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June 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:09
308 Projecting Torture
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Good afternoon, brothers and sisters.
It's Friday before a long weekend.
And I'm going home to my baby.
How are ya? I'm slithering out of work at 2.30 in the afternoon on a Friday after a rather challenging week, which I will talk to you about some other time.
And we're heading home for a beautiful weekend with the bride.
And I hope that you're doing well, and I hope that you had a good week.
And with any luck...
You got out a little bit early too.
So, to continue the joyful chat this morning, to continue from the joyful chat this morning, I thought it might be worth talking about, in a little bit more detail, what I mean by managing your own feelings by manipulating others.
And with any luck, I will manage my own disappointment at donations by manipulating you into giving me a kidney or a first one.
I'll take either one. I'm not fussy.
And I thought it would be worth having a chat about it because I talked about it at the end of the podcast this morning but didn't go into it into the usual bone-scraping atomic grain of sand on a beach level of detail that I am want to.
And so I thought I'd talk a little bit about it.
In the realm of torture.
So, this will be a...
Gosh, how to put it?
A tortuous amount of detail about...
Well, torture.
So, the idea of how we deal with discomfort is a very, very interesting idea.
And it is really the beginning of wisdom to...
Approach the problem of discomfort in a rational way, in an objective way, and in, may I dare say it, a moral way.
And the question of how we deal with discomfort is one of the basic foundations for, I think, the criteria for a successful or unsuccessful life in terms of happiness and unhappiness.
Because our unconscious is really not that fragile and neither are we.
So, to deal with discomfort, learning to deal with personal discomfort is a very, very important part of becoming a mature, wise adult to the degree with which we're all flailing away at that.
This would be something that I would talk about.
And I've certainly had more than an occasional twinge of discomfort after I started doing these podcasts.
So, after I sort of emerged from my layer of consolidation of ego strength...
So to speak. I think that's actually a cave in Italy, if I understand the Italian translation correctly.
After I emerge from this particular process...
I was able to put myself out there in terms of the podcasts.
And of course, if I were Steph Limbaugh or something like that, then I would simply continue talking about politics and rouse up, do a lot of rabble rousing and thunder at this, that or the other, and would gain a much wider audience, I think. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unhappy with the audience that we've got, and I'm very happy with it.
But if I had taken sort of the more direct route of these topics and not basically pissed people off about their families, their relationships, then I would be...
I think we would have a greater listenership, though of course it wouldn't be...
It wouldn't be worth doing. We don't need another human being out there talking about merely or only the free market.
Plenty of people have talked about the free market.
Plenty of people have talked about minarchism as a small state.
Even some people have talked about anarchism and so on.
But there's not, I think, a lot of people who try to do the whole bow-tied package together.
And since I came to anarchism through a rigorous and consistent application of certain moral principles, it really didn't make much sense for me to say, okay, well, I'm going to talk about these moral principles, but only in terms of the state.
And to that insight, of course, I owe everything, as I do most things that are decent about me, to my wife, who is...
Not only very funny, for those who've listened to Podcast 300, and you should see the live imitation of me.
It's quite something, let me tell you.
It's very funny.
But I owe a good deal to her intellectual acuity in this area, so you're taking on a team, baby.
But since I started doing this, because I go further than politics and I start talking about the family and I say, you know, your mother wears army boots and your daddy's in a dress and all this kind of stuff, then what's happened is I've received quite a...
Maybe a little more than my fair share of volatile emails about people who not exactly call me every name in the book, but who are not always too curious or complimentary about my approach to these kinds of issues.
And so I have found that I have gone through my own levels of personal discomfort around these kinds of issues.
And I used to...
And I'm sort of going to let you in on a little secret here about what it is that I'm doing...
Let me lift my kimono and blind you.
But I think it might be worth understanding where it is I'm in this, just so that you can understand where I'm coming from and where, if I have a certain kind of confidence and so on.
I'm sort of going...
Well, let me tell you a little bit before, and then we'll talk about torture.
And if this tangential introduction is not torture enough for you in order to set up the topic, then I just don't feel that I'm doing my job properly.
So I'll tell you what, I'll...
I'll take a pay cut.
So, if I start wandering into the realms of the family and personal relationships and say that we should not focus all of our energies on the state, but rather should achieve freedom in our personal lives through this, that, and the other, and that other people's ethical or moral behavior is not under your control, your only control is whether you see them, and blah, blah, blah.
So, now I sort of got a whack load when I started delving into these topics of emails about What a bad guy I was, how intolerant I was, how culty I was, and blah, blah, blah.
And as a sensitive soul, these things cut me to the quick, of course.
I sort of read them and it's just like, oh, I am a bad person.
Well, I shouldn't say. It's not quite that bad.
But it is like, oh, it's more did I go too far, more than am I a bad person.
It's more like, did I go too far...
In my explanation of these things, should I start off gentle and say, well, maybe you should talk to your parents and blah, blah, blah.
But I don't know that that would have been very helpful for a number of reasons.
In fact, I think it would have been sort of manipulative, right?
I think it's important to state the risk of this sort of process up front and the depth of it and the power of it and then let people make their own decisions.
But I didn't want to trick anyone into confronting their parents.
I know for a fact that when people confront their parents, it almost always goes very badly and And if it goes well, it's usually not for permanently, as Stanley Kowalski says.
So, what I really wanted to do was to deal with these issues head-on about family as the root of the power of the state and religion and so on.
And of course, it's pissed off a lot of people, it's alienated a lot of people, and a good chunk of them haven't been too shy about sharing that with me.
So there was quite a bit of personal discomfort.
And it's even down to silly things, right?
I mean, silly things relative to their importance in the world, right?
So, I will scour the web sometimes in the evenings.
I will scour the web looking for libertarian blogs, looking for libertarian societies, looking for objectivists and anarchists and atheists and blogs and societies and so on.
And then I will send off invitation emails to Freedom Aid Radio.
And, I don't know, I think some people have come by.
I've been cross-linked and so on, and that's been good.
But... What has happened is I occasionally get, like I got one last night, I think it was, I got an email back where I'd sent one of my invite emails off to a woman and she says, she wrote back and she said, spam is not a libertarian concept.
So I read that, and of course there's a little sting in that.
There's a little jive that you're not a libertarian because you're invading my inbox or something like that.
So spam is not a libertarian concept.
So of course all of these replies pop through my head, and a lot of them are pretty cutting.
You put your email out there, you put your ideas out there, but you don't want anyone to contact you about sharing ideas.
I see. And because it was kind of a jerky response, my particular impulse, which was a false self impulse, was to lash back, right?
Because obviously this was a, you're a bad guy, you're invading my inbox, it's this unsolicited spam, you're a, you know, whatever, right?
So she got to, because I put my return address, right, she got to lash out at someone, maybe she gets a lot of spam, Lord knows I do, and so she got to lash out at a spammer, you're a bad libertarian, you're an I'm invading my personal property or whatever, right?
And of course, that doesn't help at all, right?
So my impulse was to write something back pretty cutting, right?
Oh, okay, so you're sort of for the free market, but not for any kind of advertising.
Isn't that interesting? So you put your email out there, but you don't want anyone to contact you with resources that you can use that might help.
Blah, blah, blah, right? So anyway, I just wrote back and said, I'm so sorry.
I generally don't consider it spam if I don't charge for what it is that I'm doing and it's commercial free and so on, but...
I won't bother you again, right?
So I sort of wanted her to at least understand.
So this is a silly, tiny example where I felt a bit of a stab and a couple of cutting responses came back, but of course it doesn't really help.
So in terms of managing discomfort, what I felt was, I felt, oh, I'm a...
I'm a bad libertarian.
I'm a bad respecter of property rights.
And of course, I would feel this sometimes when people would write to me and say, oh, you sell to the government.
How hypocritical is that?
Blah, blah, blah. And so I'd go, oh, maybe I am hypocritical.
Maybe I'm telling you. So I would have those impulses where I would feel sort of a kind of strong and unpleasant self-doubt in what it is that I'm doing.
And, of course, I sent an email off to this guy, Tyler, who runs marginalrevolution.com with my friend Alex, inviting him to come and listen to a podcast on the minimum wage.
And he wrote back and said, hey, thanks so much.
I appreciate it. So it just goes to show you how subjective all of this sort of stuff is.
So... Just because somebody else is managing their feelings through negative action towards you or attempting to, doesn't mean that you should do it in return, right?
So my guess is that this woman, I think it's a woman, this woman got an email from me inviting her to a libertarian podcast.
And I don't say free because I ask for donations, but of course it's all perfectly voluntary.
But she got this, and so she got angry.
She got angry at me, and she didn't have any curiosity, like, how did this person get my email?
I wonder why this person is sending me...
I obviously have a libertarian blog, like I'm not sending it to the Republican Party, and I've got this libertarian blog.
I've got my email right there, so if somebody sends me a libertarian resource, that's not perfectly illogical, right?
But... Obviously, she just got angry at me.
And rather than sort of look at her own anger and say, Ah, okay, well, somebody's sending me a libertarian resource.
I'm a libertarian with my email on the web.
It's sort of like being a heavily public figure and then being irritated because...
You're a public figure. It doesn't make much sense, right?
So rather than her sort of looking at her own feelings and saying, well, gee, I wonder why I'm so angry.
Let me at least go have, before I sort of flame this guy or give him a sort of snarky email, let me at least go and have a look at this site and blah, blah, blah, right?
And if she doesn't want to go and look at my site, then obviously she doesn't care that much about the email and so why send a response to me?
And I have had a few people who've asked me to take them off their list, and of course I don't contact them again.
I don't really email anyone again, right?
Because I just figure I don't want to spam people, so I'll just send them one invite, and if they come, great.
If not, I'm not going to bother them again.
So, but by sort of, she felt irritation, she jumped to conclusions, and then rather than try and figure out why one little email makes her so angry, rather than anything to do with that...
She just sends an email back with a sort of nasty, cutting sort of remark.
And I've got to tell you, an email in my inbox that's not solicited, I just don't see the point in taking time.
Yeah, maybe I'll block the sender, maybe I'll whatever, right?
But in taking the time to write back a cutting email, this is obviously somebody who's experiencing a feeling that they don't want to experience, and like anger, frustration, irritation, it's got nothing to do with me, right?
What does she know, right? These podcasts might change her life, right?
Who knows? Probably not if she's sending snarky little responses back, but who knows?
But this is somebody who is experiencing anger and frustration and not sort of saying, well, this seems like rather a strong reaction for one little email that's come from a fellow libertarian who's offering a free resource.
I mean, this seems like quite a...
So maybe I should sort of figure out what's going on.
No, she doesn't want to explore her own feelings.
She wants to discharge her feelings.
She wants to do this sort of cathartic boom and get them out.
So then when she discharges her feelings and she sends an email, the snarky email back to me, then...
She feels like she's done something right.
She's pushed back at the spam beast or whatever, and she's done the right thing and asserted herself or stood her ground or something like that.
Told me what's what. And then her feeling, of course, is relatively well managed through her actions towards me.
Of course, not personal towards me or anything like that.
It's just her way of managing her own anger and frustration.
it out against me, then it's nothing to do with anything else in her life, right?
Which I can't imagine it's not.
I mean, obviously, there is other things in her life that are making her angry and frustrated.
It's not really coming down to my email.
But by acting on my email, she gets to manage all the other aspects of her life that are causing problems, perhaps.
And the people who send me angry emails about their families, or I even had one from a couple from a guy, guys who were really big on marks and the fact that I had a negative email about Marx, it causes them acute discomfort.
And rather than sort of say to themselves, well, I wonder why this person's opinion is making me so angry...
Instead, they sort of flame me with an email about, you know, what kind of idiot is going to compare Marx to this and that and the other, and Marx was blah blah blah, this wasn't his, right?
They're not engaging me with any curiosity, and they're certainly not trying to correct me in a way that sort of is positive or productive.
They're just, you know, flaming me, and they're hoping that I'm going to take up the whip and keep flaming myself.
And so I find that to be sort of interesting.
If you were to dig into it, and if I were able to sort of get the truth out of these people, I bet you it would go something like this.
My father taught me that Marx was good, and I'm a socialist, or my parents are socialists, or my friends are socialists.
And I've been taught that socialism is really great and this guy is telling me that socialism isn't great and he's doing it in a half-hour podcast with lots of facts and lots of theory and the fact that nobody has ever mentioned this to me before but Marx was just taken to be great indicates...
At the very least, I've been given a somewhat one-sided view of communism or socialism or Marxism or something like that, which means that people haven't given me the right objectives, but they've acted as if it's true, telling me that Marx is good and so on.
Let's just say it's my parents.
My parents are Marxist professors.
They tell me Marx is wonderful.
And then along comes this oddly accented Brit boy, and he tells me that Marx is not good, and he has some arguments that aren't Deranged.
And he's doing it in half an hour, right?
I didn't have to take a full year course to understand this, so it's not like it's that hard to communicate.
It might be hard to think up, but it's not that hard to communicate.
And so if it's really that easy to communicate some of the flaws and problems within Marx, then the professors, my parents, my teachers, my friends, whoever, kind of were giving me like a one-sided thing.
They were telling me something was absolutely true, but they never addressed any of the arguments in this relatively simple half-hour podcast.
Therefore, they were probably lying to me.
They were probably manipulating me.
And so, the moment somebody hears something about Marx, and we're just taking a fairly simple example, you can substitute just about anything, the moment that somebody takes something fairly simple, fairly simple objections to Marx and hear it, then they don't have answers to it.
And they then get uncomfortable, because the proposition rears its ugly head that they might have been lied to by people who claimed that they knew the truth, but were in fact merely re-expressing prejudicial beliefs, one-sided beliefs, and passing them off as the truth, which means that they're not good people.
In terms of intellectual integrity, but of course they came across and told whoever is listening to my podcast that we are good people, we really care about the poor, this, that and the other.
And so, when people hear my podcast about Marx, they have a huge amount of discomfort.
And rather than say, well, this is interesting, I wonder why I would be getting so angry at somebody who is, you know, trying to do right by Marx in terms of, he understands the viewpoints and he's got some objections, and of course, you know, 70 million people did die in Russia and so on.
So why would I get so angry at somebody?
If that person is malevolently twisting Marxist views, then being in communication with them isn't really going to help, right?
This is somebody who's just working out weird issues.
Maybe he was beaten with Dusk Kapital when he was younger.
So getting in touch with that kind of person is not really going to do much good, right?
If somebody says that the free market is Satan, then I don't really have a debate with them, right?
The free market is not Satan.
It's actually Beelzebub. No wait, Zeus.
No wait, it's some other Cerberus.
So you don't really have debates with people who just come up with crazy ideas and attach evil labels to what it is that you're talking about and don't have any arguments.
So I must have some kind of argument in order.
It can't be just insane, because otherwise they wouldn't.
Like, I must have struck a nerve.
I guess that's what I'm saying. Otherwise, they wouldn't send me emails saying I was an idiot for what I believed about Marx.
But they experience anxiety and they desire to act on it in order to discharge those feelings.
So... They send me an email which is kind of pissy and kind of aggressive and then sort of walk away dusting off their hands and say, well, I showed him and then their discomfort kind of goes away, right?
So if you become a conduit of abuse, then you get to not feel the vulnerability that occurred when you actually were abused, right?
So let's just say that your dad raised you that you never ever question authority, right?
And then you come across someone like me, who, yeah, I'm not so big a problem questioning authority, and you then get very uncomfortable, because I'm disproving the absolute, you must never question authority.
Or, those who question authority are bad people.
I think it would be kind of hard to listen to a couple of podcasts and say, ooh, that stiff guy, he's a bad fella.
He is just downright desperate and nasty.
And so it's hard for me to sort of people say, well, he seems like a fairly genial and merry fellow, and so he's got a good relationship with his wife and a successful career, so he can't be all bad.
And so... It's kind of hard for people to say that I'm a bad guy.
So what's happening is they're kind of coming across living proof that it may actually be a good thing to question authority, whereas they've been told, you can't question authority.
Now, what they need to then do, as I've mentioned before a couple of times, is they need to normalize that behavior.
So they need to say that, yes, telling people not to question authority is a virtuous action.
And doing it in an abusive way, as my father did to me, is a good thing to do.
So snarling at someone and being pissy and hostile, as my father was to me, is a virtuous and good action.
And the best way to prove to yourself that something is a virtuous and good action, when it's not, is to do it, is to mimic it, is to repeat it.
And that avoids you from feeling the pain of having been mistreated.
When you mistreat others, then you get to avoid the pain of being mistreated yourself.
The problem is, of course, that you get trapped in sadomasochistic relationships for the rest of your life, so yeah, there's a downside.
But the upside is that you don't actually ever have to confront your own father, you don't ever feel the acute pain consciously of having been abused, and so it seems like a relatively good idea.
Nietzsche talks about this quite a bit.
People who are mistreated become overcharged with hostility, and then they vent it on other people and feel better.
This is sort of how emotions get a bad name, because the emotion that's not applied to its just and proper object will always be abusive.
So, if somebody lied to some guy about Marx's whole life, and probably about a whole lot of other things...
And then he gets mad at me instead of getting mad at the people who lied to him, then it's going to come out abusive, right?
If you get angry at the people who've done you wrong, then you're in good shape, right?
Your anger is appropriate and it's going to be positive and liberating and healthy.
But if you then switch the anger over to an innocent party and act out the abuse that was performed against you in order to normalize it and avoid the pain of having been abused, then you are going to end up in a particular kind of personal hell that I wouldn't even want to contemplate.
So let's have a look, or listen to, I'm listening to Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command, I think it is, where they talk about, or he talks about the situations led up to the Abu Ghraib tortures, Abu Ghraib tortures as they pronounce it, which I'm sure is correct. And so, an exchange was sort of interesting.
Of course, there was a lot of sexual humiliation going on in these prisons, and people say, well, it's because they know that in Arabic, men aren't supposed to have any homosexual thoughts or feelings.
Being naked in front of another man is bad, and so they're torturing them that way.
But I wouldn't say that it's that sophisticated.
So one of the things that they did was they had prisoners simulate oral sex with each other.
They sodomized them with broomsticks and they put them in sexual positions and they had to masturbate and so on.
And there's an exchange that I think is very interesting.
One soldier went into one of the sort of 666 layers of hell that was Abu Ghraib and the A woman and a man, it was Lindy England and her lover, I think, but a woman and a man were making the prisoners lie in sexual positions and masturbate and so on.
And the guy said, wow, look at these guys.
You leave them alone for, these animals, you leave them alone for two seconds and look what they get up to.
Ha ha ha, orgy, orgy, orgy.
And then the woman said, hey look, he's getting hard, right, because he's masturbating himself.
And this to me is a very interesting phenomenon.
I mean, sick and evil, but interesting.
And the reason that it's interesting is because there's simply no possibility, I absolutely guarantee this, I would put my whole intellectual reputation on this, absolutely no possibility that these people did not experience sexual abuse when they were younger.
They absolutely, totally and positively experienced sexual abuse as children.
Because what they're doing in Abu Ghraib is normalizing sexual abuse.
So what they're doing is they're saying, right, because people who abuse children don't think that the children find it horrifying to be abused.
What they feel is that the children are naturally curious and sexual and that they take pleasure out of sexual interactions with adults and they're all horny and they want to get involved and they want to do it and all that kind of stuff, right?
They don't say, I'm torturing this poor child's innocence with premature sexual activity, right?
And giving them a horrible secret to hide and gnaw at them for the rest of their lives.
And they say, nah, they want it.
The children are sexually curious.
Look at the Mayans or whatever.
They come up with all this nonsense anthropology.
And what they're doing, though, is they're saying that these children really wanted it.
Right? So this, of course, was the perspective of their abusers when they were sexually abused as children.
So what they're saying is that if you leave these victims, these victims who are completely in my control, if you will leave them alone for a moment, they will voluntarily jump all over each other and simulate orgies and masturbate and so on.
And so all human beings, if you don't watch over them and so on, they will just start having orgies spontaneously with each other, gender irrelevant, and the fact that they're prisoners, irrelevant.
And so what's happening is they're actually forcing them, the prison guards are forcing the prisoners into sexually compromised positions and then saying to other people, look, they want it, they love it.
They're keen on it.
They live for orgies. And it's the same thing with what Lindy in England said, which was, look, he's getting hard.
And what that means is that we're forcing him to masturbate, and look, he's getting hard.
In other words, he really wants it.
We've liberated him, right?
We're doing him a good thing, because he really does want to masturbate, and he really does want to get sexually excited.
And now that we've forced him into this position, he's loving it, right?
I mean, this is what abusers do, right?
They can't process the vulnerability and horror of being put into those kinds of situations, or they refuse to process it.
So what they do is they normalize it.
So they say, what I'm doing is a good thing.
It's liberating these people.
They would do it anyway. And, of course, they only say this to outsiders, which is exactly what their abusers did to them.
Their abusers abused them and then said that they wanted it.
You see this with rapists as well.
She really wanted it, and now she's changed her mind for whatever reason.
Now she's, you know, and there's hypocrisy that's always considered to be going on in these kinds of situations, right?
So when a rapist rapes a woman, he says to some degree or another, she wanted it, she let me on, and now she's been courted that she wanted a bad boy.
And now she's just hypocritically saying that she didn't want to and so on.
So what happens is that these people are not experiencing their own horror and moral catastrophes that occurred for them as children.
They're not processing any of that stuff.
And so because they're not processing it, they have to manage their feelings.
This is an extreme example. They have to manage their feelings by acting out the abuse that they themselves refuse to process.
Because the abuse happened, and that can't be ignored, because these people were sexually abused as children, or at the very least physically violently abused.
And so that occurred.
That can't be ignored. That's a basic fact.
And so they can't sort of live as if that abuse didn't occur, and either they're going to deal with it and deal with the vulnerability, the rage, the shame, all of the problems that go along with the sexual abuse, or they're going to go the other way.
They can't sort of go in the middle, because it actually happened and it was horrifying, so they either have to act it out and say that it was a great thing and thus become the abusers, which is a way of managing their own feelings through actions rather than through contemplation, And that is obviously horribly unjust and is one of the roots of the great evils in the world.
So thanks so much for listening.
Hope you're doing well. Have yourselves a great weekend.
I guess I will chat with people on Sunday using Skype.
Check on the boards for all that.
Sunday, 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
And drop me some cash.
I would really appreciate it.
And a new Lou Rockwell article.
Check that out. And sign up for FeedBurner and take a listener survey, please.
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