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Aug. 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:25
371 Loss
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Time Text
Hi, everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It is 10 to 4 on the 15th of August, 2006.
Boy, I feel sad.
You know, I just packed up everything from this job that I've had for three and a half years, and I've been looking forward to leaving, and I'm looking forward to where it is that I'm going.
But I... I feel kind of emotional when I have to leave a place like that.
I made some good friends there, some really nice people worked there, especially the coding team, which was, they were just great fun to work with, and I wish them nothing but the best, of course, and I try to stay in touch with them, but it's a funny feeling to pack up your desk.
I've only done it sort of, I guess, seriously, like once or twice in my career, where I've worked at some place for a considerable period of time, and then I've ended up Not working there.
It's a funny feeling.
It's a really bittersweet thing.
The company's going through some challenges, and so who knows where it's going to end up, but it's a funny feeling.
I feel a little bit teary.
I feel there's a real strong sense of bittersweetness to this transition for me.
I'm glad to be taking some time off between because, you know, I did some close relationships and it is funny, you know, how in life people just kind of come and go in and out of your life.
I had lunch with a woman who worked there at this company who left a couple of months ago and I had lunch with her about two weeks ago.
And I told her that I was leaving this company.
And she said, oh, okay, so where are you working?
I said, I'm working, you know, not too close.
And she's like, oh, so I guess we're never going to have lunch again.
And I mean, it's not exactly true.
I mean, if there's a way, some coincidence can happen.
But it's entirely possible that this person that I worked with for a couple of years, and we did lunch, and we were...
You know, I guess friends of a kind, you know, as close as friends get in this sort of world of work.
And other people I've shared lots of jokes with, I've gone on business trips with, I've done sales presentations with, we've sweated through technical snafus together, and it's just poof, just gone.
Just gone. The whole history just kind of toodles off into the sunset, never to be seen again.
And you know, you make, it's like the end of high school, right?
You make You make your claims or you make your statements and we'll stay in touch.
And you do for a little while. Usually I find that the case.
And some people, like the Caribou people, I've really stayed in touch for years.
The company that my brother and I founded, I stayed in touch.
I'm still in touch with those guys.
This place is going to be a little less likely because it's so far away from where I live and now work.
But it is just a funny feeling.
I feel almost like I don't know.
I'm trying to think of a good analogy.
When you know something's going to end and you just want it to end.
So when I'm sort of packing up and I'm sending off notes about these files, these clients, showing everyone where my source code is and sending off all these updates and calling the clients.
And you just like, especially when you get down to those last couple of hours.
I actually have a dentist appointment in an hour.
I know. Four or five.
Yeah, in an hour. I'm going to be way early for it, but I just...
You know when you're going to go and you just want to go?
Hopefully that's going to be the case on my death event as well.
But there's a sort of quiet agony in...
Just waiting to leave and people dropping by and saying goodbye.
And then you don't want to... I mean, it sounds so silly, but it seems to be true for me at least.
You don't want to do that false exit.
You don't want to do that thing where it's like, bye, and then you have to come back.
Oh, I forgot my pen. And so I'm just glad to be out.
But it's a bittersweet feeling.
I feel a little teary as well as the happiness that comes from taking on something that's better and more productive and so on.
And I'll make friends at the new place that I go to as long as we don't talk politics and so on.
But it's a bittersweet kind of thing to leave a long-term position.
It's emotional.
Of course, I don't talk politics at work.
I don't talk Philosophy at work, I just, you know, and I think, I mean, it's what a number of people commented, that I'm an enjoyable guy to work with, lots of fun, and so on.
And the CEO was, you know, and I'm sorry that the timing worked out this way because this, that, and the other, but it still is a...
Yeah, it's a moving, it's a bittersweet thing to let a part of your life fall away like, you know, like one of those...
Stages of a rocket, right?
You're sort of moving on to the next thing, and part of your whole life just falls away.
And the people who are in it, and of course you're falling away to them, it's not like I'm trying to paint this in some sort of narcissistic way, but you're falling away for them as well, but it just is...
It's a sad thing. There's a sad thing about it.
It's like carving off...
I mean, every day falls away, right?
I mean, every second falls away.
But when you look at, conceptually, a very large chunk of time, years and years, falling away all at once, and the relationships that you've built...
And I like the clients, too.
I have good relationships with the clients.
It is, you know, it's a real sense that probably there's just a little bit of sense of mortality in it, right?
I mean, there is a...
I'm just sort of trying to examine my own feelings about why I'd feel bittersweet about something that I wanted to leave.
I think it's because life is a pretty constant process of saying goodbye.
And I guess it's a foreshadow of what occurs closer to the end, that life is a fairly constant process of saying goodbye to people and goodbye to things sometimes.
And I guess it's just a foreshadow of where things are going to go.
And I guess when you bid farewell to a number of years and the people therein, it is an echo or a reflection of where life is going to end up taking us, right?
Which is to either our own graves or to the gravesides of others as our life and youth and history and memories and friendships and loves and marriages and so on just slowly get...
Well, just sort of stripped away from us, I guess.
I mean, there's this sense of loss that goes on.
I watched a film, and I didn't really get it the first time that I watched it.
But a film called Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins is very much along these lines, that life is loss and you have to...
You kind of have to get used to that idea, because if you don't, it's going to knock you over pretty hard.
And I guess there's these little mini-deaths or these mini-endings that...
Get you kind of geared up for the bigger ones or get you to...
I mean, this is sort of a deep ache in me at the moment, just sort of...
And it's not because of this job.
I think it's because I'm looking at...
The losses that are going to occur in the future, and of course I feel like calling Christina and calling my friends and telling them how much they mean to me, and you listeners, too, mean a lot to me.
This conversation is a huge, huge part of my life, and I really appreciate the time that people spend listening and contributing to this conversation, so kudos to you as well.
I appreciate that. But I think it is a dress rehearsal for The larger losses, that's sort of what it feels like.
And that's the only way that I can sort of explain why I would feel so strongly just about leaving a job.
Now, of course, as far as losses go, those of us who've gone through the process of separating from our families of origins, defooing as we call it, have gone through a fair amount more loss than most people and that's something that is hard to communicate in a lot of ways to people who haven't gone through that process that when you get rid of your family of origin because of you know an unbearable kind of hideousness to the relationship or an unsupportable kind of alienation within the relationship When you go through that process,
you do let go of quite a lot of your past, and I think that that's probably what's coming up for me as well in this process of leaving this job, which is that...
It is probably a memory of what went on for me in terms of my family, I guess a number of years ago, where I did have to, didn't have to, chose to, although it felt pretty compelled at the time, that I did have to let go of these relationships that I had with my family.
And in letting go of these relationships, I let go of an enormous chunk of my life.
You know, the one thing that is tough about sort of saying farewell to family is that you have a lot of history bound up with these people.
It's not your identity, but it is your history.
I don't know anyone.
I have nobody in my life who knew me when I was a kid.
And... You know, sometimes that would be nice, you know, to have that sense of continuity, which sometimes we lose in our sort of day-to-day stuff, to have that going backwards in time.
And I don't miss the people, but I miss the history, if that makes any sense.
I don't miss my family, like, I want to call them up and talk to them, because I know how that goes, but I do miss I do miss having witnesses to my history,
if that makes any sense. I miss having people in my life who knew me when, who knew me back then, who knew me when I was a child and growing up, and all the formative instances and the histories.
And the funny thing is with family, of course, as you age, I noticed this before I defood, With family, as you age, you do talk more and more about the past sometimes, and that conversation is absent from my life,
and there's an ache around that, about having to hold all of my own history, about having to hang on to everything that went before without witnesses.
It's a hard thing to do, and I don't even know why exactly, but it is.
There's nobody you can say, remember when.
And I'm not a very nostalgic person, although that may not be too evident today.
I'm not a very nostalgic person overall.
I don't really see or feel very strongly this idea of the good old days, but I think it would be nice to have Those witnesses to my history still available in my life.
And it doesn't mean that I'm going to change my decision because my decision is not based on the values that are accidental or not chosen and the people who were my family who know that history.
Of course, it's not...
I think this is probably why I feel sad in this area.
It's not...
It's not that this...
this history is lost anyway because that's something that I very strongly remember from these conversations with my family towards the end as well and not just towards the end but earlier on as well that this history my history my history the history of myself as a child that all of that was Anyway, because I can't get any straight answers out of my family in this regard, right?
I can't get any kind of information out of my family that is an accurate, I would say, an accurate representation of what it was like for me to be a child.
Sorry to interrupt this one.
I'm at the traffic lights here, and I am trying to get a hold of the plug, because I thought this was going to be a bit of a shorter trip.
I'm a little bit concerned about running out of go-go juice for the old computer.
So, let me try and get a hold of that.
Hi there, it's Steph.
Sorry about having to ditch out on that last podcast.
I had left my power cord at work, so I had to go back and grab it.
Talk about making a stellar exit on the last day.
So I just wanted to go back and do that.
I sort of had an arrangement where I'm going to keep the notebook in return for doing a demo tomorrow from I'm going to go up north to go...
Yeah, I'm canoeing and hiking and so on for a couple of days with Christina, and I'm gonna have to do the demo from up there.
If I didn't have the power cord, it would be a little short of juice to do the demo.
So anyway, not that that's gripping to you, but that's sort of what happened.
So it was very lucky that I was podcasting and he did the power cord.
Otherwise, I might not have noticed until too late, in which case that would have been double plus ungood.
Anyway, It's also funny to think, I've just finished at the dentist, just going in for a cleaning and a check-up.
Everything's fine, thanks for asking.
It's interesting for me to think back on when I was last at the dentist's, which was, I guess, you know, a little over six months ago.
And it's very interesting for me to...
I'm getting all over again.
It's very interesting for me to remember what I was talking about the last time that I was at the dentist's.
And this is all about the groats.
Once I get on the highway, it's so bad.
But it's interesting for me to remember what I was talking about the last time that I was...
Podcasting from the dentist or on my way to the dentist, I remember it very clearly.
It was a cold evening and dark.
It got dark very early.
I don't remember the name, but it was the podcast on...
The apple at the dinner table and the family that tells you that the apple is not real and what that does to a child.
So it's very interesting for me to think back on all of that and just to sort of remember or figure out how far we've come as a group during this time.
And I hope that it's been as rewarding a journey for you and will continue to be as rewarding a journey for you as it is for me because I got to tell you it's a very very powerful thing for me and to be part of this conversation as I mentioned earlier and to have the true honor of speaking This intimately with people who share certain values,
who share certain approaches, who have kindness and generosity and intelligence and wisdom and are willing to share it both in the board and in emails and in Sunday shows.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
I think it's just wonderful. And I hope that it is, I'm sure it is, since we're not about altruism here, I'm sure it is as beneficial for you as it is for me, in which case we are truly in a win-win world.
So, I'd like to continue.
I'm still sort of having trouble shaking this kind of gut-level feeling around...
Leaving this job. It's really interesting.
Now, I'm not going, and I'm going to kind of sort of continue pursuing it.
I don't know if I'm going to post this or not.
If it turns out to be something interesting, then so much the better.
But for me, trying to figure out why I'm feeling what I'm feeling has always been a very interesting thing to do.
And If it works out for me, then maybe you'll get a chance to see me, or I guess somebody, going through the process of trying to figure out what they're feeling, which might be helpful for you, sort of at some point, I guess you can say,
in your life. But it's not something I would say that I would suggest trying in the absence of Having had some real professional experience with professional help or a professional therapist, like a good therapist, somebody that you trust and who works well with you, I would say that...
Don't try this at home, I guess.
It's the sort of message that I'm trying to get across.
I've had years of therapy.
I've got a therapist as a wife and heavily, heavily medicated.
And, of course, I've written books and entire thousands of pages of journals.
So I've got some, I guess, experience in introspection.
So I would say maybe this will be of interest to you to sort of watch me figure out what's going on with myself, but I wouldn't say that it's a substitute for being able to talk to a real professional, sort of in my humble opinion, that would be the key.
And don't try this without having had that approach or that perspective at some point, I would say, in your life.
So, I think I sort of got somewhere in trying to figure out why I was feeling what I was feeling when I was driving down.
I was feeling quite teary, and only at one point did I catch myself slipping into a sort of voice-catching bit of self-pity, which was a bit of a false self-erruption, which I tried to catch when it happened.
But, only at one point did I go, no, that wasn't a real big deal.
But, It was a deep well of feeling, and therefore it has to do with early loss, right?
So when you have a deep well of feeling that's coming up that's not particular to the situation, right?
I mean, this company that I'm leaving, they're nice people, they're good people, they're friends, sort of, I would consider myself a friend slash acquaintance with some of the people, but, you know, I haven't really, except on a rare occasion, socialized with them outside of work, and, you know, they're work buddies,
I guess you could say. And, So the depth of feeling that I was experiencing about leaving this job, because it was quite deep and powerful for me, obviously had a lot more to do with something to do with my family than it did have to do with anything at work.
And I think that the feeling of loss of chunks of life, I think, had a lot to do with what was going on, that I feel very sad Yeah,
okay, here it comes again. I feel very sad, and I think that the sadness is really rooted around missing not the family that is, but the family that could be.
Yeah, that's kind of it.
You know, I don't know if you feel the same, if you have the same sort of feeling.
About the world that could be.
I feel it very strongly.
The world that could be.
The way that people could be.
The lack of conformity.
The lack of being controlled.
The lack of lashing out at the young and the helpless.
There's so much that people...
Don't have that they could have.
It kind of drives me a little bit crazy as an idealist.
It kind of drives me a little bit nuts.
And I think the same thing is occurring for me emotionally with my family.
When I'm thinking about it, and it was triggered by leaving this job, which obviously triggered for me some historical memories or some fairly deep memories of leaving my family from an emotional standpoint.
And it's not so much that I feel that this job, you know, this company had potential, and that potential was not realized in many, many ways.
And so that's all going on.
Sorry about keeping adjusting the webcam, but I'm on the public road, because that's where my dentist is near to.
And until we get back on the private road, we are Jostle City, and I haven't got around to putting Velcro, which is another damn thing to do, putting Velcro on my...
On my webcam so that it doesn't jostle around on my dashboard.
The last one had a nice rubber base which clung nicely, this one not so much.
It bounces around a little bit.
Anyway, so...
But I think that there was enough of a squandered opportunity that reminded me of stuff in the past with my own family that I think I really feel a sadness about the family that could have been, or the family that existed, I guess you could say, in my mind's eye, or you could say, the family that I hope to create.
In the future with Christina.
And I gotta tell you that the stories that I get both on the board and sort of personally Really hard stories to absorb.
The people who are on the board and the people who email me, and not everyone, but a lot of people, they have this experience with their own families that really is quite wretched.
They have experience with... With schools that is really quite wretched and they're worried about bullies and they're worried about their fathers, they're worried about their mothers, they're subjected to a lot of violence and there is a lot of pain out there in the world.
You know, there really is a lot of pain out there in the world.
And I'm certainly no lightning rod for it, but people do share with me, and I'm sure they share with others too, they do share with me some of the pain that they're experiencing, and there's a lot of it.
And a lot of it has to do with family and the states, the schools, the family and the church and religion and so on, which is all the stuff that we are, or at least I am, sworn to oppose to my dying breath.
And there's also A real, a personal pain, and that comes from the loneliness of being good people in a bad world, right?
I mean, that's the fundamental challenge that we face as moral people or as moralists, is the problem of being good people in a bad world.
It's a significant, significant problem.
We want to be part of the species, but at the same time, we are not a part of the species, or at least it doesn't feel like we're part of the species, and that gives us a lot of pain.
And that's really hard.
That can be really hard.
It's really hard to feel part of The species, but not part of the community.
To feel part of the human race, but not feel part of the community.
That's a very difficult thing.
And I think that Freedom Aid Radio and the board, the community that we're building there, is a response to that.
And, yeah, we don't all agree, and there's lots of back and forth, and there's some fractious back and forth, but I think that there's a fundamental respect that people don't necessarily get from...
Other communities that are out there.
And so because we feel part of them, obviously we're human beings, right?
We're carbon-based and human-based.
But we don't, I think, very strongly feel part of the community.
We feel part of the race.
We don't feel part of the community, which says is a difficult thing.
Now, we're certainly part of the race because we're human.
And we are as much part of the race as the first Homo sapiens was.
Actually, no. Oh, if I could only edit videos, I'll figure it out at some point, but my learning curve is pretty maxed at the moment, so I'm not going to fuss too much about it.
But we are absolutely part of The species, because the species includes improvements, right?
I mean, we are the random gene that goes forward, that pulls humanity forward, so we're definitely part of the species.
We're just not so much part of the community, which is tough, but inevitable, because the community is really not very It's a really good place to be these days, and it's getting worse, and so without us, we would absolutely fall into some sort of horrible pit of backwards compatible medieval-style dictatorship,
but with the slight additional negative of there being weapons of mass destruction, which other than the organized religion, dictatorships have not had as much access to as we can be thankful for.
I think that for me, not feeling part of any close-knit, familial, extended family kind of community, because there's lots of myths about that, lots of mythologies out there.
The same way there's lots of myths about, you know, kind, benevolent, gentle priests and, you know, the very concerned and interested and eager to help bureaucrats and public school teachers who are all bucking the system to help the kids.
With the exception of the former two, I think the latter is true to a small degree, and I know that because there are a couple of public school teachers on the board who shall remain anonymous, of course.
And so there are some of those people which I can attest to.
But... We're not part of the community.
I mean, I think that's a very fundamental thing, and I can feel both an easing up of emotional tension, and at the same time, an upwelling of a bit more sadness when I talk about that, and maybe this is part of how I'm sort of going through this break with illusion, which is almost continual, because we're social beings, and we want the stereotype, I guess you could say, of social life.
And... We...
By not being part of the community, we can be part of the new community, the next community, the community that is to be, so to speak.
We can be part of all of that.
It may be after we're dead, but that's okay.
I mean, we are the scouts who are ahead of the tribe, finding, as best as we can, the new world, right?
I mean, as the old world is falling apart, right?
I mean, this is like... The old world is a...
It's an island, or a continent almost, falling into the ocean.
And we are scouts.
We're almost sent out by our natures, not by society, which reviles us, but we are scouts sent out to find more solid land, because the old landmass is crumbling, and we see it, and other people don't.
And it's hard. It's hard to be out there, because, of course, the scout metaphor works to some degree, but, of course, in an army, The scouts are highly valued and trained and part of the group.
They're a bit loners, like the snipers, but we are not even part of that.
We are the mutation that moves the world forward.
I think a benevolent mutation and a beneficial mutation, but we're part of the species but not part of the community.
And that's a hard thing because...
I see what community can be.
I see very clearly what family can be, what friendship can be, what marriage, what love, what intimacy and togetherness, what all of that could be.
To me, that's all very clear.
And I don't know if it's clear because I've worked on philosophy for so long, or if I've worked on philosophy for so long because it's so clear.
I don't know. And there may be no way to know other than some atomic level CAT scan or PET scan that I don't...
that doesn't exist yet.
So... That reality of seeing so clearly what the world could be, seeing also so clearly, or not as clearly as I'd like, but seeing so clearly, or relatively clearly, how far away we are from that.
What a long, long way we have to go for that.
Or to achieve that is daunting at times, depressing at times, exciting at times, and as I've said, of course, the more The greater the enemies, the greater the glory.
The further the javelin throw, the greater the javelin thrower.
So the fact that we are, on the lip of a volcano, seeing the future that nobody here can see, very few people yet can see, means that we should, I think, be proud and recognize the honor and the valor of what it is that we're trying to do as philosophers, as rationalists, as people who are not Trying as best as we can not to succumb to the generalized propaganda of the world.
But it is hard.
It is hard. And I think that I feel today a little bit like I mean, I know this may sound a little bit glorious, and I'm just going to have to follow it.
I don't know if this is the final answer, but this is sort of what's coming to me right now.
It may be false self, it may be true self, but I don't think it's false self.
Let's see where we go with it.
I feel that I move among cripples.
I feel like...
A long-limbed, healthy man among cripples.
And I think I find that hard.
I think I find that hard.
I think I find that hard.
And the healthier that I become, the more painful it becomes.
Neither are two, when I was myself partly a cripple, and of course we're all, I mean, we're all born where we're born and had to grow up where we grew up, so there's always going to be that aspect of things.
But the healthier I become, the more apparent that becomes to me.
the world of us relative to the world that is.
And of course as a philosopher I want to help these people.
I really, really do want to help these people.
And that's when I really feel like a different species.
When you, as I've mentioned before, you're a doctor with a cure, but nobody knows that they're sick.
And in fact, view your cure merely as sadism.
But it's not. It's not subjective.
It's not my opinion. It's not just a possibility.
What we're talking about here is the truth.
Is health. Is vitality.
Is what people need.
It's what people should have.
I mean, we shouldn't have to have podcasts about these things.
They should be understood. They should be fairly basically understood.
Of course they're not.
And it feels almost, of course, like sometimes that they're willfully misunderstood.
These basic truths.
Government is violence. God doesn't exist.
Religion is corruption. Families are dismal.
Families are brutal.
But of course it's not. It's just propaganda.
It's just the argument for morality in action.
But it would be...
It would be really something to have...
A real community.
Like a real honest-to-goodness community.
And I don't mean a community like a star in the night sky.
I don't mean a community like an island or like a once a...
a Mont Pelerin society or something like that.
A once a year kind of retreat.
I don't mean a Galt's Gulch kind of place.
I mean, I think it would just be fantastic.
And it's not something that I expect to live to see.
But it sure would be great to see the kind of world that is to come.
The place where there is a deep joy in people's sense of life and in their existence.
Right?
Where there is real brotherhood and sisterhood Between men and women.
Where parents are treasured for the virtues that they have inculcated and nurtured in their children.
Where this endless goddamn war of all against all called religion and the state are finally put to one side.
Thrown away!
Learned at the stake, I might almost say imprisoned.
I would really love to see that world.
I would really love to see that world.
And I am happy to be a small brick in a little foundation for building that world.
I saw a picture in the newspaper today of a woman, a Lebanese woman, returning back to her home Flashing the victory sign over, I guess, the Israelis.
And, of course, the Israelis were, you know, we won.
No, we won. No, we won.
It goes back and forth from either side.
And they talk about victory and they talk about winning.
When children's limbs are lost in the ruins, they talk about victory and they talk about winning.
When people are maimed for life.
And I would just love to see a world where that was understood, where that was real for people.
In the newspaper today also, and I only say this because I was at the dentist and I had to wait, so I read the paper.
The more fool me. In the paper today as well, Some Muslim group started talking about how the Western nations, or Canada in particular, should work to get the Western troops out of Iraq, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And somebody wrote...
I got a feeling it's a guy.
I don't know. I mean, I just think it's a man.
Somebody wrote, and I... Remember how the whole thing went, as I didn't read past the first couple of sentences.
But somebody wrote, the civilian deaths in Iraq, though regrettable, blah, blah, blah.
Though regrettable.
*Tonk* I don't think I can express how angry and how Agonizing that that statement really is.
The civilian deaths in Iraq, they're regrettable.
And I'm not saying that the Iraqi deaths are worth any more or less than the American deaths or the British deaths or, I mean, in terms of the bombings or 9-11, but regrettable.
What a fucking poisonous word to use about the slaughter of 100,000 people.
Regrettable. This word, of course, was used with the rocket attacks from Israel and the rocket attacks from Hezbollah.
regret.
It's regrettable.
And this is where we are as a species.
This is a war crime.
A genocidal action is viewed as regrettable.
We have to go in and kill the bad guys and the fact that we wipe out a lot more innocent women and children and men than we do wipe out these quote bad guys is regrettable.
This coming from a Canadian.
A goddamn Canadian sitting in an air-conditioned office in the Globe and Mail talking about deaths in a desert he has never seen as regrettable.
Now I wonder, and I do not wish harm, but I wonder, and I can't tell you anything other but I wonder, and I can't tell you anything other than that it would be a grim satisfaction although I understand that it's a complicated topic.
So, the police are chasing a crook.
Some guy who's done some real evil.
And they're taking a corner too fast and they go spinning up on this guy's lawn And behead his two-year-old daughter.
Accidentally, a car rolls over her, separates her head from her neck.
And this man's world evaporates to a fine mist of near-endless pain.
I wonder if he would write an article saying, my daughter's death...
Though regrettable, was justified because the police were pursuing a criminal.
I wonder if at his eulogizing his dead child, That he would say, my daughter's death, though regrettable, served a larger social purpose.
And I wonder how he would feel if it turned out that the cops, through their own incompetence and greed, were chasing the absolute wrong guy to begin with.
Whether he would still say, my daughter's murder, though regrettable, is part of a larger social group.
Everybody else's lives are just so disposable.
Everybody else's children can be flushed down like dead goldfish.
Everybody else's family, everybody else's community is expendable.
And yet, one hair of one head of these golden children is touched.
And there is hell to pay. - And I see a world wherein what this person is writing is understood and explained as a mental sickness and sociopathy.
Where if somebody talks about that, we would look at them with the same horror as somebody who bounds over the newly decapitated body of his daughter, rushes up to the police and says...
oh yeah, that was regrettable, but did you get the criminal?
And we would look at that human being as completely sick, And I can see the world so clearly, where we view somebody who writes the Iraqi deaths, the deaths of Iraqi civilians, they're regrettable.
Here's blahdy blahdy blahdy, war on terror, conquer terrorists, rogue nations, blahdy blahdy blah.
I can see that world, I really can.
And I think that I miss it, if that makes any sense.
I think I miss a world that isn't even here yet.
I mean, I miss a world that was never there, which was a world of benevolent child-rearing, which I didn't experience.
But I really miss that world, where there's almost no need for newspapers, maybe the weather.
I really miss that world that is to come.
I really miss that world.
You know, they say that you can't miss what you never had, but that's not true at all.
Try growing up without a father and see if you don't miss that.
You can miss what you've never seen.
You can miss what you've only imagined.
Because it's the imagination that is the progress of the species.
We have to imagine things to be better in order for the world to progress.
And so we have to imagine things that are better and possible and real and potential.
And so we do have to miss what isn't here, what never was.
And I really, I really miss it.
I miss it in the past. I miss it in the present.
I miss...
Or I guess I could say that I grieve that the rest of my life is going to be fighting for a paradise that others are going to inhabit.
And I wish them joy in the inhabiting of it.
But sometimes from...
Down the well here, struggling to pull the cripples out.
It just feels a little overwhelming and I guess this is one of those days.
And it all comes about because I quit my job and actually leave.
And it all comes about because I'm not going to be able to do it.
And you know, I mean, a part of me knows the future, knows that there is a grieving to be undergone for what is not going to happen in my lifetime, because even if the state collapses and we start this or that, you know, I've got to tell you, I'm really not holding my breath for Libertopia.
I think that we are, even if we were heading in the right direction, it would be unlikely to happen in a lifetime, but turning this thing around is, I still, it's going to happen for sure, but I just don't think I'm going to need to see it.
In fact, When I sort of get down in my gut, I think I'm going to live to see a lot worse before any better.
And better might be simply returning to where we are now, right?
That might be better.
As Freud said about treating neurotics, I attempt to return them to an ordinary state of unhappiness, not a pathological state of unhappiness.
And maybe...
The sum total of all of our trials and efforts, those of us who talk about philosophy and who talk about freedom, maybe the sum total of all of that is going to be to return the world to where it is now, rather than have it be where things are even worse.
Because it is really hard to break the hold of the family.
Okay.
And that's the great stumbling block, not politics, not religion.
It's really hard to break the hold of the family.
I mean, those of you who are on the boards who are going through this know what I'm talking about.
It's really hard to break the hold.
There's a biological imperative.
There's something that it's just really hard to break the hold of the family.
And until we do break the hold of the family, Everything else is just an effect.
Everything else is just a spin-off.
Everything else is just a symptom of the primary problem, which is the pathological hold of the conscience that the family has.
The automatic virtue of the family, the automatic obedience of the children, the automatic desire for approval that comes and is particularly provoked among children who are rejected, as we all were.
as we all are now, for being who we are.
When you speak the truth, existence is rejection. ...
And we're not even talking about that yet as a culture, right?
They say, I'm a cult. Look at the cult that's at the root of the word culture.
We're not even talking about this stuff yet as a culture.
I mean, we've had a couple of hundred years of talking about freedom and the free market and Adam Smith and Ricardo and Malthus and all these sorts of economics and philosophers and we've got that stuff down and we're still losing that fight and we've had centuries of sorting it out.
Now, we're not even talking as a culture yet about The fundamental opposition to human happiness, liberation and independence, joy and integrity, that is the family.
It's barely, well, except for those of us in this conversation, maybe some others that I've barely heard of, it's barely in our vocabulary.
And I think that maybe my true self is sort of trying to make sure that I don't end up with these illusions about imminent liberty.
I have it for myself, and I hope that as you begin to understand your family better and begin to make decisions about that, that it becomes part of the vocabulary.
But right now, it's like talking about the free market to a caveman.
The what? To talk about the primary liberation which is from the family, from unchosen and unpleasant relationships.
So maybe that's...
The purpose of these emotions is for me to understand the distance that we have to go to so that I can be in for the long haul rather than thinking that something imminent is about to change, which would be...
I think demotivating.
And so I think that, yeah, I think this is it.
I think that this is what this is all about.
Understanding that this is going to be a long flight.
This is going to be a long haul, and you've got to be in it for the long haul.
Not so much in it just for the moment.
So, I hope this has been helpful to you.
I'll have a look at this before posting it and see if it is helpful.
I really appreciate you listening as always.
Thank you so much for your donations and for your attention and your time invested in this conversation.
I really appreciate it.
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