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Aug. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:23
363 The Joy of Anger Part 1

How to turn petulance into healthy anger

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's 7.50.
I know. It's shocking.
It's shocking. It's like I've moved to Calcutta.
I'm up so early. But I have two demos to do today.
And wouldn't you know it, last night, as I generally do, after going to see Van Morrison, which was a pretty good show, actually, he's really moved back into the 1940s, and it works for him and it works for me.
So, I checked my computer last night, as I always do, and found that I had a problem with a software package, so I have to head downtown.
I'm supposed to head downtown.
I'm supposed to sleep in a little and head downtown to do my demo, but I have to head to the office to get my computer fixed, to fix my computer so I can go do my demo.
Life, life, life. Almost full of surprises.
And very rarely do those surprises include sleeping in.
So, I hope that you're doing well.
I'm going to talk about a subjective thing today.
Auga! Auga!
Alert! Alert!
Subjectivity approach! Subjectivity approach!
And I'm going to...
It's an unusual topic.
We will see if it helps you.
But it's worth talking about, I think, because the one thing that...
The modern world, in particular, I would say it's not just the modern world, and the modern world may even be a little bit better at it than societies in the past.
But the one thing that the modern world absolutely tilts against, absolutely opposes, is the fabulous world of anger.
And I find this to be really quite...
And it's a challenge for me.
It's a real challenge for me.
I was, as you know, the younger brother in a family of two, a family of two brothers and one mother.
And I was certainly never allowed to get angry when I was a child.
And what that did for me was it left me pretty defenseless.
In the world when I was younger.
And that's not something that I think is obviously certainly not a good thing.
And it's something that I think is well worth taking the steps necessary to try and alleviate within yourself.
And I've certainly found it very, very helpful to take the steps necessary to alleviate it within myself so that I can get angry and not feel that...
It's abusive, that I can get angry and not feel that it is disrespectful to the truth, that it is not manipulative, and so on.
And I'll give you a minor example from the board, and this isn't to pick on anyone in particular because it's not a very uncommon phenomenon, and I'm certainly tempted by it, and I'm sure I've succumbed on more than one occasion, so this is not any high tower stone throwing.
But on the board, just as I was brushing my teeth last night, I was having a look at the board.
And welcome to our new members.
Yay! Great to have you with us.
And one gentleman was talking about how he agreed with the podcast that I did yesterday that he agreed that I was kind of condescending and snarky and so on when I was laughing at ideas that I found absurd.
And then, in response to another person's post, he said that, and this was within, I think, within 20 minutes or so of telling me that, yes, he found me to be, you know, condescending or whatever, and that that was a bad thing, I should have more respect for people's viewpoints, and so on.
And then, not 15-20 minutes later, he posted...
In another thread, when somebody was talking about disagreements that he was having with a Christian friend, he posted, I can't remember it verbatim, but it's something like this.
Well, I guess I'm a little different, he said.
I don't have to agree with every, sorry, I don't have to agree with someone about every single little aspect of reality from the top to the bottom, from the back to the front, all the way around in order to consider them a friend.
Right? Now that is a very interesting thing.
And again, I'm not trying to pick on anyone in particular because we've all had these impulses.
I've certainly acted on them in the past and put some, I guess you could say, sort of snippy emails out there or snippy posts out there about this kind of stuff.
But this is not something that...
Is going to be very productive for this person's life, for sure.
And if you have this habit, as I do myself, I just think it's important to recognize that it's not going to be very productive for our lives either.
Because if we have a look at this post and try and sort of unravel the complexity of what's going on behind it, I think we can understand what happens when there is a deficiency of anger.
You see, when there's a deficiency of anger, the result is almost always either aggressive or passive-aggressive bullying or condescension of some kind.
And so, when we have somebody who's having a conflict with a Christian, and if you have a friend who is a Christian, and you are of a scientific mind, you do have a challenge.
You do face a challenge.
No question. No question that you face a challenge.
And it's a significant challenge.
You have to weigh a lot about the relationship.
You have to weigh whether or not that person is capable of change.
You have to recognize and prioritize within yourself, well, how important are values for you?
How important is the truth and logic and so on for you?
And also, does the Christian use the argument for morality in order to justify his or her Christianity or religion or statism?
Because if they do, it's highly unlikely that the relationship will survive, and it's highly likely that they do.
Because that's what everybody does.
Everybody justifies their own actions with appeals to the argument for morality.
So, if you are a consistent person and you try to organize your thoughts according to rational principles and to organize your approaches to life and so on, then people will say, well, consistency, as Emerson said, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
And to look for consistency is to be a naive idealist, that consistency is a utopian fantasy, and so all these kinds of things.
So if you try to be consistent, people will tell you that you're wrong for trying to be consistent.
You're wrong, you're foolish, you are a dreamer, you are making a fundamental mistake, and they will definitely impugn that you have emotional problems, right?
This is the This is the sine qua non of the passive-aggressive approach to argument.
And it arises...
Well, we'll get to what it arises from later.
The passive-aggressive approach to argument is to say not only that the other person is incorrect, because that's not enough, right?
To say that somebody's incorrect and to help them out of their error, however you do it, if you do it in a way that is passionate and respectful of the other person, then that is a true self-response.
And I'm not saying I always get there.
I'm just saying that that's what I think is a true self-response.
The false self-response...
Can never simply be to correct another human being.
The false self-response is always, always, always to correct and to humiliate.
To correct and to impugn that there are vast emotional problems underlying it without any rational explanation or exploration of those issues.
So when people send emails to me with all of the epithets that I receive, then if I'm grandiose or, you know, oh, I think I'm so smart and all this kind of stuff.
I mean, there's no real exploration of psychology and motivation under those.
They're just kind of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
And I think that because I've done a fair amount of work on myself, it's a little harder.
I don't mind if someone gets mad at me at all, but I do expect that if they're going to tell me that I'm deficient in some psychological manner, that they do so in a way that helps me to understand the cause and effect of that deficiency and hopefully I mean, I don't get a lot of those, but that's sort of a false self attempt to humiliate, but...
If you say to somebody, you're missing some information here, here's what you said, here's what you're missing, and here's how you can fix the information, then I get lots of those emails and I try to respond to them when I remember them on air, I guess you could say. And that is a helpful thing to do, and I really, really appreciate people who correct me in terms of facts.
The great FDR Horace mistake further back in the podcast is something that comes to mind when I think about things that I had to correct, and also my vast oversimplification in my communications on free will and numbers and numbers of others.
So, the true self wants to help out somebody who's in error.
The true self does not usually want to help out somebody who's just being mindlessly abusive.
But if the false self will want to engage and get angry with somebody who's being mindlessly abusive because the false self is so sensitive to slights and sensitive to criticisms because it is, as I mentioned before, scar tissue based on A far excess of humiliation when you're very young that it simply can't stand being criticized.
And we all know touchy people like this, when you criticize them even legitimately, even gently, they hit the roof, they get pouty, they get upset, they slam cupboards, they counterattack, they just can't handle...
The truth! But they can't handle any kind of course correction because they're entirely within the grip of the false self.
And this just speaks to the amount of humiliation they experienced when they were young, and now the amount of humiliation that they're doling out, right?
The false self defends against abuse by reproducing it towards others.
And that is not, not, not, not, not where you want to be as a human being.
And this is why I say the false self arises from a deficiency in anger.
Not necessarily a deficiency in anger, just to be slightly more clear, just wasn't quite as ringing a phrase in my head.
It's not just a deficiency of anger, it's that you're not allowed to have anger.
It's not like you're short of iron because your body won't process iron, you're just not allowed to eat any iron, right?
That's why you're short of it and the solution is not quite as complicated.
To solve. Get some iron, right?
And get angry. So this gentleman who posted to...
So somebody has this problem with a Christian and is trying to work it out.
It's a very complicated issue.
I certainly sympathize and understand.
And... Then this person is being accused of over-consistency.
Over-consistency.
And somebody did post and said, well, yeah, a lot of people do say that over-consistency is a bad thing and it's a fool's quest and so on.
And, of course, my question is, always, always, well, what argument for morality do they use to support that?
So somebody says, well, you shouldn't be...
Don't try to be so logical.
The world isn't logical. Don't try to be so this.
Don't try to be so that. The world isn't this or that.
And that is something that is always put forward as an argument for morality.
It's foolish, it's incorrect, you're a dreamer, you have it wrong, and also you're emotionally disturbed to the point where you can't handle this kind of ambiguity.
And so you've become sort of like intolerant of other people's differences, right?
This is one of the great... Leveling absolutes of a democratic, especially a decadent sort of last stage democratic society like we have today.
You can't think of yourself as better than somebody else in any fundamental way.
You're supposed to feel good about yourself, but not in any way that is comparative, right?
As if you just live on an island in pure isolation.
And your abilities should never be compared to anyone else's, right?
Because intelligence, like, if everybody's got an IQ of 80, a guy with the IQ of 90 rules the planet.
So it's to some degree important to compare your attributes for others.
It's sort of a reality check.
You're never supposed to compare yourself to others and find them wanting and find yourself in some manner better.
That's sort of the basic.
And you're also supposed to have this endless yawning tolerance for everybody else's foibles and inconsistencies.
And if you don't, then you're intolerant.
So even people who say that inconsistency Is a virtue, and the consistency is a sort of a mental illness of some kind.
They can't get away from the argument for morality.
Nobody can ever get away from the argument for morality.
The justification of the self is, as human, Through morals is as human as breathing.
You simply can't get away from it.
You can either work to manage it in an intelligent way, or you can pretend that that's not the case and just let other people ride roughshod over you or let them provoke you into anger, because what's going on under the table of every, quote, civilized human interaction is a war to the death, a war to the death of arguments for morality.
And it's a pretty bloody business if you lift a tablecloth, so I'm just trying to make you aware of the conflict that's going on in the world so that you can see it and then decide if you want to participate or not, but at least be able to see it, I think, a little more clearly would be helpful and productive.
So... When people say, well, you're obsessed with logic and you're trying to be way too consistent for this world, then they're trying to paint a portrait of you as somebody who has kind of like the following characteristics.
So you're hyper-intellectual, and you're hyper-intellectual because you have trouble with your feelings, and you have trouble relating to people.
So, rather than just taking it easy, kicking back, sucking on some suds, chatting with people, and not necessarily going into some crazy, insane, relentless Socratic dialogue with everyone you meet because of some strange compulsion you have, you know, just kicking back and enjoying life and chilling and chillaxing and all that kind of stuff.
Having a relaxing time and not probing people about their ideas all the time and all this kind of stuff.
So you can't relax.
You're high-strung. You're hyper-intellectual.
Ooh, and you're judgmental.
You are so judgmental, right?
You get that one a lot, too, if you actually try and rub a couple of brain cells together to figure out the world from an objective standpoint.
Suddenly you become judgmental, right?
And of all the people, as I mentioned yesterday, of all the people that others complain about being judgmental, I would say that we, a tiny band of anarcho-capitalist, rationalist, scientific people, are not really that high up in the queue, but as I mentioned before...
The false self always has to respond to questions or criticisms of any fundamental nature by a counterattack through humiliation and by a distinct absence of rational arguments.
And so, when you have a...
If you desire for and you're working towards a logical, Socratic, philosophical understanding of the world, then you will be labeled all these terrible things, and you will be really like a...
It's a cover-up, right?
It's hypocritical.
It's hypocritical, and it's a cover-up, and it's a false self thing, right?
The false self thinks everything else in the known universe is a false self.
If it could work out a false self Venus flytrap, it would.
Oh, that Venus flytrap with its smell is just sitting there so innocent, right?
But you will be termed false self by other people, and the false self aspect in you that they will be trying to warn you about, so to speak, or humiliate you on the basis of...
Is that it's something like this.
Well, you think that you're interested in philosophy, but you're just lonely, frightened, judgmental, and paranoid.
Or, you know, some more gentle or more harsh aspect of that.
But there won't be any curiosity, right?
The false self has no curiosity whatsoever, because the false self is a defense mechanism.
It's like asking the shields to detach themselves from the Enterprise and go wander off and explore planets.
That's not what they're for.
It's not their role.
And so if you, as a curious person who wants some intellectual consistency and enjoys philosophy and to put together the world in a way that makes sense and is consistent, then everybody and their dog will tell you that you only think you're doing that because of virtue, but it's not really virtue.
It's just fear or being paranoid or being judgmental or this or that or the other.
And you will actually get, and I've got emails about this, and there's a couple of posts about it as well.
Quite fascinating. You will get people, of course, as I mentioned before, who will tell you, oh yeah, so basically everything that Steph says is right.
Or, oh, okay, so basically there's this one guy, one guy up in Canada who solved all of the problems of the ages, and everything he says you're just a slave to.
Well, that's not philosophy, that's just culty.
That's not you thinking for yourself, that's you parroting Steph, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And these very same people, these very same people are often religious.
And these very same people are often statist.
I mean, there's so much that you could say about that in terms of projection, that people who are religious, who follow the mass propagandistic interpreted fantasies passed down over hundreds or thousands of years, that they listen to somebody interpret all of that kind of stuff into a mishmash of slavish obedience and absolute culty conformity.
That they consider that they're just religious.
But if you listen to a philosopher who is trying to put rational arguments behind things and is always open to correction and never asks you to take a damn thing on faith and is very clear when more subjective topics are being discussed...
Then that, to listen to someone like that and say, hey, you know, he's got some good stuff to say.
I'm not going to disagree with Steph because, of course, you're not agreeing or disagreeing with me.
You're agreeing or disagreeing with logic and reality.
Not that I am logic and reality, but that's the standard we all operate by.
They simply can't...
We get that to listen to a philosopher who uses rationality is the absolute polar opposite than to go to a church or to praise the state or to be patriotic or whatever, whatever.
I mean, there's simply no possibility because the false self is a complete fragment.
The false self is a fragment and it is absolutely against integration, right?
Because the integration that it's fighting is, I hate my parents, right?
Or I hate my school or I hate my teachers, right?
And yes, this is in general about anger and hatred, but it's going to take a couple of podcasts to unravel in the way that I would like to this topic.
The original cause of the false self is an unbearable emotion that is inexpressible within a family environment.
I mean, you can talk PTSD as an adult, but we're talking about the sort of fundamental childhood stuff that goes on.
So when you're a kid, you are provoked to rage, you are humiliated, you are beaten, you are accused of stuff, you have some unmanageable feeling that you are not allowed to express.
Fear, rage...
Mostly it's just fear and rage, I guess you could say.
But that feeling which you are not allowed to express, and there's also a sexual desire, or desire of any kind.
A sexual desire is a very strong one, right?
I mean, the number of families, especially those in the religious side, who view sex as evil, or corrupted, or, you know, the finger of Satan on your peepee, or whatever, And have the same kind of hostility towards masturbation, which is absolutely foolish.
I mean, we all get either tennis elbow or carpal tunnel when we're 13, 14, and 15, and so to be against masturbation when you have a teenage son, and I would assume a teenage daughter as well, there's got to be some reason why they're taking all those long showers, and the showerhead's never in the same place, but...
To be against masturbation is just to say, your natural instincts are bad, and by the way, you have three years of never being able to concentrate on anything and never wanting to stand up.
So, that's just foolishness, but usually it's a lot earlier that this kind of stuff emerges.
So your parents will taunt and provoke or bully or enrage you or do something, and you then can't express it to them because what happens is if you do express it to them, they'll laugh at you, they'll further provoke the feeling in this endless way, and you can't go that way they'll further provoke the feeling in this endless way, and you can't go that way
I mean, to realize, as we talked about many moons ago with the parable of the apple at dinner, to realize that you are in the absolute authoritarian grip of people who are kind of cruel and sadistic, It's not going to make you very happy.
And it's not something that the human mind can sustain and stay even remotely healthy.
I mean, the false self is an attempt to maintain health.
And it is. I mean, the false self is very valuable.
I know I sound like I'm down on the false self.
I'm down on the false self after the stimuli has gone away.
It's something you need to dismantle.
It's the defenses that you need to dismantle so that you can live a richer and calmer and less volatile kind of life.
And this is part of Buddhism, right?
Buddhism identifies the personality with the false self, saying that, you know, desires are bad and so on, because, yeah, false self-desires are usually pretty destructive.
But that's not the personality, that's the scar tissue, right?
That's the reaction to humiliation and abuse, and not human nature itself, fundamentally.
So... And we know that because it takes an intense amount of pressure to create a false self.
So we know it's not... I'm just not making this stuff up.
At least you believe that.
Even if you don't believe it's all correct, that I'm not just making this stuff up.
Steel is not a natural substance because you have to melt a whole load of crap at like 1600 degrees in order to get steel.
So steel is definitely not a naturally occurring substance.
And... It exists, for sure, but it doesn't exist in nature.
It takes a huge amount of intervention to produce something like steel or plastic or the Backstreet Boys or things like that.
Now, given that that's the case, that we have pretty much a false self society.
This is what it's all about, and the false self, of course, is...
Profited from and tweaked and maintained, excuse me, heavens to Betsy, is tweaked and maintained and so on by the 16,000 odd images that we see from an advertising standpoint every day.
No problem with the advertising, it's just that right now it's not doing a whole lot to get people off the false self bandwagon.
And you can't blame advertisers for that because they're not philosophers, right?
It's the job. Of philosophers to set society aright when it's fallen over, and advertisers will definitely try and profit from the plummet, so to speak.
And I don't have any problem with that.
It's inevitable, right?
I mean, if the gazelle falls over and dies, you can't blame the jackals for eating them.
That's just what they do. So this question of...
What's going on for somebody who says to somebody else, well, I guess I'm just a little different.
I guess I don't have to have an absolute agreement on every single thing down to every last detail with someone in order to consider them a friend.
Well, I can tell you for sure that this person has been exposed to a narcissist in the past and may, may, may have narcissistic tendencies in the present.
Certainly the Post would indicate that.
Because what we attack in others, or what we put others down for, is...
The stuff that we are, I mean, assuming in the absence of a rational argument, is the stuff that has most hurt us and that we're most afraid of in ourself, usually.
I mean, certainly it is what has hurt us the most in the past, because when we want to hurt someone, you know, we pick up the weapon that did us the most damage.
That's inevitable, right? But...
This is somebody who has a great fear and rage towards a kind of narcissistic personality structure which says, you have to never express disagreement with me.
You have to obey, you have to agree with, and you are not allowed to think for yourself.
You are only allowed to parrot back to me what I say as an absolute, and I'm not going to give you any arguments other than one or two liners like, it's just the way it is, it's my way or the highway, blah blah blah blah blah.
So, if you've been exposed to this kind of wretched, wretched personality structure, And it really is claustrophobic.
And I know something about this, having been raised by two people who were not strangers, I guess you could say, to this kind of phenomenon.
And if you've been exposed to this kind of thing, then the moment that you hear absolute, right?
The moment that you hear absolute, you hear stifling, claustrophobic, narcissistic destruction of other human beings' personalities.
Right? Now...
That connection is very important to make, because that is the pinpoint of justice.
The connection that you make between your own history and what you're doing in the present is the fulcrum, is the white light, the pinpoint starlight of justice.
And you can't get there without legitimate anger.
At least I've not found that I've been able to do it, and Christina's also been working on this and found it very helpful.
But, if you have had exposure to somebody who never allowed you to think for yourself, then that person had an absolute based on personal domination and humiliation.
This is important to understand.
This person had an absolute based on personal domination and humiliation.
The absolute was you do not exist, right?
The narcissistic personality is very much around you do not exist.
You can't leave, but you don't exist.
And so every time you evince any kind of or have evidence of any kind of personal thought or personal desire or anything, anything which is contrary, To the whim of the narcissist at the moment.
Or, in a more fundamental sense, anything that indicates any kind of individuality.
Individuality hugely threatens the narcissist, because the narcissist is about domination, which is the absence of individuality, the destruction of individuality.
So anytime you show any kind of individuality, the narcissist is going to humiliate and attack you.
This is absolutely inevitable.
Except for free will. But, when you then...
Try to...
You can't fight back against that, right?
The narcissist is the parent, always have the complete control.
And so then, when you end up, as an adult, coming across somebody else who is into philosophy and into sort of absolute standards, then you end up with a very large problem in your own heart, right? In your own emotional apparatus, right?
Because absolutes in the past were incredibly destructive towards you.
Absolutes in the past were the equivalent of ending your personality and your being and driving you down into this murky, Hades-like half-world of compliance and soul agony.
Which, you know, naturally you probably try to laugh off at some point at this, that or the other.
But down at the bottom, it's anybody who's got an absolute will, is intolerant and vicious and brutal and all of these kinds of things.
And so what happens is then when somebody talks about rejecting somebody because that person thinks differently from them, then that awakens within you all of the memories of all of the agony that you went through when you had to go through or when you were subjected to this kind of control, hyper-control, stifling, claustrophobic control when you were a kid.
And I'm gonna actually have to pick this up.
I have to go up and get my computer fixed.
But we will hopefully, if I've got enough battery power, pick this up a little later.
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