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Sept. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:40
417 Islamic Offense

Why the Muslim world is so volatile

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. It's noon on Saturday, September the 16th.
It's bathroom time! And that means that I get to clean my thoughts and my tub at the same time.
So, I haven't done media recommendations in forever, but I thought I would recommend just a little bit.
I'm sort of a big swing fan.
I just find the music peppy and happy, and I guess I would suggest, if you're interested in that kind of music, there's lots of great oldies and so on, right?
The Glenn Millers and the Duke Wellingtons and so on.
But some modern stuff is actually pretty good, too.
You might want to check out...
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.
It's a great band.
They do a fantastic version of I Want to Be Like You from the Jungle Book.
Horns are just fantastic.
They also do a good version of Mini the Mooch.
They have an original song, I think it is, called You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three.
Also very good. You might want to check that out.
And the Cherry Popping Daddy's Zoot Suit Riot.
It's got some great scat bit in the middle and a great song.
You might want to have a listen to that too.
Alright, from swing to Islam, let's have a little chat about a question that came up on the board this morning, which is from another forum that a member is watching.
We won't consider this a rank betrayal.
Actually, we will, but we'll stay quiet about it to avoid accusations of culthood.
But this is the post from another forum.
Someone says, this new wave of protests after the Pope's speech is highlighting a fact of our times.
The Muslims are the most easily offensible people in the universe.
I mean, all it takes is a few poorly chosen words for them to go on a protesting spree, some even burning churches and threatening embassies.
And all of the time, they also bring cameras and very convenient signs.
In English, it seems that Muslim protesters are also the world's biggest media whores.
Now, we all know what the apologists will say.
Quote, We're good to go.
And it's also the religion of the easily offended, which is the main point of this thread.
Yes, sometimes Christian or Jewish groups get offended by some pretty stupid stuff, but when it happens, what we have is some 10 or 15 people protesting and looking ridiculous.
When the Muslims are offended, they torch churches and they keep marching for week after week.
It reminds me of an older thread by Bozo.
Nobody can take this anymore.
Everyone has problems and torching and protesting ain't going to make them disappear.
I think we can all agree that there is a problem.
And my question is, why are they so easily offended?
Personally, I have no idea and with lack of insight.
And I'm not sure whether I have an idea.
Well, I know that I have an idea.
I'm not sure if it's helpful. But I think that in order to understand...
The exquisite, almost hibiscus-like sensitivity of the Muslim population.
And I'll talk about Muslims, but of course this is general to just about anybody who believes things that are false.
You know, you sort of need to become, if you're going to get involved in these kinds of disputes, you need to familiarize yourself with a little topic that psychologists call projection.
And you will, I think, if you get the hang of this idea, you'll recognize that people become the most aggressive in their beliefs when those beliefs are false.
I mean, the maiden doth protest too much is a fairly important principle here.
And as Jung said it when he asked a patient, a woman who was, I think, considered what was considered back then a hysteric, he said to her, he asked her a particular question and she said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And he said to her, you know, one no would have been sufficient, which is quite true.
One no is sufficient.
But, of course, she is overcompensating, or was overcompensating in response to this question, because she was not sure of what it is that she was saying.
And we tend to, when we've been brutalized as children, we tend to compensate for the uncertainty and the bullying that we experienced with an over-adherence.
So psychologically, you can't ever beat psychology any more than you can beat biology.
But psychologically, the way it works is sort of like this.
So let's say that I am some poor Muslim kid, and if you've heard the podcast about the apple, then you sort of know the backstory behind this.
So, you know, my parents say that Allah exists, and so I'm going to go to heaven or to hell, and I have to obey the Sharia law and the...
Quran and all this sort of stuff, right?
The Prophet Muhammad and blah blah blah.
Well, of course, none of it's true, right?
I mean, none of it's true even in a logical sense, let alone in an empirically verifiable sense, right?
I mean, mathematics can't be empirically verified in the pure form, right?
Of course, numbers exist because there are such things as discrete entities in the universe, and so because there is space between objects, we have such a thing as numbers, right?
If it was all a big fog, there would be no such thing as numbers, or us, right?
So you can't even get to a proof of any of the propositions of religion, even in a purely mathematical or logical sense.
They're completely self-contradictory.
And so what happens is you don't believe it.
So when you're told all of this stuff as a kid, you don't believe it.
But the biological imperative, which we're all sort of born with, is pretty much survival at just about all costs.
So we end up, you know, forcing ourselves to believe it.
This is the trauma that's really at the heart of religious belief, that we are horrified by the fact that we're being lied to for brute self-interest, that our parents are not interested in our development as individual souls, but are only interested in getting us to conform to the brutal fantasies of others.
So, we're horrified by this, of course, and what happens then is that We end up conforming.
Now, we don't believe any of it, and it seems to me quite likely that, I certainly can remember this phase, where we go through a period of skepticism, right?
So we go through this period where we say, well, what about this and what about that?
And what happens, of course, is that we get met with, you know, blanket hostility, right?
So we end up with rage resulting from any sort of honest questions about the beliefs that are being put forward.
We ask, well, if this is the case, then what about this?
Who created God and how do we know it's true and this and that?
And you may not have gone through a process like this explicitly as a child, but you probably either saw other people getting attacked for being questioned or you just kind of generally got the idea as a whole that if you ask questions, but you probably either saw other people getting attacked for being questioned or you just I mean, it's a sort of totalitarian essence to what it is that we call culture, right?
Culture is all false.
If it's true, then it's science.
Culture is all false, and people end up...
Believing this stuff because they're frightened, right?
Because they don't want to get attacked, right?
When you're a kid, you're defenseless, you're dependent, and so on.
So that's the biggest power disparity you'll ever have, even between yourself and the government if you're thrown in prison.
And people are terrified, right?
And so they just don't.
Children are terrified, so they stop asking questions.
Now, just because you stop asking a question because you're frightened, it doesn't mean that the questions go away.
Just because you stop talking about a backache or a headache doesn't mean that the headache itself goes away.
That's sort of fairly important. Repression is not elimination.
It's impossible to eliminate emotions within the mind or whatever.
And so when you have the questions that you're lied to as a child in the Muslim world, or of course in the West in terms of statism and socialism and perhaps religion as well, so when you're lied to for brute self-interest, you could even accept that, right? If you were lied to honestly, so to speak.
So if your parents said, well, you know, you have to kind of talk about this Muslim stuff, because if you don't, you're going to get attacked, right?
So, you know, we've got to kind of stick together here.
We know it's nonsense, but if you don't spout it, then you're going to be attacked, so let's all get our story straight, you know, like a criminal family trying to get their story straight or whatever.
And so they don't do that, though.
They say it's true, right?
It would be kind of tough for the parents to tell the children that they lived in terror of some external authority and that the children should comply to whatever the majority is because of fear and so on, right?
Because the parents want to pretend to be heroes and noble and virtuous in their children's eyes because their parents...
I don't know, as Jung said once, he said, most parents are just ordinary little incompetents, barely more than half children themselves, which I actually think is quite true.
So what happens is you have all of these questions, the natural movements of your rational mind to strive to understand the universe.
And of course, as a child...
You are gaining all of these principles that are absolutely essential to your survival through the use of your senses, through the information that's provided by your senses.
If you're crossing a street, when your parents teach you how to cross a street, they say, look both ways and make sure that no traffic is coming.
So they say, rely on the evidence of your senses and don't try and...
And cross them, right? And if you see a car coming, then you accept the evidence of your senses, you accept that the car is there, that it's coming towards you, that if you step out into traffic, it's going to hit you, and if it does hit you, then you're going to get physically injured or killed, and that's a bad thing.
So, of course, when your parents are teaching you about the world, from a sort of basic pragmatic physical health standpoint, then they say, do X, Y, or Z. Don't climb too high on the monkey bars if you're too young, because you will end up falling and blah, blah, blah.
So, you get all of these instructions from your parents and, you know, go to school, you follow this route, this route is not going to magically change overnight, you can't wish it to be different, you can't will it away, and so on.
What they don't generally say is something like, when you are crossing the street, what you should do, or when you want to cross the street, oh child of mine, then what you should really do to be an effective street crosser is you should close your eyes, you should pray to Allah then what you should really do to be an effective street crosser is you should close your eyes, you should pray to They don't say that, and they don't say that we're not going to teach you anything about God because God will speak to you directly and all you need to do is wait for God to talk to you and God will reveal to you everything in a far more pure manner than we could and they don't say that we're not going to teach you anything about
And all you need to do is wait for God to talk to you, and God will reveal to you everything in a far more pure manner than we could ever teach you.
That would sort of be logical.
I mean, if somebody wanted to teach you Aristotle, or if you sort of had to learn Aristotle, And Aristotle was alive and infinitely available to take your questions and more than happy to do so, then it wouldn't really make any sense to sit there and say, well, we're not going to go and talk to Aristotle.
What we're going to do is we're going to go and talk to a bunch of people who've written really contradictory interpretations of Aristotle and his thoughts, and we're going to try and figure out which one of these people is correct based on whatever whim or feeling that we have in this area.
You wouldn't really do that, right?
You'd sort of say, let's go to the source.
Let's go ask Aristotle what he meant by this and that and have it cleared up for once and for all, especially because, you know, what Aristotle says is the absolute, unvarnished and total truth.
So it wouldn't really make any sense to try and find some substitute for Aristotle when you wanted to learn about Aristotle, of course.
That's not really the case either, right?
I mean, when I guess Muslim kids or any religious kids are taught Euclidean geometry...
Then they're told, you know, well, these are the principles.
This is what you learn. You can work it out for yourself.
It's logical. It can be marked.
It's accurate. Same thing when they're learning grammar or words or whatever.
That's the wrong word. You should use this word.
That's incorrect and so on.
So that's how the children are taught.
And of course, if you get the idea, if they become scientists or doctors or whatever, that process just continues.
When you want to learn mathematics, right, you go directly to the mathematics textbook.
You don't Go to contradictory interpretations of possible numbers to try and learn mathematics, right?
You go, you learn, you practice, and you mark sort of true and false in particular areas.
But of course, in religion, things are completely different, right?
So if I'm evil religious instructor, parent number 12 billion and whatever, then I'm going to sit you down at one time when you're a kid, and I'm going to say to you, listen, the ultimate truth about life...
This is spoken by a guy who lives in a box under my bed.
And it's a little box, but he's real.
And you look at the box, and I show you the box.
It's a matchbox, right?
Like an inch around or something.
You say, really?
Really? Guy lives in there who tells you everything about the ultimate truth of life, and you say, well, yeah, absolutely.
It's like, well, that doesn't seem too likely.
Can I talk to him?
And people say, oh, absolutely, you can talk to him any time that you want.
And they say, great, lift the lid, and I want to talk to him.
And then they say, well, no, I mean, you can't talk to him directly, but you can ask me.
You can ask me what the little man in the box has to say about the really important things in life, right?
And you say, oh, so you can talk to him.
It's like, yeah, I can talk to him.
And you say, okay, great.
And I can talk to him too.
Yes. Okay, great.
Then you don't actually need to tell me anything.
I can just go ask this guy in the box myself, right?
You don't need to. You know, it would be sort of a waste of time and probably would involve some inaccuracies for me to ask you what the guy in the box says.
But instead, you know, I'll just go talk to the guy in the box myself.
Myself. And then they say, well, no.
No, you can't do that.
You can't open the box, and you can't...
I'm not going to let you learn about life from the guy in the box.
I'm going to tell you what the guy in the box actually said, right?
And then you say, well, now I'm really starting to get confused.
You say that the guy in the box exists, that he's got all the truth about everything.
And that it's absolutely essential that I get all of this knowledge, but instead of me talking to the guy in the box, I've got to talk to you instead.
What kind of sense does that make?
And then, of course, what happens is you get beaten for being impious and for asking questions.
And that's a terrifying thing.
It's a totally terrifying thing.
And, of course, the analogy, while sounding absurd, is actually very accurate, I do believe, because...
You are supposed to be able to talk to God, right?
I mean, if God existed and God wanted people to learn about how buddy Jesus died for their sins or whatever, then God would sit down and talk to children, right?
God would appear to children and speak to them quite reasonably and explain to them all of this, right?
You can't say it's because God doesn't like to intervene because, of course, he has intervened in the writing of the Bible and so on, right?
So, when children are told that this guy in the box knows everything and that they should believe it, but they can't actually talk to the guy in the box, right?
It's like, no, no, I'll tell you what the guy in the box really wants you to do.
You can kind of talk to him, but you can't really talk to him, and I'm going to tell you everything about what the guy in the box really wants you to do because I'm the Pope or the priest or the imam or whatever.
And this is all the most patent nonsense, right?
Children are incredibly rational deep down and innately.
And so what happens, of course, is that children go, you know, I really don't think that's the case.
And if you ever have any doubts about that, you can simply try this.
You know, if you know any children or whatever, you can simply try this, right?
So the day after Halloween, when the kids have got a bag of candy, tell them that there's an invisible guy in the room who's telling them that they need to give all their candy to you.
And just see what kind of reaction the kids get.
The kids don't say, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense, let me give you all my candy.
What they'll say is, oh, come on, you just want my candy.
You don't need to make up all this stuff.
Children are incredibly rational, right?
And So, if you try that, feel free to try that experiment and do let me know how it goes.
I absolutely guarantee you that unless the child is completely broken in spirit, terrified of everyone, and perceives an implicit threat in what you're saying, you're not going to get the candy.
You're not going to get the candy, right?
And that's not really going to be the case.
You can also, if you like, go to a woman and say to the woman that you need to sleep with me because my invisible friend says that you need to sleep with me.
I doubt very much that she's going to say, you know, great, let's lube up and hit the town.
She's going to say, no, you just want to sleep with me.
Don't make up all this silliness about some invisible guy telling you and telling me that that's what's required and so on.
So people are perfectly capable of piercing this complete ridiculous illusion that there's some invisible force in the universe that you're bound to because you're responsible and who can talk and will talk to you but can never really talk to you and you have to talk to the priest or whatever.
And even if you're a part of one of those religions, or was raised in one of those religions, I mean, that doesn't really make any sense.
It's the old thing, right?
You go and talk to Aristotle, right?
If he's available and he's willing to talk to you, you don't reach a bunch of texts that are all contradictory and confused and don't help you understand Aristotle other than to understand that Aristotle seems to be very hard to understand, right?
You go talk to Aristotle and get it cleared up.
And since all religions believe or posit that you have the capacity to communicate directly with God, then if that were the case, then any rational religion, so to speak, not that there would be such a thing, but the rational conclusion of that would be, well, of course we're not going to send you to Sunday school because God's going to tell you.
Everything that you need to know.
Why would we send you to somebody who may have their own agenda, who may be confused, who may have misunderstood something themselves, who may have been poorly educated?
If you want to learn about Aristotle, go talk to Aristotle.
Don't read the books about, or at least read Aristotle in the original, which of course you can't do with religious texts because they're all written down by people and translated by people and interpreted by people.
So, the reason I don't want to go into big proof about, disproof of religion, because I don't feel that that's going to be hugely required, given the amount of energy that I put into that already.
But I just sort of wanted to point out, if once we start looking at the question of why are Muslims in particular so offendable or so aggressive, well, it's because they're lied to the most.
So, when you are told all of this nonsense by an authority, by somebody in power, a teacher, a parent, or whatever, a priest, when you're taught all of this nonsense, and you're taught these completely contradictory things, you don't wander into traffic and pray for Jesus Christ to open the way for you and just trust in...
I guess some people do, but they don't tend to reproduce if they do this as kids, because they're mostly...
Cream grill work on some big truck, but you're sort of not taught to do that.
So you're taught in one sense, trust your senses, don't pray for how to cross a street, but look, trust your senses and act accordingly.
That's sort of the one approach that is quite rational that people take with their children and their interaction with reality.
But when it comes to virtue, then you're supposed to pray and listen to people and not trust the evidence of your senses, which of course is that God doesn't exist at all.
And so all of this contradictory, of which there are hundreds and hundreds of examples, I won't sort of get into each of them, but all of this stuff that you're taught as a child, which is purely false, and I'm simply picking on the Muslims because that was the topic of the post, but of course when you think about how Western children are taught about but of course when you think about how Western children are taught about the state in public schools, that they're taught not to hit, that you don't solve problems through hitting people, you don't solve problems through punching people or pushing them off the monkey bars or anything like that, and that a bully
you don't solve problems through punching people or pushing them off the monkey bars or anything like that, and that a bully who takes your lunch, even if that bully ends up sharing your lunch with some poorer kid, it's still bullying and you shouldn't do it, and of course, after being told his whole childhood that violence after being told his whole So,
So, this is exactly the same thing occurs in the West, which is why, you know, we look at the Muslims and we say, boy, you people are really oversensitive, you know, you people are really, you take this stuff too seriously, and you shouldn't be so upset, and all this, that, and the other.
And, I mean, that's all pure nonsense, because if you talk to a Western statist about the welfare state, You're going to face exactly the same kind of response as you're talking about with the Muslims.
So the idea that over there people are really irrational and touchy and will protest at a moment's notice and get aggressive and that makes them very different from us is ridiculous.
We're all human beings and we all have the same basic emotional and psychological makeup.
And if you think that we in the West are very different and we don't protest over things and we don't get too aggressive over things, then see what's going to happen if you suggest getting rid of the welfare state or Social Security.
I would imagine that, in fact I wouldn't do more than imagine, I will guarantee you that what you will end up with...
It's a large amount of people marching and protesting and burning trucks and whatever, turning over buses and so on.
So where they have in that particular realm, they have their irrational preferences and violence and hypocrisies in the realm of religion.
Well, we have the same thing.
We just have it in the realm of statism.
So I would say that if you really want to understand the Muslim world and the Muslim mentality, then just have debates about the role of the government with Westerners, and you'll see exactly the same thing.
So, they're not different.
They're not distant. They're not alien.
They're not other. They're just like us.
It's just that we tend to do it around political redistribution of wealth, and they do it around religion.
But it's the same damn nonsense either way.
It's just same shit, different pile, frankly.
So, that's sort of important to understand.
You don't want to... You don't want to look at the Muslim world and say, wow, those people are really freaky.
Holy crap. You know, that's really bizarre, right?
I mean, how they march and protest and so on.
But you start touching people's political benefits here, exactly the same thing is going to occur.
Yet it's just harder to see it, right?
It's harder to see the corruption in your own house.
It's always easier to look at it somewhere else.
So, as to the question of offense, then we can sort of, I think, start to understand it in this kind of way.
When you're told these things as a child, you know that it's nonsense.
You know deep down that it's nonsense.
And again, if you have doubts about that, just go and try and Tell a child to obey you because your invisible friend says that that child has to obey you.
The child's going to laugh at you.
It's going to look at you skeptically and it's going to say, yeah, right.
Just try it. Try it with a teenager.
They'll get it very quickly.
And that just helps you to understand the amount of fear that is involved in the teaching of statism and religion when you realize just how much that natural rational assertiveness gets destroyed and undermined in the minds of children.
So... It's all false and it's all nonsense and children know this perfectly well.
So what happens to all of that doubt and that concomitant or coincidental fear?
So when an authority figure lies to you and controls you and bullies you and terrifies you and manipulates you with woebegone tales of eternal retribution or being evil because you don't support the welfare state or whatever, right? Then...
You kind of get really, really frightened, right?
Because your parents, your teachers, your social leaders or whatever, are lying to you, sort of open, bold-faced, and self-contradicting themselves, right?
So the government says you have to pay taxes at the same time as it teaches children that violence...
It's an evil way to solve problems.
It's complete hypocrisy even within, not even compared to an outside paradigm.
In the religious world, people teach children about God while saying God is everywhere and can talk to them.
Because, of course, if God can't talk to people, then the child's legitimate question is to say, well, how do you know about God then?
Well, God did talk to people.
Well, why doesn't God talk to me?
Well, God does talk to you. He just talks to you through me, in terms of teaching children about religion.
So even within the sort of paradigm itself, that is...
I think pretty clear to understand that hypocrisy is rank within the whole process and procedure, and children are perfectly aware of this.
So what happens?
What do they do with all of this fear and hatred?
Because if somebody lies to you and frightens you and is hypocritical and bullies you, obviously for the sake of their own self-interest and control and so on, then you're going to get kind of angry.
Right? Now, what's going to happen, though, is that children are fundamentally incapable of processing that their parents are corrupt and destructive, right?
This is not something that children can do, right?
I mean, they don't have the intellectual capacity or maturity, and fundamentally they need to pretend at least to have a bond with their parents because, as I've mentioned a couple of dozen times, children, you know, kind of want to survive.
And parents...
The best way to control children is to threaten the bond, which is what parents do all the time, the withdrawal of affection.
We've gone over all this ground before.
But what happens then...
The children are terrified of the parents and they're really angry at the parents.
So what happens is the unconscious survival mechanism kicks into place.
And this is very, very common among children because what happens is the children then say, well, asking questions, being curious, being rational...
It's causing my parents to threaten me with physical violence or emotional withdrawal or abandonment or some significant sanction that's a little bit more hefty than a mild frown and 30 seconds in the naughty corner.
But... The child then does this sort of instant calculation association and says, well, when I ask questions, my parents get angry.
So either, right, this is sort of the logical thing that goes on in the mind, either my parents are bad or the questions are bad, right?
So if you ask your parents questions and your parents get angry, logically, either your parents are bad or the questions are bad, right?
Those are sort of fundamental questions. That children don't have any problem processing.
Now, children cannot fundamentally process the result of that question to be that my parents are bad.
Right? So, if I ask questions and my parents get angry, then the questions are bad.
Right? That's sort of the first thing that happens.
The questions are bad, and it's bad to ask these questions.
And, of course, the...
The Bible and the Koran and all of this nonsense, it all sort of backs that up, right?
Questions is evil, doubt is evil, bringing rationality is evil, as Luther said, we must take reason and pluck its eyes out and stuff like that.
That reason, rational questions, and curiosity lead to doubt, which is evil.
It leads to the devil is tempting you.
And so questions, rational questions, are evil.
And they are a temptation to be fought and resisted.
So they have an answer for all of that, which perfectly coincides with the natural reasoning of the child.
If I'm doing something... That makes my parents incredibly angry and threatened to dissolve the bond explicitly or implicitly, and it's usually implicit, though I think it's a little more explicit in the Muslim community, particularly in the area of honor killings, where it's more like breaking the life rather than just breaking the bond.
But... Religion, and of course statism, has no problem with defining rational, curious questions as evil and sent by the devil, right?
And in the secular sense, in the sort of socialist sense, it's exactly the same, right?
So if you question...
The value or moral validity of using violence and so on, then the secular world has all these answers as well, right?
So if you question taxation, then you're selfish, you don't want to contribute your share, that you're anti-poor, like you're evil, right?
So whenever you start to question the hypocrisies and falsehoods and motives and controls of sort of the dominant intellectual paradigm, Then children, because it provokes such hostility in their parents and in their school, and uniformly, in their social circle, among their extended family, and so on, then the children inevitably define the questions as evil.
If I ask these questions, I get attacked.
Then either the people who are attacking me are evil, the questions are evil, the questions are evil.
And therefore... Thank you.
You in front.
Yes, evil.
I think that's fairly clear and not too hard to figure out.
Although I can't believe I've stretched it out this long.
Hey, you know, sometimes the bathrooms take a little longer to clean.
And you get some repetition and filler.
Well, sorry, let me correct that.
You get slightly more repetition and filler than you would in a regular podcast.
So what happens then?
Well, as these people grow up, then this whole perspective, you know, kind of gets hardened and kind of gets aggressive.
Right, so of course when people can't say, my parents are evil for attacking and undermining and destroying my natural curiosity, they can't say, well my parents are evil for doing that.
They have to say, well my curiosity is evil and this of course creates a vast landmine assault zone against any kind of individuality or rationality or curiosity.
So, because of their own trauma and the fact that kind of two things occurred psychologically, one was that they ended up having to protect their parents and their society and their culture and their extended family, right?
Because they had to say, well, these questions are evil, not that my society is evil, which is too much for children to bear.
And the second thing, of course, is that they then inflict this on their younger siblings, they inflict this on others' children, right?
So, once they've accepted that The questions themselves are evil, like rational questions about religion or whatever, or society or taxes or whatever.
Once they've accepted that these questions are evil, then, because of the argument for morality, the most powerful force in the universe, whatever people define as good and evil is their destiny, and it modifies all their actions, then whenever they catch a whiff of these kinds of questions, then they attack...
The source of these questions, right?
Whenever there's any kind of curiosity or criticism or whatever, then they attack that.
Now, fundamentally and sort of psychologically, what they're doing is they're attacking themselves, right?
So this is the subjectivity and the projection part of it, right?
They have doubts, of course, which is why...
They ask questions, right?
Any child who has doubts asks questions, right?
I mean, if you don't know how to get somewhere, it's usually good to look it up on that quest rather than just start driving randomly.
So doubt leads to questions, right?
But of course doubt and questions are both considered evil, but you don't get rid of those doubts and questions, right?
They have to be somewhere. So what happens is you then start looking for scapegoats, because your own doubts and questions are not eliminated by calling them evil, any more than sexual desire gets eliminated by calling it evil.
Let's look at certain clergy, right?
So sexual desire and so on, these things don't get eliminated by calling them evil.
Saying to women, as is so often said to women, that getting bad-tempered or getting angry is bitchy or nasty or whatever.
It's not nice. It's just not nice.
That doesn't get rid of anger, right?
So not talking about pain or frustration or curiosity or whatever, lust, doesn't get rid of it.
Calling something evil doesn't eliminate it.
So It's not been eliminated in the mind of a Muslim, the idea of questions.
They still exist and they're persistent and they're nagging.
Deep down, you know, in the wee hours of the morning in their heart of hearts, they have a strong suspicion that it's all bullshit, that everything that they've been taught is to control them, and they were lied to, and it's not the questions that are evil, it's the people who call the questions evil who are evil.
It's their parents, it's their priests, it's their culture, it's their community.
That is evil.
These sort of ideas that corrupt children, interfere with or destroy or undermine at least their capacity to reason and think for themselves.
So, deep down, in the heart of every person who's not totally insane, who believes silly things, they know.
They know deep down that it's all ridiculous and it's all nonsensical.
And so what they do is that they feel, then, of course, that there is a constant evil within them.
Because the devil then becomes real.
And this is true not just for curiosity, but for things like lust and so on, sexual desire, whatever you can define.
If you can define some sort of natural process as evil, then you set people up for a nice juicy, long-term kind of war with themselves, and you make evil sort of omnipresent and immediate for people.
I mean, you think of these ridiculous...
I think largely Catholic prohibitions against something like masturbation.
It's completely lunatic, right?
I mean, all teenage boys, and I'm sure all teenage girls, might as well get tennis elbow and copal tunnel syndrome from...
The number of times that masturbation occurs when you're that young, right?
So once you set up that masturbation is evil and so on, then people get to play this fun soap opera with their natural instincts for the rest of their lives and so on.
Because you can't get rid of curiosity by calling it evil anymore than you get rid of lust or anything else like that.
So what happens then?
Well, people then have defined a natural capacity and a good capacity, right?
A good capacity. As evil.
So, curiosity and rationality is evil.
And so, they can't master this within themselves, of course.
It's absolutely impossible. They can't, they can't, they can't, because it's a natural process.
It's sort of like defining your heartbeat as evil, right?
Then you're going to be constantly reminded of the presence of Satan or some sort of nefarious deity within your own chest.
And so, given that they can't get rid of this evil...
They themselves feel evil.
I should have perfect faith in God, but when my child dies, then I can't quite get round to being thankful that that child is with God.
I actually feel sad, which is impious, and so on, and so on, and so on.
And I would actually kind of prefer, maybe if I'm a woman, to not have to follow, not to wear the burqa, and so on.
These questions will naturally occur to everyone all the time in these false, horrible philosophies or fantasies.
And they have to continually escalate the evil within themselves.
And there's a continual process of frustration and escalation at their inability to rid themselves of the evils of doubt or lust or whatever, right?
And so this escalation of aggression is continual, continual, continual, continual.
And... I mean, there's two ways of approaching it.
Either you go low self-esteem and you say, well, I guess I'm just sort of naturally evil or I'm a special target of the devil or whatever.
And so I have to keep fighting myself in solitude and so on, which is sort of a more solitary monk-like approach to it.
Or you employ a handy-dandy unconscious mechanism called projection, where you say that the evil that I have to fight is out there in the world, not within my own heart, and it's certainly not the people who lied to me when I was a child.
The evil that I must fight and wage war on and kill and destroy and uproot and so on is outside in the world.
And so what happens is you begin to start playing out this process of attacking doubt, attacking rationality, attacking questions, attacking curiosity, attacking deviations from a standard.
Because it's within your own heart that you have these things, and you should be listening to them and accepting your own doubt and asking questions, but you've been too brutalized as a child and you've lost, well, let's just say lost, who knows, right?
But you've kind of lost the capacity to deal with the problem through introspection.
You now have to deal with the problem of continued and growing evil within yourself.
You deal with it by projecting that evil into the outside world.
So, for instance, in the Muslim religion, what's called apostasy, which is a deconversion from Islam, is punishable by death.
So, if you become a Muslim or you're born a Muslim, And you break from the faith, you become a non-Muslim, then that is punishable by death, right?
So in this particular instance, rationality and doubt is punishable by death, right?
It's the natural result of punishing and attacking natural and healthy drives and capacities like rationality and curiosity and so on that you're going to end up Having to attack outsiders who exhibit even tiny strains of this particular situation or this particular trait, you're going to have to attack, hysterically and in ever-mounting aggression, you're going to have to attack anybody who displays this characteristic.
And of course you can see this in the media with individualists and so on all the time.
And... That is sort of the root of the continuing and hysterical aggression that comes out of religious and irrational communities, right?
And then you have the infinite escalation, right?
The purpose of these communities is to find scapegoats, not to maintain the truth, right?
So one of the things that was baffling to me when I was younger was wondering why If someone like Stalin or Hitler or Mao continued to escalate in their aggression, right?
Once this, you know, Hitler, for instance, this poor bum house painter slash art student, once he'd achieved political mastery of one of the most, well, the most educated country in Europe, and he had nothing but total control over the population, why did he then want war?
Why did he want more war?
And so on. Well... The explanation, I believe, is something like this.
That your goal is to root out and destroy doubt.
And the doubt is within you, which is why it has to be constantly escalated and becomes hysterical and ridiculously violent and so on.
But what happens...
When everyone conforms, right?
So once you get everyone starting to conform, right?
So they become frightened of the punishments that are meted out, right?
So in Stalinist Russia, if you then don't, if you have doubts about communism or the virtue of the party or whatever, if you have doubts about these things, then you are thrown to a concentration camp, you're shot, you're tortured.
I mean, the tortures that went on in Stalinist Russia and Mao's China, they're just absolutely horrendous.
So people start to conform, right?
They start to go, holy crap.
Not only, if I display curiosity, not only will I become dangerously close to identifying the true corruption in my childhood, which was not my questions, but the evil answers, the brutality that was applied against me for asking these questions, not only will it be very dangerous and unpleasant psychologically, very destabilizing, let's say, but also...
You know, shot and tortured and killed and sent to concentration camp for 20 years, right?
So people begin to conform, right?
Of course, right? I mean, who's going to choose?
Very few people are going to choose some sort of abstract ideal over 20 years in a concentration camp, especially when the abstract ideal...
Isn't going to change, the world is not going to change if they sacrifice themselves to it.
That's certainly my perspective, so I'm not going to say that it's, I'm not going to openly argue that it's the wrong one.
So people say, okay, well, I'm going to conform because it's going to be painful and it's going to be brutal if I don't.
Right, so then when everybody is openly mouthing, The platitudes of the dominant fantasy, communism or religion or statism or democracy or whatever, whenever one's mouthing these platitudes, you'd think that, you know, that would have solved the problem.
When no Muslims deconvert anymore because the punishment for it is death, you'd think, okay, well great, now they've achieved their end, which is not to have Muslims deconvert, and so they'll stop attacking whatever, whatever, right?
And... You find, though, of course, in reality, that this is not what happens at all.
That what happens is that the bar moves and the violence escalates further and continually until the whole system sort of self-destructs.
And that's a pretty important thing to understand and a pretty important thing to fathom in its sort of fundamentals.
Why is it that these Paradigms, even when they supposedly achieve their ends, continue to escalate to the point of self-destruction.
Well, I think that we can answer that fairly easily.
And the principle to understand is the one we've talked about before, that there is no external solution to internal problems, right?
With something like insecurity by becoming wealthy or becoming successful or getting a hair transplant or working out or losing weight or dating a pretty girl or dating a pretty boy or anything like that.
There is no external solution to internal problems any more than you can put makeup on cancer and have it heal.
I mean, if you deal with insecurity successfully by identifying the root cause, getting angry at being corrupted and taking responsibility, if you get angry at your emotional problems and if you deal with them and get the bad people out of your life and so on, then the result will be that you will, I think, become more successful and lose weight or whatever, right?
You don't have to sort of somatize or psychologically manifest in your body the issues that you have within your soul.
But... You can't put the cart before the horse.
You don't lose weight and become confident.
You become confident and then you lose weight.
And you become confident by recognizing and processing the facts of reality and in your history according to objective truth and morality.
So, of course, if the doubts that the Muslims are so...
that they hate so much, if the doubts and questions and rationality that threaten the Muslim soul are internal, then gaining external conformity isn't going to solve the problem.
In fact, it's going to make it worse.
I mean, if you think that you're depressed before you lose weight, think how sad you're going to be when you remain depressed after you lose weight if you haven't dealt with your core issues.
Then what happens is, the Muslim feels anxiety and fear, and then says, okay, well, it's the questions that are evil and my parents and society that are good, and so I have to bully myself, and then I have to bully others, and I have to control others, and I have to...
Right? Because then when a Muslim parent has children, then the children start asking exactly the same question, and lo and behold, like a pendulum, like a clock, the Muslim parent then attacks...
The children, for having exactly the same questions that the Muslim parent had when he or she were young, blah, blah, blah, blah, round and round it goes.
And of course then your fate is truly sealed, right?
Once you've carasseted your own children, you can't ever deal with that, because it can't be undone, right?
If you don't feed your child and they grow up malnourished and stunted...
You can't go back and feed them again and make them healthy, right?
Once something can't be undone, your fate is sealed, and that's when you become cancerous and rancorous and, you know, an enemy of all things good, noble, and true.
And so when people begin to conform to what the Muslim believes is virtue, right, that the women are all wearing the head-to-toe burqas and not getting educated, and you look at the Taliban society within Afghanistan prior to the invasion, you can sort of and you look at the Taliban society within Afghanistan prior to the invasion, you can And of course, I'm sure it's a lot worse than even any of us can imagine.
But this doesn't solve the problem, because what happens is when people become frightened of being bullied and they begin to conform, then the anxiety, which is at the root of the desire to conform, simply returns and escalates, right?
So people feel, well, questions are evil, so I've got to attack anyone who shows any sort of doubt.
And then what happens is people then conform, and you can't then find as many reasons to attack them because...
So the anxiety then begins to return back into your consciousness because you're finding it harder and harder to project that anxiety into the outside world, right?
So you feel that questions are evil, that your own questions are evil, and you overwhelm that feeling by attacking people in the outside world.
And then as you get them to conform...
Then you haven't gotten rid of your anxiety about questions, right?
The need to ask questions, the desire to ask questions, and your basic knowledge that those who lied to you about essentials did so to bully and, you know, based on their own issues, had nothing to do with truth or virtue.
And so when people conform to your bullying, your anxiety returns stronger, right?
So what happens then? Well, what you have to do is you have to start inventing transgressions, right?
This is pretty natural and inevitable in this realm, right?
So if everyone has to never express any doubts...
Sorry, if people...
Who are 20, can't express doubts, and everyone then conforms, then you have to change it to 18, then to 16, then to 14, right?
You always have to keep inventing new people to attack in order to fight and repudiate the knowledge that what you're doing is unjust and that what you need to do is introspect and stop believing in all this nonsense and deal with the real issues that your parents lied to you in order to control and to bully and humiliate you, right? So... This is one of the reasons why these societies always get worse.
It's not really a moment, it's more of a progress.
But as people begin to conform more and more to the bullying demands of those in charge, the anxiety begins to return to those in charge, so they have to invent new transgressions and new problems and then have to attack people all over.
And of course, in the complete absence of visible enemies, you have to invent thought crimes.
So what you have to do is you have to start inventing things that are going to allow you to attack people.
So a sort of classic example of this is, if you know anything about sort of the medieval witch hunts, What happened was there was lots of complicated reasons psychologically around women and power and so on.
It's kind of tough to have a male god who's the source of everything when women sort of obviously give birth.
We can get into all of that stuff another time.
But in sort of the medieval witch hunts, you end up with this situation where...
You see witches because they're doing X. So women who are out after sundown are witches and have to be tortured into confession.
And if they don't confess, it's because the devil's really strong and you have to torture them even more.
And what happens is that if women are out after sundown, they're witches, that's bad.
So what happens naturally and somewhat logically is that women stop going out after sundown.
So then, it's like, okay, I have to keep attacking people because otherwise my own doubts and fears are going to become clear to me.
But women aren't heading out after sundown, so now I have to invent a new category, which is...
Women who own cats, right?
Women who have warts.
You keep redefining these things until you find new victims, and eventually it's anyone who breathes, right?
And this is why you want to set up a repressive system, if you are this way inclined.
You want to set up a repressive system wherein inevitable and natural human drives are the enemy, because then you'll never run out Of victims to persecute, right?
So if something like lust is a great evil, well, you're never going to say to somebody, have you felt any lust in the past month, and have them say no, right?
I mean, you just won't believe it. And then, of course, they'll feel guilty about lying, and so then you set up lying.
So you set up all these things.
It's a no-win situation for people, and then it's absolutely inevitable.
You're going to end up with more and more victims to persecute, and as victims conform to your persecution, you're going to end up making more and more rules to continue to allow you to persecute.
And to return just at the end here to this question of statism, this is sort of what I mean when I say that...
The welfare state was invented to give the government power.
The government didn't take power in order to deal with the poor.
The government invents problems in order to expand its power.
And there's reasons which you can...
I'm not going to sort of go over them all again because I just finished them with the Muslim world.
They're directly analogous to statism and to the cult of the family and all these other sorts of things.
But usually it's a little easier to figure these things out looking at some supposedly foreign culture.
But the purpose of culture, right?
The purpose of culture is not to promote tradition or to have songs or dances or foods or anything like that.
The purpose of culture is an endless assault upon individuality.
The purpose of culture is an endless attack upon rationality.
I was just talking about this with Christina this morning for a variety of questions that she had about herself.
And the whole purpose behind the Greek thing or the Muslim thing or the Jewish thing is not to promote a particular belief, but to attack rationality, to attack and undermine and destroy individuality, curiosity, questions, science, rationality, I mean science in the philosophical moral sense, not just in the sort of physics and biology sense.
But the purpose of these beliefs is to attack and to project the original attack and assault upon the child's integrity, which is being lied to by his or her elders, to obscure that original attack by projecting the need to attack into the outside world.
So people who say, well, the Muslims are aggressive because they're poor, no, they're poor because they're aggressive.
The Muslims are aggressive because they're oppressed.
No, they're oppressed because they're aggressive.
And they're aggressive because they're irrational.
And they won't accept that they're irrational.
The irrational has become an absolute, which immediately transforms all doubts into external enemies to be attacked.
It can't be me that has these doubts.
I'm virtuous. It must be somebody else who has these doubts.
So I'm going to now become my parents and attack other people's curiosity and individuality in the same way that mine was attacked.
So you can't solve the problems posed by the Muslim world or by the status world or by the family or any of these cults.
You can't solve any of these problems without identifying the core irrationality, which is that none of these things exist.
God doesn't exist.
Islam doesn't exist.
An imam is just a guy in a funny hat.
The pope is a ridiculous concept.
It's just some doddering old dwarf in a funny hat.
Countries don't exist.
You just have to say that these are all fairy tales.
And, of course, what's going to happen is that you're going to get attacked, right?
This is why people don't generally do it.
because, and...
I wouldn't say that I'm the most shrinking violet in the world, but I get uneasy about the hostilities that I receive for what it is that I'm doing.
It's not easy. That's actually a comfort to me, because if it was easy, then the slavery of the world would be sort of incomprehensible, as we talked about before.
So I hope that this is helpful in trying to make a case for the psychological progress of why irrationality and attacks upon children translate into general violence and attacks upon the outside.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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