like directly in front of them, and me, my ghostly voice floating in through the vents, they still have trouble making the kinds of personal changes that really have a positive effect on their life.
She has a great deal of difficulty, of course, with her patients around Father's Day, lots of guilt and lots of obligation and lots of resentment and lots of, you know, especially among women, sort of the good girl thing, you know.
And so there's, you know, what we're taking on here is saving the soul of the world is not a small thing, and it's not something that we should look at like, dang, I didn't save another one.
Ha ha ha.
I mean, most of life, here's my motivational speech, I think I mentioned it before, so I'll give it brief, but most of life is abject failure.
And to me, you know, you've got to love life without being focused on success.
It's a challenge, right?
But most of the people that I try and sell software to don't buy.
Most of the women I went out with, well, all but one, I didn't marry.
Most of the books that I start, I don't finish because they're not working for whatever reason, or my unconscious doesn't pick up something that's really useful.
Most of the books that I've tried to sell haven't sold.
Most of the books that has sold hasn't become a runaway bestseller.
And so, I mean, maybe it's different for you.
Maybe you have a Midas touch.
But in my experience, everything in life, you know, with a few shining exceptions, doesn't work out.
And that doesn't mean that, you know, think of all of the tens of thousands of movies that get released every couple of years.
And we remember like 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
That's a success rate of less than a percent, or maybe a couple of percent.
Even if you look at the greatest geniuses in English literature, you have Shakespeare, who wrote 37 plays, hundreds of sonnets, prose, thousands of lines of poetry.
We remember, or consider to be central, seven or eight of his plays.
Right? So, even with a mad genius like Shakespeare, who has the greatest command of character, plot, and language in the history of the world, not just even English, the best writer in the world is considered to be, anyway.
He has a success rate of making meaningful plays.
I mean, I know that his other plays aren't bad.
I've read or seen most of them, but they just don't have the power because he was writing them for a particular people, usually.
And So his success rate is 20%.
20% of his plays, I mean, they're all great, but 20% of his plays have become real classics.
Like when you hear they're putting on Shakespeare, you're not expecting Timon of Athens, right?
You're expecting one of the biggies.
So he can get it up to 20%.
And that's his big thing.
And Dickens, one of the greatest prose writers, although I do find his characterization a little empty and awkward, but still a great writer in terms of prose and some magnificent speeches and great with plot.
Well, what do we remember from Dickens?
Well, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, my favorite Dickens book.
A couple of others.
Well, the guy wrote 30 or 40 plays, so he's got a success rate.
And not that they were all bad and Bleak House and things like that.
Not that the other plays were bad.
I started a couple of later ones.
I didn't find them very compelling.
But they really, you know, you have a failure rate, even when you have the greatest genius novelist in the English language, they have a failure rate that's relatively significant.
If you look at Dostoevsky, we've got Notes from Underground, which is read mostly by students, so it's a good book to read.
Memoirs from the House of the Dead, not read by many people, but again, an excellent read.
And fascinating to compare with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Apikalago, because the prison conditions are just so wildly different under the evil Tsar than under the good communists, and I'm sure you know which way they're worse.
We have The Brothers Karamazov, and The Possessed, a couple others, and Crime and Punishment.
If you read one book by the end of your life, you have to read Crime and Punishment.
You just have to read Crime and Punishment.
The first 60 pages, a little bit of a slog, but when you get cooking on it, oh my god...
As Robert Louis Stevenson said, as he wrote to a friend, he said, Hey, I just finished Crime and Punishment.
Or, to put it more accurately, Crime and Punishment almost finished me, because it really is an absolutely haunting, terrifying, beautiful, deep, rich, wonderful, sympathetic, and...
Empathetic book that is well, well worth reading just to, well, read it and we'll talk.
I'll do a review of it.
I'm just going through the audiobook.
At the moment, I read it many, many years ago.
I've read it twice. I listened to the audiobook about four years ago and I'm just plowing through bits of the audiobook again because I wanted to refresh myself prior to doing a review.
But it is an absolutely staggeringly good book.
There's a subplot about Marmaladov that's a little bit like two spaceships colliding, but that's not the end of the world.
The central thrust is absolutely fascinating.
But, of course, Dostoevsky's success rate, he's written The Gambler and so on.
Well, just about everything he writes is great, but the question is how relevant is it to the world that we live in now?
Well... Crime and Punishment is still a classic.
And if you ever get to see a...
I think it's a Brazilian film, which is an adaptation of Crime and Punishment set in Moss in Brazil called Sin Compasione.
It is... I've only seen it once at a film festival.
Never been able to find it again.
If you know where I can get a hold of a copy, please let me know.
But it's really, really well done.
But, so does the FC success rate one of the greatest, certainly one of the greatest dramatic writers in any language.
I wish I could read him in the original, but that might take more than a weekend or two.
But, his success rate, yeah, it's not that great.
Relative to his output, and of course his personal life was kind of a mess.
He was addicted to gambling.
He went on a vacation, went on his honeymoon with his wife.
He was supposed to be away for two weeks, and they came back some years later because he kept getting into debt.
His wife wrote a short memoir that's quite...
It's tough reading because you see this great genius who's completely addicted to the gaming tables.
I mean, Dostoevsky had this life that we could only...
We can only imagine what it would have been like to go through that kind of life.
But we'll talk about that another time.
So, you know, his success life, his success rate in books was, you know, again, 10 or 20%.
That's what genius can do.
Genius can raise success rates to 10 or 20%.
And that would be the same as true for, I would say, you know, if you're a really excellent salesperson, you might close 10% of the deals you start.
And so on.
And most products that launch, they fail.
And failure is just absolutely part of human life.
And it's so central to human life that...
It's just hard to...
It would be hard to live any kind of pleasurable life if you were concerned about failure.
It would be very hard...
I mean, we're all concerned about failure.
But it would be very hard to live any kind of life of joy if, whenever failure occurred, it cast you down.
I mean, yeah, a couple of people on the board said, oh, your podcast on Monday morning, you sounded kind of down, right?
Which, to me, is fine.
Am I not supposed to be down?
Is that a rule somewhere? I'm allowed to be down.
And so are you. Because, you know, if you're down, we want to have the full gamut of feeling here, right?
We want to have passion, joy, anger, love, all that kind of stuff.
Because it's certainly what I experience.
And, you know, it's what I want you to experience it too.
All in this podcast.
Wait. Hang on. Grip the edges of your chair.
We're going in, baby. It's time for a manic depressive podcast.
Oh, wait. Actually, that's kind of all of them.
Anyway, so just around failure, people sort of feeling disappointed and hurt and upset that conversations that we've had on the board or conversations that you may have had with people in your life, that they haven't worked.
Well... I mean, there's two things about that, or three things.
One, it's really difficult.
So, if you're trying to shoot an arrow over a house and hit a bullseye, getting mad every time you miss is really, and that's, you know, you've got to stay there until you hit it, and you're going to be there for weeks, and you don't want to spend weeks getting angry every time you don't hit, because it's really hard.
And it's not hard because we're such wretched communicators or anything.
It's hard because your success rate for conversions is very low.
Anybody's success rate for conversions is very low.
So, you know, Dr.
Phil will get some agreement with people in the short run, but you want to check back with them in a year and see how they're doing.
There's not a whole lot of follow-up in these kinds of things.
And relapses are common and inevitable.
And, you know, his patients end up in jail, even though he's worked hard to intervene.
Patients storm off his set.
This is a guy who's pretty experienced, and he's got TV show and cameras, and people see how every facial tick is being recorded and so on.
Well, his success rate is very low.
And all he's trying to do is get people who are openly admitting that their lives are miserable to stop certain behaviors that are making them miserable.
He's not even promising to give them eternal bliss and to clean up their whole lives.
He's just saying, well, if I can just get you to stop yelling at your kids...
Or at least go for a walk when you feel like yelling at your kids, I'll consider that a great success.
Well, of course, and these are people who are visibly distressed at yelling at their kids.
So, you know, when it comes to debating about the government or personal freedom or religion or anything like that, they're dealing with...
An enormous amount of challenge.
And so, it's got to be fun to debate.
It's got to be fun to talk about these ideas.
But if you are, and we all feel it, because we all want, right?
Despite determinism, we all want outcomes.
And although, of course, if determinism is true, then the outcomes are pre-ordained, and there's no reason to get upset about any of them.
But, and of course, I will...
Okay, one last...
It's not a dig. I mean, this is genuine concerns that I have about determinism.
I'm not trying to dig at this issue.
But I will actually be a lot closer to becoming a determinist if the following were to occur.
If the following were to occur, like, if I'm having a debate with a determinist, and I say, so the outcome of this debate between us is completely foreordained, And the determinist says yes, and then I say, well, I'm not going to participate in something which is sort of pointless, right? It's a sham, right?
I mean, if you're pretending to have a debate and change someone's mind, but whether they're going to change it or not is completely foreordained, then I would say, okay, well, then I'm going to stop debating with you because I just think it's silly to go through this sort of hollow sham of pretending to debate when everyone's going to walk away with the opinions that are completely predetermined.
And then I stop debating, and the moment that I experience or I feel no frustration or discontent from a determinist because I am stopping a debate on determinism because nobody can change anybody else's mind,
The moment that the determinist then experiences or expresses no disappointment or frustration at the fact that I'm refusing to debate when there's no actual debate going on, then I will be a lot closer to believing in determinism because that would, to me, seem to be an acceptance of...
Like, if a philosopher does not believe and live his own principles, to me it's like, okay, well, that's very interesting, but I'm certainly not going to be your guinea pig, right?
I mean, this is an important thing.
I'm not going to be another philosopher's guinea pig.
So if a philosopher says, or somebody, anybody says to me, you know, give away all of your possessions, and, you know, the Pope says, give away all of your possessions, as Jesus tells you to, and give them to the poor.
Well, of course, if the Pope is sitting in my car, And I don't have an eject button, then of course the Pope is going to be saying that to me and I'm going to be saying, well, the Vatican has tens or maybe more, tens of billions of dollars of assets.
That's a mighty nice robe you're wearing.
I see that you flew first class and you have your own bus.
So it's a little hard for me to see what you mean when you say give away everything to the poor and live as Jesus did barefoot and bleeding.
And he's going to have all these justifications and this and that and the other.
But basically, it's like, well, if you're not living it, don't ask me to do it, because I'm not going to be your guinea pig.
If you don't believe enough in your ideas to live them and to become what you preach, to live what you preach, then I'm not going to have...
Why would I believe something that you don't believe?
If you're asking me to believe something and you're not living it, then why would I... If I was saying to y'all, if you have a corrupt family and you can't change them and they won't listen, then you need to disengage.
But I was still having lunch with my mom.
Then it would be like, okay, I've got this idea that disengaging with your family would be good, but I don't really want to do it because it's really dangerous and scary and upsetting and so on, and people will criticize me for it.
But if you guys could go out and do it and just report back, let me know how it goes, because then maybe I'll give it a shot.
Well... I can say that if I want.
I don't think too many people are going to be, sure, let me detonate my family relationships just to report back to you, oh big jelly forehead, about how it went so that you can make a more informed decision.
I think that would be a wonderful way to spend my time because everybody wants to please me, I'm sure.
So... So when determinists are debating with me, sort of one of my tests, right, about whether they believe it, right?
I mean, this is important. This is important.
You really have to believe, right?
I mean, it's a cheesy sales thing that's true, right?
You have to be sold yourself before you can sell others.
If you don't believe in your product or yourself, it's not going to make any difference.
If I'm debating with a determinist, and I say, and I sometimes will, and I was thinking of doing it on Sunday, but I decided against it, but I can say, well, so the outcome of this debate is completely foreordained, and then they say yes, and I say, okay, well, I'm going to stop debating then.
Because if I'm going to walk out of this debate with preordained opinions that are determined in advance, then I'm not going to bother debating because I'm just going to save time.
I'm just going to save time.
And if the person who I'm debating with shows absolutely no frustration or a desire that I do things differently, then I will start to believe in determinism as a viable thought model, at least that somebody really believes in.
If somebody doesn't child-proof their house because they say, well, whether my child falls down the stairs or not is completely predetermined, so me going through this charade of child-proofing my house doesn't make any sense.
And if determinists start advocating for no prisons, no law courts, no justice, no disciplining children, no self-defense, nothing like that, no philosophizing, because it's all useless, right?
It doesn't make any difference.
And I know that they're going to say, well, we don't know the future and this and that, but if we do know...
That nobody's responsible for their actions because they're all preordained.
There's some significant changes we need to advocate for.
But then, of course, once they start advocating for those changes, then they'll be trying to affect a change.
Anyway, so all I'm looking for at that base level is somebody who is never frustrated that nobody...
Really seems to accept the moral conclusions of determinism, but is perfectly happy with the fact that people don't want to debate that issue because the debate is foreordained, the results.
Then I will sort of say, okay, well, here's somebody who's really living determinism, rather, because, of course, if determinism means nothing, like if you're going to live as if you have free will, which is the default position, right?
You ask just about anyone, do you have any kind of free will?
They're going to say yes. And if a determinist says, no, I'm going to childproof my house, Right?
And the free will guy says, well, I'm going to childproof my house because I have free will and I want to protect my children and if I don't do it, they're going to fall down the stairs.
So if I protect my house, great, my children are safe or safer.
And if I don't protect my house, they're going to fall down in one, so I'm going to choose and, you know, affect the future.
Whereas the determinist says, well, I'm going to childproof my house because I don't know the future.
Well, that's...
Okay, so it's exactly the same one way or the other.
In which case, why would I want to...
Believe in something that's not proven against my own prior experience.
Like, if somebody comes to me and says, I believe in God, then...
I will say, well, you need to change your belief, and here's the results, right?
You won't go to church. You won't pray to God, right?
I mean, you would certainly ask for wisdom from your unconscious and all the stuff that we've talked about in prior podcasts, but you won't believe that there's a living entity outside of yourself.
You won't teach your children this.
You won't do that. You won't do the other.
You won't baptize your kids.
You won't, you know, and now you're in the holy crew of people who are trying to rid the world of a dangerous illusion.
So there will be significant changes in your life.
And ethically, there will be changes in your life as well.
Because all of the morals that you believe in that are derived from the Bible, you will have to question and you will have to get rid of those that aren't universal.
There will have to be an enormous change in ethics.
You'll have to advocate the separation of church and state.
And whenever conversation comes up, you'll have to oppose it.
And you won't be able to invoke God to cause your children to obey you.
There will be huge and enormous and Ramifications of change to not believe in God.
It's not just an internal process and then you continue living your life exactly the same way, right?
So, I just want to know what changes, you know, with determinism.
Because if nothing changes, then it doesn't matter, right?
I mean, if I tell you that you need to believe in the bouncing blue bag of happiness on Aldebaran, and if you say, okay, I do.
What do I do? Oh, you do exactly the same as you were doing before.
Like, okay. Well, that was fun.
So, that's one thing.
And the last thing I'll say on this is that the evolution argument works to some degree, but the problem with determinism is that if everything is causal, how do new ideas pop into existence?
And people say, well, yes, but new species come about through evolution, and we know that's a blind process.
And a causal process, yeah, absolutely.
But... If certain species popped into existence and the evolutionary mind tried assembling different arms and wings on them, and then let them live if it worked, and then winked them out of existence if they didn't, all within the space of like 10 seconds or 20 seconds or a day,
Then we would say that something significantly different from evolution was at work, and when you come up with ideas, or when I come up with ideas, they pop into my head, I'll assemble them, disassemble them, compare with other ideas, sometimes within the space of seconds, and sometimes while I'm taking a breath in the podcast, So I'm generating, I'm discarding, I'm looking at all the different paths I can go down to work out these ideas, whether they're compatible with existing ideas and so on.
So there's all of this kind of stuff that's going on.
And that's not how evolution works.
Evolution is a gradual intergenerational process wherein advantageous organisms, or advantageous aspects of organisms that are perfectly well adapted or better adapted to the environment, that they sort of survive that they sort of survive and flourish and those that don't.
It's a multi-generational process at best.
And yes, there are mutations, but they don't occur spontaneously within the same organism.
You don't sprout a wing and go, holy shit, that really pokes into my back while I'm driving, so I'm going to unsprout the wing.
But ideas work within the mind.
Ideas work that way, so I don't really see how the evolution argument works too well, other than as a sort of general thing.
But it doesn't work very specifically when it comes to To something like free will.
So there's certain limitations of that for me.
So when it comes to talking to people about the government or about freedom or whatever, you know, failure is your default position.
Failure is your default position.
And of course, even if you succeed, you may never know.
So you get people storming off the board because, you know, we're asking them questions about their family.
Well, they always come on really aggressive, right?
And then we, at least I think most people, I certainly try, they come on really aggressive, like, you guys are jerks.
And it's not common. I don't want to sort of scare anyone away from the board.
It's like 0.01% of the posts or whatever.
But, you know, there will be guys who come on and, you know, they come on swinging with both fists and...
And we can ask questions. Of course, it's completely obvious to anybody with any insight what's going on, right?
Which is that they desperately want to get free of their family.
And so when we talk about this, they get really angry because their false, like their true self yearns for it.
And so they have to get angry at us as the proxies for the true self.
The false self gets angry at us, because it can't get angry at the true self, because then it would be admitting a desire of its own, so it gets angry at us instead, and it's all, you know, perfectly obvious.
And people storm off, but you don't know what happens.
You don't know what happens to that person when they leave.
It might take five years, and then every now and then they'll come back to this, you know, they might come back to the board once in a while, every now and then they'll come back to this debate with anger and bitterness about, you know, what jerks we are.
And then you just, you never know, five years from now, they might be sitting with their dad or mom or both, and they'll say something cutting and unpleasant.
Or they'll start ripping into someone else.
And he'll just, bing!
It will just come to him.
It will come to him whole and complete.
Or he might be having a nap.
Wake up and go, holy crap, I've got to break with these people.
You don't know. You don't know.
You just, you know, you sow seeds, right?
That's all. All we're doing is we're scattering seeds from a water bomber.
That's all. We're in a drought, right?
So, it is...
That's not to make you feel hopeless.
Because I think there's no surer way to feel hopeless than to continue to have hope where there's almost none.
And I don't mean almost none like the world will be free because we can't predict any of that.
I don't believe that's written in stone at all.
It depends on what we do and how rigorous we are with our own self-examination and with our examination and how gentle and kind we are with our examination of others.
But the best way to end up being hopeless is to hope for something that's...
like to hope every day for it's impossible, right?
So if you're a 50-year-old woman...
And you're still getting a period.
You're trying to get pregnant. And every month that you don't get pregnant, you're in complete despair.
Well, that's a great way to erase hope from your heart.
But if you go in saying, well, I've got like a 0.01% chance of bringing a baby to term.
So, I mean, to some degree, although I may want it, this is just for funsies as far as the odds go.
And every time I don't get my period is the norm.
And if I do, sorry, if I do get pregnant, it's very much not the norm.
I mean, that's a miracle almost.
Then you, I think, are going to go in with an attitude that's a little bit more rational.
And it's going to make sure that you have more pleasure in the process, right?
So if you have, if the odds are very low, and you pin, but you hope and you desperately want Something to occur, then you're going to slowly scrub all joy from your life.
I mean, that just seems to be a natural fact from that standpoint.
So I'm sort of saying, if you recognize the odds against you, then you won't feel the same kind of hope, followed by crashing the despair, followed by anger, like every time you have a debate with someone, recognize that the odds of converting them on the spot, or illuminating them on the spot, are virtually non-existent.
I mean, you might as well I'm going to have a conversation with you, but by God, I hope against hope that you don't get struck by lightning when we talk.
You don't go into a conversation saying, boy, I hope you don't have a heart attack while we're talking.
Oh, cross my fingers that you don't have a heart attack, right?
Because you go into conversations thinking, well...
It's probably not too likely that they're going to have a heart attack, so I'm not going to be very invested in it.
And if they do have a heart attack, then I'll be pretty shocked, I guess you could say.
So that's sort of a way to approach it that would be a little bit more rational, because the odds of converting someone in any particular conversation on the spot to your face, it's about equivalent to somebody dying of a heart attack during a conversation.
Yeah, it happens, I guess, but I can't say that I've experienced it a whole lot.
I'm trying to think sort of back.
I've had some people who've said that I've pushed them over the edge, that I've tipped them over to market anarchism when they were already on the way.
Wasn't through any debate, right?
Because when there's debate, there's a certain amount of pride involved, right?
People don't want to admit that they're wrong because they feel it's subjecting themselves to the other person's willpower, right?
Because we've been so badly raised.
We think that saying, oh, you're absolutely right, is submitting themselves to somebody else's willpower, right?
So somebody on the board, a very articulate and well-written gentleman who's arguing the determinist position pointed out a contradiction in In the length of time that I had asked for determinism to predict behavior, because evolution can predict behavior, and has been proven, you know, dark winged moths in a town getting a lot of air pollution are the ones who end up surviving, and the light wing, well, because they're on the trees, right, the trees get darker.
And so evolution has made specific predictions about What is going to occur from a biological standpoint?
And, of course, those predictions are borne out, but I don't believe that determinism has been able to make any viable predictions about human behavior.
And so, from that standpoint, it hasn't achieved the same kind of veracity as evolution.
But he was pointing out a time frame that I was asking for.
I'd said at one point, 10 seconds, and at another point, Five or ten years.
And so what am I going to say?
Of course. I mean, absolutely. I'm so sorry.
I did contradict myself and I clarified that position.
And then what I'll do is I'll wait a couple of days until he's forgotten about it and then start contradicting myself again so that he wastes time pursuing my contradictions rather than proving me wrong.
These are all things that, you know, tricks that you can use that, you know, advance the cause of freedom and self-justification.
Really, I mean, for yourself more than the cause as a whole, but, you know, you're important too.
So there's lots of different ways to approach and, you know, you will have an influence on how somebody gets these ideas and how well they sink in and to what degree, how they're going to view these ideas.
You do have an influence on that.
I mean, there's a reason that it's important if you want to pursue debating with people that you become a better debater.
I mean, I'm always striving to become a better debater.
All I see is deficiencies in the way that I put things across.
But, um... You should strive, if you want to debate, you should strive to be excellent at it, because it will have an outcome.
It will have an effect on the outcome, and that's a good thing.
If we choose to do something, we should try and do it well, because it's efficient, it's less frustrating, it's more pleasurable.
But like all things, we need to recognize the odds.
We need to recognize the odds.
And so, the important thing to work with, as far as I'm concerned, is, you know, recognize that the odds are hugely against you, and you can swing them to some degree, And you will probably get no personal gratification from doing it.
As far as people saying, you know, my life is so much better, right?
I mean, certainly that doesn't happen with me.
I mean, the emails that I get are, wow, you know, I've sort of started trying to do some of this stuff, and man, my life has gotten really bad because everyone disapproves of me, and I'm looking at maybe getting some corrupt people out of my life, and I'm having lots of problems, and I mean, you know, I know what's on the other side, having gone through it myself.
I'm not asking anybody else to be my guinea pig, so I know what's on the other side, so I'm sort of, you know...
But nobody's phoning me, or emailing me, or IMing me, or posting on the board saying, my life is, like, so much better because of the contributions that your ideas have made to my thinking.
I mean, that doesn't happen, right?
I mean... Maybe it'll happen in a couple of years, but it sure as heck is not happening now, and it would be crazy for me to expect that, right?
We've been running this thing for a couple of months, right?
I've been sort of started last November, but the Free Domain Radio website and board has only been running really since sort of early to mid-March.
So, I mean, it took me quite some time to go through this whole process, so for me to sit there and go, boy, you know, I really wish people would just email me and tell me what a positive influence is, You know, in terms of making them happy, I'm having.
And some people have been, you know, kind to say, it's helped clarify my thinking and so on.
But nobody has said, boy, this stuff, boy, am I ever stewed in deep and unfathomable joy now that I've been working through certain ideas that Freedom Aid Radio has contributed to my mental matrix.
I mean, I don't get any of that stuff, and I wouldn't expect it.
I mean, I might expect it maybe in a year, or six months to a year, or probably closer to a year.
But there hasn't been any turnaround situations where people say, wow, boy, you really did give me something that made me happy.
That's not the case.
It's going to take a while. So you're not going to get people who say, yes, I agree with you and you're right and it's made me happy and so on.
You'll get people who will grudgingly admit that you have points in a surly and, you know, yeah, fine, okay, I guess maybe my family isn't the best, but...
But so what? I still don't have to break with them.
I mean, I get tons of that sort of stuff, right?
And that's fine. I mean, it's perfectly natural.
I'm not expecting people to go, wow, you know, I listen to 12 podcasts and I can levitate.
That's not going to happen.
What's going to happen is people are going to, at best, if they have a certain amount of integrity, they're going to, you know...
Angrily admit that I have some points, but then start ad hominem stuff, right?
To some degree. I mean, I shouldn't sort of give the impression that I'm wielding, I'm sort of fighting off 500 hostile emails a day, but people will always say that there's some sort of problem, and that's fine.
I mean, that's perfectly natural. That's exactly what I would have done in their situation when I was pre- Uh, pre-past this, like when I was not through this storm, I would have done exactly the same thing.
And it would be perfectly healthy.
It would be perfectly unhealthy to not do it, right?
Because if they suddenly went, oh, I'm just going to be, oh, whatever Steph says, right?
I mean, not that anyone does that, but if they did, that would not be healthy because that would be the transfer of a kind of blind allegiance from, uh, you know, someone else to me, which wouldn't make any sense.
It wouldn't be healthy because good heavens.
I mean, as I've mentioned about it a million times, I'm not at all important in this equation.
The ideas, as you evaluate them, are important.
You are important in this equation, not me.
So, that having been said, and I know I said at the beginning, I was going to talk about the government.
I am going to talk about the government.
I really wanted to talk about this issue of odds, though, and not throwing your whole emotional happiness and unhappiness into whether people change their minds or not.
Obviously, for the determinists, that's not relevant.
But for the people who believe in free will, that you want to affect the outcome.
That is something that is going to make you unhappy, it's going to make you frustrated, and philosophy, as I've said many times, should not be something that brings you despair, should not be something that brings you frustration, should not be something that brings you problems and makes you unhappy, and, I mean, in your relationship to other people and things that you can't control, right?
I mean, I know I've just said that my philosophy is making everyone unhappy, but philosophy shouldn't make you unhappy, so let me just clarify that for a moment, because that's...
A seeming contradiction.
The philosophy that I talk about in terms of personal integrity and voluntary association and getting bad people out of your life, if you want to be happy and if you believe in freedom, I mean, if you don't, that's fine and keep the bad people in your life.
I mean, nobody can tell anyone what to do.
You actually have control over that.
Whether you walk over and pick up the phone and call your mom or whether you answer the phone from your father or whatever, you have control over that.
So if it makes you unhappy to go through this particular process of getting corrupt people out of your life, that to me is perfectly acceptable and perfectly understandable.
But you have control over it.
So you can choose to do it.
You can choose not to do it. You can start it.
You can stop it. You can take two steps back.
You can go and see them to double check.
You can say that Steph guy is the craziest guy in the universe and just because he had a bad relationship with his family, now he wants to mess up everybody else's relationship with their family, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You can say all of that kind of stuff for sure, and then you can just stop listening to Freedom Aid Radio, and you can go back, and you're completely in control of that process.
You can manage your own feelings of guilt or whatever people are doing to manipulate you into feeling bad if you don't see your family for their own issues, right?
Because a brave person is an implicit...
Condemnation of a coward, right?
So if you're doing something brave and something that has integrity, you will be disliked just for that, right?
Because the false self will...
The false self says it's impossible to be brave.
The false self says it's impossible to be virtuous.
So the moment it sees someone, it has to immediately start to pick them apart and put them down and say that they're hypocrites and say that they're false and say that they're motivated by some sort of unclean psychological prompting.
And it has to dismantle and Disassemble any kind of virtue that it sees, because the false self is predicated on virtue is impossible, submission, domination, and manipulation are all that you can get by within life, and so people are going to get kind of hostile to you as you start to go down this road, and, you know, it's not the end of the world.
The people who remain will be people who love you dearly, and you'll have fantastic relationships with them after that.
But you are going to face that sort of issue as you go through this process, but you're in complete control of it.
However, if you are dealing with a situation wherein you are trying to control somebody else's thinking or trying to influence somebody else's thinking, you have no control over that.
You have no control.
You can't get inside somebody's head and reassemble it.
Philosophy should give you joy.
That doesn't mean that it's not going to be difficult to get to a state of health because we're all born healthy, made unhealthy through a variety of social, familial, and state and educational influences.
And then we have to become healthy.
It's a bit of rehab. It's kind of painful, but we have complete choice over it.
If it gets too painful, we can stop.
We can take a break. We can do that. So that's fine.
Philosophy is designed to give you joy and shouldn't make it hurt where you're not in control because then you can stop, right?
And so you need a safe word when you're doing your bondage with philosophy.
I guess really that's what I'm trying to say.
But when you're trying to control somebody else, you can't place your happiness on somebody else's opinions because you have no control over it.
That's surrendering your happiness to other people, and that will cause them to manipulate you.
I mean, you're inviting them into your world by saying, my happiness is dependent upon what you think, or whether you accept this argument or not.
99.9% of people, because power corrupts and you're giving them all this power, will end up doing something, almost despite themselves, to hurt you, because that's just what happens when you invite people into your life from a position of desperately wanting them to change.
Then they will end up not changing to continue to have power over you, it's just You know, we are drawn to power because it's biologically advantageous.
We're drawn to power and we want power.
Power is very bad for us.
And so the last thing you want to do in your life is to give other people power who are not virtuous and who want that 0.1% of people who can be trusted with power.
I mean, I'll do anything Christina says and she runs all the finances.
I just turn my paycheck over to her and trust her completely with everything under the sun.
So she has power, I guess you could say, but she's earned that trust by not ever abusing power.
So, you know, so that's sort of my suggestion, just to pull that back is a very important thing.
And to recognize that you're going into a fight where you're going to get beheaded every time, and your sailing head as it turns in the air must be laughing at the same time, because otherwise, why bother?
So... Thanks so much for listening.
Still waiting for some donations.
I'm finding it a little troubling that I'm not getting any donations.
We have almost 150 board members who've probably downloaded countless MP3s.
We have had 35,000 MP3s downloaded so far this month.
Actually, closer to 40, I think.
So, I know that there's a lot of people out there who are listening to this who aren't donating.
I would really, really urge you to do it.
I mean, obviously, I want you to do it, and that's great.
Don't worry about what I want.
You should do it for your own integrity because this is a unique conversation that we're having here.
I would like to do it full-time, and I think it would do an enormous amount for the Freedom Movement if I could do it full-time.
And thank you very much to everyone who's donated so far.
It is not enough yet for me to go full-time, but you can make that difference.
And if you do believe in freedom and you think that I have something to contribute to that conversation, Then I would say that kick, I'm not asking for a fortune here, kick some bucks my way based on your listening.
Usage 50 cents a podcast is the suggested donation.
Throw some dollars my way.
You'll be doing a lot for freedom.
And I'm not looking to get two Rolls Royces and set up an ashram.
But if I get even 40% or 30% of my current salary, I'll make the switch because I want to be able to do this stuff full time as well.
And I think that you'll be doing a lot for that if you've come this far in the conversation.
I think you'll recognize that I have some pretty unique stuff to add to the debate within society.
And if you do want for the world to become a little bit more free and you think that I'm somebody who can help bring that about, then I think a donation would be in line with your values.
And I think that is always a good thing to do.
Thank you so much for listening.
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