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July 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:34
327 The Rise of Evil Part 2: Theory
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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
It is the 12th of June, 2006.
We are going to continue with the topic from this morning.
It's 24 minutes past 2.
I'm just driving back from my meeting and my lunch.
And, you know, I find this a... it's a tough topic to talk about.
I find this very difficult.
It's depressing.
This is where the real core of the sort of living hell of human existences are.
And... You can say a lot of things about Hitler, but I bet you he wasn't happy.
I bet you there was a huge amount of human misery occurring there in his soul and in his agony, which is then wreaked upon the world.
And there really is, given that this is the majority of human beings' existence, a lot of pain.
A lot of pain in this. I'm sort of getting a sense of that as I'm working my way through the topic.
I was sitting there thinking to myself as I was grabbing a decaf from Timmy Hortons.
I was sitting there going, oh man, maybe I won't do this topic on the way home.
I... I feel kind of depressed about it.
Of course, that's usually a good indication that it's worth pursuing, but I just tell you, I don't know if you feel it too, but it's a black world to be in from this standpoint, this stuff that we're talking about.
But let's keep plowing on and see if we can't come up with something useful because when you're sort of halfway into the fog, turning around doesn't always help.
So let's just keep going on and see if we can't sort something out about where we're going.
And of course, if I wasn't feeling depressed about this topic or sad about this topic or That this topic was painful, then I probably wouldn't be on the right track.
So let's see if the old true self unconscious is going to kick up something useful.
Now, when you go through terrific, savage, brutal, and endless child abuse, the real question that you have in your heart of hearts is, is this the world?
Is this the world?
See, the false self believes that it is the world, right?
The false self is the Catholic self, to some degree, in that it is the world to be abused.
Abuse is human interaction, as Sartre said in No Exit.
He said, Hell is a great play, and I'll give away the ending, but these people end up in Hell.
And they are, I think, four of them sitting in a room, and they are petty and vindictive souls who begin torturing each other sort of psychologically, and they realize, because they know that they're in hell, and at one point near the end, one of them says, well, we're in hell, but where are the devils?
Where are the demons? Who's going to come and torture us?
And then they realize, of course, at the end, that nobody is coming, and that the demons are each other.
Hell is other people.
And this is the false self axiom that you have to hide because everyone's a predator.
You have to be false because truth is rendered limb from limb.
No one will help.
No one is coming.
No one will save you.
Virtue is impossible.
It's nihilism.
The false self is the nihilistic axiom.
Now, the great challenge of human history and human growth, one of the great challenges, in my opinion, is that this is history, for the most part.
History is a hell of others.
And to be perfectly frank about my own social circle, it's pretty much the case for my own social circle as well.
But hell is, I mean, not the people who've remained, a couple of people who've remained, but say a couple of years back, that being around other people required and requires falsehood.
Now, the false self says that that is the nature of reality.
That to exist is to lie.
To survive is to lie.
That life is lying.
And we, as philosophers or ethicists or anarcho-capitalists, we know, even as libertarians or objectivists, we know what that is.
We know deep in our very bones what that's all about.
To exist...
Is to lie. I know that's a bit of an inflammatory statement.
Let me sort of explain what I mean by that.
The people who I haven't seen in a number of years will still ask me how my brother is and how my mother is.
And generally, because I don't want to get into the whole story and it's not really worth it in my relationship to them, I'll say, oh, they're pretty much the same.
Which I know is true, but it's not the whole truth.
It's a hedge. When I'm at work and people say, so what are you doing for Mother's Day?
Putting on a big flower dress and cleaning the kitchen.
I don't tell the truth about that either.
When people say to me, how's your father?
I don't say, no clue, haven't spoken to the man in half a dozen years.
And hope never to speak to him again.
Because there's a strong amount of disapproval.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe everyone else can handle this.
I can't. Christina and I have difficulty in this area, and we might as well be honest about the vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
And I don't think that's a problem, because if it was easy, then we wouldn't be fighting the fight we're fighting.
So, when you have some scrap of the truth, which is what we aim for, then to exist in society...
Is to be faced with the constant near requirement, but certainly challenge, of lying.
You've got to lie. You've got to lie to live.
You've got to lie to live.
The best I've been able to do...
It's to keep my falsehoods to a minimum.
I don't sweat it anymore when I lie.
It always used to be, well, what do you think of George Bush?
Well, I think he's Hitler.
You know, to very many people around the world, he is exactly the same as the way that we would view Hitler.
I think that he is a monstrously evil human being with control of far too much power.
He's been completely corrupted. I have some sympathy for him, and I think that the kindest thing that we could do would be to take away all his power and get him into therapy.
So when people say to me, well, how do you Canadians view the war in Iraq?
I don't say, well, I can't conceivably speak for all Canadians, but these are my views.
Because these are just things that I choose.
I could certainly say all of that without a doubt.
Never close any deals.
Lose my house. Lose my job.
No, lose my job, lose my house, lose my car, and not have any money to podcast.
Or pay for bandwidth. So...
I compromise, and I'm aware that I'm compromising.
And the reason that I can compromise is because I have a blessed, blessed area in my life wherein complete honesty and authenticity is the norm, is de rigueur, is what is.
And that is my marriage.
As I made it to an island, now I can look at the sea and say, holy crap, that was a lot of swimming.
And I can go for a swim, in terms of social falsehoods, But the core of my existence is an open and authentic and honest relationship with my wife and to some friends to a large degree, but nowhere near as complete as it is with my wife.
With all of my other friends, frankly.
With all of my other friends, and this includes some of the people on Freedom Aid Radio, but with all of my other friends, there are topics of significant emotional volatility that you just can't go there.
Of course, people may feel this about me too.
I'm not sort of saying that I'm immune to this, but...
To be alive is to lie.
To have integrity is to lie.
If you've got no integrity, then there's no such thing as lying.
If you are a utilitarian, then there's no moral rule called don't lie.
There's a moral rule called, well, lie if it advances your advantage, and don't lie if it doesn't.
But there's no moral. As soon as you understand the universality of ethics, then you are in a situation where ethics breeds noncompliance, breeds unethical behavior, or is unethical behavior.
So, hell, in sort of a very real sense that I understand this, is other people.
Not because other people are innately hellish or original sin or anything like that, but simply because everybody is raised to lie.
And to attack anybody who's telling the truth.
This is just... I mean, we're a bunch of rabid jackals all turning on each other while our masters laugh and pull the old puppet strings.
So, hell is other people.
And anybody who doesn't feel this deeply, like if you're sort of getting up in arms, and you could be right, right?
If you're getting up in arms and say, oh, Steph lies, that's evil, I have no problem, then just report to me how it goes when you tell the truth to everyone.
Just let me know.
Maybe I'm missing some way to approach it.
I think that I can communicate the truth in a positive way.
And I'll put the truth out there, but not all of it, and not all at once, and not in an unqualified kind of way to begin with, because it just doesn't work, and it doesn't make me happy, and my job is not to be a warrior for truth to the exclusion of all other self-interest, but my job is to be a happy human being, and that's what makes me happiest.
So, this false self, though, is based on the idea that truth is impossible.
And not only is truth impossible, but truth will get you beaten up, or killed, or violated, or hurt, or excluded, or thrown out, or kidnapped, or starved, or, you know, whatever.
Whatever signals we got from our parents when we told the truth or asked honest questions and weren't satisfied with their nonsensical argument for morality answers, whatever punishment we seemed to be getting from our parents in this area, exclusion, or non-talking, or Whatever punishments that parents...
And of course these all equate, as I've said before, to death in the mind of a child.
All these punishments equate to death in the mind of a child because to be excluded by your parents is to die.
I mean, it's sort of fundamental.
This is the power that parents have, which hopefully we'll never experience again unless we get a really bad nurse at the end of it all.
But that's okay because we'll have had lots of time to develop our love of freedom and our capacity to be...
Maybe if we have Alzheimer's and a bad nurse, this will occur at the end or whatever.
But... The false self is that which believes that honesty is impossible, that virtue is death.
So it's a shielding mechanism, and it arises for very honest and good reasons.
It's a little tough to shuck off, right?
It's a good suit of armor to put on, but if you don't take it off with the great struggle that it involves, then it sort of turns into one of these alien hand things that comes and lays eggs in your belly and can't get off your face, right?
So... This sort of basic principle that occurs with the false self, that honesty is death, virtue is destruction.
That's sort of the basic paradox that occurs within the false self.
And you can see this in religion, particularly in, well, most of the major religions that I can think of, which have divine punishment of some kind.
You can see this very much.
In Catholicism, your natural self is evil.
Because of original sin, because of the sin of Adam and Eve.
Adam, really. Eve by proxy.
Your natural self is evil.
So, to be is to be evil.
So, existence is destruction.
And the only salvation is through our Lord Jesus Christ and so on.
And that's through abandoning your will, abandoning yourself and surrendering to the true God or the priest or whatever, right?
So there's sort of parallels in lots of ways of that as well.
I experienced a lot of this when I was a kid, not only in terms of religion, but in terms of just the general ethic of social life.
So, for instance, when I grew up, and I certainly would put this question out there to people who are listening, tell me more about your experiences this way, because I think it's an important topic.
In what way were you portrayed as innately wrong without significant correction?
This is a very important aspect of being a child.
So when I was a kid, it was like, children are selfish.
Children are lazy.
Children are schemers.
Children are manipulative.
Children are petty. And there was a whole list of all of this sort of stuff that went on in boarding school and in school in general.
Children are willful and disobedient because children ask questions that people don't have the answer to and so they get bullied.
Nobody wants to admit that they don't know because they would have to face their own parenting, the lives of their own parents and so on.
So in North America...
The big one is, I think, I mean, you can let me know what your experiences were.
I came here as a little older.
But in North America, the big thing is selfishness.
This is from the Judeo-Christian altruism slash socialism that we're currently infected with as a mental tumor.
And it is that children are selfish.
So you have to learn to become part of a team, and you can't deny the team, that's selfish.
And selfishness is the big gun that's leveled at the self-esteem of children in North America.
I mean, there are a couple other ones, lazy and greedy and...
Immature. But selfish, to me, is what I've seen as the big one.
Maybe it's different. And of course, if you're religious, then, yeah, ungrateful, selfish, greedy, disrespectful, willful, disobedient, manipulative, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, to be is to be wrong.
Your natural self is wrong, bad, evil, nasty, whatever.
Right? That's sort of how all this stuff sort of starts, and how people end up so corrupted.
To be is to be wrong.
To exist, and you need a huge amount of fixing.
That's the fundamental thing that's told to children.
You're born broken. But if you submit to me, thou shalt be mended.
Which is complete nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
It's like that old Twilight Zone where you can't see the doctors or the patient, and the doctors are all saying, oh my God, she's hideous.
I don't even know if plastic surgery can save her.
She has so much disfigurement and so much of a ghastly and maligned and mutated facial features.
I don't know if there's anything we can do.
We can maybe bring her to some semblance of normality.
Who knows? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, of course, the camera pulls back, and you see that there's a beautiful woman In the bed, and all of the doctors standing around her have these grotesque and misshapen goblin-like faces.
This is parenting, in a nutshell.
You get this beautiful, innocent, healthy, virtuous child, and you have to fill that child full of bile and poison and filth to get that child to believe that fundamentally they're broken, but if they submit to the group, they can be saved.
But only if they keep submitting to the group and keep submitting.
I mean, the devil rules the world in this sense and from this standpoint.
And this is true all over the world. There is no place that I know of, at least, that is immune, except maybe some libcab.
Kind of households, or maybe this, anarcho-capitalist households, or, you know, basically rational.
Who knows, right? But this is like, the devil rules the world, and children are poisoned from day one in this kind of area.
Now, the question, in general, is the more extreme this kind of abuse gets, the more likely you are to believe that it's the world, right?
That it's not your parents, it's not a choice, it is what is, right?
Then abuse becomes indistinguishable from gravity, right?
So to exist is both to be wrong and to be rendered.
To be wrong and to be attacked.
And to be wrong and to be abused.
So existence is abuse.
Existence is abuse.
Power is abuse.
Power is destruction.
And you are either being destroyed or you are doing the destroying.
We can see some of, of course, Hitler's psychology, and boy, am I ever going to get emails about psychologizing from a distance, but what I'll do is I'll switch to fluent Weimar German for the rest of the podcast.
Anyway, so, existence is domination or being dominated, inflicting pain or receiving pain.
Existence is sadomasochism.
You sort of get each side of the sharpened stick.
You get one side or the other.
And so life is hell.
Existence is hell. Other people are hell.
Interaction is hell.
And because you have never developed any joy in your own existence, solitude is hell.
You have no self in these kinds of environments.
So you are forced to interact with others because being alone is a complete nightmare.
You must interact with other people.
And the only interaction that's possible is kill or be killed.
Domination or submission.
No other possibilities. Because, and this is sort of the fundamental thing that I'm trying to sort of work my way towards, and I apologize if I'm taking too much time, but I've just sort of got a couple of ideas that I'm trying to flesh out, so I hope that this is okay as far as that goes.
But the real question that occurs...
Based on my own experience, this is all...
Start subjective, I'm trying to work it into something more objective, but of course you can tell me if it fits your history or circumstances or whatever.
But in my experience, when I would say that I had been abused, people didn't want to hear about it.
They really, really didn't.
And it wasn't like I'd walk up to someone in a store and say, Hey, I got beaten!
Or, hey, my mother walked around the house naked until we kicked her out when I was in my teens.
Hey, my mother was inappropriate in every way.
I mean, people don't want to hear that stuff.
And this is a continuation of the abuse, right?
To be able to listen to somebody's tale of pain and not tell them they're wrong, not tell them how to fix it, not tell them that they have to forgive, but just shut up and listen to it.
It's fundamentally how you rid the world of evil.
We'll sort of get to that in a little bit.
But... People need witnesses to their own suffering if they are to classify it as suffering and not as existence.
Sort of very fundamental principle here.
If you have suffered...
And telling people about your suffering serves to increase your suffering.
So I suffered as a child and telling just about everyone who asked, you know, well, what was your childhood like?
What are you doing with your mom?
Well, nothing. Well, why not? Well, because she was bad.
Oh, come on, really? How so?
How is she bad? Well, she beat me and she did this, she did that.
Well, you know, there was a different generation.
Then people just don't want to hear, right?
So, I mean, I sort of volunteer this stuff, but if people ask, I'll tell them.
And people universally did not want to hear.
Universally This supposed compassionate society that's so into helping the poor and providing health care for the sick and caring for the age did not want to hear about child abuse.
They just don't want to hear about it.
So, if when you experience abuse as a child and you try to talk about it with people who are asking as an adult and they don't listen and say, oh my god, that was awful.
That just sounds terrible.
I'm so sorry you had to go through that.
Then you can begin the process of classifying the experiences that you had.
And classifying is too abstract a term because it's a very, very fundamental and blood-soul-emotion-laden process.
You can begin the process of classifying your experiences as non-universal.
To some degree, as subjective.
I mean, that they happen to you, but they're not universal.
In the same way that gravity is universal, right?
The fact that you were abused is subjected to you, but not universally human interactions.
Now, once you begin the process of saying, it is not existence that hurts.
It is not life that hurts.
It is not society as a whole that hurts.
It is not drawing breath and speaking forth and listening that hurts.
It was what happened to me as a child from these specific people that hurts.
So to cease to universalize it, to denormalize it, as I've mentioned in other podcasts, is the first growth towards virtue and hope and joy and differentiation, but it's a severe blow against the true self.
So sorry, let me rephrase that.
It is a severe blow against the false self.
Because then the false self is no longer a defense against the universal self, In other words, a personality structure that is essential and should be dominant because it's universal.
Like if the false self was the only thing that could deal with gravity, you'd want the false self to run things.
If the true self thought that it could fly and float, you wouldn't want the true self being around at any particular time except maybe when you're sitting in your chair.
But once you get the principle that what happened to you was specific pain caused by specific people and not required and not innate to the nature of human interaction, We have these debates on the board and people say, well, human nature is this and human nature is that.
And we don't know. I don't think so.
You can tell what human nature is by what is opposed.
So, if children are told repeatedly...
That they are evil or wrong or bad or sinful or screwed up or weird or selfish or disobedient, willful, manipulative.
If children are told that repeatedly and with emotional bullying, it is because children do not believe that to begin with.
Propaganda is always the opposite of human nature, because if it was human nature, you wouldn't need propaganda.
You don't need a whole lot of propaganda to say, eat chocolate and have sex, because that's stuff we want to do.
But we do need propaganda to believe that we're bad because we're not.
And of course, the fundamental paradox is, well, if children are bad and you're adults, then you grew from children, so you must be bad as well.
No, no, no, no. We're bad because we conform.
Well, who do we conform to?
Well, we conform to the leader. Well, the leader was born bad, and so the leader must be bad.
No, no. The leader has grown up and is good, but the leader doesn't conform to anyone, so how is the leader good?
No, no, no. See, the leader conforms to God.
Well, what's God? God made us, but we're bad.
Yes, but it's our fault.
But how? Well, we disobeyed God, but God knew we were going to do that because he's omniscient.
Doesn't matter. We're still bad.
Like, you can't ask any of these questions as a child because you will get severely, severely attacked either verbally or physically.
All right, so all of these jails of illusion, as I talked about before, and it's important to understand this.
I know that it sounds apocalyptic.
I know that it sounds down, and this is why it's depressing for me because this is the world.
This is the world. And this was your life.
This was your experience.
I'm not telling you anything that's particular to me.
The details were different.
The principles were the same. And if you were one of the people, and I do know a couple of people like this, who sort of grew up in, quote, stable and nice families and so on, the blind spot that you then have is that you don't think this is the world.
So you can't hear other people's pain.
There are people, and this is the paradox, right?
You could call this the mysticism-slash-rational paradox, or the Eastern-Western paradox, or the religion-science paradox, but this is the weakness.
Either you were brought up in a situation of explicit pain and manipulation and control and emotional or physical or sexual bullying and dominance, in which case you understand pain, but you think it's universal.
Or you were brought up in sort of a, quote, nice, middle-class, stable family with...
You know, 2.1 children and parents working and station wagon with wood paneling and soccer practice and so on.
All of which are fine. Good things.
Nothing wrong with those things. But your parents could not tell you that you are the exception and the rule is pain.
The rule for children is pain.
This is the existence for children.
It's pain. Pain and panic and fear and compliance and conformity and giddiness and excitement and sugar and pain.
I mean, this is... This is the life of children.
And they have to have all of these extraordinary pressures applied to them because by nature they are calm and curious and rational and affectionate and all of the things which people in power can't have because if that's the way people are we really don't need anyone in power, right?
Because then the pursuit of power would be the sickness not simply existence, right?
Which would mean that the people in power are evil and the average person is not.
So either you have experienced pain but think it's universal, or you have experienced less pain but can't recognize the existence of pain because you have a shallow understanding of society.
Either way, you're flying blind.
And either way, there's this great divide between people who experience pain but think it's universal and inevitable.
And people who didn't experience as much pain, but think that the people who had experienced pain are milking it, are victims, are professional victims, are faking it, are exaggerating it, should just, you know, wake up and cheer up and stop obsessing about the past.
And, you know, you get this kind of shallow bullshit that goes on with people who haven't experienced as much pain, but find the existence of pain to be kind of threatening.
Because, of course, if their parents didn't tell them about the pain that's in the world, then the parents kind of mess...
Telling them something fairly important.
And so they have to defend their parents' ignorance in this realm.
Ignoring the pain of the world doesn't help.
And teaching your children that there's no pain in the world when the vast majority, even if we say everyone in North America or everyone in the West is happy, the majority of the world is still in agony.
Not telling them about that is, I think, kind of not helpful.
Not helpful, right? So, to return to our good friend Herr Hitler, this is a gentleman...
Who was raised in a brutal, brutal religious household.
I've got to guess. There's no way to know for sure.
I've got to guess raped as a child.
The violations that occur were pretty significant.
And the sexual violations that occur in the concentration camps that he built were echoes of that original soul murder or attempted soul murder.
So the man grows up with extraordinary pain, a complete horror of his own existence and of existence as a whole.
Now, he doesn't kill himself because he says...
This is life. And I identify myself with the nation-state so that I can serve something and at least find some kind of martial joy and conformity and compliance to an imaginary entity so that I can put one foot in front of the other and live, right?
Because your testicles want to reproduce, right?
So they don't want you to kill yourself, so they'll make up whatever crap they need to to get you to sort of keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Now, the real question was, I think, in Germany...
At the time, what was the perception of Hitler's upbringing as a whole, right?
So when Hitler said, yes, my father beat me violently and I was raped by three uncles, did people say, oh my God, that is the most horrifying thing in the world.
Oh, I'm so sorry. What a terrible, terrible existence you had.
Of course not. This was Germany.
Poisonous pedagogy was the rule, as we talked about last time.
Alice Miller is the name of the woman.
It's come back to me now. Drama of the Gifted Child.
Well worth a read. Her stuff on Kafka is also very good.
But in Germany, when he went from his home to church and to school, did he experience any denormalization of his own horrifying existence?
Well, no. Because pretty much everyone, with the exception that rape was probably not the majority of child rape, but the exception...
It's that there was no exception to this kind of rule.
Everybody said, that's exactly right.
That's how children should be raised.
Because children are willful and they're disobedient and evil and selfish and blah, blah, blah.
So the fact that your parents attempted to drive your innate evil out of you with beatings only proves their virtue.
So Hitler then experiences a re-abuse of the symptoms, right?
A re-confirmation of abuse and of the horror of human existence.
Every time that he goes out, people praise his parents for beating him up.
So everybody sides with his parents and his teachers and his clerics to confirm the honor and the virtue of beating him up, subjecting him to the most horrendous kinds of abuse that can be imagined.
So in other words, Hitler has no capacity to differentiate Between abusive and non-abusive treatment.
He has no chance to denormalize the abuse that is occurring.
So everywhere he goes, the confirmation still exists that life is hell.
That existence is abuse.
And that's a fairly important thing, I think, to understand about the development of the psychology of this kind of stuff.
And yes, you can absolutely email to me and say, what the hell are you talking about Hitler for?
Well, of course, I'm not talking about Hitler.
I'm talking about you. Hitler's a little bit more of a convenient way, and I'm not saying that you're as evil as Hitler.
Please don't misunderstand me.
I mean, willfully you can do whatever you want, but it's not my intent.
I'm not talking about Hitler. If you don't find that there's any resonance for you, if there's no true self-echo with you of this kind of situation, then of course I can't prove it to you.
I can't prove to you what happened to you when you were a child.
There's no evidence, right? I have to rely on your word.
And... So I'm not trying to psychologize Hitler.
I'm talking about a cause and effect.
I think that there's stuff that we do know about Hitler, and I think that there's stuff that we can reproduce in the people that we have histories from who have similar sociopathic tendencies, genocidal tendencies to Hitler, that they did not go through happy, loving childhoods.
And so this has something to do with it, and I'm just trying to work on a framework about how we might understand this.
It's very tentative, and it may turn out to be complete nonsense, but I think it's worth, so far it feels like we're onto something.
Well, now you can email me and tell me, what do you mean feelings?
Have you thrown aside all reason?
Well, let's see. Let's see if I have or not.
Let's find out. So, what then happens is that as Hitler grows up, He is absolutely incapable.
His vastly diminished and brutalized true self has absolutely zero allies in the outside world through which to fight off the dominance of the false self.
The false self is that existence is hell.
It's control or be controlled.
It's violate or be violated.
It's kill or be killed, punish or be punished.
And you can't live alone.
So you have to go into this jungle where it's attack or be attacked, kill or be killed.
And life is hell.
Existence is abuse.
Existence is destruction. Now, deep down, he knows that this is not true.
Because deep down, our primary relationship, the true self, is all about reality.
And the reality is, of course, that his parents did choose to abuse him.
And he knows that. He knows that deep down.
He knows even if everybody in the whole culture tells him so, that they're doing it based on a choice.
Now, what do you feel against your abusers?
You feel anger.
Damn straight you feel anger.
That's healthy.
You should feel anger because you're being violated, right?
You need to defend yourself.
So, against your abusers, you feel anger.
Now, when you talk about your abuse, or your abuse comes up, or people even just see the symptoms of your abuse...
But reject any recounting of your abuse, right?
So if you're in some pub, I don't know, like with some friends, and you start beating yourself over the head with a wooden spoon because you did something wrong, and people are going to say, oh, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?
Oh, my heavens, I didn't know that you felt that way about yourself.
It's okay, you know, you can make mistakes.
That's sort of part of being alive.
Tell me what's going on for you.
What just happened for you, blah, blah, blah.
So then you start to talk about it.
I mean, it's not going to be easy, but you at least are being treated differently than you were being treated in the past.
And so you have just one scrap.
Of different behavior is all you need to break the absolute dominance of the false self in this area.
If everyone is hell, only one person has to not be hell to break the rule.
That's the amazing thing. It's true about physics as well, right?
One rock falling up gets a whole bunch of physical rules rewritten because that's impossible, right?
It's supposed to be impossible. Except in the once every 20 universes quantum theory stuff, which I've never really understood, so I'm not going to even try to make sense of any of that stuff.
But if everywhere you go, people side with your parents, then your parents abused you, everyone in your social circle abused you, your teachers abused you, your priests abused you, your extended family abused you, and then, of course, he was in the army, so he was abused by the army, and then he comes back, and nobody wants to hire him, and he has no economic future, and the economy keeps collapsing.
So the abuse is continual.
The abuse is continual.
And so the false self...
has a very strong case that existence is agony, dominance or submission.
The dominance of which is brutally satisfying and submission under that dominance is horrendous and incredibly humiliating and that is the real hell, right?
There's less hell in dominance in this mindset than there is in submission.
And of course the dominant runs society, right?
The abusers run society.
So if you want any kind of power in society, then you kind of have to join the abusers or you're going to be joining those who are abused and helpless.
And we all feel this to a much lighter degree.
We feel this with our politicians, right?
The politicians and the corrupt and the people, they run society.
And the people who are honest do not run society.
And so we feel a certain amount of, I think, at least I do, frustration at times and a feeling that virtue is punished and vice is rewarded and all that kind of stuff.
So basically, you grow up and you hate the world.
Thank you.
You hate the world and you want to control the world, obviously.
So, the true self, which is at the bottom motor of all of this, right?
The bottom motivator for all of this stuff, right?
The false self can only manipulate the true self as the one that truly motivates.
Now, the truth is that you were abused and it was a choice and it was not inevitable.
And those who abuse you are responsible and those who continue to abuse you are responsible.
So the horror that you experienced as a child finds no purchase and is continually denied by the people around you.
And so, this is partly a leap, I understand that.
Let's just see if it leads anywhere.
This is sort of my theory about what happens.
The horror has to be experienced because it is real.
All the social stuff about you go to the army and you're noble and your parents were virtuous and God is good and all that shit that people feed you to get you to shut up and obey is not real.
It's all just made up and it's part of the abuse that you're fighting.
What did occur was the hell that existed.
Which you need to be visible in order to free yourself from it, right?
If hell is existence, you're never free.
If abuse is life, if life is abuse, you're never free.
But also it means that you're fundamentally insane.
It's like getting angry at gravity.
You're hating something that is not optional.
So you're in this paradox. You feel angry and raging and hurt and humiliated because your true self knows it's a choice, but your false self says, no, it's not a choice, it's just life.
Don't be petty. So you're finally faced with this insanity that your strongest feelings are deemed to be insane and irresponsible and immature and so on.
And so these two alchemical evil twins, or good evil twin, and the false self and the true self, combine with the same motivation.
The false self says that since dominance and brutality and violence is inevitable, is the inevitable and constant and perpetual state of human relations, Then I better grab me some power.
Because otherwise, I'm going to go back to where I was as a kid and be abused and raped, and so I don't want any of that.
I've got to get me some power.
And power is abuse.
So, Hitler goes for power.
The moment he gets power, he begins abusing people.
The principle of the false self believes that existence is abuse.
So, that's the false self's approach.
Now, the true self is to say...
I'm still angry at everyone who's abused me, that's the honest, because I know it's a choice and I know it's not real.
So I want to punish people.
The true self is not some angel.
The true self is justice and reality.
And so yes, I will rend the world that does not believe in suffering.
If you do not believe in suffering, then you should not mind, you hypocritical bastards, you should not mind war and torture and rape and bombs and knifings and strangulations and brutalities of every kind.
Because suffering, you say, does not exist.
Suffering is healthy. Suffering is good.
There is no such thing as suffering.
Which is what that person has received his whole life in feedback for any time they've brought up their childhood.
Oh, don't be such a whiner. Oh, don't complain.
Oh, your parents did fine. Oh, you had to be beaten because your parents loved you.
So the suffering is not real.
The suffering is not a problem.
Suffering didn't occur. The suffering is only because of weakness and whining and complaints.
Dramatization. Victimization.
Self-dramatization. Self-victimization.
Playing the victim. Only reason that suffering could occur.
So the false self is going to have to inflict suffering because that's the inevitability and you either kill or be killed.
So it's going to go do some killing rather than be killed.
And the true self rages against the world that none of the suffering has been perceived to be real.
And so basically it says, fine, let's turn it around.
The argument for morality and the scientific method are the purview of the true self, which means that it's reversible.
So if people say... Suffering is important to cleanse the soul, and they really can't complain when you start a war.
And you can start a war against them, in particular, because they're the ones who rejected that suffering occurred for you.
So they should be punished, and the whole system should come crashing down, but based on their own argument that suffering doesn't occur, you should be able to get rid of that, right?
These people should not experience suffering because they say suffering doesn't occur.
But the suffering was real and did occur and will be played out in one form or another.
It's either played out on the couch of a therapist or it's played out on the eastern front.
It's played out through honest conversation with moral people or it's played out in atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You either talk it, or you act it.
You either speak honestly to sympathetic ears about your suffering, or you inflict your suffering on other people.
Endlessly. Now, what happens when this suffering...
And this is the reason why the suffering has to escalate.
This is the reason that the suffering has to escalate.
Because the suffering was real and it will continue to be exaggerated and it will continue to expand and it will continue to escalate and it will continue to increase until it is visible.
A drunk needs to free himself of alcohol but the false self has too strong a grip and so the true self provokes escalation until there is release through catastrophe.
This is why philosophers are so necessary because in the absence of philosophy...
Problems escalate until genocide occurs.
So, if we look at the very largest sense of the Second World War, and it didn't occur with the First World War for reasons I couldn't really explain, but probably because there wasn't enough civilian damage, damage to civilians,
but... If you look at what happened coming out of the Second World War, for some time, though sadly not forever, there was a vanquishing of the principle of relativity, moral relativity.
This was the basic principle from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, was that moral relativism was the way to go.
Because of the influence of Germanic philosophers and so on.
And of course the institution of public schools and all this kind of stuff.
Because if you allow for violence to occur, then everything must be relative.
If violence can occur, for instance, for the funding of public schools, the expansion of the state and all that, if violence occurs and is moral, then everything must be relative.
This is why the government always creates the argument from relativity.
It substantiates the argument from relativity.
But what happened was, after the moral horrors of the genocidal natures of all of these regimes were clear, then people kind of got that there was suffering in the world.
People kind of got that everything wasn't subjective and relative.
And this was the basic argument that was used in the judgment at Nuremberg, the Nuremberg trials.
And this had a huge shock effect throughout the academic community, because they'd all been sort of, they were into positive law, not natural law, and they were into relativity, and they were socialists, and so on, and violence is okay as long as it's for the good of whatever, and it's not really violence if people submit, and everything's relative, and nothing's true.
Well, it's kind of tough to hold on to that position when you're standing among the ashes and the teeth of the people who were gassed in concentration camps.
A little tough. A little tough in your gut.
Like it finally breaks through the bullshit academic nonsense of the false self and you feel a kind of moral horror that is your true self reacting to the actual facts of the situation.
This is why it's important, I think, to be able to...
To understand and to sympathize with your own moral feelings, because we get a lot of bullshit fed to us, and sometimes it's just good to go back to the feelings.
So I wasn't sure to podcast on this, but the fact that I felt depressed about the topic meant that I was probably going to get somewhere.
I think we're getting somewhere.
So the upshot of Hitler was that people rediscovered morality, to some degree, and within the limited confines of the state system and so on.
Right? So, in a very sort of very real way...
By people not saying that suffering is real and the people who cause suffering choose it and it's not inevitable.
In other words, people not denormalizing the abuse that people like Hitler suffered as children.
I'm not saying everyone had to go and give Hitler a hug, but this is just in general, right?
Because Hitler did nothing.
Hitler was one guy. Hitler did not start World War II. Hitler did not kill 40 million people.
Hitler was a symptom, not a cause, which meant that there were lots of people like him.
And this means a general systemic problem.
This does not mean that, boy, if Hitler hadn't come along, everything would have been fine.
It's not true at all. We all know that's complete nonsense, right?
Hitler was a symptom. Which meant that there were lots of people out there who suffered horribly as children and nobody would give them any credence or sympathy for their suffering.
And so they're like, well, fuck you.
I'm going to dominate the world.
I'm going to escalate it.
And the true self will inflict suffering until people wake up.
This is the justice side of the true self.
It's not an angel.
It's not a bloodless, simpering, altruistic nothing that just wants the best and so on.
The true self is pretty merciless.
And I think that's actually for the better.
For the better. And so, when suffering is denied and obfuscated and excused and approved of and supported and praised, then it's like, okay, well, let's just up the suffering until we get that there's suffering.
And it's a choice, and it's optional.
This is what war is to some degree.
You can love George Bush.
You can love Tony Blair.
You can think that they're the best people ever.
It's not true. And that's fine.
All that will happen is violence will increase based on your submission to these sociopaths.
Violence will increase. Until you get that being enslaved to other people's whims is irrational and wrong.
That's the sad fact.
It's very sad that innocent people, mostly children, get swept up in these conflagrations of human advancement.
And I wish it weren't necessary, and that's why I work on these podcasts, to whatever degree that I can, to help people to understand that sympathy for suffering is the avoidance of war.
Sympathy for suffering is the avoidance of the state.
Sympathy for suffering is the diminishment of evil.
Because that's what happens. If you deny suffering, if you pretend otherwise, if you don't have sympathy for yourself, fundamentally, don't have sympathy for others, and don't recognize the pain and horror that most children are going through in the world, if you don't recognize the agony of the species, the agony of the species will escalate until we recognize it.
This is true of problems within your own life.
If you don't deal with your problems, they get worse, and life's lessons get harder and harder, until you deal with your problems.
This is the natural escalation, because the truth has to come out.
And so the lies will cause more and more problems until you die or collapse.
Until you wake up, you know, tattooed and with hepatitis in a gutter in Vegas, then maybe you'll deal with your drinking problem.
But if you don't intervene in a voluntaristic sense first, everything just gets worse and worse until you learn your lesson.
You have to then learn empirically because you're not willing to learn philosophically.
You have to learn through experience because you're not willing to learn through abstractions.
If you are a farmer and you don't believe that you have to plant crops in order to reap crops, then you have to go through a pretty hungry year in order to learn your lesson.
So this is sort of my theory as to why violence escalates and why these sorts of things tend to occur in human history.
So then you learn a little bit about good and evil because of the Second World War, but then the government quickly sits about obfuscating or obscuring that again.
As soon as you start to learn about good and evil, then you start to learn about your rulers, and you start to learn that your compliance is not a virtue, and you start to learn that you are not a child, that you are a fully autonomous and morally responsible human being, and surrendering your moral authority to other people who claim to have dominion over you is not morally good.
And so, until you learn that lesson, life gets worse, right?
I mean, this is natural.
This is inevitable. If you keep pounding your head against the wall, you will, like, until you pass out, you'll keep doing it.
And then you'll wake up with a huge headache, right?
So you've got some sort of massive adrenaline or PCP kick going on, PCP kick.
You keep pounding your head against the wall until you pass out, then you wake up and you're injured and brutalized and whatever, you're mentally damaged.
Then you're like, okay, well, I won't do that anymore.
Now, it's my hope, of course, that human beings will learn about this a little bit sooner than the next round of hellish war and conflagration and so on.
I think that we will.
But if we don't recognize the massive suffering that is occurring within the world, particularly to children, and if we don't listen to and respect, and this is true for the assembly folk, remember this whenever you're debating with people, right?
Make sure you're talking about the real issues.
If we don't recognize these kinds of things that go on in the world, and we don't have sympathy for the suffering of the helpless people, And we don't help people denormalize the suffering that they have experienced as children.
Then we are going to continue to face these escalations of crises and deaths and conflagrations and wars and so on.
And boy, it would be nice to avoid the next one because we've now reached such a level of technological excellence that the next one might be a bit of a doozy.
So I hope that that's helpful.
I think it's an interesting approach to take.
Do let me know how this sort of sits with you and how it fits within your own life or the life of the people that you know.
I look forward to donations.
Thank you so much for the people who are sending them in.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate it, but I really, really do.
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