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July 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:29

351 Call In Show July 30, 2006 - No Free Will!

Professional insecurity, children and state compulsion, and the pursuit of happiness...

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	Okay, so thanks everybody for joining us on this unbelievably muggy Sunday afternoon.
	It's actually nice to have a good excuse to be inside.
	It's up here in Canada.
	You have, you know, a couple of months, like four to six months of cold where you want to get outside, then you have a couple of months of good weather, and then you have Hell's Kitchen and the bugs.
	So it's a nice mix of environments, but this is actually kind of nice to sort of have a good excuse to slither into the air conditioning and to enjoy it from that standpoint.
	Well, just we'll hang tight.
	I'm assuming that's because all this background stuff is still loading.
	The Windows I just booted up. Excellent.
	I've been trying to work on my stutter, and I think that this public speaking stuff has really helped quite a bit.
	And you know what's interesting too, just by the by, I don't know if this is the case with anybody else, but if you've done public speaking, I actually found it made interviews a lot more pleasant.
	I've never really disliked interviews too much, but I did find that having done all these podcasts, when I went in for interviews with people sort of looking for new work, I did actually find that it was nice.
	It was sort of a positive thing.
	And somebody had once long ago told me about Toastmasters.
	I've never done anything like that, but...
	I could see it sort of being very useful to get used to sort of speaking in a slightly wider stage and to enjoy that and sort of get the hang of...
	I always had trouble ending thoughts before and so the podcast has imposed a kind of discipline on that for me and to anticipate when the thoughts should end because of course I'm gauging it depending on traffic.
	I have to sort of make the podcast last anywhere from 30 to 45 to 50 minutes.
	So getting all that balance going has been quite enjoyable, and I think it's sort of helped me out in my professional life as well, which is kind of neat.
	Has anyone else, I know, Heron, you've done some public speaking, but has anyone else ever done any public speaking of that kind and found that it had some effects on other areas of their life?
	Really? So you're kind of a podium guy?
	When I speak publicly, I usually wet myself.
	No, but I mean, if you are going to public speak, given the self-urination, you'd want a podium.
	I'm kind of a, I don't want to get up in front of anyone guy.
	Yeah, yeah, because you don't want anyone to see that, right?
	So a podium would be a sort of, maybe that's why podiums were first put up there, right?
	So I had a sort of interesting, well, I've had a number of interesting exchanges on the board this week, which I'm going to podcast out a little bit later.
	I won't talk about it now, because I don't know if everybody's been following them.
	But one of the questions that did come up, which I thought was very interesting, was the question, if you have to send your children to public school, and in some places, I think in North America you can opt, in America you can for sure, and in Canada you can as well, you can opt to homeschool your children, which means that you get to pay for the service you don't use, and then pay extra for the service that is actually valuable.
	But also, in some places in Europe, in Germany in particular, you just have to send your children to public school, which is unusual because Germany is normally a little bit more lax with those kinds of rules.
	Just kidding. So I was sort of wondering, if I have kids and I was in Germany, would I actually end up saying to people...
	I just have muted everyone because somebody just joined us who's got the old speaker loop back.
	But I was wondering if it would be worthwhile telling your children that they have to go to public school because they're forced to go to public school.
	In other words, to tell them the truth about the situation that's going on for them.
	Because that's going to have some pluses and minuses, right?
	The pluses are that they understand that your values are opposed to what they're teaching in public school, but they kind of have to go.
	They do get a sort of clear view of the government.
	They don't get pumped full of a whole load of stuff at school that then you have to try and wriggle your way around, because, of course, if they feel that you're sending them to school voluntarily, but that everything that they're being taught at school is completely against everything That you believe, then they're going to feel that your values don't really translate into action.
	Like, I really dislike the state, but here I'm going to ship you to the state school.
	It's sort of like being an atheist and signing up your kid for Sunday school, right?
	Well, I mean, that would be so you could sleep in, so that's a little bit different.
	But I wonder if you wouldn't end up actually...
	You're not telling your kids that they're forced to go, and that makes it easier for them in school.
	They're not going to end up with all this stuff where people are just going to be saying to them, oh, you don't believe this stuff, and what do you mean we're forced to go?
	And then other kids' parents are, oh, you told them that we're forced to go?
	And then the teacher's saying, well, he says, why on earth should I listen?
	To you, because I'm just forced to be here and all this kind of stuff.
	So I can sort of see it both ways.
	It's a little bit more fundamental than the old, do you tell your kids about Santa Claus kind of thing.
	But I think that it would be a very interesting question.
	I was just sort of wondering what other people thought.
	Because it's kind of a pretty significant question related not just to this, but to a whole bunch of other things that you talk about in terms of the state.
	So you're unmuted. Please go ahead.
	Yeah, in my opinion, why wouldn't you tell your kid the truth if you really believe that?
	And the fact that it seems to me that the fact that parents don't tell their kids that either means they're lying or they actually believe that public schooling is a good thing, one of the two.
	So it just seems to me that by, you know, Making up excuses for why they have to go, what you're really doing is you're telling the kid that even you don't understand why they're going.
	So, I just, I mean, I think it's an interesting question, and a lot of it has to do with socialization when it comes to your kids, right?
	So, the general social milieu that they're going to be operating in is either religious or status, sort of some combination of the two, and what do you tell them about This kind of philosophy, or what we would say is kind of a true philosophy, where collective concepts are subordinated to individual instances.
	Not that you'd frame it that way until they were at least six, because you want to make sure that they understood it.
	You can't very well tell your five-year-old you have to go to school or someone's going to come and shoot us.
	I mean, that would be terrifying for a kid.
	Well, not us. Daddy.
	We're going to shoot Daddy. Well, but you could tell your, you know, You could tell your five-year-old that, I mean, the whole that's just the way it is explanation,
	though. I think it's a cop-out, because if you don't tell them something that makes sense, then what you're doing is reinforcing the idea that the state is some Unidentifiable concept that you just have to obey.
	Well, I think it's an interesting question, and I'm not sure that I can sort of answer it completely, but that sort of question when your kid says, why do I have to go to school?
	Or, of course, the kid's going to come home with the kind of homework, sort of like, you know, coloring the evil capitalist pig destroying the environment, or something like that.
	Or, you know, the people most responsible for problems in the world are business people, capitalists, the private market, or your dad, or something like that.
	So when they get this kind of homework, the question is, what are you going to do with your children when they have to answer that kind of stuff?
	Especially when it comes to the propaganda around the environment.
	So I remember reading in a very good book about economics, this guy who was saying that his kids would come home with all of this stuff around...
	His kids would come home with all of this stuff around environmentalism and why recycling is so important and why if you don't recycle, you're evil and the blue boxes are the new prayer mats and so on.
	And he actually came to the teacher and said, I would really appreciate it if you would stop teaching this kind of stuff to my child.
	And the teacher got really angry and upset.
	And said, well, I'm going to teach this stuff to your child just because you might be into environmental destruction doesn't mean that I will be in all that kind of stuff.
	Now, as an economist, of course, he knew that recycling was totally bogus, right?
	So, like here up in Canada, you have to wash out your cans.
	In order to send them back.
	And of course, the amount of energy and resources it takes to get the water out of the lake, cleaned and purified, pumped up to your station so that you can run the water for two minutes to wash out your can, is ridiculous, right?
	So he said that he wanted to not have his teacher teach all of this stuff, which was just false.
	And the teacher really got down his throat about all this stuff.
	And then, interestingly enough, she said, sort of in the next breath, that they were going to be changing the Christmas pageant so it was like the winter solstice pageant or something like that, so that the children who weren't into Christianity wouldn't be offended.
	And he said, but this is exactly the same kind of thing.
	The environmentalism that you're teaching is just a kind of specious religion.
	And so I prefer that you don't teach these kinds of false things to my children.
	And you recognize this when it comes to, say, Islamic or Muslim kids and Jewish kids and Christian kids and atheist kids.
	But you don't recognize that the environmentalism that you're preaching is a kind of religion.
	But you always got, I mean, those are great stories, but you always do kind of have to wonder, I think, how these kids do on the test, right?
	I mean, it's a really tough situation.
	Does anybody want to respond to that?
	It would be a really good lesson for the kid as well to see what happens when you oppose the authority.
	Well, and I wonder, I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that, let's say that we have kids, right, and I do this kind of stuff, and because, you know, I don't get enough conflict on the board or in emails or something like that, or at work, So let's say that I do that with my kids.
	I wonder if it's not a little bit hypocritical because, of course, I went all the way through high school not having a clue which end was up and 2 plus 2 was blue to me because I just didn't really think for myself, didn't know how to think for myself, and just kind of accepted and went along with the flow in general.
	And I wonder if it might not be a little bit kind of hypocritical to say to my kids, well, I kind of sailed through on this tsunami of conformity.
	But you have to fight from kindergarten onwards all of the lies of the state, whereas I basically didn't really get into it until university and so on.
	I wonder if it might, like we're asking them to do something in a sense that we didn't do, if that makes any sense.
	But we have knowledge, of course, that we can impart on them.
	Sorry, Greg, we have knowledge that we can impart that nobody imparted on us.
	I agree. I'm just wondering if it's imparting or inflicting.
	I don't know. That's a good question.
	Sorry, Greg. Go ahead. Well, one way or another, there's Some generation is going to have to take on the burden one way or another.
	I mean, to teach a kid to do what you did is really just to perpetuate the same problem, isn't it?
	You know, just go along to get along and don't make waves and you'll be better off if you...
	Just take the money if they give it to you.
	At some point, somebody's going to have to stand up and say no.
	And yeah, that's going to entail a huge burden, but I frankly don't see how else it can get done.
	Right. No, I do hear what you're saying, and I think that it is a...
	It's an important point.
	I think you're kind of right about that.
	I think that somebody's got to take the bullets to get things to a newer or higher plane, and it is a shame that it does have to be our kids.
	And I often wonder, if I had known about this stuff when I was much younger, what effect it would have had on my life.
	I mean, it certainly would have saved me some time, but I think also it would have ended up causing me a lot of conflict.
	You know, kids do have a pretty high...
	I don't know if this is a defensible position from a sort of human nature standpoint or just a conditioning standpoint, but kids do seem to have a kind of conformity requirement, especially as they get into their early teens, sort of puberty and post-puberty, because, you know, you're sort of on the whole reproduction drive, right, which apparently ends, I think, for a man about 12 minutes after you're dead.
	But you're kind of on this whole reproduction drive, and philosophy, which directly opposes the vast majority of thinking of both the same sex and the opposite sex, doesn't exactly propel you along in that arena, so I wonder if that would be the case, that, you know, that conformity aspect, it might be sort of tough for the kids.
	I mean, I agree with you, you kind of have to tell your kids the truth, but...
	I think there's going to be some...
	I think there's going to be some cost to it and I think I guess I'm just sort of saying that it's important to be aware of those up front and to sort of apologize that mommy and daddy are slightly enlightened and all the difficulties that's going to cause them but that we think that it's going to be better for them overall.
	Yeah, that's a tough one because you're kind of...
	It's almost like you're trying to get them to subscribe to a kind of...
	Millennial religion in and of itself.
	Suffer now so that you can feel better later, that whole thing.
	Well, but of course I'm preaching that with breaking with corrupt families, so I don't have as much problem with that, but I'm preaching it to adults for the most part, because kids don't really have that option.
	But it is a challenge, but of course, yes, I mean, when it comes to moving the species forward, you know, there are some people who have to take some bullets, and I certainly have taken my fair share.
	I just... And of course it could be the case that when you tell kids the truth, they're going to have, I mean, I do believe that in general they're going to be a huge amount happier.
	It's just that when it comes to socializing with other kids, and it's not even so much those other kids, it's those other kids' parents.
	I mean, we had this discussion a while back on the board, which was something like, you know, our neighbors here, they have like four kids who are very nice kids, a little bit beaten down, of course, because their parents are religious, so...
	This guy is very proud of his son's drawings, and so he brought over a fairly well-drawn picture of Christ, you know, bleeding tears from his eyes or something like that.
	So, you know, when you see that kind of stuff, it's like, wow, that's really horrible.
	It's really well done.
	But, you know, it's like the sides of those heavy metal vans, which have all of the Pegasus and the women and all that.
	It's like, yeah, it's kind of nicely done, but it's kind of horrible, too, at the same time, so...
	You know, I would say that from that standpoint, I was like, good sadism, good masochism, that's really well done.
	So it's kind of tough, you know, if those kids ever sort of come over and say, do you go to church?
	It would be, yes, I go to the church of Zeus.
	And they'd be like, well, who's Zeus?
	It's like, Zeus is my god of reason.
	You sort of get into those conversations.
	And then this is sort of one of the reasons why we're thinking of building a fence, and a heavily electrified one as well, just to avoid that kind of stuff, much that we do like the kids.
	But it's tough, you know?
	I mean, as we've all sort of found, I think, while going through this kind of journey, and I don't mean the free-domain radio journey, I just mean sort of the pursuit of truth journey, We found that as we begin to talk honestly about our thoughts and feelings and reasons for what we believe, that there is some considerable costs in terms of personal relationships.
	And it seems to be quite a few people on the board who are going through this at the moment, so I feel that my work is almost complete.
	I plan to sunder all relationships that I come across.
	But one gentleman emailed me about problems he was having with his wife and got a couple of others about parental issues and so on.
	And there are, I think, a lot of people who are going through this kind of process at the moment.
	And it is tough.
	And, of course, if you get it as a kid, you're going to face some problems there.
	But then your adult life is going to be that much easier.
	So probably on balance is going to be better.
	But it's not something I'm particularly looking forward to.
	I mean, if you think about how terrifying it is for us as adults, it can be extremely terrifying for children who, like you said, need to go through that phase where they conform and they bind with their peers and they explore and they just grow and develop.
	I mean, that would be absolutely terrifying for them.
	Right, and I think the best way probably to communicate it with kids is, you know, most kids have a closet or under the bed, which is where they think the monsters are.
	And I think if you simply tell the kids that there are monsters under there, they're called the state and god, and then, you know, in the middle of the night you can kind of rattle around in there, you know, make some slithering noises or some eyeball-popping noises or something like that, just so that they can sort of, you know, personalize it a little bit more.
	more, does that sort of make sense?
	What do I say to that?
	Well, that's the end of my topic.
	It...
	In my own case, I've always kind of had just under the surface a nagging belief that everything around me was sort of hypocritical and False.
	And so I just naturally maintained a distance in order to kind of shield myself from that.
	And then to actually want to go and do that to another kid, I don't think I could...
	I couldn't stomach it.
	No, it would be really hard.
	It would be really hard to do that, and what amazes me is that there are people out there who have the same kind of gnawing feeling in their stomach, that there's hypocrisy all around them, and then they just turn it off.
	Can you give us some examples of that?
	No, I would have to go into a lot of clinical cases to do that, and I'm not prepared to do that.
	Okay, I will then. So, Christine is patient on Friday.
	Actually, no, Friday is all Steph Day, right?
	That's the heavy lithium and nerf bat day of personal therapy for me.
	So, it wasn't Friday, Thursday?
	Thursday is Steph 2.
	Let's just say it's Steph day every day.
	Absolutely. Normal tea, did you have something that...
	I'm going to unmute everyone and just sort of see where we are, because I would be more happy if we could all talk at the same time, assuming that people haven't got the loopback feed thing going on.
	Good, good. Okay, so I think we solved those issues.
	So everybody who wants to talk can talk.
	I'm going to ask that we stay off the topic of free will versus determinism, if you don't mind, just because we're having some chats at the moment that are clarifying some of that stuff from a more personal level.
	And I also still have to have my Yahoo chat with the kind determinist.
	So, if you would like to throw up some topics, I'm going to just sort of pass it open.
	I have a few more to chat about, but I don't want to monopolize as I get to during the week.
	So, this is as much your show as mine.
	So, go ahead. Everybody's got the mic if they want to.
	Oh, sorry. Normalty has said that he has no microphone.
	If you could just webcam and hand signal, we can probably try and figure it out from there.
	Or if you have a whiteboard and a webcam, we could go with it from there.
	Niels would like to talk about free will versus fraternitism.
	And what that is, is the choice whether to join a frat or not.
	And we can talk about that perhaps next week?
	Next week. So if anybody else has anything to add, no problem if you don't.
	I will continue on with regular topics.
	But if you have anything to add, I just want to know if anybody's sort of mulling something over in their head and wants to join in and add something.
	I'm sorry. Hello. My name is Stephen.
	I'm good. So I guess I'm happy to join this conversation.
	This is my first time listening in on the live chat.
	And I guess I'm curious to ask you, Steph, about an issue that I've heard you talk about before on the podcast relating to the...
	As people are maturing emotionally, there is this tension between Weighing are short-term payoffs versus long-term gains.
	And in particular, this might come up with the day-to-day choices that people make with their careers or the way they spend their money or just the type of lifestyle they live.
	I guess I was curious how What your experience was with dealing with that issue of short-term payoff versus long-term payoff.
	In particular, I'm curious, because of your family history and because of also the things that you have managed to achieve, like starting businesses and these things seem like the opposite way that people would tend to go if they had the childhood that you have had.
	Right, right. Sorry, go ahead.
	Do you have more questions? No, that's basically it.
	I mean, I'm mostly curious about this because these are, I guess, issues that I feel myself dealing with.
	And I just wanted your perspective on it.
	Right. I mean, I'll give you a short, and this is more just sort of a personal bio kind of thing.
	I'm not going to try and extrapolate it unless what I'm saying at a personal level connects to people.
	But I would say that...
	Once I got out from underneath my mother's obviously fairly horrendous form of authority, I became a kind of rational hedonist for some time, because I think that if you defer gratification in a fundamental kind of Calvinist way, then your life ends up being a continual process of deferring gratification.
	And what happens then is your life becomes progressively less and less enjoyable if you're always saying, well, you know, I had a bad childhood, so now what I need to do is I need to work extra hard at university and take, you know, accounting or something so that I can set myself up to be in some sort of opposite position.
	So maybe you came from a poor background and then you want to become an accountant or you feel that becoming an accountant is important to make up for whatever, whatever.
	And so what I found was that because the first 15 years were very difficult and unpleasant, that I became quite a hedonist.
	And what I mean by that is nothing particularly bad.
	What it meant is that, I mean, I've never done drugs, and I guess I smoked a little bit, and I got drunk a couple of times.
	But that really wasn't what I'm talking about.
	What I'm talking about is I decided to go and do an English literature degree.
	Why? Because it was so economically viable.
	Well, of course not. It was something that was of great pleasure to me.
	I loved reading, writing, and debating, and so on.
	And then I started getting into acting, so then I applied to the National Theatre School of Canada, and I got in for acting and playwriting, so I did that for a couple of years.
	And then I finished my undergraduate in history, and then I took a year and I worked because I was out of money, and then I did a master's degree.
	So for probably about six or seven years, After I had finished my sort of direct childhood experiences, my brother and I sort of kicked my mom out when I was about 15, I think.
	And so we sort of made do ourselves from there by working and having other roommates and so on.
	But I sort of wanted more sort of immediate short-term gratification from my life because there'd been so much difficulty and unpleasantness In the first 15 years, I kind of went down that road and really enjoyed it.
	I loved university. It was a daily combat, but that's something that really stimulated me and I found it very enjoyable.
	I loved some aspects of theatre school.
	It was a little bit emotionally intense and a little bit culty, but that wasn't the end of the world either.
	And so I kind of pursued this stuff for my own gratification without sort of the long-term goal in mind.
	And I think that if in my mid-teens I had said, okay, well, now in order to secure my future, I'm going to become a doctor or something or an accountant or a lawyer or something where there's just a lot of hard work, a lot of grind and stuff that I didn't really enjoy, I think that would have been a real mistake.
	I think that would have been a bad thing for me to do because then it would have been like, okay, well, the first 15 years sucked.
	And now for the next six or seven years, they're going to suck as well.
	And then I'm going to be trying to start my career, so that's going to kind of suck.
	But by the time I'm 40, then things should be relatively unsucky.
	And I just think that that would have been way too long to defer gratification.
	I think that if you've had a pleasant and happy childhood, you can throw yourself into school in a more demanding way.
	And I mean, I threw myself into school, but I definitely made sure that it was stuff that I enjoy.
	So I think that when you have a tough...
	Childhood, I think you've kind of got to enjoy stuff for a couple of years.
	To reorient yourself, to let yourself have more pleasure.
	And then I started getting into business.
	And of course, I'd always loved computers and so on, so that wasn't so hard.
	And that was a very, very hard transition for me.
	I mean, I'd gone from grad school, which is mostly sitting around thinking and, you know, typing a couple of pages a day, which was great.
	And I developed a lot of the core ideas that I worked with during my time in grad school in my mid-twenties.
	But when I ran out of money at the end of grad school and decided not to do a PhD, I ended up going into business, and that was a very hard transition because there was a lot of new stuff, stuff that I didn't know anything about, how to present, how to sell, how to build software, how to manage, how to grow a business. It was all very hard.
	And of course, it was a startup, so it was like 60, 70, 80 hours a week.
	It was like a week or two of travel every month.
	It was very hard. But because I had taken six or seven years and had a really great time, I could do that kind of work without feeling like life was just a constant amount of drudgery.
	And then after I did that for six or seven years, sold the company.
	Then I took a couple of years off and wrote books, which was great.
	And then I started back up.
	I've been back in the business world for three years.
	And so what I find is that it's kind of like a rhythm.
	Like you've got to do stuff that is really tough and you don't want to do.
	It's like doing your taxes and stuff like that.
	But you also have to make sure that you schedule in stuff that you really want to do.
	Because life is obviously a big balance.
	It's a very complex balance and a constantly shifting balance between short-term pleasures and long-term pleasures.
	So yes, sometimes I will defer spending today to save for my retirement.
	But I'm not going to live like a pauper to save for my retirement.
	So it's a complicated set.
	But I do think that you really do have to schedule significant amounts of time in your life that you're doing stuff just for the pure, sheer, fun hell of it.
	And if you don't schedule that kind of stuff, I think life can get a little bit grey, a little bit monotonous, and I think you can end up kind of depressed if that makes any sense.
	So that's sort of my experience of how it works.
	Does that sort of ring any bells with you?
	Yes, that does make sense.
	So I guess some of that, what you described, the timeline you described, or just what I know from listening to your podcast, is that you met Christina after you had made some of those large transitions.
	Is this fair statement that you're never in a position where you might have felt like you were sacrificing time cultivating the relationship with your wife in favor of working hard at your business or I don't know, something else. No, I think I understand what you mean.
	Yes, I think that it helped a lot.
	I mean, two things helped a lot with Christina.
	One was that I had achieved what I wanted to achieve in my professional career, so I didn't have to work as hard.
	And the second, of course, was that I'd gone through two years of three hours a week of therapy, plus a huge amount of work that I did sort of on my own.
	So I think that process had really helped me to close the chapters on a lot of unresolved business with my With my childhood because when I was in business and starting my own company, I experienced a lot of fear.
	A lot of fear of failure.
	A lot of fear of... And of course that's what drives a lot of people to accept.
	And so I think that I certainly found...
	I experienced a lot of terror.
	And of course I was in business with my brother who's not the most relaxed and confident human being in the world either.
	So we both had, I think, some skill and ability.
	But we were driven by this high-octane jet fuel of sheer terror.
	We can't fail.
	We can't fail no matter what it takes.
	We work all weekend. We work all night.
	We can't fail!
	And so that can drive you to quite a significant amount of achievement.
	But at the same time, it's not exactly a high-quality, high-pleasure state to live in.
	So by the time I met Christina, I had learned to find a lot more satisfaction in kind of living and breathing, which meant that I didn't have fear and the resulting hyper-ambition Driving me at the same time as I was trying to become intimate with someone at an emotional level and an intellectual level, because the two are kind of opposites.
	We're just watching at the moment some shows called Entourage, where Jeremy Piven plays this absolutely hilarious, and he's a fine, fine comic actor, he plays this hilarious, Ari Gold, and who's constantly driven by these demons of insecurity to success and excess.
	And of course, this causes an enormous amount of problems within his personal relationship.
	And I think because I had managed to deal with the fear and insecurity that drove me to become hyper-competitive and so focused on professional success, then I was able to manage my workload and manage my ambition and professional life to be reasonable enough to allow me to have scope to develop a closer personal relationship.
	And so I think that having dealt with the demons of insecurity and fear of failure, I was much more available in a sort of romantic sense.
	Does that jive with what you remember?
	Yeah, completely. I think that you were...
	You had definitely dealt with some of those demons and not to say that we haven't had other challenges for both of us in terms of allocating time for fun and pleasure and connection and work and starting up my business and you starting a new job early in our marriage and trying to manage those, I guess, pursuits was very interesting, very fulfilling for sure.
	But what I found was that when you have a strong personal connection with a lover, or this could also occur with a friend I'm sure, What happens at work then becomes something that you can get help with from your partner.
	Whereas in the past, when I had relationships and was hyper ambitious, the work staff got in the way of my partnership because there wasn't a solid enough connection with my partner at that point.
	She viewed work staff as an intrusion into our relationship.
	Whereas when you have a very strong and intimate bond with your partner, you can deal with the work staff relatively efficiently and it's not viewed as something that is competing.
	With your romantic time, but it's something that is supported by the relationship, and thus you can deal with it much more effectively and get back to the relationship stuff, which is like the pure relationship stuff, which is the real core of things.
	Yeah, you recognize the significance of what the person is trying to do with his or her career and how important it is for the couple, for the family.
	And the last thing I'll say, sorry, just before turning it back, is that When you get involved with someone at a romantic level, and this is true for friends as well, and I guess just about anybody who listens to these podcasts, then you necessarily reveal an enormous amount about yourself, about your own history.
	And I've mentioned this once on the podcast, but I think it bears repeating in this context that when you reveal something very personal about yourself, you know, your history and what makes you tick and what you went through and so on, then what happens is that you kind of give that other person a lot of power over you.
	Because then, when, like, you know, let's just say that, okay, well, I had this thought of that childhood, and then when something is occurring in my work profession, somebody can say, oh, look, you're just playing out this bullshit from your childhood, and so you better just stop it, right?
	And what are you going to say?
	Because, yes... It certainly could be the case, but revealing truth to other people about your own history does give them power to help or to hurt you in addition to the pain that you're going through.
	Because if you are in fact running through something from your childhood, somebody pointing it out in a kind of harsh way isn't really going to help very much.
	In fact, it's going to hurt a whole lot more than it helps.
	So I think that I'd learned the difference in terms of how to trust someone and how to tell them something about myself in such a way that then, if I was re-enacting something from my childhood, Then they could actually help from that standpoint.
	So, you know, we had a long chat last night about what was going on the boards with regards to the free will versus determinism debates, which was very helpful.
	And, of course, that kind of trust is important.
	And I certainly didn't have the ability to differentiate between those two different kinds of situations where self-revelation leads to strength and support versus self-revelation leads to mockery and contempt.
	And I didn't have the insights enough when I was younger to be able to differentiate between those two.
	So, just let us know if this is sort of helpful to you at all, if there's anything else you wanted to add to that?
	No, everything you've said, I understand.
	Can you hear me still? Okay.
	It's weird, I cannot hear myself, and so I'm not sure if anyone else can.
	I understand. So, I certainly trust my wife.
	And she and I have grown up emotionally together in the last two years.
	Also, during those two years, I have been in that fear-driven success hyperdrive that you described.
	And I guess, together with that, there has been the not-too-pleasantness of it.
	And I guess I'm just dealing with Whether or not I want to...
	How to keep doing that or how to do that without the bad parts.
	How to keep working towards success, but with the right balance.
	Right. Also, sort of to broaden your success to include both the personal relationship and professional aspects of your life.
	Is that sort of fair?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Could you elaborate it, if you don't mind, if it's not too personal?
	What do you mean by the bad part?
	I'm sorry, I couldn't understand.
	Can you say again? You said you wanted to continue doing this by trying to minimize the bad parts, and I'm just curious if you can elaborate, if it's not too personal.
	Yeah, so it's not too personal.
	I'm a graduate student in computer science, and I guess I feel maybe driven by my own insecurities to work very long periods of time in order to, you know, prove that I can do these things and that's very painful.
	Because I'm simultaneously competing with those feelings of, I guess, insecurity.
	Or, you know, lack of personal worth.
	I guess maybe I'm trying to realize those the wrong way.
	No, listen, I mean, what you're doing is fantastic.
	I mean, it's very, very important to take the pauses in life and figure out where you are relative to your general goals, not just specific goals like your graduate degree, but also happiness in general.
	So is it my understanding that the case is that you kind of work in long hours in the lab or coding or figuring out your thesis or working on your thesis and that your wife is finding that to be difficult to have you away for so long?
	Or is it that you're home but you're still thinking about your work and so you're kind of emotionally not as available as maybe she's used to?
	I guess I'm not as available as I would like to be.
	With her sometimes.
	But my feeling is that if I'm not, you know, working on, you know, my code or my thesis or some paper, then, you know, it's not going to be done, obviously.
	But I've also, I guess, tied up my success there with some amount of my own...
	I identify my own value.
	Now, do you mind if I ask you something?
	Do you think that the cues...
	That are making you work hard or feel insecure in your graduate degree, do you think that your cues are coming from outside yourself, like from your thesis advisor or your faculty or maybe people that you're applying to work for or people you're submitting articles to, are feelings that you are not doing enough or achieving enough, are they coming from outside yourself or are they coming from inside yourself?
	In other words, you're getting things done and you're meeting with approval, but you still feel that it's not enough.
	That's a good question.
	I guess my feeling has always been it's coming from inside rather than outside.
	Okay, and would you say that a feeling of sort of always running to try and catch a train that's always getting further and further away from you, or a feeling like if you're not continually achieving that you're sort of either climbing up that mountain or you're falling down it, there's no sort of space for you to stand on and rest,
	Does that feeling, do you think, come from any place historically for you, like when you were a kid, was there a certain level of approval that you felt that you didn't achieve in any consistent way from your authority figures, your teachers, your parents or anything?
	Yeah, sure, absolutely.
	I mean, I definitely identify this as originating with the relationship I've had with my parents or theirs, the way I was treated when I was younger.
	I guess the reason I asked the original question to you is I was wanting to know how you dealt with that and maybe as a template for a way of me dealing with that.
	Well, I can certainly tell you how I dealt with it, but you're probably not going to like it.
	Was it Steven?
	I'm so sorry.
	I just unmuted the wrong person.
	We were getting a little bit of echo. Did you hear those last comments that I made?
	I did. Yeah, I'm not sure that it's true, but I won't like it.
	Yeah, I'm sure you won't like it, but because, of course, if it was easy, you would have done it already, right?
	So, I mean, you're a smart guy, obviously, like just about everybody who listens to this program, I think, is pretty damn brilliant and sometimes a lot smarter than I am.
	But, of course, the things that you could have done that would be relatively easy, you know, then you would have done it, right?
	It's like, fill out this checklist and everything will be fine.
	Well, The way that I dealt with it was...
	I assume that you're still in contact with your parents?
	Yeah, sometimes. Not very often, but...
	Right. Okay. And so what I did was I went to talk to my parents about this, about issues that I had with my history with them.
	Now, I'm guessing...
	I mean, you can let me know if you want or not, but I'm guessing that The kind of situation that you experienced with your parents had a lot more to do with withdrawal and disapproval than it would have to do with, say, direct physical violence.
	Would that be the case? Yes, certainly.
	Right, so you have a very difficult situation on your hands, emotionally, and you have a much tougher situation on your hands than I ever did because, I mean, the amount of catastrophes that occurred for me as a child, and I don't mean to laugh about it, but relative to the kinds of more subtle control issues or trust issues or respect issues that go on for a lot of people, my stuff was just so catastrophic that it was really in my face that I had to deal with it.
	And how to deal with it was relatively important, you know.
	And everyone kind of agreed with me, yes, you know, beating up on kids is a bad thing to do.
	So at least I had a kind of general, you know, like if your parents are raging crack addicts, then you kind of have a lot of agreement in the world that there's a problem.
	But when your parents have more subtle kind of control or withdrawal or passive-aggressive issues, or manipulative issues, then you have a lot more difficulty because it's kind of a lot more foggy.
	And so I certainly sympathize with the difficulty.
	And what you have to do is a lot harder than what I had to do.
	And I certainly empathize and sympathize with that to an enormous, enormous degree.
	But, I mean, there are three things, three people that you can talk to about this, and this would sort of be my suggested sequence.
	The first thing is that you can probably get some free or heavily subsidized counseling from the university that you're at.
	That would be an excellent thing to do, assuming that you can find a good therapist, right?
	They're not all good, just as not all doctors are good.
	That has been one of the biggest helps during the last two years, has been exactly that.
	Oh, good. Okay, so we can skip past...
	It's like the cooking show where we've already got the first part of the dish already done.
	This is great. All right, moving right along.
	Well, good for you, and congratulations for taking that step.
	I think that you're the first computer science guy, other than myself, to actually have done that.
	So, you know, engineers are not always most friendly with this kind of stuff, right?
	But good for you. Congratulations.
	Now, have you tried talking to your parents about your feelings and what went on for you as a child and the effect that you feel that it's had on you as an adult?
	So, I have not talked to my dad because he's like a stone wall.
	But interestingly, I have talked to my mom much more.
	She and my stepdad have undergone, I guess, a similar spiritual development or emotional maturity in the same way that I or we are as part of this conversation.
	And so I've had a much better time communicating with her than I have had with my dad, which is to say I haven't talked to my dad at all.
	Right, right. Now, one of the things that I found hard to do in a relationship, and Christina taught me a lot about this, and I don't know if this is the case with you as well, it could be a guy thing, I don't know, but when you feel afraid of your status, Within the grad school program or your career potential or whatever, when you feel frightened about that, which I'm sure you're aware of, right?
	Because you're talking about, of course, you've been in therapy, so you're aware of your own feelings.
	When you feel those feelings, do you talk about them with your wife?
	Oh, yes. Yes, I mean, she is the large reason.
	She is a lot of the reason why I got through the last few years, because I was able to talk with her about How I was feeling and all the very difficult feelings that did come up for me.
	Now, okay, so you have a therapist.
	You can talk at least to your mom and your stepdad, although you don't talk to your dad because it's a stone wall.
	And you do talk about your feelings with your wife.
	Now, would you say that your feelings are gaining in intensity, sort of staying about the same, or lessening in intensity, the feelings that you're having problems with?
	So, recently I guess I feel like they're gaining intensity.
	The one that I've asked about.
	And I guess the problem seems to be that I'm pushing forward for the wrong reasons.
	Like, it's more fear-driven rather than, you know, happiness-driven.
	Like, I'm doing what I'm doing, yeah.
	Doing what I'm doing for the wrong. Now, when you do experience your feelings, I'm guessing, just based on what you said already, when you do experience these feelings, I'm guessing that you deal with them by working harder, is that fair to say?
	Well, don't do that. No, no, no, look, I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like it's this simple, right?
	But if you continue to mask your feelings by acting out something that covers up your feelings...
	Yeah, relieving attention.
	Yeah, if you're relieving it, then it's kind of like a drug addict, right?
	And not even with all the fun, like, flashbacks later.
	So, if you feel fear about your professional whatever, right, the stuff that's going on for you in grad school, and you try to deal with that fear by acting to reverse the fear by pushing ahead with some project, then you're not actually going to deal with the fear, right?
	You're just sort of smothering it through action.
	You're not going to deal with the underlying cause of the fear.
	What you're going to do is you're going to treat the symptom.
	And actually what that's going to do is it's going to make your fear worse.
	Because your fear of not being good enough is existential, right?
	I mean, because of your original family of origin, your fear of not being good enough, of requiring approval but feeling like you're never going to get it in any kind of personal way, right?
	Tennis star, I can't remember her name, she said, the thrill of victory lasts 15 minutes.
	So you work for 20 years to win Wimbledon, and then you feel good for 15 minutes.
	I mean, that's not a very good proportion, as far as I can see.
	So if you have these fears that you're not good enough, then it's existential.
	And so if you end up trying to achieve something in the external world to deal with an internally generated problem, Then you're actually going to make that internally generated problem worse because the problem is your thoughts about yourself, not what you achieve in the outside world.
	But if you try and deal with the thoughts that you have about yourself by achieving things in the outside world, it's just going to make that worse because you're applying the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
	That sounds very consistent.
	So, the way to maybe, and this is just an approach, and Christina will...
	Smack me back side of the head if I'm going adrift here.
	But the way to deal with the feelings is...
	The first thing you've got to do is you've got to feel the feelings, right?
	Your feelings are trying to help you.
	Your feelings are not trying to trip you up.
	They're not like evil gremlins that are going to try and mess up your life.
	Your feelings are actually going to try and help you.
	So if you act in a way that smothers or reverses your feelings, then you're kind of numbing yourself.
	And I think I made some metaphor once on the podcast about...
	You know, you're climbing a tree and bees are stinging your ass.
	And if you can't feel that the bees are stinging your ass, you're going to keep climbing the tree until the venom overpowers you when you fall out of the tree and break your neck or some horrible thing on the way down.
	So you kind of need to feel the negative feelings in order to change your course.
	But what you're doing is you're continuing to climb the tree despite the fact that you're getting stung.
	Well, I think you need to stop climbing the tree and figure out what needs to be done.
	And the best way to do that It's to stop acting to control your fear by doing something in the external world.
	So the next time you start to feel nervous, you need to not go to the lab.
	You need to not go to work.
	You need to sit down and write about your fear or talk about it with your therapist or talk about it with yourself or talk about it with your wife or friends or whatever, right?
	But you need to feel that fear because that's where the real cause of the problem is and that is actually trying to help you.
	It's trying to tell you something important about your history.
	Which you can't solve the problems of childhood by getting all the trophies that you can imagine as an adult.
	Because that's not the source of the problem.
	The source of the problem in your childhood is your parents and how they treated you.
	And there's no amount of trophies that's going to change that as an adult.
	Like you could become the agent professor of, you know, crazed supercomputing at MIT. It's still not going to make your childhood any better.
	And the more that you try to achieve things in the external world to make up for things that occurred that were negative or painful as a child, The worst things are going to get for you because you're still not dealing with the original symptoms, right?
	Like if you've got a kind of illness and you just, you know, you've got a kind of skin ailment and you just put makeup on.
	Okay, this metaphor would work better with a woman, but pretend that you're transgender.
	Just for a moment, and we'll come back to reality in a sec.
	But you don't want to put makeup on it, right?
	It's actually going to make it worse.
	You need to deal with the actual thing.
	And the actual thing is that when you were a kid, you didn't have a secure bond with your primary caregivers, right?
	And you always felt that you had to achieve to win their approval, and that approval was always transitory, which is an incredibly agonizing thing for a child to have to go through.
	And if you continue to ignore the fear and pain that that generates, your relationships are just going to get worse and worse.
	and the degree of satisfaction that you get from achieving things in the external world is going to get less and less.
	Right?
	Does that make any sense?
	It's a bottomless hole.
	It's a bottomless hole and you'll continue to achieve and achieve and achieve and achieve and you'll never feel like you've made it.
	Yes, this does make sense.
	Just as a second note, it sounds related to the discussion you guys were having last week about the escalation of evil, but it sounds more general.
	There's just the escalation of any problem that is You're trying to address any problem in a way that's somehow removed from its real cause.
	It just tends to escalate, I guess.
	Right, absolutely. I thought you were about to confess that you were working for the Defense Department.
	So I'm glad that that's not the case.
	But does that sound...
	I mean, I'm trying to give you something, because of course I'm not your therapist or anything like that, but I just sort of wanted to point out that you need to stop smothering what you call the negative feelings, right?
	And they are unpleasant, but of course we do need to deal with them.
	But you actually have a rather simple thing to do up front, which is to stop doing the things that are smothering your feelings, and then your feelings will be more clear to you.
	So it's actually not too complicated to start with, but of course it's going to get complicated as you go forward.
	It's great. And the great thing is, of course, after they throw you out of grad school, you'll have lots of time to work on this.
	See, the major thing is I'm actually not trying to help you.
	I just don't want more competition in the field.
	No, I mean, of course, you still have to do the basics, of course, but it's just you've got to get out from underneath the compulsion to do it to cover up your feelings.
	So, of course, I mean, I'm not saying, you know, lie in bed all day and work on your feelings.
	I mean, you have to do your work, of course, but when you feel the insecurities arise in you, just avoid doing the actions can be a lot more helpful for you.
	And it will, I promise you, it will be difficult, but it will really improve your relationships, primarily with yourself.
	You don't want to be somebody who says, in order to validate my existence in this world, I need to achieve a Nobel Prize a week.
	You want to be somebody who's like, I'm a valuable person because I'm virtuous and kind and just and angry at evil or whatever.
	Things that you actually have some control over.
	Your own actions, your own thoughts.
	You don't want to say, I'm justified as a human being because other people have approved of me.
	Because that really is, you know, what Ayn Rand calls a second-hander syndrome or whatever, right?
	That's looking for approval.
	There's no external solution to the problem of insecurity, and looking to other people for approval just makes it worse.
	So you at least have something that's useful to start with, which is just to stop trying to achieve, to deal with your feelings.
	Now, you don't see your dad at all, is that right?
	Is your biological father? I don't talk to him regularly.
	He's actually coming to visit us.
	In a week. Is he a military man?
	Oh, no. Well, not by trade, but demeanor.
	And what's your history with him, just sort of briefly?
	My parents were divorced when I was very young, and my brother and I were raised with him.
	So we grew up with him.
	Now that's kind of unusual.
	Why didn't your mom get custody?
	I think that she didn't want custody.
	Ouch. Oh, God.
	That's horrible. Oh, my God.
	Go back to work. I can't help you.
	I'm sorry. Oh man, that's killer.
	Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.
	I can certainly appreciate that your mom might have had to go through some sort of spiritual revolution to say, because I don't know about you, my parents divorced very early as well.
	I actually think it was mostly my fault.
	No, my parents divorced very early as well, but...
	And the one thing that I got more angry at with my dad than with my mom was I thought, you know, and I wrote to him actually as well.
	He lives in Ireland. I haven't seen him in years and years and years.
	But I wrote to him and thought, I was more mad at my dad because my dad's sort of marginally saner than my mom.
	My dad kind of left me in the care of this German lunatic, right?
	Not to insult lunatics.
	But I found myself to be more angry because my dad knew what my mom was like and still left me with her, right?
	and my brother too.
	So did your mom, have you ever talked to her about why did you leave me with Joe Stonewall?
	That might be important to do as well.
	Uncovering your past is a great way of opening up your future, right?
	So, if you can figure out why people made the decisions that they made relative to themselves, right?
	Because as kids, we always interpreted that all the decisions are made based on us, right?
	And our actions and behaviors.
	But if you can ask your parents, trace the decisions that they made and the reasons that they made those decisions when you were younger, it'll probably be quite liberating for you.
	And liberating for them as well, right?
	Because we take everything personally when we're kids.
	We just don't have any choice.
	That's our nature, right? I mean, we're total second-handers because we can't survive on our own.
	But I think I found it very helpful to try and figure out why people made the decisions that they made with regards to me when I was younger, so that I could sort of see it more objectively.
	And it didn't give me any sort of sense of forgiveness, but it certainly did give me a sense that it didn't have that much to do with me, that I was just kind of like a leaf in a thunderstorm, and that it helped me not take these kinds of things personally.
	Alright, well listen, keep us posted on how it goes.
	I certainly wish you the best, and congratulations on everything that you're doing so far.
	It sounds like you're doing magnificently, so good for you.
	Good for you. Alright, we are now having everybody unmuted again, and we do have some new people.
	If you'd like to introduce yourselves, feel free to.
	If you don't want to, no problem.
	I'll introduce you for you.
	No, I'm kidding. I have a quick request.
	Yep, go ahead. This is Nanocool.
	The person who was just talking, I think if they mute their mics, this hum that's killing me might stop.
	This problem that's killing you?
	There's a hum that's coming from, I think, the person who was just asking questions.
	Okay, I've just muted him.
	Has that helped at all? Nope, I guess it wasn't him.
	Okay, well, I'll just keep muting people.
	Did you have anything that you wanted to add while I'm going about doing that?
	No. I just wanted to hear a little more clearly, that's all.
	Alrighty. Okay.
	I've noticed some sort of occasional bits of background noise, but some people do say that they don't hear any humming, but that's not...
	Who knows?
	You know, this is cutting-edge technology, baby.
	There are some typists.
	And do you know what that means? That means somebody is not paying 150% pure attention to the free domain radio conversation.
	Shocking! It's beyond shocking.
	Yes, sir. Your edification, it's perfect now for some reason.
	Ah, I think we found it.
	Okay, hang on. Do you have a humming now?
	Yep, it came back. Alright, so we've discovered it.
	It's Addy from behind the Iron Curtain.
	The former Iron Curtain.
	So, it's a Soviet block humming from the 1980s.
	So, it does seem to be the case.
	Now, Niels, the fact that you type hum in the chat window I don't think is exactly the same thing that we're trying to figure out.
	But thanks for trying to help anyway.
	Okay, now, does anybody else have other topics that they wanted to chat about?
	Or anything that came out of our chat with the last gentleman?
	Who, again, I appreciate being so honest and open with what's going on.
	It's certainly not unusual. Does somebody have something that they wanted to add for that?
	Let's see here. Steph, quick question.
	Are you still planning on doing a podcast about Islam?
	Absolutely. But what I'm doing is I'm still working on my Mueller's call to start it.
	So it's going to take a little bit of time to figure that part out.
	Plus I have to have a high tower and...
	I have to get up at about 4 o'clock in the morning.
	And, of course, I have to convert to Islam and learn Arabic.
	So there's a few barriers in the way, but yes, I am absolutely planning on talking about the core content of two of the other big religions, right?
	I mean, there's, well, I guess there are four big religions, right?
	As we talked about on the board this week, there's Stephanism, there's Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
	And I've talked about Christianity, of course, quite a bit.
	Old Testament stuff, which applies to all three religions.
	I've talked a little bit about Judaism and its relationship, particularly to Communism.
	But definitely Islam, I'm still sort of slowly dragging myself through the horrible religious texts, right?
	It's always like reading the ramblings of some lunatic to do this kind of stuff.
	But I am...
	Going to get through and do something about Islam as well, right?
	This religion of peace, it's definitely worth chatting about.
	Why, was there something in specific that you wanted me to look at, or just have a general thing that's going to get me targeted?
	I've got a free Koran in the mail.
	Yeah, well, check for wires.
	Okay, go ahead, Eddie. Yeah, he's...
	Oh, okay, let's... We're going to unmute, Eddie.
	Cuff your ears. Okay, go ahead.
	Hello. Sorry about the hum.
	I didn't even keep the mic close to my mouth.
	I don't know how you can hold a note for that long.
	It's amazing. I think a question about the approach that we should use when talking about morality with people.
	And I think there is some value in the universal approach to establish universal rules and to apply them consistently or to try to find the consistent system in which to apply morality.
	So, I think you use that yourself to go on a person-to-person basis so we can establish first what the other person agrees to in terms of morality and most of the time she will agree that something like murder would be wrong or rape or So we can start from there and if we apply some consistency,
	we can work something.
	And I've had some interesting experiences right here.
	I actually found a Romanian anarcho-capitalist community, very small, classical liberal somewhere.
	So I think there's some value in detailing something about this methodology, person to person.
	Oh, I see. So basically, the argument for morality that we've talked about, I guess, since very early on in the podcast series, you've had some real success bringing that to bear and getting people to understand that they can't just sort of make up moral rules and then apply them randomly to different segments of the population, like, this guy can't do this.
	That's completely evil, but the moment he puts on a uniform, it becomes completely good.
	So you've had some success in taking that approach to people.
	I can say that I read some eyebrows for now and I caused some curiosity about this, yeah.
	Well, that's great. You know, and again, that really is the Socratic method, right?
	Which is the most dangerous thing.
	Like, there's three areas of knowledge.
	And I don't mean to hijack this.
	We'll get back to you in a sec. But there's three areas of knowledge, right?
	There's stuff that we know that we know, right?
	Like, I know that I live in Mississauga.
	And I know that whatever Christina says is the absolute truth, right?
	So there's things that we know.
	And then there's things that we know that we don't know, right?
	Like, I don't really know what the population of Luxembourg is, but at least I know that I don't know what the population of Luxembourg is.
	And then there's a third set of knowledge, which is stuff that we don't know that we don't know.
	And that's where the great realms of bigotry and assumptions and irrationalities and taken for granted kind of occur.
	And the whole Socratic method is to continue to dredge up stuff From the area that people think they know, they know, but they don't know.
	And so when somebody says something like, yes, murder is wrong.
	Well, what is murder? Murder is the murder or the killing of another human being not in the immediate act of self-defense, or something like that.
	And, you know, if that's their definition, then of course that applies to soldiers and so on, and then they have to start using all these concepts of collective self-defense and preemptive strike and so on, which of course can be perfectly applied to, you know, my neighbor looked at me funny and I hear ticking sounds from his basement, so I'm going to nuke his house, right? So, the first thing that you want to do, and this is the whole Socratic method, is to continue, always, always, always, to ask people for their definitions of what they say is true, and then apply them universally to see if they halt.
	That's the scientific method, that's the Socratic method.
	And that way, what you do is you dredge more and more out of this vast sea of assumptions that every human being operates with, because we're all taught so badly.
	And you just say, okay, well, if this is the case, what about that?
	And that's the whole Socratic method.
	It's dredging out All of these things that people don't know that they don't know.
	They think they know them, but they don't really know them.
	And that's just the cross-examining, the questioning, and the argument for morality is a way of approaching that in terms of ethics.
	And I have found it, because people think they know something, but they don't really know it, you can't debate with them, because they're just certain and ignorant, which is the two deadly combinations when it comes to discussing things with people.
	So if you can get them to understand, as Socrates did when somebody said, oh, I know all about justice, and he'd say, well, that's great, because I find justice to be very confusing.
	Perhaps you can tell me about justice, right?
	Or I remember in the Gorgias, he's asking, I think it's Alcibiades.
	Alcibiades says, the satisfaction of immediate pleasures is the greatest good in life.
	And Socrates says, well, that's fantastic, because, you know, when I have an itch on my back...
	When I grab a stick and I scratch it, I feel the most blissful thing in the world.
	And he's like, yeah, so what?
	He said, well, then by your definition, having an eternal itch and scratching it eternally would be the ideal form of life.
	And that doesn't seem quite right to me, right?
	And so, you know, it's people who make assumptions and you just see if they fit.
	And then when they realize that they don't fit, they realize that they have incomplete definitions or incomplete understandings of things that they think that they know, which is a fantastic place for fruitful discussion to occur.
	Is that sort of the approach that you've been taking?
	Yeah, and two other related questions that I had.
	How would you approach someone who would tell you that there are different kinds of moral agents and different kinds of morality to apply?
	For instance, someone said that children have their own moral rules and moral rules that apply to adults.
	And in matters of theology, we have moral rules that apply exclusively to God.
	And secondly, and if you can work it up in one answer, would be to acknowledge some way that there is a level of arbitrarity in statements, right? Only our purpose would be to achieve a minimum level of arbitrarity.
	So how would you frame the question that to one certain level things are totally defined, right?
	Like the moral questions, right?
	And so how would you take that on?
	So these are two things that I have for you.
	Right. Well, you know, you're always loving me the easy questions.
	Thanks. That's great.
	Well, I mean the first thing that I would do when I discuss things about ethics is that I'm perfectly aware that there are some great areas in ethics.
	Right? So, if you're trying to turn ethics into physics, you're going to fail, right?
	Because ethics, there are gray areas, right?
	At what point in someone's IQ diminishment, like, so you've got 10 people, one guy has 150 IQ, well, of course, he's pretty much responsible for his behavior.
	And you've got another guy at the end of the line who's got an IQ of 50, probably isn't responsible for his behavior, and somewhere in the middle, there's a guy we don't know.
	It's sort of, sort of, right? So...
	It's kind of, you know, and when it comes to euthanasia, well, somebody whose brain stem has gone completely dark and you're just keeping their heart pumping, well, sure, that might be a candidate for euthanasia, whatever your debate is on it.
	That's a possible candidate. But there are other areas where it's like, well, the lower brain is lit up and the upper brain is kind of vaguely sparking and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So there are certain issues of ethics if you believe in abortion, right?
	Nobody really usually feels that you can kill the baby right before it's born, yet a lot of people feel that the RU-486 pill, which, you know, prevents implantation, is not really so bad.
	So, you know, somewhere along that continuum, it goes from good to bad.
	And so I'm perfectly aware that there's gray areas within moral philosophy.
	But they're completely tiny, relative to the general aspects of moral philosophy, and we only are going to start dealing with those areas when we get rid of, say, the genocide of 250 million people by governments in the 20th century.
	Like, let's deal with that first, and then we'll deal with the grey areas of how much of the brainstem needs to be alight before you don't think about euthanasia, right?
	That's way down the road.
	So I would first of all admit, yes, of course, there are certain ambiguities and subtleties in grey areas within moral philosophy, But that doesn't make it any less of a science, anything more, than the fact that there are grey areas in biology where it's sometimes difficult to differentiate between one species or another, or you get mutation from animals, like if some cat gives birth to a bald cat, you don't invent a new species, you just say, Whoa, that's kind of freaky.
	And the science of biology still holds, even though it's based on organic stuff, and there's always randomness and variation within organic stuff.
	So, the first thing I would do is accept that there are going to be some gray areas and not try and prove it black and white like physics, because it's just not going to work.
	So, that would sort of be one answer that I would take.
	Now, if somebody says that there are different kinds of moralities, then I would say, sure, absolutely.
	There is different morality for a five-year-old Than there is for a 25-year-old.
	So if a 5-year-old steals a candy bar, well, they may not even understand theft.
	They may just say, well, I thought it was a lot, or I thought it was a pantry.
	We were in a store, there were lots of candy bars.
	I take them at home, and I took them from the store.
	I mean, they might not say it quite that way, but that might be their reasoning.
	But you expect a 25-year-old to understand about shoplifting, assuming that they're not, you know, very low IQ. And so, sure, I have no problem with there being different moralities for a 5-year-old and 25-year-old.
	Why? Because there are objective biological differences.
	Between a five-year-old in terms of brain development and sense of self-development and empathy development and socialization and all of that.
	There are very objective measurable differences between the brain of a 25-year-old and the brain of a five-year-old.
	The same way there is in the brain of somebody who's perfectly mentally healthy and somebody who's got a biological form of schizophrenia.
	So, if you're going to make up moral rules for different groups, that's perfectly valid.
	As long as you can classify them according to some objective metric, some biological objective metric.
	So not like, well, a guy one evening can't go and kill someone, but the next day he puts on a soldier's uniform, he can go.
	Well, his biology hasn't changed, right?
	He's still the same human being.
	And so I don't think that you can say, just make up random different moralities for different people.
	And if somebody says, I think this was your final question, somebody says, well, there's different moralities for God, it's like, sure, and there are different moralities for leprechauns, and there are different moralities for Zeus, but who cares?
	You know, it's like saying there are different realities for some fictional character in the movie, but it's all fiction.
	So I wouldn't even bother with the ethics of God until the person had proved to my satisfaction that God existed.
	I wouldn't certainly talk about what kind of pajamas God wears until the question of God has been settled.
	So, does that help at all?
	I actually missed the most important part.
	The light went off for like a second and then the modem took something to restart and the type card connection went down.
	So, yeah, I guess I'll listen to the recording tomorrow.
	Yeah, if you do, hang on, let me give you a bit of a hand here just so that it doesn't...
	I mean, I'm sure you'll listen to the whole thing anyway, but you might not want to.
	It's at one minute and about ten.
	Sorry, one hour and ten minutes.
	To about 1 hour and 18 minutes.
	Okay, thanks. That probably is where you'll get the stuff that you missed.
	But, boy, I think I just nailed it.
	Boy, it's so much nicer when somebody doesn't actually have the chance to evaluate what I'm saying in any sort of detail.
	Oh, how lovely. Now, just to other people who were maybe tuned into that more or less, did you feel that that was a decent potential answer?
	I had a couple questions.
	Oh, your internet connection didn't go down, huh, Greg?
	Nope. Bummer. Okay.
	Go ahead. Ari, I'm going to put you on mute because the humming is making someone's head explode.
	I can't remember whose. But just give a chat in the IM if you want to come off mute.
	Go ahead, Greg.
	Just let me see if I can put in a couple of muting bits for you so that I can claim that you've dropped packets.
	Go ahead. Okay.
	Okay. Three questions, really.
	Well, actually, two comments and a question.
	The gray area you were talking about, it seems to me that it's more than just a gray area there, that if we're willing to accept a fundamental building block of this whole system as a gray area, then aren't we really saying that it's all just...
	You know, a highly refined opinion.
	And that's usually where I get stuck with people, too, because, you know, the assertion that, you know, if you're going to posit a moral standard, then it has to be consistent.
	The answer is always, why?
	Why does it have to be consistent?
	And, you know, isn't the demand for consistency just another opinion of yours?
	And when I say, you know, well, you know, consistency ensures that it's not an If what you're positing is inconsistent, then it is just an opinion.
	The answer is always, well, so what?
	The guy with the biggest gun wins anyway.
	So I guess the point is that if we can't nail this down in some...
	I don't know, in some concrete term, then it's always going to be a game of...
	Evasion, I guess.
	Okay, now, would people feel that the science of biology is not a science because there are some areas where classification is difficult?
	No, but the science of biology has some specific presuppositions that everybody has to agree to.
	And so, if you don't agree to those presuppositions, then it doesn't make sense to practice science.
	Right. And now, wouldn't you say, though, that this would also be the case with moral philosophy, that there are certain presuppositions that you simply have to accept, otherwise you are not a philosopher, right?
	You're just somebody with an opinion, right?
	I think people should jump five feet in the air.
	Well, okay. You know, good luck with all of that, right?
	I mean, you're just somebody who's got a bunch of opinions, right?
	Between opinions and science, or at least the rigors of philosophy, is, you know, logical consistency, valid and empirically proven axioms, reciprocity, universality, all those kinds of things.
	Those are just the rules, and the rules aren't made up.
	They're derived specifically from the nature of reality.
	So if I'm going to describe the characteristics of a rock, and I'm going to say that I'm accurately describing the characteristics of a rock, and I say, well, This pile of rocks stays on the ground and this pile of rocks floats in the air.
	Right? Then I have to have some sort of empirical reason for that.
	There has to be some difference between these rocks, right?
	Maybe this set of rocks is a cunningly painted set of helium balloons.
	You know, they just look like rocks, but inside they're helium and so on, right?
	Then I have some reason to differentiate these two kinds of rocks.
	But if I simply say these rocks...
	Stay on the ground and these rocks float in the air and they're exactly the same in terms of their properties, then obviously I've got a problem in that what I'm describing in reality is not supported by what is actually in reality, right?
	So people who are trying to create moral propositions are trying to describe how human beings should act.
	Now, of course, there's a question of, well, who says anybody should describe how human beings should act?
	And that's fine. If you don't believe that there's any possibility that human beings should ever be told how to act, then that's fine.
	I mean, then there's no point debating, there's no point, you know, correcting your children, there's no point, you know, whatever, right?
	This person's not a moral philosopher.
	That's like somebody saying, there's no such thing as scientific laws.
	Well, all it does is it disqualifies you from the debate.
	You don't go to the scientific convention and say, there's no such thing as scientific laws, and I don't believe in the scientific method.
	I mean, you can go, but you're not going to have anything to contribute to the debate, because the fundamentals of the debate are that reality exists, matter has properties...
	There are universal laws, or at least laws that we have found so far to be universal, and there's a methodology that is objective and logical for separating truth and falsehood.
	If you don't believe any of that stuff, well, that's fine.
	Then you can go to the mystic stone pyramid quartz crystal convention and talk with everyone about how licking frogs makes you happy.
	Actually, I think frogs do have psychedelics on them, so licking leprechauns makes you happy.
	Right. Which if you haven't tried it, I would really recommend it.
	And that's one of the presuppositions you have to get people to agree to even.
	I mean, as absurd as it sounds, just getting people to agree with you that human beings both do and should pursue happiness.
	Well, tell me what you mean by should pursue happiness.
	Well, I mean, the idea that that's the goal, right?
	Well, is it? I mean, no, I don't think that's the case.
	It's like saying human beings should pursue health.
	I don't see why they should at all.
	If you want health, you need to do X, Y, and Z. You know, exercise and eat well or whatever, right?
	But if you want health, if you want to be free of physical pain, the physical pain that's associated with things like diabetes and obesity and whatever, I don't know, heart disease or blocked arteries or whatever the hell, a heart attack or things like that, if you want a life free of physical pain where you feel vital and healthy and so on, then you need to do X, Y, and Z, if you want those things.
	But if you don't want those things, and of course we can see lots of people in the world Who very obviously don't want these things.
	They're the people whose torsos are always shown on those obesity epidemics TV shows.
	Then they don't have to pursue those things, right?
	I mean, it's a conditional. If you want to have a life free or with as minimal a set of emotional pain as possible, then you need to pursue a rational course of action.
	You need to have philosophy. You need to have virtue.
	If you want to be happy.
	But I'm not sure that it's the case that most people want to be happy.
	In fact, I would say that it's the case that very few people actually want to be happy.
	A lot of people will say it, but very few people will do it.
	Like, everybody wants to be thin and healthy, but very few people do it.
	Right, okay, so happiness is not the goal.
	Well, it's a possible goal which has specific requirements like health.
	Okay, so then fundamentally anybody who isn't willing to sort of agree with that position, then it is kind of pointless to argue so then fundamentally anybody who isn't willing to sort of agree with that position, No, I wouldn't say that because I think you're conflating the two things that philosophy aims to provide to you.
	The two things that philosophy will aim to provide to you is virtue and happiness and those two are not always synonymous, right?
	So it's virtuous, in my view, if you're surrounded with corrupt people who won't change, it's virtuous to get them out of your life.
	And it will make you happier in the long run.
	But it's not going to make you happy in the short run.
	I can guarantee it's going to make you a whole lot more unhappy to go through that process, right?
	So philosophy will aim to give you virtue, and virtue is a lot more around the thou shalt not.
	It's like don't punch, don't kill, don't rape, don't steal, that kind of stuff.
	And that to me is kind of like an absolute.
	Like people who are going to go around stabbing people or raping them are absolutely immoral.
	We have every right to use as much force to defend ourselves against those people as possible within the realm of, you know, you don't shoot somebody who's trying to steal a candy bar.
	I mean, it's proportional violence or whatever.
	So there's virtue, which is a universal requirement, and then there's a happiness, which is a subjective option.
	If you want to be happy, right, then you need to do X, Y, and Z. But everyone has to be virtuous, at least to the point where they're not interfering with other people's virtue.
	I have a question.
	Oh, sorry sweetie.
	I can only take one set of questions and yours tend to be very good.
	And so do Greg's. So if you both gang up on me, I'm toast.
	Sorry. Don't you have to define what happiness is?
	Doesn't everybody have a different definition of happiness?
	Well, I don't know. Does everyone have a different definition of health?
	To some degree, yes. Like an athlete is going to have a different set of definitions for health than somebody who just is trying to avoid high cholesterol.
	So an athlete is healthy if they're down at 2% body fat and if they can climb the CN Tower without breaking a sweat.
	That's going to be healthy for an athlete.
	But for somebody who's currently recovering from an automobile accident, or Christopher Reeve, say, after his accident, Health is going to mean something different.
	But what it definitely does mean is a minimization of potential pain within the circumstances of the person's current situation.
	And a maximization of positive vitality or good feelings or whatever, that kind of stuff.
	And that's certainly going to be the case as well for philosophy.
	Philosophy is not going to make you happy if the doctor is telling you that you have a terminal illness.
	Right? Philosophy is not going to make you happy.
	But given the situation of being told that you have a terminal illness, You will be as happy as possible with that diagnosis and subsequent difficulties that that's going to entail if you have a strong set of values and a rational approach to life, rather than getting petulant and angry and crying, why me, why me, and throwing yourself off a cliff, right?
	Which might be the case with other sort of non-philosophical or non-rational approaches to dealing with the issue.
	And for sure, if you are, say, a Mormon who believes that Any kind of medical intervention is against God's will.
	You're going to be a whole lot less happy if you're told that you have some sort of illness that could be curable and you decide that it's not because irrational or whatever.
	So I think that there are ways to measure it, but it certainly is a little bit more subjective and relative.
	Like murder is not relative because it occurs in the real world.
	But happiness and health are to some degree subjective based on long-term values and blah blah blah.
	Like health for somebody who's 20 is quite a bit different from health for someone who's 90.
	Does that sort of make sense? Sure, but help me understand, you know, the pursuit of happiness.
	Greg is saying, should we, if the final goal is happiness, and I hear that you're saying it, and I think I agree with you that no, not necessarily.
	But it is a consequence, and then what is it?
	So what is it? There's lots of definitions for happiness, but generally it's a sense of well-being that comes when you are using your mind to its intended purpose and living in accordance with rational values.
	Health for the body is when the body is operating in its proper function, to its proper purpose and goal, at its optimum processing, or whatever.
	The same thing I think is exactly true for the mind, that happiness is when your mind is Working to its accorded goal, which is to understand and work with reality, right?
	Our mind is not invented to deal with mysticism.
	That is a corruption of the mind's capacity.
	So our mind is created and optimized to deal with reality, right?
	To deal with tangible, material, objective, logical reality.
	And so, if you're using your mind in that context, then you're generally using it for its intended purpose, and that's going to make you happy.
	It's going to make you feel good about yourself.
	Now, that doesn't mean that you're always going to choose happiness relative to unhappiness, right?
	So you're going to go to the dentist to some degree, or you're going to deal with a difficult co-worker, or a difficult boss, or, God forbid, difficult parents.
	You're going to go and try and deal with that, which is going to make you unhappy in the short run, but with the goal of longer-term happiness.
	You're not going to do that if you've only got two days to live, right?
	Because it's just going to make you unhappy.
	So there's lots of different ways in which happiness and the goal of it changes throughout life.
	But murder is always wrong, right?
	So happiness is a much more subjective and transitory and constantly realigning state.
	Because you're going to do different things when you're 90 than when you're 20.
	But murder is always wrong, because it occurs objectively within reality and doesn't change over the course of your life.
	Like, it's not right when you're 20, but wrong when you're 90.
	The ways in which you pursue happiness are different at 20 than at 90, but it all has to do with appropriate functioning to where you are and your circumstances.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes, that's great. Thanks. Sorry, Greg.
	Did that help you at all?
	I'm sorry, what?
	What?
	I'm sorry.
	Well, you've...
	Listen, I jotted a few down.
	You've sufficiently blown all the questions out of my mind.
	Is morality itself as a whole a grey area?
	And I don't think it is any more so than biology is.
	And of course, somebody who tells you that biology is nothing but a grey area is obviously deranged, or somebody who's willfully destroying the capacity to have a decent discussion so much that they're not going to be worth chatting with.
	And also, people say to you, Well, why does morality have to be consistent?
	Why is consistency at all related to morality?
	That was the second entry.
	Right, and then as a follow-up, why is happiness the goal, which you're now saying it's not?
	Sure. So then power could be the goal.
	Then there's specific things that you need to do to get power, right?
	But all of those would be immoral.
	I mean, assuming we're talking violent and power, not like lots of money power.
	Well, lots of money voluntarily earned power.
	I mean, if you're looking for violent power over other people, sure, yeah, there's things that you need to do, right?
	You need to join the Republican or Democratic Party.
	You need to do lots of things that you need to do.
	You need to sell your soul to the closest devil, all that kind of stuff.
	But all of those are immoral, right?
	So, I mean, and they won't bring you happiness, they're sure.
	Right. So, in other words, then, the end goal of the individual is utterly subjective.
	It could be whatever he wants it to be, but, of course, he's going to have to follow a specific course of action in order to achieve it.
	So, for the person who's interested in personal or psychological or philosophical happiness, however you want to define it, he has a specific path he has to follow.
	The man who's after power, he'll have to follow.
	There's one wrinkle I'd like to add to that.
	There is no human being that I've ever met or read off or heard about or could even imagine that is going to say to himself or to anyone else, I want political power over others.
	And even if they did say that, they would never get it by saying that.
	Right? Nobody... Nobody comes on and puts their 30-second spot on the ad if they're running for the Senate and says, give me power because I'm insecure and feel better when I can order people around.
	Right? I mean, if there were truth in advertising, you'd get that for political campaigns.
	But that's not what people say.
	Everybody says, well, I'm reluctantly going for this kind of authority to serve you and do the right thing to be a moral guy because everybody's encouraging me to because I've been blessed by all these gifts and I want to serve the country and all this kind of stuff for me.
	So seeking power is, in your mind, a sort of performative contradiction.
	You must seek anything in life.
	Anybody who justifies their own life to you or to themselves or explains anything about what they're doing always uses an argument for morality.
	Always, always.
	It's an iron law. It's like gravity.
	No single human being can talk about their life without using an argument for morality.
	Absolutely, for sure. This is why the argument for morality...
	Oh, that what they're doing is good.
	Even somebody who's a pure cynic who says, there's no such thing as morality, everybody just, the biggest gun wins, and you people are all stupid idealists who don't understand how the world really works.
	He's still using an argument for morality, because he's saying it's better to be clear-eyed and cynical and understand how the world really works, and that's a better thing to be.
	That's better, more accurate, more honest, more integrated, more truthful, more reflective of reality, more whatever, right?
	It's universally better and you should adopt it.
	Right? And that's an argument for morality.
	So every single human being in the world, except maybe a couple of crazy lunatic schizophrenics, are going to tell you whenever they have a conflict with someone, whenever they have a goal, whenever they do this, whenever they want that thing because it's universally good.
	Not because they just want it and they, you know, for themselves, because that's called being selfish, right?
	It's always because they believe and will tell you and will try and convince you that it's universally good.
	Yes, happiness is not the universal goal for everyone, and virtue is not the universal goal of everyone deep down, but everyone will claim that they're doing what they're doing because they're virtuous.
	But you did say virtue was a requirement.
	Yes, absolutely. Virtue is a requirement, for sure.
	And everyone will claim virtue as what they're doing because virtue is a requirement.
	Everybody knows that nobody can say, again, who wants to invade another country?
	Nobody's going to say, I want to invade because I like killing people.
	Or, I want to join the army because I like killing people.
	I want to join the army because I want to get yelled at and then yell at other people.
	They always say, I want to defend the country and do right by this noble and honor and blah, blah, blah.
	I actually did have one guy that was in when I was in that did say that, and I tried to stay as far away from him as I possibly could.
	Sure, absolutely.
	There are a few sociopaths who tell it like it is, but these people are definitely not among the higher-functioning specimens of the species.
	Oh, right. You know who they are, right.
	The people who we have to worry about.
	Yeah, it's not the individual sociopath you need to worry about, it's the IRS, right?
	Right, yeah, this guy would tell you openly, yeah, I joined because I want to kill people.
	And I'd be like, okay, guy.
	So, virtue is a requirement for what exactly?
	Oh, just sort of in a rational and moral philosophy, the virtue which is involved with don't aggress against others, like the sort of universal definition of virtue, right?
	Right. That's something which is objective, and it's universal, right?
	Because it occurs within reality, not just within somebody's consciousness, right?
	Which is within reality as well, but a little bit more subjective, right?
	So, when you have a moral rule which says, don't kill, then that's sort of universal, because it occurs within reality, it's between people, it's objective, it's measurable, and so on.
	Then, that is a requirement.
	Don't kill people. Or, sorry, to put it more precisely, any So to make sure I've got this clear in my mind then,
	killing is wrong Because the moral rule that states people should be killed is a performative contradiction because I'm implying that I should be killed as well.
	Right, and of course, then any human being who's not currently in the act of killing someone is immoral.
	And the person who's being killed can't be virtuous because he's being killed rather than killing someone.
	So it's obviously a completely ridiculous statement.
	Okay. And as we've mentioned before, like the property rights one, right?
	If I say I steal somebody's property, it's because I want to keep it.
	So I'm both simultaneously affirming and denying the validity of property rights, right?
	You don't have property rights because I'm stealing from you, but I want to keep what I've stolen, so I do have property rights, right?
	So that's just any theory which says stealing is good faces that problem, that they're both simultaneously affirming and denying the existence of property rights.
	So those things are just innately contradictory.
	So any moral philosophy which says those things It just fails, right?
	It's exactly the same as the theory of physics, which says, you know, birds fly and swim simultaneously.
	It's like, I'm sorry, biology, right?
	Birds fly and swim simultaneously.
	It's like, well, you might want to go back and work on that because it doesn't make any sense to be in reality.
	Okay, so then the pursuit of happiness, then, is really just the desire to remove contradiction from your...
	For sure, yeah.
	There's some stuff which I would put under the category of willpower.
	For instance, you're at a dinner party and we've all faced this situation.
	You're at a dinner party and it's a pleasant dinner party and everyone's telling funny stories about when they were in college or whatever.
	It's a perfectly genial evening.
	And then some guy says, yeah, my brother just signed up to go to Iraq and I couldn't be more proud of him.
	Now, as A good old libertarian or anarcho-capitalist, you have a choice here, right?
	You either go, yeah, let's toast him, and then, you know, whatever, pretend that nothing happened.
	That's not immoral, right?
	I mean, it's not evil or anything like that.
	But you're probably going to be happier if you have a little bit more courage, right?
	Because otherwise, kind of you have a split, which says values are both very important.
	so important that I'm going to live my life by them, but not so important that I might introduce the slightest measure of social discomfort to a dinner party.
	That's sort of a contradiction, right?
	Are values important or not important?
	If they're not important, then don't live your life by them unless it's, you know, vaguely convenient at the time.
	If they're not important enough to cause a little discomfort at a dinner party, then how important are they really?
	Exactly, exactly, right?
	That's sort of why I keep bugging people on the boards to say, well, show me how your philosophy shows up in your life.
	Because if it doesn't show up in your life, why are you spending weeks arguing it on a board?
	That's sort of my, you know, how important is it in reality for you, right?
	That's sort of why I keep bugging people about that.
	And that's why I try to sort of show, I try to sort of preach what I haven't practiced, so to speak, and why I sort of try and show how things show up in my own life relative to these things.
	And that's also why I bug people for donations.
	It's not because I don't eat otherwise, it's just that If I'm important enough to listen to 350 podcasts, you know, all of us sort of together in this conversation, then, you know, it should be worth, you know, 50 bucks, something like that, right?
	Where you want to try and say your hierarchy of values is consistent across a fairly wide range, otherwise you're going to end up with contradictions which lead to uncertainty, which lead to kind of contradictory behavior, which lead to unhappiness, and, you know, that can just try and be consistent.
	Right, which gets me, actually loops me right back to the lying question.
	In the case of the dinner party or other examples like that, for lack of a better phrase, wouldn't refraining be a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission?
	Yeah, I wouldn't say that I would call it a sin.
	I would just say that it's probably not going to make you as happy as if you...
	Greg again with his pacifist stuff.
	And of course, the larger question is why are you hanging around people wherein you can't speak your mind about anything that you really value.
	That sort of would be the larger question, right?
	But I wouldn't call it necessarily a sin.
	I would just, like a sin to me would be like, you know, killing or whatever.
	You're not doing anyone any harm except yourself.
	And of course, you're refraining from correcting other people, which is kind of like if you are a doctor and you specialize in diabetes and you see some overweight guy eating a cake You might say, you know, this is probably going to give you diabetes and whatever, right?
	So even if the guy gets mad at you, you kind of swore a Hippocratic oath to sort of do as much good as you could in the world and so on.
	And I think if we have an ability for philosophy, we should do that, just because we have sort of appointed ourselves, to some degree at least, self-physicians, which means that we know, based on our common humanity, what's good for other people as well, to some degree, or at least what they shouldn't do, which is, you know, praise hired killers, say, like this guy with his brothers going into Iraq.
	So, it's not a sin specifically, which is why I always say do it if you feel that it's important, but if you don't feel that it's important, it's something you need to sort of take away and think about.
	Like, if you don't want to disturb the dinner party by talking about how this may not be a virtue to go to Iraq, then you, at some point, it's not that you're a bad person for not doing that, but I think you then have a responsibility to sit down and try and figure out what your relationship is to virtue and integrity.
	Right, because at that point in time, what you're doing in your head is you're calculating that civility at a dinner party is more important than the truth.
	Right, and a pretty important truth, not a truth like I told a white lie the other day.
	You don't jump across the table and, you know, choke the person.
	You lying bastard! Stop being so evil!
	Right? I mean, we're talking about somebody who's praising a hired killer who's going to go over and murder people who've done nothing to threaten him or anyone else at the table.
	Right? So from that standpoint, that's a pretty important one, I would say.
	And the reason that you are more scared of it, at least I would be, and I hate those kinds of conversations.
	I make myself do it just because I know that it's the right thing to do.
	But it's, you know, I'd rather it didn't come up because also what it generally does is not even so much specific to that conversation as a whole.
	It's specific to the group.
	If I'm in a group where somebody's praising a soldier And I feel that everyone is going to come down hard on me for pointing out that this is not virtuous, then the question that I have is not about the specific discomfort at this dinner party, but the social circle as a whole.
	And fortunately, I went through that a couple of years ago and got rid of everybody who wouldn't listen to reason in this area.
	But it's the larger question that people want to avoid, not this dinner party this moment, but the larger question of social life and family.
	Procosm of the... Of the entire life.
	It is, it is.
	And what people don't want to do and what they understand deep down is that if they make that decision to bring it up, they are going down a path they cannot easily turn back from.
	Yeah, I've experienced that a couple times myself.
	Yeah, you're leaning over the cliff, and you're like, okay, if I jump, and then I hope that there's a parachute, it's a scary thing.
	Somebody who was IMing me the other day, talking about issues with his wife, said something to the effect of, he's like, gee, Steph, I kind of hope that you're right, because I'm in it for a little bit more than a penny right now.
	So, I can certainly understand that.
	It is really a, people don't want to start down that path, because they know that you think It turns into this ice chute or this bobsleigh run and you just try and hang on as best you can.
	But people just don't want to take that first step because they're kind of showing their hands and you can't put that cat back in the bed.
	Yeah. And see, that's why I'm coming at with the whole question of lying is that if you're willing to do it in that instance, in the dinner party metaphor or example, then...
	Why wouldn't you be willing to do it everywhere at that point since it is a microcosm of your entire life?
	So if you're not willing to do it anywhere else in your life, why would you be willing to do it there?
	To me, it feels like an all-or-nothing proposition.
	You can't on the one hand say, well, I'm just going to, you know...
	Tell the people I work with that, yeah, you know, whatever, Iraq War, you know, doesn't bother me.
	And then to other people, say something else, you know.
	You're living a Jekyll and Hyde existence at that point, as far as I'm concerned.
	No, that's quite right.
	That's quite right. And you can even do that, but you do need to unravel it at some point.
	Because if you live these two kinds of values, you're going to split yourself, you're going to end up weakening your position.
	And the worst thing is, for me, and I've mentioned this in the podcast once or twice, the worst thing for me is that, you know, there's real conformity, sorry, there's real pleasure in conformity.
	I mean, that The people aren't generally insane.
	They don't do what doesn't give them any pleasure.
	There's real pleasure in conformity, and there's real displeasure or pain sometimes in individualism.
	I think that on the balance individualism comes out way ahead, but there's real pleasures in conformity.
	And my concern is that people get stuck in the middle, right?
	That they sort of have enough individualism to make them uncomfortable with conformity.
	But not enough individualism to free them from the need for conformity by getting rid of the people who demand that they conform against their values.
	Right? So you don't want to... I mean, not you, but people shouldn't get stuck because then you get the worst of both worlds, right?
	So if people want to sort of say at dinner parties that the Iraq war is okay or not say anything about the evil that, say, the military represents, to me that's fine, but then don't muck around with libertarianism.
	Right? Don't muck around with anarcho-capitalism.
	Don't muck around with philosophy in general.
	Because it's just going to make you more and more unhappy unless you're going to go all the way.
	This is not... You can't have one foot on the pier and one foot on the boat because they separate, right?
	So that's sort of my major concern with people and that's where I think I try and focus them on these moments and say, don't torture yourself by pretending to be an individual when you're going to end up conforming.
	Just give this stuff up and go and conform.
	But if you do want to have this stuff, and of course people, again, it's kind of like a speechless argument because you can't put the hat and the cat back in the bag, so to speak.
	You've just got to keep going.
	And you can go slowly if you want and take three years to get the bad people out of your life.
	But that's just like getting a really slow root canal.
	I mean, why would you bother? And to kind of bring this all back around, that's exactly why you shouldn't be lying to your kids.
	Oh, he's good.
	Oh, there's some long-term continuity of memory.
	Oh, dude. Oh, I just got goosebumps.
	Cool. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
	Yeah, absolutely right.
	Quite right. That was just, yeah, what can I say?
	Totally right. Yeah, because if you're willing to lie to them, you know, I mean, they are, like, all you exist for at that point.
	And they're formative, right?
	So how much damage is it going to do to not give somebody the nutrition they need at the age of 5 rather than the age of 25?
	I'd rather get the nutrition I need at 5 and grow healthy and then lack some at 25 rather than the other way around.
	No, you're quite right. You're absolutely right.
	It's a difficult bridge to cross, but it is something that you have to tell them the truth.
	Quite right. All right, now, does anybody have anything that they wanted to add to this conversation?
	Six, yeah, so we've done our two hours, or just a little bit under because of my technical snarfies.
	But is there anything else that people wanted to add to this chat?
	It's certainly been a lot of fun for me.
	Of course, like everyone else, I've completely missed all of the...
	The free will versus determinism stuff, which of course is anybody's reason for breathing.
	So, if nobody has anything else to add, we'll close it off today, and we'll be back this time Sunday, 4 p.m.
	Eastern Standard, on Skype, and I'll post the link again on the Free Domain Radio Board.
	Thank you so much, everyone, for listening.
	I certainly appreciate it.
	Fantastic chat, and I learned a lot, and apparently when...
	When my kids say, why did you tell us all this stuff?
	I can do the responsible thing and say, Uncle Greg told me to.
	So that will be very helpful, and I certainly appreciate having that as an excuse.

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