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July 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:58
335 True Versus False Selves

Details on the differences between the true and false selves

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's the 18th of July 2006.
We're going to start with a pleasant listener correction.
This is from a fine gentleman named John Langley, who has kindly offered a few constructive criticisms, which I think will be worth sharing because I think that they're excellent.
So this is his email. So this is his email.
Perfectly fair.
Two, quote, in my humble opinion.
Why pretty much always the humble?
In my opinion is a fine filler and sometimes a fine nuance, but the humble, in my opinion, draws unnecessary attention to it.
Three, criteria.
You still use this crucial term as a singular, should be criterion, as well as, correctly, a plural.
A few weeks ago you thanked me for pointing out this error, but it persists.
4. Funny voice at the beginning of quite a few podcasts.
I suppose it helps you break the ice, but it does nothing for me except irritate my eardrums.
Your natural voice is beautifully modulated for the most part.
5. Historical solecisms.
Most recent ones, Napoleon's, quote, whiff of grapeshot.
You stated, or at least implied, that poor Parisians were demonstrating against their enslavement by the monarchy.
Actually... The king had already been guillotined, and the rioters were ironically royalists and counter-revolutionaries.
I know you're doing your best to provide historical illustrations of your ideas, but clumsy errors like this, and they do occur regularly, might put off informed listeners.
I'm making these points because I care about the ideas and encourage you as an artist and craftsman in the world of thought to delight and astonish your audience even more brilliantly and subtly in the cause of freedom and happiness.
Thanks again for your wonderful gifts, John Langley.
Well, thank you, John, of course, for that feedback.
I certainly, certainly appreciate it.
I mean, there's points to be made on both sides for some of the things.
I'm not sort of laughing at my own jokes because I think that people need to know that they're funny or because I don't think that they're funny.
It's because I do think that they're funny.
And the jokes sort of surprise me sometimes as much as they surprise you in the sort of stream of consciousness that we call Free Domain Radio.
I certainly do understand that the laugh track is not the best thing to add to an intellectual sitcom.
So I will do my best to be surprised by the jokes, but not to laugh too, too much.
And as far as the funny voices at the beginning of the podcast, I think you're right.
And I certainly do get the sense that you're an older gentleman.
But we are trying to rope in some teens, and I just wonder if it might not.
I mean, the reason that I do it is because I'm aiming at a younger set, as well as at an older set.
I'm trying to aim at everyone.
Thank you again for Criterion.
Do you know, I went through my entire education never learning about that distinction, at least not to my knowledge, so I will do my best to try and remember it, and he is very kind to point it out again.
And last but not least, he's of course entirely correct about Napoleon.
Napoleon was defending the revolutionaries and he was firing into a crowd and there were about 300 killed at the end of it all.
He was firing into a crowd of royalists and counter-revolutionaries.
And so, although the brutality of the act was pretty consistent with what it is that I was saying, it was not the sort of ragged poor of Paris who were demanding their bread from their masters who were shot down.
And that's a very important point to mention.
I should not wander into historical analogies without, especially ones that I'm not very familiar with, without the paperwork.
I certainly appreciate the correction.
And, of course, there's an excellent article on Wikipedia about all of this.
But I will sort of say that the essence of it remains the same, although I certainly don't feel that that justifies errors in historical accuracy.
But the central point does remain the same, that if you look at these sort of royalists and counter-revolutionaries, if they'd actually won the poor in Paris who suffered so greatly under the reign of terror, Under the reign of terror that occurred after the revolution, they would have been a whole lot better off if Napoleon hadn't fired the whiff of grapeshot and the new masters of France had been beaten back.
Because although there was great suffering under the existing French monarchy, the revolution caused any blood to flow in the streets of Paris like nothing else.
So between a rock and a hard place is definitely the case for these people, and Napoleon's brutality, which founded his career as a defender of the realm, was still pretty vicious.
And I wonder, I always wonder the degree to which in these kinds of situations, this is nothing against John's excellent pointing out of a historical accuracy, which is important to maintain, but I always kind of wonder, in these kinds of situations, Whether when we say they were a bunch of loyalists and counter-revolutionaries, whether it might not just be the case that they were a bunch of people who had to go into the military because they had nothing to eat.
Or if they had been press-ganged two weeks before under threat to their family or to their own lives to do these kinds of things.
Or whether they were philosophers who really understood the issues and decided to take up arms.
Or whether they were people who just were raised in a particular kind of environment of propaganda and ended up Sort of marching out that propaganda with guns in their hands into the whiff of grapeshot from Napoleon.
I always find it hard to say that...
These people who attacked Napoleon, or not attacked Napoleon, but were attacking the existing state, whether they are actually people who understand what's going on and who know the philosophical differences and know the history and know how they got there, or whether they're just a bunch of poor saps on both sides, a bunch of poor saps who ended up in this kind of situation without really understanding in any great or real depth what's going on.
And Napoleon, of course, stuffed into military academy at the age of 13 or 14.
Not a whole lot of choice in Napoleon's world.
I wonder if it's not just a bunch of propaganda robots fighting each other.
They have different propaganda they were susceptible to or was inflicted on them.
But they're really acting out the ideas of philosophers and those in charge.
And it's, for me, hard to say that on one side were the defenders of the new revolution and on the other side were royalists and counter-revolutionaries.
I would just be very surprised if you could resurrect them and question them about any great detail.
They would just basically say, well, king is good or king is bad, and they wouldn't really have any clue what that meant or what they were talking about, or, more importantly, what to replace it with.
and that's sort of like talking to somebody who's got a huge gout abscess or ulcer on their leg and they say gout is bad and someone else says gout is good but none of them, neither of them have any idea how to go about curing or preventing gout and I think that's sort of where I go from the division of people into one form or another and this is certainly true for most of the people who are firing on the poor Or,
in this case, firing on other people.
They really don't know what they're doing.
Look at the guys in Iraq.
Do they have a clue what's going on in Iraq?
What they're up to?
What the history of Iraq is?
What the proposed solution is?
Have they seen the endgame for the administration?
Do they know in a big long-term picture?
No, they don't have a clue.
They don't have a clue. These are largely uneducated people who went into the military because they didn't have any other options.
These are not philosophers who understand why they're pulling the trigger.
They're goons and thugs spiritually broken by public school, economically broken by bad status policies, and they just end up in the military because it's the best economic and educational option for them.
But they don't have a clue.
Like the guys who were the insurgents or whatever you want to call them, the freedom fighters in Iraq, they are the ones who are fighting against the Americans, and they don't have a clue what they're fighting against.
They don't have any understanding of capitalism or socialism or communism.
They probably have never read through the Koran.
They simply have had the Koran sort of, quote, explained to them in brutal manners every day since they were children.
And so you basically have these warring puppets of the power elite, and the power elite, in a sense, is a warring puppet of the philosophers, right?
We who are laying the foundations of a new kind of thinking, or I might even argue that it is a first kind of thinking, Because we are not only bringing philosophy and logic to its conclusion as best as we can in the world of politics, but in every other realm that we can get our hands on, we're trying to find the unified field theory of philosophy, right?
We're trying to figure out how the same philosophical principles can apply to politics To art, to psychology, to relationships, to child raising, to familial relationships, family of origin, that can explain trauma, can explain and predict world events to some degree of accuracy, and can explain historical events to a greater degree of accuracy, because they've already sort of come and gone.
But we are sort of trying to find the one answer in Free Domain Radio.
We're trying to find the whole thing, the whole kettle of fish, and the fire and the landscape it sits on.
And so we could be said to be bringing something to bear that is unique or new.
And certainly lots of philosophers have tried this before.
I think we're taking a damn good run at it, though, in conjunction with myself as the mouthpiece and a certain amount of propellant and The board and the emails that I receive as excellent additions and supplements and sometimes even plain old topics and insights into what it is that we're trying to do.
But for the most part, those who've tried it before have been in the thrall of some sort of power structure.
They've been in the thrall of...
You couldn't do this if you were a professor, for instance.
You could not do...
Because you'd be into the thrall of a power structure called the university, which is always, always, always dependent on the state to some degree or another.
And you could not do this.
Of course, if you were like this, you'd never get to be professor anyway.
You'd just face this constant slog up this indifferent hostility that certainly I experienced all the way through my education, all the way through university and grad school.
That's an enormous amount of indifference.
And I was the only one who really, at least the only one that I met, Who really, truly and genuinely cared about the truth.
And was a little less curious and open to exploration than I am now.
But still did it.
I mean, I still read all these new books.
I read stuff that was the opposite of what I thought.
I mean, just about everything that was in my courses was the opposite of what I thought.
And learned quite a bit thereby.
But I was the only one who really cared about truth.
Who worked on papers voluntarily just for my own instruction.
Who would do papers early...
To make sure that I got it right.
And, of course, I was the one who nobody wanted around.
That's the nature of our higher education, right?
That I actually do love the truth to the point where I'm doing podcasts and reading and writing articles and doing the board, none of which I get any direct pay for, but simply because I love the truth and I feel that it's the most important thing in the world.
I believe that it's the most...
I know that it's the most important thing in the world.
And so of course I was the one who was viewed as a freak by everyone in university, not just the teachers or professors, but all of my co-students.
They sort of felt that I was taking a silly joke very seriously.
For them, it was, well, this is a fun place to hang out.
I sort of enjoy what I'm doing, although most of them faced quite a personal crisis when it came to figuring out their thesis, which we won't sort of go into the reasons why, but they are quite interesting.
But the fact that I really had strong opinions and passionate opinions and was curious about history and read voluntarily outside of the areas of study, it was viewed as like, Somebody who goes to see a dumb comedy and ends up bursting into tears is like, dude, it's not that serious.
I need comedy. What are you doing?
Are you okay? Like, what's wrong with you?
You need to up your meds perhaps a little or get off them perhaps.
But there was this kind of joke that Steph was the guy who took all of this silliness too seriously, or taking it seriously in any way, shape, or form, was taking it too seriously.
And the professors found...
I mean, because they were generally corrupt, they found my enthusiasm to be a power that they could manipulate, and they almost all fell into that desire to manipulate me because I was so enthusiastic and so eager.
They did end up in this situation where they ended up trying to manipulate and control me, which caused a lot of interpersonal problems.
Just because when you desperately want something and desperately are enthusiastic about something, that's an open wound for most people because they've killed their own enthusiasm, so they have to kill everybody else's enthusiasm.
And that's sort of an open wound. People have a great deal of difficulty resisting that temptation to control people who are enthusiastic, which is why most of us develop this semi-cynical shell and don't...
Really show any kind of enthusiasm.
The best that we can muster is hostility to those who oppose us, not enthusiasm and joy in the pursuit of knowledge, because we've been so beaten up for having any kind of enthusiasm.
And of course, as you know, my answer is not to get rid of enthusiasm, but to get rid of the people who beat you up for being enthusiastic, who think that it's geeky or weird or strange or perverse or Or that it's masking some emotional defect, right?
That somehow if you love the truth and pursue it, it's sort of at all costs that you are making up for some vast emotional deficiency and that your level of self-knowledge is terrible and You're acting out some trauma for the pursuit of truth,
or you love conflict, or you just love taking a contrary position because you have psychological problems, or you're lonely and therefore you just strike out at people, or you're narcissistic and therefore people who don't agree with you, you just strike out at them.
Anything that you can imagine will be thrown against you if you're interested in the pursuit of truth.
That's natural.
And it's also natural that we're susceptible to it.
Because we love truth, we value feedback.
And therefore, those who give us feedback are usually, I mean, if they're virtuous people, they're trying to help us.
Like John's email is fantastic.
He gives me feedback, trying to help me, trying to make things better.
I really appreciate that.
It's absolutely wonderful. I love to get emails like that.
So we value feedback to the degree with which we value truth, because truth is to some degree assembled, both from our own perceptions, our instincts, our application of reason, and the rational debate with others.
We assemble the truth.
It's like we're trying to paint a picture that matches reality, and we've got to keep looking at reality, right?
Reality includes our own thoughts, our own sensual data, our own experiences, our histories, our impulses, our instincts, our gut feels, and the input of others, right?
So when we're trying to paint this picture called the truth, the input of others is very important.
And what happens is people continually and almost universally Keep attacking us for wanting to know the truth or for being curious about the truth.
And not being certain.
To not be certain is anathema to weak egos.
They can't take it. It's certainly anathema to the false self.
The false self can't take uncertainty because it's scar tissue based on complete horror and so it simply can't express doubt.
It's very hostile to doubt.
Because it's designed to mask doubt, i.e., I doubt that my parents are good people, so I'm going to cleave to the nation-state instead and project all of my thwarted affection for my corrupt parents onto the nation and then back down to my parents and to God and all that kind of stuff.
I'm going to overcome any doubts that I have about the virtue of those in authority by loving them in a completely slavish and absolutist manner.
That's a fairly decent summation of patriotism.
It's a reaction formation to doubt about the virtue of those in power, which you overpower to some degree by loving them to death, so to speak.
Actually, not even so to speak.
It happens quite literally that way for the most part.
But so we value feedback, and therefore it becomes almost inevitable that we're going to be hurt by people who attack us.
The only people who aren't hurt by attacks are sociopaths, people in a coma, and the dead.
Given that we're really none of those things, then people's feedback is going to hurt us.
And generally, when people attack us, we have sort of one of two choices.
When we're painting this picture called the truth, and we're adding details and fleshing it out and erasing and starting over in certain areas, just combing over it in a number of ways that you have to, an almost infinite number of ways that you have to, to get to some reasonable picture of the truth.
When people attack us, And we're sort of holding our paintbrush, we have one of two choices.
If they say, your truth is paranoid, right?
This is the one thing. Or you're a weirdo.
Let's just say, there's a million things that get thrown at us.
Let's just take that one. Say, the picture that you're painting is one of paranoia.
Then we have one of two choices, right?
When we're sort of painting our portrait of the world.
We can look at the entire portrait and say, wow, maybe the whole thing is paranoia.
Or we can paint within our portrait of the truth people who call us paranoid for painting a portrait of the truth.
That's a very important distinction.
When someone says to you, your portrait, your truth, the truth that you're working on, the rationality, empiricism, the scientific method you're bringing to bear in every field that you can get your hands on, that is paranoid.
We either say, maybe it is paranoid, or we say, the truth that I am working with now includes the fact that people are hostile towards using the scientific method in realms which they're not familiar with, like the family, like moral philosophy and politics and so on.
That's your choice.
Are people right in calling me paranoid?
Well, no. No, absolutely not.
Calling somebody paranoid is not an argument.
If somebody can prove that you're paranoid, then that is an argument, and a very helpful thing, and that's what therapists do over the course of quite a lengthy treatment.
Paranoia is a very difficult psychological ailment to treat, of course, because You can invent an explanation for everything, and my mother suffered from pretty extreme paranoia, and so I know whereof I speak that there's no logic that can penetrate or pierce the challenge of the paranoid,
right? Everything that occurs has a story, and if it turns out that your story seems to be coming true, like an alternate explanation, like maybe it was just a car backfiring, and maybe it's not the insurance companies that are trying to kill you, mom, Then the moment it starts to become true, then you are viewed to be in the employ of those who are desiring to harm, and you're part of the conspiracy.
It's very, very difficult to penetrate somebody's paranoia logically, but simply calling somebody who's paranoid, paranoid, is completely ineffective.
And also, to me, to a large degree, it's proof that they're not paranoid.
It's important, at least, to understand from that standpoint.
It's a sort of proof that they're not paranoid.
Because calling somebody who is paranoid, paranoid, will actually get you attacked.
But calling somebody who's sensitive to feedback, paranoid, will hurt them, right?
So if you're being called paranoid, it's because people know that you're not.
Because if you are paranoid, they won't call you paranoid.
They'll just sort of nod and smile and try and change the topic.
I guess that happens too, but they'll do it out of fear, not out of indifference or contempt, which is what we always receive.
So, if somebody calls you paranoid, they know that you're not.
And this is true of just about every other epithet that you can have thrown on you.
For being somebody interested in the truth and somebody curious about the truth and somebody who has standards for proving the truth or disproving it.
You get called everything, of course, because you really are threatening a power structure that people believe is virtuous but know in their hearts.
is only brutal, right?
This is an important consideration to understand, or an important thing to understand, that when you start to question things openly, you are attacking the false self.
And you've got to understand that.
I know that I've mentioned this a number of times before, but you really have to understand that.
Because the only alternative that you're going to have in this realm is to feel that you are strange or weird or paranoid and so on.
Whenever you bring the truth up around just about everyone, you are directly threatening what they perceive as the entire basis of their personality.
You're threatening virtue.
You're threatening confidence.
You're threatening self-esteem.
You're threatening everything. It's to some degree what the determinists do when they talk to me, but at least I can manage my feelings and be aware of them and not say that they're wrong because I'm upset, but simply use my upset to fuel, I think, a passionate debate.
But most people don't have any clue that a particular idea is threatening all their values.
They just feel angry and threatened and hostile.
And Just to do one sort of final differentiation on the true false self thing, the true self is entirely capable of lying and remaining the true self.
The false self is not lying.
The false self is not a direct result of trauma.
The false self is not The fact that you lie or the fact that you believe something that's not true, that is not an aspect of the false self.
That is an aspect of the true self.
Sorry, let me go a little further to clarify that last statement.
This is the old moral question about lying.
If somebody bursts into your house and you love your wife and says, where's your wife?
We want to beat her up. You don't say, oh, she's at work at this location.
Here's the address and here's the Google Maps directions to get there.
You say, I don't know.
She left me yesterday.
Oh, I'm so sad.
I don't know where she went.
I know she didn't go to her mom's because they're away on vacation, but I have no idea where she's gone.
Some hotel somewhere, God knows.
But if you find her, please let me know.
I mean, that's sort of a reasonable response, assuming you don't want your wife to get beaten up, right?
I mean, this is a reasonable response.
And that is a completely true self-act.
To lie in the face of coercion is a completely true self-act, right?
So if you get pulled over by a cop, you don't say, hell yeah, I was speeding.
I just figured I'd take the risk, right?
So, you know, I guess I lost, so nail me.
You say, oh, I was going with the traffic flow, I was just passing, I've used the, I only have a car that has kilometers in the States as the mileage, so I don't know as the speed, so I don't know what the exact mileage is, I was just trying to go with the traffic.
You come up, that's perfectly true self stuff.
Because you know that you're lying.
And you're responding to a threat.
So when your father comes into the room with his belt and says, did you knock over the house plant in the living room, you say, no, the wind blew it over, or something like that.
You don't say, yes, Dad, beat me up.
Please, hit me with the whip.
Hit me with the belt. I think that's a wonderful instruction for me to get healthier and better.
You don't do any of that sort of stuff.
You lie. And there's nothing false self about it.
Someone's going to beat you up if you tell the truth about something inconsequential.
You lie. It's perfectly true self, right?
Don't get all fussy about, I have to tell the truth at all times.
That's a false self absolute as well.
So the fact that you experience trauma is not the direct cause of your false self.
The fact that you lie at times, and we all tell white lies at times.
Mmm, that pie is great.
Hey, I love that pie. When you are out in front of clients, and I don't do this as much anymore, but if you're selling something, you're going to gloss it up a little.
You're not going to present everything around the deficiencies of the product relative to your competition.
That's their job. But in this realm, none of these are false self-activities.
None of them. And that's a very important thing to understand, just so you can really differentiate these two areas of psychological energy.
The false self does not arise because you're hurt, and it does not arise because you lie.
The false self arises because you love your abuser.
The false self arises when you no longer remember being hurt and you no longer know that you're lying.
And you have become the opposite of truth, right?
The opposite of truth is not lying.
The opposite of truth is not knowing that you're lying.
It's sort of an important distinction.
And the false self genuinely worships the abusers.
My dad was tough but fair.
He did the best he could.
I'll give him money and resources when he gets older, right?
The guy who hits you with the belt.
This is why I keep focusing on the fact that they knew it was wrong because they hit it, right?
So that you can get out of the false self, Stockholm Syndrome.
I mean, this is the truly horrifying ending in 1984, which is about the family, right?
Big brother, and it's two plus two is four, if that is granted the freedom Freedom is the freedom to say 2 plus 2 is 4 if that is granted all else follows.
Well, you get that 2 plus 2 is 4 freedom when you're a child.
No adult learns 2 plus 2 is 4.
You learn it as a child, and of course Big Brother is the one in charge.
It's really about a childhood, and there's no escape.
So it's really about a childhood.
It's not about totalitarianism.
But what happens at the end of 1984, that is the pure horror, is that Winston Smith, at the beginning he's conforming, but he knows that he's conforming.
And that's not false self.
He knows that he's going to get thrown into a prison camp if he tells the truth about his feelings.
So he hides it from the view screen.
And the view screen, of course, is a metaphor for childhood because when you're a child, you're always watched.
You don't have privacy. Everybody's watching you all the time.
You don't get much time on your own as a child.
So at the end of 1984, Winston Smith loves Big Brother.
So he has now experienced so much trauma that he now loves what has destroyed him.
That is the false self.
When you genuinely love what has destroyed you, when you genuinely feel loyalty for that which has rendered your soul, when you genuinely feel obligation Towards people who do not feel obligation towards you.
Towards you as an individual, not you as a son or a daughter or whatever.
When you love what has destroyed you and don't know that it's a problem, that is the false self.
Being hurt doesn't count.
because you can be hurt and survive.
I'll have to pick this up a little bit later Sorry about that. And that is the big difference between the false self and the true self.
And that's very important to understand when you're debating with people or having any kind of interaction with people, that they probably don't have the capacity to determine truth from falsehood any more than Winston Smith at the end of 1984 has any real capacity to evaluate The information that's coming over about the victory on the Malawar Front.
He has no capacity to evaluate it.
He has simply bonded in a slavish and degraded way.
He has been completely and totally broken.
And he has bonded with his destroyer.
This is a very well-known psychological phenomenon called the Stockholm Syndrome.
You can look it up. Where you become passionately attached to whoever is destroying you.
And it's got very real reasons psychologically which make sense from a biological survival standpoint that when you're around a sadistic narcissist or a vicious narcissist or a violent narcissist in one form or another that it is from a biological survival standpoint the most advantageous strategy is simply to abandon your own identity and become a mirror of the narcissist and an amplifying mirror of the narcissist.
The grave, and the reason, the way that the false self is created is sort of in one fundamental manner.
You are hurt, right?
So your parent screams at you, or your parent hits you, let's just say.
And you experience pain and you cry.
And then what happens is, the greater your distress, the more you are hurt.
Right? So normally when you're hungry, right?
When you're a child and you're hungry, you cry, and then you get some food.
Or if you're Nappies or your diapers are dirty or you got a rash.
You cry and then your parents try all these things to comfort you and then they find what works and then you don't cry anymore, right?
But when you're a child, if when you cry your discomfort is increased, you will very quickly stop crying.
And so what happens is if your mom hits you and then you end up, you know, the day or two later your mom comes in And scratches her head and you flinch, she's going to get angry at you.
Why? Because you've got this sort of ingrained self-protection going on based on the fact that you were hit and you don't want to get hit again.
And the last time you were hit, your mom raised her hand and now she raises her hand again and you flinch.
Well, your mom's going to get angry, right?
Because it's going to remind her that she beat you or hit you and she's going to feel guilty.
And because she's an immature and vicious narcissist, she's going to feel that you're attacking her by making her feel bad.
And so she's going to get angry.
It's not being attacked that causes the false self.
That's not the issue.
It's being attacked and then being attacked further the more you try and defend yourself.
That causes the false self.
Well, actually, that causes a kind of emotional numbness.
The false self, the actual genesis of the false self is a little bit different, but this is what causes the first break with the instincts, right?
It's like if you can imagine some sadistic scene where we all touch the stove as a kid and get burned, and then the more we cry, the more our parent is going to push her flesh onto the hissing stove.
That's going to cause a sort of psychotic break with your own feelings because your feelings are designed to protect you.
But the more your feelings try to protect you, the more they expose you to harm.
So the more that you cry out about being beaten, the worse you're going to get beaten.
The more you try to defend yourself against being beaten, the worse you're going to get beaten.
So every instinct and feeling that you have that is trying to protect you ends up causing you greater harm, right?
So your feelings, which are supposed to be your defenders, turn into, sort of, quote, your attackers.
Well, that's the root genesis of the false self.
Because the truth of that reveals, right?
That's the sufficient but not necessary cause for the false self.
The truth that that reveals is that your parents, or those who are in control of you, are sadistic narcissists, right?
That's the truth that is revealed.
And that's the truth that children find unbearable, as we've talked about before.
And so that's an important thing, a very important thing to understand about the genesis of the false self, and about the level of trauma that you're dealing with when you're debating people who are showing false self tendencies, right?
This is the level of trauma that you're dealing with.
You're trying to argue politics With Winston Smith after the end of 1984.
Of course you're going to get endless misdirection.
Of course you're going to get condescension.
Of course you're going to get hysteria.
Of course you're going to get endless falsehoods, because the level of trauma that's at the bottom of the false self is truly psychotic.
I mean, the false self is the personality's attempt to deal with being viciously brutalized by those who claim to love you.
That's a very important thing to understand, the level of trauma that's at the bottom of the false self.
And this is true for yourself as well.
Just don't imagine that this is just a little thing you can wriggle out of, you know, like a jacket that's too tight or something.
There's a lot of trauma at the bottom of the false self, and we all have it because to different degrees, but all fundamentally have it because society is full of very little but falsehood these days.
So I just sort of wanted to point that out, that this is an important thing to understand about the false self.
And what we'll do this afternoon, if I remember, and I think I will, is we'll talk a little bit more about what emotions and what relationship emotions have to the false self.
And I'd also like to touch a little bit more on Nietzsche.
I did actually most of this yesterday in a podcast.
Unfortunately, I lost it.
I had to end up podcasting on my Zen and sadly it locked up at the end of the recording.
But it's certainly better this time around and we'll do a little bit more of this this afternoon.
So I hope you're doing well. The board is back up and we are taking steps to correct Recurrence.
But I hope that you'll come back to the board.
So sorry that it was down for a couple of days.
We're doing our best to work with GoDaddy.
They've resolved the issue, but have also warned me that my database is not safe for the infinite future.
So we will figure that out and come up with a more reproducible structure for the board.
So thank you so much for listening.
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