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July 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:17
334 True Versus False Emotions (this one, sadly, is cut off!)
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's the 17th of July, 2006, and it is 4.30, going to yet another interview, and it is all too exciting for words.
I miss the days when I was trying to get a low-level job, and it was just one or two interviews, but at this level, well, it just takes a little bit longer, so I hope that This all works out because I hate sort of eeling out of work a little bit early and going for these interviews.
I also hate that feeling when you know it's very unlikely that you're going to continue in your current position and therefore you're really not that keen on starting on big new projects.
That's never particularly enjoyable.
Hopefully this will all be over soon and this delicate transition will be complete and I can start on a new and exciting chapter in my professional career and I'm certainly looking forward to that.
So I thought that I would, since I'd like to do some more on Nietzsche, but I'm going to have to have quotes and not be so much with the driving, so I thought that it might be worth having a chat about the true false self thing in a little bit more differentiation.
I know that I have sort of thrown these terms around quite a bit, In various forms and what I think that has created, at least based on the emails that I'm getting and comments that I'm getting, what it has created is a kind of impression Of truth.
An impression of something that's useful.
And impressions aren't bad, right?
Because dreams are impressions too and can be incredibly powerful as we've talked about.
But they have generally created an impression of truth rather than something that's clearly delineated.
So I thought that it might be worth spending a little bit of time going over what I mean by the true and false self aspect of psychology or of the psyche.
So that at least the terms as I use them can be clearer or clearer than they have been, and I think that will be quite useful.
Now, as I've sort of mentioned before, the true self is the self that is aligned with objective material reality.
The true self The true self is empirical.
The true self is objectively rational.
The true self subjects to the scientific method and to logic of all forms.
The true self is not unemotional, but absolutely passionate.
In other words, passionate about absolutes.
And that is because we have value which we bring to bear on reality based on how that reality serves or does not serve both our own self-interest and the self-interest of others or the interests of others.
And this kind of aspect, I think, is quite important to understand, that there is this dichotomy in the world, or in life, or in people's thinking.
There is this dichotomy wherein, if you are logical, then you are not so much with the emotions in this sort of Kirk-Spock dichotomy.
It used to be called the mind-body dichotomy until Gene Roddenberry's fantasy life overcame us, and now it's the Kirk-Spock dichotomy.
But you are either, or could be called the Stanley Kowalski Blanche Dubois dichotomy, for those who like their drama just a tad more refined and only slightly more gay, then it is the idea that if you are logical, then you are not logical to the degree to which you are emotional.
And if you are passionate, then you are passionate only to the degree that you are not logical.
These two things are considered to be opposites, and that's quite funny in a way because I, for one, have never really understood the difference between reason and passion or why they would ever be at odds with each other.
Now, I think the reason that it's become at odds with each other is that True self-passions are very hard to come by in this world.
We are all born with them, but they are bred out of us because they're very, very powerful.
When you unite passion with logic, you have, I think, a very hard-to-stop force on your hands.
And force for good.
Force for good. It's not kryptonite.
It's good stuff. It's the tights and the cape.
This power for good that the unity of feeling and reason combines to create is exactly what corrupt power mongers don't want to have around.
The last thing they want is to have this sort of power around, where people are not only logical, but they are also passionate.
Generally, people who are inclined to logic are scorned and degraded on a social or emotional level.
If you're the knowledgeable geek Then you have this problem because nobody is going to respect you for the knowledge and the intellectual energy that you have, but instead you are going to end up being denigrated for these very same things.
Unless you happen to be, I don't know, like really athletic and really good looking, in which case you have to kind of hide that stuff.
The most that could be conceivably allowed, and I remember this, just a very handsome and athletic and musical black gentleman who was in my high school, just a great guy.
And he was allowed to be athletic and good-looking and musical.
He played the saxophone. He was allowed to be these things, but...
Only to the degree that he was conventional in his thinking, right?
So he could be good at math and science, but he couldn't think anything original in terms of philosophy, right?
That definitely wasn't to be allowed.
And so if you are original, then you are going to be attacked, and there is a great degree of emotional instability in originality, because you do feel, as we talked about on Sunday's show, excluded from the herd.
And pushed out into the nether realms of philosophy wherein it is very hard to feel that you have a solid foothold on tangible things because we are sort of social animals and to go against the herd is a strain but essential, as I talked about yesterday.
So there is a conflation between the false self And the true self in psyches, and this is generally more true in the Western psyche than it is in other cultures.
It's not that it's any better in other cultures, it's just that we have a little bit more of the whole rational thing, and so it's more apparent that we have this split than it would be if we were in another culture where irrational passions, false self, manipulative pseudo-emotions are the order of the day.
So, in the West, we have a rationalist tradition and we have an emotionalist position.
Nietzsche would have called this the Apollonian and the Dionysian, after the two ancient Greek gods, of course, the god of reason and poetry and the god of wine and debauchery.
And it shows up in other cultures as well, but this is a very common thing, that if you are rational, then you are bloodless and unemotional and geeky, and you do not have any rich blood in your veins.
Whereas if you do have rich blood in your veins, then you are not, of course, allowed to be irrational, but you must instead go to these hysterical, operatic, semi-Mediterranean Extrusions of passion, which are pretty destructive, and this is a very common thread throughout most of Western history, right? I mean, Western history in terms of art.
And, of course, we have to go to the source of Western art, which is Star Wars, right?
Where you have the man who is passionate, Han Solo, who is not very rational, and the man who is more rational, who is Luke Skywalker and the little guy with the Einstein eyes, Yoda, and I guess Obi-Wan Kenobi, are all the rational kinds and kind of bloodless, right?
Kind of. And kind of conformist, right?
There is a very great deal of conformity that is considered to be the case in rationality.
If you look at Spock, he lives in a very hierarchical society.
He's only allowed to mate once every seven years.
So he's bought in a trouser rocket, I guess, for about 6.9 years.
He's nicknamed the rational tripod.
This is a very common phenomenon that you have in art, just about of every form.
When you look at a passionate character, they really can't be rational.
You can see this in Firefly as well.
When you have a rational character, they really can't be passionate.
It's just one of these prejudices that people have because they have trouble understanding that the two are united.
And we're all taught that you can't be true and united.
You can't be both passionate and rational at the same time.
And this is the difference between the scientific and religious mindsets, right?
The scientific mindset is considered to be antiseptic and cold and white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses and no passion, no depth.
And the artistic side is, you know, tousle-haired and paint-daubed and crazy kind of passionate and yet not so much with the thinking and the rationality.
And this is a very common dichotomy that you see in just about every kind of movie.
You could view this in the 19th century, or I guess the 18th century, would be the debate between the philosophers and the romantics.
The romantic movement was very much around passion, and I just read a biography of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's marriage where they had inherited this all the way through to the mid-20th century.
Where they had received the romantic manifestos, I suppose, from D.H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley's lover is all about primordial, violent emotions, and you can see a good chunk of this in Ayn Rand's novels as well, though not to the same degree, and with, of course, much more of an emphasis on the rational side of things.
But this particular dichotomy is a really great shame, and it's a really bad fracture within the human psyche.
And it arises, of course, from religion and collectivism and mysticism, because when you associate feelings with things that are not true, of course reason is going to be the opposite of feelings.
But the real fact of the matter is, I'll stand by this, although I'm sure I'm going to get some complaints, but I will certainly give it a shot, and you can let me know what you think.
You cannot have any real feelings about that which is not true.
You cannot have any real feelings about that which is not true.
And so the feelings which are associated with the religious experience and with collectivism, patriotism, mysticism, collectivism of any kind, these are not real feelings.
They're not real feelings.
And I know that when people cry, this is not always real.
In fact, I would say that very rarely when people cry, Is it real?
Partly, it's because of the people that I grew up with.
If being a great actress was crying on cue, my mom would have a closet full of Oscars.
She could crank up the feelings, the hysterical passions from zero to Mach 50 to lightspeed in the blink of an eye and back down again.
And real feelings are a little bit slower to come.
They're much more forceful and they can't be switched off.
I remember, as an example of this in my own life, I was in theatre school and for the first six months I did fantastically.
I actually went for the writing program but had to do a year of acting to begin the writing program and they said I was a good actor and I should stay in the acting program.
And then we got this woman up from New York who I thought was very hostile and kind of a cutting down kind of person and very sort of non-Canadian and very confrontational.
And one of the things that happened was she put an exercise in front of us.
She made us do an exercise or invited us to do an exercise.
I guess there was no force involved.
And the exercise was you sit across from a table from someone.
They look down at a script.
They think about a line and they speak the line to you.
And you simply look at them and absorb the line.
And then you take a deep breath.
And you keep looking at them and it's designed very much to get you out of the habit of waiting to talk and it's designed to get you to really absorb the presence of another human being and it was a very interesting exercise and it was very hard to watch because all of us who hadn't done it yet thought, oh this is easy, why are they having such trouble with it?
Because she'd be jumping all over everyone's defenses and people who were going too rapidly and people who were smirking and people who, you know, couldn't absorb in the moment what was happening.
And so, all of us sitting up on the, we had a little sort of scaffold rising, we were sitting up there saying, oh, I want it to be my turn.
And when I got up there, I was sitting across from a gentleman, and I was, I can't remember what play it was, but I read the line, and I looked into the person's I looked into this gentleman's eyes, and then he read his line and looked back into my eyes.
I guess I was about 19 or 20 at this time.
The woman who was, I guess, in her 50s and a pretty harsh stellar Adler addict from the Stanislavski School of New York acting, which is pretty confrontational, she was zeroing in on all of my physical defenses around avoiding intimacy.
So she zeroed in on, you know, relax your jaw, relax your shoulders, keep breathing, and so on.
And so she was very, I guess, acutely sensitive to the physical defenses that I had up, right?
The tensions that block feeling in the body.
And I just at one point, and I felt it coming literally like a freight train running me over.
I just burst into tears. I kept with it and it was quite an interesting breakthrough for me and quite fascinating.
I really found it a very powerful experience and those times in my life where emotion has really struck me very powerfully, that to me is true self-feeling and it is very, very rational.
I grew up where other people were always a threat.
And so to actually be non-physically tense around someone when I was staring into their eyes was a great deal of difficulty.
It was very, very difficult for me, as it is for a lot of people.
And so she zeroed in on that and it was a great, great experience.
Scary and also gave me a sense of the depth of both the suffering that I had experienced as a child and the depth of feeling that I was capable of as an adult.
And that is a very powerful thing.
I mentioned before, not for some time, but when I confronted my brother about childhood things that had occurred to us, he had the same kind of paroxysm of feeling that seized him and almost threw him off the couch.
That's the level of feeling that can occur.
As opposed to when my mother was thwarted and she would get kind of screechy and petulant and mean and then she would burst into tears when she didn't get what she wanted.
None of that was real. And you knew it wasn't real because, and you may have seen this if you have these kinds of parents or siblings or lovers or friends or whatever, That the person seems to be wild in terms of passion, but then the phone rings and they just pick it up and answer the phone perfectly sugar and spice and all things nice and then they hang up the phone and they get back to being angry and all of these things occur in a false self manipulation.
This is not real feeling.
This is not real feeling. Real feeling comes along very powerfully.
It is not something you can control.
Or should control, and it doesn't mean that it's going to make you throw yourself off a bridge.
It's just very powerful.
Accept no substitutes to that.
It is not designed to control others, but to reveal truth to you.
It is not designed to control others.
Just about every piece of feeling that you see in the world is designed to control The resources of others.
Not just their behavior.
There's some truth to that.
Especially when we're adults.
It's all designed to control our resources.
When somebody feels disapproval, it's not that they feel disapproval fundamentally deep down in their core.
It's that they've had it inflicted upon them and they inflict it now upon others.
They have learned that the infliction of disapproval can get them what they want.
That's a very important thing to understand.
When someone's disapproving of you, they're just trying to control you.
That's what they're doing.
It's not because they're so wise that they can genuinely and completely understand in a very deep and meaningful way what it is in this world that it is important to disapprove of and to approve of.
They don't have that kind of wisdom.
It is simply A manipulative control to get you to obey or to give them resources or to withdraw a confrontation or something.
And you see this with parents, of course, all the time.
And you say, I'm an atheist and they're religious.
You don't get arguments.
You get sadness and disapproval.
None of that's real. None of that's real.
Controlled by ghosts, by phantoms working invisible levers.
Controlled by frowns.
Ridiculous, ridiculous stuff like that.
None of that stuff is real.
The real passions of the true self, the real feelings of the true self bring people together.
They bind people in intimacy.
They create brothers from strangers.
They unite in love.
They create intimacy and joy, interaction, humor, anger, healthy, just anger.
The real passions of the true self Unite us, because we meet only in reality.
We meet only, only, only in reality can we have any kind of connection.
Yes, we are social animals, of course.
But the pseudo-community of the false self is not what we need.
All too sadly, it's what we so often get, but that is not the community that nourishes the human soul.
The community that nourishes the human soul is the community that comes about through true self-intimacy, through real feeling, through genuine understanding, through genuine sympathy, through empathy.
These are all of the things that the true self can generate and can only do so in the realm of reality and in the nature of reality.
And almost everything that you see in the world, every passion that you run into, is a passive-aggressive or overtly aggressive manipulation and control mechanism.
And they basically, most feelings that we have are warning shots of the capacity for violence or brutality.
That is most of what we get from people.
And that is what we are enslaved by.
If you have a father who's violent, then when he raises his hand, he doesn't actually have to hit you, you flinch anyway.
And the people who are violent, they would like their violence to be more efficient than it is.
Actually being violent is kind of a lot of work.
You can hurt your finger from punching, you can hurt your knuckles from punching people, even children.
People want their violence to be much more efficient than it is.
The way they do that is they create signals about upcoming violence so that people will be trapped into obeying if they can't get away.
So people create these shows for violence.
And one of the shows is emotional manipulation.
It's the first thing.
It always results in violence or the complete withdrawal of the other person.
Because once you start to approach this kind of falsehood or these false manipulations with the true self certainty, they evaporate.
The person gets hostile, fundamentally frightened, aggressive.
I mean, a cornered rat, right?
It will attack anything. And this is the danger that occurs.
This person is saying through emotional manipulation, I will use violence or total withdrawal.
That's the only two possibilities you have with me.
And the way that I'm going to communicate that to you without you having to go through it is the warning shot I'm going to give you is false self, hysterical emotional manipulation.
And that's really what people see as feeling.
That is the opposite of reason.
To control and manipulate others is the opposite of empiricism and reason.
Absolutely and completely.
And so the feeling that people get that reason and feeling are opposites is perfectly valid because in this context they absolutely are opposites.
False self-manipulation is the opposite.
Can you imagine a scientist attempting another scientist to believe a theory that was false by pouting?
Can you imagine how ridiculous that would be?
I remember once presenting at a conference and I had a whole set of slides.
I had about a 45 minute presentation and about 20 minutes into it people got what I was talking about and I won't bore you with the content.
They got what I was talking about and what they then realized was that I had nothing of value to offer them.
Of course, I was younger, and I was quite disappointed.
I thought, this is a bad thing.
I'm never going to get invited to speak at any conference again.
Of course, it was pretty funny, and so I felt kind of pouty.
Now, I knew that I couldn't get pouty.
I couldn't actually become pouty.
I couldn't say, oh, yeah? Well, maybe you do need this stuff.
I couldn't get pouty and upset.
How ridiculous would that be?
But can you imagine if that had been my approach, that I would have said, well, I've recognized that I don't have anything of value to offer you, and the way that I'm going to deal with that is I'm going to get pouty and resentful.
That's going to be how I approach this problem of not actually having anything of value to offer you.
It would be ridiculous.
So scientists could never do that.
Can you imagine a salesperson trying to convince you to buy something, and the way that they do it is they get pouty if you don't buy it?
Would you be very convinced to buy something?
Well, of course not. You don't add value by pouting.
It's a very ridiculous thing to say.
So this is as true in families and with friends as it is with absolutely anything else in the world.
That pouting does not add value.
Pouting does not make something true.
And emotional manipulation, control, passive aggressor, all of these things you have to absolutely scratch from your vocabulary if you are to be an effective salesperson or you're to an effective communicator or something.
It doesn't mean don't get angry.
At all. It doesn't mean anything like that.
It doesn't mean don't have emotion.
I mean, as you are probably aware, I can be quite emotional about these topics, and I think that they're absolutely crucial.
But the false self-manipulation of things is the opposite of rationality and would absolutely have nothing to do with what could help from that standpoint.
I think I'm going to have to switch because I think I'm running low on battery go-go juice from my computer.
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