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July 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:45
353 False/True Feelings
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It's time for a short podcast.
How's everybody doing?
I hope you're doing well. It's 8pm.
I'm actually returning home from my first ever dinner with a listener.
So, as it turns out, Heidi Klum's a big fan, and so we had a little bite to eat, and got caught up on Seal's latest tracks.
So, I had dinner with a listener and his grandparents.
So, a little bit of cross-generational, libertopian anarchy, and it was quite enjoyable.
And so, if you're coming through Toronto...
Give me a shout. Anyway, so I'm going to chat up with Christina, and I spent two days working, and also I managed to do some edits on the show yesterday, Sunday's show. The levels were everywhere, everywhere, man.
It was kind of mad, you know, like someone's coming in from Jupiter and somebody else is inside my brain.
And so I finally figured out how to normalize the level, so I think we've made some progress, and I think it sounds a little bit better than the ones before, and someday, when I really have so much time that I barely have a will to live, I will maybe work to normalize some of the other ones, but not anytime soon.
We must plow on! So, to continue, I wanted to point out a little bit about some other ways in which you can differentiate true self and false self emotions.
Now, false self emotions are sort of innately contradictory, and they're sort of innately contradictory in the way that bad logic is, in the way that bad moral propositions like you should steal are.
The false self emotions are innately contradictory.
And this is how you know.
And at the extreme end, you end up with something called a borderline personality disorder, which is, you know, I hate you, don't leave me.
All of that kind of stuff that goes on in really dysfunctional relationships.
But you want to look at your emotions and figure out when you're feeling something very passionate, what you want to do is, I'd say sort of two things.
Look for two things if you want to figure out true self versus false self emotions.
The first thing you look for is tension.
Genuine emotion, genuine true self, reality-based emotions, they don't have a lot of tension.
They may sometimes have fear and so on, but there's not a lot of tension involved in them.
It's like when you get angry or snippy or bitchy or whatever, naggy or whatever it is.
You get tension, and you relieve that tension through the discharge of emotion in this sort of Aristotelian, evil, cathartic, from hell kind of methodology.
And so there's tension associated with it, right?
So when you see a post that irritates you or offends you or makes you feel that the other person is putting you down or whatever is going on, then you feel a tension and you generally act very hastily, right? And, you know, act in haste, as they say, you know, post at haste, repent at leisure.
So, in these kinds of situations, you feel a compulsion to act quickly.
That's why they say count to ten when you're angry, right?
So make sure you're not going to do some false self-destructive thing.
So you feel a certain kind of tension that will give you the impetus to act quickly to relieve that tension.
And also it has a lot to do with a perception of the other person's perception of you.
This is very important.
When someone says something that you can perceive as a slight or an insult or something negative towards you, then you have the impulse to regain status in a very sort of primitive, chimpanzee-like, ape-like way.
You have this desire or this impetus to restore status to yourself by putting the other person down and so on.
So there's a kind of tension in false self-emotions that you deal with through the quick discharge that is brought about by quick action, right?
So there's a tension which you then release by acting.
So, that's sort of one way that you know that you're dealing with the false self-emotion.
The other, of course, is the fundamental logical contradiction that is involved in false self-emotions, particularly the emotion of rage or jealousy or, you know, things like that.
Well, we would sort of call the negative emotions.
And the way in which you can figure this stuff out, and we talked about this briefly this morning and touched on it another time, so I will touch on it briefly here.
And that is that if somebody is worth debating with, then you should respect their intelligence and their motives.
If you respect neither their intelligence nor their motives, or significantly either one, then you just don't debate with them.
I don't debate with people in Japanese because I don't speak Japanese.
We're not on the same language, we don't speak the same terms, and so on.
So, if you don't have respect for people's intellects, If you are a strong and secure person, in other words, if you yourself are your own judge of value and you don't necessarily have to get value derived from other people's opinions of you,
which is not a very healthy thing to do at all, Then if somebody puts you down, a healthy person views that as an act of self-admission of shame and self-hatred on the part of the other person, right? So if you're in a debate with somebody and they give you some kind of serious smackdown...
Then the false self views that as something which needs to be retaliated to restore status.
The false self is all about avoiding humiliation and attempting to dominate in response to humiliation.
So it's false self to false self, right?
Now, if you experience a serious smackdown, though, what generally occurs for a healthy person, I'm not going to say me, because I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but what happens to a healthy person is the healthy person says, oh, well, this person has just kind of revealed a huge amount about their own capacity to deal with conflict, rather than this person has now uncovered my fundamental flaws as a human being.
So if somebody says that you're a self-worshipping narcissist, then the choices that the insults that people throw at you are very important as well.
People will attempt to insult you with what has hurt them most in the past.
This is an important thing to understand.
So if somebody says that you're stupid and irrational, I absolutely guarantee you that they have been called stupid and irrational in the past and it hurt them deeply.
If somebody says that you're narcissistic, then they were probably raised by a narcissist.
If somebody says that you are a sophist, then they're perfectly rational.
I'm just kidding. I'm just so kidding.
And if you're not on the boards, you don't even know what that means.
But anyway, so when somebody gives you a serious flame or a serious smackdown, what they're doing is they're telling you what has hurt them the most in the past.
Or what their greatest fear is about themselves or what their primary authority figure was like when they were a child.
This is so clear.
You don't just pick random insults and hurl them about.
It's all causal.
You see how I'm working this in?
It's all causal.
Somebody who lays an insult on you is telling you about themselves.
They're not telling you anything about yourself.
So that's a very important thing to understand.
Somebody who's insulting you is not talking about you.
They're talking about themselves.
Because the choice of insult that they have come up with is something that is their greatest fear and they're attempting to hurt you with that.
So, for instance, my brother would take great pains at times to tell me just how I was alienating everybody with my philosophy and that everybody was finding me intolerant and judgmental And everybody was drifting away from me and giving up on me and tired of just listening to the same rants over and over,
blah, blah, blah. So he was sort of saying that your philosophy will lead you to social isolation.
Now, because my brother is not me, and because he was judging by his own standards, he was actually attempting to hurt me with that which would, as a second hander, hurt him the most.
My brother is not somebody who can ever stand to spend time alone.
He's a real social metaphysician, as Ayn Rand used to call them.
And so what he was doing was he was telling me, this is what would hurt me the most, and because I am kind of narcissistic, I'm going to assume that this is what's going to hurt you the most.
And, of course, all they're doing is telling you what their own fears are and giving you a complete map of their own psychology rather than telling you anything about yourself.
For somebody to really hurt you, they kind of have to know you pretty well.
And, of course, if you are around somebody who knows you pretty well and has a desire to hurt you, then you obviously have a lot that needs work on.
In other words, you have a lot of hot buttons that can be pushed that is going to be causing you pain.
So, that's sort of an inevitability.
That's something important to understand as well.
The false self looks at what would be the worst kind of horror for itself and throws that at the other person.
Or it looks at what it is covering up that hurt it the most, or hurt the true self the most, which caused the false self to arise a scar tissue, and throws that at the other person.
And that's what's going on at the middle level.
At the top level, The person who is insulting you is saying, you are X, Y, and Z. At the middle level, they are telling you that this is what hurt me the most, and that's what I'm using against you.
And at the bottom level, down in the true self dungeon where our honest soul waits and fights and rattles its chains to finally become free...
The true self is praying for two things.
The true self is praying for two things.
And when I say praying, I mean appealing to the God of rationality, which, for those of you who think I might be narcissistic, has nothing to do with me at all.
It is, of course, Poseidon, as I mentioned before.
But the true self is desperately praying for two things to occur.
One, don't Don't react as if there was anything truthful in this.
Don't make the false self energy real by responding to this attack as if it were directed at you and not a revelation about the false self.
Don't be fooled by the false self.
Don't fight back.
That's sort of the first thing. That...
The true self is desperate for.
Don't fight back. As you fight back, then it's false self to false self and the true self gets lost again.
That's number one. Number two is don't run away.
Don't fight back. Don't run away.
What is it that ends the rule of the false self?
It's what we've all been talking about all this time.
Curiosity. Rationality and curiosity.
These are the two things that liberate the true self and which destroy, or at least liberates, you could say as well, the false self from its endless protection and guard walls.
So this is what is a proper response if you want to continue any kind of discussion.
Nobody says you have to. You can say, this isn't for me, and not to continue.
But the two things that you can do if you want to continue any kind of discussion with somebody where this kind of thing occurs, the two things is do not fight back, do not defend yourself, which is another form of fighting back, and do not run away.
Engage in the false self attempts at humiliation.
Identify them as, this is you attempting to humiliate me.
Don't pretend that what's happening is not happening.
Because the false self is absolutely trying to humiliate you.
So you say, yes, you are trying to humiliate me.
So that the person doesn't think that you're just reacting because you're compliant or conformist or whatever.
So you do, I think, legitimately have to say, this was a specific and deliberate attempt.
At humiliation on your part, and I fully recognize it as such.
And I'm not going to defend myself in these areas, and I'm also not going to simply not respond, right?
Because that gives the false self a sense of triumph and of all-conquering power and this and that, which is not good for the possibility of the true self to liberate itself.
So you don't want to fight back.
You don't want to run away.
And that's another way in which you can figure out whether your false self or true self is generating the emotions.
And so, if your false self is generating the emotions, they have this tension, they have an urge to impulse that's very quick, and they have a win-lose aspect to them.
The false self is all about the win-lose.
I win, you lose.
I conquer, you submit.
I have power, you must be subservient.
Because the false self is about illogic, and in the realm of illogic, one person wins and one person loses.
Absolutely inevitable. No conceivable way to get away from it.
In the false self world, it's win-lose, which is why the false self and the state and religion go hand in hand.
So the false self is all about win-lose, and so when you feel a kind of tension-laden savagery in your breast where your desire is to crush and continue to engage, then you know it's false and so when you feel a kind of tension-laden savagery in your This is all, I think, very important stuff to understand.
And again, sort of at a very fundamental level, this is very important stuff to understand.
Because you don't want to be in that kind of situation.
Where you are constantly being dominated and bullied by your false self and end up doing things that you regret.
And it also is not going to free you from your childhood, which is where you learned all of this stuff.
So when you feel the urge to crush, the urge to destroy, and also the urge to revisit the site of the crime, then you're in the land of the false self.
Because the false self is about domination, and domination is win-lose.
Domination is the absolute result of irrationality.
It's irrationality eventually because you can't make any decisions in the realm of irrationality that are objective, right?
It's like I dominate or you dominate.
It's like two people having a religious argument.
There's no rational, objective world to appeal to, and so they end up having to Either they agree to disagree, they walk away, or they end up killing each other.
Fundamentally, those are the things that occur.
And the zero-sum game with profit to the corrupt is the realm of the state as well.
So these things are all religion and false virtue of the family and the country and the state.
They're all outgrowths of the false self because they're all about domination through irrationality and brutality.
Sorry. They're all about domination as a result of irrationality through brutality.
That would be a much better way of putting it.
So... That urge to win, to dominate at all costs, it is actually a kind of murderous impulse, right?
It is around the erasure and destruction of the other.
And that's pretty important, to want to erase or destroy another human being who is persistently contradicting you.
And, you know, perhaps rationally, perhaps not.
It doesn't really matter. But when you do feel that you are unable to get your way...
And your impulse is to hurt and attempt to destroy and humiliate another human being, then, of course, you're talking about your childhood, right?
You're not talking about the debate anymore.
You're simply talking about your childhood.
That particular urge, the urge to hurt and the urge to obliterate the other person through a kind of rage, definitely false self-stuff.
Because, of course, it's fundamentally irrational to want to destroy another human being who is obviously not threatening you physically at the moment.
Because, you know, fundamentally, if somebody is making you that angry, then you really shouldn't be debating with them, right?
I mean, that's sort of something that's...
The basic contradiction, as I was talking about, the contradictory nature of false self-emotions is that they will put you in situations that logically make no sense and drive other people around you batty, of course, as they see you pursuing these particular things.
So, if you are...
Just to say... I'm just using debating as an example.
It could be anything, right? So, if you're debating with somebody and they make you so angry that you want to just slam them in some manner, then...
The logic is that, well, if the person is crazy and narcissistic or evil or corrupt or something like that, then, you know, clearly you don't want to be debating with them, right?
That would be sort of the sensible thing, right?
As Billy Joel says, you should never argue with a crazy man.
And it doesn't say you should never take a ride with Billy Joel, but that's a story for another time.
But... If somebody is what you say they are, then you wouldn't be debating with them, right?
So your urge to hurt someone in a debate, and we've all had it.
Look, I don't put myself above this either in any way, shape, or form.
We've all had that urge, and we all have it even now.
But, of course, if it's true, then it's false, right?
So if it's true that somebody you're debating with is crazy, evil, or narcissistic, or something...
Then it's false that you should be debating with them, right?
I mean, so you have responsibility in the matter because if you are debating with a crazy person, you don't get to get off the hook and be self-righteous by calling them crazy.
Because you're debating with them, right?
So you don't get to distance yourself from it and say, now you do get to do this with your parents, right?
Which is why everyone displaces it to everyone else.
Because with your parents you genuinely do not have a say in the matter.
You're just born into the rat's nest or whatever.
And so you can legitimately say that with your parents, but not in voluntary interactions like dating or debating or whatever, right?
You can say that about your boss, right?
If you weren't hired by the guy, right?
But you really can't excuse yourself from causing the matter by saying to somebody you've been debating with for some time, look, you're just crazy, right?
Because then the first thing you can say that if you want, it's not going to do any good because if you genuinely have come to the conclusion that they're crazy, you're just going to ease out of the debate by saying, well, that's very interesting.
Let me think about it, right? And sort of not come back.
Because that's what we do with crazy people, right?
You don't stand up in front of the guy who's picking his nose and living in blankets on the subway.
You don't walk up to him and say, you're crazy!
Right? Because you don't want to do that on so many levels, right?
But you will say it to somebody who genuinely is not crazy, but is going to be hurt by you.
And we've talked about this before, right?
So there's this basic contradiction in the world of the false self.
And when you get these feelings, you can pretty much figure them out, that they're about domination and they rely on the other person's virtue.
And sensitivity in order to get their intended effect of domination.
And the reason that we can't see it is that's how most of us, of course, lived our childhoods.
So I hope this has been helpful.
Nice, short, tasty little podcast for you.
What are we at? Only 20 minutes?
20 minutes? My God!
It's actually about the same as a 40-minute podcast when I cut out the ears and arms.
So thank you so much for listening.
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